Fuck, my arm hurt. Pulling me back to reality. Civilians were still a concern. The first wave looked like Fallen soldiers. Others might come.

I took flight, going from a position low to the ground to the upper reaches of the trees. I took my hands away from my ears, and the only sound I could hear was the incessant howling of the dogs and the faint static sound of rain against leaves.

Dangerous to use my thinker-one power when Mama could be in the area, but my instinct was that she wasn’t. Now that I was thinking about her, the whispering was back. The snow was the same as before.

The power wasn’t really a power, but the benefit of flying. A bird’s eye view, being able to see the battlefield from a semi-decent vantage point, provided I could get up high enough. I could see motion through the trees, but I couldn’t see much else.

No white. Seir had dressed in black—if Rain had continued to talk, would that have been part of it? How set was it? I could imagine the Fallen identifying themselves as closer to the Simurgh sticking to white or silver, while the Leviathan-favoring Crowleys might prefer green.

No green, no black, no white. I wasn’t even sure if it was that hard-set, or if my speculations were off-point, but it helped on a level. It helped validate my assumption that Mama Mathers wouldn’t be part of a headlong rush, and I liked even the idea that my enemies’ costumes might be conveniently color-coded.

Valefor and Mama Mathers were scary, or Valefor had been scary, but they weren’t warriors, and they weren’t generals. Their weakness in this was that they were subtle players and the small-scale war wasn’t subtle.

I descended, aiming for the group where the Fallen were more numerous and the one dog was alone.

One cape, that I could tell. She wore a biker helmet, with fragments of helmets worked into her costume. Her arms looked like melted plastic, swords with the blades curved into hooks on the end. Weld was fond of the design—what the hell had he called them? She was using them to climb the dog, hacking at its face, and missing as it shook and twisted its head away.

There was a limit to what I could do when my arm was hurt to the point my entire body was feeling it. I grabbed her by the helmet with the one hand, and pulled her back into a more upright position, until her stomach was exposed. I drove my knee into her stomach, and felt some resistance. Light armor.