Chapter Thirteen: Panic Attack

Massimo ran to his apartment, which was thankfully only a few blocks away from the Dahl. Slamming the door open, he ran to the small room beyond his den, toggling the light switches along the way. Here he kept all the elements of his potions, everything from herbs to crystals to blood of various species of fae. They were meticulously organized on his ancient oak shelving unit, labels covering the dull orange and blue gleam of the bottles underneath.

He grabbed everything he needed for a pick-me-up – ginger root, diamond powder, and just a drop of wolf blood. He ground them together and raised the cool bowl to his mouth, downing the mixture in a hurry.

Next he picked some other items while his first batch took effect. He used many of the same ingredients he used for his potion to knock Vex out yesterday, only this time he added a few extra to make it pack an extra punch. He hoped this new potion might kill the Mesmer, but knew the man was too powerful to be taken out by a tonic. And if Vex was presently up to what Massimo suspected, then he had to act fast or else Vex would be completely unstoppable.

He thought of Dylan, how terrified he must be, and knew he had to do something now. There was no time to plan, or to think. The time to step up his game had come, and he wanted nothing more than to shove his potion down Vex's throat. Come to think of it, Vex would probably be expecting that, so he threw in a dash of pixie dust into the mixture. This would enable it to act more like a grenade, instead of having to be ingested to take effect. So maybe there was time for a little planning, after all. He just had to get back to Vex's building now.

Doubling checking his newest creation, he felt the full force of the potion he had taken for himself. He felt awake, he could see the burns and bruises fading on his body already. He really needed a change of clothes, he just realized, and probably a shower as well. The shower would have to wait, but he could take a minute to change.

A new thought entered his mind: how badly he wanted to take another shower with Dylan. He just needed the touch of his flesh again, needed to breathe in his energy. This was about more than just controlling the Lamplighter, he thought he might be falling for the boy. With water rushing over their bodies, cleansing them of everything from the last twenty-four hours, they would let themselves be baptized in a new life.

Pushing the thought aside, he scrambled into some fresh clothes, dropping the charred remains of his previous outfit in the trash on his way out. He paused at the doorway, then took a couple steps sideways towards the couch. From beneath the middle cushion, he extracted a pair of curved blades, which he promptly tucked into his belt, covering them with his coat.

Half-way down the hall outside his apartment, a sudden rush waved through his body. He fell against the wall, sliding down to the floor.

"What the fuck…?" his voice trailed off as a paralysis settled over his body. He thought back to the potion he took – had he messed up some of the ingredients? He thought not, but he also knew not to put it past Vex to have one of his many cronies to come in and switch around some of his labels. At best this meant a mighty delay, with the worst case meaning his death. He thought Vex wasn't the man to kill him with a simple potion, so maybe he was safe for now. But it also meant that he couldn't trust the potion in his pocket, and that was a major disadvantage.

Vex had to have also been behind the bombing, he was certain of that. How did he have the time to hit all these places back to back? So many questions swam around him, and he had no answers.

His vision began to dim. Whatever he had taken was working fast. As he faded into sweet oblivion, he thought of Dylan's pale, soft flesh beneath his touch. He wanted nothing more than to feel Dylan's body again, and his only wish as he faded completely was that he would dream of him.

"End of the world?" Bo shouted incredulously. "What exactly are we talking about here?"

"Already on it BoBo," Kenzi said, whipping out her cell phone and getting on Google. "Dyson, how do you spell Ragnarok? Never mind, auto-correct got it!"

Bo's head was spinning. The largest, most burning question for her was: If Tamsin was changing into something that meant the end of the world, why had she tasted to delicious to her? Did that mean that somewhere within herself there was something fundamentally Dark about her true nature? These questions shook her to the point of questioning her very identity, but the knowledge of what Tamsin now represented was something worse. There has to be a way to save them all, if she could only clear her mind enough to think of the right course of action. She was still upset about what Massimo had done to Kenzi, and then the added stress of the threat of extinction for an entire side of fae, and now the extinction of every person on the planet. This was all too much, and she found a crate to sit on to catch her breath. She was vaguely aware of Dyson and Kenzi speaking in front of her, but their voices faded into white noise.

"Earth to Bo!" Kenzi screamed, snapping her fingers in front of Bo's face.

"I'm sorry… what?"

"Apparently Ragnarok is an event about the end of the world. There is supposed to be an epic battle which culminates in basically Noah's flood that wipes out the entire population. And if what I got from Trick's memories are correct, the other way to avert this is to keep that blonde out there hammered!" Kenzi spoke faster than Bo could ever remember.

"Well at least she seems to be doing a good job of that herself," Bo answered, still slightly distracted by the mad train of her thoughts. There were still missing pieces here, or at least they weren't able to quite grasp the bigger picture.

"First a Lamplighter, now this," Dyson muttered. "As if we don't have enough going on."

That connected something for Bo, but she wasn't quite sure what exactly it all meant. Then it started to make a little bit of sense. "Wait… did you guys see what Dylan did after the bombing?"

"You mean how he saved all our asses?" Dyson asked.

"He literally sucked the smoke and flames back inside his body," Bo mused. "It was like he had complete control over fire in a way I've never seen any fae be able to control the elements."

Kenzi's eyes lit up – she was getting it. "And now you're thinking that Tamsin is aligned with a water element, right? So why are these two opposites suddenly appearing in our lives?"

"It can't be a coincidence, can it?" Now Dyson was starting to figure it out. But just realizing that these two occurrences might be connected doesn't tell them anything, really. Two ancient prophecies were colliding, and it made no sense that this was happening now. Certainly the apocalypse wasn't a real thing, right?

"No," Bo said. She turned to her best friend. "You need to try to retain everything you got from Trick's mind. Go into his office, find a pad of paper and a pen, and just write down everything you can think of."

"Okay," Kenzi assented and went back into the main room.

"What do you need me to do?" Dyson asked.

Bo didn't want to deal with his puppy dog eyes and lingering glances right now. And with everything else that was going on, he was more of a distraction than help. She didn't want to come off as abrasively as she was going to, but that couldn't really be helped. "Don't you have a job to get to?"

He was taken aback, shocked. "What… exactly are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I don't need your energy around me right now. You are always a great help in combat, but right now we have things we have to piece together, and in that department you are a distraction. I need focus right now."

"And Tamsin isn't a distraction? Especially how she is now?"

Bo considered her next words carefully. They needed to sting, but not enough to drive Dyson away for good. With Trick gone he was her most knowledgeable link to the world of all things fae. So she leveled her gaze on Dyson and said, "Right now, she's a welcome one. I will let you know when I need you."

For a moment she thought Dyson was going to tear up, but he just nodded at her and took off. At least he listened to direction well, if nothing else.

After he slammed the door behind him, Bo settled back onto her crate. This was all just too much. A small part of her hated pushing Dyson away like that, but it was necessary. She couldn't think straight with him around, their history was too complicated. Not for the first time, she wished Kenzi hadn't made the reckless decision to turn to Massimo, which just made Bo's connection to the druid stronger. She also knew that she had seen something in the way Massimo looked at Dylan, that there was actual love there, and while he might not be her favorite person, she would rather see Dylan connected to him than to Vex.

All it came down to was time. She needed time to figure out what her next move was, but she knew that Vex had already planned this whole thing out. He always seemed to be a few steps ahead of her. The thought occurred to her that she should just kill the fucker and let Kenzi suck up all his memories and sort it out from there, but she wasn't a murderer. In self defense, obviously she'll fight for her life, but this was an entirely different animal. And if Tamsin was the world's stopping point, could she bring herself to remove Tamsin from the picture? She didn't think so.

"Ragnorak, fuck," she whispered to the nothingness around her. "What the hell else could go wrong?"

As if in answer, she heard the main doors to the Dahl bang open. Not only bang open, she heard them ripped off their hinges and clatter over the floor.

"Did I really have to ask it?" she muttered, rising from the crate. Dyson would be long gone by now and Kenzi never had a penchant for combat. Tamsin was inebriated, of course, so whatever busted through that door she had to deal with. She pulled the blade out of her boot and rushed back into the main room of the Dahl before stopping short.

The man that pounded down the doors was gigantic. His sheer size was enough cause for concern, but the way he was dressed… it reminded her of the stories she had been told as a child. His look predated medieval, by at least a couple centuries.

Tamsin had finished the rum she had been supplied and stood awkwardly looking up at the mountain before her. "Who the fuck are you?" the valkyrie shouted, stumbling around trying to maintain her balance.

The man took his chance and swung at Tamsin, knocking her clear across the room. Bo readied her blade, and herself for the fight to come.