As Lexie stared into the cool blue eyes of the man across the street, her heart rate spiked up several notches. She knew him. She really knew him, but for some reason that information was hidden in her brain, by several layers of…something. Maybe fear. So much fear. Whoever this man was, he was dangerous.

How do I know? What the heck is going on? She wondered. Where have I seen him before?

He didn't look especially distinctive. He was tall but not overly so, with brown hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a dirty black pirate coat and leather pants. He looked like a delver, his attire something her uncle would wear, and he'd shoved both hands in his pockets, casually leaning against the wall.

He shifted and straightened, lifting his back from the wall. Lexie tore her eyes away, but it was already too late. He was walking towards her.

Her heart was now trying to pound out of her chest. She looked around for an escape, but there was no way to hide, and Tate was still inside. What if he hurt Tate?

Who is he?

"I'm not allowed to talk to strangers," she blurted out the second he reached her. His shadow loomed over her, and she backed into the door, ready to run into the store even though Tate told her not to.

"I'm not a stranger," he said as he once more tucked his hands into his pockets. He smiled, and it was terrifying, flashing his white teeth like a shark. "Or do you not remember me?"

"No," Lexie said as she avoided his piercing eyes. "Sorry."

She silently opened her inventory. She tried not to show it on her expression, but she was ready to attack at even the slightest flinch on his end. She wasn't playing around here.

What would she attack him with?

He cocked his head to one side like a snake. She had a feeling he was reading her mind, but she didn't feel even the slightest nudge on her pathways. Maybe he wasn't reading her mind. Maybe he was reading her, her soul, or her being. He looked like he was trying to figure out something, and as the silence stretched, Lexie's anxiety worsened.

She also felt like she couldn't move even if she had ample space, felt the fear pressing her chest closed and quieting her brain.

Where had she seen him?

"Are you okay, Lexie?"

He knew her name.

Her eyes shot up to meet his. He smiled. Before he could say anything else, a door opened from across the street, and a shorter man walked out from the store he'd been standing by.

The new man called out. "Jeez, do you plan on spending all day here? The boss is getting antsy. Let's go."

He lingered for a second, his eyes still on Lexie. Then he backed away slowly, walking backward.

"See you," he said giving her a wave as he walked away. Lexie stared at his back and wondered why she felt that burgeoning and almost overwhelming hatred. She wished she had Uncle Max's gun so she could shoot it right at his back.

She kept staring even after he'd disappeared around the corner. It wasn't until the door behind her opened and Tate emerged that she looked away.

"What happened?" Tate asked her.

Lexie shook her head.

"I don't know, I just.." She didn't know how to describe it, and she placed her hand over her chest. Her heart was still trying to jump out of it. "I just think I ran into someone… bad."

"You know them?"

She shook her head, hesitated, then nodded.

Tate was instantly on alert, and his dagger flashed into his palm, gaze raking down the street. "Where?"

Lexie smirked. "What? Are you going to kill him?"

"If I need to."

He sounded serious that if Lexie didn't know him, she would be worried. She shook her head. "Nah, it's fine. He's already gone, and I was probably just being paranoid."

Nevertheless, the doubt and fear didn't leave her for a good while.

Viktor Vulcan stopped and turned to stare back in the direction he'd just come from.

"What?" His companion, the short and easily irritable, Silver Mist, also known as just Steven, confronted him also drawing to a stop. "Wanna waste more time? Come on, I'm gonna get my ass chewed out again if we don't get to the meeting in time and I don't want to explain to the boss how it was because you wanted smell the roses."

Vulcan tuned Steven out like he usually did, still watching that direction. He didn't expect to see Lexie Sparrowfoot here. Well, he didn't expect to see her at all, considering that she should be dead.

Shouldn't she?

He wasn't sure. Reality sometimes muddled itself in his head. But he'd always known there was a fifty-percent chance that she would survive that last attack. Those were the rules, weren't they?

Shame.

For such a small and seemingly weak girl, she was surprisingly hard to kill.

He wondered if she recognized him or if she was just pretending. He hadn't seen recognition in her gaze, only the intrinsic fear of prey. She shouldn't remember him, and her mind may not remember, but internally, she did.

That mother of hers had put him through a lot of trouble, and so had her father. Vulcan had thought he'd succeeded in the end, but Lexie Sparrowfoot was still alive.

That would certainly complicate things.

"What is it?" Steven snapped. "What are you looking back for?"

"Nothing," he said and continued to his meeting.

Yet as they walked, his neck ached from craning it so much, and he craved to go back there. He resolved to put Sparrowfoot out of his mind, at least for now.

The meeting was held in an unassuming, abandoned apartment building with the outside made of brick and the insides made of metal to couch the sounds.

On the first floor, lined with yellow walls and dirty carpet, he pushed the button to open up the elevator. Once inside, he entered the floor number and the passcode for the meeting arena.

Even as the door closed, the elevator didn't move. Not really. It was the rest of the apartment that moved around it, to become something else.

When the elevator opened up again, they stepped into a space whose width was three times longer than the building they were in, and which looked far more modern. It had nothing but a round table and white seats, surrounded by black pulsing walls that moved like they had a heartbeat.

Alchemy.

It always fascinated Vulcan, and its inner workings were one of the deepest-kept secrets in all of this Earth. It wasn't magic that had a beginning and an end, that had formulas, but it was the creation of something mutable, continuously changing, both existing and non-existing depending on the context. It was like living in a constant flux of particles, and it excited him.

Because it was just like Vulcan himself. After all, he was forever changing, forever different, forever living in flux.

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An old man was the sole person at the table, arranging a piece of a puzzle in front of him. He frowned as he picked up one, changed its form, and put it down so that it fit into the gap he wanted it to.

"Perfect," he said.

Tufts of white hair stuck up around his bald head and spiked to the sky. Wrinkles were etched into his forehead. No one knew how old he was, only that he was very, very old.

Then again, he was the father of change after all. Or as the rest of the world knew him, The Alchemist.

He glanced up at the pair finally and said, "You're late."

Vulcan glanced around. No one else was in the room. "You said there was a meeting."

"There was. You're late for it."

"Yeah, yeah." He already knew who would be at this meeting, and they weren't here. Unless... "Are they still around?"

The man stared at him and smiled in a way that revealed a slightly haggled left tooth. Then he held up a knobby-knuckled hand and snapped his fingers. Out of nowhere, people appeared in the empty seats. They looked just as spooked to be seeing him as Vulcan was to be seeing them.

Or at the very least, Vulcan would have been spooked had he not already gotten used to the crazy Alchemist's ways by now.

Both groups had probably been in the room at the same time, with neither of them realizing the existence of the other. Only the Alchemist had been able to see them both.

Crazy bastard.

"Couldn't you have warned us that there was someone else in the room, old man?" Silver Mist said, sounding annoyed, but the Alchemist ignored him, just like Vulcan would have. Or maybe he hadn't heard him. The man was losing his mind after all, or at least that was what they'd all guessed.

Still, a mad genius was better than nothing, and since he was still useful to them, they kept him around.

"Here we are," he said. Vulcan ran his gaze around the room. The [Hero] was here. And so were three other representatives of the Villain Alliance. Of course, it wasn't so much of an alliance as it was some bastards who were all leeching off his hard work, but that was beside the point. Vulcan and Steven were here on behalf of GLITCH. Attending meetings wasn't in his job description. Nevertheless, his boss wanted him here, and so he was here.

Of course, he had his own reasons for being here, but that was beside the point. This was a meeting between the [Heroes] and the [Villains] on neutral ground, and that neutral ground was the Alchemist.

Despite his mildly criminal past, the Heroes Association still used him for several of their machinations. Although he was an insane fiend, he was too useful to get rid of, so they put those bands around his neck and deactivated them when they wanted him to make something for them.

They thought the bands would contain and control him, but alchemy wasn't as easily controlled as magic. What they didn't know was that the Alchemist was doing what he wanted behind their backs anyway. Or maybe they did know, but they simply didn't care.

Now, certain [Heroes] who were rebelling against their status quo were relying on the Alchemist to help them stage their little [Heroes] revolution.

Silas Creevy, of course, led the rebellion.

As Vulcan's gaze lingered on Silas, Silas's gaze rested on him too. The look on the other man's face suggested that he wanted to fight him, but Silas always looked like he wanted to fight someone.

"I thought you said you were going to lay low and stop attending the meetings from now on," Vulcan asked Silas. "After you got blackmailed by the one-eyed mercenary."

"Change of plans," Silas said. "I believe I'm about to be found out."

"How?"

"The golem. I think it's failing."

"Impossible," the Alchemist said. Vulcan had been there when the older man had made the golem. From nothing but black goo, he'd formed a physical, mental, near-spiritual reflection of Silas, down to his powers. It acted as him, spoke as him, and did magic as him. It was so creepily perfect a human copy, something not even magic could do.

It was a copy of Silas, missing all the memories of his betrayal of the Hero Association. The golem took after the old Silas, was honorable, and dedicated to his job.

The best thing about it was that the golem could never act independently. Even as much as it was given all those attributes, it could only be made to do as Silas wished, through a backdoor in its mind where its will was encoded. Silas could also see through its eyes and adjust its behavior remotely. The golem did not know it was being controlled because its willpower had been so enmeshed in its mission that it would never stray from it. And its mission had been to stay normal, in order to keep Dominic Vacek from discovering that he had several moles in his organization.

"I think you made a mistake," Silas said. "Something about the golem tipped off Vacek."

"Never," the alchemist responded, his eye twitching at just the word mistake. "My creations are perfect. No mistakes."

"Whatever you say, Vacek noticed something. He's sicced his little emotion-sniffing hound dog on me. It's only a matter of time until they figure out something, no matter how well the golem pretends." He sighed. "I think we might be reaching the end of the road for me at the Heroes' Association, so whatever we have to do to get Vacek out, we have to do it fast."

Ah. Now I understand why I'm here.

Vulcan was the man with the plan, the one who could enact a flawless heist that had a hundred percent chance of successfully causing the perfect amount of damage. Of course, more damage was always better in his opinion, and chaos was always fun, but most of the time, he got the best results when he kept things more controlled.

After all, if he broke his toys now, it meant that he couldn't play with them later.

So he tried not to break them all at once.

"There is one problem," Vulcan mentioned, the memory spurring a little annoyance. "Your Arithmancer."

"Lucy Frank?"

He nodded. "Last time in Arcadia, she messed with my plans." It was hard for his powers to work well around a seer. That always messed with his fun, and as much as he tried to confuse her, working around her also confused him.

She'd been placed on GLITCH's case since before the Arcadian bomb incident, and had caused a lot of their missions to go awry, so much so that they'd had to lay low for some time, too.

"Don't worry," Silas said. "I'll take care of her."

"I can take care of her."

"No." Silas' response was sharp, his gaze warning. "Don't touch Frank. I'll make sure to keep her and Vacek busy so you'll be free to do what you need to do. But whatever it was, it had to happen soon."

He smiled and cracked his neck. "Okay." He thought back to the toy he had just met, Lexie Sparrowfoot. The one he couldn't seem to break.

She would be part of his chaos. Maybe this time he would get rid of her once and for all.

After the meeting with the villains, Silas Creevy walked out onto the street and felt like he needed a shower. That was normal.

He always felt like he needed a shower after meeting with these guys.

If anyone had ever told him that he would be in that den of thieves working with the low lives of society, he would have called them a liar. But he had no choice. Enough was enough. Vacek couldn't keep getting away with the things he was doing, and if Silas had to sacrifice himself for the cause, then so be it.

He would fight back with everything he had.

Already, his golem was in Vacek's office while Vacek subtly interrogated him. The golem knew something was wrong, but it had no idea why Vacek suspected it. Silas himself didn't know what gave him away, because he'd tried so hard to cover his tracks, putting up several fall men.

Nevertheless, Vacek was too bright a man, so Silas had always known that it would only be a matter of time till Vacek caught him.

His phone rang. He slipped it out of his pocket and put it to his ear without checking the ID.

"Well?" Azure sounded anxious. "What's the verdict?"

"I might have to go down," he told Azure. "But you'll be left out of it."

"Silas...I …"

"It's alright. I'm willing to die for the cause." He'd been the perfect double agent and staged the perfect series of crimes. Nevertheless, perfect was never quite good enough to beat Vacek. You had to do better than perfect to have any hope of getting the wool over his eyes.

And soon enough, the wool was coming off.

Stella couldn't sleep.

She kept tossing and turning, forming folds on her fancy thousand-thread-count arachnean cotton.

Finally, she quietly turned over again on her side, eyeing the moon outside her ceiling-to-floor windows.

A muscular arm threw itself over her waist.

"What's wrong?" Her husband asked, his voice still husky with sleep.

Stella sighed. She was hoping not to wake him, but Mane had always been a light sleeper. "I don't know. Nightmares, I guess."

"About your brother?"

"No." Luther was currently serving out his punishment on another planet. An Orcan one. Last she'd checked in on him, he was fine. Pissed and tired, but fine. "It's not him."

She didn't know what the nightmares were about. She could never remember them when she woke up. Only the unsettled feeling in her stomach remained as if something bad was going to happen.

But she wasn't premonitive. It could have just been indigestion.

"I'll be fine," she said. "Go back to sleep."

"Hmmm," he murmured, tracing soothing circles on her stomach. Though he pretended to assent, she knew he would be awake for as long as she was.

Stella sighed and opened up her system screen, instantly accessing Video Alley. Lately, there was one video she watched whenever she was in a bad mood because it always got her to smile.

LITTLE CARD MAGE GIRL GETS FLAG FROM CONRAD GRACE!

Torin had shown her the video, which he'd claimed to have found by accident. It was her new favorite thing.

Stella smiled as she watched little Lexie zoom across the screen, yelling orders at her teammates. She looked and sounded just like her mother. Same twinkle in her eyes when she fought. The same pursed lip as she plotted. The same smile when she won.

Little Lexie was a Card User.

And for a Card User, she was skilled. So skilled that Stella was half-sure she wasn't using just card magic.

Of course, it was a given she would be skilled with magic. She was Aiden's daughter, and as much as Stella hated that smug bastard sometimes, she couldn't deny that he was the best at what he did.

To clarify, because her therapist said she needed to be more honest with herself, she didn't hate Aiden–he simply irritated her. He had from the first day she met him at Victoire.

"If you were going to keep doing this to yourself, you should have gone to the dinner to meet the girl," her husband said, his voice sleepy though aware.

"I was busy," Stella said.

"You could have gotten out of it."

Stella pressed her lips together. Yeah, she could have, but she was a coward. She'd wanted to meet Lexie, but at the same time, it was painful to do so, to have that reminder of Lara staring right at her, to remember the ugly words they'd shared before her death.

It was painful to know that she couldn't take any of it back now, just as it was painful to know she didn't have any rights to her goddaughter, especially since Aiden wanted her to stay away from Lexie totally.

At first, Stella had fought him and the court mandate that gave him sole custody. She would have taken the matter as high as she needed to, but Vacek told her to lay off.

Vacek surprisingly had taken Aiden's side. Well, maybe not so surprisingly. It was clear Aiden was his favorite, and even his villainy hadn't changed that.

Stella sighed again as the video ended and restarted from the beginning. She put it on a loop that would hopefully soothe her mind enough for her to fall asleep.

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