Penrose appeared beside his portrait. He looked furious, but Elizabeth was happy to see that he manifested at a greater intensity than he had been able to manage a little while before.
Marla swung her arm around and pointed her long red fingernail at Penrose. "Prepare to die completely," she cried.
"Huh?" Carl looked to where Marla was pointing.
Penrose raised his right hand, palm out, and intensified until he appeared to be as solid as the rest of them. "Whatever you think you're about to unleash, you're making a terrible mistake," he said. His eyes fell on Elizabeth. He took a step towards her, but Marla blocked his path and raised her hand as if to strike him.
With the crackle like static electricity, a band of light sprang up between their hands and slowly expanded, creeping down their arms and over their bodies until Penrose and Marla were completely enveloped in light. A low hum vibrated through the room and increased in pitch. Through the blue light, Elizabeth saw Penrose's jaw tighten and Marla bare her teeth.
With another crackle, the light surrounding Penrose and Marla shifted and intensified over Marla until hardly more than a blue film covered Penrose. Barely visible beneath the brilliant light, Marla threw her head back and cried out. Her bones lit up through her skin and her hair stood on end; she looked like a cartoon character getting electrocuted.
Sensing that their leader was in trouble, Carl and Becky leaped into action. Carl laid his hands on Marla's shoulders and pulled her back while Becky, apparently able to see him or at least the light that surrounded him, grabbed Penrose's arm and tried to yank it down and away from Marla. The instant that Carl's hands touched Marla, they were all rocked by a sudden release of energy that sent them sprawling.
Becky's hands plunged into Penrose and she cried out in anguish. She withdrew her hands and screamed when she saw they were frosted white from the cold. Fading again, Penrose reeled backwards towards the wall and fell into it.
Wind gusted through the smashed out windows and guttered the candles and the fire. A flicker of activity from beyond the windows caught Elizabeth's attention. The light had gone on in Trip's apartment and she saw Trip walk through his living room, alone, and turn on the television. He sat down on the couch and picked up the remote control.
"Trip, help me!" Elizabeth shouted.
"He can't hear you," chuckled a sultry voice from the doorway.
Titania walked into the room, her heels clicking on the pine floor. She looked around at the bizarre tableaux with an expression of distaste.
Smoke rising from their clothing and hair, Marla and Carl picked themselves up from the floor. Becky remained on her knees, rubbing her frostbitten hands together and whimpering.
Titania pursed her extraordinary lips and said, "It's a good thing I decided to come back. You don't have things quite under control here."
"Everything is fine," Marla said. "I'm just in the process of sending him away out of this world." She pointed at Penrose, who was pulling himself out of the wall.
He flickered and then became more solid.
Another gust of autumn wind blasted through the windows and all the candles on the table were blown out. In the fireplace, the flames sprang higher. Jennifer and Becky both squeaked involuntarily. Even the stolid thug holding Elizabeth shivered. Sensing his distraction, she tensed herself to pull away, but he did not loosen his grip.
Elizabeth thought she saw something floating in from the kitchen. Trying not to turn her head, she strained her peripheral vision to identify the object. It was the small red fire extinguisher that normally rested on the floor beside the stove. Now it was floating about four feet off the ground, keeping to the shadows and working its way around behind the table until it passed out of sight.
Titania was smiling at Penrose, who was flickering less and less. Her smile intensified and she tossed her black curls, casting a bit of glamour over everyone. Carl was slack jawed and Elizabeth felt the grip on her relax slightly.
"You." Penrose became very still, his features assuming an expression Elizabeth had never seen on him, not wariness, but a careful watching for an opening.
"Not exactly. I am She, but a few times removed." Eyes half closed, Titania undulated gently while she combed through memories that may not have been entirely her own. When she spoke again, her voice reverberated as if she were a plurality of women. "Centuries go by and you keep turning up, posing an impediment to my friends and their plans no matter what I do to cancel you out of the equation. When Carl told me about this house and the difficulties he and Marla were having with something drawing off the ley energy, I should have expected to find you at the heart of the situation. I suppose I shall have to effect your removal with more permanent measures than I've used before. I shall enjoy it. I've let you lurk around making trouble for too long."
He bared his teeth in a death's head grin. "So we can get this over with? Finally? It really has been a long time and I've been awake every minute of it, wondering what to do when we met again."
"You weren't thinking of," she paused and arched her back, "revenge, were you? I think I'm rather disappointed. Even you should have been able to come up with something more interesting than that. You've had three centuries."
"Oh, it'll be interesting."
With a catlike yawn, Titania took a step towards him. "I'm quite jaded. You'd be surprised what it takes to get my attention at this point. In any event, you're bothering my half-sister here, so we'll continue this discussion in Faery. I'll warn you, though, to keep in mind that if you're tiresome, we'll use you to for our next tithe to Hell instead of Trip. And even if you're not, we might use you for the teind anyway. I think our patron would find you more acceptable than a lawyer." She cocked an elegant eyebrow at the Velvis.
The draft from the windows rippled beneath the velvet. The black velvet shadow in the background moved its puppeteer hands and the Elvis nodded.
Eyes widening, Jennifer did the math and cried, "Trip? No, he's my brother! You can't take him. That wasn't part of our deal."
"Don't be a fool. The kind of power you want comes at a price. Always," Marla snarled. "You didn't think your legal tricks with the title would be enough to buy you immortality, did you?"
Elizabeth twisted free of the hand covering her mouth and chirped, "Immortality is overrated. Didn't you see Highlander?"
Everyone ignored her.
Advancing on Penrose, who hadn't moved and looked as though he were gathering himself for.something, Titania slipped off her green coat with a practiced motion and swirled it around. She held it open as if she would throw it over him.
Elizabeth realized what she had to do and tore herself from her captor's hands. As she wrenched away, leaving a fair amount of hair and her sweatshirt behind, she heard a ringing sound and he dropped her entirely to grab at his head. The fire extinguisher dropped to the floor beside him and rolled away. Elizabeth threw herself towards Penrose and flung her arms round him. She tried to brace herself for the blast of cold that she knew would follow from his touch, but nothing could have prepared her for the Arctic freeze that swept through her. She felt ice crystals forming in her guts.
"How annoyingly folkloric. You'd think this sort of thing wouldn't be necessary in the twenty-first century." Pouting, Titania approached them. She put her astonishing lips together and blew.
Her breath shimmered in the air and fell around Elizabeth and Penrose like glitter in a snow globe. Penrose blurred around the edges and his shape began to change into something not human. His arms melted into his sides and his feet joined together. He swayed and Elizabeth was horribly reminded of a cobra dancing to the flute of a snake charmer. His mouth open in an O of surprise, he looked down into her eyes and the transformation was complete. The snake draped its icy coils around her.
She tried frantically to recall the ballad of Tam Lin. Miss Price had been singing it the other morning and she had read it that night Penrose had her searching Child for Death references. What next? A bear? That depended on the version of the ballad, and there were more than a dozen variants. The only thing she could be sure of was that in the ballad, Janet had saved Tam Lin from the Queen of Faery by not letting go, no matter what they turned him into.
She was cold, colder beyond anything she could remember. Winter in New Jersey, when she went out without a hat and her ears turned red and ached with cold, was downright balmy in comparison. But this chill numbed her to everything and left her barely aware of hands on her shoulders and arms and shouting.
Marla and Titania were directing their followers to pull Elizabeth away from Penrose. Hovering back near the table and wiping her nose on her sleeve, Becky wouldn't come near her at all. The thugs tried to separate them, but dropped back after being burned with cold. Their faces showed a dawning awareness that their leaders were unwilling to step into the fray themselves. Elizabeth saw the fire extinguisher rise from the floor and bang itself down on various heads. Carl dropped like a rock, but the fire extinguisher rang multiple times on the heads of the thugs, without much effect. Finally the agent that was using the fire extinguisher gave up and dropped it. The fire extinguisher rolled away.
The snake began to thicken and uncoil from her waist. Now she found her hands buried in icy fur. She clung to a bear who swung a frying pan-sized paw at anyone who tried to touch her.
At some point in the ballad, she remembered, Tam Lin turns into a red-hot iron. She was looking forward to that.
"Get her off," Marla shouted.
Titania swirled her coat back around her shoulders and picked up a candlestick from the table.
The bear dropped to all fours and began to melt into the slim shape of a lion. Sinking to her knees beside him, Elizabeth knotted her frozen fingers deeply in his mane. Roaring and leaving her half deaf, he faced the dining room. Her back was to the fire now and the blissful heat soaked into her frozen body.
She pulled her attention away from her physical misery and saw rather fewer people in the room than there had been at the start. The thugs had vanished. Jennifer was still clinging grimly to Marla's side. The two women held the knife with Jennifer's hands wrapped around Marla's in a white-knuckled mass. They advanced towards the lion. Becky pulled a smoking brand from the fire and approached from Elizabeth's blind side. Carl began to stir from the position on the floor where he had been sent sprawling by the fire extinguisher.
Flames reflected along the blade as the two women moved closer, unafraid of the lion. Elizabeth herself felt hardly more formidable than a mouse by now, but still she held on. The lion backed away and roared again. Elizabeth's heels were in the fire, but the cold had reached her mind and numbed her towards unconsciousness. Penrose began to change shape again.
A shout roused her from the impending stupor. The bucket that Bob had been filling at the sink flew in from the kitchen and emptied itself over Marla and then hit Jennifer in the head. Shrieking, the slender lawyer let go of Marla's hands and ran from the dining room towards the front of the house.
The torch was wrenched from Becky's hands before she could drop it or set anything on fire (it must be Bob, Elizabeth thought. Bob with the ring) and was brandished fiercely at Becky, who backed away trembling. Rififi appeared beneath her feet. She tripped over the cat and fell headlong across the floor.
Marla dropped the knife and stood there with the water dripping down her nose. A small wisp of steam rose slowly from the top of her head and was joined by larger wisps from her hands. She choked, "I'm melting. I'm melting!"
She crumpled to her knees and kept on crumpling, her bloodcurdling screams rising into the night. The smoke and steam that lifted from her as she dissolved, very like much brown sugar, were caught in the draft and drifted towards the broken windows and the night.
An inky shadow stepped down from the velvet Elvis and approached the cloud that hung over Marla's soggy garments. The cloud drew away from the shadow, but was enveloped by the inexorable, black shadow, which struck a karate pose and sprang back into the velvet painting. In the end, all that remained was a soggy pile of black clothing with two large platform shoes poking up from beneath.
With an enraged cry, Titania looked wildly around for someone to blame. She settled for Penrose, who had now regained his astral human form, having skipped the hot iron stage, much to Elizabeth's wintry disappointment. He interposed himself between Titania and Elizabeth.
Her glamour erased and her mouth a savage slash across her ivory face, Titania screamed, "I'm not through with you. You'll be playing chess with the Devil himself before we're done." She vanished in a flash of green light that left violent afterimages dancing across Elizabeth's retinas.
The last thing Elizabeth saw before she slipped into unconsciousness was Alice and Joe entering the dining room. Alice had Jennifer's arms locked in a nice come-along grip. Carl rose and moved towards the floating torch, which was flung into the fireplace. The invisible presence socked Carl on the chin and sent him falling back against the table. Becky fled.