Stone Cold Killer

The collection of rooms above the bakery was nicer than Jordan's own place by a long way. That considered, the guy they were trying to re-home in them could be a bit more fucking appreciative. Jordan clenched her fists and only the gloves stopped her fingernails drawing blood.

"Look..." She crouched down further, drew a calming breath and tried to remove the scowl from her face and the anger from her voice, even if those had become permanent fixtures recently. The guy was Troubled, scared, and a stranger in town, and she'd been there. Calm, she ordered herself, aggressively. Soothing. Nice. She also tried to remember his name. "...Anthony. It doesn't have to be so bad. I know it's all... very new just now."

Anthony whimpered and stayed where he was.

Why was she bothering? It wasn't like she was being paid anything to put up with this. This was supposed to be a simple job, a settling-in gig, something quiet after the last disaster -- a piece of hand-holding. Not that she was suited to hand-holding, but it had been going okay. Polite welcomes, smalltalk... and, okay, minor incidents with a whoopee cushion, plastic spider and an electric handshake that had come very close to a serious backfire (really, the guy had no idea). But then Jordan had walked into the bedroom and found suitcase contents scattered all over the place and their Troubled relocatee nowhere in sight.

She jerked her head up as Hamish walked into the room. Seeing his startled expression at finding her on the floor, she said, "He's under the bed," with such force it was almost a growl, and Hamish stepped backwards.

She'd been saddled with Hamish after her last partner had disembowelled himself. The one before that had very literally gone to pieces, and the one before that had been Grady, and everyone now knew what had happened to him. Hamish, overly youthful and socially useless, hadn't been told that he'd drawn the short straw, and so far had proved more interested in his hand-held video game than the mission. He was so thin he looked like a lollipop, with a big, round skull capped with lank blond hair lolling on top of a skinny stick-body.

"What'd you do to him?" Hamish complained, his voice rising to a squeak. "Tickle him with your tickling fingers of pain?"

Jordan was mentally compiling a list, and she sourly added that comment to it. "No. I didn't touch him, and I don't want to touch him by mistake. So how about you get down and coax him out from under there?" She straightened up and angrily stepped back out of the way.

"I'm sorry," quavered the voice from under the bed. "I can't stop it. I can see it, but I can't stop it. It's awful. Those poor people. All that blood..."

Jordan forgot her list of grievances with Hamish long enough to exchange him a doom-laden glance.

"That," Hamish said, jabbing a finger in fidgety apprehension, "that did not sound good. That sounded like a Thing. You heard what this guy does. Mr..." He made a false start to bob down, backed up and looked for a safe surface to put down his game. "Uh, Mr Rowell, What did you see, exactly?"

Jordan was going to break that useless piece of plastic over his head.

Anthony Rowell was a banker from Florida who'd started seeing things. Vivid, unpleasant things that apparently sent him diving for the nearest corner, transforming a mild-mannered, balding little man with a penchant for practical jokes into a big chicken. Some of the visions could be identified as prophetic, others seemed genuine incoherent nonsense so far as anyone could determine, but theoretically a lot was being lost in the interpretation and Anthony Rowell reliably saw the future.

"If you saw something," Jordan said to the man under the bed cautiously, keeping her distance and consciously folding her arms, "can you tell us more? Was that a vision?" She had meagre hopes he was seeing a future where he was going to get out from under that bed and start acting like a rational human being again in the next five seconds. She waited: no. It struck her with, she felt, genius clarity that perhaps if the man fell to pieces when he received visions of bad things about to happen, it would have been wiser for the Guard not to bring him to Haven.

She rolled her eyes when he didn't answer and reflected that, while his initial declaration had been alarming, the flip side of him being in Haven was that spouting doom-laden prophecies also didn't actually mean much.

It was another day in Haven.

"Aw, man, come on..." Hamish wheedled, down on his knees, and Jordan scowled around the new carpets and nice curtains while her otherwise useless partner held Anthony's hand and rubbed his shoulder encouragingly and tried to draw him out of his hiding place. Who, she wondered, managed the Guard's finances and decided who was getting what, when they were brought into town? Why was she living in a glorified shed out back of the Gun & Rose if others were getting set up this well?

Then again, Rowell had had money. He'd probably bought his way into the executive relocation package.

"Touch," Anthony gibbered, flinching abruptly, pulling clear of Hamish and disappearing again. "I see hands... His hands are doing such terrible things, and... You... lady with the gloves... you'll have to let him touch you. I'm sorry. I have to go to sleep now."

Hamish groaned, shifting his awkward, balanced position, and implored, "Get up and sleep on the bed. You don't worry about anyone touching Jordan, either. Kirk did warn you, right?"

"Hamish," Jordan barked.

"I don't want to," Anthony rejected, fighting Hamish's increasingly physical efforts to manoeuvre him up. "You should get down, too."

Hamish made a choked-off noise. Jordan turned and discovered he'd stopped, frozen still. His clothes and skin had become the same undifferentiated shade of grey, and before her startled gaze he very slowly toppled over. His oversized head cracked against a set of drawers on the way down and with a crunch, broke off from his neck. The two pieces of him hit the floor and rolled in opposite directions. Jordan gasped sharply, jerked back a step, and stared in utter disbelief. What?

What the hell had just happened?

Anthony Rowell had gone totally quiet under the bed. She cautiously stepped forward, a sick sensation gathering in her throat as she got closer to Hamish. He was... stone. She crouched down, very attentive to her centre of gravity, and bent to look at Anthony. He was also frozen, in a pressed-to-the-floor pose, his complexion far more grey even than it had been a minute ago. Both men had become... statues.

"Crap." She'd seen Troubles and Troubles, and this was by no means the weirdest, but-- "Crap! I don't believe it." Hugging her own arms tight for comfort, Jordan stepped over Hamish and went to the window, where the street noises had ominously silenced. Down below, people had stopped in their tracks. For as far as she could see, there was not another living, moving soul.

She wondered if she'd been spared because she was standing at the very edge of its extent. Then she wondered, how far did it extend?

With trembling hands, she pulled out her phone and rang Kirk. Rang endlessly, and then rang again. And again. Then she rang her other Guard contacts. And then, she even rang Nathan Wuornos, and that was just as much a waste of time as all the rest of them because nobody, nobody was answering.

"No," Jordan asserted positively. "No way in hell. No." She was not the only one left standing in the middle of this. "Fuck!" She started a movement to bowl the damn phone at the wall and stopped herself just in time, seething.

There had to be someone. Fucking Audrey Parker was immune to the Troubles. She rang Nathan six more times. "Shit, shit, shit!" Trust her to pick the one historic moment when Audrey wasn't standing next to the bastard. She went through every other name in her phone after Nathan, then started again at the beginning of the list, continuing while she left Anthony and Hamish behind and ran down the steps and out into the street. Number after number echoed hollowly against her ear. People stared blankly, grey and motionless, everywhere she looked. She tried not to look at them; their frozen expressions, their petrified skin. It was the first time she ever could have imagined wishing she had Audrey Parker's cellphone number.

She'd become so accustomed to the endless ringing that it was a shock when one of her calls finally got answered. "--Wait, who is this?" she backtracked, not finding much clue in the gruff, grunted "Yeah?" on the other end. She was walking up the steps of the police station, past a statue of an officer manhandling a handcuffed suspect.

"Jordan, you rang me," the voice replied impatiently.

"Dwight! Yes! Thank God!" Dwight was a one-man army, and she could definitely feel happier about the situation with him around for backup. "Where are you?"

"On the road back from Camden. Just gone past the Grigson garage. Jordan, why are you calling? I told you the other week was a one-off. I don't work with the Guard any more."

Self-righteous ass, thought Jordan. She did seem to pick those, and it was a habit that she needed to break. "Something's happened in town. Just forget the crap, I -- I need you. Everyone's--" She tried to find a less crazy way to put it, and couldn't "--statues. Dwight, the whole town, everyone. Turned to stone."

"Everyone?" She heard the shock in his voice.

"That I've seen so far," she qualified. "I tried to call Nathan, Dwight." Which should tell him how desperate she was feeling. "A dozen times!"

"Have you tried to contact Audrey?"

"What did I just say? Like I have Audrey Parker's phone number!"

She heard him drag in a rough breath. It sounded like logs being sawed. "Alright. Well, I do. So I'll try that. Where are you now?"

"Police station..." Jordan stopped at the doors and looked through, grimacing. It was ironic. For weeks she'd almost had the run of the place, popping in and out casually, but the last time she'd been here, it had been as Nathan's prisoner.

"Wait there. I'll catch you up in a half hour." She heard the engine roar as he stepped on it, just before he cut the call.

Knowing Dwight was on his way made her happier, but it was still creepy as hell being the only moving soul around. Jordan pushed back the door and headed into the police station. Judging by the line of three suited stiffs, stalking out the main corridor wearing pissed off expressions and FBI IDs, something interesting had been going on.

Some part of her had still really hoped, despite everything, that she might find Nathan untouched and able to help. She found him, all right, but he was standing in his office with a cup of coffee in one hand, caught in a pose of casual argument with someone who'd since moved. No prizes for guessing who that had been, Jordan supposed. Fine, so Audrey was around somewhere, but not here. The whole building was as silent as death. Jordan wasn't one to waste an opportunity, so with time to kill, spent it digging through Nathan's files. She didn't like the idea of him watching her do it, whether he could process what was in front of his eyes or not, so she took his jacket off the back of his chair and draped it over his head, just in case.

She couldn't find anything helpful to any of the Guard's ongoing projects, or anything pertinent to their current situation. After a while, slightly nervous of running out of time and fairly sure Dwight wouldn't approve, since he was in tight with the cops these days, she stopped, replaced Nathan's jacket on the chair, and behaved herself. Mostly. She grimly perused Nathan's noticeboard, decorated with the work of a different killer this week. This one had a thing for blondes.

Eventually, she sat in the Chief's chair and stared morbidly at Nathan. Maybe engaged in just a little fantasy about finding herself a chisel and going to work on his face. When Dwight showed up, she heard him coming a mile away. Nothing else around was making any noise.

Dwight slid his eyes over the room and gave her a look that said he knew exactly what she'd been up to. Sometimes she could forget that Dwight could be a shifty bastard, too. "Hey."

"I'm so glad I could hug you," Jordan said caustically.

He shifted his feet. "I'll forgo that offer. Thanks."

Dwight circled the coffee-swigging statue, his forehead crinkling and his mouth forming a grim line. He picked up a pencil from the desk and poked at Nathan tentatively. "You've been here a while. Do you think he knows we're here?"

Jordan shrugged. "His conversation hasn't been affected."

Dwight guffawed, but didn't really have any business to. It would be a close-run thing if the two men were to hold a terseness and textured silences contest.

"Stop poking him," Jordan said, becoming annoyed. "Why the pencil, anyway?"

Dwight turned and looked at her, his face pulled very bland. "You've not touched him, have you? Not touched any of them?"

Confused, she held up her hands, still securely encased within her gloves. People were stone, and probably didn't care, but no, she hadn't touched them anyway. It was -- habit.

"It must have occurred to you," Dwight voiced patiently. "I was thinking about it on the way over. What's different between you and everyone else? When's the last time you touched anyone, skin to skin?"

Jordan drew a sharp breath. Oh, that stung. Her last human contact, now that Nathan was out of the picture, had been last Thursday, in the line at the grocery store, when someone accidentally jostled her. She could still hear the screams. "You think it's been spread by contact," she said hoarsely. "Like a contagion?" She tipped her head at Nathan. "That didn't help him."

"He touches people," Dwight said. "He just can't feel them. Must shake a dozen hands a day, now he's Chief of Police." He grimaced. "Now, I've been out of town since Sunday, dealing with -- never mind. That's two days. So we're looking for someone new, who arrived since then, or someone here already whose Trouble was activated during that time. There could be some overlap. I might've got lucky and it just didn't have chance to spread to me before I left."

Jordan said, "The Guard hasn't brought in anybody new." Except Anthony Rowell, who she could definitely rule out. She couldn't help but think... "Surely there'd be other people unaffected. People don't touch that often."

He gave her a look that might have been pitying but then shrugged and allowed, "Maybe so, but they're probably few and far between, and probably even more likely to stay inside if they've seen what's going on." He waved the pencil in his hand, and said warningly, "Just in case this is still communicable, be careful what you touch." He tossed the pencil back onto Nathan's desk.

Jordan snorted. He was the one who needed to be careful.

"Right. Sorry." Dwight cast around. "Still no sign of Audrey? I must have tried to call her twenty times in the last half hour."

"She was here." Jordan gestured at Nathan's posture. "Now she's not." She watched Dwight take that in. "I haven't seen her. Shouldn't she have fixed this already? It's her job."

"Cut her some slack." Dwight eyed Nathan. "This will have thrown her. She's not usually a solo unit, not like you and me."

"The Guard give me partners. They just can't stay on the ball. Or in one piece. Or alive."

"Sounds like I need to be careful." Dwight went to the door and held it open for her with a jerk of his head. "Suggest we go visit the Teagues, see what the Herald archives have to offer. If nothing else, you got to rummage through the Chief's files, and I've been itching for a crack at Vince and Dave's."

"All right." Jordan smiled, leaned in closer to him than he evidently found comfortable, and purred, "I'll try not to infect you with my jinx on the way."

She eyed the bike sourly. The mental image of Dwight's overlarge frame perched atop it was only slightly more ridiculous than the idea of her attempting it in black leather and knee high boots. She said, "We'll walk. It isn't as though the Herald office is far."

Dwight's expression was judging her. "No-one will see."

"Or everyone will see." She gestured at the statues around them. "Not much else to focus on." She rolled her eyes. "I've not ridden a pedal bike since I was ten. Find me one with an engine, and we'll talk again."

He crooked at grin back at her and they set off, avoiding the stalled obstacles peppering the streets. It stabbed at Jordan's heart to see kids holding their parents' hands, just as frozen as the rest. This Trouble didn't discriminate.

In the Haven Herald office, Vince-statue and Dave-statue were arranged at opposing desks. Vince's curly head looked like the finest detail carving, and Dave's glasses were almost as impressive, the thin glass and frames gravity-defying at the end of his nose. Dave had a stone paper aeroplane in his hand, caught on the verge of pelting it across the room at his brother. Vince was focused in concentration, head bowed, typing.

Jordan would have sworn Vince was scowling at her from under his brows as she waved a hand in front of his face. She rounded the desk to read over his shoulder, nudging the mouse to remove a screensaver displaying buxom art nudes. Behind her, out of both Teagues' theoretical stone sight, Dwight conducted a methodical search of their shelves and drawers. Jordan decided to opt for a more 21st Century method of digging. She carefully shoved chair and Vince clear and knelt in front of the screen.

Using a computer wearing gloves wasn't ideal, but at the moment, she'd rather be safe than sorry. She left them on.

Vince was writing about the escape of a notorious criminal from Shawshank Prison; the same man whose grim handiwork decorated Nathan's noticeboard, and presumably also the reason for the suited FBI stiffs at the station. Kris Glave, 32 years old, was a Haven native and Vince was speculating upon the danger to the population should he return to his home town, warning every citizen to be on the alert. Glave was a psychopath who'd killed three women for fun and two men mostly because he felt like it. The things he'd done to the women didn't bear repeating -- leaving Jordan none the wiser, since Vince hadn't repeated them. But the pictures on Nathan's boards had been... unpleasant, and they returned to mind too easily.

Glave had escaped the solitary confinement that had been his almost permanent state of existence at the prison on Saturday.

Jordan opened a folder on the desktop labelled 'GLAVE' and found Vince's research material, which was suspiciously similar to Nathan's, and who in hell knew how Vince got this stuff? The crime scene reports and survivor interviews made bile rise to the back of her throat. She already knew something of how these women felt. She didn't need or want the reminder.

Chewing the side of her mouth, she brought the Herald archives up on Vince's screen. The timing seemed uncomfortably close. It was worth digging deeper. Was it better to have a potential lead on their mystery Troubled person even if it raised the possibility they were dealing with this? She typed 'Glave' into the archives' search box and gained a flood of articles dating back to his original arrest five years ago that were of little interest, considering the Troubles hadn't been around then.

Further down was a find that made her gasp. A 1955 article read, 'Local Man's Tribute in Stone to Missing Wife'. The article waxed lyrical about the artistry of the statue, and even had a poor quality picture. An obituary dated some weeks later spoke of Michael Glave's inconsolable sadness since his wife's unexplained vanishing.

No shit.

"You've got something?" Dwight had wandered over and hung at her shoulder.

"Well," Jordan qualified, "I got that our Troubled person is an escaped psychopath. I'm not sure I'd class that information as welcome or helpful." She gave a small, incredulous laugh.

Dwight broke away and rummaged among the jumble on Dave Teagues' desk with a particular focus.

Jordan blinked. "What are you doing?"

"They've got a mailing register with every citizen in Haven on it. Damn it, Dave, where did you put it?!" Dwight slammed his hand on the desk as he addressed the stone-locked man, then hauled the whole desk forward to clear himself space to safely ransack the drawers.

Jordan turned back to the screen. "He looks so normal. He looks just like anyone," she murmured unhappily, staring at the escaped killer's picture. His face was bland and maybe even pleasant. He would easily fit into the background, unmemorable in any crowd. "He must have been back in town for days, maybe even since the escape, to have spread this so far. No-one would notice him." She shuddered.

She had a flash of that innocuous face at a table in the Gun & Rose. Of a hand reaching for her arm, which was clad in a red t-shirt to the wrists with black gloves overlapping the red and ensuring a safe seal on her skin. Of herself twisting away anyhow, out of habit. She had no idea if the image was a real memory or a product of her imagination.

"This takes objectifying someone to a whole new level," she said hoarsely.

"Got it," Dwight announced, slapping a thick book onto Dave's desk. "Glave... there's a Felix and Emma at 25 Oak Drive. And Kristopher Glave himself, crossed out, for an address up on Cotter Hill. There's no house number, just a name -- Highview."

"That's miles away," Jordan protested.

"Yeah." Dwight looked frustrated. "And after high seas washed the road out in March, it's also practically an island. You can still get up there with a good enough four-wheel-drive if the tide's not at its highest. But it's probably more reliable by boat."

Jordan pried herself up from her kneeling position, feeling her legs had begun to set almost as immovably as the unfortunate Teagues. "Lets hope Felix and Emma can offer a more immediate solution." Oak Drive, they could walk to in about ten minutes.

When they got there, Jordan wished they hadn't. There had been statues there, too, but they'd been pulverised with a sledgehammer, or something like it. Two big piles of gravel and one little one. Dwight went stock-still and very pale at the sight of that last.

"Maybe they had... a dog," Jordan offered weakly. She picked up photo frames from the dresser, and turned face-down any depicting the little girl, hoping Dwight hadn't seen. A few pictures had already been smashed to the floor with obvious, personal anger. In some of the older photographs, she could see bland-faced Glave, alongside a man of similar age with a notable family resemblance. She offered shakily, "I think Felix was his brother. I guess they really didn't get along." Dwight knelt by a gravel pile and froze his hand just shy of touching the pieces. "This is frustration," he said roughly. "It's not what he wants. He's been cheated of what he wants."

"What?" Jordan asked.

"You saw the crime scene photos. These people didn't suffer." His face twisted up as he turned and looked back at her. "The statues can't be something he's doing on purpose. He can't control it."

"Right. Dwight the criminal profiler." Jordan stopped, struck suddenly as his words caught her up. She put her sarcasm away and said slowly, "He's been trapped by his own power..." That, she understood. After what had happened to her, she'd never wanted to be touched again. Then she'd got her wish, instant, ironic and bitter, stripping away more of what humanity she had left. Glave, with a world of victims at his fingertips... well; as soon as his fingertips touched them, they'd never deliver what he needed from them again.

Dwight abruptly jerked to his feet and headed out the door at a run. He threw back over his shoulder the jarring question, "So where the hell is Audrey?"

Blondes, Jordan thought, and each and every one of those horrible pictures flashed again before her eyes.

Sometimes immunity wasn't a blessing at all.

Jordan had a collection of good reasons for resenting Audrey Parker, and had always kind of thought that female solidarity was crap, but what did you know? It turned out that faced with this choice, she was with Dwight all the way. Besides, they needed Audrey. Audrey could end the Troubles, and was far too important to let some asshole psychopath fuck with and risk losing everyone's chance of going back to normal for the best part of twenty-seven years.

Outside, Dwight stopped still in his tracks, risking a bump that could've proved painful, if she hadn't been buttoned-down fairly well today. Jordan scowled, backed off carefully from his big frame and opened her mouth to say something scathing, but found herself following his gaze. It had alighted upon, and now gently stroked, the matt black bodywork and glistening chrome of two Suzuki motorcycles in a neighbouring driveway. "Oh, now?" Jordan crooned approvingly. "Now you're talking my language."

Taking the motorbikes was easy. Dwight was like a human Swiss army knife; you could pull out a multi-tool from his crazy skill-set for every occasion. Jordan had missed that, since the Chief nabbed him from them. The urge to smite him with the nearest blunt object for being so absurdly capable hadn't gone away, either.

Dwight completed his grand vehicular theft trifecta with a motor boat once they reached the shore. Dumping off three smelly crates of fish next to a fisherman statue, they powered on their way across the waters.

Glave's semi-island had a pebble shoreline. They dragged the boat up to join a small collection of others beached where the sparse grass begun, and immediately faced a steep slope of dense foliage and trees. Much of the undergrowth was formed of cultivated plants run wild from the gardens of the scattered houses, a half-dozen or so of them half-buried in the greenery. They dotted the path of the road that wound up the hill. This was a forgotten part of Haven, a tiny scrap of near-vertical land all but surrounded by the encroaching sea. Anyone who liked having neighbours or shopping trips had moved out long ago.

The first house, perched at a bend in the steep, narrow road, had a name plaque so old and defaced by weathering it was barely readable -- 'Rose Cottage'. The door was open. It occurred to Jordan that this was the perfect place to find other people unaffected by the widespread Trouble just as she smelled the blood.

She pulled her knuckles back, aborting a knock upon the door, and slowly pushed it inward, willing it not to creak.

The smell produced when blood was liberally daubed around a room was... memorable. There had been one occasion that the Troubled person she'd been meant to help had turned himself inside-out before the Guard were able to get to him, painting walls, floor and ceiling in the process. The sight -- and smell -- had never really left the dark corners of her nightmares since.

What Glave had done to the wreckage of a human being in the living room of that house was much worse.

Jordan felt herself shut down. She backed out again, pulling Dwight with her, gloved hands on his shoulders. After a moment of standing numbly on the doorstep, staring at the fluffy white clouds drifting in the blue of the sky with her mind wholly blank, she went back into the kitchen, ran the faucet to fill a glass with water, and brought it out to Dwight. He'd finished throwing up. She didn't know why she wasn't. She'd do it later, she decided. Maybe she'd feel it, by then.

"Thanks," Dwight said roughly. He drank. "If he's got Audrey..."

"He can't have her. We need her." What would happen to the Troubles if that happened to Audrey Parker? "So let's hope it's the other way around." Crouching down, Jordan pulled stems off the lavender in the garden, crushing them between her hands and steepling her palms in front of her face, inhaling the oil residue left on her gloves, trying to forget about the other smell. "This isn't what he did before. I saw Vince Teagues' files. I saw Nathan's. He likes to take his time."

"Either a world full of statues pushed him way over the edge, or whatever caused him to go over the edge kicked his Trouble into high gear." Dwight shifted, the movement too rigid, too full of suppressed pain to call it a shrug. "Doesn't matter which. He's an animal. Maybe he's been itching for this through all his years behind bars."

After the first house, with urgency driving at them, they did not venture into any other homes, only taking long enough to establish the address. Jordan could have guessed their destination would be near the top, judging by its name and her luck. Right on the nail, Highview turned out to be the house perched at the uppermost point of the cliff.

As they walked up to the rotting wooden sign, Jordan murmured, "I'm getting a definite Bates Motel vibe."

Dwight grunted and drew her off the road, tucking both of them tight into the edge of the foliage at the gate's side. "Call it a soldier's sixth sense," he said, at her look of askance. "I'm pretty sure someone's home."

"Then we need to be inside," Jordan reasoned. "Finishing this." Any other day she might have issues with the idea of tackling a mass murderer, but Audrey Parker was going to stop the Troubles, and no-one, including the sick bastard who'd perpetrated the horror they'd witnessed below, was going to screw that up.

Dwight's scrutinising gaze looked her up and down uncertainly. "Are you all right with this? We've... seen what he does to women."

She smiled back. "If he touches me, he deserves everything he gets. And I'll probably be a statue. Which in the circumstances is not so scary. So lose the chivalry and let's go neutralize the bastard."

Neither of them were properly armed. Anthony had hardly merited that kind of caution, and even if she'd had a gun, it would have been more dangerous for Dwight than any enemy. Dwight, caught on the hop, was not his usual uber-prepared self, without a crossbow or morningstar in sight. They settled for picking up a couple of sturdy lengths of scrap wood as they crossed the yard. The front door was closed, but not locked. Inside the house, several years' accumulation of dust mixed with signs of very recent occupation, though dust sheets still covered the furniture in most rooms. Voices came from somewhere at the back. Jordan and Dwight exchanged glances, then walked side by side down a long, dark corridor. The speakers fell into a silence until, with the door at the end only feet away, one all-too-familiar voice said, "What will you do once you're finished with me, huh? Everyone else in town is rock. Can't hurt them. Or you could, but they don't care. It's not enough, is it? I can help you with that."

Jordan had no qualms about holding back and letting Dwight burst through that door before her.

In a characterful sitting room crammed with half the contents of an antique store, divested of its dust sheets, Audrey Parker was mussed but more bruised than bloody as she faced off against Glave. Her hands were cuffed in front of her and she gripped in them a large, ugly ornamental statue -- a real one, in bronze. She was, however, down to a light, sleeveless top that didn't match the weather, and there was a thin line of blood along the top of her left breast where the material was wrenched askew. Glave had a split lip, bloody mouth and open zipper. Jordan felt her expression curl.

"Stay away from her," Dwight said, stepping in between the stand-off, a striking anger on his face.

If Audrey looked surprised to see Dwight, her face underwent even more extreme contortions when she noticed Jordan, but her attention returned in such fast panic to Dwight that it all cascaded across her expression in about half a second. Her puffy lips gasped urgently, "Dwight, no!"

Glave hadn't stopped moving. Dwight swung the wooden bar in his hands, but Glave managed to duck and the fierce blow only scraped his shoulder and head. The two men stepped in to meet each other, and the realisation on Dwight's expression was almost comical as he grasped that he couldn't bring the bar back around fast enough to block. It was replaced swiftly by decision. The bar left his hands and hit the floor.

Dwight didn't try to pull clear, but reached forward in full knowledge, determinedly clamping his strong arms around Glave, tightening the grasp to an inescapable bear hug, racing the stone effect that rushed over his body from their first point of contact.

On the plus side, the knife in Glave's hand clicked against stone as he shoved it upwards into Dwight's abdomen, and Jordan thought it had probably done no worse harm than to chip his jacket. Far more negatively, Dwight's last-ditch embrace was a little too loose to do the job of restraint he'd been hoping for. Glave started wriggling almost at once. With Dwight's eyes dead and flat, it was obvious Glave saw no meaningful obstacle between himself and the two women. His eyes flashed at them, taking in Jordan with a leer that made her feel almost as filthy as the night her Trouble had kicked in.

He said, "I like blondes, but I'll make an exception."

"Scum." Jordan lunged the few steps she needed to break her own improvised club over his head, but the wood was more crumbly and rotten than she'd thought, and it only staggered him and didn't put him out. His knife hand was already loose of Dwight's embrace, as if she'd dared get too close anyway. She looked around for something else large and heavy to slam into his head. Why wasn't Audrey doing anything useful with that chunk of bronze in her arms?

"We can't kill him," Audrey said intensely. "We need him to end this first. It's the whole town, Jordan. We can't risk it."

Jordan stared at her. "Don't kill him? How the hell do you think we're going to do this?" But sure, she remembered Audrey's methods, with Moira, and with Holloway (when they hadn't worked). Audrey didn't want to kill Glave -- Audrey wanted him to stand still and let her fucking talk. "So what's your plan? You have a plan, right? You're always the one... who knows." God damn it, she thought, her hands itching inside her gloves as she stared at the murderer steadily inching his way free of Dwight, trying to ease his head through the tight vise of stone arms, all the time slashing the knife to ward them off. Tell me what to do! But Audrey's eyes were wide with shock and too close to the edge, and even Jordan had to admit she had every reasonable excuse for that. "Capture him," Audrey said plainly, swallowing and nodding at the leering bastard.

"How?" Shit, this -- this was Jordan's own trick, facing back at her like a twisted reflection. You couldn't easily capture or control what you couldn't touch, Nathan fucking Wuornos aside, who had cuffed her and dragged her off like her taser body meant nothing.

Her body... that was her weapon, but Glave, Glave would win that contest. She would only get one touch, then she'd be stone, and then he'd be alone with Audrey, who could touch him but was hampered by handcuffs, and Glave was half again her body mass. So, how? How the hell were the two of them going to subdue Glave and keep him that way long enough for Audrey to work her magic on him?

If they needed to find a way to persuade -- to help, she supposed, since he clearly didn't want them in that state either -- the Troubled Glave to restore the population of Haven, then the only one who could fix that problem was Audrey.

Anthony Rowell's words echoed in Jordan's head, so out of context back in that clean, bright apartment.

She drew a ragged breath. Dwight had hit upon the right idea. Jordan pulled off both gloves and shrugged her jacket over her shoulders. If she was only going to get one touch, might as well make it count. As she moved forward, she cast a hard look across to Audrey. "You're going to fix this." Trying to reassure herself -- hell, both of them -- for all she was worth. Whatever her feelings about the other woman, Audrey Parker was still the fucking messiah, after all.

"Jordan!" Audrey shouted in dismay and even started to lunge forward to stop her.

Jordan went for the wrist of the hand holding the knife and for Glave's face, judging her angle with care for ultimately more important reasons than the sharp steel blade. Maximum skin-to-skin contact, while plugging the gaps left in the cage provided by Dwight. Sliding her arm around Dwight's large shoulders and the killer's neck, she wrapped both men in a tight embrace, pressing her lips up to Glave's but never quite feeling if they made contact. He was already howling from the fingers curled around his wrist.

Cold spread from her hands to engulf her. The world greyed out to the familiar background music of agonised screams.

Time kind of passed and kind of didn't. Glave's screams were still ringing in her head when she blinked and staggered, completing movements she knew had been begun hours ago. Some instinctual part of her, developed over the last few years, knew that she was far closer to other people than she ought to be, but her limbs felt wooden and uncooperative when she tried to offer them commands. Audrey dragged Glave, in handcuffs, away from her and Jordan and Dwight fell into a mutual leaning-on-each other as their balance gave out. It ended abruptly and inevitably when their cheeks brushed together and Dwight wrenched clear with a strangled cry.

"Sorry," Jordan gulped. Without his support, she tottered to a chair and collapsed in it.

"Are you both all right?" Audrey asked.

Neither of them answered. Jordan, frankly, had no freakin' idea, so she assumed Dwight was in the same position. She had confused, stony memories of Glave's screaming lasting an awfully long time. "What happened?"

Audrey looked shaken, but holding together. Probably helped ever so much by Glave being locked in handcuffs and looking like death. The killer's gaze was fixed upon Jordan in terror and loathing. Well, good, she thought, because in her book pissing off that sort of asshole meant you'd done something right, but why?

...Oh. She felt the grin twist her face, and though there probably was still a fixed quality to it, it was relief, more than anything, overcoming her today.

All right, she could embrace her fucked-up self sometimes. Just as her fucked-up self had embraced Glave. Apparently just as fucked-up when wrapt in stone.

"Let's say you gave him hell of a persuasive reason to learn to control his Trouble. He was one co-operative little psychopath. Though it did take a while for him to really get the focus. But I guess pain can get kind of zen after a while." Audrey tipped her head and shoulders in a cute shrug. She didn't give a shit about Glave's suffering, either. The way she spoke that last phrase suggested she was echoing back something said to her earlier.

"We both got turned into...?" Dwight asked sluggishly, trying to catch up.

"I followed your example," Jordan said with a tired smile. She was exhausted. She got up and walked heavily across to retrieve her jacket from the floor, covering up again the thin scrap of a top she'd worn underneath. It felt like her feet were still stone. Her fingers resisted, clumsy and numb, as she pulled her gloves back on.

Dwight looked across at Glave's tall frame being shepherded by tiny Audrey and got back into focus. "You want any help with him?"

"Uh-uh," Audrey said. "Best not. He can control it now. But pettiness aside, I think all the fight's been knocked out of him for a while." She pulled a face. "I have no idea how I'm going to explain the careful handling of this one to the FBI."

Jordan considered opening her mouth, because the Guard generally prided themselves on handling their own kind. But honest to God, she did not want him, and she was going to have explanations enough to make -- and, shit, she could only imagine the freakout Anthony Rowell was having right now, waking up next to a headless Hamish.

She sighed. The sights and stresses of the day were starting to settle in, now the immediate horror of it was over, and they were making her sick to her stomach.

"You both saved the day today," Audrey said, with a strange hesitation. She was looking at Jordan, who opted to look away, scowling. Yeah, she helped the Troubled, too; helped manage the clusterfucks that the worst kinds of Troubles inflicted, and she'd been doing it since before Audrey reappeared in town. They'd never got along, they weren't going to start now, and she wasn't interested in any olive branches. "Thanks anyway," Audrey concluded. "I'd better take this asshole back to the station and start cleaning up the mess he left in his wake."

She left. Jordan and Dwight eyed each other in the silence of her absence. Dwight raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth.

"Don't start," Jordan said. "I had to save her, and you know why I had to save her."

He shrugged his big shoulders instead and after a moment, turned and ambled somewhat stiffly out the door, like his legs weren't working properly either. Jordan followed him.

Audrey and her baggage were already way down at the end of the garden, hustling out into the drive where a grey SUV waited.

The sun was shining brilliantly, glittering on the sea, and someone was wailing from the house at the bottom of the slope, cries carrying up to them above the sound of the breakers on the pebble beach.

"I have a mess to clean up back in town, too," Jordan said, pointedly.

Dwight grimaced and nodded, and handed over the stolen keys for the boat. "I'll take it. Least until Nathan gets here." His gaze roamed uncomfortably over her. "I'm guessing you won't want to wait around for that."

In the circumstances, she gave him a tight smirk instead of her annoyance. Then, she ventured a step further. "Come here." She crooked her gloved finger at him, and when he failed to move hooked it in his collar and pulled his head down closer to her level. He only flinched a little bit as she set her gloved hand gently against his cheek, then stretched up and kissed the back of the glove. "Thanks," she said, echoing Audrey with irony, "for helping out anyway."

She allowed herself to keep smiling, feeling his eyes on her back for a long time as she walked away.

END

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