Wyngarde’s illusionary fire struck the first Hunter and violent flash of heat ran over Henry’s skin. In a panic he threw himself from his seat, scattering his pistol and the condiments from the table. He hit floor hard, he rolled and flailed, trying to brush off imagined flames and outside the stricken hunter mimicked his actions, scoring deep gouges in the paintwork as it thrashed against the minivan. The van bounced about on is suspension under the weight, flames and claws writhing against it side beating a terrible din against glass and metal. Henry’s fear fed the Hunter’s frenzy and in turn all the sensation of that fed back to his mind along the vorpal connection. The psychic feedback loop intensified with each passing moment, scattering Henry’s thoughts and overwhelming his faculties of control. While the first burned the other two hunters collapsed, crashing into the road in a tangled mess of twitching arms. There they began to evaporate, shapes and colours peeled off them and flittered away on some unperceived wind, curling and folding until they faded away.

Something cut through the confusion. An icy crackle at first, spreading out underneath the clamour before a sharp, crystalline snap powered into the fore. It reverberated there for a moment as Henry’s mind tried to centre on it, a glassy timbre that wailed and whispered as it passed in and out of his focus. As it became clearer it’s pitch heightened into a terrified shriek that pushed back the haze from Henry’s mind and he could think again. He could pick out words, someone, wait no, more than one person trapped beneath the Hunter. He had to get them out.

He rolled onto his front and crawled back towards his table. He fished about in the ketchup and broken glass for his pistol and on finding it clambered onto his feet. He had to steady himself on the furnishings as he shuffled towards the door, the sensations from the Hunter no longer threatened to overwhelm him but still remained, throbbing away in the lower recesses of his brain. He recognised the beginnings of a monstrous headache. He got them sometimes after over exerting his powers, although he hardly considered that those three constructs had been a particularly strenuous undertaking. Actually, what had happened just then?

“Am I having a brain thing?” he asked as he pawed for the door handle “Am I leaking things into my brain? Am I going all weird and lumpy? Why am I asking you? You’re a door.”

He’d never felt feedback that strong. His powers had been acting up lately just little bits of conceptual manifestation in times of stress but nothing as severe as this. His head swam as he tried to make sense of it, and he finally managed the door and stepped out onto the street the situation only got more perplexing. Laying atop the minivan the Hunter burned. One of vorpal’s most frustrating limitations was its inert structure, it couldn’t produce anything reactive like explosives or fuel. He’d seen it fractured by heat but it shouldn’t be burning, it wasn’t physically possible. As intriguing as this new development was curiosity was out matched by his fear, something was wrong with his powers and people were going to get hurt.

He reached out to the Hunter and demanded it un-manifest. As the vorpal lost the support of his conscious will the structure began to quickly degrade, fraying along the edges of its conceptual components and Henry quickened the collapse by pulling on those strands that became exposed, and in moments up the Hunter was gone, just a few ghostly shapes tumbling away. He felt a pressure dissipate somewhere over the back of his skull. It was a strange sensation when a construct was tidied away, something important had left him but at the same time it was relief, almost like forgetting something horrible. That relief, however, would prove fleeting.

Something remained in the psychic hollow left by the Hunter, something alien, something that did not belong. It was a sharp cold spread thin somewhere on the surface of his mind where it pulsed, washing fractal patterns across itself with each heart beat. With each design made anew he felt the ice in each fold crystallize and grind against his scalp. Unease crept back over him but before it could settle he felt his eyes drawn back to the minivan and the fear was on him, mere unease just wouldn’t cut it.

The Hunt was gone but the fire persisted, if indeed it was fire anymore. Glowing sheets of red and orange thrashed about the minivan, cracking and bursting with unstable psychic energy. Wherever it touched it scored deep scratches and left its mark even on metal and stone. He struck out at it, tried to pull away the keystones of its existence but wherever he attacked it that strange cold energy would flood into the gap and the ‘fire’ would only rage more furiously. “Oh god. Oh no.” he moaned and for a moment he felt the same terrible weight that he’d felt during the Thunderbolt escape, threatening to push him down into earth and root him there immovable.

Henry was not given to quick action. His personality was less of a character and more of a collection of unhelpful contradictions. A combination of intelligence, empathy and empiricism that kept him playing devil’s advocate to half the world and second guessing the rest. Occasionally, however, it was his self loathing that proved to be his saving grace. Somewhere deep inside Henry a little voice struck up, marshalling the better parts of him to action. It said:

“I say chaps how about, I don’t know, fuck this shit?”

Before Henry had much to say about it was running. A full on sprint across the street and towards the minivan. What he was going to do when he got there he had no idea but he was going to have to do it pretty bloody quickly.