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When Jodi clocks that she can't hear a third pair of feet splashing behind her, she has to fight the urge to slow down.
"Case?" she calls. "Olly?"
"What do you need?" O'Casey shouts back, frighteningly distant.
"Casey, where is he?"
There's a pause, punctuated only by the sound of their running, the sound of Jodi's breath heavy in her lungs and her heartbeat in every capillary of her head. "Shit."
It's just like him to run off on his own, try and find the answer before either of them notice what he's up to. She and O'Casey have been trailing around after Oliver Davis since they were teens, after all, have been the lucky ones swept up in his prophesied glory and allowed to stick by his side as friends and confidants; by now, they know what he's like. And while those instincts to play hero have never left Olly for dead so far…
"Okay, duck out, regroup, we'll focus better in the dark," O'Casey tells her, and Jodi obliges. Casey was always the smart one, ever their Hermione, although not half as dainty, half as damseled by their story. Casey is the strategist, and Casey throws a punch like you wouldn't believe. So maybe moreso their Annabeth?
If Casey's the smart one, though, Jodi is the heart - and while heart is great for morale, when your golden boy goes missing, it's not very much use at all.
They find her in the alley, cast a wall of protection over the entrance and watch the flood start shoving up against it. "Okay," they say again, a little out of breath. (Not as much as Jodi, though. Never as much as Jodi. O'Casey has always been perfect like that.)
"Okay, we don't have Olly, we don't know if the - if those people followed him or if they're still looking for us, we're ankle deep in water and I get the feeling it's not getting any shallower."
"It's - fine! It's fine. It's fine, Jodi, it's gonna be fine," O'Casey tells her, although it's a little hard to believe it. "We'll find him. Olly doesn't die, he's got his visions. We can fix this."
"So what do we do?"
An awful silence in the shape of Oliver Davis permeates the alleyway. He's supposed to be - offering a quip right now, a stupid comment, a bad idea that O'Casey can shoot down, and Jodi can top off with a joke of her own, and they can all find solace in each other's locked eyes and squeezed palms before running back out there to face the danger head-on.
It's almost lonely, although Casey's less than a foot away from her. It's like losing a limb and trying to fight a bull before you can relearn your balance. It's scary.
"We get protected," O'Casey begins slowly, "we head back out, and if we're not still being hunted then we look for Olly, okay? And when we find him -" (there's no room for if, not now) "- we'll figure it out from there. He will have seen what to do, he'll know how to fix it. He's probably already seen where to find us, right?"
"Right," Jodi nods, feeling less and less certain of their eventual victory by the second. They always come out on top in the end, of course they do - but with just the two of them together, it feels a lot less like a sure thing than ever before.
When Jodi Bea was thirteen, she had a wand put in her hands and solemnly swore to never let it be lost, destroyed, or reposessed. When Jodi Bea was seventeen, she'd snapped that wand in two, weathered the crack of her aura like a fractured femur, and dropped the splintered carcass of her magic in the lake.
Olly had been there, of course. He'd been trying to tell her no all evening, but Jodi was upset and obsessed and maybe a little manic, and she hadn't let him tell her she was just as capable of magic as the rest of them. Jodi's powers lay in intuition, everybody used to tell her, in emotion and expression. Mutable, like the tides; not cardinal like Olly's, projecting the future that lies ahead, or fixed like Casey's, straight from the spellbook and unchanging in the air.
Jodi had understood that, quite appropriately, she thought, to be a load of shit.
She supposes, in hindsight, that it might have been better to just ask to get it swapped out for an amulet or something. Something like Olly's looking-glass, something that wouldn't look weird to always carry if she ended up integrating back into the mortal world after graduation like about half of their cohort were. But it was too late the second she snapped the string that threaded her to her conduit on the little bridge that night, and it is too late for her to have regrets. Jodi Bea graduated a liar and a mundane. Jodi Bea will never let another soul know what she did.
She might not be able to. The water's half a foot higher now, crashing against O'Casey's protective wall. Time might be running out.
O'Casey casts impervious, casts water-breathing, casts aura-glow, because her aura's weak and broken enough that their pursuants might just miss her, but Case and Olly will know what they're looking for just fine. They cast themself a bubble that shrink-wraps tight around their skin, layers of magic built up thick enough to wipe a finger through like dust, because they've been casting and casting and casting without a chance to clear it out in hours, maybe days. God knows O'Casey never liked to clear their aura in the first place, for some reason liked the weird tingly feeling of magic sticking residual to your skin and your soul. Liked the memory, they'd tell you if you asked them. The proof.
When the wall drops, the water floods around their shins. Casey runs, and Jodi follows, back of the pack.
(Is it coincidence that the one time she led is the one time that Olly got left behind?)
They cast location, and it leads them back up the hill to where they'd come from. The water isn't high, here, just running in rivulets on either side of their feet, wide streams that flood towards the beach down below. They cast location again and dart towards a building, brown brick, black tile roof and a symbol Jodi wishes she didn't recognise emblazoned on the awning of the porch. The Brotherhood, then. Why is it always them?
Of course the door's open; Olly wouldn't lock it behind him, not if he thought he'd found a way to get them out. Two pairs of shoes squelch messy against the carpet in the hall. O'Casey casts location again, and points her up.
When Jodi Bea was thirteen, she met a cocky but distractible boy and the prettiest girl she'd ever seen. When Jodi Bea was fourteen, that girl told her they were not a girl after all, and she got into the habit of using their last name until they picked a more suitable first. When Jodi Bea was fifteen, she stayed up with that boy all night while he panicked and fretted and ran through a million doubts about maybe not being straight, and congratulated herself on being a loving friend and ally. When Jodi Bea was sixteen, she noticed the way her best friends looked at one another change, felt in her bones the way she shifted to priority number two. When Jodi Bea was seventeen, she finally recognised what the twist in her gut when she looked at that pretty, pretty person meant.
They'd gone with Ferdimand, in the end, a play on something traditional from the land their mother called home. Jodi never kicked the habit of calling them O'Casey. Now, as with all things, it's a little too late to correct.
They find Olly's body on an altar.
Guess he didn't see that coming, she could never, ever say.
O'Casey claps a hand across their mouth and backs away, stumbles into the wall, tears brimming, trying not to throw up. "Fuck," slips past their lips, muffled. "Fuck."
"Hey! Hey," she puts both hands on Casey's shoulders, "it's okay. We can fix this. We can fix it."
"Fuck, what have they - did they take his -?" They flip on a dime, push past Jodi's arms, pick up Olly's lifeless wrist to check for puncture marks. "Fuck. Of course they did. Why does he never listen?"
"So, what, there's a ritual in action?"
"It's gonna be bad. Olly was supposed to be more powerful than anyone of his kind, and he was cardinal. If they've got his blood and Brotherhood spells - fuck!"
She's never seen O'Casey this freaked out before. What the Brotherhood are trying to do, what they’re trying to raise… "Come on, Case, we can -"
"We can't fix this!"
O'Casey grips her shoulder vice-tight. Jodi meets their eyes, red, burning with fear and grief and fury for their idiot best friend.
"We can't fix this, Jodi. They have Olly's blood, and Brotherhood knowledge." Rain slams against the window. "Whatever's coming, it's gonna be bad."
Olly lies, unmoving, on the altar. He has no visions to share, no future path to guide them down.
And… hey. Maybe Jodi’s feeling a little manic.
“I love you,” she murmurs, though her voice gets stronger with every word. “I love you, I always loved you, I know you loved him and I wanted you to be happy with him but I loved you and I just want you to know that if we get out of this okay then -”
“No,” O’Casey cuts her off.
“... Oh.”
They jerk their head back at Olly’s body. Not the time, then.
“Sorry.”
“Let’s just go.”
Jodi only has time to turn around and pull the door back open before there’s a knife to her neck.
The Brother of Sea and Storms does not waste time in slitting Jodi’s throat, whoever he is. All she knows is pain, razor-thin and blooming and bloody and burning, and then suffocation that chokes her into the newly stained carpet, into her untimely demise.
Olly would have seen that coming, too, would have had them all jump out the window or at least be ready with a heavy object on the door-swing open.
As it stands, all Jodi can do is die.
When Jodi Bea was thirteen, she truly believed that one day the prophecy about her best friend would come to pass, that she could help to save the world. When Jodi Bea was seventeen, she renounced her magic, resolute that she would never save anything at all. And then, apparently, she died.
O’Casey sobs, the noise wrenching from their throat, and then they scream, and then a body falls on top of Jodi Bea. It does not save her. Nothing can. O’Casey’s magic is fixed; it cannot bring back the dead, cannot change a state of being like a mutable prodigy might. The sound of squelching footsteps marks their exit down the hall, towards a dozen other grunts, most likely.
Jodi does not know if Casey saves the day, stops the flood, completes the prophecy alone. She’s not Olly. They aren’t Olly, either, they are not the name inscribed on ancient scrolls, not the cardinal that would stop the unholy king that reigns forever.
… rains forever, Jodi thinks, alone in a ritual room, surrounded by corpses, and then she thinks no more.