Lauren had given Ginny too much credit--or not enough, depending on one's perspective. And so she sat surrounded by half a dozen appallingly young women, bereft of support, mildly disturbed by the decorating changes made since her time as a dorm resident.

Ginny was much better in these situations. She could switch gears easily: in her line of work, it was a necessary skill. She had to communicate with her colleagues and the parents of her patients, and also had to win the trust of the children she treated; slipping back into college student mode wasn't much more difficult for her. Lauren could pass for normal more easily than Ginny, but she rarely attained Ginny's degree of comfort-factor with situations like this.

Lauren usually considered herself more adept at screwing others over--she wasn't a horrible person, but she was a lawyer, and sometimes nasty tactics were appropriate. Tactics like arranging a meeting and then calling to bow out twenty minutes beforehand, for instance.

Ginny had claimed there was a problem at work. It wasn't the sort of excuse you could argue with, not when "work" meant pediatrics.

And so Lauren privately plotted revenge, because she knew she'd better come up with a plan before she saw Ginny again. Ginny was just so damn nice, and the really awful thing was she'd done this for Lauren's own good. She saw what she perceived as a problem, and she'd gone about trying to fix it.

So on a Friday night a decade after she graduated--on a night she should have spent with her husband and daughter or, failing that, reminiscing with an old friend--she was stranded at her alma mater, surrounded by children who knew too much and too little of the world, talking about magic.

There were two Catherines--there were always two Catherines, with the occasional Kate or Kathy thrown into the mix--and a Mary, a Rebecca, an Amanda and a Susan. Blonde, black, henna, brown, brown and green-streaked hair. Senior, sophomore, frosh, junior, junior, sophomore. Mage, mage, mage, empath, mage, empath. Duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, goose.

"Carrie trained me," blonde Catherine said. "And she was trained by Tina, who was trained by Erin."

They thought they had a tradition. Traditions were big on campus; you couldn't go ten feet without tripping over one. But those were the normal traditions, filched from urban legends and ancient folklore and the occasional real-life event: walk up the Senior Steps before you were a senior and you wouldn't graduate; kiss your significant other on the Moon Bench and you'd live happily ever after or go mad; win the Senior Hoop Race and be the first in your class to earn her Ph.D. The official traditions were appropriate for a college campus.

But this group...they believed they could work magic, or use psychic powers. Most people would automatically consider them crazy, or at least colorfully unbalanced. Lauren knew better than most people.

Of course, she also knew better than the group seated before her. She knew that "training" wasn't at all formal: training was what you picked up from other people, and if you were lucky they were right, and a little more advanced than you. If you weren't lucky, they were just making stuff up (though they might believe with all their hearts that they'd stumbled upon some grand universal truth--that was even worse than meeting a malicious person), or they had such vastly different abilities and philosophies that their training did more harm than good.

"Erin's coming to May Day this year," Catherine I continued.

May Day was the biggest official tradition on campus and doubled as an unofficial reunion for alumnae. Lauren had avoided it for several years on general principles. She was an adult and should do adult things. College students should be allowed to revel in their time as college students, without concerns for what the big bad world would do to them in time.

Ginny didn't get it. Catherine I and her friends probably didn't even perceive Lauren's absence as a distinct choice, if they'd even noticed.

They noticed, Lauren thought, feeling a dozen eyes on her. They noticed, because they've got a tradition, and I'm part of it. Erin had been trained by Teri, who Lauren had helped train.

"We want to have a ritual in the Cloisters, so we wanted to do some housekeeping first," Rebecca put in. "It's been a while since we've done any cleansing."

The Cloisters were the geographic and emotional center of campus. They were at once a stronghold and exceedingly vulnerable. Ardent campus mages sought to safeguard that space from astral beasties and unwitting energy sinks. Of course, those same ardent campus mages tended toward emotional instability of their own, and half the time ended up contributing more negative energies than their mundane classmates. Not that one had to look far for psychodrama on a campus inhabited by thirteen hundred intelligent, stressed-out young women.

It's just routine cleansing, Ginny had said. It's probably overdue, and it'll be a good idea for us to be there. We've got more experience with cleansing, and other things.

They'd shooed away a few astral beasties in their time--they'd referred to it as "battle" the first couple of times. But Lauren knew what Ginny was thinking: this would be a safe, painless ritual, and once Lauren got to know the current crop of campus magic-workers, surely she'd be drawn back in....

Instead, this felt like a bizarre sort of career day. By rights she should be talking to them about the LSATs and law school and the realities of practicing law. That was how she spent most of her time. Magic was purely recreational--she didn't know enough for it to be otherwise, and lately she'd cut way back on the recreational aspect.

She had been doing a lot of shielding lately. An obsessive amount of shielding, one might say, until one took into account the fact that she had a family to protect.

"Standard calling of quarters and casting a circle?" Lauren asked. She might be the senior mage, but she had no desire to run the ritual--or muck it up.

"Yep. What element are you?" Catherine I asked.

"I'm usually Earth, but I can do Air if we need the numbers." She could also do Fire or Water--she never felt particularly elemental one way or the other, but she was a creature of habit. She'd been the Sensible One for a while, and then suddenly she was just always positioned to the North.

That was the direction of death in Chinese cosmology. Cemeteries were always located to the North of cities and houses opened to the friendly ch'i from the South.

Chinese cosmology also has five elements and we're cribbing from the Celtic New Age tradition, Lauren reminded herself. There's no reason to fear feng shui.

"I'm Earth, too," Catherine I beamed.

Such enthusiasm. She doesn't even know me. Why be happy we've got something in common?

Simple answer: she was an enthusiastic college student. She wanted to connect with other people. She wasn't old enough to be legitimately cynical.

"Rebecca and Catherine are Air," Catherine I said. "Amanda's Fire and Mary and Susan are Water."

Based on the lack of protest, Lauren assumed these were long-standing designations. She was thankful for the absence of argument. Artificial discord had no place in a ritual--especially a cleansing ritual.

"We enter the Cloisters from the South door," Catherine I continued. "We salute the graves at the South, West and North, then enter the area that will be the circle from the East. To cast the circle we go around the fountain deasil, not widdershins." With a questioning look. Lauren remembered the Great Debate over the proper direction to move during rituals. Vocal proponents of deasil and widdershins had found documentation to support their opinion, and threw around words like "authenticity." There had also been a third group that hadn't much cared so long as everyone was moving in the same direction. Lauren had always counted herself as part of that silent majority.

"Deasil's fine with me."

Catherine I smiled. "Then we push the negative energy out, and after that we reinforce the shielding." She pointed to the windowsill and a selection of salt and pepper shakers filched from the dining hall. "Salt, if you want. Or you can use earth."

Lauren picked up a salt shaker. "It's part of too many superstitions to pass up." Belatedly, she was relieved she hadn't been asked to be Air, since she hadn't brought any tools. That was mainly because she didn't use tools, but this group might not have understood. "Shall we head over?"

# # #

The best institutions of higher learning came with corpses.

Three women were buried in the Cloisters, a president and two professors. Small stones marked their resting places, engraved with initials and years of birth and death. Plaques on the wall provided additional information, but Lauren had always liked the near-anonymity of the stones. If you didn't know what to look for, you could easily walk over the graves and be none the wiser. Plenty of tour groups did just that. The college did not encourage its guides to draw attention to the graves, or to relate stories of campus ghosts.

Lauren had never understood that. The best institutions of higher learning also came with ghosts. That, more than graduate school acceptance rates, prominent alumnae or famous professors, made a college worthwhile, at least in Lauren's opinion. A college shouldn't simply be a place to learn; it should be textured, with the weight of history. The density of history, in fact: a college should pack more history into its years of existence than any other place, so that its students could pack more experiences into their four years than they'd have during any other four year period of their lives. A college shouldn't strive for an appearance of normalcy. People had their entire lives to be normal; they deserved four years to get the non-normal out of their system. Or four years to figure out how to integrate the non-normal into their normal lives.

Lauren supposed she couldn't blame the administration for not understanding. Most people wouldn't, and she'd never felt that crusading to convert the mundanes was a particularly worthwhile endeavor. The non-mundanes would find a way, and they tended to find each other.

At least some of them found each other. Lauren suspected many mages never discovered their latent abilities. She supposed they got along just fine, and despite Ginny's occasional musings upon the subject of recruitment, crusading to find the non-mundanes didn't appeal to Lauren as a lifestyle choice either.

The women buried in the Cloisters were not typically believed to wander about campus much. This generation of mages considered them residents of the Cloisters, not guardians of the campus. Greeting them before a ritual was a matter of politeness rather than a request for aid. Lauren rather liked that perspective.

She half-listened to the students chat about how the various graves felt: fuzzy, oily, warm, tingly. How many times had she had similar discussions during her own undergraduate career? "We never managed to come up with standard terminology either."

"Everyone's Gift is different," Mary affirmed, perhaps a little proud of that.

It's only natural. She's young. Everyone wants to be different, special, at that age. She's realized she'll never fit it, so she might as well go the other way. Lauren didn't have empathic abilities, but in this case she didn't need them. She knew these women--these children. She'd been them. Nostalgia warred with embarrassment.

"How do you get around that problem?" Catherine I asked.

Present tense. She wondered if Catherine I had simply leapt to the conclusion that she still practiced, or if Ginny had planted something bordering on misinformation. "I still haven't," Lauren said. "Ginny and I have Worked together a lot, so we can draw comparisons to past situations. But when we find something new, the best bet is usually for us to both get a feel for it. Then we decide what to call it."

"Look at the sky, and call whatever you see blue?"

"Or gray," Lauren smiled. Gray storm clouds over gray collegiate gothic architecture made for a case study of Seasonal Affected Disorder.

But the sky tonight was clear of all but a few clouds, and the forecast for the weekend was good. Lauren hoped there wouldn't be rain on Sunday; May Day should be bright and sunny.

Amanda entered the building for reconnaissance. Sometimes two groups opted to do a ritual at the same time, and the Cloisters were a popular location. Lauren mainly hoped that there was no party going on in the Cloisters, and that any potential skinny dippers had come and gone. Most people refrained from disturbing a ritual in progress, either out of actual respect or an aversion to cloaked freaks (who were identifiable even if they didn't own, or were not currently wearing, a cloak), but end-of-semester alcohol-enabled parties were probably in progress.

Happily, Amanda reported that the Cloisters were deserted, and they proceeded into the space. Lauren followed the others in their solemn progress, stopping at each grave in turn. She paid more attention to the state of the shielding, which could use a bit of work. Someone needed to teach this group the importance of regular maintenance...or maybe they just weren't very good at erecting shields. Their Work during the ritual would be a good indicator, and maybe afterward she could give them a few tips without causing too much offense.

Something tugged at her senses as they approached the North side of the Cloisters. Imagination, she thought: a standard, defensive thought to distract her from panic as she peered into the shadows at the end of the corridor.

Something was there, something familiar, something just beyond her Sight.

It could be anything...we always got astral beasties, the shielding's degraded, so it makes sense that one would be here...that's why we're doing the ritual in the first place.

She took a deep breath, strengthening her personal shielding and probing her own aura. It felt different than usual, not the comforting warmth she associated with the color green.

An astral beastie wouldn't have worried her. This astral beastie worried her quite a bit.

Rebecca was staring at her. In a calm corner of her mind, Lauren made a mental note that she was the stronger empath. She debated etiquette for a brief moment, and then decided prudence was more important.

Orange tastes bad.

She reached out for each woman's aura. Her Sight was unreliable, but she could Feel colors. More importantly, she could change colors.

Catherine I frowned. She realized something was going on, and the others were starting to pick up on it as well.

"I think we need to go back to the dorm," Lauren said quietly. "Now."

# # #

The back smoker--anachronistically named, since the entire dorm had been nonsmoking since before Lauren's time--proved to be a comforting place. Even if the couches were cleaner and more comfortable than the ones Lauren remembered, even if the vending machines looked like they might actually dispense junk food without eating dimes, it was still the back smoker. She'd spent a lot of hours here, talking about classes and philosophy and fiction and magic and the way the universe worked.

But more importantly, the back smoker was halfway across campus from the Cloisters, and the dorm was solid concrete. It didn't quite fit into the collegiate gothic aesthetic, but it did wonders for making Lauren feel grounded.

That was all psychological, she was sure. But at the moment she'd take what she could get.

"What did you do?" Catherine I demanded, not quite certain if she should be angry or awed.

"I changed the color of your auras," Lauren said. "They're orange now."

"That's not part of the ritual," Catherine II said.

"Mine's deciduous. It's usually green, but it goes orange some times. When I'm under stress." When I'm panicking. If I'm not careful, it'll rub off and then we'll have seven hysterical women trying to Work magic. That's not good. She took a deep breath. "There was something in the Cloisters, an astral beastie. Did any of you feel it?"

"I don't know," Catherine I admitted, and Lauren took heart. People who claimed certainty in matters like this usually didn't have the faintest clue about anything. But a healthy I don't know could lead to reasonable theories which could then be used to formulate plans of action.

A healthy I don't know also held forth the hope that Catherine I wouldn't swallow whole whatever story Lauren gave her simply because she was Lauren, venerable alum. She didn't want followers...she wanted allies.

I want Ginny. I want the old crew. I want somebody to tell me what the hell is going on.

I want it to go away.

"A few months ago, somebody I know died," she said. "He was murdered by somebody he knew. They'd done a ritual, and they'd summoned an astral beastie. It was...it hung around his apartment, the place he was killed."

"Talk about negative energy," Amanda said, and Lauren nodded.

"I think the same thing was in the Cloisters. I don't know how bad it really is," Lauren said, and suddenly I don't know ceased to be a comforting phrase. "It makes me nervous. My reactions are subjective as hell."

Evan, sprawled on the floor, blood everywhere. She dreamed of that some nights, and a couple of times she'd been tempted to see a therapist.

"You were terrified," Rebecca said.

Lauren nodded. "I don't know if it's dangerous. It might just be a psychic scavenger. But--well, my aura went orange before and it didn't hurt me."

Purple is best, but blue will do, Horace Blackburn had said. Horace Blackburn, murderer. Or perhaps: Horace Blackburn, tool of psychic predator. Or Horace Blackburn, holder of the astral beastie's leash.

Blue will do, but orange tastes bad. She'd assumed that he was talking about aura colors. That was the only interpretation that made any sense. Now she wished she'd had a chance to talk to the man directly, demanded to know what he and Evan had summoned....

It didn't matter. She couldn't trust the word of a murderer who might well be clinically insane. As always, it came back to trial and error. Her limited experience said that no harm had come to her while her aura was orange.

And green was almost blue.

She didn't want to take any risks. She wasn't about to let these kids take any risks either.

Catherine I gnawed her lip. It looked like she did that a lot. "Do you think it's the same one, or just the same type?"

"I don't know. I don't think I'd be able to tell." If it was the same one, would it recognize her? There were smart varieties of astral beasties.

And why come here? It had been summoned to an apartment in Philadelphia, and there were more murders in the city than the suburbs....

"Has anyone done anything that could be construed as a summoning ritual?" she asked.

Six heads shook. "Someone else might have done it," Mary suggested.

"Or maybe it got here on its own. It doesn't matter," Lauren said. "The important thing is getting rid of it."

Hypocrite, whispered a tiny part of her mind. She believed very strongly in the scientific method, and looking before you leaped. But now she was scared--scared of what a human being had done, she reminded herself; she couldn't really ascribe motives to the astral beastie. She didn't have the data. But she was still scared.

And territorial. This was her alma mater; the Cloisters were hers. That was why they were shielded, to keep out the astral wildlife. Even if Evan Matthews hadn't been murdered, this cleansing ritual would have happened.

And damn it, they were all so young. The maternal instinct had kicked in, even though this group was closer to Lauren's age than her daughter's. They were young and inexperienced and they needed to be protected.

"I think we should go ahead with the cleansing ritual," Lauren said. "But first we need to shoo this thing out." She thought of her cell phone. She could call Ginny, they could call for more help. But even though there would be more people, Lauren didn't know that it would matter. She was currently the expert on this flavor of astral beastie, and they had one lead on things it didn't like. "We'll paint the Cloisters orange."

# # #

Lauren beefed up the students' shielding before they left the back smoker, and made sure their auras felt orange. Amanda could See auras if she tried, and affirmed that they all looked to be the right color. As a control, Lauren changed the color of her own aura.

"I Saw that," Amanda said. "It's green."

"And now?"

"Purple."

Lauren let the others sample the color. "This is what we don't want." She felt uneasy with the color, but forced herself to hold steady for a couple of minutes before shifting her aura back to orange. She and Ginny had done a fair bit of color experimentation--the concept of wavelengths had leant itself well to methods of visualizing the invisible--but she wasn't certain if the current students had done the same. And given the patchy state of the shielding, she didn't put much faith in their trial to error ratio.

"We shoo. Our first goal is to just make it go away." The students nodded. "Then we shield."

This time, Lauren led the others back to the Cloisters. She hadn't consciously intended to do so; directing rituals wasn't her style, but no one else was available to play den mother. Poor Ginny, missing all the excitement.

When the entered the Cloisters, Lauren realized she'd left her salt shaker sitting in the back smoker. That had also been unintentional, but perhaps it would be useful for the students to observe a ritual performed without the crutches of tools and--well, ritual. They needed to be protected, but they also needed to learn how to protect themselves.

It took a moment to reacclimate her Senses to the Cloisters. She felt the shielding built into the walls, the residual energies clinging to the fountain in the center of the space. And across the grass, in the North corridor of the Cloisters, the astral beastie radiated.

It felt like it was watching her.

Lauren watched back, courage illogically bolstered by numbers, or perhaps merely a sense of purpose. The first time she had confronted this creature, or one like it, she had feared for her own safety and just wanted to escape as quickly as possible. She still wanted to escape, but she also wanted to protect the students. Her charges. You could fight only so hard against evolution, and her gut was telling her that these young women were her responsibility. Tonight, and tomorrow as well, for at least as long as they were a part of this place....

Lauren smiled. Ghosts didn't need to guard the campus. The alumnae could handle it.

"I want you all to get a sense of that thing," she said, voice soft but above a whisper, and pointed. "It may be bad, it may be nothing, but we're going to ask it to leave. I want you to all be able to recognize it if it comes back."

She gave them a minute, listened to the muttered assessments of "I can See something" and "It feels slimy" and "It knows we're here."

"We'll go to the East side of the fountain and then take up our positions, facing outward," Lauren instructed. The direction they faced didn't really matter, but a clear course of action was probably good for morale. She almost offered Catherine I the opportunity to change elements and position herself farther away from the astral beastie, but the young woman's determined expression dissuaded her. For the next couple of weeks, at least, Catherine I was the senior mage on campus, and Lauren saw no reason to undermine her confidence.

She still took the lead, eyes on the place where she knew the astral beastie sat. They left Rebecca and Catherine II on the East side of the fountain, and walked deasil to deposit Amanda at the South and Mary and Susan at the West.

At least one mage at each quarter, Lauren noted. Not that it matters. Ginny was a mage as well as an empath, so it was quite possible Rebecca and Susan were dually Gifted. Perhaps she should have tried to assess their abilities, and the self-identified mages', but she didn't have much experience with that sort of thing. These six women had performed rituals together in the past, so even if their shielding left a bit to be desired they at least avoided stepping on each others' toes.

Lauren offered an encouraging smile as she and Catherine I proceeded to the North side of the fountain. "Pay attention, everyone, so we can compare notes later."

With a final glance in the direction of the astral beastie, Lauren closed her eyes and centered herself. Wireframe image of a woman, herself, her core, building out to feel every inch of skin.... Wind rustled the leaves of the birch trees, taller now than when she had been a student. She Felt them, Felt the energies swirling in the fountain behind her, and drew them to herself. Behind her the students did the same, with varying degrees of success.

The thing in the North corridor had taken notice.

Lauren opened her eyes. At first she was disoriented by a flicker of Sight, which seemed like a film overlaying her vision, but she refused the temptation to blink it away. Indirectly--that seemed the only way to manage her imperfect Sight--she regarded the astral beastie. Impression of a crouching beast, most definitely aware of the fresh activity in the Cloisters. It radiated, just as she remembered from Evan's apartment, and she forced herself to extend a tendril of her own energy to meet the creature's.

Slight shock, milder than an everyday exchange of electrons, but she didn't like it. She could still feel it after she broke contact. It extended another tendril and moved closer, perched in an archway.

Orange tastes bad, Lauren willed, but the tendril did not retreat.

"We claim this place," she said aloud. "We ask that you leave."

It didn't react. Its attention was still focused on her, but she had no idea if it understood her words or the emotions behind them. Go away! she thought at it.

For a long moment, nothing happened. And then it drifted out of the archway and onto the grass.

Behind her, someone stifled a whimper. "Think orange," she said, because she had to say something, she couldn't just stand silent as the thing approached. She drew energies from the Cloisters, made them hers and then made them orange, and lashed out in the direction of the astral beastie. It recoiled, and she could have sworn she felt anger, she who'd never had an empathic moment in her life. She followed through, pumping more energy at the creature. The others did the same, and she almost Heard a snarl as the creature finally withdrew back into the corridor, and then disappeared.

"Is it gone?" Catherine II asked.

"The astral beastie has left the building," Lauren affirmed. "That was very good." Susan was definitely a mage, in addition to whatever empathic abilities she possessed. And Amanda...her control had been a little rough, but Lauren thought she had a gift for combative magics. "Keep thinking orange."

Catherine I almost said something, but thought better of it.

Sometimes I don't know became a complicated matter. Sometimes you didn't know what was going on, but you had a pretty good idea of what wasn't going on. You might realize that orange alone didn't seem to be much of a deterrent.

But then you also had to concede that the astral beastie was gone, and even if it hadn't done any good orange didn't seem to have done any harm, so why spoil morale?

"All right, ladies," Catherine I said. "Raise shields."

Lauren nodded solemnly, and after a moment Catherine I nodded back, still digesting this practical lesson on dealing with life's uncertainties without the benefit of a roadmap. And that, my dear, is going to be worth more than any class you took in your four years at this institution.

# # #

Lauren took them all out to a diner after they finished. In her day, late night diner runs had been the traditional capstone of any ritual. Amanda had a car, so no one had to go without a seat belt.

Lauren wasn't about to let her charges take any silly risks.

And over sandwiches and omelets and hot chocolate--another staple from Lauren's college days; she made a mental note to put it on her shopping list--they talked. They talked about books and movies and their career aspirations. Lauren told them how she and Keith had met, and broke out the baby pictures.

They dissected the ritual and speculated about whether the astral beastie had abandoned this plane of existence, or merely relocated. The diner was almost deserted, but there were still people around. People who could easily overhear a group of college students, and their den mother, discussing crazy things.

It would be so easy to use softer voices, or come up with intricate euphemisms. Lauren didn't suggest it, didn't even refrain from joining the discussion with a normal conversational voice.

One patron gave them a strange look before leaving. Half the table tittered, half looked frightened.

"Don't be embarrassed that you like LARPing," Lauren said calmly, and took a sip of hot chocolate.

"What's that?" Rebecca asked.

"Live Action Role-Playing," Lauren said, because they really should learn the art of misdirection. "It is a most elegant explanation. People dismiss you if you have silly hobbies, they assume you don't have a life--but they don't think you're crazy, and after a while they hardly pay attention."

"I'll have to remember that one," Catherine I said.

Poor thing. Just when things were getting interesting, she was going to graduate and leave all this behind. Except you never leave it behind, apparently.

Lauren couldn't decide if that was encouraging, but it seemed to be what was. She supposed tomorrow she'd have to call Ginny and tell her that she'd been right. And that yes, this year she'd come to May Day.

# # #

It was nearly three by the time she packed the students off to bed. Catherine I offered crash space.

"I'm fine to drive," Lauren assured her. "Keith's not waiting up, but he'll worry if I'm not there tomorrow morning."

"Will he come to May Day, too?"

"Maybe. I'll at least bring the wienerschnitzel." That meant she needed to go shopping tomorrow. White dresses were traditional May Day garb, but she didn't currently have any in her wardrobe.

"Good. It'll be good to talk more." Catherine I terminated the statement with a yawn.

"Good night," Lauren smiled.

She visited the back smoker once more to obtain caffeine. Poor Ginny, missing all the excitement. Silly Ginny. She's met them, knows they're good kids, but they do need training, and like it or not we're the best option.

She sighed and forced herself not to gulp the Coke. Her aura was green again, and as far as she could tell the astral beastie hadn't penetrated her shielding.

But it had tried. She could feel the pock marks left behind. Given time, it could have gotten in.

That sort of behavior was at the very least rude, if the astral beastie was intelligent enough to comprehend matters of courtesy. That sort of behavior might be the prelude to something more harmful.

She concentrated and formed a second set of shields against her skin, tight as a wetsuit. The existing shields she left in place, the customary three inches from her body. After a moment's consideration, she enlarged the holes made by the astral beastie.

Confusion to the enemy. If it accepted the bait, Lauren felt little compunction about treating it as the enemy. And she was not about to let any of the students serve as bait.

She finished off the Coke and made her way out of the dorm, meandering uphill to the Cloisters. She doubted she'd be able to track the astral beastie very effectively, but if it had gotten the message and left then she didn't feel too compelled to chase after it. Attempting to play guardian of her entire plane of existence seemed overly ambitious and rather presumptuous. She'd settle for being the guardian of her own home and her alma mater.

It had not come back to the Cloisters. The shielding remained strong, and just as orange as it had been a few hours ago. Lauren smiled, wondering what an aerial View of campus would look like.

When she was a student, as now, the Cloisters had been the location of choice for rituals. But when Lauren had wanted some time alone, she'd always gone to the garden behind the library. The astral beastie had once proven to share her taste in location, so she made her way to the garden. Slowly, eyes half closed, she picked at the air. It seemed that she could Feel evidence of the creature's passing, but that might simply be imagination. In the business of magic, it was all too easy to get swept up in the moment and allow enthusiasm to override common sense.

But by the time she reached the stairs to the garden, she was certain that it was not merely her imagination at work. I should be frightened, she thought. If I believe this creature is a threat, I should be frightened. If I do not believe it is a threat, I should be ashamed of myself.

It was in the pool, and that offended her sensibilities. She had bathed in that pool--not the rollicking skinny-dipping of a senior with a completed thesis, but a solemn, contemplative sacrament. For this creature to enter that pool, her pool--

She took a deep breath. "You must leave this place."

Its attention was on her. Almost too late, Lauren remembered her aura and stopped the green from shifting to orange. "You must leave this place," she repeated. It--stood, oozed, extended upward. Verbs were designed for creatures with muscles, not beings of energy.

"You must leave this place." It's mine. She took another breath. The scientific method called for experimentation and observation, a balancing of controls and variables, and it was time to establish the significance of one variable.

Lauren made her aura go purple.

The creature leapt. Her body's reflexes took over, and Lauren tumbled backward before the attack. The creature burrowed through the holes in her old shields with frightening speed. She could Feel it bearing down on the new skintight shields, trying to claw through....

She overrode her instinct to run, to curl up and protect herself. Instead she laid wide the old shields, let the creature pass through the holes--

--and then she embraced it, wrapping her arms around it, wrapping the old shields around it, pinning the creature between two layers of shielding. Too late, it realized the danger and fought to escape.

She cycled through the spectrum and found orange again. The creature's struggles grew more frantic. Orange. Orange for her aura. Orange for her shields. Orange for the energies she pumped into the space between her shields.

It was not a pleasant sensation. She could half-See the thing atop her, Felt the illusion of pressure even though it had no mass. The creature writhed, desperate to escape. It fought back, and the orange faltered, grew muddy as the pressure on the skintight shields increased. No! Lauren pumped in more energy, drawn from the garden and her own reserves--something they'd always speculated might be risky, if you were in a dangerous situation, but Lauren wanted to be certain she made it out of this particular dangerous situation.

The creature seemed to grow smaller, drawing in on itself, attempting to retreat now that an attack had failed. Lauren refused to release it. Astral beastie sandwich, she thought, and fought the urge to giggle. Sandwich. She imagined mixing mayonnaise into tuna fish--orange mayonnaise, in this case.

She thought she could almost Hear its cries, or perhaps that was simply her imagination again. Orange, she thought, relentless. Mayonnaise. Tuna. The creature's struggles grew weak, and eventually stopped. It no longer radiated, sodden with astral mayonnaise. Dead.

Or something that passed for dead.

Lauren lay on the ground and stared up at the stars. Breathe. Just breathe. A breeze danced over her skin, cool and welcome. She'd started to sweat, an unpleasant film covering her body beneath the skintight shielding.

She strengthened that shield, just to be on the safe side, and then prodded the astral beastie. It did not respond. Lauren couldn't even detect any definition to the mass of energy. It was just a muddy lump. So this is what a dead one is like? They might have tripped over dozens on campus, and never realized what they were.

She conjured a purple ball in one hand. No reaction from the dead lump. She tossed the ball aside, then thought better of littering and pulled it back to herself.

The astral beastie had no mass, but her body was half-convinced that something heavy pinned her to the ground. Lauren pushed herself up, mind over energy, and opened the old shields to let the astral beastie's remains slough away.

She'd performed many cleansing rituals, but they hadn't usually resulted in piles of garbage. A corpse. Maybe a sentient creature.... She shook her head. It had attacked. There had been provocation, but there were people whose auras were naturally purple.... No. It had been a danger. She was as certain of that as she was of anything in this business.

Lauren built a shield over the astral beastie, bright orange. If it was still here on Sunday, if the energies didn't just seep away, then she and Ginny and the students could study it.

She could relate the story, provide a bit more knowledge to be shared and passed down.

Catherine I should be the first to know. She was senior, she'd been nominally in charge, and she was about to graduate. There was already some training for student mages, but learning should be a lifelong process. Catherine I would need to decide if she wanted to opt in as den mother and guardian.

Ginny liked to poke things with sticks, but she didn't approve of independent study of this nature. Maybe it was because she didn't have kids, Lauren reflected. The stakes were no higher than they'd been when she was a student herself. She saw all mages as equal.

But some are more equal than others, Lauren thought, and it's up to the den mother to protect the cubs.

No, Ginny would not be pleased when she learned of this stunt. She would be especially displeased when Lauren pointed out that it really was all her fault.

Lauren smiled. The right sort of revenge truly was sweet.