Page 34 of Langiappe & Lost Legends

"Time is my domain," she said simply. "Your wards are impressive, but they exist in linear time. I don't."

"And we should trust you why?" I demanded, not lowering my shields. The last surprise visitor we'd had turned out to be one of the Lost Legends.

Instead of answering, she gestured at Phi's detection equipment. "The crystal's power is becoming unstable. Its energy signature is bleeding into the fabric of the Quarter and creating pockets of recursive time."

"The time loops," I realized, thinking of our distraught coffee shop owner. "They're not random, are they? They're happening where the Lost Legends have used the crystal."

"Precisely." She moved to examine Phi's latest invention, which looked like someone had tried to combine a grandfather clock with a Tesla coil. "And each use makes the crystal more unstable and creates more rifts in the time continuum."

"We've been tracking both," Phi said cautiously as she pulled up a map. "The reality distortions and the crystal's energy signature. Look at the pattern."

We gathered around the map. I didn’t fully trust our visitor but was too desperate for answers to ignore her. Points of light appeared, showing locations of temporal anomalies. More lights indicated where we'd detected the crystal's power. As we watched, the points connected themselves and formed lines of energy that intersected and crossed.

"It's a ritual circle," Dani breathed. "They're creating a massive magical array with the crystal at its center."

"But where exactly is the center?" Kota asked, studying the pattern.

"That's the problem," Madame Chronos said grimly. "The center keeps moving. Time isn't flowing properly around the crystal anymore. It's like trying to pin down a moment that won't stay still."

My phone buzzed again. This time, it was Puich. I answered and put it on speakerphone. "The problems are spreading. We've got people showing up at hospitals with chronological displacement syndrome." His tiny voice was pitched with concern.

"With what now?" I demanded as I reached for my bag.

"They're aging randomly," Puich explained. "One minute, they're their normal age. The next, they're experiencing their childhood or their elderly years. The doctors are baffled."

"Send them to Charity Hospital," I instructed. I had worked there when I began nursing too many years ago. There was a unit run by witches and Fae. "We'll meet you there. And Puich? Try to keep the mundies from noticing that their patients are temporarily becoming toddlers."

"Already on it. The brownie network is in full damage control mode."

I turned to my sisters. "Ready..."

Dea held up her bag. "Let’s go."

"I'm coming with you," Steve said. "Someone needs to keep you from adopting every temporally displaced person you try to heal."

Madame Chronos stepped forward. "I should examine these victims. Their temporal signatures might help us track the crystal's location."

I shared a look with my sisters. We still didn't trust her, but she seemed to know her stuff about what was going on. She hadn’t attacked or tried to get us to take her to the main house and into the secret artifact room, so she had that going for her. "Fine," I said. "But try anything funny and you'll find out why the Lost Legends are afraid to face us directly."

I rushed through Charity Hospital's side entrance. Two months ago, a group of witches and Fae had worked together to convert this abandoned wing into New Orleans' first supernatural medical ward. The project had been my baby. After hearing about one too many supernaturals dying because they couldn’t get any care, I'd finally pushed the council for a specialized location. Neither Kip nor I could be everywhere healing people when needed.

Kaitlyn had the coven pitch in with protection spells while the Fae had added their own brand of magic. Even the brownies had helped renovate. Now every room was equipped to handle everything from pixie pox to mermaid molt to banshee laryngitis. The whole place hummed with layered wards that kept mundane humans from wandering in and supernatural patients from freaking them out. But right now, those carefully crafted wards were struggling against the chaos besieging the city.

Puich met us at the entrance. His ridiculous white tennis shoes were somehow still pristine. "It's getting worse," he reported, leading us past the reception area where a young witch volunteer was trying to keep her desk from disappearing. "We've got three full rooms of patients, and Kip's already busy dealing with others in the city."

The ward was pure madness. The first thing I saw was a businessman in his forties who kept flickering between board meetings and high school football practice. His Armani suit was playing tag with a vintage letterman jacket. A young mother by the window was having it worse. She was experiencing her own childhood while trying to comfort her baby.

"What can you do for them?" Steve asked quietly as I examined the businessman. After two months of careful planning and creating a safe space for supernatural healing, and now we couldn't even keep our patients on the right timeline.

"Technically, this isn't an injury or illness," I replied as I called up my healing power. The magic that usually flowed so easily through these specially designed rooms felt slippery. It was like trying to grab smoke. "It's more like their personal timelines are getting tangled. I can try to stabilize them temporarily. Unless we stop whatever the Lost Legends are doing with that crystal, this will get worse."

The next few hours were a crash course in temporal triage. Madame Chronos moved from patient to patient, stitching time back together around each person. Meanwhile, I followed in her wake. I healed the physical toll these temporal hiccups were taking on their bodies. Turns out, existing in multiple moments at once did a number on your organs.

We fell into a rhythm. She'd stabilize their personal timeline, and I'd repair the damage caused by their brief stint as quantum pretzels. The businessman's nosebleeds stopped as soon as she anchored him to the present. The young mother's migraine eased when I got my hands on her after Madame Chronos untangled her timeline from her baby's.

Steve stayed close, running interference when the regular hospital staff got curious about all the activity in the abandoned wing. It was harder for the wards to hide it with time going crazy. Steve was getting pretty creative with his excuses. My favorite was telling a nurse that we were investors considering a new oncology wing in the abandoned section.

"Your healing abilities complement temporal magic quite well," Madame Chronos noted as we moved to the next patient. "Most healers can't work with temporally displaced patients at all. Their magic gets too confused by the timeline splits."

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