Birdie's suggestion that she stick close by so that they might resume their stroll caught her off guard. It seemed unnecessary and ... peculiarly kind. Not coming from the healer, precisely, just in its general flavor. Cress stalled, then nodded, adjusting her shoulder when Roger wiggled off center. "Sure." Agreed, she intended to exit stage left with all due haste, to put as much space between herself and the perils endemic to dealings with Fae as was reasonable. The twinkling laughter and gleaming smile of the Spring Court's child queen resurfaced from memory, unbidden, as though her abduction had been last week, not last year. She shuddered, choking down a murmur of distress. Willowy arms crossed over her chest, Cress stepped crisply away—only to be stopped mid stride as surely as she would walking headfirst into a concrete wall.
Cricket. You're being a Possum.
Her blank eyes the size of quarters, she turned on her heel so quickly that Roger's little claws sunk into her shoulder to secure his. post. He looked at everything but what she wanted to see, so Cress shot a hand towards the shooting gallery and urgently snapped her fingers. "Hey, here, look." A visual wasn't necessary. She'd heard what she needed to, and in tandem, the sharpness of her headache had immediately begun to dull. The energy matched an exhausted parent watching their oblivious child on an Easter Egg Hunt, having walked past the last hidden treasure at least a dozen times, none the wiser and no closer to getting a clue. Finally. Jaime's mimicry dispelled the last of her doubt. The corners of her mouth twitched in the infancy of a smile, then went slack again, disbelief rendering her jaw more susceptible to gravity.
Then everything went black—too black. Motion and magic erupted in the Midway, and Roger took a flying leap from her shoulder, depriving her of sight, his survival instincts overriding all else. "You spearmint Judas!" Cress seethed, grasping at empty air in his wake. "The dog wouldn't do this to me." For Roger, It was the worst slight she could summon.
Birdie argued for reason. A hard smack contacted flesh. A bellowing roar followed, prickling the back of her neck. The doppelgänger continued her heinous nonsense, and Cress felt certain the woman could suck a golfball through a garden hose. The Siren stood declawed, her face twisted by the desperate anger of impotence. Sound was a dizzying landscape, but the trauma of Jaime's change was so familiar she required no sight. Fear was a cold fist gripping her lungs in a vice, making it difficult to breathe. If he changed, and couldn't shift back again ... Trusting that Birdie was keeping herself at a safe distance, the diminishing thump of footsteps made her want to spit acid. Were it not for the sound of Jaime's pain, she'd have been tempted to order the trickster to run his head into a wall, or stop breathing. Bracing a palm against her throat in preparation for the consequence, she took a breath, ignoring the frantic trilling of her heart. This would hurt, and it was her own damned fault for not practicing.
"GET UP, GET TO LIGHT." Cressida's voice was not a singular thing, but as a small pack of wolves harmonizes its howling to make their number sound greater, she seemed to possess several voices, overlapping, complementing and disconcerting as the delicacy of a spider creeping along the spine. "DON'T HURT ANYONE." Twice, the compulsion of her voice had worked on him. Twice, she'd almost killed him with it. Moving on cracking bones would be excruciating, but he had to.
Sung compulsion didn’t hurt, but there were no lyrics for ‘haul ass to a lamppost and stop turning into a Wendigo.’ Journeyman expertise made a blunt instrument of her. Vocal chords overburdened near to tearing, her eyes slammed shut, her face a rictus of pain. Cress doubled over, making a tender collar of her palms. She could only focus on breathing gently around the injury she'd dealt herself, while listening for signs of success or failure.