The world blazed in thousand fold relief. Ellie, through her new eyes, could see things with a clarity that was almost painful. Information poured into her mind from two sets of eyes, two sets of ears, two senses of touch but rather than overwhelming her with a glut of information it synergized into a crystalline perfection. Afterall she did have to minds with which to process it, and the additive effect was greater than the sum of its parts. Most of two minds anyway, sealed away in a corner of her consciousness, Madeline existed in a gentle reverie walled off, for the most part from what her erstwhile employee was using her body for. Ellie thought she was probably happier there, safe from the grief of her dead sister, segregated from the fear of a new and alien situation. Madeline’s lips curled with Ellie’s smile.

“Let me take a look at the wound,” Ellie-Madeline said. Unfamiliar fingers reaching out to examine Malone’s neck. There was a lot of blood and it looked extremely painful.

“Obsidian cuts cleanly, minimal crush trauma,” Ellie-Madeline noted, pressing the profilers head gently to the side. There were some surgeons who operated with obsidian scalpels as the stone could be fractured to a keener edge than even surgical steel. Malone was probably lucky that it hadn’t cut any major arteries.

“She left her bag… That is I left my bag at the terminal,” Ellie-Madeline continued. A frown touched her lips at the momentary slip up in control. Was there something wrong with the spell? That seemed unlikely, if a spell failed it usually did so during the opening moments due to some error or lack of focus. Ellie-Madeline banged against the chair beside Malone as her muscles moved independent of her own command, her head striking the window with a dull clunk. There was no pain, That particular aspect of Ellie-Madeline remained Madeline’s. Ellie-Madeline reached a curious finger to her lip where she had bloodied it against the glass. She peered at it for a moment perplexed. In the corner of her eye she saw the figure of Morgan slam Ellie into the side of the SUV. Focus fell away like a collapsing sand castle.

“What…” Ellie’s focus crashed back into her own body with the suddenness of ice giving way beneath a reckless skater. There was sudden intense vertigo as her mind struggled to adjust to two sets of inputs without the mental processing to handle it. Morgan was holding her against the side of the van and was snarling something at her. She blinked her eyes as the spell crumbled, one blink to Madeline’s blue and then one blink to her own green, her pupils dilating till they were nearly completely black. The world steadied and she heard a choked scream from the car in which her other self had been tending Malone. The door opened and Madeline tumbled out lip bloody and eyes wild with panic.

“Eleanor, Eleanor come back!” the woman whimpered her voice that of a scared child whose mother was nowhere to be found. Covering her eyes with her forearm, she shivered for a moment and then turned and vomited onto the grass beside the parked car. The effort seemed to drain her and she toppled to the side and curled into a fetal position. There was a sudden shocking vision of Madeline and Cassandra playing in a park as children, golden light streaming down from a sky Ellie had never seen. With and effort of will she blinked back psychic bleed from the aborted spell. The loss of intimacy was like a shock of cold water after making love and it twisted at her on a level below that of conscious thought.

“Miss Blackwood,” Ellie enunciated the syllables perfectly, her voice devoid of all expression but her emerald eyes smouldering with suppressed anger. From her fetal position Madeline also spoke the words in exactly the same tone and at exactly the same time, resulting in a disconcerting, almost ritualistic echo. It seemed Ellie wasn’t the only one experiencing bleed through.

“Kindly control yourself and remove your hands from me so that I might see to Miss Malone.” The backlash of the magic she had worked washed through her like a tropical evening, her skin prickling. Morgan knew enough about magic to know that both the binding and the possession would damage Madeline’s mind. All geas tore at the psyche, at an instinctive level the ensorcelled victim knew what was being done to them was a violation of their own free will. Given enough time, or a clumsiness practitioner it might lead to mental break down or worse T-Syndrome. Madelines voice faltered midway through the sentence and she shuddered, the last of mental entanglement fading.

“I’m sure you have your own business to which you should be attending,” Ellie concluded, laying unnecessary emphasis on ‘own business’ to make her point abundantly clear. She cast her gaze around her team, making the statement a general one after the fact.