Just what the hell is going on?
Victoria Craft was annoyed.  And she was annoyed because she was perplexed.  Confusion was not, by her nature, something she experienced often.  Joy, frustration, annoyance and exasperation (usually when dealing with Zachary), serenity, happiness, pride, these things came easily enough and were part of her life.

But there was very little that outright confused Victoria Craft, and she found the current situation of the world rather annoying.  The forces of magic were... at large in the world in a way which seemed to make no sense.  In the past two weeks, she had made contact with more than a dozen magical users of her acquaintanceship, and of those, four of them had been... not in their right heads.  One a minor practitioner of Order magics who read palms in Greenwich Village, a chaos magic using brother and sister who'd found themselves at odds, and an Order user who kept a magical library whom she'd had to prevent from destroying his own books.  She'd been able to help them fight off the influence, briefly, but had been forced to subdue them for the time.

And even Terrance Thirteen had been calling, sayings that instances of psychotic breaks seemed to have been up, with people blaming rubbish magic.

Neither of her... charges, so to speak, were necessarily fitting of the pattern, but magic always seemed to attract magic wherever it was.  She would feel safer with Mina and Salome where she could keep an eye on them.

The first leg of her journey first brought her to Mina's doorstep, where she knocked.