All of that, the quiet terror, the leap of faith, relying on instincts, it was what I’d been doing since meeting Rose. I followed the family up the front steps, the teenagers right behind me.
“Hi, come in, welcome, welcome, hi Beth, come in,” Laird’s wife was talking to each new guest. She gave me a polite, distracted smile as I passed through the threshold and into Laird’s house.
If I didn’t feel as panicked as I should, I told myself it was because I was going with the flow, adapting to circumstance. I didn’t want to believe it was some deeper flaw. Another, deeper element at play.
■
Earlier
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked Rose.
Maggie and her father exchanged a glance.
“You haven’t noticed?” she asked. “Both times, the ghosts reacted to my voice, not yours.”
“This is kind of important,” I said.
“It is. I know. But I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it.”
“When did you figure it out?”
“The lawyers. They came when I said their names. You were in the kitchen, and I said it, and boom, there they were.”
“I tried, I failed, and you succeeded,” I said. “You just succeeded in calling…”
“Dickswizzle,” Rose said.
I glanced down at the goblin. The size of a chimp, maybe, but generally flabby. He was hard to make out, because his bristly black fur tended to blend into the area between the car and the snowbank. His eyes stood out, widening as he heard his name.
I shivered a little. I wanted him to stop looking at me, but I knew he’d react if I gave him any leverage. He would be pieced together with the worst parts of animals and humans, including a predatory, maladjusted personality. That made him somewhat more predictable.
“Dickswizzle,” I said. Who the hell names these bastards? “Fuck me, it wasn’t just the ghosts, was it? When I went up to the room, the barber turned his back to me. Rejecting me.”
“Barber?” Maggie asked.
“It’s a female line,” Rose said. “That’s how Others see the Thorburn practitioner. The simplest Others, the ones who can’t really think, or who think in an alien way, I think they look for the female part of it. Ones like Padraic, they can maybe work their head around it.”
“If they even realize what genders we are,” I said.
“I think it’s more basic than that. Something like Dickswizzle or the Barber looks at us, and they see something completely different from what we see. Gender’s tied up in something intrinsic about our being. I think.”
“Gender’s a mutable thing,” Maggie said.
“It is today, but Others are old fashioned,” Rose said.
“I’m still trying to work my head around this,” I said, shaking my head a little.
“You gave the goblin an order, but you don’t have the whistle,” Maggie said.
“No,” Rose said. “But he does. And we’re sort of one and the same. By the letter of the law, the Thorburn practitioner is holding the whistle, and the Thorburn practitioner is giving the orders.”
“Yeah?” Maggie asked. She lowered her voice as a group of kids approached from the direction of the school. “That’s… complicated.”
She pointed, and we collectively moved away from the street.
“Am I even me right now?” I asked. “As far as the whistle is concerned?”
“I hope you are, at your core, at least,” Rose said. “There’s one possibility, that you’re the body and I’m the voice. You can obviously do some material things. Drawing circles, some shamanism. Glamour, obviously.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“But our line’s supposed to have some power, some history, and maybe I got that,” Rose said. “Maybe that’s why I’m here?”
“You’ve got the clout?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
Which raised questions about the idea that she might be tapping me for strength or merging with me. Would she gain clout, or borrow from my abilities over time? Until she had all of the power?
“We have a lot to talk about, it seems,” I said. “But not with company around. Not when we only have a few hours to get ready.”
“You were making a move against Laird?” Maggie asked.
“Before anything else happens, I’m going to need answers,” her father said.
I met Maggie’s eyes. She shook her head a fraction.
What was that ‘no’ for?
“I’m in trouble,” I told him. I touched the pendant, “We’re in trouble. A lot of that trouble has to do with some locals. Laird Behaim among them.”
“The police chief,” her father said.
“Yes.”
He glanced at Maggie. “You said this place was safe.”
“Relatively… relative to home,” Maggie said. She smiled.
He gave her a very good ‘I am not amused in the slightest’ look.
“I’m the one who’s really in danger, sir,” I said. “I’m hoping Maggie is going to help me. That’s all this is.”
“I don’t want her getting embroiled in fights. She told me that she’d do this for defensive purposes, to protect herself and protect me.”
“I did agree to something like that,” Maggie said.
“I don’t want to get Maggie into a bad situation. I only needed some help, and there aren’t many people to ask.”
“And… uncontrolled goblins are an appropriate sort of ‘help’?” He asked. He looked at his daughter, speaking to her. “We’ve talked about what you’re doing with the goblins, we didn’t talk about lending them out to others. You’re containing, trapping and controlling, so you can stop things before they start.”
“Right now, sir,” I cut in, “I’m trying to stop something. It’s probably big, it might be ugly, and even though it’s directed at me, I’m not sure it won’t do any collateral damage.”
He looked genuinely upset. One hand flew up to the zipper on his jacket, stopped, and then dropped to his side. Fidgeting. “This place was supposed to be safer. More stable.”
“It is, dad.”