“Sounds like I need to get in touch with the Astrologer,” I said.
“Could be.”
“And if I do want help going up against the Lord of Toronto,” I said, speaking very carefully, “Can I offer you anything in exchange for a hand?”
Shotgun exchanged looks with everyone else that was present. “Probably not.”
“He’s wanting to use my knowledge for something ugly,” I said. “You kill me now, he’ll be mad enough to do something to you. Leave me alone, and I might be forced to do what he wants, and that could mean issues for you.”
A very, very small ‘could’, given the deal the Drunk had struck, but still theoretically possible.
“So we have to help you, is that it?” Shotgun asked.
“No,” I said. “But helping me would do us both a world of good. I can even sweeten the deal.”
“We don’t set our sights all that high,” he said.
“I’ve got something in the works,” I said. “Tomorrow night, at midnight, it comes to a head. You help me, and I’ll give you access to my family’s resources, minus the… troubling books. The books I don’t particularly want to read.”
“Meaning we wouldn’t be dabblers,” he said. “We could be…”
“A lot of things,” I said. “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t at least one good book on every major subject and discipline.”
“I can see the appeal,” Shotgun said.
“It’s an option,” I said.
“But, and I’d have to talk to the other Knights for their opinions, I’m quite comfortable being a dabbler. A group of low-key people who lucked into more mysterious things.” He glanced at his familiar. “Don’t have to stick our noses in too deep, don’t have any pressure. No enemies, not a whole lot to fear, outside of our one big fuckup to date. We get to be excited if, a couple of times a year, we get a new book, a new doo-dad, and we can explore it together.”
“Then…” I said, reaching for an answer. “You want less? Not access to a whole library, but maybe a guarantee of a book once in a blue moon?”
Shotgun looked at the others. I saw one or two shrugs and some nods.
“You’re speaking closer to our language now,” he said. “But the risk is still too high.”
“The risk is already high,” I said.
He slowly shook his head. “We walked into a bad situation once, thinking we had no choice. It didn’t go well.”
“I was aiming to get around to that topic,” I said.
“Makes for an awful lot of wondering, you know? Oblivion. Knowing we maybe had friends or family, people we had as friends, people we loved, and they were devoured. Eaten so completely that we can’t even remember them.”
I nodded. I put the coke down on the nearest shelf. “I’m sorry for your losses, whoever they might have been.”
“Thank you.”
“If you have any thoughts, or if you can let me know what precautions you used that didn’t work, it would help a great deal,” I said.
“Precautions? Half the ones we used, it ate. We can’t remember if we tried something and it didn’t work. Can’t remember what the others tried doing that didn’t work out. We tried circles, I know, but maybe it never got far enough to try eating those.”
“What kind of circle?”
“Same type you usually see. Lines and reinforcing shapes, all of us at the center.”
The same kind that had been used on the Barber. That had worked, ostensibly, because he was abstract, just like this oblivion demon.
Huh.
That would have been my first guess and one of the few educated guesses I could make, and it was wrong.
How did one ward against a being of nothingness?
“Anything else?” I asked.
“We went in armed. We do okay, at trinkets. Swords, knives, wands. Whatever the others brought, it didn’t work. That’s… just about all I can tell you, on the weapon and self-defense front.”
“Better than nothing,” I said. But not by much. I didn’t have the resources to research and figure out a good path to take, and the fact that the evidence and memories had been ‘eaten’ meant I couldn’t even work by process of elimination.
“I lie awake thinking about it,” Shotgun’s son said. “The thing. The near-miss.”
“We shouldn’t have brought you,” Shotgun said.
“I’d lie awake thinking about it even if you hadn’t. Who did we lose? What place did they have in our lives? Then you think about what happened to Marcie…”
Shotgun glanced at me. “My son’s ex-girlfriend.”
“She’s still my girlfriend, I think,” the young man said. “At least, that’s what I think she was.”
“Yeah,” his father said.
“You’re going to have to fill me in,” I said.
“She disappeared,” Shotgun said. “Few days after that afternoon. We’ve talked about it, tried to figure it out, actively tried to find her. But there was nothing. She wasn’t eaten, or we wouldn’t even know, but…”
“I can’t really remember her face,” the son said. “Or her last name.”
“I think,” Shotgun said, “The people around her were eaten. Mother, father, maybe a sibling or two, a friend. There wasn’t enough connecting her to this world, so she just…”
“Went,” the son said.
“Went away,” the father echoed him. “To wherever people go when they fall through the cracks in this world. Makes you wonder. Were we something different, before? Did we have more dreams? More aspirations? Did we lose important people that were supposed to prop us up, and settle into a different position when we tipped over, without them?”
“As in, maybe you weren’t all a bunch of dabblers working within a small scope, before?” I asked.
“I look back at the places we were investigating,” Shotgun said, “And they were big. A factory? An old farmstead? Far too big for our sad little group. Too big for a group twice our size.”
The guy sitting under the window spoke, “It eats away at you. Wondering what we had, before it was taken away as thoroughly as something can be taken. We can’t do it again. Can’t go up against something big and lose.”
“Can’t take the risk,” Shotgun said.
I finished off the sandwich I’d been nibbling on, thinking. Nobody volunteered anything further.
“You’ll back me against the Lord of Toronto, if there’s a zero-risk way of doing it?” I asked.
“Yes,” Shotgun said.
“Will you take on a small risk, if I offer a book, once in a blue moon?”
“What risk?”
“Not sure yet,” I said. “Still trying to pull pieces together and form a game plan.”
“Then we’re not sure either,” he replied.
“Fair,” I said. “Will you hear me out if I want to contact you with a request?”
“Number’s on the phone,” he said. He gestured, and his son reached over to grab the phone on the counter, turning it my way.
I wrote it down.
“Dealing with that thing is tomorrow, so I should have time to talk to the Astrologer before then,” I said. “Today, I’ve got to deal with this goblin called the Hyena.”