I was tired, and I was far enough away from the police station. I swept snow off the bus station bench, very nearly falling over as I bent forward, and took a seat.
“What can I do?” Evan asked. “About June?”
“Nothing. This is… it’s awkward. Kind of screwed up on a lot of levels,” I said. “If I feed the connection, though, she might find her way to me, or I’ll at least be able to keep her from slipping away and getting lost before I get back to the station.”
Evan shivered.
“If you’re cold, you could go back to being a ghost.”
“I’d rather be alive and cold,” he said.
“That’s allowed,” I said. “You’re okay?”
“I feel okay. My neck hurts.”
“A lot?”
“Some. I’d go back to being dead if it hurt more. It feels more better than before.”
“Good,” I said. I nodded. “Good. I don’t want this to be a bad thing for you.”
“I don’t either,” Evan said.
We sat there, not having much more to say. Evan’s head turned this way and that, watching the city going through its motions.
It had probably been a while for him.
A car slowed on approach. I felt the connections tying the occupants to me, and tensed. A drive-by? Or whatever the practitioner equivalent was?
It was Fell, with Rose in the backseat, not really there so much as reflected in the windows. He stopped in the middle of the lane. An illegal park, I noted. A car honked at him, as it had to change lanes to keep heading down the street.
I tried to stand and failed.. I was like an old man, too stiff to move much, not enough strength to make much of the movements I did make.
I was getting looks from passerbys. Did they think I was an addict or drunk, as Rose had observed? A crazy hobo?
It wasn’t something I liked to admit, but the judgments of others did matter to me. My judgment and perception mattered to, as far as how I could and would view myself. I didn’t like being bedraggled. I’d promised myself I’d move forward, that I’d make constant, consistent efforts to be a better, stronger person, both in general, and in terms of who I interacted with and how.
Fell stepped out of the car, ignoring the incoming traffic that very well could have slammed into his open car door, and walked around the front of the car to approach me.
He had a gun in his left hand. Momentarily I wondered if I’d made a mistake, asking for Rose to summon him. People weren’t freaking out as they saw the gun. Fell himself barely registered.
He offered me his right hand. I caught it, and Fell hauled me to my feet.
He didn’t support me, though. When I was up, he let go, and I was left to stagger forward to the passenger side door of the car, where I leaned against it.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Fell said. He paused. As a tangent, he said, “You’re cutting this one close.”
“Can we get moving, then?” I asked.
I tried the door handle. It was locked.
I had several pet peeves. That was one peeve of note. Few things got me so pissed as when someone made me ask.
“Can I?” I asked, gesturing towards the door.
“I was instructed to bring you to the factory building,” Fell said. “Turn around, look at me.”
I did, leaning against the car door for support.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t have to bring you if I have reason to believe you’re not you. You look like you could be possessed.”
“You’re fucking with me?” I asked.
“If your head turned around three hundred and sixty degrees,” Fell said, his tone placid, “and you started spewing projectile vomit everywhere, I wouldn’t be particularly surprised.”
“Cute,” I said. “Can we talk instead about how a police officer practitioner at the station was flaunting his power, working against Conquest’s aims? That I dealt with him? That’s got to be worth credit.”
“To another lord of a city? Quite possibly. To Conquest? Less possibly. To me? Not at all.”
“What do I have to do to prove I’m me?”
“That question is for you to answer, not me,” Fell said.
“Do you want details from our past meetings?” I asked. “I’m tired as fuck, but I could come up with something.”
“If you were possessed, the being that possessed you would have access to your memories.”
“Can you or Rose tell me, then, how one usually identifies the possessed?” I asked.
“Request the aid of an expert,” he said. “Or use one’s common sense. No expert available, and my common sense is telling me something is wrong.”
“I just dealt with an imp, a crazed goblin-beast and a practitioner with a vendetta, all in the span of two and a half days. If things were right, that’d be a pretty good sign something is pretty damn wrong.”
That had sounded better in my head.
I turned to the side, “Rose? Help me out here?”
“Blake, don’t fight this.”
“Rose-”
“It’s a bad idea, to go forward. I’ve been reading the texts. We don’t know enough. We aren’t ready, not for this, not for tonight.”
The stress she put on that word… she was referring to our ability to deal with Conquest. To use Pauz and enact some plan.
I worried Fell would catch it, but he just looked generally annoyed, standing there with the gun in hand.
Rose continued, “It’s hard to protect against something as abstract as this, especially when you don’t have the information. You can barely move. Just… accept that Fell isn’t going to give you a ride. That you can’t go and stop the abstract demon tonight. You tried, you failed. You met your end of the bargain with Conquest.”
“But not my bargain with Evan. I told him I’d work against the real monsters,” I said.
“You can. Your promise to Evan has nothing to do with your promise to Conquest. The odds are very, very low that anyone is going to get hurt in the meantime, waltzing into the abstract demon’s lair. It’s isolated, by all accounts,” Rose said.
“It is,” Fell said.
Rose went on, “Take the rest of tonight to recuperate. We meet with Conquest tonight, as we arranged, we deal with that.”
Again, the thinly-veiled reference to dealing with Conquest.
I was already shaking my head.
“Blake, you can do it another day. Tomorrow, or the day after.”
“With the way life keeps coming at us hard and fast? With all the other shit that’s liable to come up? I’m not so sure,” I said.
“There isn’t a lot I can do,” Rose said. “I can’t really affect the world you live in. I was… I was put here, and I’m supposed to be the figure on your shoulder, guiding you, but you don’t listen to me. You picked a familiar without my input. You blithely stride forward, trusting your instincts. Can you understand how this impacts me?”
“I understand,” I said. “But with all due respect, I’m the one who’s sliced up, I’m the one who almost got shot, who almost got devoured, who fought off a swarm of fucking squirrels, housecats, and other animals, including some murderous relation of Bambi…”
“Careful,” Rose said. “Lies.”