“…So to speak,” I added, even though I was pretty sure I was in safe territory. “I’m the one in the line of fire, Rose. I’m the one who’s doing the binding. Work with me. Don’t work against me.”
“I am working with you. I’m trying to keep you from taking a path that’s going to get you killed. Maybe, maybe you’ll lose a bit of power, if you don’t meet your obligation to Evan. But you lose everything if you die.”
“I’m coming out of every altercation a bit stronger,” I said. “With more tools.”
“You’re coming out of every situation in pieces. I don’t even think you’re running on metaphorical fumes anymore, you’re running on borrowed fumes. Power borrowed from me, and now power borrowed from Evan.”
I glanced at Evan, as far as I could make him out.
“What I think,” Rose said, “Is you’re falling into the same trap most diabolists do. The same trap grandmother did. An inability or unwillingness to look forward. You’re too focused on the present.”
“Present is kind of important.”
“I’m sure grandmother thought the same thing. Except you’re liable to run into a situation like she did. You reach the end of the line, where you’re cornered or all the problems and consequences you’ve been postponing start catching up with you, and you’re forced to make a big compromise, or you make a mistake, or something.”
“Or something,” I said. I sighed. “You’re probably right.”
“Grandmother hit the end of the line, she had to pick an heir… she admitted, at least to me, that she had waited far too long to do it, that she didn’t prepare us enough. But I can’t help but wonder why she set the rules that she did. Going to meetings, reading for the future. Forcing us to make plans and lay groundwork. Do you think, maybe, she wanted us to do better? To not repeat her mistake?”
“Do as I say, not as I do?” I asked.
“Look forward,” Rose said. “Think beyond today.”
“Bringing us back to the issue of today,” I said. “The problem at hand. Kind of hard to ignore.”
“Then focus on it. But… can’t we find a way to work together? Compromise? Let me focus on the future, you focus on the now, and we find a way to make it work together? Except you need to fucking listen to me when I give you advice.”
The anger was uncharacteristic.
For a moment, I wondered if Rose were the possessed one.
“Okay,” I said. “Alright. Compromising, then.”
“Thank you.”
“If you two want to hash this out,” Fell said, “I’ll go.”
“No,” I said. “I… I think whatever happens, we’ll be helping you out.”
“Do you?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. My thoughts were muddled. I was thinking about Rose, about the demon.
I couldn’t tell Rose in front of Fell, not without raising problems, but we needed more firepower to deal with Conquest. We definitely needed firepower to deal with Conquest and Pauz at the same time.
At the very least, if we could do something about the demon, we could get the Knights on our side.
What would Rose say? She would say that risk wasn’t worth it, and we should push forward with what we had.
If I had to trust my gut on this, though, we couldn’t. Even as a mockery, as a being that wasn’t really as powerful as he made himself out to be, he was too strong. I could see the tower now, I’d seen the other practitioners, I’d seen Conquest within his domain, after Rose had passed out.
“Rose, do you have ideas on what to do about this demon?” I asked.
“Some, but they’re incomplete, unverified. If it slips past your defenses, you’re gone. I don’t know where that leaves Evan and me, but I don’t think it’s good.”
Slipping through the cracks. The first ones to mention that concept had been the Knights, if I remembered right. if they didn’t outright disappear, they’d go where things went when there was nothing to hold them up.
“It’s a scary idea,” I said. “Let’s… let’s talk compromise. What if we found a way to do this? If we hashed out enough of a plan that we could be reasonably certain, using Fell’s term here, that I wouldn’t get eaten?”
“I don’t think anything would make me feel that certain,” Rose said.
“Not certain. Reasonably certain. There will always be surprises. There’s nothing we can do about them. But if we ignore random happenstance and bad luck-”
“Which are a factor, with our bloodline’s karma.”
“Fuck karma. Life sucks, it’s always sucked a bit. I’ve fought for everything I have, and I’m still fighting for everything I have. Nothing’s changed, as far as I’m concerned. Here’s what I’m saying. You and me get in this car. We drive to the factory. We talk. We hash out a plan. You treat it as if we were deadly serious about it, no quibbling. If we’re not on solid footing by the time we arrive, we turn around and go. Or we walk back, if Fell insists, or I call friends and get a ride. I don’t know.”
“Forgive me for saying so, Blake, but I can’t help but imagine we’ll get there, I’ll say we aren’t ready, and you’ll go in regardless.”
“I swear I won’t, so long as you’re saying so in our mutual interest, go against your word. The power is in your hands, Rose.”
An oath. The inability to lie was a handicap, a bad one, but the truth had power too.
Rose hadn’t replied.
“All I need from you, Rose, is for you to give me Rose Thorburn’s best showing, from the moment we get in that car until we arrive. Until we get back, if we actually go in. That’s the end of the compromise I’m asking you to meet. If I can’t argue it well enough to go in, we shouldn’t go in. That’s my end of the compromise.”
“Okay. Just… just give me a minute to get some things together.”
I nodded.
“I don’t seem to recall giving you permission to enter my car,” Fell said.
“Some practitioners have barometers, to measure where they stand in the grand scheme of things,” I said.
“Implements and the like, yes,” Fell said.
I started to pull off my coat, Evan fluttering loose, and I very nearly fell. It took me far too long to make any headway in pulling my arms from my sleeves.
I was left standing on the street, the snowfall heavy enough to have piled on the shoulders of my coat, cold, my sliced arms and tattoos exposed.
It was almost too dark to see.
“I hope you’re going to treat that bird on your shoulders better than you treated these ones.”
“I certainly hope to,” I said, trying to catch my breath. The struggle with my coat hadn’t helped.
“This? It’s not quite good enough. It almost works against you.”
“Probably,” I said.
“Man, you really cracked yourself wide open, didn’t you?”
“I guess so,” I said. “Needed to make myself small.”
“You may well have done that,” he said.
He unlocked the car door.
I opened it, and I didn’t sit down so much as fall down. Evan fluttered down and landed on my hand, while I took a humiliating amount of time to catch my breath after the brief exertion.