“You really don’t have to explain,” I said. “I’m not… I guess I’m not expecting or demanding anyone to go against their nature or take risks. I get it if you’re shy of getting into any more messes. I just had a taste of what you guys went through, way back when.”
“My husband said you failed?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Looking at you, I don’t think we can say you didn’t try.”
I huffed out a bit of a laugh.
Evan alighted on my shoulder.
“Hi there, bird,” Priss said.
“Hi,” Evan said.
Priss didn’t even flinch. But it wasn’t the non-flinch of being unsurprised by the unusual. It was obliviousness. She hadn’t heard.
“He’s Evan,” I said.
“Same name as the boy you were accused of murdering?” Priss asked.
“Yep,” I said. I didn’t volunteer anything more. I wasn’t sure what the rules were.
We reached the door in the chain-link fence.
We reached their truck. Nick, who I’d dubbed ‘Shotgun’, was standing by the truck, his overweight, one-footed buddy beside him. Both had their guns, and were talking in murmurs to the truck’s side view mirror.
When I got close enough, I let go of Priss and hobbled forward until I could lean against the front of the truck. My leg briefly blocked the headlight, and the sudden darkness made my heart jump.
“What’s in the jacket?” Nick asked.
“Demon arm,” I said.
“You got a piece of it?” Nick asked me.
“For what it’s worth,” I said.
He nodded.
“I was just telling them we had to run,” Rose said. “We went in with ideas, only one really worked.”
“Fire,” I said. “When we do this again, we use more fire.”
“Huh?” Priss said. “I’m missing something.”
She doesn’t see the girl in the mirror.
I pointed at Rose.
Priss turned, bending over. “Oh. Huh.”
She squinted some.
“Huh,” she said, again.
“You’re going back?” Nick asked, stepping forward to wrap one arm around Priss. Priss wrapped one arm around him in turn.
“It needs to be bound or eliminated,” I said. “But it won’t be tonight, I don’t think. Probably not even tomorrow. We figure out how to trap it inside, we burn it out. Or we burn it until it’s small enough to bind.”
“I can’t believe you want to do this again,” he said. “God.”
“To be fair, I’m sort of thinking the same thing,” Rose added.
“I don’t want to go back in,” I said. “But I’m more sure than ever that that thing needs to be stopped.”
“I wouldn’t object,” Nick’s male friend said. If I’d been given his name, I’d forgotten it. “But getting this close is about as much as I can manage. Scares the everloving shit out of me.”
“Yeah,” Nick said.
I nodded. My eye roved over the jacket-wrapped demon’s arm. I’d seen it with my peripheral vision, and my impression had been of a human-sized arm with clawed fingertips that managed to be brutish, fat, and disproportionately long at the same time. The end of the limb where the teeth had bitten things off, had been bitten off at an angle. The cut had been more or less clean. I flexed it as well as I could, and found it rigid. I suspected it could cut anything a butter knife could.
“We’re not ready,” I said. “We need to deal with the Lord of the city, but we don’t have the assets. It’s ugly, and it’s about to get uglier.”
“When you say ‘we’-” Nick started.
“I’m saying Rose and I. Evan. You said you weren’t willing to do more than offer token assistance, low risk assistance.”
He nodded. He’d only wanted to stress the particulars.
“I’d hoped to win you over and get you on our side by stopping this demon. Getting a kind of revenge on your behalf. I’m sorry I couldn’t. But circumstances allowing, I’m hoping to try again.”
Nick nodded. “That’s something.”
“I’m not asking you to fight, or to do anything. But can I hitch one more ride?”
“It’s why you called, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s get the fuck out of this godforsaken place,” he said. “You take the back seat. Bit of a squeeze, but my front seat doesn’t really slide anymore.”
The heavyset man gave me an unsolicited hand in climbing into the truck, then walked around to the far side to climb in.
A moment later, we were moving.
I leaned my head back, wanting nothing more than to sleep.
“I have books on hand,” Rose said. “Incarnations, binding Greater Others…”
“Is he a greater other?” I asked.
“He’s Conquest,” Rose said.
“That’s a name we don’t want to be throwing around willy-nilly, Rose,” I said. “Sorry. I sort of picked up on that during my last big conversation with the Knights.”
“Right.”
“He’s not the C-word,” I said. “He’s a C-word.”
“Well put,” Nick said, from the driver’s seat.
“He’s an incarnation,” Rose said. “A being tied to the intrinsic workings of the world, at least on an abstract level. They have no technical beginning or end. They just are. What we see is kind of a crystallization of that essence. Some jackass decided to invoke a force and absorb the force in question into themselves and fucked up, they gave themselves over to the force for some reason or another, or a big event helped it come into being. Now it’s autonomous. You can weaken it, but you can’t really kill it. He’s… major enough to count, I think.”
“Right,” I said. “Can you bind something like him?”
“Can I? Probably not. But binding anything is theoretically possible.”
“Right. That’s vague.”
“It’s all I’ve got, until I can get more reading done.”
“Then let’s talk plan of attack,” I said. “The Imp’s binding-”
I couldn’t say too much around the Knights
“-won’t hold,” I finished.
“Yeah,” Rose said. “I really sort of hoped for us to have more of a plan of attack by this point, so it could serve as a distraction.”
“But we don’t have a plan,” I said. “C-word has few friends, and a good few enemies. Except none of them want to play ball with us. Which means we’re doing what we can with the very limited resources we have. Two bound ghosts, Evan, you, me, maybe the Knights giving us another ride if they’re feeling particularly generous, and a few small tools.”
“That’s essentially it,” Rose said. “We do have other allies, but-”
“But they’re allies who ask a heavy price,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I nodded.
Nick spoke up, “Do we know these allies you’re talking about?”
“Lawyers,” I said.
“Lawyers?”
“An association of diabolists in suits,” I clarified. “I think they want me to join. They kind of offered me a get out of jail free card.”
I could see him glance at his wife, a look that probably conveyed an awful lot I wasn’t privy to.