“I’m not particularly keen on accepting said deal,” I said. “There’s that saying, out of the frying pan, into the fire? We could easily be talking about the hottest fire there is.”
I pointed straight down for emphasis.
“You really are a diabolist, then,” Priss said.
“I know names I shouldn’t,” I said. “Names I don’t want to know. Yeah, I guess, on a technical level. Not at heart, though.”
Priss turned around to look over one shoulder. “You kind of look like what I expected of a diabolist. Kind of. In two very different ways, put together. But you don’t act like one.”
“I’m not quite sure what a diabolist is supposed to look like,” I said.
“Sunken eyes, gaunt, lanky, thinning hair, clearly not taking care of yourself, with a crimson and black robe and hood, and some flesh-bound tome in your hands…”
“I look like that?”
“Dark circles around your eyes, your hair is greasy-”
I touched my hair. “I spent the night in a prison cell, no showers offered.”
“Hood?”
I touched the hood of the sweatshirt I wore under my jacket. “That’s reaching.”
“The other image I had was some goth teenager who was in over their head. You’re kind of a middle ground between the two.”
“Between an old, deranged man in a wizard robe and a clueless goth teenager?” I asked.
“A slightly deranged, clueless young adult?” Rose chimed in.
“Exactly.”
I leaned back, sighing. “Well, this clueless, deranged-looking twenty year old needs to figure out a way to defeat a centuries-old entity, because time’s running out.”
Rose spoke up, “When time’s up, there’re three eventualities that are liable to come up, without us stepping in. The Imp finds a way to manipulate the Lord, and we’ve got a deranged, dangerous, warped Incarnation in the area. The Lord finds a way to leverage the Imp, and he’s stronger, or there isn’t a problem, and we’re forced to obey C- Toronto’s Lord as he demands access to all our family’s power and knowledge. That last one being our worst case scenario,” Rose said.
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Just about every time someone says ‘worst case scenario’, I immediately think of a bunch of ways that things could get even worse.”
“Pessimism?” Priss asked.
“I like to think it’s the creative side of me more than pessimism,” I said.
“It’s a very fucking bad scenario, if he gets what he wants,” Rose said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. Getting back on track.
“We could fight fire with fire,” Rose said. “I mean, we bring out the big guns by, well, calling in the big guns. Summon and bind something from one of Grandmother’s books.”
“How is that any better than calling the lawyers?” I asked.
“It’s cleaner. The demons are technically safe to use, if we make absolutely no mistakes.”
“There will always be mistakes,” I said. “Human nature.”
“What’s messier in the end?” Rose asked. “We risk Toronto’s Lord getting what he wants, and he unleashes uncontrolled demons on the world, we give him what he wants and he uses controlled demons to achieve the aims and ends that he exists to pursue…”
Conquest.
“…Or we use controlled demons to achieve our aims, for the good of everyone in this city?”
“I think that’s a pretty slippery slope,” I said.
“I think you’re exactly right,” Nick said.
Priss glanced at him, confused.
I glanced up at Rose while Nick gave the ‘twenty words or less’ explanation to Priss.
Rose had a counter-argument waiting, “We only have… two and a half hours to get something in place. I’m not hearing anyone come up with better.”
“Demons don’t make anything better, as far as I can tell,” I replied.
“Then make up a plan. Give me any plan. You talked about the Hyena, I talked about how we’d sic our enemies on each other…”
“And we have a demon’s severed arm,” I said.
“What are we going to do with a demon’s severed arm?”
I looked over the coat-wrapped arm. The tapered edge…
I’d thought of a knife, but the shape, it invoked another sort of thought.
“It’s like a chisel, a wedge. A doorstop?”
“A doorstop?” Rose asked.
“Let’s work backwards,” I said, leaning forward, the demon’s arm in my hands. “Evan’s good at escaping, yes?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the last step of our plan. Escape. Getting away intact. The step before that… let’s say we find a way to bar the door to the C-word’s personal realm. We’ve never seen him outside of it, and we can safely assume he’s going to be there when he calls us. I think he’s setting a stage, almost, in that tower of his. We get in, do our thing, whatever we need to do to distract him…”
“How?”
“Imp gets loose, and we release the Hyena, too,” I said. “There are more than enough ghosts in there for it to use against C-word, and it’ll weaken him.”
“The plan was to strengthen him.”
“If you have ideas on how, I’m open to them. For the time being, I’m thinking maximum distraction, a broad-strokes plan to throw him off balance. We use or make the opportunity to escape and wedge the door shut behind us. Maybe, if we can find a way to do it, we tap the demon’s abilities and make it so there’s no door at all. We contain the damage, we contain the threats…”
“And me?” Rose asked.
“Evan can break locks.”
“Normal locks. No guarantee on this sort of lock.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So we have two things that could break the lock. Maybe if we can get enough muscle behind it, we could use this demon arm to break the chain.”
“Muscle. You’re as weak as a baby, Evan weighs, what, an ounce?”
“I’m stronger than I look,” Evan said.
“You are,” Rose said, sighing, “But I’m not so confident that you’re strong enough that it’s worth this risk.”
“You have a material form in there,” I said. “You could do it.”
“If you’re close enough to see me while you’re in there, he’s close enough to take the arm from you,” Rose said. “Maybe Evan could slip close enough to break a lock, but taking the time to chip at the chain with one end of an arm?”
I sighed.
“We could teach you a rune or two,” Nick said.
“No power to supply to said rune,” I answered. “And we’d need a lot to counteract his stores of power.”
“That’s a bit of a problem.”
“Thanks though.”
“Sure. So this is your friend that you said was in trouble.”
“Yeah.”
“His nearly useless friend,” Rose said. “I can read, and I can argue, and I can’t do much else.”
“You can give awfully frightening suggestions,” Nick said.
“That too,” Rose said. “For all it’s worth.”