“I think I need a debrief,” he said.
“I know,” I answered. “Just… give me a second.”
A few seconds passed.
“Blake,” Evan piped up, cutting into the silence. “What are you doing with the Hyena?”
“I’m kind of wondering what he’s doing with Ty and me,” Alexis said. “We made this leap, and-”
“Guys,” I cut her off. I came across a little more intense than I’d hoped. “Take… take a few minutes, get acclimatized. Talk amongst yourselves. I just need a bit to get my head in order.”
“What you mean is you want us to leave you the fuck alone,” Alexis said.
“For five or ten minutes,” I said. “You’ve… A good few of you have been involved in this for a day, for hours. I’ve had day after day of it. There isn’t anyone here, Pauz and the Hyena excepted, who I don’t either deeply respect or feel very fond of. Really. Just give me five or ten minutes. Please.”
There was no reply. Awkward silence stretched on.
The awkward silence became a merciful silence, punctuated by whispers between others in the group.
My eye fell on a cracked window. I could see Rose on the other side. Hugging herself.
Rose hadn’t even said hi to my new recruits. My circle. My cabal.
I kind of missed the point where I could talk things out with her. We kind of needed to return to that point.
Need being the operative word. I wasn’t sure we’d survive if we couldn’t.
■
The sword was heavy as I set it down on the dining room table.
This spirit world was a representation of our world, but the forces that had affected it were very different. I was only just barely beginning to wrap my head around it.
In the mortal realm, things were maintained by care, regular cleaning and maintenance. Here, things were maintained, I suspected, by caring. Things that were neglected were neglected, while cherished objects were well looked after.
The parts of the road where cars traditionally traveled were in pristine shape. Some of the other parts were so pitted and ruined they might as well have been ditches or chasms.
It was eerie. An entire city, desolate. When I did see something, it was an eerie thing, a phantom image of a person in the other world who made a deeper impression, a lesser Other, like some faerie equivalent to a rat or a child’s nightmare that had slithered out of a dream and into this world, where it now hid in the cracks, scratching out some kind of existence I might never wrap my head around.
Even my apartment was an eerie twist on its real appearance.
Evan. Rose. Ty, Alexis, and now Tiff, who’d stayed at the apartment. We also had Nick, his one-footed friend, and Priss, as tertiary allies, Fell as a questionable ally and information source, and the imp and Hyena were… mostly just questionable.
“Can I have your phone?” I asked.
“You don’t have a cell phone?” Fell asked me.
“I… no.”
“I’d like to know how you get by in this day and age without a phone.”
“I just do,” I said. “I never really thought about it.”
He gave me a funny look, but he handed over his phone.
I searched online. Finding a phone number was hard. Finding an online profile wasn’t. I sent Maggie a message over social media.
I returned the phone to Fell.
I drew in a deep breath, then sighed. “Okay. One at a time. In order of introduction. Rose?”
Silence.
“Rose?”
I looked, and she wasn’t anywhere near us.
Where other connections were either smooth and fluid, or weak, occasionally jerky and flickering where they snapped into place one moment and disappeared the next, Rose’s connection to me was something else entirely. Inconsistent, jumping here and there, but most definitely not weak.
She appeared at one of the shards of mirror that I’d tacked to the wall. My head wasn’t the only one that turned to look at her.
“Rose,” I said.
She dropped some books, making a noise, glanced at me, and said, “Gimme a minute.”
Then she was gone.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll touch base with her later. Who’s next?”
“If it’s order of introduction, shouldn’t we be before her?” Ty asked.
“You were only introduced to this today. Um. Fell?”
“I’m the second person you ask?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You had something you wanted to tell me?”
“It’s too late to make a meaningful difference. I might say you’ve already shot yourself in the foot, but that’s understating it.”
“Explain, please,” I said. “Because as far as I can tell, this is the only way I’m going to get one over on Conquest.”
“A contest that overwhelmingly favors him?”
“He wouldn’t accept if it didn’t,” I said.
“He could have taken us,” Alexis said.
“He could have, but he wouldn’t have,” I said. “I… I sort of understand him. He’s more machine than man. He follows certain rules. If we know what those rules are, on top of the underlying motivations, we can predict him. Maneuver him. I don’t think this is as unwinnable as it looks.”
“We, the people at this table, just have to get past the coven of elementalists, the time travelers, the ghostmonger, the astrologer, and a flaming force of nature that could theoretically bring mortal Toronto to its knees,” Fell said.
“Exactly,” I said. “I didn’t say it would be easy. But it’s not unwinnable.”
“You also have the Drunk out for your blood, for reasons inexplicable to me and Conquest both,” Fell said.
“There’s that,” I admitted.
“And the Sphinx is going to try to kill you.”
“Wait, what?”
“There’s been animosity towards you from the outset, the moment it became clear who you were and how you played into Conquest’s hands. Can you wrap your head around why?” Fell asked.
“I’m a diabolist.”
“No. That’s part of the problem. That label means anything that goes bad can potentially go catastrophically, but it’s not the whole problem.”
“You’re going to have to explain,” I said.