“No,” Rose said, very much on the same page with me. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Something else, then,” I said. “Time… I’m thinking about what he could pull on that front, but I’m not coming up with anything time related. We don’t have any major appointments… no.”
I saw the blonde girls get up, and I tensed. I couldn’t say what I was tensing up to do, but I wanted to be ready for anything.
They glanced my way, unsmiling, before stopping to talk to Laird for a second and then leaving. Not long enough to plot something.
“He has other tricks up his sleeve,” Rose said. “Having a focus doesn’t mean you can’t do something else.”
“He said he dabbled in a variety of things,” I said. “But there’s too much we don’t know on that front, I’d go crazy trying to figure it out.”
“There aren’t many options,” Rose said. “We don’t know much.”
Pocketwatch, familiar, implement. Who was he, how did he operate?
A keeper of the peace, a police officer, a family man invested in community. He was a figure, a pillar in the community.
I looked down at the pattern in sugar.
“What are you thinking?” Rose asked.
“I was thinking he could use those spirits from before to make these people lynch me.”
“Could he?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But… it doesn’t fit. I mean, yes, he sort of lured me here. But… he seems too orderly.”
“It could be a mask,” she said. “A deception.”
“It could be,” I said. “Except the watch is orderly. Overcomplicated, maybe, but it’s orderly. For a personal icon of who he is, for a badge, it doesn’t fit that the guy holding that item in particular would turn around and incite a riot.”
“True,” Rose said.
I could see Laird at the station at the far end of the counter, getting sugar packets, no doubt. People had mobbed him, with questions about the murder, the house, and me, no doubt.
I spoke my thoughts aloud. “A badge. It’s a really nice watch. Maybe there’s more to it? Nuances? It’s old fashioned, which ties into the whole ‘mucking with time’ idea. It’s beautiful, attention getting, a status symbol.”
“Okay,” Rose said. “How does that affect how he applies his magic?”
I glanced down at the diagram in sugar.
“Influencing crowds, people, and perceptions,” I said. I stood from my seat. “With time at the heart of it, as his primary focus?”
“If I read something like that in one of the books,” Rose said, “I’d buy it.”
I crossed the room to reunite with Laird. I had to make my way through the local flavor. Girls in ugg boots with vests and backpacks, no doubt commuters from Toronto colleges; too many flannel shirts; a couple of truckers in baseball caps who were blithely ignorant to the fact that the headwear was ill suited to the season; and some middle-aged women who looked like they’d smoked far too much.
“Hey!” Barista James called out.
I turned.
“Do me a favor?” he asked. He jerked a thumb towards the door. “Maybe clear out?”
Ah, the hostility that Molly had alluded to. “Clear out?”
“Get going. I’m going to kick everyone else out soonish, but those guys are actually buying stuff.”
I still felt lost, and it didn’t help that I was splitting my attention between James and my search for Laird in the crowd. “Kick everyone out?”
“Closing,” he said.
I was no longer searching for Laird. With that one word, he had my attention. Very carefully, I said, “Early to close.”
“Small town,” he answered. “Eight’s late enough.”
Eight.
My eyes searched the crowd. The college girls, the truckers. An entirely different group from before.
I’d just lost four or five hours.
Laird was nowhere to be seen.
He’d stranded me.
I pulled my hat and scarf from my pockets and had them on before I was out the door, taking long strides.
The light outside the window was a streetlight, not daylight. As I glanced up at it, it seemed to decrease in intensity. Almost as if it were apologizing for the deception, or as if the light was one of the last things to catch up with the new status quo. It was night.
It wasn’t a jump. It was a blurring. Me, the other people, environment and all other things sort of sliding along to a new time at their own paces. No comment was made that I’d been at the coffee shop for four or five hours.
The snow crunched under my feet.
I had questions. He’d promised this wasn’t a trap, but… what had his wording been?
Could I even worry about that right now? If he’d lied, it was on his head. Either way, this was my situation to deal with.
People here and there were on the street. A man, smoking, staring at me the entire time I walked down the length of one block. A woman sitting on the porch, doing the same.
Cold looks.
Were any of them Others? Practitioners?
I felt the hollowness of an empty stomach, despite the anxiety. My mouth was dry. Was my body belatedly catching up with me, in terms of the lost hours?
A man, bundled up in winter clothes with hat, scarf, jacket, slacks and boots all in black stood in the middle of the sidewalk, at the end of the block. His eyes were fixed on the snowbank in front of him, his breath fogging with the slow, steady breathing.
He didn’t move at my approach. Unnerved, I crossed the street, triple checking for cars.
“It smells like a rose,” a man announced, “It’s as beautiful as a rose. I dare say it’s as fragile as a rose, once you get past the thorns. But is it really our Rose?”
I turned.
Three twenty-somethings, if I went by appearances, were approaching me from behind. I might have been off. Each had alcohol in brown bags.
I recognized one of them from the vision. He was the one speaking, his arms thrown out to either side, for the drama of it.
“Padraic,” I said. The one who had been with the girl in the checkered scarf.
An Other.
“I prefer Patrick in polite company,” Padraic said. “Good grief, little rose, where are your thorns? You’re defenseless.”
They kept walking, not slowing as they drew closer to me. I backed away a step, then another.
Behind Padraic was a beautiful, willowy young woman in a long black coat and a man with a very fine bone structure on his face, his fine brown hair expertly styled, shining with the snowflakes that had gently alighted on it.
I might not have given them a second glance, except their faces weren’t flushed with the cold.
“This rose has no eyes, which is only natural, but it’s usually sharper,” Padraic said. I had to back away a step. “It has been cast away. Denuded.”
My instincts were screaming at me to act. The problem was that they were telling me to do things that would make this go very, very badly.
When the woman spoke, her voice was almost more musical for her drunkenness, rapt in her fascination, “There’s a vulnerability, isn’t there? Like seeing a king without his clothes. A movie actress howls in fear, nothing held back. A chieftain begs like a craven coward.”
“The beauty of a thing with all the protections stripped away,” Patrick said. He pulled off his hat, holding it to his chest, as if in mourning. His bright red hair was cut to a length just above a buzz-cut, carefully cultivated ringlets framing his face.