“I know,” Maggie said. “But I hate goblins, and that counts for something for at least one Faerie.”
I nodded. “Whatever you can do helps. We’ll try to be fast, hit them hard, do what I need to do, and get out. I just don’t want to get cornered again.”
Rose spoke up. “Saying ‘we’re going to do this fast’ feels like you’re tempting fate when we’re talking about chronomancers.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Definitely,” she said. “But since we know who we’re up against, I did some reading. Time is a fundamental force. It’s hard to find a valid counterpoint to it. But it’s a heavier thing to manipulate. The restrictions are bigger, and the costs are stricter. Physical space is one of the big restrictions. You mess with time, you have to work within certain boundaries. The house is a pretty clear example of that.”
“Very strict focus on the area affected,” I said.
“Turning back the clock, if the sphinx was right, is probably limited to degrees of separation and connections. Only people that are three degrees of separation from the target, you, and from Duncan, or something like that. If there were ripples that extended beyond that third degree of separation, then there would be incongruities.”
“Stuff not adding up?” I asked.
She nodded. “And that costs, when dealing with a magic that’s very costly to start with. It’s not a cost you can anticipate, either. Chronomancers either have to build up a safe buffer to protect themselves in case they wind up having to pay a penalty fee, or they suffer consequences.”
“Like?” I asked.
“Years off their lives, premature aging, distorted perceptions, stolen memories.”
I nodded.
How was I supposed to process this? On the shallow level, we were talking about employing monsters to stop Laird and Duncan, very dangerous creatures.
On the other hand, I was hearing about those penalties, and my knee-jerk reaction was to think that I wouldn’t make my worst enemy face something like that.
To be rushed to their demise?
Maybe it hit closer to home than it might have before my conversation with Isadora.
“That’s essentially it,” I said. “If ghosts or vessels start to show up, Ty and Alexis do what they can to warn us so we can clear out, or Fell and Maggie go after the Shepherd. If we end up facing the Astrologer, Fell tries to bend the paths the light is following and distort the picture.”
“She’s stronger at night,” Fell said. “Less of a concern.”
“We have strategies for everyone. Either stall and warn us or go on the offensive, depending,” I told them. “Stay alive above all.”
“Let’s go,” Fell said.
I bent down to pick up the posterboard and wobbled a little, stopping halfway only to catch my balance.
Still not entirely recovered. Not even halfway there, even.
It was hard to tell if I felt better because I was getting better, or if I was getting used to being a weakling.
I folded the posterboard along the pre-cut marks, until it was a quarter of the usual size. I slid it into my backpack.
Fell, Maggie, Rose and Alexis used the gate to cross over, and they became vague silhouettes, pale. Rose was even harder to make out than usual, but she was brighter than the rest.
Two overlapping realities.
I had to wonder if this kind of vague form was what Others made out when they looked at us.
I focused on them until I could make them out, as if I were adjusting the dial on a microscope.
Alexis stared back at me, her eyes lacking irises or pupils. As it had after the awakening ritual, her hair shifted as if in a breeze.
Her clothes were transparent, and her tattoos stood out. On her back, on either side of her body, on her leg, including a few small ones on the side of her foot, practice sketches, visible through the foot, as if it were more real than her flesh was. Three molars were visible through her cheek, like some faintly glowing mark on her cheek.
I glanced away before I saw anything too rude.
Fell was also wearing an astral body, and his clothing had changed in a way that left me no doubt he’d inscribed it like I had my suit. I could still peer through it, seeing the holster of his gun and the powder that now stirred as if it were alive. I deliberately avoided looking below the belt.
Maggie – Maggie was just as problematic, but for different reasons. A touch too young for my conscience. What I could see of her without looking right at her was surprising. She was second only to Rose, and Rose was pretty much an astral body made solid, Maggie was the most intense to look at. She was something wild and restless, her hair tangled and bristled like a briar bush, eyes dark, slightly thinner than she was in reality, her fingertips and ear tips were pointed.
I couldn’t tell without looking, but I thought there might have been blood spatters.
Had she stepped a bit too far into that world?
Or, maybe, was she right? Had she really dealt with an ‘eight’ on a scale of one to ten?
Fundamentals had warned about using the sight too much, going too deep. I was starting to understand how that worked. When we crossed over, our sight had adjusted. If I peered hard enough or long enough, I suspected, I might not be able to readjust my vision to view the normal world at all. Go too deep, exploring permutations and distant perspectives of things, and perhaps you couldn’t resurface.
I could see the problem with that. Being in the real world, but only able to view the spirit world version of it? It would be like going mad, except the monsters and things in the shadows could very well be real, and there could be no hope of maintaining normal relationships, when you saw normal people through the eyes of an Other.
There was probably more to this, what I was seeing, and what it meant to look at things out of focus and see the spiritual side of people, but we didn’t have time to explore it.
I adjusted my vision until they were blurry enough that I could look at them without being embarrassed, and signaled the go-ahead, carrying the posterboard.
We moved as a unit, though Rose moved from mirror to mirror, and Evan flew, taking to the air to view the area around us.
Interesting, to see how some pedestrians walked through Fell and Alexis, while others stepped around him, as if unconsciously acknowledging his presence.
One by one, we split off. Taking our stations. Ty, still real, found a table at the window of a big book store, while Alexis stopped on a street corner. Fell and Maggie waited on the same block the police station was on. An impressive red brick structure. Some police officers and a fair number of cars were situated just outside, the cars parked along the length of the street.