“I’m not the solution you want or need,” he protested.
“I need a voice in my ear. Every great man has a great woman at his back, but the inverse is true. Isn’t it?”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Sometimes all you need is someone to tell you you’re doing the right thing, or the wrong thing. To bounce ideas off of. That’s the way it is in the books. The Watson, the Sam, the Friday, the Horatio.””You can’t base real life off of books.”
“I don’t have anything else to work with,” she said.
“I’m sorry, but no. I can’t.”
She nodded.
“There’s no rush,” he said.
She didn’t nod in response to that.
“Talk to me,” she said. “Change the subject, please. I’m embarrassed.”
She couldn’t know it, but the only other time she’d looked as human as she did right then was when they’d been trading insults, getting riled up, a prelude to the event of four nights ago.
“When I talked about expectations, there were things I didn’t say. When I was on the ground, in the trenches, I had certain responsibilities. Because the Germans have practitioners, you know what I mean?”
Rose nodded.
“I want to say that there was a great fantastical secret mission, that we knew the Germans were getting involved in the occult, but it wasn’t like that. He’s an ordinary man, and he has no idea, outside of a few books he has no idea how to use. There are people under him that know, but they’re keeping their mouths shut. They’re protecting him, but they’re keeping their mouths shut.”
“They could be afraid of what we could do in response.”
“Maybe. But that blade cuts both ways. If one side realizes their losing and decides to tap into resources like your family has, what happens? The only solution is for the war to keep going.”
“It could wind down. Forces unrelated to practitioners started it, those same forces could end it.”
“It’s so much worse than you think, Rose. The things that happen over there, the state of things in the trenches, and having to guard my unit at all hours? I changed, I got fit, I changed the way I think, how I sleep and eat, so I can be on guard, always watching for tricks. For rats that are a little too smart, or phantoms that would whisper panic into men’s ears while they sleep? For ghouls that… well, they pretend to be soldiers that die like anyone might, but when you let your guard down and search the body, they bite you and get a hungry kind of death into the wound?”
He raised his hand, showing off the cast.
Rose nodded.
“If it weren’t for that, the idea that I have to go back, to keep fighting on that second, secret battlefield? I might think about your offer. But I can’t. Not really. I can’t commit to anything, and I can’t be your ally in whatever it is you’re trying to do.”
“Okay,” she said.
She wiped at her face, but he couldn’t see enough to tell if she’d been wiping at a tear or moving her hair out of the way.
“We can stay in touch,” he said, “At least until I go back to active duty. If I go back to active duty.”
“Don’t pity me,” she said, with a note of anger. “Don’t condescend.”
“I’d like to think I wouldn’t.”
“Like or don’t like all you want, you would condescend, Aimon,” she said.
A bit more anger than before.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Change things,” she said. “It would be easier if I had help. A voice to say yes, or to say no. But I’ll move forward. Maybe I’ll lend a hand to the war effort.”
“A hand? You?”
“I only have so much time before my hands are tied. You’re dreading this eternal war, but I’m worrying about the clock running out, and a chronomancer could be so useful in that department.”
“The clock?”
“Diabolists bear a heavy burden. My family passes that burden down from parent to child. When my mother dies, I’ll adopt the burden. A shadow will fall over me and it will linger there thereafter. My mistakes will cost me more, bad luck will find me, my enemies will prosper more easily. I have to do more with my life before that can happen.”
“Could that be why your mother is keeping her distance?” Aimon asked. “Giving you that freedom? Or protecting you from the shadow that lingers over her?”
Rose looked at him, momentarily bewildered.
“Maybe you’re not so alone as you imagine,” he said. “I won’t give myself over to possession to cheat the rules, but if you need a dissenting voice… I can ignore the pestering of my sisters and aunt for a little while longer.”
■
Thirty-five years later…
The rain poured down, torrential. The bad weather made Aimon’s hand and wrist hurt.
The ghoul’s bite had never healed completely. Flesh had necrotized, turning black, and even now, bone was visible in places. He could cut at the rot with a knife, and it would be a red hot agony, or he could let it linger, and he would feel his strength slipping. It didn’t get worse, it didn’t get better, but the dilemma remained.
Aimon was aware of his father’s eyes on him. There had been suspicion, but he had covered his tracks. To admit that they knew would mean his family would have to admit that they’d spent valuable power to spy on him using their craft.
His father watched as he stepped forward, and he felt the resistance of the small hand that gripped his own. He relented.
Laird fought to catch up, black rain boots splashing in the flooded grass.
Rose was already there. Regal, water ran off her wide-brimmed cap. Avoided by virtually every other council member in attendance. She couldn’t have looked less motherly, holding the swaddled child.
More for the child’s benefit than for Rose, Aimon offered the shelter of his umbrella.
Aimon could feel the weight of his father’s disapproval, but he could ignore it.
He looked down at the babe, and almost as clear as day, he could recall the scene.
Rose, standing before a pile of pig carcasses, her child held overhead. It had been pouring then too.
Bonfires had burned, and Aimon had worried that one would go out in the face of the torrential rain. That one of the seven jars filled with a mixture of wax and hair might tilt over and roll away.
He’d been there, a bystander.
A friend.
He’d been there when the demon appeared. Fat, decaying in some mockery of what had happened to Aimon’s hand, with a horse’s skull fixed over his head, it had carried a sickle.
And Rose-
Rose had never seemed more alive, facing the worst kind of end, the potential loss of her firstborn.
That moment had left a wound as bad as the ghoul’s bite. Her expression, the intensity. They’d loved each other, but never at the same time. They’d been allies, confidantes, they’d slipped away to have secret meetings, to talk about what the council was doing, and how they might do it differently.
“The day is finally here,” Rose murmured.
Aimon nodded.
“You’re free,” she said.
Aimon looked down at the tombstone.
Malcom Behaim.
His father stood near it, a mere echo, watching in disapproval. Was the horror in his father’s eyes real, a ghost’s realization of things that had occurred that it was now powerless to change? Or was it an imagining, a reflection?