Note:
Touching up all of my notes, for my soon-to-be heiress. He is a manipulator, content to bait people and lure them to their doom. Fitting, given the implement of choice. He safeguards his demesne by making it a fiefdom, with neighborhoods held by Others and a handful of lesser practitioners. Stay clear, this is a threat you do not need to face down.
I looked up at Rose. “He’s powerful, then.”
She said, “He doesn’t have a family. He had nothing given to him in advance, as far as we know. But he managed something.”
“Okay,” I said. “So there are obviously other options. Approached directly, the situation is filled with contradictions and obstacles, but maybe there’s an oblique answer, like Johannes found?”
“Like what I was talking about with the witch hunters,” Rose said.
That again. I shook my head.
“You’re refusing my ideas too fast,” she said, and the emotion in her voice caught me off guard. She was irritated, upset. “Have you even read up on witch hunting, Blake?”
“No,” I said. “Have you?”
“I can’t. I need you to rotate the mirror in the study. Damn it, listen, there are things we can learn to do that don’t rely on familiar, implement or demesne. Like Laird’s shamanism.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m very on board with that.”
“But you aren’t on board with getting the protections witch hunters have? If anything’s going to get us killed, it’s a knee-jerk reactions and making stupid assumptions.”
“It’s not that I don’t like the idea of protection,” I said. “But when someone says ‘witch hunter’, it makes me think of hunting things. Fighting, instead of defense. And I think that any of those protections we might use as practitioners are going to be found in books for practitioners. It’s hard enough without overcomplicating it, sifting through all the stuff we can’t use for some tidbits we could find elsewhere. Can we compromise? Maybe focus on getting this wizardry crap down, and we’ll look at the witch huntery stuff later, as the side project it is?”
When I looked at Rose, she was frowning, eyebrows knit. tapping her hand on some surface in front of her.
We were similar in other ways. Prone to anger. But something told me that Rose wasn’t one to actually show or exercise that anger.
Something to watch for, if she was bottling up her stress. What outlets did she have to vent it, and how would she react if she couldn’t?
“Fine,” she said, in that way that girls were so very good at. She took a deep breath, then sighed. Purely for effect, I imagined. Calmer, she said, “We shelve that idea. We can use trickery, deception, manipulation, to get our foot in the door, get one of the three major things we need.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Harder than it sounds, because Others are naturally deceptive and are probably looking out for those tricks.”
“What else? We could try marshaling forces, like he is. We need a good rapport with Others to figure out who we might pick for a familiar, right?”
“There’s a problem with that,” I said. I reached for the mirror, then stopped. “May I?”
“Yes.”
I lifted the mirror from where I’d hooked it onto the bookcase, then carried it to the window, pushing the curtains apart. I set the bottom end of the mirror on the windowsill.
There were five more Others than before. All clustered around the fence. The rest were still there. Waiting.
Rose was turned away from me, so I couldn’t see her, and she was silent, leaving me to stand there, presenting our situation.
“That’s the issue, right now. That’s the biggest complication we’re facing with the rituals, with life in general. Someone’s done the equivalent of putting a price out on our head, or they said that the usual rules for going after someone in an inhabited area are on hold, for me, or for us,” I said, my voice low. “We can’t conduct any rituals, because those guys are waiting to fuck us up.”
“That-” Rose started.
She stopped short as a car appeared, parking at the far end of the street, a sign perched on top.
This time, seeing the vehicle approach, I could see how the Others moved out of the way of the headlights. Stepping literally into shadows, or stepping to a position where they were out of sight. In the latter case, it looked like they were stepping out of my field of view, to where the fence or columns on either side of the gate were blocking my view, but I felt like they were doing it for everyone that might be looking. Finding a universal blind spot.
A guy stepped out of the car, holding the insulated bag with the pizza inside. He crossed the street, and approached the gate.
“Stop him, Blake,” Rose said.
“I want to, but how?”
“I don’t know. Shout?”
I strode to the front door, hauled it open, and bellowed, “Hey!”
Others appeared from the shadows by the gate, a ‘child’ with his back to the stone column, glancing my way. Further down the street, I could see the faceless woman with the cigarette appear behind the delivery guy.
He didn’t stop walking. When he shouted back, I couldn’t make out the words.
“Stop! I don’t want it! Go back to the car!” I hollered.
Again, I couldn’t make out his reply.
I watched as the Others closed in.
The ‘little boy’ who’d been scratching himself walked down the street, so short I could barely make him out over the stone wall which bordered the property.
He approached the delivery man head on, not moving out of the way. When it looked like they might collide, the ‘boy’ hopped up onto the short stone wall. His hand around the man’s wrist.
A moment later, so fast I couldn’t see it, the boy slammed the delivery guy’s hand down on the railing. The man screamed, dropping the pizza, hand impaled on the spiked railing that ran along the top of the short wall. He tried to pull it free, but the ‘boy’ still had a grip on his wrist.
“Hey!” I shouted. I stepped out onto the porch.
A girl hopped up, using the man’s knee as a foothold, grabbing the delivery man by the jaw. She was more monkey than child as she swung up onto the wall. The momentum of the swing brought his head down and forward, driving it into the top of the railing.
I could hear the sound it made on impact, which said a lot, considering how I hadn’t been able to hear his words. There was no saying how much was the upper row of teeth breaking on impact with the railing, or the sound of the jaw breaking as it was wrenched down with a sudden weight of the not-little-girl.
The girl let go, walking along the top of the railing, her arms extended to either side, pigtails swinging, the grin the only part of her I could make out beneath the winter clothes, too wide, filled with very white teeth that didn’t match each other.
I could hear his continued screams, now more strangled than they’d been.
I felt cold, paralyzed. Had I just killed a man, simply by inviting him here?
The faceless woman caught up to him. Her free hand reached into the back of his head, and I could make out the fingers reaching out the front, moving just beneath the skin, closing together into a fist over one of his eyes. She moved her hand, leaving the skin bound shut in a knot of flesh, and she closed the other eye in the same manner.