I frowned.
“Then there’s only one option,” Maggie said. “We gotta hit them. We knew it was going to get ugly. Let’s be the ones to decide how.”
“How?” I asked.
“Blood and darkness,” she said.
7.02
My backpack, sitting at Ty’s feet, produced the gate for travel to the spirit world. Tyler did the ritual, for the practice.
I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d gotten to the spirit world earlier when I’d entered the police station. I really hated having a gap in my memories.
Entering the spirit world, as it happened, wasn’t much of an improvement or a help.
I’d suggested the detour as a way to stay off the radar without straining Fell’s reserves, but the slips of paper with the eyes on them were visible here too. They fluttered in the strong wind like ungainly bats, and went out of their way to catch on light poles, windows and walls. The eyes, drawn on the papers in the real world, were visible here, fully detailed, complete with eyelids, the pink at the corner, and the tiny veins on the surface.
I could see the connections tying the eyes to the people who’d drawn them. Most were inactive, lazily looking over the city and the shadowy silhouettes of people or watching where they were drifting. When the connections flared to life, though, the eyes were alert, and they had a way of finding us.
It was like being caught in a net. Struggling meant getting caught faster. Moving around, we put ourselves in a position to be seen by more eyes. They were communicating, I suspected, using something as mundane as phones, and reporting what they saw so others could do the meditating thing, get their eyes to focus, and track us.
Problem was, even if struggling did get us more tangled up, staying put and doing nothing left us in the same predicament, caught in the metaphorical net.
Snow came down hard and wet, and the wind was so chaotic that there was no protecting ourselves against it.
We headed straight for the nearest group of Sisters, and I was all too aware that others were making their way toward us, some from maybe halfway across the city. The net was closing.
Our only option was to cut the net.
I had nothing against the sisters, but they’d joined this fight, and even Laird’s kids had to accept that picking a fight might mean you’d get hurt.
We rounded the corner as a group, me in the center, Maggie in front, her athame in hand, bag slung over one shoulder, hanging just beneath her free hand. Her black hair and the ends of her scarf whipped in the wind.
I wasn’t sure if it was uncharitable to say, but she looked most at home in this chaos. Here, as we walked into the wind, she was moving faster than any of us, determined, and the human veneer was giving way to the Other with the force of the wind and the traces of the spirit world. I apparently looked like a heroin addict when I was infused with too much in the way of spirits. Maggie was a little more elemental, a little more natural.
Fell held himself together better than any of us. His flesh and hair were largely untouched, but his eyes and clothes periodically showed traces of the smoke and dust that he so frequently used.
“Evan,” I said. “Scout, that way, see if you can’t stop them from running.”
“On it!”
He took off, and tumbled head over talons as the wind caught him off guard.
Some wing flapping and experimental twists and turns later, he figured out how to fly into the headwind, using twists and turns in the alleys where the walls broke up the wind.
“Good kid,” I muttered. The air whistling past us made my nearly inaudible.
The weather was steadily getting worse. My clothes were soaked, and the cold was seeping into me.
“Is this something important?” I asked, raising my voice. “The weather?”
“It’s important,” Fell said, raising his voice to be heard.
“What is it?”
“No idea!”
We were drawing closer when Evan returned. I nearly dropped the object he deposited in my hand.
A keychain. A set of keys, a car key, and a USB stick connected to a fish-shaped carabiner.
Evan moved his wings over his head, and my first impression was that he was trying to shield himself against the wind.
It was only after he’d taken off again that I realized he’d been trying to salute.
“Stealing is bad karma, right?”
“Yes. Implements more than regular things,” Fell said. “But even stealing a regular thing is bad.”
“What if I throw it away? Still bad if I don’t have it?”
“You moved it from where it’s supposed to be. A little bit of a problem.”
I nodded. “I can deal with little problems.”
We caught up with the two Sisters at their car. They were out of focus, clearly in the real world, but they did see us. Both had identical tools. Rings on their fingers, burning bright in the spirit world.
They could have left the car behind. They didn’t. Rather than give us access to it, they’d decided to hold their ground here.