“Yeah,” Rose said.
“I don’t want to follow in their footsteps. In fact, that may have been one of the moments where that really dawned on me. That I wanted to go a different route.”
I climbed to my feet. I had to search around for clothes, and found my backpack. I dug out a shirt.
“It wasn’t for me,” Rose said. “It wasn’t a revelation or anything. I feel like I reached that point a long time ago. I got pulled into the schemes, that was an early one.”
“Early?”
“Against Kathy.”
I blinked.
“Callan, for me,” I said.
“Ah,” she said.
“But go on.”
“It’s just… I was immersed in it, I was implicated, I played roles, reported back on them if I saw them at school.”
“Ah,” I said. Worlds different from me. Mom and dad had essentially given up, with no real viable heir, only periodically attacking the people who looked like they might be contenders, and our family being the target more than a few times.
“I fought it, but I didn’t really have a way to break the pattern or get them to stop. They plowed forward, I watched it like I might watch a car wreck, and it became easier to just ignore it, do my own thing. Or so the fabricated memories go.”
“Were you in the running?” I asked.
Rose nodded. “We all thought Paige was the top candidate, then Peter made his play and… well, the next thing I remember, I got confirmed as heir at the meeting.”
“Not Molly?”
Rose shook her head.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“It doesn’t really matter. It’s just the vestige thing. When it’s bent out of shape, reality seeks the straightest path to righting itself.”
“That can’t be right,” I said.
“Hm?”
“Molly. You’re forgetting Molly. If reality is seeking the straightest path, why would you be the first pick for heir? Why not follow after Molly?”
Rose frowned. “I don’t know.”
“That’s the kind of important detail you really should be sharing,” I said.
“Our focus has kind of been elsewhere,” Rose said. “With the most recent issue being you in a near-Coma? Remember that?”
“I remember,” I said.
“The discrepancy is important, but let’s not lose sight of what’s really going on.”
I bit my tongue for a second.
If I pushed on this subject at the expense of other stuff, I’d be doing what Rose had done.
“Okay,” I said. I found my sweatshirt on the back of a chair, grabbed it, and found both the claw marks on the front and my clawed-up t-shirt beneath. Both had been thoroughly washed, but a thorough washing hadn’t gotten all the blood out. Unsalvageable.
“Changing topics. What’s really going on, then?”
“The lord of the city has, through indirect means, sent Others out into the streets, searching for our hideouts. They’re finding our hideouts, and if we’re ‘counting points’ as you said before, then we’re losing here. The Knights aren’t responding, Fell’s dead, for all intents and purposes, the Imp is occupied keeping Laird pinned down, and the Hyena isn’t cooperating. Your friends, I get that you wanted them here, they aren’t really potent strategic assets. I’ve been teaching them, giving them access to books, but they’re not exactly big guns. We’re losing.”
I pulled on the tattered sweatshirt, because going out in the cold with just a t-shirt seemed like a bad idea, and I didn’t have any more clothes.
I looked at Ty and Tiff, and I wondered if they had any clothes I could borrow.
It would be a bad idea, I reasoned, to take the clothes outright. It could be bad karma, even if we were close enough for the sharing of said clothes to be implicit.
Or did the connections factor in? Were the clothes okay for me to take simply because of the indirect ties I had to them?
Fuck, I didn’t understand enough about how the world worked.
“You only have two champions,” Rose said. “You’ve got me, and you’ve got Maggie. Maggie’s out, doing her thing.”
“Her thing?”
“Hunting monsters. Diverting them away from Laird, our last remaining hideout. We don’t have Fell to hide us anymore.”
“And you? What are you doing?”
“Ah. This is the point where I have to explain J.P. being here.”
“J.P.?” I asked.
Corvidae smiled.
“Do you talk?” I asked.
“I do,” he said. His voice was hoarse, uncomfortable to listen to. More fitting for an old man than a young one, or for a heavy smoker.
“Primarily when asked questions,” Rose added.
“When invited to respond,” he corrected.
“Full name?”
“John Pica,” he said.
I broke from his unwavering eye contact to look at Rose, my eyebrows raised.
“We needed ammo. They were rooting us out, they’re still using the dolls, the vessels, they’ve got ghosts, and when they get close, they bring in the Eye to start wreaking havoc. Power goes out, fires in the neighborhood… trying to get us to pick up and move, distract us. Astrologer has constructions at regular points around the city, it’s… it’s a mess overall. So we called on a few more Others. I called on a few more.”
“More?”
“It’s all I can do. I can’t match the Lord of the City in numbers, not with summonings. I can be smart about bringing them in and pointing them places. I can call on specific Others for specific tasks, and J.P. was one.”
“What task?”
“Distracting your adversary’s champions. J.P. set the Astrologer and the Sisters of the Torch against each other.”
“How?” I asked.
“Apparently the sisters have this elemental they all use in their rituals. An intermediate flame spirit, the eponymous ‘torch’ of the group, their go-to power source. J.P. went for a walk, came back, and the elemental decided it wanted to set up shop in one of the Astrologer’s pieces of equipment, rather than the housing they’d prepared for it. Apparently there’s a lot of power flowing through her systems at the moment, enough to bait an Elemental closer.”
“She’s not giving the elemental back, I take it?” I asked.
“The equipment was handed down to her by her teacher and master. It’s sentimental and it’s a huge aspect of her power base. No, she’s not giving it back.”
I’d made some headway with the Sisters, and I had questions about the Astrologer and her changing allegiance… this wasn’t something I would have gone along with.
Stupid as it sounded, I didn’t want to hurt them.
I bit my tongue. “Where’s my jacket?”
“You’re not going outside, are you?”
“I’m not sitting here and waiting for things to get worse,” I said. “Evan, wake up.”
Saying his name flexed the connection between us. He roused, then did a small bird stretch, wings extended fluffing out his feathers to look bigger. “You’re up! You’re okay!”
He flew to my shoulder.
“Thanks to my friends,” I said.
“Ahem,” Rose said.