“I’m counting you among them,” I told her. “Don’t be silly.”
She seemed genuinely taken aback by that.
“What are we doing? What’s next?” Evan asked.
Already full of energy, it seemed.
“We’re meeting up with Maggie,” I said, “Then we’re putting together a battle plan for one last skirmish against the big man.”
“I don’t think that’s wise,” Rose said.
“Why?” I asked. “We’re weaker than we were, he’s stronger?”
She didn’t respond right away.
“A… voice in my dream told me that he’d consolidated his power and he was strong,” I said. “Are you saying there’s more to it than that?”
“Kind of,” Rose said. “It’s better if you see.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It is,” she said. “I can station Mary to guard your friends, but maybe you want to leave a note, reassure them it’s all okay. We should go meet up with Maggie. I might not agree about going up against the lord of the city, but I do agree that we should hash together a plan.”
■
The snowstorm was bad. I’d borrowed Ty’s coat, scarf and hat in the end, and the cold cut right through it. My chest tightened as the wax filling my wounds hardened.
I’d be sensitive to temperature, it seemed. Keeping away from direct heat sources would have to be a priority.
Hail had broken windows and damaged cars, broken branches lay around every tree, and the snow was bad enough that the plows weren’t keeping up, if they were showing up at all.
The city had shut down. With no power, the snow, and thick clouds, it was darker in the middle of the day than some nights had been.
Minutes passed where all I could see were flurries of thick white snow, all I could hear was the sound of wind.
The Tallowman followed me. Rose was clearer than ever as she moved within the windows, Mary, Corvidae and an oily black figure following her.
Rose was stronger.
I wasn’t so sure I could stop her if she decided to send her monsters after me.
She’d saved me, though, to her credit. She’d also known something about me being vulnerable, what happened when I died.
She’d told Conquest. I could put two and two together. Conquest knew the particulars about how Rose and I functioned as a pair, including the fact that I’d be replaced by Rose if I got offed. Rose knew more particulars than she was letting on.
I hadn’t lied when I said I considered Rose a friend.
I didn’t trust her one hundred percent, but I hadn’t lied.
At the same time, I wasn’t sure the sentiment went both ways. What was I to Rose?
Was I a jailor? A figure that kept her from leaving her prison of mirrors?
Had I been that jailor from some point very early on? I could remember how she’d acted, on our early mornings in the house. Sudden shifts in attitude, harboring knowledge, hostility without rationale…
…I could remember her reactions. The way she’d acted almost offended when I’d been nice, reached out, tried to make amends.
Almost as if she wanted to hate me, and I was making it harder.
Had she known?
I felt Evan shiver beside my neck, tugged Ty’s scarf tighter, to bring the my familiar closer.
If Rose had known, how had she found out? Had she been reading something I wasn’t aware of? Had the lawyers reached out to her by some arcane means, like Mrs. Lewis had found me in some buried part of my psyche? Or had she known from the beginning?
Or was I something else to her? If not a jailor, could I be something else? Molly had been a sacrificial pawn. Was I the same? Was I simply chosen because my mirror-world alter-ego was the most competent, or because I was most likely to help the family’s overall karmic balance before I died? Was she only helping me because it bought her more time before she had to brave these dangers herself?
No. She’d put herself at risk, being shackled by Conquest to spare me from being tortured.
I had to remember that.
She might have come to regret the decision, but I had to remember that sacrifice.
Her reactions to so many things like the taking of a familiar and the binding of my friends, it all made more sense if I thought that she didn’t want me connecting myself to this world, making myself harder to dislodge.
But I had to remember that she’d made the big sacrifice. There was no explaining that away. She cared on some level.
“Heads up,” Rose murmured.
I looked, and I saw a homeless man in a puffy jacket making achingly slow progress through the snow.
When I looked at him with the Sight, though, I saw something else.
In the sliver of his face I could see, I noted no nose. His mouth had no lips, only obvious, yellowing teeth. His skin was a bruised green-purple color, his eyes hidden by shadow. Almost like dessicated corpse given life.
The window beside him shattered. Rose’s oily black creature pounced from the midst of the flying glass to tackle the big brute. Long fingers circled its neck.
“Keep moving,” Rose said.
I couldn’t shake the mental image of her sending the black thing after me. It was eerie in appearance. If Corvidae was the kind of Bogeyman that preyed on adults, powerful people –white men, if Rose’s accounting was right- then the black strangling thing was a baser kind of monster. One that would be perfectly at home under a child’s bed or in a dark swamp, waiting for the right foot to be placed down in its reach.
We didn’t get half a block before she was sending Mary out to attack two more bystanders.
I hadn’t even realized they were there before blood was being spilled.
Rose’s expression was hard and unreadable. What was going through her head?
I didn’t want to be second-guessing my allies when I should have been going after Conquest, but I was. My head was whirling with questions long before I saw what Rose had wanted to show me.
Then I had more.
“The hell?” I asked.
Streets that should have been straight were curved.
They were shorter, the dimensions warped.
It was even true when I didn’t use the sight. The snow made it less obvious, shifted to more aggressive patterns to blind me, flakes stinging my eyes, or moving in such a way that I couldn’t notice.
But, all that in mind, the reality was that in both the spirit and the real world, the city was being drawn together in a spiral.
Like spaghetti around a twirled fork.
The fork, I realized, was Conquest’s tower.
He was drawing up the city, altering geography and everything else. The spirit world was the most obvious victim, and the real world was following suit in its own way.
It was his city. Now he was restructuring it.
Or, more likely, he was having a minion do it somehow, just like I’d had Evan act as an extension of myself for the purposes of freeing the Hyena.
“What the hell is he doing?” I asked.
“Giving us less places to hide, while pushing out the monsters from their roosts, driving them out to roam.”
Squeezing us out.
“You think he’s pretending to be stronger than he is? When he’s doing this?”
“I want to think so.”
“If you’re right, and that’s you’re as in you were, not you are, things might be different now. Look at this. Think about the power being spent.”