The teenage girl beside Duncan spat on me. I was pretty sure she was aiming at my face, but she hit the coat I’d borrowed from Ty instead.
I didn’t move. I held their gaze, steady.
The spitting, the seconds of silence that passed, it was a tacit acknowledgement that I wasn’t entirely wrong.
“Go,” I said. “Get Duncan there some help. Do what you need to do, family-wise. I’m guessing I’ll see some of you soon.”
The teenagers led Duncan off, the little girl following.
The youngest boy stayed, staring at me. His face was drawn, his features tight.
“What?”
“Trying to remember what your face looks like,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s worth the effort,” I said. “A whole lot of Others and powers that be who can see the future are telling me I’m due to bite it sometime soon.”
“The Faerie told my father that one of his sons had only one year of life remaining,” the boy said. “And he was told he had thirty more years. Things can always be fudged. I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
“How does that work?” I asked. “How were things fudged?”
“Use of real time magic, just to be safe,” the kid said. “The family held a meeting, they voted and signed off on it. My father wrote terms into his will and sealed them with the appropriate magics. He and mom are giving us their remaining years if they die, half to me, half to my brother. Or my dad is going to try to.”
It looked like it was getting harder for him to speak. He was very deliberately avoiding looking at his dad.
It struck a chord in me, how I didn’t want to think of the wrong thing.
“I’m glad you’ve got that,” I said.
“Fuck you. You shouldn’t be,” he said. “We were enemies before, because of what you are and the family you come from. Now, after this? Like my cousin said, English doesn’t give good enough words, sometimes. What’s worse than enemy?”
I didn’t answer the question. “He knew what he was getting into, he knew what he was getting you into.”
“You killed my dad.”
“He pushed me into the worst sort of corner,” I said.
My tone was eerily flat. It sounded disconnected, unconvincing even to myself.
“You killed my dad,” he repeated himself.
“He was setting me up for a fate that could be worse than death.”
“You killed-” he stopped himself.
It was an eerie parallel to Evan. The singlemindedness.
“Maybe I can’t call you forsworn,” he said. His voice was small, and it sounded like it might break. “Don’t want that backlash. But I can say I wish you suffer everything bad that’s coming to you. I can appeal to the greater powers and the least powers, and tell them that if you have upset things, if you’ve got something bad coming your way, then they should make you lose whatever it is that made you feel happy and- and safe.”
With that last word, his voice finally cracked.
“Fuck you,” he said, as soon as he could speak straight, punctuating his statement.
Spat on, sworn at on two different levels…
“We can’t take him with us. Don’t you dare touch the body,” he said.
“I won’t,” I said.
“If you’re wrong, and you don’t die soon, then I’m going to come after you.”
I nodded.
“No fancy comeback? No threats?”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t blame you. I blame him, because I think he’s given you a pretty one sided version of things, but I don’t blame you.”
“Fuck you,” he said. “Just… whatever you killed him to avoid? I hope you get worse.”
I nodded.
There was nothing more to be gained here.
I turned to go.
“Fuck you!” he shouted at my back, and his voice cracked again, worse than before.
I rejoined Maggie, avoiding looking their way. Evan perched on my shoulder, watching my back for me.
Maggie had the circle closed, now, and was rearranging the cord yet again. “I need something else. Can you bring the Hyena?”
I glanced at the monster’s corpse. It was easy to miss, half-buried in snow.
I started to speak, but my throat was tight.
It was Rose who spoke. “Hyena, you’re done. I, um, bid you to collapse and be bound again, for it is a simpler form, and one you’ve committed to.”
Nothing happened.
Then, after seconds had passed, the Hyena moved. The snow fell, covering the remains of the body. When it settled, close to the street, the sword stuck out of the thickest part of it, broken.
“What the hell books have you been reading?” I asked.
“I pulled that one out of my ass,” Rose said, “so to speak. Borrowing from you, really.”
I nodded.
I extended the handle of the sword in Maggie’s direction, but she shook her head. “Much as I want it, best you do it. You have a role here, since you freed the people.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “What do I do?”
“I’m going to hold the paper down, and try to angle things so I can use the point of the athame. Use the sharpest point of the broken blade. We’re going to use two blades and work together to tie a very simple knot. Don’t put your hand inside the circle, or you might not get it back.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
She shook her head.
I didn’t touch the handle, instead resting my right hand on the distorted wolf-skull emblem on the hilt, and my left on the cluster of bone at the pommel.
It was harder than it sounded, and it sounded very, very hard.
I almost didn’t mind. Ten failures, then twenty.
I’d heard stories about how scientists gave games like Tetris to the recently traumatized, to force a change in brain patterns and keep the trauma from getting its claws in the psyche.
I suspected I wasn’t so fortunate as that, but it was almost meditative. Not at all bad. I didn’t have the energy for impatience.
By the time we got it done, the sky was growing darker, and paradoxically, the city was waking up.
We finished about ten seconds before my hands and knees started to go completely numb, one minute before someone happened to walk outside and see us kneeling in the driveway.
My ears were ringing, my eyes had been so focused the rest of the world looked distorted, and I was cold and hurting.
I didn’t even hear the questions the bystander asked.
We’d tied the knot, Maggie reached in to cinch it tight, and we pulled the mirror from the circle, bound in bloodstained paper and cords that had been soaked in blood. Maggie tied the knots with locks of Rose’s hair.
We hadn’t conversed while our focus was on the knot, and I wasn’t even sure if Rose was even around, or if she had sought refuge somewhere where there were books and modern conveniences. Evan was resting, his thoughts elsewhere.
Even with the mirror bound, we were silent as we headed off. We didn’t have a specific reason to be silent, but we didn’t have anything more to say either.
I wanted food, I wanted sleep, and I doubted I’d have time for both.
The hard part came next.
■
The mirror clattered on the dining room table.
My apartment, as it happened. No reason to hide anymore. Not exactly.