Paige frowned, as if this were some kind of moral quandary.
“A little bit of pizza and some water?” she finally asked.
I nodded.
These unexpected, uninvited guests were going to eat the pizza Joel had brought. I put the water on the stove for oatmeal, resigning myself to a less than exciting meal, to be sure I had enough to offer.
I could hear them in the living room. Alexis was talking.
“…Hurts, I can’t really stand up or bend over without help, but it didn’t hit anything vital.”
“I’m not surprised. A shame that Malcolm Fell wasn’t rescued as well.”
I looked over my shoulder at Maggie.
Was the Sphinx sowing doubt, or was that a subtle reminder?
Joel leaned close, “Should I go? I’m not much different from Paige. I know some, but not nearly enough.”
“You know to not ask questions,” I murmured, as I opened the silverware drawer and found a serrated knife to cut the pizza with. “She’s more dangerous, because she’s unprepared and she’s still walking headlong into this. Because that thing is leading her headlong into this.”
“Thing?”
“Nevermind. Go if you need to, but I don’t know if anything’s going to get mentioned in front of Paige that would be a problem for you too.”
He nodded. “I’ll stay then, for moral support.”
Doubling down on Isadora’s gambit. Our meeting would take place with innocents in the room. Say the wrong thing, or use powers in an obvious, aggressive way, and we risked becoming responsible for those same innocents.
I brought Paige’s pizza and water over. Isadora was sitting in the armchair that Ty had been planning to sit on while gaming, and Paige leaned against the wall to Isadora’s right, arms folded, expression troubled.
“Isadora, glass for the beer?” I asked.
“No need.”
I removed the cap from the beer and handed it over. She took a drink and smiled.
“Laird Behaim is dead,” Isadora said. “The Behaims will claim and cremate him, I expect. I wouldn’t anticipate legal problems.”
I nodded.
“Casualties are to be expected. It’s not part of my makeup to mourn the dead, even the deaths of children or the deaths of thousands. So long as it happens at the right place and time, cleanly.”
She looked directly at me as she said that last word.
“I can guess what your concern is,” I said.
“Yes. The weather cleared up, and virtually everyone knows you’re all here. All of you, including him. You can imagine our collective curiosity and concern.”
Including him. She meant ‘including Conquest’.
Conquest, who was in an ignoble location, in the bottom half of my double-decker toolbox, not five feet from me. Anyone who tried to get him out would have to undo the clasps, discovering the lock I’d worked into the clasp at the back, unlocking and removing it, and then lift off the upper section with all the attendant tools, bits, and pieces.
Virtually every step would be a noisy one, somewhat time consuming.
One clasp had a piece of paper with a rune on it hidden just beneath. The inside of the box, too, had a rune set in place. The runes, too, would delay anyone from trying to steal the mirror with the incarnation bound within.
“Explanations will have to wait until everyone’s arrived,” I said.
“Of course. I already suspect I know what unfolded.”
“Can I trust our other guests to not blow up the building or kick the door down and attack on sight?”
“They can’t kick the door down if you leave it open,” Isadora said.
I started to head for the door, but Joel was already going.
Weird, that there was more security in an open, unlocked door.
Isadora leaned back, relaxing, beer held in both hands. On a level, it made sense, the reclining cat, on another, it didn’t fit the noble sphinx’s image. “The little bird is doing well, I see.”
“I’m doing pretty awesome,” Evan said.
“He’s been a huge help,” I said. My hands were jammed in my pockets.
Paige was observing everything, watching, silent, trying to put two and two together. She spoke, “How?”
“You could say I’ve been kicking ass and taking names,” Evan said.
Paige didn’t react. Evan’s voice went in one ear and out the other.
“Moral support,” I said. “Backup.”
“A bird?”
“We egged super-zombies,” Evan said.
“A bird,” I said. “I thought you said you had been filled in.”
“In abstracts,” Paige said. “Metaphors about masks and icebergs, and the progression of man from being heavily confined by their own limitations and driven by base needs to being driven primarily by ideas, and how everything casts a shadow. Even man and what man is doing at the time he casts a shadow.”
“Ah,” I said. “So you haven’t been filled in. Just the opposite.”
Her gaze was intense. “I have almost no details. I want any you can give me.”
“I don’t think you would, if you had a better sense of things,” I said. I looked to Isadora. “Please forgive me for saying so, but I have a hard time believing this isn’t you trying to extort me, or hurt me in some backhanded way.”
“I don’t blame you for feeling that way,” Isadora said. “It’s neither. Think back to Paige’s metaphor of the rock, lashed to other rocks by the pond.”
“I’m thinking,” I said.
She raised a hand, and in the moment she turned it over, the light in the hallway formed a backlight against her hand, and I saw a flicker of what might have been claws in her long fingernails and the position of her hand. “Imagine that I’m holding firmly to a rock named Paige. When your stone tumbles into the water, dragging all the rest with it, Paige remains firmly in my hand. Maybe the other rocks dangle. Maybe the rope breaks, and they all fall. In both cases, there’s less of a splash, less upheaval, one less stone in the water.”
“You’re laying claim to her,” I said.
Paige shifted position, clearly uncomfortable, even though she was getting what she wanted. She wanted information, but the moment I dropped a hint, she couldn’t make eye contact?
“Close enough,” Isadora said. “A strong connection that won’t be easily broken.”
“What, then? This becomes some partnership? Master and apprentice? Something like I have with Rose?”
“Rose?” Paige asked.
“Or Evan?” I asked.
“That’s twice now you’ve-”
“Shush,” Isadora said. “I can’t stand interruptions.”
“Right,” Paige said. “I’m sorry.”
“I believe you,” Isadora said. “Mr. Thorburn, the closest parallel would be to you and Evan, yes.”
I could see it. Paige as a practitioner, with a freaking powerful familiar.
But wasn’t there a danger there?
“So she’s going to be-”
“Before you go further and inadvertently insult me,” Isadora told me, “Paige would be the ‘Evan’ in the partnership.”
I blinked.
“Huh?” Paige asked, forgetting her promise not to interrupt.
“A pet?” Tiff asked.
“Kinky,” Alexis said.