“No,” I said, “Just… are you okay?”
“Okay?”
“You haven’t explained what you have going on with your parents, you’re acting strange, different. Little things have come up, maybe a big thing. I know you’re not sleeping. I get the impression something’s wrong.”
She was silent.
“You helped me before. If something’s come up, if you need help, if you’ve done something or made a bad deal, we can put this on hold and back you up.”
She jammed her hands into her pockets, staring at the ground.
“I was telling the others before, maybe you let something in and you got possessed?”
She shrugged. “Thanks for worrying about me. But you should focus on this right now.”
“Should I?” I asked, making it a pointed question.
“You’ve got help here that you might not have if you wait a few days. The Sisters, the Knights, you can’t back out now, or this won’t work.”
“So you do need help?” I asked.
“Don’t we all?”
“Don’t dodge my damn questions,” I said, more harsh in tone than I’d wanted. Nervousness seeping through.
“Sorry. I’ll try to be more direct.”
“You were among the first people that were decent to me when all this started.”
“I was.”
“And you came here to back me up, you made a difference.”
“I did,” she said.
“I’m allowed to show concern for you,” I said. “Even if there’s something going on that I don’t fully understand.”
She gave me a look, and there was a bit of sadness in her eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“I really want to give you a kiss on the cheek,” she said. “But I can’t, can I?”
I shook my head.
“Give him heck,” she said.
I smiled.
The conversation was over, and I wasn’t accomplishing anything meaningful looking at the map. There were more important points to cover.
Slowly but surely, things were settling into place. Objects and people.
A few ghosts had arrived, observers.
“Blake,” Ty said.
“Yeah?”
“Ghost dropped these off.”
He extended a hand, and he dropped two objects into my outstretched palm. A box of matches and what looked like a piece of burned pillow?
No, a stuffed animal’s limb.
I could feel the ghosts within.
The Shepherd was volunteering aid?
My eyes roved over the area. I didn’t see the Shepherd. I did see the Sphinx. Isadora was lying down on the far end of a wide gap in the trees, the same spot where I’d grabbed the branches for the wreath. She stared, oblivious to the light dusting of snow that had settled on her black fur and wings.
Put more pressure on me, why don’t you?
People were gravitating toward me. Isadora didn’t budge. Maggie, on the other side of the
My nervousness only intensified.
“It’s about time,” I said.
It was good that we had a designated time for this to begin. It was harder to jump off that diving board when you had all the time in the world. Better to be thrust into a situation where you had no choice to jump, if jumping was absolutely necessary.
It was almost a relief, knowing.
I just couldn’t let myself entertain the slightest thought of being able or willing to retreat from this. To run.
One of my legs jittered, the knee wiggling from left to right, as if I was as unsteady on that leg as a newborn fawn.
I shifted my weight to make it less pronounced.
“You don’t enter. If something goes wrong, if things turn sour, we back off. If something happens to me, well, you won’t know. So don’t make it matter.”
“This sounds insane,” Ty said.
I ignored him.
“You guys have one job. Approach from an angle where the sun hits the windows. See if the windows have paint on them. If they do, it might be part of the binding, and we can’t break that. Find open windows. Toss in the gas cans, toss in the rubbing alcohol, toss in the kerosene. If you can reach, dump it in, but don’t put your hands inside the building”
There were nods.
“Knights, you’re manning the halogen lights. If this works, those lights should give me a clear path. If it works really well, then they’re going to cross in a way that makes a protective diagram. Bad alignment and the sun mean that might be a bit of a pipe dream. Just give me the extra light you can, shine it through, I’ll figure out what to do from there.”
Nods from the Knights.
“Rose?”
“I keep track of the time. I’ve got notes in front of me. Whatever happens, when the time runs out, we burn the building.”
I nodded.
“My job… I’ve just got to get to the door to the basement. Going over the rubble might make sense, but there’s an awful lot of cracks and darkness in that rubble, and if my foot disappears into a gap, I’m gone.”
I sounded so much calmer than I felt.
“…That means going in the front door, same place I entered before, I head to the back, turn a hard left. I toss what I carried down there, I use any cans I can that you guys passed through the window, then set it on fire. I leave, and we scour the ground floor, using what you guys put through the window. With luck, we’ll gain some ground against the thing, and we can hold that ground by keeping the fires lit and the lights on. We figure out where to go from there. If the boiler room or basement or whatever is down there is too big to burn by tossing stuff down the stairs, we use a similar strategy there.”
I took a bit of a breath. “But what we’re really hoping, is that it’s one lifeform, and if anything’s lurking downstairs, we can cut off everything above from what’s below, with a strong blaze in the right place.”
I checked the time. Ten seconds past the mark where we’d guessed the sun would be in the optimal location.
I couldn’t even think about not hesitating.
I turned toward the factory. “Let’s go. Question me while we move.”
There were no questions. Even Evan had dropped the firebird topic. I didn’t tell him I’d researched it and found it too dangerous. Shamans keen on the dramatic had tried riding fire spirits, and by and large, they’d self-immolated.
The silence yawned, and for a moment, I felt utterly alone.
But Evan settled on my shoulder.
It only dawned on me when I couldn’t see them, that they were almost as afraid as I was.
I held two gas cans this time, I had the Hyena in my back pocket, and the flare gun at one hip.
“Hey,” Evan said.
“What’s up?” I replied.
“Thanks for letting me come.”
“Didn’t want to go in alone,” I admitted.
“We have company,” Evan said.
I looked. Four dolls.
“I’m not sure they count.”
“They count if you let them count,” Evan said, in a tone that suggested he thought he was being wise.
“I’ll try,” I said.
Without breaking stride, I grabbed the matchbook and lit a match from within.
A wraith flared into being as the match touched snow. A man, too burned to make out features. A husk, made uglier by the wraithmaking process.
The arm of the stuffed animal…
I gave it a squeeze. Smoke puffed out.
A little girl emerged from the smoke. When she looked at me, her eye sockets were empty, with only glowing cinders around the rim. Her nose and tongue nearly gone, glowing in the same way, like some cigarette butt.