Damn it.
I didn’t have the abilities of a proper practitioner. I didn’t have options.
I’d do what the maenad had done to me, attacking from a distance, but I was pretty sure that anything I threw through the window would be fake, breaking with the window. I didn’t have anything suitably solid I could grab and throw.
Well, no, that wasn’t true. I had the Hyena. I didn’t trust my ability to throw it effectively.
Something else…
If I was going to turn the tables by doing what the maenad had done to me, why not take it a step further?
If I had no power or options… the natural conclusion was to bluff, and hope this pair wasn’t too brilliant.
“I now invoke all the powers and knowledge personally taught to me by my grandmother,” I said, speaking low and grave. “I call on the instructions she gave me in this very room, the words she gently imparted to me in the antechamber upstairs. I call on the tutorings of demons she summoned on my behalf, everything that was given to me so I might know the words to speak to kill a god.”
Not technically a lie, as I saw it. When I invoked all of those things, I was invoking nothing.
But both the satyr and maenad looked at me, eyes wide.
Evan flew free, slipping out of the cranny behind their turned heads.
“Deus nihilis,” I started. “Nex-”
That was enough to get them to act. If not because they bought it, I imagined the idea was still pretty insulting.
They weren’t keen on closing the distance and getting stabbed like the greater maenad had. Killia or whatever her name had been. The maenad grabbed a book instead. An old leather-bound dictionary with gold at the edges of the pages. The sort that predated the internet, a one-stop place to find any given word.
She hurled it at me.
I shoved my hands through the window. Glass shattered. The local section of the mirrorverse went dark.
I caught the book.
I leaped over to the dark reflective screen of the television set before I could get shunted, because moving faster was key here.
Still holding the book, I threw it, two handed.
Glass shattered as the dictionary punched through.
I was already moving to the side. I stood in the hallway, with only a sliver of a view of the living room.
The satyr was sitting down, hand to his nose, blood flowing from the cracks between pages.
As far as they’d seen, they’d thrown the dictionary at the window, only for it to disappear as the window broke, reappearing a second later from the nearest reflective surface, apparently slamming into the satyr’s head.
I was glad it had worked. If I’d merely dropped the book instead of bringing it with me, I would’ve had to catch the next one, throwing it back blind in the same motion, before the window finished breaking. Less effective.
Damn, all the same. I’d been aiming at the maenad. More dangerous, as far as I could tell.
I saw Evan flying in short bursts. Still not a straight line, taking evasive maneuvers with nobody chasing him, or just trying to get away with no idea how.
“Evan,” I said. The satyr and maenad snapped their heads around to look at me.
Evan stopped again, doing his skid-landing in the hallway, coming to a stop a short distance to the left of me.
The satyr started to stand, wobbled, and fell.
The maenad grabbed him by one horn, hauling him to his feet. He leaned heavily on her.
What now? Reach for me and I’ll cut you. Throw something at me and I might throw it back.
They didn’t want to walk by me, either, and that meant they couldn’t go back upstairs.
“What now?” Evan asked.
“Trying to think,” I said. I didn’t feel as unfocused as before.
Were the effects wearing off?
“Are you feeling better?” I asked.
“Some,” he said.
I nodded slowly.
Not necessarily a good thing.
That meant Rose might be waking up.
“The stuff you mentioned. Countermeasures and traps?” I asked.
“There’s some stuff with the deeb- diabluh- the evil books. Pack of dust stuff, uh, powder. Some more in the shelves. cards. She didn’t even tell the others, but I sleep in there and I preted’d to sleep and watched. She doesn’t want ’em to tamper with any of it.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“My head hurts.”
“It’ll get better,” I said.
“There was this big bang, and then bluh,” Evan said. “Couldn’t see, couldn’t stand. Rose said to go in the library and then tried to close the door with Tiff. The crow man said somethin’…”
“Corvidae?” I asked.
“Yeah. Corb- Crow man said somethin’ and Rose was scared. She banshid’ him instead of fin’shin’ the door. Tiv and Ty didn’t get the door closed, and then it all went fuzzy.”
I watched as the maenad paced, dragging the satyr with her, as if she thought she could find an angle to attack from.
“What did Corvidae say?” I asked.
“That he’d look after her while she was sleep’n.”
“I get it,” I said.
“Really? I can’t even talk right.””
“You’re drunk,” I commented.
“This is been’ drunk? Bluh,” he said. “What’s wrong with people? Why would you want this? Can’t even fly proper.”
“People don’t fly,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” he said, sounding amazingly affronted. It went beyond the indignance of the young and the surliest inebriated and combined the two.
“You fly, though,” I said.
“I’m not people,” he somehow manged to pronounce the word like he was saying ‘peephole’. He sounded even more belligerent as he raised his voice, “I’m a god-dammed bird of fire and awesome who just isn’t on fire yet.”
“Damn straight,” I said.
The maenad was watching us. Her eyes moved from me to Evan as we talked. She was following the conversation. The satyr looked like it had a little more control of its faculties than it had. A fast healer?
I couldn’t move to hold the conversation elsewhere without giving up the spot that kept her from reporting to her priest. Evan wasn’t coordinated enough to fly up to me, and I couldn’t bend down, either.
That made detailing a strategy difficult.
“I need a mirror,” I said. “Something that can be carried. I need you to think. Have you seen any kind of compact or hand mirror with Rose, Tiff or Alexis’ stuff, in the bathroom? Grandmother’s stuff, even?”
“Dunno,” he said.
Damn.
“I can look,” he said.
“Wait,” I said.
But he was already taking flight.
In a way, my short skirmish with the elder maenad had been helpful. While it had broken a dozen pieces of glass, it had scattered that glass over the floor upstairs. It had also given me a very practical way of assessing just how my particular relationship to the mirror world worked. The speed I could move, the way the worlds came apart.
The maenad here gave chase, pushing the satyr so he’d land on the armchair before bolting forward, after Evan. She was almost on all fours as she crossed the couch, dropping close to the ground.
I lunged, stabbing through, but she was out of my reach.
I moved, switching to the nearest window.