Easily an hour passed before the influx of Others started to taper off. My mouth was dry, my heart pounding, my face hurt where I’d been hit, and my hands hurt more.
Above all else, I was realizing what I was up against. These weren’t pages in the little black book. They were enemies of mine. Virtually all of them.
A lot of them would kill me.
A good few would probably do worse things than kill me.
This wasn’t quite what I had expected. I’d expected a few practitioners. Not everyone.
“Blake,” Rose whispered.
“What?” I asked, leaning closer.
“Don’t tell anyone that I did the ritual,” she said.
I nodded.
Keep cards up our sleeves. That was how we needed to think.
But we couldn’t be wilting flowers, bowing over if someone so much as looked at us the wrong way. I could do that for Callan, but not here.
A woman from the Duchamp family was talking to Laird, off to the side. She might have been the one who was talking in the vision I’d had. Not the oldest Duchamp woman here, but she had a kind of presence. They both cast glances my way as they talked, making me the obvious topic of conversation.
I went out of my way to look like I wasn’t terrified.
All of these people were my enemies.
“Beautiful Rose,” Padraic purred. “Both of them, here. A good night, I’m sure.”
He’d entered alongside his two regular companions, two other companions of similar attractiveness, and Maggie Holt, the girl with the checkered scarf. She was a teenager, making her slightly younger than the Briar Girl, and her eyebrows made her look perpetually angry, helped by a swift, graceless manner of walking.
She sat to my right, across the aisle. Padraic and his group sat around her, instantly and automatically settling into comfortable seating positions that could have doubled for poses.
“Padraic, as usual, is the last to enter,” Laird said. “We can begin a little early tonight. Please, Mr. Thorburn. You’re at the center of attention. Would you please step up to the front and introduce yourself?”
Every set of eyes in the room
“Say no,” Rose said.
“I said I’d run impulsive plans by you, right?” I asked.
“Blake?”
“Mr. Thorburn?” Laird asked, his voice ringing down the length of the church.
“If I had a way to divert our enemies from us and to each other?” I asked. “Yes or no?”
“Blake, you can’t expect me to-”
“Blake Thorburn, grandson of Mrs. Rose D. Thorburn, Diabolist of Hillsglade House,” Laird said. “I would like a response.”
Making someone repeat themselves, in some cases, would make them look weaker. Laird was getting more intimidating each time he spoke.
“Yes,” she said.
I stood.
There was no murmur of conversation as I walked down the aisle. There were hundreds here, but most were Others, and they were all exceptionally good at being quiet. Goblins, disgusting to look at, as though they were distilled versions of human ugliness, squat and all of them armed with weapons forged together from scrap. Ghosts, etheral and exaggerated in appearance, forever marked with their causes of death, twisted by an imperfect recollection of what they looked like and who they were, before. Faerie, in myriad shapes and forms, and spirits. The other half of the Others were impossible to identify.
Funny, how many others with the appearances of children were around Johannes.
Andy and Eva sat on the stairs to the right of the stage, facing down everyone. Like bailiffs or guards, a reminder to keep the peace. The other set of stairs was blocked by the crowd. I stood at the very end of the aisle, and gripped the railing.
In the midst of the faces, of the twenty or so members of the Duchamp coven and thirty-ish members of Laird’s family, all of the Others, I had to search to find the tiny round mirror that Rose would be peering out of.
“I’m Blake Thorburn,” I said. “I doubt you really care about that, or about who I am. I imagine Molly Walker did her own speech here. I can’t even guess how she handled it, or what she said. I’m an obstacle for you to remove, to get power. I know this. I know you might see me as one number on a countdown clock, with prosperity waiting when there’s nothing left. When there are no successors. But you need to know, that thing so many of you are terrified of? That I might learn enough to summon something problematic? It’s already summoned.”
I could see Laird react to that. A shift in the crowd. Some of the kids went pale, in the Duchamp family.
Johannes smiled. Mara the immortal, for her part, didn’t say or do anything. Most Others didn’t seem to care one way or another.
“Not my choice. I also didn’t choose the arrangements my grandmother put in place,” I said.
I was thinking of Rose, but I didn’t need to elaborate on that.
“Some of you have been baiting me, trying to get me to retaliate. I don’t know why, but I imagine there’s something at play. I’m not going to do what they want. I’m going to make you guys a deal. I’ll make three deals. If you approach me and offer a ceasefire, an agreement you won’t attack me or help anyone who might, if you make a good offer, I’ll take the demon off the table for you and yours.”
I could see people exchanging glances.
That was a maxim, right? A rule of war?
Divide and conquer.