“Wearing away?”
“Starving, falling apart, something like that. I don’t know the proper term for it. But a part of me is dying, and I think the ugly parts might gain ground.”
I could see a note of concern on his face. Not quite to the point where I thought he was feeling concern for me. I was still a stranger.
“You do need something then?” he asked.
“Peace,” I said. “I need peace. The turmoil is, as far as I can tell, literally eating me up, inside and out.”
I saw his expression change, just a little bit more concern.
“I don’t think I can give you that,” he said.
I wanted to fidget, to bounce my leg in nervousness, in some representation of how I was feeling, or for the outlet. But it wasn’t something that came naturally. I was still, and in being very still I was very inhuman.
“I feel pretty horrible about it,” he said. “Dunno if that matters.”
“Matters some, but it doesn’t help,” I said. “I don’t want you to feel horrible.”
“We were suffering from the worst hangovers to date-”
“First hangover! And probably my last!”
“-and doing our best to shore up the defenses. Four walls protecting us, and not a lot else. More than a handful of things slipped in and needed to be dealt with.”
“I could have helped,” I said.
“Probably,” he said. “It’s like, four thirty in the morning, and I’m pretty out of it. I heard you talking, and Evan was flying around, which isn’t quite silent.”
“Not bumping into walls anymore,” Evan said.
“…I thought I’d just stop in, before one of you disturbed the others. It was pretty clear you weren’t asleep.”
“I don’t think I sleep anymore.”
“I can,” Evan said. “But it’s not like it was before, when I was alive and all. Back then, I could wait til I was tired, lie down, and sleep would come. Now I have to look for it. It’s more like a nap. Maybe that helps? You can try doing it like I do?”
“Maybe,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it did. “Thanks.”
Ty stepped out of sight.
I wasn’t sure if I was in the clear to ask Evan about the wink and salute earlier.
“You know, when you said thanks, I totally thought you’d give Ty a dad look. Or a mom look, like Rose sometimes gives, or even Ty sometimes.”
“A dad look?” I asked.
“I can’t do it. I don’t have the right face muscles. You know what I mean? That look like you’re just pretending to take me seriously, and you’re pretending so badly you just gotta look at someone like, ‘ha ha, we’re not really taking the kid seriously, am I right?'”
“It’s different if the dad does it or the mom does it?”
“It’s two totally different looks, though I can totally see the man having the mom look while the mom has the dad look, depending on what kind of parents they have. And Mags obviously had a dad to give her the mom look.”
In the midst of trying to keep up and wrap my head around the dads and moms, I caught that last bit. My attention snagged on the had.
I felt like I was missing so much, spending time in the Drains, and now spending time here.
“I’m not about to be condescending with you, Evan,” I said. “As far as my memories go, I didn’t really have parents to model my behavior off of.”
“But Rose did?”
I made a so-so gesture with my hand. “Enough. Maybe the opposite. Rose got too much attention.”
“Tiff too, in a bad way,” Ty said, returning. He held up a pack of cards, still in the box. “Same general type, in that respect.”
“Sure,” I said. “Is everyone okay?”
“They’re managing. Mags isn’t in anyone’s good books after the wraith thing. They’re using her to try and hunt Molly down.”
“And the state of things?”
“Ugly. The fights so far are small, contained. Nothing that’d scare the innocents, but aggressive. Can’t speak for the others, but I was glad to get back here, even with the lousy defenses. Once it got late enough in the day that there weren’t people on the streets, other stuff came out.”
“Yeah,” Evan said.
Ty took a seat, cross-legged, on the floor. He paused, then leaned to one side. “What the hell did you do to that desk?”
“Made holes,” I said. I didn’t lose anything by admitting, “I wanted handholds, to see if I could move it, drag the reflection-version into view.”
“That’d be difficult.”
“It was,” I said. “Didn’t work.”
“Probably for the best,” he said.
He paused, shuffling.
“Hold ’em,” Evan said. “C’mon.”
Ty gave Evan a look.
“Deal me in,” Evan said.
Ty reached around, grabbing a book, and placed it so it sat open, standing up, blocking his view of Evan’s cards. He did the same for me, dealing the two cards face up, behind the books. It looked like he’d done it before.
Nothing interesting in the book. A glossary of alchemical symbols, it looked like.
He doled out what looked like copper coins from another nationality.
“Real money?” I asked.
“Found them in the cupboard about a week after we all moved in,” Ty said. He issued the stacks of coins.
We played ten quick hands in relative silence, only speaking in single words as our turns went around, and, in Evan’s case, when he tried to move coins with his head and knocked over the stack. In such cases, it was usually a muttered cuss word and summary pleading on Evan’s part for Ty to pile up the coins again.
The bids were small, one coin per, but all the same, Evan had a few more coins than Ty or me.
“Maybe Go Fish,” Ty said.
“But I like winning,” Evan said.
“This is a regular thing?” I asked.
Ty raised his eyebrows, “Poker? No. Because Alexis-”
“Usually wins,” I said, simultaneously with him. When he gave me a funny look, I said, “When it comes to poker, anyway. I know that much.”
“And Evan wins whenever Alexis isn’t playing, despite the fact that we had to teach him to play a couple weeks ago, and here I am, with something like three hundred hours clocked on online poker.”
“I thought you quit,” I said.
“I did. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve clocked those hours,” Ty said. “I’d think the little guy is cheating, except there’s no way for him to keep any cards tucked up his sleeves.”
Evan spread his wings, looking. “Nope.”
“It’s like being a fencer, and you think the other guy’s going to play by the rules, and he just comes at you with a foil in one hand and his other hand swinging. Except he’s following the rules. Evan doesn’t fold when he should, which throws me off, but when I try to play it smart and efficient, by the odds, he still pulls ahead wins because he has the devil’s own luck, as the idiom goes.”
“That seems to be how it’s going,” I observed.
“And he doesn’t have tells,” Ty said. “Tiny bird face. You’d think he’d have the decency to puff up his feathers when he had a nice hand.”
“Why would I do something like that? That’s dumb.”
“Kind of loses its shine when playing smart doesn’t win. I blame magic,” Ty said.