I turned back to the text.
The final chapter was, as far as I could tell, the ‘I fucked up, how do I run damage control?’ for novice scourges. Troubleshooting and understanding where things could go wrong. It said a lot that it was the last chapter, as if the assumption on the part of the guy who put the catalogue together was that the scourges would prioritize summoning first and fixing problems later.
Diabolists, priests, and now scourges, as sorts who were their own worst enemies, setting themselves up for failure.
The book followed a trend I’d noticed, where authors really liked referencing their other texts. I imagined it was a way of selling more books to what was no doubt a niche market. Couldn’t fully understand the contents of ‘Lost and Bound: Bogeymen’ without ‘Plumbing Darkest Depths’ first.
Those who’d buy just the catalogue without getting the work that presumably introduced concepts was probably reckless to begin with. The ideas raised in the last chapter seemed to be intent on answering that sort of recklessness.
Bogeyman came with a container, practitioner broke the container? Approaches to binding rituals.
Sent bogeyman to go murder someone in the most horrible ways possible, but they were blocked, and came back to me, what does the practitioner do? Do the same thing, and hope they aren’t equipped to bounce it back for the third total time, because it would be far stronger on the third trip.
I looked at the mirror. I was going to figure out a way through and out. There were countless possible solutions. I just needed to find one.
I heard the door open, interrupting me as I read.
“Oh! Oh wow, you scared me,” a female voice. Tiff.
Not directed at me.
My guard, it seemed.
I closed the book, setting it down off to one side. My eyes scanned my surroundings. No contraband in sight.
Tiff knocked on the desk as she approached.
“I’m here,” I said.
“I didn’t want to intrude,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said.
Tiff wore a beige sweater that seemed designed to be oversized, the sleeves folded back two or three times over so they didn’t slip over her hands, as well as a knee-length skirt over tights. Where Ty had been in pyjamas, she was up and ready to face the day.
“Rose was saying at breakfast that you were falling apart?”
“In a sense,” I said. “I’m degrading. Being in here is wearing on my sanity and my Self, as far as I can tell. Less human, more… whatever this is.”
“That’s common,” she said. “For Others to not like being bound.”
“It wasn’t so long ago that I wasn’t an Other, or not so obviously,” I said. If I sounded bitter, it wasn’t intentional.
“I wanted to ask if there was anything I could do,” she said.
“Talk to me,” I said. “Keep me company. Or let me go.”
“I would, but there’s other stuff going on. Rose asked me not to fill you in, just in case.”
“I see,” I said. I traced my finger along my arm, following a ridge. “Who is Rose, to you?”
“A friend. Someone in need.”
“You were my friend,” I said. “Look at me. I’m dying. I’m in need.”
She frowned.
“You were my friend,” I said, a second time, with emphasis. “You alone, Tiff. Alexis is… I think you’re among a very small group of people who can imagine what Alexis means to me. She helped us both in very similar ways.”
“Yeah,” Tiff said.
“But she and Ty, I have memories of them being my friends. I loved them. I still love them, like they were my own family. But as far as I can tell, those relationships aren’t any more genuine than they were with Rose. They were stolen from something and then Rose got them.”
Tiff shook her head a little.
“You were my friend,” I said. “For real. Just like Evan. Just like some of the individuals I met in the Drains.”
“You said that, a bit ago. It kind of stuck with me.”
“Yeah.”
“This… isn’t an easy conversation to have,” she said.
“If it feels like I’m turning away from Alexis and Ty by saying that, that’s not it. I will help them. However contrived our friendships were, I will die if I have to do it to save them.”
“I’d say that’s a relief, but I don’t want you to die.”
I couldn’t meet her eyes. I looked down at Lefty. “Thanks for saying so.”
“When I said this wasn’t easy, I meant that there’s so many things to trip over, and gaps, and conversation landmines.”
Gaps. I felt compelled to ask, “So you do remember Rose?”
She looked uncomfortable. “No, or yes. I… the other two, they didn’t handle it well, when whatever happened at the factory happened.”
“When Rose entered this world and I headed off to the Drains.”
“Yeah. Ty just couldn’t process, on a mental level, and Alexis took it really hard emotionally. It came and went, and affected them especially at night. Alexis said it was worst when you’re in that twilight of near-sleep and your mind’s wandering, she kept tripping over-”
“-A Blake shaped hole,” I said.
“Yeah, a Blake shaped hole. Ty took a while to find equilibrium. Different. He’s really a guy in how he just doesn’t recognize how bad he was, looking back. Rose was… on a level, we knew Rose. Or we didn’t know her but we were familiar with her. She offered help, and where I couldn’t do anything to help Alexis or Ty, Rose could heal that damage and fill the gap, help them through the bad nights.”
I wasn’t sure how to handle that. Being as angry as I was, yet hearing that she’d helped people I cared about. It jarred. I frowned, and I hoped it didn’t look as scary as it could, given what I was.
Tiff seemed to get more intense as she talked, her tone resembling a person pleading for a loan they needed to stay afloat. “We couldn’t just turn our backs on her after she helped them with that. Stuff was happening in Toronto, and we thought people might come after us, just because, so we stuck by her. She stuck by us.”
“She thrust you into this situation,” I said. “She treated you like sacrificial pawns, rejecting the rules that others were trying to set, knowing they might go after you to get at her.”
“We talked about that,” TIff said, sounding more than a little defensive. Because she didn’t believe it? “We planned it, and we talked about all the bases we needed to cover. Knowing we might be vulnerable or targeted was one base we covered.”
“You talk about a lot of stuff as a group,” I said. “Me, and Conquest setting up shop in Rose’s head.”
She fidgeted. “What else are we going to do, cooped up here for days on end?”
“It’s her fault you’re cooped up. This wasn’t supposed to be how things went with you guys. You’re not supposed to be pawns at all, you’re not supposed to be sitting there talking at you guys and swaying you.”
“Blake-”
“She’s taking something that was supposed to be good, something that wasn’t hers to take, and she’s fucking twisting it-”
“Stop!” she said.