Evan hit snow.
I winced. Evan didn’t necessarily heal through any connection to me. Any damage he sustained…
Alister didn’t waste a breath. He backed away from me, and reached into his coat. He threw down a piece of paper, then stepped on it.
“Tick,” Alister said.
The paper broke away into a swirl of sand. I heard that same tickticktick whir I’d heard earlier, only it had a cadence to it like a chitter.
A clockwork arachnid, with a bulbous behind. An hourglass was built into the behind, suspended in a globe.
“Guard me,” Alister ordered. “Focus on the bird.”
Noting that he’d gleaned an advantage, I somehow felt fractionally better than I had. Stronger.
Had I scared Alister, just a bit? Or had the Hyena scared him just a bit? Enough that he’d wanted to summon something?
Busying himself with Evan and the summoning had let me slip away again. I walked on the edges of reflections, so I could step to the next window or mirror with a single stride.
I got to the car closest to him, and I smashed the window.
The crash was violent, and in the moment the side window broke, I could hear the bell pealing loud, unfiltered by the glass but more muted at the same time. It was something that was absorbed and blunted by the blowing wind and the atmosphere of Jacob’s Bell.
I realigned myself just in time to see that Alister had barely flinched.
“A feint,” he said, holding his deck up. The tick had interposed itself between himself and Evan.
“You apparently didn’t like what the card said about the sword,” I told him. “You don’t feel like sharing. Why?”
“The deck is mine to use, not yours.”
“Weapons can cut both ways,” I said. “Don’t want me making declarations to the spirits, Alister?”
Evan flew at him, then veered off as the tick raised its forelimbs, lunging at him.
It still got Alister’s attention. Whatever foresight he had, he’d wanted to see what unfolded. A casualty of wanting to use his deck to keep track of what I was plotting.
Pressure.
I decided to use the moment. Crossing the street to the nearby car, reaching the side window.
The tick was still focused on Evan. It was a dumb thing. Probably a minor spirit.
I stuck my arm through the window, and speared it in the head.
I was shunted, cast off to one side.
The tick, by contrast, was dead.
The faint ring of the bell seemed to mark its slow, mechanical death.
I smiled a little.
“You want to know what the sword does?” I asked. “It leaves wounds that don’t heal.”
“Ah,” Alister said. “Too bad. That was a favorite little summoning of mine. I can’t ever repair it?”
“Evan here managed to dodge that fate, being left with an injury that wounded his very soul, leaving his ghost insane with agony. I could theoretically do the same thing to you.”
“I can undo it,” Alister said, moving himself to a position in the middle of the street. Evan was perched on a car, and I was in the largest window nearby, at the front of a house.
“That’s what the cards are telling you?” I called out the question.
“Common sense is telling me. The cards are telling me something else.”
“Beggar woman and the church window?” I asked. I couldn’t remember the cards. “Loss?”
He wasn’t about to give me an answer. I only needed his attention.
If something was getting to him, then I’d use that.
I shattered another window.
“Another-” he started.
I carried through with the same motion, drawing the broken blade against the back of a car.
He didn’t finish the sentence, caught off guard by the vicious metal on metal screech.
He might be able to see my next move, but if I was quick, he couldn’t see the one after.
“Enough of that,” he said. He still managed to sound confident.
But a part of me fed off of whatever he was feeling. It was less like a rush or a high, and more like waking up after being half asleep. Stepping from the bleary fog of having just woken up into a cold shower.
I felt clarified.
The bell continued to toll in the background.
“Want to see if you can undo the damage I can do with this sword?” I asked, and my voice carried. “The agreement you proposed was that I wouldn’t cause any permanent damage. If you can undo it, then it’s not permanent.”
“It doesn’t matter. Your ‘help’ is arriving. Delayed, but arriving all the same. She might give you the benefit of a doubt, but she can’t relinquish control.”
“Evan,” I said.
“On it,” he replied.
He took flight, heading in the general direction of Hillsglade.
Stopping help from coming.
“Offer still stands,” I said. “One slice. I can reach through glass, mirrors, even some ice. If you’d rather I stay away from the face…”
“A bluff,” he said.
“Which part?” I asked. “Me avoiding the face?”
He set his jaw.
“You’re good,” I said. I continued to pace, zig-zagging, so I was always in his peripheral vision, or behind him. “Clever, talented, born to the right family at the right time, in the right circumstances. All the things a person needs to be great, in this modern day. I’m not just talking about practitioners either.”
“Envious?” he asked. “How sad.”
“No,” I said. “Somehow, I always took it in stride.”
A thought crossed my mind.
A gamble, but all the same. “Do you know how I remember spending my eighteenth birthday? Can your cards tell you that? Or are you going to show the spirits how incapable you are a second time?”
He didn’t hesitate. Deck cut, card displayed.
A woman in a tattered shawl and a child, making their way through the snow beneath a stained glass window. The five of coins.
I chuckled a little, pleased that I’d managed to rope him into showing the same card. “Adversity and loss.”
You just drew the trap card.
If he’d refused, I’d still have gleaned an advantage. It had been a win-win, with a very good chance that I’d been wrong, and my background would have turned up a different card.
Such was the nature of the game he had posed. Positioning. Getting the other guy into a position where he was cornered.
“You have all those advantages, Alister, but you’ve got one thing that’s always going to hold you back,” I called out.
“What’s that?”
“You’re a fucking Behaim,” I shouted.
I slammed the Hyena into a window. The glass broke.
It took a second for the glass to stop tinkling, clattering onto ice and the floor inside the house.
“Your Evan can only stall them for so long,” he said. He wasn’t smiling with his mouth, but those bottle-glass eyes were sparkling. He was enjoying this, fear aside. “The Others arrive in a moment.”
That was the problem, in the end. I was blind. I didn’t know why he was pleased about that. I didn’t get his aversion to the Five of Coins.
He, on the other hand, could see everything coming.
That was, as I’d just revealed, a double-edged sword.
Rule of three in effect. One minute to get him to draw that card a third time.