Hell, if I did that, I’d have beaten three Behaims, and achieved my third victory by rule of three against the family.
I even had an idea on how.
I’d just been talking to the two cats about taking the direct approach.
“Surrender,” I told him.
He barked out a laugh, “What?”
“I’m not just an Other, Alister. I have all the memories of being a practitioner. I’ve got victory in my grasp. Surrender, and agree to turn down the position to lead the Behaim family.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I beat Laird. I beat Duncan. I won using the rule of three twice. With this, right here, I can have victories against three of you, three of which use the rule of three. That has to count for something.”
“It does, assuming you’re not bluffing.”
Straightforward approach? I could do it.
“I’ll tell you how I can win,” I said. “I’m going to attack you. If you use your deck to predict and avoid the attack, you’ll probably draw that card, because it’s associated with this blade. Somehow, I don’t think you want me to force you to draw it three times. That’s what my instincts as an ex-practitioner are telling me.”
“Why do I need to draw anything if you just told me?” he asked.
He wasn’t smiling anymore.
I was.
“Why indeed?” I asked.
I broke the window, changed locations.
Broke another window. I arrived at the next spot and saw him covering his face and head with his arms.
I shifted position, battered him further.
I knew I was scaring him. I could feel it.
He didn’t have his ability to view the deck. To know what was coming.
Anything I did could be the attack I’d mentioned.
He backed away a step, so I moved directly behind him.
“Surrender!” I shouted in his ear.
He spun, deck in hand, but didn’t look.
He didn’t open his mouth.
Fine.
I reeled back, and I flung the Hyena through the window.
If I could reach through, so could the Hyena, in a way.
It passed through, flying blade over pommel.
He dodged it. No looking at the cards. Only human ability.
The Hyena clattered to the ground.
I could hear the echo of the bell, louder than ever.
“Well,” he said, “The bird failed. That’s it.”
I watched the Hyena spin in place on the ground. No ice nearby, but the bulge in the crossguard and the shortness of the broken blade let it spin briefly.
I could make out the Others. Rose’s bogeymen, a small contingent, coming for help. Alister turned, backing away as rapidly as he could.
I closed my eyes.
I willfully relinquished my presence on this mirror realm.
I let the real world be reflected as it was.
The Hyena spun lazily on the ground a few feet to my left.
“Sympathetic magic,” I murmured. I said a few words in latin, and I fed one spirit to the reflected sword. “Shape, borne of the same goblin, delivers the same blows.”
He heard me. He snapped his head around.
The real Hyena was still on the ground.
I put my foot on the top of the reflected one, then kicked it. It and the real Hyena skidded across the road, catching on a ruff of snow and skipping a foot and a half into the air, spiraling.
Alister threw himself to one side.
I was already using the gap between reflected spaces to cross the distance, getting ahead of the reflected Hyena.
I stopped it with the bottom of my sneaker.
Alister wouldn’t move fast enough to dodge it.
I didn’t have to offer surrender. He knew he could end this with a word.
He didn’t.
I kicked the broken sword in his direction again, sending it skidding his way, every part of it bladed, spiked or otherwise hazardous.
I watched as it veered off to one side, as if a magnet were pushing it off course.
“Enough,” a woman’s voice called out.
Sandra.
“About time,” Alister said.
Sandra was joined by an Other. A tall Middle-Eastern man with a long black coat trimmed with gold. He wore sunglasses, but I wasn’t sure the glimmers of light I saw on the lenses weren’t his eyes shining through from beneath, rather than reflections.
“What a mess,” she commented.
“Timely arrival,” I said.
“What we’re doing here isn’t just fighting each other for Lordship. We have to prove we deserve the position. Knowing what’s going on is critical, if we’re going to earn the trust of the neutral parties,” she said. She walked amid the broken glass. “I have something of a web spun across Jacob’s Bell. I can feel the weights of certain events and entities.”
Oh. So this was it. When Rose’s Others arrived, so would Sandra. The fight would be over. She seemed perfectly at ease, picking her way through the glass.
“I’ve arranged it so I can arrive promptly on any scene I feel requires intervention, if unchallenged. I can tell you this, Blake. Everyone is prepared to challenge the Thorburns. Any action on your part will provoke a response from others.”
She was heading for the Hyena.
I beat her to the reflection, grabbing it, and sliding it.
Two more steps took me to the nearest window. I punched my hand through, retrieving the blade before I was cast aside.
“More mess,” she said.
“The rules don’t disallow mess, Sandra,” Alister said.
“Expectations of the council discourage it,” she said. “Let’s clean this up so we don’t have to explain yet another gas explosion. Everything in its rightful place, please.”
She drew her chalice from her bag and tapped it against the nearest mailbox. It sang, a ring of metal on metal, every bit as pleasant as the gouging of the mailbox hadn’t been. She touched it to one shard of glass.
The bits of glass vibrated.
“Back you go,” she said, authoritarian. “Where you’re meant to be.”
The glass danced, slid, hopped and jumped until it reached the window panes, fitting together like a dozen individual jigsaw puzzles.
“Eblis?” she asked. “It’s easier for your kind than it is for anyone else.”
The tall man snapped his fingers.
Like lightning, the seams disappeared. I saw reflected areas appear around every window I’d broken, like a flash of lightning.
“Hm,” she said, sounding a little satisfied with herself. “Thank you.”
I wondered how the spirits took that. If Alister got credit for a show like the removal of the small scratches, what kind of cachet did Sandra have?
“This concludes my duty to Johannes for this day,” Eblis said, his voice as deep as the rumble of thunder.
“That’s between you and him,” she said. She turned her attention to Alister and me. “You two are done. I would like you two to agree this is a draw. We leave it at this.”
Was it a draw?
If the Behaims disapproved of this display here, they might refuse to give Alister the lordship.
I’d had him on his heels. Without intervention, I’d have beat him.
“I agree if he does,” Alister said. He was still on the ground where he’d fallen. Where he’d be bleeding if I’d hit him with the Hyena. He might be able to undo it, but he hadn’t wanted to.
All the same, he looked just a little smug, lying there.
But this won’t go the way you want it to, I remembered his words.
I had to weigh what this meant. The consequences.