“Right-o,” Ty said.
Rose got as far as the stairs before pausing. “Blake? Don’t make me regret letting you inside. Please.”
I wasn’t able to formulate a response, so I only bobbed my head in a curt nod.
She was gone so soon after that I wasn’t sure she’d even seen my response.
I watched the others work. They were pretty efficient, saving breath for work, only speaking to call across the room and ask if a box or stack of books was in a good spot.
I stood watch by the front window.
“That’s going to have to do,” Ty said. There was a sheen of sweat on his face. “Dishes, papers…”
He hurried from the room with what he could carry.
Tiff and Alexis left with the spellbooks that had been strewn on the table in front of the couch.
Alexis was faster in returning, an unlit cigarette in her mouth. I’d known her to do that when stressed.
“This arrival feels too convenient,” I said.
“A push from Sandra?” Alexis asked.
“It would fit.”
“Yep,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what else to say. I continued watching the streets outside via. the window. Alexis hadn’t visited me while I’d been bound. She’d been the person closest to me before all this, and now she was the furthest.
When I glanced back her way to see if she was cleaning, I found her less than a foot from me. I didn’t startle, but my heart did something funny in my chest.
“I don’t know how to feel, seeing you like that,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“My work, becoming something warped. It’s all how I’d ink the branches, the spatter pattern, the watercolor in the space beyond is maybe a little pale, but if I was dealing with someone who didn’t give a damn about the fading…”
“The colors were more vivid when you first did them,” I said. “In my head, anyway.”
“That’s… were the lines that good?”
“Yeah. I think so. My eye isn’t bad, but I was so happy with what I got I didn’t exactly study it to find flaws.”
“That would be some of my best work, either way. Except now the darkness is using it on a symbolic level or something. It’s being used to turn you into something else. That…” a pause. “Sucks.”
Sucks. Such a simple word for an utterance she had so many subtle emotions into.
“I think I was something else to begin with,” I said. “Rose’s attitudes seem to point that direction.”
“Blake, I can’t- if you start talking like that, fishing for tells…”
“You’re good at hiding your tells,” I said. “But okay. We won’t go there.”
“I’m thinking a year and a half ago, if I had to put it somewhere chronologically?”
“Yeah. About.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Huh. I can even picture the week it was. I thought it was a slow week.”
I rotated my arms, studying the tattoos that now clustered on them. More tattoo than bare skin.
“Well,” I said. “If I’ve got to have something changing, as I lose my humanity, this is…”
I searched for how to phrase it. I had to be careful not to lie, and I felt like the choice of words was exceedingly important. Alexis, standing behind me, didn’t say anything.
“It’s good,” I decided.
A light thud.
Alexis’ head forehead rested on the glass of the window. I couldn’t make out her face, with the angle of her head, but I could see the cigarette sticking out.
I checked the street. No sign of the family.
Reaching up, I touched the glass from my side. The side of my thumb traced the line of Alexis’ hair.
“I know you don’t remember it. I know it might not have even happened, but to me, you saved me, Alexis.”
She didn’t move.
“I was cursed with an inability to create,” I said. “Maybe that’s part of being built as a warrior, with only the necessary parts. But I could never draw. Tried a bunch of things, but I never found that talent. I don’t… I’m trying to sum up this one thought, but I feel like I’ll keep getting off track if I try to explain it. I don’t really know, but if there’s any ability for an artist to be able to tell this sort of thing through their work, I really want you to be able to look at this and see it as it was supposed to be, and know that you saved me. That-”
Again, I couldn’t find the words.
“That- Um- Shit.”
I wasn’t choked up, but I wasn’t sure I could be choked up in the normal way anymore.
Words simply failed me. I tried taking in a deep breath, even though I didn’t need it. The back of my hand stroked the glass that separated me from touching her hair, then dropped to my side.
“If- If I’m stubborn, if I have any well of strength to draw from at all, I owe that to you. That means I have a responsibility. I can’t use that strength and stubbornness the wrong way. I- you never let me in enough for me to really know why you were so set on helping people like Tiff and me. I’ve guessed. I’ve speculated…
“…But I want you to know that you did help me. You helped me to my feet, helped me be a real live boy again. And maybe the demon took that away when he took away the connection, and maybe that’s why you took it harder when I left. Maybe it’s not real, maybe it didn’t really happen, I don’t really know. But if you were trying to prove to yourself that you were capable of something… I think you proved it.”
The silence that followed scared me.
I’d conquered my demons, so to speak, in the midst of the realization that I wasn’t entirely real. But I was a little scared, standing there.
Looking past Alexis, I could see Tiff and Ty standing in the hallway, only a sliver of their bodies visible beyond the living room door. No doubt they’d seen or heard some of it and then stepped back out to leave the two of us alone.
The pressure of the silence grew with every second. I glanced back. Nobody approached, though one car had stopped by the side of the street.
“Sorry,” I said, “If that was presumptuous or if I was adding to your burdens, saying you’re somehow responsible for me.”
“No,” she said. She stepped away. “That was…”
More silence.
“It was?”
She smiled a small smile, lips pressed together a little in that unconscious way she had of hiding her teeth, the cigarette in her mouth bent, maybe from when she’d rested her head against the window. “Good.”
Was there less tension in her face and neck than there had been?
“I really need a damn smoke,” she said, with no rancor in her tone. “Excuse me. I’ll be outside.”
“Is that a good idea?” Ty called out.
“We’ve got some wards. I’ll be okay,” she replied.
I was left alone, with only the faint murmur of Ty and Tiff’s conversation in the hallway.
Two minutes passed, me agonizing over ever last word I’d said, wishing I’d picked some better ones, while paradoxically not at all displeased with what I’d said in general.
I’d needed to say it.
“We need a theme song,” Evan chimed in, behind me.
“Hm?”
“Bird boy and scary tree,” he said.
“I’m not a tree yet,” I told him.