11.11
When mom and dad come home, they’re going to be soooo mad.
Flooding house, oil and broken glass at the base of the stairs, shattered back windows, at least three people in need of a hospital visit, one of whom was folded into the couch.
Oh, and the bombs.
If they showed up at the wrong time and tried to force their way in…
I shook my head. Too many ifs. If we took too long, if Andy got to my friends, if Alexis wasn’t okay, if one of my friends were hurt, dying, or dead…
I didn’t like the feeling that took hold of me as I thought on that subject.
I relocated myself to the kitchen floor. There were places where the residue from the extinguisher made the water too muddy to reflect anything.
The mirror Peter had been holding was gone. Covered, broken, or cast aside to a place where it couldn’t reflect anything I could use. Peter, too, was missing. From the water or whatever else that was on the stairs, I suspected he was already up there.
“Evan,” I called out.
Evan came flying to me from the bookshelves. He started to land on the edge of the counter, but shied away and landed on the toaster instead.
“Water,” he noted. “And, oh poop, witch hunter.”
I didn’t have a good angle to see Eva.
“Clever, Bloody Marv,” I heard Eva speak.
“Wasn’t quite my idea,” I said. “Also, Bloody Marv? Really?”
“Gotta call you something.”
I considered reminding her about my name, then reconsidered.
I’d given it freely in the past, just talking to the junior council, but there was a sense of danger about Eva. Her willingness to harm, her sheer resourcefulness.
“Thorburn Bogeyman,” I said.
“T.B.?”
“Whatever,” I said.
I moved to the one intact picture frame by Eva, watched her pace a little. A restless tiger in its cage. She kicked the doormat until it blocked off the water that creeped closer to her. Her body was dusted white from the fire extinguisher’s spray.
She had the machete in one hand, the dark green orb cupped in the other, and the fanny pack with the grenades slung over one shoulder, apparently collected when she’d run past the pool of oil.
It was, in an odd twist, a reversal of the situation they’d had with us.
One more pressing threat upstairs, a lesser, hobbled threat downstairs. Couldn’t ignore them both.
If I went upstairs to help Peter deal with Andy, I risked letting Eva run rampant. Much as they’d done with us.
If I stayed here with Eva, well, Andy wasn’t quite the threat Eva was in a fight, but I suspected he could deal with Peter rather easily. Neither was a fighter by nature, but Andy, I imagined, at least had practice. Armor, too.
The water on the stairs was coming from the second floor bathroom. Andy would have heard.
“Only one more to go,” Eva said, unaware that I was close to her, ready to strike if her pacing brought her too close to the frame. “Pretty sure.”
One more?
“One more what?” Evan called out.
“T.B.?” the witch hunter called, almost taunting. “I’m talking to you.”
I could see her body tense. She approached the doormat, putting one foot on it.
Ready to make a break for it?
I switched locations. “I’m listening, I’m just not sure why I’m supposed to take the bait.”
She chuckled to herself.
“Evan,” I whispered, “Go check, help if you can, don’t get shot.”
Evan took flight, wings flapping as he headed upstairs.
“I’m asking,” the witch hunter said, “Because I want to know if you’re there.”
“I’m here,” I said.
By asking periodically, opening a dialogue, she kept me here, watching her, keeping her from making a break for it
She thought time was on her side.
Yet the house was flooding. Water crept on a variety of surfaces.
“You’re a new bogeyman, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Damn,” she said. “I always wanted to know if it sucked, being bound. Stuck inside some old antique until someone releases you.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t know,” I said, glancing back. Nobody in the stairwell. Light covered much of the second floor hallway. Where footsteps landed, the reflection was disrupted. I couldn’t tell where the footsteps were, only the cadence.
“Andy said it’s hard, being a bogeyman. You spend a while in the Abyss, or Limbo, or whatever name you want to slap onto the ground level of reality, and it chews you up and spits a monster out, right?”
“Something like that. Haven’t heard it called the ground level before. Doesn’t seem much like reality.”
“Yeah, I bet,” she said. “You want Andy for that explanation. Mayans or someone thinking that all reality was basically chaos and void before the first gods set it straight. Humans following after, smoothing off the rough edges. I’m getting bits wrong already.”
“Sure,” I said. The entire world was essentially like the Drains, in another time?
“Let’s say I whip out a thing and use it to bind you. Nice old fashioned thing with a lot of weight and power to it. Do you just stay inside? Or is it more that you go back to the place you came from, Limbo or wherever, steadily getting worse, and you pop out when the container gets opened?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Which of the two is worse?” she asked. “Stuck inside some container or another, all dark, just waiting for a few decades or centuries, or going back to the place that made you a monster?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“When we capture an Other, there’s a guy we call. Specializes in disposal. All the little whatsits and doodads get relocated somewhere proper.”
“That’s a spooky idea,” I said. “A warehouse full of boxes with monsters inside.”
She snorted. “Fuck that. Hole in the ground and poured cement, way out in the middle of the scads of protected land we’ve got here in the great white north. Nobody’s going to dig much in permafrost, except our guy that’s sticking cursed items and bound monsters in the ground.”
“If you’re trying to scare me,” I commented, “I don’t feel fear in the same way, anymore.”
“Ahh. That’s no fun,” she said. “So if I just happened to tell you that one of the people upstairs has a bomb glued to them, that wouldn’t affect you at all?”