I glanced upstairs.
“Hard to picture something like that,” I said.
She made a sound, not quite vocal enough to be a chuckle. “I had my bushwhacker to her throat, Andy rigged the bomb. Level on the top. Tube with water in it, big fat bubble? Fluid is conductive, right? If the bubble moves to intersect one of the wires, the current can’t conduct, the bomb blows, and you get diabolist all over the walls and floor.”
“Telling the enemy how to defuse your bomb?”
“Not quite. I saw Andy build it, or I was in the same room watching TV while he built it, same thing, but I couldn’t defuse it if you gave me twenty tries. I’m just saying. Last I saw, other two were cornered, afraid to even get close. Rune of exile on the thing to keep it from being tampered with by other spirits, keep the boom muted. She’s shaking, trying not to shake too much, or she’ll go out with a bang. You can’t feel fear, or you don’t feel it the same way. How do you feel, hearing that?”
“Not good,” I admitted. “Angry.”
She sounded like she was enjoying herself as she spoke, “How would you feel if I told you that while we were putting the bomb on her, I watched your other friends, safe inside their circle? Every time they moved, I gave her a little tap. Right at the collarbone. She bled. She screamed lots. If it was wood and not bone, I’d have left notches. Maybe I still did.”
“If you’re trying to get me angry,” I said, my voice low, “That works.”
I heard her chuckle. Or cackle. One or both of the two.
I moved back to the window behind her.
She had the cabinet by the back door open. There were brooms and mops inside.
She spoke while she worked. “They’re all bleeding, one’s probably dead, by the way, and the other one can’t move with the bomb strapped to her. Forty minutes to half an hour, and none of that’s going to be different. The boggarts and shit come crawling in through the woodwork and they’re going to do horrible things to those people, to the Thorburns you identify with, to all the others.”
She can lie, I told myself. The self-assurance wasn’t very effective.
I watched, unbeknownst to her, while she propped two mops up against the window. She hooked an old towel from the closet over them, so it covered the shattered mini-window.
“You there?” she asked.
I had to relocate to answer from the kitchen at the end of the hall, so my nearby voice wouldn’t tip her off that I had a little window. “I’m here.”
“Are you really that much of a monster already? You don’t give a damn?”
“Believe me,” I said, “I look forward to showing you just how much of a damn I give.”
She offered me that cackle-chuckle again.
When I returned to the spot nearest her, I saw that she’d moved on from the window. Stopping the draft?
No.
She was working to set up the same thing with the window to the right, propping up brooms, not using a towel this time, but coats that had been hung up by the door. Alexis’ was one. She drew the billowing, shifting curtains over the coats.
She hit the light switches a few times. The hall light and kitchen lights alternated on and off until both were off.
I was shunted. Back to the puddle, still growing as the sink overflowed.
The end of the hallway was dark. In the gloom, the reflections might as well have been covered by fabric. I didn’t have a view of a surface I could stand on.
Damn it.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I always liked the dark more than the light.”
“Somehow,” I replied, my eyes on the ground I stood on and the kitchen that was reflected beyond it. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
“S.O.P. against any Others who are reliant on a certain environment. You deny them their environment of choice. In your case…”
She trailed off.
Looking down, I could see the kitchen ceiling below me. Water flowed, and the surface rippled as the water made waves.
A small, dark object sailed high, flying from the patch of darkness, diagonally across the kitchen, and into the living room.
I saw smoke.
My first thought was what Andy had mentioned about an incendiary grenade. Setting the house on fire.
My second thought that even Eva wasn’t that heartless. She cared about her brother, and he was on the second floor.
It was only smoke.
With the kitchen light off, the light that currently reached the reflective surface of the water was the little light that came in from the living room, the overhead light in the center of the ceiling, and the slices of light that escaped around the edges of the plywood that had been boarded up over windows.
The smoke obscured that light. A lot of it was low to the ground, maybe only waist height, if I was judging it right, but that was still high enough to block a lot of the light from the water.
I backed away before I could get shunted again.
I heard footsteps splash, and couldn’t do anything about it.
“You think you have a clever answer? The water?” she taunted me. “It doesn’t make a difference, Thorburn Bogeyman. The sun is setting, and all I need to do is cut the power, and you’re outta here!”
God damn, she was enjoying herself.
Why was it that only the really crazy types enjoyed themselves in situations like this?
I didn’t take the bait. I remained silent.
“Hello?” she asked.
I didn’t respond.
“Huh,” she said.
A second later, she was running.
It caught me off guard, and my reaction was slow.
She passed me, easily.
She leaped over the puddle of olive oil, now in the process of being diluted by water, ironically impassible to me, water mixing with oil to create a mess of small reflections instead of one big one.
She was faster than me. Or maybe she was the same speed, with the benefit of having the head start and experience.
I, however, had the opportunity to take shortcuts.
I went up.
Second floor.
Eva was cresting the top of the stairs, cradling the fire extinguisher against her body.
Hyena in hand, I cut. She, in the same moment, saw me and leaped.
The blade grazed her boot. Nothing more.
She landed on her side, squeezing the trigger on the fire extinguisher, carpeting the water at the top of the stairs, and many of the stairs besides.
I was forced downstairs.
I wasn’t sure why it was downstairs, when the closest position would have been just behind where she’d landed. I didn’t have time to think about it.
I headed upstairs, putting myself in the bathroom.
Peter was inside, sitting on the counter by the sink, feet on the lid of the toilet. One of his hands was pressed into his armpit. The shower was on, the shower head removed, and the hose leading to the shower head dangling over the edge of the tub, gushing water onto the floor outside the tub.
“Peter.”
He jumped. “Geez!”
“You’re hurt.”
“Ah, yep. Guy out there got my hand. Pretty sure I have a broken finger.”
“Guy and the girl are both out there,” I said.
“Hm.”
“She’s mucking up the water.”
“They blocked the underside of the door, too, not much water getting out,” he said. “This was as far as I could get without getting beaten up or zapped.”
“It was good,” I said. “Only a step in the right direction, but nice work.”