“I’ve got people to look after.”
“So? Do something, then,” he said.
I couldn’t understand how she even had to think about it. That such a line of thinking was even possible. Self preservation, yes, but she was trying to rationalize her way through this. Invent some way through it.
Did she expect us all to tell her she should hang back? We’d handle it on our own?
She had, I suspected, spent the entirety of her life with someone else available and ready to take the fall for her or cover for her. Where others might have gotten spoiled or indolent, Kathryn had flourished under the combination of Uncle Paul and Aunt Steph and found some ambition. She had a desire to be something more from Uncle Paul, knowledge on how to game the system from Aunt Steph, and unlike Callan, Kathryn hadn’t suffered the crushing disappointment of realizing she might never inherit the house. She’d found her own path. A path with a lot of victims and scapegoats left in her wake, but a path nonetheless.
This, right here, was Kathryn in a situation that was utterly alien to her. The murder-reaper-thing, the clockwork man, the homonculi, a hallway drenched in blood and a long-lost cousin in a mirror weren’t the things she was having a hard time dealing with.
I suspected it had more to do with the fact that she was, for maybe the first time in her life, the only one truly accountable for her actions and their consequences.
More homonculi slipped into the room. Kathryn swung the chair, striking two, and the remainder backed away, unwilling to venture further.
There was a larger crowd outside.
“Do something!” she cried out. I wasn’t sure who she was saying it to. Everyone was already doing something, or were too injured or incapacitated to. Unless she wanted Roxanne and Christoff to leap into the fight.
What she was saying didn’t matter so much as why. Why was she demanding help? Because she just couldn’t compute that this was on her.
Damn it, I hated my family.
“Go, Kathryn!” I said. “Just go!”
She moved. Failure to compute or not, she’d been on the verge of action, and my words propelled her forward.
With the sound of her footsteps, the reaper-thing turned, arm raising. Green Eyes used her tail to try and bind the arm down, as if she was tying the skeleton thing down. One more contortion among many that kept her on the offensive, her full body weight piled on it without making it so much as bend, doing her best to stay out of the way of those twin scythes. Even as she worked to entwine it, the reaper still twisted its arm around, upper arm pressed against its body, the bit past the elbow jutting out. It walked toward Kathryn, spike of bone sticking forth.
Peter threw a tome at it, striking it in the back of the head. Same mistake that Green Eyes had made, trying to fight it or bite. It didn’t function along those lines. It didn’t have flesh to wound. The only hurt that probably mattered was a bone-breaking level of hurt.
Even if he’d hoped to only distract it, it was a futile gesture. It wasn’t human, and it wasn’t bogeyman. It operated under different rules. Seek out one target, dispatch. I wasn’t sure how it defined what qualified as a target, but it seemed to like going after people, especially moving people.
I could see how close the fully-pinned-down arm was from the end of Green Eyes’ tail.
“Green Eyes!” I said. “Back!”
She flung herself back, more snake than fish, and the force of the movement did serve to put the reaper off balance.
It was the distraction Kathryn needed to run past Tiff and Alexis, still holding the bookcase, and reach the automaton.
The old wooden chair crashed into the automaton’s legs.
The legs didn’t budge.
A man made of metal, it seemed, was pretty damn dense.
Where Kathryn’s strategy differed from Callan’s however, was that she wasn’t aiming to just hit the thing.
The chair remained where it was. Gears and moving parts at the joints caught on the cross-shaped piece of wood that the individual wheels were attached to. Something hitched, and the metal man’s leg jerked. It took a step back with the one leg, repositioning.
The reaper drew its arm back, its attention on Kathryn.
“Kathryn!” I shouted.
She turned to look, and belatedly brought the chair up. It was a miracle more than anything that kept her from getting stabbed – the back of the chair she was holding caught the bone spike that was being stabbed at her, and by bringing up the rest of the chair, she knocked away the thing’s arm with the seat.
I could see the fear in her eyes.
Trust your instincts, I thought.
If nothing else, we Thorburns had a streak of stubbornness running through us.
She swung the chair at the reaper, and the legs caught in the spaces between the reaper’s bones.
But the arms weren’t bound anymore, and the thing could easily reach around the chair to attack Kathryn.
She pulled away, backing up, and the reaper decided to hit the old wooden chair instead, cleaving the seat from the section with the wheels.
It said a lot about just how shitty the homonculi were in a fight that Ty, Alexis and Tiff were fending them off pretty damn well with periodic kicks, while still holding the bookcase-doors in place. So long as they kept their weight against the shelves, the automaton was frozen, unable to reposition itself.
Green Eyes approached the reaper, but it wheeled on her, no pun intended, and she stopped where she was. Using her tail, she knocked the seat of the chair in Kathryn’s general direction.
She did the same thing she’d done before. The seat of the chair was shoved into the clockwork man’s knee, and moving parts caught the wood. The already damaged wood splintered, breaking, and was swept up in the mechanisms.
Unlike the prior leg, this one simply moved back as far as it would go, unresponsive.
Losing its grip, it moved its other leg forward.
The leg jerked.
Callan’s hand gripped the heel, keeping it from moving forward.
He couldn’t possibly be alive. Not for much longer, anyway.
He’d grabbed it earlier, and held it even now.
Kathryn brought the chair down on the clockwork man’s arm, and the entire clockwork man went down, collapsing. The library doors moved along their rollers, shutting as yet other Others tried to push forward, making their way over fallen bodies and swarming homonculi.
I could make out the click as the doors shut.
I could hear the pounding and scratching as the Others tore at the bookcases.
The defenses weren’t just physical, though. I couldn’t enter, and the doors had held up to even the smiting of a god, when the defenses across the rest of the house had failed to.
But that was a sword that cut two ways. The things battering on the door took any number of forms, and some, invariably, could be forms that could break into the library. If the library was a section of folded space, there were attackers that didn’t care about space to begin with. It was only a matter of time before they made their way into the library.
Or, as I noted the reaper’s presence, they could break out, and let others inside in the process.
Looking up at the second tier of the library, I could see Eva at the railing. She was standing by her brother, who was still limp, leaning over, apparently content to watch.
With the section of floor ringing us above, it was like we were in a gladiatorial arena, all of us against the monster, me trapped in the mirror, the rest in various states of injury, awe, or confusion.