One momentary look, a meeting of eyes, eyes glittering with righteous anger, and she slammed the plunger down.
Eva kicked my cousin hard in the face.
“What was it!?”
“Save him!”
“What was it!?” Eva kicked Ellie again.
But Ellie had been to juvie and she’d been to prison, and she’d been the omega there too. A thief, living on the bottom rung. She was… easy to hate. She’d taken beatings there too.
She wouldn’t break with this much.
“Save him,” she said, her voice in a different tone.
Rather than take the ladder, Eva leaped down, landing two paces behind the Bane.
Peter had opened a cabinet door and was using it as a meager shield.
Eva staked the thing through the back.
It crumbled into its constituent parts. I saw a wisp of something person-shaped flow out of the base of the stake.
“There,” Eva said, standing back. She turned to glare at us. “Done. Now you’re going to tell me what you gave him, or I’m going to kill you. If you gave him drugs-”
“Poison,” Ellie said. “There’s stuff in the cupboards. I grabbed some while we were in here. I filled the syringes.”
I glanced at our resident sparrow.
“She was rummaging. She did something in the cupboards, until I told her she might let a monster out,” Evan said.
I nodded.
“Fuck,” Eva said. “Poison isn’t some magical shit where you give the antidote and he gets all better. If he’s dying and something is getting to him…”
“You’re going to help for the next few hours,” Ellie said, gripping the bars of the railing, her face pressed between them, glaring down. “You’re going to have to trust us.”
“Trust you?” Eva asked, looking around. “You’re some of the saddest, most disgusting excuses for humans I’ve ever met.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed.
Fuck, we were sad. We were disgusting. But Callan’s dying action, and Ellie stepping in to save her brother…
“Thanks,” Peter said, looking up at his sister.
“Don’t,” she spat the word. “Don’t you dare. When this is done, I’m going to hit you five times for every time she’s hit me.”
“Sure, Ellie,” Peter said, smiling.
The pounding and the scratching continued on the doors, upstairs and downstairs both. I could see dust fall from the edges of the shelves, and I wasn’t sure that there weren’t cracks on the backs of the bookshelf doors that hadn’t been there before.
They would find their way inside.
Worse, I wasn’t sure what the Thorburns would do if they stayed cooped up here. Kathryn, Christoff and Roxanne were all glancing around the room. Ellie was focused on us – she’d already looked around.
Peter, the idiot, was using the edge of his sweatshirt to hold the fallen scythe-bone from the Bane.
Evan landed on the corner of the desk beside me.
“Sorry,” he said. “Letting them in-”
“Was smart,” I finished for him. “It’s good. We’re mostly safe. Except for Callan.”
Christoff’s eyes went to the floor.
“These doors won’t hold,” I said, mainly to distract the remaining Thorburns from looking too intently at the books and trinkets around us.
“No,” Alexis said. “Tiff, you’re the best one at the protective stuff. Can you do something?”
Tiff nodded.
“We need a plan,” I said.
“I’m open to hearing any plans,” Ty said.
“If this continues, we’ll have only one place to go,” I said. “The fourth floor, maybe.”
“That’s the worst idea I’ve heard out of your mouth,” Alexis said.
“I know,” I said. “But I’m about to trump it.”
“Oh boy,” Peter said. “This should be good.”
I was thinking of the number of times that fire had been referenced since we’d come inside. Eva and her incendiary grenade, Alexis and her Ofuda.
The trick was figuring out how to phrase the plan so I didn’t sound like a complete lunatic.
A good minute passed, while I turned the words over in my head.
No good way to phrase it.
Leaving me no choice but to tell them, knowing I sounded utterly insane.
12.04
“I’m thinking we should start a fire in or near the house,” I explained.
I studied the expressions on their faces. Concern was a pretty big one.
“That sounds like a bad idea,” Green Eyes said. She had crawled part of the way up the desk, using one hand to prop up her upper body, and the fingernails of her other hand to comb gore out of her hair.
“Start a fire in the house… while we’re in it?” Ty said.
“Just enough of a fire that they notice,” I answered.
“Not even a small fire, then,” he said. “Not a table or a piece of furniture.”