They weren’t implications I could wrap my head around, but the general sentiment was clear.
I’d done more harm to our relationship than good, confessing that much. A breach of trust that I might never recover entirely from.
“I guess I’m next?” Tiff broke the silence. Ty shrugged.
“Sure,” I said.
“I studied some divination, mainly because I studied a lot of the defensive stuff,” she said. “I’ve always been pretty lame.”
“Passive,” Alexis said. “We were working on that before all this started.”
Tiff shrugged. “Passive. Focusing on the protection stuff seemed like the thing to do. Figure out what they’re going to do by telling the future or remote-viewing them and prevent it. Keep things intact and let Rose be the heavy hitter.”
I nodded.
Her voice was quiet. “If we’re going to set fire to the house and try to draw them out, I can do a reading. It might give us better odds if I do it right. But I agree with Alexis. I don’t know if you’re saying we should do this because it’s you or if it’s the… less pleasant things inside you that are saying it.”
“Less pleasant?”
“You were sent to the Abyss, and that’s why Rose was able to take your place. You were supposed to die, but you didn’t. You came back…”
“You don’t have to be nice, Tiff,” I said.
“Dirty. Darker. I- I-” She stuttered, obviously uncomfortable with the number of eyes on her. She made a conscious effort to get her thoughts in order. “-don’t know how you were before, but you’re a little twisted now. Your arms bend funny inside the sleeves of your sweatshirt, and there are places I can see through the branches that are covering you, and I just see…”
“Darkness,” Ty said.
Tiff nodded. “You brought a bit of that place with you. And maybe that place wants you to burn the house because it’s a place that chews things up and it wants to chew up this world too.”
“You’ve done your reading,” I said.
“Yeah. Rose has summoned a lot of bogeymen. I wanted to know how to deal if another one of them went wrong.”
I nodded.
“So… I guess if I have to finish saying my thing… maybe we should let the others chime in. If the fire seems like a good idea, without your saying anything to make it happen, then maybe we do it.”
She shrugged, obviously unhappy with the compromise.
I wasn’t too happy with it either, but I could shut my mouth and let the others have their say.
“Alexis and Tiff think you’re the problem,” Ty said. He was holding one of the nails with tags attached – the ones jammed into the mountain man hadn’t done anything. “I’m just not sure it’s a good idea. How do we fight past that group outside the doors? How do we start the fires?”
“Ahem,” Evan said.
“More importantly,” Ty said, “how do we put it out?”
“We could decide on the plan and then work out the details,” I said.
“We could,” he said, “But should we? I’ve had moments where I had to wonder whether I should move forward with a project or abandon it.”
“Shitty tags that didn’t do anything are a clue you should abandon more shit,” Eva commented.
“Probably,” he said. “Wasn’t talking about the magic. There’s stuff in the books we haven’t read yet. If we get everyone reading, we could come up with something, a summoning, or a ward…”
“That you haven’t found and bookmarked in the last few weeks?” I asked.
“Found, bookmarked, summoned and lost,” Tiff said. “We burned a few bridges, just trying to get by. Others that can only be summoned once every so often, because the Abyss holds on too hard.”
I nodded. I felt a little uneasy talking about just how short the collective resources here were getting, with Eva listening.
“There’s not a lot,” Ty said. “But it beats the alternative.”
“What’s the alternative?” Peter asked.
Ty shook his head, “Ask if you’ve gotta ask, but ask on your turn. Let me finish. Blake, I’m willing to be convinced, but if everyone’s getting their say, it’s going to take a while. I don’t think we have that long.”
“Like Peter said before, about pressure and lack of time messing with your ability to think critically,” I said.
“Goes both ways,” Ty said. “It might be affecting you as much as it’s affecting me.”
“Yeah,” I answered.
Ty shrugged.
“My turn?” Evan asked.
“I suppose it is,” I said.
“I should have had my turn before, you know. Because I was your familiar before Alexis and Tiff and Ty did the ritual.”
“Yeah,” I said, “You were one of the first to get clued in, but Alexis knew about the general family circumstances before, and… yeah.”
“Technically,” the witch hunter said, “I’m the most senior one here. I’ve known about how fucked up the Thorburns were since I was four.”
Alexis spoke in a low voice. “Technically, I don’t expect you to have anything to add. You’re just a problem, until there’s something to be killed.”
“Story of my life,” the witch hunter said, sounding far too casual. With a little more bite in her tone, she added, “Hurry up so I can unpoison my brother.”
“Okay,” Evan said. “Right. Ahem. So.”
“So,” I said, echoing him for the benefit of those who couldn’t hear him.
“Fire. Awesome.”
“Fire, awesome. I think I see where you’re going with this,” I said.
“Ty was saying we need strategy. So… we gotta get out of here, right?”
Not where I’d anticipated him going.
“We do need out of here. That would be step one.”
“We open the door and there’s a buttload of monsters out there.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The monsters pose a problem.”
“And we want to come back. Because we gotta go somewhere after the fire is started, and if we leave the house, we’re not going to do very well. This-”
“This library is our starting point and our ending point,” I said. “Nowhere else to go, as sanctuaries work out.”
“With monsters filling the space between here and the far side of the house. In the hallways.”
“Yeah.”
“Rooftop,” he said.
“Rooftop?”
“I’ve flown over this house a bunch of times. I know how the outside is. Instead of going through the hallway, down the stairs, all the way to the ground floor, then alllll the way to the back hallway, we go out, then duck right. Out the window, or through the bedroom and out the bedroom window, then we’re on the roof.”
“There are gargoyle-things outside,” Ty said.
“But probably less than there are things inside!” Evan said.
“True.”
“Sum up?” Peter asked.
“If we decided to start a fire, we could head out a window and make a break for it along the roof.”
“Slick,” Peter said.
“Snow could help or it could hurt,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Would we even make it to the window?”