“No guarantee,” Ty said. “And those gargoyle shits were vicious. Just saying.”
It’s not the answer.
“Food for thought,” I said. “Thank you, Evan.”
“Is it worth a brownie point?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Because I’m saving up my brownie points, to call in a favor,” he said. “I want-”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
My eyes fell on the Other who was sitting with Evan.
“Me?” Green Eyes asked.
“Thoughts?”
“Um.”
“No pressure,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’ll help. But if things go bad, and I get killed, I’ll probably wind up back at the Drains.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Bring me back?” she asked. “Please?”
“First real chance I get,” I said.
She nodded. “Thanks.”
That cleared up the practitioners and Others in the group.
Leaving me to deal with the Thorburns.
“Peter,” I said. “Anything to say?”
“Alternative,” he said.
“Hm?”
“Before, you mentioned an alternative. You implied it was bad.”
“Demons,” I said.
His eyebrows went up.
“Not nearly as good an idea as you’re imagining,” I said.
“Actually, I’m thinking that’s probably bad,” he said.
“I can virtually guarantee you that it’s worse than you’re thinking,” I said, thinking about Rose’s theory that demons of the first choir were the reason the universe was as empty as it was.
“Okay,” he said. “It’s bad enough that being killed like Callan was is a pleasant alternative. How much worse?”
“In December, you and I would have resembled each other. Different builds, I’m taller, but I was human, to all appearances. One demon, and it sent me to the same place that she came from.”
“Yeah,” Green Eyes said. “It’s where we met.”
“I lost everything,” I said. “My humanity, fake as it might’ve been, my home, my motorcycle, my friends, my familiar, my ability to feel properly, my identity. It… I think it hurt my friends here, took something from each of them, because affecting me was enough to affect them too, as collateral damage, by association.”
I was careful to meet each of the Thorburn’s eyes.
I had to communicate just what the danger was, here.
“You being inside a mirror, that a part of the demon or something else?”
“Little bit of column A, demon, little bit of column B, Grandmother.”
“Right,” he said.
“And the kicker?” I asked.
“There’s a kicker?”
“It didn’t get me. It almost got me, and it did all that. I was lucky. It missed, and it ruined the very fragile image of Blake Thorburn and left only Blake the Bogeyman. That demon is still alive, still active, within a kind of binding circle. It’s not even a major demon, as far as I know.”
“A not-major demon turned you into a monster. What does a major one do?”
“You’re asking too many questions,” Kathryn said.
“If this goes south,” I said, “and they enter the room on the fourth floor and look at the occupant wrong, we may well find out,” I said.
“Ah,” Peter said, with a nuance that suggested the pieces were falling into place.
I hope he doesn’t make me regret this.
Then, with with all the sarcasm he could muster, he added, “Great.”
“Kathryn,” I said.
She shook her head.
“No?”
“This is your fault. You… set this up.”
“Rose did,” I said.
“Ok, then what is Rose doing? Aside from using us as human shields and playing chicken?”
“I imagine,” I said, “That Rose is talking to people.”
Alexis added, “She’s playing chicken, she’s got to look brave. She’s got to scare the other guy.”
“Rose? Scary?” Peter asked.
“She’s read up on pretty terrifying things,” Tiff said. “Demons, bogeymen, real monsters. Stuff we couldn’t summon if we had a few months to prepare. Right now, she’s got an incarnation in her head. Conquest personified, leaking into her brain and behaviors.”
“She might not be able to back down,” I said.
I could see Alexis’ expression change as I said that. I was too aware of it.
Why? Why had she reacted?
In the interest of not using this knowledge to my gain, I looked away.
Stupid, maybe, but I wasn’t about to tell Alexis I wouldn’t use illegitimate knowledge and then turn around and read her body language.
“Head games, then,” Peter said.
I nodded. “Same way she could stay levelheaded when she was dealing with our family.”
“Wow,” I heard Roxanne mutter.
“She didn’t have a lot of time to prepare,” I said. “What I’m wondering is how much power the locals have over her. Did they have her drugged, or explicitly avoid drugging her? Could they deny her a mirror?”
“You’re thinking of paying her a visit?” Ty asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lot of things I’m thinking of. But too many start with us opening these doors, and we don’t have a lot of options once that happens. Any thoughts, Ellie?”
She shook her head.
“No comment or questions?”
She shook her head again. “This is fucked. Comment made.”
“Roxanne?” Tiff asked, talking to Roxanne like she was a normal kid. “Do you have any questions?”
“The lying thing,” Roxanne said. “That’s for real? He can’t lie?”
“I can’t either. Ty can’t either.”
“Uh huh. If I became like you, I wouldn’t be able to?”
“No.”
“Uh huh. Alright. That’s all I needed to know.”
Why did that bother me more?
“Callan,” Christoff said, the moment he’d realized it was his turn. “Can I bring him back?”
“Probably not,” Tiff said.
“Not like he was,” Alexis corrected. “There are other ways.”
“I came back, kind of!” Evan said.
“The bird mo- he came back,” Green Eyes translated from ‘can’t be heard by innocents’.
“I never left, really, but I got to live again.”
“There are ways to call spirits and put them in vessels,” Alexis said. “There’s… probably very good reasons that practitioners don’t generally bring back their loved ones.”
“But I could,” Christoff said. “If I became a wizard?”
“If you became a practitioner, maybe,” she said.
“Can I, now?”
“Not now,” she answered. “We don’t have the things needed to do the ritual.”
Christoff nodded.
Peter was rubbing his chin.
“What?” I asked.
“Seems wrong, that the dead could be brought back from being dead, but our whole problem is we’re in a bad place and we can’t get out of it. The dead can go from one circumstance to another, violating the natural laws of the universe, but we can’t get from A to B?”