Rose glanced at me. I nodded.
“I so swear that we have no intention of summoning anything of the nature you’re talking about,” Rose said.
“Then promise you’ll protect me when and where you’re able, using the knowledge and tools you’ve got,” Maggie said. “I’ll settle for that.”
Vague. I wouldn’t have settled for that sort of protection.
I was too tired to look up, so I only gave a thumbs up.
“Should the deal go through, I promise that will be the case,” Rose said, again.
“Good enough for me. Yeah. That sounds pretty good. Is a verbal contract okay?”
“No,” I said.
“No?” Maggie asked.
“No,” I repeated myself. “No verbal contract. We can hash it out in writing.”
“Written contract. Isn’t that more dangerous? Room for traps and loopholes?” Maggie asked.
“Not if we keep it simple,” I said. “Which we can. After I get a good night’s sleep and talk things over with Rose. But the interior of my skull is feeling a bit slow, I’m tired, and I’m not focused. Tomorrow, or the day after.”
Maggie groaned, flopping back in her chair. “Yeah. Except it never works out that smoothly.”
“I don’t think anything is going to change in the next day or two,” Rose said. “I’m sorry, but I sort of agree with Blake. We should be careful and deliberate in anything we do.”
“You don’t think anything is going to change. What? You want a chance to spy on me? Run a background check on the local?”
“Are we going to start fighting?” Rose asked. “Because that’s a bad sign, if we descend into animosity so readily.”
“Animosity?” I asked. “Readily?”
“I’ve been reading too many of these old books,” Rose said.
“I don’t want to be animostic,” Maggie said. “I just want power. And everyone’s keeping it to themselves and making me pay out of the nose for it. I get teased with it, and it never gets delivered in full. Padraic, the North End Sorcerer…”
“Dangerous guys to be associating with,” I said.
Maggie was up and out of her seat in an instant. “I don’t have a choice!”
Wrong thing to say, wrong time. I hadn’t realized how upset she was, how its barely restrained.
“Not if I want to do something! And I don’t not want to do something because I did that when I had to watch my old neighborhood go up in blood and fire!”
“Calm down,” Rose said.
Maggie switched to a more sarcastic tone. “Oh, yeah, How often does that work? Tell someone to calm down and they chill out?”
“I don’t know,” Rose said. “But I think, given that this is Blake’s house, and he can ask you to leave at any time, and we do want to work with you, we’ll all be happier if this conversation doesn’t escalate into something ugly.”
Maggie deflated a little. “Crumbs.”
“Well put,” I said. “Do me a favor? Take a minute, we can enjoy a bit of silence, I’ll try not to fall asleep, and we start again when we all have our thoughts in order?”
“I gotta head to school in a few minutes,” Maggie said. “Don’t have a lot of time.”
“Please?” I asked.
“I’m really not a patient type, but sure.”
“Thank you,” Rose murmured.
Maggie collapsed into her chair. I took my time getting up, cleaning off the plate and putting it away in the drying rack.
I debated coffee, checking the tin. Just enough grounds to tantalize me with the possibility, but leave me short of a decent brew.
I settled for tap water, instead, and felt suitably depressed over it.
I set a glass in front of Maggie before taking my spot on the couch.
“Cool?” I asked.
“I’m alright.”
“Alright,” I said. “You understand that we have to be careful?”
“Yeah. And… I did use the moment of silence to think. As apology for my outburst, and maybe a bit of incentive to get you on board…”
She reached behind her back, and she put a piece of intricately folded paper on the table. She used a flick of her index finger to send it sliding across the table.
I didn’t touch it. “What is it?”
“One tidbit I was able to pick up these past few months was about Eastern styles. India, some of Japan. See, they aren’t big on familiars and implements and demesnes. Well, the Western-influenced ones are. But they prefer to remain hands off, delineate pretty severely. Their preference is to contain, bind, leash.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We walk around with the metaphorical equivalent of a canine companion. They work with us, they help us hunt or they get our food, they get the benefits of cozy mortal living, we get the benefit of their talents. In the East, in the places I’m talking about, they prefer to leash the things. They tie their dogs to trees. Or keep them behind fences. You get my meaning?”
“I think so,” I said.
“That right there is an ofuda. Your metaphorical dog in a cage, and it’s not a big dog, but it’s still a dog. It barks, it bites.”
“A goblin.”
“A little bundle of mean. He’ll come out gnashing and snarling, so point him away from you and at whoever you want to hurt.”
I picked it up. “Amassing a bit of a collection of trinkets today. Hatchet with a ghost inside, a lock of a faerie’s hair, now this.”
“Yeah?”
I had to stand to move my sweatshirt and draw the hatchet from where I’d jammed the handle in by my hip. I needed a better way of holding it close to me.
I put it on the table beside the slip of paper. Still standing, I removed the lock of hair from my back pocket. It was only after I’d withdrawn it that I realized I’d managed to get it all in and out of my pocket without losing any. If it had been my hair, I’d be finding hair in my back pocket for weeks.
“May I see the axe?” Maggie asked.
“Look, but don’t touch,” I said. “And it’s a hatchet, not an axe.”
“Semantics.”
“Do you not live in this world?” Rose asked. “Semantics are important.”
The phrasing made me think of Paige.
God damn, I needed to interact with a familiar face so badly right now. Heck, even an unfamiliar face… it would make a world of difference to ground me, to give me a solid injection of reality and sanity.
“Admittedly true,” Maggie was saying. “They are important. And people who argue over semantics are still a pain in the bum.”
“You’ve got to explain how you lost the ability to swear,” Rose said.
“I don’t got to do anything,” Maggie said. “Unless we arrange that deal, and you agree that tidbit of knowledge is worth the loan of a book.”
I could follow the conversation, but wasn’t quite feeling up to joining in. I looked at the piece of folded paper with letters scrawled on it in ink, then slipped it into the little mini-pocket of my right jeans pocket.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Gotcha,” Rose said. To Maggie, she said, “That sets a bad precedent. You’ll be more inclined to hold details back just so you can sell them to us.”