12.07
Visions of violence danced through my head as I donned my armor, so to speak. Being slapped by my dad. Carl. Smashing Letita with the rusty pipe. Fighting the Shepherd. Fighting Conquest. Hacking at Duncan’s arms. Killing Laird. The fight in the hallway. Tearing my heart out of my chest. In the darkness between visions, I saw Ur.
It was a mess, disconnected, disparate thoughts, and noise.
Do this, the thoughts seemed to promise, and it would all start to make sense. The jumble would start to be something that pointed to a conclusion. A reality that made sense, if only to a me that thought about those sorts of things.
Another part of me almost wanted Alexis to come up behind me, grabbing me, stopping me.
They’d been a big part of why I’d even bothered to fight my way out of the Drains. Why I’d let go of my humanity, and admitted my existence as a Vestige. Faced down Carl.
For what? To have them turn around and plot behind my back.
It made sense. I didn’t agree with it, I didn’t like it, but it made sense. Deciding what they decided. Doing what they did.
Yet there was a small, tiny, diminished part of me that craved for them to do something that didn’t make sense. To come after me.
That part of me was soon drowned out by the noise. I could see the house, and I could visualize the Barber, as I’d seen him in the corner of my vision.
The shears, which he had used to carve a man up, producing Rose the heir and Blake the custodian.
I wondered what our name had been, before.
I started to zip my sweatshirt up partway, found what remained of the zipper so ruined as to be useless, and tore away the zipper instead, leaving only the cloth, my chest and stomach exposed to the cold. The fabric of the sweatshirt had been wool, but stuff of the Drains and the Abyss and the blood of a number of homunculi and other creatures caked it, long since dried and frozen. A part of me suspected it could have withstood a knife thrust without giving way.
My pants weren’t in much better condition. Where the damp snow touched the fabric of the pants leg, the snow came away darker, like the gray slush on a city street, after snow and ice had mingled with crud from the road and tires. The pants didn’t get cleaner in the process.
We were halfway up the hill to the back of the house when Green Eyes handed me the Hyena.
Half-buried in the snow, she didn’t look much like a mermaid. Snow clung to her hair, and her skin was a pale white-blue, masking how transparent it looked. As I took the Hyena, she ducked beneath the snow, traveling four feet before emerging again, slightly ahead of me. Her eyes flashed as she looked around. Pale hair, pale skin, pale snow. She was hard to make out.
“Hurts to hold, especially when I’m crawling on my hands,” she said, even though I hadn’t asked a question.
“Thanks for bringing it this far,” I said.
It was easier, putting the others behind me. I felt a tension in my new body ease, and I’d barely recognized it had been there.
The anger, too, was there. Tearing myself to pieces and plucking my still-moving heart out of my chest hadn’t done anything to abate it, either. An effect of being what I was, quite probably.
My thoughts were a scattered black noise when they even touched on the subject of my friends. Staying focused on the now helped. What I was wearing, and what I was capable of.
We didn’t slow. Green Eyes kept up her forward progress, I walked, taking long strides, and Evan flew from branch to branch, stopping to let us catch up.
Three Others on the hill had noticed us. Not the worst thing in the world. There were easily twelve to fifteen Others in the backyard, and in approaching from a direction they weren’t expecting, we had time to cover ground. The three that had noticed weren’t shouting warnings or reacting. It was very possible that they didn’t recognize us as the people from inside the house.
Three women, in various winter clothes, much like a college girl would wear. Jackets, tight-fitting yoga pants, and those boots with fur at the top. Two were Asian, the third white, and the only unusual thing was the heavy ornamentation around the neck. Chokers, loops of jewelry…
“Okay, since nobody else is asking, what’s the plan?” Evan asked.
“Grab the box with the log stacked up inside it, drag it away from the house, and set it on fire,” I said. “Then we run before everything in the house comes after us.”
“I meant for dealing with them.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
“I can see right now,” he said. “Birds have great eyes, for reals. We’re outnumbered. A lot outnumbered.”
“Very outnumbered,” Green Eyes said. I wasn’t sure if she was agreeing or correcting him.
“A lot outnumbered,” he said, apparently deciding that she was correcting him. “Outnumbered enough that you gotta be grammatically wrong to say how bad it is. Like holy angel poop we so dead outnumbered.”
“You don’t have to fight,” I told him. “You’ve done good tonight.”
“I want to do more good. I gotta act my most awesome, and the spirits can recognize it and make me more awesome. I’ve already worked it out. I gotta be honest and true to myself and I have a game plan that I’ve declared a lot of times. I gotta stick to the plan and the spirits will reward me with sweet, sweet karma.”
“You’ve ‘gotta’ be alive to do it,” I said. “Green Eyes and I can theoretically come back. I’m not sure you can. You can help without putting yourself in danger.”
The three female Others were heading down the slope of the hill, picking their steps carefully in snow that ranged from mid-calf to knee height.