Not strong, by the look of them. Strong Others would have plowed through it.
Yet something about them told me they weren’t practitioners. It was as if their breath didn’t fog in the cold winter air, except their breath did. As if there was a clue I was missing.
As they descended from the top of the hill and we climbed from the bottom, it looked like we’d meet halfway.
“Okay,” Evan said. “Instead of that, why don’t we all survive and avoid the crazy stuff? Because I think you’re great, and I like Green Eyes too, and I like the other guys and what’s the point of running away if I’m not going to be around all the people I like?”
“You’re a survivor,” I said. “You survived the Hyena. I want you to survive this, too.”
“Uh huh, and what happens if I’m all alone, huh? I’m falling apart and I’ve been dying since just after Christmas. I need Ty and Alexis and Tiff and Rose if I’m going to get the spirits stuck in me to keep me going, and I need you to help me figure out a way to stop needing the spirits, since you know the full story.”
“And me?” Green Eyes asked.
“I need you to, uh, tell me how great I am.”
“I can do that,” Green Eyes said. “I’d be very eager to find out just how good you are.”
“Great! See, Blake? So cheer up. I need you and you need us and we need each other and we’re good. But we gotta get through this okay. And I’m saying okay only because I’m not sure how alive some of us are anymore. But we gotta get through this.”
I didn’t have a good refutation for his argument. We were only a fifth of the way up the hill. The women toward the top had stopped, apparently deciding it was too much hassle to come after us, when we were ascending.
“What’s the long-term plan, Evan?” I asked, changing the subject and hoping he’d let up on the pressure. I was accepting that he was with me through thick or through thin, here.
“Long-term plan?”
“When we’re done?”
“Oh. Like you were saying back there.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got some video games to finish with Ty, and I obviously want to work with the others and get myself fixed so I’m not falling apart anymore, and I want to have a moment of ultimate power so I can shove it in people’s faces when they groaned and moaned at me for bringing it up. Besides, you and me are supposed to go monster hunting, right?”
“Yeah, that was the plan,” I said. “Stop the worst of the monsters, if we can.”
“Right.”
“Everything you just mentioned, you need others around. What if some of us don’t make it?” I asked.
“Then that sucks monkey beans. Ruins my plans. We’ve all got to make it. Which was my whole point, before. We’ve got to make it, and that means you, too.”
“But what if some of us don’t make it? Hypothetically? What do you do?”
“Fly until I can’t fly anymore,” he said. “I’d want to ride a motorcycle again, but I dunno if that’s possible. But, but but but, I can fly and maybe ride motorcycles if everyone does make it, right? So that’s best. Let’s aim for that.”
Fly, ride motorcycles, everyone lives.
“Hey Green Eyes.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really lucky I met this bird, here.”
“Damn right,” the bird said.
“Sounds right,” Green Eyes said.
“He’s starting to convince me not to do the headlong rush.”
“I’ll do what you want to do,” she said, looking up. “But I’d rather make it through this. I really don’t want to go back.”
“The headlong rush is easy,” I said, and raw violence would go a long way towards settling the unease I feel deep inside. Or distract from it, anyway. “…If we’re all going to prioritize survival, that’s hard.”
There was no reply. Evan was flying, and Green Eyes didn’t have anything to volunteer.
“I’m not good at planning,” I said, but the words felt like they were more for myself.
Rose and I were two parts of a greater puzzle. Two flawed, incomplete people. We’d both, in our ways, filled in the gaps. Made ourselves more complete in different ways. Rose had Conquest, and I had… this. Ideas, symbols, spirits.
Take away the magical stuff, like the Drains had shown me when Eva had attacked me and cast me down into the dark space below the basement, and I was only a part of a man. Whole sections missing. Other sections damaged by things that had happened since all of this began.
If I didn’t cling to the monster…
We were drawing nearer to the three women.
“What about you, Green?” Evan asked, perching on my shoulder. “What’s your big goal?”
“The warmth of food in my belly. Being safe.”
“But that’s a now goal. What about tomorrow? Blake was just saying we shouldn’t be constrained in our thinking, right?”
Not up to talking, still trying to think of how to approach this situation, I only nodded.
“Warm food inside me, not having to worry, maybe talking with friends or watching television.”
“You gotta think bigger.”
“You mean your ‘blaze of glory’ sort of big?”
“Yeah!”
Green Eyes changed how she was moving through the snow. She was a bit ahead, and rather than crawl, elbows bent, she walked forward with her arms extended straight down, dragging her lower body behind her. She was a little slower, but not so much that she’d fall well behind in a minute. “I’m not like that. Can’t remember what I was before, but I don’t think I ever had dreams. I would’ve held on to them. It was always about getting through the day. Then, in the dark waters, it was about getting through the hour. Every hour.”
“But you can change.”
“I have. I will. But I’ll probably always be okay with having clean water, company, and food that’s warm and panicked. That’s good enough.”
“Is it?” the woman at the center of the three asked. “Think carefully about where you’re getting your food.”
Still holding the Hyena, I spread my arms. The universal gesture of nonaggression. Green Eyes, for her part, relaxed her arms, dropping into the snow, only barely peering above it.
“Whose are you?” the lead woman asked me. She looked like a Japanese student.
Not who, but whose.
“My own,” I said.
“You’re not wanted here,” she said. “Not by us.”
I knew for a fact that neutral parties had been a part of the attack on the house.
“You’re probably right. We’re here all the same.”
“Some of those present,” she said, “Appear to be territorial. Go around to the front door, it’s better.”
Trying to get rid of us?
I had to wonder why.
“I became what I am, right here, because I didn’t want to do what others told me,” I said. “I have to walk my own path. Right now, you’re standing on that path.”
She moved her hands at her sides, not raising her arms, only bending her wrists.