He saw the relief in her.
“They’ll be as close to safe as they can get, soon enough. I’m having the family call their creatures back in a minute. I expect Johannes and Sandra will follow suit. It’ll upset their tempo. Your friends will have time. We can use that time.”
“Well,” she said, “You’re looking like a knight in shining armor, here.”
“A good portion of this was Laird,” he said, “Not me.”
He could see the surprise on her face.
“This is going to get far worse before it gets better,” he said.
“It’s… pretty damn bad.”
He held up the deck, fanning out cards. “Greek to you, I imagine, but believe me. It’s going to get a lot worse, very fast. We’ve got company.”
13.01
Rose and Alister, side by side. Behaims all around me, a clockwork knight of some sort barring my escape route.
Now I could hear the bell. It tolled in sync with the pounding movement inside my chest, my arms, my legs.
I had to move, shifting my feet, hand clenched at my side, other hand gripping the Hyena. I saw them react, tensing, securing their own footing on the snowy street.
Alister let out a long breath, a plume of cold breath in front of his face.
The bell was Working in concert with the bogeyman part of me to urge me to attack, to go all out. Solve a dozen problems at once. I could surprise Alister and Rose by lunging, moving faster than they expected, or by throwing the Hyena.
Alister was young, though. Eighteen, I was pretty sure? When I’d told the man in the ill-fitting suit he had free reign around here, I’d told him to steer clear of anyone under twenty.
It had been a spur of the moment call, but my gut feeling had been that anyone under twenty wasn’t necessarily free of their parents’ influence.
Alister, though… I had little doubt he was independent. Did my own rules apply?
Or, I thought, maybe I can stop thinking about Alister in terms of how easily I could kill him.
“Hi, Rose,” I said.
“Blake.”
“Does the armor talk, Alister?”
“No. It’s a construct.”
“Okay, that makes it simpler,” I said. “I can just greet you. Hi, Alister.”
“You could greet Will, too. He’s the guy who you just tried to murder.”
I nodded slowly, looking at the guy who I’d just cut. Time had rewound. Probably chronomancy trickery, messing with my perceptions, rather than an actual reversal of time.
“Heya, Will,” I said.
“Fuck you.”
“Right,” I said. Couldn’t blame him.
“Do me a favor, and give us some space?”
“If the council wants, we can replace you,” Will said.
“I know. I know I don’t have your full trust, but… we need privacy here.”
Will didn’t look too happy, stalking off with his mechanical soldiers. He didn’t leave so much as walk away until he was more or less out of earshot.
Many of the other Behaims were lurking nearby too. Keeping watch.
Alister let go of Rose’s hand, sticking his hands into his pockets, instead. “I should ask, Blake, is the murderous spree because things went wrong, or because they went right? Either the others are safe, or they’re gone. I can’t imagine you’d be here otherwise.”
“There’s a third possibility,” Rose said, her voice quiet. “He might not have trusted himself to be around them.”
“That wasn’t it,” I said. “Not quite.”
“I see,” she said. “Is my guess closer or further from the truth than Alister’s?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Depends how you interpret the sentence.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” she said.
Some of the Behaims were still backing off. Every set of eyes was on us. It was, if I wound up in a fight, a lot of firepower leveled my way.
“Ah, there’s a bit of pressure,” Alister said, his voice just a bit quieter than before. “They nominated me to be the guy in charge, after a hell of a lot of debating. This is my first publicly visible act as leader of the family. How do I deal with the Thorburn bogeyman, when I have the Thorburn heir at my side?”
Rose was studying me. Emotionally cold, detached, disconnected. Beneath the old fashioned coat, I could see her knee-length dress and the lace-patterned hose on her legs. Her boots had brassy buckles on the straps, with snow in some old scuff marks at the toe. She’d fixed her hair recently.
My antithesis, in a way.
“Any opinions, Rose?” Alister asked. “Have to admit, this gets a lot easier if you give me the okay.”
“If I tell you you can deal with him with extreme prejudice?”
“Yeah. That.”
She nodded.
But she didn’t give the okay.
“How is the house, Blake?” she asked.
“Flooded, there are some areas that are virtually painted in gore and bodies, holes in the floors, broken taps, the inner library was broken into, last I saw, before access was barred, which might cause further problems. Then there’s the fire, and… glancing over that way, I can tell that it’s still burning, despite the efforts of the attacking Others.”