“Okay,” I said. “And you’re afraid it’s going to flow to me?”
“No,” Rose said. “I’m concerned about how you’ll react if the human parts of you flow to me, and all that’s left on your end is an apparently murderous bogeyman with a hate-on for me.”
“The alternative is that you could cooperate with me. Listen to me.”
“Or you listen to me,” she said. “I’m the original. The heart, the soul, the core. The books were pretty unambiguous. I checked multiple texts. Go back to the basics, the raw stuff of humans and humankind, birth and death, and you’ll find it starts with the woman, ends with the woman. Cut away and you’ll wind up with a female at the heart of it.”
“Maybe,” I said, remembering her saying something very similar in my vision in the Tenements. Her arrogance was grating, and it was making me feel agitated again. I had to be very deliberate as I spoke, to keep my tone under control, “But I’m not sure that means what you think it means.”
“We were someone, and that person is gone now, never to be whole again, because that’s the issue with demons.”
“Yep. They destroy. Even the worst Others out there, what they do is just a change of states,” I said. “Pretty much everything non-demon is in agreement that it’s a very bad thing in the long run: what a demon destroys is forever broken.”
“I get chills when you phrase it like that,” Alister said.
“I don’t know who we were,” Rose said, “But she would have-”
“He,” I cut in.
Rose frowned at me.
“Common sense,” I told her. I plucked at the fabric of my sweatshirt. It had an importance, and I’d just realized what it was. It was even possible that the Drains had made sure to give it to me, because of that. “The guy had an apartment, a bike, clothes. You’re wearing grandmother’s hand-me-downs. What makes more sense? Girl gets cut in two, universe rearranges itself, and her clothes became a guy’s clothes, somehow-”
“A demon or a spell could have done it.”
“Add or remove demons as needed,” I said. “Or, second option, we were a guy in the first place. The simplest answer is often the correct one.”
“Names,” Rose said. “Names hold more weight. Names are fucking important, when you look at what happened to Mags. Why would Ivy be called Ivy? If we were a guy, then she’d be Rose. For the same reason I-”
“Ross,” I said, the moment the thought came to me.
I saw Rose’s mouth open and close.
I saw a crack in her facade. A moment of true concern. Almost a kind of fear.
A part of me wanted to capitalize on it. A screaming, angry part that remembered how she’d turned my friends against me, made this so much more complicated, out of fear and arrogance.
Kill her while she’s off guard.
Alister seemed to recognize her distress, and the knight’s lance was suddenly pressed more firmly against my throat, threatening, warning. The angry thoughts went quiet all of a sudden, as that simple touch brought me back to reality.
I noticed that Alister hadn’t even moved or spoken, yet the clockwork knight had obeyed.
I spoke, calm, “We were probably Ross, or Russ, or Russel, or something that was the male equivalent of Rose. Mom and dad wouldn’t name their second kid Rose, if they’d already named their firstborn something equivalent. They aren’t that tacky.”
A part of me didn’t want to enjoy seeing Rose put on her heels. Realizing just how egocentric she’d been. She’d been arrogant, because she’d been made that way. She’d jumped to conclusions and she’d acted on them, and I couldn’t fault her for that any more than she should fault me for being an incomplete human.
“We were a guy, and we were cut in half. And the feminine side, the heart, the soul, they went to you, whatever a heart and soul are without friends. You got the name. I got… blackness, or white, or whatever you use to represent nothingness, maybe. I got the trauma, the defining experiences, the desire to fight, and you got… ambition and attachment to family. Your memories of high school are probably fuzzy, and pretty damn empty, because reality had to stretch what you had to fill in the blanks.”
“Blake…” she started.
I waited for her to finish, but she didn’t.
“I’m not denying that you might have the heart, the soul, the core, or whatever. I’m definitely not denying that you got the name, or something damn close to it. I don’t, however, think you’re a shoe-in to win any tug-of-wars. I’m not trying to be hostile as I say it, but I’ve got an awful lot of important memories. Unpleasant ones, but we were just talking about traction. Connections forming. Years of homelessness, intense emotional turmoil, being in a cult, Carl… Alexis. Our friends. That adds up to a lot of traction. I’m not sure what the barber left you, that weighs on your side of the scale.”
I left the last bit unsaid. The conclusion to my argument.
Rose had been left as a blank slate. Only the parts grandmother needed and wanted in an heir were kept.
From the look in her eyes, she knew.
I glanced at Alister, who was standing just a bit to Rose’s right.
Maybe it was bad to air all this in front of a potential enemy.
But there were no good times. It was the reality of our existence, if I waited until things were calm and everything was right, I’d never have a chance to speak frankly with Rose.
Putting it all out there, even though I knew it put me in a worse spot. Rose knew I knew, now, and that made her more frightened of me.
“Don’t mind me,” Alister commented.
“I don’t,” I said. “Not too much, anyway. Your thing might be holding a lance to my throat, but you’re giving me and Rose a chance to talk.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good thing,” Alister said, glancing at Rose. “My fiancée doesn’t look happy.”
“I’m not,” Rose said. “But I don’t think I’m going to be happy until all of this is over, if we even make it through this.”
“That sounds like an excellent change of topic,” Alister said. “This. The discussion has been an eye opener, but you did try to kill poor old Will over there, and you were going to maim me not so long ago, and all signs point to things between you and my fiancée ending in tears. The house is burning, and we’ve got you at, er, lancepoint.”