I drummed my fingers against my leg.
I couldn’t help but think of Carl.
Carl, who I’d last seen in a nice apartment, enjoying himself as he talked to people.
Sometimes bad people slipped the noose.
Sometimes good people suffered.
“I’ll take that under consideration,” I said. Then, with more emphasis than the comment warranted, speaking to all of them, I said, “Thank you.”
“You’re really doing this?” Lola asked. “Cold blooded murder?”
“I’m not sure that you’d find blood, exactly, if you tapped one of my veins and put the fluid under a microscope,” I said.
“You should know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said. I took the paper from Joyce. I looked down at it. “Yeah.”
That said, I turned to go. I pushed the door open, stepping outside.
Did I trust them? No.
Did I trust that there weren’t any traps in here? No. The Benevolent Polygamist was the most obvious potential trap. Old enough that it wasn’t a true loss to the family if he died, and if he was as fortunate as I hadn’t been, back when I’d been custodian of the house, I could be running headlong into disaster, if I challenged him.
I mentally crossed him off the list.
“You were gone a while,” Green Eyes said, from within a snowbank. Snow partially piled on top of her, and she was largely camouflaged. Only the glow of her eyes gave her away, as I walked to a point where the light from the nearby streetlamps met the right angle, lighting the orbs up.
“If we coulda gone in after you, we woulda,” Evan said.
“I got what I needed,” I said. “A list of names.”
“What names?”
I showed him the sheet. “These names. Targets. This next part is going to be tricky. Do you two know the basics of evading Enchantment?”
■
Sandra’s camp was effectively dealing with what we’d faced at Hillsglade House, except they were outdoors, with the benefits and drawbacks of that, and they had an awful lot more people. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected the enchantresses were doing something to interfere with the attacking forces. Turning one against the other. There were points in the conflict where I wasn’t really sure about sides.
But if I had to guess, the Duchamps were winning.
Given a chance, everything defaults back to ‘normal’.
Without something to tip the balance, the Duchamps would recover. They’d fight their war with the other major powers until someone did something dramatic.
I estimated twenty to thirty Duchamps, spread across four generations, from the elderly to the young, and maybe twenty male practitioners. Exact numbers were hard for the men, as many of the Others around them were humanoid or humanish, and a good number of them were odd enough in style that they became harder to distinguish from the monsters.
The little spot by the water had a one-story building with an ice cream shop and a convenience store at the front, the signs and windows dark, as well as bathrooms and change rooms for those visiting the beach or using the park, apparently open, with practitioners using the raised walls that blocked off the view to the interior as a defensive position, defensive runes painted on the walls. Far off to the right was a stage, separated from the building by a gap and archways, and Sandra was using the elevated position to command. Most of Sandra’s contingent were standing on the raised platform that surrounded the shops, building and stage, behind the wrought railing. Sandra was on the edge of the stage, flanked by her troll and some tougher looking Others, a higher vantage point, to overlook things.
I was careful not to look too hard or too intently, especially at the women.
There. Fire. Carter. Drug dealing pyromancer. I wasn’t sure how that worked in execution, if he took out competition by burning them alive, or if he only used the pyromancy for the ‘light a joint with a burning fingertip’ gimmick, but I had trouble wrapping my head around who he was and how he functioned.
Too minor a player, yet simultaneously too dangerous for me to risk dealing with, considering the dry wood I was made of.
I didn’t fuss with looking for the brothers Stan and Eric. Yes, I had Lola’s assurance that they deserved what was coming to them, but they were minor. Not a threat.
The Spellbinder was supposed to stand alone, but I couldn’t make him out. Was it possible that he was isolated enough that he wasn’t even here? He was vulnerable enough to pick off as opportunity permitted, but going after him too early would be giving away the show, when I could pick off someone who was networked, before the Enchantress network started working against me.
That left two options.
The valkyrie man who had turned his own children into fodder for his practice, and the scourge, who dealt specifically with Bogeymen and the Abyss.
Looking for them, I found Crooked Hat. The scourge. Identified, surely enough, by the worn, bent top hat he wore. He wore a tattered trench coat that looked like my sweatshirt did, albeit dustier than mucky, buttoned over a vest and a dress shirt with a tie, and he carried a bent cane.
The items didn’t match, not quite, despite his generally neutral color scheme.
The various articles of clothing had been collected. Trophies.
“There,” I said. “If you look at the sign above the ice cream shop, under the far right corner, in the-”
“Top hat,” Evan said.
“And the man’s head engraved on the top of the cane,” Green Eyes said.
I squinted. I could barely make out that the top of the cane was engraved at all. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there we go. There’s one.”
I was little different from the Others that were attacking. I wasn’t particularly strong. I wasn’t smart, and I didn’t have any powers that broke the rules in any meaningful way. I was tough, I was fast, and I was stronger than one might assume, given my frame.
“What do we do?” Evan asked.
“Watch,” I said, “Wait. Make opportunities.”
“Opportunities?”
My eyes scanned the park and beach.
A movement caught my attention.
Pointing, a gleam of something gold.
Not quite at me. At something close to me.
An Other just behind me lunged forward, breaking into a run. Seven feet tall, oddly proportioned with a narrow body, a large head, and larger extremities, it had too many teeth crammed into its mouth, forcing a perpetual grin, and eyes that were too recessed in the sockets to make out in the dark. It looked almost fake, like it had a carved pumpkin for a head, topped by a long-haired wig, made surreal by the addition of very real teeth.
I realized what had happened as the Other pushed his way past me. I raised my hand, but his palm slid down my arm. He raked himself on the chain and barbed wire I’d wound around the forearm.
I saw him react, obviously feeling the pain. He spun on me. I saw the gleam of his eyes in the sockets, where slivers of light had found the eyeballs.