He shook his head, taking his time.
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” I said.
He turned, comfortable enough in the here and now to let his guard down, exposing his back to me.
“We’ve been manipulated. Sent this way and that by the bell, and by practitioners. My friend here was driven halfway up the wall by the tension here. The bell let up, and I thought we had a moment to think for ourselves. Some of the others have been noticing that they’re an awful lot stronger tonight. There’s something going on.”
“Sure,” I said. “There’s a lot going on.”
“Something specific,” he said. “We went to go find answers, and we were headed off by the young Alister Behaim. He sent us here, suggesting that we could get the answers we wanted if we ran into you.”
I closed my eyes. “Right. Of course.”
“We’ve been here for a little while, understand, my friend and I. We know how this works. We know Alister. And, I’d like to think, we know when we’re being manipulated. He knew what you were doing, and he decided we’d make a good obstacle.”
“I can see that,” I said. “I expected him to intervene later. When we were actually squaring off against the Behaims.”
He couldn’t quite smile in the conventional sense, given how his burned face exposed most of his teeth in that ‘smile’ that all skeletons seemed to have, but the change in his expression did reach his cheekbones, which rose up toward his exposed eyeballs.
“I went after your kin, your kin took my face off. No permanent damage done either way,” the Revenant said. “Let’s spite little Alister, yeah? He thinks he can manipulate us, I say fuck him. Let bygones be bygones?”
When bygones consisted of attempted familicide and mutilation?
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll swear on it if you do. To be a decent ally.”
“Broad.”
I shrugged.
“I swear we’ll be allies to you, or to leave you be. Can’t promise to be with you through thick and thin, but you won’t have me champing at your heels during the thin.”
“Good enough,” I said. “I swear the same.”
He did that smiling-despite-lacking-a-face thing again, and gestured.
All in all, eight Others joined us, before we’d crossed one block. I moved briskly.
“We going to assassinate Behaims?” Evan asked. “That’ll be a little weirder than anything else tonight, I think. Strangers, okay. But I’ve been watching Behaims and I know their faces. It’s like in a video game, you know how you play, like, Fray, and-”
“What’s Fray?” Green Eyes asked.
“Fighting game?” Evan asked.
“I know Fray,” the Revenant said.
“I don’t know what Fray or fighting games are,” Green Eyes said.
“Okay, well, you’re brawling with these other characters, and you fight them and when you win two rounds you win, right?”
“Sure?”
“Well, what I’m saying is it’s like, when you play for way too long, you get to this point where you’ve fought Bat a hundred times and you see him and he’s kinda easy if you know how to deal with him so you feel almost fond of him? You know anything like that?”
“Yeah,” the Revenant said.
“No,” I said.
“Not really,” Green Eyes said. “But it reminds me of something?”
“Pshh,” Evan said.
“Oh, wait, now I remember!”
“Yeah?”
“I kind of liked the pregnant sewer rats, before. The ones that are the size of a dog? They were slower. Easier.”
“Well,” Evan said. There was a lengthy pause. “There you go. Take what I can get. That’s how I sort of feel about the Behaims. They’re the bad guys, but do I really want to go after them like that?”
“Don’t worry,” I told him. “We’re not after the Behaims, exactly.”
“Okay. Good.”
“If one presents themselves, and they’re one of the sketchier ones, backing the wrong system, being more of a problem than they could ever be a solution… then maybe. But that’s not what we’re after.”
“What are we after?” Evan asked.
“I’m quite interested in the answer to this question, myself,” the Revenant said.
“We need to knock their legs out from under them,” I said. “For the Duchamps, it was the husbands. For the Behaims, it’s their well of power. To access that, we’re going to need information, and we’re going to need something else. With luck, we’ll find it at Hillsglade House.”
We were two blocks away, if that. Very few of the Others that were with us were the types to get tired. Being dead, Bogeyman, or winged had a way of helping when it came to prompt travel.
“You may find that we have a problem on that front,” the Revenant said. “For one thing, when we ran into Alister…”
He trailed off. I picked up the statement. “…It was at Hillsglade House.”
“Got it in one.”
I nodded.
“You know he’s engaged to miss Rose?”
“I know,” I said.
“They’re getting their ducks in a row. You’re a concern for them.”
“I know,” I said, again.
The wind stirred. Picking up. The cold was sharper.
I looked east, and I couldn’t make out the sun itself, but I saw light at the horizon.
“I like your mermaid,” he said.
I gave him a curious look.
“Interesting,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Well, I like her too,” I said.
Green Eyes looked up at me.
“Fashion choice, a little more curious,” he added.
When I glanced at him, he pointed to the body I still carried.
“Not sure where to put it,” I said. “Moment I harvested bits from it, it became my responsibility, I think. Couldn’t leave it where it was. Body on a rooftop, it’s different. This is harder. ”
“Yeah,” he said. “There’s a reason your traditional bogeyman picks on campers, or people on vacation. Cleanup is easier. Urban city center? Gets harder. Have to get creative, or have certain talents.”
I glanced at the faceless woman.
As if to answer the question I hadn’t asked, he said, “If it’s not recognizable as human, after the fact, and you can leave it by the side of the road for a cleanup crew, there’s something to be said for that.”
Four satyrs in total joined up with us. “Jeremy’s coming.”
Hillsglade House loomed before us, as we rounded a corner, approaching the street just beyond the property’s railing-topped walls. Hollow, dark, with scarcely any light within. Plywood boards had been put up against windows, and only slivers of light escaped through the cracks.
As we drew closer, I could make out people around the house. I couldn’t look at one section of roof or set of windows without seeing something broken. Siding was gouged and torn, there was a suspicious dark brown or crimson stain on one outside wall, and more suspicious stains in the snow, where bodies had been dragged away.
The collected individuals were all Behaims.
Alister, other Behaims, including close relative of about Alister’s age standing close by. The timeless armor, Alister’s weapon. Rose.