Roxanne only shot the mermaid a dirty look.
“I do realize it,” I said. “I’m okay with it. Not happy, but okay. I’d rather she was preparing to deal with the monsters. Even if that includes me. It didn’t look like she was about to use the thing.”
“She was on that road,” Peter said. Peter let go of the jacket. Roxanne pulled it down straight, unflinching. “Kathryn was told to make herself successful, and she did it the way she saw fit. Dad never forgave her for setting her sights as low as she did.”
He continued, “Paige was told how to be successful. She set herself on that path. The family very nearly tore her down. She handled it badly. James was more coddled. They’re breaking him down, making him into a puppet, to try and get the best of both worlds, doing what they say when they say, studying what they want him to study, because that’s what he’s good at. They’ll shape the personality later, they’ll do a terrible job at it, and they’ll ultimately break him like they break everyone else they interacted with.”
“They didn’t break me,” Roxanne said.
“They haven’t started with you, you twit,” Peter said. “The wizards and whatsits get started at thirteen or so, or so we’ve been told. That’s when Dad lays down the law. Starts exerting pressure. Shaping you like he thinks you should be shaped. Which is so stupid it makes me want to spit.”
“I wouldn’t have let him ‘shape’ me,” Roxanne said. She sounded a touch defensive.
“Maybe not,” Peter said. “But he should’ve recognized what you’re capable of as is. You’ve got that same aspiration that Paige and Kathy have. A desire to be better, but without Dad’s interference, and with natural intelligence and viciousness, you could be as scary a monster as anything here.”
“That’s not true!” Evan piped up. “Blake’s a great monster!”
“No,” Peter said. “That’s-”
“He took on a dragon without flinching! You didn’t even see him killing people earlier tonight! He was brutal!”
“Evan,” I said. “Stop defending me.”
“Hmph,” Evan grunted. “Green Eyes is a good monster too.”
“Thank you,” Green Eyes replied.
“What I’m saying,” Peter said, “Is that Roxanne has all that aspiration, and when she gets forced into a corner, taken down a peg, forced to get mean, she immediately slips into the best role that she can emulate, from all those around her. She did it easily.”
“Slipping into the role of the witch hunter,” Roxanne said.
“Most capable person we’ve seen that didn’t have the benefit of weeks of studying the right books or having the right tools,” Peter said.
“It almost sounds like you respect me.”
Peter barked out a laugh.
“Fuck that. You’re a spoiled little shit, and Dad pretty much ruined you. But this?” He gestured at her midsection, where all the weapons were. “I can respect this. Pretty much the best the Thorburns have to offer.”
“Mm,” Roxanne murmured.
“What I don’t respect, what I think is downright pathetic, and what you need to stop fucking doing, is going after us. Because you’re doing it. You’re scared and I’m scared and I bet even the bloody mermaid is a little scared. But that fear is making you fall back on your emergency measure. Going for the wrong jugulars. Pay attention. Do this smart. Come on.”
I suspected the message could have done without the biting tone he’d given those last two words. Like the worst of a disappointed parent’s rebuke.
Which might have been the language Roxanne recognized most easily, now that I was thinking thought on it.
Roxanne had fallen silent.
The wind stirred.
I could see the reaction of the others, as I turned my head. That momentary discomfort, followed by the realization that the wind shouldn’t be moving at all.
I might have picked up on it sooner, simply because of the fact that I’d been flying, when there had been air but no proper wind, the rising thermals there when I brought my wings to them, immediately responsive, but the skies remaining still.
There was something there.
“Guardian,” the maenad said.
“Is that a thing?” I asked. “A label we need explained?”
“Sure,” the satyr commented. “We don’t know what it is, but it’s guarding these woods. Making it a guardian.”
Not helpful, I thought.
The shape moved through the trees.
Narrow, tall, naked and simultaneously sexless, with only dark pubes at the nether regions. Its flesh was mottled like that of a corpse, or maybe a baby fresh from childbirth, it had spidery fingers that each had two or three joints too many. It moved like it floated, leaving no tracks behind it, legs only periodically moving to propel it forward. The front of its head looked exactly like the back of its head did. A tangle of hair, blowing in wind that wasn’t there.
Each hand touched the trees it passed, bony fingers almost clicking as they wrapped around branches and trunks.
“Shit,” Tiff said. “Wraith, maybe?”
“Assuming she’s covering her bases,” Peter said. “Maybe something that could handle what falling trees couldn’t?”
“That makes sense,” Tiff said.
“Green Eyes,” I said. “Ideas?”
“Not really,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like most things I saw in the dark waters.”
The thing continued to move across our field of vision, at a jogging pace that nobody mortal could maintain in the deeper snow. The snow didn’t stir on contact with it.
It felt ominous. Like a pressure on my chest. As if it were digging fingers into my gut and twisting up the contents, just by being there.
“Like most? What does it feel like?” I asked her.
“The black fish,” she said.
“Mm,” I said. “Like Carl. Yeah.”
Like it was something that, instinctually, I should run away from.
“English?” Peter asked.
“Like it’s the worst possible thing, made manifest,” I said. “Except… maybe less personal.”
“Yeah,” Green Eyes said. “I couldn’t have said it that well, but yeah.”
I watched it with a wary eye as it passed through a thicket of trees.
And, in the span of an eyeblink, where the terrain blocked it from view, it stopped. The eye carried forward, expecting it to continue, and saw only the usual darkness.
The maenad spun in place.
The thing was there. A matter of five or so feet from us. It floated the rest of the way, covering the distance before I could step back.
I hacked with the Hyena, only for the blade to pass through it.
Spidery fingers wrapped around my neck. Very solid. The fingers wrapped around my neck twice over, more like rope or ribbons than actual digits, and some wood immediately gave way under the thing’s grip.
The fingers naturally constricted, each finger encircling what remained of my neck two and a half or three times.
I stabbed in the general region of its head, and I touched nothing.
Tiff threw something at us. I thought it was snow, at first.