“You also carry a share of the darkest places with you,” Mara said. “For a location teetering on a precipice, what would it mean, for you to be there, as something significant occurs, while your counterpart remains behind?”
Rose and I exchanged glances.
“You would work against your own agenda, tilting the city at a delicate point,” Mara said.
“I go,” Rose said. “You wrap up? Or we go together.”
“I’ll wrap this up, then I’ll follow,” I told her. “I’m pretty sure I can catch up.”
“We can stick around here if we need to,” Alister’s female relative said. “If we’re balancing the groups, like Alister recommended-”
“No,” I said. “That’s a trap. We don’t need manpower here, and if there’s something going on, you’ll need all the help you can get.”
“Okay then, just you Ainsley,” Rose said, even as she was backing away from the scene. “Look after Blake.”
“Will do.”
Look after, or keep an eye on?
“Where do you want me?” Tiff asked.
“Come,” was Rose’s response. As if she were talking to a dog. “Knights, all but one of you with me.”
Tiff nodded. Shotgun Nick communicated briefly with the others, then joined Rose. Only one knight remained behind, a woman.
“Come on, Ellie, Kathy,” Rose said. She paused. “Satyr, Maenad, Ainsley, Sarah, stay behind, and he’ll have Green Eyes, Peter, Roxanne, and Evan. I think that’s everyone we can afford to give up.”
I glanced at the Knight who was staying behind. Sarah, by process of elimination. She looked like someone I might have seen at one of the shelters. Not homeless, but living at a point where she was perpetually down on her luck. Thirty five or so, a puffy jacket with a plaid felt exterior, a hat that didn’t match, and stringy hair. I respected her gun though. It was a fairly large rifle. A club hung at her hip, inscribed with something.
“I’m still exhausted from getting here,” Ellie said. “We’re leaving again?”
“You wanted to come,” Rose said.
I raised an eyebrow at that.
“Except I’m turning out to be useless. Peter went off and-”
Ellie’s voice stopped as Rose’s expression changed.
And set the fire. Which Mara doesn’t know about.
Ellie had an impulsive streak. I was glad she’d reined it in.
“I’m not even doing anything,” Ellie said, and her tone was resigned.
“You’re staying alive,” Rose answered. “And you’re helping, through your presence alone.”
“You’re telling me I can’t slip into a house where some family is playing sleeping beauty, grab a set of keys and take their car out of town?”
“You could,” Rose said, “But I don’t think it would go well, and neither Christoff or Peter seem willing to go. They’re interested in this, in different ways.”
Ellie glanced over her shoulder, in the direction of the smoke.
“Ugh,” she said, but it was a ‘yes, I’ll go’ sort of ugh. “The shit I put up with for my little brother.”
The bonds of family. We’d all been through so much, and through all of the pressure, I was seeing glimmers of the real ties, beneath all of the hostility and ugliness that had been ingrained into us.
It wasn’t just them. We were working with the extended family and the Behaims. A few weeks ago, could I have imagined it?
Probably.
It still felt strange.
Rose and her contingent headed across the clearing, striding across and through the deeper snow.
Our forces were divided once more. Rose didn’t pay attention to the balancing of the scales. We’d moved past that.
Without stating it out loud, without locking it in with oaths and promises, we’d agreed that I would cede the fight to Rose. In our tug of war over existence, I would let go of the rope.
They made agonizingly slow progress. I knew I could fly faster, glide faster, especially now that the sun was up.
How ironic, to be a bogeyman, a creature of darkness and night, and yet to be limited in this way.
A taunt of sorts, after all. I could only glide, and I was reminded constantly that I had to stay out of the light, away from civilization.
I’d told Evan that I didn’t see much of a future for myself. That was a part of it. Yes, I could fly with him, and we could travel over water so Green Eyes might join us. But it would be at night, furtive. I would always be flying with Evan as a crutch.
It wasn’t true freedom.
When I looked, Rose and her group were only just disappearing into the trees. I would catch up.
Wouldn’t I? I’d leave later, but I’d arrive around the time that they did?
I paced a little.
“If I went after them, would I be letting you go?” I asked.
Mara shook her head. “I’m caught. You’d be straining the limits of your own oaths, but I’m caught. I’m ruined. You would be giving up something greater.”
There was no sign of a lie.
Head games?
“Something greater?” I asked.
“Look at the pair of you. Rose and Blake Thorburn. Your heart sits at the center of your being, Rose’s head rests at the center of hers. But the darkest places have taken your heart, and a working of the universe has taken your other‘s head.”
“Riddles,” I said.
“If you pay attention, there’s more to it,” Mara said, “I hope you’ll be desperate enough to offer my release in exchange for a prompt answer. If you wait, I’ll still give you the information and the lies you want, but you may well be late to arrive.”
I felt so restless. A lose-lose.
“In this moment, bereft of a sound heart, your mind is the critical tool.”
“And the inverse is true for Rose?”
The young girl smiled at me. Sly, humorless, almost mocking.
“You reached a truce,” the crone observed.
“Don’t want to hear it,” I said.
“Two spirits, two bodies,” she said. “A ragged cut, so the twain shall never meet again. Any connection that forms between you will be twisted and warped.”
If I’d made Rose into my familiar, or vice versa…
Just lie, Mara, I thought. End this. A few more lies, and we’ll be done.
But she knew it as well as I did. She knew how anxious I was. She insisted on stretching out as much as she could.
“You are what you are, creature,” Mara said. “She is what she is. By nature of your dissonant existence, you would not like what she does, once she has won.”
“You don’t know her,” I said, “and you don’t know me.”
“I have watched the Thorburn family since it set roots in Jacob’s Bell. Since your ancestor first experimented with the darkest practices, and did great wrongs to her enemies, securing a place to live, a husband, wealth, and all things she wanted in life. The cost of these things she bought was passed on to her daughter, who did much the same. You have been bred to clutch, to grasp. For existence, for material gain, for power. It runs through your bloodline as hair or eye color might. From daughter to daughter, the sons tainted by association. Even as a distant bystander, there are only so many times you can watch things play out before you start to see the patterns.”