“Mm. Rose senior,” Ms. Lewis said. She touched her chest. “It’s been a few long months since I felt proper agony.”
“It would be very convenient if you died,” Jeremy commented.
“My continued employment supercedes death. It’s a… consequence of dealing with beings that operate in the very deepest workings of reality.” Ms. Lewis said. “Now, if I may call in a favor, Mur-”
Nick raised his arm.
The Knight to his right aimed and fired, cutting off Ms. Lewis before she could finish.
“Guns are underrated,” Evan said, brightly. “Bang!”
“Learning to rate the bullets we have left pretty damn highly,” Nick said. “Unless Sarah or some other help arrives, we’re down to only a few bullets.”
He raised his hand behind his back, out of Ms. Lewis’ sight. He held up two fingers.
“Good to know,” Rose said. Her mind was ticking over the options.
All the ways this could play out.
She sighed.
“Faysal,” she said. “I humbly request your presence.”
The wind stirred. Over in Jacob’s Bell proper, snow formed spirals and clouds as it was blown free of rooftops.
No answer.
“You complete and utter asshole,” Rose said. “Faysal, I request your presence once more.”
She wasn’t surprised in the least when her request wasn’t answered.
“Faysal,” she said, and she allowed Conquest to take a greater hold, putting all of her authority as a practitioner of some heritage and the power derived from Conquest into her voice. “For the third time, I ask for an audience!”
Her voice rang out over the city.
Before the echo even faded, she was thinking about the other options that were available to her.
“Murr, I ask your-” Ms. Lewis tried once more, still lying on the ground.
A gunshot rang out.
One shot left.
One side free to ask, with nobody of import willing to listen. Another side trying to ask, held at bay with agony.
“We could run,” Evan said. “Escape? Or we could-”
“Evan,” Rose said. “Please. You have to let me think this through, without interruption.”
They have only so many resources, but one lawyer we can’t kill is enough for this problem, Rose thought. We push it too far, or start proposing the wrong suggestions, and they might head us off the pass, and devote another lawyer or two.
Even the discussion of retreat was dangerous.
“How’s Blake doing in there?” Evan asked.
Green Eyes turned to look, glaring.
“Not good,” Rose admitted.
Not good.
Understatement, that.
The pessimism was a counterpoint to the fact that Evan cared.
The church was gone. Conquest liked to frame things, to draw out the battlefields, so every scene we entered took its own unique form, tangential to what Rose was thinking about, and to what she was doing.
Not long ago, Conquest had been weaker, but better versed in this battlefield, and with far more experience in how these fights were fought.
Now that Rose was drawing on Conquest for power, that ‘weaker’ part was no longer a consideration.
More skilled, more experienced, more knowledgeable, and stronger.
Two dimensional, more inclined to wound and lord over the suffering than to go for the jugular, Conquest had weaknesses, but they weren’t weaknesses I could leverage right now.
If this landscape was a mosaic, each individual element meshing roughly with the others, cracks running through it, Rose’s side of the mosaic somehow felt brighter than mine did.
She’d never been homeless. I’d spent long nights under the stars, or in shelters that turned the lights off at eight. I’d spent time with Carl, in cabins I and others at the commune had built with our own hands. Cabins that hadn’t had power. Even then, toward the end, it had only been a few.
Conquest held me, forcing me to be the bludgeon that she used to knock down barriers, and they were darker barriers than Rose’s. She tore down my superstructures, and my confidence with them. She hurled me, and did it with enough force that she could collect me again before I’d recovered. Forced me to fail at getting to my metaphorical feet, as scenes unfolded around me.
No speech, no taunting.
I had no throat that could be ripped out, no heart that could be punctured. I was my heart. There was no way to finish me off, except to grind me down.
Conquest, as it happened, was very, very good at grinding people down.
I struggled and was battered through scenes of pain, of seeing the others suffering at my behalf. Evan’s rage at the idea of losing me, the pained looks of my friends, at realizing that they couldn’t share themselves with me. That they had to keep me at arm’s length, and hide the most important things from me.
Rose’s suspicion, her anger, her hatred. Her fear, above all else.
Me attacking people, me being bloody, me cutting down those I called monsters.
A me I hardly recognized, now that the Abyss had so little in the way of a grip on me.
I was stripped down, pure, defenseless, weak.
All of me was out here, exposed and raw. An open book.
Conquest insisted on wearing my grandmother’s face. A face I had seen in the course of two short meetings and a handful of encounters when I was a very small child.
The root of all evil I had dealt with.
The woman who had made me, set me up as a distraction, a pin to be bowled over. Now Conquest drove that point home, setting me up, dragging me to my feet, though I didn’t quite have any, and then knocked me down again.
Conquest paused. Letting me lie there.
I realized which memories and elements of my personality surrounded me here.
My friends, my old life.
Joel. Joseph. Goosh. Tiff. Ty. Alexis.
It wasn’t the sights that surrounded me that made the scene bad, though they didn’t help. People I cared about giving me looks. Looking afraid. Looking concerned. Helpless.
No. What spooked me was the fracture.
A thick black line, running through a whole tract of my life. Scenes removed, or broken into pieces too small to make out.
Half of my memories and experiences with my friends had been cut away.
Not given to Rose. Just… removed.
Lost to some dark place that only demons knew.
Useless to the creation of Rose, grandmother’s perfect heir, made for the destruction of the Thorburn line. Too dangerous to give to me, because it might tie me too tightly to Toronto, or alter my priorities.
A simple savage cut, and yet so much finesse, so much care and precision into the systematic ruin of one human being’s life.
“I’m a spirit too,” Evan was saying. “Why don’t you eat me, too, and then I can go help Blake?”
“There’s only so much room in me for spirits,” Rose said. “I’ve already got Conquest and Blake bumping shoulders in there. Too many more and I might split at the seams.”
“Hmph.”
If I split at the seams… Rose thought, but it wasn’t a thought that led to other ideas.
Rose could hear Ms. Lewis sigh.
The woman found her feet, slowly, halting, and then brushed snow and dirt off her pants leg and jacket.
Rose glanced at Nick.
Nick shook his head.
“Thanks for coming, Nick,” Rose said. “If you wanted to run, now, I wouldn’t blame you.”
“A demon took people from me,” Nick said. “In every sense of the word, they’re gone. You were right, when you said an entire town might suffer the same fate. You want us to run when there’s a chance we might be able to do something against some other demons? Or some immortal bitch that thinks it’s a good idea to traffic with them? I’m almost insulted.”