“I see. One you were in a great hurry to summon us to.”
“Yes,” Rose said.
“After the state you left Toronto in over the course of several days, I’m somehow not surprised this is what Jacob’s Bell looks like after a week,” the Elder Sister said.
“Thank you for saying so,” Rose said.
“You’re thanking me.”
“It leads straight into my next big statement,” Rose said. “We would like to abdicate my Lordship. Given the state of things, I no longer feel that Jacob’s Bell should stand as is. It’s not salvageable, and I would like to turn it over for Toronto to condemn. Remove the roads leading into here. Ward it from the eyes of the unawakened. Let it be lost and forgotten.”
“Yet, by turning it over to us, you make your problems our problems,” Isadora commented. “I can’t help but notice that you have… immediate, infernal problems at hand.”
“It talks?” Peter asked, under his breath.
“Our problems would include me, ideally,” Rose said. “I’ve agreed to be a scourge for the Abyss. Help me deal with things here, including securing the fate of this angel, Faysal Anwar, and you’ll have all the assistance I can render.”
“And if we refuse?” the Elder Sister asked.
“These problems might become big enough problems to be Toronto’s problems,” Rose said, gesturing at Ms. Lewis.
“You’re aware of what this means,” Ms. Lewis said. “My partners won’t simply accept a diabolist slipping our grasp.”
“I know,” Rose said.
“You’re bringing all of these others into it.”
Rose shrugged, unflinching. “They were always a part of it. They just turned a blind eye.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” the Astrologer said.
“It wasn’t. Now I’ve made it that simple,” Rose said.
I’m such a bitch, she thought.
I privately agreed, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever liked her more.
15.x (Histories)
His hands closed into fists. They were covered in so many unhealed cuts and scratches that the simple action was a shuddering one, his fingers and thumb twitching with the pain.
The lights in his apartment flickered. The kitchen was clean, but far from tidy. Bags were filled with trash he hadn’t been able or willing to take out. Days spent active, nights spent reading, accumulating the garbage. He couldn’t even begin to guess how many days there were until the garbage was next picked up.
“You told me to tell you if I saw it,” Fisher murmured.
The practitioner nodded.
“I belabor the obvious, but it’s sitting in your kitchen,” Fisher said, only his eyes peering out and above the top of the practitioner’s coat pocket.
The practitioner nodded once more.
He had a simple table in the corner of his kitchen, with room for two stools. The table was piled with books, candles, and an ashtray piled high with ash. Many cigarettes had been smoked down to the filters. Many of the others had been loose tobacco and rolling papers, with no filters at all. Smoked until they’d threatened to burn his lips. He tended to smoke those when pacing, so he could spit them into the sink, to be swept up later.
A figure occupied one of the stools. Manlike, but far from being a man. He was clothed, and the clothes were nice, with a black sweater that had yet to fade from washing or wear, a lambskin jacket, and straight-leg jeans tucked into calf-length boots. His eyes, eyebrows, nose, cheekbones and chin were each so very carefully constructed and shaped. The figure’s white hair, curly, too long, only accented the appearance.
But his teeth, as he smiled, were oddly brutish. Not inhuman, but not straight, angled so that they suggested sharpness, or the idea of fangs. They were too large for how delicate his features were, and they were white.
The figure could have passed for one of the practitioner’s friends. Probably had, already. He looked like the sort that traveled in the same circle, where being in a failed band and recreational drug use were not uncommon.
But the smile, here, with the lights flickering, was just a little too white, too feral, suggesting teeth meant for tearing. The smile caught the eye and held it.
Cause enough for fear. Maybe even terror and panic.
But two things served to push matters well past fear and into the realms of despair. For one thing, there was context. Weeks of the hunt, the chase.
For another, there was the shadow. Though it wore the shape of a man, the shadow it cast was a shadow of something far, far bigger. Something that shouldn’t have fit into the apartment.
Fisher ducked lower into the practitioner’s pocket.
As the figure breathed, the shadow mimed the movement, swelling, deflating. Spices in the spice rack, many cannibalized for hasty and haphazard rituals, moved in time with the breathing. The shadow swelled, and it pushed out, past the confines that shadows should be limited to. The spices were tilted, touching the metal bar of the rack, then left to return to a normal position. Tilted again…