“I really did try to keep it simple,” Ms. Lewis said.
“I believe you. But that doesn’t change that things are far from simple now.”
“Blame the Thorburn diabolist,” Ms. Lewis said. “She was the one who conspired to raise the stakes.”
“I did warn you,” Isadora said, behind Rose. When Rose turned, the sphinx was already looking, making eye contact. “The best thing you could have done would be to simply end your own existence. Now look at where things stand.”
“I don’t remember that warning,” Rose said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Isadora said.
Rose felt more than a little heated at that, much as if she’d been talking to Blake, enduring his casual disregard for her, or how monumentally difficult he was making her life. She wished she had some means of retaliating, telling the sphinx to shove it, somehow, without hurting the group’s cohesion.
Blake probably would have.
But the stirring of anger was different than she was used to. Harder to pinpoint, when Rose was often very good at figuring out what was going on with her head and her heart.
A bit of indignation she hadn’t had before? Stubbornness?
“I don’t want to die,” Rose said, aloud. “I don’t plan to.”
“Who does?”
This line from Peter.
The act of rebellion, standing up for herself, it went a long ways toward centering herself.
Have to assert control, break this illusion.
“You don’t want to die?” Callan asked. “What about me? What about us? Huh!? We’ve died. We’ve seen what there is, after.”
Fell, the imp’s Knight, and Alexis were nodding in agreement.
“Bullshit!” Peter said. “You lying fuck!”
The ‘bullshit’ was becoming a refrain, almost a catchphrase.
“It’s true,” the Astrologer’s mentor spoke. “I was a good person. Paid my dues. I was a good person, wasn’t I, Die? I know I didn’t do the family thing, but, I took care of you, right? As a scholar, I contributed to the betterment of people in general?”
Diana nodded, and there was a fierceness to the gesture.
The look on the man’s face was terribly sad. “Then take it from me. Even for the good guys, every second of being dead is a kind of torture.”
Diana reacted as if she’d been struck. She backed away a few steps, making an unintelligible sound.
Her mentor didn’t follow, and it was a break from the pattern where they’d been inching closer.
It lent his words a fraction more authenticity.
Freshly armed with a bit more caring and sensitivity than she’d had, Rose was trying to find some way to reach out, to convince these people about what was happening.
It was a flailing attempt at trying to figure out a strategy. Blind, unsuccessful, unfamiliar.
And, she thought, if there was an answer to be found here, Blake could offer me something. A memory, perhaps.
If there was an answer to be found, did it lie within her?
She took all the emotions and feelings and memories that Blake had given her, and she pushed them down and away.
She looked at this from an objective sense.
“Fuck you,” she said.
Laird raised his eyebrows. The mentor looked at her.
“I’m not talking to you,” she said. She pointed at the Astrologer, then to the Elder Sister, then Nick. “Every single one of you who are looking at them and getting all teary-eyed, fuck off. You were happy enough to throw me and Blake under the bus when you thought we had something to do with demons, and then you see a demon actually create these sad-ass puppets, and you’re crying, you’re buying this?”
The focus was on her. Even the Astrologer was dimly aware, and the Astrologer was a moth flying very, very close to the flame.
She simply had to use the advantage. Somehow.
“It’s not like that,” the Astrologer said.
“What’s it like, then?” Rose asked.
“That’s-” The Astrologer floundered.
“Someone?” Rose asked, “Anyone?”
Apparently, anyone included Blake. He was ready. Offering up a memory.
This one so recent it was disorienting.
A glimpse of Alexis, fresh from the Abyss. Changed. Lurking in shadows, broken in form, with an unearthly light in her eyes. The Abyss, taunting him.
This Alexis wasn’t that Alexis.
The action, the push of the memory into her head, it didn’t feel helpful. It felt more like she was being stabbed with that twisted blade that Blake always had with him. This new memory of Alexis was dropped in the midst of her other memories of Alexis, and the aftermath of it left her feeling hollow.
The feelings were a little too raw, too heavy, and a little too bogeyman. It was worse than before. It damaged things.
She’d been given the ability to care, then had a share of it smashed from her only moments later.
These were negative sum maneuvers. Whatever he gave, she lost more.
The Barber’s curse.
It scared her, more than she liked to admit.
Fear, unlike her ability to care, to miss someone, was something that had sat close to her heart since all of this began.
That fear threatened to become anger, and the anger was directed at Blake, even as she knew he had a reason for doing what he was doing.
Even as she’d known, when she accepted him into her, that she might well become part of Blake’s negative-sum game. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, now that he had access to her being, that the very being might end up a casualty. That he might not see the full picture, like the fact that she’d agreed to be a scourge, and he’d just given her an experience the Abyss had used to get one more hook in him.
Now, potentially, it was a hook in her.
But, even as Blake’s crude interference it made her head hurt, left her mind feeling like it was scraped raw, it helped clarify her thoughts. Make sense of it all.
This Alexis wasn’t the same as the Alexis Blake had seen.
Rose’s eye fell on the three shadowy figures who stood by, unmoving.
Broken. Nonfunctional. Something missing.
These were all constructs. And they had been constructed in a way that didn’t reach to Blake, though it reached out to all of the others.
Because Blake was buried? Hidden within her? Was that part of what had broken these three, and the one near the Knights?
Oh.
What connected the Knights to her and Blake? A certain demon.
She drew in a breath, then spoke.
“I’ve studied vestiges more than you would believe,” Rose said. “Chances are good that these things are reflections of our memories, of details that we can’t quite recall, so it goes beyond just the surface level, beyond the point where we can think of things to trip them up. They’re drawn from our impressions of them, most likely. But that’s all they are.”
The Astrologer blinked.
“They’re mocked together from missing connections, from psychic impressions, or from memories, or something in that vein,” Rose said. “And they’re wrapped around demonstuff. It’s a headgame, and it’s a distraction.”