Oh, so many of them had known individual elements, but so very few had heard the whole story. Only Alister and Tiff were really equipped to know, and Tiff might well have been ignorant of the implications of possession. Even Blake had been in the dark about parts.
She could feel his agitation. He wanted to act. She suppressed it.
“They are our enemies. In the broader sense, we are fighting against the end of all things. Not everything, now, but everything here, soon enough. If they get what they want, they will take everything we are, everything we hold dear, and they will defile or destroy it all in the worst ways.”
There were murmurs. Paranoid looks at the shadows.
Leaders in individual groups were trying to reassure, or organize. Some people were standing from their seats, unwilling to sit and listen much longer.
Rose glanced at Mags, hoping for a call to order.
“I can’t,” Mags said, then said, “My dads.”
Not refusing to call things to order, but hesitating at the call to arms?
Was that part of it? Why they were falling into disorder? Behaims and Duchamps, maybe, who wanted to go find their family or friends who had stayed back rather than come to the meeting?
All in all, a disaster.
Rose had meant it as a rallying cry, a call to battle in the sense that, if they didn’t fight, all was lost. Because it was.
But, she realized, Conquest still had an influence on her, as did her lack of social flexibility. If she needed to intimidate, to be arrogant, or be formal, she could. She’d been made to. Yet in trying to raise them up, she’d ground them down instead. In trying to give them vital information they could use, she’d outlined too much too fast. She’d destroyed their morale.
She’d forgotten how much one person could fear for their loved ones. She’d felt so little of that fear herself.
I’m too cold.
She wished she could call on Conquest here. Even knowing it would sit badly with the Toronto practitioners and Others, it would give her the ability to seize control here.
Blake shifted, the movement too acute to be anything but a response to the thought.
She didn’t trust it. Even as spooked and out of her depth as she was, ill-equipped to organize an outright war, she still trusted herself more than she trusted the incarnation’s power.
Rose swallowed hard. Speaking as if they weren’t actively breaking ranks, she spoke out, “Listen! My grandmother studied this enemy!”
That got attention. People did listen. Some.
Isadora opened her wings wide. More heads turned that way.
But the sphinx was merely stretching. She sat her leonine hind end on the church floor, beside the pews, and squared her shoulders, attention on Rose.
Thank you, Isadora.
“My grandmother studied this enemy. She noted a great deal of what I described to you. She studied demons and the way this world is put together. Trying to find an out, a loophole.”
“Did she find it?” Isadora asked, calm.
Rose felt Blake provide something. She gripped the sides of the altar, head bowed, as the ideas settled into place.
“You can answer the question without fear,” Isadora said. “I can suppress instinct, tonight.”
“She found a way out for my family, kind of,” Rose said. “She studied karma, and she decided to use a demon to break the family line. If all had gone according to plan, the line of diabolists and the karmic responsibility would have ended with me.”
The words were hollow, coming out of her own mouth. Not easy words to say.
“Our enemy here put safeguards in place, trying to set things up so the title of Thorburn diabolist passed from one of us to the next, but I was intended to outlast the others. I was made from the cut of the demon’s shears. My counterpart was made to die, and I was made to last. Until all the other Thorburns were dead, the lawyer’s safeguards having no living cousins to default to, with childbirth being largely impossible on my part.”
She stared out at the others.
“If I hadn’t, the family was positioned to self destruct. Each heir worse than the last, armed with a demon while residents of this town were equipped with a means of turning that demon back on them.”
Ellie and Roxanne stared back at her.
“Everything was planned, and I don’t know the entirety of her plans. I do suspect that she had Laird help manipulate Jacob’s Bell into helping those plans along. Putting pressure on us. Being actively hostile. Positioning everyone else as enemies. Setting individuals in her own camp so they’re engineered to fail. All to mask what she was doing right under the lawyers’ noses.”
Molly. Even Blake.
“What I’m saying is this: they can be outplayed. They can be beat. If we play our cards right. The kink in the workings, one that the plan couldn’t account for, was Johannes, and it was Faysal. Faysal was too Other to grasp the plan or the implications, just like the group was too big and focused on the whole of their work to see what one old woman was scheming.”
Even as she talked, she was getting something of an idea.
“I think,” Rose said, “And I welcome any other ideas, but this is one… I think Faysal and Johannes are still kinks. Still the key to bringing down their power structure here. I won’t deny that they’re terrifying, or that stakes are high. But they’re unsteady. They’re likely just as scared as we are, if not more. Even if they don’t show it.”
She raised a hand to adjust her collar, and her hand trembled, visibly enough that people in the back row could have seen it.
Idiot, she admonished herself. Damn it. Can’t show weakness here.
And don’t you try and tell me to relax by shoving a memory into my head, it’ll do more harm than good, she thought, pushing the idea at Blake.
There was no response.
“They’re unstable, and we know exactly where we need to hit them. We know their weakness – their scope is too broad. They’re too big to see the small picture. The bulk of their weapons are so devastating they’ll only use them as a last resort. They want us scared and stupid. They show off the power and knowledge they have readily and easily, theatrically, to mask their weaknesses and make themselves out to be more than they are. But if my grandmother had won, they might well have suffered a telling blow, or collapsed entirely. If we win, we can destroy them, utterly and completely. We just have to win smart.”
She let the silence hang.
“Together,” she said.
This time, the silence was less strategic. She waited, uncomfortable.
A bead of sweat ran down to the small of her back, as if to mark the passage of every long second that passed. Cold against warm skin, dancing along her skin, touching minute droplets of moisture and tiny pale hairs, almost imperceptible to the eye, each touch provoking it to halt for a moment or changing direction.