She smiled at him, raising her own hand in a small wave of response.
Fuck. She actually cared what happened to these people. Not just to Tiff and Ty and her family, but to the people as a whole.
It made it so much harder.
“Do you have a strategy?” the Elder Sister asked.
Rose turned around. Many of the Toronto powers were gathered behind and around her, along with Sandra, Alister, and the Briar Girl.
“Beyond the broad strokes?” the Elder Sister added.
“They’ll be waiting,” Rose said. “We’re all gathered here. They’re going to hit us hard. Our fear is their strength. They’ll want to break our momentum. Have us run out the door, then turn and run back inside, before they crush us.”
“You apparently know them well,” the Elder Sister said. The words were accusatory.
I just have to think of Blake’s strengths combined with my own, and strip away the genuine desire to be good. Use that sort of individual and form an establishment.
But speaking and likening the enemy to herself wasn’t going to make her any friends or win her any loyalty here.
“In terms of my group,” Rose said, “If Emily could cover our escape, block the lawyers’ view of us… it would make a big difference, especially if they have their demons on leashes. We break through enemy ranks. Then, if Johannes is here we catch him from behind. If he isn’t, we make a break for his demesne.”
“I can try,” Emily said.
Rose would have asked Emily to come, but the girl was so young.
It was a daunting idea, to ask so much of someone so… unreliable.
“But you think that our group will be tested,” the Elder Sister said.
“Yes,” Rose said.
The rest of the people in attendance at the church had gathered. They were listening, faces solemn and serious.
“We need a strategy, then,” the Elder Sister said. “You have yours, thin as it is. Enchantresses can help sway things, but they can’t form the focus of our attack. I don’t have nearly enough power to bring to bear. Chronomancers alter time, but we need to do something with that time. I don’t have enough power to matter, and the rest seem to have limited resources.”
“We don’t need power,” Rose said. “We need… to pave the way. Leave moving forward as an option.”
The Elder Sister spread her hands. “I lost our little contest, so I won’t say it, but…”
“You’ll imply,” Rose said. That maybe we should hunker down and stay.
“Hey,” Evan said. “Hey. Hey. I have the best plan.”
“No,” Rose and Tiff both said, automatically.
“You haven’t even heard me out!” Evan said.
“He’s right. You haven’t even heard him out,” Lola said. “He’s fighting alongside us, and he has as much of a voice as anyone. If nobody has any suggestions, I don’t see why we can’t hear his.”
“I might love you a little,” Evan whispered.
“The plan?” the Elder Sister asked, her words terse.
“I’m a container for spirits. I’m supposed to be a vessel for an Evan-spirit, but stuff got broke. Spiritstuff is leaking out like a slow drip, so we’ve been giving me more spirits to keep me going. So what I’m saying is, we stuff something inside me. Something like a megahuge fire spirit, and we let me blaze a trail. Literally. And maybe we make them poop their fancy lawyer suits a bit.”
“Someone to lead the way,” the High Priest said. “There’s worse choices than him, if he’s properly equipped.”
“Uh huh,” Evan said.
“I could do that,” the Elder Sister said. “It wouldn’t last, if you’re leaking like you say you are, but I could do it.”
“Let’s make it happen!” Evan said.
“I might have something to contribute,” the Astrologer said. “If I use my dipper sign to refresh the swan sign, given that you’re a bird…”
“Why are we even still talking!?”
■
Rose and Alister each pulled on one door, just peering around the edges.
The lawyers were gathered. With them were motes, all the ones that had survived the first conflict, along with a few more. But they were joined by no less than three demons. Each was spaced out, and diagrams marked the snow, melted in, forming dark lines where pavement and burned grass were revealed.
Where there weren’t diagrams, the tumorous imp had blighted the ground in broad patches. The road was cracked and pitted, trees had fallen and now hosted clusters of diseased flesh, and snowy lawns had been poisoned, turned into noxious marsh. The poison there could quite likely kill a man with a touch, and it still festered, still spread centimeter by centimeter.
One demon in a female guise, her body twisted, enclosed in what looked like three cubes that had bitten into flesh. Her head-cube rattled, shuddering, jittering, the orientation moving.
Another, broad in the shoulder, mouth yawning perpetually wide, as if its jaw were broken. It wore human flesh like a shroud, a twisted mass of skin and muscle piled over and around the shoulder, over the head, a twisted mask where the eye and mouth holes of another individual’s face aligned with the dark, burned face beneath. The eyes glowed, and Rose instinctually averted her own eyes away from them. The ‘clothes’ of human flesh it wore moved and twitched, an eyeball that looked to be a heartbeat from falling from the socket moved, looking in another direction.
The third was narrow, a thin androgynous figure, wearing clothes that looked like they had been sewn together around it. Corset thin, with voluminous sleeves, it had a thin mouth, no hair, and an oddly small nose. The eyes, conversely, were overlarge.
Rose had almost expected a horde, but three demons was more than scary enough. If they were anything like Ur or the Barber…
Everyone in the church was taking cover, staying out of the line of sight of the door.
Evan hopped up a bit, the sole exception. In plain view, just a little bit behind the mat for drying and scraping boots, just inside the door.
Lights flared around him. The Astrologer had removed some of the rigging she wore, laying it out on the floor.
Fire ignited, lighting up a trail of accelerant, drawing lines around Evan.
He swelled in size. From something that weighed less than a full glass of water to something the size of a small dog, then a large dog.
His feathers glowed at the edges, like the edges of burning paper on a cigarette.
Evan laughed, and as he grew, the laugh swiftly took on a tone, deeper, almost guttural.
He spread his wings, continuing to grow.
“Yes!” he said, and it was more a man’s voice than a child, gravely, a hair from being a roar.
A bit of the influence from the Eye, which was being tapped as a power source.
The feathers ignited in full. The flames poured off him, and they fell on the mat and the diagram.
“Go!” the Elder Sister shouted. “Before you incinerate all of us, for the love of-“