“Okay,” Paige said. “Man, I do not like feeling drunk.”
Rose glanced to one side, and she could see how Paige was rubbing one side of her face.
“She might be okay,” Lola said. “I… don’t know if I feel any lasting effects. If we can bounce back, maybe she could recover?”
“I don’t know,” Paige said. “I’ve only got a few weeks of all of this under my belt. I don’t know anything about way too many things, and I’m usually a fast study. That thing back there was the worst experience of my life, and it hasn’t exactly been all unicorns and flowery meadows. I don’t have anything to compare to here.”
“Rose is the resident expert on horrible badness,” Mags said. “Not that I want to distract, if you’re focusing more on the badness that we’re about to deal with than the badness we just dealt with, but…”
“It’s fine,” Rose said.
“Great,” Mags said. “Because I’ve read that demons tend to do permanent damage, and if you could shed any light on what we were just dealing with, it would do a lot for my peace of mind.”
Rose looked around as she walked. At the gaps.
They’d been part of the vision, except they were more permanent, persistent.
“The world is managed by spirits,” Rose said. “Spirits are influenced by us and our will. For most, it’s a pretty passive relationship. Spirits don’t interfere or change things too much, and they follow set patterns. People don’t influence them either, by that same token.”
“Okay,” Mags said. “Practitioner 101 there.”
“Well,” Rose said, “I’m not liking the look of those gaps. The demon did its thing, and the town started to come apart at the seams. I thought at first it was the Barber, but I’m not so sure, now. We can alter the makeup of the world, with sufficient will or expectation, and it’s subtle, and we’re pushing against the pattern or the will of others if we try to will the world to be different. But if you have a demon alter that will or expectation, twist everyone’s minds to a specific purpose…”
“Breaking up the world?” Lola asked.
“Or a part of it,” Rose said. “They chose the demons they did for a reason. One that could hurt practitioners by hurting their workings, another that debilitated and stalled us, while…”
Lacking the words, she gestured at the surroundings. At the ripped seams and world left ajar.
“…Making it easier to do what they want to do,” she finished. “So… I’m not ruling out that she could recover. If doing permanent damage to our psyche was the point, then we’d know, I think. But I do think it was trying to hurt the fabric of things, affecting us like it did.”
A part of her worried that the others would react badly. That she might crush morale as she’d done back at the church. But this group, perhaps, was more resilient.
Scared, but resilient.
They’d reached the last leg of the trip before the passage under the highway.
Mags looked down at the dip to one side. The ground sloped down from the road, normally it would have been grass, but now it was only snow. A short tobogganing hill at best.
“What happened to Molly?” Mags asked, all at once.
“Absorbed into the Abyss, I think,” Rose said.
“I owed her better,” Mags said.
“I sort of know that feeling,” Rose replied.
“Darn it,” Mags said. “Hate knowing that there’s nothing left for me to do for her. She’s gone, or mostly gone?”
“Gone, I think,” Rose said. “But if you want to do something for her… we need to focus on this. I don’t think the real Molly would want Johannes to win. She wouldn’t want people to suffer any more than she did. All that anger was just the Abyss speaking through her. Let’s respect the real her.”
Mags huffed out a breath, then rubbed her hands together. “Evan, do me a solid?”
“For sure,” Evan said.
“See that space under the highway? Under the bridge?
“Yep!”
“Go there, and flame on, you know? Not destroying the highway, just to light it up. Kiss the walls and top with fire. Yeah?”
“You say that like there’s a chance I’d say no!” Evan said. He hopped forward, wings flapping.
Looking in his direction, watching him take off for the space under the bridge, Mags already walking briskly, broke out into a jog. Rose could see Green Eyes, off to one side, previously blocked from Rose’s view by Evan’s bulk.
Was that intentional? Was the mermaid stalking her, deliberately lurking?
I’m supposed to be a leader here, but… I’m not sure I’m there yet. I need to figure it out before it matters.
“He was on your skin,” Green Eyes observed.
“Yeah,” Rose said.
“He still is, a bit.”
Rose nodded, checking to see for herself. She wasn’t sure she wanted to put words to why that might be the case. Was it because Blake didn’t want to move, when every movement eroded the two of them?
Or because he didn’t have the strength?
Beneath the bridge, Evan flared with fire and light, flames reaching out to fill the space, fire filling the space, tongues of flame spilling out.
A half-dozen goblins dropped from hiding spots in the shadows, partially or wholly on fire. Mags very carefully extinguished a patch of fire on the underside of the bridge itself before starting to put the creatures out.
It took a few seconds before Rose and the rest of the group were close enough to hear.
“-y darn time,” Mags said. “Every time, you try to mess with me! You little twits don’t learn! I’ve shot you, I’ve frozen you, I’ve blown some of you up. Do you learn? Do you announce yourselves and stop trying to ambush me? No. But doing it on a day like this? With demons running around? That’s a special brand of twit.”
“Aaaaaah!” a goblin that was still on fire screamed.
Mags reached out with both hands, athame extended, other hand flat, then clenched her free hand into a fist. The fire went out in the same moment.
“Aaah!” the goblin screamed, still smouldering, burned.
“Deal with it!” Mags said. “Peckerbottom, I bind you. You know the drill, standard rules.”
“Aaah!” it screamed.
“Nod,” Mags said.
It nodded, still writhing.
“That’s the most half-assed binding I’ve ever seen,” Lola commented.
“I’ve bound these little twits at least three times already. Same rules every time. If they can break the binding, I’ll be surprised. Snotwit, I bind you. You know how this works.”
“Uh huh,” Snotwit mewled.
“Spunkyfeets, Pissgag, Cuntwhistle, Stump, I bind you. Stop whining and get to your feet.”
The goblins did.
Lesser goblins, Rose observed. None any taller than waist height.
Mags saw Rose studying the things, “What do you think?”
“Having a few more numbers wouldn’t hurt,” Rose said. “We only needed the smaller group to slip away.”
“That was my line of thinking,” Mags said.
“Can’t help but feel like goblins are more liability than advantage,” Lola commented. “Never liked them.”