It made her deeply uncomfortable to see. It reminded of the circumstances surrounding herself and around Blake, without the politer aspects her grandmother had no doubt enforced or demanded.
“I’ve made a habit of checking on them when I stop through,” Mags said.
Not that Mags’ acquaintances here were any better, as reminders went.
They’d been moved to what looked like an office building minus the office part of things. A floor of a building with no walls erected, beyond the exterior ones. Paint, drywall or other coverings were absent, leaving the insulation and wires exposed. The ceiling was the same, a drop-ceiling without the tiles dropped into place. Where the four blades of the Barber’s extending up into the ceiling and the ceilings of the floors above, thicker bits of construction had come down, leaving piled rubble throughout much of the otherwise empty, lightless space. Everyone was scattered around the room, the vestiges in one corner, and Evan at the window, standing on a concrete balcony, doing his level best to avoid igniting the premises. It helped that he was smaller, now, but she still worried he was a beacon of light to any who looked.
Now that Rose forced herself to look at the vestiges, she saw two boys and two girls. One was older than the remainder of the group, thirteen or fourteen, the rest prepubescent. They were, viewed with the sight and without, like cracked porcelain dolls come to life. Hollow on the inside, they teemed with rat spirits, to the point that the press of furry bodies formed discolored, matted walls that covered the gaps. They stayed to shadow more than they ventured into light, and only the flames that licked Evan’s body made their faces visible.
Paige created a light in the palm of one hand, and the light made them too visible. The little band of vestiges even looked a little shocked when they saw one another.
The elder member of the group was missing most of his face. The dog spirit that occupied him looked like roadkill, twisted, emaciated, its broken, short-muzzled face and one ear peering from the wreckage of one corner of his head. If Rose squinted, it almost looked like a patch of hair that was the wrong color, covering part of his face. That aside, he looked to be the strongest and healthiest, if especially wary.
The boy closest to him was thin to the point of being wasted, but his stomach was bloated to the point that his shirt couldn’t cover it, more weight on one side than the other. Small, dark shapes moved beneath the skin, reminiscent of Green Eyes’ skeletal structure and organs.
A little girl with black skin was the third member of the group. That she had her hair in twin buns was almost unfortunate, because it was reminiscent of mickey mouse ears, and she had more than a little bit of mouse in her. Cracks ran along her skin, and as the spirits moved there, fur and the occasional paw or tail stuck up and through cracks, pushing the cracks apart. One eye was black from corner to corner, the lids covered in fine dark fur, the other eye socket had a number of mice poking their heads out and through, moving furtively, noses and heads turning as they sought to peer at their environment before others pushed them out of the way. As one grubby little paw reached too far and scraped her cheekbone, the girl flinched, rubbing at it with one hand, turning a small pawprint into a thin streak of dirt.
It made Rose think of Blake, with the small bird heads peeking out around the edges of one eye.
The shyest member of the group was a skinny little blond girl. She had freckles across her face that might have faded with age, had she been able to grow older. She wore a glare on her face, partly concern, partly because that was how her face was constructed. Her tongue, lips and cheeks had been devoured by the bloody-faced mice that now lurked on the floor of her mouth, and mouse teeth and skulls pushed between her teeth and cut through her gumline here and there, as if the meat of her face was a fleshy grave for the rodents. The teeth that hadn’t been displaced outright were jagged, twisted around, or set at odd angles.
The girl coughed, and a rodent flew free like a great glob of phlegm might, just barely managing to to catch at the ragged edge of flesh near the jaw before flying out onto the floor. It darted around the side of her face and into her hair, legs scrabbling for leverage before it managed to squeeze through a gap that the hair hid.
Rose noted how Green Eyes, lurking off to one side, only barely managed to restrain herself from going after the morsel.
“Noah, Benny, Mia, and Olive,” Mags said, indicating the four children in order.
And we’re all present, Rose noted.
“What’s happening?” Noah asked. “Is this the war you were talking about?”
“Uh, no,” Mags said. “No, this is… war being led to a very unfortunate conclusion.”
“A demon took over Johannes. It’s using his power to further its own ends,” Rose told the children. She turned to Mags, “Why are they okay?”
“I’ve made a point of protecting connections,” Mags said. “I asked Johannes to go easy on them, and I sort of… guarded them. Maybe that counted for something?”
“Oh my gosh,” Paige said. “He was going easy on them?”
Noah narrowed his eyes.
“That’s not important,” Rose said, changing the subject. She couldn’t be sure if the kids knew how screwed up they were, but reminding them wouldn’t help anything, and informing them could derail the conversation altogether. “I’m more interested in the fact that he might have kept a promise he made prior?”
“Maybe,” Mags said. “Maybe it was subconscious? Or he’s still in there, just a little, and he could steer it, or resist? I have no idea.”
Rose frowned.
“A demon,” Noah said. “It did all this? We were napping when it happened. It was like lightning hit everything all at once, from every direction. We just barely managed to get out of the way before those things tried to spear us.”
Ainsley and Lola were nearest the things, the great blades that had speared up through the floor. Ainsley was investigating one.
In the midst of her investigation, Ainsley nearly tripped over Mia, which put her on a collision path with the blade. Lola grabbed her and stopped her from making contact.
Virtually every set of eyes present was on the trio of girls.
“You’re the magic types from the town?” Mia asked. She hadn’t moved when Ainsley had approached her, and now her tone of voice suggested another kind of stubbornness, an insistence. “Wizards and wizardesses?”
“Yeah,” Ainsley said.
“You knew what Johannes was doing?”
“Oh,” Ainsley said, seeing the logical conclusion to the line of questions. “Listen-”
“You knew?” the smaller girl pressed, a little more intense. “Mags says she didn’t have a choice, her very Self was at stake, but why didn’t you do anything?”
“It’s complicated,” Ainsley said.
“How? Why?”
Had the little girl been an adult, the questions might have been answerable, but these were questions that came from the heart, and demanded an answer in kind.
Rose spoke, “Because he was considered too powerful to mess with.”
“That doesn’t sound very complicated at all,” Noah said.
“There were a lot of reasons,” Ainsley said. “I’m young, there were other things going on, there are rules about who you can attack, when, and why. But if you strip it all away, or if you distill it into some basic concept… yeah. The reason we couldn’t just deal with him was that he’s strong.”