False Moves – 12.z
Author: Wildbow

False Moves – 12.z | Pale

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The cabin was expansive enough for five families to stay in, the lacquered wood a warm orange in the light.  Three bedrooms were upstairs, two on each side, with a hallway leading to a living room at the back, and a main bedroom and bathroom at the very back.  That one was taken by Reid’s father, the others by his Others, who were currently either up there or elsewhere in the house.  He was hard at work there, both setting up a link to one of his demesnes, and also maintaining a video call with Raymond about managing the school, which involved some virtual images manifesting up there.  A lot of light, and the murmur of conversation.  Abbas, one of his father’s Others, a Stormchild, was standing by the railing upstairs that overlooked the main area, eyes and hair faintly glowing.

Reid knew he’d have to keep his voice down.

Down here, he had one bedroom, Wye another.  The entire setup was such that there could be a fire in the wood stove down here and a party in the kitchen and things wouldn’t be cramped.  Couches and chairs were arranged throughout, and other Others were seated and doing their own thing.

Nova Aquila was one of his father’s Others, an Icon.  Her skin was like ivory, her hair raven black, her top a silver silk halter that very intentionally draped down in folds to reveal her décolletage.  A god had put some of its essence into a statue to breathe power and existence into her.  Not life, exactly, but animation.  It was possible her skin was ivory, as a matter of fact.  Icons served as decoration, representatives, errand-runners, and sometimes guardians.  They had a lot of divine power, but it was a finite source that didn’t tend to replenish without the direct attention of the god that made them. A lake’s worth of water that didn’t refill when it was drank from, used to grow trees, used to put out fires.  When it was spent she would go still and never move again.

They’d found her in the midst of her journey to learn pop culture, music, computers, movies, plays.  She’d gone dancing, she was studying, trying on wildly different fashions.  All led by a young practitioner who’d found her alone in a disused temple for a god that was no more.  A guy who’d seemed to find vicarious enjoyment in exposing her to, well, everything.  The young man had taken her as a familiar, to bring her even further into the world of humans, and Reid’s father had taken her away less than a day later.

She sat on the couch, reading, but Reid had noticed that she would turn pages, but she never really made progress through the book.  When she was called on to assist with something or when they mobilized, she would put the book down, and when she picked it up again she’d start from the beginning.  Reid was fairly sure she didn’t know how to read very well, and she might not have the capacity to learn, exactly.  It seemed to him that it was more important that she have something she appeared to be doing, and have something to occupy her eyes.  She existed in part as decoration and it was to Reid’s father’s tastes that a fashionably dressed, beautiful woman could be seen in his vicinity, keeping his general company, reading proper literature.

The reason he noticed her was twofold.  Because Drowne had noticed her, for one.  Drowne sat down on the same couch as Nova, and she curled her legs closer to her body in what could have been read as aversion, but was deferential politeness at best, giving the Visage Drowne the space to sit down.  She looked, Reid thought, like she was glad to not be reading.

Drowne had been a man once, an ugly fisherman who’d found a pretty young woman he liked.  He’d won her heart, and he’d made a lot of enemies in the process.  A group of men and boys who’d hoped to win her heart attacked him and disfigured him, particularly his face.  She hadn’t cared, she’d helped tend his wounds, and so they’d repeated the process.  That time, the damage had been so bad that infection and necrosis had led to his face sloughing off.  He’d died, or his body had.  The face had lived.

Drowne had lived a long time as just the face.  A parasitic, slimelike mass of face that attached itself to others, or polluted a place, the knots and lines in wood grain twisting until it resembled his stretched-out face.  Anger and passion had boiled up, at times, sufficient for Drowne to flood a building, not with water, but with roiling flesh and repeated elements of his face, crawling up from basement, through the house’s walls, to attack the house’s resident.  He’d haunted the descendants of that original family, acting the very first moment they showed signs of inheriting their parent’s ugliness, and he’d protected his love, and his love’s descendants.  He’d worked out the rules to how these things worked, making it a game, always providing a chance to figure out his history, unravel what he was, and stop him.  Sometimes it worked and he was driven back, reduced to a fist-sized mass of flesh with a face on it, creeping into a crack in the wall, but it was fair.

Drowne adapted.  He could drag himself into existence by pulling on the echoes that haunted a place or feed on a building.  He could draw on practice and he could latch onto a person as an infection in a wound, a tapeworm, a growth on the face that would gradually turn their face and personality into Drowne’s own.  Spirits followed him and made places moist and mildewy where he gathered power.  He’d been a schoolboy capable of stretching his face into that macabre, pulled-tight expression he wore now, he’d been a glitch in a video game, a stain on the wall.  As a man he could stretch himself or his host out a little thinner, his flesh and form malleable.

As an Other that adapted, Drowne was a contrast to Nova, who stood still by default.

Whispering, mindful of the conversation Reid’s father was happening upstairs, Drowne struck a conversation with Nova that had nothing to do with her book.  He was careful to not put her on the spot.

You could teach her to read, Reid pushed the idea at Drowne.  It interrupted the conversation in progress as Drowne glanced his way, and it would make things more awkward, but it would be good to remove one weakness from one familiar of his father.  As a vessel of sorts, Nova couldn’t learn, but she could be taught.

“What are you thinking?” Wye asked.

Reid looked at the man, a bit older than him, but they were, as his father would say, of an age.  Wye wore smart looking glasses and kept his reddish hair styled, even in a place like this.  Navy polo shirt and white shorts.  He looked ready to step onto a yacht.

“About familiars, about family.”

“Family?” Wye asked.

Reid looked upstairs.  At that light show.  The fact that his father was redecorating.

He looked over at Raquel, who’d stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel and then re-entered the bathroom with an armful of clothing to change into a few minutes ago.  She now sprayed herself with bug repellent, hair wet and combed.  It seemed like she’d done something to keep the bug spray from smelling.  He had no earthly idea why she’d bothered to step into another room instead of changing in the open- the only people around were family, Others, and Wye, and she was merely thirteen.  Literally nobody and nothing in this cabin cared.

“Spray,” Reid said, clapping his hands.

Raquel looked up, paused, and then tossed him the aerosol can.

“Shall we step outside?” Reid asked.  “A short walk, patrol the cabin surrounds?”

Wye nodded.

“May I come?” Raquel asked.

“Don’t you have anything to do?”

“I’m caught up on things enough,” she replied.

Reid was about to tell his cousin that there was literally no way that could be the case, but Wye beat him to the punch, saying, “Come.”

Raquel nodded, hurrying to grab a jacket and her bag.

Reid was mildly annoyed, but he held his tongue.

He’d have to hold his tongue more, now, because Raquel was along.  He pulled on sandals and grabbed some weapons, his shirt pulled down over the knives at his belt, a one-strap bag at his side, heavy as bricks.  He held the can without using it.

“Reid,” his father said, from the balcony above.  He stood there, holding the phone like he’d just paused in the middle of the call.

All conversation had stopped.  Familiars craned heads around to look up.

“Take Drowne.  Have him stop agitating Nova.  Report back if there’s anything out of the ordinary.”

Reid looked at Drowne, then beckoned, one finger.  Drowne rose from the couch, not even glancing back at Nova.

He stepped outside, and sprayed himself there, offered to Wye, who refused, then placed the canister just inside the door.  Raquel took it to spray her legs, before hurrying to catch up.

As they descended the cabin stairs, Blackhorne, sitting there and standing guard, rose to a standing position, a giant of a man with horns disproportionately big even for his frame, falling in step, parallel to Drowne.

Drowne was bothered.  Reid could tell.

“My comments should be kept to this conversation alone.  There’s nothing damning to them, but I’d rather they stayed between us,” Reid said.

Wye nodded.

Reid glanced at Raquel.  “Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Swear it.”

“I- I swear.  Barring something that would hurt the family in a serious way.”

“The Mussers aren’t a family where cutting one person down elevates another.  Father would take such a cut as a mark against you and me both, if you tried.”

“I’m a Musser, I know.”

“You’re of the Mussers, but you’re not a Musser, Raquel.  You know the distinction.  Now, are you done interrupting what I’d intended to be a conversation with my friend?”

She nodded.

“I was struck with a suspicion back in that cabin, that I may be especially well equipped for this venture.  It gives me a small amount of pride.”

“Equipped?” Wye asked.  “Do tell.”

“My father has to force this environment to bend to his will.  He draws on a link to his demesne to reshape it, so he can have a mattress suiting his tastes, at least three walls, ceiling, and floor that are protected against intrusion, his Others gathered between the last remaining point of access and the front door.  Raquel is immature, inexperienced in the world.  They’re out of their element.”

“Is this your element, Reid?” Wye asked.  “I wouldn’t have thought.”

“No, but I’m acclimated to so many elements, by now.”

“I’ve heard the anecdotes,” Wye said.

They walked the dirt path, tracing their way to the river, where stones led the way down to the lake, about a twenty minute walk that would pass Kennet.  They didn’t walk toward Kennet.

Maybe this could be a way of educating Raquel, giving her the information she seemed to have failed to grasp, in what it took to be a Musser.  Wye, he knew, wouldn’t mind the recounting.

“When I was young, my father drove me hard to get my basic education out of the way.  Tutors, boarding schools, advanced classes.  Education in society when I wasn’t getting my grounding in the world.  It was never said out loud that I had to, but I’ve seen many family members fall by the wayside, some twice my age.  My older brother Donovan currently attends family business in Edinburgh.  When mentions are made of plans for the family, logistics, who should attend to what, he’s not a part of that planning, and his name rarely comes up.”

“I didn’t remember you had the older brother,” Raquel said.

“Case in point.  I have uncles who are the same.  Still of the family, but not the family, understand?”

Raquel nodded, and he could see her eyes move, working out where she stood, working out the others, who weren’t even of the family.  Like her mother.

“I graduated early, a couple years older than Raquel here, and I did well enough that I got rewarded.  They gave me a choice, for the first time.  Did I want to stay and focus my efforts within the family, somewhere in the cluster of family members my father keeps around to delegate to?  Did I want a mission, a specific, greater task that would be my test to see if I warranted more missions?  Or did I want to leave, furthering my education?”

“You chose to leave, obviously,” Wye said.

Reid nodded once in confirmation.  “I had a suspicion even then, that others have been given the same option, yet… nobody I knew had taken it.  Ergo, taking that option was not a good way to remain someone that young people in the family knew.  Perhaps it was a track to becoming a Donovan, or worse.  You know the kind of pressure I talk about, when I say it’s incessant, Wye.”

“I do.  Worse for your family in some ways.  Abraham is strong, while Alexander is cunning.”

“Don’t discount my father’s cunning, but I do get your meaning.  It’s so tempting to leave and go, and even more tempting to leave and not make the regular calls home.  To leave and relax standards, find escape.”

“Why did you go, then?  If it’s a trap?”

“Because I recognized that yes, it’s an apparent trap, but there are reasons my father would offer that as one of the options that go beyond just recognizing one obvious trap.  It’s intended as a test, Wye.  I went, but not as an escape from the Mussers.  If you leave of your own will, you aren’t invited back.  I kept their standards, even when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, when I was filled with hormones, tired, scared, hurt, in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar standards.  Daughters of family allies invited me out to party with other teenagers, urged me to let loose.  Boys my age offered me alcohol and put me squarely in that difficult position of having to decide if I should play along and maintain family alliances with them, or maintain integrity.  Volition.”

“From that last bit, I’d assume you didn’t partake.”

“Ha.  Alexander would have been disappointed if I hadn’t drank, in that same situation.  He says- he would have said, rather, that I should experience the world.”

“And the girls?” Reid asked.

“Depends on the alliance, but that kind of calculus didn’t really enter the conversation until we talked about marrying Nicolette off.”

“And now she’s gone astray.”

“She’s gone her own way, yes.  So, you were very careful with the girls, I imagine?” Wye asked.

Reid glanced back at Raquel, and then said, “Five days and four nights with the Knighton family in Minneapolis.  Much of my time was spent working right alongside Kaye Knighton, glancing at each other, smiling, making more, uh, accidental brushes of arm, shoulder, and hand than would be likely to truly happen by accident in a whole year spent together.”

“Ah, young love,” Wye said.

“She crawled beneath my covers one night while her father was out.  After kissing her, despite being… I can’t even describe, nearly out of my mind with an entire adolescence of pent-up urges, I couldn’t even reliably relieve myself with my hand-”

“Ew,” Raquel said.

“It’s reality, Raquel, and you’d best learn of it before you get a husband,” Reid said.

Raquel made a disgusted face.

“Was even that forbidden to you?” Wye asked.

“Spilling seed by my own hand, in the house of a family that was an ally today, but that could become an enemy tomorrow?  Not allowed, even into the waters of a toilet or shower.  You never know for sure.  Especially with the seed I’d wanted to spill, if I’d started I might not have stopped.  Some of the girls I was staying with, Wye…”

Wye chuckled softly.

He hoped, a little bit, that making Raquel uncomfortable would make her regret butting into this conversation with his friend.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how much willpower it took to crawl out of that bed so soon after she’d climbed in.  I told her I needed protection, which I did, but I also needed a moment to think.  I got my phone and decided to text my uncle.  It was too late to ask my father directly.  I asked if Kaye Knighton was acceptable.”

“The Knightons are fairly well to do.  Kaye is pretty and competent.”

“Yes.  My uncle thought as much.  I got the one-word affirmative, put on music as a way of excusing what I’d been doing on my phone, and returned to Kaye.  Until late in the evening.”

“Good for you.”

“We still email sometimes.  I don’t think she’s been taken off the list of my own marriage prospects, for when I go looking.”

“Will Uncle give you the choice?” Raquel asked, sounding a bit surprised.

“As he gave me the choice of the path I wanted to take, after getting my education early.  You have to do well and pass the tests to get the choices,” Reid said, trying to give the words the gravity that would communicate this to his little cousin.

He looked at her, and her chest was fair for her age- straining against her shirt.  She had hips.  She was slender, hair and skin taken care of.

“You’d do well to follow after Kaye,” he told her.  “You have that opportunity.”

Raquel didn’t take that as the praise and advice it was intended as.  “I could study and do well enough to get the choice you did, Reid.  I’m a good practitioner.”

He had a few things he wanted to say to that.  He also wanted to talk to his friend.  He looked to Wye.  “I passed the test, in the end.  Remaining Musser while exploring the world.  I went to places like that four million dollar penthouse apartment with pretty young Kaye Knighton, and I’ve slept in muck because the alternatives to the muck were so much worse.”

“What places?” Wye asked.

“Japan, to study their familiar practices.  Australia to learn with an Astrologer.  I picked up Blackhorne while on a ship between there and Canada.  An errand to Rome to meet the chosen champion of a pagan deity and judge if they were of a caliber that Durocher might be interested in.  They weren’t.  Then, hm, Venice to meet a rival cousin of Graubard in dollmaking enterprises.  Some background decisions being made there, about whether the Blue Heron network would keep Graubard or favor the cousin instead.  Then London for a trial run at schooling, explored some, got Drowne.  Then the Faerie courts, High Spring for three days, that felt like ninety, Dark Summer for a week to run another errand, finding someone for a family friend.  A lot of the places I’ve forgotten in the blur.  I’ll remember them when I’m called on to exercise certain practices, but I was all over.”

“Hmmm.  Any misadventures in there?” Wye asked.

“Paris.  I won’t forget Paris.  I’d gone to the Underside of the city to visit with a person who could teach me spellbinding, except I arrived mere hours after the head of the family had been beheaded.  The family was in chaos not just with a lack of leadership and enemies at the gates, but enemies from within, too.”

“Vying for control?” Raquel asked.

“Spellbinders bind the living and when the patriarch had died his slaves had been freed.  The spellbinders were so focused on the Others in their midst that they’d forgotten the humans.  One of the humans was able to get in position to corner and kill Eve Allemand, who would’ve been another of my potential marriage prospects.  She died a few minutes after the first and last time she spoke to me.  The freed human had smashed his hands against her face and head until she’d died.  His hands had been so broken and bloodied by delivering the beating that he’d been unable to operate the doorknob to let himself out of the room.  So he’d just sat on the floor and waited two hours for someone to find him there.  It was me who found him.  Me who shot him where he sat.”

“Was that your first kill?”

Reid blinked.  “Yes.”

“A milestone then.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.  It didn’t really rate.”

“You were fifteen, sixteen?” Wye asked.

“Sixteen then,” Reid said.  Uncomfortable, he changed the subject.  “You know, that whole business was another test.  Not set for me or planned in any way.  Our family didn’t conduct or anticipate the beheading.  But it was a situation that called on me to be my absolute best.  Any failure in the handling of it would make me less of a Musser, more of a Donovan, or an Uncle Grant, or an Uncle Lyndon.”

Reid glanced at Raquel.  Potentially even sending me down a course like that of Billie Musser, or her daughter, Raquel.

“How bad was it?”

“Getting them to calm down and sit down together was the hard part.  So many accusations and rivalries flying about.  Blackhorne helped keep the peace, physical enforcement.  Drowne watched for outside trouble.  I threatened to pull family resources out if they couldn’t behave like civilized people.  Then, once equilibrium had been reached, I helped for a fee.  Asking a small price-”

“Makes them more grateful than free help would,” Wye finished for him.  “It forces them to recognize the service is a service.”

“Helped to manage things, helped to remove the rival family, and the Allemands have remained diehard family allies since, though they were weaker as a family than they’d been before.”

“A pity for them, a feat not unworthy of a badge of honor for you, in your family’s eyes,” Wye rejoined.  He had a way of making it very easy to go on at length.  He was probably used to it from Alexander.

“Barely any time to launder my clothes free of blood and gunpowder, I traveled to a serial killer’s hovel in Soissons, because the shabby woman there had worked out some interesting things with practices and demesnes.  Talked my way into her company, spent two weeks barely able to sleep because she was so dangerous, even with my familiars guarding me.”

“You weren’t invited then?” Wye asked.

“I invited myself, at my father’s instruction.  Another small test, I’d think.  She was willing to hurt me while I slept, and slithered past the slightest gap in their watch over me.  Fatigue made it all harder.  She was able to sleep like a baby while the pregnant woman she was keeping captive in her demesne wailed and cried out for help.  I thought my heart was harder than it was, but it kept me up.”

“So soon after your first kill, too,” Wye said.

“Ah,” Reid said.  “True that.  You’d think it would harden my heart further.”

“I might, but I’d also think it would weaken the defenses, actually.  Did you at least help the victim?”

“I did give her some assistance.  Some direct, some subtle.  I’d been trying for some time to harden my heart and exercise discipline and volition, but I couldn’t leave her completely alone, despite that.”

“Hmm.”

“Learned what I needed to learn about the demesne she maintained constant and free access to, slipping back to it at a moment’s notice to elude authorities, hm, delivered the baby, that was one bit of assistance I gave.  Took a life and helped bring life into the world, about one and a half weeks apart.  Then told my father what I’d learned about the demesne.  Matter of days later, I smoked outside while my father took it.  We sent the victim on her way with her baby, spellbound to forget we’d existed or where the hovel was.  Easier than cleaning up the evidence I’d been there.”

“Convenient.”

“Then back to Canada, to study at the Blue Heron and try to win the affections or loyalty of Estrella Vanderwerf.”

“That would have been-”

“While she was off-balance with the recent slaughter of her family.  Embarrassed myself trying, I admit, but even my father commented that he wasn’t sure he’d succeed if he’d been young enough and if he’d been the one trying.”

“She likely turns down the affections of comely young fae princes and such.  Compared to them you’re unequipped, Reid,” Wye said.

Nettled, Reid replied, “I knew that much.  I thought being crude and genuine was the road to take, while I covertly tried to get her into the fold as a close family ally.  But the crude, direct approach is defeated with laughter.  Maybe I could have tried harder or let myself be laughed at, but I decided I’d rather have my pride.”

“I was there around then,” Wye said.  “We renewed our childhood acquaintance.  Friendship?”

“Friendship, yes.  We did.  You probably knew most of this, now that I think of it.”

“Most.  It’s worth saying for Raquel’s benefit.”

“Let’s hope,” Reid replied, looking back at his cousin, who trailed a few steps behind.  “I went away again with father, then once again back home, if such a thing existed anymore.  Six months of study over winter and spring, and then the Bristow Belanger fiasco.  My father took the role of headmaster, of course, and here we are.”

“Interesting, interesting,” Wye said.  “Here we are indeed.  I see glimpses of you when you’re around, and I’m left to infer much of what fills the gaps.  It’s good to have the scaffolding to set those inferences onto.”

“You’re one of the few outside of the family I trust to have that much, Wye.  In any event, I think having traveled the world in a way my father really hasn’t has left me far more comfortable living in a modest cabin at the edge of hostile territory.  He’s strong and capable, but this setting will wear on him.”

“We may not be here for long, we’ll leave, return to school, we can smoke together in Bristow’s old quarters with Tanner and Chase, share stories.  You can make another attempt at Estrella, knowing what you know now…”

“I’m not so brave as that,” Reid confessed.  “Don’t tell my father that or he may force me to work on it, trial by fire.”

“By cold, rather, or by ice queen,” Wye commented.

Raquel kicked a tree root that was sticking up onto the path, and stumbled briefly.  Drowne caught her before she could fall and skin her knees.  She cussed under her breath at the stubbed toe.

“Getting to where I stand with my father is the product of years of this, Raquel,” Reid told her.  “Never once having a friend merely for the sake of having a friend.  Always with a calculus for cultivating allies.”

“Truly!?” Wye asked.  “We’re not genuine buddies of the bosom?”

“Ha ha,” Reid replied.

“No, family allies first, but I do enjoy your company.”

“Likewise,” Reid said.  He looked over at Raquel, and then, tiring of twisting around to look back at her, put a hand on her shoulder, steering her ahead and forward until she walked alongside him.  “Had I not put family first in my mind at all times, had I faltered and taken time to myself, sought escape, or chose friends and girls purely for the sake of friendship and romance, I would not stand where I stand now.  Making the mistake merely once would be something held against me for years to come, a glimmer of weakness our father and those in immediate proximity to him would keep in mind for decades.  It would make everything from that point on that much harder.”

“I’m well aware of how the family works,” Raquel replied, shrugging away from the hand he’d put at her shoulder.

He let the hand fall away.

He wouldn’t say it directly, because direct tended to encourage retort, denial, anger, grieving, bargaining.  Anything but acceptance of the fact.  No, he left it out there, information for her to digest.

Because she’d made those mistakes several times.  She’d had days on the school campus where it could be said she did nothing that bettered her position or the family’s.  She’d befriended Yadira Kennedy, who was of a family of appreciable standing, but of an offshoot branch, never to hold the reins, and Kassidy Knox, a chubby little brat who was so far from holding a position that mattered that she could try while having all the luck in the world, and never get there.

If he were Raquel, he’d be taking a completely different path.  No Yadira, no Kass.  Fernanda, maybe, on the gamble that Chase had some connections, still.  Then, with tits, a pretty face, a beginner’s education in a wealth of practice from a respectable school, and the Musser family name, he would seek out prospective husbands to win over.

The fact she wasn’t going that route frustrated him so much he could spit.

He spat off into the side of the woods.  The river that fed into the lake south of them burbled beside them.

She didn’t understand that no, she would not ever get the choice.  She’d already forfeited it.  She had even from early on, when she’d complained and cried about her mom’s absence instead of turning her focus to family and opportunities, and then she had carried on down that road, ignoring every cue and clue she was given.  At this point, he was halfway convinced that if she was given the choice by some miracle or uncharacteristic kindness of Reid’s father, her uncle, then she’d pick the option to leave, seeing it as an escape, and she’d hit every pitfall and fail every test out there.

When Reid had been at the school with her, he’d watched, and on the rare occasions his father had inquired as to how Raquel was getting on, the implication had been there.  Was she getting on with the other students?  Was she recognizing the one good path ahead of her?

The crop of students this past summer hadn’t been exceptional.  Reid was of the opinion she should have set her sights on Sawyer Hennigar or, better yet, the older Kellen Hennigar, who could potentially inherit stewardship of the Hennigar family.  Every single day that had passed that she wasn’t pursuing that had been a failed test of sorts.

There would be no choice for her.  Just the opposite, really.  For the tier she occupied, she had two routes to exit.  To find a way up and through, or to go the road her mother had traveled.  Someone who wasn’t loyal to the family was a liability to the family, by way of the things about the family that they knew.  What if they got into drugs and decided to trade information to a family enemy in exchange for a score?  What if they gave a filtered version of events to a therapist, received filtered guidance in return, and then decided to lash out and hurt the family?

You rate lower than the Others like Nova, Reid thought.  And you’re so close to being removed from the picture, becoming a Donovan at best, a Billie at worst.

“Raquel,” Wye said.

“…Yes?”

“What was your impression of the individuals you ran into?  Avery and…?”

“And some Others.  I don’t think she gets it.”

Ironic, hearing you say that, Reid thought.

“Gets what?” Wye asked.

“She seemed legitimately surprised when I called her out as being a hurt more than a help, essentially.  For the world at large, for practice and the networks we’re trying to build up.”

“Is there a world at large?  Practice at large?” Wye asked.

“Isn’t there?” Reid asked.

“I don’t see it that way.”

“Seeing things is meant to be your specialty,” Reid told his friend.

“The world is fluid.  These systems naturally manifest and evolve.  Sometimes we set down rules and laws, the powerful get to dictate it.  Solomon got to dictate it.”

“Solomon was forsworn in the end.”

A woman’s voice.

They turned.  Reid’s hand went to his belt.

The faceless woman they’d glimpsed before.  She raised a hand, but the hand was hidden from view.  Tree branches blocked the view of her face, the edges of leaves faintly illuminated with the last vestiges of light that was reflected from sunset to river and then to branch.

“Solomon was forsworn?” Wye asked.

“The architect of this system we abide by set rules even he couldn’t operate by.”

“You didn’t see her?” Reid hissed under his breath.

“I’m not exactly peeping about with those damned glamour thornbushes those girls like to make,” Wye replied.

“I mean no harm,” the faceless woman said.  “I go by Miss.”

“Unwilling to give your real name?” Wye asked.

“I’m missing that as much as I’m missing a face and hands.  I was wondering if we could make another attempt at parley?”

“Why come to us and not my father, then?” Reid asked.  “If you’re so ignorant as to not understand why you should, you aren’t equipped to parley.”

“You’ve spent your lives generating a currency of sorts within your family, Reid.  Standing, respect, connections… abstract but still something that could be estimated and tallied.  I’d think you could spend it.”

“On what?  Urging my father to retreat?  I could throw any currency I have into the river, wouldn’t that be more likely to get me something?”

“I think you might have more say than you suspect, Reid.  Raquel.  A united front from family, advice from an augur, it’s not for nothing.  Bristow does have connections to the Lighthouse that may yet be preserved.  Witch Hunters make dangerous enemies.”

“I think Witch Hunters that would attack so soon after the deal with Bristow dissolves aren’t allies we need.”

“Perhaps.  But the argument can be made alongside others.”

“I don’t see how I could convince my father, and you’ve failed to convince me it would be worth the attempt.”

“You stand to gain so little,” Miss said.  “You stand to lose a lot.  The practitioners of Kennet have argued on your behalf.  For Raquel, primarily, but for you as well, Reid.”

“And me?” Wye asked.

“You’re of an age where you’re more free, Wye,” Miss said.  “Your decisions are your own and you conduct your own business.  If you want to leave, we won’t stop you, but we don’t place you among those who might need rescue, who’ve had family bring them here rather than come of their own volition.”

“I decided to come,” Raquel said.

“A decision that was influenced by the nature of your larger family.  You came primarily for your uncle, not for reasons that have anything particular to do with Kennet itself.”

“Are you that sure?” Raquel asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you trying to strip away our allies?” Reid asked.

“I’m here to make an offer.  Our concern is Abraham Musser.  I don’t wish for innocents to get hurt, nor for the like of Raquel to suffer.  If you agree and remove Raquel we’ll tie up, eliminate, or distract one or two Witch Hunters with one local Other.  It’s clear you don’t value her enough, you were willing to send her off alone to look into cabin rentals, we’d be utilizing John Stiles, who dealt with Alexander.”

“We send Raquel away, you deal with two witch hunters, using John Stiles, and that’s less for us to worry about?” Reid asked.

“Yes.  It’s our prediction the old gunman Haris and the young one, Francis, would be easiest to draw away using John.”

“Wye?” Reid asked.

“Are there any of those damned thornbushes around?” Wye asked.

“Nothing glamour-generated, to the best of my knowledge,” Miss replied.

Wye’s eyes flashed gold, and the gold touched eyelash, which touched glasses.  The glasses took on a heavy tint that left his eyes as shadows on the far side.  Those shadows moved in ways eyes couldn’t.

“I’d say no,” Wye replied, his eyes and glasses changing to normal.

“Based on what you saw?” Miss asked.  “Or based on your goals for the Belanger family and Musser’s place in them?”

“Both.”

“I don’t think this suits you, Wye,” Miss said.

“And how would you know?  Do you know me?” Wye asked.

“No, I don’t.  But when you first arrived at the outskirts of Kennet, at nine or ten years old, still innocent, in Alexander’s company, I saw you and watched you.  I played my part to divert you both.  You’ve passed through the area several times now, usually when you have business out west, going to and from the school.  I pay attention each time.  It’s not truly knowing you, but I’ve seen how you’ve grown.”

“Disturbing,” Wye said.

“Are you one to talk about watching others?  If this is about Alexander, could I arrange a meeting between you and John instead?”

“It’s not about Alexander, really.”

“I didn’t think so, but I thought it respectful to offer.  Raquel.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t talk to her,” Reid said.

There was a pause.  As if both Miss and Raquel thought he was talking to them.

“Are you well?  The Witch Hunter came close.”

Raquel held up a hand, an unsightly scar ringing her thumb, where the Witch Hunter had apparently dragged a tool through skin as she sought the angle to cut the digit off.  She hadn’t finished.

“I can heal wounds,” Raquel said.  She slapped one pocket.

Don’t give away information.

“But are you alright?  Avery worried.”

“It’s not Avery’s concern,” Raquel said.

“Avery saved you earlier.  I’m hopeful those three won’t get as involved with the Witch Hunters or you until this all resolves, but we do intend to act with their wishes in mind.  Your uncle and Reid’s father Abraham Musser intends to battle.  He’s already given instructions to his Others.  I’ve talked with Avery and the local council.  If you find this battle is too much, raise your hands and flee the fight.  We’ll see what we can do to clear the way and guard your retreat.”

“Mere words to capitalize on a moment of weakness, should one emerge?” Reid asked.  “Making it easier for your enemy to rout?”

“The same will go for you.  For Wye as well.  If Abraham Musser can communicate his genuine willingness to stand down and walk away, we’ll let him leave.  All we want is less threats to deal with in already tense times.  Abraham Musser is a threat, as is anyone following his instruction.”

“It seems to me that already tense times for the enemy are the best times to strike,” Reid said.

But the branches moved and when they shifted back, she wasn’t there anymore.

“Keep more of an eye out, will you, Wye?  That could have just as easily been the gunman, John whatever.”

“You’re protected against bullets.”

“By pieces of paper.  Forgive me if I’m not eager to test it.  Let’s go.”

They headed directly back, choosing patches of forest to wade through instead of a roundabout path, because it was faster and because it kept them out of the way of anyone waiting to waylay them on the winding dirt road.  Wye’s eyes flashed as he searched the surroundings.

Drowne was upset and Reid tried to be patient with it, but it worsened as they approached, and he decided he’d rather deal with it now than snap in the presence of his father.  “What is it, Drowne?”

“He’s sentimental,” Blackhorne said.

“I don’t see a reason why we’re here, except pride and greed,” Drowne said.  He peered through perpetually wet hair, the skin of his face stretched tight across his features like hands were pulling on the sides, his expression either a macabre frown, corners pulled far back, or a macabre smile.

“Pride and greed are enough.”

“We keep making small decisions that hurt us,” Drowne said.  “I won’t claim to be a genius-”

Blackhorne barked out a laugh.

“-but I managed, once.  I feel like we’re not managing.  We’re- there’s a fundamental misunderstanding about all this.”

“There is,” Reid agreed.  “I’m sorry, Drowne, but the misunderstanding is yours.  We make the decisions.  You Others follow through.  That was the deal.”

“Yeah,” Drowne said.  “But things as big as… what’s the greater goal, except standing and power?  Your father talks about a movie he wishes to make, but he takes so few steps.”

Wye hissed through his teeth.

“Don’t denigrate my father,” Reid said.

“Things as small as Nova.  Teaching her to read would-”

“Is that what’s nettling you?  Do you have a crush, Drowne?  She’s attractive by design-”

“Affinity, not a crush.  Teaching her to read would make us all stronger, if only a little.”

“My father gave his instruction.  A gain so small as that is not worth pushing for.  It’d make us seem petty.”

“Is it so petty?”

“Yes!” Blackhorne crowed.  “You want to put your eel inside a literally sculpted body.”

“Butt out, Blackhorne.  I’m trying to explain-”

“You’re trying to justify something fed by the basest of desires, but you can’t reproduce, unless it’s to shed your face like a blob of a cell undergoing mitosis, and she certainly can’t,” Blackhorne said, his voice deep.  “Is it much different from a dog desperately trying to hump a table leg?”

Drowne lunged, arm reaching, joints cracking as cartilage rubbed against cartilage, form shuffling, letting the arm reach further, for Blackhorne’s horn.  Reid didn’t look, leaning instead on the familiar bond, and, not moving from between them, he raised a single hand.

They stopped.  Drowne let go and stepped back.  Drowne spat the words, “Is it petty if it’s a question of loyalty?  Of driving a closer bond?”

Reid, hand still raised, turned to look at Drowne, his expression cold.  He moved his hand slightly, showing Drowne the family signet.

Drowne fell silent, looking away.

“Wye, would you go ahead?  Blackhorne, Raquel, you too.  Tell my father I’ll be along in a moment.”

“Good luck,” Raquel said, quiet.

With the angle of her face and the focus of her eyes, it seemed dangerously close to a wish for Drowne’s luck, not Reid’s.

He would have to tell his father.

“Are you implying that loyalty and bond are anything but perfect?” Reid asked.

“I serve.”

“Serve without question, Drowne.”

“As you wish,” Drowne said, looking off in the general direction of the lake.

Reid walked to the cabin.  He stopped partway.  “Drowne.”

Drowne hadn’t moved.

“Serve without hesitation.”

“Yes,” Drowne said.  “Of course.”

They entered the cabin.  Blackhorne stood on the porch, and fell in step with Drowne, a pace behind Reid.

His father was there, carrying a heavy bag, and wearing fine clothes with the glasses perched on his nose, glove on one hand.

“Why did you delay to discuss with Drowne?” his father asked.

“He’s to leave Nova be from here on out.”

“If you have time to tarry, you can help with the efforts tonight.  I thought about having you stay with Wye to guard him, but we’ll lean on wards instead.”

“Very well,” Reid said.  The comment about tarrying was a clear indication his suggested reasons hadn’t been good enough.  It was possible his father knew the real reasons and had noticed the lie.

“Do you have what you need if the Witch Hunters come?”

“I went out prepared.  I could leave now with what I have on me.”

“Then leave now, with what you have on you.  Let’s be on our way.  Wye?  Stay in touch.”

Wye nodded.

They left.  Father with his seven Others.  Wye with his two, Raquel alone, a cup in hand.

The door opened.  Reid entered, smiling, smoothing his suit jacket.  “There you are.”

The girl was clearly homeless, a young teenager with a perpetual glare.  She wore a wool cap with straight black hair sticking down out of it, and a duffel coat that would’ve fit someone a size or two bigger than her, but she wore other layers too.  Her boot had duct tape around it , near the laces.  “The fuck?”

“My long lost sister?  Hasn’t it been a while?” Reid asked.

His father entered behind him.  The door clicked shut.

“You’re deluded.  I’m not your sister.  Help!” she hollered the word at the top of her lungs.

Her eyes widened a bit.  She’d sensed something was off, or wrong.

The lack of an echo.

“You’re wizards too.”

“Practitioners.  Don’t be vulgar,” Reid’s father said.

“What the fuck creepy shit are you up to?” the girl asked.  “Leave me alone.  I keep to myself, I’ve met the Lord of the city, I got the all-okay to practice here.”

“That’s not our concern,” Reid said, before his father could comment.  Another little test.  If he let his father take the reins too much, there was a chance they could get to the important part, only for his father to call it off, because he wasn’t ready.  It had happened to his cousin Hudson, with Hudson’s father.

The kid was looking all around the room, assessing the environment.

There was one exit.

“You spread lies about being my estranged family.  You sent the child welfare people after me.”

“Yes,” Reid said.

“There are holes in the story.  We already found some.  It won’t hold up, they shouldn’t let you take me, unless you pull some heinous shit.”

“No,” Reid agreed.  “The systems of innocents can be pretty tough to beat, sometimes.  Turn enough eyes to any single case and stuff starts falling apart.  But that wasn’t the goal.  What we needed was for enough of them to believe that I could be in this room with you now.”

“Fuck you,” the girl said.

He could see her working out her options.  Her eyes searched the room for weapons, paused momentarily as she noted a pen on the desk.

If she wanted the pen, Reid would get his notebook.  He opened it up and paged through it, aware his father was watching his every move, judging his every word.  The notebook was his spellbook, and the spell was a simple one.  He pulled the pencil from the binder of the notebook and made a small tickmark to close the diagram, and pulled it free of the book rather than take the time to recreate it.  He’d have to replace it later.

“What’s the plan?” she asked.  “I’m a little young for you, creepy guy.”

“It’s not you I want,” Reid said, closing the tiny notebook and putting it inside his coat pocket.

He could see the dots connect.  She’d been brought here, and probably, right from the outset, she’d expected her familiar to come help her.  It was something he did, both in terms of personality, and in terms of capability.  He was an infiltrator, impossibly versatile.

And he hadn’t come.

Now this, the words…

A tough street kid who’d been through all sorts of bad stuff before she’d found familiar and practice, almost in that order, she’d been ready to face him with snarls, swearing, and a pen as an improvised weapon.  Whatever he’d wanted to do to her.

Faced with a danger to her familiar, all of that melted away.  Fear, the expression of a child, defeat.  “No.  Not Drowne.  What have you done to him?”

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way.  If you-”

“The hard way, if you’re going to hurt Drowne.  What have you done to him?  What?”

He reached for her.  She materialized a knife out of thin air, slashing at him.  She immediately went on the offensive, cutting twice and not getting past his shirt.  She got three swipes in, and he could feel the layered protections he’d set falling apart with each cut.

It was stupid to let this get even that far.  He snapped his fingers, activating other papers.  A nearby paperclip holding papers together, a metal filing cabinet handle, and the knife itself shattered.  She exclaimed in pain, hand bleeding, and he threw her against the desk, her face colliding with the wooden edge.  She pushed herself away, disoriented enough she didn’t face the right direction, and he pressed her against the wall, the length of his arm against her throat.

Disoriented and choking, she grappled with his arm, fingernails dragging against his sleeve.  Her fingernails scraped against his suit sleeve.  She could have gone for the skin of his hand, but that was protected too.  She was too out of it to even think about strategy now.

Just a kid.  A few years his junior.

“Drowne…” she gasped the word.  She twisted, trying to get relief from the press against her neck.  He let it go a bit, ready to reapply force if she started to practice.  “He’s all I have.”

“Was all you have,” Reid said.  He could feel his father’s eyes boring into the back of him.

“I hate the shelters, but I’m too old to get an apartment of my own yet.  We save money for when I’m old enough.  He helps.  He thinks I can start pretending to be sixteen next year, I’ll be old enough to rent an apartment.  He helps with food, with everything, he protects me,” she whispered.  “He says I’m the descendant of someone he once loved.  Isn’t that amazing?”

Reid didn’t answer.

“Isn’t that so cool?” she asked, voice ethereal, sentiments dug up from somewhere dreamlike.  “It’s so special.  Love for someone that leads to him protecting someone generations down the line?  Don’t- don’t ruin that.  He’s all I have.”

“Was.”

“He showed me there was magic in the world,” she said.

“Abracadabra,” Reid told her, before pressing the signet ring to her neck.  It sizzled audibly, and she gasped.  “You chose the hard way, so I’m placing this somewhere visible.  A seal to help the transfer along, and to keep you in check.  I can’t have you working out solutions to this.”

The words were more his father’s than his, a reinterpretation of something his father had said when someone had ticked him off.  Reid wasn’t really ticked off.  Just- upset that she’d made him feel bad for doing this.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“It’s possible to lend the familiar bond, given cause.  It’s easier when it’s family. I’ve given you my family seal, as it happens.  But we’re going to do a bit more than a lending.  You’ll give him over to me.”

She shook her head as much as he was able.  He pressed harder against her neck to keep her from vocalizing that same protest.

He spoke to her, his face close to hers.  “This will take about an hour, to go through the procedures.  With this binding, every time you think of him, it will feel like a hot poker is being pushed through this seal.  If you act on that thinking, it will be worse.”

“I’ll think of him every day.  I’ll deal with it, no matter how much it hurts.  What else do I have?”

“That’s one layer.  You’ll swear to forget and I’ll help push you down that road with some more bindings.  Should you realize you’ve forgotten something important or get too curious about the seal and go digging, the burning seal will discourage you, burning you every time you pry too deep.”

“Then I won’t swear.  You’ll have to kill me.”

“If you don’t swear, we’ll destroy Drowne, first.  I’ll suppress the connection, and my other Familiar will annihilate him.  You can feel his fear, can’t you?  The danger he’s in?”

“I’m not that strong.  I know I’m supposed to be able to, but-”

She stopped.

“He’s trying very hard to reach you, and you’re trying to reach him.  Just barely,” Reid said.

“I can feel him,” she whispered.

She looked at him with what looked almost like hope.  Like she wanted this discovery to mean that she got to keep Drowne.

“You’re feeling him for what should be the last time,” he told her.  “He-”

He could feel Blackhorne act.  He saw her eyes widen.

“He’s made his own oaths,” Reid said, changing what he was going to say.

This cut both ways.  Drowne had surrendered on the threat of Reid killing the young girl.  He’d started swearing the oaths that would protect her.

He released the pressure on her neck, straightening.  He waved the paper at the pen on the table to cast it into the gap between desk and wall, just to be safe.  Not that it mattered.

The fight had gone out of her.

“The easy way from here on out?  You know it’s what he would have wanted for you.”

She shrugged one shoulder, staring at a filing cabinet.

His father addressed him, “Rabbit Killer is telling me there’s an enterprising young woman who can shrug off his influence.  I’m going to intervene to prevent any child services workers or officers from thinking too hard about the fact we were left in here alone with a girl they’re not sure we’re related to.”

“Okay,” Reid said.

“Good work, Reid.  Drowne will be an asset to you.”

Reid nodded.

The door closed behind him.  The girl stared at him.

She renewed her attempts, as if she’d sensed that Reid might not do this if his father wasn’t behind him.  Maybe, if his father hadn’t been here, his resolve might have faltered.

What would he even have said?

What was he supposed to say here?  A lot of the words had been his father’s, more or less, Reid aping the approach his father had taken when he’d let Reid watch the capture of his sixth and most recent familiar.

He mulled over the words, and then decided on, “He was too good for some shabby little girl who can barely practice.”

He carried on.

Wye made a big deal of my first kill, but I’d already done worse well before then, Reid thought.  The taking of Blackhorne had been bad.  Drowne had been worse.

Drowne was not doing well.  The fight wasn’t in him tonight.  The nonsense with Nova was holding him back, dredging up memories.  That might’ve been why the recollection of the taking of Drowne had been as sharp as it was.

The fucking little kid was a ninja.  What had he been called?  Francis?  Reid turned and hurled a knife from his belt.  One of his nine implements.  The knife arced through the air, curving as it flew around the corner.  He felt it strike road, felt the blade dull, felt it bounce.  It hadn’t hit its target.

The kid had a very intuitive sense of when he was watched, of light and shadow and its interplay.  Reid had fought the Hennigars who had trained in a variety of styles for much of their lives and those guys hadn’t had the ability this kid was putting on display.

Reid held his hand up, fingers together.

The phone in his left hand buzzed.  He glanced down at it, read ‘above’, and looked up.

The kid had already scaled his way up there.  He held a small crossbow.

Reid snapped his fingers.  The tin hammer at his belt stirred, and windows on the upper floor of the building shattered.  He’d been focused on the crossbow, but the practice had a way of not landing directly on these assholes.

The glass had scared the kid off, and even though he hadn’t seen or heard it, there was no bolt in the crossbow.  The glass had made the kid miss.

Reid hurried in that direction, not to go after the kid, but to take cover with his back to the front wall of the building.  Yes, something could be dropped on him, but he’d rather take a stray flowerpot than a knife or bullet.

He held his hand out, and the wire he had wrapped around his upper arm, just up his sleeve, absorbed his power.  It had many uses, depending on how he arranged and knotted it, but his primary method was to manipulate his claim over his implements.  Pulled by the wire, the knife on the road moved, bouncing and dragging across the road with increasing intensity, until it leaped the final ten feet to his hand, handle slapping into palm.  Left alone, his belt would draw on his Self to replace the knives, producing an effect like a bit of blood loss, but doing it this way spared him that small cost.

The chainsaw roared.  Raquel was in the sights of the leader of this merry band of lunatics.

He checked his phone as Wye messaged him.

Yeah.  He’d already noticed.

It wasn’t that far into the evening and an awful lot of the town was going to bed early.  Or going inside, anyway, to put their TVs on with curtains drawn.  There was either an impressively powerful Other in this town, or the locals had called on greater powers and the greater powers had obliged.  This was the most recent of three encounters Reid had had, where someone had gone that far.  Once it had been a Lord with that kind of sway, all the way back in the Underside of Paris, another time it had been a fight he’d witnessed, back in Japan.  Different systems and expectations, there, with a lot of practitioner culture bleeding in from the West, but the end results were so often the same.

The chainsaw was cutting something.  He turned his focus that way, checking the coast was clear as he jogged across the road.  There were no cars, and half the streetlights were out.

Raquel was keeping a bench between herself and Elise, the Witch Hunter leader.  She’d summoned an Other, someone’s shadow that had gone its own way, leaving its owner bereft.  The shadow was more red than black now, bleeding from open wounds.

He hurled a knife.  Elise might’ve seen the glint of steel.  She turned, moving the chainsaw, and the blade curved through the air.  She made a last-second adjustment, and the blade bounced off the saw, flipping buzzsaw-fast through the air.

In an arc toward Raquel.  He pulled on his claim to the knife, the shadow moved to intercept, and between the two attempts at helping, the shadow got the knife through the hand instead of catching it.

And a chainsaw through the middle.  Elise shoved it into his back while it was turned to her, and toward Raquel, who threw herself into the garden just outside some dentist’s or doctor’s office to avoid it.

His phone buzzed.

Elise kicked the shadow in the rear end, knocking it onto Raquel.

He aimed another knife, readying the throw.

His phone buzzed again, and he changed his mind, running across the street instead.  Elise had seen him readying, and- he saw it.  The crossbow shot bouncing off the road.

If Wye was messaging him that insistently, there was a reason.  Moving when he was standing still and going still when he’d been moving was a pretty good policy.

Stay calm, keep your thoughts together.  Ninety percent of people will panic in a life or death situation.  If you can keep your head, you’re in the top ten percent.

Familiars, he thought.

Drowne was moving toward the roof.  After the kid who was up there, taking shots at people around the scene.

And Blackhorne…

Elise was focused on him.  She heard the thudding footsteps too late.  Blackhorne came at her from the shadows, a massive, musclebound creature with great horns, relative to satyr, called a deuadai instead, more savage and strong than lustful and feral.

Though he was lustful.  He was feral.  He was more of a lot of things.

The chainsaw met Blackhorne’s chest, digging into meat and bone.  Reid could feel the damage there.  He could feel, through the connection, as Blackhorne reached over and grabbed the chainsaw by the moving blades, and pressed hand down, pressing it harder into his chest, until it grated against bone and calloused hand both, the resistance greater than the engine’s ability to move the blades.

Elise screamed, angry, unhinged, and the blade began moving as if it could hear.

Blackhorne screamed back, loud, and the blades stopped altogether, the engine no longer humming..  Blackhorne laughed, tearing the weapon from Elise’s hands, and swung the engine end of it at her head.  She avoided it, and she avoided the follow-up swings.

Reid threw a knife, hard, and pushed it out, away.  It went as far as a bullet might, out of sight, and with Drowne’s awareness, he could push it in the direction of his target-

The knife found the flesh of the little ninja-like asshole with the crossbow.  He didnt know where, but it didn’t matter.  It slowed him down and pushed him to the ground, letting Drowne approach.

Drowne wasn’t as fast about it as he could’ve been.  Reid pushed, and Drowne moved faster.

He’d have to address that.

Blackhorne, chest and hand mangled, gave absolutely no shits about either as he laughed, pursuing Elise, who was putting a hand in the bag she had at her waist.  It looked like first aid kits he’d had once, more square than anything, but it was reinforced, and it didn’t have the telltale markings.

A can?  A canister?  Pepper spray?

She had a theme, and it reminded him of goblin kings he’d encountered.  Brutal, savage, mean.  What made a tin can mean?

“Drowne’s faltering,” Blackhorne laughed, feeling his way through the same connection.

“Drowne is less a fighter and more a problem solver.”

“He’s fighter enough, that’s not the problem,” Blackhorne said.

“You’re meant to be the fighter, Blackhorne.  Justify your inclusion in my roster.”

Then, to make it clear why he was the master, he followed up on one of Blackhorne’s missed swats with the handle-end of the chainsaw by throwing another knife.  She caught it out of the air.

And he snapped his fingers.  That little trick from the tin hammer implement he’d taken years ago, from a young rival of the Knightons.  It hung from his belt, at the opposite side of the knives he kept where his right hand could reach them, and it bounced like it had been poked, tapping his leg.

The knife shattered, lacerating her hand.

Blackhorne bashed her over the head, bowling her over.

The tin can fell free of her other hand.  He would have shattered that if Blackhorne’s bulk hadn’t been in the way of him seeing it.  As it was, he had to have Blackhorne move into the way.  He leveraged the connection to Blackhorne and had the Other step between him and the can.

Just in time.  It detonated, five feet from Elise and five feet from Blackhorne.  A rigged weapon meant to scatter bent nails, glass, and pieces of the can in every direction.

Whatever it was that made her that competent at wielding a chainsaw, it helped the can focus its output on Blackhorne, while the scattering of shrapnel largely avoided Elise.  She was nicked in places, but it wasn’t so bad.  She rolled over, staggered to her feet, and retreated from Blackhorne, who hadn’t suffered more than a sharp pain in his right arm that made closing his hand difficult, and damage to his eyelid that let him see light through it, albeit with a filter of thick blood.

Elise limped back, and moving backwards while Blackhorne advanced would’ve been a losing proposition to begin with, but she had a head wound and shrapnel in her leg.  She moved to Blackhorne’s right, into the part of his field of vision that the injury had turned into a blood-stained darkness.

Drawing his attention away.  “Blackhorne!”

He pushed, tugging Blackhorne to the side as well, with the knotted wire implement.  But Blackhorne was big and an important aspect of Blackhorne was that he was hard to stop and hard to budge or turn aside.

The punt gun fired, a violent noise that shoved air at Reid.  Aimed at Blackhorne, as he closed in on Elise.  Blackhorne moved less as the shot hit him dead on than the car had.  But there was silver in there, along with other stuff.  That, more than the crater in his side and back, made Blackhorne drop to his knees.

Live, Reid willed.

Blackhorne stirred, grunting.

Blackhorne pushed himself to his feet.

“This motherfucker!” the gunman said, from the trees.  “Elise, to me!”

She turned, limp-jogging away, head turned to look at Reid.

Go, Reid willed.

Blackhorne stumbled forward at first, then broke into a run.

“Elise!”

“Haris!” Elise shouted.

The old man with the beard, the black clothing, and the gun stumbled, slapping at his shoulder.

Behind him, shrouded in the demesne of the serial killer, a doorway to a black and degraded place around him, Reid’s father held a sickle-like knife in one hand, and left his other empty, wearing the glove.  He turned his head, stepped through the doorway he carried with him, and into the darkness there.

Blackhorne had stopped approaching as the two Witch Hunters stood together.

“Fuck!” the old man shouted.  “How bad?”

Elise looked.

From Elise’s vantage point, it was impossible to see, but the old man’s shirt split, and was followed soon after by a line of blood.  The cut dragged itself from the back of his shoulder to the top, to the front, down his chest, tracing a lazy, traveling line.  The older parts of the cut got deeper, as the line lengthened.

“Alcohol, or salt!  Cleanse this!” the old man barked.

Both sides of the line continued to extend, a cut that got longer, like someone was being playful, flirting with the most vulnerable destinations.  Neck and crotch, curving toward, then pulling away.

Then, probably because his father had asserted his will, the playfulness ceased.  One end of the line struck a sharp, straight path to the side of the old man’s neck.  The other to the inside of his thigh.  Blood welled out at first, then poured out, spurted briefly, then resumed pouring out.

“Haris,” Elise said.

“All written down, don’ nee- geintoit,” he said, before collapsing.

Elise straightened, one hand at her leg.

Drowne approached.  Reid was very aware that Drowne hadn’t actually followed through on finishing the boy.  He didn’t know enough and hadn’t dedicated enough focus to seeing the actual events unfold.  It didn’t matter.  He would punish Drowne by using the signet ring and the seal, burning Drowne’s prior owner from afar.

It would be the first time he did it, since the seal had been set.  The fear of it being employed had always been enough.  A young woman no longer aware of Drowne’s existence, suffering for Drowne’s actions, not knowing why.

“Get her,” Reid said, before his father could give the instruction.

Blackhorne and Drowne ran after her.  Drowne was fast, Blackhorne unable to stop.

Elise ran.

“The other hunters?” Reid asked.

“Their tendency is to have their leader take point, while they move around the flanks,” Reid’s father said.  “I intercepted them.  They fell back, I stopped them from signaling her.  Removing her will break their backs.”

“That’s the hope.  She’s vicious.”

“I’d hope your familiars are more vicious.  Are you alright, Reid?”

“Mostly.  You?”

His father gave him a look.

Raquel, picking herself up, followed by the shadow Other, came to stand by them.  “Does anyone need healing?”

“Blackhorne will need it.”

Raquel nodded.  She treated her injuries, saving water in the chalice for Blackhorne.

She cut through a park, not a large one, square shaped with a path going diagonally across it, large trees overshadowing it.  In the gloom of the street, the path was dark.

And in that darkness, Blackhorne was swallowed up.

“Something’s in the park.  Other, or a trap enough for Blackhorne.”

“A pitfall?” his father asked.

Reid shook his head.

His father drew power, fed the doorway, and opened the shadows around himself.  It worked better at night, away from a territory someone else owned.  Since he had the school, he could use it there now, which was convenient.

And nobody owned this town, really.  No Lord had claim.

For all intents and purposes, his father disappeared into shadow.  Reid glanced at Raquel, then jogged down the street, watching out for any of the Witch Hunters that had been scared off by Drowne or his father.

In the woods, he saw the Oni.  She stood on the sidewalk, on the bottom end of a gentle slope, and waited as a metal box rolled down the grass and pine needles.  Black sides, steel framing at the edges.  It bounced to her hand the same way Reid’s knife had bounced to his.

He could feel Blackhorne in darkness, slamming a hand against a wall.

The half-foot-by-half-foot box jarred, the bang coming from within.

“Release him.”

“You first,” she said.  Her head turned.  “Witch Hunters come.  I’ll leave you to it.”

We’re doing too well.  They’re weakening both sides so it’s even.

He pushed power into Blackhorne, feeding the Other the strength to start breaking down the barrier.

It wasn’t that strong a box.  It was just a question of the immediate danger, and if he didn’t have Blackhorne for thirty seconds, for five minutes, or for an hour, before the Other escaped the trap.

“Father!” he shouted.  “Heads up!”

“If she’s not lying about the Witch Hunters coming-” Raquel spoke to him, touching his arm.

He pulled away from her touch.  His phone buzzed, and he hurried to check it.

It was a message from Wye.  An overhead map marked with the general locations of the Witch Hunters that were coming, each a triangle, one point extended, to suggest the directions they faced.

It was followed by a message.  Wye had seen the Oni and he was leery of the potential for more glamoured thorns, so he was going to ‘focus on other things’.  What had happened to Nicolette had traumatized Wye some.  Her eyes had been gouged when she’d gone looking around here, earlier this spring.  Wye was going to try to find a way around it, but he’d only started looking into it earlier today and they’d been busy.

“I’ll stall them.  Let Father finish what he’s doing.”

“Do you want my help?”

“What can you even do?” Reid retorted.  “You’re young, untrained, you squander opportunities to learn and advance your standing.  You can heal?  Good, be prepared to, but get out of the way for now.”

She looked like she was going to respond, and then she fell silent.  She ran off, closer to Reid’s father.

Drowne emerged from the trees, eyes skyward.

“Threats incoming,” Reid said.  He pointed the directions.

“Something’s happening.”

Reid looked skyward, and he could see red in the sky, darting across like a vein showing itself before disappearing.  Then a mark, then red spots, like marks on film.

It accelerated.  His skin prickled.

The smell of blood in this foul little town got thicker, mingling with a smell like burning plastic.

It gained in strength every second, taking over the sky, and all the lights went out.

A town with no electrical power now.  Lit by the shifting, flickering red of the sky.

The noise of it reached them.  A roar, a grinding, a nails-on-chalkboard squeal, the tumbling noises of bodies falling down stairs.

He ended up having to cover his ears.

It was a noise that drowned out sound, a flickering that made the eyes lie, suggesting figures running down the street where there were none, hiding the ones who were there.  The Witch Hunters.

He ran.  Drowne followed.

Something popped, as if a great big lightbulb in the sky had gone out, and red lit the sky like a flare was up there, ominous and casting a glow with a lengthy, dancing shadow for everything tall enough to cast one.

He threw a knife, directing it through the air.  It missed, and so he drew on the wire, pulling it to him, adjusting the trajectory to have it travel to someone’s back, as they ran toward him.

It moved, then stopped.

The noise that drowned out sound, the sights that made the eyes lie… a chaos that made the practice falter.  He was left with nothing.

He’d learned to throw knives before deciding he liked the style for his knife belt.  They weren’t his knives anymore, they didn’t obey him, but he could still fling them at a person.  His aim was alright.  It made them hesitate to approach him directly.

The kid Drowne had left alive dodged off to the side, toward a building that had had a fire escape.  Two more approached, one weaving left, forward along the side of a car, right, between two bumpers of parked cars, then forward along the other side.  The other ducked low.

He didn’t know where the heartless one was.

He was scared now.  They weren’t slowed down.  He was.

His father could fight, still.  Could still draw on power.  He’d picked many items and methods that had latent power and then had beaten them.  The knife was one of those things. So was the glove.  Reid had been working up to that.

If he could get to his father-

“Cover my retreat!” he ordered.

Drowne ran alongside.

“Did you hear me!?  Cover-”

Drowne grabbed him by the neck, and flung him sideways, while Reid was still running.  His face bounced off the side edge of a car hood, and he felt skin split.  Felt his brain bounce in his skull, headache exploding out like fireworks.

When he came to grips with himself, he wasn’t sure which way he was meant to be running, which way they were.  What Drowne was doing.

The Other’s stretched face was wearing a macabre smile.

Reid reached for Blackhorne.  Reached past the noise, reached for that connection- it was dim.  Faint.

Blackhorne was there, idly amused.

The sensations were hard to make out.  Amusement, a casual fondness… rejection.

I like you some, but not that much.

He could imagine it in Blackhorne’s voice.

Blackhorne wouldn’t help.

The Witch Hunters advanced.  Reid grabbed onto the hood of the car, leaning into it to try to stay upright, disoriented as he was.  His hand slipped on the little splash of blood from where he’d gashed his forehead open on the metal trim.

Drowne held up one hand, one finger.

“The fuck?” one of the teenagers asked.  A boy younger than Reid.

“Now that I’m free, assuming this doesn’t end in the next few seconds… what I intend to do is so much worse for him than what you could dream of.”

“I can dream of some messed up stuff,” one of the boys said.

Reid breathed hard, blinking hard to see through the blood that made his eye sting.

“I vote we let him,” a teenage girl with short blonde hair said.  “I kind of want to see.”

“Might you cry out to Daddy?” Drowne asked, his voice a whisper.  He leaned in closer to Reid.  “Are you even capable of that?”

Reid swallowed, gasped.

“Hold your arms up, do as the Other named Miss suggested, hm?” Drowne asked.  “Surrender.  They’ll even help you escape.  But if you leave, you know, you won’t ever be welcomed back by Daddy.”

“Stalling?” one of the guys among the Witch Hunters asked.

“I’m rubbing it in.”

“Stop rubbing and get to the point,” the guy said.

Drowne loomed in closer.  “Release your hold on them.  Your stolen things.  Your stolen Others.”

Reid grimaced.

“Then you can blame this… weather,” Drowne whispered.  “You can crawl back to Daddy.  It’ll be seen as a loss, it’ll take years to crawl your way back.  Everything will be harder.  You might never get another genuine chance again.  But you’ll be alive, and you’ll have some chance with Daddy.”

Reid tried to think.

“I can keep going, Reid,” Drowne said.  “The options get worse.  I could inhabit you.  Every time I do it, it’s a little different.  I could keep you inside, watching from my eyes.”

Reid reached down for his knife belt.  Drowne seized his wrist.

Drowne’s face slipped, moving down his face and neck like dark raindrops on a window.

Down his arm, toward Reid’s wrist, which Drowne held.

“I release this belt.  I give up all claim and power I have over it.  Let it return to its owner.”

“Good,” Drowne whispered, with a face that wasn’t on his head anymore.  “Swear.”

“Swear?  Swear what?”

Drowne resumed moving his face toward Reid’s wrist.  It reached the back of his hand, smiling wide.  Reid’s arm jerked, but he couldn’t break the grip.

“I swear to release it in full, I give up all claim, now and forever.  I won’t take it back.”

“Next.”

“I release this garotte wire, I give up all claim, I swear an oath, it’s no longer mine, I’ll release it back to its owner, I won’t try to take it back.”

“Me now.  Before this strange weather turns.”

“I release you, Drowne.  I swear, you’re free.  I swear… you can go back to her, if she’s still alive.”

“Bad thing to remind me of.  Keep swearing.”

“I swear… I won’t hurt her.  I won’t touch her, I won’t do anything.  I swear, she’s free of worrying about me.  I’ll let her have her memory back.”

“You won’t retaliate.  You won’t look for her.  You’ll fight anyone who tries.”

“I so-sw,” Reid stumbled over a combination of so-swear and swear.  “I so swear.”

“Keep going.”

He kept going.

“Stand by?” the largest of the remaining Witch Hunters said, the guy with no heart.  “I think Elise is losing, even though this red sky is messing with them.”

“We’re being played, you know,” the youngest of them said, from the rooftop.

“I like this game, though.”

“I know you do, Rocky.”

He relinquished his things, one by one.  Blackhorne.  The corrupt cop’s badge.  The syringes.  The pillbox.

Everything.  Every incremental bit of power.

Leaving him face to face with an angry Drowne, all the uglier with the red sky flickering above them.

Drowne smiled.

“Let me go?”

“When you picked me, you knew what I was.”

“A parasite.”

“Yes, but also a protector of those I love, and a specialist in revenge.  Did you think it would be so easy as this?  Giving up what you didn’t deserve?”

Reid’s teeth did a chattering-like movement as he failed to find words.

Drowne heaved him around, full-body, to put his face into a car window.  It didn’t break, even with Drowne’s strength, but his nose did break.

On the second impact, the glass shattered.  It came apart into tiny pieces that barely cut him.

But Drowne didn’t let him go, dragging his face across the ragged glass at the bottom edge of the window frame, all the way left, all the way right, then twice more in that fashion, in a zig-zag, before letting him go.

“I’d rather he live and suffer,” Drowne said.  “Do me that-”

The voice became muffled and muddled, disappearing into the disorientation and a cloud of pain.

He came to in a dark hospital room, the lights dimmed.  His face bandaged.

Mostly, he drifted in and out.  A series of scenes.  He thought he heard his father’s voice at one point, then decided it wasn’t the case.

In, awake, pain, his face on fire.

He mashed the button to call the nurse, a guy who came in and gave him more morphine.  The drug hit him and fuzzed everything up.

Because he couldn’t urinate with the morphine they’d given him, he got a catheter.  He pushed his mind away from the vague discomfort and in the doing he was out.

In again, someone was making a commotion.  He tried to sit up and he couldn’t, and he realized his hand was attached to the bed.  Shackles.

He saw a male doctor wearing a coat, sitting in the chair next to Reid, writing on a clipboard.  Reid couldn’t raise his head or his gaze enough to get a good look at him.  The doctor talked to him, “The cuffs are because we don’t know what happened to you, but that kind of brutality is usually drug related.  When you’re more coherent in the morning we’ll have the police talk to you.  For now, focus on getting rest.”

A nurse made him more comfortable.

He saw the dangling nametag, roughly at eye level.  For the first time since he was thirteen or so, he fixated on that instead of the glimpse of cleavage and bra.

Ellingson.  An uncommon name.  Probably a combined one.  She was black, too.

He didn’t care.  He didn’t have the energy.

He wanted to leave.  To put this all behind him, and start slowly picking up the pieces.

“Better?” she asked.

He nodded a bit, winced at the pain, then said, “Mouth’s dry.”

He accepted the water she helped him drink.

Soon after, he was out.

Breathing hurt.  Everything hurt.  The exhaustion that ran through his entire body was the product of a full-body signal that he was very, very hurt.

“Uncle brought you here and left to handle business.  Killed three of them,” Raquel said.

He blinked, and even blinking hurt.  His eyes were dry despite the IV.  “Okay.”

“He couldn’t call me to tell me where you were, with the distortion at the perimeter,” Raquel explained.

She knows more than I do.  Perimeter?

“If I’d been able to get to you sooner, I could have healed you more.  Even delaying with my finger, it left a scar,” Raquel explained.  She held up her hand.  The unsightly scar encircling one finger like a ring, that would make her harder to marry off.

The thought of his face was worse.

These things could be healed in other ways.

The other consequences couldn’t.  “Father’s familiars?”

“Obeyed.  They’re too scared of him.  They’ve served him too long.  He doesn’t need the seals anymore.”

He thought for a second.

“Did you run, Raquel?  Like they offered?”

“I can’t totally understand you.  You mumble with those bandages.”

“Raquel.  Did you run?” he asked, more insistent.

“Those bandages, Reid…” she said.

He met her eyes, and she stared at him.

The bandages didn’t make him that hard to understand.

She changed the subject.  “Until Uncle has other instructions for me, I’ll stick by you.  Let me know if you need anything.  I’ve fended off the initial questions about what happened, best I could.  They’re not too inclined to believe some random thirteen year old.”

“Okay,” he murmured.

“We’re family, Reid.  And we’re not a family where one member gains anything by putting another in a bad spot,” she told him.

He was of the family now.  Only that, after a loss this sharp.

He was out.

Next Chapter