Author: Wildbow

Go for the Throat – 23.2 | Pale

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Verona’s breath fogged as she tromped over snow.  A lot of her neighbors were outside, taking care of driveways or just talking with one another.  Probably a bit because of the chaos last night.  Finding community?

Heads turned her way as she walked down the street.

If they’d taken a closer look, they’d have seen the marks on the cheap-ass sunglasses she’d bought.  Gate of horn, to borrow Sight.

Her childhood home was a burned husk.  From one angle, it looked okay, but as she got around to viewing it from the front, she could see more of the side where the flames had done the most damage.  Part of the top floor had collapsed, and it looked like part of the back wall had fallen in or was open to the sky.  The inside looked weirdly bright, with indirect sunlight flowing in.

No car in the driveway.  Made sense.

She was glad that she’d moved a good share of her things to the House on Half Street.  That included a lot of art stuff, jars of hair, winter and fall clothes, but there were a thousand little things she’d accumulated over the years that hadn’t made it out.  A lot of things that she wouldn’t have thought about, but maybe she’d dig them up when she moved out, or they’d be part of a junk drawer and she’d empty it and she’d get a fond memory.

On the way over she’d been dwelling on the pencil topper Lucy had given her, way back in the day, like the vibrating astronaut one she’d been drawn to, that had initiated her friendship with Lucy.  The rocket ship wasn’t as cool as the astronaut had been, it wasn’t important- Lucy had forgotten it was even a thing.  It was still a part of the fabric of her life up until now.

She didn’t really like the ‘real world’ all that much, so losing even a few crummy things felt… crummy.

She used her regular Sight first, peering around the house.  No live electrical wires.  She looked up at the ceiling, peering through the open front door.  “How stable are we?”

The flat meaty thing in the ceiling shrugged and gave her what she presumed was the equivalent of a thumbs up.

“Thanks buddy,” she said.  “Sorry you got burned.  Or is it like a grunge thing?  The equivalent of me wearing a torn T-shirt and crap?”

The spirit stared blankly at her.

“Yeah, sorry.  Doesn’t mean much to you, I guess.  You live a life of flat.  You’re flat, you hold things up, you get held up, flexing the flat.”

The meaty flesh thing stretched the closest thing it had to a face into a smile.

“Do me a favor, don’t fall on me?  I know we’ve had a decent relationship, I keep things clean, bit like tending to a shrine, you’re a ceiling, you hold things up. You’re kind of also the floor above.  I figure you’ve done good work, let’s cap off with you not killing me in an embarrassing way?”

It nodded at her.

She wrapped her scarf around her lower face and ventured inside.  She wasn’t sure it was necessary, with the fire gone cold and the cold weather keeping the smells down.  And fumes down?  Whatever.

Someone down the street saw and shouted at her.  She ignored it.

There was a layer of frozen dreck at the ground floor of the house.  Water from the hoses had collected the crap and then it had frozen.  There wasn’t much to salvage here.  She bent down, pulling on a picture frame, and hauled it out of the muck.  Family photo, from when she’d attended her Uncle Grant’s wedding.  It had been a pretty modest thing, with Aunt Lorraine not even wearing a wedding dress, and the marriage had barely lasted two years.

Two kids, one born a few months after the wedding, the next about eleven months later.  Divorce shortly after.  Uncle Grant didn’t really stay in touch much.  He sent out one big batch Christmas letter, and he was her dad’s go-to when her dad wanted to vent and Verona wasn’t around, and Verona’s impression was that Uncle Grant had stopped picking up the phone as much, or had backed out of being the emotional support.

She shook the frame to let the broken glass fall out, then pried out the somewhat damp picture.  The smoke and grossness had combined with the damp, creating a thick layer of black grit that pretty much ruined it.

“I’m going to put on sunglasses, I won’t be able to chat with you,” she told the ceiling spirit.  Other black-charred spirits watched her from all angles, in this house she’d cleaned top to bottom, multiple times.  “Don’t fall on me.”

It nodded at her.

Sunglasses on.  Through the Gate of Horn, she borrowed Snowdrop’s Lost Sight.

It was cool Sight.  She liked it a lot.  Seeing around corners.  Things looked a little warped, which took a bit of bending the brain to adapt to, but she could take in more of the world.  She imagined it was like a baby learning object permanence was a thing, but it was applying to her, after fourteen years of figuring out how the world worked.

There’s a thing behind the thing, even though I can’t see it.

Stone figures from above the fireplace.  There was a plastic box that had weathered the fire well enough to hold its rough shape, so she grabbed that and began stowing salvageable stuff inside.

There was a cabinet in the kitchen, by the dining room table that had been crushed by a bit of fallen wall, with some old, mismatched chinaware, some cracked by the fire or by falling over when things had shifted knick-knacks, some figurines on the top shelf, which had partially fallen when some glue had melted on the one side.

There was a folded towel in there, bottom layer, cushioning and providing some support for a plate and other things, so they could stand up without sliding on the wood floor.  Little folded towel with a heart partially visible.  What was the opposite of her dinky little rocket ship pencil topper, that was way more sentimental than its one dollar price tag?

She pulled out a drawer and found napkins.  Singed but serviceable.

She carefully removed the chinaware and used napkins to separate each piece from the one beneath, before surrounding it with more.

Until there was only the towel.  She pulled it out, and it stuck to the wood, it had been there long enough.  Or maybe the fire had helped that happen.  She shook it out, and even though the cabinet had a glass door, there was a bit of dust there, beyond what had leaked in with the fire.

I love Vancouver.

No love there.  After she’d come back from a trip with her mom and forgot her dad’s birthday, he’d flipped.  In desperation, she’d offered some souvenirs.  But that ‘I love Vancouver’ towel had been like fuel on the fire.  Everything he did for her, everything he bought for her, he’d said, and she couldn’t remember his birthday?

He’d trashed her art shelf.  Which was bad.

She wished she’d remembered this when David was here, and the subject of her dad’s tantrum had come up.  Maybe that would’ve helped David twig to there being something wrong.  Maybe it would’ve been too much.  Because this aspect of it, she felt, was a bit worse, in a big picture sense.

That her dad had held onto the towel.  Put it on display, in a roundabout way.  Not in a way that anyone else could see and know, but she knew and he knew, every time they looked at the display case and saw that sliver of heart at the fold of the black towel, back corner.

Like he wanted it there so he could remember.  Fuel the resentment.

She tossed it aside, tromped on it to get it flat, and then kicked some burned stuff and snow that had come in through the now-open exterior wall over it.

Photo albums… some wet, some with a thin layer of plastic on the wallpaper-like patterns of the front and back covers that had crinkled with the heat, but as she opened them, there were a bunch of photo negatives in plastic bags in a plastic sleeve at the back.

She set those aside until she found another box and could slot them all in in a row and then keep them propped up with one of the soapstone carvings her dad liked.  It made the box really heavy, though.  She partially dragged it toward the front hall.

“Hello!” one of the neighbors said.  She might’ve been the one to call out to her as she’d gone inside.  She was fifty or so, and had a permanent ruddy complexion that Verona supposed might have been alcoholism.

“Hello,” Verona replied.

“I’m so sorry about your house.  I heard it was arson?”

“Was it?” Verona asked.  She looked at the structure.  “Damn.”

“I really don’t think you should be in there, um?”

“Verona.  Hayward.”

“Hayward.  Right, remember now.  Been a… decade, I guess, since I talked to your dad.”

Just lived down the street from you all my life, in a small town, Verona thought.  Then she amended, don’t blame you.  She pulled her scarf down to flash a small smile.

“You shouldn’t be in there,” the woman reiterated.

“I got the go-ahead,” Verona said.  She pushed her sunglasses up and looked into the house.  The ceiling spirit smiled at her and nodded.

“I… really?”

“Thanks for caring, though,” Verona said, jamming her hands into her pockets.  She could see her friends coming.  Neighbor thing cuts both ways.  “Did you guys get affected?  Fire near your place, or…?”

“No.  We got woken up by the noise, then we were up for a bit after, watching.  But I don’t work, so I could sleep in.”

“I slept in too.”

“Where’s your dad?  Even if it was safe to go in, you should have him around.”

Verona turned to wave at the others.  McCauleigh wore a new white winter coat, Julette with ass in the hood, chin resting on her shoulder.  McCauleigh matched Anselm in height, while Mal was shorter by a couple of inches and Oakham was an inch or two below Mal, only slightly above Verona.

“Yo,” Mal greeted them.  “Hey, lady, I remember you.”

“You’ve met?” Verona asked.

“She was the one who gave me the stink eye, I mentioned her, way back when.”

“You have tattoos,” the woman said, frowning a bit.

“So many more,” Mal said, grinning, pulling her sweatshirt and coat to one side to show her neck and shoulder.

“That’s- no,” the woman said, very concerned.

“It’s way better than when I was cutting the images in with razors and rubbing ink in,” Mal said.  She turned to Verona.  “Saving up to buy a real tattoo gun.”

“Maybe buy art lessons, too?” Verona suggested.

“Maybe shut your spit hole?”

Verona smiled, giving Mal a light punch on the arm.  “Hey, McCauleigh, hey Oakham.  Hi Julette.  Anselm, didn’t think you’d come.”

He shrugged.  His long brown hair reached to his shoulders and got in his face a lot, and his eyebrows were drawn in with perpetual… she liked to think of it as thoughtfulness.  He wore a black sweater with no shirt beneath, and a long black coat.

“We hired some people to pick through the pieces of our house,” Oakham said.  “Insurance is covering it, but my parents aren’t happy.”

“Your house was one of the ones that got set on fire too?” the neighbor asked.  She’d backed away a bit.

“Nah.  Truck drove through the front of it.”

“Does anyone know why any of this happened?” the woman asked, very concerned.

Mal glanced at Verona, and Verona could kind of read her mind.  The woman wasn’t going away.

“Random bad luck, I guess,” Oakham said.  “Maybe the police will come up with something, oh wait, ha ha.  Our police are useless.”

“Really building that relationship for when you become a private investigator, huh?” McCauleigh asked.

“Do you think I can get away with being that pain in the ass type investigator you see on TV?  Surly, drunk, but I get the job done and handle my shit, so they roll with it?”

“If they’re useless, does it matter?” Verona rebutted.

“I don’t think I’d be doing it here.  I’d have you, Lucy, and Avery stepping on my toes, and my one foot’s already fucked enough without them doing that.”

“I’m going to poke around a bit more, see if anything’s salvageable, dunno if you guys want to sit around or come in.”

“I really don’t think you should,” the woman said.  “Maybe you misunderstood whoever you think gave you permission.”

“I’m kinda curious to see,” Oakham said.  “Smells.  You smell.  Like burned trash.”

“You calling my old house trash?”

“Just saying it smells like burned trash.”

The neighbor fretted visibly, but it looked like the group intimidated her a bit.  Mal especially, which was funny.  Julette was a literal pussycat and was more dangerous than Mal.  Oakham had trained with Guilherme.  Only Anselm being around saved Mal from being the weakest here.

Mal walked over onto the driveway, getting a better look at the damage.  As she did, the neighbor backed off, keeping a distance from Mal.  Once she was back a few paces, she seemed to decide to retreat, glancing over her shoulder.

“Thank you for your concern!” Verona called out.

The woman frowned at her.

“Hey,” Verona said, turning around, flipping sunglasses up, and pointing at the ceiling.  “Don’t fall on my friends?”

The spirit nodded.

“I don’t See clearly enough to know what you’re talking to or about there,” McCauleigh commented.

“Ceiling.  I’m talking to the ceiling.”

“If there’s any intelligent spiritual force there, isn’t there a good chance it would buy into the drama and mischief of falling on us at a bad moment?” McCauleigh asked.

“Well, now that you say that, there’s more of a chance,” Verona replied, annoyed.  “Pretty sure we’re still clear.  It has a trustworthy… face?”

“You said that like you don’t know if it has a face,” Oakham said.

“Because it’s a ceiling,” Verona said.

“Sure.  Whatever.”

“Be good,” Verona muttered at the ceiling.

She picked her way through things, finding containers and boxes.  There was a little foot-high shelf in the front closet that served as a rack to slide shoes into, with most of the shoes in bad shape, but the rack had survived, so she repurposed it as a box, moving things in and passing them to McCauleigh, who had shucked off her coat so it wouldn’t get soot on it.

Some crows that were perched in the hole where the kitchen window had fallen out cawed and fluttered as Oakham explored that way.  Oakham went to the door that led to the basement.  Verona happened to have her own Sight going, and saw the ceiling spirit react, ‘mouth’ opening wide.

“Oakham?” she interrupted.

“What’s up?”

“Pretty sure opening that door would be a bad time.”

The ceiling spirit trembled in anticipation and alarm.

“Bad time how?”

“Fuck up your neck like your ankle was fucked, maybe.”

Oakham raised her hands and backed off a bit.  “Damn.  That leads to the basement, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Wanted to see if it flooded when they put out the fire, and froze up.  Could be a cool thing.  Tragic, obviously, but cool.”

“No idea.”

“I think you had me over for a birthday party once, way back when.”

“Back in the day when we’d all invite the entire class,” Verona confirmed.  Same kids in their class from the beginning til now, mostly.  Except for the ones who’d left, and the occasional new addition, like Bracken last fall, and Avery the fall before.  “Probably.”

“And we’d go down there.  I remember it was pretty creepy, but you had good costumes.  Or am I mixing you up with someone else?”

“Yeah.  Good costumes.  Fixed that basement up, actually.”

“Fat lot of good that did, huh?” Mal asked.

Verona snorted lightly.  “Anyway, that’s where we had renters.  The two creeps?”

“Right, yeah,” Oakham said.  She leaned on her cane while walking over uneven floor, into the kitchen.

The thought of the costumes provoked a bunch of other complicated thoughts.  They were a thing she’d like to have, even if they probably aged badly.  She wouldn’t wear them or use them, it wasn’t like she wanted to have kids ever, but they were more of a fond memory, a time her dad had actually put in effort.  Mingled with the memory of the time she’d fought her dad the night Avery had gotten stranded on the Forest Ribbon Trail.  Screamed at him.  It felt like the moment things had started to trend from an ongoing but stable bad to worse.

The way he’d screamed at her in the kitchen, before breaking her stuff.  Like he’d been holding it in, waiting to use it.  From the shouting match in the basement in the spring until the summer.

She checked with the stair spirit, then ventured carefully up the stairs, further from the basement.

“You okay?” McCauleigh asked, quiet, following behind.

Verona shrugged.  The others were downstairs, except Anselm, who trailed behind a bit.  McCauleigh had passed Julette on to… Verona looked.  Mal.  Sure.  Mal lounged with Julette on the torched couch in the living room, which looked more uncomfortable than lounging just about anywhere else.

“I thought you’d be more bothered, or less bothered, joking?  Dunno,” McCauleigh said.

“Not sure,” Verona echoed McCauleigh’s sentiment.  “In a lot of ways, I said goodbye to this place already.  It’s the little things.  The sneaky memories that filter through the metaphorical netting that you put up to catch things.”

“Mmm.  Yeah.”

“Hey.  How are you?  It hasn’t actually been that long since I got you out of that place.”

“You know how they say, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, blah blah, blah?”

“Yeah.”

“It was a shithole.  I was in the hole and got treated like shit.  Ate shit.  People talked shit, stirred shit.  I talked shit, stirred shit, went apeshit on people, ’cause I had to.  I felt like shit.  Because of how I acted, and because shit people sling at you sticks.”

“Shitty.”

“Yeah,” McCauleigh said, without any actual humor or admiration in her voice.  Then with five different kinds of emotion in her voice, she said, “Shitty.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve been good to me,” McCauleigh said.  “Giving me a place to stay, clothes, not laughing when I, dunno, don’t know how to shave my legs.”

“It’s cool.  You’re alright to have around.”

“You too,” McCauleigh said. “Mrs. Kelly took me shopping and was really sweet, even when she was obviously freaking out about Avery and trying to hide it.  The Garricks made sure I had clean sheets and nice sleep clothes.  Didn’t push me, even slightly.”

“They’re cool.  Dorky but cool.  They can be pushy, though.  With Ave.  I’m glad they weren’t with you.”

“Gave me food when I was hungry, let me sleep in, fell over themselves making sure I had what I needed.  Brought me back this way when I said I wanted to go, no questions asked, even though it seemed like a pain in the ass.  There was no shit.”

The way she kept putting so much emotion into that word, it was like it was- it wasn’t shit, but a shorthand for… for a lot.  For being beaten, starved, kept in a cage, and for being treated that way because her parents had decided she had to.  Because she’d gone her own way.

All that, wedged into a four letter word.

“You don’t deserve that shit.”

“I can’t shake this- I feel like I don’t deserve-” McCauleigh tried twice, aborting each time, clearly growing frustrated with herself, her voice quiet but insistent.  “The Garricks, they gave me these clothes to sleep in, these soft clothes.  Silky flannel, I dunno if it was new, but it felt new.  Like the kind of stuff you’d give a baby, except I dunno if I ever had that.”

“Makes sense that your family wouldn’t,” Verona said, as she checked, then opened the door to her room.

Unsalvageable, at first glance.

“I was wearing them, sitting on this bed, big puffy covers, tired as I’ve ever been, just had to pull my feet up, put the covers over them, I knew I’d fall asleep right away.  I sat there, feeling like a fraud.  Like shit.”

“You’re not, you know.”

“Felt like it.  I felt like it, and these soft pyjamas-” McCauleigh’s nose wrinkled, like she’d just had shit thrown in her face and disgust was overwhelming her, but she was talking about flannel.  “-I was angry.  Too angry to move, to pull my feet up, to let myself sleep.”

“At your parents?”

“At me.  Myself.  For being, I dunno, shitty?”

“You’re not, you know.”

McCauleigh looked restless.

“Fuck,” McCauleigh said, with the emphasis of someone realizing they’d forgotten to bring an important assignment to school.

“What?”

“I’m supposed to be backing you up, not talking about my shit.”

“I asked.”

“I’ve been dealing with this for days.  It’s your turn to get backup.”

“I’ll let you know if I need it.  I asked.  You’re fine.”

McCauleigh looked miserable, still restless.

“Guess we could get you some soft pyjamas.  Gussy up your bed in my Demesne some?  Make that the new normal, until that doesn’t feel fake anymore, until you feel like it fits you?”

“Does that work?” McCauleigh asked.  “Does it fix anything?”

Verona shrugged dramatically.  “Wish I knew.  But I figure, if being treated like shit got you feeling like this, maybe being treated good will move you the other way?”

“It’s probably going to take a lot more time to go the other way.”

“That’s ’cause you’ve got a whole lifetime of lead-up to that crap,” Verona said.  The plastic bits that let the drawer of her bedside table slide in and out had melted enough the drawer didn’t budge.  She hauled it open, and found the cheap set of drawers had basically no bottom and no substance to it, and a lot of it had just burned out from beneath and behind.

“I didn’t really like the extra fluffy, soft stuff,” McCauleigh said.  “It’s hard to pull covers around you when they’re this puffy blanket that’s, I dunno, a foot thick.  The flannel was staticky.”

“Then we can find something else.  Just let me know, I’ll back you up or help you find it, how’s that?”

“Want a really bad segue from that?” McCauleigh asked.

“Like, funny bad, or weird bad, or hurt-my-feelings bad, you’re leaving bad…?”

“Not leaving.”

“Cool.”

“I don’t know.  Awkward segue.  Awkward bad.”

“Give me the awkward bad, McCauleigh,” Verona said, picking through clothes in her dresser in the corner of her room.  She was reminded of having Jeremy in her room.  Throwing bras in his lap, before showing him the clasps.

It was less the fire and more the heat.  Everything with polyester in it was trash.  A lot of stuff without polyester in it was questionable.

“Anselm,” McCauleigh said.

Verona frowned, turning away from her clothes.  “Has he been screwing around with the deal he and I made?”

“Nah.  I don’t want this to screw up our friendship.  So if you say no, I won’t mention it again.  But if he and I were to…”

“To?  Date?  Or do what he and I are doing?”

“What you and he are doing.”

“Messing around,” Verona said.

“Sure.”

Verona thought about that.  She found the raccoon skull and put it in a box.  Her books on her bookshelf were toast.  Not literally, but… not readable either.  She had to fix her scarf, because the smell of smoke was thick, even now, even in winter, even with part of the outside wall gone and snow creeping into the bathroom across the hall.

“I mean… yeah?  Yeah, no, that’s fine, if he keeps to the deal.  If it was dating and he wanted to be exclusive with you, that’s-” Verona tried to find the words.  “-annoying?  Especially after Jeremy.  But also if he’s your fuzzy pyjamas that make you feel welcome and better, I’m okay with my arrangement with him ending.”

“Nothing like that.  Anselm!”  McCauleigh raised her voice.

“Not listening in!” he shouted up from downstairs.

That’s more suspicious than if you said nothing, Verona thought.

“Come up!” McCauleigh shouted.

He came up the stairs, which creaked a bit ominously.  He peered in the doorway.  “Your room?”

“Yeah,” Verona said.  She was glad she’d left her closet open, because if it had warped in the heat, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to open it now.  She fished out some stuff.  There were old clothes way too small for her, a few spring clothes that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to wear…

“I like that shirt,” McCauleigh said, as Verona tossed it across the room, to the area with the most damaged stuff.

“Too small for me, or for you, pretty sure,” Verona said.  “You know what the real bitch of this is?  So many clothes are just… awful.  So I’ve got to find stuff in my style, that isn’t see-through, that isn’t too tryhard, right?”

“Are we not talking about Anselm?”

“We can, but let me get this out first.  Because this?”  Verona found a top that had been lying on the floor of the closet, that had absorbed enough smoke and heat it was fucked.  “This sucks.  Because when you’re my size and my body type…”

“You have to wear kids sizes?” McCauleigh asked.

“No,” Verona replied.  She indicated her chest.  “Because these.”

“I like those,” Anselm said, helpfully.

“I kinda do too but anything I wear that’s my size that accommodates these makes me look like my stomach sticks out.  And I had clothes I was okay with, and now I don’t.  What ass.”

“Your mom wants to take you out shopping, right?” McCauleigh asked.

“Yeah.  Gotta navigate that later,” Verona muttered.  She got fed up with the state of things.  She found some stuff and pulled it out.  It was one of the junk drawers of her childhood, kept to a little resealable plastic box that had suffered for the heat.  No pencil topper, though.  She tucked it under one arm, turned, and faced them.  McCauleigh standing by her bedside table, Anselm in the doorway.  “So.”

“I told her it didn’t matter, we talked about this, made a deal, sorted it all out in advance,” Anselm told Verona.

“I wanted to double check,” McCauleigh said.

“If you guys are messing around and he and I are messing around, and Julette and he are messing around-?”

“She draws me, that’s it,” Anselm said.

“Right.  Still, makes it extra important to be safe.  If you give me herpes through Anselm or whatever, I’m not ruling out making it super herpes and shucking it off me to send it to you as a curse,” Verona warned.

“Don’t see myself doing that,” McCauleigh replied.

“Then sure, if you’re off with someone I trust, someone I like?  Just let me know if you start catching feelings, don’t let this be some thing where it goes on for a year, and you start hating my guts for hanging with him while I have no idea.”

“I like you as a friend more than I like him as a whatever,” McCauleigh said.  She looked at Anselm.  “No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Might change,” Verona said, sighing.  She had to fix her scarf to keep it from slipping down.  Her nose was starting to run from the smoke smell.  “But yeah, whatever, sure.  Did you go to him about this, or did he go to you?”

“Sort of- mutual?” McCauleigh turned the statement into a question midway through.  Anselm shrugged and nodded.

“That’s nice.”

“Do you get dibs?  Like, if you want to ‘hang’ with him, and that’s a whole thing…” McCauleigh trailed off.

“Anselm’s his own boy who can make his own decisions.  Right?”

“Right,” Anselm replied.

“Let’s try not to get pissy with each other, whatever happens, whatever decisions those are,” Verona said, picking idly through her destroyed room, using a toe to nudge stuff that had fallen to the floor and was now stuck there, melted to it by heat or whatever else.  And before McCauleigh could say anything else, she added, “And we probably will, I’m thinking.”

“You think?” McCauleigh asked.

“Like, we don’t always realize what we’re feeling, or why we do what we do.  Stuff gets funky.  Lucy’s my best friend, and after a few weeks of living with her, we were fighting pretty hard.  Other stuff going on, of course, but yeah.  A lot of that makes more sense when I think about it now, but in that moment?”

Verona shrugged.

“Okay,” McCauleigh said.

“I hope we figure it out.  Let’s talk, communicate, share what’s going on?”

“Sure.”

“Cool.”

“Cool,” McCauleigh said, hands in coat pockets.  She looked around the room.

Verona was glad she’d done some reading.  Boy stuff and navigating this crap was just as arcane as practice.  Lots of variables to take into account.  Still, she didn’t mind so much.

“Sorry about your shit,” McCauleigh said.  “And sorry if this is adding more shit onto your plate.”

“Could be worse,” Verona said.  “Might be worse in the future.  You know, considering what I’m probably going to be up against, in the fight against Charles and his people, and considering what nearly happened with Avery…”

She looked around her room some more, because eye contact was hard.  McCauleigh stared intently at her.

“…I had a letter for my dad.  Wanted to double check the connection block around it wasn’t burned while leaving the letter fine.  It’d be messy if my dad or some cleanup people found my ‘just in case’ letter.”

“Makes sense,” McCauleigh said.

“If something happens to me, I want you to have the house, for as long as you need it.  I’d prefer it if you made it a place people can retreat to, but don’t do that if it’s going to make you and other people miserable.  Use it, ditch the shop idea if that’s not your thing, or make a deal with Luna to run the shop downstairs while you live upstairs, or… something, live there for a few years and then move on to your own thing.  Whatever works.  But I don’t want you to be locked out if something happens, so I’m saying this and willing it to work this way if we end up there.”

“Okay.  It won’t be a Demesne.”

Verona shrugged.  “Raquel has that whole deal with repurposed implements.  Alexander’s office was apparently Belanger H.Q. after Alexander bit it.”

McCauleigh nodded.  “Sure, but it won’t have the usual conveniences.  It’ll be better than it should be, but…”

Verona nodded.

“Sure,” McCauleigh said.

“Thanks for stepping up last night.  Didn’t mean for you to have to join in, start screaming.”

McCauleigh shrugged, but there was a bit of a look in her eyes… yeah.

Getting her away from that shit she’d described would mean minimizing the whole screaming thing, or finding some kind of replacement for it.

“Help carry?” she asked.

McCauleigh nodded, taking one of the plastic containers.  Anselm took another that Verona put some stuff on top of.

She added a few things to her bag as she spotted them.

Pictures in the hallway, pretty gone.

She wished she could think of more things to scrounge for, but there wasn’t a lot.  She felt like she’d have a moment weeks from now where she thought about the house and something in a closet or cabinet that she’d really miss.

A crow cawed downstairs, and she used sunglasses with Lost Sight to get a better view of them, making sure they were regular crows.  Yep.

“Good enough?” Oakham asked.  “Nothing from the kitchen?”

Verona wandered through, checking the kitchen.  The heat had taken the magnetism out of the magnets.  She hadn’t had stuff on the fridge, and her dad wasn’t the type to put her art up there of his own volition.

“I wonder if it’s toxic,” Verona mused.  “Nothing I want that much.  I pretty much transport all the snacks from here to the House on Half Street.”

There was too much crap from the collapsed wall occupying the rest of the back end of the house for her to really go looking for stuff in cabinets.

She heard the car.  It was a familiar sound, altered because the walls were different.  The car pulling in.  A familiar feeling.  The faint sinking in the gut.

Maybe the last time.

“Verona,” Oakham called out.

“I know.”

She moved through the kitchen to the living room, where Oakham was.

Her dad.  She heard the car door slam.  She brought some of the flat, shallow plastic containers out with her, placed them on the stairs, then went and got some she’d set by the door.  The chinaware and stuff.

“Not Lucy and Avery, huh?” he asked, glancing at her friends.

She gave him the box.  “Avery’s in the hospital.”

“Is she okay?”

“Stomach obstruction or something in that neighborhood.  She’ll be okay, I think.”

“Did you visit?” he asked.

The house had been burned by a horror and there was something horror-like about how the words he was saying were nice… barring context.  Barring an angle.  Everything twisted, so he might even look like a normal dad to Mal and Oakham and McCauleigh, but what he was really doing was leading into some bullshit.  When he’d had his bowel obstruction she’d been at the Blue Heron.  For most of it.  She’d stopped in and then left.

“Yeah, helps that I’m in town,” she said, keeping it simple, pre-empting the bullshit.

“Uh huh,” he said, with loaded meaning in those non-words.  He glanced at her friends, studying them.  “I recognize… Melissa, was it.  Or Mia?”

“Melissa Oakham.  She’s going by Oakham.”

“I don’t know the others.”

Verona glanced back.  The others had come outside.  McCauleigh had Julette in her soot-stained arms, winter coat still off.  Anselm leaned against the railing of the stairs, hands in pockets.  Mal had her coat collar turned up, hiding her neck, though she still had some decoration on her cheekbone and temples.  It could be explained away as pen, from afar.

“I can introduce them.  That’s-”

“Verona, I have a lot on my mind.  I’m tired.  I won’t remember.  What are you doing here?  With your new gang?” he asked, emphasis on that last word, making it a middle ground between something accusatory and something… maybe he was trying for playful and failing?  Trying not to come at her head on?

“Old gang is still around.  These guys are more friends in the circle.”

“Your name came up around the time of the fire.”

“Did it?”

“Did you do this?” he asked.  “Did you play a part?  Did you think it was funny?”

There was more tension in the words, now.  It felt a bit like that terse conversation before he’d blown up at her.  That flip-out in the kitchen.  Except she had people around.  That changed the dynamic.  He always put in effort when others were around.

“Do you really have to ask?” Verona asked.  “Really?”

“Your name came up.”

“You said.”

“Why?”

“If you happened to tell me the context of my name coming up, I could possibly follow up with an answer.”

He looked at her friends again.  After a long deliberation, he said, “it doesn’t matter.”

From tone, she felt like it mattered.  It felt like it mattered a lot.  Except there were people around, so it was a thing that would sit in his head like that towel had sat in the cabinet.  One sword among many hanging over her head.

“There are a few more boxes.  Some I’m taking for me.  Some you can take.  Photo albums?”

“Memories of my ex, your mother, and of a time we had a better relationship.  Too sad to look at.  Will be for a long time.”

Almost nice words.  Except for the tone.  Except for the tension, like he was holding something back.

“Do you not want them or-?”

“I want them.”

“Because mom would take them, I know she’s asked for copies of-”

“I want them, Verona,” he said, with a note of anger.  He looked at the house.  “I’ve put so much of myself into that house.  So many memories are rooted there.  Thousands of hours of time at the office, time at my second job, and it’s gone, just like that.  Up in smoke, and I can’t even fucking grieve without your little gang there gawking at me.”

“Backing Verona up,” Oakham said, looking really uncomfortable.

“Oh, so you’ve got backup.  How amazing for you.  The house is gone-” The look he gave her as he said that was accusatory.  Studying her.  “-and you’ve got backup.”

“Yep,” Verona said, hands in her pockets.  The trace soot on her hands made them feel- whatever the uncomfortable opposite of clammy was.

“A neighbor called, said you were poking around the house.  Didn’t say you had company.  She was worried.  I’m worried.”

“I’m okay,” she said, her voice soft.  “Picking over the bones of our life.  Bit of a bummer.”

He looked like she’d slapped him in the face.  A bit angrier, now.  He twisted it into something like sadness.  He brought fingers up to his face, pinching the inner corners of his eyes and the bridge of his nose.  “Can you send your new friends home?  This is a family tragedy, I’d rather deal with it as a family.”

“It’s okay.  I don’t mind.”

“I mind.  I’ve just lost a house- my first major accomplishment as an adult was getting that house.  I got married in that house, we had you in that house, my ups and downs of the last fifteen years were in that house.  I separated from your mom in that house, I divorced her -the woman I love- from that house.  That is our life!  Our life!”  He gave the two words different emphasis the two times he said it.

He looked like he was going to cry.

“I thought it’d be a nice gesture to dredge up some stuff, so you haven’t lost everything,” Verona said.

“You know what would’ve been nice?  If you’d been around.  If our house hadn’t burned down.  If you weren’t pulling… whatever it is you’re pulling right now.”

“Not pulling,” Verona said.  “I’m here, talking.  Processing.”

He made a light snorting sound.  His face was red.

It felt a bit like, with the house burned and cracked open, this part of their life and dynamic was pushed out into the open.  Because it couldn’t be inside that contained space.

She felt like this might be it.

“I’m taking a leave from work, but I have a project to wrap up before I do that, and I can’t abandon my second job or they’ll find someone else to permanently take over.  That’s only the beginning of the stuff on my plate.  The places to stay here are all full, but there’s a place an hour or so down the highway.  I think it’s where David stayed the one time.  Can you load up the car with those boxes while I take a quick look around in the daylight?  We’ll head out to the room I booked after.”

“Nah,” she said.

He rolled his jaw, eyebrows drawing together, eyes roaming, as if he was looking for something, anything to grab onto, that wasn’t saying what he wanted to say, which he couldn’t say with people around.  “Things are hard enough.  There’s a lot to do and figure out for how we move forward.  You’ve had it real nice with the online schooling, lots of time over with your friends, I haven’t been on your case much, but this is when we’re meant to come together.  You need to help me out, give me your time, give me a bit of your focus.”

“I don’t think I could bring Julette, so that’s a wrinkle.”

“Leave that cat with Lucy for a short while.  Or whoever it was who had it before.”

“Sir.  Oakham,” Verona jerked a thumb at her friend.  “I don’t think I’ll do that.  I could stay with Lucy, maybe.  That way I don’t need to go in and out of town, Julette is easier to handle…”

With restrained patience, eyes looking up at the gray sky, he said, “You don’t need to go into town.  You study online.  We’ve just had a major life-altering event.”

“Then I’ll get out of your way.  You can handle stuff.”

“We can handle stuff.  I’m going to be up to my neck in five kinds of paperwork.  I have my own work to do, I’m in a hell of a position with the tenants I took on-”

“The ones I vetoed?”

“The ones who were paying us rent.  Not only am I paying for my hotel room, but I’m paying for them as well, because they’re on the lease and apparently it’s my job to house them if they can’t be here.  I’ve got a million expenses coming my way, I don’t even know where to begin.  I need you.”

“For what?”

“There’s a stove in the room we’ll be staying at.  You can make dinner- we can’t live off takeout, not with these expenses.  You can help me with organizing the paperwork.  I read out loud, you type.  We’ll buy some bare necessities in the way of clothes until insurance money comes through.  I hope it comes through.  I let it lapse around summer.  Even if you’re only running errands or tidying up, keeping me company to keep me sane and awake, it’ll make a world of difference.  When you’re not doing that, you can do your homework.”

It felt like getting control over her was his way to get a handle on everything overwhelming here.

“You know mom’s in town?”

She knew she was taking that control away, bringing this up.

“As if my day wasn’t bad enough already,” he said, jokey in everything except tone.  “I’m kidding.”

“Want to have a sit-down, sort some stuff out?  You, me, her?”

“I want to get a handle on all of this.”

“Do I figure into that?”

“Haven’t you been listening?  I just spent at least a minute telling you how you fit into it.”

“Into your life.  I figure I’ll see Avery-”

“She gets two visits, I see.”

“Check in with mom-”

“You’re in my custody.”

“Until mom says boo or I call the CAS guys.  Obviously things can get shuffled around.”

Was she burning a bridge here?  She was burning a bridge here.

She turned away, walking back toward her friends.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

All of this, the damage and the destruction, it felt like an end result of everything that had unfolded, the last few years, with her and her dad.  She felt like she could try and convince her dad in ten different ways that she wasn’t responsible for this fire, she could have Oakham say something clever.

“Verona!”

It wouldn’t matter.  It didn’t matter.  She could say she did it maliciously, she could have proof of innocence.  He wanted to be mad, he lived in resentment.  From the moment she’d screamed in his face, the night Avery had gotten stranded, things had rolled downhill.

That scream had opened a door to her screaming more, trying to communicate with him, and him just… not getting it.  He didn’t get it if she said she was having a bad day, he didn’t get it if she said she had almost died, he didn’t get it when the house burned down.  He’d held onto the screaming as a point he wanted to make, and then he’d flipped, showing that the art shelf thing wasn’t truly something he regretted, but something he’d build on if the situation called for it.

That, after its own bumpy road, led here.  To the house being burnt down, because, Verona supposed, her dad wasn’t really ‘family’.  So the protections were thinner.

“Verona!” he raised his voice, closer.

McCauleigh stepped forward, hands in her pockets.  Oakham descended a stair.

Verona partially turned to look at him.  He’d followed, and was right on her heels.  Hand out but not grabbing her.  Close.

“Don’t act like that,” he told McCauleigh.  Or Verona.  “Don’t pretend I’m any kind of danger to her.  But if she’s going to walk away, I’m going to follow.  I have to parent her.”

“If you’re following, you could follow me to some place to eat, then,” Verona said.  “I can call mom on the way, we can meet, we can talk, we’ll hash out a game plan.”

“I won’t be in the same room with that woman.  I love her, still love her, and she tore my heart out in the worst way.  She tore yours out too.”

Anything good she did wouldn’t be remembered- that had been sinking in before, but it had been ocean-floor sunk after.  Anything bad she did would be held over her head forever.  He would go out of his way to remind himself.

All they’d had was the house and the house was gone.  Her dad would keep being this.

If therapy and a wake-up call from CAS hadn’t changed anything…

She blinked and a tear came out.  She rubbed at her eye.

More than the house burning down, there was this.

“So this is what you want to do then?” he asked, voice low, like he figured the others wouldn’t hear.  As is, it was hard to judge.  Maybe he thought he’d seen a crack, in that tear.  “You cried as much as I did when your mother left.  She didn’t care.  And your response to that heartless psychopath was to become her?  To do the exact same thing, take whatever you want from me, use the house as long as it’s convenient, take the food I make and buy, then turn around and spit in my face, abandon me?  Think hard about what you’re doing, Verona.  Think hard.”

“You said you wouldn’t do that anymore.  Compare.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do when you’re acting just like she did?  She betrayed me without even blinking or apologizing and now you’re doing the exact same thing.  Apples and trees, right?  I’ve never known her to really truly care about another living soul that wasn’t named Sylvia Dunn, later Sylvia Hayward.  I thought at least you had that in you.”

“Maybe if you got to know her, you’d know how much she cares,” McCauleigh said.

Oakham stuck out her cane, holding the end, so the right-angle of the handle stuck out, hooked Verona’s shoulder, and tugged a bit.

Verona stepped back, and then let herself be pulled back.

“She never gave me the chance,” her dad said.

I did, Verona thought.  This conversation was one of them.  If you’d genuinely changed after the wake-up call with CAS, I’d be talking to you now with a different goal in mind.

I’d offer you the same thing I’m planning on offering mom.

She stared him down, hurt in her eyes.

“Right,” he said, bitter.  He headed back to the car.  “If you decide you need me after all, you have my number.”

“You didn’t want the photo albums, figurines?” she asked, before he could climb in.

He reached for the back door, opening it.  “Put them back there.  On the floor, so they don’t slide around.”

She didn’t budge.  Her group didn’t either.

“You won’t even do that for me?  You can’t extend even that much effort my direction?”

She turned, grabbed some boxes, and picked them up.  When Anselm bent down to help, she indicated which were okay.

Then she went.  Taking her boxes of her things.  She’d kept the negatives from the photo albums.  The rest of it she left on the stairs for her dad to take or leave as he wanted.

Avery was okay, and now they needed to get stuff sorted, and fast.

She opened the door to the House on Half Street.  She subtly kept the cold out, while stepping out of the way.

Her mother peered inside, then stepped into the house.  “Oh.  You’ve spent time here.”

“Is it that obvious?” Verona asked.

Moments before her mom got to any angle where she’d see, images and murals were moving across walls, until they became decorative borders along walls and doorways.  Instead of full-fledged images spanning entire walls, they were eyes peering around corners and doors, the surrounding visual effects tracing the wall.

“Is this the big project you’ve been working on, then?” her mom asked.  “With the eco-friendly bottles that cost so much?”

“That’s a connection I didn’t expect you to make.  Kind of?”

“Kind of.  So there’s more.”

“This is the tip of one hell of an iceberg,” Verona said.

The house was clean.  Floors clear of little bits of debris and trash that had a way of accumulating.  There was no alchemy setup in the kitchen.  Just food.

“What is this place?  A party den for the older teens?”

“Sometimes, maybe.  Not that much since I claimed it.”

“Jasmine alluded to things that were going on.  With you, your dad, you not spending much time at home.  I didn’t realize it was this.”

“I can fend for myself.”

Her mom frowned.  “Just you?”

“No.  There are others.  Most aren’t here.  People that needed a place to retreat to.”

“Was the idea that you’d get emancipated?”

“There were a lot of ideas,” Verona said.

Almost experimentally, she reached out to make an adjustment.  Taking the Demesne to Kennet found.

Less as a prelude to what she was going to show her mother, once she’d broken her in, tested the waters.  More to help frame her own line of thinking.

“What other ideas?  If you’re okay showing me?”

Verona knew she was her dad’s kid.  She knew she was her mom’s kid too.  There were patterns of personality and behavior.  A really tentative, uneasy way of forming connections.  The more time she immersed herself in the rest of the world, the more she moved past that.

But in this case, Verona being very Verona, her mom being very Sylvia Hayward, it was two people who, taken on their own, would see a signal to back off and back off.

Stay backed off.

If she said she wasn’t okay showing her mom, she felt like her mom would just accept that.  Accept it, then find a configuration for their relationship with that new boundary.

Which got really complicated when there were a whole lot of miscommunicated and misread signals in the mix.

If Verona said or did the wrong thing, then it felt like her mom would take that as a signal to back off and they wouldn’t get anywhere.

“Sure,” she ventured.  “This way.”

She opened the door under the stairs and that was a door that led down steps.  Past the little nook that Peckersnot had made in that window that was barely a foot and a half by two feet across, the stair railing running past it.  That Blankshanks liked to sneak into when Verona wasn’t around.

Luna was in the shop.

“Oh!” Luna jumped.  She hesitated, then pulled her mask off, face a bit stricken in the aftermath.

“Hey Luna.  Didn’t think you’d be here.”

“Just so happened to be… yep.”

“Is this a library?” her mom asked.

“A bookstore,” Verona said.  She navigated into the familiar but unfamiliar space.  Past vague books.  Zed’s Librarian Nina had given her a sorting system and Luna was putting it to work.  “Luna helps out sometimes, for kicks.  At ease, soldier.”

“I’m not a soldier, I wouldn’t be a very good one,” Luna said, biting her lip.  She looked like she really wanted to bury her face in her hands, and squirmed as she tried not to, hands clasped behind her back.  “Hello, I live in the general neighborhood.”

“Luna’s great,” Verona told her mom.

Her mom looked through the books.  “These aren’t…”

“They’re special books,” Verona said, to help things along.  “Books you can’t find anywhere else.”

“How?”

“I have contacts.”

She knew this was the sort of thing her mom would love to dig into, to pick apart.

Dangerous ground, but… it was probably also the avenue by which her mom would best connect with this world.  For Avery and her mom, her mom had helped with market stuff and negotiations, stepping up for Avery to make sure Avery didn’t get walked all over.  But Kelsey’s thing was Avery, first and foremost.

“This is ambitious for someone your age.  These books are…”

“Special,” Verona reiterated.  “Weird.”

“Mmm.”

“Mom,” Verona said.  “What would it take for you to move to Kennet?  For good?”

“Is this about your dad?  Do you think he might get a house elsewhere?”

“Maybe.  Fresher start.  Might have to stay, for his work at his company.  But it’s about you.  Really truly, it’s about you.  What does it take?”

“I don’t- I really don’t see myself ever doing that.”

“Because you love the city?”

“Yes.  The people.  The opportunities.”

“The things to do, the things to explore?” Verona asked.

Her mom nodded.  “And as far as Kennet goes, I- there’s nothing for me here.  There’s nobody for me here.  Except you.”

“Good save.  You like Connor okay though.  And Kelsey?””

“I’d go crazy if it was just him and Kelsey.  They’re lovely.  I love Kelsey’s drive.  I love finding people for her to network with.  But I’d go crazy.”

Verona moved some books, restless.  She saw Luna was keeping herself busy, with one hand.  The other hand scratched the bridge of her nose nervously, so the hand covered a lot of her face.  “Hey Luna?  You don’t have to stick around.  You’re always welcome, but if it’s awkward-”

“I’ll make hot chocolate?” Luna offered.  “And tea?”

You just want hot chocolate.  “That’d be great.”

Luna rushed upstairs, wasting zero time in pulling her mask down on the way.

“What’s with the mask?” Verona’s mom asked her.

Verona shrugged.  “Among the least of the weird bits you’re liable to run into, keep hanging out with me.”

“Artists and friends of artists?”

“I don’t even put artist on the top five of things I call myself.”

“It’s all over the walls.”

“There’s a lot to me, I guess.  And there’s more to Kennet than you think.”

“I remember chatting with the mayor.  There were little events.  There was the rooftop concert, I heard about that after.”

“Yeah.  Tip of the metaphorical iceberg.  What if there was more going on in Kennet?  If it was growing, doing interesting things, and you could be part of that growth, the interesting things, the interesting stuff that came to Kennet as a part of it?”

If she was too gentle about it, or mistepped and gave the wrong signal, that was a problem, yeah.  But if she was blunt and pushed hard, laid everything on the table, it could be like when she’d asked her mom for help, before the end of spring party.  Getting a hard ‘no’.

That ‘no’ in itself was a miscommunication, there was more behind it, in terms of context and stuff going on.  There was less behind it, in that it wasn’t a rejection of Verona.  And there was enough clumsiness around it that instead of navigating their way past that miscommunication, they’d just parted ways, Verona hurt, her mom feeling vague regret but maybe not entirely understanding how hurt Verona was.

She didn’t want that to happen here, so she had to navigate carefully in a situation that was already hard to navigate.

“I’d be worried I’d get your hopes up, but it wouldn’t be enough.  I’d wither and stagnate, I’d become my worst self.  I don’t want that worst version of me to be your mom.”

“Even if it’s the only real option?” Verona asked.  She stacked some wood meant for shelves more neatly.  “If Dad isn’t an option?”

“Oh, honey.  I know he’s upset, after the fire, but…”

“I might’ve burned bridges.  I don’t have a lot of options.”

“It’s rarely as bad as that.”

There it was.  One of those statements that read in more than one way.  Was her mom just wrong, or was her mom subtly trying to fob her off, make sure there was a clear route of escape, from being cornered by Verona in a high-pressure ‘I need you to move in’ move?

If it was the former, she needed to correct her mom.  if it was the latter, pushing would seem like she was trying to corner her mom, and it would move fast toward that kneejerk ‘no’.

“With dad stuff gets bad more than you tend to assume, I think,” Verona said, carefully.

Her mom looked concerned.

Verona didn’t know how to navigate this gap.  To bring her mother across it.  Too gentle and nothing happened.  Too firm and things collapsed.  It was a hard enough subject to navigate in general.

Mom, Verona thought the words, without saying them.  Magic is real and I want to show you it.  I want you to get into it in a serious way.  Into the market.  Into the practitioner families, the Others, and a whole world of overly invested people to drink wine with.

She looked toward the door.

Mom, there’s a ton of awful stuff out there.  Exciting too, but lots of awful.  I don’t expect you to tackle it, but it’s dangerous and violent and I don’t have the backup that Lucy and Avery do, at home.  If shit gets fucky and CAS starts getting involved to the point I can’t stay here, telling me to go to dad or to you, that screws too many things up.  If I dive into the fucky stuff and I have problems instead of a safety net, that might make the difference between me making it and me ending up dead or worse.

In the midst of thinking about how awful and exciting and fucky things could be.  She nudged the outside, and now the door to the shop led out into Kennet below.

She ran fingers through her hair.

Her hand twinged, and she rubbed at it.

“How bad is it?”

“Your dad.”

“He doesn’t let go of things.  So I don’t think the bad ever goes away,” Verona said, flopping forward onto a counter that stretched between her and her mom.  “It’s there, it’s not better.  I don’t think it’ll ever be better.  So I put distance between him and me.  I kind of don’t see myself being twenty five and visiting him regularly, you know?”

“And you don’t see yourself getting married, so you don’t imagine him coming to that.”

“Nope.”

“I’m sorry.  That’s sad.  I- the non-invitation to a wedding you don’t expect to happen.  I’m sorry things aren’t working out with him.”

“I don’t want this to be about him.  Because he doesn’t change, that won’t change.  I’ve gotta navigate life around him.  So… I’m showing you my place I retreat to.  I’m showing you my shop, and I can show you some market stuff…”

It was dark outside.

“Market?”

Verona propped her head up, hand on cheek, elbow on counter.  Her other hand hurt, so she pressed it hard against the counter.  “There’s multiple markets.  Interlinked.  With special craftsmen.  The concert thing was related to that.  Obviously with the fires and everything, we’re set back a little, but… we’re making Kennet something else.”

“Markets and a shop.  Hm.”

“And craftsmen, cool artists and things way different and, I think, way more interesting than what you’ve been seeing.”

“It’s a neat little venture.  But- I mean, that’s amazing, but-”

“But that’s the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, mom,” Verona said.  “Really truly.  Want to see?”

Pain lanced through her hand and arm, making her almost faceplant onto the counter.

“Fuck, no.”

Verona sat up, the dream falling away, as she lurched forward, accidentally elbowing Anselm in the head, who lay beside her.  Her hand cramped.

One of the bad ones.

“Fucking-”

“What’s wrong?” McCauleigh asked.  She’d been napping on the far side of Anselm.  “Cramp?”

Verona nodded, tears springing to her eyes.  With one hand cramping and the other grabbing it, and the bed occupied, it was awkward to get up.  McCauleigh reached out, providing a supporting hand for Verona to get fully upright and be able to walk over the edge of the bed.

Anselm, despite the elbow to the head, was slower to rouse, confused as Verona went over him.

Verona went to the bathroom, running water.

“It woke you up?” McCauleigh asked.

“Happens sometimes, I sleep on it wrong or wedge it under my pillow and something tweaks,” Verona muttered.  “Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“It’s okay.”

“I was getting somewhere.  I had plans.  It’s a bitch to coordinate sleeping at the same time.”

“It’s a bitch to coordinate a nap but most nights your mom will sleep, I figure.”

“But there’s too much going on.  I wanted to get one thing solid.  One thing today, before we get onto other stuff.”

Verona ran water over her hand to numb it, pressing it down into the sink’s surface, palm down.

Sensing the commotion, the squirrel had come upstairs.  He tilted his head and put paws forward.

“Tea?” Verona asked.  “The herbal stuff.”

The squirrel scampered away.

“Thanks buddy,” Verona said, having the House carry her voice far enough.

Well.  That was a bust.  She’d hoped to have a general ‘life’ game plan for tonight.

She pressed her hand down, pain making her whole arm jump.  McCauleigh was by her, tailbone against the edge of the counter, by her, without much more to add.

She’d hoped to run things by her mom, with the cover of ‘it was all a dream’ if things didn’t work out.  Laying it on the table, seeing how her mom took to it.

She leaned forward, head between her arms, groaning.

“How was it going?  I was waiting to back you up, but we didn’t get that far, I guess.”

“I don’t even know.  It’s not easy, and then this throws a wrench into things?  Such bull.”

“Total bull,” McCauleigh said.

A very sleepy Anselm peered in.  He shot her a sympathetic look, then wandered downstairs.

Well, she wasn’t with him for the emotional support.

“You want to help the squirrel bring tea upstairs?  Gets a bit awkward when you’re not much bigger than the teacup,” McCauleigh called down.

“Sure,” he called back.

“You’re bossing him around a bit,” Verona muttered.

“Am I?  Shit.  Is it a problem or-?”

“I dunno.  Just observing.  He’s getting a pretty good deal here for a few ‘come here’s and ‘get that’s, so I don’t think he’s complaining much.”

“I’ll watch out,” McCauleigh said.

“What happens if this shit pops off right in the middle of one of the key moves against Charles that’s bound to be coming up?” Verona asked.  “It’s always in the back of my mind.  What do I do?  What happens?”

“You adapt.  You have help.  Backup.  Us.  Your friends.”

Verona nodded.

She winced as fresh pain darted up and down her arm, from the cramping hand.

She’d gotten off pretty easy, going up against Charles at the end of summer.  Avery had scraped by.

What happened next?  Would they keep scraping by?

“We don’t want you to keep just barely scraping by,” Miss said.

“What’s this?” Verona asked.

The others were gathering.  It wasn’t easy, getting here, but ‘here’ was a complicated place.

Avery was doing the escorting.  She flashed a smile at Verona, hurrying over.  Verona and Avery hugged, tight.  Lucy was off to the side, and Avery ran off to greet her.

Wanting to move around a lot after being in the hospital bed overnight.

The Promenade.  A place Charles couldn’t and wouldn’t hear.

Being here meant that Oakham couldn’t come.  Bracken wasn’t wanting to dive into the weirdness any more than he already had.  A bunch of their allies and forces had to stay behind and hold down the fort.  As things got dark and they entered night-time the night after all the shit went down, they were expecting some people sympathetic to Charles to cause a fuss, on the level of vandalism and other stuff, so that needed backup too.  Goblins.  Dog Tags.

Grandfather and Horseman were here, though.

Yiyun Jen, Harri, Adrian, and Nomi were all in attendance, looking a bit awed by this place, keeping to themselves.

Miss had come, and it apparently took some doing to extend herself from Kennet.  They were planning to keep this short, to lay out some ground rules and plans for making plans- future meetings, who to contact, and so on.  With Miss’s movements outside of Kennet being strained as they were, they’d have to really nail timing, so the last stragglers weren’t being brought over just as Miss was having to leave.

If Miss rubber-banded back to Kennet, then at least Luna was here, looking very animated and pleased to be in her element, ready to take notes.  She leaned precariously over the railing that looked out on Earth.

Snowdrop, too, was in her element, and tackle-hugged Luna, nearly knocking her over.  Luna managed to keep her position without toppling.  That antagonistic friendship.

“Lucy?  Avery?” Miss said.

The two, talking with one another, gave Miss their full attention.

“We talked about things, and we have concerns that you’re too invested in this war and it threatens to put us all in jeopardy.  We swore to support you in long and full lives.  With Avery’s close call…” Miss said, trailing off.

“That freaking oath,” Verona said.

“It saved us more than once,” Lucy said.

“Ughhh.  Technically, the wording-”

“The spirit of the rule is a concern too.  Especially with the judges being set up as they are,” Miss said.

Toadswallow arrived, escorted by Jude.  He looked like a terrible match for the Promenade in a lot of ways, short and sauntering forward with an unwavering course, that made Lost have to change direction to get out of his way, where the Lost normally moved around the space in a natural way.

The Bitter Street Witch and Vice Principal were here, Vice Principal on her steed, Bitter Street Witch in a wheelchair pushed by her brother.  Toadswallow intersected them, and it felt like a bit of a stand-off, Toadswallow smiling like he was enjoying himself.  Would they move out of his way like the Lost had?

The brother started to move her out of Toadswallow’s way, and she hauled up on the long walking stick that sat alongside her leg and body, jabbing him with the top end of it.  The Vice Principal did move.

Once he had the room, Toadswallow opened a container, and Alpeana flowed out, a mess of black hair, black cloth, and black dreck that had pale, awkward limbs and a pale face with black eyes stick out of it, crawling forward and pulling together into a girl shape.

“Ah, lassie!  Verona!”

“Heya.”

“This is chaos,” Miss muttered.

“A’m sorry I dropped ye.  Tis hard enough tae keep th’ nightmare oot o’ the nightmare.”

Verona unclasped her hand-brace and rubbed at her palm, nodding.  “It’s okay.  Wasn’t your fault.”

“Aye, ah’m sorry all th’ same.”

“My mom was giving me weird looks when I met her this afternoon, after the nap and the failed attempt.”

“Aye, that’s richt.  Ah had tae come up wi’ somethin’.  Ah hud a wee thing speiled oot whur ye said ye wur up th’ duff.”

“I was what the what?”

“Pregnant,” Avery volunteered.

“Oh come on.  That makes things harder if she catches on I have a secret house and she had recent nightmares about me being pregnant.”

“Ah dinnae haf much time, ye disappeared on me!”

“She should catch on!” Jasmine raised her voice.  She was coming over, Kelsey and Connor too.  Escorted by Jude’s dad.

Verona groaned.

In the background, Queen Sootsleeves was coming in on horseback, with her ‘kingdom’.  It looked like the Promenade was five kinds of messy, overflowing with the individual Lost.  Or were they considered a part of Sootsleeves, still?

“Seriously,” Jasmine said, having adjusted to a normal volume and more sympathetic tone, now.  “Any headway?”

“I don’t know if I’m going to tell her, but I’m leaning that way.  I want to do a better test run, an ‘it was all a dream’ peek at things, see how she rolls with it.  But if she doesn’t… I dunno.”

“Move in with her, maybe possibly?” Avery asked.

Verona looked at Lucy, and saw Lucy’s hurt expression.  Lucy would be alone.

“I really don’t want to,” Verona said.  “But I can’t go back to my dad.  The house was the… I dunno.  The thing keeping it together.  Bridge burned, in more than one way.”

“You need a parent,” Jasmine said.  Connor, in the background, was nodding.

Ugh.  She’d liked Connor, as a tutor, peripheral to her life without controlling it.

Ugh, ugh ugh ugh.

“We’ll work something out,” Julette said, as she came back from her idle wanderings.  Verona had arrived early, and Julette had poked around while waiting for others.

“I don’t want you and you pretending to be Verona to be part of that working out,” Jasmine said.

“They’re onto us,” Julette murmured.

“We really gotta re-tie some of that twine, tweak the twigs, rewrite something, make you a bit more subtle,” Verona told her.  She sighed, turning to Jasmine, Connor, and Kelsey.  “I knew we’d have to chat about things, my plans, where I was going, you made that clear.  But I had a hand thing, it derailed the plan.  I tried to sound my mom out, but she’s… tricky.”

“She is,” Jasmine agreed.  “Let me talk to her?”

“Okay.  Do me a favor though?”

“Maybe,” Jasmine said.

“Let me stay at the House on Half street or with you for the next bit?  Until the Charles thing wraps up?”

Jasmine looked like she was going to say something, then stopped herself.  She looked back at Kelsey and Connor.

“What?” Verona asked.

“It’s a tall order,” Jasmine said.  “You’re a teenager, unsupervised.”

It felt a lot like that wasn’t what Jasmine had been about to say.

“We’ll talk about it later.  Sorry for the interruption,” Jasmine told Miss.  She said it weirdly and with more deference for Miss than she’d showed in the last… ever.

“It’s alright,” Miss replied.  “I think the way this is organized… or not organized, we’ll be interrupted constantly throughout.”

Their group had to part because a guy in a business suit who was on fire was trudging forward, heading off in the direction of the trains.

“Maybe that’s the best place to start, if we have to start somewhere,” Miss said.

“You want us to back off some?” Verona asked.

“No.  Almost the opposite,” Miss said.  “We’re making plans.  We want to make our move against Charles.  Without you.”

“What?” Avery asked.

“One decisive move, all of our assets, all of our forces.  You hang back.  When we’re done, we regroup, quickly organize, and then we make another move.  An attack, a ploy, a major ritual, whatever that may take.  While he’s weak and reeling, or his focus is on the method or angle of our initial ploy, you three catch him in another.  That is the part we want you to be involved in.”

“We don’t want you to hold back, dearies,” Toadswallow croaked.  “We want this to be the last major effort you’re involved in.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lucy said.

“It’s necessary,” Matthew said.  “We talked it over.  You’re kids, you’ve given your all, you’ve put your lives on the line.  It’s our turn.  If you try to help for the initial attack, we abort, things will probably be a disaster.  If you try to get involved after your part in this… we swore the oath to long and full life.  To give you that, we’ll turn off the power source.”

Lucy shook her head a bit.

“Temporarily,” Louise said.

“For however long we think you’re trying to pull something against Charles,” Matthew said.  “We won’t cooperate.”

“We’ll ask for gifts back,” Toadswallow said.  “That ugly stick is technically still on loan.”

“Is this because I got shot?  You’re giving up on us?” Avery asked.

“Not at all,” Louise said.  “Don’t blame yourself.  It’s not about that.”

“Would it have happened if I hadn’t gotten shot?”

“Sooner or later,” Matthew said.  Then, as if responding to a cue or warning look Verona didn’t see the source of, he added, “maybe a bit sooner.”

Verona turned to study the crowd.

“I think this is a mistake,” Lucy said.

“It’s our decision.  Firm,” Miss said.  “We discussed, we swore an oath.”

“You what?” Verona raised her voice.

“If this carries on, it destroys you, it destroys us.”

“War, that thing I talk about,” Grandfather joined the conversation.  “Both sides losing.  There’s only so much we can take and do.  Maybe we can stop him.  Maybe we push him back and threaten to test him every time he comes at us, and we have an uneasy truce of threatened mutual destruction.”

“Or mutual enough-damage-to-hurt,” Matthew amended.

“Except we’re not part of that mutual?” Avery asked.

“You go and enjoy sports, have your girlfriend.  Work with the Garricks.  Lucy should go to school, find a boyfriend if she so desires, she should make her connections in the practitioner world, build on what she started with the sword moot, if it doesn’t agitate Charles too much.  Verona can have her bookstore.  If we can secure Kennet, it doesn’t matter if the surrounding region is messy.  You can have your wandering bookstore wander outside.”

“If Charles allows,” Verona said.  “Or the Aurum.  That’s more his deal, I think.”

“Right now, we’re at a place where two judges are against us, one is on our side, and one appears to be neutral,” Miss said.  “Charles has made his moves against us, we’ve made moves against him.  If this really truly can’t budge, we may have to adapt to a new climate.  Let another group be the ones to target Charles.”

“Gerhild is said to be on the way, five or ten years from now,” Toadswallow said.

“This is such bull,” Lucy muttered, angry.  She couldn’t stand still, and moved like she was going to storm off, then turned around, staying, because she couldn’t miss this conversation, either.

“We can’t keep throwing ourselves against a brick wall until we’ve smashed ourselves to pieces against it,” Miss said.

“We’re not saying it’s impossible,” Matthew said.  “We do want to make an attempt.  If we fail, hopefully it’s a demonstration of what happens if he provokes us.  If we succeed, we stop him.”

“There’s no chance he just gets angry and comes at us harder?” Verona asked.

“I think, knowing him, knowing his motivations and grander plans,” Miss said.  “If we make it clear we’re throwing our hands up, he’d welcome that.”

“That would be so fucked if we did that and he did that,” Avery said, voice low and quiet, almost horrified.

“Then let’s win,” Horseman said.

Verona’s eyes settled on the parents.

They were conspicuously quiet here, when they should have a lot to say.

Probably better not to bring that up.

Everything was tangled together and as one thing fell to pieces, the rest was dragged down with it.

They couldn’t let more things fall to pieces, then.

“While we’re on the topic of the neutral judge… Avery went to talk to the Alabaster, back in the spring.  Verona went to talk to Charles in his realm, back when she was gainsaid.”

“You what?” Jasmine asked, looking at Verona.

“Did we not have that in the notes?” Verona asked, as innocently as she could.

“I’m thinking I’ll take a hike.  Find the safest way to go, pay a visit to the Sable.  He’s neutral.  Very by the books.”

“He’s dark, I like dark, I could do that, theoretically,” Verona offered.  Solves the ‘where do I sleep’ issue for a couple nights.

“He thinks you’re a pain in the ass,” Lucy said.  “That’d be a bad idea.  I can handle myself-”

Jasmine looked like she was gearing up to say stuff.

“-But I wouldn’t mind company and backup, so my mom doesn’t fret.”

“Okay,” Grandfather said.

“So you guys can all plan and do your initial attack, I’ll see the Sable, see if there’s any way we can have two judges on our side, or more clarification on what it means for him to be neutral… because ‘neutral’ as an idea makes me uneasy.  Switzerland or whatever else, it doesn’t tend to actually be ‘neutral’.”

Verona nodded.  They’d talked about this idea before.

“Is she going to be safe?” Jasmine asked.  “Backup or no backup?”

“There are ways,” Miss said.  “I suggest a declaration made to him before you leave and make your approach from whatever oblique angle you have planned.  So he won’t treat you as the Aurum did Avery.”

Lucy nodded.

“I’m feeling my ability to stay here is limited, so I may have to go.  If you decide on more things, Luna can pass them on to me.”

Luna stood a little straighter.  Snowdrop poked her in the side of the stomach.

Sootsleeves, mostly a bystander, moved closer to Miss.  Various Lost who had been talking to Sootsleeves in the background flocked closer, moving in the midst of the sea of urchins, rats, and pigeons.

They surrounded Miss.

As Miss departed, disappearing from here, by angles that weren’t up, down, left or right, she brought Sootsleeves and about a dozen Lost who were interested in visiting Kennet found with her.

That was cool.

“We should work out a schedule, organize better so we can have more of these meetings,” Louise said.  “What worked best, what slowed us down?  How can we tighten this up?”

There was some discussion that followed.

Verona walked around the group, and stuck out the toe of her shoe, prodding Toadswallow in the butt cheek.

He looked at her, then followed her as she stepped away.

She drew a line in chalk, blocking Lucy, which made Lucy frown at her.  She gestured it was okay.

Life would be less complicated if Lucy didn’t overhear.

“How’d they get you to agree to all of that?” Verona asked Toadswallow.

“Whatever do you mean?” he asked, trying very badly to look innocent.

“The parents,” Verona said.  She worked her way down to a sitting position beside Toadswallow, undid her hand brace, and rubbed at her palm.

“I think some of us were feeling the need for there to be an end to this back and forth already,” Toadswallow said.

“That’s deflecting.”

“They brought up the oath.  To let us know they were serious.”

“Hmm.  Reckless, you think?  I don’t want relationships to sour or-”

“No, dear,” Toadswallow said.  “They care about you.  I think they would have made the same threats if we were all humans.  They may not understand our individual quirks, but they see us as people, except for the initial wobbly steps into this world, I don’t think they’ve failed to treat us as people.  If they didn’t, Miss would rankle more, I would too.”

Verona nodded.

“You can’t bring up forswearance or gainsayings without there being some hard feelings.  Gets right to the fabric of some of us, shit-stained or glittering.  But only a few, easily smoothed over.  I think the group understands.  A fair few were worried about our sweetheart Avery.”

Verona looked at her friend.  Avery looked okay now.  She had an arm around Snowdrop to stop Snowdrop from harassing Luna.  Luna had ventured a bit closer, as if teasing Snowdrop by being just out of reach for more harassment.

Avery was smiling over that, a bit, even if a shadow had sort of fallen over all of them, with the whole deal here.

Verona sighed.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Toadswallow said.  “Lessons.  Or if you read something and you want someone to bounce it off of.  I’m very bouncy.”

He slapped his belly a bit.

“That’s a really cool offer.  I’ve got Julette, but…”

Julette had ventured close enough to listen, and was nodding.  Verona reached over, pulling on the back of Julette’s top, making it pull against her throat.  Julette made a small ‘hurk’ sound, then sat too.  Badly positioned.  Verona reached over to lengthen the line so Julette wouldn’t let something leak.

“…it’s a cool offer,” Verona finished.  “We’ll have to figure some stuff out.”

“That we will.  All hands on deck, nobody on the benches,” Toadswallow said.

“Except us three, at first.”

“Except you three, at first.  We open the doors, you storm through.  Or something.”

“If you’re offering help-”

“I am.  All of us will be.”

“Market?” Verona asked.  “I know it’s awkward, so soon after everything.  But if we can get the market going again…”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Verona nodded.

They sat, watching, listening to the ongoing organization and logistics stuff.

Gotta keep my options open, Verona thought.  I’ve lost power too many times and it hurts too much.  Especially for how I function.  The gainsayings, the power hit when Avery was out…

If the council was saying they’d turn off the spigot temporarily, to force Verona, Avery, and Lucy out of the fight, then Verona’s instinct was to make sure there were options.  Magic items worked if the spigot turned off.  The market sold magic items.

She wasn’t sure whether that was to defend themselves if Charles got sneaky while they were powerless, or if it was to get in one after-the-final-battle parting shot, but it only made sense to do.

It was how Charles had beat them.  By having those resources.

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