If their job was to solve a mystery, then there might never be a better time to pay attention.
Matthew was drawing lines in the dirt with a branch, pushing it in to carve deeper where the ground was hard from the cold. He seemed focused on the task, without nervousness.
It was hard to not feel nervous. There was so much strangeness, she barely had anything to defend herself with, and every single one of her senses were on edge. The smell of nature with traces of other smells she felt like she should track, the singing in the background nagging at her ears, the eye-catching movements of the various Others, some sudden, others subtle, the chill in the air against her face and bare legs numbing her sense of touch, the dryness of her tongue in her mouth. She shouldn’t have had the salty pepperoni earlier.
She could have pulled on the extra clothes she’d packed, or gone to grab a drink, but she felt like she would miss things if she did, and she had to keep to old promises to herself.
“Explain what you’re doing?” Verona asked. She sat on her heels, wincing and bringing her hand to her lower stomach as she did so, looking at the lines. “This is a magic circle?”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn any diagrams,” Matthew said. “It might help to think of this as a stage. If you don’t spread things out evenly, it’s imbalanced, the stage tilts.”
“We were told, uh, one person shouldn’t do all the shopping,” Avery said. She had her hands in the pockets of her track pants. “Or bring all the things. Same idea?”
“What happens if the stage tilts?” Verona asked.
“I… that’s complicated, and might not have a singular answer,” Matthew said, as he drew out a circle. “I could see a situation where the spirits look to one person in your group as the spokesperson or leader. One person ends up holding the cards or having more power, while the others are supporters. In the very worst case, the other two practitioners could be suppliers of energy or power for the primary figure. I wouldn’t worry, we’re well past that and into safe territory.”
“I bought the meat, bread, and milk, plus the molasses and vegetable ash,” Verona said. “That’s more than Lucy and Avery.”
“Minor,” Matthew said. “If there’s a difference it’ll barely be noticeable. It’s more to do with the division of labor and effort.”
“Then I think we did okay,” Verona said. She looked over at Lucy. “What do you think? The wine was a pain? But you just got the wine, right?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, her arms folded. Her legs were cold.
“And Avery got the… honey.”
“Honeycombs,” Avery nudged her bag with her foot. “And honey too, of course. I went to my aunt’s to get it. I thought it’d be a nice touch.”
“Do you know what’d be the best touch?” the smallest, reddest little ugly thing piped up. “Spit in it!”
“Uhhh.” Avery looked a little disconcerted by that.
“Manage yourselves, goblins,” Matthew said, without looking up from his work.
The goblin with the monocle wrapped his hands around the littlest goblin’s lower face, knobby fingers with pointed claws interlacing. “My deepest, lowliest apologies for my companion’s vulgarity. She has a brain the size of a thumbprint and it is composed entirely of nightsoil.”
“Nightsoil?” Lucy asked.
“Is easier to show than tell,” the plump goblin said, adjusting his grip, reaching behind him and into the back of his pants.
“Uh, no!” Lucy said. She stuck her foot out, toe prodding the fat goblin and knocking him off balance and onto his rear end before he could do anything. He nearly lost his grip on the small one, returning to a two-handed hold on her face, fingers threatening to crush the smaller goblin’s lower face.
“Nice save,” Matthew said.
“What’s their deal?” Lucy asked Matthew, pointing.
“Goblins are creatures of filth, vulgarity, and the basest, and the ugliest of human actions. The smallest of them are rude jokes in the process of being told ad-nauseum. The most dangerous of them could be mistaken for dark and twisted gods.”
“Sir Toadswallow,” the goblin with the monocle introduced himself, giving them an insincere smile.
“Toadswallow. Is that toad and swallow or toads and wallow?” Verona asked.
“Activities best enjoyed when it is both at the same time, girl. It’s a stage name,” he said.
Lucy crossed her arms. “What kind of stage?”
“I work with children,” Toadswallow said, before giving her a wide smile that showed all of his teeth. “When a practitioner drops a bit of meat from their nethers and wants to teach it to deal with goblinkind, they like to have goblins they’ve met and made deals with beforehand for the practice and initial lessons. They summon, I go, they pay me.”
“You might get better business if you didn’t call the clients nether-droppings,” Lucy said.
Toadswallow smiled, and it was so fake it looked like someone trying to smile for the first time and doing it badly… with added fangs. “My most regular summoners seem to have misplaced their books, and I have some time to myself. I’m training some of this lot to do the child-work. Cherrypop is the noisy little foetal deposit here in my hands. The big one is… let’s call him Bluntmunch.”
The big goblin groaned, low, long, and drawn out.
Toadswallow pointed. “Over there, separate from my students, is… you can call it Gashwad. Cherry, dear, stop fighting or I’ll drown you in an outhouse.”
Gashwad was off with some of the Others, perched on the shoulder of the man with the questionable haircut who’d been called John. It had a nose like a toucan had a beak, and dark eyes that seemed stuck in a perpetual glare. The Giant who had been in the woods had ventured closer, and was talking to the goblin, John, and Miss.
The fact the giant was seven feet tall wasn’t impossible by human standards but he was seven feet tall and confidently carried muscle in a way that defied sense. When he moved, her instinct was to assume it would move slowly, she would take a half-second to check other things in the environment, including the winged woman, who reacted every time he stirred, and then she would look back and find herself surprised that he’d covered as much ground as he had. When he moved, his hair sometimes got out of the way of his face. That was as distracting as anything. Not that she was into it, but it felt like recognizing a celebrity on the street.
The woman with the wings hadn’t actually unfurled her wings. She’d hopped down from the branch with them still wrapped around her. She smiled in a way that suggested she had secrets as she glanced at Lucy, even as she wandered on her own. The teenager with hair like the matted, moldy black stuff in a gutter stuck to the trees and stuck fairly close to the woman with the wings, crawling across branches and staying mostly hidden.
Lucy watched them carefully. Was anyone acting suspicious? What was suspicious or ordinary, when they were so far from being human?
“Um, Sir Toadswallow, what is it-” Avery started, before being interrupted by Toadswallow’s yelp. Cherrypop had bitten him. He shook her free and tried to grab her again, only to land on face and belly.
“John!” Matthew raised his voice. He’d messed up the diagram, maybe when Toadswallow had made the sudden noise. He pointed the branch at the squabbling goblins. “Would you?”
The intense looking guy broke away from the other conversation. He marched across the clearing, toward the goblins, who were too preoccupied to notice. He scooped them up and pulled them apart with apparent ease, despite the fact that tooth, nail, and stomach-spikes were hooked into one another.
“Suckle my ass!” the tiny goblin screeched.
“Orders?” John asked.
“I order you to suck, suck, succckkle it! Suck out my bloody insides and choke on them!”
“No orders,” Matthew said. “But if you wanted to take them somewhere out of earshot for a few minutes and let me finish this, it’d help.”
John glanced back across the clearing, surveying it. For a brief moment, he met Lucy’s eyes.
There was something about the look in John’s eyes that bothered her more than any creepy singing kids, any drunk old forsworn guy, or the way she couldn’t see Miss’s face.
Three years ago, she had heard shouting, and had hidden in her room. When she’d finally crept out, she’d found her mother sitting on her bed, crying. For one moment, before she’d realized Lucy was there, her mother had had this look on her face… like she’d been wounded in a way that cut deeper than bone.
Then her mom had realized Lucy was there, mostly pulled herself together, and even though she hadn’t been able to talk much because she was choked up, took her back to her room and tucked her in, giving her a kiss goodnight.
John, as far as she could tell, had that look on his face all the time. He didn’t or couldn’t pull himself together, and he didn’t look like he tucked anyone in or gave anyone kisses goodnight.
She watched him walk away.
“You okay?” Verona asked.
“Hm?” Lucy gave Verona a quizzical grunt of an answer.
“You happy? Excited?”
“I was,” Lucy said. “I will be again. For right now I’m mostly trying to take it all in.”
Scruffy Verona, eyes large in her face, nodded in answer, hand going up to the mask that lay flat at the top of her head to keep it from slipping, before turning to look at the various Others.
“I like that we got our mission, I guess,” Lucy said. Her fingernails dug into forearms, and she balanced on one foot for a second so she could rub at a cold calf with the shin of her other leg in a vain attempt to warm it. “Helps to distract, gives us things to start looking for.”
“I have a bunch of questions I want to ask,” Verona said. “About twenty questions for each person here about the practice, and what they are, and how they operate.”
“We’re investigating a disappearance, remember? Kind of.”
“-And ten questions about the disappearance. Questions about who they are are going to be important for that too, I think. We’ll get there, Lucy.”
Lucy nodded. Made sense, considering who Verona was as a person.
“You okay, Avery?” Verona asked.
Avery was sitting on a log, a spare jacket thrown over her legs, her attention on the woman with the wings and the girl with the dirty hair. “I’m freaking out a little. Worrying a bit.”
“About… what if I want or have to move? What happens then?”
“The deal is that you’ll look into matters,” Matthew said. “If you have to move, you could still look into matters if you paid irregular visits.”
“But, you know, try not to move away if you can help it,” Verona said.
“Yeah,” Avery answered.
“They won’t get angry or impatient?” Lucy asked. “If Avery screwed off and moved to Toronto or something, and only showed up every five years?”
“Every year would be better than every five, to check in, but I think it’s important to stress that many Others live forever, or they experience living in a different way,” Matthew told them. “Patience, impatience, time, it doesn’t often matter in the same ways. When it does matter, a lot of it is stuff you still need to think of from a different angle, like Faeries and their amusements.”
He indicated the woman with the blanket of wings wrapped around her. She turned her head to look at him, smiling.
“So…” Lucy drew out the sound, unsure if she should bring this up. “Is that why it took five weeks for you guys to start investigating the disappearance of this Carmine Beast?”
Matthew seemed surprised at that. “I think it might be. Didn’t cross my mind.”
“The first forty-eight hours are the most important, aren’t they?” Lucy asked.
“I always hated that idea,” Verona said. “Isn’t the last forty eight hours the most important? Without them, nothing would ever get solved.”
“I know you think you’re being clever, but it’s mostly annoying,” Lucy said, frowning at her friend.
“The first forty eight hours might matter more in your world, maybe,” Edith spoke up for the first time in a bit. She stuck her hands further into her pockets. “The kind of evidence and details you’d want to track for an investigation like this… the trails don’t fade, they take more turns, at worst.”
“Hoping this doesn’t end with a big ‘surprise, ritual sacrifice!’ and knives in our chests.”
“If they were going to do that, they had plenty of opportunities before,” Verona said. “And the parts of the ritual Matthew just explained make sense, I think.”
Lucy looked at the circle as it had been drawn thus far. A triangle about three feet across was contained within a circle, which was ‘strung’, for lack of a better word, with five lesser circles spaced out around it. That diagram was in turn surrounded by another ring strung with more circles.
“Almost done?” Verona asked.
“Bowls go in seven sub-circles arranged in a ring, offerings to Others,” Matthew explained.
“I’ve got the bowls for that,” Avery said. “They’re my family’s.”
“Get them out, we’ll need them soon. These circles will each have an offering supplied by one of us. I’m thinking back to a ritual I was barely paying attention to when I went through it twenty years ago, but it should be myrrh, oil, spice, quartz, and.. holly?”
“I would suggest holly,” Miss said, from the other end of the clearing. “It’s the old way, and our approach here hews to old ways. Up to the girls.”
“What’s the new way?” Verona asked. “And what does it change?”
“The materials connect to fire, earth, air, and water. The fifth spot can be wood or metal, depending on culture. Wood has roots, and metal points to the future.”
“Got it,” Verona said. She walked over to her bag and began to scribble down some notes. “I don’t have an opinion.”
“I like holly,” Avery said.
“Holly it is. Here, we have your objects,” Matthew said, indicating the outer ring. “They relate to the pillars of human experience.”
Verona, already by her bag, was ready to pull some things out.
Knife, skull, coin, timepiece, thread, Lucy recalled.
Lucy reached into her pocket while walking over to her bag. She fished out two coins, and showed Matthew. He took them, examining them. “One of them isn’t a coin, exactly.”
“Not a coin, exactly, but it’s metal and it was a currency of sorts. Hudson’s Bay Company. My grandfather had a coin collection. He left it to me along with some stuff like a shoe shine kit and some mugs. That’s supposed to be more expensive than the other one.”
“Silver dollar?” Matthew asked.
Lucy shrugged. “It’s not expensive enough to pay a month’s rent or something, but…”
“It’s good. Either one works nicely.”
She nodded, taking the coins back and closing her fist around them.
She had a knife in her bag. Hand made by her cousin, and it felt nice enough to qualify for a ritual.
Well, technically she had two knives. They were part of a set. She grabbed both, along with the thermos of wine.
She stabbed one knife into one circle that had been made in the dirt, so the handle stuck up, then walked over to do the same with the Hudson’s Bay coin, so it was buried just enough it didn’t fall over.
“I have three skulls in my room,” Verona said. “I asked Miss and she said the one that was actual bone instead of clay or plastic would be best.”
Verona set a raccoon skull down in one of the circles. It was missing a fang.
Avery had a knit doll that wasn’t quite finished, with the knitting needles and the yarn still attached. She looked back at the knife, then stuck the knitting needles into the cold ground with a bit of effort, propping up the doll so it sat up, and so the yarn wasn’t sitting in the dirt. “I never finished making this for my baby bro.”
“Considering what the thread is meant to represent, that may be a perfect choice,” Miss said.
Avery looked nervous. She placed a pocketwatch inside another circle. “My grandfather’s. He was going to throw it away, I kept it for myself. Way before any of this.”
Knife, coin, thread, timepiece, skull.
“Is it a problem if I use the same thing twice?” Lucy asked. “Knife and then knife again.”
“The ritual is, at its essence, you introducing yourself to our world,” Miss said. She walked through the trees, and she seemed to have little or no difficulty at all picking her way through the undergrowth. “The only wrong answer is the answer that feels wrong.”
“Does anything here feel wrong?” Edith asked.
Lucy had given a lot of consideration to the things she’d contributed. She looked over the other things. She shook her head with enough emphasis she could feel her hair move side to side, pulling at the elastic.
“No,” Verona said. She pulled on her mask as she said it, ready to get started.
A bit premature, as the food still had to be apportioned out. The plastic bag from the convenience store had the carton of milk, bread, and meat treats in it. They put everything into bowls, and with each of them carrying their personal items, the two bowls, and the clothing, they made their way to the center of the diagram, being careful not to step onto any lines.
They’d shared online videos about the mask carving and a website with tailoring templates for the making of the hats. The differences in mask were intentional, any differences in the hats accidental. Verona’s hat was just a bit floppier at the brim.
When they’d done the search for the capes, they’d agreed to use the first blueprint on the list. They’d been halfway when they had discovered the cape designs were all different. Not that it mattered. Verona’s was closer to a cloak, and Lucy’s closer to a shawl, it was so short. Avery’s looked like more of a cape, with a wreath around the neck and shoulders. She wore it ajar, so it covered most of one arm.
They stood with their backs to one another, and Lucy felt Avery reaching back, fumbling.
She took Avery’s hand, which was awkward when Avery had a folded-up bit of paper clamped between two fingers. Pulling the knife out of her pocket, she tried to do the same with Verona, holding Verona’s hand and the knife at the same time.
The Others began to draw near. Children, John, who had returned with goblins, the woman with the wings, the girl with the filthy hair, Matthew, Edith, and Miss.
The fox mask only had eyeholes, so her breath was hot against her lower face, while her legs were cold and her hands and head warmer. The eyeholes gave her almost no peripheral vision.
Miss walked around the group, and her face was consistently hidden by the backs and heads of the Others. When it wasn’t, others moved, distracting Lucy, or the Circle began to somehow stand out more than everything else around them, also serving to distract Lucy.
The singing in the background faded.
“Suleiman Bin Daoud took the first steps to establishing a new relationship between human and Other,” Miss said. “A lasting compact between human and Other. There are forms of this ritual where we recite old words in your language and in Suleiman’s. There are forms where we conduct old traditions. At the heart of it, however, lies an invitation. For you to join our world, and for us to cooperate with you in interacting with the world of man. Would you invite us in, Verona, Avery, and Lucy?”
“Yes,” Verona, Avery, and Lucy spoke in unison, but it was only Lucy who added, “With provisions.”
She felt a fingernail from Verona’s hand dig into her hand.
“Provisions, of course,” Miss said, taking it in stride. “We pledge you safety. We will do you no willful harm to body or mind, and we will do what we can to give you a long and full life, and avoid barring you from such. Agreed?”
“Yes,” Lucy and Avery said, in near unison. Verona was a bit late.
“If enemies from without would stand against you, we pledge our intent to stand with you, those of us here available as bodyguards, soldiers, distractions, or counsel. You three shall not be alone against any threat. Agreed?”
“Yes,” Lucy, Verona, and Avery said. In sync this time.
“We pledge to give you our power and our knowledge without reservation, provided that power is taken in goodwill and without undue harm, or taken with the will of the majority here. Agreed?”
“Yes,” the three girls agreed, in sync again.
That will be important. I was wondering how we’d handle things if we could find the culprit of the disappearance… now we can call a vote and drain them of power. I think.
The entire area had darkened, but the light of the overcast sky seemed to stick, where it fell on the diagram around them and where it lit up the various items, foods, and the empty circles where items were yet to be placed.
Lucy could feel the expectation. Miss didn’t jump in, elaborate, or give any indication, but…
“We pledge to fill the role that was once filled by Charles Abram,” Verona spoke up. “If others expect you to have local practitioners, we’ll be those practitioners, so they can’t upset the good things you have here. If Others stand in judgment over practitioners in crucial matter of word, we’ll manage what needs to be managed, without any interest in taking over, enslaving you, or harming those of you who don’t do unjust harm to others.”
We didn’t rehearse this. Am I supposed to say something?
Verona sounded so precise, so adult, using words she wouldn’t use, like ‘crucial’ and ‘unjust’.
“We’ll deal with you fairly, if you’ll let us. As equals,” Avery said. She didn’t sound quite as confident, and her voice was muffled by the deer mask she wore. “If you’ll teach us of your world and show it to us, we’ll do the same for you, and help keep you in our world.”
Lucy swallowed. She was halfway through the swallowing when she felt that expectation fall on her. So many eyes were on her.
“We’ll work on your problem,” Lucy said. The words came easily. It was like letting a ball roll downhill. She had to fill in the blanks and she already kind of knew the answer. “We’ll commit ourselves to solving your problem and bringing the culprit to justice, whatever form that may take. If-”
She hesitated. This wasn’t exactly words that rolled downhill. Not until she formulated the idea in her head. “If justice is warranted we’ll play our role in meting it out. We’ll do our part to protect Kennet, Other and human.”
‘Meting’, like Verona’s ‘unjust’, was one of those words that flowed, the words coming from a part of her deeper than lungs or breath.
The light that sat in the lines was so bright the world beyond was like shadows against the back of her eyes. There were only the lines, circles, triangle, the scattered items, and the Others.
Lucy herself was cast in shadow, but for the mask she wore, the brim of her hat, and the folds of the short cape she wore at her shoulder.
“Who are you?” Miss asked.
Lucy let go of the hands of the other girls. She brought the sheathed knife she held to her chest, pressing it against her sternum.
“I am Lucy. Lucille Desiree Ellingson,” Lucy said. “I picked the fox mask because I wanted something with fangs. It’s important to me that I have fangs.”
It felt like an admission of weakness to say that much, and that admission was jarring enough that she almost thought the ritual would end, forcing a complete restart from the beginning. It didn’t. Everything was suspended, the lines of light tense.
“…The fox is smaller than a wolf, clever, capable of finding its way into henhouses, unraveling hedgehogs, and using cleverness with those fangs instead of brute force or a pack. Even though it has fangs, it’s not always a carnivore. I picked this knife because… family. It came from family and it can protect those close to me, who are family by blood or friendship. Because I wanted something that was a tool and a weapon both. Same idea.”
It felt like everything was brighter, but when she fixed her eyes on them, they didn’t seem any different. It took Lucy a moment to realize that even though she wore the mask, it wasn’t hampering her peripheral vision anymore.
“My name is Verona Hayward. I picked this antique pair of scissors because… I didn’t really think about it so much as I just did it. But if you want to know who I am, I think I’m the type of person who can improvise a good answer on the fly. Scissors cut, they craft, these scissors in particular stand out, and those are me things. I almost brought a toy from my childhood but… I don’t want my childhood back. I don’t want something that ties back to who I was. I wanted something that can cut that tie and also point where I’m going. I picked the cat for my mask because I wanted a confident animal, and I want to be confident. I wanted an animal that’s comfortable in nighttime and shadow and you’d better believe I’m ready to jump in with both feet first and join some of you in the nighttime and shadows.”
“Avery Kelly. I picked the deer because I run, and that’s what I’m good at. I run fast, I skate fast, I like to go fast. Maybe I run in other parts of my life. I don’t know…”
Avery held the paper up, which had partially unfolded. Not paper, exactly, but a photograph. With her nervousness, the photograph shuddered in a way that exaggerated the shaking of her hand.
“Do I actually have to talk about it?” she asked. “I didn’t think I’d actually have to explain it.”
Only silence answered. Because, Lucy knew, it was Avery’s time to speak, and only her time.
She didn’t know if she was breaching protocol or threatening to disrupt the ritual, but she turned a bit, reached back, and placed a hand at Avery’s shoulder, giving shoulder and back a bit of a rub.
“This photograph, it’s from the last game of the last Hockey season. It’s more. It’s not the best photo of that night, or the most important photo of that night, even. But it has all the important people in it. I was homeschooled for a long time. I didn’t have many friends and I really cherished the friends I did have. My best friend and teammate- our hockey team has people pulled from Tripoli, an hour’s drive from here, because we didn’t have enough players. Some of the other players from Tripoli would go to Swanson. My best friend… changed from our team to Swanson, because she wanted to win more than she wanted to be my friend. I left homeschooling and went to a new school and everyone had already formed their friend groups since kindergarten. I spent a year so-”
The mask hid Avery’s expression.
Verona stepped from her position in the diagram to give Avery a one-armed hug. Lucy gave her another rub of the other shoulder.
Others watched. A woman with a hidden face. Children with bloody faces. Sneering, vulgar goblins. A man with an intense gaze.
Avery didn’t seem to care about them.
“-So alone. Until I felt like there were times I couldn’t breathe. It got worse when I realized there were big parts of myself that I couldn’t share with people, even though most would be okay with it. My family’s big and I got lost in the shuffle. I made a game of seeing how many days I could go where I only gave one-word answers or answered questions when called on by a teacher or coach. If I had to talk or had someone talk to me, I’d reset my streak. Even counting time with my family, I went twenty-three days one time before a girl in class complimented my shirt. Then I had a streak where I got to fifty-one before I stopped counting. I don’t know if it got to fifty-three or sixty. It started out like a joke, and ended up feeling like I couldn’t breathe. A teacher saved me. From that.”
Avery took a deep breath, around the choke that emotion had on her throat.
“That game, that night, we played against Swanson. The photo was taken after. My old best friend is in there. So is my family. So are Lucy and Verona. Photographs are still images and we tend to think of them as moments in time, but… that was the night I first saw Miss and got introduced to them. And I’m so glad. The deer thing? Deer are strong. Deer have antlers. They kick. I’ll kick you if you look down on me or try to do anything to them.”
“When I went looking, you were the one I found first, Avery.” Miss’s voice was quiet.
Miss stepped out onto the diagram. The diagram had become more complicated, with more lines like constellations, squares, and sub-circles orbiting bigger circles. There were three dimensions to it, and the circles that had held the items were now arches.
In the darkness where it was only Lucy and the other girls, the diagram, the items, and the Others just beyond the diagram’s perimeter, the light from below didn’t reach Miss’s face or extend to her hands.
The woman walked on the light, small bright circles forming stepping stones, lines serving as roads to cross the void. Through the arch-circle with the doll, which turned its head to watch her enter and walk past it. To an empty circle, where she placed down a dull orange stone. She had to walk a quarter-circle of the way around before she reached Verona, moving a hand to indicate a bowl.
Vegetable ash. The bowl was bright and the ash was dark.
Verona lifted it, and Miss reached in to take a pinch, raising it to her face.
She left the same way she’d come.
The rattling of metal drew Lucy’s attention. The knife had come free to the ground, and like a compass, pointed at John, who stepped into the knife’s arch. It tracked his feet, shuddering toward a middle-point when both were touching the circle, and pointed after him as he ventured further in.
He made a deposit of what might have been oil, black and contained in a small glass vessel. Then he walked around until he was near Lucy. He indicated the bread, torn up and arranged in the bowl. The rye crust was almost black, the bread itself luminescent.
She offered him the bowl. With that dark look conveyed even with his eyes nearly cast in shadow, he took a chunk of bread and put it into his mouth, chewing, before departing the circle much in the way he’d come. In by blade, out by blade.
The woman with the wings came in past the thread, which seemed larger and brighter. She placed a chunk of glass-like crystal before approaching Avery. Honey and honeycomb, which gleamed like gold. As Avery held the bowl, the woman lowered her mouth to the lip, sipping from the edge as Avery tilted it. She left by way of the coin. That was different.
The goblins came after, in through the knife-door. They took separate paths once they were there, the little one traveling almost a three-quarter circle around, hitting two dead ends before finally joining the others by Lucy. Their offerings were thrown down. Packets of spices and spices in plastic containers with labels peeled off.
Meat for all four of the goblins. The raised edges of the meat glistened like ruby in this special darkness. They scattered again. Toadswallow left by hourglass. The other three by skull.
The giant, tan and long-haired, with chiseled features partially hidden behind long hair, entered through the hourglass, almost stepping on Toadswallow. He approached Avery, who held up the bowl.
He reached out and laid a hand atop Avery’s head, crumpling her hat and disturbing her mask, which had turned white. With ginger care, he adjusted the bowl in her hand, rotating it ninety degrees before taking the bulk of the honeycomb from it with fingertip and thumb. He exited by way of the sewn thing.
The girl with the filthy hair moved like a spider did, her movements too quick and jerky, her body low to the ground. She navigated her way across by darkness, not the paths of the light. In through the thread, giving oil. Verona and Avery both reached for the bowl of molasses, blacker than night, and it was Avery who picked it up to offer it, tipping it into her mouth. The girl left the same way she’d come.
Edith and Matthew entered at the same time. Edith by skull, Matthew by the timepiece. Their paths didn’t see them cross or intersect, as he contributed holly, and she placed a reddish gemstone by the glasslike stone. He took wine that glistened like gemstone. She took vegetable ash. Edith exited by coin. Matthew exited by skull.
Leaving the creepy singing children, the milk…
The Children came in past the arch with the skull, filing in one after another. Fifty, a hundred. There was no singing, only silence.
They took meat from Lucy’s bowl until she was sure it would run out, but even with twenty chunks of jerky and pepperoni sticks in the bowl and perhaps fifty hands, there seemed to be enough that it only ran out as the last hand reached in.
They filed out by way of the coin.
When she looked down, all the bowls were empty. Even the milk.
“Close your eyes,” Miss said, from the shadows beyond the bounds of the diagram. The Others weren’t visible anymore.
There weren’t enough other sounds, sights, or things to go by, for Lucy to keep good track of time. Even her racing heartbeat wasn’t any help.
“Open your eyes,” Miss said.
When Lucy did, she was in the clearing again. Charles and the Others were there, in their arrangements, and she assumed friends stuck by friends. John with one of the goblins and the giant. The filthy-haired girl with the faerie with wings. Toadswallow with his proteges.
“Open your eyes again,” Miss said. “Don’t think too hard about it. Just do it.”
She did. Like the raising of an eyelid, she lifted up a veil that was entirely of her will.
The world was painted by watercolour, favouring dark blues and grays for the snow, dark greens and black for the trees. More startling was the red. Like bloodstains, the red was everywhere, sinking into snow, into trees, and even dirt, though it was hard to make out. As if to facilitate that bleeding or bloodstaining, blades, swords, and shafts of wood impaled everything. Ribbons, sashes, and tatters of cloth were tied to handles, blades, and shafts, and each blew intently in a different direction.
Even people had sashes, but it was hard to tell the origin points. When she got closer she found things got blurrier, harder to make out, as if it was the opposite of the way things worked in reality.
“I might have overdone it, doing the double knife thing,” she said. “I’m seeing knives everywhere.”
“I…” Verona said, with mirth in her voice, “am loving your hair.”
Lucy had to bring one hand to her afro-ponytail to push it to where she could see it. Pink?
She closed her eyes, much as she’d opened them. Her hair was normal. Light brown, glossy, with the highlights of blonde she thought of as the only thing she’d inherited from her dad, and total pain to take care of.
“What’s all this?” Avery asked. She took tentative steps like a horse that had just been born, hands out for balance. She waved her hand out to indicate the woods and the path back to the city. “It feels like the harder I focus my eyes, the less I can see details.”
Matthew spoke up, “The Sight is something you can train. With practice and specialization, you may learn to see connections that thread between people, to see things like dreams or the approach of Death, or more easily track the spirits and how they move.”
“Which segues nicely into my next question,” Miss said. She stood by a tree. “Where would you like to begin, young practitioners?”
Verona was moving this way and that, taking things in. Lucy had a gut feeling that Verona would get to grips with a lot of this with a surprising speed. Her friend was always so smart when it came to the things that didn’t matter, and all of this seemed like it took those things and made them matter.
Avery was still working on finding that grit. That speech, and what she’d talked about, it had shown more courage and strength than Lucy had managed to summon up in the last few years. But it would take a short bit. The first steps with Avery were always shaky and hesitant, then she ran, either toward or away. Hopefully all of this would serve to close the gap, make Avery more confident from those very first steps.
Lucy drew in a deep breath.
“We need the lay of the land,” Lucy said. “What happened, who’s close to it-”
“We have a witness,” Miss said. “A Louise Bayer.”
“After,” Lucy said. She was thinking of the cop dramas she’d seen, how they structured things. What else? “We won’t even know what questions to ask, yet. We need answers, first. Who was the victim, this Carmine Beast, what was the victim, possible whys. We’re going to talk to all of you, but not here. Not now. We’ll come to each of you or call you to come to us. We want to know how you work, what you do, how you relate to the victim. Hmmmm. What else?”
“You’re on top of this,” Avery said.
“I’ve been thinking about it since before the ritual,” Lucy said. She glanced at Verona, saw the look of interest in her best friend’s eyes, and remembered. She addressed the Others. “Be prepared to teach us or give us something, for our practice.”
“We should start from the basics,” Verona said.
“Who can teach us the basics?” Lucy asked. “Both for practice and how this world works? Matthew?”
“Edith can,” Matthew said. “And Charles?”
Edith, with the toque, nodded. She’d been so quiet, throughout. Interesting.
Charles, who looked like a homeless man, rose to his feet from the rock he’d been sitting on. He held one hand to his lower back, wincing.
“No need for the rest of you to stick around,” Lucy said.
“We don’t mean to be rude. Thank you for this,” Avery said.
It was nice to have Avery around, if it meant she didn’t have to try to be nice.
“If you need me, call for me three times,” Miss said.
“Will do,” Verona said.
Lucy watched as Others left, searching for those telltale human signs, like nervousness, wariness, in things that didn’t have much or any humanity.
“Charles,” Lucy said. “Can you write down the Others of Kennet? We’ll need a list to work off of.”
Lucy was already formulating a suspect list. She needed the names to go with the faces.
She wouldn’t be calling Miss, if she could help it. Not when Miss had just jumped to the top three on her mental list of suspects.