Pale: 9.9 - Verona

Shaking Hands – 9.9 | Pale
Dwelling on practice stuff helped Verona to distract herself.  She flew a lazy circuit around the area, her Sight on, the twine with the pen on it dangling from one talon.  It let her do five or six things at once and none of those things were the thing she was supposed to do.

First thing: it was a bird’s eye view of Kennet and it let her see how things were moving and changing with the Sight, where the spirits were agitated, and where the veil between reality and practice was getting thinner.

Second thing: it was a double-check confirmation about the movements of the compass points, a simple tool she’d made to gauge where the depression was, with the highest concentration of Carmine blood.  If the pen hadn’t worked, she’d been prepared to use Lucy’s knife, which they’d used to represent War in their awakening ritual.  If that hadn’t worked then she might have tried dog hair, fox hair, blood, or some mixture of those things.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t moving right now.

Third thing: it let her cool off a bit, and get some fresh air.  Petty, but wind that rushed through feathers was way better than a shirt that stuck to her back with sweat and shoes that had Warrens-mud in them.

Fourth thing, related to the third thing: With some altitude, it gave her some distance from Kennet, to see if she felt her mental or emotional state changing any.  This was a weakness.  Being caught by surprise by her own emotions was an embarrassing weakness, when it led to crying fits in front of tons of students and teachers who she might be working with in some capacity for the rest of her life.  When it led to her puking in front of Clementine.

Fifth thing: she was able to do a test run of her own glamour trick, because Lucy hadn’t broken down exactly how to do the multiple fox thing, and she wanted to try things.  Being a bird again let her test what happened if she wrapped herself in a bird form while holding a spell card with the Venus mark as a central component.  The Venus sign was the opposite of the ‘hit stuff’ Mars sign that Avery liked to put on her hockey stick, and it acted as a ‘get hit’ card.  From there, she had an arrangement of surrounding drawings of crows in sub-circles, smudges of glamour, and a starburst of radiating triangles and rotating lines.

She landed with more impact than necessary.  The crow glamour split, the spell card took off, and it grabbed at the glamour that she was shedding, drank it, and fed the burst.  Crows took off, cawing, from her point of landing, as if she’d startled them out of a bush.  They were a little feeble, lacking momentum, and most flew off to the one side, because it gave them the shortest path to disappearing from sight, so they could fade away from existence.

She’d have to work on that.

She jogged across her back lawn, up to the back door of her house, checking her phone.  No messages.  The other two were probably checking on their families right about now.

Her dad’s stuff was on the kitchen table, laptop running with the blog software for the newspaper he worked for on the screen.  She was tempted to do some mischief but she knew she couldn’t procrastinate.

She could hear her dad upstairs, and as she ascended, heading to her room, she hoped she wouldn’t run into him.

He was in the bathroom, door closed, light shining through the gap.  She closed the door to her room.  Success.

“Verona,” he called through the door.

She got her laptop and turned it on, scrolling through her phone to try and find the stuff for the Athenum Arrangement.  It hadn’t been set up, but how hard could it be?  She texted Zed about it.

“Verona!” her dad raised his voice.  His fist pounded on the wall three times.  She pretended she didn’t hear as she sorted things out.  Wards… she still had some limited notes on the wards they’d done for the barrier.  She wasn’t sure how that applied here, especially when it needed a lot of layers, and each function sort of supported the others.

It hadn’t been right away, but she’d wondered why Nicolette had needed to recruit the eye thief Other to steal eyes from echoes and why the Augurs couldn’t necessarily see inside.  Those functions hadn’t been covered by Charles, she’d thought that was odd, and she’d dismissed it as a bonus feature of the barrier, or of the connection turner.

Maybe it was tied into the anti-practitioner functionality the Others might end up pulling on them.  Was that how they’d ‘get rid’ of the three of them?  If there was any truth to that, when Toadswallow, Montague, and Tashlit didn’t seem to be on board with the ‘getting rid’?

It was weird, and she wished she could break that down more and get answers.

There were fifty things she wanted and needed to do, here.  Practices to tap into and explore, people to reach out to, spending time with Tashlit, building bonds with Pecker, protecting their families, investigating this Carmine Beast thing, helping John…

And the things she knew she had to do were the things that were hardest to get moving on.

It felt like the end of summer was a huge project deadline and the others wanted her to get a Demesne but the idea wasn’t coming together in her head or her heart.  She’d floated the idea of doing the familiar ritual instead, intentionally unbalancing how they operated, and Lucy hadn’t seemed keen.

Which was a recurring thing.

She trusted Lucy and upsetting Lucy was probably one of the very last things she ever wanted to happen, but it really, really frigging sucked when she felt like she’d grasped a possible solution or way out of a bind and then it didn’t fly.

Not being human, not doing the Demesne ritual.

The reply came in from Zed.

No shortcuts.  The application process isn’t easy or fast.  I can look something up on your behalf if you want.

She sent him a reply: I need to protect my family.  General wards?

“Verona!” her dad raised his voice, barging into her room, as she sent it.

“Knock!” she replied, going to the door and pushing on it, trying to push him out.  He was wedged in the doorway, and all she did was squish him slightly.  “What if I was naked?”

“I spent years wiping your rear end, Verona.  I’ll start knocking when you start acknowledging me.”

She pushed on the door again.

He continued, not seeming to care much.  “Can you pull something out of the freezer to start defrosting for dinner?  That’ll take an hour, and you could get started on painting in the basement in the meantime.  We can make a night of it.”

Instead of pushing on her door, she pulled on it, opening it wide enough that she could slide past her dad, running down the stairs.

“Some verbal acknowledgement would be nice!”

She made her way to the basement.  There was a side room with all the storage, deep freezer, and a partition separating it from the water heater and furnace, but her focus was on the main room, which was about seventy-five percent of the space.  One big room with a stained concrete floor covered in remnants of work done by past owners.  Paint splashes in a dark forest green that probably had lead in them, white smudges that might have been paint, or plaster, or something else, that had soaked into the smooth floor.  The interlocking floorboards were in flimsy paper wrappings, like really awful, out-of-season Christmas presents, printed with the company name and the floorboard type.

She’d already done a lot of the work with her dad looming over her to remove a wall that had been studs and bracing with nothing else.  Opening up this big room.  She’d also scraped up and sanded off the worst lumps of paint and things that would make the floorboards sit wrong.

The walls were drywall, and she’d done most of the work putting that in, using the little levers that went on the floor and had to be stood on with both feet to lift the drywall up off the ground.  Then she’d done the screws on the bottom half, carefully maneuvering from her perch on the little lever, so they wouldn’t fall back to the floor and tear where the screws were already in.  After that she’d smeared stuff into the gaps, so it was one smooth, off-white surface, more or less ready for paint.

Her phone buzzed with a message.  She looked, expecting Zed’s message about wards, but it was Jeremy.

A picture of Sir, standing up with paws on the upper edge of the box.

100 out of 10, imo, she texted him.

The reply came in: is that rating for me or Sir?

Sir, she replied.  As for you…

She thought for a second, without sending.

…You’ve stumbled on what I could call the Verona cheat code.  Cat pictures win you points and there’s no real limit to how many points you can earn.

His near-immediate reply was more cat pictures.  Sir eating, Sir sleeping.

She replied to them with emoji as they came rolling in.  Cute barfing, dying of cuteness, hearts…

She couldn’t get distracted!  She sent a quick message, Needed that.  Gotta go.  We should hang out again sometime soon.

That was another thing for her to-do list.  Not that she was going to do Jeremy.  That could wait a while.  But a repeat of the other night would be awfully nice.

She wanted to talk to the other two about that but she really didn’t want it to become a ‘poor Jeremy’ thing, either.  She forced that thought out of mind.

She could never do what Estrella allegedly did, and juggle this jumble of relationships, alliances, enemies, experiments, studies, investigations, and critical moves.  Verona was thinking about this stuff every waking hour, making plans to eat around it, sleep at Lucy’s house to coordinate better, and now they were turning their dreams into chances to meet the Others and hang out and that was cool, but it all contributed to the feeling that if she had to sit down and put pen to paper, listing it all and organizing it… she’d forget something critical, or let something slip.

Avery had thought Melissa was the thing they were letting slip.  Verona harbored the opinion that that was maybe not the absolute worst thing ever.

No, the worst thing would be if the failure was her own.  A feeling stuck with her, leaning on her like her dad in the doorway while she tried to close the door, that she was kind of floundering.  The end-of-summer deadline was approaching, and they needed something.  Having the furs wouldn’t be enough.  They needed each of them to do one of the big three rituals and they needed each of them to have a specialty and Verona didn’t have either of those things.

She was standing in the room, phone in one hand, paint can and paintbrush at her feet.

It was all such a big jumble of paralyzing fuck.

She put the phone aside, and then picked up the brush, surveying the room.  This was an art project, improvised, with its own degree of precision, spacing, balance.  Drawing a diagram was like setting down objects on a plate that was balanced on a pole.  Too much on one side and it would tip.  So she had to put things on opposing sides at the same time.

There were ways to do it where it was like balancing the compass-pens, where she’d found the midpoint resting the length of it on one finger.  This didn’t seem like it would be that.

If the idea behind this diagram was to slow down anyone coming after her dad or her house, with an alarm to signal her if something came up, then she needed a strong link between something here in this room and something she’d carry with her.  There’d be a connection-break that would dissolve as attention was paid to her dad, while also turning people away.  Something solid, and big.

She could visualize the elements and where she’d need them.

Wait, a big connection breaker could be a disaster.  If she took up an entire wall with one, and Lucy and Avery did normal sized ones, that would only deflect attention to the next available target.  Jas or Avery’s family.

She texted the others: show your work.

Avery’s picture came first.  It was dark, a dim and very orange lightbulb illuminating a space.  Was it the garage?  Verona saw insulation in the ‘floor’, and realized Avery was in the attic.

In these temperatures.  It had to be an oven in there.

Avery had spread out some plywood boards that were arranged to provide a surface to walk on, putting tape down to connect them into a large square, about two long paces by two long paces in width.  A spray can was in the corner of the shot.

Don’t die, Verona texted Avery.

Don’t fall through the ceiling, Lucy added.

Lucy’s picture followed.  It was her room; the various posters and pieces of album art she’d put up on the wall had been pulled down in one interconnected sheet, leaving a space.  A little smaller than Avery’s.

Verona set up her phone on the stepladder she’d used months ago to get up high enough to put in the upper drywall screws.  Set to video.  The screen adjusted, becoming two videos side by side, with one in Lucy’s room.  There wasn’t room for Avery’s, so a bar with an arrow appeared at the far right.  She touched that, because she didn’t care about seeing her own video.

She drew, using the large paintbrush first.  Basic structure with the connection break at the center, linked to the ‘alarm’ in the upper left.  Within the connection break, she arranged another, smaller connection breaker to make it so her dad wouldn’t come to the basement.

“Not necessary!” she raised her voice for the phone.  “Not for your attic, Avery!”

There was a distant, almost inaudible reply from Avery.  Verona could hear Snowdrop.  She glanced back and saw Snowdrop exiting the attic through the little window in the roof.

For balance, she had to add other elements, and she had to fill out the alarm.  Did she have bells upstairs?  One bell to carry, linked to this one, with the ‘pluto’ character in her diagram that would activate if the diagram was broken?

Seemed a bit obnoxious.  What else?  An old toy in her closet, maybe?

The phone vibrated, rattling violently on the metal step she’d balanced it on, and she rushed over.  She thrust a hand through the steps of the ladder to catch it as it fell.

“Nice one, Verona,” Lucy said, through the phone.  “Caught it?”

“Caught it,” Verona replied.

A message from Zed, about wards.

She hurried upstairs, and her dad was in the kitchen, giving her a look, annoyed, as he placed a big frost-crusted tupperware thing of mystery food in a bowl of warm water.

She got her bag.  Inside her notes were some of the details on the selective connection penetrating stuff from when she’d called her mom and dad while at the BHI.

Some of Zed’s stuff about phone calls was included.

Within the alarm section, she gave her own phone number.  In another branch, after a bit of consideration, she put ‘911’.

‘When broken, call me,’ basically, and ‘when broken, call 911’.  The call had to come from somewhere, so she found the little phone outlet at the base of the wall.  She’d had to cut a hole in the drywall and align it to make room for it.  She circled it, then connected that circle to the ‘911’ part, the other alarm, and made it an arch over the entire diagram.

She backed up to look at it in its totality, phone on the stepladder by her head.

“I’m not calling the police to my house,” Lucy said.

“That’s fair,” Verona answered.  “I just figured, flood of innocents showing up, sticking their nose into things?”

“I’ll call the neighbor, maybe.  She sorta gets along with mom and she’s a bit nosy.”

“If I pass out from heatstroke and spray paint fumes and Snowdrop can’t get me out of here, can you guys maybe come pick me up?” Avery asked.

“Don’t die!  You’re not allowed!” Verona said, raising her voice because she was stepping away from the phone, adjusting.

“I’m making arrangements so I won’t,” Avery said.  It looked like Snowdrop was bringing her things.  Water, and a bottle of what might have been whiteout or more paint.  “My house is too crowded, there’s no other place to put a big diagram.  Ugh, it has to be at least forty degrees in here.”

“Draw,” Lucy said.  “Let’s get this over with.”

“Wards,” Verona said, starting forward.  She had the stuff from Zed, and she could make some sense of it from what they’d done with Charles when rebuilding part of the perimeter.  Except instead of a bundle of carefully arranged sticks, it was strokes of orange-red paint.

“We should give Zed a big present as thanks for this,” Avery said.

“We really should,” Lucy added.

More stuff for the pile of fuck.  Right.  Instead of letting it pile up, Verona quickly sent a text to Brie, asking what Zed liked.

Ward stuff went on the other walls, Big brush strokes for the major lines, then the small edging paintbrush for the writing and smaller stuff.  She placed the camera in the upper windowsill to show the others, then did finer touches.

This would burn out, though, and parts of the diagram would remain, like wild and messy slashes of paint and shapes on the wall.  Her dad would be mad.

They were waiting for the goblins to report to Matthew or Toadswallow, who would then get in touch with them.  Until then, they had to scramble to set this up, and figure out their game plan for going after the possible Carmine Furs.

This, at least, was a project that could cut through the paralyzing ‘pile of fuck’, a way to help the other two, which meant they could get their own stuff done, think of the things she was missing.

It felt good.  The diagram felt good.  The feeling motivated her to take it a step further.

“Going to set up some cover for all this, Lucy, when you’re done, do you want to check on Avery and I’ll catch up?” Verona asked.

Lucy’s response was unintelligible.  Verona checked her phone and Lucy was still drawing on the wall in fat marker.

When Lucy stepped back to check, Verona repeated the question.

“Yeah, okay.  What’s the cover?”

“Paintsplosion, hopefully,” Verona said.

The ‘Sagittarius’ sign was one that was all about direction and directing.  It didn’t have to have notation, but she gave it anyway, designating targets.

She set up her own runes in the corners of each wall and spaced out along the walls, with distribution lines radiating out, then she set up simpler shapes on the floor and windows with tape, and then rigged the paint buckets.  Target the wall runes, block targeting to the floor and window runes…

Timer.  If she wasn’t home by morning she needed this setup to go off.  Her dad would come to get clothes from the drying racks.  That would test the connection blocker keeping him upstairs.

Explosion runes laid on the cans themselves, connected carefully to the timer.

It was a bit of a gesture, for her dad.  For better or for worse the painting would get done, or at least there would be enough paint on the walls to mask the diagram stuff.

Or enough damage done, maybe.

In which case she’d fix it.  Sand down the lumpy paint maybe, or something.

“Are you guys there?”

“Putting my posters up,” Lucy said.

“Suffering,” Avery commented.

“Can we say a few words?” Verona asked.

The others had to wrap up what they were doing.  Verona waited, fidgeting.  She had a response from Brie, saying that Zed was really hard to get gifts for.  That he seemed to care more about a card she’d given him with a dumb drawing inside it than about the gift of retro sunglasses it had come with.

“Brie responded, I’m thinking maybe a thank-you card for Zed,” Verona suggested.  “Nicolette too?”

“Okay,” Lucy said.  “I’ve got a line down the wall to the phone but that’s the only thing that’s visible.”

“I need to shower to cool off,” Avery said.

“We’ll come to you.  What words are we saying?”

“I’ll lead,” Verona said.

She stepped to the center of the room, then stood on the explosive paint cans, phone held at arm’s length, the diagram included in the video feed.  “Spirits, this is a big one.  Hear my words, take of the power the Kennet Others promised to us, and feed this, fit this to our intent.  Keep us alerted, and keep our families safe.”

“This keeps the peace and supports you guys, spirits,” Lucy said.  “It helps us carry out our duties.  Protecting those we’ve pledged to protect, investigating that which we’ve pledged to investigate.  Our goals are Kennet’s goals, the judge’s goals.”

“You okay?” Verona whispered into the phone.

“Drawing a bit of a blank, but you’re both right, this is… this is the way it’s meant to be, isn’t it?  We’re supposed to do this, we’re owed this power.”

“And… attic, middle of the house, basement, top to bottom, we need this.  Amen.”

“Amen?” Verona asked.

“I’m so hot I can’t think straight.  I’m going to go shower and consider dying of embarrassment.”

The three-way video call ended.

Verona packed up her stuff, got sorted, sent Brie a brief ‘ty!’ and slung her bag over one shoulder.  She still had paint on her fingers and arms, sticking to the little hairs of her forearm and making them clump, but she liked that aesthetic.  Her good clothes were okay.

Rinsed her hands and arms, wiped down with paper towel, ran wet fingers through hair, pushing it back a bit, tucking it behind her ears, and then changed shirts again, because the laundry room was a few steps away and fresh laundry was in the machine.

She felt good about this, she was being a decent-ish human, doing good practice.  All she needed was to keep this momentum going.

If they could tackle this Carmine furs thing as well as she felt she’d tackled this diagram, they’d be way ahead of the game.  She jogged up the stairs, opened her bag, and got her water bottle, filling it at the sink with her bag at her feet.  Her mind went over everything she might need, and if there was anything in her room.  She was pretty sure she was okay.  She’d stocked up to get Tashlit’s stuff on their way to Matthew and Edith’s.

“There is no way you taped things off and put in a solid amount of effort down there in the time you spent.”

“Check it in the morning, maybe.”

“A response.  My daughter actually acting like a human being, treating me like a human being.  Stop the presses.”

She took a drink from her bottle, then topped it off with colder water.

“And back to ignoring me?” he asked.

She shook her head.  “It almost never feels like I can say anything that’ll make you happy so I’m not saying much, that’s all.  I’m just trying to live and let live.”

“You’re living off of me, Verona.  I’m paying for the electricity, I’m paying for the water you’re drinking, I’m paying for this house, I’m in debt for this house, as a matter of fact, because it’s important to me that you have a nice home.  Those clothes on your back?  With paint on your shorts and drawings scribbled on your shoes?”

She turned, bending to get her bag, and her dad’s hand at her shoulder stopped her.  He scooped up her backpack.

“Part of that money comes from me, you know.  Your mom gets too much credit when she can be bothered to send money, then you get excited to buy clothes.  But I’m paying for those clothes, Verona.  Take that money she’s sending, put it toward your additions to the bills, and imagine the money coming out of my pocket for your clothes.  For your art stuff.  For your computer.  Does that help you to understand my frustration here?  Because it feels like you go out of your way to avoid giving me any thanks or credit for this stuff.”

“Why would you even need your bag?  You’re not going out tonight, Verona.”

“Yes I am,” she told him, setting her jaw.

“I told you to defrost dinner and you ignored me.  You’re staying for dinner and you’re staying in tonight.  We’re going to have family time.”

She reached for her bag and he pulled it out of the way.

“I have stuff to do.”

“Why do I somehow never rate, Verona?  Why do I never get five minutes of your time?  Tell me.”

“I was just downstairs, painting.”

“Five minutes of your actual time.  To talk, to be a family.  Give me a hug once in a while.  Say ‘I love you, dad’.  Unless you don’t, or you don’t think I deserve those things, when I work as hard as I do.”

“Your second job is editing a blog using free blog software.”

“It takes a few hours a week, and the only reason you get as much money as you do is because the clients are old newspaper owners who don’t understand technology!  You bragged about that to Mr. Sitton on parent teacher night!”

“I come home so tired I don’t have the energy to do anything else and then I put the extra hours into that so you can have your clothes and art supplies.  I give my all and then some for your sake, for this house, for you.  But when I need something?  A few minutes out of your day for the lawn, or painting?  You do a half-assed job and then run off to Lucy’s or Avery’s.  When I’m sick, in and out of the hospital, nothing.  I’m still not all the way back to ‘better’ and nothing from you.  You’re a selfish, spoiled little brat who screams like a toddler when she can’t get her way.  You’re thirteen, Verona.  It’s time to start growing the fuck up.”

“Why would I want to grow up when there’s an iota of a chance I might grow up to become you?” she asked, reaching for her bag.  It felt like her dad was twice her height, when he wasn’t.  It was just that his stomach jutted out and added to the distance she had to reach to grab a dangling strap.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” he said, voice hard.  “You’d have to care in a meaningful way about another human being to become me, Verona.  Like I care about you.  But you don’t.  So instead, you’re well on your way to becoming your mother.  Except, wait, no, she actually puts effort into one thing in her life.  You’re your mother if she stopped trying!”

“How would you know what I succeed or fail at!?” she asked her dad.  “What do you even know about me?  Do you know what I do?  What’s happened to me in the past few months?  Why I was so scared for Avery that night, when I asked you for help in the storage room?  Do you know what shows I watch?  The art I create?”

“It’s really telling that when I ask you to make an effort you think of fun drawings and television, instead of anything that matters.”

“My friends matter!  What we’re doing matters, but you don’t have a clue!”

“Because you don’t tell me anything!”

“And I have no intention of telling you anything because I have tried, dad!  I’ve tried for years!” Verona shouted.  She blinked hard. “Ever since the divorce I’ve tried and nearly every time you’ll turn it back on me.  If I say I have it hard you say you have it worse without ever listening!  So I’ve given up trying!  Do you know how many times I almost died this summer!?  Or worse!?”

Shouldn’t have said that.

Shouldn’t have said that.

Shouldn’t have dropped that line.  Frig.

“I’m dying, working my way into an early grave trying to give you this life.  And I’ve told you that, time and time again, and I don’t know how to convey to you the gravity of that.  I’m so frustrated.”

It was like he was broken.

He went on, “I dig so deep, I hurt, mind, heart, and body, because of what I do for you.  To give you this, to give you Christmases, birthdays.  To make up for the fact your mom isn’t here for you.  And all I want-”

“You want me to do the same?” she cut him off.  “Do so much for you it hurts me?”

“I’d settle for more than a token effort.  Or any effort at all, at this point.”

“But no, I don’t- no,” she said, shaking her head.  “Because I have, and you didn’t seem to care.  It never changed anything.  I can clean the whole house and you act like it’s not enough.  Is that why?  Because to count, it has to be so much it’s bad for me?  Like you claim you’re doing for me?”

“It’d be nice if you tried it once or twice, to get a view of things through my eyes.  Maybe then I could be a brat to you, scream in your face?  We could see how you like that,” he told her.

“Get a life,” she told him.

She could see how that remark stung him, but his voice was level.  “I can’t.  I’m too busy trying to give you one.”

“No,” she told him, shaking her head.  Her back was pressed against the counter, hands gripping the edge, elbows at shoulder height.  “Because Jasmine works harder than you, and she still finds it in herself to be a complete person.”

“Jasmine paints a pretty picture for you while you’re over there but I know Booker had issues with getting drunk and being brought home by the police, and Lucy’s a problem child in her own way.  Attacking her stepfather?  She’s a failure of a mother, Verona.”

“Don’t talk about them like that.  You don’t have any real idea what you’re talking about.”

“Speaking of failed mothers-”

“Shut up about her!” Verona screamed.  “Stop comparing me to her!”

“Stop emulating her!  Gallivanting around with boys, like how she cheated on me, taking everything I give for granted!”

He screamed, closing the distance on her, and with nowhere to go, his face angry and distorted as it closed in on hers, Verona dropped to the floor, back to the dishwasher, occupying the triangle of space between his feat and the upper body that leaned against the counter, head looking down at her.

“Not fun, is it?” her dad asked, straightening, face still flushed.  “Stop screaming or I’m going to scream back.  Grow up.”

“You have no idea what it means to grow up, or to try.  You coast, Verona.  You’re clever and you have talents and you lean on that, you lie, you dodge, you think you’ve figured out the systems to get the easiest, laziest ride, whether it’s school or chores here at home.  Dodging consequences.  And that works until it doesn’t.”

She tried to squeeze out from beneath him, and he put a foot in the way of her hip.  He went on,  “Stop dodging and listen.  Take it from me.  I used to be fit, I used to be smart, I had a pretty, ambitious wife and then I hit the wall.  Taking care of you, so she could further her education, so she could get set up in her work, put in the extra hours, sacrificing my own life, my own ambitions, my own health, waiting for my turn.  And what did she do?  Slept around, went to her friends, gave less and less and then she left me with a house I couldn’t afford and a broken heart.”

“Get over it,” Verona said.  “I’m tired of hearing about it.”

“You need to stop daydreaming and face reality, Verona,” he said, leaning over her.  “This path you’re on?  You’re going to reach a point in your education where you aren’t clever enough, and you’ll scramble to catch up, and it won’t be enough.  It’ll happen to your friendships, because childhood friendships rarely last.  I don’t know what you’ve got going on with that boy you brought over.”

“Do you want a play-by-play?” Verona asked.

“No.  I hope you’re using protection, that’s all.  He’ll move on, too, you know, because you’re taking the same course as your mom and I, all the worst traits of us both, and I’m alone, and one of the few glimmers of real joy I have is that your mother is truly alone, too.”

“Gee, why did she leave you?” Verona retorted.

“She left you too, Verona.  And I held you when you cried and you held me when I cried.  But you forget that.  You complain I don’t give you credit for chores but I at least look you in the eye and say hello to you in the morning.  She’s a mother when she feels like it.  Does she even get back to you on all your phone calls?  She buys you presents you never use because she doesn’t know you.”

“You love that, don’t you?” Verona asked.

“She doesn’t want to know you.  She doesn’t want you,” he said.

“Don’t become her.  Meet me halfway, even when you don’t always brim with love for me.  That’s where it starts.”

“I hate you more often than I feel any love for you,” she told him.

He straightened, moving away from the counter, his face red, eyes wet, lips pressed together.

“I think you broke me,” she told him, as she rose to her feet.  “Dumping so much of your whiny emotional garbage on me that I can’t feel things right anymore.  You can’t make an eleven, twelve, thirteen year old your therapist or whatever without messing them up.”

“Maybe I’m a bad dad, but you’re a worse daughter.”

“Get therapy.  Get a life.  I can’t be the one person you care about, because you’re really bad at it.  You’re breaking me more than you’re helping anything.”

“You’d need a bit of actual humanity to be a person in my life.  I’m cutting off your phone service, another thing I give you.  It’s not like you call me or check on me when I’m sick.”

She clenched her jaw, thinking of the diagram downstairs.  She hoped he postponed that.

“If you want your bag back, you’ll need to make things up to me.  Start by putting dinner in the microwave to cook.  Then we’re going to watch a movie and bond-“

He said that last word with a kind of venom, face red and distorted with hurt.

“-We’ll work on the rest of it later.  I have a headache,” he told her.

Screw him.  Screw him and him having any right to be more hurt than she was.

She hurried over to the dining room, and she picked up his laptop, holding it over her head.  She met his eyes.  “Trade you.”

They stood there, her dad at the far end of the kitchen, holding her backpack, her with the laptop, both breathing hard from the argument.

She wanted a rescue.  She wanted an Other to storm in and distract her.  She wanted Avery and Lucy to have realized she was late and to circle back.

“You have two options,” he told her.  “Put that down, put the food in the microwave, and pick a movie we can both watch-”

She wondered if he’d even thought through the second option.  A road that wasn’t what he wanted.  He seemed frozen.

He held up her bag and she thought he’d drop it.  She started forward-

He didn’t drop it.  He swung it, hard, into the counter’s edge.  She ran forward, laptop under one arm, and he turned, swinging again, his back to her, his body blocking hers.

The bag hit the counter, hit it again.  She scratched, clawed, pushed-

He kept going.  She tried to squeeze past, to get a grip on the thing, and she couldn’t.

He threw it across the room.

“I don’t care anymore,” he told her.

She stood there, stunned, mind numb, as he strode from the room and went to the stairs that led up to his room.

“I have insurance,” he told her.  “If you want to scream, I’ll scream back.  If you want to break stuff, I’ll break your stuff.  I can replace my things.”

She dropped the laptop into the sink, where it splashed in the water.  Then she went to her bag, checking the contents.

Glass had broken.  Her glass pens.  A bottle of ink.  Something pricked her, and blood welled out around the black ink that stained her fingertips and nails.  Books in there were ruined.  Notes, clippings from the Blue Heron.

Spell cards.  So many spell cards.

She pulled out the word-changing quill, broken in half.  The big red button was okay.

Wood rustled.  She gently retrieved it.

The cat mask gave as she pulled it from the confines of the bag, broken into three pieces, with the third piece clattering to the floor.

Lucy had made that for her.  She’d touched it up a bit, but it was… it was an important gift.  A symbol of where she belonged.

She lifted it to her face, trying to position it where it would be if she wore it normally.  It fell in its three pieces to the floor.

She took a deep breath, wanting to scream and not being quite ready to.  Wanting to cry, to sob her frustration, to do something, and…

There were more important things.

She used the last of the glamour she had.  She pulled the mask to her face, and them glamoured into the associated cat form.  She pulled the bag and its broken contents to her chest, and wrapped that up to, in a body much smaller than she was.

A body that had different emotions.

Her emotions were still there.  Like she was one gasping breath from tearfully breaking down, or losing it, or screaming.  But they were distant, set apart.  Waiting.

Out the open back door, with its billowing curtain.  Into the heat of the late afternoon, up onto the patio chair, then the railing of the small back porch, then the fence around the property.  She leaped down and then she ran.

Stop, minding traffic, then across the road.

Grass was better on her paws than pavement was.

The hurt and frustration was a lump in a throat that wasn’t hers, a lump gargantuan in proportion, bigger than she was.

Leaping was a pleasure.  Twitches of grass in the wind were a distraction.

Avery was on the bridge, heading her way.  She ran into the railing, then leaped into Avery’s arms.

“Heyy!  No wonder you’re taking a while.  Why not become a bird?” Avery asked.

Snowdrop extended her nose down from Avery’s shoulder, toward Verona’s face.

Verona buried her face in between Avery’s elbow and her body.  Her tail hung straight down.  The smells of Avery and soap and Snowdrop filled her nose.

She wanted only this, but they had responsibilities.  If they could get some important stuff done, then she could devote the resources to handling this later.

She pulled away, because she had to, leaping over to the railing, and almost going right over the edge.  Which would have been a heck of a thing.

But she landed, and then she ran, in the direction she assumed Lucy was.

Things weren’t okay.  All of this was hard enough, without everything at home.

She couldn’t respond so she didn’t.

“This way,” Avery said.  “Lucy!”

“Lucy, I’m not sure Verona’s okay.”

“I don’t know, but I know she can talk in animal form if she tries and she’s not trying.”

“Are we sure this is Verona?” Lucy asked.  “It’d be funny if we picked up a random cat…”

“It’s Verona,” Avery said.

Lucy’s smile fell from her face.  Verona looked away, tail hanging straight down from the fence she was poised on.  The sun’s heat pressed on her fur, which was relaxing in its way, but nothing else was.

She could smell blood in the air.

That lump of emotion was like a boulder, poised to roll over her.  There was no time for that.

“Maybe it’s a glamour issue?  If we gave her glamour she might be able to talk,” Avery suggested.

“Want glamour?” Lucy asked.

Verona wondered where they had to go.  She looked around.

“She didn’t budge.  The Verona I know would jump at the chance.”

Verona looked back at them, then, impatient, wanting to do something productive so she could leave the destructive behind her, she leaped at Lucy, who startled.  Her teeth found Lucy’s collar, tugged, then she jumped away, to the ground, back legs punching at Lucy to propel herself in the right direction.

“You want to go?” Avery asked.

Verona turned, looking in the general direction of southeast.

“Then let’s go,” Lucy said.  “But I want you to explain things after.  Please.  This is spooky.”

Avery ran, and Lucy followed.

“The goblins got their coordinates.  They’re calling in help.  Ghouls and Tashlit have to wait until after dark, so a lot of our more human Others are going to see what they can find and if they can cut the enemy off,” Lucy said.

“We said we’d search the general perimeter some more.  We didn’t exactly say what we were searching for,” Avery said.

“Let’s spread out a bit, get different readings.  See if we’re trending the right way,” Lucy said.  “Do you have your thing, Ronnie?”

Verona ran ahead, leaped up onto a bench at the corner of the intersection, looked back, and shook her head.

“Hey there, Ronnie.  A reaction,” Lucy said, smiling with her mouth and looking worried with her eyes.

Verona shrank back inside herself.  Too close.

They pressed on.  Away from the conflict.  Away from Kennet, from home.

Into woods.  The Bowdler ski hills loomed north, and the trees went from being something cultivated and cut back to denser foliage, littered with branches.

She was nimble enough to zig-zag her way through.  It took all of her focus, and that was good.

They paused, Lucy pulling out her compass and letting it dangle, taking twenty or so seconds to find its direction.  Avery continued ahead.  Lucy pulled out her phone, calling Avery, comparing notes after Avery got settled.

Then they changed direction.  A bit more north.  Avery continued east.

The compasses took longer to find a point to settle on as they went, until they were unable to settle at all.  They continued a bit further, and the compasses stopped working entirely.

Their destination became clear.  A wooden building in woodland, at the edge of the treeline, southeast of the Bowdler hills.  Above it were more cabins, set on the mountain.  A little more east and around the back of the mountain than the ones where they’d had the party.

They stopped, observing from a distance.  Someone was inside.

Avery caught up, and together with Lucy, used the compass.

The pens tilted slightly downward.

A cellar?  A basement to a winter cabin?

“I’m worried about you, Verona,” Lucy whispered, longer fingernails combing through Verona’s fur.  She crouched low, peering through the greenery, Avery beside her.

The phone buzzed.  Lucy checked it, and Verona leaped onto Lucy’s back, lying there with her chin on Lucy’s shoulder, looking down.

“Melissa’s been sighted,” Lucy told Avery.  Verona could read it, even with her eyes being weird.  “Talking to the families of the people the Choir took.  They’re wanting us to make a move.”

“It’s here, isn’t it?  This isn’t the monster we were tracking before?  That came from the highway, then had the three impostors clean up after it?”

“I don’t think so,” Lucy said.  Lucy’s eyes switched over to Sight.

She could see it.  The sheer amount of crimson, soaking through the gauze-wrapped building with a speed that suggested it was being pushed out, up until it reached the pillars that supported the porch.  There, runes were absorbing the ‘juice’ of it.  She could see the silhouette inside the building, crossing, stepping out to the porch that faced the mountain.

“Can you hear the person inside?”

“They’re talking but I think the building is protected against listening in.”

“Because of you?” Avery asked.

Verona rustled past Snowdrop, nudging her, then bounded through the woods, dry leaves and things sticking to her body.  Snowdrop followed, not quite as silent as she was.

The cellar had no windows, but a short set of steps beneath the lip of the porch led to a doorway.

To her Sight, that door looked ominous.  There was something leaning against it, crimson, indistinct, and yet somehow heavy.  Snowdrop glanced at Verona, then joined her in checking the base of the building.  A raised cabin, porch and cabin extension supported by pillars that were basically stripped logs, and then interlocking logs for the bit that was sunken into the ground, keeping dirt from flowing into the hole beneath.

The pillars had carvings set into the wood.  That was what was controlling the signal.  It didn’t stop the depression from existing, but it kept augury out, apparently, like Lucy’s earring, and it made the compasses stop working.  The power of the furs leaked out, soaked into the runes, and powered them.  Their effect spread out into the area around the cabin, even hundreds of feet away, for some purposes.

As two small animals, a housecat and an opossum, they circled the porch.  There was a spot where mice had stored collected lint and nesting material, wedging it into the gap between board and plank.  She could smell them, and it was the kind of smell that rolled up between her eyes and over the top of her brain, around the sides of her head.

She pawed at it, then Snowdrop climbed up and used finer fingers to remove the stuff.

There was a gap, but it was a narrow one.

Verona checked the other points where the porch and under-cabin met the cellar walls, and the gaps got progressively wider as they got closer to the back.  Then, at the very back, where the gaps were large enough a mouse might be able to crawl in, a mixture of foam and steel wool had been placed in there.  Some of the other gaps had gotten one or the other.

Snowdrop’s paws and Verona’s claws worked at it, pulling it away in strings of abrasive wire and chunky, tacky foam.

Bitter hurt welled in her absent human body as pain lingered in her paw, wire sawing at her claw and the soft tissue of her paw.

They pulled the largest chunk free, and then Verona tried her hand at slipping through, face and body working throguh the hole only barely big enough for a human fist to squeeze through.  She groped for and found the top of a shelf, put her front paws there, and eased her rear body through, pawing her way forward as she drew the length of her body with her into the basement.

Snowdrop’s nose and body followed.  A good thing that Snowdrop was a bit undersized, a bit of a runt.  She was catching up to Avery in age, but still inches shorter, appearing younger.

Verona’s eyes adjusted and her Sight pulled on the limited illumination that came in through the cracks.  The floor was sawdust, and workbenches and storage boxes were arranged around the edges, with various tools and things.  Maybe this was a place for ski hill employees to camp out, stowing the equipment used to fix the lifts.  Except it looked old.  From older lifts?  When Bowdler had only had the rope lifts you sat on to get dragged uphill?

She could see shapes suggestive of that.

Second most importantly, there was the rough cube shape, silken furs blowing slightly in the faint air currents, catching Verona’s eye.  It sat on the main table in the center, or maybe on two tables pulled together.  Some of the ropes that had lashed it into that cube shape had been undone, and material was stretched out over the edge, bleeding faint rivulets of crimson gore into the sawdust.  Materials from what looked like leatherworking or tailoring were scattered around it.  Whoever it was, here, they were making an outfit.

That was only second most important.

The most important thing was that there were traps.  Practice, maybe.  Papers that caught her eye in the Sight that she had trouble seeing otherwise in the gloom, possible glamour, and goblin things that trembled like the Nettlewisp had trembled, a skewer waiting for its target.

Stuff was buried in the sawdust, she saw, and the back of the door was trapped.

She ventured as close as she dared to one of the papers on the shelving unit, and lay down, chest and belly flat on the surface, while her head leaned over, trying to interpret the rough runework.

Maybe not practice.  Something Other.  This wasn’t like what she’d made in her basement.  It was less free, more like something an Other could do that it was doing over and over again, in small amounts.

The smell of the furs stirred her emotions.  Anger and frustration.  She buried it, and for once, she felt like the practice she had at that was a help.  Her adolescent cat nostrils flared.

Snowdrop nuzzled her, and she turned to look.

Above them were the braces for the upstairs floorboards to rest on.  Part of that was the pipes that extended to the bathroom or the kitchen, running just beneath the floor.  There were electrical wires too, with more foam around them, to cement them in place, maybe.

Verona nodded, then crawled forward, providing a step for Snowdrop to put a paw onto, and a thing for Snowdrop to press against for leverage.

The opossum got a grip on the narrow pipe, no bigger around than a quarter, and then hung upside-down, gripping it with both forelegs and both feet.  Her tail swished this way and that as she moved her back legs.

The pipe wasn’t firmly affixed to what was above.  With her weight pulling on it, it dropped an inch.  It clanged against brackets.

Snowdrop moved, paw reaching up, at the same time Verona ducked behind a box on the shelf top.

Thirty or forty seconds passed.  Verona was ready to start moving again, and to encourage Snowdrop to do the same, but her ear twitched as she heard footsteps.

Verona remained behind the box, Snowdrop atop the pipe now, the floor joists on either side of her, floorboards above her, and the rune carved on the back of the door uncoiled, individual pieces sliding apart.

The door opened, and Edith’s eyes burned as she looked through the interior, searching, phone to her ear.

“I don’t see anything.  Listen, they’re suspicious, and my absence will be noticed.  I have to make an appearance, at least later on, when they do.  I’m stuck here as long as you have the truck.”

She paused, eyes searching.  She picked her way carefully across the floor.

“I’m not walking, and I’m not leaving the furs unattended.  Make an appearance if you want, to deflect their attention, then come and give me backup.  I’ll be more useful in the later stages of tonight, anyway.”

She picked up a draping length of fur and pressed it back into the part of the cube that had been pulled apart for the material that had formed the clothing on the bench’s edge.

“With what?” Edith asked.  “She’s not a fan of them, it seems, so she could be pushed in their direction.  Sure.  Just make sure she doesn’t come after you, too.  I still want to take part.  We- yes.  Yes, soon.  Distracting those three kids is good, but what isn’t good is letting the invaders get the best of us and us getting slowed down.  We’re behind, with everything occupying our time.”

She ran fingers through the fur, touched some papers, feeding power into them, then reversed direction.  She checked the mark on the back of the door, then said, “Make sure you aren’t followed.”

She closed the door.  The rune there reassembled into the focused detonation rune, carvings in the door moving like worms to find their new places, notched into wood.

Snowdrop stuck her head out, nostrils going a mile a minute.  Verona moved out of cover.

Snowdrop investigated.  Verona circled the room’s perimeter, using the tops of furniture, the top of the doorframe, and jutting wood.  As she got too close to one spot or the other, the newly refreshed runes began to glow, pulling in energy, ready to go off.

Verona took in the scene, the arrangement of traps, and it was chaotic, dense and violent.  One wrong step could detonate something or trigger a goblin trap, make her fall or stagger in the direction of another trap… or trigger glamour, to do something she couldn’t decipher.  The flowers were a light purple, the vines like filigree.

With Sight, she scanned the table, searching, studying.

The runes on papers looked primed to trigger if she got within one or two feet of them.  There were goblin traps across the floor, sitting on shelves, and rigged to the light switch that Edith had completely ignored.  Glamour spotted the walls and hooked into crevices.

Verona jerked her head, and Snowdrop clambered back to Verona.  The pipe banged again.

Edith didn’t make another appearance.

Verona extended a claw from her foot, and began pointing out the traps she’d spotted, the papers, the tricks.

Snowdrop sneezed and pointed out more that Verona hadn’t had the angle to see.

Verona indicated the table.  Snowdrop pointed out one she’d just noted.  A bit of glamour in the sawdust with a filigree vine that extended up the table leg.  It didn’t seem like a primary purpose.  More like a hint.

Verona nudged Snowdrop, headbutting her repeatedly, driving her to one side, and Snowdrop mock-bit her.  She escaped the bite and kept pushing, until Snowdrop was pressed up against the wall where the gap was.

In case this goes wrong and I need rescue, be ready to go.

Verona turned, and she leaped.  A single bound, from the top of a shelving unit filled with tools to the table in the center of the room.

Furs swallowed her up, redolent with the smell of blood and a smell that approximated Verona’s moments of peak excitement.

She shook her head and climbed up to the top of the pile of fur.  Snowdrop stared at her.

Then Verona became human.  Half standing, half-sitting on the table, in the dead center of the room.  Her head hung, face bent toward the ground, hands holding her mask intact, so it didn’t crumble to pieces and set off something below the table.  Her damp hair tickled the backs of her hands, which were slick with ink and bleeding from fine lacerations from glass.

With the ink-soaked finger, she reached down to draw a rune on the table at her foot.  The furs reacted.

Probably why the table wasn’t trapped, itself.

A rune arrangement for silence.  She drew another on the ceiling, hand holding the mask where it was.

She had her bag with her, and she used that too.  When the ink on her fingers started to dry, she considered using the welling blood, and she decided against that.  She motioned to Snowdrop, one hand reaching overhead to stop the pipe from banging.

Snowdrop reached her, then watched as Verona drew more runes.  She pointed, and Snowdrop made the careful climb to take the papers to the edges of the room.  To fix them to nail-ends that jutted from floorboards, and stick them into slits in the wooden logs.

It was only when she stopped drawing and stopped having things that needed her hands that she devoted the two hands necessary to removing the broken mask and putting it in her bag.  Wood knocked against wood and made no sound.

The room grew quiet.  Even the steps overhead stopped entirely.  It deafened them to Edith’s movements, and they’d be blindsided if Edith did anything, but at the same time, Edith was deaf to them and what they did.

Snowdrop’s back and forth movements along wiring and pipe stopped making any noise.

The emotion sat heavy in Verona’s throat.  She didn’t make any facial expressions, didn’t speak.  Her bag was filled of destroyed things.

With hand movements, she indicated for Snowdrop to go.  Snowdrop didn’t go.

Impatient, knowing she had to figure out an escape route soon, emotion swelling and then choking back down, Verona carefully reached out, between two rune papers, each movement a half-inch too far one way or the other, causing the black ink to start turning red, then orange-white, until she adjusted… she grabbed a hammer.

Then, roaring without any sound coming out, she reached up, pulled on the pipe, and hit it full-strength with the hammer.

It bent, then broke on the next hit.  Water gushed, and she used her thumb to make the gush into a spray.

A spray that hit papers and soaked them.  A spray that wet glamour and washed it away.  Running water that took the edge out of goblin traps.  She hit the pipe to make it bend more easily, another silent kind of violence, and soaked other areas of the room.

Water streamed down her arm and body, across her head, stained black by ink, as she kept a thumb in that sharp-edged hole to make the water spray out far enough to reach where she needed it to reach.

Snowdrop went to get the others, and Verona crouched there, one hand on the pipe, the other with nails digging into furs, while virtually all of the security around her disintegrated.