False Moves – 12.6

Avery

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Dreams were supposed to be the brain sorting out the things it hadn’t processed in the day, so Avery made a point of not getting too caught up in what Charles was saying, examining the cramped little house.  Her fingers trailed the wall, toes of her running shoes tapping things set against the wall, fingers touching the little things like jars and books on shelves.  The words were gibberish.

“Why?” Verona asked Charles.

“That requires a long explanation-”

“Don’t dodge,” Lucy cut him off.  “Don’t drag this out in hopes you can escape or-”

“I’m surrendering.  People like me don’t get to escape.  We endure at best.  Now, will you take a seat?”

Avery turned.  Her eyebrows went up a bit as she noted the three chairs that hadn’t been at the table earlier.  The table was square, but the chairs were clustered at the one end, the chair on the left and the chair on the right situated so they rested against the table legs at an angle.

Wary of Charles, unsure if it was him or their collective unconscious that had changed this space, Avery didn’t sit.  Verona did, though, plunking herself down to Charles’ left.

“Why’d you do it?” Lucy asked, standing behind her chair with hands resting on the chair-back.

“Before I get to that, I do want to say I’m afraid I can’t be hospitable.  I don’t have any food or drink.”

“Stop dodging!” Lucy raised her voice, alarming Charles.  His arm jerked, and dragged against the glass embedded in the table’s edge.  He winced and gripped at the wound with one hand.  “Stop delaying, stop playing games-”

“I’m not playing games!” Charles raised his voice back, standing, wincing again as he put more weight on his feet with the glass all around him.  “Fact is, I don’t want to talk about it!”

“You’re going to have to!” Lucy shouted.

“I know that, girl!  But-”

“And I’ve told you, call me by my name!  Lucy Ellingson!”

“Nothing is meant by this.  It’s how I talk!”

“Say.  My.  Name.”

Charles took his hand away from his scratched arm to clench a fist, and the blood that had collected on the hand squeezed out from between his fingers in beads of blood.  “Lucy.  I’m sorry.”

She nodded, but she didn’t relax.

Avery walked over to the window, and it was not only grimy, but it looked like oil from the nonexistent kitchen in this tiny shack-like space had gathered on the window in beads and dribbles, that had then collected dust.  It made the space darker than it should have been, and made the view outside blurry.

She glanced back as Charles resumed talking.  Almost growling the words, he said, “I know I have to talk about it.  It eats me alive.”

“That sounds fair to me,” Lucy said.

“Hey Charles, Charles,” Verona said, leaning forward.  She grimaced at how dirty the table was.  “Charles?”

“What?” Charles asked, testy.

“Why’d you do it?”

“That depends on what it is,” Charles said.  Then, seeing Lucy getting ready to raise her voice again, he raised a bloody hand, to indicate for her to pause, or to acknowledge her.  “Let me gather my thoughts.”

Avery fished in her pocket for a spell card and used it to scrape the window of grease and grit, mostly streaking it.  As soon as it was clear enough, houseflies began to collect on both the inside and outside of the window, keeping the view obscured.

Charles didn’t take long to gather his thoughts.  His fist was unclenched, blood at his fingers, blood running down the side of his forearm to drip onto the glass beneath him, clothes rumpled and darkened, like they’d been through the wash with the darks too many times, he didn’t meet their eyes, instead fixing his gaze on the table that was grody with moist dust.  The normal grit to his voice was even worse as the words came reluctantly.  “It wasn’t my goal to make the Hungry Choir what it was.  I was newly forsworn, I was bitter, angry, and desperate.  I had no more ability to practice, and what I did have was slipping steadily through my fingers.  Water damage to books, things getting lost, some were taken by Alexander Belanger.  I gave some to the local Others for safekeeping.”

“What things?” Verona asked.

“Partially completed projects, tools for welding spirit to substance, extracted pieces of Others, reserves of power, like a kernel of elemental power from the original Girl by Candlelight, before she was refined.  Every week, I had a little bit less than the week before.  When you’re forsworn, there is no ideal time to act, understand?  Acting right away, I was rash, I hadn’t had time to think things through, but if I waited, I wouldn’t have the tools.  Freshly forsworn, I didn’t understand the ins and outs.  I never intended to hurt innocents.”

“Who did you want to hurt?” Lucy asked.

“I want to make it clear, I didn’t want to hurt those innocents.  Would you give me that?  It’s important,” Charles told them.  His eyes went to Lucy’s and he looked away, like her gaze was too hard.  He looked to Verona, and stared there for a second, looking for a response, and there was nothing.  No change in her solemn expression or large eyes.

He looked at Avery.

“Why is it important?” Avery asked, meeting his gaze.

“I was a bastard once.  That was back when I kept more company with Alexander, Larry, Ray, and Marie.  I was even more of a bastard when I was younger, I thought I could change direction, focus on other things.  I didn’t realize until too late that I was empowering the wrong people.  I retreated from everything, but in the end I still opened my door and my home to Alexander.  More than an oath about glass, I think that’s what I’m being punished for.”

“I don’t get it,” Verona told him.

“That’s important why?” Avery repeated.

“Because…” he paused, shaking his head, trying to find words.  “…The universe doesn’t want to give me what I want.  I think that’s why it became what it was.  I wanted retribution that was more or less free of collateral damage.”

“What were you trying to do?” Verona asked.

“I wanted to use another aspect of Yalda.  As a Black Dog… Sick Dog, Famine Dog, whatever you want to call her, she hurts people who hurt people.  They’d appear on battlefields, to represent the unjustly killed innocents.  She’d represent the anger, sorrow, and ugliness that they carried in their last moments, casualties of someone else’s war.  And when someone hurt them, or spoke words of hate at them, or even looked at them with prejudice-”

He paused, looking at Lucy.  As Avery glanced over, Lucy was narrowing her eyes.

“-Anyone doing harm in some fashion would invite the curses that Yalda and those Black Dogs like her would carry.  I wanted that piece of her, at the center of the ritual incarnate I was trying to build.”

“Not very fair to Yalda,” Lucy said.  “John was pretty upset about Edith’s involvement in Yalda.”

“I know,” Charles replied.  “I was desperate, I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Avery opened a cabinet, musing on what he’d said.  It made some sense.

There were bottles and broken table legs in the space beneath, covered in cobwebs.

Have to remember, he can lie.

“Who would the ritual have targeted, if not innocents?” Avery asked him.

Charles paused, then looked at the three of them in turn.  “Practitioners.  Alexander’s type of practitioner.”

“How?” Verona asked.

“Ritual incarnates can be prizes for practitioners.  I know the types they look for.  I know that Alexander is- was greedy, opportunistic, with high aspirations and a willingness to harm others.  I would have made it something that had promise only to practitioners, a riddle with an element of the technological and a lot of power drawn from an elemental lantern.  Drawing on the right themes, suggesting the divine, lay the breadcrumb trail, and paint a tempting picture.  I thought maybe not of a blue heron God, exactly- has he told you this story?  Have you heard of it?”

“He, Ray, Durocher, and other practitioners broke into some kind of server building that an Other took over?” Verona asked.

“Yes.  I was one of those others.  I custom designed and altered the Others that they used to open the way and fight past the dangers.  I thought it would be nice to create a suggestion of something else, similar to the Blue Heron God, possibly of the same origin.  A red bird instead, with a ritual incarnate surrounding it instead of server infrastructure.  Alexander envied Larry Bristow his collection.  What about the possibility of collecting nascent gods?”

“Nascent?” Avery asked.

“Fledgling.  New.”

“Oh.”

“I thought it was clever.  The riddle would be something Alexander would pride himself at being able to Augur his way past, the power would be irresistible to him.  The technological element would draw in Raymond.  The scale of it could lure in Marie Durocher.”

“It didn’t work out,” Lucy observed.

“Riddle became rhyme, rhyme became verse.  Yalda fought me and won some scant willpower, then twisted out of my grip.  Edith had some claim, she used it in the moment-”

“Edith was there?”

“Edith was there.  She helped make the Choir.  I mentioned the lantern of elemental power, I had her bring that and several other things to me.  I’d pulled that out of her, it was Abyss-touched and it was affecting her, making her meaner.  It was a lot of power and I wanted the cruelty from it as one piece in the ritual incarnate I was making.  I did the work on the Yalda side, Edith worked with that, and when it all started becoming something else, she grounded it in Kennet and Kennet’s power base.”

“So are we supposed to hear that and think you’re innocent?” Verona asked, leaning over the table.

“I’m not fucking innocent,” Charles replied.  “I should have known better.  At the outset, later on.”

“You didn’t tell anyone what the Choir was?” Lucy asked.

“I am a doomed man.  I intended to create something that hinted at a false god to target the kinds of practitioners who hurt others.  That would have been the trap, the test at the end of it.  Would they be willing to sacrifice themselves for the many?  And what did I get?  A mockery of what I wanted, with innocents in the way, its existence a taunt to me, its only real uses ones of selfishness for me, confronting me with my worst self.  Do you know what happens if I try to stop it?  If I try to be the hero?  It’s not pretty.”

“That sounds like a whole heap of excuses,” Lucy said.

“Yeah.”  One word from Charles had five different kinds of emotion in it, none of them especially pretty, with a bit of anger, a bit of bitterness, and other things.  It came out sounding almost triumphant.  “I know they’re excuses.  I dwell on them every single day.”

“The Choir had people hurting and despairing out every single day,” Lucy said.

“You think I don’t know!?” Charles replied, slamming a hand down on the table.  “But let me ask you, if I only get to ask one question of you three this entire interview, can I do that?  Will you give me your answer?”

That intensity was still there.  He breathed hard, and the hand he pulled off of the table had a triangle of glass embedded into the palm.

“Depends on the question,” Verona said.

“It’s more of a test question, seeing how well you understand what you’re dealing with,” Charles replied, pulling the glass out of his palm.  It broke, and fingers tremble-curled around the wound as he stopped pulling at the glass.  He let the hand drop.  He was calmer now.

“You can ask,” Lucy said.

“Whodunnit?” Charles asked.

“The Carmine murder?” Lucy asked back.

“The Hungry Choir,” Charles replied, calmer still, glaring a bit.

“Is this a trick question?  Because you admitted-”

“No,” Charles said, “I made it.  I have my responsibility, but Edith and I weren’t the only ones there, trying to pull the disparate pieces together into a convoluted force.  There was someone else present, who I’ve already mentioned.”

Not Yalda, not John…

“The universe?” Avery asked.  “The- the Carmine.”

“The Carmine,” Charles replied, dipping his head in one small nod.

“We saw it with the Sable and the Alabaster.  They have their own interpretations for the different… systems.  How they enforce rules, how they act, how they interpret.”

“They stand in for the collective unconscious.  For the ambient spirits, for the seats unclaimed.  If there are no spirit lords in the area, they’ll be the spirit lord where spirits need leadership.  If there is no Lord of a township, they’ll arbitrate the highest disputes.  When those forces and others are away, they arrange defense against the forces where not defending isn’t an option.”

“And they manage karma, decide forswearing cases,” Lucy said.

“Yes.”

“The Carmine was the one who twisted your ritual incarnate into the Choir?” Avery asked.

“She gave things the push they needed to go astray, and let the pieces fall in a way that would hurt me most.  Damn all the rest of them, am I right?  Damn the men, damn the women, damn the children, damn the communities, friends, and family.  Damn those sorry individuals who felt they had no choice but to do some ritual they read about on a newsletter or online!”

A fleck of spit flew from his lips as he raised his voice.  “Let them eat each other alive, let them die violently at the hands of animals, let them get pulled from the meat of their bodies to join the Choir!  At least she fucking got me!  How’s that?  Set that into motion and then she let it be and there we fucking go, she got to rub my face in my failure again, as if I wasn’t already fucking aware of it all, and Alexander got another chance to act the hero and grow his status, and I get the victims on my conscience!”

They didn’t have an immediate response for him.  Lucy went from leaning over her chair to turning away, arms folded.  Verona looked down at the table.

Avery glanced at them, saw Charles breathing hard, a bit of spit still there where scraggly beard drooped over the corner of his mouth, and looked away.  She glanced out the window, but there was nothing to see out there.  She opened a dresser drawer with the toe of her running shoe, lifting and pulling the edge, then backed away a step.  Rodents teemed within, using clothing they’d chewed up and torn up as nesting material.

“So you killed her?”  Verona’s voice was quiet.

Charles shook his head, looking aside.

“Charles?” Lucy asked, turning around to face him.

“I had the idea to, but any involvement more than the idea could have gone that same way, twisting against me.”

“You had the idea, others carried it out?”

“Others led the way, managed, forced me to play along in the small things, see it through.”

“Edith, Maricica, Bluntmunch?” Avery asked.

“Bluntmunch?” Charles asked.

“Is that wrong?” Avery asked him.

“It doesn’t surprise me.  I don’t know for sure.  I know goblins have helped here or there… it would be late involvement.  If our burliest goblin is involved, then you can count on them to be organized.  As organized as goblins get.”

“Let’s go back to what happened,” Lucy said.

“If you want,” Charles said.

“You had the idea.  They carried it out.  How did they carry it out?”

“Edith had some claim, still, they could collect some things from John to establish more, influencing the Choir through Yalda, and we’d established precedent early, tying the Choir to Kennet and Kennet’s perimeter.  It wasn’t a long line to draw between a hostile force powering the fence and the hostile force targeting someone who breached the fence.  We were able to make a bid, an ask, the Choir followed through.”

“And Maricica?”  Lucy asked.

“A trick.  Maricica avoided direct involvement, but did hamper the Carmine Beast in ways that helped her fall into the Choir’s clutches.”

“It was blindness, according to Maricica,” Lucy noted.  “She said it was temporary but weeks or months can be temporary, still.”

“Something like that.  I don’t know many particulars.  Faerie, as you might have noticed, don’t like to give straight answers.”

“Humans can be tough on that front too,” Verona murmured, slumping forward over the table.  “And here we are, hmm?”

“It took nearly a decade for the Choir to gain the power necessary.  I wanted it to happen sooner, but I don’t get what I want.  I hoped the Carmine would destroy the Choir and hurt enough she regretted her place in it, or be weakened and replaced, or that the Carmine would go and someone else would step up to take the spot.  Someone who wouldn’t let Hungry Choirs come about to make a point.”

“Do you know why she didn’t fight back?” Avery asked.

“I don’t have a clue.”

“Do you know why she went to the Arena?” Avery asked.  “The sports area.”

“I know what the Arena is.  No.”

“Or who the furs are meant for?”

“I think Maricica had ideas.  I wasn’t privy to them.  My job was to seed misinformation and mislead you.  For what it’s worth, I didn’t want to.  I didn’t want you to be so young.  I was braced for them to bring in an outsider, or for Miss to pick someone they would easily get rid of, with conscience clear.  She surprised me.”

“Then do-” Lucy started.

“Small,” Charles interrupted.

“What?”

“I overheard.  Edith was doing the tailoring.  Maricica told her not to make it too large.  I’ve wondered if they intended to put John in the crosshairs so one of you would take the seat yourselves.”

“Us?” Verona asked, sitting up.  “Any one of us?”

“It would be one of you, specifically, with Maricica playing a Fae game to push you that direction.  I have to admit, I hoped that you’d know and point to one of you three when I said it.”

“Then why would they want the furs back?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know.”

Verona stood from her seat.  She indicated Lucy and Avery, and beckoned for them to come.

Avery glanced at Charles, then headed for the door.  Verona shut it behind her.

“One of us?” Avery asked.

“Carmine Doe?” Verona asked, indicating Avery.  She pointed at Lucy.  “Carmine Fox?”

“Carmine Cat?” Lucy asked Verona.  “Don’t tell me the thought didn’t cross your mind.”

“It did cross my mind, and was swiftly dismissed.  That sounds like hell to me,” Verona noted.  “Stuck with a job to do and responsibilities?  Until someone decides you’re not fit for the job and murders you, maybe replaces you?”

“I could see you enjoying making Others,” Avery said.  “And being tapped into practice?”

“Maybe,” Verona said.  “But you remember when Nibble and Chloe were talking about how their relationship would go bad eventually?  Made me think… I’m not sure I want forever if it’s forever without you guys.”

“Aw,” Lucy said.

Avery gave her heart a light punch, but… ugh.

I’m sorry, she thought.

“It might not be true,” Verona noted.  “If I wanted to distract from the truth, I’d do what he did and turn things around so the other guy is all, ‘Is it me?  Is it you?  What is truth?’ and stuff.”

“He’s seemed very upfront,” Avery replied.

“Good for him, but maybe he’s a really good liar.  He already got us once.”

“We have to remember that because he’s forsworn, there’s this ambient bias, right?” Lucy asked.  “We ran into that almost right after meeting Charles.  It’s come up a few times since.  The universe makes him really easy to dislike and hard to believe when he’s being upfront.”

“We don’t want to be biased,” Avery agreed.

“Do what feels right,” Verona said.

“The point is that it all feels wrong when it comes to Charles,” Lucy replied.

“Okay, fine.  Yeah, but you know what I mean, righ?  Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”

“Why are we out here?” Lucy asked.

Avery looked around.  They stood on a bit of grass and broken ground in the middle of void.  One tiny house and nothing else.  Bugs clustered on the window.

“Alright, hm, okay, keeping all possibilities in mind,” Verona replied, “how does this map out?  If they want to force us or trick us into taking the furs, theoretically, assuming it’s truth… big assumption, right?”

“Right,” Avery replied.

“From what I can pull together, they have the furs, they start making clothes out of them, then we get them, right?  And we know they were frantic and worried… did that stop when they figured out we were the ones that had them?”

“Same end result?” Lucy asked.

“Something to think about,” Verona replied.

“Crap,” Lucy replied.  “I hate this.  Because I don’t think we’re there, or close to there, and the only way they’d get us there is… bad.”

“Massive bribe?” Verona asked.

“What about threatening everything we care about?” Lucy asked.

“Could it be someone else?” Avery asked.

“Definitely,” Verona replied.

Avery thought through all the people they knew, or the people they knew that Charles knew.

Nobody jumped to mind as a good fit.  Anyone that might would’ve already been considered.  They’d been thinking about this Carmine murder thing for months, really.

Avery sighed, and looked out in the direction of the void.

The darkness out there was the kind of dark that got mottled and distorted the more she stared into it.  As she stared, she could make out shapes from her nightmare.

“Want to continue?  I think these nightmares get more fragile the more we drag them out,” Avery asked.  “Until we get a jolt and fall back awake.”

“Yeah,” Lucy said.  “There’s other stuff we can discuss in daylight.”

Avery reached the door first, and she pushed it open.

There was a rat that had crawled out of the drawer, digging incisors the length of Avery’s pinky finger into Charles’ leg.  Charles looked down, grimacing, but resisted moving until Avery approached at a swift stride and the rat pulled away, tearing a chunk of Charles’ shin off.  Charles’ leg moved involuntarily, the soles of his feet raking across the glass embedded in the floor.  He hissed through his teeth.

“Are you okay?” Avery asked.

“Does it matter?  I’ve told you how many people I hurt.  To keep to the plan to destroy the Carmine, I kept quiet, didn’t I?  I could have told people how the Choir worked.  I’ve made excuses, they may even be good excuses, but I could have told people,” Charles told them.

Avery looked around the dismal room, which was starting to smell like mold, blood, and mouse poop.  Charles bled from multiple places.  It was dark, and everything was a bit dirty and gross, in a way that suggested that cleaning wouldn’t be as easy as a wipe.  It wasn’t just dusty, but it was dusty and moist, so the dust streaked.  The windows were oily and dusty at the same time, and her attempt to clean it had only invited flights toward the increased source of light.

Blood soaked Charles’ sock and shoe, and pooled beneath him, not as a growing circle or oval, but something that spread maze-like through the uneven glass that peppered the floor beneath him.

He looked groggy, like the blood loss was getting to him.

This wouldn’t do.

“Do you want to go for a walk?” Avery asked.  “I think we can get out of here.”

“Please,” Charles said.  “I’ve seen this room too many times, too many variations, in nightmares I can’t wake up from.”

“This way, then,” Avery said.  “Can you get outside?”

He made the effort of standing, and the glass on the chair back had made marks from below his shoulderblades to the small of his back, scratching in deep lines or sinking in like small knives.  The same was true for buttocks and the backs of his thighs.

He took a step toward her, and glass slid out of the plain, uneven floorboards to meet his feet as he put his weight down.  His knee bent too much, he nearly fell, and there was glass waiting for him if he didn’t.  As he fought to get his balance and get properly upright, his foot slid on slick blood, a handful’s worth of glass cutting him from the front of his foot to the heel.

Avery reached out.  His bloody hand nearly slipped on hers as he took hold with a bony hand.  The grip was hard and fierce enough to be cruel, the blood sticky and cold.  Long arm hairs tickled her hand and made her skin crawl, from arms to shoulder, down her back, all the way down her legs.

When he walked with her support, there was no more glass.

Lucy was frowning more than usual as she held the door for them.

“Where are we going?” Verona asked.

“Anywhere but here,” Avery said.  “I can see my nightmare.”

“My nightmare wasn’t a great sit-and-talk sort of nightmare,” Lucy said.

“Ave?” Verona asked.

“It’d be a walk through the woods,” Avery replied.  “Let’s do yours first, if yours works?”

Verona nodded.  She looked out into the void.  “How?”

“Just… expect it to be there,” Avery told her.  “It’s out there in the gloom, like the shapes that appear against your eyelids when they’re closed.”

Verona stepped out toward the edge.

The shadows intensified in areas, leaving other areas brighter.

The more progress that was made in the nightmare coming to be, the more there was to work with.  A corridor became a school hallway, and then there were people.

Verona hopped across.  Clothes, skin, and hair ripped away, flying in their faces.  Avery shielded her face with her arms.

Verona stood ten feet down the hallway.  Three or four years younger, short, with shaggy, wavy black hair down to the small of her back.  Her hair was thick, so it was never quite straight, and it tended to be a bit messy in all but the best of times, and that made the long mane of hair have an insane amount of body.  Her eyes seemed even larger than usual on a smaller face.  She wore black overalls with paint on them in a way that seemed intentional and strategic, and a purple tee.

Lucy’s hand touched Avery’s.  Avery looked over, then held Lucy’s hand.

They made the leap from the edge to the hallway.  Avery felt an outer layer of skin and hair pull away, and she thought of the glimpse she’d seen as overeager members of the Hungry Choir had torn into Collins, the guy with tattoos.  Revealing a smaller body within, beneath the meat.

Lucy, beside her, still held her hand.  Lucy wasn’t wearing her usual ponytail, and had mostly natural hair glistening behind a headband that pushed the hair back and away from her face.  Mostly natural because it glistened with something that might have been helping to reduce frizz.  Young Lucy wore jeans with rips at the knees and a t-shirt with a breast pocket, with a graphic of a bird poking its head up and out.  It was a look that felt a bit like Verona might wear it today.  Just… it would be a cat in the pocket, and darker colors.

Lucy flashed a smile at Avery, revealing missing front teeth, and the smile was interrupted as Verona tackled Lucy with a hug.

Avery glanced back.

Charles had crossed.  He was blond, hair buzzed super short except for a frill at the front, and had a smudge on his cheek.  He wore a white tee with a tear in it near the beltline, a very thin jacket with a zipper, almost like an overshirt, and jeans that were rolled up twice at the bottom and cinched at the waist with a belt, like they didn’t fit him yet.  His eyebrows were thin and expressive, his eyes sharp.  He immediately jammed his hands into pockets, glancing at her.  He’d been reduced down to the same age.  There were no more cuts, no more blood.  He looked more alert.  He looked okay.  Like he wasn’t forsworn anymore.

Someone bumped Avery from behind, and she twisted around to look.  Olivia, young, running down the hallway with some other kids.  The rest of the Swanson team.

It left her with a bit of a pit in her stomach.  She wrinkled her nose and she was made aware that there was a band-aid there, over the bridge of her nose.  Bright green, at a glance, contrasting with the hair she wore in a ponytail, that had been redder when she was younger, now a reddish-blonde.  She wore an oversized sleeveless jersey, the breeze reaching through the armholes and around her lower ribs and stomach, a hand-me-down from Rowan, actually, that would go to pieces before she grew up enough to wear it, and jeans she remembered owning.  She’d complained about getting Sheridan’s hand-me downs, these were a pair she’d picked out herself, no hearts, no flowers, no dump-in-my-diaper look where Sheridan’s butt had stretched out the rear-end region and hips.  Just straight-up jeans that she’d drawn leaves on at one point, doing one leaf a week near the heels until she messed up her pen drawing on denim and stopped bothering.

“We should still talk about what needs to be talked about,” Avery said.

“Okay,” young Charles said.

“Raymond is coming.  He wants to meet.”

“I know.  That’s fine.  I guess you’ll decide what to do with me, now that I’ve confessed.”

Avery’s dad came down the hallway, reaching for a young Declan, who was running away from him, laughing in a way that the Declan of today never did.  Her dad’s angle, bending down and to the side to reach for Declan, made it feel like he was going to crash into Avery, like he didn’t see her.  She sidestepped and bumped into Verona, who responded by hugging her.

“With everything going on, I would understand if you’d want to put me front and center,” Charles said.  “If you ask, I can draw their focus.”

“Their focus?” Lucy asked, eyebrows knitting together, not in a frown, but a look where the middle point was raised high instead.

“I want to go shopping!” a ten year old Sheridan complained, as she led her mother away.  Their mom carried a whiny infant Kerry, looking harried.  “This is a drag.”

“We’ll go shopping after, or tomorrow, if Kerry needs to go down for a nap.”

“You said today!”

Avery’s mom, younger, bent down in passing and kissed the top of Avery’s head, interrupting Kerry’s whining as she dipped her and then straightened.  “Thank you for being good.”

Avery nodded, turning a bit as her mom carried on walking down the hall, carrying Kerry, Sheridan trotting beside her.

“I’m being good too!” Sheridan complained.  “Aren’t I?  Isn’t it fair that if you promise something you stick to that?  I know you’ve told me that.  I don’t think it’s wrong to stand up for myself!”

“I have told you that but I also told you that when there’s a child as young as Kerry in the picture that sometimes we have to compromise.”

“I didn’t ask for another little sister,” Sheridan complained.  She glanced back at Avery and gave her a look, like Avery’s mere existence was akin to Sheridan just having stepped in dog doo.

“Why is it just my family and peers?” Avery asked, turning.

“It’s not,” Verona said.  “My parents are here.”

“I saw my mom for a second,” Lucy said.

“Oh,” Avery replied.  She glanced at Charles.

“I didn’t have the support of family.  My father worked, my mother didn’t get out of bed.”

“Depression?” Verona asked.

“It was a long time ago, and I think there were many versions of the story even back then.  Depression, she had chronic fatigue, alcoholism or drugs, all of the above, or none of the above.  They divorced,” Charles said.  “My dad went to prison for not paying child support, I stayed with my mother.  He was in prison for six months, got out, got his second chance, never even tried to find work, went back in for nonpayment.  My mother would go weeks or months, mostly catatonic, then get out of bed just long enough to get my hopes up, back to bed she went.  Most of my parenting was in the form of advice from my dad when I went to visit him in prison.  Then, fourth or fifth time he got out, he decided it was easier to disappear.  He said goodbye, said he was sorry, left me to take far, far too long to realize he wasn’t coming back.”

“I’m sorry,” Lucy replied.

“They didn’t teach you practice?” Verona asked.

“No.  I got to my mid-teens, my mother never changed, I got fed up paying for her and me, I left too.  Met some kids who would find isolated houses where the families were going away, break in, and throw big parties with a small entry fee, trash everything, three hundred people who’d steal everything that wasn’t bolted down.  One of the houses had books on practice.  I took as many as I could load into the car.  They stopped throwing the big break-in parties after we had too many burglar alarms in a row, used the money they had to start selling drugs instead.  We amicably parted ways.  Then I started summoning Others to help them out for a cut of profits.  I’d tell them I knew someone scary that’d deal with any problems they had.  That ended badly.”

“Spooky,” Avery said.  She winced as Olivia came tearing down the hallway, bumping shoulders with her, not even looking.

The boy-version of Charles continued, “Me summoning Others opened the door for a revenant to rise up to get revenge against them, I think.  It hurt their innocence, left them vulnerable.  It was a wake up call for me.  I started trying to do better, be better.  I thought I’d associate with better people.  I keep- every time I stop paying attention and start relaxing and getting into the flow of things, I end up looking back and realizing I’ve been associating with terrible people.”

“Are you still trying to do better and be better?” Lucy asked.

“I’m-” Charles started.  He shook his head.  “I don’t think I can be better.  That opportunity is gone now.  Third strike.  The dealers, the Blue Heron group, and then inviting Alexander into my place.”

“That-” Avery started.

She was shoved, hard, wrists skidding on floor instead of stopping her fall.  Her chin cracked against the gritty tile.

“Leave her the frig alone!” Lucy shouted.

“Sorry sorry sorry!  I love you, Avery, we’ll hang out another time, okay!?” Olivia called out, still jogging down the hallway with friends.

A bad feeling was welling up, as if this was building up to something.  Avery accepted help in standing, and realized that one person was Charles, the other a young Pam.

Her mouth opened, and she wanted to say something to Pam, but Pam was already flashing her a smile, totally unfiltered, dashing words and sense from Avery’s brain.  Then Pam was gone, turning away.

“Was there a bigger plan with the Carmine Beast?” Lucy asked.

Charles absently dusted off Avery’s arm with one hand.  “Some.  I hoped to get unforsworn, if it came down to it.  I know one boy at the school got forsworn.”

“Seth,” Verona replied.

“Alexander has probably forsworn many more that we don’t know about.  It’s a power thing.  He’s gainsaid others as a matter of habit, I know.”

“Definitely, except past tense, because he’s dead,” Verona told Charles.

“Right.  That’s hard to picture.  He always seemed like someone who would always get by, always thrive by being slimy.  I started thinking that the deaths were unavoidable.  My fault, yes, also the Carmine’s.  But if something could come of it, it would be nice to undo the forswearing of others.  It shouldn’t be a punishment.  Edith started out helping me because I’d asked, and because I’d helped her without asking much in return, for a long time.  Later, it took on other reasons.  A catch-all solution for her problems.”

“And Maricica?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t know.  She inserted herself into things and gave it cohesion and direction beyond simply pointing the Choir at the beast and waiting.”

Avery saw Ms. Hardy in a classroom.  Ms. Hardy glanced at her, and without even smiling, turned to a young Ian, Noah, and their parents, and shut the door.  With Avery at the far right of the hallway, the door was pretty much shut in her face.

“What about painting the town red?” Avery asked.  She turned, then turned around and started walking backwards, to keep an eye on Olivia, to avoid getting bumped.

Behind Charles, she saw Lucy frown, shaking her head.

But it was too late.  She’d already dropped that clue.

“Painting-?” Charles asked.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you?  It’s the plan, isn’t it?”

“I…” Charles trailed off, then shook his head.  “I’m wondering who would have said something so cryptic.  Cig?”

“Overheard, really,” Verona said.

Olivia was out of sight.  Avery turned, looking, and saw Olivia and her friends careening down the hallway, past parents, teachers, and younger-versions of kids at school, almost like pinballs.  They banged into lockers with empty metal bangs, and bumped into people or one another before pushing themselves off at wild trajectories.

This was like a game.  A playing field.  She anticipated their movements-

And a movement at the corner of her eye made her flinch.  Rowan.

Rowan and her parents.

Her mom held up one finger, indicating for her to wait, then shut the door nearly in her face, like Ms. Hardy had.

“Don’t wake up,” Verona said.

“Don’t say that!” Avery told her.

Olivia came at Avery, harder and faster than a person should be able to move, and it was Lucy who intercepted, crashing into her, shoving her into a locker, to the wincing ‘ooohs’ of the people around them.

Olivia bounced back up and she wasn’t Olivia anymore.  It was a boy, kind of good looking except for a sharp nose, and he came back fighting, tackling Lucy to the ground, and punching her across the face.

“Frig off!” Lucy shouted.  “Why me!?”

He hit her across the face again, then again, and the milling crowd efficiently blocked Avery from reaching her friend.

“It’s a nightmare, Lucy!” Avery shouted, but the crowd’s voices rose in eerie sync to drown her out, volume-wise.  Verona was in a similar boat.

Lucy was trying to fend off the kid, to defend herself and push him away, and he was- he was trying to hurt.  He had a grip on a lock of her hair and another on the vest pocket of her shirt and he pulled on both hard, alternating, each tug eliciting tearing sounds.  The breast pocket tore first, showing the bird with the little pink butt instead of a bird tail, and hair tore too, coming away in a clump.  She shoved him away, he climbed on top of her, and in scrabbling for position he found purchase on the ripped knee of her jeans, and used it, kicking down.  What had been a modest rip ripped to the seams on either side of the knee, and pulled her pants partway down one of her hips.  She tried to tug them back up into position and he used the opportunity to grab her head with both hands, shoving it into the floor.

“Leave her alone, Logan!” Verona screeched.

“Are you doing this?” Avery asked Charles.

“No,” Charles and Verona replied at the same time.

“No, this is the nightmare,” Verona said.  “Just… expanded to all of us and our individual flavors.”

Lucy shoved Logan away with arms and legs both, and he hit a locker, with a resounding bang.

And everything went eerily quiet.

“What is your daughter doing to my son!?” the voice cut through the quiet.

“Mom,” Lucy called out, climbing to her feet.   Avery tried to squeeze through the crowd and it was a step of progress for every three steps Lucy took, moving away from her.

“Look at him, look at the mark on his forehead!”

More people joined in, all raising their voices at Lucy’s mom, or tut-tutting, or pointing fingers.

“Don’t blame my mom!  Leave my mom alone!” Lucy shouted.

“It’s a nightmare, Lucy!” Avery called out.  “We need to leave, find somewhere else to talk!”

“Don’t wake up!” Verona called out.

Lucy was still trying to protect her mom and get to her mom and she couldn’t.

Avery glanced back, and behind Charles, there were others.  Kids, many older, all with a… a dark aura, she supposed.  It wasn’t actually darker, but something about them made her skin crawl.

Charles backed away from them, but the rule seemed to be that the kids appeared behind him, and by turning to face them, there were more kids stepping out of doorways behind Charles.  All with that feeling.  Avery couldn’t put names to faces, there wasn’t a clear teenage Alexander in the mix, but she knew that they were the bad influences, the people he’d fallen into problematic friendships with.

Lucy banged into a locker as she tried to push her way through to her mom and got rebuffed.  Lucy turned her head to track Logan, who was back on his feet, nose bloody, cut on his forehead bleeding, glaring at her, pacing like he was trying to circle around to her side or behind her.

Lucy’s fingers reached up to a bald patch at her temple, where hair had been pulled out.

“Go away, I need to protect my mom!”

Lucy’s mom shrieked, and Lucy’s face became the picture of alarm, her head turning.

The scenery behind her shimmered, trembling like it was about to give way.

Before she could do anything, including waking up, Verona screamed.

The kind of scream only a kid could make, high pitched, long, and loud.

Interrupting everything about the scene.

Until her parents came in.  A bit younger, Verona’s dad a fair bit slimmer, bending down to grunt as he picked Verona up.  He was large and strong and Verona was small for her age.

There was a momentum to their appearance.  Avery grabbed Charles’ wrist and jogged after, and Lucy, hesitating as she glanced in the direction of her mom, followed.

“Spreading lies, not doing your homework-” Verona’s dad said, putting Verona down but not really letting her go.

“We’ll talk about it later, let’s just focus on the problem right now,” her mom said.  “What can we do to address this?”

“For one thing,” the teacher Avery didn’t know said, “making the time to sit down and go over her homework with her.  She’s a smart kid, and I know she’s done her homework before, but she won’t turn it in.”

“I have coworkers who do the exact same thing, I couldn’t even begin to tell you how frustrating it all is,” Verona’s dad said.  “I wouldn’t have to work half the number of hours if my coworkers would do their share, but instead I end up doing the share of fifteen people, you wouldn’t believe it.  I work twenty-seven hours a day…”

“I’m supposed to say you’re embarrassing me, oh god, my entire class is outside in the hallway, but this is a rerun of my nightmare,” Verona said.  “I don’t care, can I go back to talking to Charles?”

“Can we focus on everything Verona’s doing wrong?” Verona’s mother asked.

“Excuse me, I was talking,” her dad said.

Verona tugged, trying to get out of his grip, and failed.  His arm moved less than if it was a stone statue’s.  He tugged on her arm to move her in front of him and held her shoulders.  That seemed to distress Verona more than the scene overall.

Avery looked around, then reached to her back pocket, to pull out the Dropped Knife.

She looked at Lucy, and saw that Lucy, vulnerable and young, had tears on her cheeks.  And behind them all, Charles stood surrounded by five kids, two standing shoulder to shoulder with him, another three behind him.  He was firmly in their grips.

“We were thinking about sending her away,” Verona’s dad said.

Kids in the hallway murmured and commented in whispers.

“We can talk about that later,” her mom said.

“Or you can say no now!”

“It’s a nightmare, remember!” Avery shouted.

Lucy was crying, tugging at torn clothing.  That worked.  With care, Avery reached out, holding the knife near Lucy’s face.  “If I may?  For Verona’s sake.”

“Just about anything for Verona’s sake,” Lucy whispered.

Avery scraped a tear off of Lucy’s cheek with the flat, edgeless back of the knife.

“Just about anything for you too, you know,” Lucy said behind Avery, as Avery turned away.  The knife took on a brilliant sheen, and got more brilliant as Avery dug deep into a well of feeling.

“One tear, one hundred cuts!” Avery shouted, leaping, cutting a hundred times in a second.

Brett exploded into confetti.

The scene began to take on that shimmer of a nightmare about to end.

“No weapons in school!” someone shouted.

The entire tone of things changed, getting more intense, the promise of something dark and violent sweeping toward them.

Avery sheathed the knife and turned, looking to the window and the tree outside.  “Verona!  Get the window!”

Verona scrambled over.

Charles was still there, surrounded by seven kids, but the oldest kid had fingers digging into the side of Charles’ face, dragging down.  And like fleshy mud, Charles’ face distorted, stretching down, eyelid pulling away from eye.  Bone grated and stretched.

Avery and Lucy tugged on either of Charles’ hands, hauling him free, and the distortion got worse for the pulling.

He came free, but the group of bad influences kept pieces of him.

They threw themselves into the window and hurled themselves out, as teacher and student chased.

We shouldn’t have shown Charles all this, Avery thought.

🟂

“Let me turn your last question around on you,” Charles said.

“I forget the last question,” Lucy said.

They were their regular ages again.  They walked through Avery’s Forest Ribbon Trail.  Dark trees both painted and growing out of the wall, ribbons attached to branches, rattling vents blowing cold air.  The only light came the moonlight that shone down past two impossibly tall walls on either side of them.

“What do you think it is that Miss and Rook want?” Charles asked.

“I feel like if we said anything we’d be betraying them,” Verona replied.  “You’re still one of the culprits.  Maybe there are sorta-reasons, but that’s not good enough.”

“If I admit to my involvement tomorrow, when Raymond comes, then it can draw attention away from the murder of Alexander.  It would confound Maricica.  If Bluntmunch is coordinating the goblins, he won’t be able to after this.  You could try arguing with Raymond to keep custody of me, or turn me over to him.  Whatever he’d do would probably be more secure than anything you could manage on the short term.  Not that you’d need much.  You could put me in a room with a door you’ve left unlocked and the lock would decide to spontaneously close on me, or the door would jam.”

“That’s up to you,” Lucy said.  “But I don’t see what that has to do with your question.”

“I’ve surrendered.  I’ll face consequences.  I’d- I’d say I already have, far and above anything I did to Alexander, but I’m not going to fight.  I’m too tired.  You don’t need to re-litigate it, you don’t need to keep bringing it up.  I’m caught, I’m done, let’s talk.”

“You had a question about Miss,” Avery said.

“I did.  What do you think Miss hopes for?  And you don’t want to answer, so I’ll give my best attempt.  Miss is keenly aware of the very same thing I am.  That this system is broken.  It’s antiquated, it’s ugly, it’s unfair, and it serves the worst people best.  She knows this, I know this, Rook knows this, Matthew and Edith know it, Toadswallow knows it, and I think even Maricica has her own version of this in her head, flavored to the courts.  Practitioners and practitioner society aren’t good for this world.”

“Everyone on the same page?” Lucy asked.

“No, not at all.  But we’re in agreement on this.  It’s a world that serves the Bristows and Alexanders-”

“The Mussers,” Lucy said.

“Oh yeah.  The Mussers.  I didn’t think you’d met him.”

“He runs the Blue Heron now,” Verona said.  “Or co-runs.”

“We told you guys all that,” Avery said.

“Ah.  Memory gets weak when you’re forsworn.  A combination of the spirits not cooperating and the distractions of everything else.  My point is, this is a world that serves them.  Us, here?  We all have our different responses to it.  It’s usual for them, for us to avoid it all.  We retreat, and we let the worst of them grapple with the worst of them.  What happened early this summer at the Blue Heron Institute is the sort of thing that happens every five or ten years, I’d think.  An event to be remembered and remarked on, but nothing for the history books.”

“I think it was mentioned that they had a crisis every two or three years, actually,” Verona said.

“Something like that,” Lucy said.  “But probably not a headmaster-dying type of crisis.”

“Every two or three years, hm?” Charles asked.  “I suppose it was Alexander’s school, styled after his approach.”

“Yep,” Avery said.  She pointed at a picture on the wall.  “Skull of a cat, painted there.”

“Isn’t that a bundle of ribbon?” Lucy asked.  “Oh… no, huh.  Good eyes.”

Avery gave her a thumbs-up.  “Turn around.”

They turned around and carried on in their walk.

“This is nice.  Why didn’t we start with this?” Verona asked.

“Don’t you feel the mounting dread?” Avery asked.

“Well, yeah, but I felt that at school.  I kind of feel it at school most days at non-nightmare school.  That feeling of being processed.”

“Back on track,” Lucy said.  “Everyone has the same goal, but with different approaches?”

“It might be that I’m a tired man, aged by my experiences before I’m middle aged.  I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in nearly a decade, I struggle to scrape together a tolerable meal.  Worry eats holes into my guts.  But I’ve fancied that if this went through and if we got what we wanted, even just the part where we released the forsworn in this one region of Canada, that might get at least a few people thinking about what the alternatives might be if this system starts coming apart at the seams.  Would Miss or Toadswallow begrudgingly admit that this wouldn’t be the way they’d go about it, but the end result isn’t the worst thing?”

“How does freeing people lead to things coming apart at the seams?” Avery asked.

“If a lie can pass without judgment, then a special truth doesn’t matter nearly so much, and practice is about your word meaning something, isn’t it?  If broken Oaths become even a bit more acceptable, then Oaths stop holding as much sway.  What use a contract, if there’s no ability to enforce penalties?”

“And the world loses its magic?” Verona asked.  “What happens to Others?  Wasn’t the big Seal of Solomon thing a way of slowing or stopping that gradual loss of territory and whatever to humanity?”

Charles’ voice was rough in his throat as he replied, “It was.  No, they’d hurt for it.  But Maricica and Edith are on board all the same.  The ideal case would be if a new, modern system was invented and put into place.  But I don’t have that faith in humanity.”

“You think people would just shrug and be okay with what you did, because even though your way of doing it was horrible, you all kind of agree?” Lucy asked.

“Accepting it is different from being okay with it.  Believe me, that’s where I stand with the slaying of the Carmine Beast, and the innocent lives the Choir took in the process of getting strong enough.”

Lucy shook her head.

The trees were changing.  That ominous feeling returned.  The walls had dropped away and there were more actual trees on either side of the path.

The ribbons on the trees were red now.

“It’s why I didn’t want you to practice, you know.  Why I discouraged the Asian girl and your friend with her foot in the brace.  There are too many drawbacks, and I think we should do away with practitioners as we understand the idea.”

“And you’re going to do that by…?”

“With luck, the Forsworn will be forgiven wholesale.  Freed from unjust consequence.  But I’m not lucky, so… I can only hope for the best while expecting the worst.  Maricica will pick her champion to fight John over the Carmine Throne, and she seems confident it will happen the way she wants it.”

“And that’s enough?”

“Miss has told me, years ago, that we can’t expect to change things from Kennet alone.  But one small change here could provoke thought elsewhere, and the right thought in the right mind?  I’d hope that could change what Solomon built.”

“People would stop you,” Lucy said.  “I don’t… I’m not in complete and total disagreement-”

“I don’t think anyone with enough exposure to Alexander and Bristow would be,” Charles said.

“-But can’t they supplant the Carmine by picking Lords?”

Avery perked up, then grabbed Lucy’s arm.

Lucy turned to her, and this was the moment Avery had connected the dots, that she’d mention it, and Avery didn’t open her mouth.

She didn’t need to.

Verona nodded, as well.

Yeah.

“Yeah,” Charles agreed.  “Anyone who takes the seat and starts making dramatic changes to the practice itself will be challenged and removed, or made redundant by the placement of Lords over any major areas, pre-empting the Carmine’s authority.  The Carmine only rules where the Lords of cities don’t.”

“We’re about at the end of the nightmare,” Avery noted, as the way got darker.

“The end?  That soon?” Lucy asked.

“It’s why I wanted to go after Verona.  Because I knew… there’s a clear end point.  You have to keep moving but when you get to the end, you wake up.  That’s this nightmare.  I took a detour to get to Charles’ nightmare.  Alpy helped.”

Lucy nodded.

“Will you go to see Ray?” Verona asked Charles.

“He should come to see me,” Charles replied.  “Or I’ll need something to protect me.  I’m protected from the bulk of what would hurt most Forsworn by the power and privilege the Kennet Others provide.  But Edith, Maricica, and the Choir are gone, Matthew is a shell of his former self, and the new Others aren’t fully a part of Kennet.”

“That’s why you were so hard to get to?” Lucy asked.

“In part.  It’s a problem with two edges, because their absence also means more Others have entered, and I’m the best sort of prey to them.  Consequence free predation, easy, defenseless, and rich in all kinds of misery that many Others eat, and there’s no karmic cost or risk to coming after me.  No, it’s a karmic reward.  Dispatch the Forsworn, and you can benefit like you’ve found a four leaf clover.  Hurt him slowly and regularly over time and the powers that be might as well be clapping their hands and calling you Just for every little bit of harm you do.”

“Ugh,” Lucy said.

“Ugh, yes,” Charles replied.

“But I think you’re not being hard enough on yourself,” Lucy said.

“What do you know about how hard I am on myself?” he asked.

“Hundreds of people, Charles.  To give the world of Practice a big middle finger?”

“It might mean more than that.”

“It might mean less!”

“Maybe,” he said.  “But I didn’t create the Choir willfully to get these ends.  These were the ends she handed to me!  I’ve got nothing but misshapen, tumorous lemons and I’ll make my fucking lemonade if I must!  Give me that, at least!”

“No,” Lucy retorted.

“Sorry, Charles,” Avery commented.  “We’ll try to be fair and just, but I don’t think you’re being straight with us.  I think of the people who got taken and everything that happened, and… there were better ways.”

“I don’t get better ways, and I hope to hell, I do mean this, that you never ever have to truly know and understand that for yourself.”

“You want to take magic away,” Verona said.  “There’s Others who are hurting too, for reasons that aren’t plugged into this thing you want to overturn.  Tashlit.  You gotta- you gotta set up something better.”

“If the-”

“If they can’t set up something better, they deserve this?”

The voice, feminine, came from down the path.

Verona gripped Avery’s sleeve.

“I can hear her breathing,” Lucy said.

“If Ray and Marie Durocher couldn’t find the goodness in them to beat your arbitrary challenge, they’d deserve their fates?”

“Choosing the many over the self is a basic, long-understood bar for goodness,” Charles replied.

The Wolf approached, coming down the path, pushing branches out of the way.  Her teeth caught on a ribbon, and she bit, eyes that peered through dark branches bright and intense.

“That’s not my Wolf,” Avery whispered.

“I don’t know Finding,” Charles said.  “What is it?”

“A Wolf,” Avery told him.  “A threat tailored against your Self.  Except it’s not mine.”

“Not mine, either,” Verona said.

“No,” Lucy said.

Avery looked at Charles.

“Hello Avery, I’ll get to you eventually,” the Wolf said, letting the ribbon fall from her mouth.  Her hair was silver-gray with an emphasis on the silver, her skin pale, and her clothes familiar.  She walked like Durocher walked, but-

The clothes were Alexander’s, for the most part.  The button-up shirt in satin blue was a button up shirt in satin red.  The black blazer, the slim pants, the black shoes.  Her footsteps were overly heavy on creaking floorboards that had been set into oily, brown-black mud.

“She didn’t wear human form very often,” Charles said.  “Even for the meetings with the others.”

“The Carmine?” Avery asked.

Charles indicated his Wolf.  “She didn’t wear those clothes, of course, or move like that.  But the face…”

He fell silent.

“You girls may go.  He’s the favored prey, by karmic rules,” the Wolf said, as she drew a wand from her waist.  “But Avery?”

Avery frowned.

“You might get to wake up when you reach the end of this dream, but him?  He doesn’t get to wake up that easily when the nightmares get bad.”

“Alpeana normally protects me from the worst of it,” Charles said.  “But for tonight, there was no avoiding it.  I’m glad we were able to talk, even with this.”

“Let’s see if I can change your mind about being so glad,” the Wolf told him.  “If you girls don’t go, I’ll include you in this.”

“Go!” Charles barked the word.

They went.  Avery backtracked on the path, and she felt that ominous feeling that had intensified as she reached the Wolf getting worse, redoubling.  The nightmare began to break up.

Verona woke up, the nightmare breaking up around her.  Lucy did the same.

Avery turned, found a detour that felt more or less right, and then she leaped.

Charles wasn’t waking up.  The Wolf was right about that.  Which meant his nightmare was out there, stitched to their nightmares by Alpeana.  Verona waking up had stripped hers away, as Lucy’s had with her own, but Avery remained asleep, in this realm of dark dreaming, and so did Charles.

So she let him dwell in her nightmare, confronting some amalgamation of Carmine Beast and Blue Heron staff, and she went back to his nightmare.

The nature of the Paths that Finders walked, like Oz and like Alice’s Wonderland, were whimsical, sometimes, or random, or weird.  For a long, long time, according to Jude Garrick from the Garrick clan of Finders, they’d thought the Paths were special dreams that went on forever.  There was apparently evidence to support that idea, but the Paths were weird enough that someone could take anything and find a pattern as far as how it linked to the Paths in general.

Whatever it was, she was better in a dream than some.  She could pull out tricks, like the Dropped Knife, and she could push the boundaries of what a dream allowed, she was the last one to wake up, and that might have had to do with mentality, but it might also have been tied into her wearing the Finder label with pride.

So she remained, and she made use of it.

She visited Charles’ nightmare, and entered the house.  She did a more thorough search, pulling on the gloves she’d gotten from the Paths, to avoid rodent bites and cuts from glass.

She dismantled the cabin of Charles’ unconscious, heaving the table to one side and letting the gloves put it somewhere else with a firm clapping.  She opened cabinets and pulled out drawers, pulled furniture aside and found that the cabin from most angles had vertical boards on the walls, but from another position, standing where the broken bed had been, there were recesses.

Bookshelves.  Most gibberish.  Photo albums.  She could almost recognize some faces in pictures, a teenage Charles hanging out with practitioners.  They’d been the young faces clinging to him.  The gang members?

She checked other books, then saw more stacked haphazardly on top of the bookshelf.  Navigating got hard, the space cramped and labyrinthine, all storage, bookshelves, and paper records, the occasional memento used as a bookend for records or diaries.

She closed her eyes momentarily, to figure out how much time she had.  There was a limit to what she could pull off here.

Avery reached out to her bond with Snowdrop, for sentiment, for feeling, for awareness.

Snowdrop opened the way.

Perched on a windowsill, Snowdrop watched Charles sleep.  Increasingly fitful, but… he didn’t get to wake up easy.

She had time.  She clapped her hands three times, and brought the table back into reality.  It dropped with a crash, splitting in the middle with one leg breaking, but she was able to kick it over and then balance one foot on the peak of the little pyramid shape formed when the table lay ajar, propped up by one leg.  She reached up to the top of the shelf with the Dropped Knife, nudging books over, over-

They dropped to the floor.  Avery hopped down.

Records, records… childhood memories, foods and food preferences, food dislikes-

Avery winced as a piece of paper tore free and zipped off around the corner, the white of paper disintegrating, the letters dissolving into meaning and intent.

Maybe he was tasting something bad at the Wolf’s behest?

She carried on.  It would be nice to find a way to wake him up early, when she was done.  She dug through the books.  Nothing.  She carried the broken table over.

She found logbooks.  She paged through, but it was purely visual notes, inspiration, the type and nature of inspiration logged in code she couldn’t read.

There were others.  Pulling notebooks from shelves only revealed more.  She put things back with care.

She didn’t want to leave traces.

More logbooks.

Scenes and dates, and some wheel of emotions, overlapping an image of his face, with notes on the side.

She paged through until she found the right range of dates, then flipped through more slowly, looking at scenes.

To Snowdrop’s eyes, he was getting more agitated, fighting his way to consciousness.

What had Edith said?

That they’d get rid of them.

Back at that meeting.

And here it was, sketched out on the left-hand page of the notebook, captioned: we can’t keep them from living long lives, but one way or another, we’ll get rid of them.  The left hand side referenced notes on the right-hand side, with emotion map and expression.

Edith and Charles alone in the kitchen, having a conversation.

Charles, finding his way from concern to relief.

There were other scenes, and she wanted to find tonight, but whatever the system was, it wasn’t here.

She searched more, aware that time was running short.  She needed hours and she had ten minutes at the very most.  Time moved funny here and staying anchored to Snowdrop made that harder.

She changed tacks.  There was a flavor to each area, disorganization for some memory stuff, a transition of nice to austere to gritty and dark as things moved away from early childhood to where he was now.  Or close to.

She searched the maze, running this way and that, finding her way from one recessed space to another, until she came upon an area where the bookshelf had been sundered.  Like an axe had been taken to shelves, everything fallen, much of it in disuse, left to pile up and gather bugs and dust.

But some had been set aside.  Stuff he found relevant even now?

She found a book on summoning, and it seemed to be his rudimentary understanding of it, a chronicle of growth.

She looked through the stacks of books by chronology, looking for the dark and looking for the bloodstained.  What was most recent?  Would that be the ritual to create the Hungry Choir?  Would it be possible to verify the facts?  To look for the lies?

“Thar yer!”

Avery jumped.

Alpeana wove and used hair to move through the space.  “Lassie, no!  This is a space even ah’ament meant to deep into!”

“It shouldn’t hurt him, going by the ways alcazars work-”

“It doesn’t maiter, lass!  Ah let ye in, ah didnae think you’d find yer wey ‘ere!  It’s a matter o’ privileges!  Get rid o’ that!”

Avery looked down at the book she’d picked up.  Each of the books was a very specific slice of one very specific field.  The earlier texts had included memories of facial expressions in key moments.  This was the most recent memories of summoning, but going by date…  She tossed it aside, then dusted off her hands.

“I’ll be wakin’ ye up now.”

“I hope you had a good night, Alpeana.”

“Ah did, but it weren’t helped by this!”

“Really didn’t mean to cause you any grief,” Avery told Alpeana.

“Ah know.  Yer a good lass, but let’s be goin’.”

Avery nodded.

Alpeana reached out with dirty black hair and swallowed her up.

🟂

Avery woke up, sat up, and stretched.  It was early, but not unconscionably early.

People were up, but the house was quiet.  Air conditioning hummed.

Kerry was sleeping in, and Avery made sure not to jostle the bunk bed too much.  She climbed down, gathered up her stuff, running shoes included, and carried them downstairs, depositing them by the front door.

Curtains were drawn, but morning light shone through the gaps like laser beams.  It made the space feel stark.

She slapped her cheeks hard, to test, making sure this wasn’t a nightmare.  All clear.

Right.

Just… different.

Her dad was on the phone while he made breakfast, waving hello while keeping phone tucked between ear and shoulder.  Declan was already up and playing video games.

She pulled stuff together, pulled on clean clothes straight from the dryer, kicking dirty t-shirt and pyjama shorts to the corner with the laundry waiting to be done.  Then, before eating, she checked on Grumble.

Because he was old and in a bad way and it felt a bit like maybe one day she or someone else would check in on him and he wouldn’t be snoring like he was right now, like a table being dragged across the floor, the grumbliest of snores.  She smiled fondly, but it was a sad sort of smile.

In some ways, she felt like she was barely hanging on.  This quiet was crushing her.  The snoring helped, and she found herself sitting down on the floor next to the bed, so she wouldn’t disturb her grandfather.  Her head leaned against the mattress by his hand, and she just listened for a little while.

There were still things to figure out.  They’d be running full-tilt for a lot of this, and it didn’t help that Verona and Lucy were super grounded.  If they couldn’t figure out the secret purposes of some of the new Kennet Others, if they couldn’t figure out what Maricica’s plan was, if they couldn’t defend Kennet, if they couldn’t avoid consequences for Alexander’s thing…

In another situation, she would have had a hard, next-to-impossible time moving away from this spot without an excuse.  But she could reach out, through that familiar bond, and she could connect to Snowdrop.

It was like getting a hand, being helped to her feet, except Snowdrop beamed feelings of fondness and warmth and happiness at her.  And some of those feelings of happiness included Snowdrop, right at this moment, having a mouthful of bugs while she laughed at something.  Avery responded with mild disgust.  Avery found her feet and left her Grumble’s room.

“Going for a bit of a run before the day gets too hot,” she told her dad.  “Want anything from the convenience store?”

“Here, I’ll get you money for milk.  Be safe.  Keep your phone on.”

“Yep.”

She communicated where she was going by general feeling, and Snowdrop started moving in that direction too.  They’d meet, they’d hang.  Then Snowdrop would probably sleep for a good chunk of the day.  While they’d been sleeping, Snowdrop had been watching Charles, just in case he woke up and started to make a break for it.

She waited until she was clear of the house to pause, getting ready in case the thing with outside practitioners, witch hunters, or something else got problematic.  She made sure she had her knife, her black rope, her collection of ribbons, friendship bracelets, and barometers.

She pulled on the gloves.

Would this work?

She clapped three times.

The book, pages torn and free of the back binding, dropped from the air to the ground in front of her.

While in Charles’ nightmare, she had tossed it aside and in the process of dusting off her hands, she’d clapped them three times.

She picked up the damaged book.

This was the most recent notebook on his experiences on the subject, dated after the creation of the Hungry Choir, going by the spine.  The genre seemed to be summoning experiences.  What summoning had he been doing?

The information was arcane, referencing forward and backward.  This wasn’t about summoning, but it was related to the summoning practice and his experiences in it.  This text seemed to be focused on a hiding place?

The pages were badly stained and torn from their passage through wherever the gloves sent things.

It took some doing, and she stepped off the road because she was so focused on the task that she couldn’t hope to stay out of the way of incoming cars.  Not that many people were up.  She had to check four areas to make sense of the recent page.

There was a cabin where he’d worked on Edith.  That thing he’d talked about, extracting some lantern.  It was a good distance away from here.  He’d stayed there before moving to Kennet full time.

The leftover items, tricks, and books on summoning were stowed there, buried under a tree.

Charles wasn’t being entirely forthright.

“Guess we’ll be making a detour, Snow,” she murmured, pushing a feeling at Snowdrop.  “Shrines first, then a short trip, and with luck, we should be back in time for Raymond and all heck breaking loose.”

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