Authors: Tim Pratt
“You died.” That dull monotone made my skin crawl.
“You’ll proceed as planned, because your mission was a success.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Okay. Forget about the monster that attacked you, too. If you’ve got aches and pains, it’s because you tripped and fell down in the woods. All right? In fact, forget any memories that contradict the narrative of your mission going flawlessly. Got that?”
“Yes.”
“Wait. In the future, any time you try to take a human life, you’ll start to vomit uncontrollably instead, until you give up on the idea of murder.” There, I’d done a good deed. Look at me using my powers for the betterment of humankind. “On your way, then.”
He rose to his feet, a bit shakily, eyes still fixed on the candle. I blew out the flame, and he blinked, stared right through me, and then ran off toward the woods.
Say ninety minutes, maybe two hours for him to get to the airport, and…some fraction of that again for the Firstborn to return, with her short-hop teleporting mojo.
I needed to be ready.
I went back to the house. “Trey!” I called as I approached the kitchen. “We’re not getting that romantic weekend in Vermont after all. But how’d you like to join me for a totally unromantic half hour in the woods?”
Trey rose up from the kitchen floor and brushed glass fragments from his shirt. He was all in black and white, along with everything else in my field of vision—residual magic hangover. And you know what? When he grinned, he did have kind of a classic movie actor thing going on. Put him in a suit and hat and he’d be all set to banter with a sharp-as-fangs leading lady in a ’40s screwball comedy. (So maybe casting me opposite Trey wasn’t totally historically accurate. Not a lot of interracial romantic banter back then. Never forget—the present is already the glorious future, in a lot of ways. The world is pretty terrible, but for most of human history it’s been a whole lot worse.)
“Wherever thou goest, I also go,” he said.
Okay, that wasn’t exactly screwball movie banter, but nobody’s perfect. “I love it when you get biblical on me. Come on, then. I’ll tell you about the hit man and the monster while we’re walking in the woods.”
The Book of Grace
had no trouble taking me to the wooden church I’d seen in the vision, though it was abandoned now, its steeple missing entirely, with a hole gaping in the roof. The forest seemed denser, too, but that may have been the difference between the leafy autumnal present and the bare-branched wintry past rather than a genuine increase in vegetation.
How long ago had the Firstborn been that teenager in my vision? Her girlhood definitely postdated the invention of photography, but beyond that, I really had no clue about her actual age.
“So you just let the monster go?” Trey stayed close beside me as we crunched through fallen leaves, with me desperately trying to remember which way to go. It’s hard enough to navigate in the woods at the best of times, and this wasn’t those.
“I don’t like having anything enslaved to my will, Trey—you of all people should know that. Not even monsters. Hell, I’m even going to set your dad and grandfather free when I’ve got a spare moment.”
“In your case, Bekah, the apple fell awfully far from the tree. It’s almost like you’re not even an apple at all. Maybe you’re a pineapple.”
“I hope you mean I’m sweet and juicy, and not that I’m prickly and spiky.”
“A little of this, a little of that.” He bumped his shoulder into mine companionably. “Now that I’m a free man, can I take you out again sometime?”
“You have a one track mind…but sure, you can ask. Maybe I’ll say yes. Check with me after we’ve dealt with my sister.”
“Oh, sure. It’s always something. If we go out again, just so you know, you’re going to hate it. I’m going to talk back so much. I can’t wait to be contrary and argumentative. Doing the opposite of what you say all the time, just for the thrill of it.”
“It sounds like the foundation of a successful relationship. Really, you should keep doing what I say. Just do it because I’m right, and not because you have to.”
“I’m not sure that’ll be as much fun as spiteful disobedience, but I could give it a try.” He looked around. “So where’s this—”
“There.” I pointed. The long stone wall hadn’t weathered the years well. There were big gaps where parts of it had tumbled down and never been repaired. We walked along its length slowly, me pausing frequently to peer at stones that were always not quite the right width or color, until after half an hour of increasing frustration, I was pretty much just kicking the wall at random intervals.
Then I caught a sparkle in blackness and knelt: the right stone, in the right spot. I couldn’t work it loose, though. Either the Firstborn had wedged it in supertight, or the passage of years had caused the wall to shift and settle into a more stable configuration.
I took
The Book of Grace
back home—to the falling-down shed—and retrieved a crowbar, then used the book to pop me back to Trey’s side.
He gasped and fell back. “Shit, Bekah. You might want to warn a person next time you just pop out of existence, okay?”
Oh. Right. I shrugged. “I may be a pineapple, but you’re definitely turning into a crab apple.”
“See how you like having an amazing appearing-and-disappearing girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend, huh?”
“Hope springs eternal.” He held out his hand for the crowbar. “Allow me.”
“What, you think I can’t bash apart a stone wall? Girls can’t use wrecking bars?”
“It’s more that you get all the fun of teleporting, so I should at least get the fun of breaking stuff with metal tools.”
“Oh, fine.”
As he carefully shoved the edge of the bar into a crack beside the stone, he said, “Couldn’t you have, I don’t know, telekinesised the wall apart?”
“‘Telekinesis’ isn’t a verb, so no. But, that aside…yeah, probably. I didn’t think about it. I’m not used to having this whole toolbox at my disposal.”
“It’s just as well.” He leaned against the bar. “I bet using magic for everything is a good way to get fat and atrophied.”
“You’re saying you wouldn’t like me any more if I were fat and atrophied? You’re so shallow.”
“I walked into that one, didn’t I?” He grunted and wriggled the bar, and the stone popped loose and landed in the dirt.
I crouched and reached inside the hole, withdrawing the leather bag stuffed with tissue paper. I opened it and delicately pushed the disintegrating old paper aside until I caught a glimpse of something speckled, brown, and fragile. “I’ve got it. Now we go back home and ruin the carpets.”
Trey consulted the diagram I’d sketched out for him, and drew more blue paint lines on the living room rug. “This is never going to come out, you know.”
“That’s okay. There’s nice hardwood under the floor. I saw it in a vision. If we survive this, I’m going to tear up the carpet anyway. The house needs a remodel to reflect the tastes of its new—and saner—owner.”
The Book of Grace
had provided many options for protective circles, and squares, and triangles, and pentagrams, and all of the former superimposed over all of the latter. I could bind demons—Grace always wrote it as “demons,” in scare quotes, maybe implying they were actually something else, but he didn’t elaborate—or lycanthropes or “elves” (more scare quotes) or politicians (who apparently were separate from “demons”) or the possessed.
There was no binding specifically for “homicidal elder sisters” but there was one that “negates all forms of escape, magical or otherwise,” and I hoped that would keep the Firstborn from bouncing out of the house with her short-range teleportation abilities once she realized the game was up. Or afoot. Or whatever.
There was blue house paint in the shed, and the other ingredients—belladonna, dried sea horse flakes, lion shit—were all accessible via
The Book of Grace
. (A poisonous-plant garden in England; Chinatown in San Francisco; and the lion enclosure at a zoo, if you were curious.) I ground the ingredients up into a paste, said a nonsensical incantation that I’m pretty sure Grace included only to fill the time it took for some weird supernatural chemical reaction to take place among the ingredients, stirred the resulting concoction into the house paint, and put Trey to work. I suppose I should have been the one doing the painting, being an artist and all, but he wanted to help, and it gave me time to psych myself up for the ordeal to come.
He was careful to draw the final connecting symbol that closed the irregular polygon from the outside, because the next person who stepped inside those lines would be trapped until I decided they shouldn’t be.
“When do you think daddy’s little girl will show up?” Trey said. The paint was dry, so he covered up the sigil with some of the million throw rugs my father had kept around the place. No reason to make the trap too obvious.
“Assuming she comes straight from the airport after my killer tells her the job is done? Could be any minute now.”
“What if she doesn’t show up? Or she sends a bird to peek through the window or something?”
“I’m pretty sure she’ll want to dance around my corpse personally, but if not, we’ll figure out some kind of plan B to lure her here. I doubt we’ll need it, though. I’d better get in place.”
I arranged myself in my best playing-dead pose, sprawled prone on the floor just on the far side of the sigil on the floor, in such a position that I could keep one eye on the door. Trey squeezed raw hamburger all around me, spattering the carpet with blood, and then—for verisimilitude, but
ew
—smeared some of the meat into my hair so it would look like a messy wound.
“What should I do? Hide?”
“Maybe go upstairs and watch from the balcony, in case things go totally wrong. The sword’s up there, right? I’m glad I gave it to you. I’m bulletproof, but you aren’t.”
“Feel free to remedy that, oh witch of my heart. I’d be happy to take on the burden of invincibility.”
“There’s probably some horrible price to making you invincible, though. Male-pattern baldness. Impotence. Who knows?”
“You wouldn’t like me anymore if I were bald and impotent? You’re so shallow.”
“Shoo. I’ve got raw meat in my hair and blood dripping into my ears. This is no time for flirting.”
Trey withdrew up above, and I settled in to wait. After not very long—ten minutes, fifteen—I began to wonder how much longer I should stay there, and how dumb I’d feel if the Firstborn never showed up at all, or, more likely, two minutes after I finally gave up and washed the hamburger out of my—
The front door creaked open. I’d instructed the house to act like any ordinary house, with no defenses, no early warnings, nothing to indicate that the lady of the manor was still around running the supernatural security systems.
The Firstborn came in dancing. She looked so happy—so genuinely joyful—that I felt a brief stab of guilt for
not
being dead. She spun in slow pirouettes, the skirt of her flowered dress swirling, as she drifted in my direction. Then she stopped—within the confines of the seal drawn on the floor—and gazed down at me. I could see only her shoes, which were knee-high, silver Doc Martens, of all things.
“Oh, Rebekah. It didn’t have to be this way. But so it goes.” Suddenly she shouted, “Trey! I can tell you’re up there, lurking. I saw your car in the driveway. Come down, darling. You’re pledged to serve the heir of Archibald Grace, and that’s
me
.”
The landing above creaked, presumably as Trey emerged from the master bedroom. “I don’t respect your claim,” Trey called. “Even if Bekah died without designating an heir, this could be tied up in court for a while. I’m not sure you even legally exist, so it would be tricky for you to inherit.” He was careful to avoid declarative statements, just like I’d told him to be. Didn’t want any ringing bells at the wrong time.
“Hmm. I suppose there’s
some
debate about whether or not I inherit.” The Firstborn sounded amused at the prospect. “I might have to kill the Trips, and Hannah—but then I’ll be the only Grace left, and it will
all
be mine. It won’t be easy, but utter devastation, scorching the earth, leaving no stone left upon a stone—it’s what my father would have done.”
“What if Bekah drew up a will?” Trey’s voice sounded surprisingly confident, considering he was talking to a woman who’d come within a whisker of killing him. Then again, he
did
have me on his side. “She was dating a lawyer, you know. I’m good at paperwork. Maybe she left everything to me.”
The Firstborn snorted. “She never found the vessel our father left behind, the one that contained his power. The
house
was hers to dispose of, perhaps, and some of the objects, those she could pass on through the mundane magic of dull paperwork alone, I suppose. But the
power
belongs to the Grace line, and I have the strongest claim on that power. I’ll succeed where your girl failed. I’ll take this house to pieces, if I must, and I will find the place where my father hid his strength away—”
That seemed like as good a time as any. I rolled over and sat up. “I found it, actually. A cup full of blood and other things I’d rather not think about. I drank it all down. Tasted terrible, but I have to admit, it was pretty strong medicine.”
I’ll give her credit—she didn’t even hesitate when she heard my voice. Instead, the Firstborn
lunged
at me, hands twisting into claws—literally, she was a shape-shifter, and she got downright animalistic—but she hit the edge of the magical polygon and bounced back like she’d struck a plexiglass wall. For a moment she looked perplexed…and then she started
keening
, a sustained howl of anguish and rage at a brain-shredding pitch and volume. She squeezed her claws into fists and blood began to drip from her clenched hands.
I picked up a little box from the coffee table and flipped it open, then drew out the egg that contained her soul, and held it up where she could see it.
The terrible screaming cut off instantly. She stared at the egg, as captivated as Trey and the hit man had been by the candle flame. “No. That’s not possible.”