We came back to the apartment not long after that, his statement still banging around in my head. He said he didn’t have much longer—work kept him too busy to spend much longer than a meal apart from it—but that he was glad we had the chance to speak alone and freely for a while.

I think the jury was out on “alone,” and equally out on “freely,” but I didn’t dispute him.

Neville thanked me for my time. It was sometime around eleven o’clock.

He said he hoped we could meet again for lunch. He said he was doing these meetings with everyone important in the organization, just to get to know them better, so he would see them more as people instead of particularly adept tools.

He told me it was step one.

Then he turned and headed to his office.

I said nothing, for a time, and then I turned and tried to open the door to room 608, only to discover, just then, that in the whirlwind of that morning I’d left my key in the apartment and I’d accidentally locked myself out.

By the time I came to my senses after Neville had left, after I could no longer feel his outline and smell the fabric softener on his pressed dress shirt, I realized that I was well and truly alone.

There was no guarantee that Matthew knew I was back yet. Neville was not a particularly loud talker, and if Matthew was just sitting on the couch with the TV on like he was when we left, then the odds were good he wouldn’t have heard us anyway if we didn’t open the door.

Matthew and Neville hadn’t discussed who was going to open it. Neville must have assumed I’d just let myself back in. Matthew must have assumed the same.

My awareness shifted toward the elevator buttons at the end of the hall. I could press them from here, easily, and just slowly walk toward the doors, timing my steps so I could get in right as the doors would close behind me, let it go down, let me go free.

But I hesitated.

So I could go out. So I could maybe find Cygnus and Bell, and I could do…what? Come back here? They’d know I was gone. They’d be ready. Even with two more sets of hands, I couldn’t imagine that would make my task any easier. Neville had already proved himself more than capable of dismantling Prochazka’s best-laid plans. While I had full faith in Bell as a plotter, I had to admit to myself that she couldn’t be as qualified for that duty as Prochazka was, what with his years of warmongering behind him, and that the brains of Cygnus and I counted for little and less.

Bell against the world, I supposed—that was what pushing that button would be betting on. Bell took down the entire magical policing organization in Buffalo by herself, didn’t she? What’s to say she couldn’t do it again? Near as I could tell, Neville had no flesh-keys on his roster. He was wholly unprepared for the kinds of hell Bell could wreak on him. Prochazka had standards—he knew the conducts of war, what kinds of things were permitted and what was not. Bell may have known, but she certainly didn’t care. While dropping a glacier from the sky was something that could only ever be explained by magic, Bell’s form of war was more insidious. It couldn’t be explained by much of anything but superstition—demonic possession, aliens, forces beyond mortal control. Magic, sure, but less obviously. Less convincingly.

When you see a tidal wave rise from a lake, you believe in a higher power. When you see a man’s face decompose into skin and bone, sloughing into a slurry as they stumble forward, knees locking in place and keeling forward until they slam, head-first into the concrete, all the soft features painted on their face splattering out like icing off a cake—when you see that, you doubt in one.

But if Neville had gotten New York this far—

I hesitated. I knew, because of my hesitation, that I wasn’t going to do it. Despite everything, I was still in the best position I could be to blow the lid on this thing. I was inside, and somehow, people were starting to trust me.

I could blow that all by walking away. I could cement it, permanently, by knocking.

I was already in the best possible position to succeed. All I had to do now was turn the lock.

I couldn’t have been set up for eventual victory better.

That was what I told myself.

0 0 0

So I turned back to the door and knocked. Swallowing down hard and trying not to think about all the caveats.

The hollow clack of my knuckles signed the contract. Too late to back out now.

After a moment, the door’s lock clicked, and the whole thing swung open. Matthew was there—and yes, the TV was on, and yes, he was sweating, and yes, he breathed a heavy sigh of relief when he saw me there.

“Where were you?” he asked. “It’s been, like, two hours.”

“Neville and I went out,” I said. “I couldn’t let myself back in because I left my key in my room. We just got here—he just went down the elevator.”

“So you were just standing out there, alone, for a second?”

I nodded, turning red.

Matthew’s fingers tapped out some rhythm on the pocket of his jeans. “Neville just left you alone out there?”

Finally—a chance to tell the truth. “Yep.”

Matthew stepped toward me, stuck his head out of the door, bracing himself against the frame with his hands. He looked back toward the elevator, and also down the hall, just for good measure, before receding into the room again. “He’s gone totally insane. Talia was right. Jesus.”

“Um…not…not quite,” I muttered. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

Matthew didn’t hear me. “You could’ve just walked right out. My God. You could’ve just fucking left.”

“I know,” I said. “I thought about it.”

“I know you thought about it,” Matthew snapped. “I was sitting on the couch, zoinked out of my skull because I assumed I was never actually going to have to try and quick-draw you. It would’ve been a hell of a lot easier to do it if I was already in there, but since Neville made me back out, I would’ve had to re-do the whole entry and unplug you, and I honestly didn’t think I could do that faster than you could shoot an icicle through the door and skewer me.”

Sometime during that speech, I felt a little tug in the back of my head.

Matthew crossed his arms, tight, half-hugging himself. “Just get in here. Jesus Christ.”

I shrugged, stepped inside, and closed the door gently behind me.

0 0 0

I re-took my position on the easy chair and he took his on the couch. He was watching one of those white-bread daytime-TV game shows.

I was feeling a bit bold. Matthew’s fear-confession fueled me, like those things tend to. I guess, deep down, I’m not really all that complicated. “You watch TV like you’re seventy,” I said.

Matthew scooped up the remote and turned the TV fully off. “What did he tell you?” he said, straight to me, eyes locked with mine.

I blinked. “He…you know, I think we might be on the same page now.”

“Cut the shit and tell me what he told you or I swear to God I will make you regret it,” Matthew snapped.

“Why are you so freaked out now?” I said. “Nothing’s really changed since last night.”

“Last night I was still able to lie to myself and think that this was all some kind of elaborate recruitment mission that required him to buddy up to you,” Matthew said, nearly breathless. “But he literally left you unattended in the hall with an elevator that doesn’t require a code. Bell and Cygnus are, in fact, still alive, and they’re not actually that far away from here. If you left, you might’ve actually found them before we re-captured you. Holy shit. We all almost just died.”

I tried not to think about that branch of possibilities too much. “Well, we didn’t,” I said, simply.

“You wouldn’t have died,” Matthew snapped. “But I’d be a puddle of blood slurry and bone dust. Now tell me what Neville fucking told you, or I will escalate the dry room into a fresh level of hell you have yet to even imagine.”

Part of me expected that threat to mean more to me than it did—but again; Matthew’s fear confession emboldened me. I was reasonably confident I could quick-draw him.

But if that was the case—why was I still letting him talk?

I’m not much of a schemer. I will admit. I follow orders. I rarely compose them. I used to want to, way back in the day—I used to worry about being a bruiser forever, but now that doesn’t concern me as much. If there’s anything I’ve learned in this whole war endeavor, it’s that being at the helm is hard, and it’s much easier to just let whoever’s up there guide you by the shoulders to your next task.

I can’t say for sure if it’s better that way, but it certainly helped me sleep at night.

I was starting to realize that the lines between keys weren’t quite as hard as I previously considered them. Fire-keys could win fights against water keys, nature could beat fire, and so on. And just like that, it wouldn’t be quite as simple of a task as everybody thought to just sic a telepath on me and call it a done deal.

First, they’d have to quick-draw me, and I was nothing if not pretty quick. Second, they’d have to stop whatever power I could set in motion before I let it out of my hands, and I was nothing if not pretty powerful.

Sure, it’s possible to kill a sumo wrestler with a nine-millimeter, but you’ve gotta be a good shot. You’d better not miss, because—good God—I will make sure you only get one.

Weston got one. Every single one of the keys who dropped from the ceiling that last night got one.

Matthew got one, too. And he succeeded, but only because he got the jump on me. Now, here in round two, he didn’t have that luxury—but I did. It was up to me to initiate and to him to react, and if my record in magical battles had taught me anything, it was that raw strength mattered a hell of a lot less than the element of surprise.

I, however, had both.

Now I had a chance. This was a pivot point. I could be a bruiser and let this play out however it decided to, or I could try and seize control and get something done.

Nobody would do that for me. There was nobody I could rely on to give me orders.

And so, tentatively—gently—I took my best crack at it. I knew enough to know that what I was staring at was an opportunity I might not get again. In front of me I had a man having a crisis of faith, and inside me I had the power to change his will.

Bell once told me that all orders come with two facets: the words and the impetus. The words are what you actually say to someone—the thing you literally want them to do; and the impetus is the implication of what happens if they do—or don’t do—the thing you’re asking for. At the time, I didn’t think much of that, since I didn’t think it’d ever matter to me, but sitting there in that easy chair, fully reclined, relaxed, it all made sense.

Without meaning to I’d navigated our relationship to a position where we were equals again—and now, with just a few words, I could tip it.

So twelve-year-old Erika wanted to be something more than a weapon—now, at fifteen, step up and show her what you’ve learned.

I let my breath out slow. Chose my words carefully. I knew I got exactly one shot at this. “Neville didn’t tell me much,” I said. “But what did happen was that I told him what Talia said, and he was surprised by it. He hadn’t thought of that before, and he—he kind of liked the idea.”

Matthew went limp. His eyes went up to the ceiling. “Jesus fuck. He—oh, shit. Shit. That’s really bad, Erika. That’s captial-B fucking bad.”

That was the hit—the shovel stabbed into the dirt. Now to pry.

I shrugged. “I mean, I’ve thought about it a bit. It’s not all that bad, really. For—for me. Neville gets to blow the lid off the whole thing, and I survive. I’m celebrated, even. Imagine that. I can try and convince him to leave Bell and Cygnus alone if he needs me for this that badly. I don’t know what happens to you in that case, but…honestly, Matthew, you’re a nice guy and all but that’s not really my problem.”

I turned toward him. Made sure my eyes were pointed in his direction as best I could. “You’ve got some choices here, I think,” I said, slowly. Thinking this over before I said it. “Option one is that you try and unplug me, right now, and deal with the consequences later. Aside from the fact that we don’t even really know if you can do that before I freeze your brain solid, you’d still have to get out of the city before Neville finds out what’s happened to me, and this probably results in him actually going insane. He seems like he’s trying to make a real effort at bettering himself, but…I mean, I’m obviously not the best judge of that.”

Slight pause. I forced my voice steady. I was almost there. Counting them on my fingers. “So that’s choice one. Choice two is you do nothing. You let Neville and I continue to talk, I keep telling you what he says, we loop Talia in on this, and maybe we work something out. I don’t think you want magic to go public yet. Talia certainly doesn’t. And I don’t know what Neville’s plan actually is. His original plan, anyway. And that’s something we all want to know, together. If you want to figure it out, you need me, and if I want to do something about it, I probably need you. I know you might not see it from here, but I think we have a common goal, even if that goal stops at just…you know, finding out what the hell’s going on.”

Breath out. “Option three is you plug your ears and hope nothing bad happens to you. Speaking from experience, that option leads you to weird places. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I can’t tell the future, but if I had to guess, using what I’ve done and the things that have happened to me as a reference, I’d say that...well, I’m probably gonna be fine. Someone’s going to want the strongest water-key in the world for something. As for you, well, I don't know. But the other thing I can say for sure is that somehow, throughout all of this, I’ve ended up with more powerful friends than you. If all this implodes, I’ve got a spot at Loybol’s table. You—maybe, maybe not.”

One last shrug for good measure. “I guess I could vouch for you.”

Matthew breathed, slowly. His breath was red.

I closed it out. The line was so perfect—it drew itself out of my mouth like a golden thread. “If I were you, I’d pick option two. But I’m not you, so why don’t you go ahead and do what you like.”

Matthew, I’m sure, went very pale. I had to imagine his eyes went glassy and blank, staring up at the ceiling, where a fan sat unmoving. We didn’t know if the fan worked or not. I don’t think we ever turned it on—the room had air conditioning, so it was more or less purely ornamental. He stared at it, though—he took in its every curve good and long.

Just to piss him off, I sent some extra water up there and gave it a gentle shove.

I had to imagine everything I’d told him was piercing him somewhere soft and important, because he didn’t say anything for a while, longer than anyone should in a conversation, long enough where I was starting to second-guess myself even though I didn’t have any reason to do that.

But when he spoke, almost a minute later, he was quiet—softened—and I knew I’d won.

I don’t have a whole lot of trophies in competitions of the mind like that, so I hold the few I have dearly. I’m hardly the world’s best arguer. I’ve gotten better at it over time, as a factor of getting older, but it’s way easier to line up my words in hindsight like this than it is in the moment—although, I guess, if everyone was good at speaking their mind clearly and cleanly, the world would be a lot better than it is.

So even though this whole chapter of my life is by-and-large painful to recall, this little bit—and the time I snapped at Misha—bring me a little smile.

Sometimes things just work out.

“My family’s going to disown me,” Matthew said, without looking at me. I’m sure he wished he was telekinetic in some flavor right then, so he could flick the switch for the fan and watch it do something instead of sit there, still again.

“With all due respect,” I said, slowly, since it seemed like a canned phrase I should say to couch the rest of my statement, “I think that’s putting the cart before the horse.”

“It’s not,” Matthew went on. “The Biiris don’t stand for stuff like this. It’s unprecedented.”

“Then you’ll be the first,” I said.

“I don’t know if they’ll let me.”

“What’ll they do? Kill you?”

Matthew shrugged. “It’s unprecedented,” he repeated, limply. “Nobody’s ever betrayed their partner. It’s never happened.”

“Neville doesn’t seem to think that way.”

“I don’t think Neville realizes he’s betraying me,” Matthew said, slowly. “He’s just losing his mind. I—maybe I can…”

He trailed off. I put it together. “Re-programming your boss seems like betrayal, too.”

Matthew raised his eyebrows for a second. Slumped back. “Yeah, that’s true.”

Silence, again. For longer than he should have waited.

In the end, he spoke, his words just as slow and measured as mine. “What was option two again?”

“We get Talia in on this, tell her what the plan is, and play it by ear. Neville’s obviously got something planned that he’s not telling us and we all want to know what it is.”

Matthew cast his eyes down to his feet. “I can maybe couch this as helping him. He’s…clearly not right in the head. And I don’t think the expectation is that I try and fix him manually. I…I don’t know. I’ll talk to the family head about it.”

“You might not have that kind of time,” I said.

“Later,” he corrected. “I’m…I’m gonna do it anyway,” he added. “I have to. I think.”

I cracked a smile. “Shake on it?”

“I have demands,” Matthew said, eyes flicking toward me for a moment without a change in his neck.

“So do I,” I replied, without really knowing what mine were yet. I just knew that this wasn’t supposed to be a one-way interaction. “You first.”

“I stay in your head,” he said. “At the end of the day, you’re still a totally psychotic nightmare person. Whether I can quick-draw you or not is beside the point. I want to give myself the best possible chance.”

I shrugged. “Deal, as long as you tell me where Bell and Cygnus are as you get more info on them.”

“I honestly don’t know if Neville’s gonna give me that information anymore,” he said.

“If he does—”

“He could lie,” Matthew said, playing with a loose thread on the hem of his shirt, twirling it between two fingers. “I’m being totally serious with you right now. Neville’s devious like that. If he thinks we’re working together, he’ll start dropping little things here and there that he can use to confirm it before he ever says anything to anyone. Being ahead of the curve is how he got this far. I have to assume he’ll figure out we’re plotting against him—or…I don’t know, plotting…to fix him or help him or something. And I’ve gotta assume he’ll suspect it before we suspect that he’s…suspecting it. I…I guess.”

“Tell me anyway,” I said. “And if at any point, I get the info that they’re dead, I bulldoze a city block.”

Stared him down.

Matthew said, “You wouldn’t,” but it was weak. Limp. He knew it was true. He knew, perfectly well, that I meant every ounce of what I said.

He was so certain that he backed off it without any prompting. “Okay, fine. That’s the kill-switch. And you tell me and Talia everything Neville tells you. And if at any point, we decide it’s in our best interest to kill you, I’m gonna take a crack at it.”

I paused. “I could do the same, and my info would come before yours. Then we’re back at square one.”

He inhaled deeply though his nose, let it out slow. Mouth pulled tight. “Okay. Fine. If one of us decides to pull the plug, we duel. Ten paces back in a basement somewhere, old-west style. We get a buzzer for the countdown so it’s impartial. Fastest arm wins.”

He snorted. “Is that what you want?”

Matthew may have considered that a joke, but I didn’t. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Deal.”

He blinked. “Really?”

“Seems fair to me.”

“I…I was joking,” he said. “I don’t actually want to do that.”

“I have plenty more I can demand if you’re not interested,” I said, again—not really knowing what that’d be yet.

Matthew shook his head. I’d completely raked him over the coals.

There’s not a lot that I’m truly proud of from this time in my life, but this whole endeavor was one of them. Finally, just once, I got to give someone over me a taste of their own medicine. If this is how battles were supposed to be won in a more secretive age, then—well—I had at least one victory to my name.

I had him totally under my thumb. That’s what you get for giving Erika Hanover an inch.

“Fine,” he said, breath breaking free. “If we call it off, we quick-draw. We fucking duel like it’s eighteen-sixty. God, that’s stupid.”

“It’s kind of cool, though.”

“Not when you die on a coin toss,” Matthew snapped.

“Every magical battle is an elaborate coin toss,” I said. “And I’m pretty good at winning coin tosses.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

I frowned. “You know what I mean.”

Matthew inhaled deeply again, ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, whatever. Sure. I’ll—I’ll call Talia and tell her to come down here. Fill her in. I think she’ll be mad for a second, but…she’s reasonable enough. She’ll come around.”

“’Mad for a second’ seems like her default,” I said.

“She’s been having a pretty rough go of it,” Matthew said, absently.

“Haven’t we all?”

“You seem okay.”

“Well, I’m fine now,” I said. And just for emphasis, for comfort: “This whole talk was really cathartic for me.”

It was Matthew’s turn to make a disapproving frown. “Yeah, go ahead and pat yourself on the back.”

“I will.”

“I’m being sarcastic.”

“I’m taking it seriously,” I said. “I don’t get to win a lot of these. It’s nice when I get one.”

“Win what? Talking?”

“Yeah.”

He took a second. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Most people probably talk circles around you.”

“I know the words, I’m just not great at using them.”

Punctuated it with a shrug.

“Well,” Matthew said, pulling out his phone. “Don’t get to used to this.”

I gave him a little half-smile. I hoped it was one like Bell’s—but maybe other people didn’t see Bell’s expressions like I used to. “We’ll see.”