“So when you said war, you meant a war?” I asked, my voice small.
“I’m afraid so,” Blondie said.
I’d known things were serious, and I knew people would die—I’d already seen a massive amount of collateral damage from Morrigan’s actions. But that had been one person—albeit in the shape of a dragon. I couldn’t begin to fathom the chaos created by two armies clashing.
Suddenly feeling overwhelmed, I turned to Anyan.
“I think I’m ready for that wardrobe now,” I told him, gravely. Even if we weren’t going to have sex in it, it would make a good hiding spot.
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Blondie interrupted. “This changes everything.”
It speaks to the depths of my discomfiture that I did not call her Captain Obvious for that last statement.
“What do we do first?” Anyan asked, all business.
Blondie pursed her lips, clearly thinking. Then she nodded to herself.
“We make our own,” was all she said, as she began sidling backwards down the outcropping, so that we didn’t stand up on the ridge for all to see.
“Our own what?” I asked, following her movements.
“Our own army, Jane. And you’ve got to help.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Blondie didn’t waste any time. The second we’d gotten on the train from Brighton to London, she’d been on the phone—cajoling, threatening, and bribing various supernatural leaders to get them to meet with her. And there were a lot of phone calls. In fact, the only reason she didn’t bother wasting her energy apparating us directly to the capital was that she needed this meeting to be way bigger than the one we’d had before.
She wasn’t dredging up a few extra soldiers. She was creating our own army.
When we did finally all meet, the room was hot and crowded, packed with people milling about. We were back in Bloomsbury, very close to where Anna Gibson’s grave had stood, at the London Welsh Centre. It was a stout, grey-stone building, housing a huge, second-floor social club with space for dances, weddings, and the like. But even in that large space we were packed to the gills. Despite the number of people, however, everyone seemed to know everybody else, although I could tell they weren’t necessarily all friendly. In fact, there was a lot of posturing, posing, and sizing one another up.
Speaking of sizing everyone up, I couldn’t help but gawk at the spectacle of all the Great Island’s rebel leaders contained in one room. I’d thought that the parties thrown at the Alfar Compound in my home Territory had been garish, but nothing could prepare me for the rebel version. Realizing now that things had been kept toned down for delicate Alfar sensibilities, I found myself spending a lot of time either blushing at, confused by, or in awe of the costumes and shapeshifting shenanigans pulled by the various halfling and pureblooded rebels milling about the room.
I’d never been to a fetish club, but I imagine that if every fetish in the world were represented in one room, that might look a little bit like what was on display tonight.
To be honest, the sight scared the shit out of me. Not because I was intimidated by the sexiness, but because of what we’d just seen at Morrigan’s compound. The goblins she had on her side were practicing how to kill with vicious efficiency. Ours were dressed like leather daddies. And those minuscule harnesses weren’t even good protection.
How were these creatures going to become our army?
So I tried to stay out of the way as I watched our satyrs toss their horns flirtatiously, and our harpies compare the feathers—as in the human fashion trend—in their hair, and our nahuals try to out-naked each other with their creative costuming, all the while trying hard not to think about those other satyrs, harpies, and nahuals. Luckily, dressed as I was in my very vanilla jeans and black T-shirt, at first, I’d been mostly ignored. I didn’t have the labrys out, I wasn’t using any power, and I was used to blending into the background, so everyone ignored me in favor of keeping an eye on Blondie or Anyan.
I wish it could have stayed like that, but I should have known better.
Eventually, someone bothered to really see me. That person must have made the connection to the wallflower in front of them and the girl on television the day before. Soon I had a small half moon of curious onlookers surrounding me. Some stared openly, while others did so more surreptitiously, but all were wondering who I was and why I was there.
I ignored the scrutiny, focusing in on myself like I used to do in Rockabill, right after Jason’s death and my release from the hospital, when everyone had been so gods awfully curious. Even so, I was relieved when Blondie shouted for everyone’s attention, smoothly mounting a long trestle table in the middle of the floor that she could use as her speech’s stump.
“Greetings comrades,” she said, her strong voice carrying through the hall. “Thank you for coming so swiftly to my call. I wish this were less of an emergency, but the truth is that your speed was warranted.”
“What’s happening, Cyntaf?” shouted a voice from the far corner of the room. I was way too short to see anything in that crowd, but the voice sounded both scared and angry. “Was that the Red?”
“Yes,” other voices shouted, various people demanding answers: what had happened, was that the Red, what were we going to do about all the human witnesses.
Blondie raised her hands, looking surprised. I don’t think she’d been expecting this much confrontation from her audience. For while she was apparently an old hat at fighting ancient evils, most of the people in this room wouldn’t have been alive the last time she fought the Red and the White. Of course they were afraid, and of course they wanted answers.
“You have every right to ask questions,” Blondie said. “And I’ll do my best to respond. Yes, that creature you saw in Paris was the Red.”
Briefly, Blondie lost control of the crowd again as everyone gasped, then started babbling. I heard people shouting “What do we do?” or “How do we fight her?” All of which were good questions.
I only hoped we could answer them.
“The Red is awake,” Blondie shouted, repeating herself until the crowd quieted. “But the White is still asleep. And we need to keep it that way.”
Beings looked nervously at one another, their faces betraying their skepticism.
“What can we do? We can’t fight the Red!” shouted a tall goblin halfling. I could only see him because he was near me, and he stood about a head taller than everyone else. He had the yolk yellow eyes of his goblin ancestry, as well as the build, but otherwise he appeared human. For a second I thought of Jarl’s Healer, the monstrous “doctor” who perpetrated awful crimes against humans, halflings, and purebloods alike. I wondered if I’d see the Healer again, and whether I or one of my friends would get to kill him.
Blondie frowned at the halfling’s pessimism, her frown deepening as others took up the goblin’s questions. This seemed to buoy him, and the goblin halfling called out again, “It’ll destroy us without even trying. We can’t fight it!”
“Not true,” Blondie said. “We can fight it, and we must. Together! Together we must stand against this evil…”
The Original continued on in this vein, but she’d lost a large portion of her audience. I met Anyan’s eyes, and his own features betrayed his concern. Normally Blondie was awesome at speeches and leading people, but she’d fallen apart on this one.
It’s too much of a no-brainer for her, I realized. The Red and the White pop up and Blondie fights them. It’s what she does. What everyone always did. But she was too good the last time… they were destroyed for so long that enough people had time to forget. Whole generations had been born since she last picked up the labrys, and the Red and the White had passed into legend. So people don’t know what to do about them, anymore, the way they used to, and they didn’t innately understand the threat, like they had.
While Blondie’s natural charisma could sway a small group of people, as she had in Brighton, this was a huge crowd. They were feeding off of each other’s skepticism rather than lapping up her natural ability to lead.
Blondie was still up there, speaking about joining together, and fighting the good fight, but I could tell no one was listening. They were all looking towards their own leaders: individual supes looking at what must have been their local leaders, the local leaders looking to the regional leaders, the regional leaders looking towards Jack, who stood near me. The rebel leader, for his part, was watching Blondie with a placid expression. He wasn’t undermining her directly, but neither was he throwing his weight behind her.
Instead, he was letting her sink or swim on her own.
I sighed, pulling on Anyan’s elbow. The barghest looked down at me, and then nodded before I spoke.
“You better do something,” he rumbled. “Show ’em the ax or something, before we lose ’em.”
I nodded, and then began to push my way slowly through the crowd. It took forever, and it was ridiculously slow going, but eventually I was at Blondie’s table. I looked up at her enquiringly, and she almost appeared relieved. Taking my outstretched hand, she helped me up on to her platform.