6:1
There were no answers. It had been four days since Dan and Ben had been unable to apprehend the person or persons who had kidnapped Siobhan. Four days since they had each run through the door of her torture chamber to find themselves outside of the Mystery House. Four days and… six hours, Dan checked the clock behind the bar, since they’d saved Siobhan and failed to find out why she was taken to start with. Technically it was a zero sum game, but it felt like a loss.
Patti slid a tray of drinks onto the table. “How’s Siobhan doing?”
“As expected, I guess. Gwen is staying with her and walking her to school in the mornings then one of us is picking her up after. We don’t know why she was targeted or if they’ll try again so we’re making sure she’s never alone.”
“That’s good.” Patti shifted from foot to foot. Her gaze darted from Ivan pointing out something to Gwen on a device he held in his palm to Prairie and Kim passing papers back and forth between themselves, and then skimmed the piles of books stacked in front of Dan. “If there’s anything I can…”
Kim looked up and pointed at the empty seat beside her. “Sit. We don’t bite. Well, Ben does, but he’s picking up Siobhan so you’re safe for now.”
“I…”
“’am acting like I don’t belong with these idiots’.” Kim finished for her. “You do. Belong. Take a seat and welcome to the Table of Frustration. We were going with the Table of Suck but someone,” she slanted a glance and a smirk at Prairie, “felt that was harsh. Sit. Suck with us.”
“Be frustrated,” Prairie corrected gently.
“Well, if you insist.” Lifting her brows, Patti took the seat next to Kim. “So, I’m guessing no new information?”
Dan balled a fist on the tabletop, the only sign of his agitation. The word Hope flexed above the knuckles. “I’ve hit up my contacts again. Both Investigators and Bibliomancers.”
He pulled out a pile of papers. “The first have been flooding me with reports of missing people and I’m finding a pattern that supports the theory that people are being targeted but the connections are all over the place. There are multiple patterns rather than a single one.”
Patti leaned in. “Like what?”
Dan pulled out a piece of paper and drew a circle on it. He wrote Diana and Nieve in it. He then put another circle on the paper, overlapping with the first and wrote ‘Mal’ outside of the overlap. “Like Diana and Nieve are both affluent and that puts them in one circle of the Venn diagram. Mal is the son of a farmer, which doesn’t intersect with that circle at all.” Another circle and the names Christina and Kyle, a line connecting the two, then Susie next to these. He still wrote nothing in the section that overlapped. “The three kids I’m looking for came from middle income families.”
He started to make another circle, then shifted his pen so that the shape he drew didn’t overlap the others, though he did connect it with a dashed-line. “Then you have Bisman, who we can’t even confirm for sure is a victim. For all we know he’s one of the people doing the kidnappings. Diana and Nieve are around the same age. And obviously female. Mal is younger, late teens, and male. Bisman…” He poked at one of his notebooks with a pen. “My research says mid-thirties. Upper middle-class. Former Investment Banker. Living on investments and there’s shit-all else about what he’s been doing since taking a break from working to figure out if he had a hobby that would cross over with the others’ interests. I’ve got evidence that he invested in Apfel Industries, but so do a lot of other people. It’s a respected conglomerate that provides excellent dividends on investment. And he has a vacation home in the same community as Jake Rosenthal, though far more modest considering he is self-made and Jake’s money is older than dirt.”
“Usually in abduction cases patterns emerge to explain why the specific people were abducted. What we’ve got,” he tapped the diagram with his pen, “is a big bunch of subsets with some minimal overlaps but nothing that screams ‘here’s the answer!’.”
Ivan slapped a file on the table. Flipping it open he removed a sheaf of papers and passed them to Dan. “This is the information on the women we found with Nieve. With so many victims, maybe you can find something to help with your patterns in here.”
Dan took the papers, added them to the stack. “Thanks.”
“You said something about asking Bibliomancers for information,” Prairie prompted.
“Yep.” Dan poked a toothpick into the corner of his mouth, working it with his tongue. “As you can probably guess there’s a lot of enthusiasm regarding this entire situation. Especially,” he flexed his knuckles, making Hope pop, “this. But so far not a lot of helpful information. I’ve got feelers out still for better source material but finding a Bibliomancer with a viable text and prying it out of their hands is proving… What a better word that difficult?”
“Fucked?” Kim offered with a shrug.
Dan pointed his pen at her. “Adequate. I’ve even resorted to asking my brother, Carl, to use his contacts on this.”
“Your brother?” Patti asked.
Kim answered before Dan could. “His brother, Carl, is a dick. Sorry, Dan.”
Dan shrugged. “Harsh word choice, true depiction.”
“So, Carl,” Kim continued, waving her hand in emphasis, “has been known to make poor choices.” Before Patti could ask, she added, “poorer than mine. He’s gotten Dan into some questionable situations.” Again before Patti could ask, she answered, “More questionable than the ones that Ben has gotten Ivan into.”
Ivan tipped his finger to his forehead in acknowledgment. When Patti looked to him, he muttered, “As a duly elected official of Ourton I have never performed any form of illegal activity. Definitely not to help my best friend.”
Patti nodded. “Definitely.”
“The thing with that,” Kim expanded, “is that regardless of the poorness of Carl’s choices and the questionable situations he has been known to get himself and others into, he gets results. Specifically, results others of us don’t get as we tend to shy away from the kind of situations Carl chases with a gleam in his eyes. And avarice in his heart.”
“Hey.” Ben strode up to the table, an arm around Siobhan’s shoulders. “You talking about me? Rude.”
“For once,” Kim lifted her brows. “Not you. Carl.”
“Oh, what did that fucker do?” Ben gestured for Siobhan to take the open seat next to Ivan then settled in the chair beside Kim.
Kim’s gaze shifted to Siobhan who looked pretty-darned normal. Not normal for someone who’d been abducted and tortured a few days before. Normal for that would be a bit of tentativeness, maybe a tightening of the shoulders or quick glances at the corners of the room to assess for danger. Maybe a slightly tight jaw or clenched hands that gave away tension. Not loose hands swinging the bag Ivan had returned to her as soon as they were free of the Mystery House over her head and placing it gently on the table. Sure not the calm and analytical expression that was her habitual way of looking at the world.
Not that Kim wanted her to appear fragile. Or a damsel. As Prairie liked to point out, specifically to Ivan, there were no damsels at this table. But, there was something so inherently wrong with the way Siobhan acted like *nothing had happened*. It grated little skittery claws along the nerves on the back of Kim’s neck.
Siobhan was too damned calm. Too possessed. Too “nothing to see here”. And had been every damned day since her return from the Mystery House. Maybe she broke down in the privacy of her own room. Who knew? But Gwen said that around the house Siobhan acted like it was just another day. Every. Damned. Day.
Was nobody that damned self-possessed. Eventually she would break.
But at least they’d be there when she did. Which was why Kim surreptitiously watched her like a hawk from the corner of her eye. Like a hawk. And why Ben was doing something similar. As was Prairie. And Ivan. Literally their surreptitious gazes clashed as they sought to look like they weren’t watching Siobhan like a hawk. Dan probably was too, but he was hiding it by focusing on the embarrassment of reports spread around him.
Gwen didn’t even pretend she wasn’t watching. She, in fact, straight up pinned Siobhan with her stare. “Did you eat?’
Siobhan lifted her brows. “I ate, Mom.”
“Something besides crackers and peanut butter?”
“Peanut butter is full of protein and fat.”
Gwen shrugged. “Can’t argue with that but it’s still not Real Food.”
“I’ll eat the stew you made when we go home.”
“I can top that.” Patti rose from the table and walked into the kitchen. A minute later she returned with Marcus, the chef/cook/dude-in-the-kitchen, following her with a tray from which steam rose. Their trip from kitchen to table was followed by not one, not two, but all three women left there.
Marcus got that kind of response. He drew the eye. Especially of women. Not in the Ivan “I command the room way”. More a “heeeeey, how you doin’?” thing. In an unselfconscious, I’m-a-man kind of thing. The kind of thing some guys just breathed. Like they loved to drink beer and throw tomahawks and read bedtime stories to tiny, little children they cradled to their big chests. Probably all at the same time. So, maybe they’d put down the beer before cradling the children. Maybe.
You didn’t look at him and think “chef”. Or alchemist, which, yep, he was. A big ole chef/alchemist that looked more like he should be providing private security for someone like Jake Rosenthal.
Big, like “I work the docks and lift heavy things” big, with well-defined biceps that were displayed by the rolled-up sleeves of his white t-shirt, but moving with the grace that a poetic person might compare to a leopard in the night. Slinky, Kim thought. A big, slinky, dark leopard stalking across the pub, unhindered by the fit of the jeans that were probably his close personal friend if you could judge by the way they hugged him, was how Gwen would put it, but then Gwen was more likely to notice those kind of things. Kim noticed the dark intensity of the gaze he trained on the food on the tray, the strong hands that supported it, thick fingers tensed to distribute the weight. They were the hands of a sculptor, strong, with nicks from knives rather than chisels but clearly an artist’s hands. Ivan shifted and glowered as Prairie smiled and finger-waved to the chef.
Patti reclaimed her seat as Marcus placed a plate in front of Siobhan.
“Rosemary Rabbit,” he pointed out the meat on the plate, “with new potatoes poached in butter and rosemary. Dessert is a cinnamon almond sponge sweetened with myrrh, kind of a tres leches thing I’m playing with. And to drink, lavender lemonade.”
Siobhan narrowed her eyes as she cataloged the items in front of her. “Marcus? Are you trying to dose me?”
“Just trying to feed you.” He rumbled in a low-down voice that made you think of blues clubs and clandestine meetings on foggy docks while a mournful ship’s horn bounced off the night. “If there’s any other effects, all the better, but it offends me when someone goes hungry.”
“Uh huh.” Siobhan picked up the fork and knife Marcus had placed beside her plate and cut into the rabbit. “I’m only eating this because it looks good and I haven’t eaten to-” She stopped, corrected, “because it looks good.”
“Of course. Besides, how could I have made it for you when I didn’t know you were going to be here?”
Siobhan lifted her brows and looked at Patti who cracked like a walnut. “So, I told him.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Whatever. Shut up!”
Marcus gave a bow of his head. “I need to get back. I have something in the oven. Enjoy.”
Gwen’s gaze followed him as he walked back to the kitchen, murmuring, “I’ll give you something in the oven.”
“Shameless.” Kim muttered to her.
“Yup.” Gwen angled her head and Prairie giggled behind her hand. “Do you think he’s got a brother? I’d like to double-date them.”
“Double-date with who?”
“Me.”
Prairie’s snort drew another frown from Ivan.
“Stop objectifying the man.” Ivan grumbled.
“Oh, I’ll objectify him.” Gwen rubbed her hands together and gave Ivan an impish look. “So. Hard.”
Siobhan didn’t participate in the conversation. Her expression remained placid, like a pond, frozen, as she dug into the food in front of her and ate it with no indication of enjoyment.
“Can I have your cake?” Ben leaned forward with hand raised.
Siobhan stabbed her fork at the hand. “No.”
“Oh, so sorry.” Ben fell back in his seat with his hands raised in the universal ‘I’m so innocent’ hand gesture which was *never* used by anyone innocent.
Siobhan’s “My cake!” was actually reassuring, a tiny crack in the ice of her implacable calm. As was the way she curled her arm around the plate and glowered at Ben, gesturing at him with her fork before digging back into the food.
Ivan stepped into the leadership role he’d taken since Siobhan’s abduction and recovery, directing the conversation back to the investigation. “Ben? Have you found out anything about Bisman? I know you were going to look into him?”
“Separate from what Dan dug up?” At Ivan’s nod, Ben started reeling off facts. “My informants have found information to suggest that Bisman had a history of paying for his entertainment, but all the other women who were linked with him are still alive. My people have interviewed as many as they could find.”
“A lot?”
“A lot. Guy liked variety. In more than just his companions. His tastes ran to the exotic although never anything his dates found so repugnant they weren’t willing to name a price to perform them. A few of them did decide to not go back after a single date. Those were the ones that needed medical attention.”
“Medical attention?”
“Nothing too extreme. The reports started with bruises and rope burn, but some of the women he dated more recently took issue with his emphasis on knife play. Seems he had a real collection of medical instruments that he liked to use on his dates. Which,” Ben shrugged, “is a thing and not to be judged one way or the other. That,” he explained, “is literally a direct quote from several of his dates. A lot of people have medical kink. Sorry, Prair.”
Prairie gave a half shrug. “You aren’t saying something I’ve never heard. it’s funny to me, honestly, that people refer to ‘playing doctor’ as an innocent thing children do, but frown on adults who want to explore the dynamic.”
She scrunched her nose up at Ivan when he gave her a pointed stare.
“Go on?” she encouraged Ben.
“He progressed to edge play and needle play, only he didn’t seem real into the Safe/Sane/Consensual and had a tendency to go further than his partners agreed. Several required stitches and one had to have foreign bodies removed from beneath their skin.”
Gwen pressed her hand to her mouth, her skin going three shades paler than normal, and Kim’s eyes were wide enough to pass for saucers. “That’s such a violation of trust,” she murmured. “Those poor women.”
“Yeah,” Ben nodded and then continued. “I think if you look at the patterns it becomes clear he was escalating to the point of Karen.”
Dan clenched his jaw and tightened his hand into a fist on the tabletop. “My information on the house indicated he’d owned it for years. The county records indicate he’d applied for permission to build a wine-cellar about three years ago. Other than that, he paid his taxes, kept up his property. Your average “he was so nice; he always walked his dog” serial killer type. Because he was basically retired and was, as described,” he flipped through one notebook, running his pen along the words, “a loner without membership in any clubs or documented passion for any hobbies.” He ground his teeth, “besides apparently cutting up animals and women.”
At his sigh Gwen reached over and placed her hand over his clenched fist. “You said no one reported anything about it that would draw suspicion. That’s what people like that do. On the surface they maintain average lives to hide what lurks in their minds. Trust me,” her usual smile had an edge that spoke of things she saw, and things she’d seen, with her Magick. “Damaged souls aren’t something that shows on your skin.”
“None of this,” Dan indicated the notebooks, then swept his hand to include Ben. “helps us form a pattern. So, it’s all useless. We don’t even know if the guy is missing because he fled or if he was taken. Or, like I said, if he was a victim or if he’s one of the bad guys.”
Gwen squeezed his hand. “There was a story. The man is missing. That pattern we know we’ve established. Story. Missing person. Can we assume he was taken? No. But we can assume he was targeted. We haven’t had a single instance where a story about someone was found, or left, that didn’t lead to them going missing. What we need to do now is figure out why they got the stories. And maybe who wrote them.” She met Dan’s eye and slowly nodded. “Right? That would be good.”
Dan snorted, then worked his toothpick from the left of his mouth to the right. “Yep. That would be good.”
“I’d ask if you were making any headway on that but I’m guessing the answer will be no.”
“Yep. No.” Dan tugged his earlobe. “We’re at the infancy of this thing. I don’t know what kind of Magick is being used, though I suspect it’s similar to mine if not an advanced branch of what I do. I also don’t know why the stories are being written. Or left. Is that part of the Magick? I have never run across a form of Bibliomancy that doesn’t use previously written texts to channel Magick. This case is more that, maybe, someone is writing their own texts then using them as a channel.”
Ivan steepled his fingers in front of him. “And you’ve never heard of that? It seems like that would be a natural impulse. If you can’t find a text that does what you want it to do, then write one.”
“But, that’s the thing.” Dan worked the toothpick some more. “Bibliomancy uses preexisting texts that provide a framework for the Magick. Sure, we can do little things, like cantrips, by writing them out and focusing our will on the words but they are usually only a single Word. Maybe two. At the most three. And that’s pushing it. To dictate the course of Magick you need to have a work that, basically, binds the Magick to a specific task.”
Kim planted an elbow on the table and fingered her lip. “But the Magick came from somewhere, right? Someone wrote the first books that Bibliomancers use?”
Dan fell into professor-mode, gesturing with the hand on which the tattoo of Hope stretched over his fingers. “It isn’t the book or really even the words. If that was the case any book or written work could be used to channel Magick.”
At Kim’s questioning look he expanded. “I can’t read a manual on how to make a television and make a television.”
“Why not?”
“No one is exactly sure but the general consensus among Bibliomancers is that there has be a certain quote unquote magic in what is written to start. Which is different than Magick.”
Everyone at the table stared intently at Dan, each processing his explanation through their own filters. For others this might be dry and boring, or maybe at the very most interesting from an academic remove, but for Magickers who invested part of their every day to understanding what made them Magickal, what he was explaining, the thought structures developed by countless practitioners of Dan’s form of Magick, was intriguing.
“How so?” Ben asked.
“Bibliomancy Magick… Hmm…” Dan worked the toothpick back again then turned to Patti. “You said the more people that know a song the stronger the Magick is for you?”
Patti nodded. “Yes. Definitely. An obscure song can be a conduit for Magick but it’s like, thin,” scrunching her brow she screwed her mouth to the side. “It’s like I need a base of people who have invested energy into a song. Memorized it. Sang it with others. Had some kind of connection to it. It’s like the difference between memorizing facts and knowing those facts. And,” she fanned her fingers, “I’m really struggling to explain this. You’d think it would be easy for me to communicate something with words, right?”
Dan ‘pish’ed. “I’m not finding it any easier and my Magick literally is Words.”
“Sometimes, I’m not sure we are meant to explain our Magick,” Prairie offered in a quiet voice, dragging her hand over her hair. “Maybe it’s supposed to be a Mystery. Capital M. A truth that you can only know through revelation but can’t truly be understood or explained.”
Kim leaned forward. “Your suggesting Magick needs to be seen through a filter of faith?”
“I’m suggesting approaching Magick with the reverence of faith. To just accept something that we can’t explain but we know exists because…”
“Because causation equals correlation,” Kim finished for her. “That’s deep, Prairie.”
Prairie looked down, bit her lip, then gave a small laugh and looked up to meet Kim’s gaze. “I am deep.”
“Anyhow,” Ivan cleared his throat. “Back on track. Dan, you were saying?”
“Bibliomancy Magick is channeled through books, through stories, that multiple people have read and, like Patti said, put their energy into or, as Prairie suggested, put faith in. The more people that read something or, even better, genuinely take it to heart like fairy tales or other popular works like Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia or even The Odyssey, the more Magick it can work. I’m sure you know but we don’t make the stories come to life, which is what is weird and also amazing about what we’ve been experiencing. Instead we use Words from within these texts. Literally single words like Scare or Bind. My notebook,” he tapped a leather bound volume he kept in his breast pocket, “contains lines from books that I have the strongest connection to that contain that word. And when I need to use my Magick, to say Bind Something, I read the line and I focus my Magick through the connection I have to that line. I don’t need the original source unless I am trying to do much more focused and specific magic.”
“Okay. So…” Kim worked over the words, “how were you able to make Cinderella happen by reading the book?”
“That’s a really strong example of focused and specific Magick. I think.” Dan shook his head. “I was acting on instinct when I did it.”
“But you brought the book with you. Because you knew you’d need it and be able to use it?”
Dan laughed. “No. I wish I’d thought of that. I was carrying around the book because I’d just gotten it from another Bibliomancer. I’d put out word I was looking for as close to the original fairy tales as I could get because I was hoping that I could find something new in them that could help me think like the people who are manipulating all of this do.” He waved his hand vaguely over all the papers. “It was more of a hope to understand their psychology. To get why the fairy tales are important to them. I wasn’t thinking, in any way, that I’d be able to reproduce the Magick they are using with a copy of fairy tales. That was pure and ridiculous luck.”
Patti shrugged. “Or Magick.” At Dan’s look, she added. “Usually when I do my Magick I pick a song, I focus my intent, and then I perform. But on the two trips I’ve taken with you all I’ve just let instinct guide me. Or maybe it’s Magick doing so. Who knows?” Another shrug. “But I haven’t been controlling it. I mean, I’ve been controlling my Magick. But I’ve kind of been letting it pick the music instead of the way I usually work. Maybe that’s why you got the book and were carrying it.”
Siobhan, who’d been silent up to this point, placed her fork down on her plate. “That implies Magick is a force beyond us, like God. Something that is directing our actions without us being aware.”
“Maybe?”
“Well, that’s shit.” No joke, at least four of the people at the table fell back into their seat at Siobhan’s harsh words. “That implies that something outside of us, call it Magick if you will, wanted some… some… asshats to grab me and torture me? That it served some purpose? Like Dan carried a book he needed and you got songs you needed and I got tortured?”
Siobhan jumped up from the table, shoving her chair back, and ran for the bathroom. Gwen leaped up and started chasing after her, stopping halfway to give the group a look of confusion and concern that pretty much echoed to some extent what each of them was feeling. Siobhan didn’t do that. She didn’t have outbursts. She sure as Magick didn’t lose her cool and use words that would get her suspended from teaching children.
Almost to the bathroom door, Siobhan turned with wide, wild-eyes and snapped. “Don’t worry. I won’t go anywhere without someone to take care of me. Poor little Siobhan, can’t take care of herself.”
Kim jumped to her feet. “Siobhan!” She shoved back her chair. “Ugh! Siobhan!” she called as she rushed across the space. The bathroom door slammed in Gwen’s face as Kim rushed up beside her friend. “Is this…? Have you…?”
Gwen shook her head. “It was going to happen. It had to. She’s been too quiet. Too contained. This was…”
She shoved the bathroom door open and she and Kim hurried in to find Siobhan sitting on the floor, under the bank of sinks, her knees to her chest with her arms linked around them. She was staring sightlessly at the wall and rocking.
Kim stared at Gwen, wide-eyed. This was so not her thing. But even she, with her limited social skills, got that they needed to do something.
“Hey!” Ivan’s voice carried through the closed door. “Can we come in?”
“No!” Siobhan yelled. “No. Just go away. Go…”
Gwen snatched the door open and planted a hand in Ivan’s chest. “Girl time.”
“Well, that’s crap.”
“Just…” Gwen held up her hand. “Give us five minutes.”
“Fine.” Ivan’s face screwed up, the picture of reluctance. “Five minutes. Not a second more.”
“Do you believe in God?” Siobhan’s question came out of the blue as the door closed.
Kim’s response was immediate and instinctive. “I’m not sure. I think I’ve said this before but… I hate to close the door on the possibility. And there’s a whole lot of,” she clicked her finger, summoning a small flame to the tip, then snapped it back inside of herself. “So, it’s hard to discount that there’s some power out there but is it Magick? Is it God? Is God Magick? Is Magick God?” She lowered herself to the floor and pressed her back to the wall beside Siobhan, resting her arm on her upraised knee and talking to the wall rather than directly at her friend. “I’m not sure. I kind of feel like I have to believe in something because well, again,” another snap, another small fire. “If I don’t believe does this go away?”
“I don’t know.” Siobhan also talked to the wall.
“Maybe,” Gwen said, lowering herself to the floor to bracket Siobhan without getting so close it would be uncomfortable for her friend. “We aren’t supposed to be sure. Like Prairie said, faith is kind of believing in something you can’t prove. Or see. Only we have a slightly better grasp on those two things, don’t we? We, Magickers, kind of are proof that there’s something powerful out there.”
“How so?”
“You ever think that we all reflect something of the creator or whatever made this existence?”
Siobhan shrugged.
“So, here’s the thing.” Gwen settled her shoulders more firmly against the wall and reached out with her pinky to delicately touch Siobhan’s leg near her clasped fingers. “You do stuff with nature. So does Kim, only different. Alchemy takes things in nature and changes them. Sometimes for good. Sometimes for boom. Although sometimes that’s good to. And if this all came from… energy.” She gestured at the space around them with her free hand. “Then something molded it. Like you do. Kind of.”
“Are you implying we’re God?”
Gwen looked up, like maybe a bolt of lightning was going to come through the ceiling and hit her on the top of the head. “Oh, no. Not just because if there is a God I’m so not going to step on their toes. Because we don’t have all the cool powers God is said to have, right? Most religions that believe in a creator god, or gods because I’m all about the equality across cultures thing, believe that god has a lot of juice. Like, my empathy, totally something God has. And the whole seeing Spiritus and, maybe, the afterlife that Prairie walks, God too.”
“So, we’re watered down versions of God?”
“They say that we were all created in God’s image, right? So, we’re kind of reflections of God?”
“You actually do believe,” Kim shifted to look around Siobhan.
“So?”
Kim shrugged and sat back against the wall. “It’s cool that one of us does.”
“I do.” Siobhan’s voice was quiet, tentative. “Or I did. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Okay, so, what you said out there? About God wanting you tortured?” Kim tilted her head. “That’s always been one of the things I’ve considered in my head. If there is a God… And,” she tilted her head to talk to the ceiling for a moment, pitching her voice loud, “there probably is. I’m saying.”
Once that was clearly stated, she went back to her wall staring. “So, I don’t know that God directs our actions exactly so sometimes we do things that aren’t to God’s purpose. Like those assholes snatching you up. Totally, probably, not something that God wanted. Not like some people would say “God has their purpose. Or her purpose. Or non-gender God has a purpose in mind and controls every action of everyone.” Because that’s just… if I was God I’d probably want to let people make their own choices. Then learn from the consequences of those choices. Ugh.” She pulled her head forward then threw it back to bounce against the wall. “I’m seriously botching this.”
“You’re not. Not really,” Gwen said. “You are putting it through your filter which means you, because you see things as ways to learn and grow, project that onto your God concept. Siobhan could have a different idea of God and express God’s purpose in a different way.”
“I want God to be a protector. Guidance.” Siobhan’s mouth twitched. “A teacher. Huh.” She reached out her finger and twined it with Gwen’s pinky where it still rested against Siobhan’s leg. “You’re right. God didn’t protect me. Didn’t stay the hands of those jerks. I would have protected my children. If I was God. And, wow, that sounds really amazingly…” she trailed off, like she couldn’t find the right word.
“Human?” Gwen suggested.
Kim shrugged. “Sounds pretty human. Guess you aren’t God after all.”
At her shoulder nudge, Siobhan turned and glared at her. Kim shrugged, “What?”
Siobhan rolled her eyes.
“You ever think when you roll your eyes you are turning them heavenward?” Kim asked.
“I’m going to beat you.” Gwen shook her fist in Kim’s direction. “With my shoe.”
Kim continued as if Gwen hadn’t said a thing. “No, seriously. Does our knee-jerk compulsion to roll our eyes reflect an internalized belief in God?”
“Don’t make me get up!”
“Why me?” Siobhan’s words cut Gwen and Kim off.
“Why you what?” Gwen asked
“Why grab me?”
“Well.” Eyes trained on the wall Kim hummed then said, “Could be we got ‘their’ attention. Could be they wanted information.”
“But why *me*? What did I do to make them target me?”
“If they just wanted someone from our group, you’d make the most sense.” Siobhan stiffened. Before she could follow-up with another question, Kim continued her reasoning. “Me? I’d lose my shit. No, really,” she dug her head into the wall, pressing into it’s support. “I have some…” she trailed off, searched for the word, continued, “stuff in my history that would make me a very bad bet to handle the situation you were put in. Besides, look at what I’ve done each time we’ve gone on one of our adventures. Set fire first, ask questions later probably isn’t what they were looking for. Gwen would be working so hard to make the best of the situation she’d miss stuff.”
Gwen grunted but didn’t contradict Kim’s assessment.
“Prairie would go away in her head or into Spiritus so she’d be useless as a source of information. Dan would have information but I feel like he wouldn’t be targeted because he’s been able to manipulate the environment they are working in. He could possibly gain an advantage and I don’t think they are about that. So that leaves out me, Gwen, Prairie, and Dan for sure.” Siobhan’s breathing deepened, slowed, as she processed what Kim was saying. “Ivan would work and maybe Patti, but she’s new and if they want information she’d be a bad source. Ben would probably die just to spite them.”
A snort startled out of Siobhan. “You are not wrong.”
“Right. So that leaves you and Ivan. And Ivan is… well, he’s big, he’s male, and he’s prominent in the community so he’d make a bad target.”
“So I’m not prominent and I’m not big and I’m female,” she made the last sound like a curse, “and therefore I got to be the designated victim?”
Kim shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe if we go back to the whole ‘there’s a purpose to things’ thing, maybe you would be the most likely to be able to turn the situation to your advantage.”
“How? I was…” Siobhan cut off her angry snap and took several deep breaths through her nostrils. “Out of all of us I’m the biggest victim. The one that’s least likely to be able to defend herself. That’s why they took me.”
“Bullshit.” Gwen turned and glared at Siobhan’s profile. “That is a complete and total pile of crap.”
“Take away my potions and what do I have?”
“Your brains?”
Siobhan turned her head slightly towards Gwen. “Huh?”
“So. Kim came at this as the They wanted information but what if that isn’t the case? What if someone or thing wanted us to get information and it or they decided you were the best one in our group to do that?”
Siobhan just shook her head, confusion clear on her face.
“The House let us in. We didn’t have to do a puzzle or use Magick or any of the things we had to do before. And why did we have to do those things? No one has been asking that question, but it’s been bugging me.”
Gwen left the question hanging. When there was no answer from Siobhan or Kim, she explained her reasoning. “What if we had to prove ourselves to the House? Or to Magick? To God? Or to whatever is guiding this thing? I yelled at the House and the door opened. Doesn’t that feel like there’s something there? That the House or whatever force is behind The House is listening to us? And maybe, possibly, we’ve proven ourselves smart enough or brave enough or whatever it has been looking for in us. Maybe *you* proved yourself smart enough or brave enough while those jackasses were doing whatever they were doing to you. Ever think about that?”
“No.” Siobhan’s tone took on a note of contemplation.
“Well,” Gwen turned her head and went back to staring at the wall. “Maybe you should. Maybe you weren’t the weakest of us. Maybe you were the strongest.”
Silence stretched between them, then Siobhan curled her finger around Gwen’s. “I’m not sleeping.”
Gwen shrugged. “Okay.”
“I can’t close my eyes because I’m afraid when I open them I’ll be back on that frame and all of this will have just been some delusion my broken mind created.”
“Okay. That’s not completely out there. It isn’t true, but there’s really no way for me to prove it isn’t true that couldn’t be construed to be your own delusion arguing delusional thoughts. Kind of a conundrum. How about, instead, I just hug you?”
A long moment passed then Siobhan said in a quiet, slightly less broken voice, “Okay.”
Enter The Woods 