The days that followed were frightening and more than a little saddening, as refugees from the raid arrived. I spent a lot of time with Annie, who filled her time cooking and cleaning and generally being helpful in any capacity she could. Through her, I came to know Tefis, the strange kitchen fey. She’d fallen in love with a human, once many moons ago. Her people had turned her out, disgusted at the very idea of breeding outside of the species. The romance had fizzled, but the fey had long memories and longer lifespans, and Tefis had been left out in the cold, so to speak. She was a long-term resident, one of the core few that would probably never leave the House.
I also met the other, more permanent members of the household. They ranged from the mildly magical to the truly outlandish. There was a shapeshifter, Connie, who was prone to anxiety attacks which brought on violent changes with very little notice. He opted to stay here, to protect others from himself. “Allie” turned out to be a vampire, and I would never dare to call him that to his face. To everyone other than Annie he was Alistair. He was the last of a bloodline that had been wiped out by a rival clan, and was here out of necessity of diplomatic immunity of sorts. Beth was an honest to gods witch, which was a lot less thrilling than it sounded. She had some small capacity for healing magics, and felt her talents were best used in an environment like this. As far as supernaturals went, they were all fairly run of the mill. There was a brownie who lived here somewhere, who I hadn’t met yet. And then there were the wardens.
They were a little harder to pigeon-hole. As far as I could deduce, Six was Six. At least, that was all anyone would tell me. Everything about her was as human as you could come. And yet. Just like at the bar, I found the way that others treated her was strange. The core household worked as a well-oiled little machine, where all the different parts got on quite well despite their many and varied differences. But beyond that, I found that they treated her with reverence and respect that went far beyond any other relationship there. I don’t think it was a warden thing - Tall was something else entirely, but even he did not seem to garner the same reaction. It was like Six was quietly in charge of every situation she found herself in. It was not a case of being bossy, or even assuming the mantle of leadership. It was just that the others looked to her, in almost any circumstance you could imagine. I just could not fathom why.
She and Alistair often went out to do “something”. Sometimes the result of that something was bedraggled and frightened Others, who had avoided the on-going raid so far but were only just scraping by. Sometimes, it didn’t seem to be anything at all, at least nothing that they brought home with them. Alistair was a fairly fearsome example of a vampire. He tasted old, like old books and coffin dust. And yet he seemed happy to follow the small woman’s lead, on whatever adventures it was that they were having when outside the House’s walls. It was weird.
Putting the conundrum of just what was going on there aside, Tall was...well, tall. I’d heard stories, once or twice, of the kinds of supernaturals that the Witchfinders were really looking for. The ones that would “further the science” of hunting that which went bump in the night. They weren’t too interested in vampires, or shapeshifters or even fey. They would quite happily kill them, yes, but they didn’t want to keep them. And it was the ‘keeping’ part more than anything that truly terrified me about their organisation. Nightfolk who went into the Witchfinder’s strongholds never came back out, but neither did their bodies. If you were unlucky enough to land there, you could expect a lot of dissecting, slicing and dicing in your future. They took apart their treasures, their one-of-a-kinds and rare as hens teeth finds, one bit at a time.
Tall would be a treasure, and I imagine he would have stayed at the House even if he hadn’t been a warden. He was hard to miss, for starters. He loomed over just about everything, including some of the shorter trees in the orchard. I’d always been aware that I was taller than most humans - it was one of the few things that glamour did not help to hide - but next to Tall I felt diminutive. The ceilings in the House were unusually high, no doubt to accommodate his unusual build. Every part of him was thin and long and tapered. Fingers, feet, arms, everything. Even his face, what you could see of it anyway.
I didn’t know what the technical term for what he was called. “Tallmen” is what they were known as, and they were almost mythical in their rarity. There was something almost birdlike about Tall, with his strange elongated face and round eyes that peered out owlishly from behind the smooth expressionless wooden mask that he wore without fail every time I had seen him. His fingers seemed to have more segments than they should have, and he bent strangely at the elbow and knee.
He would have stuck out like a sore thumb in any environment, but the fact that he was living in a city and had managed to evade capture was phenomenal. I got the feeling he probably didn’t get out much, and I was still a little mystified that he and Alistair had gone out that first night after I had arrived at the house, when the whole city was boiling with Witchfinders, and had avoided notice.
The raid had continued since I had gotten here, and I realise now just how lucky I was that I got out when I did. Most of the nightfolk who arrived on the doorstep of the House were not half so fortunate. There were precious few, and I had to wonder how most of the city’s supernatural population had fared. Annie had expressed some doubt. The Witchfinders were angry, she said, about losing out on the quarry they were seeking, and had taken it out on any supernatural they could find. She was bubbling over with anxiety. Most of the residents had stayed put, within the safety of the House, except for Alistair and Six, who continued to go out, again and again. Often they went together, sometimes they took turns. They usually brought back frightened nightfolk, to deliver into Beth’s waiting hands in the infirmary. Many were injured.
The source of Annie’s anxiety tonight was the fact that Six had gone out on her own. She had looked visibly exhausted, and the vampire had let her sleep for half the night. So when she awoke and Alistair had returned, they swapped. Annie was a mess as a result. I could understand why. She had been gone a long time, much longer than I had expected, and obviously much longer than Annie would have liked.
Feeling like I was about as useful as tits on a bull, I’d taken it upon myself to keep her distracted. I wasn’t much use to anyone else; the House regulars were incredibly efficient in going about their business, and the refugees from the raid too shell shocked to do anything except exist. So we sat, in the wonderfully cosy sitting room, and I tried to draw her focus with as many questions as possible. We spoke at length about a number of things: the residents, including Ylls, the brownie who had kept very much to herself and would likely continue to do so for quite some time and most of all, the House itself, and exactly what made it tick.
“But what is ‘She’?”
Annie’s worried, fluttering hands stilled for a moment in her lap, as she considered the question.
“She’s hard to describe. I can’t see her myself, surprise surprise, but one or two of the occupants can. I think she’s an entity? Not like a ghost or something, more like energy.” Her nose screwed up as she frowned, “Six says she was a powerful witch, one so powerful that when she died her essence didn’t just dissipate. Instead it infused the house, and here we are.”
I’d never heard of anything so powerful that it could do something like this. Yes, possession was a thing and some ghosts were cranky, but this wasn’t just a case of rattling the crockery and lifting the furniture. This was warping what the house even was, forcing it into being something that it wasn’t.
“So,” I could feel my own face screwing up in the brain power it took to comprehend just what she was attempting to explain, “It’s like the House itself is a skeleton, something for this entity to hang its magic on?”
Annie smiled, and tilted her head to one side, and then the other.
“I guess? Sort of. It’s like the inside of the House is its own little pocket universe, and She is its god. I think She just chose a house so it had a physical door of sorts, like a portal. That’s why things move about the place and change, and nothing appears like it should fit inside the extenior. The House itself is a facade. Allie tried to explain it to me once. He said that’s the reason this place is so safe. Because it doesn’t actually exist physically on the street, you step through the door and you can’t be found. Even if whatever is chasing you is able to track you one way or another, it would be like you just stopped existing. Because in a way, you don’t anymore, at least not in the place and time you were when you stepped through.”
For some reason, that last bit twisted my belly in something that almost felt like anxiety. Before I could analyse the feeling though we were interrupted. The bell in the corner of the room, as small and silver as the one fixed above the bedroom beside mine, went ballistic. Not the gentle tinkle I had heard when I had first stepped foot in the house, a sound I had heard many times since, as Alistair and Six dragged back terrified supernaturals. This almost didn’t even sound like a bell. It boomed, a sound far larger and more urgent than the tiny bell should have been capable of producing. Annie clapped her hands over her ears, and then almost as quickly her mouth. In an instant she was on her feet, reaching for my hand. Together we ran. Even not knowing the significance of this sound, I could tell it was not good. Nothing good could come of that sound.
The front door was gaping open when we rounded the corner, and the hall was filled with a throng of Others. Tall and Allie blocked most of the view, with Connie a twitching anxious mess behind them. When Allie bent down, I could see why Connie was so stressed. Annie made a terrified little noise beside me. All we could see for a moment was blood, smeared on the door and the wall. Something had hit the door hard, and then slid along one wall when it swung open. There was a tangle of limbs at the vampire’s feet, and it took my eyes a moment to focus and resolve it into a person. Or two people. The child would have been maybe seven or eight, mouse brown hair turned black with blood. She stared out with huge eyes from the circle of arms that surrounded her, clinging desperately to the one who carried her. The person carrying her was -
“Six!” Annie pushed forward, hands reaching out blindly for the woman sagged in a growing pool of blood on the floor. Connie shot forward and grabbed her, even as Allistair raised a hand to stop her. With gentle fingers, Tall stooped to offer a massive, expansive hand to the little girl. He used the other to push up the mask he wore. Standing behind them, I couldn’t see his face, but something in his expression made the little girl’s face soften and tears well in her eyes. With both tiny hands, she reached up for him, and the Tallman lifted her into his arms while readjusting his mask. The minute her tiny, blood-streaked head hit his chest, she started bawling.
Free of the little girl, Alistair gathered the limp woman into his arms and turned, face grim. He moved almost as if the rest of us didn’t exist, snaking through the growing crowd with a supine grace at a speed that would have had a normal human wetting themselves to see. I couldn’t see much, but the limpness of her form, and the bloodiness of the carpet made the lump grow in my throat from a small ball to an enormous boulder. Surely no normal human could survive such damage.
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