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Lady Northcott held up her hand. “I know you’re Lady Hallowell’s consort, and I respect that, but you need to respect our position here too. We know details beyond those records. Do you think we want a catastrophe any more than you do?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But ignoring this doesn’t make any sense. When you look at the facts—”
Brimsey sighed and meandered off in the other direction as if the argument was boring him. I bristled, but at the same time I took in the expressions on the faces of the officials still facing me. Defensive, resistant. Just like I was feeling.
Well, how did they expect me to act when they were ignoring all the research I’d done, all the knowledge I could share, just out of hand?
That thought drew me up short. It was hard not to think of Jin just an hour ago, laying into us for getting stuck in the same old patterns. Telling us to try new angles, step outside what was comfortable.
What if the point here wasn’t all the things I did know that they were dismissing, but the things I didn’t know? Because, if I was being honest, there were probably an awful lot of the latter. This wasn’t my world, no matter how much research material I’d gotten my hands on. I’d only been a part of it, and only in a small way, for a few months.
I took a deep breath and ignored the balking sensation in my chest. I was supposed to be the guy with the answers, the guy the others could count on to know or find the key info that they needed. But going all know-it-all with the Assembly hadn’t gotten me anywhere in the last few days. I could admit the gaps in my knowledge too, couldn’t I?
“I’m sorry,” I said, slower and more evenly than before. “I rushed in, and I don’t have the full picture. It was wrong for me to act as if I did. There’s obviously a lot I don’t understand about the situation. But I want to understand—I want to be in a position to help later if I can. Is there time for someone to explain to me what the issues with closing the portal are?”
“So you can shoot them all down the second you get the gist of them?” Lady Northcott said skeptically.
My face flushed. That was sort of what I’d already been doing. “I swear I’ll listen with an open mind. And mouth zipped.” I drew my thumb across my lips.
Mr. Northcott’s mouth twitched into something that was almost a smile. He glanced at the woman who’d spoken up earlier. “What do you say, Lady Paulson? Did you have any urgent business on your side of things?”
“No,” the woman said, but with a certain amount of hesitation. The way she looked at me was skeptical too.
“Please,” I said. “All I want to do is help, however I can. I was coming at it badly. But I can’t do anything at all if I don’t have all the necessary context. And if you know more about the portal than is in those records… I’m kind of dying to understand this whole situation better, to be honest.”
Lady Paulson’s jaw worked. “All right,” she said, not sounding all that happy with her decision. “Come on. I want to be in my office if any new reports arrive.”
With that underwhelming welcome, I couldn’t say I was all that enthusiastic about the short hike across the building and down to a little office about the same size as the one I’d spent most of the last few days working in. Inside, maps, a large one of the state and several smaller ones with more detail of specific counties, hung on the wall beside a neatly organized desk. A broad whiteboard gleamed on the far wall, the lingering scent of the markers making my nose twitch.
Lady Paulson strode right up to the desk and grabbed a folder off the top of a pile. “You want to understand?” she said. “It’s all here. People I work with have been out in the field observing this creature and the gateway it emerged through from the first moment we knew about the Cliff. Testing them with magic. Collecting every observation they could possibly make.”
“And?” I said, and caught myself before I could point out all the things I already knew. “What have you seen that makes you think the rest of the demons aren’t a threat?”
“Oh, they are,” Paulson said. “They’re just not as great a threat as what will happen if we manage to close the portal while the demon already out is still on the loose.”
I blinked at her. “Okay. I think you’re going to have to lay that out for me step by step.”
She sighed. “You haven’t been close to this thing, have you? What has your consort told you about the impression it gives her?”
Rose’s comments from the few times she’d encountered the demon came back to me easily. “It feels unnatural. Like there’s something justwrongabout it, some kind of dissonance in the energy it gives off. Just being near it makes her queasy.”
Paulson nodded. “We don’t understand very much about the realm these creatures come from, but it’s clearly not one that can exist in harmony with our own. The witches who’ve gone out to study the portal and the Cliff around it, as well as those who’ve been tracking the creature that escaped, have experimented with various sorts of magic and tested the destruction it leaves behind. None ofourinnate energy has the effect we’d expect.”
“That’s why Rose has been so important to the efforts to stop it,” I said. This was all information I already knew, but I reined in my impatience. “Because she has a little of the demon-type energy in her magic.”
“Yes. But the other consequence…” Paulson paused and contemplated me. “With all the reading you’ve done, what do you think would happen if we managed to kill this creature?”
What kind of question was that? “Well, I guess you’d… bury it somewhere?” I said. “Or burn the body? And then we’d be done with it.”
She gave me a crooked smile. “That would work if the demon were a creature of this realm. But as Lady Hallowell has noted, it doesn’t correspond with this world at all. The effects we would expect from an ordinary beast don’t apply.”
“Which means…?”
“One of the initial attempts to stop the demon resulted in a small fragment of its… well, let’s just sayskin… being sliced off. The witch who managed that, it immediately killed.” Paulson gave me a pointed look as if to say I shouldn’t try the same myself and then opened up the folder to a photograph. A ragged bit of dark gray material with a reddish glow around the edges lay on a white surface.
“Dead flesh,” she went on. “As it were. But it would not burn away and it showed no signs of rotting. What itdiddo is deteriorate any surface it was placed on for more than a few minutes. It seared holes in that table. We couldn’t find any material of this world that could consistently contain it.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. If a tiny piece of the demon did that, then what effect would an entire immense corpse have? “What did you do with it?” I asked.
