Jacqueline searched the room, picking a brass kitten off the China hutch. She gripped it around its belly, turning it so its point tail and blunted four feet turned out, then straightened her spine. One of her bosses once told her that the secret to projecting confidence is to square your shoulders, look past the person, and think the word murder. She found the last step the easiest at this moment, knowing the threat outside, though Mica had suggested it would not do her any practical good to harm an agent. Even if it were some supernatural monster, Jacqueline did not think she had murder in her blood, something they could potentially smell.
Wick looked in curiosity between Jacqueline's clenched fist and wide, glaring eyes before nodding to Mica to intercede.
"What's your plan there?" asked the steward, a gentle step closer. Mica's height was to her benefit, as she could comfortably fit beneath the laser hatred Jacqueline projected toward the living room.
Jacqueline thought her plan was evident. There was an agent in the other room with Stacy and her father's corpse. She would hit them with a metal kitten as a surprise attack and improvise from there. She doubted it would do them serious harm, but it would show that she wasn't about to be pushed around.
Mica stepped toward her, putting her hand on the kitten, but did not try to remove it. "It's not a great plan."
Jacqueline wondered if Mica could divine how she was visualizing the convolutions of her sneak attack. Mica was a witch and could be assumed to be full of tricks. "What's a better one?"
"You speak with them," said Wick. "It is the only move you have. Learn what they want from you and hope it is reasonable. We will support your decision, but you should know enough to make one."
She had not been immune to their warnings. If the agents had wanted her harmed, they would not need to employ diplomacy. If a street full of them had stepped through the door, they could force whatever issue they wished, but they only stood. They had not even reacted to seeing her.
In the history of the Agency, someone must have bested them. Neither of her companions had cared to tell her those stories. She had not thought to ask, to be fair to them, and doubted they would be up for the rousing tales now that might make her find something more lethal than a paperweight.
Looking toward the living room's threshold, her gaze softened. She could see nothing conspicuously out of order. She envisioned Stacy's body slumping to the ground -- white from her blood drained, green from infection with some poisonous rot, blackened from hellfire -- but the thought melted away.
The agents wouldn't need brutality, and, she admitted to herself as she handed Mica the kitten, her violence against one wouldn't help matters. She could not imagine this repelling the agent in the house, to say nothing of those surrounding.
The steward replaced the knick-knack on the cabinet, rubbing it between its ears as though it were alive and she could soothe it from Jacqueline's rough treatment.
"We'll come," said Mica. "I mean, I'm not thrilled about being in close quarters with an agent, but I'm less excited to step outside the front door and see the horde. Imagine if they were all in the same position but five feet closer? Like they get closer every time we blink?"
"That may not be a helpful thing to imagine," noted Wick.
Jacqueline would not let herself be cowed before some supernatural... whatever. They were beneath her, she told herself under her breath. She was the daughter of a god, wasn't she? True, he was dead, but her lineage should mean something. They were just daemons who couldn't cut it on their own. She had argued with more obnoxious people than an eldritch hive mind.
She strode in, spine straight, shoulders back, and glowered through the thing in the room who was not the nurse, thinking at least maiming if not murder.
They were a dark-skinned, male presenting figure of no more than five and a half feet, their hair a storm cloud of gray and black around a gray homburg. They carried an intricately carved cane in one hand, garnet ants up its shaft. In their mouth was a pipe with a dark metal bowl. They sucked the clay stem, considering her father's body as though it contained a greater mystery. Nothing in the pipe glowed, nor did smoke issue, but the smell of sweet, fresh tobacco surrounded them.
Stacy stood at the bedside. Her father's face was covered. Some of the tubes and wires that had intruded into his body were gone. All the machines were off now.
Jacqueline held her breath, trying to estimate Stacy's anxiety, but it was absent. The nurse wouldn't know about agents and, given the last few hours, might not see cause to question this man's appearance, but her demeanor did not betray any worry. Jacqueline had at once known the threat of the agents on the street, but such fear had not visited the nurse as she continued tending to her final duties.
"What do you want?" Jacqueline said. In negotiations -- as this might well be, though she couldn't imagine what they could want of her -- it was imperative to get the first and last words.
They shifted his eyes to her, an amused twinkle to them that all but disarmed her.
"What I would like," said the agent, "is a little conversation, so things don't have to become" -- they removed the pipe from their lips, pointing the stem toward her like an accusation -- "more unfortunate. I'm dearly sorry for your loss. It hasn't been the first of your life; given your mortality, it won't be the last. Can't say he's in a better place, mind you. Not my pay grade."
She expected something close to a robot, but this agent behaved warmly, their voice unsmoothed by seeming age. She felt she could have a conversation with them, but it made her want that far less. It felt like a trick to put her at a disadvantage.
The agent limped nearer to her but stayed out of reach, leaning heavily on the cane. Did they need it, or was it a prop? She felt she was in a play and did not know her lines.
"They've told you some stories, these two," they said, returning the pipe to his mouth, nodding toward Wick and Mica. Their voice took on a hollow whistle with it between their teeth. "Some of them may be true. For those damn fools out there? No doubt. Me, though? I'm the man who wants to unwrinkle this peaceably."
Mica and Wick whispered behind her, present as moral support -- and perhaps more helpful if it came to that -- but allowing Jacqueline to remain the agent's focus.
"Unwrinkle what?"
Quicker than her eyes could register, they pointed their cane at her chest. All reaction, she flailed backward, away from this weapon, landing on Wick. He bore her as though he had expected her to fall. He set her back to her feet in a move that bordered on rehearsed.
The agent bore a subtle smile on their lips. Not in apology or satisfaction. More appreciation. They lowered the cane with gradualness more like the setting moon than something a human hand could do, let alone one belonging to an entity who looked to be in their seventies, arms more sinew than muscle beneath their sooty gray suit.
"I see how that might have startled," they said. "You've got all we need to suss this out if you wouldn't mind?"
Jacqueline felt a burning prickle again in her chest, reaching toward it to rub it away, but she resisted the urge. They must have been causing it somehow -- was the cane akin to a magic wand? -- and she didn't want to give them the satisfaction of more reaction.
The itch grew hotter and more direct until it was no bigger than her fingernail. She reached down her collar to scratch despite herself, discovering the Herkimer diamond necklace pulsating with an inner fire.
She yanked it off her neck, throwing it at the wall to get it away from her.
The agent limped to the pendant in no rush, lifting it from the floor with their cane. It slid down the shaft until it was in their hand. The agent dangled it before their eyes, admiring the roiling within. The darkness now had an iridescent shimmer and a flickering orange glow.
"You've penned in something fierce. Eighteen faces to it. What's that right there? Bit of water?" they looked at the four others in the living room. "Whose idea was that?"
"No one's," said Jacqueline since she did not trust that her companions or Stacy saw any reason to interrupt. "We picked it up on the way here."
"So, it was you, then."
"No one chose this," she said. "Or Mica did! It was her book."
The agent gave her an escalated version of the look Mica did when discovering to what a degree Jacqueline was ignorant of magic. "The Codex gave you the excuse, but you would end up there anyway, bringing this with you. Don't know how, but you would."
"I didn't put anything in it," Jacqueline said. She could take the blame for the crystal since the agent seemed to want to acquit the steward (maybe out of professional courtesy). Whatever ended up in it wasn't her fault.
"His death, yes. It's in there good. It isn't everything that can kill a god. You can't commit deicide with a stick and rock. Nothing that could kill him could have gotten in here unless it did with you," said the agent. "Aside from the Purging. Probably brought in with some nurse, beneath the notice of his godly protection." They patted the body's shoulder. "That took it out of him, but he couldn't die. Damn near, but isn't that worse, dying without the sacrament of death?"
"That flu did this?" It had passed through Jacqueline as little more than a cold, though she knew the mortality rate of those initially infected had been high. It burned hot and fast, extinguishing itself in weeks.
"Did worse, depending on your perspective. Swelled the ranks of agents, I can tell you that much," said the agent. "Can't say that's to anyone's benefit."
Again, she heard a conference from Mica and Wick. Stacy walked over to join them as though she had something to add or only understood that she didn't wish to appear to be on the agent's side.
"So, I killed him?" asked Jacqueline. "I sat here, spoon-feeding him, and I was murdering him the whole time?"
"Comfort. That's what you gave him." They held the necklace out to her. She would accept it by the cord, but she would not touch the stone. "Typhon, you could say, did the work, only" -- they sucked in their cheeks contemplatively, releasing them with a pop -- "it's a story. I suppose that would be easier for you to digest. Not Typhon embodied, but the story of what one mythic figure did to another."
"It didn't want to come," she said, the memory of the Ferris wheel rushing from her. Time had stretched impossibly since this morning, longer still since she entered this home. "It would have hurt me to stop this."
"Can you imagine the sort of thing that would want to kill any facet of Anubis? What's in there wouldn't have come within ten miles of this house if it could help it," said the agent.
Jacqueline could relate to that now. She meant to attend her father's death, but she didn't think she would be a causal factor in it. She narrowed her eyes at the crystal, sickened that it had been the Trojan horse.
"You've got your father's -- let's call it divinity for the ease of your understanding -- dangling from that cord. You lose it, though? Nothing happens. It is not some precious object, merely a convenient focus." He narrowed his clouded, dark eyes, then waved her off dismissively. "Eh, you don't know anything. It's better that way."
The agent's demeanor overwhelmed her. This person in front of her seemed a distinct species entirely from the mute, unblinking mob she could all but feel surrounding them now. "Are you an agent?"
They chuckled, pointing the stem of their pipe toward her to punctuate their pleasure. "That depends entirely on who you ask, but since you're asking me, no," said the man. "Name's Mr. Oswald. Or I'm telling you it is, and you won't know to call me anything else. I'd prefer dealing with this predicament rather than that mob out there making you piss your britches until you do what they want. They still register ol' Mr. Oswald as a them, but I am absolutely a me."
"And what do they want?" Jacqueline said. It was a relief to return to the point, especially as she hadn't been the one to navigate the conversion back to this.
"The world needs Anubis. It's not like you can just pick someone from the crowd. Not someone who'd want to be Anubis or a part of him--best we do not get into those weeds. This godliness is in the blood, not the mind."
The muscles in Jacqueline's neck pulsed with the tension of this crashing upon her. He wanted her to become her father. She could stand to get into the weeds with that, to know whether she would have a canine head if she said yes, but it hardly mattered. Nothing he could say would cause her to consent to this.
"There are worse offers," Mr. Oswald continued. "The world doesn't need you to do much, only the role filled. There is some ceremonial hooey, but there always is. You get his assets, which include not aging much or at all. That's up to you."
"And magic and such?"
He sucked his teeth. "That was yours already. Humans, I mean. Not you in particular."
"No," said Jacqueline, having heard more than enough. "I have no interest in being a god of any sort. I accept no inheritance. You cannot make me, legally or otherwise." She assumed she must be correct or could convince him with adamance. "I'm allowed, aren't I? You are giving me a choice?"
"Of course I am. It does not matter to me one iota what you decide here," said Mr. Oswald. "No skin off my balls. I was a god long ago before I wasn't. The world had no trouble moving on. Your father still had those who honor him, but they do not believe in him. He is a kitschy statuette on some earth mama's mantle or a jackal-headed enemy in some threadbare pulp movie. Can't imagine the world will be harmed much without this iteration of Anubis for a while. You always get a choice."
"I didn't," Mica protested, her expression affronted.
"All stewards do," said Mr. Oswald as though Mica were being deliberately obtuse. "You could opt to get killed; then, you don't have to be steward anymore."
"That's a shit deal."
"Didn't say it wasn't, but it's a choice."
"So, you offered," said Jacqueline. "I declined. We're done, right?"
He chewed on a stuffed grape leaf. "You and I were done before I set foot in this house. I told you as much. Now, the agents out there might see it a different way."
"How do they see it?"
"Without nuance. There's a hole. Fill the hole or collapse it."
Mica leaned forward, elbows on the table. Her expression remained sour, as well it might after being told her only choice for liberation from stewardship was her murder. "What does it mean to collapse it?"
"Nothing we want, I assure you."
"What do we do?" Jacqueline asked. She did not know that she could trust Mr. Oswald to be acting to her benefit, only that he hadn't done anything to contradict it yet. He was a better repository for her hope than the horde.
"You can get past them if that's what you want. It's not forever, but it might be long enough to produce a better plan."
"How much time would that buy us?"
"Not long." He sucked his teeth. "Twenty years, maybe, until someone makes a big deal. Someone always makes a big deal about something, but how often is it about Egyptian gods? There's probably some relic in the Great Pyramid or some such that would inconvenience you, someone trying to end the world who is going to be put out when Anubis doesn't pop up from their overcomplicated summoning circle."
"Twenty years?" Jacqueline asked, finding this to be more than adequate for an escape.
He waved his finger as though this were the least important part of the conversation. "Thirty, maybe. I'm just spitballing here. Not much grave robbing around the pyramids these days, since the best view is now from a fast-food restaurant and the police tend to do their jobs to keep the tourists happy."
She would be in her fifties or sixties by the end of Mr. Oswald's estimate. She might be naturally dead by then. It seemed to run in her family. "And when they come?"
"You deal with it, whatever that means," he said, sounding upsettingly calm about this. "How long have you known about any of this, your father and such?"
"Not a week," said Jacqueline.
"You would be a little better prepared then. Do you mind us sitting a spell, figuring this out?" said Mr. Oswald. He looked past her. "All of us, since it would irritate me to hear you clucking like hens in the corner while we get to business."
Mr. Oswald did not wait for permission, settling himself in the chair where Wick had sat and, without invitation, picking with bare fingers at the cooling plate there. "You ever had ful?" he asked Jacqueline, food half-chewed and visible. "You can't get a good ful in America, not that I've tasted. You all don't have idras, not good ones, or you're too damned impatient to do it right." He lifted an oily clump of pasta and beans to her. "This kushari? This is good."
Jacqueline sat across the table from him, faintly horrified at his table manners. She pushed a few paper napkins his way, and he ignored the gesture.
The other three sat on her side, watching Mr. Oswald push food into his mouth, not bothering to dislodge his pipe until he was into his fourth handful. Jacqueline appreciated this show of force, having all of them on her side against Mr. Oswald.
"You are going to have to forgive me. The Agency always has eyes on one another. Panopticon. They don't know about me right now," he said, a speck of food escaping his lips. "They know an agent is in here, keeping the others at bay for now. They don't differentiate between one and another, if you follow. So, I'm going to eat while the eating is good since they all don't see a reason for it and would find it curious that I did. They're not given to the more sensual pleasures." He arched an eyebrow to indicate that food was only a fraction of what he missed, though he returned to its rightful place, so Jacqueline did not get the idea that any of them were next on the menu.
He ate with such unnerving gusto that Jacqueline could almost forget the danger at the gates.
"What happens if I go out there?"
"The Agency is a simple animal. They think they are not, that they could not have survived as long as they have -- it is never as robust or long-lived as they believe -- if they were stupid, which they are." He swallowed. She was briefly grateful that she would not have to see the chewed remains of chicken and fish that had been sacred half an hour ago. "So, they see there has been an upset in the balance. When the Purging hit, they went all still and stupider. Quiescent is the ten-dollar word. They didn't care about it until the dust had settled. Since then, they've gotten more insistent with cleaning up these messes." He nodded toward Mica. "Or we get our stewards to work overtime."
"I noticed," said Mica, sulking.
He patted her hand paternally, leaving an outline in mixed sauces on her cave-paled skin. "You're a good girl."
Mica rubbed her hand on the tablecloth despite the presence of napkins, one act of rudeness meeting another.
Mr. Oswald said, "We do it how I want it -- or how you want it by way of how I want it -- or they make you do this."
"What's the play, then?"
He sucked in his cheeks as though tasting them. "You put the death in that crystal? Can't see why you can't bring it out again." He grabbed a napkin from the table, wiping his fingers clean with casual care. "Now, we just need a vessel to represent your father."
Jacqueline did not like the sound of that. "What vessel?"
"Not you, my dear. A scarab will do nicely. Anubis charged it with his power, and it's still loyal," he pronounced. "Beekeepers, you know, have to tell the hives about important events -- births and deaths, that sort of thing. You don't do that, and the hive will stop producing."
Jacqueline found at once the sadness of this. "Houdini doesn't know my father died?"
"Scarabs don't see death the same way you do," said Wick.
"It still belongs to your father," said Mr. Oswald. "His force still is working in that little carapace. You tell -- what'd you call it? -- Houdini that your father is no longer with us. I hazard a guess the bug's eager to do what we need now. His last order was to find and protect you. Getting you out of here fits the bill."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
