Houdini stood on the table next to a morsel of maroon food its size, discarded by Mr. Oswald in his frenzy for a satisfying meal outside judging eyes. Jacqueline had not summoned the scarab. It buzzed in from the other room, where it had been nestled safely in the hoodie she had cast aside for more somber clothing to suit the occasion.
She wished Houdini had stayed put or at least had the basic decency to keep hidden until she hesitated to unearth it. If it were reluctant, she could better pity what they were about to do. She could not fail to notice that the scarab seemed as eager now as it had when she first grasped that it wanted to communicate. Had that been only yesterday?
It remained a struggle to imagine complicated emotions without facial features, but she imposed enough of her feeling, projecting a puppyish enthusiasm on Houdini to torture herself further. She'd had to put down an old cat when its liver became riddled with tumors. She felt worse about sacrificing a bug she had known for a few days, during which she had thrown it out of a window, put it in a cage, and dropped it in the toilet. She doubted that her relationship with the scarab was intended to be friendship, but she had been a terrible friend for Houdini to have.
She did not need this loyalty and pity. She couldn't say she felt as much for her father.
Houdini crawled over her hand, the barbs of his tiny legs making her itchy as he stumbled up her arm to summit her shoulder. It stopped near her neckline. She wished him to bite her so she would have the excuse not to pretend she cared dearly for him.
"They are not long-lived," Mr. Oswald said, dismissive of her hesitation. "Didn't anyone ever tell you not to invest yourself in anything that gives up the ghost before the year is out?"
"Yeah, but I did not think I would directly be the cause of it dying." She had lost the others through neglect, defense, or understanding that she could not stop them. Houdini had stuck around. She had expected that, having come this far, having made it into her father's house, it wouldn't have to meet the same fate as its siblings.
"It is better that you do not think of this as killing the scarab," said Wick, but she heard the rhetorical wiggle room. She wouldn't call him on this. His clarification, no matter how well-meaning, could only hurt.
"Why are you helping me?" asked Jacqueline Mr. Oswald, partly to delay the inevitable but also because the question had been prickling her.
"Is it a shock strangers want to help you? Has our young Wick not been of assistance to you? Sweet little Mica?"
Jacqueline said nothing, but it was a heavy nothing. Mica scoffed that anyone would ever have the galls to use these adjectives for her, grumbling that he would not get the chance to do it twice, no matter how big he believed his balls to be.
"I'm not a fan of the agents," said Mr. Oswald, as though it were a dare. "The reasons are mine to know. Suffice it to say, I enjoy foiling their worst plans."
What part did Jacqueline have in the agents' worst plans? Given this world, could this be near the top of that list? She still did not fully grasp what the agents wanted out of her. She knew what Mr. Oswald said. Of everyone in the house, he was the likeliest to know. He also claimed the largest chip on his shoulder about them, eclipsing even Mica's resentment that the agents had some indirect hand in making her a steward. She did not know that Mr. Oswald's claim was the whole truth but suspected no force on earth could get this out of him. "So, you are on the side of the angels?"
Wick and Mr. Oswald gave her the same look of horror and warning, as though she were in a slasher movie, and suggested they split up and investigate different rusty machete sheds after disrobing.
"I don't want to hear that word again for another decade," Mr. Oswald admonished. "Too much death, too many fires to step on. A real pain in my rump."
A being who detested angels wasn't implicitly a demon, but it did seem to push him farther from the benevolent theological team.
"You have to admit, the forces that rule this world groomed you well to assume his role, thinking there are just angels and demons out there," said Mr. Oswald, appreciating her shape in a way devoid of sexuality yet still objectifying.
"Groomed me? No one groomed me for anything."
"Let me guess. You work in law enforcement? Something like that?"
"I was prelaw," she granted but did not like even a sideways agreement with him.
He clucked his tongue happily, turning to Mica. "Is she the judgmental sort?"
"She did call me an asshole," said the steward. "In her defense, I am occasionally an asshole."
"And is she fixated on rules?"
Jacqueline did not want to hear Mica confess to more of her flaws. "I do not like when people are rude. Is that a crime?"
"Judgy," he said, grinning. "The world is not a simple spectrum, nature or nurture. You come from both -- them and more. With a different house, you go to a different school, you learn different things, you make different friends. You are still you, no matter. You could be raised on the damned moon, and you'd still be Anubis's daughter."
"She would be very dead, though," noted Mica.
"Indeed, she would, so best that she was raised where she was and gave me the side-eye when I ate with my fingers, as is only natural to her."
Jacqueline's immediate urge was to pronounce them all rude, though she couldn't now. They had backed her into a conversational corner.
She wanted to keep postponing the rite, knowing its lethal outcome. She brushed her thumb against Houdini's carapace, attempting overdue affection she did not mean. The more she desired to put it off entirely and ask them for a fallback plan that kept Houdini alive in this escape, the more she knew she could not avoid it. "I don't suppose this is another ritual that my being Anubis's daughter gets me out of?"
"Quite the opposite, my dear," said the former agent. "Without you, the whole thing is skunked. No one in this room can handle your father's divinity but you."
Mr. Oswald did not need the preparation Mica did. He suggested no conjurations or spells ("childish ramblings," he proclaimed), but basic directions.
"Put the pendant on the body. Put the scarab on the crystal," he said. "Then step your ass back for the light show."
She obliged. Nothing happened and continued for long enough that she felt silly and wondered if Mr. Oswald was playing a trick on her.
Then, from the air over her father's chest, the basalt head of a jackal glowing stygian blue bloomed. Its eyes, those of a curious predator, focused only on Jacqueline. The head, its long neck terminated an inch above the body's chest, shifted to one side, its long ears quirking forward like a friendly dog. This jackal looked more like a greyhound than it did the longer-furred genus she remembered in biology textbooks. She expected its snarled keening. When it didn't, she waited for it to speak in her father's voice and dispense overdue advice, but it did not do this either.
It fractured into slices, each overlapping in contrasting spirals, then collapsed to the point of the crystal.
Jacqueline clutched at her chest as though she might catch her breath in her hands. She looked at them, expecting them to be equally amazed by this vision, but they didn't.
"None of you saw that?" she demanded. "Mr. Oswald, you said it would be a light show. You had to have seen--"
"Your father meant that for you, young lady. Whatever you saw was yours alone, gift or curse though it may be."
She didn't know what the hell a photorealistic canid head was supposed to do for her, conveying no more information than a mirage. It seemed an insult that even the most supernatural people in the room were blind to it. What good was something that weird if witnessed alone?
All that remained of this visitation was Houdini, hovering above the crystal on the body's covered chest. Its wings flapped, but it was difficult for her eyes to follow whether they kept it aloft or something else held him in the air.
The crystal kept roiling, a speck, a lump of coal threatening to extinguish. Jacqueline would not get closer to it than she needed for fear the jackal would reemerge, but she couldn't deny that it compelled her eye. Its glow spread, the white of her father's sheet reflecting it upward. The tableau seemed silly; something easily faked with glowing paint and a rubber cockroach on a string.
Houdini dropped. Not as though it stopped flying, but that it stopped everything. Gravity seemed twice what it should, the impact audible even at her distance.
"You all saw that, though?" she asked.
Stacy confirmed she had. The nurse was the least magical of them, so it was as good as answering for the rest.
"It's done?" Jacqueline asked. After her father's death, she couldn't be sure. This insecticide was the more dramatic of the two.
"As done as it is getting," said Mr. Oswald.
"Houdini's dead?"
"Dead enough for our purposes," said Wick, "but it may be bold to call something as sacred as it ever alive."
Mica held the dead bug between her fingers, her expression some inscrutable mix of disgust and awe. Neither seemed wholly warranted. As Jacqueline's urge toward the extinguished scarab, the only one she had cared to name, was being distraught, she did not have it in her to police another's reaction.
"It's a matter of checking a box, a form signed in that creature's sacrifice," said Mr. Oswald, standing beside her as though he might hug her or lean on her shoulder for support but doing neither. "It's a bureaucracy. Until it is audited, they will consider it good enough."
"So, the world doesn't need an Anubis, only some paperwork?"
He twirled the cane on its base, thinking through the phrasing as though translating from a language none of them could speak, one with alien grammar. "It needs Anubis. More than the myth. It needs the repository. The cosmic balance requires someone staffing those scales. Gods exist beyond his pantheon, whose function is similar. Syncretism, you see. We can suffer without him today and a thousand tomorrows. Our scope is a myriad, and mortal life is only a blink of an eye."
"And your agents will be fooled?" She needed him to say yes -- that and nothing more.
"They are fools, but they are not mine," said Mr. Oswald. "I can't see why it wouldn't work."
Jacqueline was satisfied that Mica said, "That was conspicuously not a yes."
"And it won't be. You don't get to be my age hanging on definitives. Maybe it won't work. You go out there, and every one of them lurches toward you. It's not the end of the world; I've seen a few of those." He patted Jacqueline's shoulder. "You'll do fine."
"I don't see how dozens of agents lurching toward me is 'fine.'"
He sucked his pipe. "Indeed, you don't."
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.
