"What now?" asked the daughter of the dead god.
"You leave this house," answered Mr. Oswald. "You do not return to it until it is stripped bare of his ephemera. I promise that this will be done as efficiently as possible, and you can proceed with more everyday matters at that point. Alternately, this can be done completely beneath your awareness."
"Who is going to do all this?"
The former agent gave a chuckle that did not seem appropriate for standing in the same room as the body Anubis had vacated. "I have associates who can, shall we say, effect this transition. I will take a cut of the proceeds for keeping some of the more suspect of his possessions away from those who would only misuse them."
Mica scoffed, looking more amused than offended. "Wait, you mean money?"
"Of course I mean money. You think I can spend dear Jacqueline's gracious thanks when she gets around to giving them?"
Jacqueline did not feel as though she would soon be in a thankful mood. "Why do you need money?"
"It can't be by magic always. Systems are in place that keeps the world turning, and they spin faster when greased with currency instead of tricks," said Mr. Oswald. "I'm not going to fleece you. It's not in my nature. And what do you care? You didn't want anything bequeathed to you. Now you clutch your pearls over a thirty percent cut?"
"Thirty?"
He clucked his tongue. "Twenty-five if it bothers you so much. My associates do excellent work, and we'll get what it's worth." He leaned close as though a silent film actor miming a confession. "That parts a little magic. No sense standing on ceremony like some witless clod, but no one gets cheated who doesn't deserve to be."
"And I don't deserve to be?" asked Jacqueline, who was emotionally compromised, true, but not so much that she would let herself be manipulated.
"I thrice promise you that I have no intention to cheat you. That'll have to be good enough for you."
Jacqueline turned to her companions, asking what she should do. Wick remained taciturn and unhelpful. Stacy hemmed and hawed.
Mica tugged at her sleeve. Hours ago, Jacqueline might have swatted it from instinct, but she excused herself to the porch with the steward now.
The agents remained stationed on the street. A car weaved around them as though they were traffic cones. The driver did not seem to care how bizarre this was. "He's lying," said the steward.
Jacqueline had already taken this as given. Thrice promising meant nothing to her, though Mr. Oswald thought it would. She did not know this world with the intimacy of Mica and did not wish to if she could help it, but she knew stories enough not to trust someone who appeared with an appealing offer and said he wasn't a cheat. "How? Is he going to feed me to them?"
Mica scrunched her nose in thought. "No, but he is after something more than he is saying."
"If you were him, what would you want from this?" Jacqueline asked though she doubted being a witch had gifted Mica with more insight into paranormal mores than she had as an erstwhile ordinary woman.
"Leverage," came the voice behind Jacqueline's ear, which she thought for a second was the brass kitty's objection.
Mr. Oswald was there, but he was not a moment ago.
"You are clever women. I'll have to give you that." He bit the stem of his pipe. "Clever, clever women. Or paranoid about the inherent goodness of a kind gesture in a wicked world." He chuckled, making clear which was truer.
"Do you want my father's divinity?" Jacqueline said. Nothing else seemed worth all this pageantry.
He recoiled as though he'd walked face-first into a wasp. "I could offer some coarse words, but I will distill them down to: I would rather swallow my pipe whole. But I have no aversion to having the agents think I have it." He leaned an arm against the porch door. "I can't say I have a plan for what to do with that lie. Maybe nothing, but there is value enough in having it in your pocket."
"Why wouldn't you want it?" No one had seemed more suspicious in all the mysteries she had ever watched. Mr. Oswald might not be the killer in some potboiler, but his hands would not be clean.
He sniffed, a sound Jacqueline found animalistic, as though he were snuffling if she were dangerous. "I've been on that echelon. This world is not built for godly intervention. I am only too thrilled to manipulate behind the scenes and enjoy my wine, women, and song."
"But you want to buy the house and everything in it?"
He turned back to her. "Can't buy wine with my seductive smile." He gave her one of these, and Jacqueline couldn't argue. His smile was both avuncular and lecherous at once. "Now, the women and song, that's another matter."
She could tell him no, and that might have been good enough. She had the Herkimer diamond. She could take Houdini's remains -- she would have no matter what else happened, feeling it deserved better to remain her, dead on dead. She did not know when Mr. Oswald would stop her, if he would.
She was not without the power to deny him, but she opted to take a leap of faith and trust him.
"Walk me through what I do here?"
"You want out there, head held high, and you leave."
She gathered Mica and Wick behind her, then stood on the porch, looking at the gauntlet before her.
She clutched the deceased scarab in one hand and the crystal in another. The latter felt alive, warm and throbbing, but that may have only been her extreme attention to it, feeling the reflection of her pulse as she gripped it. She held Houdini's remains lightly, wishing just for a twitch from it that would not come. Its legs curled in now, only a departed bug and no longer anything connected to godliness. It was vermin, something she would have swept into a dustpan or gathered in tissue instead of letting it touch her skin.
She wanted to walk down the stair, head held high as told, daring the agents to throng her so that she could... she wasn't sure. She assumed she could come up with some plan should it happen.
She could manage a furtive step, then another step, looking at the creatures only from the corner of her eyes. She did not know what she would do should they move at all. Returning to the house would be as effective as hiding her head beneath her bedsheets; they would think nothing of entering and had only refrained because of their assumption of Mr. Oswald being one of them. She trusted that the agents could get to her wherever she might be if they assumed she had something they wanted of her. She tried to trust a fraction more that they would not, remembering the vision of the jackal no one else had seen.
She had a pang of anxiety that Mr. Oswald had lied, that he was to bait her into performing this final ritual and induce her to exit without any protection. She could not know all the etiquette of this world and had only, in a metaphorical sense, learned which was the salad fork and which the soup spoon. However, her companions accepted it, so she did.
The agents did not move to acknowledge her any more than they had the bicyclist, and she did not dare to press the issue.
She looked back to caution her companions to likewise act as though they ignored the agents, but they were doing it better than she could. They knew the nature of these things. Though she didn't need them to explain to her to play ignorant, she wouldn't have found the reminder impolite.
Three agents stood around Wick's roadster. Two were tall -- impossibly so, such that they loomed beyond their shadows, visible even in the night -- and one was squat and could have passed for a human being if they had not dressed as the others. The latter revolted her most, which could have easily tricked her into relaxing her caution.
They were not guarding the car, nor would it be impossible to negotiate around them with a bit of finesse, but they were an obstacle she could not accept now when speed seemed essential. They stood with the same fixated scatteredness as the other agents, gazing at the house for something Jacqueline could not know for sure was there.
Should Wick tap one of them with a bumper, would that not be as good as alerting them all? She had no evidence that he would be so careless but could not free herself of the fear.
Jacqueline and her companions gathered in the car. A sigh of relief escaped her lips before she could stop it. If only she had Wick's composure or Mica's magical instinct, she would not have been so lax in her control. Mica went rigid, her hand tight on Jacqueline's shoulder.
Wick went through the motions of starting the car. With graceful effort, he weaved through the agents in a way that would have passed as hilarious had Jacqueline watched it from the outside.
When they were at the stop sign, she felt brave enough to chance a look in the rearview mirror. The agents remained fixed.
No, one turned, looking like a cardinal-haired girl of thirteen years. Jacqueline could not see their eyes enough to guess if the agents had spotted them. She did not alert Wick of what she had seen. She was foolhardy enough to turn in her seat as though to check on Mica, focusing past her. The agent looked again at the house, their posture no different than it had been.
"Where to?" asked Wick.
Jacqueline relaxed her hands now, letting bug and gem both tumble into her lap. "Home?"
"Is the journey over?" prompted Wick, which she took to mean that it wasn't.
"We came, he died, and a lot of spooky bullshit happened. How is it not over?" asked Jacqueline. "I did more than was required of me."
Turning down another street as though he knew the way, Wick nodded toward the content of her lap.
These could not return with her. They could have belonged to her as a birthright, but she had not wanted that. Neither the miniature carcass -- which would not rot, she knew, but only dry out -- nor the crystal's contents had a place in her mundane life. They were not her trophies.
Jacqueline shut her eyes tightly against the starry night.
"I need a tiny, secluded church," she decided. "Do you know of one?"
Wick gave a slight, satisfied nod. "I believe I can accommodate that."
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.
