It is good to have a success under my wings, even with all the worries that remain. For this I have to thank Ophell, Ananiah, Inca, Eburnean, Brid, and my new friend Erendura, whose courage in the face of strange circumstances impressed me to no end. I would never have been able to do it without you.
Erendura is a Fortune, and I admit that before I requested her assistance I did not know the richness of their discipline. Luck, my siblings, is not a simple thing. Just as Readers must use their arts to divine the possible consequences of human choice, a Fortune has to judge the many forking paths that chance may take with things that make no conscious choices. They must look at the world and gauge what will happen if a leaf falls to the left side of its tree or to the right, or what impact a single raindrop might have on those who walk the sidewalk where it lands. Through this web of infinity do the Fortunes walk, twitching its threads to bring goodness rather than trouble.
According to Brid, who befriended Erendura a few months ago, Erendura is particularly deft at her craft. And she has a boldness that was necessary, because in the trap that we set for our prey, she was the bait.
Over the past few days, Erendura has spent every possible moment at the publication office, bringing as much good luck as she could within its walls. It is truly amazing what she can do! Alysse found fifty dollars in her desk that she’d misplaced weeks ago, and Sarah recovered the drawing by her daughter which had fallen behind the radiator, and Freya’s friend Sylvie finally got up the courage to talk to her boss about a raise—which she received—and they finally got a cappuccino machine for the office. Everyone has been more productive in the past week than they were in the past month.
Meanwhile, outside, tires have blown, windows have been smashed, and one young man came home to find his dog had been run over.
I wanted to chase after the culprit of all this misfortune, but I was patient. We needed the creature to believe that Erendura alone was the solution we had chosen to use, to make it arrogant enough—or at least irritated enough—to come within our reach.
This afternoon, it did.
I had been keeping my distance, wanting the creature to catch no hint of my aura. Instead I had Inca and Eburnean nearby, while I, Ophell, and Ananiah watched from heaven. I was taking no chances with either Erendura’s safety or Freya’s. Naturally, I was anxious at the separation, and so was Freya, though she did not quite understand why.
Kara was there, too, discussing the plan for her next book, and she noticed Freya’s mood. “What’s with you, Cobb?” she asked, setting her phone down on Freya’s desk. “You’re real jumpy today.”
Freya rubbed her eyes, and I could see her trying to put her sensations of danger and wrongness into words. In the end, she only said, “It’s been a weird week. Come on, let’s take a break. Want a cappuccino?”
“Am I breathing?”
They went to the break room, chatting about wedding plans, and got their cappuccinos, but since Alysse and Sarah were in there loudly disagreeing about a sports team, they decided to go back to Freya’s office.
The break room is on the second floor; Freya’s office is on the first. There are two stairwells in the building. They had taken the nearer one to go up, but on their way back, another editor had just dropped a large box of papers all across the stairs. He refused their offer of help—“your coffee will get cold and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone”—and so they went down to the second stairwell. Moments before, one of the assistants had spilled her own coffee all across the top steps, and she wasn’t yet back with two fistfuls of paper towels from the bathroom.
None of this was coincidence. Erendura had just withdrawn an hour ago, and Hazards work very quickly.
As Freya and Kara came into the stairwell, a thin, cold finger prodded Kara, reminding her of a question she had. “Oh, hey, Frey,” she said, and in the middle of a step down, Freya glanced back at her.
I was there between one heartbeat and the next. I clapped Freya’s hand onto the railing, so that her slip was only a few inches. As she exclaimed and jumped back to safety, I met the Hazard’s widening eyes.
It tried to flee, but I seized it at the joint of its wings and hefted it right off its feet. It squealed, struggling. Truly an unfortunate creature, it was big-bellied and woefully ugly, its lower lip protruding and its eyes darting.
“And did Asoharith send you, as well?” I asked, giving it a shake.
“Oh, please, please,” it begged. “Just a little bit of bad luck, it never hurt anyone, please—”
“You could have killed Freya,” I snarled. “You put a great deal of effort in to at least hurt her. That, I cannot and will not forgive.” I handed the creature over to Ophell and Ananiah. They have since told me that it confessed to being sent by Asoharith, and that harrying Freya’s coworkers was her idea—she is getting more subtle, which worries me.
Freya and Kara had made it back to Freya’s office safely, but Freya still hadn’t said anything when I joined them. As I came into the room, she took a deep breath as if she hadn’t in some time.
“You sure you’re okay?” Kara asked, frowning at Freya. “You still look kinda spooked.”
Freya didn’t answer immediately. “Kara,” she said finally, and she looked down at her hand, “did you see me grab the railing?”
“Yeah, and good thing you did or you’d have busted your butt or worse.”
“Yeah, but…” Freya stopped, and I could see her thinking over the stream of events. She did not remember reaching out for the railing—only the moment that her slip was suddenly stopped by the tightness of her grip. In that moment she had felt not relief but confusion and a bit of fear, as if her hand had moved on its own accord—which in a way it did.
Before I could say anything, there was a knock on the door, and Phoebe, the offending assistant, poked her head in, still clutching a paper towel in one hand. “Hey, Freya, I am so sorry, I should have let someone know about that spill. Are you okay?”
Freya looked up at her. “Yeah, of course. No harm, no foul.”
Phoebe exhaled heavily. “I swear it, this place is cursed lately!”
“Not anymore,” Freya said.
They were all puzzled by the words—Freya wasn’t even certain why she had said it. But she knew it was true. She made some excuse, sent Phoebe away to clean up the mess, and went back to work, but that strange surety stayed with her the rest of the day: that something had changed, and for the better. This did not reassure her as it might have because it came with a sense that there is much she does not know.
This will bother Freya, I’m sure of it. She has never liked being out of touch or uninformed. She will go looking for answers, and I am not sure what she may find.
Perhaps it’s time for me to go looking for some answers of my own.