36

I went to Underhill next morning at sunrise, and Cobb was waiting for me. He took me back to his territory in a sullen silence. Apparently he was still angry with me about the conversation last night. Once he had gotten me to his place and into the phone booth room, I stopped and waited until he turned to face me. He started to speak, but I started first. “I know we should have said it last night, but everything was still too unsettled for any of us to think clearly, so I want to say, “thanks for helping us out with that creature.”
Cobb looked at me and I smelled a satisfaction come from him like pine. “You are quite welcome Ms Fatelli, now if you would please update me on your progress, I would be most interested as what you have found so far.” He said with a smile and a slight bow to me. Well, if he was going to be so accommodating, I suppose I could live with the situation until the job was done. “Thanks, now let me start with what we found in the books.....”
For about fifteen minutes I gave him a detailed outline of the data we found and how the aging spell was found and counter-spell ed by Fawn's on-staff wizards. He listened with apparent interest, even asking a few questions about the spell and a little more on how it was extracted. I didn't know the details but told him I'd ask Fawn about it, and she would ask the wizards, and get back to me.
He leaned back against the wall he been standing next to as I detailed the information for him, and crossed his arms. “Very interesting report Ms. Fatelli”, he said when I finished. “Now, do you have any idea of the creature that attacked you?” “None at all”, I answered him. The memory of the fear it generated around itself made me rub my arms for comfort. “Do you wish help in driving it away?” He said that in a peculiar way, as if there was something of a ritual in asking. I looked sharply at him, and saw the hunger in his eyes for a moment, and I went cold.
Fawn had seen something, but she got it wrong. I could feel his eyes boring into me, almost willing me to say yes so that he could claim something he wanted. And he wanted it so very much. I could smell the need coming off of him like a thick wave of musk. How had he kept this consuming hunger under iron control before? Or was it something that was new? Something he just had discovered? Regardless, he wanted an answer now.
“I can manage the creature, I'm certain, and I have to finish the service you so neatly maneuvered me into, so no I do not desire help in dealing with the creature.” I told him. He reacted with an enigmatic look, and he accepted the answer with a quiet, stiff bow. “Very well, Ms Fatelli, I will leave you to your work. Please keep me accurately apprised of your progress.” he said with almost no inflection at all. Whatever he was feeling and thinking, he buried deep suddenly.
“Yes, I shall do so”, I said, and suddenly I wanted out of Underhill very badly. The place now had the feel of a prison rather than a place to visit. Cobb smelled like dust, and death. I caught a very faint whiff of rotting meat under the dust, and this change caused me to think of Cobb as dangerous to me. I had thought him manipulative and petty, but not truly dangerous, not until I smelled him this time.
I kept myself firmly under control until I got back to my car and then I threw it open and scrambled in and drove wildly away. Cobb had scared me at the end, and I needed time to sort out what had changed, and try to figure out why. I didn't need this. I was going to take on a very dangerous spell soon, and that needed all the concentration I could give it. We had to be subtle, and the power of the spell would be anything but if we didn't control it absolutely.
“It isn't going to work.” Larry shouted, then threw his fistful of papers at the wall in his work room. They splashed against it, and scattered, then drifted down like large white snowflakes. Larry muttered something unintelligible, and then started picking them up. “Why not? We know how to do the spell, we've got the echo of what was there before, and we've got enough wizards signed on that we can do the work in shifts like you suggested. So why isn't it going to work?”
“Because no matter how slow we go with it, a spell that big is going to be noticed. We need a powerful spell to hide the effects and I don't know of anyone here in Halifax that has any idea of how to quiet a spell with a spell. Hell, I don't know how, and until we can, there's no way I'm going to let anyone risk casting it.”
I grimaced in frustration. We had a solution, but without a solution to keeping the spell quiet, we were no better off than when I first was forced into service. I didn't want to talk to Cobb about it, knowing he would offer help again, but I didn't wan his help. There was a feeling there of knowing that accepting his help would come with expectations and consequences. I hated the first and was worried what the second might be. I had resolved never to find out if I could help it.
Cobb had gone from irritating to downright scary over the last week as we got the materials together. His demands for updates to the situation were now daily, and his eagerness was very unsettling. More I was thinking past the service when I could get away rather than focusing on surviving. That could be lethal, especially with the spell we were trying to cast. There had to be a way to silence the spell. There was, but it meant looking up something that had haunted me for years. I could try finding the entity of the dark. Really, it was one of the last things I wanted to do in this lifetime. However, those things are precisely the things that find you when you least want them to.