Chapter 186 Another New Year's Day
POV: Callum | The Feral Den, New Year's Eve
Three years ago tonight my father was still alive and I was someone else, a version of myself that I cannot fully reconstruct from the inside because the person you were before the thing that changed you is always slightly hypothetical in retrospect, assembled from evidence rather than memory.
Three years. I am thinking about what three years means while standing in the Feral Den with five hundred people moving around me, which is not a number I intended and which is the number anyway, the packless community and the Rookeries regulars and the volunteers and the rescued wolves and the hybrid children's guardians and Tom's network and Cormac, who is leaning against the bar with the expression he has developed over the past year that I have decided to call settled, because it is not happy exactly but it is the expression of someone who has stopped fighting themselves, which in Cormac is the closest thing to peace I expect to see.
Three years ago I had forty wolves. I have five hundred and nineteen now, which means something about the Rookeries and something about the war and something about what people do when they have been shown that organizing is possible, that the thing they assumed was fixed is not fixed.
The hybrid children are in the shelter under Isla's watch and they are not at this party because Isla correctly assessed that fifty adults in an enclosed space drinking and being loud was not the right environment for children who are still relearning what safe feels like. Ash sent a message through Estella that said, verbatim, tell Callum we'll celebrate when it's actually over, which is the most reasonable position anyone has taken all evening and which made me laugh in the specific way that only Ash's pragmatism manages.
Valentina is here. She is standing at the far edge of the room in the way she stands in all rooms, which is with full awareness of every exit, and she is watching the party with an expression that is not quite removed and not quite present, the expression of someone who has spent the past three months hunting one target across the entire city and who has not yet worked out how to put that down for a single evening. She has not found Fell. She has not found the embryo. She has not stopped moving toward both.
Cormac's son is in Scotland. Cormac knows this with the specific quality of knowledge that is also a wound, the kind that is not getting better exactly but is getting more familiar, which is its own kind of improvement.
Parliament is divided in the way Parliament has been divided for two years, half moving toward Alteroni's reforms and half moving away from them, with the specific exhausted stubbornness of institutions that know they need to change and cannot work out how to do it without admitting that the previous version was wrong. Alteroni's first three reforms have passed. The next four are in committee. The four after that nobody is talking about yet in official sessions, though in unofficial sessions they are all anyone is talking about.
The Hermetic Order has four facilities destroyed and one remaining. The one remaining is Fell's, and Fell's is mobile in the specific way that a person running a program out of portable preservation equipment can be mobile, which is to say it could be anywhere and we have one lead and that lead is Jack, who found an Order mage's documents two weeks ago and who has been sitting on the location for reasons I have not yet extracted from him but which I intend to extract before the week is out.
Mordaunt is weakened. Politically, financially, in terms of the specific credibility that the Covenant observers are quietly dismantling by being present at every Parliament session and taking notes. He is still dangerous. Weakened dangerous is not the same as neutralized, it is just a different kind of threat, one that operates through patience rather than power, and patience is the resource I am most concerned about him having.
I pick up a glass. Tom is beside me, Cormac on the other side, Valentina crossing the room toward us with the deliberate movement of someone who has decided to be present for this specific moment even if she cannot be present for the rest of the evening.
"To survival," I say.
"To the children," Tom says.
"To the fight," Cormac says.
We drink.
Outside, I will learn later, Fell is standing in the street with his hands in his coat pockets looking at the light coming out of the Feral Den's windows with the expression of someone who has spent a year being outmaneuvered and who has decided that this year is going to be different.