Page 20 of Practical Boots

And despite the brilliant sunshine, the blood was still wet on the windows.

A tiny, fractured groan caught her attention. She spun back toward the reception desk, seeing what she hadn't seen before: the receptionist she'd spoken with lay behind it, hidden by its size. Blood matted her hair, leaking on to the floor, and her color was bad, even at just a glimpse. Cat ran and knelt at her side, feeling the woman's too-cool skin. "Hey. I've got you now. You're gonna be okay."Practical boots, she thought, so distantly it seemed almost unattached from her at all. The boots had brought her where she needed to be, not where she thought she should go.

"Cat." The woman sounded surprised and confused. "He said he'd find you. That he'd find her."

"Grace?"

She gave a fragile nod and Cat grimaced. "I know you're not supposed to, but can you tell me where she lives?"

The woman shook her head, an effort that clearly cost her. Her eyes rolled back, and after a few, faint breaths, she whispered, "I think…bye…"

"No." Cat's heart clenched furiously and she lifted the woman in her arms, stood, andstepped.

* * *

Steppinginto a busy space was dangerous for a lot of reasons. First, humans didn't like it when magic happened right in front of them. Second, and actually more important in terms of immediate danger,physicsdidn't like it if two objects suddenly decided to occupy the same space simultaneously. Cat used back alleys and remote parks to move in and out of the World, if she had any choice.

This time, though, she stepped directly into an emergency room, and yelled, "Help her!"

The thing happened, the one that always did. People blanched and flinched back, their gazes going every which way, searching for answers to how she'd gotten there. Confusion drew thick lines in their faces and made enemies of their gazes. Their shoulders hunched defensively as they crowded together, instinctively forming a mob to lash out against the sudden unnatural thing in their midst. If that reaction had a name, it was the phrase that came with it, down through all the long centuries:burn the witch!

This once, though, just this once, Cat's burden trumped the primitive fear that awakened in the base of human brains when they saw magic happen. After that first hideous moment, empathy triggered a stronger response than fear,, and there were suddenly voices calling for a gurney, for oxygen, for doctors, for whatever the hell they needed to save the receptionist's life. Someone said, "Excuse me, excuse me! Who is this? What happened to her?" to Cat, who shook her head.

"I found her. I'm sorry. I have to go."

"You can't—you can't—!" The impotent protests followed her as she ran for the door, ran out the door, and before she was safely out of sight of security cameras or prying eyes,stepped.

* * *

The manor she'd grown up in seemed less friendly than ever before, close growing walls stretching for her, as if they could crush her through malevolent will. Cat ran through them, her boots thudding against the floors as she wished she'd daredstepdirectly into her father's office. But if it had beenhers, she would have warded it against just such an incursion, and she didn't want to find out what happened when somebody stepped from the Waste into an unforgiving shield. At best, they'd bounce back into the Waste. At worst…

At worst would be very bad indeed.

But his office wasn't warded against an ordinary entrance through its door. Not against her, at least; not now. She didn't find her father within its curved, living walls, but then, she hadn't expected to. What she needed was a compass. Something to lead her to her father, since she didn't know where Grace lived, and doubted her sibling's mother would think to use the baby rattle.

The truth was, Grace almost certainly would never know she was even in danger, not until it was too late. Cat's father would come in, attractive and flirtatious, and Grace would be under his spell just long enough to give birth to their child. Then, if she was lucky, she would merely be discarded as Cat's own mother had been.

A treacherous thought, one she didn't often let near the surface, crept up: assuming 'discarded' was all thathadhappened to her mother. Banished, sent away from the Torn, exiled; whatever word they wanted to use, Cat mostly had to hold on to the belief that nothing worse had happened.

It got hardertohold on to that belief, with each passing year that she failed to find any hint of where her mother had gone.

Whatever had happened to her mother, Cat wasn’t going to allow it to happen to Grace.

A hair. A hair would do nicely, to find her father with. Deep red, stuck lightly to the back of the chair her father rarely used, it was difficult to see unless you were looking for it, as Cat had been. She coiled it in her palm, and then, about tostepback into the Waste so she could fashion a compass, Cat went still.

She had never in her entire life been alone in her father's inner sanctum. She'd rarely been in it at all, and he tended to absorb the vast majority of her attention when she was, as if she was a rabbit waiting for the snake to strike. The decor had always carried an eerie edge of life-likeness to it, but staring around the room now, she began to see that it told a story. His story: the moments of his life that he deemed important.

Or that perhaps his subconscious did, unconsciously shaping the walls, because here and there in the shadows Cat thought she caught glimpses of herself. Not the whole of her, but a hint there and a curve here that made her think she'd almost seen her reflection in a mirror. They didn't exactly fade when she looked directly at them, but nor did they come any clearer. There were other moments, half-suggested, that made her think of stories people had told her about her father; a stretch that might have depicted a great battle, or a hollow that hid within it a tale of the World.

And there, where itdiddisappear if she looked at it too closely, was a woman's profile. A profile Cat knew, a profile she had memorized as a child and that her Torn-born memory had never let her forget. A profile of a downward gaze, of upswept hair, of—unexpectedly—a fashionable hat from an era gone by. Cat stared at it from the corner of her eye, trying to memorize the whole of the look: a ruffled blouse, a puffed shoulder to the sleeve, all written in the dips and shadows of living wood. She burned that faint image into her mind, unable to place any of it save the profile itself, and, with that half-seen memory locked safely in her imagination, Cat returned to the Waste.

* * *

A coil of hair wound around the stuff of the Waste twisted and reformed until it became a compass, brass and heavy in Cat's hand. Beautiful and almost entirely useless: all it would ever find was her father. With more care and more time, she might have made one that would find anyone, but Cat preferred single-focus Artifacts. Not just because they were easier, but because they were much less dangerous.

Not that the item her father wanted, the one that would allow him to lie, would besafe. But at least no one else would be able to use it. He’d only be able to because they already shared a bond of blood, and because she could shape the Artifact to draw on that bond. The other one he wanted, the object of disguise, would be harder to tie to him and him alone. It would take some thinking, but not now.

For now, she only wanted to follow him back to the World and along whatever path he'd taken to find Grace Law. She breathed that desire into the compass, and light glittered through its clockwork parts, pulling her forward. She stepped, and stepped, andsteppedagain, then stood at the edge of a busy, near-shoulderless road. One step ahead of her lay rushing traffic; one horrifying step behind her lay a canyon, plummeting down plenty far to be terrifying. Cat, overwhelmed with the urge to lie down and whimper, didn't, because she couldn't see how to without getting flattened. A few hysterical heartbeats later, she convinced herself that there was, in fact, enough room behind her to take a cautious step backward without falling to her death. She edged back, letting traffic zoom by, and studied what lay across the road.

---