Nest finished the last of her orange juice and stood up. Tatterdemalions were strange, even as fairy creatures went. She tried to imagine what it must be like to be Ariel, to have lived without experiencing a childhood anal with no expectation of ever becoming an adult, to know you would be alive only a short time and then be gone again. She supposed the concept of time was a relative one, and some creatures had no concept of time at all. Maybe that was the way it was with tatterdemalions. But what would it be like to live your entire life with the memories of dead ,children, of lives come and gone before your own, to have only their memories and none of your own?
She gave it up. She would never be able to put herself in Ariel’s place, not even in the most abstract sense, because she had no reference point to help her gain any real insight. They were as different as night and day. And yet they both served the Word, and they were both, in some sense, creatures of magic.
Nest stopped thinking about it, went back to her room, brushed her teeth, put on her heavy windbreaker and scarf, and went out to greet the day.
She had looked up the address to Fresh Start and consulted a map of Pioneer Square, so she pretty much knew where she was going. The map was tucked in her pocket for ready reference. She walked down First Avenue, retracing her steps from the night before, until she reached the triangular open space where she had heard the death screams of the demons victims. She stood in the center of the little concrete park and looked around, No one acted as if anyone had died. No one seemed to think anything was amiss. People came and went along the walk-workers., shoppers, and tourists. A few sad-looking homeless people sat with their backs to the walls of buildings fronting the street, holding out handlettered cardboard signs and worn paper cups as they begged for a few coins. The former mostly ignored the latter, looking elsewhere as they passed, engaging in conversations that kept their eyes averted, acting as if they didn’t see. In a way, she supposed, they didn’t. She thought that was an accurate indicator of how the world worked, that people frequently managed to find ways of ignoring what troubled them. Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe that was how the demon got away with killing homeless people; everyone was ignoring them anyway; so when a few disappeared, no one even noticed.
Maybe that was the cause that John loss had taken up in joining forces with Simon Lawrence. Maybe that was his passion now that he was no longer a Knight of the Word. The thought appealed to her.
She walked on, doing her best to turn away from the gusts of cold wind that blew at her. Winter was corning; she didn’t like to think of her world turning to ice and snow and temperature drops and wind-chill factors. She didn’t like thinking of everything turning white and gray and mud-streaked. She glanced bark at the people begging. How much worse it would be far them.
At the corner of Main, she turned east and walked through a broad open space that was marked on her map as Occidental Park. It wasn’t much of a park, she thought. Cobblestones and concrete steps, with a few shade trees planted in squares of open earth, a scattering of bushes, a few scary totem pales, same benches, and a strange steel and Plexiglas pavilion. Clusters of what looked to be homeless were gathered here, many of them Native Americans, and a couple of police officers on bicycles. She followed the sidewalk east and found herself at the entrance to an odd little enclosure formed of brick walls and iron fencing with a sign that identified it as Waterfall Park. The space was flied with small trees, vines, and tables and chairs, and was backed by a thunderous man-made waterfall that cascaded into a narrow catchment over massive rocks stacked up against the wall of the building it attached to.