“Whoa, wait a minute!” Pick straightened abruptly, suddenly all business. His twiggy finger stabbed the air in her direction. “Are we talking about Findo Gask?”
“We are.”
“Well, you can stop right there!” Pick threw up his hands. “What do I look like, anyway? I’m just a sylvan, for goodness sake! I don’t have that kind of magic! You’ve got a real live Knight of the Word living under your roof. Use him! He’s got the kind of magic you’re talking about, the kind that can strip the skin off a maentwrog in the blink of an eye. What do you need with me when you’ve got him?”
“Will you calm down and listen to me for a minute?” she demanded.
“Not if the rest of the conversation is going to be like this!” Pick was on his feet, arms windmilling. “I’m a sylvan!” he repeated. “I don’t fight demons! I don’t charge off into battle with things that eat me for lunch! All I do is take care of this park, and believe me, that’s work enough. It takes all of my energy and magic to handle that little chore, Nest Freemark, and I don’t need you coming around and asking me to conjure up some sort of. ..”
“Pick, please!”
“… half-baked magic that won’t work on the best day of my life against a thing so black…”
“Pick!”
He went silent then, breathing hard from his tirade, glaring at her from under mossy brows, practically daring her to say anything more about the subject of demons and sylvan magic.
“Let me start over,” she said quietly. “I don’t really expect you to conjure up antidemon magic. That was a poor choice of words.”
“Humph,” he grunted.
“Nor do I expect you to sacrifice your time and energy in a cause where you can make no difference. I know how hard you work to protect the park, and I wouldn’t ask you to do something that would jeopardize that effort.”
Her attempt at calming him seemed to be working, she saw. At least he was listening again. She gave him her best serious-business look. It wasn’t all that hard considering what she had to say. She told him about what had happened during the snowstorm, with the disappearance of Bennett Scott and the attack by the black thing hiding in her basement. She told him about Wraith coming out to defend them, and of his struggle with their attacker.
“Findo Gask, for sure!” Pick snapped. “You can’t mistake demon mischief for anything but what it is.”
“Well, you’ll understand then when I tell you I am more than a little on edge about all this.” She relaxed a hair, but kept her eye on him, waiting for his mercurial personality to undergo another shift. “I can’t have this sort of thing hanging over my head every time I walk through the door. I have to find a way to prevent it from happening again. John Ross says he should take the gypsy morph and leave Hopewell. But if he does that, we lose all chance of finding a way to solve its riddle. It will last a few more days, then break apart and be gone. The magic will be lost forever.”
Pick shrugged. “The magic might be lost anyway, given the fact that no one knows what it is or how to use it. Maybe Ross is right.”
Now it was Nest’s turn to glare. “So you think I should just give up?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“All I should worry about is helping you in the park? The rest of the world can just be damned?”
He grimaced. “Don’t swear. I don’t like it.”
“Well, I don’t like the idea of you giving up! Or telling me to give up, either!”
“Will you calm down?”
“Not if you’re telling me you won’t even try to help!”
“Criminy!” Pick was back on his feet, shuffling this way and that on the narrow ledge of her shoulder. “All right, all right! What is it you want me to do?” He wheeled on her. “What, that is, that doesn’t involve antidemon magic?”
She lifted her hands placatingly. “I’m not going to ask you to do anything I know you can’t.” She paused. “What I want you to create is a kind of early-warning system. I want you to spin out a net of magic and throw it over my house so that the demons can’t come in again without my knowing it.”