signed_sabrina | listen to the wind blow (down comes the night)

There's bits of this that Rosie already can't quite understand--the candles, the picture on the floor, the teacup on the dresser with the dregs of something odd-smelling inside--but when Sabrina beckons her over, she goes without question. What Sabrina says pulls at her heart a little; it sounds desperate, like some kind of bargaining or denial, and who could blame her? To believe something like that, that the boy she'd loved so deeply had been replaced somehow though some Darrow trickery, made the whole thing far easier to bear.

Rosie nearly opens her mouth to murmur some kind of reassurance, a commiseration from one heartbroken girl to another, but she looks at Sabrina just before she does, and the expression on her face stills the words before she can voice them. This isn't denial. This is conviction.

"You know that for sure? Because of..." Rosie looks back at the candles, the picture, the book in her friend's lap. "And you know this...it worked the way it ought to?"

Sabrina is well aware that there may be some convincing needed across the board, though she's hoping she's bought enough trust that it should be minimal convincing. She beckons Rosie over, patting the bed beside her.

"You should sit down," she says. "I just couldn't get over how much this Nick didn't seem like ours. It kept... it kept sitting in my brain. And then I though, what could be wrong? What would be in him that would do this?"

Her voice has gone quiet.

"It seemed like... delusion. At least until I did the spell."

"Believe me, I'm not going anywhere," she says, moving to sit on the bed and curling her legs up as she settles next to her. Rosie looks down at the book for a moment, curious, but turns her gaze back to her friend as she starts to explain.

None of it makes any sense, but she listens anyway, trusting in Sabrina utterly. "He hasn't seemed like himself, you're right, he's been..." Again, her mind shies away from something; she shakes her head. "He hasn't been who we thought he was, before." She looks over at the other girl, confusion and hope mixing strangely in her dark eyes. "But...what did the spell tell you? What's wrong with him?"

Because there has to be something wrong. There'd been an urgency in the message she'd received, something more than just the weary sadness the other girl had felt the last few days, and combined with everything scattered around her room...there was something here. Rosie fights back the urge to keep peppering Sabrina with questions, lapsing into an effortful silence as she waits for the next bit of explanation.

Sabrina closes the book, skating her fingertips over the cover.

"I know it could sound like I'm making excuses for him. I think that except for a handful of other people in Darrow, anyone would think that, or that I'm so upset I'm imagining things." She's quiet for a few moments, and then she makes herself say it. "It's the Dark Lord. Lucifer Morningstar, my... biological father. If biology applies to the devil."

She curls her fingers into fists.

"You know how things appear here, from wherever you originate? There was a device we used, to try and trap him the first time around, before Nick sealed him into his own body. That device, it showed up here, and broke with Lucifer inside and he went into Nick. It's what I saw with the spell."

If she'd been back home, Rosie would have scoffed, dismissing the idea before it had time to truly settle. That the devil could be here, that he could be inhabiting her friend, Sabrina's boyfriend--someone they both cared about and who'd seemed to care about them up until a few weeks ago--seemed too absurd to even contemplate. But she was more now, had seen more now, than when all she'd had was her unexciting life back in Oxford: from the glittering whirl of Anterwold to the confusion of Darrow; the magical parties and gatherings, the terrifying oddity of all that had happened back in June.

Rather than scoff, all Rosie does is let out a very soft, nearly involuntary "Oh my god." It's not at all correct, given the circumstances, but she says it anyway.

"Y-you told me about that, back when you got all of those memories," she continues, recalling the tearful, shaken confession Sabrina had made to her in the woods, what felt like ages ago now. "When...when you remembered Nick, remembered what had happened to him. It's all happening again? Here?" Rosie looks at her, concerned and frightened--and, more than that, full of a wave of sympathy so strong it nearly chokes her. "So he's been...ever since that happened, Nick's been..."

If Sabrina can be brave enough to say it, she can too. She ought to be. "He's been the devil. The Dark Lord, whatever you want to call him."

"I'm sure of it," Sabrina says. Now that she's had time to really think on it, she recognizes some of the cool cruelty in the way Nick-- not Nick, Lucifer had been behaving. With the spell, with her own feelings of disease, she just knows.

Slowly, she admits, "I thought at first it was maybe wishful thinking, which-- how horrible, that I'd rather think the devil is inside of him than that his feelings have changed. I don't know if he'd admit it, or if--" She rubs at her forehead. "But the thing is, my-- he-- he can't comprehend mortals. I'm only half-mortal because it was for prophecy."

She turns her eyes to Rosie, grim and full of trepidation, sorrow. "He has Nick again, and I--"

Sabrina doesn't know how to finish that sentence.

Everything seems to spill out of Sabrina half-formed, thoughts and sentences abandoned partway through, and Rosie tries to piece them together as best as she can. To pull out the important details, the things that might lead them forward to a solution, the ways in which this unbelievable situation might be fixed. But when Sabrina looks at her again, pale and sorrowful, Rosie lays it all aside--if only for the moment. They're sitting close enough that it's no effort at all to put an arm around her, pulling her close and holding her. "He has Nick now," she says, her voice trembling a little. She coughs, once, tries to steady it. "What do we need to do to get him back?"

Of course she says we. Though so much of this is unbelievable, and despite the uncertainty that still swirls in her mind, the one thing Rosie knows without question is that she'll help Sabrina in whatever way she can.

Sabrina hugs her back, arms wrapping around her waist, somewhere between perched and nestling as she thinks it through. "We have to convince him to leave Nick. I don't know if we could force him out. I'm not sure what it would take." She's trying to control her own voice, her own feelings.

If she gives in to the desire to cry, she's not sure she'll be able to stop.

"We tried killing him the first time, but it didn't work. We didn't have the right-- I wouldn't know how to get it." She's biting at her lip now.

"What if he thought there was a better host?"

"What, like bait?" Rosie asks, her mouth going a little dry at the idea. "That could work, but who would we..."

She allows herself one single and deeply vengeful thought about suggesting David, then sets it aside.

"So we tempt him with somebody, and then, what, redirect him at the last minute?" She thinks for a long few minutes, her brow furrowed. "Back into the device, before he can take over anyone else?"

"It would have to be myself, or someone who's more powerful than Nick. Me because the devil is the biggest narcissist ever, and he considers me as part of him, or someone that could provide a bigger tactical advantage."

She lets herself flop back on the bed.

"...I don't think he'd go for it. Nick is already very skilled and it's a choice that hurts me. I don't know that he'd believe I'm ready to just give up and join him, either."

"Well, it's absolutely not going to be you," Rosie says almost as soon as the words have left Sabrina's lips; a stubborn, hardheaded sort of reaction, but the truth. "I won't allow it." In her heart, she knows she couldn't stop it, no matter how hard she tried or wished or insisted. But she says it, and she means it, and once it's voiced she nods once, firmly, looking down at Sabrina's prone figure.

"If we can't distract him, or...or tempt him, whatever you want to call it," she muses, trying to think as fast as she can, knowing she's as far out of her depth now as she'd been her first few hours in Anterwold. More so, even. This, after all, was not a problem she could stomp and threaten her way out of as she'd done in the forest clearing. "If we can't do that...what did you need to kill him, last time? Even if we can't find it here, there has to be something similar. People arrive from all over, different worlds and times and...there has to be something."

listen to the wind blow (down comes the night)

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