Stone faces turn to snarls of outrage, and the entire court turns on me at once.
“How dare you—”
“—cut your filthy tongue out and scrape her title off of it—”
“—don’t even joke about—”
“Danovich is dead.”
All heads turn to the new voice. Bautista stands, grim-faced, as petite and grandmotherly as ever. She doesn’t seem to notice or care about the other councilors’ attention; her eyes are trained solely on me. “Lee, what was it you were saying about psychics being attacked?”
I swallow, suddenly feeling small and self-conscious. “It’s—it’s Joy. Joy is missing, ma’am.”
The councilors start in recognition of the name. Bautista’s brow furrows.
“Hmm.”
That’s all she says.
“Do you have proof that Joy Gillian was taken by a hostile party?” the Meresti rep demands.
“It was made to look like she left on her own, but someone impersonated one of her civilian friends, it was a set-up, there’s evidence on her phone—”
“Would the civilian friend be able to give a statement?”
I think about Nikki and her fear of witches, how scared she was to know I’d discovered her secret. If she were brought in, it’d be almost impossible to hide her non-human nature from a roomful of Enforcers. And if she did somehow succeed, the Council would assume she was a strait-laced civilian and scramble her memories as soon as the interrogation was over. “N-no, I don’t think she can, at least not right now—but I can try talking to her—”
“How long ago did Gillian disappear?”
“Uh—” I almost lie, but Bautista’s wrinkled, hooded eyes catch my own. I wilt. “…Two days ago.”
Multiple exasperated groans. I even hear the slap of someone facepalming behind me.
“This has all been a complete farce,” Nádasdy complains. “Why you reported this to us and not the civilian authorities is beyond me. You have forced our hand in disposing of an enormous amount of evidence just to conceal our own unnecessary involvement.” She narrows her eyes at me, pencil-thin eyebrows bowing. “One might even think you meant to waste our time.”
“We should end this meeting quickly,” the Lockhart rep says. “We all have more pressing concerns.”
I look desperately from councilor to councilor, seeing only agreement and waning interest. “Joy is gone!” I shout, my panic bubbling over. “You guys used to obsess over her! All of you fucked her up and burned her out, and now that she’s in trouble you’re just going to pretend she never existed?”
Nádasdy lifts her chin and sniffs. “Maybe her absence is for the best. She was never more than trailer trash, and we were fools to waste our energy on her.”
My vision blurs red. “SHUT UP!” I scream as I clamber to my feet, magic rushing down my arms on instinct—the bramble crown tightens, and the thorns plunge into my skin. Dirty, swarming static floods my head—when I jolt back to reality I’m on my hands and knees, panting, drained, rivulets of blood trickling down my face and through my scalp. The thorns twitch where they’re embedded in my skin, like mosquitoes drinking their fill.
“I think we’re done here,” Luo says, quietly.
I crane my neck up, my vision still swimming, as the Council disperses. The Lockhart and Meresti reps disappear almost instantly. Two Enforcers hurry forward to help Bautista off the platform but she waves them off, smacking the wrist of the more persistent one. Luo gives me one last, mournful look, and then he’s gone too. Nádasdy gathers her coat up at her throat and steps daintily off the platform, walking straight down the aisle; at the last second she veers around me, our eyes locked until the very moment she exits my field of view. I can still hear her heeled boots on the wooden floor behind me. I stay kneeling, eyes on the floor a little ahead, as I speak with all the venom I can gather.
“I hope your son grows up to know how much of a cunt his mother is.”
The boots click to a stop behind me. A pause. I expect her to run up and hit me, maybe aim one of those boots to the back of my head.
I don’t even hear footsteps. All I feel is a rush of air, a sudden stretching, tearing of the skin and muscles of my back—and then a hand of ice closes around my spine. An actual hand. Nádasdy’s hand.
A spasm wracks my whole body—and then I can’t move at all as the muscles in my back go strangely cold, then icy, ice becoming flame, flame becoming jagged crystal that crackles and creeps outward through my chest and up my shoulders—I gasp to scream just as the feeling reaches my lungs, and my voice is stolen by a string of coughs that try and fail to make it out of my throat.
Nádasdy’s lips are right at my ear, a quiet hiss.
“Miklos. His name was Miklos. If you’re going to use him against me, at least say his name.”
—cold, hot, cold cold cold, chilling numb crawling up my throat—bright silver sparks stabbing at the edges of my sight, flooding blackness—
…My right arm is tingling from shoulder to fingertips. I can see its silhouette, but when I move it, all I feel is an amorphous lump of TV static. Voices reach me from a distance.
“Don’t move, we only removed the shackles to operate on your shoulder.” Sunglasses, that’s the Enforcer with sunglasses speaking. “The nerves there were already damaged from the demon blood, and if Nádasdy had been on you a second longer you would have lost access to your entire arm.”
I try to speak, but scratches in my throat eat up the sound. When I turn my head I see the arching, crumbling ceiling of the church. I try to speak again, this time with more force.
“What—what did she do to me?”
Now it’s the hooded Enforcer who answers. “She was frying your nervous system, and she was doing it just slowly enough to make you feel it. If she reached your brain before we acted, we wouldn’t have been able to reverse the effects.” My arm is finally awake, and I can feel fingertips digging into the muscles, energy coursing from their hands through my own shoulder. My whole shoulder itches the way my bullet wounds itched after Luce stitched them up.
“Why save me at all?” I croak.
Sunglasses snorts. “Do you realize how much paperwork your death would have created? Not to mention the falling-out with your sister. Nah, you’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
“Gee, thanks.” I crane my neck to look around, finding the church empty. “Where’s everyone?”
“Council’s been gone for a good twenty minutes. Bautista stuck around longer than anyone else, but once you were stable, she cleared out too. Alright, you’re good—quit being lazy and get up.”
Hands haul me up by the armpits, like I’m a sulky child. The chains around my waist jingle sadly at the movement. My hair falls over my face; I reach up to push it away and find that I’m still wearing the bramble crown.
Sunglasses starts undoing my shackles with an intricate key. Once my wrists and waist can finally breathe again, I realize the whole back of my shirt is soaked with freezing sweat. The hooded Enforcer beckons for me to lean down; I do, and she raises her closed fist to my forehead. A sigil flashes on the back of her hand. With a low hiss, the bramble crown shrivels up, withdrawing its thorns from my head, and the hooded Enforcer delicately removes it.
A tap on my shoulder. I turn to see the Enforcer in the baseball cap and surgical mask. She tosses her head in a “let’s go” gesture and begins leading me to the back exit of the church, behind where the choir would be. I glance back right before we leave to see the other two Enforcers huddled over my crown of thorns, lips moving with words inaudible from this distance. The hooded one is gesturing to one section of the brambles, where there’s something darkly reddish-brown—my blood, maybe? Then I’m out of the church and unable to investigate any further.
The car we arrived in is parked right outside, half on a dirt path and half on a patch of messy, dying grass. “Son of a—please tell me that thing was parked farther away when we first got here. You didn’t just put a
sack over my head and walk me in circles for half an hour, did you? Did you?” The Enforcer unlocks the door to the backseat, opens it, and gestures for me to enter with a cheeky bow. “Oh, you absolutely did,” I grumble as I slide into the seat, arms crossed and face sour. It only hits me as she shuts the door that her baseball cap now prominently features a stark white Yankees logo.
The Enforcer hops into the driver’s seat and turns the ignition; the doors to either side of me suddenly swing open, revealing the other two Enforcers.
“Move over,” the one to my right says, pushing his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose with a knuckle. “We’re coming with.”
The two of them force me into the narrow middle seat again as the car takes off. Well, at least this time I’m not shackled and crowned.
Then a kazoo cover of The Girl from Ipanema starts.
***
“I’m on what arrest?” I shout at the three Enforcers puttering around my living room.
“House arrest,” the hooded one repeats patiently, standing in front of me as her colleagues continue burning sigils into my walls with smoldering, textured coins. “The barrier we’re erecting around your residence will prevent you from leaving the apartment for the next seventy-two hours.”
“Seventy-two hours? Three days of house arrest? For what?”
“You did attempt to attack a Council member during a trial convened specifically at your request,” Sunglasses states from the window.
“She attacked me too! And she actually succeeded!”
“Hey, you started it. Just be grateful we’re letting you stay at home instead of in a holding cell.”
“What holding cell? I thought all you people had were prisons and those gnarly transport cages—oh.”
“Exactly.”
“Don’t try to use a counterspell on the barrier. We will find out, and we will hurt you. Do you have enough food to last you three days?” the hooded Enforcer asks.
“Um, not really, I had a sort of home invasion and all my food’s gone—”
“We’ll get you some ramen. And if you need anything else, you’ll have a guard posted right outside your door twenty-four-seven. Just give us a holler.”
“Won’t my neighbors think it’s weird if there’s a random stranger sitting in the hallway with a newspaper all night?”
“Oh, you have friends over!”
Everyone turns to the open door, where Ms. Baek is standing with a bag full of groceries. I tiptoe so she can see me over the hooded Enforcer’s head. “Annyeonghasaeyo, ajumma—no, these aren’t really my—”
“Annyeonghasaeyo,” Sunglasses says in flawless Korean, immediately stooping into a bow. “We’re just a few of Harry’s old friends from college. She offered to let us stay with her while we visited New York.”
“But I never even went to coll—”
“Oh, how nice of you! It’s wonderful to see young people being generous these days. And so good that you brought a boy over for once, especially one who speaks such good Korean!” She leans toward Sunglasses with a hand cupped around her mouth in mock subtlety. “The girls who stay over are very pretty and I don’t mind them much, but they do make it hard to sleep without earplugs…”
I bury my face in my hands and groan.
Sunglasses sweet-talks Ms. Baek some more while the other two finish setting up the barrier. I don’t even need to donate a blood sample to complete it; the hooded Enforcer tosses a thorn from the earlier bramble crown into my doorway, and it disintegrates with an electric zap! Ms. Baek hands out apples and bananas to everyone before she takes her leave, followed by Sunglasses and the hooded Enforcer. The only two people left in my apartment are myself and the Enforcer in the baseball cap, standing casually before me with both hands in the pockets of her oversized bomber jacket.
With her shorter height, I’m forced to stare down at the nondescript trident logo on her baseball cap. I’m so preoccupied that I don’t even notice her holding a small paper box until she prods me in the stomach with it.
“Wha—”
She rattles the box, glancing back to where the other two Enforcers can still be heard talking in the hallway. I get the message and take it, silently. She tips the brim of her cap to me and jogs out the door, closing it along the way.
I look down at the box. There’s a little tag tied around it that says in neat cursive, “Open while sitting or lying down.”
“What the fuck?” I say out loud. I tug loose the twine knot and pop the lid open.
I can barely see what comes out. It’s a thin vapor of sorts, nearly invisible, tendrils curling up from what looks like a tea bag at the bottom of the box. The tendrils find me, wrap around my head, enter into my mouth and nostrils with my breath—they seem to seep into my brain, clouding my thoughts.
I think I’m falling, but I can’t be sure.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There is No Spoon
I land on a plush linen armchair, ass-first.
“Oof.”
“Hello, Harrietta,” someone says in a creaky alto.
Bautista is across from me in a matching seat, holding a steaming mug of tea. Her face and body are just as wizened as I last saw her, but her posture is straighter, and her dark, wideset eyes spark with a younger, brighter energy.
Come to think of it, everything around me has a sort of airbrushed feel. The fabric of my armchair is surreally smooth under my palm, as though the thread count stretches past infinity. There’s a turquoise potted plant on the tea table between Bautista and me, but if I stare at it too closely, the leaves start switching places and become an inseparable jumble. When I look up, the walls are… liquid, ready to confine or retreat at a moment’s notice, like sentient tidal waves.
Dream. I’m in a dream.
Bautista takes a sip of her tea and begins lowering it to the table. “I’m glad to see you,” she says. “We need to discuss—”
I hurl the potted plant at her face.
She vaporizes, armchair and all. I shove the table out of the way as I run through where she just was, into the white walls that are rushing to meet me. I barrel through them, feeling their layers tear like wet cobwebs. If I let them, they’ll turn into a thick jelly and slow me down—but I won’t let them, because I fucking know that trick.
“You’re in my head, asshole,” I grit out as I run. “You don’t get to—”
The floor drops out from under me.
…I land on a plush linen armchair, ass-first.
Bautista is across from me in a matching seat, still holding her steaming mug. She frowns, making the wrinkles around her mouth deepen. “Child,” she says, “I’m going to have to ask you not to—”
I stand up, lift my armchair over my head, and throw that at her.
The floor drops out from under me.
This time my ass misses the linen armchair by a few inches, and I crumple into the featureless white floor like a Slinky. It doesn’t hurt, everything’s just a little… compressed.
“Hija de puta!” Bautista says with more exasperation than anger. “Stop. It takes immense concentration just to establish basic physics in a dream built from scratch, and I only called you here because of an emergency. We need to find Joy.”
I stop flailing ineffectually in my squashed, glitched-out state. Bautista makes a cranking motion with her hand; I inflate back to my regular height, though one of my knees takes a moment to pop back into position, and the material of my shoulder’s gotten a little spliced into my waist. Again, it doesn’t hurt, just feels… wrong. I shudder, then stretch, yanking the errant body parts back into place.
“If you wanted to reach me so badly, a fucking messenger pigeon would have been better than that hand-delivered roofie,” I say, glaring at her. My skin itches all over, screaming quietly at me to run for an exit.
“I chose the quickest and safest way of communication. It is an unfortunate coincidence that you have negative associations with it, but that doesn’t change the urgency of the situation.
” She leans forward, the shadows under her brow darkening as she asks, “Lee, what happened to my apprentice?”
I stay standing, matching her gaze. “She’s not your apprentice anymore.”
“And I take responsibility for that, here and now. But I cannot ask her forgiveness until I see her again, alive. So speak to me.”
I hesitate.
“For the love of—if I wanted you dead, you would have discovered Purgatory hours ago. Be smart, child.”
I sit down, still reluctant. But I tell her the truth, all of it, from the trail I followed from Aden’s school, to David, to Joy’s prophecies, all the way to the Ecsed clinic and the Council trial.
“…But you already know that part.”
Bautista’s mouth twists into a grimace. “Damn Nádasdy, damn the Merestis, damn the Lockharts—damn Luo especially. He’s the only one of them I trust, and that makes him the only one who isn’t underhanded enough to stoop to their methods. It’s obvious, isn’t it? A blood magic attack on select members of the Council, and then a massive crop of human sacrifices found slated for cremation downtown. It’s the biggest smoking gun we’ve had in five days of nonstop investigation.”
“Woah woah woah, wait, what? A blood magic attack?”
Bautista waves a hand, and something floats down from the cloudy white ceiling: a single raindrop, swelling into a spherical bubble a little bigger than my head. It floats straight into my face, engulfing it—when I reopen my eyes, I’m in a laboratory. Or at least, I’m being surrounded by the image of a darkened laboratory projected onto the bubble’s inner surface.
The lab is more homey than sterile with three long tables in the middle of the room, their contents spotlighted by long-necked, angled lamps. There’s a bubbling beaker of liquid silver, connected with translucent tubing to a tank of something green and cloudy. Three prosthetic hands are lined up on the table: one made of rubber, one of chrome, and one of gnarled, imperfect wood. They sit next to a stack of blueprints with shifting, swimming notations, the lines and labels responding to the hushed words of one man standing over them—Luo. He’s got his sleeves rolled up to his elbows as he leans over the table, pointing and murmuring, while a young brunette in glasses and a lab coat studiously takes notes. Her hair is done up into a bun with an elaborate onyx and gold pin: Lockhart. There are others in lab coats milling around, taking measurements, pouring substances, writing in chalk on the walls.
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