Torchlighters

by Megan R Miller

  “I think so,” Callum said. “Which one is that?”

  “An articulation,” she said. “This shape was designed to keep a soul trapped within a circle. Not a body. It is what they use to bind heat into flameless tea and coffee pots, and the wisps into lanterns, but this here is far more specific than you would ever need to bind a wisp or a basic flame sprite. If I didn’t know any better I’d say they were aiming to capture the soul of a proper demon. It wouldn’t normally be worth the risk. Now, where did you see this?”

  He opened his mouth to tell her it had been written on a wall in an alley but his voice caught hard in his throat. She must have noticed his distress, because she laughed.

  “Underneath the cushion of the chair you’re sitting on is another glyph,” she said. “That one is designed to render you incapable of lying to me as long as you are sitting in it. The articulations on that circle won’t allow you to rise until I give the command either. We have to get more creative with our clients who have no demon blood. If it makes you feel any better I’ve been bound to the same restrictions.”

  She opened her mouth, dropping her jaw and letting her tongue roll out for him to see. There was a brand burned into it, a circle with a shape he didn’t recognize. She let him look for a moment before withdrawing the appendage back into her mouth.

  “All Nightingales take the brand. I’ve insisted on it,” she said. “A little bit of witchcraft for a lot of security.”

  “You speak very well for someone with a burned tongue,” Callum said, dryly.

  “You would be surprised how quickly and thoroughly injuries to the inside of your mouth can heal,” she said. “Now, where did you come by this shape?”

  “On the flat of a dagger,” Callum said. It wasn’t a lie, it simply wasn’t the whole truth.

  “The dagger that was used to stab you in the chest, Callum Trezza?” she asked, calmly. It was as if she were checking to see if he wanted cream in his tea. His throat ran dry.

  “What will you give me to confirm that?” he asked.

  This time, Rune laughed hard.

  “Oh, my clever boy, you and I are going to have a long friendship, I think,” she said. “I will tell you, but because I like the cut of your jaw and the way your lips move when you sing to me and would like for you to come and sing to me again. It was a Gate Street Player holding the knife, but they are not the ones behind this. Someone is merely hiring shoeshiners. Taking up a collection.”

  “Yes,” he said, immediately, ”on the dagger they used to stab me in the chest. Do you know how I survived?”

  “No,” she said. “But when you have more to tell please feel free to come back to me and we can discuss it at length, then. I am always listening, you know, and always singing songs. If there is nothing else?”

  She asked too fast for him to know which word released him from the trap against the wood of the seat. He got to his feet, heart hammering in his chest.

  “Wait,” he said.

  “There is nothing to wait for, my clever boy, don’t overstay your welcome,” she said.

  “I need to know who,” he said.

  “The price for that is far too steep,” she said.

  “At least tell me why,” he said.

  “If you gave it a little bit of thought you would be able to figure it out on your own,” she said, “so just this once, I’ll offer you a free answer. Power, Callum Trezza. Why else?”

  It hung in the air between them. He knew in that moment he was going to get nothing else from her tonight. It was best not to burn that bridge.

  He gave her a nod before moving for the doors. Samael was waiting for him in the hall, his silver braid hanging over one shoulder.

  “Did you find out what you needed to know?” Samael asked.

  “Enough,” Callum said, walking now. He needed to get out of this theater. He needed air that wasn’t clogged by the thick stench of cigarette smoke and ill won secrets. “They were trying to take my soul.”

  “The Nightingales?” Samael asked, wrinkling his nose. The walk out seemed much faster than the walk in had been. Callum spilled out into the brick street outside and sucked down night air like he’d been suffocating.

  “No,” Callum said. “Whoever had the dagger. I don’t know why it didn’t work.”

  He didn’t mention the confirmation that a Gater had done it, yet. He’d had a lot confirmed for him just now and he needed a moment to breathe and wrap his mind around it.

  “Sammy?”

  “Yeah?” Samael asked, looking at him.

  “I need to take a walk,” Callum said. “Let me find you in the morning, I just need some space to clear my head.”

  Sam nodded. “You have it.”

  It was hard for Callum to guess what his brother was thinking in that moment, so he didn’t try. He just took off at a brisk pace. He didn’t bother with the tram this time, he just walked.

  He kept walking until he reached his loose brick dead drop and pried it free.

  This time, there was a real note waiting for him.

  Joey came out of the bank and waited for a moment as a cyclist crossed in front of him before walking into the alley on the other side. One of his. He kept one hand in his pocket and raised the other to check his wristwatch. On the opposite end of the alley, another cyclist cut him off and he stumbled back. A chuckle on the other end of the alley brought his attention back to the far side.

  “Daelan City Devil?” Lissel asked, loping towards him down the alley. “Get over yourself. You can’t think putting a mask on makes it less obvious that you’re you, Trezza, and you can’t have thought we were going to just let you get away with picking on our underlings.”

  She was a little older than Samael, with pink skin and hair as black as ink. He’d seen her fight. Quick and dirty, vicious like an imp.

  “First,” Joey said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Second, I don’t have time for this. Which leads me to third; I don’t care. Now move along, before you do something you’ll regret.”

  “Never took you for the type to lie, Trezza,” Lissel said. She cocked her head, her arms folded. “And you really thought it was going to work. I’m not sure if this is more funny or pathetic. You have time.”

  She grinned, showing more teeth than a human would have been capable of. There was a little cracking sound as her jaw unhinged and her head opened producing a tongue with roughly the same thickness as a tram cable. It came whipping at him.

  He took a step to the side as the glistening tongue shot past him.

  “Call me a liar one more time and it will be the last thing you ever say,” he said. “Now I’m not asking. I’m telling you to leave.”

  There was a garbled sound as Lissel tried to speak while she was withdrawing her horrific tongue. Then it whipped, hot and stinging, against the back of his shoulder and she was laughing as she regained her articulation. There was a gun in her hand.

  “Yeah, I thought so.”

  Joey’s hand lit up with a hellfire glow.

  Lissel lashed at him again. This time, he caught her tongue in his grip and it sizzled and thrashed under his fingers. Lissel jerked back, aiming to pull him closer along with the far end of her tongue and lining up a shot with that pistol.

  Joey flexed his wrist, wrapping the end of her cabled tongue once around it as he planted his feet and yanked her forward. Lissel lost her footing, and he strode forward.

  On the second step he was pulling a switchblade out of a pocket he’d sewn into his left jacket sleeve and on the fourth he was slashing out at Lissel’s forearm. He got his cut. Her blood coursed a thick dark blue down her wrist and fingers, but she didn’t drop the gun.

  “The longer you take to decide to run, the closer you get to dying. You’ll find I’m rarely in this generous of a mood,” Joey said.

  The gun slipped from her fingers. Her face was hard, but he was close enough to see the tremor in her legs and shoulders. Her blood dripped onto the brickwork. It was a bad
cut.

  Lissel ran.

  Joey found himself standing in Danny’s shadow, as he came up behind him.

  “You were one cut away from a dead Verida,” Danny said. “Payback for Callum. That’s not the kind of restraint I was expecting. Why did you let her go?”

  “She knows something I don’t,” Joey said, “and whoever she runs back to is gonna know even more.”

  “Then we’d better get moving before we lose her,” Danny said. Joey loved that about his brother; he always knew when to ask questions and when to just accept the situation and haul ass.

  The Summoner’s Academy campus was beautiful in the winter. It was one of the few places in the city with a lot of trees, with pristine snow clinging to the boughs. Elysia tugged her scarf a little tighter around her neck against the chill in the air and headed for the massive stone building with the lions on either side that served as the academy library.

  Several students were starting to leave for the night, passing Ely on her way in. None of them spared her so much as a glance, and that was fine by her. Most people, in her experience, were caught up in their own lives anyway and the less they noticed her the more she could get away with.

  The trick, she had learned, was to walk in like she had no doubt that she belonged there. It was shocking how much she could get away with simply by showing her confidence. It was almost as though people couldn’t believe someone could be lying and also be that audacious at the same time.

  The interior of the library was a vaulted ceiling and beautiful marble floors. Marble pillars held up a mezzanine around the upper half of the lobby. There was a space near the front where a large rounded counter sat, with a small swinging gate to allow employees to get in and out. Several student workers were seated inside, each with a ledger in front of them. Hardly any of them were actually looking at those ledgers, instead studying their own material since no one was at the desk.

  The shelves were rows of polished oak crammed with books and smelling strongly of vellichor. Between the stacks were round tables with numerous chairs where students brought their materials to study. One young blond man was sitting at one of these tables with a stack of thick architectural books around him and his glasses slightly askew from where his hand was pushing them.

  She recognized him. That had been the man that had greeted them when they came to confirm that Callum’s body was his. A part of her mind wondered what the mortician was doing here; at the time he’d seemed completely in place. She wondered if she would feel like he was if she hadn’t seen him there.

  One of the clerks stood up and approached her with a cordial half-bow.

  “Welcome to the Royal Summoner’s Academy Library,” he said. “May I see your ID?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t attend here, yet,” Elysia said, straightening.

  The clerk considered her for a moment, as if sizing her up. He took in her clothes. She stayed calm and waited as he looked her over, taking her measure and deciding her worth, and finally, he continued.

  “I bid you enter and learn, but first I must ask what brings you here. You don’t have a student pass and we like to collect the data for posterity.”

  Ely gave her best smile.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’m touring the campus because I have an interest in your medical program. I want to enroll next semester and I thought it would be wise to familiarize myself with the facilities.”

  He gave her a dubious once-over and Ely didn’t stop smiling for a second.

  “Forgive me, but you don’t look like the nursing type,” he said. Elysia kept that smile on her face but let her eyes go cold.

  “Perhaps that’s because I’m not,” she said. “I’m going to be a doctor.”

  She extended a hand for him to shake before he could offer any sort of argument to the sentiment. He started to shake it with a look of clearly forced tolerance on his face, as though he didn’t consider it his job to tell her the truth and shatter her dreams.

  “Please,” she said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Elysia Trezza.”

  It had the desired effect. He shook her hand but she could see the beginnings of sweat breaking out on his brow. He did a reasonable job, for the most part, looking unconcerned, but Ely knew what to look for and she knew she had him.

  His once-over had asked ‘are you sure you can afford to go to school here’. His forced tolerance had said ‘That’s a little ambitious for a girl, don’t you think?’. And now, his expression said ‘I’m not sure I can afford to question you again’.

  She strode right past him without giving him a second look, and headed right for the stairs.

  The door that partitioned the stacks from the restricted archives downstairs was unlocked. The metal gates below would not be. There were several floors of restricted records, here, starting with city information and ending with the books on summoning demons farther down. The farther down you went, the more security there was. She’d heard stories, but wasn’t sure how many of them were just that, and how many were accurate.

  They typically stationed a guard near the books on summoning, but Ely wasn’t looking for anything quite so egregious at the moment. She stopped on the first landing and drew her lock picks out of her sleeve pocket, going to work on the iron gate.

  The mechanism was almost too easy. The gate gave a soft creak as she pushed it open, just enough for her to slip through, and then shut it again behind her. She didn’t lock it. Odds were good no one was going to come in here while she was looking around, anyway.

  She was about to take a step when she heard a sucking sound in the air behind her, and darted between two shelves to watch through the books. The shape in the hall was nothing remotely close to humanoid. From the shadow on the wall behind it, it almost looked as though she was looking at a wheel of arms.

  Something about that shadow was fraying, in her mind. The answer clicked a moment before flesh came around the corner, and Ely shut her eyes, dropping to crouch as low as she could. Slow, deep breaths, she reminded herself, as quiet as you can make them. The noise that thing in the hall was making didn’t sound like something any living being should make. It was a high pitched warble, distinctly annoyed.

  Vaguely, she realized she might actually die here. And this was supposed to be the easy job.

  “What are you doing down there?” a harsh voice called down the stairs. Ely knew immediately it wasn’t talking to her. “I keep telling you, you can’t come up past the third floor down without a really good reason, and rats aren’t good enough! Shoo, before you burn the mind out of some poor intern again.”

  The words were charged with a summoner’s power. A command by a warlock that couldn’t be refused. A series of enochian syllables filled the air and that warble got louder for a moment before silencing completely.

  After the footsteps above her faded into the distance of the library, Ely opened one eye.

  She found herself staring into another pair and shortly realized it wasn’t a pair at all. The creature was a wheel of arms, like a series of interlocked shoulders, and the entire side of the wheel was covered in dozens of eyes that were all fixated on her and narrowed. It wasn’t making a sound anymore. One of the palms extended downward, fingers pointing toward the floor, and the mouth along the palm tugged open to whisper to her, but she heard its voice more in her head than with her ears.

  Do not be afraid, it said.

  Ely considered the being. A quick mental estimation gave her an association she wasn’t sure her brothers would have been able to come to. There were seventy-seven eyes in all. Seven arms.

  “You’re an angel,” she whispered. “I’m not afraid. I didn’t come down here for anything you are guarding.”

  Now, she kept her face schooled to a careful blank. She had a feeling this being wouldn’t appreciate the mask of any forced emotion, but she wouldn’t show it fear.

  Seraph’s child, it said, it is not often I contact one that can look upon me dead on like this and not be r
educed to a quivering heap. A being of my magnitude should not be chained by mortal hands. Free me.

  “That’s quite a demand,” Ely said. Her voice was still low, constrained. “Tell me, why should I? You’re quite chained at the moment, I presume, or you would have brought down the heavens’s wrath on your captors.”

  Chained, yes, from harming them, the angel said, but not from harming intruders.

  “And yet if you harm me,” Ely said, “there will be no one left to free you.”

  The silence stretched between them, all seventy-seven eyes locked on her in a knot of fury and frustration. Ely allowed herself to quirk a small smile.

  “A favor,” she said. “One outsider to another. I free you from indefinite servitude, and you come to aid me one day when I need it. One moment of righteous fury for me.”

  That would require I give you my name, the angel said.

  “If I’m going to break the circle that binds you, I will learn it anyway,” Ely said. “And when I call you up it will be in your best interests not to harm me then, either, because if they managed to call you once there is a good chance they will do so again and you might need me once more, to liberate you from the confines of your subjugation.”

  There was a soft keening in the air between them. After a beat, Ely realized the thing was laughing.

  You have my word, seraph’s child. I will come when you call. Once, the angel said.

  “That’d be the berries,” Ely said, dryly. “I’ll also have your word that you won’t burn down the library on your way out. You get one murder and you aren’t allowed to use it on me. Deal?”

  You seem keen on putting restrictions on me, child, the angel said. Do you know how old I am or what I am capable of?

  “Right now it isn’t much,” Ely said, “and I’m offering to help you change that. You’re asking me to set you loose, so I get a say in what comes as a result. I wasn’t the one that called you here, but I’m taking a lot of risks in letting you go. I know what I’m worth.”