by Elle Cross
I had blacked out. When I came to, I was still sitting on my heels, and when my eyes had focused, I found myself staring into the aqua eyes of the broken girl who wasn't broken anymore. In fact, she had sat up, like she too had just woken from a dream. Her name badge swung from her neck and hovered over her belly.
Corbin.
She blinked at me and tilted her head, a bird's gesture, as if she were curious about how I fit into her world.
Chloe was cradled in Mrs. Strong's lap. When had she gotten there?
She kept whispering Chloe's name, begging her to wake up now.
Chloe's arm was limp at her side.
That night, I was fitted with gloves and told never to touch anyone with my bare skin. If I did, that was bad.
The next day, I would find out that Chloe had multiple fractures in her arm.
She would never come out of her coma.
A heavy, viscous thing like a slug trickled into my ears, and wriggled its way down my throat. It was hot, and scorched its way to my chest, wrapped around my lungs like a snake and squeezed. A repetitive bass-like sound intruded into the fog of my brain. It took me too long to realize that it was my own heartbeat.
"Vesper, you wake up now. Let go! Do you hear me? I know you can hear me. Let go!"
With that one command, the grip around my lungs constricted once more, squeezing tighter this time. I shot upright, coughing out smoke and tar. The burning that was deep in my lungs passed up through my throat, scorching up my nose and mouth.
"Open your eyes. Now!"
My eyelids flew open, met her black liquid gaze, a sign she had called power, her most primal self that she no longer remembered. She Voiced me. She had used it to try and stop me from touching John Doe and then, just now.
I hated getting Voiced. Always gave me a fuzzy feeling, like a hangover without the fun times preceding it. "You do that again, Detective, I'll scratch your eyes out." My throat was on fire, my breath strangled and parched.
Relief washed over her like spring rain. Her eyes were aqua again. "And if you do that again, I'll chop your hand off." She nodded, and let someone wrap me in a blanket and get me on my feet. I tried not to wonder where else this blanket had been.
"Oh Lords Above, was I on the floor?" I openly cringed at the thought.
"Gee, I'll make sure the next time you do something stupid that gets you knocked out cold, it's on silken sheets scented with lavender."
"Ok, thanks, and make sure I get a nice dinner first." I winked at her, but I wasn't fooling her. She knew I was still shaky. Hells, the damn blanket rippled from my body's trembling. I couldn't seem to breathe in all the air I needed, and stars swirled in my field of vision again.
I sat heavily on to a chair, held tight to the blanket to keep from swaying. Something small and thin was in my hand, wrapped up in the folds of the blanket. My eyelids were so heavy, blinking was as challenging as lifting weights.
"Get that fucking useless cow in here now," Corbin demanded.
I couldn't hear all of her words, but judging by Corbin's whip crack tone, someone scrambled from the room and everyone else quickly found some other important task to do.
From one blink to the next, Ruby stood in front of me, a blur of jangling bracelets as she plucked and wiped the air around me—where she thought she saw my shields. If she didn't annoy me so much I'd have laughed at her attempt.
"Hey, is that my coat?" My words slurred together. I dragged my coat from where it hung on the crook of Ruby's arm, and wrapped up in it, breathed in the familiar cashmere. The might-be-plague-filled blanket slipped off me and onto the floor. When I plucked it up between my index finger and thumb, something black fluttered from its folds and fell to the floor.
I bent to retrieve it. It could have been a credit card except it was flat black, like carved ebony. Perhaps a hotel room key? There were no demarcations at all, no symbols to tell where it had come from.
"Hey, what's that?" Ruby's face got really close to it.
I instinctively wanted to hide it from view, but she'd be even nosier then. "Just my credit card. Fell out of my pocket." I slipped it into an interior pocket so it wouldn't fall out again.
"Didn't have any numbers on it?"
I raised a brow. What Ruby lacked as an empath she more than made up for in hyper-observation. "It's one of those exclusive reward credit cards, the kind that have really good security so my numbers won't get stolen," I said nonchalantly. "You know, rack up enough points, get flown to Paris for dinner and dancing." I shrugged, like I did that sort of thing every day.
That hit a familiar raw spot with Ruby, and I felt a shadow of guilt exploiting it. She moved off, grumbling under her breath about being underpaid. She could never keep her thoughts to herself. I swiped a finger down the side of her hand, just a small touch, to take away what impressions she'd gotten off me earlier, rearranged her memories just a little bit. I breathed a few happy thoughts in her direction for good measure.
Now that I was comfortable in my own body again, I forced my eyes to make the blurry shapes and images around me come into focus.
The man. John Doe. He had been on the chair. Now, the chair was empty, handcuffs laid ruined and useless on the floor beside it. And just beyond them, the broken shell of what was once a man laid out onto a stretcher.
Blackness crept up around my field of vision. Images cluttered my periphery. Discarded bodies. Limbs akimbo. Hollow eyes. They were arranged in a tapestry of flesh, tucked against each other like a collection, cataloged just so.
Terror. That terror that I took from John Doe. A terror that wasn't mine. A terror that could become mine, wanted to be mine. Only if I would let it, which I wasn't about to do.
I breathed slowly in through my nose, out through my mouth, measuring the seconds, focusing purely on the numbers. Four seconds to inhale, hold for two seconds, then four seconds to exhale. Repeat three times.
The tide of suffocating black receded, swallowed up in the vast ocean inside me, wrapped up under a thick layer of ice until I could deal with it safely. Away from anyone else who could be infected by it. Until then, it was just another thing I needed to ignore.
Please.
The thought rang clearly in my head.
Was that my voice?
The two EMS workers who were tending to John Doe's body were done, and one zipped the black body bag closed. I tracked his hand as it pulled the zipper. Something about the body. I was supposed to do something.
Please.
This time the voice was distinctly male and was definitely in my head.
"Wait," I said.
I strode to the body and searched his face. With his eyes closed he looked like he was merely sleeping. He looked more alive now than he had when the police had brought him in earlier.
His cheekbones were angled high on his face. His lips were full and lush. The curl of his eyelashes and full eyebrows were enviable. He had a face I would have loved to sketch, to mold, to sculpt. My chest constricted at the waste of life…of beauty. It wasn't fair...
Please.
"Vesper." The thrum of Corbin's warning resonated through the room. Her Voice was a light touch that coiled around my wrist and stayed my hand.
I hadn't realized that I nearly cupped his face. I gripped the metal handlebar of the stretcher instead.
"It's all right, Detective. I'm all right." I straightened and took a full step back, found my gloves in my coat pockets, slipped them over my hands. "I think you need to take this man downstairs, though."
"No worries, Ms. Tallinn, we was on our way to the morgue."
I raised my eyebrow at him. The EMS worker meant well, just tired, so I overlooked the condescension in his tone. "That won't be necessary." Then I turned to Corbin. "He's not done. He still has more to tell us, but can't right now. He needs to be in special holding. In the Basement."
Corbin's eyes widened for an instant, then nodded at her officers to escort the EMS to the Basement. A ripple of tension went thro
ugh the men, spikes of sour, unpleasant scents that underscored their musk. But they didn't hesitate to obey Corbin's command. They fell in line, the rhythm of following orders an instinctive response.
"The Basement?" Corbin murmured when they were out of earshot. "I know it would've helped earlier, but why would he need it now that he's dead?"
"He isn't though," I said. "He's not dead, and it's still not done. He's still not done."
Corbin stared at the body bag being wheeled in the middle of the entourage heading toward the service elevators for the Basement, as if anticipating the body jumping up and wreaking havoc again. "What's not done? Like he's not done decomposing or whatnot?"
I snorted. Decomposing was a big word for her. "No, well, technically, yeah he'll need to decompose, but I mean he has more to tell us. Like literally tell us." I moved closer to her. "He's seen something, something that someone else didn't want to get out. Something that someone was willing to kill over, no matter who he was with, where he was. Did you feel the power rolling off him?"
Corbin nodded.
"I can't imagine the kind of currency that was spent to push that kind of power past your warded walls. And you know there is more than one way to pay for power." My stomach churned thinking about where that power could have come from, and for all the bodies I'd seen, even in bits and snippets among the terror inside me.
I squeezed my head between my hands, like I could squeeze the answers from my brain. "I feel like he has more to tell us, but there's…something. Something other than John Doe was present. I felt it. And it did not like the fact that I knew it was there. I think when I touched John Doe, it cut off the connection between them."
Corbin raked her hair into an unconsciously fashionable windswept look which matched the growing halo of turbulent seas that whipped around her. It reflected her frustration. She hated anything that she couldn't see. Hated that she didn't push to get the guy in the Basement in the first place. Hated that she not only lost a lead to a likely murder, but that she had another death to contend with. Possibly more.
"Oh great, so you're telling me that some murdery parasite thing that we can't see tried to get John Doe killed rather than being discovered, but then gets discovered anyway by you? Oh, and wait, it also knows that you could sever its connection with its host, is that what you're saying?"
I ran her words through my flagging mental filters and nodded once. "Pretty much sums it up. Oh, and I kind of...put John Doe on hold until he can tell us what he needed to tell us." I smiled weakly at her.
Corbin opened her mouth to say something, before she closed it, pressing her lips into a grim line. If she had thoughts about me being in some murdery parasite's crosshairs or my ability to hold death at bay until John Doe could communicate what he wanted, she wouldn't tell me. She just nodded once, raised a sharp eyebrow at me. That was enough.
Her impatience for any gray areas, any in-betweens, grounded me. She treated unseen forces and murderous shadows as real as any other flesh and blood foe. She was always looking for the catch, the reason and motive for why something was in the gray. And when she did, when she discovered the reason, she would file it neatly back into her black and white world of absolutes, as neat and rational as any of her How-To manuals. Corbin's view of the world spilled out in her gaze, which was always clear and confident.
And that was how she looked at me now. My head swirled, but I kept my focus on Corbin's face, on her absolute faith in me. She never questioned my process, nor did she ever doubt my interpretation of what I skimmed from a reading. I was part of her How-To-Get-The-Bad-Guys playbook, and it gave me a second wind, made me feel like I could kick ass even though I was made for softer things. It made me feel like I could push for more, try for better, simply because she believed I could.
Beyond Corbin, Ruby still lingered, a placid look replacing her normally pinched face. Great, now she was too happy. She needed to get gone before she pricked another one of Corbin's hunches. "Hey Ruby."
Ruby turned toward me, radiating peace and calm. Yeah, she definitely needed out of here before Corbin suspected that I'd manipulated Ruby's emotions and memories, rather than let her take the terror from me. I didn’t need anyone, especially Corbin, knowing that I still held on to the terror I'd siphoned from John Doe in the interview room. "All right, Ruby, let's get you on your way home. You've been such a great help, really." I waved an officer over, and thrust her at him.
She meowed and petted his face. Then started to pet elsewhere. The officer leaned back, kept his face, and anything else, away from her grabby fingers. Thankfully he was pretty tall, and she was shorter than me. I was sure he'd be able to handle her.
I avoided Corbin's curious gaze, which felt like holes being bored into my head, and squeezed in with the remaining group of men in the second elevator headed down to the Basement. No one wanted to be there, going where we would be going. The mingled scents of discomfort and controlled nervousness in this small space testified to that, threatened to nauseate me again.
And then Corbin strode in, her bullheaded stubbornness radiating the scents of a crisp winter day in an aspen woods. She punched the doors closed and then the B button in rapid succession.
I inhaled deeply, memories of ice skating and candy canes flitting through my mind. By the time the elevator touched down three floors later, nothing but the sweet scents of calm and peace remained.
The Basement was the precinct's nickname for the holding area for special cases—persons of interest who weren't easily contained by barred cells or didn't play well with the general public. Walking through it always made me feel slightly off, like I was walking into one of those carnival fun houses with the pitched floors and warped mirrors. It was a place that reminded you that there was more to this world than what you could see, and once upon a time, Humans were more prey and chattel to the Remnant God tribes than the partners we had grudgingly become.
The only unit who used the Basement at all were Corbin's men. Field tough, they were the only ones who could stand to be there with no more than a grimace or sneer.
The Basement spanned the entire footprint of the precinct, which itself was the equivalent of an entire city block. The space was necessary: The twelve cells had to be set independently, so that no cell touched each other or the wall. They were even set atop protective sigils. Each cell was formed from a type of reinforced plexiglass, strengthened by blessings that the Sylphs themselves had breathed upon them. All so anyone kept here would be isolated from sources of power, even elemental power.
Midtown only had twelve cells, but it had more than any other precinct in the city. As such, the Commissioner appointed it as the go-to precinct for special cases, and created a task force—Major Cases—to run point, of which Corbin was the unofficial leader, thanks to a Lieutenant who spent more time sucking up to top brass than bothering to oversee the unit.
Just as well. Official or not, the men knew who the leader was and would crawl over broken glass for her.
"We got him here, boss."
I followed after Corbin's wake. Stride for stride, she had me beat, so I'd learned early on not to try and match her pace. Otherwise I would just end up jogging alongside her, like a puppy being shown off at the Westminster Dog Show.
The Basement had more residents than I'd ever seen in it. I hurried past the blacked-out cells, knowing that was where they kept vampires. They were a nuisance, always trying to get under my shields, like playing metaphysical grab ass. This fucker was no different. I pressed my thumb against a tattoo of a triangle on my left wrist while imagining a steel bear trap snapping shut. The metaphysical equivalent of a yelp resonated from behind the blackened cell.
I approached John Doe's cell. They had him in the biggest cell yet. It reminded me of an extra-large aquarium tank, something that could easily contain a couple of sharks. The EMS crew had left him on the bench. A couple of officers shackled him down. No one wanted a repeat of what happened in the interview room.
"G
onna be honest, boss," one of Corbin's men said. "Thought this was one of your crazier moves. But, the guy moved when EMS shifted him on to the cot. He's alive."
No one else needed to confirm that. John Doe was no longer gray. He actually had color now despite the freezing temperature.
I wrapped my coat around me more tightly.
"What did you see back in interrogation?" Corbin asked me under her breath.
Everything and nothing. I didn't exactly see images. More that the scents and emotions permeated into me, translated into a splatter of images without context. It was like trying to analyze a random blood splatter on the wall, but only seeing the close-up of the blood itself. Usually, the stronger the emotion, the better the image that came back to me, and the emotions were plenty strong. But, John Doe was broken long before he'd been discovered wandering the city streets by Corbin's men, well before his exit strategy in the interview room. Just thinking about it again signaled a new crop of goosebumps to rush down my arm. I put it aside for now so I could give Corbin what she needed, in something she would understand. Then, she could hunt her metaphorical dragons.
"It's...confusing. It came in a rush, out of order, out of context." I turned to face Corbin. "I'd say he was drugged, but it's not that simple. Depending on the person, drugs either sedated or stimulated emotions. His thoughts were all over the place."
"What do you mean?"
"It's like...if you're drugged, your emotions are there just either running faster or slower than normal. Think of it like being able to slow down or speed up a movie. In the end, you see the movie in order from start to finish.
“With him...it's like I'm watching the movie in a loop. Events keep spiraling back against themselves, out of order. Chaotic. Going backward than forward again. Spiraling down." Just the thought of this endless loop gave me a little vertigo.
"You okay?" she asked, a swirl of black dimming her aqua eyes.
I nodded, eyes closed to the dizziness. I swayed a little on my feet.