by Molly White
“Aw, that’s sweet,” she said. “You didn’t tell your boss that my mother was my Achilles heel, did you?”
“Um, Cordy, what are you talking about?” Alex asked.
“You’re not the bad guy. I mean, you’re kind of an ass sometimes, but you’re not a bad guy,” Cordelia said.
He frowned. “Thank you, I think?”
“I’m really sorry it didn’t work out between us Alex,” she said. “But I think we’re both really different people now. I’m pretty sure I’m in love with someone else, and I think there’s an amazing person out there for you that you just haven’t found yet. But stick around here and you’ll probably stumble across them. Everybody here seems to do that eventually.”
“OK,” he sighed. “But can we go back to talking to each other now that you know I didn’t tell Messina to press you about your mom? Also, what the hell? When did that happen?”
“When he called me into that creepy interrogation room to tell me I needed to work faster, or he might call my mom and tell her where I am,” Cordelia said.
Alex looked stricken. “I’m so sorry. I would say that’s not normal operating procedure for him, but he’s definitely an ‘ends justify the means’ kind of guy.”
“You’re not an evil mastermind, though. That’s a relief,” Cordelia said.
She smiled at him. Once upon a time, they’d had a moment when they were full of possibility, but that moment had passed. They were different people now, so different from the children they’d been. Alex was the past and all its weight. Brendan was the future.
“So, I’m going to go to the grocery store,” she told him. “And you’re going to stay here and not follow me. I will talk to you the next time I see you. OK?”
“That sounds very reasonable and non-evil,” he agreed. “And I will have a conversation with Messina, reminding him that he’s not dealing with hardened criminals in this town and perhaps he could catch more flies with honey instead of nuclear weapons.”
He grinned at her. “I’ve missed your wisdom,” he said.
“OK, smartass, I’ll see you when I see you.” She hopped up from the swing and jogged down the steps. She felt…lighter somehow, knowing that she didn’t have to dread seeing Alex. Now she only had to scan the sidewalk for her mother’s face, not his, too.
She’d almost reached the grocery store when a League fleet vehicle squealed up to the curb. Sonja leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door. “There’s an emergency at the rift site. Brendan’s already there. Get in.”
“What are you doing here? I thought you were at Jillian’s?” Cordelia cried.
“Your mother has shown up at the rift trailer and she’s causing havoc!” Sonja yelled. “Come on, Cordelia!”
Cordelia slid into the passenger seat. “Should we stop and tell Alex?”
“No time!” As soon as she was in the car, Sonja jammed her foot on the accelerator and they were speeding out of town. Sonja barely spoke on the drive out to the rift site, concentrating on the road like it was a particularly difficult video game.
“How did my mom get out to the site?” Cordelia asked. “What’s she doing? Is she trying to break into the trailer?”
“It would take about three PhDs for me to explain,” Sonja grumbled. “I just know Jillian wants you there ASAP. Brendan’s there and he needs you.”
At those words, Cordelia’s heart began to pound. Did Sonja mean that Brendan was hurt? In danger? Brendan was dead, technically speaking, but he could be injured just like any other being. And Sonja clearly wasn’t in the mood to answer questions. Cordelia closed her eyes and focused on her shield, making sure it was strong enough to withstand whatever it was they were about to face. And she prayed to gods she wasn’t sure she believed in that Brendan was unharmed.
In what felt like a few minutes, the car skidded to a stop. They were haphazardly parked near the rift and Sonja had hopped out, yelling, “Come on, Cordelia!”
Cordelia undid her seatbelt and stepped out. Sonja was already moving toward the trailer and she moved to follow. She mentally shoved away dozens of imagined scenarios: Brendan lying on the floor of the trailer unconscious. Brendan bleeding. Brendan turning to dust as he tries to open the casket. She was halfway up the path to the trailer when she glanced back to the car and realized…there were no other vehicles parked there.
How did Brendan get here, if not by car?
She turned around and saw Sonja striding toward the rift without hesitation. When Sonja first took Cordelia to the site, she hadn’t come near the trailer. Even when Cordelia had passed out, she’d waited for Brendan to carry her to the car. Sonja hadn’t come towards the trailer at all. She didn’t want to get that close to the rift…because she’d almost died at the rift site. In fact, she brought up almost dying at the rift site nearly every time it came up in conversation. It had clearly made a traumatic impression on her. But here they were at the site again and Sonja didn’t bring it up? And now that Cordelia thought about it, Sonja hadn’t called her Cordelia since they’d first met. She was always ‘sweetie’ or ‘honey.’
Was it because of the emergency? Was Sonja’s normal reserve gone because of the sense of urgency?
Cordelia’s eyes flicked downward and saw that Sonja was wearing sensible ladies’ loafers.
Aw, man. Cordelia had just made an enormous mistake in life choices. There was no life-threatening emergency involving Brendan. And she was an idiot.
Sonja would never wear loafers. She would wear stilettos running a marathon.
“Sonja” turned and scoffed at her, waving her towards the door. “What are you doing just standing there? Come on, we need to get inside and not even I have this sort of clearance.”
“So that’s why you needed me, huh? My thumbprint?” Cordelia asked.
The fake Sonja did her best to look confused. “What?”
“Who are you really?” Cordelia asked.
“Sonja” faltered a few times to start an excuse. Finally, she rolled her eyes and pulled a rather large handgun from her bag. “Ugh, I should have known you would be a pain in the ass about this. Fine.”
With the gun barrel trained on her, it occurred to Cordelia that running the moment she’d realized something was amiss probably would have been a good idea. She was just full of bad decisions this evening. Meanwhile, the bones under Sonja’s skin shifted, broadened, until Bernadette Canton stood before her.
Cordelia stumbled back. “What the shit!”
Her mother smirked at her. “I assumed you would be more comfortable with Sonja. Or at least that you’d be more likely to do what she said, if she said it with enough authority. Almost everybody in this place seems terrified of her. But maybe you’d prefer me in this form?”
“God, no. What are you?” Cordelia asked.
“I’m a mimic, sweetheart. I’m one of the oldest shifters there is, but I shift into people instead of some animal. I can be any person I want,” Bernadette said, grinning.
Cordelia gasped as Bernadette sauntered down the stairs and circled, keeping the gun trained on her. “You’re the one I’ve been seeing with my mom’s face! Was it you that morning with Brendan? When he was so weird and cold? You asshole! You made me think I was crazy!”
“Well, honestly, Cordelia, it wasn’t really that difficult to make you think that, was it?” Bernadette asked.
“How did you even know what my mother looked like? It’s not like I have a fucking photo album in my house,” she demanded as Bernadette forced her to back up the stairs towards the door.
“Google. You’re using your real name, right? Well, your mother’s had a tragic ‘help me find my daughter’ Facebook page for ten years,” Bernadette said.
Cordelia sighed. “Of course she does. Look, could you please take off my mother’s face? She’s a much better liar than you are. And this clumsy bullshit is making me feel bad for her, which I find unacceptable.”
“You can be very nasty when you want to be,” Bernadette m
used as she stripped out of her shirt. The decision to strip made sense as Bernadette’s mid-section ballooned into a man’s barrel chest and an enormous beer belly. Cordelia watched in horror as her mother’s face inflated, becoming bulbous around the chin and cheeks. She couldn’t even enjoy the sight of her mother with jowls as the face shifted into a more familiar alignment.
“Aw, Walt, no! I thought you were my friend!” she cried.
Walt shrugged his rounded shoulders. “You know, it’s sad how many times I’ve heard that over the years. No, little girl. I’m not your friend. I’ve been working for the League since before there was such a thing,” he sniffed. “I’m older than anything you ever met. You stay in a place long enough, stay quiet, people forget you’re there. I’ve watched the very thing I established to help my kind turn into a privileged, overcomplicated nightmare. We’re cowering in the shadows when we have the power and the wisdom to run this world. I’m tired of cowardice and I’m tired of caution. I’m tired of watching humans burning through every good thing in this world while we debate the gentlest way to tell them we’re sharing that world with them. But I’d been away from the inner workings for too long to make any changes through the League. I had to make what you might call a sideways run at it, using my old contacts, the influence I had left. Do you know how humiliating it is, to come to a backwater like this and pretend to be some common shifter?”
“That’s not really at the top of my list of concerns. You know I’m not going to cooperate, right?” Cordelia asked.
“I could always shoot you, cut your hand off and unlock the door myself,” Walt suggested with a smirk.
“Yeah, that would be a problem since you need me alive to work it,” Cordelia snorted.
Walt rolled his eyes and pulled a small plastic bag out of his pocket. He held it up so she could see the wickedly curved blade inside. She could see old bloodstains on the handle and recoiled.
“You’re going to cooperate,” he told her. “You’re going to help me get into the trailer. You’re going to connect to the entity in the box and convince it to rip the sky wide open. Then you’re going to help me load it into the transport box I happen to know is in there, and we’re walking out of here. And then we’re going on a little tour. We’ll take the casket all over the world and open up rifts on a global level. Because if everybody is magique, we don’t have to worry about negotiating with the humans. And you’re going to do all of this because if you don’t, I’m going to lock you in a room so full of murder weapons and serial killer souvenirs that you’ll go stark raving mad within minutes.”
“You make a compelling argument,” she grumbled. “You dick.”
She didn’t feel bad about introducing profanity to the bayou. He deserved it.
He jerked at her sleeve, and Cordelia could only be grateful that he wasn’t touching her skin as he forced her thumb against the keypad. The door buzzed and sprung open. For a fleeting moment, Cordelia thought about how she might be able to press the giant red RECORD button on the wall, but the first thing Walt did was smash the button off the wall and fire at the cameras, preventing her from remotely alerting the League office that something was amiss. Then he attacked the monitoring panel, so the League office wouldn’t even get a notification that her heart rate was through the roof. Because she was being held at gunpoint.
Shit.
Walt’s back was turned to her and she happened to see his phone outlined in his back pocket. It was one of those old-fashioned flip-phone models so dear to Walter’s demographic, with an extendable antennae tip just barely peeking out of the denim.
This would be the most important lift of her life and she had less than seconds to plan for it. She had to be stealthy and cunning and undetectable, which would be a hell of a lot easier if her head wasn’t throbbing like a bass drum from being this close to the artifact.
Picturing her hand as a snake sliding through water, she plucked the tip of the antenna between her two fingers and let his own motion pull away from her, leaving the phone in her hand. She shoved it in the back of her waistband under her shirt, before he could turn and see her. She glowered at him.
“I need you to open the glass box, put your hands on the casket, and talk to her.”
“I haven’t been cleared to connect with Pandora again,” Cordelia lied. “She put me in the hospital last time and the doctor hasn’t given me permission to try again.”
“Is that what you call her? Pandora? That’s charming,” Walt said, smiling at the casket through the glass. “And not too far off, I suppose. She’s older than anything in the world, older than me, older than civilization. I heard rumors about her when I was a child, but I never thought to see her myself.”
As he was lost in his memories, Cordelia reached back and took the phone out. She held it behind her back and opened it, thankful that the ancient model had embossed numbers on each key. She painstakingly tapped out Jillian’s cell phone number, knowing she wouldn’t have a second opportunity. As she pushed away, the attached memory of Walt checking his texts in the bathroom, she hit send and prayed Jillian wasn’t screening her calls.
“And I know you think you’re not strong enough to connect with her again, but if you just push past your fear, you’ll do what I need you to. Your whole life you’ve let fear keep you from fulfilling your potential.”
“Well, Walt, that would be really amazing and inspirational if you weren’t holding a gun on me,” she said, hoping that Jillian had picked up by now and could hear the pertinent details. “Speaking of which, I’ll bet you didn’t know there are snipers posted out here at the rift site. You probably only have a few minutes before they show up and blow your head off…which, to be honest, I’m sort of looking forward to now.”
Walt clucked. “Oh, sweetness, it’s so sad that you think the cavalry is coming. There are no snipers coming, because I took care of them before I even picked you up. It’s amazing how much people let their guard down around coworkers, isn’t it? Present company included, obviously. All I had to do was impersonate their teammates and I could walk up behind each of them and press a blade to their throats.”
“If you call me ‘sweetness’ one more time, I swear to God,” Cordelia said.
Walt sneered. “You’ll what?”
Cordelia bared her teeth. “I haven’t decided yet. But I won’t help you take it. You’re going to have to kill me.”
She made a grab for the gun, absolutely sure that she was about to die.
13
Brendan
Something was wrong. He could feel the wrongness of it skittering over his skin like an army of centipedes, but he had no idea what exactly was off. He hadn’t heard from Cordelia all afternoon and he didn’t like what it said about him as a man that it made him so uncomfortable.
He walked to the door and touched the knob, but turned on his heel and sat on the couch. “Nope. Just sit in your chair and read your book,” he told himself. “For fuck’s sake, have some dignity, man.”
He flipped through the pages of The Return of the King to find his place. But he couldn’t concentrate on the grandeur of Tolkien’s prose with these damn alarms crawling along his nerves. He sprang up from the couch and opened the door, only to find Zed and Bael standing on his porch with beer.
“Ah! Distractions!” he cried. “I mean, friends!”
“Hey, man,” Zed said, carrying a six-pack into the trailer. “We were stuck in the middle of baby shower chores, so we drummed up an emergency to come into town.”
“If anybody asks, there was a power outage at the parish hall and we had to come take care of it,” Bael said. “I would be ashamed, but the ladies had us tying Jordan almonds into tiny circles of tulle with ribbons. Drastic measures had to be taken.”
“What about Will?” asked Brendan.
“We had to leave him behind,” Zed said. “He’s a terrible liar and would have slowed us down.”
“You all right?” Bael asked. “You seem a little tense.”
/> Zed laughed. “Come on, Bael, you know the look on his face. You lived the look on his face. Hell, so did I. That’s the look of a man head-over-ass in love who hasn’t seen his gal in more than a few hours.”
Bael nodded in agreement. “For the record, you were worse off than I was.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Zed said.
Brendan snickered. “I would try to deny it, but sadly, you are correct. How does it happen so damn fast? A few months ago, I didn’t even know the woman.”
“With the right woman, that’s all it takes,” Bael told him.
“I’m not sure how I feel about you dating my adopted little sister, Irish,” Zed mused. “She doesn’t have any family, so I feel the need to threaten you in a manly fashion. Something general, like threatening you with some awful death if you hurt her. But you’re already dead, so it feels like a waste of time.”
“Technically, it’s more like being in between worlds…you know, I’ve spent more time explaining my condition in a place where everybody is magique than I ever did in the outside world,” Brendan said. “That seems a little backwards.”
“But, you and Cordy, you can…” Zed made a strange, interactive hand gesture.
Brendan shook his head. “I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
“You know…” Zed said.
“Are you honestly asking me if my penis works?” Brendan exclaimed.
Bael spat his beer back into his bottle. Zed shrugged. “Don’t act like you weren’t thinking about it.”
“I can assure you that of all the things going on right now, the last thing I’m thinking about is O’Connor’s junk,” said Bael. “No offense, O’Connor.”