by Ty Drago
I hadn’t wanted to go home.
“You found me,” she said, an unsettling edge to her voice. “Or rather, I found you.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“She was there!” Micha exclaimed, and with such venom, such hatred, that I flinched and retreated a few feet along the catwalk.
“I was in the Rotunda,” she went on. “It’s … hazy. Like a dream. But I remember her being there. The Third!”
It took a lot of effort to reply. It was like having a loaded gun shoved in my face. This woman still looked like Lindsay Micha, but my mind’s eye kept seeing ten legs—and teeth.
“I need to find her!” she snarled. Yep, snarled. “I came close tonight. She was right there. If I hadn’t stopped to …” Her words trailed off.
“Save me,” I finished. “You might have had a shot at the imposter if you hadn’t rescued me instead.”
“Yes.” The word was almost a hiss. Then, as if arguing with herself, she snapped, “Well, I couldn’t let those … those monsters … hurt a child! I had to do something! Didn’t I?”
I almost said, “Sure.” But I got the seriously messed-up impression that she wasn’t talking to me. So I just sat there, kicking myself for not running when I’d had the chance. Sympathy for naked, crazy, old ladies only goes so far.
“Enough!” she said with senatorial finality. “For once you’re going to listen to me!” Her eyes met mine. “Yes, Will. I brought you here.”
I nodded, though inside I was thinking: Holy crap! Holy crap! Holy crap!
Micha nodded, too. “You’re safe. They won’t find us. They don’t come this far up.”
“Up what?” I asked.
“I hear them sometimes,” she went on. “Late at night. They know I’m up here … or at least they suspect. But they’re afraid. They search for me, but they’re afraid to find me.” She grinned wolfishly. “They should be.”
And, thick as I was, it finally clicked. “We’re inside the dome!”
Micha regarded me as if I’d just enthusiastically announced the world was round. “Where else would we be? This is the space between the inner and outer domes. Very few people come up here—and lately, no one at all.”
That explained the fleeting glimpse of George Washington I’d gotten when she—the First, as she’d called it—had carried me up from the Rotunda and past the fresco at the top of the dome.
I hadn’t even known this in-between space existed!
“Charles O’Mally is dead, isn’t he?” she asked.
Her subject changes, like everything about her, were kind of dizzying. “Yeah,” I said.
“He was a good man.”
“I liked him, too. A lot.”
Her smile softened. “I can see why he took a shine to you. He always gravitated toward redheaded people; just a funny quirk about the fellow.” Then, a little shyly, she added, “You’d never know it to look at me now, but I was a redhead myself once.”
The image of Gardner’s decaying hand ripping out the Sergeant at Arms’ still-beating heart flashed through my memory, white hot and razor sharp. “I shouldn’t have gotten him mixed up in this. It’s my fault he got killed.”
“Oh, I don’t see how that could be,” Micha replied gently. “We were watching … the First and myself. We clearly saw what that zombie did to him. You tried to help.”
“Don’t call ’em zombies,” I said. A reflex.
“Why not?”
Tears filled my eyes. “Never mind. I used him. Mr. O’Mally, I mean. I lied to him to get him to let me into the Capitol after hours. All because I wanted to look for … you.”
“Me?”
“The other you.”
She started fidgeting again.
You don’t quite realize that you and the First are somehow sharing a body. Oh, you know it’s there. You even rely on it. But that doesn’t mean you want to consciously accept it.
My dad used to have this saying about swimming in the River Denial.
Well, Lindsay Micha was drowning in it.
Okay, I knew I was about to take an awful chance. But maybe the time had come to talk about the ten-legged elephant in the room. “Lindsay … do you know what you are? Um … what you … change into?”
Her body took on that same scary stillness as before. “That’s not me. That’s the First.”
“The First is the creature that saved me in the Rotunda?”
She offered me a barely noticeable nod.
“But Lindsay,” I said carefully, “the First … is you.”
“No!” she exclaimed. Then she jumped to her feet. Except she didn’t jump—she leaped, went from sitting to standing in one perfect, fluid motion, almost too quick to see. “No!” she screamed again, pointing a trembling finger at me. “I’m not that horrible monster! I’m not!”
Then her eyes flashed.
I don’t mean they got bigger with anger, the way Helene’s sometimes did. I mean they flashed, like there was light behind them. Different-colored lights. Red. Green. Yellow. Blue. Over and over again, in rapid succession. At the same time, the surrounding air crackled with energy. I felt my scalp prickle, felt the hairs on my arms—even under my page shirt—stand straight up.
Oh God … she’s gonna Hulk out on me!
It was horrifying. And when an Undertaker tells you something’s horrifying, you’d better believe it.
Once again, my instincts screamed at me to run, even though I sensed that particular window had closed. At the very least, I wanted to throw up my hands and apologize, plead even—anything to calm her down, to make those awful eyes go back to normal.
But I’m an Undertaker. And we don’t plead.
So instead I stood up and put my face right in hers. It took every ounce of courage I had, but I did it. “Look at yourself!” I shouted back. “It’s happening to you right now! Right now! You’re gonna change right in front of me! You’re about to prove me right!”
Her mouth opened to speak. It was full of teeth, but not the human kind. These were thin and spiky, like miniature steak knives. And there were hundreds of them! She glared at me with those horrible, otherworldly eyes, and tried to form words. All that emerged, however, was a low, unnatural growl.
“The First is coming out, Lindsay,” I said, faking a calm I sure as heck didn’t feel. “And when it does, you’ll probably kill me. That what you want?”
Seconds passed, each one about a century long. I found myself counting my own heartbeats. There were a lot of them.
Micha’s mouth closed. Her shoulders fell. Her eyes turned human again.
She said with a sigh, “I’m hungry.”
Then she changed.
It was so quick, my mind couldn’t quite grasp it. She didn’t “Hulk out” so much as explode from one state to the other in a blur of flesh and color. One instant, a woman wrapped in nothing but an oversized page jacket stood before me—and the next the jacket was in tatters on the floor and the ten-legged Corpse Eater fixed me with its green eye.
A word, just one, drilled into my brain. This wasn’t like Deadspeak. This was like getting hit over the head with a telepathic brick.
Stay!
Then, as if to make her point, one pincered leg knocked me down and pinned to me to the catwalk. She leaned on my chest, bringing that face—that freakin’ eye—right down into mine.
A second “brick,” same as the first: Stay!
Then it was gone, bounding away down the steps and out of sight, leaving me on my back, lathered in sweat, and desperately trying not to pee my pants.
Lilith Cavanaugh
The package arrived at Lilith Cavanaugh’s three-story brick condominium in the wealthy Society Hill section of Philadelphia at well past eleven p.m. The messenger, a federal employee, apologized for the hour, explaining that it was a priority delivery from Senator Lindsay Micha.
“But you’re dressed,” he added. “So at least I didn’t pull you out of bed.”
The Queen glowered at the human foo
l, wishing that killing him was an option. But no—too many risks. Besides he seemed a reliable messenger. Something she’d learned long ago: never kill the messenger; good messengers are hard to find.
She signed for the package and showed him her driver’s license, which was almost comical, given what she actually looked like. Her current body was falling apart—a shriveled mummy infested with beetles and blowflies, whose skin cracked whenever she moved.
Unfortunately, as her minions kept telling her, no replacements were yet available. Humans just didn’t die at a convenient rate.
After the clueless messenger departed, Lilith carried her sister’s package to the kitchen table and examined it. It was a cube—eighteen inches on each side—and, other than Lilith’s address, it bore no markings.
Reluctantly, she fetched a kitchen knife.
The Malum didn’t use weapons. Just holding one made her feel unclean. Unfortunately, given the condition of her current host, trying to tear the package open would likely cost her a finger, or worse.
So, grimacing, she used the knife to cut the tape and then put it down as quickly as she could before opening the package and looking inside.
The Queen gazed into the rotting face of John Tall. The giant’s mouth hung open, his features—already weeks dead even before he’d been decapitated—slack and purple.
That was it. No note. Just her minion’s severed head.
A moment later, her cell phone rang.
Trembling with barely contained rage, the Queen answered it. “Speak.”
“Did my gift please you, sister?”
Lilith said nothing.
“The driver just texted me that you’d received delivery. Very convenient, these human gadgets.”
Lilith said nothing.
“Really … sending a fool like that to destroy me. It’s beneath you.”
Still Lilith said nothing.
“Perhaps it’s time for you to accept the changes that are coming.”
“Changes,” the Queen echoed.
“Tomorrow, Senator Micha announces her plans on live television. I’m going to make history.”
“As well as alert the Undertakers to your existence!” Lilith snapped, though she was immediately sorry she had.
“There’s a human expression: that ship has sailed. Besides, what can those brats possibly do against me? Why, just this evening I sprung a trap that ensnared Will Ritter.”
Lilith asked, “So the boy’s dead?”
A pause. An interesting pause. “Almost certainly.”
The Queen allowed herself a smile—thin, spiteful, and mean-spirited. “I’m not without my own sources of information in Washington.”
Now it was Micha’s turn to say nothing.
“I know what happened in the Capitol Rotunda earlier this evening. You cornered the Ritter boy but were prevented from killing him by … shall we say … your better half?”
Another long pause. Finally, and with feigned certainty: “That was hours ago. The abomination has consumed him by now.”
“Has it?”
“You know what they’re like.”
“I do. And I also know that, so far, all of its victims have been Malum. No human has even been injured. Furthermore, as I understand it, the abomination arrived on the scene just in time to save Ritter.”
“It’s not important!” Micha snapped.
“You realize, of course, that the more time it spends in human company … the more her true Self will emerge.”
“I said it’s not important!”
“So you did. Do you know where it’s hiding?”
“I have a strong suspicion.”
“Then why not have your loyal minions close in and kill it?” the Queen asked. Then, smiling into her sister’s silence, she answered her own question. “Because their loyalty to you isn’t quite enough to overcome their fear of her. Is that the problem … Senator?”
Micha said nothing.
“You know what she wants,” Cavanaugh continued, enjoying herself. “What she’s driven to want. You could flee DC for a while, crawl into some safe, dark hole, and wait until she dies … but then what would happen to your ambitions?”
“I refuse to hide from that … thing!”
“Courageous of you,” the Queen remarked sarcastically.
“More courageous, certainly, than you have been, sister! It’s your utter failure to deal with the meddlesome brats plaguing your city—and now plaguing mine—that makes my bid for supremacy necessary!”
And there it was. A bid for supremacy. No more hints. No more double meanings. Lindsay Micha had finally gone as far as to admit her ultimate goal. She intended to supplant Lilith as the Queen of the Malum.
“My people will find the abomination. And if, by some miracle, Ritter still lives, they will kill him. I won’t fail as you have.”
Lilith seethed. “Let’s just hope you find her before she finds you.”
“I will,” Micha replied. “In the meantime, enjoy your ‘gift.’ I had the rest of his body destroyed … so your ‘assassin’ is still in there. I thought you would find that amusing.”
And the line went dead.
Lilith Cavanaugh considered throwing the phone through the nearby wall, but she’d done that to too many cell phones lately. So instead she pocketed the device and, for a minute or so, studied what little remained of John Tall with utter disdain. Then she lifted his head out of the box and brought its slack, lifeless face close to her own.
“Hello, John,” she said.
“Mistress,” Tall replied in the Old Tongue. Without lungs attached to his severed windpipe, he couldn’t form human speech. Nevertheless, she found it interesting that he’d waited until now to address her. Protocol. Never speak until spoken to.
“You failed me again.”
“Yes. Mistress.”
No denials. No blubbering. “But you saw it, didn’t you? The abomination.”
“Yes. Horrible.” Then, after a pause: “It. Took. Boy.”
“So I’ve been told. Do you believe it took him for nourishment? Might Will Ritter already be dead?”
“No. Mistress. It. After. Micha. But. Saw. Boy. Danger. Chose. Rescue. Him.”
So her spy had said. Still, it was good to have it confirmed.
“Thank you, John.”
“Destroy. Me. Now?” he asked in the Old Tongue. His dread was obvious. It calmed her.
What’s more, it gave her an idea. The kidnapping of Karl Ritter’s son was unexpected. But perhaps it was also an—opportunity.
“Not just yet,” the Queen said thoughtfully. “Right now I have something more urgent to attend to.”
Then she unceremoniously dropped the head back into its box and returned to the living room, thankful now that she hadn’t destroyed her cell phone.
She had some calls to make.
Helene
“Emily … sweetheart,” Helene heard Susan Ritter say carefully. “Come away from that … right now.”
Just out of sight around the corner, Helene froze. She’d been navigating one of Haven’s crumbling corridors, trailing after the woman who’d been the target of her latest disaster of a mission. It was Monday night, more than two weeks since Tom had charged her with “getting close” to Will’s mom and, so far…
…well, Helene couldn’t remember the last time she’d screwed up something this bad.
Every time she tried hanging with Mrs. Ritter, her clumsy attempts to strike up a conversation went nowhere fast. Not that Will’s mother was rude—exactly. She just didn’t give anything back, usually making some hasty excuse to cut their contact short. Things had gotten so frustrating that Helene had twice asked Tom to pick another ambassador, insisting that she just wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing.
And twice he’d said no.
So, over the last couple of days, Helene had taken to just kind of shadowing the woman, doing her best to stay out of sight while at the same time sticking close enough to kind of…step in a
nd help…if an opening arose. It felt like a stupid strategy, transparent and juvenile. But, at this point, it was the only thing she could think of.
Then from up ahead she heard a little girl’s voice. “But I want to pet the kitty, Mommy!”
Uh-oh.
Helene hurried ahead, closing the distance between herself and Will’s small family.
Just around the corner, Susan Ritter stood at the mouth of one of Haven’s many blind corridors, little more than a deep niche in the wall. By the meager light of one of the bare bulbs strung along the hallway ceiling, Helene could read her worry. So far, she hadn’t noticed Helene’s arrival, her attention being glued to the goings-on in that blind corridor.
And Helene could guess what they were.
So she approached slowly, making as little noise as possible, until she stood just behind Mrs. Ritter’s shoulder.
Emily crouched inside the niche, her hand outstretched toward an animal that regarded it with distrust. The creature growled, low-pitched and menacing.
Any resemblance to a domestic cat was purely coincidental. The animal was large but scrawny, its ribs showing. It had short, gray fur and a wide, distrustful stare lit by eye shine.
Helene knew all about them: feral cats, introduced down here a century ago by the city to help deal with rats and other vermin. Now they were the vermin. Shy and quick to run, they could be dangerous when cornered.
Well, Will’s six-year-old sister had cornered this one.
“Here, kitty! Here, kitty!” the girl cooed.
“It doesn’t want to be petted, Em,” her mother told her, and there was no mistaking the edge of fear in her voice. She was right to be scared. The little girl’s hand was inches from the growling cat, whose tail swished back and forth, its back arched.
“She could sleep with me, Mommy!” Emily suggested. “Then I wouldn’t have bad dreams!”
Her mother visibly swallowed. “That’s … not like the cats in the pet stores, sweetheart. Please come away from it.”
“But, Mooommmyyy!”
The cat tensed to strike, bearing its teeth.