Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

by Sarah Monette

  He could hear voices; as he reached the bottom of the stairs, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, he realized that the stairs were masked from the room beyond by a curtain. Green-tinged light seeped around its edges, and he drew close enough to make the voices come clear.

  “ . . . he must know something, or he wouldn’t be here!”

  “Could’ve been just listening to the rumors again. You always were a gossip, weren’t you, Jamie boy?” A heavy thudding sound and a grunt: somebody had just kicked Jamie in the ribs. Mick’s hands clenched.

  “He’s a threat, Adler,” the first voice insisted.

  “And I’m going to deal with him.”

  A beat of loaded silence, and the first voice said, appalled, “You’re not going to give him to Brett’s—!”

  “I really don’t think it will care.” Adler sounded amused. “He certainly won’t. At least not for long.”

  “We’re not ready,” the first voice said. “After last night . . . ”

  “Oh, Jamie will keep. No one’s likely to come riding to his rescue.”

  Wrong, asshole, Mick thought with considerable satisfaction, listening as Adler and the other man, now discussing logistics and supplies for what sounded like a very complicated ritual, moved away from the stairs, growing distant and more muffled, until finally, with the click of a closing door, they became inaudible entirely.

  Mick pushed the curtain aside only enough to slip through. The room beyond would have seemed ordinary enough—a waiting room with benches and chairs along the wall—if it had not been for the terrible greenness of the light, and Jamie Keller lying like a foundered ship in the middle of the floor, wrists bound, ankles bound, mouth stopped with a ball gag that could have been borrowed from any of the scenes going on in the Neon Cthulhu’s main room.

  There was blood on Jamie’s face—it looked like it was from his nose, and Mick was cursing Adler viciously under his breath as he dropped to his knees beside Jamie and fumbled at the buckle of the gag, trying not to pull Jamie’s already disordered braids, trying not to hurt him more than he’d already been hurt.

  He eased the ball out of Jamie’s mouth, and Jamie took a deep, shuddering breath, and then another; Mick hadn’t been the only one with visions of asphyxiation. Then Jamie let his head roll back on the carpet as Mick started working on his wrists, and croaked, “How’d you find me?”

  “Had a flash,” that being Jamie’s term for the times when Mick’s latent eight blindsided him.

  “No shit?” Jamie sounded amazed and delighted, as if Mick had given him a birthday present he’d always wanted but never dared to ask for.

  “Yeah,” Mick said, and the leather thong around Jamie’s wrists came loose. “But enough about me. What happened to you?”

  “Being a Grade-A Prime fool, I walked slap into Mr. Henry Adler on my way back to the stairs.”

  “On your way back?” Mick said, untying Jamie’s ankles. “Did you find out—”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said, his voice tight with the pain of returning circulation. “Only let’s get out of here before we have Story Hour, if you don’t mind.”

  “You could hardly have suggested anything I would mind less,” Mick said and braced himself to help Jamie up. Jamie was perfectly steady on his feet, and Mick hoped that meant he had not been hurt too badly, despite the blood. He was glad to let Jamie take the lead as they proceeded cautiously into a positive rabbit-warren of storerooms and access tunnels.

  “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike,” Mick quoted uneasily. “Where the hell are we going?”

  “Back door. Heck of a lot easier than trying to get out the way we came.”

  “And where’s it gonna get us? Atlanta?”

  Jamie laughed, and Mick was ridiculously glad to hear it. “Alley in back of the Kroeger’s on Lichfield.”

  “That’s three blocks away!”

  “Halfway to Atlanta,” Jamie said dryly.

  “Adler can’t own everything between here and there.”

  “Steam tunnels. Hell, Mick, you know how this city is. Everything’s connected underground.”

  “Fucking ghouls.” Much of the undercity of Babylon had been constructed in the late nineteenth century by a series of Reconstruction mayors who had preferred the local necromancers’ money—and at a choice between the necromancers and the carpetbaggers, Mick wasn’t entirely sure he blamed them—to the safety of their citizens. It was the ghouls, though, who kept those tunnels clear, as patient and industrious as moles.

  “Works in our favor this time,” Jamie said, and a voice said in answer, “It might.”

  Mick and Jamie both whipped around, and then Mick shied back, right into Jamie’s unyielding bulk. He might have screamed; later, he could not remember and could not bring himself to ask.

  The thing that had crept into the corridor behind them had once been human. It might still be able to pass, to anyone except a clairvoyant, although the way Jamie’s arms tightened around Mick for a breath-stealing moment before letting him go suggested otherwise. Mick could see the broken wings it dragged behind itself, black as tar and shadows, and the way its eyes glowed fitfully sodium orange in the dim light. But the way its voice blurred and doubled, as if it were neither one person nor two, but perhaps one and a half—that, he thought, registered on the material plane, where Jamie could hear it just as well as he could.

  And then there was the way it crawled, like a spider or a crab, and the fact that its legs ended in stumps where the ankle bones should have been; even if it could have passed for human, it could never have passed for normal.

  Jamie said, his voice unnaturally steady, “You used to be Shawna Lafayette, didn’t you?”

  “’Used to be’?” Mick said, hearing the shrillness of his own voice. “Then what the fuck is she now?”

  “I am ifrit,” the thing said, its eyes flaring brilliantly, its voice warping and splintering, and it raised itself up like a cobra preparing to strike. Then it sank back again, the light in its eyes dulled. “And I think that, yes, this shell was once called Shawna. Much is lost.”

  There were several thousand questions demanding to be asked, and Mick couldn’t find the words for any of them. Jamie cut straight to the heart of the matter: “What do you want?”

  “I am hungry,” the ifrit said in a plaintive, unconvincing whine. “I am hungry, and I am tired, and I am starting to lose my grip on this shell. You carry pain with you. You could release it to me.” It licked its lips, not like a human being, but with the darting, flickering motion of a snake.

  “No, thank you,” Jamie said. “I did figure out what they’re doing with the Neon Cthulhu, you know. You got all the pain—and all the sex—you ever gonna need.”

  It hissed, again like a snake. “It would be better this way. Brighter.”

  Mick suddenly figured out what they were talking about and lurched back into Jamie again.

  “He is eager,” the ifrit said, its voice warbling with its own eagerness.

  “He is scared out of his mind, thank you very much,” Mick snapped. “Jamie, what—”

  “Shut up, Mick,” Jamie said, and very gently put him aside. “I have a better idea,” he said to the ifrit, advancing slowly. “Why don’t I help you let go of that body, before things get really ugly, and then you can go your way, and we can go ours?”

  “Jamie—!”

  “Shut up, Mick.”

  “You will not kill this shell,” the ifrit said. “You know its name.” It sounded certain, but it had backed itself against the wall, and it was watching Jamie with wide unblinking eyes, very orange now.

  “And if you understood thing one about human beings, you’d know that’s why I’m willing to kill you. That body’s in misery, and it used to be someone I knew.” He stopped, just out of arm’s reach, and stared down at the ifrit. “It’ll be quick, and then this whole clusterfuck will be over.”

  “I do not want . . . ” But the ifrit’s voice trailed off, as if it could
no longer be certain what it did want, or didn’t want; Mick remembered for no reason that mongooses were supposed to mesmerize their prey by dancing for them.

  “Hold still, Shawna,” Jamie said, his voice terribly kind, and then he moved.

  Greased lightning had nothing on Jamie Keller, and Mick was still shocked at the idea that anyone so big could move so fast when he realized that small dry noise he had heard, like a twig breaking, had been Shawna Lafayette’s neck. The body was just a body now, slumped and broken. The ifrit was gone.

  “Is it dead, too?” Mick said hoarsely.

  “Fucked if I know,” Jamie said, and it was clear he didn’t care, either. “Shawna’s better off, though. I’m sure of that.”

  They reached the Skylark half an hour later, without another word being exchanged; Jamie folded down into the driver’s seat with a sigh of relief and reached for the handset.

  Mick caught his wrist. “Tell me first—are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Adler got me down with a hex, not a cosh. Hadn’t gone face-first, I wouldn’t even have the bloody nose.” He sounded disgusted at his own clumsiness.

  Mick hadn’t really meant physically. “Jamie . . . ”

  “I’m fine, Mick. Let’s report in and get this over with, okay?”

  Mick couldn’t argue with that, although he had a vague feeling he should. He listened as Jamie called in; neither of them was surprised when Jesperson’s voice interrupted to pepper Jamie with questions. Jesperson really didn’t sleep, and he almost never went home. The first was the result of being a class nine necromancer—a necromancer dux, they called it in Britain—even if officially non-practicing; Mick often wondered if the second was as well.

  “Did you find out what killed Brett Vincent?”

  “Yes, sir. And Shawna Lafayette, too. Well, part of Shawna Lafayette, anyway.”

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

  “No, sir. Because Adler’s hosting ifrits.”

  Jesperson’s vocabulary became briefly unprintable. “Are you sure? Adler’s only . . . ”

  “Class four, yessir. That’s what happened to Shawna Lafayette. And Brett Vincent.”

  “That . . . oh. Oh, bloody hell.”

  “Yessir. Adler and his boys, they’re talking ‘bout it like a ritual, and I know for a fact Henry Adler ain’t got the math. He can’t figure a tip without a calculator.”

  “I like this even less than I thought I would. How long do you think this has been going on?”

  “Dunno, sir. But I know what happened to Brett Vincent’s body was on account of them getting the phase wrong, and the stupid bastards didn’t even know the word.”

  Becoming aware of Mick’s goggle-eyed stare, he covered the mike with his palm and hissed, “What?”

  Mick just shook his head, and Jesperson said, “’Brett Vincent’s body.’ You don’t think—”

  “I think Brett Vincent’s been dead for a long time. Same way I would’ve been if Echo hadn’t come and got me out.”

  “Yes, what was November Echo’s part in this evening’s escapade?”

  “Echo was invaluable, sir,” Jamie said, and elbowed Mick hard in the ribs to make him stop laughing.

  “Good,” Jesperson said. A pause, probably while he wrote something on one of the legal pads that littered his office like shed snakeskins. “How many ifrits do you think there are in Electric Squidland?”

  “There can’t be that many,” Mick said, and now it was Jamie’s turn to look goggle-eyed at him.

  “How do you figure that, November Echo?”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, you said it yourself—and how did you get to learn so much about necromancy, anyway?”

  “I don’t spend my off-hours fornicating like a bunny rabbit. Go on—what did I say?”

  “That they didn’t know what they were doing. I mean, I don’t either, but if they had to repeat the spell every so often—?”

  “Yeah. ‘Bout once every five years. Ifrit starts losing its grip, and that ain’t pretty. Well, you saw.”

  “Yeah. And they’ve fucked up twice that we know about in the last three years—they can’t be maintaining an army of ifrits, or we’d be up to our asses in Missing Persons.”

  “They must’ve lost the person who knew what they were doing.”

  “Carolyn Witt,” Jesperson said, startling them both badly. “She was part owner of Electric Squidland. Sold her share to Adler just before her arrest. And she was class seven. I think a word with Ms. Witt might clear up a great many questions.”

  “Yessir,” Jamie said and yawned.

  “Go home, November Foxtrot and Echo,” Jesperson said, and for a moment the rasp in his voice sounded less like irritation and more like concern. “You can finish the paperwork when you’ve got some sleep.”

  The BPI raided Electric Squidland that same night, discovering things in the rooms beneath the Neon Cthulhu that would keep the state Office of Necromantic Regulation and Assessment busy for years. Suzanne Parker was not among those arrested; she had taken Mick’s advice and gotten the hell out of Dodge.

  At 11:34 the next morning, Mick set two cups of coffee on the desk he and Jamie shared, and sat down opposite his partner. Although his head was clear this morning, and the world was coloring within the lines, Mick had a gloomy feeling today was not going to be a good day at all. They were facing a mountainous stack of paperwork, including the closing of a file on an seventeen-year-old boy named Daniel McKendrick who had disappeared from a Nashville suburb in 1983. His fingerprints matched those of Brett Vincent.

  Jamie pushed back from the desk, stretching until his spine popped.

  “Lila going to forgive you?” Mick asked.

  “Maybe,” Jamie said dolefully. “She hates my schedule.”

  “That’s because you don’t have one.”

  “Bite me.” Jamie took a generous swallow of coffee and said, “Do you think we’re right to say that body is Daniel McKendrick?”

  “It is Daniel McKendrick.”

  “Not like that. I mean, his family’s gonna be notified, and they been thinking he’s dead all this time, and now they get half a fucking body to bury? Aside from which, Daniel McKendrick has been dead all this time—or at least most of it. That body was . . . somebody else, if it was a person at all.”

  “You mean, you think when you were sleeping with him . . . ”

  “Oh, I’m sure of it. Because he didn’t give a shit when Shawna Lafayette disappeared, and now I know why.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Mick asked, red-faced at his own stupid clumsiness.

  “No, but I’m gonna have to put it in the report anyway.” Jamie sighed, took another slug of coffee. “It’s the reason I quit Electric Squidland. Well, one of the reasons. Shawna was a waitress in the Kaleidoscope. She caught Adler’s eye, because she was pretty and not very bright, and I was worried about it—because she was pretty and not very bright. And then she disappeared, and nobody cared, and I asked Brett if he didn’t think there was something strange about it, and he essentially told me to mind my own business. And, you know, I’d seen him talking to Shawna before she disappeared. Talking to her a lot.”

  “Persuading her.”

  “Seducing her,” Jamie corrected. “And I don’t know how many other people he seduced like that, or why he didn’t try it on with me.”

  “Jamie, you’re not helping yourself—”

  “You know, that’s the worst part. He let me go.”

  “Sorry?”

  “He let me go. Oh, he tried to make me stay on, but when I wouldn’t, he was okay with it. He never used magic on me, or tried to get me to play Adler’s little games. Hell, he never even asked me to go down to the Neon Cthulhu with him, and he must have known I would have. I think about the shit he could have pulled on me and the fact he didn’t pull it, and the fact that he fucking let me go, and . . . Well, fuck it, Mick, I don’t know. Was I just not worth it? Or do y
ou think ifrits can love?”

  “I don’t know,” Mick said, wanting desperately to give a better answer but simply not having one. “I really don’t.” And hesitantly, almost cringing, he reached out and put his hand over Jamie’s, feeling the warmth and the strength and the roughness of Jamie’s knuckles. And Jamie turned his hand over, folded his fingers around Mick’s hand.

  They sat that way for a moment, saying nothing. Jamie squeezed tighter, then let go and said briskly, “This ain’t getting the paperwork done.” But his eyes were clearer, as if some of the pain knotting him up had been released, and Mick returned to his share of their report feeling better himself.

  Today might turn out to be a good day after all.

  Imposters

  They were pulling out of the parking lot of St. Dymphna’s Psychiatric Hospital when the radio crackled into life. Mick answered. Dispatch said, “There’s been another one.”

  “Shit,” Jamie said. They’d developed a rule that the partner not holding the handset did the swearing for both of them. Mick said to Dispatch, “Give us an address, and we’re on our way.”

  There was a hesitation, infinitesimal, but years long in Dispatch-time, which they understood when the dispatcher said, “Langland Street subway station. He jumped.”

  “Christ,” Mick said, racking the handset.

  “That makes what, three jumpers?”

  “Three jumpers, a bullet to the brain, and Mrs. Coulson back there in St. Dymphna’s. I think the police are right. This one’s paranormal.”

  “Evidence or hunch?”

  “Hunch mostly. But. People don’t just ‘go crazy’ out of a clear blue sky, you know. And here’s four people—five now, I guess—no history of mental illness, going zero to psychosis in sixty seconds flat. Something is very definitely wrong with this picture. And it feels paranormal to me.”

  Mick’s 3(8) esper rating wasn’t quite high enough for his intuition to be admissible legal evidence, but Jamie had never known him to be wrong. “Then we’d better start trying to figure out what these people had in common.”