Pride and Poltergeists

by H. P. Mallory

  You killed Melchior.

  I didn’t, I said, a pathetic denial.

  Yes, you did. You killed him because you had to. Because he deserved it. Because it was you or him. Monotone and indifferent, it didn’t sound like her normal voice—it was too quiet and docile. Too grey. Too much like me.

  Shut up, I thought, addressing myself.

  I should have gone back downstairs and buried myself in the niceties of conclave talk, letting the drakes, the werewolves, and the vampires fuss over me like fond grandparents, and pointing out all the parts of themselves they saw reflected in me. So what if it pinched and burned and tweaked, being massively uncomfortable? I could do it, and I probably should have. If only so I could pretend nothing happened. Nothing was different, and there was nothing I’d overlooked. No bright red flags waving madly in a high wind and practically slapping me in the face.

  Because there weren’t any. We’d proceed and follow through to the finish line like nothing changed, because nothing had changed. We were monsters full of magic, driven with great purpose, and the hell if Mother’s latest plaything would undermine that.

  Relax, I thought. Inhale, exhale. Feel the cold, and let it wash over you. Smell the woods, the leaves, the mud, the distant blood. Think about something else, anything else. Anything but those diamond blue eyes and a long, white scar that spanned a vast expanse of sculpted muscles …

  I sighed, leaning on the stone railing. I shouldn’t have watched. Mother’s glamour must have lost its potency on me. Her magic did that sometimes, spreading through the room and trapping anything semi-sentient within range, just because it could—especially when she worked herself into a tizzy. Now I was all hot-and-bothered for some floozy Loki I’d never met, and desperate to get my hands on him, while stupidly insisting he was innocent.

  Innocent is not the right word, she said. But he didn’t kill Melchior, if that’s what you’re talking about.

  I laughed hoarsely. I was too tired to tell her to fuck off. You know what? Sure. Maybe he didn’t.

  What if Mother was lying? It wouldn’t be far out of character, even if the lie were intended only for my benefit—but if she were, she must’ve had her reasons, and I wasn’t about to question her. Not when we were so close to the end.

  Maybe I could go downstairs and find her. I could hide in the kitchen and send Antoine into the crowd after her. He could lure her back with a Bloody Mary or something, and convince her to officially release her stupid spell … I believed the effects of it were probably the only reason I allowed Sebastian to fuck me.

  Fuck, I thought. Weird word. Short, and to the point. Not the kind of word I used often.

  Yeah, it is, she said, only softer now. All the fucking time.

  I blinked slowly, suddenly feeling sleepy, of all things. I shook my head and widened my eyes. Mother would be here any minute now to pull me downstairs for the final call. The last moment to drink before we went out to set the world on fire. I had to be awake for that, or at least ready to fake it. The more observant vampires and dryads might notice something was off, but most of them would be slobbering drunk by then, if they weren’t already. Anything I did had to be pitch-perfect-professional. I could slit a throat in the middle of the room and the rest of the party would consider it a charming anomaly, a queer side effect from all the changes their poor, little darling had to endure.

  Like going through puberty, I thought. But this time, it was some sacred ordeal, a ritual, and the realization of something that everyone in that room had built me up to be. Here, the watery blood of the old nymphs combined with the sap-thick sludge from the dryads, the blue vinegar from the draconian kings, and the shadowy scarlet from every vampiric House in the world. Blood on blood on blood on blood on blood, always more being added, homogenized inside a cauldron in a dark room. Spoon feeding a three-year-old who had no idea what she would become or what kind of gift she was receiving. And no clue what would be expected of her later because of it.

  Not that I cared much. Destroying things for me was easy, and it seemed that’s all I wanted to do anyway. Mother was the politician. The drake who wanted to marry me was of the military viewpoint, and some other fool dealt with optics and propaganda. Me? I was a big, scary gun, a magic bomb bristling with clashing energies. Ready to burst on command. It would be fun for a while, before I was regulated to something far less …

  Regulated. Why did that word strike a nerve? I’d meant to say relegated.

  My mental tirade came to a standstill. It all stopped so I could examine that peculiar word. Regulated, regulated, regulated … something made me feel strange, cold and blue, something from the distant past, like a half-remembered smell.

  Regulator, I thought suddenly. Not an action, but a person. But what was a Regulator? A person, a person, but what did they do?

  They catch things. Evil, angry things and confine them forever. A darker voice thought enemy, and all the familiarity I clung to suddenly sank into nothing. The word was just a word again, absent any memory, if I still possessed one to speak of.

  Memory. And that led to another thought. An odd one, one I hadn’t enough time to consider before, and never occurred to me until this very moment.

  What did I remember?

  Not just about Regulators or how often Mother lied, but about … anything. How old was I? Who were my friends? Where did I go to school? What did I look like when I was little? What books did I read? What magic did I know and possess?

  All of it, the darker voice crooned. Everything and much more.

  “More than what?” I whispered. More than nothing? Two weeks? Three weeks was more than nothing. All at once, with a terrible shock, I realized that’s all I had in my brain. That’s as far as my archive regressed—three weeks. Waking up in this room with Mother beside me, she was telling me to shoot some troublesome burglars, and I recalled watching them bleed out on my floor. But before that? Before that … there was nothing! Just a persistent darkness, an emptiness with a burdensome weight imbuing it, an absence with a bitter presence that refused to leave me. A deliberate awareness of nothing.

  Maybe it was Mother’s doing. I’d been lost for quite some time, or so she told me, and the change could only resume very recently—three weeks ago, or just before that. Perhaps this was another known side effect of the material shift: losing the memories of everything that came before. Or maybe it was an unforeseen side effect, something that would doom my present self, preventing me from forging any new long-term memories. Maybe I had a tumor, or hit my head, or I was allergic to one or more of the blood samples Mother kept pumping through me. Maybe my brain was sick, like a computer with a virus that suddenly erases all of its files. I was left with a single program that was barely operable. I found myself constantly reaching back for relevant information, but finding nothing. I could only fail to complete the code.

  I shook my head, feeling silly. Must be the glamour talking. I’d never known a glamour to do that before, but I’d also never been personally glamoured either, certainly not by someone as strong as Mother. I believed it was more hormone-based than mental. Glamouring affected the primal lizard brain and all of its baser instincts. It had almost nothing to do with higher mental functions—but brain chemistry still meant brain, and it wasn’t totally unfeasible for Mother to have temporarily wiped out my memory.

  The glamour brought my thoughts back to that man, the prisoner, Knightley. Tall, dark, handsome, and so wonderfully mobile … Maybe I would go to him after all. Just to sample him, and see if sex with him drove the feeling away. Maybe I could satisfy the glamour’s obsession with him and finally silence it. The way he fought Mother looked painful, but far more stimulating than anything Sebastian could provide. The prisoner wouldn’t be hard to glamour again, especially not after what he just endured. And he seemed to know me, even if I didn’t know him. Hell, he might even want it … I wondered if that would make it any easier.

  I looked down at my hands, turned slightly green in the light
of my wings, which were flapping languidly behind me. I remembered something a vampire said to me once, but now it seemed like worlds ago. He was describing the behavior of glamours. He said they removed the subject’s inhibitions, giving them a green-light for whatever base urges lay beneath the surface.

  He also said something about choices, and how even under a glamour, you still had them. No matter how powerful the caster was. Suddenly I felt sick to my stomach. The idea that Knightley could have engaged Mother willingly, even slightly … Ugh!

  I didn’t understand why that thought bothered me as much as it did. There was no explanation, just a jumble of feelings. They twisted my stomach and made my eyes burn and my heart race. They also brought back the panicked choking from before.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, bit my tongue, and inhaled the frozen air. You have to want it, I thought, but the voice sounded different, like a whisper from a memory I couldn’t completely recall. Some part of you, however small, has to want it.

  So what could I have wanted so badly?

  That struck me. I’m not being glamoured. The thought came slowly, like I was emerging through molasses with helpless arms. That’s ridiculous. Mother’s glamour, sure, but that was a wave of horniness, and nothing more. Absolute nonsense.

  For a moment, there was silence. Not thinking anything, my mind came to a halt. Hesitating long enough to breathe. A cold wind tugged at my robe, picking up my hair, and making my wings shudder. Everything was shrouded in abysmal, desolate dark.

  But if I were being glamoured, I started to say. The words crept into place, forming quiet sentences as though I were hiding from something. If I were being glamoured, which I’m not, and my thoughts weren’t really mine, what would I want more than anything?

  I thought about it. Knightley, maybe. He was stunningly attractive, and maybe I knew him somewhere in my black past. Hmm. What else could I want?

  Power? Fortune? Maybe, but I hadn’t done anything with the money Mother still possessed, and I didn’t particularly want to. Sex? I had Sebastian, but he was nothing to write home about. Hades! What else?

  Maybe Mother, herself, her constant presence, or her tutelage. Yes, there was a hole there, a vague, a misty silhouette where a person could be standing in the back of my head—and a soft, warm voice to go with it. Yes, it was the mother that I wanted! It had to be! Because I missed her. Yes, I missed her! I could feel it now in my being, all the way down to the marrow inside my bones. I missed the way she sang to me when I couldn’t sleep … and her smile whenever I got off the bus … and all the fairy tales she told me that weren’t real, and how she braided my hair … and she always told me I could do anything I wanted, and be anything I wanted to be … her ice water eyes, blue as diamonds, were always smiling—

  Wait.

  Mother’s eyes weren’t blue. They were grey and red and orange! Sometimes, they were black. But never blue.

  Mother’s eyes, no, I thought. But … Mom …

  And then it all came crashing down.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Sam

  The air went red and mercury-white, hot enough to blister our skin. There were lights and shouting, the distant angry crowd going up in smoke, spitting debris, hocking bricks and bits of foundation, concrete and calcified bones, along with vaporized blood. A wave, like a gust of wind, flattened us all to the ground, and we lay on top of the dirt. With the air forced out of our lungs, I didn’t have the ability to even scream properly.

  It was all over an instant later, leaving behind a blind expanse of heat. And then silence. Brooding, invisible, airless. Shadows moved across the edges of my vision. People, standing if they could, were complaining if they couldn’t. A voice, Marcus’s, asked Christina if she were all right—Christina, however, failed to reply.

  Kent grunted. “Shite.” He coughed and hauled himself onto his feet with a lot of stumbling. “Whut the hell was that?”

  I stared at the sky, the normal green was all awash with the wrong colors—the glittering aftermath of a very specific kind of explosion.

  “That’s what happens when a really old spirit dies,” I croaked. It could have been anything, from the world’s first fairy to the mother of all dryads—although I couldn’t imagine who would have taken it upon themselves to abandon their hideouts in the mountains and forests just to go off and riot in the streets. Especially if there were guns involved! Dryads openly detested modern machinery, particularly anything with the capacity to kill.

  Unless it was a demon. Drawn to the chaos, demons were the first to begin feeding on it.

  Or maybe someone trying to help, I thought. Some godlike, old-world entity trying to do some good, standing in the wrong spot at exactly the wrong moment. Old things are powerful, but not impervious to harm. And something old and powerful would be the first on the Darkness’s hit list. I figured this carnage had to be from that—the Darkness killing something that should never have been killed.

  I sat up slowly and looked at Dagan, who was still standing. The explosion hadn’t ruffled his feathers at all. He stood there stroking his chin, observing the smoky shadow hanging in the air.

  Eventually, he said, “Well. So much for the riot.”

  I felt myself explode—literally. My clothes and hair suddenly leapt to life with long tongues of violently orange fire. I wasn’t ready for it, and unfortunately, neither was anyone else. “Are you insane?” I screamed at him. “People are dead! Is this some kind of game to you? Did you just tag along so you could have a front row seat to watch the world burn?” Doing a crazed, odd dance at this point, my arms were flailing, and I was almost laughing. “What is wrong with you?”

  Dagan’s grin evaporated. He looked grim, almost professional. “I’m sorry,” he said, but I wondered if he meant it. He probably didn’t. But I was surprised by his peace offering.

  “Wait, what?” I asked, just to make sure I heard him correctly.

  Dagan inhaled deeply and sighed. “I said, I’m sorry. Now is not the time for digs, I’m fully aware.” He looked around at the general carnage and took a few steps towards me—I didn’t step back.

  “You and I have always been adversaries,” he started, looking over at Christina—she was slumped in Marcus’s arms, breathing and muttering to herself. She kept saying her boyfriend’s name over and over again: Quillan, Quillan, Quillan … “But now we have something much bigger than angry potion lords to worry about. And I’d very much like to preserve the tenuous diplomacy between the Netherworld and the American government. As much trouble as you and your coworkers have caused me, I am not ready to see you die, not just yet.”

  “Not just yet?” I repeated.

  Dagan shrugged and smiled, but for the first time, it wasn’t entirely shady. “I must allow for the shifting of my own morality.”

  I scoffed—I couldn’t help myself. “You have morality?”

  “Immorality is its own kind of morality,” Dagan said with a shrug. “If nothing else, it occupies one end of the spectrum. And so …” He offered me his hand. “In the interest of maintaining that spectrum, I would like to offer you my help. I don’t know what you might request of me now, but I’d prefer not to have to live in the Netherworld forever, if it’s all the same to you.”

  I looked back at Casey, and he gave me a confused shrug. “You know him better than I do.”

  I turned back to Dagan. “I’m not sure I do.” This was a side of Dagan, if it were real, that I never thought I’d see.

  Dagan sighed. “I’m not asking you to trust me,” he said, “I’d never go that far. But I ask you to allow me to assist you, however marginally, in the service of continued prosperity and relative peace of the supernatural population on Earth. Whatever’s happening doesn’t look good for the ANC, and what’s bad for the ANC is eventually bad for everybody. Especially in the eyes of the human government, right?”

  “Right.” I spent another minute staring at him. Then I took his hand and gave it one firm shake. I half expected him to pull
me in for an uncomfortable, groping hug or an unwanted kiss, but he did neither. He simply shook my hand and let it go, standing up straight and looking as grim and professional as I’d ever seen anyone appear.

  “Right, then,” he said. “Where do you suggest we start?”

  It took me a moment to find my voice. There was a smell in the air now: hot, acrid—bodies had to be burning somewhere upwind. “By finding the Darkness,” I said at last, “we kill him, and this ends.”

  Dagan scoffed. “And you think you can just mosey on into the home of a creature that’s powerful enough to endow Dulcie with the magic to do that?” He pointed to the silver scars at my throat. "And what do you expect to do? Just kill them? Squish them like bugs, no harm, no pain?”

  “No pain?” I spat. “Dagan, we have no resources, no backup, nothing. We’re grasping at straws here, we are the last resort, so I’m sorry if it seems a little crazy, but we’re running out of time, and—”

  I felt hands on my shoulders—Casey. He leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Breathe. It’s going to be all right.”

  His hands crept down and he wrapped his arms around me, giving me a squeeze. I leaned back into him, almost reflexively, drawn in by his smell: sweat, dirt, and whatever remained of his cologne. His glasses poked my ear as he pressed his head against mine. I held his wrist and closed my eyes for a moment, inhaling and exhaling slowly. I was also trying to ignore the powerful stench of smoke and spray paint hanging in the air.

  “Apologies,” said Dagan. “Are you, then, in need of a plan?”