[M__M 03] Misery Loves Company

by Tracey Martin

  “I do hope that’s not a problem.” My tone was icy, but really—I did hope that the furies wouldn’t consider it a problem. Because, shit, they hadn’t bothered me in a while, which was very much a good thing.

  Mace-head flicked his elaborate lighter and blew a puff of smoke into the air. “Nope, no problem. Just saying hi. Being neighborly.”

  Yeah, I bet. “Hi. All right then. See you later.” Probably sooner than I’d like.

  Mace-head grinned. “As you say. Take care, girlie. Take very good care.”

  I opened my mouth then shut it. Just like with Lucen and Devon’s joking at The Lair, some questions were best left unasked, though in this case for a very different reason.

  I hurried into the building, and by the time I turned around, he was across the street.

  Weird. I’d swear he was doing all this to freak me out, but I doubted I’d be so lucky. Especially thanks to Gunthra’s interest in the furies, I had a bad feeling about Mace-head’s interest in me.

  My phone buzzed as I climbed the steps, and I checked the text, pushing thoughts of Mace-head from my mind.

  Talk about this tomorrow for real? Lucen had written.

  Yes.

  I’m taking you to dinner. Be ready at eight.

  Ah, yes. The date I’d demanded. He got his meeting. I got my normality. Damn right.

  Somewhat appeased, I armed myself with a mug of tea, my laptop and the thumb drive, and spread out on futon. Time to get to work. I’d feel a lot better when I was out of Gunthra’s debt.

  Whether it was purposeful to spite me, or whether Tom was just hopelessly disorganized, I couldn’t say, but the information on the drive was chaotic. Since my thoughts were already scattered thanks to Dezzi throwing me for a loop with her offer, sorting through the confusion was almost too much. But I had to try. If Gunthra wanted this information enough to call in her debt for it, she must have a good reason.

  Tom hadn’t skimped on what he’d given me, but much of what was here was information that I already knew. One month ago, violent psychopath and part-pred like me, Victor Aubrey, had gotten lucky and discovered we shared the same unusual misery-sucking ability. He’d gotten my name and contacted me, trying to get me to join in his fun. No doubt, at some point he’d hoped to entice to me to go along with his disgusting game of rape-torture-murder while feeding on his victims’ suffering.

  I’d declined. Victor hadn’t taken it well and had framed me for a few murders. Or so the story went in the press, and with Victor dead—murdered in his high-security prison—no one was contradicting that tale.

  The truth was more complicated. Victor was a rage addict, although I had no idea whether that was by choice or because no one had clued him in to the fact he could reverse the pred-addict bond and drive his fury master out of his head. I suspected it was both, and Victor had enjoyed being an addict.

  But whichever, by all the Gryphons could determine, he’d been working with his fury master to choose which women to kill and had mutilated their bodies per the fury’s instructions. Specifically, his victims were vanity addicts, which would enrage the sylphs. Victor had also removed their hearts after they died, throwing suspicion on the magi, who—unbeknownst to most people—enjoyed human hearts as a forbidden delicacy.

  It was a situation certain to spark tensions among the preds, as well as between the preds and the magi. By framing me, Victor and his master had only fanned the flames since I was on good terms with Lucen. That had turned some of the sylphs’ anger directly on the satyrs.

  With regards to this information, Tom’s files contained little I hadn’t already learned with a couple exceptions, mainly how the Gryphons had tackled the investigation before focusing their energy on me. Apparently, at one point, they had covered the local magi black market in human hearts. Lovely. I hadn’t even known such a thing existed.

  Nonetheless, I couldn’t see anything there to interest Gunthra. The details of what happened were boring.

  The why of it all was another story. Gunthra had indicated that she believed the furies used Victor to try to start a pred war, and the facts of the case bore that out. Why else had Victor’s master been intent on getting the various pred races at each other’s throats? But I’d forgotten about the way Victor had fingered the magi too. If this had been about a war, it hadn’t only involved the preds.

  Swallowing the dregs of my tea, I read on.

  Victor had been killed in prison at the behest of the furies, although the Gryphons couldn’t prove it, and no one seemed to have tried too hard. Victor’s fury master had disappeared after Victor was arrested. I hadn’t known his name, so I couldn’t have identified him, and the furies’ Dom had played dumb. But all signs pointed to that fury’s demise.

  Boo-fucking-hoo.

  Tom hadn’t done much to follow up there. Most of his attention to the case had gone into me. Hardly surprising since uncovering information about my gift was a large part of why he’d been sent to Boston.

  Tom had wanted to know if my selection as Victor’s patsy had been more deliberate than first suspected. Alas, he left more questions behind than he did answers. Who concocted this scheme—was it an order from the fury Dom, or had Victor’s master been acting alone? Had the furies known about Victor’s pred-like abilities? Had they told Victor to involve me? What, if anything, did they know about what Victor and I truly were?

  I read through file after file, stared at magical scans of my blood, Victor’s blood, and the many victims’ blood. None of it came close to answering the question that Gunthra had raised. Why? Whatever Gunthra was hoping to find, it was unlikely to be here. Tom, and the other Gryphons who’d worked on the case, had thought the furies were behaving oddly, but neither the main investigation nor Tom’s follow-up investigation focused on that. The Gryphons had wanted to catch a killer. Tom had wanted to catch me.

  In the end, I was left with the same possibilities that Lucen and I had once discussed. Furies instilled rage in people, but confusion and fear were the emotions they thrived on. The furies—or a lone fury—could have been hoping for nothing more than to gorge on those feelings by causing a magical shitstorm, or they could have been trying to raise the sort of power they liked most for some other nefarious purpose. Who knew?

  Not the Gryphons, and if Gunthra could make anything out of this mess, then more power to her, I supposed. Satisfied there was nothing in here that I needed to “accidentally” delete before turning the information over, I shut my laptop.

  Thinking it was time to relax with a good book and a light dinner, I dumped the dregs of my tea in the kitchen sink. But it wasn’t Eric’s novel that caught my eye when I returned to the bedroom. It was Tom’s book.

  I frowned at it. I didn’t want to read. Didn’t want to talk to Tom and hear his crazy excuses for what the Brotherhood did. Yet for some reason I grabbed the book anyway.

  “Fine. You’re going to make me hear you out? I’m going to read your shit so I know exactly how to call you on it when I do.”

  And now I was talking to myself. Peachy.

  Book in hand, I got a yogurt from the fridge then opened it to the first bookmark. As I didn’t own a table, I leaned against the counter as I ate.

  What I’d thought might be a journal turned out to be more like someone’s notebook. Each bookmark—there were three of them—had been left on a page describing a vision some magi had had. After spending a couple minutes completely confused, I wised up at last and realized I needed to read more than just the bookmarked page to understand what was going on.

  The three visions Tom had pointed me to appeared to be of the same event, but the visions themselves were different. Each had been experienced by a different magi in a different time and location. Whoever had written this journal back in 1911—I’d found a handwritten date on the back of the front cover—had discovered similarities between the visions and made notes
describing the way they were linked together.

  I wasn’t sure I’d have picked up on the similarities myself. The first vision had been recorded in the fifteenth century. Along with the original Latin text was the journal-writer’s translation, which was the only way I could read it. Even so, it bore faint resemblance—at the surface level—to the second recording from the seventeenth century, and less so to the third vision from the nineteenth. The second had been recorded in Latin, as well. The last in English.

  The world had changed drastically during those times and since then, but eventually I figured out the “gray mountains of man” and “teeth of steel thrust into the sky” that were described in the earliest vision must have referred to modern cities and skylines filled with what would have seemed like impossibly tall buildings.

  The second vision described the cities differently but was similar in other, more disturbing ways. According to this recording, the first demons—whatever they were—would be freed by fire and flood, and rise to enslave humanity. More talk of blood came after that. Rivers of blood. Tears of blood. Oceans of blood. Blood of something called the Others.

  The second vision was obsessed with blood.

  I remembered reading something about Others and Firsts in one of the books I’d paged through while snooping in Tom’s office, but this journal contained no more information on what they were than that book had. Just lots about blood, and fires too.

  Oh, the fires. All the visions described the purple smoke and blackened skies of salamander fires burning through the cities.

  The hair on my neck prickled as I read the description of them given in the third and most recent vision, and I clenched my jaw. I’d heard something similar, too similar for comfort, before.

  Olef, a friend of mine among Boston’s magi population, had thrown me for one hell of a loop not too long ago. It was only recently that I’d learned he was a clairvoyant, and not just any clairvoyant. A clairvoyant who’d had a vision of me.

  He’d described the same sort of scene—cities burning in salamander fires—and he’d claimed to have seen me in the middle of it all.

  Much as I hated to admit it, the visions in this journal did sound familiar. Olef had said nothing of Others and Firsts, but his timing was eerily on cue. Each vision had come every two hundred years, right around the turn of the century. Fifteenth. Seventeenth. Nineteenth. And now the twenty-first for Olef.

  And both Olef, like Tom, seemed to think this somehow concerned me.

  I slammed the book shut. Did. Not. Like.

  My yogurt remained before me, mostly untouched, but I didn’t feel hungry any longer.

  “Stupid. Who’s to say any of this is real? Not all visions come true, and besides, maybe whatever this is doesn’t happen for another two hundred years.”

  Of course, Olef hadn’t indicated the cities he saw were futuristic looking, and I wouldn’t be there if his vision was of two hundred years in the future. Satyr subspecies or not, I seemed to age like a normal human, not a pred.

  “And anyway, Olef’s visions might not even be related. Why am I talking to myself? First internal arguments at The Lair, and now this. I’m losing it.”

  Cursing, I stuffed the yogurt back in my fridge and nearly jumped out of my skin when my phone rang in the bedroom. Pulling myself together, I realized that was Steph’s ringtone, and I dashed to get it. A distraction couldn’t have come at a better time.

  “I got your message,” Steph said as I paced the short length of my apartment. “Can we meet up for lunch tomorrow so you can fill me in on how Eric’s case is going?”

  Right foot, left foot, spin around in front of the window and do it again. “Yeah, yeah, sounds good.”

  “You okay? You sound spacey. What are you doing?”

  I let my fingers graze the cover of Tom’s book as I passed through the narrow kitchen. “Oh, you know. Contemplating the end of the world.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  I paused, catching my reflection in the bedroom window. I looked like shit. Very much like someone contemplating the end of the world, indeed. “You know me. No one who knows me thinks I’m fun.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I met Steph for lunch the next day at a crowded sandwich shop near the hospital where she worked. She’d already commandeered a booth for us, and I joined her without anticipating a fun conversation. I hadn’t slept well thanks to my not-so-light pre-bed reading. Plus Dezzi’s offer stuck in my head like a tack. One pinning a piece of paper to me with a giant scarlet S on it for satyr.

  Steph didn’t look so hot herself. She sported circles under her eyes that were only partially obscured by her concealer, and she had on her glasses instead of the freaky bright green contact lenses she normally wore.

  “Tired eyes?” I asked, spinning my buzzer around on the table.

  “Tired Steph. I ripped my contact this morning because I was half asleep, and I didn’t feel like getting out a new one.” She took a long draw from her soda. “This stuff doesn’t have as much caffeine as coffee, does it?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  Steph wrinkled her nose. “I’ll get coffee to go. So what’s going on with Eric?”

  I shifted in my seat as I filled Steph in on everything that had happened with the lawyer, Gunthra and the other leads and tactics the Gryphons were pursuing.

  “That’s it?” Steph stared at me.

  I spread my hands helplessly. “Bridget’s good. She knows what she’s doing, and they’re doing all they can.”

  “Then why aren’t they using you to help too?” Her buzzer went off, and she scowled like she wanted to throw it at someone.

  Ironic that I’d always thought Steph put way too much faith in the Gryphons, but for once, when I thought they were doing their best, she didn’t seem to agree. I supposed it was always different when it was your life or your family on the line. Then nothing would seem to be enough.

  My buzzer went off as she was returning to the table, so it was a few more minutes before we could resume our conversation.

  “My family is sick,” Steph continued, picking at her sandwich. “I thought they were awful before, for what they did to me, but in contrast to this, I could almost respect them for that. It’s one thing to stand by your convictions and tell me you think I’m wrong because I don’t fit with your version of religion. If that’s what you need in your life, fine. But now they’ve swarmed in like vultures circling over Eric’s money. Of course, it’s all under the self-righteous guise that he did this to himself and got what he deserved. So I told Tim last night that if Eric’s money was all ill gained through deals with the devil, then they should plan to give it away instead of keeping it for themselves.”

  I swallowed my bite of sandwich. “And what did he say?”

  “You have to ask?” Steph flung hair over her shoulders and finally started to eat, but she managed only a couple bites before she went on a new rant.

  I listened quietly, understanding her need to vent and grateful that I’d thought to order food that went well with the spicy rage her emotions stirred. As she spoke, it dawned on me that Steph hadn’t cared so much about an update on the case. She’d just needed to talk. Likewise, she wasn’t upset with the Gryphons’ lack of progress so much as she was with the world in general.

  “This is why I never talked about or to my family.” Steph tossed her half-uneaten sandwich on the plate. “They make me ill. I swear to God, Jess, some humans are as bad as preds. They feed on misery the same way. I think they enjoy it. You should hear the way my family moralizes over Eric. They’re lapping up his suffering like preds.”

  I cleared my throat. “Hey now, misery-feeder right here. Let’s be kind to those of us stuck getting head rushes from other people’s emotions. Okay? Not all of us actually enjoy it.”

  A half-smile cracked Steph’s lips. “You’re different.
You use your ability for good, and you don’t create misery just to feed on it. You’re not a pred or one of my relatives.”

  My own smile faltered. Well, I wasn’t one of her relatives anyway.

  Tell her, I yelled at myself. For the love of dragons, I’d told Dezzi yesterday. All the satyrs probably knew by now. It was hardly a secret.

  But nope, still couldn’t. I rationalized it as usual—not the right time. Steph had more pressing concerns.

  “What is it?”

  I quit poking at my sandwich. “Nothing.”

  “Liar. Your entire body twitched when I said you weren’t a pred or a relative, and since I’m pretty sure we’re not related…” Steph lowered her glasses so she could stare at me better. “You’re not beating yourself up over your freakishness, are you? I thought you’d made peace with your curse years ago.”

  I opened my mouth, shut it, opened it again, and took a bite of my pickle to delay speaking. “I’m at peace. Total peace. See me being Zen.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “Um, you know, just stuff.” I shrugged. “Not important. You and Eric and your stuff is important. Don’t let me bother you with my crap.”

  Steph flopped back against the booth. “Bother me, please. I need to talk about something else. It’s only fair. I ranted at you for ten minutes. Go on. Something’s bugging you if you were thinking about the end of the world last night.”

  Oh, crap. What exactly did I have to talk about? The actual end-of-the-world stuff was out because it skirted too close to Tom and the Brotherhood and the truth about me. There was also no way I was bringing up my deal with Gunthra. So what did that leave? The oh-so-pressing decision I’d been contemplating about cutting my hair?

  I blurted out the next thing that came to mind, which at least was a problem believably agonizing. “What are your thoughts on monogamy? Lifestyle choice or biological imperative?”

  “Say what?” I had her attention if nothing else. “Last I knew you weren’t in one relationship, never mind more.”