“That’s it.” she hesitated, biting at her lower lip. “Just partners?”
“You can be irritating often, but you are also my friend.” Saff grinned. “Most of the time. Maybe not when you pick the radio as we drive, but otherwise, yes.”
“You’ll find that EDM is underrated.” Minerva burst out laughing, a hearty sound that reassured Saff. “You’re not exactly without your annoying qualities yourself, Dragon Lady.”
“I am without flaw.”
“Right, keep telling yourself that. If it weren’t for me and my mad skills, you’d be leaving a trail of frostbitten limbs behind you.”
Saff smirked. “It can be quite persuasive during questioning.”
“Yes, but it’s not subtle.” Minerva sighed and eased her shoulders down. “Look, I know you’re trying. I know it can’t be easy being stuck between working with me—”
“It is not exactly ‘stuck.’”
“And what blowhards like Nehemaiah want. But just… It hurt, okay. I don’t want to deal with all of this right now because I get we have to help other people. It’s what matters.”
“So, we are not ‘all good?’” Saff asked, feeling her chest tighten painfully.
Minerva frowned. “We’re better, but we have things to revisit. I don’t want to be just an exception for things. I want you to work with me because I’m me and not ‘in spite of’ other problems. I’ve had too many ‘in spite ofs’ in my life.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes I don’t either. Why people say they’ll make exceptions for you but they don’t. All I know is that with my mom, it wasn’t enough. Eventually, you stop making those exceptions, listen to the pressure on the other side. Saff, I like you and we’re buds, def. Hell, we make this investigative thing look good.”
“But?” Saff breathed, amazed how fast one human could hold sway over her thoughts and emotions.
“Let’s table this for now. We’ll have to figure out how the Council affects me or where I fit in this crazy scheme of things after we save the world, or, well, at least L.A.”
Saff held out her hand and took Nerv’s, shaking it vigorously. “I can live with that.”
For now.
22
Mary Collier
Mary stumbled behind the counter. She’d lost count of the times she’d tripped today. Her head throbbed, and a distant ringing in her ears refused to dispel no matter how she swallowed or shook her head. It was like the buzzing of flies kept ringing in them. It was worse than the hangover she’d had after her last birthday when she and the girls all headed up to Las Vegas for the weekend. Forcing a smile to her lips, she rang up the current customer and then slumped down into her chair. For weeks she’d been feeling run down, but this was different. It was like her very will to concentrate was gone, as if someone had filled her head with cotton and expected her to keep carrying on as usual.
The cough she’d been fighting the last few days (who got head colds in Los Angeles?) returned, and she yanked out a tissue from the box beside her. Mary hacked into the Kleenex until her burning chest and throat felt a little clearer. She leaned back and rested her hands in her lap. Then, her eye caught sight of the tissue.
She screamed.
A layer of jet black mucus oozed garishly over the white tissue. She wiped at her mouth and then found herself staring at the back of her hand, where her veins crawled through her skin, visible as inky black spiders. Mary took off for the employee bathroom, but halfway there, was forced to slow. It was so hard to breathe, like a vice clamping around her chest. She stumbled the final few feet to the restroom. Flipping on the light, she let out a small sigh of relief. Her eyes were normal, her skin untouched, but her mouth still was lined with black. She pulled out toilet paper this time and coughed again, uncontrollable shudders racking her body. When she looked down at the toilet paper, this time the black mucus was tinged with blood as well.
“God, what’s happening to me?”
She leaned against the wall and slid to the floor, as tears ran down her cheeks. The bell clanged to signal a new customer had come in, but she couldn’t care. Mary couldn’t make her feet move. Hell, she couldn’t do anything but shiver and cough.
The clomp of heavy boots sounded in the background, growing closer as the new customer strayed into the private staff area. Mary blinked up through bleary eyes and let out a squeak of surprise when she realized it was the woman who’d taken up so much of her attention yesterday with endless questions about her friend’s gift. The one who’d knocked her and Lester unconscious (he’d gotten fired from his guard position, too) somehow and then swept out their entire downstairs inventory.
Damn it.
She reached weakly for the plunger. It wasn’t exactly her weapon of choice, but it was the only one available in this bathroom, and that woman was clearly dangerous.
“Leave me alone!” she flailed the plunger at the blonde’s face.
The blonde woman frowned and leaned down on her heels. Reaching out, she surprised Mary by feeling her forehead. “You’re burning up.”
A second set of boots clicked against the marble, and a smaller, rounder face peered in through the doorway. Oh, right, that Mexican-looking girl who’d come in at the same time. The two had to have been working an angle. Usually Mary knew enough working in a shop like this to see all the scams. She had to admit that the blonde and the Latina had surprised her. It was a rarer combination to see, and it had cost Annette some gems, something she’d been furious about after Mary had called the cops yesterday.
“You’ve cleaned us out. The most expensive stuff is gone. But you knew that,” she coughed. Black spittle fell across the white fabric of the blonde’s t-shirt.
The Latina girl shuddered. “We’re here to help.”
“How? You can’t help me, not unless you bring Annette’s gems back.”
“They were never gems,” the blonde said, her voice calming, almost as if it were inside Mary’s head. Her soul. “And they were never Annette’s, either. You must have suspected something was amiss. You saw the strange, rich men and women coming in for them. You saw their furtive glances. Heard their whispers. Did you ever touch one?
“No, never.” The noise rang more ferociously in Mary ears, and she wanted to scream, to do anything to banish the pain away. “Annette said not to, and she’s terrifying.”
The Latina exchanged a concerned look with the blonde who shook her head.
“It’s spreading,” the former said quietly. “Can we?”
The blonde shone the flashlight from a phone into Mary’s eyes. “There’s no blackness yet. If we’d even tarried a few more hours, I’d have said no, but I think we can.”
“Can what?” she coughed again, a sputtering episode that left her hands coated in the inky stuff. Jesus god, what was happening to her?
“Take the pain away,” the blonde said. She pulled a vial from her pocket. It glowed a bright blue, like the ocean down at Venice Beach in the summer, and it seemed to throb with its own heartbeat like the gems downstairs.
Mary shook her head. “Is it like those damn stones…? The gems?”
“No,” the Latina said. “It’s nothing like them. You’ll be okay, just do whatever Saff says. Trust me, she’s saved my life more than once.”
Mary felt her chest constrict again, and the next fit of coughing threaten to erupt from her throat. She felt like she was tearing her lungs apart every time she coughed. It would explain the slightly spungy material that was starting to come up too.
“I… help me,” she croaked.
The blonde—Saff, was it?—held the vial out to her. “Drink this, and you’ll feel better, I promise.”
Mary heaved another, shaking breath. Then she brought the glass to her lips and drank deeply. The liquid was cool on her lips but burned its way down her throat like a stiff Scotch. Saff hovered over her and placed a hand to her forehead. Off her tongue tripped haunting words, ones that Mary had never heard before, on
es that sounded of something ancient and overwhelming. Not Latin. She’d suffered through that in high school and one semester of college. This was something else, something so old that Mary felt its power vibrating in her bones.
The burn of the draught warmed her body, seeping through her limbs and up to her trunk, easing its way deep into her lungs. The pain in her chest relented, finally easing free, as if that vice had been shattered. She took a deep breath and the tension was gone, the weird slurping noise in her chest. No phlegm wanted to spill from her lips, no dark spongy material escaped.
The buzzing noises, the voices she’d been ignoring all day, were gone.
For the first time in hours, she could actually hear herself think. She could feel normal.
“Are you well?” Saff asked. The woman stood and seemed to almost scrape the ceiling with the top of her head. She was an Amazon, that one.
Mary nodded and let the tall woman scoop her up. She eyed both the blonde and the Latina hesitantly. “Who are you people? First, you pull a fast one on me. Then, you’re the reason that Annette is screaming her head off because of the lost gems. Now, I feel a million times better when I thought a moment ago that I was about to cough up a lung.”
The smaller girl scratched at her scalp and let out a weak laugh. “About that. Might be more literal than you think.”
“What?” Mary asked, brushing past both of them and back to her school behind the counter. She leaned her elbows on the counter and set her head on her hands. She felt better but was still far from 100 percent. Besides, even if the weird chattering wasn’t in her ears, her head still throbbed. “What’s going on?”
“You shouldn’t joke!” Saff chided. She sighed. “I- I do suppose you deserve some explanation. You may call me Saff, and this is my partner, Minerva.”
Mary couldn’t bite back some of her frustration with the last twenty-four hours. “Do you mean accomplice?”
The shorter girl—Minerva—shook her head and leaned over the other side of the counter. “We help each other, but we’re not criminals… Not like this,” she said, staring down at her hands. “You knew something was wrong with the gems, didn’t you?”
Mary swallowed hard, thinking back over how the gems had seemed to her. How they had glowed preternaturally with the most beautiful light she’d ever seen. She’d been in the jewelry business for over fifteen years. She knew every semi-precious stone and precious jewel on sight. The things Annette was hiding in the basement, no, was smuggling onto the elite customers were more than gems. Mary had no idea exactly what they were, but she knew they weren’t natural, weren’t like anything she’d ever encountered.
After Harvey had stumbled in here a couple weeks ago, Mary was sure they were unlike anything most people had encountered.
They weren’t safe.
Could never be safe, no matter how they’d sung to her.
“They’re wrong.”
Minerva shook her head, and, when she spoke, her voice was low and surprisingly gentle. “No.” The girl’s eyes flickered over to the Amazon. “They’re just not supposed to be here. We know there are more than just the seven we took home.”
“Home?” Mary echoed.
“A story you have no privy to,” Saff said. “However, there are others out there still, possibly dozens being traded by men and women like Annette, those who have no idea what they are dealing with.”
“What are they dealing with?”
Minerva sighed. “Trust me, something that shouldn’t be in just anyone’s hands. Please, we barely got to you in time. A lot more people are going to be as sick, please tell us anything you can.”
Mary drummed her fingers on the glass of the counter. Her eyes focused on the large, blue diamond pendant under the surface. She’d gotten into the jewelry business because she loved beauty in life, the gloss and glamour. The gems were something else, something horrifying.
If she could help it, Mary couldn’t let anyone else be exposed to them. To be left with voices in their ears and chunks of possibly lung coming up their throat.
Fuck Annette. This was bigger than her boss. Bigger than her damn paycheck.
She reached down under the counter and pulled out the master schedule. They kept most things on the online calendar, but she knew that some of the most crucial things Annette kept as a double back up in the leather-bound book her fingers caressed now. Thumbing through it, she pointed to today’s date.
“Annette never let me meet the person supplying the gems. I was only to go to the basement, not touch them, but keep them secure. Sometimes change the blankets wrapped around them, dust them off.”
Saff’s nostrils flared. “To dust them?”
Minerva patted her shoulder. “It’s okay. She didn’t know.”
The blonde swallowed, and her shoulders fell. “It hurts. To see them treated as trinkets. They’re so much more than that.”
Mary nodded. “I’m beginning to guess that, even if I’m still not sure about what’s going on here.”
“Trust me, better if we keep this need to know. Safer,” Minerva said.
Mary thought about the whispers tickling her mind, trying to weave their way deep into her psyche over the last twenty-four hours. She shuddered. Safer was probably an understatement.
“There’s a meeting she has with the supplier—that X she has there is shorthand.”
“How cloak and dagger,” Minerva said.
“Yeah, they meet at this place out by Santa Monica Pier. There’s an abandoned stretch of the rides, stuff that’s too old, and they’re supposedly fixing up. Been doing it for about three years now.”
“Sounds about right,” Minerva says. “This city moves at the speed of turtles.”
Saff frowned. “Does it?”
“More or less, “Minerva said. “You can write us down the exact address. We’ll GPS that and help us hunt through the pier, find what we need.”
“The other gems…” Mary said, not sure what she was trying to ask at first. “You’ll get them and put them back where they belong, and make sure no one gets sick like Harvey or starts to cough like me?
Saff stood tall and balled her hands at her side. “You have my oath that I won’t rest until all of them are home. It’s my mission.”
“Could you, um, check in on Lester? He never touched the eggs, either, but he’s been working here for so long… He might’ve caught something.”
“Yes, we certainly will. One of our objectives is to contain the sickness.
Mary scribbled all the information she had and shoved it toward Minerva. “Good because whatever those things are, they’re not supposed to be here.”
23
Saffyranae
The wind blew hard this close to the Pacific Ocean, a riot of movement that sent Saff’s loose, blonde hair spiraling all around her. Minerva slid over to her around the hood of the car they had, as Minerva had said, borrowed. Grinning, her partner slid her a scrunchie, one decorated with kitty cats batting at small, green mice.
“You have strange taste, Nerv,” she said, slipping her hair through the tie.
“I could say the same for you. Are you okay?”
“I am always alright.” Her eyes focused on the ocean. How it danced and played before them, unconcerned with their eyes but ever the trickster nonetheless.
“No, you have this completely out of it look on your face. It’s not good. I’ve been your shadow for a while now. When there might be a battle, don’t you need have to have a game face on?”
“Do you have yours?”
Minerva nodded and gestured to the knives hidden on her thigh holster as well as sheathed in the inner pockets of her leather coat. “I’m prepared to find a world of scary, well-paid thugs who want to make a Christmas bonus or, well, an anytime bonus by stopping us. I’ve had enough run-ins to last a lifetime, so I need to know that my partner and, let’s be honest, the person bringing the real fire power is in tip-top shape. Are you with me?”
Saff stroked her fing
ers through her pony tail, taking out any knots that the wind had twisted through it. “Mary was right. The eggs never should have been here. They are aberrations in your world.”
“I get the impression, actually,” Minerva corrected, sliding a knife from her thigh holster and spinning it in one hand. “That they’re quite normal back in the temple or through the veil, where the other dragons are.”
“Yes, but my heart is heavy. I’ve been fretting over the lives of my siblings lost and the lives we may yet lose. Today, it truly struck me how far this plague may already be spreading. It wasn’t just that man in the basement. The guard had nothing to do with the sales of that shop. He had never even gone down in that dank chamber of death. I must do what I can to get the cure to others, to find who else in Los Angeles has been affected.”
“Good. Then, we have a plan. First, we’ll see what we can scare out of these suppliers tonight, and then we work hard to save the humans we can.”
Saff zipped her jacket shut. It served as a bulwark against the steady wind. “I have only thought of the cost to my people until tonight. I am sorry for not acknowledging what this tragedy is costing your community as well.”
Minerva frowned, and her knife slipped from her fingers in mid-spin. She scurried to pick it up. Grasping its hilt tightly, she said, “Well… Let’s not have some scary melting apocalypse on our hands. Apart from that, thank you.”
“For what? For not being able to keep members of the Council from belittling you? For dragging you into the fray over and over—”
“Pfft, I so want to be here. Admit it, Saff, you’d be lost without me.”
“I believe I have done things well enough without you in the past,” Saff said, offering her a small smile. “But you’ve been badly injured because of me. You have nothing to thank me for.”
“Oh, I disagree. First, you and your bud, Oyshin, have the best healing mojo out there. Second, I’m glad you’re not like that big arrogant jackass Nehemaiah. I think me and the human race are lucky there’s a dragon on the case who gives a damn.”
Sirens and Scales Page 127