A little girl in a bloody pink dress and white pinafore stood so close, Thea could see the scabs on her shins. The girl held a red balloon, and had no head.
But that didn’t stop her from talking. “You’re a coward,” she said.
Thea lost it.
Rage like she’d never felt before came out of nowhere and overtook her. Claws out, she pounced on the girl and tried to tear into her. When the girl faded away, Thea turned on whatever she could find instead. She clawed at trees, kicked the cooler, stomped on the vials of blood and smashed them into the dirt. She spun around, somehow knowing there was a fury behind her, although she didn’t register any sound of his approach.
She’d never seen him before. Another illusion? Did it matter?
Thea swiped at him as he came at her, but he was quicker, and more used to fighting with his claws. He deflected her blow with one hand while he ducked and scored her side with the other.
The claws felt real enough.
She was still enraged, but she was more focused now. Thea dropped to her knees and rolled away from her attacker, toward the scattered contents of the cooler. He was on top of her within seconds, but she’d found what she needed. She managed to free one hand for just long enough to open the box.
The hex once again did the impossible, and went after both of them at the same time.
But the other fury couldn’t resist the way Thea could. She managed to keep her head just long enough to crawl away.
He was screaming. Thea didn’t look back. Instead she followed a lanky clown, riding a lion, that had just appeared in front of her. The clown turned to grin at her as she dragged herself along the forest floor, and she saw that he wasn’t a clown at all, but a scarecrow. Straw was flying from his mouth. Then it wasn’t straw. It was a swarm of yellow jackets.
Once, while out in the peach orchard pretending to be explorers, Thea and Flannery had disturbed an underground nest of yellow jackets. Flannery, always the faster runner, had gotten away. Thea wasn’t so lucky. She wasn’t allergic to the stings, but when you had that many to deal with, a reaction was inevitable. At least one of the wasps got in her mouth as she screamed. Her throat had swollen nearly shut. It was the closest to death Thea had ever felt. Not even This Unfortunate Incident came close.
Flannery’s personal terror was the circus, but Thea’s was wasps.
The other fury’s screams died just as Thea’s rose up.
When she opened her eyes again, with no memory of having closed them in the first place, Thea was in a cool blue room, barely big enough to be called a bedroom. A ceiling fan whirled lazily above her head. She focused on it for a minute, timing her breaths to the sound of it. When she stopped shaking, she sat up, waited to see if she’d start shaking again, and when she didn’t, got up and opened the bedroom door. She hesitated as she regarded the cramped hallway. But the door hadn’t been locked, which seemed like a good sign. And if whoever had taken her out of the woods wanted to hurt or kill her, they could have done it while she was unconscious.
A figure appeared at the end of the hall, a fury bent with age. The light was behind her, so Thea couldn’t see her face, but her voice was unmistakably feminine.
“Awake, are you? Well, come on then, let’s see if we can get you straightened out.”
Thea came into an open space that seemed to serve as everything that wasn’t a bedroom or a bathroom, and regarded the wrinkled old fury. She wasn’t wearing an amulet, but Thea still couldn’t get much of a handle on her vices or virtues.
The old woman glared. “Don’t be trying your tricks with me, young lady.”
“Yes ma’am,” Thea said automatically.
“Don’t be ma’aming me either. You can call me Nana. Aren’t you a little old not to have your wings yet?”
“I’ve only been trying for a month,” Thea protested, although she wasn’t sure why it should matter that Nana think her competent. “I’m a human recruit.”
Nana was the first person Thea had met at Hexing House who didn’t look surprised by this. She just gestured at a fluffy confection of an armchair, and Thea sat.
“What happened to you out there?” Nana asked as she settled into her own chair. “I heard the most horrible ruckus. Took me a while to find you, and by the time I got there, you were passed out, and nobody else around. Somebody attack you?”
Thea nodded, then shook her head. “You didn’t see anyone else? Any… bodies?”
Nana shook her head. “Nothing like that. Why, you kill somebody?”
“I guess not,” said Thea. “How did you get me back here?”
Nana laughed, a harsh, grating bark. “I’m stronger than I look, honey. Any permanent damage?”
“No ma’am, I don’t think so.”
“I told you, stop that ma’aming.”
“Sorry. Old habit, I guess. I’m a little disoriented.”
“I’ll bet you are. Who hexed you?”
“I don’t know. I… there was…” Thea tried to recall the details. The cabin. The cooler, the blood, the hex. And the note. There had been a note in the cooler, and she’d taken it. She almost tore it in her hurry to get it out of her pocket.
Version 8.6, try on subjects F and L in conjunction with serum 14, it read. Also enclosed is most recent sample from subject T.
Thea’s blood was the only blood in the cooler, which made her subject T.
Then subject F is Flannery.
“It was a drop,” she said. “A delivery.”
“You want to tell me what you’re talking about? Or you just going to keep muttering to yourself?”
Thea started, then smiled at Nana. “I’m sorry. I’m sounding crazy. I don’t really know what happened, but I think I was seeing things. I think I must have just lost my way and fallen down. Guess I hit my head or something.”
“Let me see that note.” When Thea hesitated, Nana grinned at her, her neat white teeth belying her age. “Good for you, not trusting strangers. Fold it, then. I don’t need to read the words. I want to read it the other way.”
Thea folded the note in half and gave it to Nana, who closed her eyes and hummed softly. After a few seconds she said, “The humming isn’t necessary, but people never believe I’m doing anything if I just sit here.” She opened her eyes and gave the paper back to Thea. “Whoever wrote that suffers from avarice, envy, and a touch of wrath, I’d say.”
“You’re psychic?”
Nana shrugged. “Like most furies, I see sins and virtues the best, but I get glimpses of other things, too.” She nodded at Thea. “You, for example. I see shadows around you.”
“Yeah,” Thea said with a laugh she didn’t feel. “Me too.” She ran her fingers across the back of the note before putting it in her pocket. “I’ve never gotten a vision from something like this. Only from the flower friends.”
“The who, now?”
Thea explained about The Book of Flower Friends. Nana looked impressed. “Might have to try something like that some time.”
“I don’t know,” Thea said. “It doesn’t seem to work anymore.”
“I would guess it worked in the first place because it was a piece of you. Could be it’s not anymore. Maybe you need to find a different piece.”
“Well, that shouldn’t be too hard.” Thea stood. “I feel like there are pieces of me everywhere.” Her sluggish mind was starting to move again. “Thank you so much for your help, but I really need to go. I have to get my head together and figure out— shit!”
“I beg your pardon?”
Too upset to apologize for her language, Thea hurried to what she hoped was the front door. “I have to take the exam! It’s my last chance!” Nana frowned in confusion as she shuffled toward her, so Thea added, “For my wings.”
“Ah!” Nana opened the door. The sky was brightening in the east. “You’ve got about an hour until daylight. Campus is that way.” She pointed at a path. “It’s not far. I don’t like to live close to all that bustle and noise, but I like to be c
lose enough for visitors.” She gave Thea a tiny push outside. “Now you go on, and young lady? You remember what I said about the shadows. Do not trust anyone.”
Before Thea could respond to that, Nana closed the door in her face. It was just as well. Thea had a lot of questions, but she didn’t have a lot of time. She wouldn’t even be able to get breakfast, not if she wanted to shower first, and she was filthy, and definitely smelly. Not to mention tired and sore. She was in no condition to take a test, but she knew better than to ask Alecto for mercy.
Thea walked as fast as she could force her bad leg to go, wiping away tears of frustration and exhaustion. But it wasn’t long before those tears froze into something else.
There comes a time when even a coward has had enough. Once, her mother had beaten her nearly to death, and Thea had had enough. Many years later she was beaten again, and she’d woken up in a hospital room with a shattered leg and a collapsed lung. She’d had enough then, too.
Now, she’d been hexed, hurt, lied to, laughed at. Robbed of her own blood. She’d had enough. Thea’s heart hardened with outrage.
Fury, one might say.
She was on time for her exam. The case was a nearly five hour drive, in a big SUV with Alecto, Megaira, and Persephone. The target was being punished with a hex of compassion, for the sin of cruelty.
“How does that normally manifest?” Thea asked.
“Almost always as extreme empathy,” Persephone said. “He’ll feel all the pain of everyone and everything around him. And I mean all the pain. It’s one of our worst hexes, actually. Ten percent of targets kill themselves before they can resolve their vice.”
Thea knew that Persephone was trying to shock her with that statistic, just as she knew they’d picked such a horrible hex on purpose. But she was holding tightly to her anger from that morning, and she only nodded. She didn’t read the target’s file, and she didn’t ask any questions.
With their human illusions, all four of them were beautiful women, and the target was disposed to let them into his house despite their being vague about what they were doing there. The others distracted him with chatter about some charity they were raising money for. Persephone handed Thea a box. Thea hexed him, and handed the box back.
It was that simple. Thea didn’t even blink.
They found a local seafood place for dinner, Megaira being a big fan of fish. The other three seemed close, and chatted without making much effort to include Thea in the conversation. Thea ate quietly, and wondered whether one of these furies daintily poking at salads and sipping wine had sent Hester to take her blood.
If not them, who?
Why?
Pass the test first. Then deal with the rest.
After they ate, they went back to the target’s house to make some observations for Thea’s report. He was screaming already, at times collapsing and writhing in agony. And too distracted by his suffering to notice Thea sneaking through a window and watching him from behind the heavy drapes. Persephone was just outside the window, studying Thea while Thea studied the target.
He’d hung cloths over the windows that didn’t have curtains, as if he could block what he felt that way. He’d smashed his television and his computer. But there was pain everywhere in the world, everywhere in his county, his town, his street. There was no stopping it from seeping in. Thea watched him weep, and felt a tiny worm of compassion wriggling its way through her mental armor.
She squashed it.
Thea gave Persephone an indifferent look as she climbed out the window. “What now?”
Persephone looked genuinely happy. “Now, I don’t think I’m going to have to sit in that damn car all the way home. Come on.”
Back in the SUV, she told the others she thought Thea had passed her test.
“Then we’d better go,” Alecto said.
“Go where?” asked Thea. Nobody answered her. She felt a sudden surge of fear. She was alone in the dark with three furies who might or might not be part of a conspiracy to hurt her. She didn’t even know what state she was in. They could do whatever they wanted to her, and she would be powerless.
No. She wasn’t powerless anymore. The anger came back, just enough to get her through the ride out into a field, where Alecto parked and gestured for everybody to get out.
Thea protracted her claws, but she did as she was told.
When they’d all gathered in the tall grass, Alecto looked down at those claws and smiled. Then she looked at Thea, into Thea, and her smile broadened.
“I see no timidity,” she told the others. “No remorse. I do see ruthlessness.” To Thea she said, “And ruthlessness, while not regarded as a virtue by the weak, is known to the strong as a form of courage. Congratulations. You’ve proved me wrong.”
Alecto held out a vial. “You’ve earned your wings.”
Thea studied Alecto’s face for a few seconds before she took the vial. Her satisfaction seemed genuine. Maybe Thea had impressed her, after all.
Or maybe she’s found something she likes in my blood, and now she wants to keep me here.
Thea drank the vial.
The first two stages had involved gradual changes—her blood, her skin, her fingernails coming out. The claws had hurt, but only for a few seconds, and then there was a surge of power and strength. Thea liked having a built-in weapon at her disposal, and that more than made up for the fleeting pain.
She knew she’d like having wings even more, but this pain wasn’t fleeting. It was torture. Her back felt like molten metal had been poured over it. There was a tearing sound, both her shirt and her flesh. Purple blood flowed over her shoulders. Thea bent over double and cried out, hating to show that weakness, but unable to help herself. She gasped as her vision blurred, and prayed only that she wouldn’t humiliate herself by throwing up. She could see now why they’d felt a need to do this out where they wouldn’t be seen or heard.
The tearing, rending feeling stopped and was replaced by shooting jabs of pain up and down her spine and arms. Not hot metal anymore, but electricity. Thea didn’t think she could take much more. She felt something in her eyes, the same thing she felt when she was inflicting a hex, and knew they were glowing violet. But it wasn’t a quick glow this time, there and gone before a person could be sure of it. Her eyes, her whole body, were dangerously hot now.
For a second, she thought she might explode. Then she breathed in deeply, harnessing all that energy, controlling it, herding it into one place. She felt a restless, buzzing need, but she didn’t know what for.
Thea stood back up, staring at the others through eyes she knew were still glowing, though her vision wasn’t any different. They watched her calmly.
She looked up at the sky and exhaled. The restless, itchy feeling concentrated itself behind her shoulders, where she could now feel a weight that hadn’t been there before, and she knew what her body was clamoring to do.
Thea spread her wings.
The flight home was worth all the pain, and then some.
Persephone stayed with Thea, while Alecto went on ahead, and Megaira stayed behind to drive the SUV back.
“First thing you need to do is feel where Hexing House is,” Persephone said. “It’s not all that different from the other things we sense, in terms of how it feels. But this is a homing instinct. A lot of animals can do it, and once you get used to it, you’ll find that you can, too.”
“Won’t people see us flying?” Thea asked.
Persephone smiled. “They might see us now, going this slow. Either they’ll think they’re crazy and dismiss it, or they’ll think they saw an alien and other people will think they’re crazy and dismiss them. Or else they’ll believe what they see, or maybe they’ve heard a rumor somewhere and this confirms that it’s actually true. And then maybe we get a new customer out of it, some day.”
After about an hour in the air, Thea finally felt the homing signal. It didn’t happen until she stopped trying to sense it as the campus or Hexing House, and started trying t
o sense home. But in the end, her childhood definition of home could not be supplanted. The signal, if that was what it was, smelled like Aunt Bridget’s kitchen, and peach trees.
Once she got it, Persephone smiled at her and said, “This is where it gets fun. Do what I do. Do not stop to try to figure out how. You’ll trip yourself up, trying to think it through. This can’t be trained. You’ve got the wings. You’ve just got to go by instinct.”
With that bit of instruction, she took off so fast in the direction of home that Thea couldn’t even see her anymore. She just felt the air move, saw a burst of purple, and Persephone was gone.
Following orders and not giving it any thought, Thea did the same. And it was marvelous. The five hour drive was about a half hour flight, a blur through the air as things whizzed by. How she was avoiding birds or low-flying planes or anything else she might hit, Thea had no idea. But she wasn’t afraid. Persephone was right: she had the wings. They came with the ability to use them.
It was maybe the most fun half hour of her life. And somewhere along the way, Thea gave up even pretending that Flannery was the only reason she had done this. She would find Flannery, and she would bring her home to Aunt Bridget. And then Thea would return to Hexing House and live out her days as a fury. The thought brought a strange, contradictory mixture of both excitement and peace.
The next afternoon, they had a party for her in the Colony Center. Personal Services would take some time to make her new clothes to accommodate her wings, so in the meanwhile Thea stood awkwardly in a slightly baggy suit borrowed from Cora, while furies gathered around and sang a song she didn’t recognize in mostly off-key, half-hearted voices. Then she was obliged to blow out candles on the cake, as if it was her birthday. She posed for a picture with Alecto while someone cut the cake and started handing it around.
“Lovely, congratulations,” Alecto said. “I have to get back to work.”
Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) Page 11