Scottie frowned at her. “Maybe it’s busted.”
Savannah turned. She pointed the gadget at him. It lit up, emitting a stream of excited electronic squawks.
“Maybe,” Savannah said, “you should be a good helper monkey and not second-guess me.”
A portly man in a three-piece suit, his face etched with worry, stepped into the enclosure. He whispered in Scottie’s ear before scurrying off.
Scottie threw up his hands. “Well, that’s just great. Vanessa Roth flew the coop, nobody’s got any idea where she is, and my police informant got caught red-handed.”
“Good!” Savannah’s eyes lit up behind her goggles. “Inside every crisis, an opportunity to learn. Now we can test a theory of mine. I believe that Detective Reinhart and Mrs.—excuse me, Ms. Roth are linked on some deep, primal level.”
She glided over to the table and traded her gadget for a syringe. The drug inside was black as tar. She held it up to Marie for inspection.
“You’re familiar with ink, of course. I invented it. Well, not alone, it took a team of subordinate researchers and innumerable test subjects, but most of them are dead so I feel comfortable taking credit at this point.”
“So you’re the kingpin behind the cartel,” Marie rasped. “You started a drug epidemic. Does the money help you sleep easier at night?”
Savannah laughed. She clutched the syringe to her chest and gave Marie a delighted smile.
“Oh, Detective. You misjudge me. It’s not about the money. It never was. Well. Okay. Maybe it’s a little about the money, but I’m a salaried employee. Ink’s value as a recreational drug is strictly to lure in the rubes. To fill the cheap seats, if you will. A little opiate, a tiny dash of lysergic acid, cook it just right and you’ve got a tasty concoction that literally melts on your tongue and livens up the dullest of dinner parties.”
She moved in, standing over Marie, and held the syringe closer. The oily liquid slowly bubbled and churned inside the syringe, as if it was a living thing.
“The real payload is an alchemical compound, magically charged and designed to turn habitual users into psychic antennae. And it’s been doing its job masterfully, with minimal hiccups, until you and your lady friend came along.”
“Turn them into…” Marie shook her head. “Why?”
“Please. I’ll be asking the questions here. Enlightenment would be wasted on you. Now, street-grade ink is very heavily cut with various nontoxic additives. Generally about twelve to twenty percent pure.” She flicked her fingertip against the syringe. “This is the real deal. One hundred percent pure. Seeing as ink users seem to have a strong reaction to your presence, I want to see how you react to it.”
Marie squirmed in her chair, fighting against the steel straps as Savannah forced her sleeve up. The needle stung like a wasp, sinking in, the ink burbling as the plunger slid down.
“We’ll start with a small injection, two CCs. Still enough to send many human subjects into a fatal overdose, but I’m betting you’re no ordinary subject.”
The world dissolved into points of starlight.
The drug burned lit-gasoline trails through her veins, spreading across her body. It was a serpent of fire, coiling up her spine and nestling at the base of her brain. She felt like a stranger in her own flesh, and then it wasn’t her flesh anymore. She saw the world as an unbroken line of overlapping lenses, slices of reality laid on top of one another. And as the machinery of the universe churned, cosmic gears clanking and galaxies spiraling, the lenses came apart one by one.
She perched on a wagon in her ragged, makeshift clothes, leading tumor-ridden horse-beasts across a cracked and endless wasteland. Then another lens flicked out of place.
She crouched in a crude fighting pit, her breath drawing curlicues of frost in the air. She gripped a pair of wooden batons as a man-mountain covered in tattoos shambled toward her with a sledgehammer. The crowds in the stands screamed for blood, their shouts drowning out the roar of her heartbeat.
She strode down a burning slum street, windows bursting and screams echoing around her. She wore jet-black armor, a sleek carapace of ceramic and steel, and a helmet with a visor that painted her vision in strokes of neon light. Women in matching armor—my Valkyries, she thought with a sense of dark pride—strafed the buildings with gouts of fire from flamethrowers shaped like insectoid shells.
She was Marie Reinhart, strapped to a chair and feeling the sting of the needle. Savannah stood over her and made notes on a clipboard.
“Pupils dilated, heartbeat accelerating…fascinating. Now, Detective, I need you to do something for me. Call to your friend. Call to Ms. Roth.”
Marie barely heard her. She was lost in a memory of her childhood. Huddling in the ruins of a burned-out shack, hiding from the bioluminous searchlights and listening to the wet squelching sounds as the Unkind Ones dragged their bloated bellies down the street on twisted elephant-stump limbs—
No. That wasn’t her childhood. My name is Marie Reinhart, she told herself, fighting to keep her identity from tearing apart at the seams. I was born in Cooperstown, New York, on the twelfth of May…
Savannah clapped her hands twice, sharp, in front of Marie’s face. “Detective? Cooperate, please. Call to her. Call her name.”
“What are you trying to accomplish here?” Scottie asked her.
“We want Vanessa, don’t we? They’re linked. Magically, mentally, on some level I haven’t begun to discern. If Marie cries out to her, under duress, her lover will come for her. And we’ll be ready.”
Scottie folded his arms, glowering. “She’s not under nearly enough duress.”
“My thoughts exactly. Let’s increase her stress levels. A natural flood of adrenaline and endorphins might amplify the effect.”
Savannah stood by her bank of machines. Marie was a million miles away. “She’s not here,” she breathed.
She felt like she was falling. Tumbling backward into an endless black pit. Nessa wasn’t there. Part of her was missing, part of her had been missing her entire life—and she never knew it until they met.
“Detective?” Savannah snapped her fingers. “Focus, please. I’m going to have to use enhanced interrogation techniques on you now. Please understand that I’m doing this for the purpose of advancing scientific thought. It isn’t personal.”
She turned a dial, and now the endless pit was lined with razor blades. Marie thrashed in her chair and let out a ragged scream as power lanced along the wires, the electrodes lighting her skin on fire.
“That isn’t electricity that you’re feeling,” Savannah explained. “This is a nerve induction synthesizer. It interacts directly with your nervous system and simulates damage ranging from the mild to the catastrophic. For instance, this—”
She pressed a series of keys and flipped a switch. Marie bucked in the chair, her mop of hair flailing as she shook her head wildly and groaned behind clenched teeth.
“—this is the exact sensation of having your right arm snapped in two places. If you’ll be so kind as to look at your arm, however, you’ll see that no actual injury has taken place. I’m afraid that won’t make the pain go away: your brain simply won’t be able to reconcile what you’re feeling with what you’re seeing. I’m told it’s quite unpleasant.”
Her hand hovered over the keyboard. She waited patiently as Marie sagged in her chair, her groans subsiding to heavy, labored breaths.
“Now then,” Savannah said. “This next sequence, which I’ve already queued up, will perfectly simulate what it feels like to have all ten of your fingers broken, one at a time, from left to right. I don’t have to proceed. Would you cooperate and call out for Vanessa, please?”
Marie raised her head, slow. Cold sweat matted her bangs to her forehead. She looked to Savannah and spat her words. “Fuck. You.”
Savannah sighed and shook her head. “As you wish. You forced me to do this, Detective. Your choice, not mine.”
Marie’s little finger shattered like glass. A
n explosion under her skin, every nerve screaming and her voice screaming with it. Then the finger beside it. Then the next, a perfectly timed symphony of pain with every starburst of agony flaring brighter than the one before.
Through her scarlet-fogged vision, eyes blurry with tears, she saw a figure approach. Impossible sunlight shone at the woman’s back, bright and strong, her hips gracefully swaying while her boot heels clicked on the straw-scattered floor.
She was perfect.
She wore a vest of sleek black brigandine accented with cold brass studs, over a blouse and leggings in nightingale blue. A wolfskin cloak clung to her shoulders, furred at the neck and draped low at one shoulder. It was pinned with a brass chain and a brooch bearing the stylized image of a horned owl. Twin sickles dangled from her belt, their curved blades honed to a killing edge.
In the space between bone snaps, Marie breathed, “You’re a knight.”
She crouched down before her chair.
“I’m you,” the other Marie said. She stroked Marie’s arm with fingers sheathed in black leather. “I was you. And you were me.”
“I don’t remem—” Marie’s words broke into a howl as her thumb shattered.
“Shh,” the Other said, her voice gentle, penetrating the wall of pain and confusion. “I’m here to help you. Focus on my voice, okay?”
“O-okay,” Marie managed to gasp.
Scottie frowned. He pointed at Marie, sitting alone in her chair, and looked to Savannah. “Who is she talking to?”
Savannah shrugged. “Likely delirious. Detective? Can you hear me? Call out to her. All you have to do is cry your lover’s name, and the pain will stop. Please?”
Silence.
“As you wish,” Savannah said. She flicked a switch. “Let’s move on to your toes, then.”
Fifty-Eight
Nessa’s hand jerked from the paperback and she nearly lost her grip on the steering wheel. She’d felt a sudden, flaring pain, like a deep paper-cut slashing across all of her fingertips at once, then nothing. Her intuition told her exactly what it meant.
They’re torturing her.
She gritted her teeth until her jaw ached and stomped down on the gas pedal.
Her mind was like the storm clouds roiling in the midnight sky. A seething torrent of rage and hatred and grief and fear, all swirling together and ready to rain down upon the entire world. She wanted to find the men responsible for this nightmare. She wanted to take the fear in her heart—her fear for Marie, her fear of losing her forever—and put it where it belonged. Inside of them. She wanted to savor every moment as they begged for their lives.
And then, later, when they begged her for permission to die.
“We’ve always failed,” said her own voice from the back seat. Her voice but older, more weathered, wizened by age. “We always lose this battle.”
She looked into the rearview mirror, somehow not surprised to see a passenger there. A woman sat huddled in cloaks of gray moth-eaten wool, shroud upon shroud draped over her frail body. Her face was shadowed by a heavy, tattered hood.
“You fight for all of us tonight,” the woman said. “Life after life, we’ve felt the glow of hope, only to have it crushed under our enemies’ heels. Love destroyed, life taken, sent back to the beginning to start all over again.”
“How many times?” Nessa asked her. “How many lives have we lived? How many times have we done this? A dozen?”
The shrouded woman held her silence.
“A hundred?” Nessa asked. She swallowed against a lump in her throat. “Hundreds?”
“All of our hopes are with you tonight,” the woman replied, “but we have so little hope left to share. Do this for us, Nessa. Do this for your sisters, all who came before.”
“Do it for yourself,” said a new voice.
Another woman sat in the back seat. A picture of elegance and wealth, in a black tailored suit with a baroque cut reminiscent of Renaissance gowns. When she met Nessa’s gaze in the rearview, her left eye glittered. It was artificial, robotic, with a scarlet iris that swiveled like a camera lens. She lifted a cigarette in a long ebony holder and snapped her fingers to conjure a spark of flame.
“You’re the center of your world, Nessa, the only thing that’s ever really mattered to you. And why shouldn’t you be? This world and everyone in it were meant to be your playthings. You’re a witch, and ‘witch’ is just another word for ‘goddess.’ Power and pleasure are your birthright. Start acting like it. Sure, go and rescue your servant. Enjoy the slaughter. But don’t get weepy over poor little Marie. She exists to serve you, nothing more.”
“Lies,” said the woman suddenly sitting at Nessa’s side. She recognized the mirror-Nessa, the one from the warning vision, by her blue peasant dress. Her face was hidden behind a mask of white bone, intricately carved to resemble an owl’s face. Her eyes peered out through small ovals, bright and piercing.
“You disagree?” Nessa asked her. She realized she was chatting with a hallucination, but the idea didn’t bother her.
“Do it for both of you,” her masked twin commanded. “And do it for her. This is who we are, Nessa. She fights for you. You fight for her. We and she. The Witch and her Knight. This is the story. Our story.”
“But the story always ends the same way,” Nessa said.
“Then change it. You have what none of us had. Open eyes. You have what we were all denied: a fighting chance. This may be our last and only hope to break the cycle and win our freedom. If you fail tonight, you doom us all. And you doom her with you.”
“Marie,” Nessa breathed. Another lance of pain shot up her arm. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she heard Marie screaming. Her eyes welled with tears.
“You’re much like me, you know,” the mirror-Nessa said. “I used to be a teacher, too. We Owls enjoy teaching.”
Her eyes glinted wickedly behind her mask.
“So go, and know that we are with you. Find Marie. Find her tormentors and teach them. Teach them the true meaning of fear.”
* * *
One of the worst things about the nerve induction synthesizer was how it forced Marie’s mind to war with itself. She could look down. She could see that her left foot was perfectly fine. That it wasn’t a mangled and bloody stump, the toes twisted, broken and black. But nothing could convince her brain of that. Nothing could stop the endless, searing pain dragging hoarse screams from her ragged throat.
Her Other was with her. The knight crouched at her side, stroked her sweat-soaked hair with her soft leather gloves, and sang strange lullabies in her ear.
“Well?” Savannah asked. “Would you like to cooperate now, or do we move on to your right foot? No? Nothing? Right foot it is, then. You know, Detective, we haven’t started to get creative yet. This is really more of a warm-up. You can spare yourself what’s coming. All you have to do is call her name. That’s all I’m asking. I don’t think I’m an unreasonable woman.”
She twisted a dial, and Marie’s world whited out in raw agony.
“I can’t,” she heard herself stammer, somewhere deep inside her mind. “I can’t do this.”
“You have to,” her Other said. “Marie, listen to me: Nessa is already coming for you. She’ll be here soon. These fools have no idea. But if you call to her, they’ll expect her and lay an ambush.”
“She’s coming?” Marie’s fevered thoughts raced. “You promise?”
“I promise.” Her Other kissed her tear-soaked cheek. “She would never abandon you. But these men outnumber you both and they have weapons. She needs the element of surprise. Can you endure a little longer? Can you do it for her?”
Marie managed to lift her head high.
“I’ll do it for Nessa.”
Scottie stood at Savannah’s shoulder, watching as she worked the synthesizer like a musician. “Can you really simulate anything with this?”
“Any physical sensation, yes. For example, here’s one of the more distasteful patterns, though a highly effective
one.” She flipped a pair of switches and turned another dial. “This setting perfectly replicates the feeling of having the left arm degloved from shoulder to fingertip, peeling back and removing the upper layers of flesh—”
Marie didn’t hear the rest. She didn’t hear anything but her own ear-splitting shriek, lasting on and on until her throat and her breath gave out.
* * *
Tony wasn’t supposed to be out of bed. Then again, he reflected as he stumbled through the hospital corridors, nothing was the way it was supposed to be tonight. He wasn’t supposed to be dressed in a paper gown with his ass hanging out and his arm in a sling, the pain of his stitched-up wound cutting through a Percocet fog. His partner wasn’t supposed to be the target of a manhunt. If what Janine said was right, after she finally got through to his hospital room, Marie wasn’t supposed to be abducted by blood-hungry drug dealers, either.
He wasn’t supposed to be standing on the threshold of the room where they were keeping Helena Gorski, the woman’s wrists handcuffed to the side rails of her bed. But there he was.
She looked over at him, squinting, groggy from the surgery and the morphine drip. “Fisher?”
“Your buddies took my partner.”
“Told you…told you they would. Forget it, Fisher. She’s dead. Or she wishes she was. You’re too late.”
He crossed the room and stood over her. His face was a mask of stone.
“Where did they take her, Helena?”
She shifted on the mattress and winced. “So they can kill my whole family when they find out I talked? Piss off, I’m not telling you anything.”
“I’m not giving you a choice.”
Now she was awake.
“Tony, what…what do you think you’re gonna do? There are two uniforms sitting right outside this room. If I so much as raise my voice—”
“No,” he said, “there aren’t. They just went on an extended coffee break. I told ’em I’d keep a lookout while they were gone.”
His hand closed over her dangling IV bag and gave it a squeeze. The trickle of solution, running down a tube to her handcuffed arm, moved a little faster.
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