by Victor Milán
“Let me put it another way,” Candace said. “Would you shut down the sewers of Paris because they had some alligators in them?”
“Well—they’re really Nile crocodiles. And there are not so many of them. And they do keep down the rats…”
“You begin to see my point.”
“All right. This is all very well and good. But I need more. Give me something that I can take to the Mayor—to the national authorities—which will persuade them to stay the Gendarmerie’s hand.” A beat. “Please.”
Candace leaned forward across the neat desk. “Mama abhors all crimes of violence, including terrorism. You must know that, from your years of dealing with Evernight. So she makes no threats. She merely asks you to imagine the effects on the peace and well-being of your city’s straight citizens and tourists in the event of even a successful decapitation strike: the horde of angry, embittered jokers and fugitives that would fill the Métropolitain stations and pour up from every manhole and access-tunnel in Paris.”
The pale-brown eyes got wide. “Shit,” the Mayor’s Special Aide said.
Candace sat back, nodding. “Precisely.”
Boumedienne frowned at nothing for a few moments. Long enough for Candace to start getting itchy about her brother’s fate. And her own. There are too many games going on at once here, she thought, and I don’t trust any of the players. Except DuQuesne, to be awful.
“Very well,” the Special Aide said at last. “I think I can persuade them with that … graphic image. Even the upper ranks of the Gendarmerie National—even the commanders of GIGN themselves—realize that such a measure as they propose is extreme, and likely to produce blowback. When I share your description of the nature of such blowback, I think they’ll reconsider.”
“So you agree to Mama’s terms?”
“Yes. Now, let’s talk about yours.”
“I’ve guaranteed my brother’s continued good behavior to Mama, which guarantee I likewise extend to you.” Even though you don’t seem the sort to kill me if he breaks my promise. “He will honor that guarantee. He’s desperate. Desperate enough even to behave.”
“Even so, he’s still wanted for an act of terrorism.”
“I’ve also promised Mama Evernight to have him out of the country within twenty-four hours. That would get him out of your hair.”
“‘Terrorist,’” Boumedienne repeated. “That’s a magic word these days. It makes rights and justice go away. Along with a good deal of sense.”
“That’s true. But in exchange for his freedom, he’s willing to provide all the details he knows about the Leopard Man leadership cadre in Paris—which means all of France. Names, dates, plans, the works. And he was Léon’s own accountant.”
“You mean—”
“He’ll give you their financial records, down to the PIN numbers on their pseudonymous bank accounts.”
“That—that would excuse a very great deal.”
“And after all,” Candace said, “it’s not as if anybody was hurt. It was only a bus kiosk.”
“It’s not as if anybody else was there. The only reason we identified your brother was that several surveillance cameras captured him in the act. We were able to match his face with an individual Gendarmerie agents have photographed in the company of known Leopard Men, and near known Leopard Men locations. Still—the kiosk will cost 63,000 euros to repair.”
Candace whistled. “So much?”
“You know government contracts.” Mme Boumedienne stood up and offered her hand across the desk. “All right. You have made yourself a bargain. I know the Mayor will see the wisdom of your proposals, and the President as well. As for the National Police and the Gendarmes—well, they’ll either see the light of wisdom, or do as they are told, depending. I cannot yet guarantee acceptance. But I think the chances are good.”
Candace almost deflated into a limp rubber sack like an empty balloon. “Thank you,” she said, pulling herself together enough to rise and clasp the proffered hand.
“You are a brave woman, Mme Shongo,” the Special Aide said. “Your brother cannot know what a remarkable sister he’s fortunate enough to have.”
“Probably not,” Candace said. “He’s my younger brother.”
Boumedienne laughed, but quickly went serious again.
“I only hope your courage turns out not to have been rashness in the end. Good day to you. And good luck.”
* * *
Where is he? Candace asked herself, checking her smartphone again. It was 2258. Two minutes later than last time.
It was chilly. Her breath puffed out visibly to join the mists creeping out of the Seine to fill the Place Vendôme with the smell of diesel exhaust and grease-trap rankness. The lights glowed dim and yellow, and few people walked abroad. A pair of lovers gazed arm in arm up at the statue of the flying ace Captain Donatien Racine, known as Tricolor, atop the famous column commemorating his defense of Paris from the 2009 attack by the Radical—her old crush and mentor, Tom Weathers. A shabby man—one of Mama’s children?—marched past the gate to the Tuileries, swigging wine from a bottle and mumble-singing indistinctly to himself.
Her own warm buzz of success and champagne was starting to curdle in her stomach. Should I have let him go off by himself?
Like everybody packed anxiously into Mama Evernight’s crypt, her brother had gone manically happy when Mme Boumedienne called to announce that the President himself had ordered the Gendarmerie to stand down from its planned attack. Candace’s bargain had been accepted.
I at least had sense to worry when Marcel said he was going out without me. Briefly. She’d been in a happy place she’d almost forgotten existed, swilling Moët & Chandon from the bottle like the mumbling hobo minstrel, dancing and chanting along to “La Marseillaise” echoing off the bone walls from big speakers playing off somebody’s iPod. She had the hairy arm of the two-and-a-half-meter-tall joker called Bigfoot across her shoulders from one side, and the hard, dense arm of the Mauritanian joker-ace who called herself La Brique from the other. He’s so happy and excited, she remembered thinking. Why not let him go?
She had pulled together enough to suggest that she come along and watch his back. But no, Marcel said. He had to go alone. He’d stashed thumb drives containing key financial records with a Christian refugee from the Albanian civil war, a shopkeeper who’d suffered mightily from Leopard Man extortion. He’d been planning his escape for a long time, he said.
His contact had the paranoid hypervigilance of an alley cat. If Marcel brought anyone along, he’d shut down and hunker behind steel shutters. So Candace nodded; her brother kissed her fervently on the cheek, thanked her for the hundredth time, promised to meet her in the Place Vendôme at 2100, and left Evernight.
Their flight from Orly left at 0130. Darkness was beginning to muster in Candace’s stomach, and tension knotted around the black sensation. To distract herself from her thoughts, and the growling of the terrible thing that lurked in her under-brain, she glanced up the column’s bronze, already green four years after its construction. Despite the French government’s official reversal of its initial genocidal approach toward those touched by the wild card into operatic concern for their welfare—powered both by guilt and a desire to twit the Yankees for their Four Aces witch hunt—it kept tight rein on everyone who drew the ace. Every one detected they conscripted into government service. As a consequence, France had few publicly known ace heroes to adore. Because Captain Racine’s heroics had been broadcast live worldwide on video news feeds, the government opted to make him the public face of its shadowy ace corps—and a tourist attraction.
Candace recalled her encounter with another official French shadow-ace that afternoon, shuddered, and felt unclean. Tricolor’s bravery was real. But it was being used to hide a lie.
Her iPhone started playing the signature tune from Van McCoy’s “The Hustle,” a current favorite song twenty years older than she was. She almost dropped it yanking it from her purse. “Hello?”
She barely remembered to end the call with a stab of her thumb before turning and sprinting for the nearest Métro stairs.
Marcel, Marcel—what have you done?
Already, she feared she knew.
* * *
When the stench struck her like a fist through the open front door, Candace flicked her knife blade into place. She stepped cautiously out of the feather-light sleet falling on the lower slope of the Mount of Martyrs into the normal-looking two-story gray stone house, cramped on a block of near-identical houses with steep slate roofs, to which Samuel L. Jackson’s voice on her GPS had led her from the Château Rouge Métro stop at a dead run.
She opened her mouth, and Darkness rolled out to precede her. Nothing could see through it but her, and those she temporarily allowed to. A were-leopard might hear and smell her well enough to strike, but a far more likely nat gunman would see nothing to shoot at.
Not that anyone she saw was in any shape for shooting. Two bodies, male, and what she thought was parts of a third sprawled in attitudes of violent death, their own guts, and all their blood on the sodden throw rug—an oddly domestic touch for Leopard Men—the doorway that opened to her right, and the stairs themselves. An old-school AKM, heavier, and higher-caliber than modern assault rifles, lay propped almost theatrically at the foot of the stairs.
She let it lie as she passed by. She didn’t need it. Also the recoil from 7.62 cartridges and steel buttplate hurt her shoulder.
The smell was familiar. Fear and fresh blood and shit. She hadn’t smelled it for years. Except in my dreams. At the house’s rear an oblong of relative lightness showed a back door also ajar. Another body lay on its front past the stairs, with its head turned to the side. Half its head. The rear half.
“You have strong jaws, you treacherous bastard,” she muttered.
From ahead, she heard a snarling and a spitting, and she ran.
She crossed a short, bare yard that stank of pee and weed, just missed stepping on one of a litter of discarded wine bottles and falling, and clambered up onto a stone wall just higher than her head.
A narrow alley confronted her. In the next yard, two leopards fought, a larger and a smaller.
They squatted on spotted haunches, yowling and swiping for each other’s faces. Though both were covered in blood, the larger one’s left shoulder lay open to bone, blood running in the rain. As Candace drew herself upright, balanced on the rounded wall-top with the help of a couple years’ ballet classes in Cape Town, she saw the bigger gather itself and leap on the smaller.
Rather than spring to meet it, the lesser leopard rolled backward across its twitching tail onto its butt, accepting the attack with its forepaws. The larger cat’s momentum flung it all the way onto its back. The bigger landed on top, its hind claws raking at the lesser’s belly.
The smaller leopard’s jaws clamped on its throat.
A natural leopard killed larger prey by holding its throat closed in its teeth until it suffocated. But Leopard Men—the few, the proud, the weres—they loved the taste of blood. Their shared ace had given them mighty jaws and razor teeth. And what was power, if not to be used to the utmost? To be enjoyed?
With a heave of its round head, the smaller leopard ripped the throat clean out of the one atop it. The bigger one fell onto its side on the flagstones, kicking and gushing.
Candace’s heart seemed to pause its beating.
The smaller cat jumped up—and continued rising, to stand bipedal, hunched over as if in pain. To her relief and fury mingled she saw it was Marcel, naked. A taller, older African man, likewise naked, lay bleeding to death at his feet.
Her brother swayed. He was awash in blood. But Candace saw no sign of deep wounds beneath the gore.
“Marcel!” she shrieked. He turned his blood-masked face to her. Their eyes locked.
He turned and staggered around the hip of the darkened house with surprising speed. Too late, it came to her to try to Dark him. Not that I know how I’d capture him without one or both us getting hurt, if he turns again.
She jumped down from her wall, scrambled over the next, vaulted the dying Léon, and ran after her brother. He was weakened by exertion, and mostly by the stress of transforming from a seventy-kilogram boy into a seventy-kilogram cat, with its drastically different skeleton and muscles, and back again to human.
She ran out past the house and stopped. Two figures stood on the street, looking at her. “M. Sluggo,” she said, panting more than she should have. “Toby.”
Toby uttered a greeting bark. He sounded cheerful. Then again, having a dog’s head atop an otherwise-human body, he probably always sounded cheerful, unless he was growling. “Our people have your brother, and are taking him below,” Sluggo said mournfully. Or so she took it from the flaccid dangle of his slugs. “You must come with us. You won’t make us compel you, too, will you? Please?”
She sighed. “No,” she said. “Lead me to the Underworld, psychopomp. Do I need to give you a Euro?”
Sadly Sluggo shook his head. “Alas,” he said, “I have no boat. Come on.”
* * *
“You betrayed me.”
On the march down and down into the everlasting dark, and round and round through corridors of bone and stone, Candace had wondered what exactly she would say when—if—she confronted her brother.
Now the two were locked in the same cell he’d been held in before. She was as much a captive in Evernight as Marcel was. She just wasn’t restricted to this room.
She knew, now, what she’d say, having said it. But she was still surprised at how levelly she spoke.
He sneered. His handsome, earnest-schoolboy features twisted in a look of hate so pure it rocked her on her heels. “Don’t talk to me about betrayal!” he screamed. Then more quietly: “You betrayed us, Darkness.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You and the others—the Hunger, Mummy, Wrecker—you were heroes of the Revolution, the fighting vanguard of our glorious PPA! Yet you deserted Alicia and the People’s Paradise in their greatest need. You deserted the Revolution.”
She glared at him through narrow eyes. He’s still my brother. Even after what he’s done.
“Fuck your Revolution,” she said, in a low, intense voice. “It was all a bunch of lies Alicia and her brother told us to serve their greed and power-lust. We killed more black people than the imperialists did. By far. We even murdered more of our own—people inside the PPA—than any outside enemy ever did.”
Marcel scoffed. “What about Captain Flint and the Highwayman and their living atom bomb that killed so many of our soldiers?”
“Who do you think did most of the Nshombos’ murder for them? Not us; we were few, though we murdered our share, many times over. Your precious soldiers. I don’t waste tears on them. Any more than I do the British aces, scapegoated by their own to assuage their tender colonialist consciences. I’m not saying the imperialists were good. I’m saying we were worse. Sometimes I wish we’d all died in the blast, too—us child aces. It would have been better for the world. And probably us as well.”
But saying that, she felt a pang of loss, for the other stolen ones, her comrades in living through a Hell no one should have to endure, much less children. It lent an acid splash to her next words. “The Nshombos made us monsters, Marcel. You and me both. But they were the greater monsters by far. That’s what I turned against. And I’m glad!”
“You only say that because you were the whore of the white devil! The one who misled us, and murdered the Doctor!”
“Oh, come the fuck off it, Marcel. Tom Weathers wasn’t a good man, but one thing he was not was into literally fucking children. Even though he helped your precious Nshombos fuck us all!”
And just like that, he shifted—partway. Her own reflexes were naturally fast. But she was only able to skip ba
ck and turn her head far enough fast enough that the claws at the end of his left arm, now spotted-furred and inhumanly jointed, only gashed her right cheek, instead of tearing her whole face off her skull.
That’s some great control you have there, bro, she thought as she opened her mouth and Darked him.
He screamed in leopard fury and lashed out. She backed up to the locked door and pounded on it with her palm, hoping Gros-pieds and Brick outside would realize what was happening and let her out.
He turned toward her. His head was still human. The look on his face was not. Though his arm was still transformed—he probably hadn’t recovered the energy for a full change—he didn’t have a leopard’s senses. But he didn’t need them. He could hear just fine. And it wasn’t hard to make out where she was. He gathered himself to leap. Candace made ready to dodge, hoping she was faster than his mostly human body.
The door opened behind her. Her brother shrieked as fibrils lashed from tiny holes hidden in the stone walls and tangled his arms, his face.
“Don’t kill him!” she screamed, as rock-hard hands yanked her backward into the corridor. “Please!”
“I will not,” an eerie voice said from her right.
She turned. Between bone walls stood the Archive, small and neat, bearing the distinctive multi-colored tendril leash of one of Mama’s Speakers around his neck.
“Not now, at least,” he said, the voice his own but echoing the cadence and timbre of a woman long dead—and eternally alive. “Now you must come and learn your fate.”
* * *
“Please don’t kill Marcel, Mama,” Candace said the moment she entered the Queen’s burial chamber. “I beg you. Take me instead.”
A middle-aged Vietnamese woman called Pétunia had cleaned the wounds her brother’s claws had opened on her face, closing them with a healing ace. “There might still be scarring, dear,” she’d told Candace.
Candace only shrugged. For a moment she’d thought the fact the Evernighters tended her wounds meant Mama didn’t mean to kill her. Then it occurred to her Mama might just not want Candace passing out from blood loss before hearing her death sentence.