A Flash of Hex

by Battis, Jes

  “We can do some pretty fucked-up stuff with materia, too. Like setting people on fire, or causing earthquakes, or reversing gravity. Lucian doesn’t exactly have the monopoly on destructive power.”

  “But necroid materia is different. You can feel it, right?”

  He nodded slowly. “It does feel strange. Oily. Like something that’s gone bad, or was never good to begin with.”

  “It feels wrong.” I took a drink. “Everything about him is wrong. But he’s nice. I don’t get it. He’s nice, and funny, and he has abs, Derrick. What am I supposed to do with that? Darkness isn’t supposed to have abs!”

  He shrugged. “We’ve never been good at choosing the right men.”

  “You especially!” It slipped out before I could stop it.

  Fuck.

  Derrick’s expression fell. “Yeah. Me especially.”

  I hugged him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that, sweet thing. I’m just tired and a little drunk. You’ve done fine in that department.”

  “Yeah, my track record shows it.”

  “That wasn’t your fault. Thomas . . .”

  He winced a bit at the name, like he’d been burned. “Thomas was a long time ago. But that fuckup still reverberates, let me tell you.”

  “It wasn’t a fuckup. You told him the truth. It’s not your fault that he couldn’t handle it, Derrick. A better man would have handled it.”

  “His leaving was the least of my problems.”

  That was true. Derrick broke the cardinal rule by telling his boyfriend—well, fiancé, really—about the CORE. The only reason he wasn’t punished more severely was because he’d omitted a lot of sensitive details. But the damage was done. Thomas ran like the wind, and Derrick’s career as a telepath went straight down the toilet.

  “That was the reason I never got promoted,” he was muttering now, “why I never got the proper training, why I always had to hear those assholes in the psi-tank snickering at me. Even when they weren’t talking, I could still hear them. And all for what? Some beautiful fucking normate guy who didn’t even bother to stick around.”

  I kissed his cheek. “He was a dummy.”

  “Really?” Derrick looked exhausted. “Maybe he was the smart one. Maybe we both should have run.”

  “Where to? Nunavut? The CORE has an office there.”

  “Anywhere.”

  I smiled. “To a place where the hot boys roam free, and the beer is always six percent.”

  “Where kids aren’t getting killed by some sick mage with a vendetta.”

  “Where the only guy interested in me isn’t a bitch-boy to the dark side.”

  “Where I’m not falling hard for a spatial profiler with an ass like Andy Roddick.”

  I grinned. “Are you? Falling hard?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, that’s good, right? At least we know we can still fall.”

  “But it hurts.”

  “Yeah.” I leaned against him. “It hurts.”

  “So what do we do about that?”

  I snapped my fingers and concentrated. A small tongue of flame, like the last cough from a dying Zippo, sprang to life in my hand.

  “Luckily,” I said, smiling, “we’re kinda like superheroes.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Maybe we are.”

  “And Thomas was an ass-face.”

  “He was.”

  “And you know what I’m thinking right now.”

  “That we should call a cab?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.” He pulled out his cell. “Already on it.”

  “If Mia’s gone, can we watch Big Business?”

  “Totally. There’s bean dip in the fridge, too.”

  “And then can we organize the recyclables?”

  “Boy, you know how to rip it up, Corday.”

  “I do. I do.”

  15

  I never thought I’d end up back at the apartment where Jacob Kynan was found, but here I was, standing outside the entrance with my coffee and wishing that it were a mug of scotch rather than a Tim’s double-double. Derrick and Miles shifted nervously on either side of me. We’d come back so that Miles could work his magic on room 208, where Jacob had spent the last moments of his life. The room’s claustrophobic dimensions would actually make the spatial profiling easier, and Selena didn’t especially feel like cordoning off a section of Stanley Park again.

  So here we were. Back at the beginning.

  “How does it work?” Derrick asked. “The profiling, I mean. Do you read the space around the crime scene like someone would read a book?”

  Miles frowned. “It’s more like—listening to music. If you’re on the subway, listening to your iPod with those crappy little earbud headphones, you barely hear anything at all. But once you clear away the ambient noise, you can see how each song is actually put together, note by note.” He grinned. “I have really good headphones.”

  “With me, it’s more like reading a blurry book with one of those clip-on travel lights,” Derrick said. “I can see part of the page, but not all of it. And whenever something comes into focus, the rest just gets blurrier.”

  Miles put a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll get better with time. You’re still learning. But you’ll refine your powers with more practice.”

  I watched his hand linger for a moment. Then, like a kid stealing a lick of ice cream in secret, he reached up to brush the back of Derrick’s neck with his fingertips. Just for a second. Derrick smiled. Miles dropped his hand.

  I was going to kill someone if this went on for much longer.

  “Okay,” I said, “the building manager promised not to bother us. So let’s go while the light in there is still good. Will the materia traces have faded too much by now?”

  “I can still see them,” Miles replied. “They make impressions, like bite-mark evidence or tire tracks. The outline stays even once the power itself has faded.”

  “Man—I’ll bet we’re not paying you enough.”

  He shrugged. “I like my job. And the city’s nice. I could get used to it here.”

  Derrick’s eyes brightened considerably at this, but he didn’t say anything. I resisted the urge to sigh. People should get to be happy. People who aren’t me.

  We passed through the lobby and up the flight of concrete stairs that led to the second floor. I could hear the murmur of televisions from closed doors. The air was freezing, and I could smell the tang of vanilla. Maybe each floor had its own special designer scent.

  The door to room 208 was still covered with caution tape, even though the cleaners had already come through here and whitewashed everything. We weren’t looking for physical evidence this time. We were looking for a trace of something that even the most powerful microscope couldn’t see.

  Luckily, we had Miles.

  I pushed aside the tape and opened the door. The bedroom had definitely been cleaned, but it still had a patina of darkness and blood to it that couldn’t be washed away. Not that any of the hotel’s occupants would notice. I had no doubt that the apartment would be rented as soon as we left. But I could feel the shadow of what had happened here. I wanted to get in and out as quickly as possible.

  Quietly and efficiently, Miles unlaced his New Balance shoes and set them on the carpet. He had small feet, and his white socks made him look much younger and innocent, like a teenager about to lose his virginity.

  “Getting comfortable?” Derrick asked, one eyebrow raised.

  “It helps to have as much contact with the room as possible.” Miles let his fingers trail against the fresh paint on the walls. “You don’t get this opportunity with large, outdoor crime scenes. But this place is like a veal pen. Much easier to profile.”

  “You’re like the room whisperer,” I said, smiling.

  He flashed me a quick sign: one hand in a closed C shape held to his mouth, thumb pressed against forefinger, then a dismissive downward sweep. Shut up. But he was smiling good-naturedly as he signed it. I felt, however oddl
y, that we were becoming friends. That was something I hadn’t expected.

  Miles walked in a slow circle around the room. He paused at the bed for a moment, and reached out with his hand, as if he was pressing against something invisible. He frowned. Then he stared at the wall by the bed—the arcs of blood had been washed away, but you’d still be able to see them with Luminol or some other chemical reagent. Blood was nearly impossible to get rid of, even with bleach. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Lady Macbeth had been on to something, for sure.

  Miles kept looking at the wall. It was white and clean, but I felt like he could see beneath it. Like he was a living infrared camera. He reached out, and I watched his fingers hover less than an inch away from the paint without touching it. Something in the room stirred. I felt a prickling in the back of my neck.

  Red light bloomed beneath his fingers.

  It pulsed for a moment, then spread out in veins and vesicles along the wall, remapping the direction of the bloodstain pattern. As I watched in fascination, a glowing tracery rose like ruby mist out of the bare white paint, coursing, flowing, slithering in all directions. Miles took his hand away, but the light kept branching out, forming new pathways, loops, and whorls, until I found myself staring at a luminous reproduction of the arterial spray that lay beneath the wall. It hung before us all—a macabre skein of bloody Christmas lights.

  “Whoa” was all Derrick said.

  “The space remembers,” Miles clarified, looking at the wall instead of us. “Whenever blood is shed, it releases dormant materia flows that carve their pathways through space. It records the path of their energy, like vinyl records music.”

  “So you’re just—playing the room?” I asked, once he’d turned to face us.

  Miles nodded. “In a sense.”

  He walked over to the area of carpet where the cauldron had sat, pausing again. He frowned. “Something powerful was unleashed here. The space remembers it.” His eyes looked dark. “It doesn’t want to, but the memory’s there all the same.”

  I tried to consider something so powerful that it scared . . . space. It baffled me. I suddenly wanted to go home and turn all the lights on.

  He let his hand hover just above the carpet. Red light curled up from the ground, shimmering in the air like rose petals made of iron. It made a slow spiral pattern against the carpet, growing darker, until it had formed the outline of the cauldron. Unlike the pattern on the wall, this light was tinged with winking motes of black, like coal dust. They scuttled and made soft, papery whispering noises. Or maybe that was only my imagination. I willed myself not to look away.

  “What are those dots?”

  “Voids,” he said slowly. “Bits of nothingness. They represent spots where the space was literally burned away. Destroyed.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  He crouched on the carpet, staring at the matrix of red light with its curious specks of shadow. “With enough power—yes. Sometimes violent death creates a backlash, a kind of psychic scream. That sort of thing can actually peel away bits of spatial dermis, in the same way that a deep abrasion can peel away the top layer of skin. It’s possible that Jacob’s psyche did this before it collapsed.”

  Miles reached out and lightly touched one of the black specks. It hovered on the tip of his finger for a split second, like a beautiful onyx snowflake. Then it winked out of existence. Or back into unexistence, as it were.

  “What about the ceiling?” I asked. “That’s where Jacob died. There must be a lot of energy up there.”

  “It doesn’t quite work that way.” Miles stood up. “When we die, our energy scatters in all directions. It doesn’t cluster. Materia tends to remain along the tracks it was summoned, maintaining its original directionality, but it can still wander off and get stuck behind corners. So we have to read the room as a whole.”

  “It’s a gestalt thing,” Derrick clarified.

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Thanks, Professor.”

  Miles was already ignoring us again. He looked up at the ceiling, then back at the floor, as if following an invisible pathway. It made me think of a trot line: the nearly invisible lines of fishing wire that were often used to booby-trap meth labs. They were hung just above eye level with dangling fishhooks designed to catch you in all your most sensitive parts. And you could only really see them if you knew what you were looking for in advance. Miles, it seemed, knew what he was looking for.

  He traced an arc with his hand from the floor to the ceiling. The air between his fingers rippled for a moment, and then fluoresced. Trails of greenish energy, like phosphorescent seaweed, burned to life at his touch, undulating in the fading light of the room. The materia flowed along the path of the arc, branching out into little spiderweb satellites that glimmered, like lone islands, or emerald shavings. He seemed to be painting with energy, or composing some kind of haunting, visual music. The materia ribboned and unscrolled itself across the space, until flared tendrils of light connected the floor of the room with the corner of the ceiling.

  The majority of the energy was green, which surprised me. That was earth materia—my specialty. I was surprised I hadn’t felt it before. But there were also traces of yellow and orange threaded through the matrix.

  “Can you sort out the different flows?” I asked him.

  “I can try.” He followed the green crescent of light, probing it gently with his fingers. It wavered a little at his touch. Some of the threads actually drew back, like the leaves of a carnivorous plant, while others stretched toward him. I’d always known that materia was, in its own way, alive, but hadn’t really thought about it until now.

  “This weave of earth materia is strong,” Miles said. “Like solid rock. It was used to anchor something higher up.”

  “The body?”

  He followed the web of light, and his fingers hesitated around the spot where it flared orange. His eyes widened.

  “This is gravimetric materia,” he said softly.

  “Well, that explains how he got Jacob’s body up there.”

  “Jesus . . .” Derrick shook his head. “I thought it was just a trick of the air. But you’re saying he actually reversed the flow of gravity?”

  “Tweaked is more like it,” Miles said. “These strands were woven quickly, and they weren’t meant to last.”

  “You think he was in a hurry?” I asked. “Maybe he miscalculated somewhere. If he got sloppy, we might be able to find something probative left behind.”

  “I said it was done in a hurry,” Miles clarified. “I didn’t say it was sloppy. This is still expert work. You can’t exactly play around with gravimetric flows, after all. The warp and the weft of thread into the spatial dermis have to be precise, like a surgeon’s cut, or else you risk blowing yourself to bits.”

  “That would have saved us a lot of time.”

  Derrick chuckled. “Yeah. Killers are so inconsiderate that way.”

  Miles skirted the area around the orange materia, reaching up to investigate the glowing yellow strands above. His eyes narrowed. I watched him reach directly into the energy flow, and his hand rippled, like he was dipping his fingers in a swiftly running stream. Materia slid over his skin with a golden viscosity. I wanted to hold my breath. What if it . . . bit his hand off, like a hungry mouth? Wasn’t he afraid? Did his insurance cover mystical amputations?

  “I’ve never felt anything like this before.” He turned to regard us, and I saw with unease that his pupils were scarily dilated. “It’s not a flow that I’m familiar with. It’s not elemental. It doesn’t match up with any physical force that I know of.”

  Derrick frowned. “But—I mean, materia is basically a set of building blocks, right? You’ve got matter, liquid, heat, vapor, electromagnetism, gravity, and then both strong and weak nuclear force. That’s it. There’s nothing else.”

  “What about dendrite materia?” I gave him a knowing look. “Or necroid materia, for that matter? We don’t understand them, we ca
n’t see them, but—we know they exist, right? Just like we know that both you and Lucian exist.”

  He made a face. “Well, sure. But whatever it is that Lucian and I ‘do’ with our powers—I mean, don’t we just assume it’s a kind of materia because we don’t know what it really is? Dendrite materia sounds better than psychic voodoo.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see your power, but I can feel it. And I did see Lucian’s power—quite vividly. It was dark and alive, like the materia in front of us. So, even if we’re not sure what it is, I think we can at least say that it’s energy. Right?”

  Miles reached deeper into the golden matrix. I saw his hand begin to tremble.

  Shit.

  “There’s something in here,” he muttered. “A trace of something. But I can’t quite reach it. The pattern is so alien to me, I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

  “Maybe you should take a breather,” Derrick said, catching my warning look. “We don’t want to fool around with this stuff.”

  “This is what I do.” His voice had a sudden edge to it. “I’m not playing around. I know there’s something weird coded within these strands—I just have to untangle it. Like”—he grimaced—“unknotting a really snarled shoelace.”

  “Yes,” Derrick continued, “but this shoelace could unravel the universe. I’m not sure it’s worth taking a peek without—”

  “Will you shut the fuck up? I’m fine!”

  His voice was different. Lower, like a tape played on the wrong speed. I took a step toward him.

  “Miles,” I said, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. “I think the energy might be affecting you. Why don’t you let us—”

  “Fuck.” He stared at me. His eyes were all pupil now, and what little white remained was the color of blood. “Bitch, will you just leave me alone for two seconds? This is delicate work, and you wouldn’t know a materia flow if it bit you in your fat fucking ass! So step back.”

  I looked at Derrick helplessly. This was not Miles Sedgwick. The Miles we knew had officially left the building.

  Derrick narrowed his eyes, and I felt his power building. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it, like a sonorous bell tone in my head.