A Flash of Hex

by Battis, Jes

  Her mouth was frozen in a scream, twisted by the avulsed bone, tissue, and decimated jawline so that it resembled a smirk. A sarcastic question mark lighting on her gloriously ruined face. Her hair—formerly orange—had become a feculent pillow of matted blood and gore. A few tawny strands still glittered in the mess, either shed naturally or torn from her scalp.

  I turned away to look at the wall, which was a mistake. It glistened with arcs of cherry red arterial spray, only partially dried to reveal skeletonized swipes and fingers within the pattern. Vampire blood was almost pink, like human blood exposed to carbon monoxide. But that wasn’t all. Something had played in her blood. Something had enjoyed itself immensely here.

  If I hadn’t already purged my stomach many times over, I would have been on my knees, retching, even after years on the job. Instead, all I could so was stand there, unable to speak, wavering but not falling as I leaned against Derrick’s shoulder. He felt like the only human thing left in the room. Even if neither of us was completely human in the long run.

  Selena finally turned from the window and stared at me. I wanted to shield my face, but with the floodlights set up in the room, there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t have looked good—even compared with what lay on the bed. Selena frowned for a moment, but then her expression shifted to professional resolve. She’d always been able to prioritize. One fucked-up situation at a time, she must have been thinking.

  “Almost unrecognizable,” she said simply, gesturing to the bed. “This feels like the finale to me. A real soaring note.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, though. The other scenes were controlled—almost programmatic. The ritual element was clear. This is just . . .” I tried to take in the whole room, but found that I could only see bits at a time, as if my eyes had quit. “It’s completely insane. Nothing like before.”

  “Someone flipped a switch,” Selena replied. “This fucker’s gone nuclear. It didn’t care about the formula this time.”

  “This was a frenzy kill,” Derrick breathed. “I mean, they knew each other, right? How else could her print have gotten on that cauldron?”

  Selena glanced at her notebook. “The house is registered to a Katrina Glass, but we know that’s not her real name.”

  “Caitlin Siobhan.” I forced myself to stare at her. “That’s who she is. Was. My God. A former vampire magnate, and this thing just . . . took her apart. Like she was a doll. How is that possible?”

  “I know what you’re asking yourself.” Selena’s gaze lingered on my pasty skin and blackened eyes for a moment, but she still wasn’t ready to ask that question. “You’ve got to wonder—is this some fucked-up part of the ritual that we haven’t seen till now? Or was it a mistake? A heat-of-the-moment kill?”

  “I don’t think it makes mistakes.” I swallowed hard and walked carefully around the bed, examining Caitlin from a different angle. Her head dangled loosely on the crimped spinal cord, a smashed egg. The cord was still intact, though—if barely—which was why she hadn’t desiccated like the vampires who attacked me in the subway. “But I don’t think this was ritualistic either. It’s the symptom of an all-out battle.”

  “Two immortals fighting.” Selena shook her head. “Bound to get ugly. Looks like the fucking Thunderdome in here.”

  “It couldn’t have gotten off easily. I mean, look at the living room. Caitlin must have left a mark on this thing.”

  “That might make it easier to find.”

  I met Selena’s eyes. Truth time.

  “I think it might be a pureblood,” I said slowly. “Something native to the shores of hell. The form that it has in our world could be—erratic. It might be hard to see at all, which would explain why there’s no trace left at any of the scenes.”

  Selena looked sideways at me. “And does this inspiration have anything to do with the truck that apparently hit you in the face tonight?”

  “Maybe.” I smiled, but it hurt. “I do think I’m finally starting to put some of the pieces together. But there are still a lot of gaps. Which is why I need to ask you—”

  She raised a hand to preempt me. “Corday, I swear to sweet baby Jesus, if you ask me for a favor, I will smack you into yesterday. Understand? I’m in no mood to deal with anything close to the shit you pulled last year. And I can smell it coming already.”

  “It’s not like that.” I struggled to negotiate a thin line of truth without spilling my entire hand. It was like skating through a minefield. “I’ve done it right this time, Selena. By the book, like you told me to. I’ve signed all the proper forms, I’ve reported everything to you—all the conversations with Lucian, my interviews with Duessa and Wolfie, even when the vampires attacked me in the subway—you know all of it.”

  Except for the part where I injected myself with Hextacy, saw an image of my pureblood demon father, and discovered that my mother’s a witch.

  Selena’s eyes were flat. “All of it? Every last speck?”

  I made a motion with my head—not quite an affirmative nod. More like a sideways turn whose interpretation was ambiguous at best.

  “And the supplier?” Her tone was particularly cold.

  I looked at Derrick. Wolfie had dumped out the rest of the Hex, so there was no physical evidence of my brush with hard drugs, but a simple blood test would confirm what I’d done. Selena could order that at her discretion. Or not.

  “He wouldn’t give up the buyer’s name,” I said. Derrick’s eyes flickered, but he didn’t interrupt. “But he’s going to give the money back.”

  Once I beat the living shit out of Patches and retrieved it myself.

  “What did he say to you about the buyer?”

  It would have been too risky to wear a wire, so there was no official transcript or recording of my interview with Mister Corvid. I could have told Selena just about anything. But I’d already been a big enough asshole tonight. I owed her some truth.

  “First he showed me the Hex. He said it was more concentrated than the stuff on the street that he was distributing. Then he said that he’d sold multiple times to a buyer who fit our description. He wouldn’t tell me who it was, but he said that . . .” I swallowed around a lump in my throat. “He said that the killer had . . . a connection to me. Something hard to define. Like I’d encountered it before.”

  Anger danced in her eyes. “What sort of connection exactly?”

  “I’m honestly not sure. I mean, I never knew my father. He could have all sorts of connections. But Duessa said something along the same lines.”

  “Did she?” Selena folded her arms. “You left that out of your incident report.”

  “I—didn’t really understand it at the time.” That was almost true. “I don’t know what else I can tell you right now. I’ve got partial answers and half-truths from two demons, neither of whom I really trust. But they also don’t have a reason to lie.”

  Selena digested this slowly. I could see the muscles in her jaw working. “You think this has something to do with your family?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s why I need to see my intake file—the whole thing, from the time I started with the CORE until now.”

  “Those records are sealed.”

  “I know.”

  She stared at me for a long while. “Something’s kinky about this tale of yours. Something you’re leaving out.”

  I looked at the floor. It didn’t seem right to lie in this room, where Caitlin Siobhan’s soul—or whatever passed for a vampire’s soul—hung around us like a pale, whispering filigree of light twined with shadow. Her presence here was still overwhelming, and would be for a good long while. I doubted that anyone would be able to live in this house for the next few decades. The feeling of dread would linger until it forced them out, and anyone with even the most nascent telepathy would go crazy from the psychic weight pressing down on them.

  Some part of me also felt like I owed Caitlin something. She’d done her best to protect Patrick, and judging from how happy he looked in his pictur
e, she’d succeeded until tonight. She gave him a home when she could have just abandoned him. And she’d most likely spent the last few moments of her unlife protecting him. She deserved better than listening to me shovel my own shit.

  “I did something stupid.”

  Derrick went pale, but he still kept quiet.

  Selena merely blinked. “Go on.”

  “When I met with Mister Corvid, he suggested a very . . . unorthodox method for gleaning information about the killer. So I followed his suggestion. The—ah—experience—helped me clarify a few ideas. About the murders, and their possible connection to me. Nothing concrete. But there were hints.” I could barely meet her eyes. “You could even call them visions. If I’m going to make sense of what I’ve been seeing and feeling lately, I’ll need to look at that intake file.”

  Selena seemed to be looking right through me. “Visions” was all she said.

  “Daimonic inspiration?” I tried to appear naive rather than duplicitous.

  She ground her teeth. “Exactly how unorthodox was this exercise that you tried—at the suggestion of an immortal drug supplier?”

  “It was a radical expansion of consciousness.” That sounded about right. “Selena, have you ever read anything by Carlos Castaneda?”

  She exhaled and looked at Derrick. “Siegel. You’ve always been”—her eyes swept back to me—“not insane. Unlike this one. So tell me—what did she do? And what agency do I need to call?”

  Derrick seemed to consider this. He was about to answer when the door to the bedroom opened, and Miles walked in.

  “Sorry I’m late. I had to take the—” His face drained of color as he saw what was lying on the bed. “Oh—holy shit . . .” Then he gagged and turned away. Derrick took his arm lightly.

  “Breathe through your nose. And try not to look too hard. I promise, this is as bad as it ever gets.”

  He sounded like a seasoned OSI. My heart gave a little tug. He really was changing—growing in power and experience. I didn’t know how to deal with it. The fear that he might somehow outgrow me was almost paralyzing.

  “Well, this is . . . certainly more interesting than pay-per-view,” Miles said quietly, between short, sharp breaths. “Usually, the body’s gone by the time I get here.”

  “Just pretend you’re in an episode of Dexter.” Derrick smiled at him. “There’s a way to stare at this invisible spot, above and to the right of the body, so you don’t actually see it all at once. It’s a trick that Tess showed me.”

  Miles tried to follow his directions. “It’s hard for me. Usually, I’m looking everywhere at once.”

  Derrick signed something, his motions uncharacteristically slow. Nerves? Or was he trying to inject emphasis? He waved both hands across each other, palms downward; then he gestured to his own eyes with his middle and index fingers, following this with a sign that I was chillingly familiar with: both hands drifting parallel, palms upward, then reversing themselves smoothly. Dead. He placed a palm over his chest, and then his stomach, as if delineating pieces of his own body. Then he pointed to his eyes again, crooking the index finger of his right hand and circling it with his left, as if describing a target. Finally, he touched his chest, smiling. I managed to piece the movements together, mostly because they were slow.

  Don’t look at the dead body. Just look at me.

  Miles blushed slightly. “Sure. I can do that.”

  “Look, this is all very cinematic . . .” Selena’s voice had a definite edge. “Very CSI: Miami, I’m sure, but we’ve got work to do. Tess . . .”

  “I can explain everything.” I held up my hands. “I promise. Everything and the kitchen sink. Just give me the rest of the night to work on a hunch.”

  “Will this hunch lead us to Patrick, the magnate successor? Because right now he’s like an atomic bomb loose in the city. With Caitlin dead, his powers will be rising to the surface, and not in a sweet, coming-of-age way.”

  “More like a homicidal, living-weapon kind of way,” Derrick clarified. “Like Henry Fitzroy on crack. Not the Showtime version.”

  “I can find him.” I held her gaze. “Eight hours. Give me that much.”

  She nodded after a moment. “Eight hours. After that, you report in full. I want every minute of those eight hours accounted for. If I like what I hear, I’ll make a call to Esther in Records, and she’ll deliver your intake file.”

  “The word ‘awesome’ isn’t big enough to describe you.”

  “Fuck you, Tess.” She smiled wryly as she said it. “Now get out of here before I make you start analyzing blood spatter. You used to be good at stringing.”

  “That’s because my life’s always one thread away from falling apart.” I took one last glance at Caitlin’s body and headed for the door.

  “I suppose I’m driving?” Derrick asked.

  “Unless you want us to end up in a ditch, yeah.” I turned to Miles. Everything was so fucked up already—might as well push both our lives over the edge. “Why don’t you call us when you’re done here, and we’ll pick you up. We can swing by the hotel and get Baron, too—as long as I don’t have to walk him in the morning.”

  His eyes widened as I said “morning.”

  “You mean—ah . . .”

  “I mean we could use the company. We’ve got a big house with lots of rooms, and your hotel sucks. None of us are getting much sleep tonight, so we might as well pool our resources and stick it out together.”

  Derrick grinned stupidly. “That’s a good idea, Tess. Strategically speaking.”

  “Of course it is. So—we’ll pick you up in a few hours?”

  Selena was ready to jump out a window.

  “Sure.” Miles looked as happy as a person standing next to a disarticulated body could look, all things considered. “Sure. Baron will appreciate the extra space.”

  “Baron’s a smart dog,” I said. “Okay, let’s do this. I need a coffee in the worst way, and we’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

  “Where are you even going?” Selena called after me.

  I strode down the hallway without looking back. “Family reunion.”

  18

  We got as far as Surrey—just past the Port Mann Bridge with its rust-colored web of struts and girders, and its insanely narrow four-lane traffic—before my body found a new way to betray me.

  “Gas station,” I hissed at Derrick, “now.”

  Wordlessly, he pulled off at the 114th Street exit and drove to the nearest Shell, which had one of those depressing attached convenience stores with inappropriate lighting and employees who always looked vaguely comatose. The car had barely stopped running before I leapt out, snatching the key to the restroom from the attendant before he had a chance to say anything. I ran past the fossilized muffins, the energy drinks, and the walls stacked with Fritos and chocolate-covered pretzels. Mecca was at the end of a long, erratically lit hallway strewn with empty milk crates and busted aluminum shelving.

  The restroom door swung inward to reveal a grimy concrete cell with an empty paper towel dispenser, but I didn’t care. I would have settled for an outhouse at this point. I slammed the door shut behind me and locked it.

  I spent the next twenty minutes hanging on to the wheelchair rail for dear life as my bowels played the tune of apocalypse. I thought I’d already puked everything up, but apparently, there was a secret cache of—something—just waiting to go nuclear. Wolfie had warned me that, as I came down from the Hex, I’d probably feel like I wanted to kill myself. “There’s really no words for how it feels to be junk-sick,” he told me. “Just try to take care of yourself, and it’ll pass. But it’ll seem like forever.”

  I realized now what he meant.

  There were knives in my gut, and ringing in my ears, and now a molten flurry exploding out of me in spasms that made me dig my fingernails into my knees, wishing I could yell but afraid that someone outside might hear me and call the police.

  If this was what it felt like to come down from heroin, I k
new that I’d never be addicted to hard drugs. I couldn’t possibly do this more than once.

  Every one of my joints hurt and itched like mad. Fingers, toes, kneecaps—everything was on fire and crawling with bugs and aching so bad. I felt hot and cold, soaring between fiery highs and frigid lows—Derrick’s shirt was already stuck to my body from sweat—and I kept swallowing around this awful tickle in my throat that wouldn’t go away. It was like some demon had reached down my esophagus and was casually, madly tickling me with a feather, laughing the whole time.

  I wanted to knock over the enormous display of Gatorade bottles outside and start ripping into them, chugging down those sweet, generic flavors with dumbass names like “grape snowstorm” and “winter rain.” I wanted my throat to unhinge like a Vailoid demon’s Carcharodon jaws—the blueprint for great white sharks—growing to hideous proportions so that I could drink everything in sight.

  Finally the last spasm seemed to pass. I was shaking, but the roiling in my stomach and bowels had subsided a bit. It was a miracle that no one had broken down the restroom door by now. Maybe Derrick was guarding it. That would be sweet of him. Most likely, though, he was still in the car, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and wondering if I’d fallen into another dimension.

  Shakily, I pulled my up my pants and wobbled over to the sink. The mirror reflected back a pale, sweating mess with pasty lips and deep circles under her eyes. I looked like a hardened addict. Wolfie hadn’t been kidding about how powerful Hex was. Of course, you were generally supposed to come down from it over the course of twelve hours, as opposed to my accelerated detoxification. My body was royally pissed, and it wasn’t going to let me off easy, not once. I could hardly blame it.

  I closed my eyes and placed both hands on the rim of the porcelain sink, trying to feel the earth materia coursing just below me. It was faint, but present. I tugged on a strand gently, and something sluggish, hot, and sweet flowed up the length of my arm. I couldn’t draw too much too fast—it was like trying to slurp a burning-hot bowl of soup when you were practically dying of hunger. But I managed to take little sips. The power soothed my insides, unknotting some of my muscles and making it easier to breathe.