by Eva Chase
They might, but whatever the shrouded folk might intend for me, he didn’t have anywhere near the practice at defending himself that I did. Neither did Sherlock, which was why I’d insisted he take the cuff. If the fiends were going to break their rules and make themselves known, dealing with them was my responsibility. My allies had already put themselves in plenty of danger as it was.
I tapped Bash’s solid chest. “I suspect in this particular case it’d be more a matter of two bodies creating too many distractions. Besides, I need you to follow up with our forger about that payment.”
Bash’s jaw tightened. I grasped his arm and bobbed up to give him a quick kiss, heading off any further argument he might have made. “I’ll see you soon,” I said. “You know how to reach me if anything urgent comes up.”
I hailed a taxi in the vague hope that a car might throw the fiend off, but I didn’t really expect that to work. The shrouded folk scent met me as soon as I stepped out onto the sidewalk outside the posh modern apartment building where I’d gotten a short-term, furnished rental unit. I pretended not to notice and marched on inside.
I quite liked the place I’d gotten with its clean simple lines and muted color palette of ivory and soft grays, but it was hard to get comfortable knowing I had an unwelcome visitor. I’d already laid out a few Fibonacci sequences in the decorative stones that had come in a glass bowl on the hall table. They obviously hadn’t been enough to shake my follower. I tweaked them slightly in at attempt to improve their accuracy and wandered into the bedroom to grab my laptop.
When I came back into the open-concept main room, a hazy figure shrouded in strips of pale streamers was waiting for me, hovering over the coffee table. I stopped dead in my tracks, my heart lurching even though I’d been expecting something like this.
It was impossible to tell the shrouded folk apart by physical characteristics. They didn’t have much of a bodily presence in our world at all. With a person, I’d have considered the facial features, but all the shrouded folk had where their faces should be was a gaping black void amid the folds of tattered fabric—or perhaps it was swaths of dead skin. What a pleasant thought.
Still, in the first instant as I took in the visitor, I knew it wasn’t the one I’d called Bog—the one I’d made a deal with to get me out of my commune in the first place. The quiver of energy in the air and the exact taint of the dryly putrid scent wasn’t quite the same. When you’d lived among the fiends for fourteen years of your life, you learned other ways of identifying them.
“Not much for manners, are you?” I said to this one in the most flippant tone I could summon. “Guests are generally supposed to wait for an invitation. A knock would have been a good start too.”
The shrouded one spoke with a voice as dry as its scent and utterly emotionless. “We do not bother with doors.”
“Clearly.” I flopped down on the linen sofa. “What do you want, then? I don’t owe any of you anything now. All contracts have been voided.”
“Indeed.” Its form shifted as if it were gathering itself. “But you voided them by way of a trick. And even if we might have ignored that and left you alone, you have not left us alone.”
“I don’t recall doing anything to any shrouded folk.”
“Do not play games. You are interfering with our worshippers and drawing other humans into this purpose. To what end?”
I fixed my gaze on the area where its eyes should have been. “What do you think?”
“You will not stop then.”
Its tone was too flat for the sentence to be a question, but I answered it anyway. “I’ll do whatever the hell I want, and none of you get to have any say in it. Not so fun being on the receiving end of that treatment, is it?”
The shrouded one quivered. “I think you are mistaken in how much control you have over this situation.”
“I know your laws. I know the ones who came at me and my colleagues with physical force two weeks ago will have been sanctioned. I’m not the one who revealed that you exist to them—you all did that by yourselves.”
“Yes, but there are forces other than the physical, as you should well know. I don’t intend to leave you alone, not at all, not for as long as you still exist.”
I tensed instinctively as the words drifted out into the air. The room around me was already mutating. A red slick spread across the peachy hardwood floor like a pool of blood, and then another formed on the other side of the coffee table, then another by kitchen island.
A metallic scent filled the air. But Bog had tried a bloody hallucination on me before, and I’d survived that. I fixed my gaze on the shrouded one in front of me.
“Is that the best you’ve got?”
It didn’t speak, didn’t move other than the erratic wavering of its covering as if the fabric were floating in an uncertain current, but I could have sworn I tasted a smile in that instant.
The puddles rippled. A bulge formed in the tops of them. It rose larger, the blood streaking down the emerging form until my spine stiffened in recognition.
My sister’s face. Olivia’s head—no, her whole body—was emerging from each of the crimson pools. Just as young as she’d been the last time I’d seen her, when she’d been ten and I’d been fourteen and I’d given her one last desperate kiss to the cheek before I’d fled, promising her I’d come back for her.
I’d been too late. The guilt of that fact never left me, and right now it knotted tight all through my chest.
There were five of her—no, six, seven, eight—rising up like cherubic demons summoned from the underworld. Her blood-streaked eyelids opened. Her bright blue eyes fixed on me from all sides. Her lips pulled back in a horrifying grimace.
“You did this to me,” she wailed, all of her at once. “You killed me. It was you.”
One of the heads popped off with a nauseating squelch. Another spun around as her neck purpled with bruises. One dug her hand right into her blood-splattered dress and gouged her heart out of her chest. Bile shot up my throat.
I closed my eyes and covered my face, focusing on the pattern of my breathing, but the rasp in and out had turned shaky.
“You. Murderer. I hate you!” she ranted, her thin voice carrying on and on. Something wet and squishy smacked into my hair—for fuck’s sake, had one of the illusions thrown her own heart at my head?
Under my breath, I started reciting the decimals of pi. I’d made it to the seventh when one of my sister’s bodies flung itself right into me.
Chapter Seven
Sherlock
I’d followed a rather incredible number of individuals in my time, both outright criminals and ordinary people who simply had something to hide. Technically, Jemma was the former, as much as I disliked that fact. She was certainly the most formidable target I’d ever tailed.
I’d made a couple of hasty changes to my appearance before I’d headed out after her: a swipe of gel through my hair to both darken it and slick it back, a pair of prescriptionless glasses from one of the drawers in the side table. As I ambled out onto the street, I let my posture slouch to disguise my height and thinness. My stride took on the rolling gait of a much portlier man.
Very few people who’d ever met me would have recognized me in passing, and I doubted even Jemma would have identified me on first glance. There was a much higher chance that she’d realize someone was following her, regardless of whom, and so when I spotted her flaming red hair just a few dozen feet farther up the street where she was speaking with Moran, I turned and began sauntering in the opposite direction.
A tiny mirror embedded in one side of the glasses allowed me to keep an eye on her even from behind. Her conversation with her associate ended quickly. As she hailed a cab, I beckoned for one of my own.
“Follow that car there,” I instructed the driver as soon as I’d slid into the back. “Police business.”
I’d learned over the years that those last two words could prevent all sorts of hesitation, even if I wasn’t officially employ
ed by the police. Few people bothered to check. This fellow pulled away from the curb without a single question and kept on Jemma’s trail as her cab wove through London’s chaotic streets.
The gold artifact she’d insisted I put on pressed against my thigh. The thin metal wasn’t exactly uncomfortable, but I didn’t feel entirely comfortable wearing it. The symbols etched in it and the gems embedded in the thin metal surface had some esoteric power that I barely understood—that a few weeks ago I wouldn’t have believed was anything more than superstition.
I hadn’t liked the impression I’d gotten from Jemma as she’d made to leave. She’d had an air of apprehension I doubted anyone else in the room had picked up on, she was so skilled at moderating her emotions and distracting those around her by stirring up other feelings. Nevertheless, the subtle signs had been noticeable enough to me now that I’d had ample time to observe her over recent months.
Something had been worrying her. She wouldn’t have told me what if I’d asked. So I would find out the way I found out many things, through further observation and deduction.
I might have volunteered my support to her cause, and I might appreciate her dedication to ending the horrors we’d witnessed from this cult twice now, but that didn’t mean I was going to trust her completely. I highly doubted her faith in the three of us on the right side of the law was anywhere close to unwavering.
Jemma didn’t appear to be heading anywhere unusual at the moment. Her cab led us from Westminster into East London and stopped outside a posh white apartment building that rose several stories higher than its nearest neighbor. I’d already determined she’d rented a flat in the place. She’d only been returning to it.
I might have headed home myself then if I hadn’t caught a glimpse of her face on her way out of the cab while my own idled farther down the street. Now that she believed she had no witnesses, her mouth was set in a tense line, and her gaze darted around her warily—not along the sidewalk or across the road but higher along the buildings.
She was watching for some threat she expected to come from above. I waited until she’d gone into the building, and then I handed the driver his payment and went after her.
I didn’t know precisely which flat she was renting, but the elevator indicator helpfully told me which floor she’d gotten off on, and a quick sweep of that hallway gave me enough clues to deduce which door she’d gone through. I hesitated there, momentarily unsure of myself.
Jemma understood how I worked. If I knocked and explained myself, she’d almost certainly laugh and perhaps admit to the problem if I insisted. Although perhaps I should take a turn around the building first to see if I could unearth any signs of a potential threat for myself.
Before I’d quite decided, Jemma’s voice carried through the door. The building was well-constructed enough to hold sound within each flat, but even though I couldn’t make out the words, the sound had the tenor of a rising yell. I might have even detected an edge of panic to it.
My instincts kicked in. Without a second thought, I yanked out my wallet, grabbed a keycard one of my less reputable sources had provided me with some years ago, shoved it into the slot, and jammed on the handle at the same time.
The building might have been solid, but it was hardly military-level secure. Hitting the handle with the right angle and pressure in combination with the signal on the card disengaged the lock in an instant. I shoved the door open and hurtled inside.
Jemma was standing at the edge of her living room, her eyes closed, her hands thrust out at either side, her face sickly pale. Her yell was already fading, but her voice kept on chanting a stream of numbers I recognized as digits of pi. She motioned with her hands, and her shoulders came down a tad. She recited more digits even faster.
The sight of her so frantic set my own mind off-kilter. Jemma was the most self-possessed person I’d ever encountered. For something to have shaken her this badly—
It had to be something to do with those creatures, her shrouded folk.
My thoughts were still whirling, but there was one certain way I knew to combat the monsters. After all, she’d given it to me just an hour ago. I yanked up my trouser leg to snap open the gold cuff and rushed the rest of the way to her.
Jemma’s eyes popped open as I knelt in front of her. I closed the cuff around her thigh over the fabric of her slacks, where it fit snugly. If I’d needed proof of the artifact’s efficacy, it came with the rush of relief in her exhalation. She peered at me as I straightened up, the color already starting to come back into her cheeks, her eyebrows arching.
“Where did you come from all of a sudden, Sherlock?”
“I got the impression you might need some assistance.” I studied the room around us, my stance tensing. Jemma might be protected now, but I no longer was. The bruise on my arm was evidence enough that the creatures were willing to affect me at least in small ways. “What happened?”
“One of the fiends showed up and tried to make me regret taking them on. It didn’t work. I was getting a handle on the situation by myself, just so you know.”
“By reciting numbers.”
She ran her fingers through her hair, which had fallen astray during her distress. “Yes. I told you the shrouded folk don’t like mathematical certainties.” She dragged in a deep breath. “It made the hallucination the thing created ease off, and I think the fiend is gone now.”
She had ways of detecting it beyond anything she could teach us or that I could fully understand. That knowledge made me shift restlessly on my feet, my own lungs tightening. These creatures exerted their horrible influence on our world in so many ways, could bring this magnificent woman to a state of panic in a matter of minutes, and even after tangling with them and their worshippers multiple times, they were still the biggest mystery I’d ever encountered, a vast blank in my understanding.
They left me little to observe, next to nothing to deduce from, and the deductions I could make jarred against everything logic and common sense offered.
“Are you safe to stay here?” I asked, with a prickle of frustration that I had no idea what the answer to that question might be.
“They can’t affect me while the cuff is around my body,” Jemma said. “Although of course that’s why I gave it to you. I can fend for myself.”
She bent down to remove it, clearly with the intention of giving it back to me. I caught her arm before she could.
“No,” I said firmly when she glanced up at me. This much, at least, I was utterly certain of. “The things marked me yesterday, and they haven’t harmed me in any way since then. The moment you no longer had that artifact in your possession, they came at you. There’s nothing you can say that will convince me that I need it more than you do.”
She sighed. “Fine. Let me at least put it out of sight. It’s more effective skin to skin anyway.”
I let go of her so she could unclasp the cuff and slip it under her slacks. The sight of her leg bare halfway up her thigh set off a flicker of heat that shot from my chest to my groin. The sensation of lust wasn’t one I was especially familiar with either, but at least it wasn’t a mystery. On the contrary, it was a human weakness so commonplace I’d once prided myself in being above it.
Jemma had shown me the productive side of physical satisfaction. And I couldn’t say there wasn’t a certain sense of accomplishment in bringing a woman this brilliant and assured to the heights of pleasure.
Her eyebrow rose again as she let her pant leg slip back down, as if she suspected my reaction. Perhaps I’d given off some hint of it that she could read as easily as I read so much else. She looked around the room as if confirming there was no sign of whatever the creature had been tormenting her with, and another pinch of restlessness nipped at me.
This was the greatest case of my career by far. My opponent couldn’t remain this opaque to me. Otherwise I’d be little more use in bringing the things to justice than a constable straight out of school.
“Will the same tric
k with the numbers work for anyone, should the creatures attempt a similar assault on the rest of us?” I asked.
“Yes, for anyone who has plenty of pi memorized.” She grinned at me. “I suppose you’ve got it to the thousandth digit or so.”
“Somewhere around there.”
“I don’t think we’ll need to put that possibility to the test, though. They aren’t afraid to hit me with the worst they can conjure up because I’m a known quantity—I used to belong to them. With the rest of you, they’ll be more careful to follow their rules. If they come after you, it may be in ways so subtle you don’t realize there’s any supernatural influence at all.”
She folded her arms over her chest. “I think I’d better come back to your apartment with you, if you’re going to insist on leaving the cuff with me.”
“I’d imagine John and I can take care of ourselves, especially if the effect would be so small.”
“You of all people should know that subtle doesn’t have to mean small. The shrouded folk only followed you there recently. I don’t think I should leave you and John alone on your first night afterward, not until I see if they’re planning anything more than just following.”
I opened my mouth to protest again and paused. Why dismiss her help? It would be easier to learn the ways of these things with her there to guide us if one of them acted on us. I might have my pride, but only a stupid man would wave off the chance to learn vital information.
“All right,” I said. “I suppose there’s the couch, if you can accept sleeping there.”
“I think I’ll manage just fine,” she said, with a glint in her eye that suggested she expected she’d make it into one or the other of our beds if only for a portion of the night. “Let me get a few things, and then we can start our monster watch.”
Chapter Eight
Jemma
“Oooh, right there,” I said, letting myself sink deeper into the sofa cushion.