by Chloe Garner
Jason took a step forward, insulted, then fell on the floor.
<><><>
“There, he hit a fragment,” Kelly said helpfully. Jason took a moment, then pushed himself up off the floor and looked around, confused.
“Oh,” he said. “I wondered how this ended up.”
“Shut up,” Samantha said. “Kara, deal with him. This is four.”
“Over here sweetie,” Kara said, steering him toward the corner.
“Why does my face hurt?” Jason asked.
“You just fell on the floor, for one,” Kara said.
“And you burned it, a minute ago,” Kelly added. Samantha took a breath and returned to the rest of the room.
“We need to scout the boundaries,” she said. “And then we need to put together a plan to actually destroy her.”
“Why did you fail, before?” Mitch asked. Samantha shook her head.
“This was the first time I’d seen her. But she was strong. Really, really strong. Healing other demons that should have ashed, moving earth in ways she shouldn’t have been able to do. I couldn’t kill her.”
She let that sink in.
“I had Sam with me, and I couldn’t kill her.”
“What is she?” Spake asked.
“I don’t know,” Samantha said. “Mist demon of some kind, but I have never seen one like her. Spasm said he knew something about her, but I don’t know how much gamesmanship that was.”
“He looking for your new friend?” Carter asked.
“I’m still looking into how he knew,” Samantha said. Carter nodded.
“I’ll get what he knows.”
Samantha grinned. Wished she could be there for that.
“You’re talking about a lot of ground,” Mitch said.
“Abby is looking,” Samantha said. “Sam will too, when he can. We need you using all of the resources you normally would to find something that isn’t right. I know that you won’t have the infrastructure for those regions, but push your people and get it. I want to find her and I want to finish her.”
“How are you going to get her this time, when you couldn’t last time?” Mitch asked. Samantha smiled.
“Because I’ll have all of you.”
<><><>
Jason felt like he should tell her. She needed to know, and he was the only one who could tell her, because he’d been there.
The problem was, at this point, he was beginning to understand the gravity of what had happened to him.
He knew the future.
He’d been there.
He’d been through that hell and he knew what was coming.
He could have changed it, but he had a sense of a cliff just over there that he might not come back from if he went over.
Of course, then, being Jason, he figured, what the hell? Screw it.
And he’d have told her, if she wouldn’t have killed him for it.
<><><>
“I need a word,” Isobel said as they were leaving. Samantha had gotten begrudging buy-in from the rest of the leaders, and she wanted to get out to see if Abby had found anything.
“Of course,” Samantha answered, catching Sam’s eye as he left with Carter. She wasn’t leaving yet, but she didn’t know if she’d see him again before that, and there was a sick sense of unspoken goodbye that was bothering her. He gave her a half a smile and shrugged. This was their life. They both knew it.
She hadn’t ever wanted it to be this complicated. It had happened, little by little, as necessity drove them to it, but it still didn’t mean she’d entirely accepted it.
Isobel was waiting.
“How long have you been married?” she asked.
“What?” Samantha asked.
“To the tall one,” Isobel said. “How long?”
“Um,” Samantha said, counting. “Eleven months? I think?”
“Will you celebrate the year?” Isobel asked.
“If I can get this done fast enough to get him back,” Samantha said. Wait. Was that what she’d agreed to? Or was Carter keeping him until whatever he was working on was done? Or until Abby caved in and came back?
Dang.
She was usually better at contract language than that.
“How did you meet?” Isobel asked.
Ha. There was a memory she hadn’t called up in a while.
“They were clearing splash demons out of a mine. I just kind of happened across them.”
Isobel narrowed her eyes.
“What manner of demon splashes?”
“Any one of them you like,” Samantha said. “The little, weak ones just tend to do it a lot easier.”
“Splash,” Isobel said.
“Yup.”
The woman shook her head.
“You’ll have to show me that,” she said.
“If you like,” Samantha answered, figuring it couldn’t hurt. Most humans she tried to keep away from demons because the knowledge would be dangerous to them. Isobel, though, already had the most dangerous knowledge she’d ever have. Spectating while Samantha went golfing would hardly contribute to that.
“The woman that you’re looking for is a demon?” Isobel asked.
“Yes,” Samantha said.
“But not a ‘splash’ demon.”
“No,” Samantha said. “She had a number of them working for her, but she’s a high-level mist demon.”
“What is your level?” Isobel asked.
Samantha looked for a sense of irony or sarcasm, but didn’t catch any.
“We don’t have levels,” Samantha said. “There are six classes of demons, and four categories, but it’s not like a numeric level. She’s just very, very powerful in a way I’ve never seen before.”
“And I will go with you to see you attack her,” Isobel said.
“Um,” Samantha said, confused. Where was this coming from? “Probably not. You’ll be close, where I can make sure that no one is likely to attack you while we’re working, but…” She shook her head. “I’ll probably leave you with Jason and Kara. Kara’s fun and she can make sure nothing goes wrong, and Jason can handle himself, so long as he isn’t dealing with a break in time.”
“Have you considered that you might be suffering from a mass delusion?” Isobel asked.
“Asks the woman who has been alive for thousands of years,” Samantha said. “The world is bigger than I know. I accept that. But it’s an awful lot bigger than you know.”
Samantha was wondering if Isobel had pulled her aside just to pick a fight when the woman spoke again.
“I need to find my statue,” she said.
“Which one?” Samantha asked.
“Mine,” Isobel said, as though that were obvious. “Surely if the contents of my mind are valuable, so would be my actual body.”
“Your…” Samantha stopped. Considered blaming herself for not thinking of that and coming to the quick conclusion that, even without the turmoil of picking up a territory and hunting the hellfactory demon, she never would have thought of it.
“My statue,” Isobel said again. “I am going to go find it.”
Samantha blinked at her.
“Right,” she said, at a loss.
“You don’t think it’s valuable?” Isobel asked.
“What happens if someone grinds it up into dust?” Samantha asked. That’s what she would have done with it, if she were inventing a way to convert that big a piece of rock into some kind of magical force.
“I should say it would kill me,” Isobel said.
“That’s not good,” Samantha said. “Where did you see it last?”
“When we left the estate where the rest of… them lived,” Isobel said.
“The gorgons?” Samantha asked. Isobel appeared to bridle at the term, but she finally nodded.
“Yes.”
“So… ancient Greece.”
“There were no Greeks yet,” Isobel said. “They came later.”
“Right,” Samantha said. “You didn’t think to bring it w
ith you when you left?”
Isobel narrowed her eyes again.
“You overestimate your cleverness,” the woman said. “If the point of having it is to allow Raef to resuscitate me when I die, I certainly don’t want it nearby when it should happen.”
“But you didn’t keep track of it?” Samantha asked. Isobel frowned at her.
“The world was young child. Rafael’s friends believed they would stay there forever, and the garden was full of such things. Mine was hardly of note, in that company.”
“There are more people like you?” Samantha asked.
“There were,” Isobel said. “Rafael never approved, but they were creating their own kingdom, where the men and women under their favor would live and serve them forever.”
Samantha thought about that for just a moment, and came to the firm conclusion that she couldn’t tell the difference between that and demons, reconsidering briefly if she regretted letting the fallen angel go.
Surely O’na Anu’dd couldn’t have been that wrong.
Apparently Isobel saw the sequence of thoughts on her face well enough to answer them.
“Rafael never approved of the number of us that the others created, but he understood, he said. Everyone needs a home, and when you abhor death as they did, it’s your nature to accumulate those you’ve saved from it. Much the way you have, I suspect,” Isobel said.
That felt like a low blow, but Samantha had too many other things to be thinking about right now to go after it.
“So where did it go after that?” Samantha asked.
“We had been gone for more than a hundred years when Rafael mentioned that our original home was gone. Someone killed the woman who had originally settled it, and the others scattered.”
“Jason?” Samantha asked passively, not even intending Isobel to hear her. “What would have happened to everything?”
“There’s more truth to the stories than most people would like to think,” Isobel said. “It’s just a matter of teasing out what’s possible from what faulty witnesses thought they saw.”
“Are you saying Jason was real?” Samantha asked.
“No, but I have little doubt that someone killed Rafael’s friend to keep them from turning anyone else to stone, out of a fear of their own life or to take a trophy,” Isobel said. “I don’t know what they would have done with everything, but we didn’t return. Rafael would visit my statue each time I died to gather my life force in order to return it to my body, so presumably he knew where it was.”
“And he didn’t think to mention it when he left,” Samantha said.
“No, apparently he did not,” Isobel said.
“I haven’t got the faintest clue how to begin looking for it,” Samantha said.
“There are only so many collectors of ancient art in the world,” Isobel said. “I would think that one of them would have it.”
“They didn’t hide the stone figures?” Samantha asked.
“As I said, they were in the garden,” Isobel answered. “They had no guarded space, so far as I knew.”
“Seriously?” Samantha asked, trying to think of a worse thing to do with so powerful a relic. “Just out in the open?”
“They had fear,” Isobel said. “At the beginning. No one would have considered approaching us without purpose and permission. After that, it was just isolated. The rest of the world was outside of us. They wouldn’t have done anything to conceal them.”
“Not even when they fled?” Samantha asked. Isobel shrugged.
“It had been too long. I have no idea what they would have done.”
“But… you think collectors are the place to start,” Samantha said.
“That many years?” Isobel asked. “Nothing lasts that long. No plan, no refuge, no hiding place. It doesn’t matter what they did, someone will have found the statues, decided they were worth money, and sold them. I’ve long known the importance of money to humans. When it comes to a block of rock verses meeting their own needs, they’ll ship it to the highest bidder, no questions asked.”
Samantha couldn’t argue with that.
“What do you want me to do?” Samantha asked.
“I thought you might have the next idea,” Isobel said.
And then she did.
She didn’t want to do it, because she needed Maryann looking for the next hellfactory, but that was the only tool at her disposal that had any hope.
“Maryann,” she said at the ceiling. Like with Abby, she was never sure why she talked to the ceiling, but it felt more natural than directing her words at a wall or the floor. “Maryann, I need you.”
Isobel looked at the people meandering past them, waiting for one of them to answer.
Samantha pulled harder.
“Maryann, I need you.”
The small demon appeared.
“Yes, Mistress.”
Isobel stepped away, finding the wall with her back.
“I need you to find something,” Samantha said, noting Isobel’s reaction but not saying anything. “Don’t call me Mistress.”
“Yes,” Maryann said. Samantha nodded, pointing at Isobel.
“I need you to find a statue of her.”
Maryann looked at Isobel for a long stretch of time, sucking her tongue up into her cheek.
“What size?” Maryann finally asked.
“Life sized,” Samantha said, watching her bound demon carefully. She was unable to rebel, and frankly Samantha hardly would have expected it, except for the fact that she was, in fact, a demon.
Somewhere behind her Samantha heard Kelly make his angelic hissing noise at having seen Maryann. It was a reflex that, for reasons Samantha had never dug into, Maryann in particular triggered. Maryann growled, deep in her throat, a noise that she might not have even been conscious of making.
“Why?” Maryann asked now, as if the tiny exchange hadn’t happened.
“Because,” Samantha said. “It’s important to me. I need you to do it without asking anyone in our community about it.”
“Which community is that?” Maryann asked. Samantha saw the thought register in Isobel’s eyes that this was insubordination, but it was a valid question.
“You can talk to humans, but they must perceive you as human, and they must not be people who know about demons,” Samantha said.
“That’s against the rules,” Maryann said. Samantha shook her head.
“You’re acting as my agent, and it’s what I told you to do. You keep them ignorant, as the rules require, but you may speak to them, if it’s necessary for this specific task, and only for this task.”
Again, it sounded like pushing back, but Maryann literally needed Samantha to give her permission in order to do it. Implied permission, even very-nearly-stated permission wasn’t enough. Demons could talk to humans, sure enough, but Maryann was gray, and that came with a much, much narrower existence.
“What about the demoness?” Maryann asked. Samantha shook her head.
“Only as a distant second priority.”
Maryann narrowed her eyes, looking around the room.
“You called this meeting to get everyone else looking for her. Why is this so much more important?”
“Because I say it is,” Samantha said. “It’s important that you not know. It might put you in danger, and you can’t accidentally leak information you don’t have.”
“I can’t say anything to anyone who matters,” Maryann said, insulted. “They know that.”
Samantha nodded.
“You remember the angel dust I carried?” she asked. Maryann’s eyes darted to Isobel. Still not an angel.
“Okay,” Maryann said.
“This is more important than that.”
“Then why don’t you have the kid doing something about it?” Maryann asked.
“Because he doesn’t know, and because there’s nothing he could do, anyway,” Samantha said. Score two points for Maryann. Samantha only just resisted shaking her head at the demon’s expressi
on. After her brief victory, she returned to Isobel.
“What else can you tell me about it?” she asked.
“It’s very old,” Samantha said. “It may have a very long history, I don’t really know. Stone.”
“Granite,” Isobel supplied. “And age is tricky. It depends on when they found it.”
“Found it?” Maryann asked.
“May or may not be a part of the history,” Samantha said.
“It won’t wear,” Isobel said.
Maryann was becoming visibly more interested as she listened.
“What’s special about it?” Isobel asked.
“I want it,” Samantha said.
“Why doesn’t it wear?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It would be a huge science project, if they knew it didn’t wear,” Maryann said. “People coming and doing tests, trying to figure out what it’s really made from. Super rock.”
“Maryann,” Samantha said, angry. Maryann fell to the floor in a low kneel.
“I’m sorry, Mistress.”
“Get out,” Samantha said, even angrier because, no matter how much she meant it, she couldn’t break the girl of calling her mistress. Without another sound, Maryann disappeared.
“How does she do that?” Isobel asked.
“It’s called glitching,” Samantha said. “Surely Rafael did it.”
“Never in front of me,” Isobel said. “He would just be in another room and then he’d be gone.”
“Where would he go?” Samantha asked. Isobel shrugged.
“War.”
Oh. Angel of death. Angels were generally trained warriors, by nature, but Samantha could imagine that an angel of death would either be completely repulsed or unable to avoid war.
“That’s what it looks like,” Samantha said. “They just stop being here and they’re somewhere else.”
Isobel was watching the empty space where Maryann had been.
“I don’t think I believed.”
“I know,” Samantha said. “There’s more.”
There was a long pause before Isobel spoke again.
“Yes. I sense that there is.”
<><><>
Abby had nothing for her.
Carter wouldn’t let them come back with him, but he’d taken Sam, so Samantha had gone back to a hotel with Isobel, Jason, Kara, and Kelly and stayed in a room by herself.
She couldn’t think of the last time she’d slept in a room by herself.