by S. M. Reine
“You’re not good enough,” Lucifer said. “I want Stark.”
Deirdre surprised herself by laughing. “You want Stark? You want Stark?” She funneled all of her frustration into making herself sound as disdainful as possible. “Your wants don’t matter, vampire. Remember who you are. Remember who you work for.” She closed the final inch between them, bumping him back. Deirdre was tall for a woman, a solid five foot eight without the boots. She made sure that Lucifer felt every inch of her height. “You’ll hear from Stark when he decides you deserve to hear from him.”
Lucifer’s tongue darted out to slide over his lower lip. There was no glisten of saliva. No hint of moisture in his body. He wasn’t cold like the Winter Court was cold, but room temperature. Void of life.
“That’s not good enough,” he said softly, flashing elongated canines. “We’re hungry. The blood from the bank was only enough to feed us all once, and we’ll need to feed again soon. When do we get more blood?”
“Soon,” Deirdre said.
“It better be soon. Because if you don’t feed us, then I’ll start to think that Stark only wanted to ‘help’ us for an election ad. And now that he’s failed, he won’t have a thing to do with the people who helped.”
It was meant to be a threat, but Deirdre relaxed at his words.
Lucifer didn’t think Stark was missing. He just thought that the Alpha was being dismissive of them.
“Take more juice from Niamh,” Deirdre said.
“She doesn’t have much more to give,” Lucifer said.
“Take whatever she has. Take her to the brink.” If that was what it took to keep the peace with the vampires for a few more hours… “In the meantime, I’m going to figure out how Melchior cheated. I’ll have answers soon. Answers, and a plan from Stark.”
“We’ll drink. We’ll wait. But our patience isn’t infinite.”
“Your loyalty will be rewarded,” Deirdre said.
Those were Stark’s words, Stark’s voice, Stark’s ruthlessness.
Who cared about one betraying harpy? Deirdre had done worse to keep the vampires happy. She’d already given them the life of a witch.
When the vampire lord finally turned away from Deirdre, a sigh passed through the room, sucking away all the tension. The shifters along the walls relaxed. The vampires moved back.
They let Deirdre walk to the elevators without stopping her, forming a corridor with their bodies.
The vampires were so close. Staring at her. Looking for a hint of weakness so that they’d be able to penetrate her armor, expose her as a fraud, and then attack.
She showed nothing.
Only when the elevator doors slid shut behind Deirdre did she finally sag against the wall and begin to shake.
They’d lost the election.
Dear gods, they’d lost.
There was no celebration outside Deirdre’s apartment that night. Only arguments from the vampires in the lobby, an occasional scream from Niamh, and shouting from the street outside.
Within Deirdre’s apartment, there was only lethe.
She could have crawled into one of those cubes, submersing herself in cascades of shimmering blue, and never emerged again.
Not even to breathe.
She wasn’t certain she was breathing now.
It had started raining outside again. She could tell because the window was leaking in a steady drip-drip-drip. Runoff spattered the floor and spread in a damp stain across the carpet.
The stain spread too quickly. Too darkly.
It wasn’t water.
Deirdre shut her eyes as she slipped the fourth cube into the intake bracelet.
Her eyelids seemed to be transparent. She could still see the too-dark fluids covering the carpet in a wash of black. It crept over her toes, surged around her ankles, and dragged Deirdre under its chilly tide.
It was hard to believe that lethe used to fill her with euphoria. It was the drug that had given her the confidence to wear a miniskirt into Original Sin and kiss Melchior as Stark watched. Now it only made her want to crawl into a sarcophagus and never emerge.
More lethe.
That was what she needed. More, always more.
Another cube slipped into place.
Deirdre opened her eyes. Or maybe she didn’t. Stark was sitting in the chair in the corner, veiled in shadow with a wooden box on the table beside him.
He was waiting for her. Offering to feed her more drugs. He would have opened a vein for her and poured everything from his body into hers.
Gage stood beyond him, eyes silently imploring. He said, “No, Deirdre. Stop.” Or something like that.
They were her conscience warring with her darkest urges. The shoulder angel and the shoulder devil.
The devil was so much more tempting.
Deirdre was out of lethe again. She had taken all that remained in her room and it still wasn’t enough to bring that warm buzz upon her.
She was cold.
Everything was cold.
The vampires were draining Niamh, taking her to the brink. Rioters crawled outside. Blood lapped at Deirdre’s knees. Blood from a witch security guard that she had allowed vampires to kill, blood from the queen of the unseelie sacrificing herself to the sluagh, blood from the dragon shifter that she had stabbed with the Ethereal Blade.
All that frozen blood was going to drain her.
Deirdre stood. She was pretty sure that she stood, anyway. She walked toward the corner where Stark was sitting.
“This is your fault,” she said.
He didn’t react. He didn’t even look at her, the bastard. After everything he’d done, he couldn’t even dignify her accusation with a glance.
“I hate you!”
She tried to take a swing at him.
Her fist passed through nothing. Her knuckles rattled the mini-blinds covering her window.
Neither Stark nor Gage were there. Deirdre wasn’t even standing near the corner.
Deirdre rested her forehead on the wall, seeking some sense of reality. Lethe’s disorientation didn’t seem worth it without the associated high, but it was too late to take the drugs out of her veins again. Even if she had, she would have only felt worse.
She needed more. Whatever it took to get the euphoria back.
At least it didn’t sound like it was raining outside anymore.
There were boards on her window, positioned between glass and blinds. She had clumsily barricaded it herself when she picked the room. The placement was sloppy, and it allowed her to peer between the cracks to the street outside.
She should have seen the damp street and angry rioters when she peered through those cracks.
Instead, she saw a gray brick wall only inches away. Close enough that she could have reached out the window and touched it.
Another lethe hallucination.
That was all.
It was as much a hallucination as the feeling that Gage stood over her shoulder, smelling like bear fur as it burned in the asylum’s incinerator.
Except that she wasn’t sure she could have hallucinated the runes stamped onto the brick in such vivid detail. The magic looked authentic. It also looked familiar.
She had seen that gray brick wall before.
“I took too much lethe,” Deirdre said aloud. The words echoed.
Why else would she be hallucinating the Holy Nights Cathedral? It wasn’t in New York City. It was in some canyon out in the mountains, hours of driving away.
Her cell phone rang.
Deirdre fumbled for her pockets and pulled it out. There was a number flashing on the screen. Someone was calling her, even though it should have been impossible. The phone was a burner, something she’d only had for two days so she could make calls to other people. She hadn’t used it yet. Nobody should have had the number.
She wasn’t sure if she was hallucinating or not when she answered the call.
“Hello?” she asked.
“Come outside,” said a masculin
e voice.
He hung up.
Come outside. Why not?
The stairway swirled around her as she climbed it with leaden legs and a spinning mind. There were faces painted into the drywall that leered at her, judging her for failure, blaming her for everything that had happened ever since the day Rylie Gresham entered her life.
Deirdre couldn’t be sure if she was obeying a hallucination or the real orders that someone had issued to her.
Certainly, if she’d been in better mental condition, she wouldn’t have obeyed those orders at all.
Fresh air slapped her in the face when she reached the rooftop. The cold was almost too much for her muddied senses. She gripped her intake bracelet in the opposite hand, squeezing it harder into her flesh so that the pain would wake her up.
Awake or asleep, it didn’t matter. She saw the same thing beyond the edge of the high rise’s roof.
She saw a cathedral’s steeple ringed by stone gargoyles, all of who were looking directly at Deirdre.
Rain pattered against their rigid hides, drenching them in darker shades of gray. What color would gargoyles bleed? Did they have veins through which blood could flow?
Deirdre leaped onto the tiled roof of the cathedral.
She landed on something solid, so it must have really been there. The Holy Nights Cathedral had materialized on a New York City street hundreds of miles from where she had last seen it.
When she crossed the peak of the roof, the gargoyles tracked her movements with their eyes.
She never saw them move, though.
Deirdre climbed into the bell tower. It was definitely the same room with the metal bars ringing the room, providing roosts for the gargoyles to stand upon. The windows looked out onto skyscrapers rather than trees. A familiar room in an unfamiliar location.
She climbed down the stairs.
The musty cathedral smelled of myrrh, and it was lit only by flickering tea lights along the back wall. The yellow flames illuminated a mural of a man and a woman, black-haired and pale, who gazed blankly upon the altar.
Brother Marshall was waiting for her there, a new sidhe staff tucked under his arm.
He was accompanied by one gargoyle. It seemed like it shouldn’t have fit within the confines of the cathedral, like its presence bent physics around it to make the room. It was entirely possible. Gargoyles were the product of unseelie magic, and they only obeyed physics in the very loosest sense of the term.
Or it might have been Deirdre’s perception skewed by the lethe again.
“How’d you do this?” she asked. “Stark broke your staff. You’re not unseelie.”
“One of my brothers gave me his staff to use,” Brother Marshall said.
She giggled. She didn’t know why—it wasn’t funny. But she couldn’t help herself. “What do you want?”
Brother Marshall must have noticed something was off, but he didn’t remark on it. He wasn’t Stark. He didn’t care how messed up Deirdre was.
Stark didn’t care, either. If he’d cared, he would have been there.
“You have to see this.” He handed her a photograph.
She tilted it forty-five degrees to the right and then to the left, trying to understand what she was seeing.
It was a picture of one of the voting booths for the election. Not one of the ones at the elementary school in Chelsea, but somewhere else—somewhere Deirdre didn’t recognize.
Brother Marshall had photographed the Hardwick Industries logo on the back of the voting booth.
“What about it?” Deirdre set the photograph on the altar before it could melt through her fingers.
“Hardwick Industries was a medical technology company. They’re best known for inventing the antidote to silver poisoning. The CEO of the company is a man named—”
“Pierce Hardwick,” she interrupted. “He was changed into an unseelie sidhe by Genesis.”
“I’m going to take the fact you don’t sound surprised to mean that you know something I don’t,” Brother Marshall said.
“Those booths were donated by Hardwick Industries, but they didn’t have anything to do with the design of the magical vote tallying.”
“They didn’t?” He hefted a piece of unremarkable plywood out of the pews. It was almost as tall as he was, though the bottom had been broken off. “This is a segment of a voting booth that I took from one of the polling stations. Watch.”
He set it down in the center aisle. Then Brother Marshall stepped back and lifted his staff.
The tide of unseelie magic surged, lifting to fill Holy Nights Cathedral with swirling neon light. That unremarkable piece of plywood was no longer nondescript and plain—it was covered in an elaborate, tangled paragraph of runes, breathtakingly elegant and unimaginably complex. Deirdre couldn’t follow the lines with her eyes.
“This might be hard for you to follow, but I’ll make it as easy as possible.” Brother Marshall waved with his staff again, and the runes separated into a three-dimensional diagram hovering between them.
The runes were connected to sky and earth, sending lines out that extended far into the world beyond Holy Nights Cathedral.
He gave a sigh and gestured vaguely at the magic.
“All right. Here’s what we’ve got. This bright stuff, all the white lines—that’s the work the mage girl did, and that’s supposed to be there.” Brother Marshall plucked at a few of the lines, dismissing them piece by piece. The magical webbing connecting the runes to the sky vanished. “This sorta yellow stuff was set up by OPA witches to validate the integrity of the magecraft. Whatever.” Those pieces were ugly and clunky in comparison to what Marion had created, and he waved them away, too.
Once they were gone, there was still pale blue magic lingering in smudges on the wood, like frost trimming a lake on the darkest of nights.
“What’s that?” Deirdre asked.
“Give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.” Brother Marshall waved his staff to enlarge the remaining runes. As they brightened, she realized that they resembled the style of the runes on his staff, like different letters in the same alphabet. “The OPA looked for magical tampering before election day, but unseelie stuff is hard to spot. I only found it because I was looking within the wood, and because I’ve got unseelie spells myself.”
“Did you check other voting booths? Are they all like this?”
“Every one that I probed, yeah,” he said.
Spiders of nausea scrabbled within her gut. Deirdre tried to swallow the feelings down, but it made her feel like she needed to vomit even more.
Stark hadn’t lost.
Rhiannon had cheated.
“Take this to Rylie,” Deirdre said. “Take this to Friederling.”
Brother Marshall’s mouth pressed into a grim line. “I did. They said it would just create more violence. It’d undermine everything that they’d been fighting for by creating the election in the first place.”
The truth of it settled into Deirdre.
He’d shown this same thing to them, and they’d done nothing.
Fury choked her. “Letting Rhiannon cheat to win undermines everything we’ve been fighting for!”
“Preacher, meet the choir.” Brother Marshall waved his staff. The runes collapsed, splashing into nothingness. Darkness settled over the cathedral. Only the mural behind him still seemed to glow faintly. “Figured you’d want to know. Figured you’d want to do something about it.”
Brother Marshall was right.
She did.
IV
Green screen. Hot lights. Video camera.
Action.
Deirdre stared unblinkingly into the lens of a handheld camcorder. It wasn’t intended for shooting this kind of video, but it had been cheap, and that was Deirdre’s priority. Stark’s old equipment had been lost in the asylum when the unseelie attacked. Brother Marshall might have been able to make his cathedral appear out of nowhere, but she couldn’t make money do the same trick.
She
was struggling to remember the words she wanted to say. The face behind the camcorder—Niamh’s face—had blanked everything from her mind.
Deirdre had grabbed more lethe out of the storage closet before trying to shoot the video. She needed nerves of steel to pull off this feat of Stark-like propaganda. But she couldn’t seem to plug enough lethe into her veins to find the euphoria it used to give her. Not anymore.
At least she didn’t have to worry about hunger. That was something.
“A rally,” Deirdre finally said. “Tomorrow. Thursday. In Times Square. I want you to be there with me.” She licked her lips, swallowed hard. “Everything you thought you knew about the election—our worst fears—it’s all true. No.” Shit. That’s not right.
She dropped her head into her hands, massaging her eyes.
“I can make cue cards,” Niamh suggested.
“Shut up,” Deirdre said. “Don’t talk.”
The harpy obeyed. It didn’t take any compulsion. This was the first time that Niamh had been away from the vampires since escaping Rhiannon, and she seemed eager to give Deirdre no excuses to send her back.
If the video took a thousand takes to shoot, Niamh would probably be thrilled.
Deirdre grabbed the napkin off of her side table, which rested beside a token that Brother Marshall had given her. It was a flat disc the size of her palm. It would get her in touch with him instantly if she needed to talk about the election, or so Brother Marshall had claimed.
She didn’t need him right now. She needed to gather her senses.
She’d jotted a few notes down on the napkin while her anger at Brother Marshall’s news was still fresh, but they weren’t significantly more coherent than her current thoughts. Rally, Thursday, Times Square. Election. She balled the napkin in her fist and dropped it to the water-stained floor.
Gods, but her head hurt.
“Five minutes,” Deirdre said. “Check the lights. I don’t think they’re angled right. They’re hurting my eyes.”
They were fine. Niamh set the camcorder down to mess with them anyway. They’d been crammed into the tiny apartment Deirdre was occupying, taking up the narrow space around the bare bed. The apartment was too small for such bright, hot lights. Deirdre liked heat, but even this was too hot.