Erica picks up by answering Amy’s cut-off question. “Wraiths aren’t naturally occurring creatures. They’re magically manufactured from corpses.”
“So they are zombies?” Ella asks, horrorstruck.
“In a way.” Erica sips her coffee. “They don’t have souls, they don’t eat or sleep, and their intelligence is limited to a fraction of what they possessed when they were alive. They’re powered by a sorcerer’s magic, and some versions of the spells that create them also allow them to pull energy from the air, like your beggar rings do, as a stopgap measure in case they run low.”
Riker raps a finger on the tabletop. “So you’re saying they can run out of power? Like a battery?”
“Precisely.”
“And can they recharge?” Desmond strokes his chin, fascinated by the possibility.
“Indeed they can.” Erica leans against the back of the booth. “But the ‘recharging’ process has to be done in close proximity to the sorcerer. Which is why wraiths usually aren’t deployed for long-distance jobs. Of course, they aren’t generally deployed at all, given that creating them is grounds for execution under ICM law. The High Court is not a fan of necromantic practices.”
Amy snorts. “Somebody should inform this practitioner then, because he’s got a fucking army of these things. We probably killed forty of them tonight. Or re-killed, I guess.”
Erica sets her coffee cup down, frowning. “Well, unless this sorcerer killed all the people they used to create the wraiths, you might be able to track them down by checking with the police for recent morgue thefts across the state. Because you can only make a wraith from a fresh corpse. If the corpse is over a week old, the spells won’t reanimate it properly. Also, bear in mind that wraith bodies continue to decay after resurrection. They last longer than unaltered bodies, but not forever.”
“These things didn’t look too fresh,” I say. “So I’m guessing he’s been building up this little army for a while?”
“Probably,” Erica replies dully. “You can’t steal forty bodies all at once and expect no one to notice. Wraiths tend to last for three to five months before their bodies become too fragile to be functional, which means the sorcerer could have been planning whatever they’re planning for sometime now.”
“You don’t sound all that concerned about it though,” Ella says, and the table quiets. “Last time we met, you were furious over Marcus’ deception, and pretty damn angry about Halliburton and all the other rogues too. To the point where you mercilessly curb-stomped them at the battle on Primrose. But you seem pretty disinterested in this wraith business, despite the fact it almost cost several DSI agents their lives tonight. And, as I’m sure you’ve surmised by now, given that we fought these creatures at the Wellington Center, the wraiths are somehow connected to the wards that were used to bring the center down.”
Erica has zero reaction to hearing that magic destroyed the convention center. And I wonder if that’s because she already guessed as much, having felt a powerful pulse of magic the instant the wards activated to destroy the building. Or if her almost total disinterest in these shocking revelations is the result of Marcus’ treachery, and that of other local practitioners. Maybe Erica simply has no sense of surprise left. Maybe all the recent chaos has bled her well dry, and now it’s just an empty hole in her chest.
Whatever the reason, Erica sighs and responds to Ella, “Look, I apologize if I don’t appear to sympathize with your current struggles. I know you guys have had a really long day, and that the wraith attack didn’t make it any better, and that all the shit going down at the convention center probably has DSI as a whole hanging from a skinny branch over a deep, fiery pit. I get it. I do.” She twirls a lock of hair around her finger. “But I too have had a very long day. A very long week. A very long month. And as of later this morning, it’s going to get much, much worse. For every practitioner in Aurora, the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
Erica’s eyes flick to me again, and I glimpse a fatigue that is so much deeper than the aching tiredness in my bones. She looks away, pretending she didn’t reveal it to me, but I know she did it on purpose. She wants me to understand, even if she’s not willing to discuss it in so many words—she wants me to understand that she didn’t choose to end our relationship with the finesse of an ax chopping a block of wood. It wasn’t a decision. It was a necessity.
It still burns me, I admit, the lack of communication, but I choose to let the issue rest.
If we can’t sleep together anymore, then we can’t. And that’s all there is to it.
(See? I can be an adult when I need to be.)
Riker says, an edge of concern in his voice, “They chose Marcus’ replacement, didn’t they? The new chapter leader for Aurora.”
Erica hides her eyes behind her hands and gnaws on her bottom lip. “The interim chapter leader, yes. The High Court doesn’t want to choose a permanent leader until they’re sure they’ve restored balance in the Aurora chapter. And by ‘balance,’ I mean they’re cleaning house. Every possible rogue, in league with Marcus or not, everyone who’s ever stepped out of line, everyone who’s broken any law, major or minor, everyone who might be a risk, now or in the future. The High Court wants them gone. Effective immediately. Using whatever force is necessary to clear them out of our ranks.”
Everyone who’s stepped out of line.
Like Erica Milburn, who’s been trading secrets with DSI.
Fuck, she’s in trouble. Big trouble.
Amy sneers, “Who are they sending exactly? Heinrich Himmler?”
Erica downs the rest of her steaming coffee in one fell swoop. Then she slams the empty cup on the table, takes a deep breath that ever so slightly trembles, and replies, “Robert ‘Iron’ Delos.”
My teammates and I exchange glances, all of them blank. We have no idea who that is.
“Care to enlighten us?” I ask.
Erica hiccups like she just drained a pint of beer. “For forty-six years, until his semi-retirement in 1999, Robert Delos was an administrator for the ICM High Court. His official role was attaché, one of the high-ranking diplomats who represent the High Court in global intercommunity affairs. But it’s well known among practitioner circles that Delos was actually the Court’s fixer. If there was a problem—a spy in the ranks, an official accepting bribes, someone practicing illicit magic—Delos was the guy the High Court sent to take care of it. Because his specialty, one of the rarest specialties in the practitioner community…is telepathy.”
“Like, mind-to-mind communication? That telepathy?” Ella asks.
Erica laughs darkly. “Oh, no. The real telepathy. The powerful telepathy. The break into your mind and crack you open like an egg telepathy. There is no secret Delos can’t wrest from you, no memory he can’t watch like a movie or edit like a book with red pen, no personality trait he can’t rip right out of you and replace with something he prefers.”
There’s a visible quiver running through her fingers now. “He’s wiped people clean as a slate, minds empty as the day they were born. He’s driven people crazy by forcing them to relive their worst nightmares over and over. He’s reprogrammed spies to become double agents without their knowledge. He’s done…shit, I don’t have a complete list. But trust me when I tell you there is nothing Iron Delos can’t do to your brain. Mindfuck doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Ella, her face a shade paler now, says, “And this man is coming here, today, to take over the Aurora chapter of the ICM?”
“Yes, he is.” Erica’s trembling hands curl into tight fists. “And he’s planning to interview every single practitioner in the city. Including me.”
The table is silent for so long that the waitress comes, drops off our food, and walks all the way back to the kitchen before anybody dares to speak.
“What’re you going to do?” Riker asks. “I assume you’re not planning to let Delos find out about your relationship with DSI.”
Erica presses her fists into the table. “I’
ve been working on something, a spell, ever since I found out they were planning to send Delos. I’m almost ready to use it, but…I have to perform it exactly right, or I’m screwed.”
Ella slips on a sincerely compassionate expression—the first she’s ever worn for the witch—and grasps Erica’s clenched fist. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
Erica returns the compassionate look with a painfully honest one. “You can stay the hell away from Delos. I mean it. Do not approach him. Do not contact him outside of official channels. Do not ever engage him in combat. If you see him coming in a battle, run the other way. Because if Iron Delos breaks your mind, there is no one on this Earth who can fix it.”
Erica removes Ella’s hand from her own, slides out of the booth, pulls out her wallet, drops two twenties on the table, and bids us goodnight with a not-quite smile warped by the weight on her shoulders. Then she walks out the diner door, the high-pitched jingle of bells in her wake, marches off into the cold, quiet night, and vanishes into the darkness.
And this, I know for sure, is the last time Erica Milburn will ever help us on a case.
Chapter Eleven
I wake up at six o’clock with a sore ass and an aching nose to the sound of my phone chirping incessantly. Sweat has glued the sheets to my chest, a normal occurrence these days, and I peel them off my torso but make no immediate move to get up. Groping blindly for my phone on the nightstand, I stare up at the ceiling, trying to recall the last few events of my late night before my team elected me as the first recipient of a well-deserved nap. Trying to remember if there were any more emergencies in the making before I hopped in my truck and trundled home.
Nothing comes to mind.
After we left the diner, we returned to the office, updated all the paperwork on the case, checked on Naomi’s team—Joe Adelman was still down, but the rest of the team was gunning for another mission, running on nothing more than caffeine and spite—and started rifling through that massive mountain of case files in the task room. But, since I am unfamiliar with most of those cases, being the rookie on the team, Riker ordered me to pair up with Cooper and do a preliminary write-up on the fountain pen before I headed home at half past three for my sleep shift.
Cooper and I couldn’t make heads or tails of the pen’s magical quirks. It refused to reveal its secrets to us mere mortals. And since all of DSI’s minor practitioners have been assigned to disaster duty indefinitely—even Navarro is stationed at a local hospital instead of the infirmary—there was no one available we could turn to for help. So after twenty minutes of using the pen to scribble nonsense on printer paper, Cooper and I gave up, typed a short report for the case file, and stowed the pen away in the lockup again.
Damn, I think as I finally grab my phone, I wish I’d taken the pen to the diner with me.
Erica probably could have cracked the pen’s secrets in seconds. But I was so focused on the wraiths that I didn’t even consider asking her about a writing instrument.
Briefly, I consider texting her about it now. But her nearly panicked exit from the diner drives that option out of the lineup. Erica’s got too much on her plate with that Delos guy shipping into town. If I push her too hard, she might trip up and fall victim to the wizard’s mind magic. And if that happens, we’re all doomed.
I’ll have to find a way to make up for DSI’s magic shortfall on my own.
Blinking my sleepiness away, I hold my phone in front of my face and tap the button to display notifications on the locked screen. I expect a text from Riker or Ella, saying we’ve had a change of plans, that I need to cut my six-hour sleep shift short due to some unforeseen circumstance.
But it wasn’t Ella or Riker who texted me, I find. It was Cooper.
Which is a little odd, considering Cooper Lee left the office at the same time I did for the same reason: he was bushed after spending hours on end scrutinizing low-res security footage, in which he discovered nothing about the mole and everything about the bathroom habits of the DSI dispatchers. He burned through six cameras’ worth of security footage last night, and he has another eight cameras’ worth left to examine in the hopes of discovering the identity of our problem.
Not a job I envy.
But Cooper hasn’t complained about it. At all. Because he’s on a mission, and he’s damn well going to finish it.
Never change, Cooper. Never change.
I swipe to unlock my phone and pull up Cooper’s text. Then I make the mistake of wrinkling my nose in confusion, which is followed by me muttering ow, ow, ow because my nose is still broken.
But the pain doesn’t negate the mystery. I read Cooper’s text, and reread it, and reread it again, but I can’t figure out what he’s talking about. The text says:
Hey, can you come over to my place when you get a chance? I think I’m onto something.
That baffles me because Cooper’s not supposed to be working on anything at home. The security footage has to stay in-house because the system won’t allow the files to be transferred to personal devices or uploaded to the internet. (A lot of weird stuff strolls down the DSI hallways, and we don’t want a leak plastered all over the eight o’clock news.) So he can’t be referring to the mole situation. And we put the pen back in the evidence lockup before we left. I made sure it was in a lock box, in a locker, in a locked room, in case the wraiths decided to make another play for it.
As far as I know, Cooper doesn’t have any other role in the convention center case right now; he’s the sole archivist on call, left to man the entire collection while the rest of his peers have been drafted into various jobs in the disaster relief operations. So what the heck is he talking about when he says he’s “onto something”? Is he working off the table again?
I hope not—because that didn’t end so well last time.
Mildly concerned, I reply to his text with: What’d you find out?
Two minutes later, Cooper responds: Too much to discuss over the phone. Please come over.
I press the side of my face into my pillow and sigh.
I’m going to have to talk to Cooper about waking me up early after a double shift.
Languid and sore, I shower and dress at half the speed I normally do. I forgo a meal because I know Cooper is standing over the stove right now, cooking half the food in his pantry. He never misses a chance to feed me, because he hates how poorly I feed myself.
My DSI uniform is still at the office, freshly laundered, so I stick on a casual jacket over my T-shirt and jeans and the gun on my belt, and limp out of my apartment, hoping as I lock my door that today won’t be as taxing as yesterday.
(God, what a vain hope that is.)
The townhouse on Copenhagen Street hasn’t changed much since I was last there. Cooper’s powder blue moped sits out front. Two bare, scraggly trees that haven’t caught up to the changing weather languish on the sidewalk on either side of the moped. Salt is still crushed into the nooks and crannies on the brick steps leading up to the front door, the result of some overzealous city worker who feared winter would return with a vengeance late in the season. And a few lights are on, in the kitchen and living room, casting a yellow glow through the curtains onto the pavement below.
I park my truck, cut the engine, and sit there for a second, attempting to wish away a budding ache in my forehead. Reluctantly, I unbuckle my seatbelt, hop out of the truck into the cool, misty morning, and trudge across the street, up the steps, and to the door. After two soft, gingerly knocks, footsteps pad down the creaky floorboards in the hall, and Cooper opens the door a moment later to let me inside.
“Hey, you made it,” he says, wearing a smile that shines way too bright for this time of day. “I’ve got some stuff I want you to look at. It’s in the living room, on the coffee table. I just need to go grab one more book from upstairs, and then we can talk.”
“What’s this all about, Coop?” I rub my eyes to emphasize that he woke me up too early, but he doesn’t seem to notice my annoyance. He ushers me into
the foyer, still blabbing about that one last book he needs—the subject of this book escapes his explanation—and points in the direction of the living room couch while he heads toward the stairs.
As I stand there like an actual zombie in the foyer, swaying from my lingering fatigue, I notice a distinct lack of something I’ve come to expect from Cooper’s house: the smell of food. A glance through the doorway of the kitchen confirms my suspicion. Cooper called me all the way over here at the crack of dawn…and he didn’t even bother to offer me food as an apology. Not even bacon and eggs. Not even toast.
Okay, now I’m a little pissed.
Cooper Lee is not usually this callous.
Maybe he stumbled onto a big break in the case though, I rationalize. If Cooper somehow uncovered the identities of the convention center attackers, I might forgive him for his uncharacteristic lack of consideration. He can get excitable when he makes huge discoveries during his research, so perhaps his behavior is somewhat excusable, and perhaps I’ll accept a belated apology for it—if he offers me food later, of course.
After Cooper disappears upstairs, I stagger into the living room and plop down on the couch, the springs squeaking under the weight of my aching ass. A number of printed texts are scattered across the table, in no particular order that I can discern, and regarding no specific topic if the headlines of the articles are anything to go by. In fact, looking closer, it doesn’t appear that any of these texts are related at all, so I’m not sure what Cooper could have gleaned about the Wellington case from reading these. They all appear to be summaries of current events unconnected to Aurora or recently published medical and scientific papers from scholarly journals.
Of course, I’m so freaking tired right now that the connection might be going over my head.
I’ll wait until Cooper gets back to ask.
I lean against the cushion of the sofa and look idly around the room. Cooper had to replace most of his furniture after he was violently kidnapped by Charun, but a few of his antiques did survive the onslaught. The dining room set, for example. He had the scuffs and scrapes in the wooden table buffed out, and ordered a custom replacement chair for one that had several split spokes and a busted leg. From the distance between the couch and the threshold to the dining room, the now repaired set looks exactly like it did the first time I saw it, when Cooper recounted his revelations about Charun and Tuchulcha and the Etruscan Underworld…
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