Vanity Scare

by H. P. Mallory

  Dagan paled. Knight paled, Casey paled, everyone paled.

  Except Darion. Instead, Darion was watching with resigned fascination, nodding like he was grading her metamorphosis.

  “Very impressive,” he said when she was finished, and gave one more quick nod. He had a mild beard, and he clearly considered stroking it. But apparently the crossed arms, crossed ankles, I’m-barely-awake-enough-to-care stance was way more important. “I like the eyes, especially. Very particular shade of yellow you’ve found there. Gives the form more pizzazz.”

  Dulcie lunged forward—claws swiping, mouth open. Something hot and red glowed behind her teeth.

  Darion moved to the left, but he wasn’t fast enough. Dulcie raked her claws across him, scoring his chest like a prison wall. She grabbed for him with both hands and he reached up, blocked her, and said something in a language I didn’t know.

  Fire leapt up around Dulcie, curling in like a punch of pissed-off flower petals. It blasted the room with bonfire heat. The flames crackled and snapped, and the rest of us really didn’t like it.

  Dulcie gave exactly zero fucks.

  She pushed Darion back, hard, and he was surprised enough by Dulcie not giving any fucks about the fire to go careening into the wall.

  “You are brilliant,” Darion growled, licking his newly busted lip and openly admiring her.

  She started forward again. Darion’s blood dripped down her hand—her paw, I guess—and pooled on the carpet. There was a lot of it. Enough to almost reflect the ceiling fan.

  “But I’m afraid I don’t have the time or the patience to tarry with you any longer, my beautiful monster,” Darion said. He snapped his fingers.

  Dagan gurgled. He choked, then hacked and heaved and strained. He scrabbled at the air, like he could catch it by fistfuls and force it into his lungs the hard way.

  “O’Neil,” said Casey, a warning. He looked between the monster-steroid queen and Dagan, who was clearly on his way to dying. “Don’t.”

  “… can’t kill Dagan if Darion’s dead,” said Dulcie in this weird growl-voice.

  Darion grinned. “Are you sure about that?”

  She hesitated.

  “A formal introduction,” Darion said, and he gestured to Dagan on the floor. “This is Mr. Rogan Halsir. He is a thief and a scoundrel, one who is not very good at thieving and scoundreling.”

  He reached down and picked Dagan up by the back of his neck, one-handed, and held him like a prize at a cheap auction. “And he is going to die a very slow and painful death…” He brought Dagan down to eye-level, staring at him like a bug under glass. “…if he does not answer my astoundingly polite questions.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Quillan

  “Magic eight… ball says… try again later,” retorted Dulcie, all growly and wrong.

  I felt the need to remind her that this was now officially a hostage crisis, but something about a bottle-brushed wolf tail and safety-yellow eyes made me think now wasn’t the best time to bring it up.

  “I’m asking you so nicely, Dagan,” said Darion, ignoring Dulcie. “I can’t understand why you’re being so difficult. Mother would be mortified; you know she would.”

  “Fuck…” Dagan’s words crawled out from between impounded vocal cords. “…you.”

  Darion rolled his eyes. “Priorities, Dagan, we’re trying to have a conversation here.”

  Dulcie approached him, and he glanced over at her. In one split-second, she went flying into the far wall and collapsed onto the ground. She began to change back into her human shape, but it almost looked like it was happening against her will, like Darion was forcing the shift on her.

  And then she was lying there, completely naked. Clearly, the metamorphosis had done a number on her clothing. I did my best not to look at her. I think all the men in the room did their best not to look at her—something which seemed to be exceedingly hard on Knight and Bram. Then, once they spotted the other spotting her, they exchanged a glare before pretending extreme interest in the carpet.

  Darion approached Dulcie with a smile twisting his mouth. “You are quite the beauty,” he said, leaning down on his thighs and running his index finger down the line of her body. “Next time, don’t fuck with me… unless we’re doing a different type of fucking altogether.”

  She didn’t respond. Probably because she couldn’t respond. He stood up and laughed.

  Footsteps sounded down the hall, approaching rapidly, thundering like zebras on the savanna. Darion looked at the door and frowned, apparently deciding that meeting those zebras was something he really wanted to avoid.

  His eyes narrowed and Dagan’s choking noises got more insistent, like Darion had turned up the volume.

  “I’ll take that,” said Darion, holding out his hand to Christina. He didn’t look at her.

  Christina hesitated. She swallowed audibly, visibly, and her shoulders moved a little as her fists clenched around the scarf in her lap.

  Let him have the scarf, Christina, I thought to myself, at the same time hoping she could somehow hear me. I was worried Darion was going to hurt her if she didn’t release it.

  He sighed and relaxed his posture a little. “Unless you really want Dagan to die on your floor.” He shrugged. “I would understand, of course.”

  Christina looked at Dagan.

  “The scarf, madam,” insisted Darion, now more impatient. “If you please.” Dagan sputtered and coughed, and something blackish-red that was probably supposed to be blood came bubbling out of him. “You could always die with him.”

  “Go on,” said Casey, thank Hades because I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even move.

  Christina grimaced, but she nodded and handed over the scarf. The movement was staccato, broken up, like when an animation is missing frames. As if she could barely get her arm to move at all.

  Darion snatched the scarf from her and pressed it to his nose, smelling it and staining it with the blood coming out of all the new holes in his body.

  “Thank you, m’lady.” He bowed to her. “Dagan, sweet brother, we will meet again. Do be in better spirits when I return; you’re really killing my mood.” He got right up next to Dagan’s ear and stage-whispered, because he wanted us all to hear: “I’d hate to have to return the favor.”

  And then, poof, he was gone.

  No noise, no smoke, nothing, just there one minute and gone the next. Like he’d been cut out of a picture. Like God had photoshopped him out of the universe.

  Dagan collapsed into a puddle in front of the chair.

  And then—then the reinforcements came storming in. Guns raised, shouting their credentials, trying to flood the already crowded room.

  Bram looked like he was having a lot of trouble with the lack of space.

  For a second, none of us moved. Dagan curled into himself, sucking in air.

  We stood. Slowly, like we’d broken every bone in our bodies and had only just gotten our casts taken off.

  “Christina,” I started as I looked at her.

  She held up her hand. “I’m fine,” she said.

  I felt stiff and wobbly. It was less somebody-cut-the-strings-on-the-puppet and more somebody-strapped-the-puppet-to-the-electric-chair. I wanted to dig a hole, fill it with pillows, and sleep until the end of the world. I wanted to build a fort out of couch cushions and make a sign that said “no demons allowed” with cheap markers and cardstock to post in front of it.

  The agents who crowded in—three humans I didn’t know personally and Henry, who was holding a t-shirt from the gift shop instead of his gun—blinked at Dulcie in abject confusion. Why? Because she was lying on the floor, dazed and completely naked.

  “Dulcie?’ said Henry, and he held up the shirt, walking forward with the material in front of his face so he couldn’t see her in her birthday suit. “Looks like you need this now even more than you did before. I didn’t know what size you were, so I got a large. I hope that’s okay. Probably should be, because now you can wear it as a dr
ess.” Henry was clearly super uncomfortable that his partner was bare-ass naked because the words were coming out of his mouth like water from a faucet.

  Dulcie reached for the shirt, and I noticed Bram and Knight continued to watch her with open admiration.

  “Thanks,” she said to Henry. Her hand was still dripping with Darion’s blood.

  When they recognized her, the agents lowered their weapons, but they didn’t totally relax until Casey got up.

  “Stand down, he’s gone,” he instructed. Then, he herded everyone but Henry back out into the hall, like a drunk preschool teacher shepherding a group of trigger-happy three-year-olds.

  Henry looked around the room and nodded at the pool of blood. “What happened?”

  “Dagan’s brother was being an ass,” explained Dulcie, who was now drowning in the T-shirt.

  “Gotcha,” said Henry. “Did we kill him?”

  “No, but we’re working on it.”

  The oversized shirt hung down nearly to Dulcie’s knees. She and Henry looked at it. She pursed her lips and nodded.

  “Maybe it can be a sleep shirt,” he suggested.

  Dulcie snorted. “Yeah. How much was this?” she asked.

  “Thirty dollars.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “This is worth, like, three dollars at best.” She pulled the shirt out to get a better look at the printed letters across the front, which read FBI. “I’ll pay you back.”

  Henry smiled and put his hands in his pockets. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Dulcie pushed a mass of now very tangled hair out of her face and surveyed the room. “Okay, guys, how we doing?”

  “Oh, fantastic,” I replied.

  Casey reentered the room, leaving the door halfway open. “Paramedics are on their way. So just, nobody move too much, got it?”

  We all nodded. Those of us who were standing slid to the floor again and sighed, because everything hurt. I had that stinging-muscle sensation that happens when you have a fever and brush up on cold metal.

  “Anybody know what Darion did to us?” I asked when I could finally find my voice.

  Christina pushed her chair back from her desk and stood on shaky legs. “No. Some weird paralytic thing, I guess, but I’ve never felt that shit before.” She ran her hands over her face, then saw Dagan on the floor. “Oh, Hades, hang on.” She started to move around her desk toward him, but she was having a lot of trouble staying upright.

  I went to help Dagan up before Christina could—mostly because I didn’t want Dagan looking for comfort from her.

  “I got him, babe,” I said. She sat back down without looking at me, nodded, and put her head in her hands.

  “I need a drink,” she muttered.

  Dagan wasn’t doing much better. He was way worse, actually.

  His body was curled up on the floor, like he’d tried to get into the fetal position and hadn’t made it all the way, like all his muscles had just gone slack. He was staring at some liminal space in between death and the carpet, looking like a hurricane full of chainsaws had come here to have a word with him specifically about some homework he’d forgotten to turn in back in the third grade. And he was shaking. Like a leaf with a high fever. He wouldn’t look at me; he didn’t seem to be looking at anything. His conscious perception of the office seemed to have been knocked clean out of the ballpark.

  And I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. It was the first time I'd ever seen him look like he was actually… scared. He looked like he’d jump at his own reflection. Like his shadow would be scared of itself.

  I scanned the room to find Knight’s attention fixed on me. Not glaring daggers or anything, just with a purpose I couldn’t pin down. I didn’t know why he would be staring at me, especially when all of us were just kind of standing around, like awkward teenagers in the middle of PE.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  Everyone was looking at each other, trading glances that had ‘fuck if I know’ written all over them. I could see all of us forgetting to breathe, and I wondered if that was part of Darion’s magic go-the-fuck-to-sleep thing. Maybe if he’d kept it up, we’d have stopped breathing completely and asphyxiated. And maybe everyone else was thinking the same thing, because they all had the same haunted, pissed-off look on their faces that I probably had on mine.

  Except Dulcie.

  Dulcie was tapping her fingers on her arm and considering the spot where Darion had been standing. She pursed her lips and looked at Dagan.

  “He seems nice,” she commented.

  I expected Dagan to scoff. Or snort, or just make some vague and dismissive noise at her. But he didn’t. Instead, he made this awful, toddler-lost-in-a-supermarket whimpering sound.

  None of us knew what to do with it.

  Christina gave Dulcie a sideways ‘that super isn’t helping, please stop’ look, but she didn’t say anything.

  Dagan opened his mouth, and we all kinda held our breath. I didn’t know what we expected him to say, but it wasn’t gonna be good.

  And he laughed.

  “Oh, he’s the best, isn’t he?” he said, and everything coming out of his mouth was drowning in hysteria. “Life of the whole party.”

  “And the death of everyone who was not invited,” added Bram.

  Hades, you could have carved the silence that followed into an ice sculpture. The fans in the computer tried to kick on, failed, and started making that awful whirring noise that happens when the heat is rising and resistance is twenty miles past futile.

  Dagan kept laughing. The silence around him stretched and stretched until he stopped.

  “It was not a… paralytic,” Dagan explained after a minute. “It was an illusion.” He waved vaguely at his head. “A trick of the mind.”

  “Illusion,” Christina echoed. “So, none of that actually happened?”

  “For all practical purposes, yes, it did. But doctors won’t find anything wrong with you, because nothing’s wrong with you.” Dagan shrugged. “I… didn’t think Darion knew where I was.”

  He swallowed and coughed wetly. “This,” continued Dagan once he was able to speak again, “is what makes him so dangerous.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Dagan faced me. “Darion convinces you of a certain truth, in this case that your body is shutting down. Your mind, your body… they make it a reality that’s impossible to overcome.”

  He didn’t sound like he was explaining this for our benefit, though. It felt closer to a justification, like he was reassuring himself that something he felt or did or couldn’t do wasn’t his fault. There was something specific crawling around the landfill of his brain, and it was something he felt he needed to defend before we ever heard what it was.

  I chewed on that for a minute.

  Casey took a breath. “So, we have a problem,” he said.

  “No shit,” said Christina, but it wasn’t mean. More ‘you said it, girlfriend’ than ‘what gave it away?’ Everyone else nodded sagely.

  “Osenna,” Dagan muttered. He said her name, then he registered what he’d said and his eyes went bug-fuck-big. “Osenna!”

  He tried to stand, bungled it, and tried again, this time bracing himself on the desk. His hands were red and the desk was glowing—some enchantment Christina or one of the department witches had cast to keep emotional creatures from burning holes in her stuff. I don’t think Dagan realized he was doing it, but something in the back of his brain was trying to set everything on fire.

  “Osenna is safe,” said Bram.

  “Safe?” Dulcie scoffed. “With you?”

  She was in a weird, bad-posture, fuck-the-police-even-though-I-am-the-police mood. I wondered what had happened. Then I remembered that Knight was in the room and slapped myself internally for being so goddamn oblivious.

  “We need to take Osenna into custody,” Casey said.

  Bram scoffed. “Not bloody likely. She’ll be far safer with me than sh
e will be with any of you.”

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually heard Bram use the word “bloody.” It was weird. Kind of felt like a bad omen.

  Lots of those going around today.

  He continued. “Darion has no idea where I might be holding her, but if he can figure out how to use the internet, he can find any and every FBI building.”

  “Holding?” asked Knight sharply. “You make it sound like you’re keeping her prisoner.”

  Bram glared at him and Knight glared right back. The two hated each other more now than they ever had in the past. And, of course, that had everything to do with Dulcie.

  And the fact that they were both in love with her.

  NINETEEN

  Quillan

  “I am keeping Osenna prisoner, I suppose you could say. For her own good.” Bram shrugged. “It is no different than what you would do were Osenna in your protective custody.” Then he glanced over at Dulcie before facing Knight again. “Or perhaps it is quite different than what you would do if she were in your protective custody.”

  “Fuck off, Bram,” Knight responded.

  Christina quickly butted in with a soft, sweet little sentence directed at Dagan. “So, Darion wasn’t here for the scarf,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Of course he wasn’t,” replied Dagan, looking at Christina with a bizarre intensity. “He wanted the scarf back, yes, but that’s because he knows what it’s capable of, and what I intended to do with it.”

  “Darion knows you want to kill him?” she continued.

  “He would be stupid to assume anything else. When I stole Osenna, I was openly challenging his marriage and, by association, his right to rule—though ruling is not quite what he does.” Dagan paused. “I declared war to help her escape him, and I did it gladly.”