Couchman glanced at Donohue before turning her attention back to Hammond. “You should know that we have protocols in place to monitor you physically and psychically during your interrogation,” the older woman said. “Any attempt to evade the truth, to lie, will be noted. Any refusal to be forthcoming will also be noted. Do you understand?”
“More than you can imagine,” Hammond answered. “More than you can begin to comprehend!”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“Of course.”
“Why are you here?”
“Because my mistress wishes me to be,” he said, as if it were obvious. “I live to serve her wishes.”
Couchman made a notation on her tablet. “Who is your mistress?”
Hammond’s eyes burned with a zealot’s conviction. “Myshael, Lady of Shadows. Mother of Darkness, Bringer of Chaos. Mother of the ultimate sleeper agent.” He strained against his bonds. “Where is Kira Solomon?” he demanded again. “Mummy and Daddy want to say hello.”
It took effort for Kira to keep her features neutral, to stay impassive even with butterflies dropkicking her in the stomach. It didn’t help that she could feel everyone in the room staring at her. She folded her arms across her chest, and then forced herself to speak. “Well. I guess we now know he’s not an innocent party in all of this.”
“Who is he talking about?” Sanchez asked. “These ‘Mummy and Daddy’ people. Who are they?”
Kira kept her eyes on the window. “He’s talking about Balm’s counterpart. The Lady of Shadows, mother of Shadowlings and the darker hybrids.”
Silence, thick and total, filled the room like a fog. These people worked for the Gilead Commission, which meant they worked for Balm. A few of them might have seen the Lady of Light when she’d been in town a couple of months back, but they all had heard of what had happened in Gilead London. They knew the kind of power Balm had, which meant they had a pretty good idea of what sort of power her counterpart could wield.
“So there’s someone out there like the Balm of Gilead, someone who leads Shadowlings?” Duncan asked, surprise filling her voice.
So Gilead East hadn’t thought through the idea of there being something out there to Balance Balm either. Kira felt less ignorant. “They’re not as organized as we are. Thank the Light for that.”
“If she’s the mother of Shadowlings,” Duncan said slowly, her voice wavering, “and he says she’s your mother, then that means—”
“It means nothing,” Kira cut in, her voice like a whip.
“But Donohue’s hair …” Duncan faltered as Kira turned to face her. Sanchez merely watched, her expression impassive. The Gilead agents looked to the section chief, poised to act on her orders.
Out of all the Gilead agents in the room, only Nguyen seemed to be rationally using his brain. “Since Hammond serves the Lady of Shadows, he would believe anything she tells him, right?” Nguyen said. “I mean, he calls her ‘mistress.’ That sounds pretty devoted to me.” He gestured at Kira. “Kira has a Lightblade. Very few people can even pick one of those up, much less use it. Certainly no one with the Lady of Shadows as a parent could.”
“Hammond believes what his mistress tells him to believe,” Kira said, with a nod of thanks to Nguyen. “As much as he believes it, that doesn’t make it true. My mother was a Shadowchaser who died shortly after giving birth to me. I was raised and trained by the Balm of Gilead herself. Hammond is saying all of this to get to me. Don’t let him get to you in the process.”
“Kira, Kira,” Hammond crooned, “come out, come out, wherever you are.”
“The bigger question is, is he still sane?” Nguyen asked with concern. “If he’s not competent enough to give testimony, can we even use anything he says?”
“He’s sane,” Kira asserted, her eyes never leaving the sight on the other side of the glass. “He may be Shadow-struck, but he’s still sane. Besides, we already know who and what. We need to find out why and how to reverse it.”
“Why don’t you tell me about the exhibit, Dr. Hammond?” Couchman asked as if she’d heard their discussion. Her voice brushed against the glass, calm, beguiling. “We know that something in your exhibit is causing innocent people to fall into comas. What we don’t know is why only a few people are comatose out of the hundreds who have visited the exhibit since it opened. Can you tell me that?”
“No.”
Donohue’s hair faded again.
“Dr. Hammond—”
“I probably should have said that I certainly can.” He smiled. “But I won’t.”
“We know that you gave the Shadowchaser’s friend a carved stone,” Couchman said, continuing with her questioning. “Is that how you were able to steal all those people’s souls? Something in the stone acted as a trigger?”
“It’s the Egyptian journey through the underworld,” Hammond retorted, his haughty demeanor returning. “How do you think their souls were taken?”
Couchman appeared unflappable. Kira, on the other hand, wanted to punch something, starting with Hammond’s snobby face. The older woman made another notation on her tablet. “Do you mean to say that Ammit the Devourer is alive?”
Hammond laughed. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
Couchman handed her pen and notepad to Donohue, who then pushed his chair back a couple of feet. “I will find out, Doctor,” the woman said, her voice still smooth, still unruffled. “Of course, my superiors would prefer you be forthcoming with the information that they require. I, on the other hand, don’t have a preference for how I get the information. All that matters is that I get it.”
“You can’t do anything to me. I know my rights.”
Couchman reached up, removing her glasses with precise movements before tucking them into her jacket pocket. “I am required to inform you that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to you. You have admitted to being aligned with Shadow. That makes you an enemy combatant, a hostile witness, a reluctant partner in helping us save some innocent people’s lives. That also means that I do not have to be as gentle with you as the banaranjans were.”
Kira swiveled to look at Sanchez. “What’s she talking about? The banaranjans turned Hammond into a human volleyball.”
“Couchman has been authorized to use any means necessary to get the information that we need,” Sanchez said. “She is very good at what she does, although it’s been a while since she’s had to get persuasive.”
“Do we have to worry about what her method of persuasion is?” Khefar asked, speaking for the first time.
“Don’t worry.” Sanchez turned back to the glass. “There won’t be any blood. At least, not from Hammond.”
Hammond laughed, sounding unhinged to Kira’s ears. “You can torture me all you want,” he taunted. “I’m not going to tell you anything.”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Hammond, but you’re wrong on both counts,” Couchman said, her voice full of reproach. “The Gilead Commission doesn’t condone torture. We do, however, believe that confession is good for the soul. Do you have anything you would like to confess?”
The interviewer’s easygoing demeanor finally penetrated whatever haze Hammond was in. He glanced at her, suspicion shoving away haughtiness. “Nothing to confess to you,” he sneered. “And who are you that I should seek absolution from you?”
Couchman leaned over him, splaying her hands on either side of his temples. “I am the Light that illuminates the Shadows in your soul,” she intoned. “I am the mirror that allows you to see yourself clearly.”
Hammond laughed, a sound that quickly devolved into choking. He jerked, then went rigid as his eyes widened. “No, no, no!” he shouted, the last word a high-pitched scream.
Power erupted in the room. Kira instinctively threw up her hand, her extrasense igniting blue-green in a protective shield as magical pressure built to a breaking point. On the other side of the glass, Donohue’s hair flared orange-red.
“Get them out of there!” Kira shouted.
>
“Wait,” Sanchez said, her voice unruffled. “Warren’s got it under control.”
Kira turned back to the window. Warren lifted his hands above his head, palms cupped toward the ceiling. With her extrasense activated, Kira could see and feel Warren’s magic flow out from his hands in a muddy, brownish-black wave. It spread like a mudslide over Hammond’s chaotic Shadow magic.
The Suppressor then lowered his hands. As he did, the level and intensity of power in the room decreased. By the time Warren’s hands returned to his knees, the power was all but extinguished.
“See what you have done,” Couchman said to Hammond, as if magic hadn’t reached explosive levels moments before. “See the lives you have taken, the souls you have destroyed. Hear their cries, the wailing of their loved ones.”
Hammond’s entire body twitched. A mewling sound slipped from his slacked mouth. He arched against the restraints, struggling to free himself from the ties and Couchman’s all-seeing gaze. His efforts were futile, Kira now knew. Couchman was an Illuminator. She hadn’t met an Adept yet capable of withstanding one. When in the world had Sanchez brought an Illuminator on board?
“What is she doing to him?” Khefar asked, his tone hushed. He sounded horrified, and Kira didn’t blame him. Her gut tightened as Hammond cried out again.
“She’s an Illuminator,” Kira said, locking her emotions down. “Couchman finds all the evil in Hammond’s life, every bad thing that he’s done, and lights it up, making him live through it from the victim’s perspective. They call it Confession.”
Kira would never have thought Sanchez would use an Illuminator. A lie detector like Donohue or a Suppressor like Warren was almost benign magic, and commonly used in Gilead interrogations. No serious or lingering harm had ever been caused by anyone exercising those talents.
An Illuminator was something else entirely. They were usually marked by the fact that they always wore dark sunglasses inside or out, so their eyes were completely concealed—a necessary measure to protect the public from inadvertently having their every dark deed brought to the surface. It took a while, Kira knew—four, five seconds—before an Illuminator’s power overwhelmed their target.
Illuminators answered only to the Commissioners, the little-seen governing body of the Gilead Commission. Kira had met a pair of them when she lived on Santa Costa—they were brought in whenever a Shadowchaser needed to undergo refinement. The few Chasers she knew didn’t fear the Fallen—who made Shadow Adepts look like second-rate magicians—but they all feared the Illuminators.
“How long has she been in town?” Kira asked, her voice strained thin to her ears. Her extrasense was still dialed up to a protective shield, her gaze glued to the people on the other side of the window. Now that she knew what Couchman was, her sense of self-preservation wouldn’t drop until she left the building.
“Ms. Couchman has been with us since you left for London to take care of your handler’s affairs,” Sanchez said, her tone sounding as if they were discussing general personnel movements and the paperwork it generated. As if she hadn’t just dropped a bomb on Kira. “She’s been helping our field agents find the Shadowlings who helped that Fallen who came to town.”
Kira didn’t bother asking the next obvious question. The Illuminator had been in town for two months, and no one at Gilead East had bothered to tell her. She knew other Shadowchasers had blown through town, and no one had bothered to tell her that either. I’m not paranoid, but this crap don’t smell right, she thought. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, chances are it’s a velociraptor with a machine gun.
“Mother of Darkness,” Hammond crooned, his eyes glazed. “She comes for you, she waits for you.”
“Who is he talking about?” someone asked.
As if in answer, Hammond turned his face to the window, his entire body straining to point. “He comes for you. The Lord of Storms comes to claim you.”
Fear skittered along Kira’s nerve endings. The Lord of Storms. Another name for Set. Sweet Lady of Truth, please don’t tell me Set has finally awakened.
“Tell me how to reclaim the souls you’ve stolen,” Couchman said in her soothing tone of voice. “How do we save those people?”
Hammond’s eyes rolled up to the whites. “You can claim nothing. Only she can decide. She will stand before the Throne of Set, she will face the Devourer of Souls. She will give her soul to the Chaos and decide the fate of the sleeping.”
Mother of Truth, Kira breathed, fear making it difficult to think clearly. Is that what you want me to do? Is this what the last few months have been leading me to?
“No.” Khefar’s voice cut like a whip through her thoughts. “That’s not going to happen. I’m not going to let that happen.”
“She will come,” Hammond said in his high, thin voice that sawed through Kira’s senses like a dull, rusty knife. “She will come and be judged, or the sleeping will die. The Devourer will be unchained by Set’s hand, and more souls will enter the great nothingness. Chaos will reign.”
He laughed, the sound degenerating into an insane cackle. “Go then, Kira Solomon. Go then to your destiny. The Lady of Shadows waits to take you into her embrace.”
Kira’s stomach began to roil. “I think … I need to get some air.”
She pushed her way out of the room and down the hall, searching for a ladies’ room. She found a unisex toilet and pushed her way in, standing over the bowl as her breath came fast and hard. The energy bars sat like a stone in her stomach, a boulder being tossed around by the earthquake of her emotions. “I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this. I can’t.”
Shadowlings she could handle. Seeker demons you fought or got killed. One of the Fallen you faced with everything you had, leaving no room for fear. But facing the Chaos god of your pantheon? Confronting Ammit, the Devourer of Souls? Knowing that they were acting as agents of the Lady of Shadows? She couldn’t do it.
Hammond’s voice pressed in on her brain, as insistent as a woodpecker digging for insects. She clamped her hands to her ears, spinning away from the commode. At the sink, she put her back against the wall then slid down it, her coat fanning out around her. Drawing her knees up, she locked her arms around them and rocked back and forth like a child fresh from a nightmare.
Except this wasn’t a dream. If Hammond were to be believed, both Set and the Lady of Shadows would be waiting for her in the exhibit. She had no reason to doubt him, especially when she considered the fact that he’d disclosed the information while being questioned by an Illuminator.
The Lady of Shadows had played everything perfectly. The Fallen sacrificed for a Shadowling’s errand, in order to inject her with Chaos to awaken her own Shadow magic. Her parents. The Shadowblade coming into her possession. Balm’s absence. The dreams of Set demanding that she join him.
Kira had believed she was safe, despite the nightmares. That, somehow, the dreams could be ignored or conquered. Now, knowing everything the Lady of Shadows had done to bring her to this moment, terror gripped her and wouldn’t let go. The idea of the dreams coming true, of having to actually face the Egyptian god of storms and chaos, of giving in to him, was almost too much. If she refused, they would destroy the souls they held. They would then kill her, and she’d become Shadow anyway.
A soft knock at the door almost had her reaching for her blades. She swallowed down the yelp, and cleared her throat. “Yeah?”
“It’s Khefar. I’m coming in.”
“You could at least ask,” she said as he pushed the door open.
“Would you have invited me in?”
“Probably not.”
“There you go, then.” He sat down beside her on the gray tiled floor, his booted feet stretching the length of the room. “That was pretty intense.”
“You think?” She loosened her grip on her knees.
“You were right about the scarabs being the key to saving those people. They can be purified with Light magic and the recitation of one of the prayers from th
e Book of the Dead. Sanchez has someone working up a translation right now.”
“The Illuminator really got Hammond talking, didn’t she?”
“Singing like the proverbial canary.” He grimaced. “An off-key, mentally unstable canary. Let me state for the record that I never want to be on the receiving end of that particular brand of confession.”
“You and me both.” She shifted, a move that put her slightly closer to him, their sleeves almost touching. Selfishly she wished that they could have had one more night together, but trouble never waited.
He reached over, taking hold of her hand, squeezing her fingers. She wanted to remove her glove, feel the warmth of his skin against hers, but she didn’t dare risk it. She needed to save her energy for whatever she needed to do next.
Khefar, attuned to her as always, gave her fingers another squeeze. “I guess this means your dreams weren’t random dreams.”
“No, they weren’t.” Set’s waiting for me. Freakin’ Set. He’s gonna ask me to join him, I’m going to refuse, and he’s going to kill me with a was scepter.
He pulled her hand into his lap. “You didn’t ask my opinion, but I’m going to give it anyway. It’s a trap. They know we know it’s a trap, and they don’t care. That means they think they’ve got the upper hand.”
She gave a weak laugh. “I think they do too. Facing the Lady of Shadows, Set, and Ammit the Devourer in the Hall of Judgment is scary. It was bad enough the last time, when Ma’at elevated me. I don’t think I can go back there.”
“All right.”
“All right?” she echoed. “Just like that, you’re okay with me not going in there?”
“My vow is to protect your soul,” Khefar reminded her. “Doing as Hammond says is a sure way of endangering your life. We’ll find some other way.”
“The only other way that wouldn’t endanger those souls is to bomb the place,” Kira said. “We can’t destroy those artifacts, and we definitely can’t sacrifice those souls because I have cold feet.”
She leaned forward, catching his expression. “What aren’t you telling me?”
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