Toxic Influence

by Voss Foster

  Finally, he stopped at an old wooden door. Gilded knob in the middle, frosted glass window filling up the top half. Gutt put his hand on the knob. "This is Vellius."

  He knocked with his other hand and a sultry voice came from inside. "Oh…oh dear…it's such a mess…I mean…yes, enter, come in, come in."

  He turned the knob and…wow. She did say it was a mess, but I was expecting your garden-variety office mess. This room was covered in bits of paper everywhere. They scattered across the floor, sat on bookshelves, choked out the potted plants struggling to thrive on the crystal desk. The whole office was very dark, browns and bronzes and blacks, and the whole place smelled slightly…stale. Like no fresh air had been let in for some time. Probably not helped by the fact that there was no window in sight.

  And then there was Vellius herself. She was definitely a gorgon, that much was certain. Her hair writhed and wriggled, even bound back in a ponytail. Was that animal cruelty, or just a fashion choice? The snakes didn't seem like they minded, just chilling out behind her, doing snakey things. They were brightly colored, scarlets and golds with black bands, and they set off nicely by her russet skin.

  Vellius fixed highlighter yellow eyes right on Gutt. "N'Gutta. It's been some time. You're living in the Mundane now, aren't you?"

  "Yes. And the Mundane is in a particular spot of trouble right now, Vellius."

  "Well I imagined as much. Charming conversationalist though I may be, people rarely visit me for a quick chat. Though the offer does always stand." She rose. Honestly, I was expecting a giant fucking snake body. Instead, I got floral print yoga pants—some Mundane fashion had been imported into the Kingdoms, just like preet culture had started to bleed into our own--and a lot of curves. A lot of nice curves that might have been something to focus on if the entire world wasn't at stake.

  Swift took her outstretched hand. "Special Agent Nathanael Swift, FBI. This is Agent Dashiel Rourke."

  "Call me Dash."

  "I am Vellius of Badenberg." She sighed. "What seems to be the problem?"

  "Well, we aren't entirely sure," said Gutt. "It's about Jörmungandr."

  Her pupils sharpened to tiny slits when Gutt said the name. "Danger in the human world with Jörmungandr. I see why you were sent my way."

  Gutt nodded. "We believe Jörmungandr's poison is being used in a series of attacks. A group of people are releasing an unknown toxin on a major city in the Mundane. All the magic we've seen so far has been runic, including iar."

  "Iar. That does sound particularly ominous." She sighed again. "Come with me. We'll check on that naughty boy, see if he's been disturbed at all recently. And hopefully the seal isn't simply decaying."

  "Whoa, wait." I couldn't help myself. As my stomach hit the floor, it pushed the words up and out of my mouth. "The seal on this world-ending snake thing could just be, what, breaking on its own?"

  "It is an unfortunate possibility. Magic that old, sealing a being like Jörmungandr? It's playing a risky game at the best of times."

  "Great. Very comforting."

  She sighed. "Take comfort that the world was able to survive this long. If Jörmungandr had been left loose to do as he pleased all those years ago, or any of the other Class As that have been bound, we wouldn't be standing here having this conversation at all." She nodded slowly at me. "Every breath taken is a gift owed to the practitioners who performed these sealings."

  Oh yeah, that made me feel tons better, thanks. Maybe cool in my nihilist, existentialism days in high school, but not so much now, looking down the barrel of Mr. Poison Snake.

  On that cheery note, Vellius led us back to the stairs, but thankfully only up one more flight to another series of offices. Down another serpentine hallway and finally to an archway, hung with a thick, white curtain. She held out her hands to stop us. "Wait here. I'll get the reports."

  She slid inside. I stuffed my hands in my pockets for lack of anything better to do with them. "So we just wait and hope?"

  Gutt nodded, leaning against the wall opposite the arch. "Very few people are allowed to enter this space. It's a limbo plane where the high-level containment seals can be managed without any other magic interfering in the process. And since I am no longer attached in any official matters with the Hidden Kingdoms, and you two are humans, we would hardly qualify for entry."

  I nodded to myself, mind going in a completely different direction. "So did someone get in when the prison break happened?"

  He shook his head. "Unlikely. These spaces are all heavily monitored. It's a better chance that someone went in through a backdoor and unsealed them all directly into the human world. The strange part isn't that it happened, but that nobody seemed to even notice to stop it. There's a reason those prison containments are manned by so many strong practitioners at once." Gutt drummed his fingers against the wall. "I assure you, I've come at that mess from every possible angle you can think of, trying to explain it away. Though I wouldn't turn down a brilliant insight if you stumble across one."

  "I'll get right on it." As soon as the evil snake was handled.

  Vellius walked back through the curtain, mouth turned down. So obviously not good news. "It's very small fluctuation, but there are changes in the seal that could be in line with a minor tear."

  It was an answer. It was something we could tackle at long last. And yet all the feeling dropped out of my body. This was the world-ending serpent we were dealing with, and I was in way too deep to actually back out of this.

  If Bancroft and Gutt were right, everyone was in too deep.

  Vellius stroked her snakes as she continued. "I can't say for certain I would have noticed these changes had I been monitoring Jörmungandr personally, but for what little it's worth, I am sorry no one found this in time."

  "You found it now." Swift nodded. "Is that not in time?"

  "I'm afraid…" She shook her head, snakes shaking behind her. "It would be easier if you came with me. We'll talk." And more walking, but at least we were learning something. "A Class-A as strong as Jörmungandr is maintained by a very different type of seal than would be used in any other situation. By necessity. His power is so immense that the seal has to remain constantly in flux. Because of that, a certain amount of change in the readings is considered acceptable. But it's so tiny, someone would almost have to know the parameters in order to pull something like this off without alerting anyone. So it is…unclear at the moment whether or not this is natural or manufactured."

  Swift's jaw was set hard, mouth in a tight line. But his voice, at least, was cool and professional. For now, anyway. No telling how long that would last. "How many people would be aware of those parameters?"

  Vellius combed her fingers through the snakes, letting them snap their jaws and twist around her joints before she finally responded. "Well it certainly couldn't be more than a hundred. The Class As are monitored by a very small group of people at any given point. I'll have a list of them drawn up from the past two thousand years or so, if that would be sufficient?"

  I almost commented on that, but then I remembered elves and dwarves and dragons, who could all see a thousand years and still not be up for planning their funerals. "I think two thousand years would work, wouldn't it?"

  Gutt nodded. "Thank you, Vellius."

  "And assuming everything survives, if there's another problem of this sort, contact me directly. I'll make time." She shook her head. "The good news here is that no major break can just happen the way these did. It would take a monumental, complex force of magic to even begin breaking the seals in any way that could loose Jörmungandr."

  Swift nodded. "I'll keep that in mind while dozens of people die."

  She cringed as we rounded a curve into a large room, very clean and shiny and very, very empty of any other people. "If Jörmungandr is truly set free, we also may never be able to bind him again."

  And one more time I was stopped cold. I couldn't even breathe for a second, and when I did I only managed to choke out one word. "Never?
"

  "The magic used to bind Jörmungandr is beyond ancient. Not only is it lost to time, but there may be requirements we couldn't reproduce in the modern era. For all any of us know, it could require the sacrifice of a mastodon." She headed into an aisle of shelves, but kept talking, shouting behind her. "On the other hand, breaking Jörmungandr's seals is actually a documented process."

  "Oh really, you guys kept that one?" I didn't catch my smart mouth until it had already smarted…but honestly, given the situation at hand I wasn't too fussed. "Didn't it occur to anyone to keep the manual for catching the damn thing in case you set it free?"

  "Actually it did." She came back with a large tome, bound in heavy stitched hide of some kind, with brass bands on the spine and bright green paint filling lines cut into the cover. Like everything else in the Hidden Kingdoms, that paint was almost painful to look at, it was so acid bright. Didn't seem to bug Vellius any, though. She unclasped the book as she continued, and opened it to pages with ink of equally virulent green. "When I said it was lost, I meant that literally. There was no metaphor."

  She turned the book to show a lot of writing I couldn't read, and more specifically, ragged edges where a couple pages had been ripped from the book. "Fuck me."

  She nodded and set the tome back down. "No one is certain when they were stolen, by whom, or why. But they've been missing since the Grand Archives were originally raised. It was the pages that came right before the unsealing process, so it's a safe bet that the sealing records would have been here."

  So lost meant lost. Completely. No one knew where the fuck they were. Something that was supposedly that old, if they weren't in whatever clean room this was, watched over and preserved, then they probably didn't exist anymore. Deteriorated beyond any actual use, if not completely destroyed by the ravages of time and exposure.

  Gutt cleared his throat. "I wasn't aware that's what happened. I would have mentioned it if I was."

  "It's fine, Gutt." Swift came around to stand next to Vellius, somehow not squinting looking at the nearly glowing text. "If you can tell us how you break these seals, we can keep an eye out and try to…I don't know, stop it. Alert someone."

  "Of course. I'm sure you would notice if that's what was being done. Unsealing Jörmungandr isn't a simple process. And it's also not enough. Breaking the seals around a Class-A like Jörmungandr is almost impossible without using the actual power of the being. Jörmungandr would have to be awoken and struggling to break free before the bonds would be weak enough for anyone to let him out."

  "And how do you wake him up?"

  She ran a slender finger down the page and stopped about halfway down. "The earth would need to be soaked with the blood of one-hundred-three innocent over the course of a fortnight to awaken Jörmungandr's appetite."

  My stomach dropped straight into my fucking feet. "We're already at seventy-five dead in twelve days."

  "How did they die?"

  "From poison," said Swift.

  Vellius glanced between the three of us and, horribly, slowly, she nodded. "Yes…that would qualify, I imagine. And if the poison is indeed Jörmungandr's…well, his hunger would certainly have been roused by that." She scanned her eyes across the pages again. "Where are the attacks happening?"

  "Manhattan," said Gutt.

  "And how big is this Manhattan?"

  Gutt shrugged. "About the same size as the palace grounds in Badenberg. I would guess around twenty-five or thirty miles square."

  Vellius took down her snakes. She ran her fingers across the newly freed serpents as she spoke, even letting them bite her. "That would be a sufficiently small area for the unsealing to take place."

  Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit. "You're telling me…you're telling me that these motherfuckers might actually be able to wake this thing up and get it out? And then what, everything dies?"

  "Not everything, no. Only sentient life. Humans and magical beings would all succumb to Jörmungandr's poison." She shook her head, still staring at the book. "It would fill the sky, and then rain down upon everyone. Those who didn't die to the initial toxins in his breath would be few, and very unhealthy. But animals, plants, fungi, they would all remain untouched." She sighed. "I assume you have seen the poison?"

  Swift nodded. "Dash got hit with it twice."

  She whipped around, and all her snakes stared at me at the same time. "Describe it. If it is not Jörmungandr's toxin, then we may be working ourselves into a panic over nothing."

  That was desperate hope, and I was more than willing to cling to it so long as it existed. "It's like this white fog. It creeps along the ground. It dissipates almost immediately."

  "Yes, but the symptoms. What about the symptoms?"

  "It burns. It makes it almost impossible to breathe. The pain is unbelievable. And it can apparently be absorbed through skin contact. Anywhere it touches, you lose skin and muscle. It just leaves you covered in black and red scaly patches. And it causes fever. Delirium. When your body tries to fight it off, anyway." I scratched back through my memories, past the terror of the giant fucking snake, to try and come up with anything I'd forgotten. "And it takes an incredibly small dose to be fatal. I think that covers it."

  "And that poison has been brought out by preets." Swift nodded. "It's not just spouting out of the ground at random. Practitioners are summoning it up."

  Vellius closed her eyes. "I would wager considerably that this is Jörmungandr's poison. It appears some of the fluctuations…were accessing the seals."

  I really wanted to shit myself, throw up, and run back to counterterrorism for however many days I'd have left alive. But what the fuck good would that do? Not any good for me, and certainly not any good for the OPA, trying to piece all of this together and solve the problem.

  Swift, unlike me in my shocked state, was every bit the complete professional agent that a department like this needed in charge during a crisis. "What is the spread of the poison? Would we be able to clear out the city and—"

  "It wouldn't matter," said Vellius. "Jörmungandr is the size of a city all on his own, and not a small city. Even if you cleared everyone out for a thousand miles in either direction, he would travel. If he dropped into the ocean to swim somewhere, the water would flood everything for a hundred miles inland. And then he would release his poison somewhere else." She sighed. "But the unsealing still isn't done with just that. It requires a specific pattern. Iar, the serpent." One more glance to the bright green text. "It needs to be 'written in sorrow upon the bloodsoaked land.' So unless you have that, it should be safe."

  "What's the exact pattern?" asked Gutt.

  Vellius turned the page, then turned the book around to face us. I did my best not to expect any good news, but I still pulled closer. Something had to be going in our favor. The world didn't just end. Life as we know it wasn't just destroyed like that.

  "Seven points laid out in the form of iar. Three along a vertical line, and four to represent the crossing bars in the center."

  I stared hard at the symbol laid out in a full page spread there. Difficult to focus on the green ink, but eventually I got it clear. And it looked way too fucking familiar for comfort.

  I didn't touch the book, but I pointed right up close to each of the circles as I spoke words that I really wanted to be talked out of believing. "Apartments in Chinatown. East Side Community High School. Rise and Shine Motel. Madison Square Park. Chelsea apartments. And the office building downtown."

  And that was six in twice as many days. Even though I didn't have the map, I was positive they would match up.

  "That's bad news." Swift's mouth bowed down into a frown, then immediately straightened rock hard. "Vellius, can you copy this pattern down? And everything else about this you have?"

  She looked around the room nervously, then waved her hands. The ink shimmered, and then paper appeared in her free hand, complete with everything from those pages. "Don't say I did that. It's technically against policy." She waved her hand again and a s
econd, much longer sheet of parchment appeared, which she also handed over. "That's the list of people who could theoretically know our working parameters on Jörmungandr's seal."

  "I certainly hope we'll be around to tell you how this worked out." Swift nodded once to her, then fixed his eyes on Gutt. "Get us home. We need to look at that map."

  Chapter Fourteen

  "Son of a bitch." Swift shook his head. "It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect."

  And it was. The image Vellius had copied over lined up exactly with every last attack site. And it left one empty spot, right at the very top. Right over Times fucking Square.

  "This could definitely be better news." I clenched and unclenched my fists as I spoke. "What are we supposed to do?"

  Swift turned to face Bancroft. "Find me something in those pages."

  "I'm looking, believe me. If there's anything, I'll tell you."

  But Swift was already gone, a mad dash into Kimmy's computer vault. I turned around and went to my spare office chair next to Gutt's desk. "He's acting like it's the end of the world or something." Humor. Shitty humor, but it was all I had at the moment.

  Apparently it didn't land with Gutt. "If you have a separate interpretation of the information, I'd love to hear it. Or an idea to save all of our collective asses. That would also be very welcome."

  "Couldn't we try and get everyone into the Hidden Kingdoms?"

  "No. We've already presented that idea to the ambassador for the Kingdoms, and she brought it to the royal families."

  "And they said no? Just let all those humans die?" What the hell? "I knew there were tensions, but that's…you know what, fuck them. How about that?"

  Gutt shook his head. "They all agreed, even our staunchest allies in the upper echelons of the Kingdoms, that the risk was too high to their own people, and their own people had to come first. They wouldn't allow us to bring humans in if it meant that Jörmungandr could be set loose inside the Hidden Kingdoms and kill us all."