by Erin Embly
No. Information was too simple a term for . . . I brought my good hand up underneath my eyelashes, where heat and wetness had begun to gather.
All I could see was the look in Simeon’s dead eyes as I stared at his severed head on the floor of that hotel room. The adoration, the agony, the sorrow. The betrayal.
It belonged to me, that moment. The responsibility for it, the memories of it. The hunger for vengeance that I’d almost let myself forget.
I remembered it now.
And suddenly, I was much more enthusiastic about the prospect of reporting to my new job tonight.
My chances of making it through my first day alive had just tanked immeasurably. But if Soma was the man behind Dirk’s missing kids, Adrian’s murder sprees, and Simeon’s death . . . it would damn well be worth it.
11
“That looks like it hurts.” Ray peered at me over the perspiring bottle of beer in his hand.
“That’s because it fucking does,” I said through the old belt he’d given me to bite down on while I tried to reset the bones in my wrist.
Despite Minnie’s fine attempt at a sling made with one of her aprons, I hadn’t been able to hold it perfectly still in the bumpy car ride over here.
And even with Ray’s help, I couldn’t magic crooked bones back into place. Healing magic was useful as hell, but it couldn’t do everything. I liked to think of it as more of a fast-forward button than anything else. If a wound would heal on its own given plenty of time, I could do it quicker with magic. But give me a genetic disease or a missing organ and we’d be shit out of luck without some real doctors.
After I’d pushed the biggest offender in my wrist back into place, I tried not to yell too loud as I gently massaged the skin over it to make sure nothing sharp was poking out. Satisfied, I held out my good hand to Ray and snapped my fingers to get him to hurry up.
His touch was better than morphine, but it only lasted a few seconds. Once the damage had been repaired and he let go, pain flared up my forearm and through my fingers. Even as I opened and closed my fist without any issues and made a circle with my wrist, it felt like I’d stuck the entire arm in a fire pit.
The fast-forward button of magic didn’t work on the associated pain, but it had been a long time since I’d been hurt badly enough for that to matter.
I bit the inside of my cheek, looking up at Ray and remembering just how badly he’d been hurt a couple months ago. Not only one broken bone but nearly every bone in his body—and they’d had to break a lot of them twice after I’d jumped the gun with magic healing on him.
“How long did it hurt for you? After . . . you know.” I nodded at him, and he gave me a small smile.
“Still does.” He took a seat next to me at his small kitchen table and put a hand on my shoulder. “But I would have died if you hadn’t helped. We’ll always be stronger together.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and not just from the pain in my arm. “Have you considered . . . leaving?” I asked.
“Leaving what? The god my daughter and I have worshiped our entire lives? All the family and friends we’ve ever known?”
“Well, when you put it that way—”
“Not that it would help,” he said, cutting me off. “Our power comes from our god. Without him, we’re just as useless as you and I are apart.”
“Not true,” I said. “I wasn’t useless before you ripped the mage mark off me.”
He frowned. “Do you really want to go back to that? After feeling what you can do now, with me at your side and the full power of el demonio inside us . . .” Shaking his head, he took a sip of his drink and then set it down firmly on the table. “What you were before, that’s like trying to grow a tree inside a house. Not useless, but crippled.”
“Maybe crippled,” I said, “but at least I was free. A house doesn’t have to be a cage.”
The pitter-patter of little bare feet running up to us prevented Ray from needing to answer me, which was probably for the best. I turned around to see Noah hanging on the arm of my chair, an uncharacteristically somber look on his face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Carina won’t play with me,” he whined, then looked at Ray. “You said she was taking a nap, but she’s not. I can hear her moving around but she won’t come out of her room.”
“I’ll go check on her,” Ray said, getting up.
My eyebrows drew together. I hoped everything was okay. I’d been looking forward to coming here today partly because it had been a while since I’d had a good dose of Carina’s sass. She might be a hot-headed bully inside a little girl’s skin, but at least she was always straight with me. And she could always make me smile.
I patted the seat Ray had left, and Noah hopped up on it. Tilting my head at him, I said, “She might just want some time alone.”
“I know but I don’t think so,” he said quickly. “She usually just says so if she wants me to go away but she won’t say anything now. I even told her I got an A on the quiz and she didn’t care. It’s weird.”
“Hey, good job on the quiz!” I said, but the glare he gave me said he didn’t want praise from me right now. “You’re worried about her?”
He nodded. “Maybe she turned into a zombie,” he said with eyes cast down.
I chewed on my tongue, trying to keep my face calm. He was thinking of his mother again, who had in fact turned into a zombie before she’d gone for good. Her soul was inside him somewhere still, and we’d had multiple lengthy conversations about how no one else in his life was going to randomly turn into a zombie . . . but trauma was trauma. Only time would tell how well he would heal.
“I bet she’s just busy eating something,” I said, trying not to linger on the zombie idea. “You don’t like to talk when your mouth is full, right?” Noah kept his head down, and my stomach rumbled at the thought of food. “Hey, where’s Dirk?” I hadn’t seen him since I’d arrived.
“Outside talking to the goats,” Noah said.
Yeah, that checked out. I wasn’t sure how Ray was keeping goats in a DC town home—maybe bribing all his neighbors with fresh cheese? But you gotta do what you gotta do to feed your daughter when she happens to be a dragon.
Noah opened his mouth to say something, then snapped it shut when a screech filtered through the ceiling from upstairs. His eyes bugged out and he hopped down from the chair, running up the stairs before I could stop him.
I followed him all the way to Carina’s room, where Ray was sitting with his daughter on her bed. I delivered a quick knock to the open door, but Noah had already run in and caught their attention.
Carina looked up with a red face, tears glistening on her cheeks, and my shock hit me harder than all the pain I’d just endured in my wrist. I knew she was only a child, sure, but Carina was the toughest child I’d ever met by far. I’d never seen her cry before—and I’d seen her get attacked and interrogated by a damn assassin.
“Why are you sad?” Noah demanded, his hands on his hips.
Carina shook her head at him and then buried her face in Ray’s chest.
I walked forward and put my hand on Noah’s back to get his attention. “Hey, I’m gonna take care of this. You should go help Dirk with the goats for a while, okay?” He gave me a skeptical look, glancing again at Carina, and I whispered, “She’s going to want to eat once she’s feeling better, right?”
Miraculously, Noah took my meaning and nodded, then shuffled out of the room.
“Hey Carina.” I knelt down in front of her, the pit growing in my gut when I saw her fingers trembling as they clutched Ray’s arms. When she heard the thumps of Noah running down the stairs, she lifted her head away from Ray but didn’t look at me.
I gave Ray questioning eyes, and he shrugged. “She’s been like this since we went grocery shopping this morning.”
Ray didn’t seem nearly as concerned as I was, but then he had known Carina all her life. Maybe this breakdown wasn’t as abnormal as it seemed to me. “
Oh?” I said, trying to follow his lead. “Yeah, I hate grocery shopping too.”
“It’s dumb to hate shopping,” Carina said quietly, a tiny bit of fire returning to her demeanor. “And we needed to get ingredients so I can cook for my mom tomorrow.”
“Mmm,” I said, remembering all the times I’d fantasized as a child about having my mom come visit me. She never had, but I could see how the imminent arrival of Carina’s mother might make her feel more vulnerable. “Why are you crying then?”
“It wasn’t the shopping. It was on the way back.”
I said nothing for a moment, hoping she would continue on her own.
She sniffled and wiped her eyes. “I saw a kid from my class on the train, and he laughed at me.”
I almost wanted to laugh myself at the idea of this little bully getting a taste of her own medicine. But with her in tears like this, there was clearly much more than that going on. And not even mean little kids deserved to be made fun of. “Like the way you laugh at Noah sometimes?” I asked tentatively.
“No.” Her voice turned icy. “Like the way I laugh at my goats sometimes.”
Uh . . . that took a turn for the weird. “What’s the difference?” I asked, genuinely not sure.
“Noah is my friend. The goats are food.” Carina licked her lips and locked her eyes on mine. “He was hungry.”
“I’m sure . . .” I started, but then my brain put the pieces together—she’d seen a kid on the Metro who had laughed at her. Putting it like that, it seemed ordinary, but I’d also been seeing kids on the Metro who wouldn’t stop laughing, and they were definitely not ordinary. “Are you sure it was really him?” I asked her. “Did you see his face?”
Her eyes grew round as she nodded and whispered, “He’s a monster. And he’s going to kill me. I know it . . .” She hit the sides of her head with her fists and shut her eyes tight, then went still and breathed out.
My heart pounded in my chest, nausea creeping back into my gut. A glance at Ray told me he didn’t believe a word his daughter was saying. And why should he? It sounded ridiculous. But Carina had obviously seen the same thing I had—a child I knew with a monstrous face. And she’d heard the same laughter I had, the laughter that had somehow been responsible for three public massacres in the past three days.
“He can’t get you here.” I said it more confidently than I felt it. “Not unless you go underground.”
Ray frowned at me abruptly. “What are you—”
“Did you see him too?” I asked Ray before he could finish his question. I had to be sure.
“I . . . saw a kid and heard a laugh, but . . .” He shook his head, and I gathered only Carina had noticed anything sinister about the encounter.
“Look.” I turned back to Carina. “I’ve seen him too.” Never mind that the one who kept appearing to taunt me looked like Noah and not this kid from Carina’s class. “And so did your dad. So if he comes for you, you won’t be alone. But I’ve only ever seen him underground. In the Metro, in basements . . . You should be safe as long as you stay up here.”
“What is he?” Carina asked, already looking more lively. I felt invigorated too, and I’d bet we both had probably been questioning our sanity. As much as I hated that this thing was apparently haunting my niece, it was nice to know I wasn’t pulling hallucinations out of my ass.
“I don’t know,” I said, standing up. “But I’m going somewhere tonight to try to find out.”
Carina nodded and wiped her face with her sleeve. “Can I come with you? You’re probably going to need my help.”
That sounded more like her. I smiled. “Nope. But I do need your help to watch Noah. He’s outside with your goats now—you should go talk to him.”
She stood up with another nod and composed herself, detangling her arms from her father’s without even glancing up at him. “Sorry I freaked out,” she said, and I was struck by how much her childhood looked like mine in this moment.
A sense of duty drilled into her so deep she couldn’t let herself cry over something like this for longer than a couple hours, and certainly not in the presence of adults. For this to have spooked her so badly at all, the encounter must have been truly grim.
As Carina left the room, I was struck by the urge to pull her into my arms. She really was more fragile than she looked, the armor of her attitude and her scales only going so far to protect her from the reality of being a child thrust into a world of adult problems.
She might need my protection more than anyone else.
I stood up to follow her downstairs, even more determined now to get to the bottom of whatever the hell was going on with Soma and the vampires and the freak massacres.
Ray held me back before I could leave the room. “Who else has seen this thing?”
That was an interesting question, and I realized why he’d asked it when my answer was, “Just the three of us, as far as I know.”
“Ay,” he said, then muttered something under his breath that I couldn’t understand.
“Do you think it has something to do with . . .”
“Our family? Maybe. If it really is singling us out.”
“It could be just a coincidence that I haven’t talked to anyone else who’s seen it.” But as soon as the words left my mouth, I remembered what the vampire had said when he’d broken my wrist in the alley. That I’d have to die because I’d seen something. If that something was the creepy laughing children with old faces swarmed with flies, then I doubted many other people had seen it too.
And if that was the case, it meant Ray and Carina could be in danger from whoever had sent the vampire to kill me as well.
That wouldn’t be great, but still I felt relief in my chest at the prospect that maybe I was the only connection between Noah and the incidents that kept happening. If it wasn’t a hallucination that had me seeing him but still a vision tailored for me specifically . . . that would be better than the alternative. It would mean Noah wasn’t somehow responsible for all the gruesome deaths I’d seen in the past couple days.
“Come,” Ray said, breaking me from my thoughts and beckoning me into the room next to Carina’s. It was set up as an office, with a small desk and a whole wall of bookshelves.
“Wow, so you moved here ‘temporarily’ but brought a whole library with you?” I asked.
“I also opened a new location here for my business, if you remember,” he said. “But I haven’t heard you complaining about that.”
I frowned, realizing I’d almost forgotten about that. “Why put down roots here if you’re trying to get me to go back with you?”
“Because I knew it wouldn’t be easy—and I don’t want to end up homeless if you never come. Worst-case scenario, I’ll lose Carina. But if I build a home here, she’ll at least always know where she can find me.”
I chewed my tongue as I watched him poke through his desk drawer. He had assumed from the start that he would fail to recruit me, before we’d even met. Part of me knew that assuming failure would often doom a mission to fail, but there was wisdom and strength in his approach as well. Whatever I decided, he wasn’t going to let it ruin his life.
He pulled a notepad out from the drawer and clicked a pen open. “Now,” he said, looking at me, “what exactly did you see?” I raised my eyebrows in question, and he continued, “I didn’t get much detail from Carina beyond how scared she was.”
“Right, of course,” I said, and then I told him everything. The feeling I was being watched by the Metro tunnel walls, the behavior of the shifter I’d witnessed go mad, the little boy who looked like Noah except for his sagging, wrinkled, leathery face, the flies swarming around it, the way the laughter echoed through the space as if it had no point of origin, the dead faces in the walls and their dead arms reaching out to pull me in . . .
By the time I was done, Ray’s face was twisted in deep thought as he tapped the pen against his desk.
“Any theories?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “Bu
t I need to check a few things.” He got up and walked over to the bookshelves, running a finger along the spines until he found what he was looking for.
While he leafed through the pages, I peered around the space. My eyes landed on a book that looked familiar, sitting on a small table by the shelves. It was the book he’d shown me when we’d met, the one that was supposed to be for the two of us.
I walked over and touched it, drawn in by the velvety feel of the blank cover, the depth promised by that texture despite the lack of visible words printed on it. When I opened it, the pages seemed shadowed in strange places, hinting at the text that was hidden beyond a magic veil. I sighed, wanting it to reveal itself to me even though I knew it wouldn’t unless I pledged myself to a god who wanted to own me and joined a family I wasn’t sure I wanted to belong to.
“This is going to take a while,” Ray said, making me snap the book shut and turn back to him. He’d eased into a comfortable slouch at his desk, a pen hanging from his mouth. “You’ll be the first one to know if I find anything, I promise.”
“Got it,” I said, already making my way out of the room. “I’ll get out of your hair.”
When I came downstairs, Dirk was in the kitchen pouring white liquid into jars from a metal pail.
“Do I want to know what that is?” I asked.
“Fuckin’ delicious is what,” he said. “Been a long time since I had fresh goat milk. Want a glass?”
“No,” I said, but he was already pouring some for me.
He handed me the small glass and said, “Still warm.” The last time I’d seen a smile so wide on his face was after he’d gotten a lap dance from extra-tits Laura at the club when we’d first met. Maybe it wasn’t the tits at all that did it for him and he was just weirdly into milk.
“Eugh,” I said, but I took a sip anyway, knowing he wouldn’t let it go unless I did. “Eugh,” I said again. It was sweet and creamy and earthy, but “warm” was an accurate descriptor and not something I would ever want from a glass of milk.