by Ramy Vance
Empusa.
Her unfertilized embryo sat in that petri dish.
CHAPTER 19
A s we say in Brazil, isto vai dar molho. Which literally translates to, “this is going to give sauce.” And by sauce, we mean problems.
This was going to cause problems.
And I was a part of it.
Among three Museum escapees during Operation Three Dead Gods, I read in the folder. Questions flitted through my head, even as I kept scanning the pages. What museum? Why was the M capitalized? And since when were Others kept in museums, of all places?
A noise sounded—shoes tapping in the hallway. A very specific tap-tap. My eyes flitted up, and I shut the folder. I stepped away from the desk and practically flew out of Dr. Russo’s room, pulling the door closed behind me. I had just reached the middle aisle between several workstations when the lab’s main door creaked open and in she walked.
The exact person I didn’t want to see.
“Ah, Isabella.” Dr. Russo stopped sudden and set one hand over her chest. “I didn’t expect anyone to be here.”
Ditto. For whatever reason, she’d come back much faster than expected. And then I realized I was early. A few hours early, in fact. I tried to slow my breathing, to avoid looking like I’d just run out of the room not ten feet right of me—or like I’d seen something I unequivocally shouldn’t have.
Empusa’s embryo.
Stop thinking about Empusa’s embryo. Think about anything else.
“I was excited to get started,” I said.
She placed her jacket on the coat hanger, turned to survey me. I realized I still had my heavy jacket on from when I’d been outside. “I bet you are. Did you already take a spin around the new workspace? We’ve changed things up a bit in here.”
I nodded, pulling off my coat and approaching to set it next to hers. “A bit. It really was a very large grant we received, wasn’t it, Dr. Russo?”
She smiled down at me. I could hardly hold her gaze; those blue eyes were almost fluorescent. “Call me Serena. We believe this work is extremely important, and we’ve funded it accordingly.”
She turned toward me, her eyes darting over my face. It made me feel awkward, and I averted my gaze as I turned away from the hanger. What was she looking for? Did she suspect?
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just always fascinated by Others. And I’ve never met an encantado before.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I guess that makes sense. There are only a few hundred of us, mostly in South America. And we like to pretend we’re someone else when we’re not swimming around in our natural form.”
“That is what I hear … I’ve read all about your species,” Dr. Russo—Serena—chuckled. “I also read that you’re quite powerful illusionists, and something vague about using amulets to store your magic.”
A pang shot through me. My hand went by instinct to my neck, where my amulet used to be. Had always been, for the past four years—until last week. I still found myself reaching for it several times a day.
It had been my last illusion, my safeguard for when I grew ancient. I had given it to a woman who deserved it more than I did.
“Not store magic. Channel it actually. Yes,” I said. “Some do.”
If she noticed me reaching for my absent amulet, she didn’t mention it. Instead, she said, “How does that work?”
My eyes lifted to her, and in that moment, I felt strongly that I should not tell her. Not just about the amulet, but about anything related to my kind. She was up to no good—if she had Empusa’s embryo, that meant she’d had very close contact with Empusa—and no ally of mine.
At least, not until she proved unequivocally otherwise. And I doubted that would ever happen.
“I don’t know.” I kept my face as straight as possible. “What our amulets do has always been shrouded in mystery, except among the elders.”
“And you’re not an elder.”
“No—at five hundred years old, I’m one of the last born.”
“Don’t you mean created? By your gods.”
My heart saddened at the thought. It was true that even before the gods left, we were created rather than born. Something that Serena had just pointed out with clinical detachment. She was stating a fact.
A fact that stung like a slap.
“Yes,” I murmured.
“And how does that happen? How were you created, exactly?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. That was another secret held by the elders.” Elders who are in hiding now, I thought.
I didn’t want to continue talking about my creation, but I also didn’t want to annoy my new boss. So I made a show of shifting my eyes toward the door. “Do you know if Professor Allman is around? I was supposed to meet him here so we could go over my most recent findings.”
That was a lie, but it worked.
“No.” Disappointment flickered across her face, but it disappeared just as fast. I guess working for the World Army gave you a lot of practice at veiling your emotions. “I’m afraid not. But since I’m working closely with the professor, I’d be very interested in your findings.”
Well, at least we’d gotten off the let’s-dissect-Isabella’s-entire-history path. I led her over to my workstation, and she pulled up a stool as I showed her my progress mapping the third strand. I pulled out a few slides, set them under the microscope.
“This segment here,” I said, “is one of many I’m examining for magic. I’m not totally sure, but I think a specific segment of our DNA is what allows us to use our magic in exchange for time.”
“Remarkable.” She stared into the microscope. She lifted her face away, turned toward me. She started talking about the possibilities for preventing cancer and alzheimer’s, and how soon those would be realistic goals.
As she talked, my mind processed the information I’d seen in the manila folder. I had an almost-eidetic memory from hundreds of years of practice, and I could picture each piece of paper behind my eyes.
I understood now that Empusa took body parts because, whenever she appeared, she was missing one. Not always the same part—maybe a leg, or sometimes an arm. She was like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, except the genders were reversed.
The most important piece of paper had been the last one I’d glimpsed before Serena came in. It explained the process for neutralizing Empusa. Except I hadn’t gotten a chance to read the meat of it before Serena had interrupted me.
I needed to get back into that folder.
Another thought occurred to me: the World Army had such an acute understanding of this Other that they knew exactly who she liked to kill, and how, and most importantly, how to stop her.
Which meant Serena almost certainly knew all these things.
She was aware of the murders.
I focused on her, and suddenly, all her black-haired, blue-eyed beauty seemed to shrink, to bleach out. It was the opposite of the halo effect; sometimes, in learning more about a person, their beauty diminished. They became themselves in your eyes, and that was what had happened with Serena Russo.
I could look at her and experience none of the glamour. Under the harsh lighting, the fine lines and imperfections in her face came clear. Tiny, imperceptible things under ordinary circumstances. But given what I knew about her, they were almost all I could see.
“Have you heard about the murders?” I interrupted. She’d been talking about pneumonia, and seemed surprised by my forwardness.
Normally I wasn’t forward—except when I sensed injustice. And not you-took-my-parking-spot injustice, but real wrongs. In those moments, I was able to overcome my insecurities, my sense that I talked not enough or too much, or that my unworthiness seeped through my skin for everyone to see.
Chalk it up to hundreds of years of superficial infatuations, which almost always ended badly. I fell in love, but men didn’t tend to react well when they discovered I wasn’t the beautiful human they’d thought they were getting.
Fear of discovery was almost second-nature to an encantado. After all, who could love us as we were? Humans were most likely to take a dolphin captive or kill it.
And maybe that was why I’d sunk myself into my research on Other DNA. And lately, into figuring out the real story behind these murders. It made me feel worthy, capable—distracted me from that fear.
“Of course.” Serena shook her head. “Terrible tragedies, all.”
“They still haven’t brought in a suspect.” I watched her closely. I knew I was treading on porous ground, but like I said: injustice. I couldn’t stop myself.
“That’s my understanding.” Her foot had started to tap, but she stopped it. She was getting suspicious, and I needed to scale it back.
I balled my hands in my lap. “I’m just so scared, Doctor. Do you think it’s an Other who’s doing it?”
Again, the blue eyes leveled on me. “It’s hard to say.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m sorry to be getting us so off topic. It’s just … I was attacked by a flock of birds on the night of the murder on Saint Catherine Street.”
“You were on Saint Catherine Street?”
“With my boyfriend, on a date. We ran into a bookstore to avoid them.”
“How did the birds behave?”
I opened my eyes. I was a master at reading people, and Serena Russo wasn’t displaying an ounce of concern. No … she was intrigued.
“They shot their feathers at us. Metallic ones. And they had massive beaks and talons that they swiped when they dove for us.”
“Did they hurt you?”
I shook my head. “By some miracle. But they definitely weren’t regular birds. Doctor, you study Others. Do you know what they could have been?”
She raised a finger. “Ah, you’re thinking in the anthropological sense. You see, I study the microscopic makeup of Others. Now if you asked me about the composition of an Other’s cells, I’d be your girl.”
I eyed her. Between the two of us, I wasn’t the only one playing a role. I was the innocent, scared student. And somehow, she’d morphed into the nerdy, shut-in scientist I knew she wasn’t and had never been.
More deception.
“Ohh,” I said, nodding with wide eyes. “My mistake.”
“It’s hard for me to say what kind of birds they were without observing them.” She pulled on her glasses, turned toward the microscope. “That said, it sounds like a curfew was the right choice on the administration’s part.”
Of course, I thought. Then, Wait. Why “of course?” Why would Serena Russo approve of the curfew? As often happened in tense situations, my subconscious mind understood something my conscious mind didn’t. I realized my heart had been sledgehammering against my chest ever since she’d walked back in.
I was terrified.
“Serena, I’m going to use the restroom,” I said, pushing myself up. “I’ll be back.”
She murmured assent, her face still pressed into the microscope.
I booked it down the hall into the bathroom. Inside, I dropped onto a toilet, bowing over until my head was nearly touching my thighs. I breathed hard, fast. You haven’t been caught. She didn’t know you were looking through her papers, I repeated in my head. She didn’t know.
I repeated it until my breathing calmed, and I could sit up straight.
Empusa’s embryo. Serena Russo. The World Army. Something massive had converged on this campus—something bigger than one killer. If she was studying Empusa, then she was studying other Others. Who knew how many profiles they had?
A quavering, powerful part of me wanted to bolt out of the bathroom and back to my dorm and climb under my floral comforter with Aimee. This was the encantado part of me, the side that knew I could slip out of anything. I could take on another illusion, become someone else.
All I had to do was run.
But then I thought of Justin. I thought of the people who had died, the kid sitting in the alley with his heart carved out. I thought of those who would still die because of Empusa—because of Serena Russo and the World Army. I, Isabella Ramirez, was who they’d picked to conduct their Other research. I would be granted daily access to their facilities. I didn’t fully understand what was going on yet, but I had been given the keys, and I only needed to set them into the door and open it.
If I didn’t, more young men would die to Empusa. And I would be responsible, because I was one of the few people who had access to the knowledge of how to stop her.
I got up, walked to the sinks, and turned on the faucet. Except I didn’t move; my reflection was staring judgmentally back at me. “Well, Isa,” I whispered, “you know what you have to do.”
I set my hands under the water, clapped my wet fingers over my eyes, and fixed my hair before I walked back down the hallway to the laboratory.
Sometimes being a responsible adult sucked.
CHAPTER 20
T he next morning, I sat down across from Justin in our favorite cafe. Which was funny, given it was the same coffeehouse where I’d once been attacked by vengeful Brazilian woman and—long story—ended up flopping around on the bathroom floor in my natural form.
All of which is to say, we’d playfully nicknamed it the Dolphin Cafe.
“You look like hell,” he said.
I set both hands around my mug, observing the frothy rosette on the surface. “Charming.”
“I meant it with the utmost affection.” I glimpsed a small smile as his hand reached out to touch my wrist.
I managed a little upturn of the lips. “If I hadn’t taken it that way, you’d have coffee all over your face right now.” I raised my eyes to observe him. “You don’t look like you slept, either.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t. Well, not much.”
“I take it you didn’t capture Empusa on your patrol last night.” I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice, but a little seeped in.
If he’d noticed, he ignored it. “No—but maybe we spooked her. No murders, right?”
“No murders.”
What a strange thing to be grateful for.
I took a deep breath, lifting my mug to take a sip. I was preparing to launch into the real reason I’d asked him here: to help me get access to Serena Russo’s workstation and “borrow” that file on Empusa.
Yesterday while I’d been working at the lab, a couple security guys had finished activating the keycard entry on Serena’s office door and the outer lab door. I’d received a keycard of my own, but I couldn’t just go walking into her office anymore.
So I needed to break in. And I needed help.
All of this was going to create some serious cognitive dissonance for the World Army cadet sitting in front of me.
But Justin spoke up first. “We did see those birds again. They were swarming up near that cross at Mont Royal.”
I almost dropped my mug. Instead, it clattered onto the small saucer and only spilled a little. “Did you go there?”
He nodded. “They had dispersed by the time we arrived. We didn’t find anything.”
No murders, no bodies. But the stymphalian birds had swarmed. Why? I needed to go there, to study the area with the kind of attention I suspected the World Army cadets hadn’t—and couldn’t have—given in the middle of the night.
Justin kept going. “Even so, I really feel like I’m helping, Isa. I feel like a part of something.”
I focused on him. For the first time since we’d arrived, his blue eyes had brightened. “What ‘something?’ ”
“A cause. I’m protecting this campus, and the people I care about.”
“A cause.”
He nodded, sitting straighter, as though the spirit of Sergeant Johnson stood next to us. “I’ve been a little uncertain about what I want to do with my life for … well, basically all of college. But I’m starting to see a future now.”
Unease filled me. “What kind of future?”
“As a protector. A few months ago, Kat and I dealt with, to put it bluntly, a superher
o infestation on campus.
“I remember.” I had walked by a crater the size of an elephant on my way to class that afternoon.
“Right. Well, back then I told her how much I would have loved to have superhero powers. Being a cadet makes me feel like I have those powers. Even if I am just a human. Part of it is just being with the other guys—the camaraderie and the commitment boosting us all.”
“Commitment to what?”
He paused. I knew he was reconsidering his first response to my question—figuring out a more delicate phrasing. “To protecting this campus. But also to protecting the world.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew the more I questioned him, the closer we would get to the truth of it. To the wedge that existed between us.
He was committed to protecting humans from Others.
I took another sip of my coffee, and in those few moments, I knew I couldn’t ask Justin to help me with this. It wasn’t just the cognitive dissonance of working for the World Army and undermining it all at the same time. It was that, in asking Justin to help me, I would be tainting the goodwill and sweet connection between us. I would be hurting us.
And no matter what, I didn’t want to hurt us.
I lowered my mug, pushing Serena Russo to the back of my mind. I allowed the encantado in me to emerge, leaning closer toward him. “You mentioned Kat. Did you and she talk?”
That brightness slipped from his eyes. “Not yet. I did get a call from a strange number, though.”
“And you think it was her calling from that strange number?”
“I don’t get many calls from random numbers in the middle of the night. And there was a voicemail … I briefly heard breathing before it cut off.”
“Her breathing?”
I waited, but Justin didn’t offer up anything else. I knew he didn’t want to admit how many times he’d probably listened to that voicemail, trying to decipher the breathing on the other end. It would be embarrassing.
So I only slipped my hand across the table and touched his fingers. “When will she be back?”
He responded to the touch, gripping my fingers in his warmth. His thumb slid over my hand in a reassuring way. “I don’t know. Soon, I hope. She and I need to talk.” He paused. “I think we’re going to break up.”