by Dan Wells
“The woman we’re looking for is named Ren,” I said.
“The demon queen?” He satisfied himself that I was not armed and moved on to Jasmyn. She didn’t look remotely comfortable letting a man touch her, but she bit her tongue and stared at the wall. I let Harris finish before I started talking again; Jasmyn jogged several steps away the instant she was allowed to.
“Ren doesn’t want to hurt anyone,” I said. “But there’s only three of them left and they feel kind of backed against a wall. Understandably, I think.”
Harris looked up as we heard more shouts and shooting in the distance. “I think our feelings are pretty damn understandable as well.”
“Everyone’s feeling are,” I said. “That’s what makes this so hard.”
“I don’t hear any more shooting,” said Jasmyn. “Or screaming.”
I nodded. “You think Dana’s gone?”
“Is that the hurricane girl?” asked Harris.
“Yeah.”
“She’s gone,” he said, “or she’s come inside.”
“Then we need to find Mr. Connor,” said Jasmyn. “We might still be able to save the agent he took.”
Harris sucked in a breath, considering his options and obviously hating them all. “Yeah,” he said at last, “you’re probably right.”
“You’re way too optimistic,” I said, “but you’re right anyway.” I started walking toward the door. “Mr. Connor’s building another muse; he needs them for anything deeper than computational thought.”
“What about Ren?” asked Harris. “I don’t want to leave a demon queen unaccounted for.”
“If she was attacking us we’d know,” I said, and I caught just the hint of an involuntary shudder that ran through Harris’s head and shoulders as I said it. He’d felt that same horrible thing I had. But Ren still wasn’t attacking.
We went into the hall, and Jasmyn picked up the rifle from the fallen FBI agent. Harris raised his eyebrow. “You know how to use that?”
“This is small-town America,” said Jasmyn. “Half the dates I’ve been on have been to a gun range.”
“Fair enough,” said Harris.
“Did you see which way he went?” I asked.
“This hallway,” said Harris, pointing toward the embalming room. We followed the hall cautiously, listening for sounds, but heard nothing. I checked in the embalming room; there were wet footprints on the tile, but no people or bodies.
“What else is down this hallway?” asked Harris.
“The crematorium,” said Jasmyn.
“Awesome,” Harris said, and shuddered again.
We crept softly down the hall, poking our heads into each room as we passed it—the restroom, the coatroom, a custodial closet—but Mr. Connor wasn’t in any of them. I looked for wet footprints in the carpet but couldn’t see any. No shouts or cries rang out in the distance; no bodies lay bleeding or soaking on the floor. We were alone in the house of the dead. With three Withered demons.
We approached the crematorium slowly, the last room at the end of the hall. The door hung open, and we could see now the faint hint of red and the subtle roar of flame. Someone had turned it on. I waved Harris and Jasmyn back a few steps, and peeked into the room as quietly as I could.
Blood covered the floor and walls, and a totem made of human flesh rose from the center of the floor.
Agent Gray’s body had been disassembled and the pieces had been carefully stacked and balanced in a grotesque new configuration. The torso, headless and limbless, sat at the base, with a careful arrangement of handless arms and footless legs forming an intricate web of arches and buttresses above it. Within this web was the head, too concealed to see clearly, and sprouting from it were hands and fingers and feet and toes, spraying out from the edges like leaves and spikes and horns. I couldn’t tell how they were attached. On one side of the room the oven burned fiercely, bathing the room in a hellish orange glow, and next to it, cross-legged on the ground, sat Mr. Connor, his fingers steepled solemnly in front of his face. Directly across from him, in the dancing light of the fire, the corpse-made monument cast a writhing, rippling shadow against the wall.
Mr. Connor watched that shadow and dreamed.
“Don’t come in unless you really want to see this,” I said, and then stepped further into the room. Agent Harris followed, his face grim and flat. A moment later, hesitant and wary, Jasmyn came in as well. She balked when she saw the display, but didn’t back out. Death was her life now, and corpses had become so clinical they couldn’t faze her. Even this one.
“What do you see?” asked Mr. Connor.
I looked at the body, at the muse he had so carefully constructed, and once again I had the unnerving thought that it meant something, that it was saying something in a language that my head or my heart or my soul could speak, even if I, myself, couldn’t remember a word of it. It was a hieroglyph, or a pictogram, or something even more primitive; it was a trail marker, flat stones stacked up to show where one hunter had passed before, so that another could follow behind. Slashes cut into a tree. I looked at my own arm, sliced with four neat lines by one killer, and raked with a chaos of scratches by another. Ancient carvings, to mark the path.
“It’s not true,” I said.
Mr. Connor stared at the shadows. “Nothing is.”
“It’s marking a path,” I said, “but the path isn’t true—it isn’t the right path just because it’s marked. We don’t have to follow it.”
Mr. Connor’s voice was low, like a drumbeat in the distance. “There’s only one path now. The only path we’ve ever had.” He rose to his feet, fluid and almost majestic in the firelight. “This is why I need the muse—to tell me what I see.”
“What do you see?” asked Jasmyn.
“Dancing shadows,” said Mr. Connor. “Real and unreal at once.”
“Like the Withered,” said Harris.
“Like everything,” said Mr. Connor, and then the bones slid out from his fingertips, as thin and precise as a sculptor’s tools. “I grew up in a cave, you know. Before the ritual, when I was still a child. It doesn’t mean anything, but this made me think of it.”
“We can get out of this,” I said, watching his claws warily, putting myself between him and the others. “We can make this right.”
“The only way out is down,” he said, and then he leapt toward me with a hiss. Harris and Jasmyn both fired their weapons, deafening me again, but the bullets simply punched through him and sparked against the cement wall behind, and Mr. Connor slashed at me with his blades. I tumbled backwards, falling to the ground, and Mr. Connor descended toward me with a soundless howl, but he never landed. A burst of wind filled the room, catching him up and surrounding him with a torrent of air and water. Dana had come. She held him in the air, invisible and intangible and impervious to his flailing claws, and then the water condensed out of the air and covered his head. He fought and slashed and kicked and screamed, but no sound came out; he clawed at his own throat, desperate for air, but the only thing constricting it was water, and all he did was slash his own face, his own skin, his own neck and throat and sinew. Water and blood leaked out only to flow back in, forced through him by the wind, and then his struggles grew weaker and his arms fell and then he stopped altogether. And then it wasn’t blood leaking from his wounds but soulstuff—ash and grease and tar, as black as the darkest shadow. He crumbled before our eyes, shriveling in on himself at the heart of the raging storm. And when the storm suddenly abated, it wasn’t a body that fell, but a slick, runny blob. It splashed against the floor, spattering us with sludge both warm and cold at once.
Mr. Connor was dead.
CHAPTER 20
Dana appeared in the room, condensing like dew from the moisture in the air. Her bare feet touched down lightly on the floor, and she watched us with eyes sunk deep into her skull. Her hair hung tangled and stringy in a frame around her face.
We looked back, too frightened to speak.
“Is it sa
fe to assume,” said Harris at last, “that if you wanted us dead we’d already be dead?”
“You’re safe for now,” said Dana. Her tattered dress dripped tiny drops of water on the floor, splashing and mixing with the sludge from Mr. Connor’s death. The muse, toppled by the storm, sat in meaningless, powerless heaps upon the floor.
“So, what can we do,” asked Jasmyn, “to make sure that doesn’t change?”
“Nothing,” said Dana. “Stay away from me, I guess.”
“Is that a threat?” asked Harris.
“It’s a weather report,” said Dana, and sighed. “No pun intended.”
“She won’t be lucid forever,” I said, watching her carefully. “Maybe longer than normal, after so many victims, but it’ll fade eventually.”
“Her mind?” asked Harris.
“Her control,” I said, and took a step toward her. “How long does it last, usually?”
“There’s no way to predict it,” she said. “Part of the deal, I suppose. Part of the chaos. I didn’t want rules; I didn’t want to feel trapped in somebody else’s way of thinking. I wanted to be free, I guess, and now I’m free of everything.” She breathed in and tried to smile, and the feigned good humor was more painful to look at than the sadness. “My mind’s so open I can’t hold anything in it.”
“Then Mr. Connor was right,” said Harris. “The only way out is down.” He looked at me, so tired and frustrated and broken he was practically laughing. “Don’t you get it, John? We have to keep fighting them because they have to keep fighting us. It’s never stopped for ten thousand years, and it’s not going to stop now just because we want it to.”
“I came to the same conclusion,” said Ren, and we spun around, guns raised, to see her standing in the doorway. Agent Harris maneuvered himself closer to the wall, where he could see both women at once, and moved his eyes and gun back and forth between them, twitchy and terrified.
“Either one of them could kill us in a second if they wanted,” I told him, “but they don’t. So just stay calm.”
“She just said she’s planning to fight,” said Harris.
“I didn’t say it to you,” said Ren, and her voice held the authority of ten thousand years. “John’s the one who deserves an explanation—you keep quiet and try not to attract my attention.”
“Maybe Dana can’t control herself,” I said to Ren, “but you can. You’re smart, you’re powerful, you’re an ancient goddess, for crying out loud.”
“That’s exactly why I can’t follow your rules,” said Ren. “I have to be me—I can’t let other people make all my choices for me.”
“So, you choose to kill?” I said. “You choose to fight and hurt and maim and destroy?”
“I choose to live the way I want to live,” said Ren. “That’s never been any more violent than anybody else, but the world still wants to kill me for it.”
“I can think of three people you tried to kill in the last six hours alone,” said Harris.
“I was trying to help,” said Ren fiercely, but then her voice softened, and she looked at her palms. “It just … got out of hand.”
“So, you fight and you die,” said Jasmyn. “John and Harris and I here, presumably, and then you later on, and what does that get us?”
“It gets us freedom,” said Ren. “And when we finally die, at least we die making our own choices, under our own control.”
“You’re not under your own control,” said Dana. “And you’re not free.”
“I’m the mother of darkness,” said Ren. “Who do you think is controlling me?”
“Pride,” said Dana. “Selfishness.”
“I’ve heard the church-and-sin talk plenty of times before,” said Ren. “You can save it for next time you give someone a speech.”
“You don’t want to be controlled?” asked Dana. “I gave up my control when I did your ritual, and I lived my life without anyone telling me what to do. And it wasn’t a life worth living.” She started walking as she spoke, tracing a small arc across the floor of the room; Harris tracked her with his gun. “Choosing to follow rules isn’t giving up control,” she said, “it’s controlling yourself. That doesn’t seem like a superpower, but try it for sixty years and tell me what you think about it then.” She stopped in front of the oven, and her shadow fell across the room like a storm cloud. “I’ve killed five people this morning, one of them a Withered.” She stared into the flames as she spoke. “Ten thousand years old. I have more control now than I’ve ever had before.”
“What are you going to with it?” asked Harris. I didn’t say a word, because I already knew.
“Honey,” said Ren, “don’t you dare do what I think you’re going to do.”
“I’m going to do what you won’t do,” said Dana, holding a hand to the heat of the flames. “I’m going to break the cycle. You can’t stop me from killing, Agent Harris, but I can stop myself.”
“No!” shouted Ren, but Dana seemed to explode into a storm again, a furious maelstrom of wind and water and chaos—but now, for one brief window of time, controlled by a powerful presence of mind. Her storm surged into the oven, hissing and steaming as the water expanded, but the intelligence behind it kept pulling back in, reining in the clouds and forcing them over and over into the heat of the flames. Steam hit the ceiling and condensed into big, heavy drops, only to come back into the fire again, over and over, endless and relentless, until the cloud grew smaller and the steam grew darker, and the harsh, acrid smell of tar filled the room like a toxic mist. I walked to the side of the oven and turned it off, and the flames disappeared. The inside of the oven was coated with soulstuff, brittle and burned into charcoal.
Ren was crying.
Agent Harris turned his gun on her.
“Don’t do it,” I said.
“Last one left,” said Harris. “I can end it here.”
“Don’t end it by killing,” I pleaded, and looked at Ren. “End it by choosing.”
“I don’t want to burn myself,” said Ren.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “You just have to promise. Don’t hurt anyone—don’t destroy any lives, don’t control any minds. I know that’s all in your nature, but you can be better than that.” I stopped talking and stared at her, trying to make her understand. “Ren,” I said, and then, after a pause, “Margo.”
She looked up.
“I’m the worst person I know,” I said. “If I can do it, anyone can.”
“That can’t possibly be true,” said Margo. “Most of the people you know are monsters.”
“Everyone’s worth saving,” I said. “Even monsters.”
Margo looked at me, and I looked at her, and I thought about what I was doing. Did I really know? Was I really certain she could change? Was any of this really worth it? I looked at her, and I thought about my mother.
And I knew.
“Let me stay with her,” I said. “Tell the FBI that we’re dead, and that the war’s over, and leave us here. You can drop in every now and then if you want, but I’ll stay here, and I’ll help her stay clean.”
“I can’t have a family,” said Margo. “It’s part of the pact—I gave that up. I can’t have children, and I can’t be needed.”
“I can be,” I said simply. “Maybe that’ll be enough.”
We watched each other, and Harris watched us, his eyes flicking back and forth from Margo to me to Margo.
“It’s not that easy,” he said. “For all the reasons I told you before. The government wants you locked in a cell that nobody even knows exists.”
“But you know me better than they do,” I said. “Death follows me because I’ve been hunting Withered, but if I’m not then it won’t. I’ll stay here—you know I will.” I looked at him. “You’re a criminal profiler, and I’m practically your entire career. As depressing as this sounds, you know me better than anyone in the world.”
He stared at me and then shook his head—not in argument, but in disbelief.
&nbs
p; “You’d be under constant, omnipresent surveillance,” said Harris. “And you, personally, would be responsible for everything. If I have to come back here next week or month or whatever for some kind of mind-controlled, arsonist, crazy-ass murder spree, I’m going to be very disappointed. And that disappointment will be measured in platoons of active-duty soldiers, adequately equipped to kill Godzilla.”
“We’ll be fine,” said Jasmyn.
“You’re not a part of this arrangement,” said Harris.
“My best friends are a serial killer and the Mother of Darkness,” said Jasmyn. “Try to stop me.”
Harris rolled his eyes but holstered his pistol. “Fine. But give me that gun back. And be prepared for a very long interview process before this is all over. Five FBI agents died on this property today, and even if I can manage to fake your death, John, this isn’t going to go away easy.”
“I believe in you,” I said. “Super-Best-Friends Powers, activate!”
“Shut up.”
CHAPTER 21
“Say it with me,” I said. “‘Today I will think good thoughts and smile at everyone I see.’”
Margo stared at me across her desk. “You know I hate this.”
“More than government execution?” I asked. “Because that’s a lot of hatred.”
“It’s getting up there,” said Margo, and she grimaced. “Maybe it’s time for another pressure valve. What’s it been, five months? Six?”
“Five months, three weeks, and two days,” I said. I adjusted my new hearing aid—too many gunshots in an enclosed space do some pretty permanent damage. “One hundred and sixty-eight days with neither a workplace injury nor a rage-fueled binge of pent-up supernatural terrorism.”
“You make that sound like a long time,” said Margo.
“You want a button?” I asked. “Alcoholics Anonymous gives you a button when you hit a milestone—”
“Don’t get smart with me.”
“I can’t help it.”
“‘Helping it’ is the entire point of this conversation,” said Margo. “Show some self-control before I give you extra mopping duty or something.”