by Tricia Owens
Elliott placed his palm flat on the glass as he looked out. “The Count happened. He told me later that my boss tried to stake him.”
“Do you believe that?”
Elliott shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “I try to.”
But he didn’t, and neither did I. For some reason, the Count had killed the previous Head of Security because of his treatment of Elliott. And that worried me, because it meant the Count could react in anger or jealousy. It meant what had been done to that body tonight could have been committed by the vampire despite Elliott’s insistence that the Count was always in control.
“I don’t believe that anyone is purely evil,” I said carefully. “They can do bad things and be motivated by horrible reasons, but at one point they were good. I believe that even of supernatural beings like witches and vampires.”
“I don’t know if the Count is good.” Elliott scuffed the brick floor with his boots. “He’s taken a lot of lives, but like I said, it’s because he needs blood in order to survive.”
“But your old boss…”
“Yeah.” Elliott sighed heavily. “I think—I think that was for me. Because the Count maybe sorta is curious about me. Or something.”
Or something.
“And you’re curious about him, too, I take it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Sometimes.”
I just nodded. I wasn’t about to judge his odd relationship with the vampire. I didn’t know the Count at all. Besides, I had a crush on a guy whose fiancée was a witch.
“I’m sorry that I’m so wishy-washy about this.” Elliott turned his back on the view. “He’s hard to explain to people. It’s easier if you were able to talk to him yourself.” Elliott said this hesitantly, as if unsure whether that would actually be helpful. “He’s more than what he seems.”
“I’d like to find out for myself. See what you see in him. And also find out what happened to that guest tonight.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Elliott promised, looking eager and maybe relieved that I hadn’t condemned him for his feelings for the vampire.
I hoped I did get the chance to speak to the Count—not because of his relationship to Elliott, but because this killing bothered me. Either the Count was a vicious beast that had no business roaming freely through the Sinistera, or something else was in here with us.
Chapter 4
When the sun fell on my face as I stepped out of the hotel, I sighed with contentment. I was struck by the sort of rush a prisoner probably experienced after decades in prison. The Sinistera, gorgeous thanks to its Art Deco influences and lush application of color, was far from a prison, but it was dark and cold in a way that chilled me from the inside out. Not to mention I believed that there was a possibility that one of these days I might not be allowed to leave the hotel at all.
The sidewalk around me was empty, which always seemed to be the case. The Sinistera existed to repulse. The pedestrians who’d gone out of their way to avoid walking near the hotel were across the street, passing by a bar that sat in the Sinistera’s shadow. I wouldn’t be visiting Ozium or its bartender, my friend Jasper, just yet, but I hoped to later.
I had an obligation to fulfill elsewhere, first. I jumped on my scooter and headed out of downtown.
My scooter originally had been red, but I’d meddled the paint so it was now hunter green. I’d also changed the color and shape of my helmet and meddled the license plate, but these attempts at deception wouldn’t get me far if a determined police officer pulled me over. As far as I knew, I was wanted for the murder of Mr. Morrison, my school counselor, and I was probably wanted if not for the murder of, then at least for questioning in, the murder of Eric Snelling, a businessman whom the demon leaper had possessed in order to murder a witch.
Murder was a pretty bad rap, and there was the matter of all the illegal IMT work I was doing, which would compound any possible sentence. So I had to do what I could to avoid running into or drawing the attention of Victory City law enforcement. One of these days, I feared, my luck was going to run out.
It didn’t take too long before I was zipping into the suburbs and through roundabouts that brought me under the protective porte-cochere of the Dandelion Home. After parking, I took a look around to see if I was followed, but I hadn’t noticed anyone suspicious on the ride in and I didn’t see any who fit the bill now.
Inside, I checked in at reception and then went straight to my grandmother’s room. The blinds were open and the television was on, but my grandmother was fast asleep where she lay propped up in bed.
My heart melted slightly upon seeing her. With the way the sunlight highlighted the white curls around her head, she looked to me like a weary angel who had come to rest after a long battle against the demons. It wasn’t pure fantasy: she had done that exact thing fifteen years ago. She was here now because of it.
I pulled up a chair and rested my hand near her wrinkled, veiny one. I wanted to take hers in mine, but I didn’t want to wake her. So I simply sat and watched over her, feeling content now that I was earning money to cover her stay here and could afford the medication that kept her magic under control.
My mind was drifting, going over the events of my shift last night, when I gradually began to notice that the room was changing. It was subtle at first. By the time I devoted my full attention, everything behind me—the rest of the room and the door leading to the hallway—was gone, replaced by sky and an awe-inspiring view.
It was also a frightening one.
I frantically grabbed the edge of my grandmother’s bed as I gaped down through the non-existent floor at the street which was forty floors below us. My chair and my grandmother’s bed teetered precariously on the edge of a skyscraper’s roof. As I looked around, wide-eyed, the last vestiges of the room at Dandelion faded, replaced by sky and the peaked tops of Victory City’s downtown buildings.
My grandmother was a Telepathic Projectionist. When she was younger, she’d been the strongest TP in the world thanks to the enhancement made to her DNA by military scientists. But she shouldn’t have been able to project right now. I’d paid for the powerful and expensive suppressant that was supposed to prevent this from happening.
I looked for the nurse call button but it had disappeared along with the rest of the room’s contents. That left only one person who could put a stop to this dangerous projection.
I wasn’t surprised to look up and find my grandmother’s eyes partly open. She needed to be conscious to project her realities into my mind, which was why a sedative would have been handy at the moment.
“Hi, Grandma,” I said shakily, with a smile on my face as I tried to convince myself I wasn’t at risk of falling to my death. A telepathic projection wasn’t real; she and I were still in her room at Dandelion. But as long as my eyes and mind believed what I saw, I could die from whatever occurred within it. “Are you awake?”
She smiled weakly, still obviously disoriented. I couldn’t tell if she recognized who I was.
I took her hand and stroked it with growing urgency. “Grandma, it’s me. It’s Arrow.”
She parted her lips slowly and then whispered, “Is it really you? What are you doing here? You’re not meant to fight with us.”
“I came to tell you that the war is over, Grandma. We can all stop fighting now.”
“It’s over?” Her eyes shimmered but her white eyebrows drew together. “But how is that possible? We haven’t stopped the demons yet.”
I looked away from her to peer over the edge of the platform. It was a harrowing sight and my hand involuntarily tightened around my grandmother’s. Far, far below, ocean water had begun to race and churn through the streets, shoving cars into each other and shattering the windows of buildings. It was like a slow-motion catastrophe, and yet the damage being caused was real and horrific despite occurring so slowly.
“There aren’t any demons,” I told my grandmother. “It’s okay. They’re all…”
I trailed off when I saw it.
My heart pounded against my rib cage as I watched the smooth-skinned creature leap from floating car to floating car, its path dictated by the people who were swept along by the water. The demon slashed at these people’s heads with its clawed fingers, turning the water red, before moving on to new targets.
Only once had I seen what I thought was an ice demon. It appeared in a surveillance footage photo possessed by my friend, Wolfgang Wagner. With so much fake news, the photo could have easily been dismissed as a hoax. But here I was seeing the truth, re-created from the mind of someone who had witnessed the demons firsthand. It looked exactly like the demon in Wolfgang’s photo.
“I see one,” I murmured in awe to my grandmother.
“They’re quick,” she replied. “Not many who saw them lived to tell anyone. So terribly sad.”
So terribly horrific.
“This is what they looked like?” I wanted irrefutable confirmation, because this one deceit could unlock others that the government promoted. “Their skin, their bodies—just like this?”
She didn’t turn her head to look over her bed, but her pale blue eyes lost their focus as though she were seeing the projection in her mind. “Yes. Just like that. So awful.”
I was conflicted. Being proved right about a terrible lie that had resulted in thousands of deaths wasn’t anything to feel proud about.
But I was right. The so-called ice demon down below wouldn’t have survived at the polar ice caps the way the government claimed. It was skinned like a silver reptile: completely hairless. It was over seven feet tall, its body and limbs pure muscle but gangly. I watched it jump nimbly from car to car, attacking poor, water-swept people, and I compared the demon to a large-eyed lemur, only skinny and vicious. This thing belonged in a jungle, not the snow.
“That didn’t come from the ice,” I declared. “That means the demons came from elsewhere, didn’t they, Grandma?”
“That bad scientist caused them.”
“The demons weren’t embedded in the ice,” I repeated patiently. “So when Dr. Febrero melted the ice, he didn’t free these creatures. They came from somewhere else.”
“The bad scientist,” she repeated with consternation. “He did it. Talked to them. We knew, but we weren’t allowed to tell.”
That had me sitting up straighter and temporarily ignoring the danger of my position. Any mention of a cover-up tended to ping my radar like a sonar blast.
“What do you mean by he talked to them? Talked to who?” I looked around with exaggeration, acting as thought I were checking for spies. “It’s okay. We’re all alone. No one will know.”
Her hand clenched around mine with sudden strength. “There was a man. The bad scientist. He made so many, and all were from our nightmares. Especially the small one.” She clenched her eyes shut. “Oh, the small one!”
“Grandma, it’s okay,” I soothed. “They’re all gone.”
“His black eyes, so dark…He talked to them, made them dance. But the small one wouldn’t.” She took a shuddery breath, her eyes opening wide. “It was him. He made them dance, but no one knows.”
I held my tongue, unsure of what I’d heard. Was she still referring to Dr. Febrero? She’d never before mentioned another scientist. But black eyes—Nathaniel’s were a bright bottle green. Had he gotten those eyes from his mother or from his father? If he’d inherited Dr. Febrero’s eye coloring, then my grandmother was talking about someone new.
A sudden strong gust rocked my grandmother’s bed. I yelled as it began to tilt.
“No!” I threw my upper half over my grandmother’s lap, arms stretched to the frame on the other side of her, trying to use my weight to balance the bed. But it wasn’t enough.
We slowly tipped over the edge.
“Grandma!” I shouted. “Make it stop! Stop it before we fall!”
“But the birds will save us,” she said with a smile as she reached to the sky. “They did before.”
“The pigeons aren’t here! This isn’t real!”
We went over.
Once upon a time, I’d jumped out of a fifth-story window and survived by meddling an office chair into a hang-glider. In the terrifying seconds as my bed bound grandmother and I plummeted to the street below, I couldn’t think clearly enough to figure out how to meddle another glider from the material at hand and with an elderly woman who didn’t possess the strength to grip a pole.
So I went sloppy. As we hurtled toward the churning, rushing floodwaters below, I frantically meddled the frame of my grandmother’s bed while I dove over her to shield her with my body. When we struck the water I grunted as I slammed face first into the mattress above her shoulder. Water poured over the bow of the metal dingy that I’d managed to meddle at the very last second. The boat drove deep, driving beneath the surface. A torrent of ice water closed over us. My grandmother’s body jerked violently beneath me as icy fire slapped our faces and tunneled up into our noses—
—and then we were both lying on her bed back in Dandelion.
“Cold!” she exclaimed.
My heartbeat pounded behind my eyes as I heaved for breath. My body continued to shake as it struggled to accept that we hadn’t plummeted off the top of a skyscraper and nearly drowned. The fantasy had been too real. Part of me wanted to cry. Another part wanted to scream.
It took a while, but eventually I could laugh, delirious, and hug her. “We would have been swimming in the deep end if you hadn’t pulled us out of that, Grandma,” I whispered against her ear.
Bewildered, she touched her hair and face, unable to understand why she was no longer wet.
I laughed again, but it held a tinge of anguish. I could have died just then, and she wouldn’t have realized it. It was a terrible thought and one I didn’t want to entertain for long. I carefully climbed off her and stood beside the bed on shaky legs.
It felt good to be standing on solid ground again, but the fear lingered that she would drag me into another projection. I had never feared my grandmother before. It made me feel ill to do so, and my guilt was enormous.
“Grandma, have you been having many projections lately?”
“The dreams come all the time now,” she told me happily, apparently having already forgotten about falling from a building and nearly drowning.
“They shouldn’t,” I said, my palms growing damp.
She yawned and her eyes fell shut. “I’m going to sleep now, Arrow. I hope I dream of nice things.”
After a pause, I bent over and kissed her forehead. “I hope you do, too. I’ll see you again soon. Love you.”
“I will always love you, dearest Arrow.”
When I could tell she’d fallen asleep again, I left the room and went searching through the corridors and at the nurse’s desk. When I couldn’t find who I was looking for, I knocked on the door of one of the offices before poking my head in.
“Sorry to disturb you, Director Endicott,” I said to the middle-aged man seated behind the desk. “I tried to find Nurse Melody but I didn’t see her.”
He smiled at me and waved me in. “Arrow, please come in. Shut the door behind you. It’s good to see you. Nurse Melody is on leave at the moment. You visited Elise?”
I took a seat in the chair across from him. “Yes. She’s doing well, except a minute ago she projected us both into a scene from the war.”
His plain face reflected faint surprise, but not the alarm I expected from him considering that the last time my grandmother had projected she’d frightened the staff into worrying the entire facility would be destroyed.
“That’s unexpected,” he said.
A great disappointment washed over me. “You’re not telling me the truth.”
He had the grace to look chagrined. “Arrow, you don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“My parents and my grandmother didn’t, so why should I be any different? Well, ignoring the fact that I’m not the hero that they were.” I grimaced slightly and leaned forward, my elbows on my knees.
“Why is she projecting? I’m paying for her suppressant.”
“Yes, and we’re administering it regularly.”
“Then what’s going on? She shouldn’t be able to use her power like this.” I’d gone to great lengths to ensure this, so along with being worried, I was angry. “No way could she have done what she just did while on her medication.”
“She’s been administered the suppressant,” Endicott said, “but when a person has been under the influence of a medication for extended periods of time the body may adapt to it, in which case treatment needs to be modified.”
“Nothing else will keep my grandmother from projecting. Nothing that won’t kill her, anyway.”
“I agree. This particular suppressant is best suited for her condition. We may need to alter her dosage, however, and monitor how she responds to it.”
I nodded, but I could see that he was on edge. Director Endicott was one of the few people in the world that I slotted into the Allies category. He had worked with me to keep my grandmother’s presence at Dandelion a secret and he had kept her here even when I’d been too broke to pay for her medication. But something was on his mind, and I thought I knew what it could be.
“Someone came to see my grandmother.” I watched him closely. “Someone who shouldn’t have known she was here. A woman around my age, with long red hair.”
He flinched. “Yes. I am aware of this woman.”
“Her name is Calia Uroskova and she’s dangerous, Director. I need to know what she wanted.”
He drummed his fingers on the desktop. His nails, I noticed, were bitten to the quick.
“She threatened the staff unless I told her Elise’s name and her connection to you. I apologize, Arrow, but I had no choice.”
Knowing Calia’s complete disregard for life or anyone’s feelings, I didn’t hold it against him. “I understand. Like I said, she’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous or not, I should have informed you of this. It’s a security breach, and especially with Elise being who she is…I failed you. I’m sorry.”