by Nyna Queen
His stomach growled again, persistently. Max screwed up his face.
“I hope she comes back soon and brings some nice food,” he said to no one in particular. “I’m starving.”
Josepha paused her pacing and looked at him for the first time since they were alone.
“I hope we don’t end up as the food,” she muttered, putting her arms tighter around her waist.
Max raised his head, intrigued. “You don’t think they … like … eat people, do you?” The thought was appalling … and just a bit fascinating.
He peeked up at his sister and could tell that she didn’t think it was fascinating at all. In fact, she looked a bit like she was going to be sick; she was pale and she hadn’t even used any of that shiny white powder she and her girly friends had started putting on their faces some time ago. When he had asked her once what it was good for, she just stuck her nose up and told him he wouldn’t understand anyway. Well, she was right. He didn’t. But then, girls were a mystery, even adult men said so.
Josepha said nothing, but turned to the window, staring at something only she could see.
To occupy himself, Max got up and started inspecting the furnishings in the apartment. Alex couldn’t have lived here long, he decided, as he walked along the bare cream walls and mostly empty shelves. When people lived in a place for some time, they’d put up pictures of their family and friends and decorate the space with those little knickknacks and thingamabobs, they had collected over the time. Most people did, anyway. Not that Alex was like most people.
Max let his fingers run along the lining of a cupboard, opened a drawer—and sucked in a breath.
Ooohh. Knives! Lots and lots of shiny pretty knives in neat rows. It was all sorts of them: big and small, straight and crooked. One of them was so tiny, it reminded him of the letter opener from the desk in his father’s study.
He goggled at the assortment, unable to decide what to look at first. There was a huge one with a black handle that gleamed like polished ebony. Another was thin, almost elegant, with a fancy handle made of thin metal strands, with two spikes on either side of the handle that would make a fine additional protection if someone tried to wrench it from your grip. A third, which he liked in particular, had a nasty looking crooked blade that slightly turned at its edge, tapering into a tooth-like ending that looked wickedly sharp to the touch and reminded him of Alex’s spider teeth. A dangerous, marvelous weapon.
Heart thumping, Max reached out and gingerly picked it up. It wasn’t that heavy at all. The light reflected on the gleaming surface of the steel, winking at him like a grinning star.
“Don’t touch anything!” Josepha snapped from behind him.
Max rolled his eyes. Why did people always tell him not to touch anything? Not to run, not to jump. Not to speak too loudly. Sometimes he wondered if they’d only be satisfied if he stopped breathing.
And also, Alex hadn’t said for him not to touch anything. It was her house, after all.
“I just want to take a look at it.”
“Looking doesn’t involve your hands,” his sister said in a stern voice. “Put it back.”
“But Joooosy.”
“Put it back, Maxwell! Now!”
He sighed. Why did she always have to ruin all his fun?
“And you know you’re not supposed to call me that,” Josy noted, while she absently turned a little green plant on a stool so that it got a better angle to the light.
Max shrugged. “You told her to call you that.”
His sister gave him a withering glance and he quickly ducked his head.
“And I know you prefer it,” he murmured, pouting a little. It wasn’t his fault their parents had called her Josepha Marilyn Constance Arabella Dianne. He couldn’t possibly call her that! It sounded like a trained poodle. Not that he’d tell her so, or she’d give him that evil elder-sister stare again.
Max sucked on his lower lip. A few months ago, she wouldn’t have minded when he’d called her Josy—at least in private.
She could be fun, his sister, he reflected. They used to play a lot together. But lately, she’d sniff her nose at the games she’d thought fun before, calling them childish and stupid. Instead, she spent more and more time sitting with the adults doing boring things like drinking tea. He hated drinking tea. Not because he didn’t like tea. Tea was okay, although he preferred cocoa. But when you were “drinking tea,” you weren’t just drinking tea. No, it meant sitting together for hours, talking about lame topics and not being allowed to run.
He didn’t get why Josy would trade their adventures for something like that. She said that in “times like these” it was important for the whole family to make the right impression.
Impression. Another of these adult words he didn’t quite get. It usually involved a lot of fussing to make things appear a certain way, when, in fact, they weren’t. From his perspective, it wasn’t much different from lying. But lying wasn’t okay. Making an impression was. The distinction seemed fuzzy to him. How was one supposed to know which was which? He’d once suggested to his parents wouldn’t it be easier if people just said what they meant and had been told that “unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as that” and that “he would understand when he got older.” In his opinion becoming older just made life more complicated.
“Maxwell—the knife!”
He looked down and realized he was still holding it. His sister started toward him. Max sighed again, and, with another longing glance at the blade, he put it back into the drawer. Josy came to a halt beside him and gasped, her eyes widening at the sight of the knives—but not in amazement.
“Merciful Mother,” she whispered. “Why would a person need so many knives?”
Max didn’t think there was anything wrong with having many knives. Maybe Alex just liked them. There was nothing wrong with liking knives. He did, too.
His sister didn’t share that liking, obviously. She looked close to a panic.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “She said she wouldn’t hurt us.”
Josy gave a short, hysterical laugh. “Of course, she’d say that!”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s a shaper!” She said it as if that explained everything. Maybe it did.
“So?”
“So?” Josy blinked incredulously. “So we cannot trust anything she says!”
“Why not?”
She threw her hands up and huffed, making it clear that she thought he was rather slow on the uptake. “You know how they are. They are dangerous, bestial creatures. You’ve seen those—” She put her curled fingers to her mouth mimicking those spider graspers and shuddered. Oh yes. Yes, he had. And he’d be the hero among his friends for at least a whole month after he’d shared that particular bit of awesome stuff. “That shaper-woman—”
“Alex,” he corrected her.
“What?”
“Her name is Alex.”
Josy waved a distracted hand. “Whatever—my point is, the likes of her cannot be trusted. There’s no say what she’ll do if she sees her own benefit in it. They murder people and cause nothing but trouble. It’s what they do.”
Max frowned. He’d gotten his fair share of “eat up” and “don’t go astray” or the shaper will catch you. People said many things about shapers, but Alex … she wasn’t at all like that. True, those teeth were scary as hell, and she had killed those bad men who had followed them, but only because they had tried to kill them first. And apart from that, she had been really nice to them. He liked that she called him Max. When adults called him Maxwell it always sounded like he’d been up to something.
“I like her,” he declared. “She saved us, and she is sooo pretty.”
Josy snorted. “That doesn’t mean we can trust her”
“Well, I trust her. She promised to help us get home.” A promise was not a small thing. You made one, you had to keep it. It was what his father always said to him.
“Great Mother, you’re so naive.�
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“And you are mean and suspicious.” He stuck out his lower lip. “You sound like Grandmother just now.”
His sister flinched visibly, and he knew it had been a blow below the belt. He almost regretted saying it, but she hadn’t been very nice to him either, had she?
She stared down at her hands and bit her lip, her throat working. He wouldn’t say sorry, though, Max thought stubbornly. He hadn’t started it.
Looking away, his eyes fell on the knives again, but this time he felt a little twinge of uncertainty settling in his stomach.
“You don’t think she’s gonna help us?” he asked in a small voice.
Josy curled a strand of hair around her left pinky. It was what she did when she felt self-conscious. “I’m just saying that we cannot trust her.”
Max tried to wrap his head around the distinction. “Is that why you didn’t want to tell her our name?”
His sister looked at him sharply. “She knows more than enough already. If she knew …” She shuddered.
“But if we told her,” he insisted, “she could—”
“No.”
“But—”
“No!” Josy said firmly. “She must not know.”
He knew that tone. It was that no-further discussion-tone, she’d copied from the adults. It would be no use arguing. Max still didn’t think Alex would hurt them, but he also knew that his parents would want him to listen to his elder sister.
“So, what are we gonna do now?”
Josy wrapped her arms around herself again.
“I don’t think we have much of a choice,” she whispered, looking horrified at her own words. “At the moment, she’s our best option.”
CHIEF Donnaghue took a sip of his coffee. Not because he really was thirsty, but rather to appear occupied. In fact, it was almost completely cold and tasted a bit like dishwater.
He took another sip and grimaced. Putting the to-go mug down on one of the high tables of the examination unit, he made his way over toward his lieutenant Keane, who was standing at the sealed door of the Jester’s Inn, looking every bit as grim as he felt. Couldn’t blame him. He was a good man—a good officer, too, he was. And as such, he had his pride.
A fresh wind kept coming from the sea, sweeping through the city and pulling forcefully at the red barrier tape they had spanned spaciously around the crime scene, making it flap loudly in the glum silence of the afternoon, a stark spot of color in this gray smudge of a street. The scene was mostly deserted, except for a few persistent bystanders lurking outside the barrier tape, no doubt, trying to get another glimpse at the corpses. Onlookers! It was a liability they had to deal with at almost every crime scene. Donnaghue shook his head, disgusted. Some people just had no respect at all.
They were out of luck, though, since the dead bodies had long been carried into the portable laboratory tent, where trueborn scientists were working on them with their magical gadgets. His eyes uncomfortably skimmed over the stiff, sterile white walls of the construction, where all you could see was a pale light shining through the translucent barrier.
He had seen the bodies before they had been covered up with black shrouds. Quite a nasty sight, it had been, too. He moved his shoulders uneasily. He’d heard what they were capable of, these shapers. And now he’d seen his own proof. Such a mess, and two children right in the middle of it. Just imagining it being his own little girl gave him heartburn.
A sharp gust of wind ripped at his navy parker and he pulled it tighter around his middle. Stuffing his hands into the pockets, he stepped beside his lieutenant.
“Anything yet?” he asked quietly.
Lieutenant Keane spat to the side, making his attitude on the situation visibly clear. “As if I’d be the first to know.”
Donnaghue understood the silent anger in his voice. It was the same he felt.
He and his men had barely cordoned off the scene of the crime and instigated the search, when they had swarmed the crime site—his crime site—waving their fancy little cards into his face and in a trice, he had been cast aside like a disposable tool. A hard, bitter lump swelled in his stomach. It was probably deemed a courtesy that he and his men were allowed to stay at the scene at all.
Trueborns! Donnaghue watched the guardaí in their dark uniforms busily strutting around the scene. It was always difficult when their lot got involved in an investigation, but so far, the relationship, if tense, had always been a courteous one and at least for the sake of public appearances his authority as the leader of the local forces, had principally been accepted. But today …
The lump in his stomach hardened like an ulcer close to rupturing. He felt like a child who wasn’t allowed in the sandbox. It was stupid to view it like that, but he couldn’t help it. As if he didn’t know how to do his job! This wasn’t his first capital crime offense and although it certainly was one of the more messed up ones, he’d handled worse cases throughout his career and there had never been any complaint about the way he went about things. And now—ousted as if he was a recruit who was still wet behind the ears. It made his teeth itch. But what could he do, really? He had the strong feeling that if he so much as opened his mouth, these trueborn busybodies wouldn’t hesitate to completely remove him from the crime scene. And he wouldn’t risk that. No sir! Not from his own crime scene.
Keane moved uneasily from one foot to the other beside him.
“Those things … they just give me the creeps,” he muttered, nodding to their left.
Donnaghue followed his gaze and felt a chill run down his spine. A giant black creature glared at him from less than ten feet away. The dark hound pulled back its flews, revealing a forest of finger-long ivory fangs dripping saliva.
Roughly the size of a calf and packed with thick slabs of muscle underneath the short black fur, the hounds were naturally designed to wrestle down mountain felines and rip a boar in half with one bite. A spiked collar circled its massive neck, with two wrist-thick chains attached to it, held by one man on either side of the beast. The handlers, intimidating in both build and appearance—the kind of men one wouldn’t like to meet in the dark on your own—looked strangely dwarfed by the hound in their middle, like two toddlers who’d accidentally snatched the leash of a combat dog.
With a wave of anxiety, Donnaghue wondered if they would be able to hold the beast if it really set its mind to breaking free. The silver whistles around the handlers’ necks, that were meant to make them heel, didn’t look too impressive when you saw the creature they were supposed to subdue.
Those dark hounds were a special breed—pure blooded, carefully chosen and purposefully trained by the trueborns. Their particular sensitivity to magical residues made them valuable tools in cases like this one. He saw their usefulness, but that didn’t mean he felt comfortable around them, either.
The beast gave a low growl and turned, dragging his handlers with him. Despite its bulk, it moved like a slinking shadow; a terrible, deadly shadow …
Donnaghue watched it vanish behind the laboratory tent. While this one was guarding the crime scene, two more of them were prowling the surrounding streets with their handlers, sniffing for traces.
He opened his mouth to assure his lieutenant that they were perfectly safe, when he himself wasn’t too sure about that, when there suddenly was a loud sizzle. Both men gave a start. A cloud of bluish smoke rose behind the translucent walls of the laboratory tent, accompanied by a pungent stench of sulfur and burning flesh. The air crackled with energy that had the hairs on his whole body stand on end.
“How can they still be preserving traces?” Keane mumbled, eying the smoke almost as uneasily as the hounds. “What exactly are they doing in there?”
Keane, like most of his younger officers, had little experience with trueborns, and his attitude toward them ranged from wary to openly fearful. Donnaghue had dealt with trueborns before, but he, too, sometimes found their methods … unsettling.
He scratched the back of his neck, watching the smoke curl
in the wind, like dark snakes crawling out of their wicker baskets. “As far as I’ve been informed, they are working on extracting the gene material of that shaper to run a comparison with their database, to see if there is any match.”
And until they found something … More useless waiting. More time feeling like a square peg in a round hole. At least at the start, he and his men had been able to question the witnesses. A futile effort, unfortunately. Which probably was why they had been graced with this task in the first place. Good enough for the dirty work, were they?
Admittedly, he reflected, it was more likely that the guardaí had just anticipated that if they confronted the people themselves, not much would come of it. They were right, of course. The Bin’s inhabitants were a suspicious lot and law enforcement was extremely unwelcome in their vicinity. A lot of water went down the drain before one of the locals felt the need to call the Peace Office. When the chips were down, he and his men might be grudgingly tolerated, but the trueborn were feared and hated. Donnaghue doubted that anyone here would have volunteered to offer them as much as a pen, had they asked for it. And, mind him, he understood them.
Not that he had gotten much useful information out of the witnesses, either. The staff had hidden behind the counter when the shooting started, and everything had been over too quickly to get a grasp on what was happening. And most of the bar’s customers had fled before the PO had even arrived or the moment they did. Questioning the remaining mostly drunk souls he’d gotten his hands on had been a complete waste of time. According to his different witnesses, their suspect could be a bald black man as easily as an ample redhead. And one tiny wrinkled old crone in tattered clothes with a voice roughened from too much whiskey had sworn that the shaper had two heads, a forked tail, and had shot fire from its eyes. That’s what you got when you had to deal with this clientele. Drunkards. Swindlers. Good-for-nothings.