by Ramy Vance
“His tongue?” I repeated, my insides turning over. My stomach was empty, but I felt nauseous.
She nodded. “There’s going to be a curfew from now on. No students out after dark until they find the killer.”
After dark. So Tremblay had probably followed my lead about Empusa being a nocturnal killer. Or they were just going by the data: three deaths, all at night.
And then there was the fact of the curfew. Because of these deaths, our entire lives were being affected. This school was becoming a frightened, frightening place. Which I knew would only get worse the longer the killings went on.
“The worst part,” Aimee said, “were the stories of those birds. Apparently they swarmed on campus last night, diving people and attacking them. Everyone was terrified, and a few people even got hurt.”
“When?”
“When what?”
“When did the birds attack? Was it the same time as the murder?”
She shrugged beneath the comforter. “I don’t know, Isa.”
Almost certainly they’d happened at the same time. I climbed out of bed, fully awake now. When I glanced at the clock—GoneGodDamn, I was late for work at the lab—I started my familiar rush around the room, dressing and brushing my teeth all at once.
Then I remembered today was my first day working under Dr. Russo, the World Army’s top scientist. The same World Army who was currently turning my sort-of boyfriend from a student into a soldier.
Dr. Russo had respect. She had sway. And she was a top researcher of Other DNA … which meant I could take my lead about Empusa straight to the top and maybe be taken seriously. She might even have ideas for how to capture this Other and end the murders.
I swallowed as I left the dorm and started walking to the biology building. The World Army. It seemed like they were closing in on my life from every front. Justin. My research. Campus patrol.
Be brave, Isa, I repeated to myself as I came into the building and walked down the hallway past the research labs where I had spent all my time working, and where Dr. Russo’s Other Anti-Extinction project was now taking place.
As in, literally right now.
I stopped short as I passed one of the doors, glanced left through the small window into the lab room. A sign had been posted since yesterday: OTHER ANTI-EXTINCTION INITIATIVE PERSONNEL ONLY.
Personnel. That word belonged exclusively to stick-up-their-ass organizations like the World Army.
When I came to the door, it was still a knob-turn, but they had begun to install what looked like a keycard entry for extra security. Would I be required to use a keycard to get into the lab from now on? And since when did research in the biology department of a university require this kind of security?
I stood on my toes to see through the small window. Inside, I caught a glimpse of Dr. Russo’s waterfall of black hair as she turned and came toward the door. Here was the woman I wanted to talk to about Empusa, and yet another impulse surged in me.
She was coming, and the two impulses battled for a half-second before the newer, dumb one won out. I jerked back from the window, falling against the wall just before the door opened, casting me in its shadow as she came tap-tapping out in her high heels and white jacket, her purse slung over her shoulder. She walked right on past in a hurry and never even noticed me.
I glanced at my phone in my bag. Right, it was the lunch hour.
Before the door could shut, I caught the knob. Even though I was 100%, completely allowed in this lab—my workstation was in here, after all—I felt like I was doing something illicit. Was I even “Other Anti-Extinction Initiative personnel?” Not yet, but I would be. I was part of their grant, one of their key researchers.
Which was why I stepped inside the lab and started looking around. Standard procedure on the first day on the job, right? Every employee has to get the lay of the land. And what I discovered was a completely different laboratory than the one I’d spent my undergraduate life working in. This place was full of top-notch equipment, machines I didn’t even know how to use. One of them was bigger than me and looked like a gigantic waffle iron.
Despite everything, I felt vaguely giddy. The biology department had always been seriously underfunded, and even though I wanted to drive a hot poker through the World Army’s logo every time I saw it, visions of the advances I could make for Otherdom were dancing through my mind.
“Hello?” I called.
No answer.
So I was alone. For now.
New partitions had been installed, doors added. I peeked in through a couple of them and discovered more equipment, some of it still in its wrapping.
One door was locked, the keycard unit already fully functional. It didn’t have a window, and the walls weren’t partitions like the rest. This was a solid room they’d installed, and it was the only one the World Army had completely secured.
The rules of any good psychological thriller dictated that the key to a nefarious organization’s plans lay behind the ultra-secure door labeled with a gold-lettered placard reading: Dr. Serena Russo, Head of AOEI.
OAEI. Other Anti-Extinction Initiative.
I set my ear to her door and listened, though I didn’t know what I expected to hear. Evil whispers? Of course, I heard nothing but the whistle of the heating vent above me.
I tried the knob anyway, just for kicks. And by the GoneGods, it opened right up.
New rule: always try the most obvious option first.
I pushed the door open, and as I passed through the threshold, the scent changed to something citrus and fragrant. It even smelled nicer in here, not to mention the array of right-out-of-the-box equipment arrayed around the room. Several microscopes of varying sizes, slides, petri dishes, dyes, forceps, two Bunsen burners.
And one particular microscope sitting prettily in the center of her desk with a petri dish in it.
I came around her desk to where Russo had evidently been hard at work before she left. At this point, I knew I was way, way out of bounds. Unequivocally. If Dr. Russo or Professor Allman had walked in right now, I would be toast, as Americans say.
But despite my fascination with science, I’d always trusted my gut. And right now, my gut was telling me that I should be breaking a few rules. Namely, I should be snooping into this World Army scientist’s very important work.
Because I might not get another chance.
Before me stood the fanciest microscope I’d ever seen, much less set my face to. What can I say? I’d spotted a petri dish under the lens, and a magnified petri dish is an impossible-to-resist lure for any biologist.
I lowered my face to the eyepiece. And I saw something I’d never seen before.
An unfertilized Other embryo.
I knew right away it wasn’t human, because I’d spent a great deal of time studying human embryos. And this looked nothing like a human embryo. It was twice the size, and instead of being round like a human’s, it was oblong.
Dr. Russo was studying Other reproduction. Which meant the World Army was studying Other reproduction.
Oh my GoneGods. Or as we encantado liked to say in Brazil, Goddess Yemoja!
The thing was this: Others were completely barren. After the gods left and we became mortal, we had been given the reproductive parts, but they just didn’t work. We had the eggs, the spermatozoa, but they were inert. They didn’t make magic (well, in the fluid-exchanging, squishing our parts together, baby-making sense).
Except I had always known it was possible. Or maybe it was a reckless hope that had led me to study Other DNA. I knew that without the third strand of the helix mapped, all of it was for naught. Embryos couldn’t be fertilized and babies couldn’t be born.
Which was why I’d spent the past year and a half on that preliminary step, and only now was I getting anywhere with the mapping.
I stood up straight, my heart galloping. My hand went to my chest, slid down to my belly. My intentions had been pure—good. I just wanted Others to live on, to be able to procr
eate if they wished.
I wanted to be able to procreate. To have a baby.
But the World Army’s intentions? Well, they were an army. No matter what they claimed, one prerogative would always take priority: protect humanity above all else. Which didn’t mean anything good for these Other embryos, these future babies—if they ever managed to figure out how to make the egg and sperm come together.
Beside the microscope, a manila folder gently flapped under the heating vent like it was begging to be opened.
So I obliged.
Inside, I found a full profile of—as it turned out—one of the most powerful Others from antiquity. I flipped through images, details from lore and myth, and even relevant passages from the two plays and one biography in which she’d appeared.
The daughter of a goddess and a spirit.
Empusa.
Her unfertilized embryo sat in that petri dish.
Chapter 19
As 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.”