Chapter 13

 

Beneath the strata of yellowed legal pads, office invoices, crime reports and homicide photographs jammed into Commissioner Snow’s desk drawers was a framed photograph of his wife. The woman in bug-eye sunglasses lifted it free, tracing the stranger’s jawline with the tip of one finger. A cute little thing, strong-jawed, with fire in her eyes.

No wonder Snow spent his waking hours getting drunk and chasing the secretaries. Didn’t like a woman with iron in her spine. If anything, dying had made him halfway bearable.

A knock at the door. She adjusted her sunglasses, licked her lips. No point in hiding how she’d rifled through the commissioner’s desk. Half the PD was already dancing to her tune - she’d been taking them into the third-floor storeroom one by one and emptying them out, making them compliant. The rest weren’t far behind. And when the New Queen learned she had Fitch secured...

It was enough to make a girl want to celebrate.

She peered through the doorway and found an officer staring nervously back. One gift after another, these days. “Can I help you?”

“Is...” The officer swallowed. “Is Commissioner Snow there?”

It was the kid that’d reported to Snow down in the basement, who’d delivered the news that Fitch was being held at St Jeremiah’s. She still hadn’t been down to the cells to speak with him. Some victories were best savoured. Better to let him stew with Goodwell and Chan. Come to understand exactly where he was, what he faced. Let him get comfortable before she crushed his hopes beneath her heels.

It was always more fun when she broke their hearts before she took their minds.

The kid was still staring. Bad move. Should’ve taken her silence as an excuse to run. She crooked one finger, beckoning him in. “The commissioner’s busy. What’s a pretty thing like you doing working here, anyway?”

“I have to file a report, Miss, and I need Commissioner Snow’s signature... Are you even on the force?”

The officer - Scarborough, she thought his name was, muscle-bound with dark curls and the sort of sea-blue eyes that probably had all the girls clawing over him in junior high - shifted from foot to foot. She could read the nervousness in his eyes as she circled, putting herself between him and the door. “I saw what you were doing down there, with Detective Goodwell. Doesn’t matter what he did to those kids, you can’t beat on a guy like-”

“Are you blackmailing me, Officer?”

Scarborough swallowed, backing up against Snow’s desk. “No, no, I was just saying-”

“Shame to have to do this. You were kind of cute.” She nudged her sunglasses down on her nose, letting him catch a glimpse of what coiled behind her eyelids. “If it makes you feel any better, this was inevitable.”

His breath caught in his throat. “God, lady, are you okay? There’s something wrong with your eyes.“

She pounced.

 

Ten minutes later, Scarborough was sitting in Snow’s office chair, head tilted back, hands flopped in his lap. His mouth hung open, tongue bleeding where she’d bit him, incisors speckled with red.

His eyes were gone. Just two red pits now, bubbling as the things she’d left behind squirmed and settled into their new home.

“Good boy.” The process always left her gasping. She tingled all the way down to her toes. Her breath came in short, hard pants. “Very well behaved. I think I’ll keep you.”

Scarborough raised his hands to his face, fingers questing over the ruin of his eyes. His mouth opened and closed, dumbly.

He whispered, “I don’t-” Then, slowly, almost reverently, he plucked his patrol sunglasses from the top pocket of his shirt and slid them into place. His hands were steady. A small drop of blood had soaked into the collar of his shirt, dark red on spring-sky blue.

“No rush.” She patted him on the shoulder, feeling the muscle beneath the linen. “Rest, for now. Then you can join your friends.” She blinked, the things inside her eyesockets squirming away from the light. They itched. Sometimes she felt like rubbing them with her knuckles, scratching at them with long nails, thrusting her fingers into her own eyesockets...

The door rattled. Shadows moved beyond the wooden blinds. She snatched up her sunglasses, set them into place with shaking hands. “I told you, Snow. If I want you I’ll call for you-”

Her words stuck in her throat. Snow was waiting outside the office door, but not alone. There was someone with him. A figure in a black rainslicker, hood pulled up, face obscured by shadow.

The emissary the New Queen had promised. No way to mistake the cold rising off its skin... if that even was skin, beneath the nylon raincoat. Just standing near the thing sent slick fingers into her gut.

There were monsters in Rustwood, and there were monsters.

“The Queen said you’d come,” she said, trying not to let nervousness creep into her voice. “Didn’t say when, though. Kind of inconvenient.”

“We have things to discuss.” The thing in the rainslicker was toneless, almost whispering. “Am I invited?”

“You are.”

She raised one hand to her face as the emissary passed, expecting to see a veil of ice already cracking there. The cold radiated, like a reactor gone rogue, drinking the heat from the air. The blackness beneath the hood was the same. Not shadow at all; it ate the light, chewed it, digested it. Beside the power of the emissary, she was barely a whisper.

The door closed and locked behind it, untouched. “The Queen knows what you’ve been doing.”

“Oh yeah?” She leaned against the desk, trying not to look at Scarborough, still bleeding in Snow’s chair. “Capturing Goodwell?”

“Playing with your food.” The emissary waved at the officer, now groaning as he struggled to stand. His sunglasses slipping from the end of his nose, exposing the raw meat below. “How many? Twenty? Thirty?”

The thing in the rainslicker was only a few inches taller than her, shapeless beneath the folds of plastic. Man, woman? No way to tell. It’d shed what few pieces of humanity remained and become something sleek and efficient.

Its face was hard to focus on, like a black hole in reverse. It drove her attention away, forced her to stare at the ceiling or her shoes. When she tried to make out its features her head throbbed, skin pulling taut over her cheekbones. “All of them, soon. You have your entourage and I have mine.”

“Are you so afraid of our Queen? You think you need muscle to protect you?”

“I’m building her an army.”

“She doesn’t want an army. She wants scalpels.” The emissary regarded her from beneath its hood. “Are they your friends?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“We have no need for friends, remember. We have the Queen. Or are you having doubts?”

She shook her head furiously. Of all the sins, doubt was the worst. There would come a time, not too far away, when the Queen would call her to kneel before the throne and prove her worth. Her brain would be picked through, sliced thin and interrogated over flame. Her mistress would know every hesitation, every tiny moment of disloyalty.

She had to be pure. Only then would she be valued. She’d be given her independence.

Maybe then she could ask for her memories.

“I never doubt,” she said. “Not the Queen.”

“In which case, she has work for you. The policeman, his partner, the Archer woman’s friend...”

The woman in bug-eye sunglasses flinched. She hadn’t even told the New Queen about their newest prisoner yet - it’d been marked on the agenda, right after drinking Scarborough’s life through his eye sockets. “She wants them delivered?”

The figure waved a hand, revealing blunted fingertips, skin turned blue like it’d been dredged up from deep beneath the ocean. “Their minds, not their bodies. Set the circle and purify them with fire. The Queen will receive them as ashes.”

It was the dismissal that angered her the most, like the Queen’s emissary was reminding her to take out the garbage. “It took so long to capture them-”

“And you did well. Now she needs them burned.”

“Is that really the Queen’s will?”

“You doubt her?”

That word again. The emissary tempting her toward a heresy. “I’m loyal and you know it.”

“Then get it done, or I will.”

“What the Queen wants, she-”

She stopped. Something tugged in her chest. An invisible hand, pulling her towards the window. Sweat pricked on her bare forearms as she lifted the blinds and peered out across the rain-swept parking lot. “You feel that?”

“No time for this. The Queen has given her orders.”

“After I’ve spoken to the prisoners. I need to find out what Fitch-”

“Now.”

This time the tug was unmistakable. Stronger than she’d ever felt before. A harpoon through her chest, yanking her east, away from the sunset. How could the thing in the rainslicker not sense it?

She raised one hand to her sternum as if she’d find a thread there, reeling her in. “She wants me.”

“Are you listening?” The emissary rested one hand on her shoulder. Even through her jacket, the cold was lacerating. “The Queen says-”

The emissary’s whispered, grating voice fell away. There was nothing but the tug, the force pulling her toward the door. Meant for her and her alone. The true Queen was calling for her, begging her services. Something only she could do. She had a holy mission...

“You get it done,” she said, stepping around what was left of Officer Scarborough. “I’ve got places to be.”

“How dare you-”

It might’ve been crazy. Might’ve been blasphemy to turn her back on the Queen’s emissary. But she was angry and burning with shame and the tug was tightening, closing around her throat.

“They’ll burn before nightfall!”

Not her problem any more. You never ignored the tug. Not when the Queen was calling.

She let it guide her out of the office, down the stairs, leaving the hooded creature and the officer’s body behind.

Out into the pure, cleansing rain.

 

* * *

 

Peter Archer woke from a strange dream of high school exams left unfinished to find himself sitting on a park bench in the snow.

He was dressed in a heavy winter jacket and snow boots, a woollen beanie pulled down tight over his ears. His fingers tingled inside fat black gloves. He blinked as a snowflake landed atop his eyelid, a tiny kiss of cold.

Tall evergreens rimed with powder snow leaned drunkenly beside a winding path. A frozen lake mirrored dark, scowling clouds. Beyond that, two monoliths of steel and stone loomed above a jagged skyline, so tall they lanced the atmosphere.

He knew this place. He’d only ever seen it in cop shows and National Geographics, but it was as familiar to him as the 7-11 down the corner of his house, or the football field out back of Rustwood High where children slipped and skidded in the mud as they clawed their way into the endzone.

Central Park. New York. He’d arrived.

The knowledge was a spike of light in the back of his head. Why the new, true Queen had sent him. What she needed done.

He was here for Kimberly. Something in New York was pulling her back. Her fiance, the man Peter thought she’d made up, the lie spun to escape their marriage.

That man was real, and the Queen wanted him dead.

“Hey, buddy!”

Peter snapped around. Two policemen in dark trousers and bulky blue jackets dragged long furrows through the drifts, one wisp-thin and as pale as the falling snow, the other a solid-built black man with a trucker moustache.

Their hands were in their pockets, not on their pistols. Even so, Peter tensed, ready to run.

“You okay?” The larger cop leaned against the bench, looming overhead, blocking what little light reflected off the lake. “Looked like you were falling asleep, there.”

Peter began to nod, then shook his head. “No, Officer. Just resting my eyes.”

“Dangerous, this time of year. You know how many people we find frozen to the benches?” The first cop raised one eyebrow, teased his moustache with one gloved hand. He had a real Richard Pryor look about him, wild and tousled, but with genuine care in his eyes. “Got ID?”

Peter reached inside his coat pockets. No mistaking how the officer’s hands moved to his hips, ready to draw, as Peter fumbled with unfamiliar bulges. Finally, he drew out a slim leather wallet, one he’d never seen before.

“You mind opening that for me, sir?”

Even as he flipped the wallet open, Peter tensed his left hand into a fist, clenched low where the officers couldn’t see it. These weren’t his clothes and he wasn’t in his town. No telling how he’d gotten there, what the Queen had supplied him with. If he had to fight...

He hadn’t thrown a punch since that day in junior high when he’d whaled on the captain of the basketball team for calling his father a drunkard. He’d never boxed or learned karate. Didn’t know whether to lead with his right or his left. But with the Queen’s gift churning and scratching inside the hollow of his ribs, he knew it’d only end one way: with two dead policeman cooling beneath the snow.

The cop squinted at the white driver’s license tucked inside the wallet. “You live near here, Mister Green?”

Peter forced a smile. “Not far.”

“Hell of an evenin’ for a walk.”

“Trying to keep fit. For the wife, you know.”

The cop smirked. “You take care of yourself. Almost sundown, and you don’t want to be out when it’s dark.” He slapped his partner on the back, whispered something in his ear, and continued into the shadows of Central Park.

Peter shivered. His fist untensed. For a moment it’d felt like there was something inside the flesh of his wrists trying to break free, a bone jabbing against the skin.

All it would take was a whisper of anger. The slightest flare to force the blade out, into the open air. Another gift from the Queen.

You can’t do this!

The voice was distant now. Not his own voice but a faded memory of an old friend, the sort that drifted over the years until their face was barely recognisable, their name just out of reach. An old Peter Archer cast off like snakeskin.

He was in New York, and he had a mission.