Ms. Kevarian received the letter at the door of the small suite that served as her office and quarters. Her features tightened when she saw the seal, as if it were a vicious insect that she couldn’t decide whether to crush or fling away. Quietly, she closed the door.
She laid the letter in the center of her desk and sat in an armchair across the room. Light filtered through the narrow windows from the city and cast a long shadow off the rolled parchment. Her elbows pressed against her knees, and she clasped her hands in front of her face, one atop the other. Night deepened, and still she sat, pondering.
At last she moved to the table and held one hand above the letter, palm flat and fingers splayed as though testing a skillet’s heat. Starfire glimmered faintly between her hand and the scroll. The seal sparked, hissed, and emitted a line of sick black smoke. She caught the smoke and crushed it into a tiny crystal, pea-sized and jagged-edged, which she tucked into her jacket pocket.
She opened the letter.
It was written in the flowing, watery hand of a person who normally used small, rapid letters but on rare occasions allowed himself a calligrapher’s flourish. As she read, the corners of her lips curled downward and fire crept into her eyes.
Dearest Elayne,
If you’re reading this, you noticed my little joke. If not, then I remind you once again, as you cough up your lungs and breathe your last, to move slowly and be careful. I would send flowers to your employers and seek out what remnants of a family you no doubt possess were I not certain you had contingencies in place to resuscitate you in the event of your demise. An apprentice, perhaps?
It has been a pleasure to watch you grow, though of course from a distance. Partner now, and in Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao no less! How it would warm old Mikhailov’s heart to see.
I know you don’t welcome advice from me, dearest, but please understand. This is a complex case. Many twists and turns here, many shadowy corners where unsavory secrets hide.
Be careful. Watch the Cardinal. My roots in Alt Coulumb run more deeply than your own, and I know him as an untrustworthy and backward devotee of an untrustworthy and backward faith. I say this not as your friend but as your colleague, and one who, if the letters I have received today are true, is every bit as interested as yourself in the development of this case.
We should speak. I will arrive in Alt Coulumb tomorrow morning, but look for me tonight in dreams.
Your adversary of the moment, but always,
Your friend,
Alexander Denovo
A jaunty line from that last “o” jagged off the scroll’s edge.
There was no one in the room to see the momentary slouch of Elayne’s shoulders, the bow of her head. No one saw her set the scroll down and lean against the desk. Of the four million souls in the artificially brilliant city beyond her window, not one saw her bend.
Nor did they see her head rise and starlight bloom from her eyes and from the numberless, fractally dense glyphs upon her flesh, shining through her body and garments as if they were fog. The room darkened, and smoke rose from the parchment where she touched it.
Her wrath broke, and she shrank within her skin and was nearly human again. Breath moved back and forth over her lips. She lifted her hand from the scroll, and saw that her thumb had burned a small dark spot on the velvety surface, over the trailing line of Denovo’s signature.
Alexander’s signature.
She rolled up the scroll, placed it in a desk drawer, and wove a curse around the drawer so that none who looked within save her would see anything of note. She paused, considered, and amended the curse to exclude Tara Abernathy. Succession planning. You never could be too careful.
A wicker box lay on the desk, stacked with contracts to sign, bindings and wards against invasion and the client’s further decay. On top of that stack she placed the book containing the notes of Ms. Abernathy’s accomplice. What was his name again? She frowned, and gripped the memory as in her youth she gripped the trout that swam close to the riverbank near her house. Abelard.
Ms. Kevarian had taught herself how to tickle trout an age of the world ago, to hold her hand in the brook and entice with her fingers, to soothe with the light brush of skin against scale, and then, fluid and fast, to grip and lift. She had been five when she gained the knack. Her parents had noticed. Everyone noticed when the word got around, including a young scholar, a boy of nearly twelve whose family was passing through on horseback, bearing him away for study at the Academies, those faltering predecessors of the Hidden Schools. That young boy had asked her how she learned, and she said it seemed natural to her, and he said things that seemed natural seldom were.
Alexander.
He would be here tomorrow, as creditors’ counsel, representative of the gods and men and Deathless Kings to whom Kos Everburning made promises that could not now be repaid.
She had expected this. She always hoped for the best, and expected the worst.
She looked through the window upon the starless city, and though she did not pray, she hoped that Ms. Abernathy could protect herself for one evening. When she returned, there would be a great deal to do.
Elayne sat down at the desk, removed the first few hundred pages of documents, prepared her black candle and her phial of red ink, her quill pen and her thin steel knife and her polished silver bowl, and began to read.
* * *
“You’re sure you know where you’re going?” Tara asked.
Cat did not respond. She held pace five steps ahead, heels clicking on the paving stones.
“I mean,” Tara said, “no disrespect, but we’ve been walking for almost an hour.”
Click, click. Click, click.
Abelard, to Tara’s right, walked stiffly and said nothing that might break the tension. Tara wished she could ask him questions with her eyes, questions like, “I thought you said this woman was your friend,” and, “We’ve been to six bars already, how many vamp hangouts can there be in one city,” and, “Was she born with that attitude or did it accrete on her with irritation, like an irascible pearl?”
The Pleasure Quarters convulsed with sick life like a corpse on a novice Craftsman’s table. Dancers in second-story windows shook their hips in time with music barely audible above the crowd’s din. An ermine-robed man vomited in a gutter while his friends laughed; a candy seller blew tiny elegant animals out of molten sugar and breathed a touch of Craft into them so they glowed from inside out. An old man with a distended, hairy belly ate fire on a clapboard stage, while next to him a girl in a pink leotard, no older than twelve and painted like a china doll, swallowed the broad blade of a scimitar.
“You haven’t given me much to go on,” Cat said, and from her tone Tara knew she, too, was frustrated by their difficulty locating Raz Pelham. “Iskari sailor, vampire. Do you have any idea how many of those there are in this city?”
“No,” Tara replied, feeling testy. “I don’t. This is my first time in Alt Coulumb.”
Cat whirled on her. “Kos!” Had her eyes been less bloodshot and her complexion not as pale, she would have been quite pretty. As it was, the word that came to mind was “striking.” “Do you want to get jumped? Your first time. Might as well put on a schoolgirl’s dress and walk about complaining you can’t get the buttons in the back done.”
Already a few slick erstwhile tour guides had proffered their services. Abelard fended them off with no effect; Cat shot them a deadly glance and they fled.
Tara bristled. “I was trying to thank you for helping us.”
“I’m helping because Abelard’s a friend even if he hasn’t dropped by in months, and because maybe your Iskari sailor can find someone to get me high.” She took a deep breath. “Look. I’m sorry. There are thousands of bars and dance halls and dives and whorehouses in the Pleasure Quarters. Some are clean, good places, most aren’t. We can’t cover them all in one night. I’ve been hitting big vamp lairs, but who knows if that’s this guy’s idea of a good time? We need more information.”
“Well,” Tara said, “I’ve told you most of what I know about him. Iskari, pirate, sailor, vampire. Five-nine, maybe five-ten, broad shoulders, red eyes, black hair. Owns his own ship.”
“Do you know how he became a vampire?”
“What difference would it make?”
“Some asked for the change, some didn’t. Some are into the terror-that-flaps-in-the-night thing, some aren’t. Some mope around all night, some want to dance from dusk till dawn.”
“I only met this guy for a minute or two.” An excuse. You could learn much in a minute. She remembered standing by his ship’s ramp, about to descend into the milling dockside crowd. “He was … made about forty years ago. After Seril’s death. He doesn’t come here often.”
Cat pulled back when she mentioned Seril, and made a brief hooking sign with her left hand. Superstition? She didn’t seem the type, but Alt Coulumb had long been a city of gods and secrets. “Forty years ago.” Cat tasted the words. “The Pleasure Quarters weren’t so friendly to vampires and their ilk back then.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the Guardians,” Abelard whispered from her side. “The, ah, gargoyles. They were still around.”
“Ah,” Tara said without understanding.
Cat lowered her head in thought, and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. The Pleasure Quarters surged around them. Then, with startling speed, she looked up, and said, “He’ll be at the Xiltanda.”
She set off through the crowd with a purposeful stride. Tara and Abelard exchanged quick, nervous glances, and followed her.
* * *
The rooftops of a great city present a panorama unlike anything in the world. A range of giant gumdrop karst formations may impress, a deep canyon awe, and a jungle canopy stun into silence, but cities alone are the product of human hands and human tools, human blood and human will. They come into being through worship, or not at all.
Too few see a metropolis from its peak. Those who do are a strange mix of the city’s angels and its demons, those who hold the strings and those who never rose far enough to have strings tied around them. A penthouse apartment has much the same view as a cardboard box on a tenement roof. The resident of each drinks his wine and calls the other a fool, and seldom is either certain in his laughter.
Both the skeleton in the black suit and the round bedraggled man with his paper-wrapped bottle of rotgut watch the city, and they do not change it as much as it changes them.
Something moved across the rooftops. It had many bodies but one heart, many mouths but one breath, many names but one truth. It leapt in shadow from building to building, gliding on spread granite wings. Dim lights from the distant street illuminated the sculptures of its form.
The Flight returned in glory to the rooftops of its birth, which it once ruled until cast out by traitors and blasphemers. Its talons marked passing buildings with harsh, glorious poems of praise, exhortations to the moon that fools below thought dead.
The Flight’s teeth were sharp, its backs strong, and its movements swift.
The Flight heard its brother’s howl of pain and captivity. It heard, and answered:
We are coming.
* * *
The Xiltanda, Cat explained on the way, was a nightclub that took its name from a Quechal word for hell. Not any hell, either: Xiltanda was one of the old-fashioned hells, a hell of many chambers and many punishments, of rings and layers and ranks and files. Before the end of the God Wars, when the night culture in Alt Coulumb—vampires, Craftsmen, and the like—had been underground, they built the Xiltanda as their first great foray into respectability. And as hell had many levels, so, too, did this club, from the ground floor of black marble and chandeliers to the higher realms where there were chains and straps and hooks and padded walls to deaden screams.
There were lower levels, too. Few knew what transpired there. Rumors told of deep mysteries of Craft and thaumaturgy, of human sacrifices and infernal pacts made while smoking cigars in rooms upholstered in green leather.
“It’s gone members-only in the last decade,” Cat said over her shoulder. “But if your friend was in town forty years ago, he’s probably a member. It’s classy, comfortable. Exactly where I’d want to spend time after a long ocean trip.”
“I don’t know.” Tara couldn’t imagine Raz among cool marble and shining lamps. “It doesn’t sound like his type of place.”
“Even if it’s not usually, it’s one of the few clubs he’d remember,” Abelard put in. “The city’s changed a lot in forty years. Even the gods were different back then.”
They found Club Xiltanda on the main drag, an imposing building in mock Quechal style. Giant sculpted faces leered from the stonework at passersby. Most structures in the Pleasure Quarters were horribly talon-scarred, but if there were any gargoyle marks on the Xiltanda’s artfully crumbling, faux-ancient walls, Tara could not see them.
Two waterfalls flowed from the roof to flank the entrance, which was guarded by a large, bare-chested man. Torches everywhere cast smoky light and shadows. Music emanated from within the building, a swing band playing something brassy in four-four time.
Tara sought among the crowd, and to her surprise identified a familiar figure approaching the front gate: Raz Pelham, still wearing his white uniform, sleeves rolled up, cap pushed back on his head. He produced something small from his sleeve, a membership card maybe, and the bouncer stood aside to let him pass.
“Raz!” she shouted, but her voice was lost in the din. She rushed through the crowd, plowing past a clucking coterie of parasol-twirling society girls and nearly overturning a cigarette vendor. “Raz!” He didn’t pause. Weren’t vampires supposed to have exceptional hearing? “Captain Pelham!”
The crowd near the entrance was thick and sluggish, sporting bad leathers and worse attitudes. Tara shouldered her way to the front of the line as the doors closed behind Raz. From all sides she felt the harsh stares of the drunk and disdainful, but it was easier to press on than fight her way out. A thrashing moment later, she stood before the bouncer, who regarded her and the disgruntled crowd in her wake with detached amusement.
“You got a card?” he asked.
“I’m looking for Captain Pelham. The man that just went in there.”
“Wasn’t any man just passed through this door.”
“Vampire. Whatever you want to call him. I’m a friend of his.”
He held out his hand for her card.
The club had been built forty years ago, about the time of the Seril case. Ms. Kevarian was almost certainly a member. Her name could gain Tara access, but also lift the veil of secrecy around their presence in Alt Coulumb. There were other ways into a club. She might as well try them.
“Look, I’m not a member. I just want to talk to him.”
“No card, no entrance. That’s the rule.” He crossed his formidable arms over his chest.
There was an added weight behind that word “rule,” and when she blinked she saw its source. Someone had woven Craft through this man’s body and brain, granting him strength and speed and protection from simple weapons so long as he obeyed the terms of his contract. To admit a nonmember would weaken him, and cause considerable pain.
She could break that Craft with her own power, or modify it to render the bouncer a kitten in her hand. A mere activation of the glyphs woven into her fingertips, a stroke on the side of his neck. She thought back to her fall from the school, and her throat tightened. No. She would not do those things. There had to be another way.
She was still thinking when she heard Cat’s relentless drawl behind her. “Open the door, Bill.”
Tara swung her head about. Cat waded through the press of the crowd. Her black leather skirt and her thin sheen of sweat glistened in the torchlight. Tara’s eyes flicked to the scars at her throat, camouflaged but not quite concealed by her black silk scarf.
“Ms. Elle,” Bill said. “You haven’t been by in a while.”
She placed her hands on her hips. Tara stepped aside to let her work. “I haven’t had a reason to come. You’ve been glad of that, haven’t you, Bill?”
Bill glanced left, right, looking for someone to tell him what to do. Cat had power here, apparently. Tara looked to Abelard for an explanation, but he was still forcing himself through the crowd. “You’re always welcome, Cat.”
“Don’t give me any crap.” Her voice was smooth and dangerous. “I’ve two kids looking for a quick nip, and a hungry old man inside who wants a meal with personality. If you don’t get out of my way I’ll make sure the Xiltanda doesn’t stay open a full night for weeks.”
Whatever hold Cat had over the club, this threat was enough for the bouncer. He was wired to serve the institution first and guard the door second. He cast a warning glance back at the crowd, sought once more for a supervisor to consult, then stood aside, opened the door, and bowed his head. “Ms. Elle.”
“That’s what I thought, Bill.” Cat produced a coin from her belt, feathered it down the side of his neck, and rested it in the hollow of his collarbone. He swallowed. “Be well. Say hi to your kids.”
She flowed past him through the open door, Tara on her heels. Abelard stumbled out of the clutching crowd and followed.
The club’s foyer eschewed the Quechal style for brass, marble, and polished wood, illuminated by a hovering crystal sphere within which glowed a creature tiny, winged, and almost human, trapped by twisting tines of Craft. An imprisoned sprite—but no. Tara’s eyes narrowed. Not imprisoned. A ward filled the creature with pain and rapture, yes, but it was temporary, and mutually beneficial. She allowed herself to be captured here every evening, and at dawn a portion of the club’s power passed to her. Was this, in truth, slavery? Ask the managers of the club and they would deny it, and the sprite trembling inside the globe would say the same. Tara was uncertain either of them could be believed.
A few patrons lingered in the foyer, checking their coats or smoking or waiting, but Raz Pelham was not among them. A thick, beaded curtain led to the dance hall. Tara strode toward it, and through.
The Xiltanda’s main hall was more to Tara’s taste than any of the crowded, sweaty dives she had seen in Alt Coulumb thus far. Trapped sprites shone within the crystal chandelier–cage above the oak dance floor, and a swing band twirled a lively tune. Patrons sat at deep booths along the walls, drinking, watching, and waiting. An iron skeleton with a heart of cold fire danced with a bronze-skinned woman whose hair trailed down the plunging back of her dress in long slender braids. The skeleton dipped her and she threw her head back and her teeth flashed. In a corner booth an ancient Iskari Craftsman played an Old World game Tara didn’t recognize—a board game with no pieces save stones the size of a thumbnail, some black and some white—against a long thin boy with long thin fingers and golden hair. By the bar, something that might once have been human, but now resembled a winged reptile, was losing an argument against a plump, smiling Craftswoman who munched on peanuts and nursed a tall glass of stout.
The club reminded Tara of pleasant evenings at the Hidden Schools, but this was not time to join the party. Across from the stage rose a broad iron spiral staircase, winding down into shadow and up through the vaulted ceiling to unknown chambers. Raz Pelham was three quarters of the way to the Xiltanda’s second story, and moving fast.
Rather than skirt the dance floor’s edge, Tara cut through. She dodged the spinning skeleton and his partner, and nearly tripped over the black dress train of a tall, pale woman dancing with a mustachioed gentleman in a pinstriped suit. A lumbering green-skinned man who looked to have been reanimated many times over nearly crushed Tara with a flailing limb, but she ducked. Behind, Cat shoved dancers out of her way as Abelard apologized in broken sentences. “Very sorry, I mean— My apologies, she— Well that’s hardly—”
“Come on,” Tara called over her shoulder as she sprinted for the stairs. “Captain Pelham!” she shouted over the music, but the retreating vampire didn’t break stride. He must have heard her.
Cat and Abelard started up the stairs behind her. The swift percussion of their footsteps clashed with the tripping rhythm of the band below.
This stairway connected all floors of the Xiltanda, but a veil of opaque shadow divided each level from its neighbors. Tara passed through the shadow between the gleaming first story and the second, a chamber drunk on red velvet and echoing with screams and sighs and repetitive, bass-heavy music. Raz’s feet were already disappearing through the shadow above, between the second story and the third.
Tara ran after him. When she reached the third floor (a bare monastic scene, altars and stone walls and the distant crack of whips), Raz had not yet reached the next shadow. He redoubled his speed without a backward glance.
Raz had to know that fleeing would make her pursue. She had already seen him. Even if she didn’t catch him, he couldn’t hide from her forever, or from Ms. Kevarian for that matter. If he was afraid of being identified, he should try to attack and silence her, not escape. There was no reason to run, if the decision was his to make.
Comprehension congealed in her gut. The next time she closed her eyes, she let herself truly see.
Vampires were creatures of Craft, their life in daylight traded for strength at night, their death for hunger, their satiety for senses more acute than mortal imagination. Folk in Edgemont feared vampires because they looked like people until it was too late, but to Tara’s eyes, their twisted souls shone.
Which was why she hadn’t previously noticed the hooks of Craft that speared Raz’s head and heart. Something was riding Captain Pelham, pulling him upstairs under his power but not of his own will.
“Someone’s got his mind!” she shouted back to Abelard and Cat. Whatever gripped Raz must have heard her, because the vampire ran faster still. She reached out with threads of Craft to lock his limbs in place, but the threads melted against his flesh. No surprises there. Craft was difficult to use against a person neither dead nor alive.
Someone had snared Raz’s mind all the same.
The fourth floor was white-walled and smelled sickeningly sterile, the fifth dark as pitch and so silent Tara did not hear her own footfalls. She closed her eyes and saw Raz outlined in blue and receding above. Motionless human figures floated in the darkness around her, curled into fetal balls and warded with Craft that banished all sensation. She shivered as she ran, and almost fell.
The sixth floor smelled of sulfur, the seventh of ice. Tara’s legs were made of melted metal, and something hot and sticky lodged in her lungs in place of air. Raz disappeared through the shadow ceiling above, to the eighth floor. Tara ran after him and found herself at the top of the stairs, her path blocked by a latched steel door.
With a backhand wave she shattered the deadbolt, crashed the door off its hinges, and burst onto the chill rooftop. Neither moon nor stars relieved the darkness of the cloud-clogged sky. The only light rose from the street below.
“Raz!” she called again. He did not break stride or slow as he neared the roof’s edge.
Vampires were difficult to catch with the Craft, but not impossible. She couldn’t touch his body nor his soul, but the dense contract that knit his spirit to his dead flesh, that she could hold. Threads of starfire spanned the distance between Raz and Tara; his muscles and mind locked up and he skidded to a halt five feet from the edge of the roof.
He pulled against her Craft. Sweat beaded on her forehead. This was harder than it should have been. Clouds robbed Tara of the stars’ power and left her to bind Raz with her own meager reserves of soulstuff. She needed to get that hook out of his mind quickly, or her strength would fail.
Footsteps on the rooftop gravel behind her. She recognized Cat and Abelard by their breath, hers even and steady, his wheezing.
“Tara,” Abelard said when he could form words. “What the hell?”
“Hook in his mind.” Raz pitched and strained like a fish against her line and she almost fell. Her unseen opponent didn’t seem to care whether the Captain escaped or plummeted to his death, so long as Tara didn’t hold him. “Controlling him.”
“What?”
She took a step toward Raz, two, the strain increasing with every foot. Her arms ached, her hands shook. She had never been one for raw displays of power. Hers was the clever solution, the quick step, but now she matched might with an old vampire who had been strong even in life.
She bound her feet to the rooftop with Craft to prevent them from sliding, and in that moment of diverted attention he began to pull away.
Someone called her name, but she could not answer. Dark shapes moved around her and she paid them no mind because she had no mind anymore. Raz was four feet from the edge of the roof, three. If he fell with Tara’s power hooked through him, so would she.
He would have pulled her off the roof already had she not bound herself to the ground. At that thought, an idea came to her. She knelt, and as he surged against her bonds, fangs bared, she connected the cords of Craft that held him with those that anchored her to the rooftop. One line knit Raz, body and soul, to the solid stone of the Xiltanda. His tether went taut and he bounced back, crumpling on the building’s edge like a netted animal.
Tara stumbled forward and fell a few feet from the vampire. The Craft hooked through his soul blazed, and he spasmed in pain as it burned his memories.
“Tara!”
“No,” she shouted, not in answer. “No, dammit!”
“There’s something you should see.”
“They’re taking his mind!”
The hook would burn him clean if she let it, without leaving a scar. The mind was good at healing. Breaches in memory it wallpapered with ignorance or echoes of routine. She had to stop the process, but she was weak without starlight. She reached for her purse and the implements within. Silver forceps for drawing the Craft from Raz’s mind, and black wax for warding him against its return. There, and there. Rosemary, for remembrance, and fennel, for … for something.…
Abelard had stopped talking. She glanced back to call for his help. Another pair of hands could make a difference.
Then she saw the gargoyles, in the dark.
There were six of them, and they were large, spread out in a loose semicircle on the roof to cordon Tara, Abelard, and Cat off from the stairwell and escape. Shale had been small and sleek by comparison. Each of these creatures was at least eight feet tall, wings flaring higher behind them. Deep scars crisscrossed their bodies. Six pairs of emerald eyes gleamed in six broad, contorted faces, some beaked, some fanged, some tusked like elephants. Light from the street below illuminated the hungry interior of six large stone mouths.
Tara had only defeated Shale with surprise on her side, when he was in human form. His brethren were ready for battle. There would be no reasoning with them, or, no tricking them through reason. They understood force, and Tara didn’t have force on her side.
Cat’s eyes were fixed on the tallest gargoyle—immense, female, and blunt-faced like a lion, with long, wicked talons and muscles tight as steel cords. Cat barely breathed. Abelard looked from Tara to the gargoyles and back. An inch of ash shivered at the end of his cigarette. “Tara?” he said, tentatively.
“Abelard, I can’t.” Raz’s brain was being fried from the inside out, and she was almost spent. She could save whatever this unknown Craftsman wished to wipe from the captain’s mind, or else try to protect Abelard and his junkie friend and maybe herself.
If Raz knew something about the case, Ms. Kevarian needed to know it, too.
Tara’s grip shook on the silver forceps.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Cat said to the gargoyle.
Stupid addict, Tara thought. Hopped up and ready to fight the world. They’d chew through her first, and save Tara to clean their teeth.
But the gargoyle answered. Her voice rumbled like an avalanche.
“We come to reclaim our brother.”
Cat was not fazed. “You violate the law by setting foot within the city.”
“This was our city once.”
Cat turned to Tara, unperturbed by the several tons of killing machine arrayed before her, and said, “Take care of the vampire.” There was authority in her tone and bearing. Tara did not quarrel. Returning her attention to Raz, she gripped the end of that red-hot hook of Craft with her forceps and pulled, evenly and with every fiber of her being. Raz twitched. A soft whine escaped his lips.
Pull harder. If you die here, leave Ms. Kevarian with everything she needs. Otherwise you’ve failed her, which means you left your home and your family to die on a rooftop in a city your kinfolk abandoned generations ago, all for nothing.
The world turned black and white around her as she pulled. Starfire caught and burned in her eyes. The blacks and whites faded to gray and the gray itself began to blur. Breath came heavy in her ears.
She heard a scream.
* * *
Abelard saw the Guardians, their presence staining the air, and he saw Cat rebuke them like an empress, head back, chin up, the scars at her throat wild and red and raw. Tara collapsed over Raz Pelham’s body, unconscious. His cigarette smoke tasted of sour, copper panic.
Cat glanced from Tara back to the Guardians and said, “It was your city. Now it’s mine.”
She raised a hand to her chest, grasped a small statue that hung from a steel chain around her neck, and began to change.
* * *
Black ice flowed through Cat’s mind as her hand closed around the badge. It chilled and crushed her fear of these six heretic killing machines, and her fury at their presence. The burning tower of her need stood alone against the rushing cold: the need for a fix, the need for a high, the need to be something better than she was.
Catherine Elle was fallible. Afraid. Angry. Desperate. What remained after the black ice washed over her was strong, clear, hard, slick, patient, hungry. Her mind froze as a shallow, clear pond freezes, trapping fish in midflow. The jumping chaos of her thoughts resolved into stillness, and the stillness came alive with whispers.
These Stone Men were members of a Flight that infiltrated the city days before and had thus far eluded capture. Judge Cabot’s killer was not among this group, but he had been seen in their company.
Idolaters, Cat would have called them. Wild creatures, barely human.
Cat wasn’t here anymore, though. Justice was.
She examined the large Stone Woman with eyes of liquid black. This was the leader of the group, old but still strong. They had not attacked—a good sign.
Your presence is in violation of City law, Justice said through Cat.
“We want our brother,” the leader snarled. “Stand aside.” The Stone Woman darted left faster than a normal human could have seen. Cat moved faster, and blocked her path.
Justice does not stand aside. But if you leave, I promise to let you go.
“Even if you defeat me, my children will eat your heathen heart. There’s one of you, and six of us.”
Not one, she said, but thousands. Fifteen can reach this rooftop before you chew through me.
“You’ll still be dead.”
Doesn’t matter.
The Stone Woman drew herself to her full height, and her wings unfurled. “You’re bluffing.”
Try me.
Wind whispered between them. Cat’s muscles tensed, ready to spring—but the Stone Men were gone. All six, scattered like dry leaves before an autumn breeze. One landed on the roof of a dance hall to the north, wings flared to catch the night wind; three others glided to the peaked gables of a neighboring bordello. Cat couldn’t see the remaining two.
The Suit released her, the oil-slick coating receding reluctantly from her skin. To Cat, it felt like peeling off a scab that was her whole mind. Power left her body, swiftness her thoughts, clarity her soul, and the many voices of Justice died in her ear. Nothing took their place. No, not nothing. The void, an absence strong as any truth.
She sagged to her knees, shaking and cold and in desperate need of a fix. Slender arms encircled her. Abelard. She saw his face as if from the bottom of a pool of water, hazy, naïve, concerned. Her friend.
Poor son of a bitch.
She was lucky, she thought as he held her, that the vampire was unconscious. There was no telling what she would have done for a bite, for a rush to fill the empty space Justice left behind. She would have sold her soul. Maybe she’d done that already. It was hard to remember.