In a hushed murmur, I tell her everything.
My recap of events lasts over half an hour, and when I’m done, Erica is left sitting speechless beside me, paper gauze wrappers crumpled in her clenched fists, gaze cast on the dirty carpet, lost in thought. Silence hangs over the studio apartment for the better part of ten minutes, as we both try to process everything unfolding in Aurora, and in my life. My attention lingers on the wooden box on the flimsy coffee table. The one containing the magic formula that can save Aurora from Delos’ curse.
Erica gets up, collects the trash, and tosses it into a plastic trashcan in the corner kitchenette. Then she starts to pace, back and forth, back and forth, arms crossed. Finally, she says, “Before we get down to business with Delos, I just want to tell you my opinion of that ‘dream.’ Namely, that I think it was the real deal, Cal. I think that was your actual memory of the day your mother died. Vanth’s strike would’ve caused your full experience of life to cycle rapidly through your mind, and there wouldn’t have been any fake memories. So if what you saw when Delos broke this ‘bubble’ in your head didn’t match what you’ve always remembered…”
My hands slowly tighten around the fabric of my cargo shorts still damp from our trip through the flooded bathroom. “You think my mom edited my memory of that day?”
Erica nods, sympathy heavy in her eyes. “Yeah, I do. Look, I’m forty years old, as you know, and I’ve been in the ICM community since I hit puberty and came into my powers. And for all of that time, I’ve lived in this city. Never have I heard the name Maria Kinsey in reference to an ICM-level witch living in Aurora. Which your mother clearly was. That leads me to believe she was in hiding for some reason. Maybe because that monster you saw was after her. Maybe for something else.”
“She never told me,” I whisper.
“Cal…” Erica rounds the coffee table and leans toward me, gripping my shoulders. “You were a child. I’m sure she would’ve told you the truth eventually, when you were old enough to handle the responsibility. She just never had the chance.”
“Because she killed herself and took the monster with her, and left me on the sidewalk with an altered memory.”
“She didn’t change your memory to hurt you.”
I blink back gathered tears. “No, she did it so I wouldn’t be haunted by the memory of a rampaging Eververse monster fighting my mom in a fire it no doubt started. Instead, I was only haunted by the fake memory of my mom being horrifically killed in a regular fire.”
Her hands slide up my neck and cup my cheeks, and she gently kisses my forehead. “You have a right to be bitter, Cal, you do, but please don’t let this poison your relationship with your mom. From what you told me about her, she obviously loved you. A lot. She even apologized before she…”
My budding resentment collapses into sorrow, and the tears spring free. “Yeah, she did.”
“We’ll figure this out. The whole story about your mom. I promise.” She pulls away. “But you know we can’t dwell on it now.”
“I know.” I close my eyes and swallow my emotions, stifling them until the pain fades into a dull ache. “Now we have to stop Delos’ curse, stop the Methuselah Group, prevent the war these bastards want to start.”
Erica straightens up and eyes the warded box. “I outwitted Delos once. You think I can do it again?”
“I think you could outwit him every time,” I say with a scornful lilt. “That bastard isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”
Chapter Fifteen
We spend nine hours unlocking the wards on Delos’ box. Or rather, Erica spends nine hours unlocking the wards while I pop some illegally acquired Percocet and waste the afternoon napping in the corner of the studio apartment designated a bedroom. When I wake up, the sun has set, and the only sound filtering in through the single window in the room is the hum of that same military helicopter, still circling the city. I lie motionless for some time, staring at the mildewed wall, the whole-body pain of my injuries intertwined with the ache of betrayal in my soul. It’s amazing how your entire life can unravel in a single day.
Enough with the self-pity, Kinsey. Get up and save the damn city.
Rolling over onto my back, I take three deep breaths and then push myself up, groaning as my cracked ribs protest and my head spins like a merry-go-round. Ten feet away, Erica sits exactly where I left her earlier, cross-legged on the couch, gazing intently at the box. The only difference this time is that the box is open, the lid placed off to the side. The bulk of the box is glowing a faint magenta, and a translucent magic film stretches across the rim. Erica’s hands dance like she’s strumming a harp, but in reality, she’s picking apart the remaining wards, a master locksmith, peeling away the last few defenses so we can claim the box’s priceless contents.
I don’t want to disturb her, so I just watch silently while she outdoes Iron Delos once more, another twenty minutes all she needs to beat the mind breaker’s tricks and steal his treasure. The remaining wards collapse, and the magenta glow disappears. Erica suddenly lets out a deep sigh, like she wasn’t breathing the entire time, and she collapses back against the sofa cushion, exhaustion weighing on her face. Her hands fall limply into her lap, fingers twitching, stuck on repeat from hours and hours of performing complex movements.
The time on the microwave shows it’s nearly midnight. I wonder if she ever took a break.
Probably not.
“Rough night?” My voice is faint, but Erica picks it up.
“You could say that.” She rubs her tired eyes and forces herself to bend forward. Her delicate fingers lift the grimoire from the box. It looks like a standard brown leather-bound journal. Erica slips the clasp off the cover and flips it open not to the first page but the one currently marked with a fine silk bookmark attached to the spine of the journal. She scans a few lines of the text, then nods. “Got what I came for though.”
Erica waves the journal back and forth. “Looks like Delos recorded all his work on the curse, including the counter-curse, as you suspected. He wrote his notes in a variety of languages though—which is normal for high-level practitioners. Anything to make their work harder to steal. I should be able to translate everything, but it’ll take me a few more hours.” She tosses the book onto the coffee table. “First though, I have to take a break, maybe a quick nap. My eyes are starting to cross, and I don’t want to make a dumb mistake at the last minute. We need to get the counter-curse deployed correctly on the first try. Any delays to reformulate it will cost too many lives.”
“I agree.” I carefully stretch, trying not to strain my injuries. “You got anything to eat?”
“In the apartment? I have military rations.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.” She chuckles. “But we’re not eating them, that’s for sure. I’ll save those for the real end of the world, not Delos’ poor excuse for an apocalypse.” Rising from the couch, she crosses the room and plucks a phone off the kitchenette counter. It’s a burner, the same model, I note with amusement, that I bought when I went into hiding. “I know a guy who makes a mean pepperoni pizza. Best you’ll ever have.”
I point to the window, indicating the sound of the helicopter flying overhead. “Uh, you know there’s a curfew on, right?”
Erica’s lips quirk up. “Have you ever had reason to doubt me, hot Crow?”
That would be a no, so I stay silent as she calls a mystery guy on the phone and places an order for an extra large pizza and a liter of Coke. I do question the safety of having somebody deliver food to a safe house, but only for a second, because Erica would never put us in danger. She’s way too smart for that.
After Erica ends the call, I open my mouth to ask a question, only for a doorbell to sound off. Our doorbell. Erica slides over to the front door, checks the peephole to be sure it’s who she’s expecting, and then opens the door to reveal a skinny white guy around eighteen wearing a standard delivery getup: a red polo and a matching hat. He’s holding one
of those insulated bags restaurants use to keep pizzas hot, along with a brown paper bag containing the Coke, and as Erica is tugging a wad of cash out of her pants pocket, the guy is tugging out our extra large from its cover.
They exchange items, Erica tells the guy to keep the change, the guy tips his hat, and the door shuts to finish the transaction. The whole thing, phone call to delivery, took less than two minutes, and as Erica carries the pizza box and Coke bottle over to the kitchenette, I sit with my legs hanging off the bed, shoulders slouched, mouth agape. Because I have no idea what the heck I just watched unfold.
Confused, I get up and shuffle over to the kitchenette counter, lift the lid of the pizza box with a single finger. Sure enough, there’s a piping hot pepperoni pizza inside, complete with a few containers of various dipping sauces. My desperate brain tries to reconcile the timeline of events, but the mental math doesn’t add up, no matter how many times I rearrange the equation.
Erica, dropping a stack of paper plates on the counter, abruptly bursts out laughing. “Oh, god. The look on your face.”
“You want to tell me what’s going on? How’d they make our pizza instantaneously?” I give the melted cheese a skeptical look.
Erica shoves a plate against my chest. “Because they made it with magic, Cal. Reid’s Pizza on Fifth, that little hole in the wall between the defunct arcade and the newly renovated apartment building? It’s run by the fae. Every member of the staff is a faerie.”
I look from the pizza to Erica and back to the delicious-looking pizza. “Faeries? Really? Didn’t think we had many of those in Aurora.”
“We don’t have many of those anywhere. They largely fled Earth after World War II.” She unscrews the lid on the Coke and rises to her tiptoes to grab a stack of paper cups from the top shelf of the cabinet. “But there are still a few full-blooded fae hanging around, like Reid, and there are plenty of fae-human combos, of course. Faeries have been having kids with humans since literal antiquity. Most of their descendants nowadays have such diluted blood that they’re hardly more magical than the average person, but even so, they tend to congregate around their distant faerie relatives.”
She grabs two slices of pizza and sets them on her plate, then motions for me to do the same. “Reid’s an oldie, and by that, I mean immortal. He’s been living in Aurora since the 1920s. He takes in wayward faeries and turns them straight by giving them jobs at his pizza place, which, of course, is a front for all sorts of other activities only the fae community is privy to.” She raises a warning finger. “Don’t ask what those activities are. I don’t know, and Reid won’t say. And it’s not our place to ask anyway. Let the faeries be.”
A dozen questions simmer on my tongue, but I let them go for the time being. I can investigate Aurora’s silent faerie community anytime. Now I have more important things to do, like eat some dinner so I don’t starve to death before I have a chance to save the city from the Methuselah Group. “All right. But at least tell me this,” I say as I claim three slices for myself, “how’d you get acquainted with this Reid guy? I’m guessing he didn’t tell you he was a faerie when you wandered in for a spare slice one day.”
Erica drops into a chair beside the rickety kitchen table. “We met a few months back, shortly after I wiped my mind. We each needed a favor the other could provide, so we had a mutual exchange, and now we’re buddies.”
“I’m guessing he’s the kind of guy who won’t sell your secrets to Delos?” I carry my pizza to the table and sit across from her. Sit slowly. My body aches every inch of the way down. “The fae know how to keep secrets, right?”
“The fae live on secrets. It’s their life blood.” She pushes a cup of Coke toward me. “And they don’t sell out people they’re on good terms with. It’s like a sacred commandment, betrayal begets betrayal and all that. Now, if you’re on bad terms with them, well…”
Erica lets that hang.
I choose to ignore it.
We eat our pizza in relative silence, watching the latest news on the small TV across the room. The hospitals are overburdened, too many sick, too few beds. A number of doctors and nurses have fallen ill, and hospital staff members are not permitted to leave their workplaces at the risk of infecting their family and friends. There was a minor string of looting incidents at a few stores earlier today, scared citizens trying to hoard as many supplies as possible in case the epidemic persists for weeks and the supply lines run dry. But all in all, outside the hot zones, where the sick are congregating, Aurora has gone quiet. Eerily so. People peek around their curtains in hushed fear. The more religious whisper prayers where none but a god can hear.
After dinner, Erica takes a half-hour power nap, during which I shower the grime of the day’s ordeal from my mottled skin. The hot water feels amazing, soothing my bruised muscles, but I can’t stand under the spray forever, pretending the outside world doesn’t exist, pretending my mountain of problems hasn’t grown a few feet taller after that earthquake of a dream-memory. So I quickly shave, shut off the water, dry myself, and wrap my open wounds in fresh bandages, complete with a generous helping of antiseptic cream.
When I emerge from the bathroom wearing only a towel, Erica is seated at the dining table again, Delos’ grimoire and several sheets of blank printer paper in front of her. She’s rapidly scribbling notes on the paper while running her finger along the lines of Delos’ coded instructions for performing the counter-curse. She mutters each word as she goes, translating between at least five languages I recognize and three whose origins elude me. It’s a vastly complex undertaking, something I couldn’t do in weeks, much less under the weight of our current time crunch. But to Erica, it seems like child’s play.
The education and training that goes into magic study to become an ICM-level practitioner must be insane. Like simultaneously doing med school and law school.
And here I thought acing my way through Stanford was impressive.
Joke’s on me.
I don’t want to interrupt Erica, but I have to ask, “Say, you don’t happen to have anything I can wear, do you?” Because I’d rather not dress myself in that ridiculous frat bro getup again, especially since practitioners like Barnett can sniff me out regardless of my appearance. “Even sweatpants would work.”
Erica’s lips stop moving, and she looks up, blinking owlishly, like she forgot I was here. “Oh, right. Guess you can’t run around town naked, huh?” She eyes my bare chest and abs appreciatively, only to wince when I turn to glance at the now muted TV, revealing the extent of the bruising on my back.
Erica sighs and says through her teeth, “I’m honestly not sure I have anything that’ll fit you, but maybe we can have somebody bring you a few things.”
“Like who? Your faerie friend?”
“I was thinking other allies.”
“Oh?” I sink into the chair next to hers. “We have other allies?”
Erica taps her pen against her note paper. “Well, there is one supernatural group—excluding the fae—that have remained largely silent about this curse. They can’t be affected by it, I assume, since they can’t use magic, and so they have no stakes in this particular situation. But they will have stakes in the war that Delos and the Methuselah Group are trying to start, because there will inevitably, and already have been, casualties among their number. You can’t wage a supernatural war without collateral damage to all groups.”
I consider her words for a moment, and it dawns on me. “The Wolves.”
“Yep.” She smiles. “I figure if we tell Wallace what Methuselah is up to, then he’ll rally the troops, give us the support we need to overcome the combined forces of Delos and his manhandled DSI pawns.”
“Can the Wolves really match Delos’ lackeys in combat though?” I know powerful practitioners can crush werewolves with relative ease. It doesn’t matter how strong or fast you are when a witch or wizard can set you on fire or strike you down with lightning from a hundred yards away.
Erica shakes her hea
d. “No, they can’t. But we don’t need them to. We need them to create a diversion, draw Delos’ attention away from us while we garner the other allies we need to stop the curse.”
“Who would they be?”
“The DSI minor practitioners. See, the issue here isn’t that I can’t perform the counter-curse, it’s that I can’t cast it across the entire city by myself. And we need to deploy it across the entire quarantine zone, because if we miss any of the infected with the first sweep, the curse will just start spreading back through the population again. Since I can’t trust any of the ICM practitioners to help me, due to Delos’ stranglehold, we’ll have to use the next best thing.”
“So we need to get to Navarro then. Have him call together all the best minor practitioners we have who aren’t sick.” I rap my fingers on the table. “And Navarro is holed up inside the DSI building, with no reliable way for us to contact him from the outside without risking discovery. Which means we’ll have to go to him directly. Sneak into the building.”
“Now you see where I’m going.” Erica chews on the inside of her cheek. “I’m assuming DSI sent all vulnerable agents home, yeah? So your forces are diminished?”
“That’s right, but there are still guards on every door, and the security crew watching the cameras is probably on high alert after my escape.”
“Okay, so, here’s what I’m thinking.” She outlines a plan whereby we force DSI to rally practically every available agent by sending the Wolves to wreak havoc in strategic locations on different ends of the city, miles away from the DSI office. That will leave the office largely unoccupied, save for the entrance guards and the noncombatant agents and the CDC team that has set up shop on the fifth floor. We’ll have to sneak past a limited number of people then, none of whom have magic sensing skills, except Navarro. In that case, a veil might do the trick, like it did earlier as we snuck through the city streets.
Doom Sayer (City of Crows Book 4) Page 16
