Torchlighters

by Megan R Miller

“I should go,” Ophelia said.

  Danny put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Believe me when I tell you, Joey’s going to want to handle this one,” he said.

  She considered him for a moment. Sure, Joey would want to handle this one himself. She could see that. He and Barghest had never gotten on, and she could never be sure how much of that was the nature of a law hound and a criminal, and how much was personal. Yes, she was sure Joey would relish the opportunity to show up at the station in person.

  It also wasn’t his decision to make which of them went. If Ophelia wanted to go, she’d do it herself. She already knew she didn’t want to, but the fact that Danny had phrased it the way he had, like it wasn’t her choice, sent all of that anger spiraling outward into the rest of her body.

  She exhaled for calm.

  “You’re right. I’m too close to the situation, and it’s not going to help. I’m going to go take a moment, make myself a cup of tea and…”

  And what? And try to calm down? Her voice broke. Grief, she already knew, was as unpredictable as the weather. When she’d lost her mother she would be fine some moments and others it would knock her flat. This was so much worse. She wanted to go to the stairs and call Callum down to her and see that reckless grin cross the corner of his mouth. She was never going to see it again. She was never going to hear his voice again or run her fingers through his hair.

  And Barghest had to talk to Sam. And what happened, then? What happened if he didn’t just let it breeze over? Were they going to try to take her other boy from her, too?

  Danny’s arms went around her and she pressed her forehead into his shoulder, shedding tears that would have stubbornly refused to come as long as he was looking at her face.

  No, she thought, she wasn’t going to be able to handle going to the station. Not if Joey could manage. He wouldn’t let anything bad happen to their son.

  Maybe she would feel differently tomorrow, but right now? Right now this wasn’t even something she could handle thinking about. She disengaged from Danny and swiped at her eyes with the back of her arm.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m just. I’m going to get that tea now.”

  She stepped into the kitchen and said nothing else.

  He scratched the back of his head as he walked away from the Trezza house. Augury came up alongside him and fell into step, her arms crossed, and looked up at him sidelong.

  “Hey, surprise,” she said. “Good job ambushing the grieving family, by the way. I liked the part where she almost shut the door in your face.”

  “You aren’t supposed to be here, Augury,” he said, sighing.

  “I needed to be,” Augury said. “There’s another body.”

  Barghest paused and looked at her full on, now.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Right now, in the morgue,” Augury said. “I found out our gorgon was a grocer. This one is a woman and her bloodline is asura.”

  “But still a cambion,” Barghest said.

  “That is generally what that means, yes,” Augury said.

  “No,” Barghest said, “I know that.”

  He groaned and dragged the meat of one massive hand down his face.

  “I mean, two cambion is an unfortunate coincidence, three is an undeniable pattern. And I don’t like what that pattern says,” Barghest said.

  “I thought you didn’t like to speculate,” Augury said, raising a brow.

  “At this point it’s not speculation that someone’s killing cambion,” Barghest said. “Was it the same wound? Dagger blow to the chest?”

  “Similar situation the body was found in as well,” Augury said, falling into step with him. Her stride was shorter than his so she had to take an extra step every so often in order to keep up with him. “What do you think? Any ideas who would be doing something like this?”

  “I know the Orthodox branch of the Church of the Veil doesn’t like Cambion,” Barghest said, “but having a motive doesn’t mean they did it.”

  “Reasonable doubt doesn’t mean we don’t ask,” Augury said, looking up at him. “You’re going to want to see the body first, though.”

  “Lead on,” he said.

  “Hellwatch captain have a bad enough sense of direction not to be able to find the morgue?” Augury asked, smirking. She skipped ahead anyway and Barghest followed. The rest of the walk there was filled with little quips, the two of them ribbing each other until she opened the door that let all the cool air escape onto them.

  Martin jumped a little bit as the pair of them entered, relaxing as he realized who it was that had just come in.

  “She’s over here,” he said, gesturing for them to follow as he went to peel back a sheet. The woman was tall and lithe with light blue skin that betrayed her asura heritage, and sunken cheeks. He couldn’t tell how much of that was just her natural bone structure and how much of it was the fact that she was dead.

  “Same wound as before?” Barghest asked.

  “Same place, too,” Martin said, tugging the sheet a little farther down to show him the antemortem stab wound just beneath the left breast.

  “No signs of healing,” Augury said. “That has to mean something, I just couldn’t begin to say what, yet.”

  “It says what it usually does,” Barghest said. “There was something weird about the Trezza boy. Not that there was something weird about him as a person, but how he died. At least compared to the other two. Have you ever seen anything like that before at all?”

  Augury shook her head, falling silent for a moment.

  “Not on a corpse,” she said. “But it’s worth considering, these two weren’t as high profile as the Trezza boy.”

  She gestured in the empty air and he took her meaning to be the other two victims.

  “What did you find out about the gorgon?” Barghest asked.

  “Like I said, he was a grocer and his parents have a greenhouse,” she said. “He worked as a cashier and never got involved in anything too crazy. He wasn’t religious, went out of his way to help stray animals…heard a couple of people say his landlord was annoyed by how many he’d bring home.”

  “That landlord have any connection to the local shiner gangs?” Barghest asked.

  “Not that I could tell,” Augury said, sighing. “If she did, it was incredibly buried and incredibly tenuous, not the kind of thing that brings you to petition them to bump somebody off for you. Anyway, I have a bone to pick with that line of thinking.”

  “Oh?” Barghest asked, turning to her. He gestured in a way that said ‘go on’.

  “You’re asking because of Trezza,” she said, straightening a bit. Her firestorm of hair twitched with the motion, back over her shoulders where it framed her face. In the back lighting of the sterile morgue room, it reminded him of a halo, like in one of those stained glass portraits of Seren Ashfair.

  Ironic, he thought, considering her heritage.

  “No shit,” Barghest said.

  “At this point he’s in the minority and we just have to accept that there’s a possibility he was targeted on accident,” Augury said. “You’ve seen people get killed by shoeshiners before, what does that normally look like?”

  She already knew the answer to that, he thought. She was also asking for a reason.

  “They get ventilated,” Barghest said. “Peppered full of bullet holes or charred by hellfire, depending on whose doing the killing. Damn Torchlighters are ritualistic about it, burn them at the stake.”

  “Not always,” Augury said. “You find those bodies washed up on the beach or dragging along the bottom of the bay caught in some unfortunate fisherman’s line, yeah, but never in an alley.”

  “Hellfire still happens,” Barghest said.

  “Yeah,” Augury said, “but when it does you can never tell if it was a cambion or a full on demon because their fire is the same. And demons get loose in this town. It’s just a hazard of living here.”

  “And Callum wasn’t killed by a gun or by hel
lfire,” Barghest said, “and you think that means shiners didn’t do it?”

  “That’s exactly what I think,” she said. “I think looking too hard at the shiner gangs right now is a mistake, and it’s going to lead us in the wrong direction. And didn’t you yourself say you didn’t like to speculate so early?”

  “I don’t like to speculate but we still have to treat it like a reasonable option,” he said.

  She nodded and looked back down at the body. Her brows furrowed a little, creating a crease between them.

  “A dagger is a very personal weapon,” Augury said, finally. “If we find someone all three of them knew we might find our killer. We have to treat that like it’s reasonable too.”

  “Interviewing the next of kin won’t be easy, the Trezzas don’t like to talk,” Barghest said.

  “Ophelia will,” Augury said. She looked up at him, then. He felt a heat in his chest, caught somewhere between anger, bitterness and loss.

  “Not in my experience,” he said, dryly. “She isn’t the woman she used to be.”

  “There’s been a lot of personal bad blood between you,” Augury said. “So she wouldn’t be, to you. Can you honestly tell me she’s the only one that’s been a little bit cruel in this situation?”

  She’d abandoned him, he thought. It was an invasive thought, one that he’d had a lot of time to push away from himself. She’d quit her job, that was all, and she had every right. She just hadn’t put in notice, and it put them all out, and then she’d done it to marry a criminal and he’d never been able to reconcile that.

  “I’ve been a professional,” he said.

  “Of course you have,” Augury said, snorting. “Just give it some thought, as you do. We’re going to have to go talk to the Veil and in the mean time I need to catch that interview with the Trezzas. Possibly several if Ophelia will let me speak to her kids. There’s a big piece we’re missing here, Tin Can, I can just feel it.”

  “Or someone’s just committing hate crimes,” Barghest said, sighing. “Yeah. At least we can both agree the Veil is the next step.”

  He nodded to Martin, who scrambled up behind them to re-cover the body as Barghest and Augury moved for the door. He had to duck to get through the frame. It only bruised his dignity a little bit.

  There were dozens of narrow alleys. Lissel had gone so deep that there were no propaganda posters on the walls. She took turn after turn, and Joey followed the sounds of her steps until she slowed to a stop. He sprung his switchblade, and leaned it around the corner, watching her blurred form in the reflection. There was another figure in the little square with her. He could make out her blue hair in the curvature of the knife.

  “You’re bleeding,” a woman’s voice said. Not Lissel. Not Vivi.

  “Got cut,” Lissel said.

  “It sounds like you’ve burned your tongue,” the other woman said. The shapes of them blurred together in the reflection of his knife as the other woman reached out to touch Lissel’s chin. “Been in a fight, Lissel?”

  The question was full of implications. It was the same tone Joey used when he knew someone was about to try to lie to him and wanted them to know it was useless.

  “Trezza cut some of our guys down,” Lissel said. “I only know because one of them lived to tell about it. Put a mask on, used some fake name.”

  “I told you I didn’t want this to escalate,” the woman said.

  “Apparently Joey missed the memo,” Lissel said, dryly.

  “He isn’t one of mine,” the woman said. “Let it go.”

  “People died,” Lissel said.

  “So did one of his,” the woman said. “It wasn’t your brother. It wasn’t your son.”

  “They were my guys,” Lissel said. “They all are.”

  He understood that sentiment. The big problem was that he hasn’t attacked anyone.

  But clearly someone had.

  “And now I’m telling you to let it go,” the woman said. “Can you do that for me?”

  There was a terse pause between them before Lissel finally said, “Yes.”

  He made it a point to remember this place. The woman started to move towards his direction and he flicked his blade back into the handle. His stride was silent as he pulled away from the corner.

  When he got home, Ophelia was sitting on the couch and waiting for him.

  When Sam had been thirteen, still attending school, Joey had rapped on the door to his room. Sam sat at his desk and turned his chair to face the door.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  The door opened and Joey walked in, taking a seat on the edge of Sam’s bed and rested his arms on his knees.

  “Son,” he said, “There’s something you need to see. It’s not gonna be pretty but it’s necessary.”

  “What is it?” Sam asked, furrowing his brow as he sat up a little straighter. At thirteen, he considered himself a man. At thirteen, he thought he could keep stoic and handle whatever his father had to show him, and that it was his duty to do so. He was the eldest, the heir apparent.

  “It’s business,” Joey said.

  Sam remembered well that little thrill that had gone through him like a bolt of lightning. He had never been included in business before. It meant his father thought he was grown up, enough, too.

  So they went outside together, just him and his father. He remembered how long it felt like it took to walk up the steps to the tram station, around and around and around, and how cold the night air felt on that rooftop. He remembered how cold the docks were, too, as always. That was night water, for you. Black and frigid.

  The walk along the rocky beach was long, too. They walked until they reached a wider section amid a pile of rocks. Sam recognized most of the people there. People that worked with his parents, a few that even had come by the house now and then. Torchlighters. His father’s sworn guns.

  The campfire they were building was a strange pyramid of logs with one larger log sticking out of the top of it. At thirteen, Sam hadn’t had a clue what they were about to do.

  A few of the Torchlighters present looked at him critically. On or two even had sadness in their eyes. His mother caught his gaze from across the pyre and gave a solemn nod and that was his first clue that something was really wrong. Ophelia almost never looked at him without smiling.

  They brought the man in with a Torchlighter on either side of him. He struggled. When he saw the woodpile, he struggled harder.

  “No!” he shrieked. “No, let me go! Fuck you! Fuck you all, damn you and your families, let go!”

  He struggled, but the hands holding him clenched tighter. Sam was shivering now. His father pulled his jacket off and draped it over his shoulders before stepping away and leaving him in the crowd. Sam started to follow but a hand on his shoulder stopped him. He hadn’t seen Uncle Danny until that moment, but what he said went.

  Joey didn’t look as professional when he closed the gap between himself and the man. He still cut an impressive figure in his white button-up shirt and suspenders attached to black slacks and blacker dress shoes.

  The back of Joey’s hand hit with a harsh crack. For one moment of shock, the man shut up.

  “You don’t get to talk right now,” Joey said, an inch from the bound man’s face. A trickle of blood rolled down the man’s chin and into his five o’clock shadow. “You want to save your breath for the screaming, you’ll be doing a lot of it very soon.”

  He turned to address the assembled crowd.

  “We caught this man red handed,” Joey said. “The tailor and his wife were under our protection. This worthless piece of trash put a bullet between his eyes and hurt her in ways she might never recover from. And you all know that ain’t acceptable.

  “The Torchlighters took over the docks in the first place to stop trash like this from messing with good folks who are only trying to get by. Every time someone dares to do it we have to make an example.”

  Joey’s gaze fell on Sam for a moment and Sam straightened a bit, t
rying not to let his fear show in his face. Joey nodded, almost imperceptibly, and a moment later he nodded to the Torchlighters that held the man.

  “Stop,” he gasped. “Stop, I didn’t, I swear! You’re looking for someone else. They deserved it. I didn’t know what I was doing! Please!”

  There was madness in his eyes. The kind of fear that comes with inevitable pain and death and helplessness. It was the first time Samael ever saw it and he would never forget.

  Joey snapped his fingers and a plume of fire engulfed his hand and his arm up to the elbow. He raised it so the assembled Torchlighters could see.

  “Let this flame light your vigil.”

  He threw the fire into the woodpile. It crackled and caught, spreading swiftly, and in minutes, the screaming began. Sam would never forget the way the blisters appeared and spread and whitened before they blackened. Patches of skin that dilated and curled revealing the layer beneath. A not-quite-pork scent that would have been pleasant if not for the bitter punctuation of burning hair.

  By the end, the man’s throat was raw. He stopped screaming a long time before he died.

  Joey stepped away from the pyre and joined the crowd. Moments later, he was standing next to Sam, and put a warm hand on his shoulder. He gave it a squeeze.

  “We’re not monsters, Sammy,” Joey said, looking into the flames. “We just speak their language.”

  At twenty-two, Sam stopped near the edge of the dock and sucked down a breath. The smell of the salt reminded him of how the beach had been that night. There was no doubt in his mind that the man they had burned deserved it. He was a murderer, and Sam found out later, a rapist as well. He was a wolf hunting their sheep and that couldn’t have been allowed to continue.

  The men he and Callum killed…that was different. Sam had no way of knowing if they deserved it or not. As far as he could tell their only crime had been signing on with Vivi.

  People would do a lot of horrible things if they were starving, he knew.

  The sun had nearly disappeared over the horizon and at this time of night the southern end of the docks were deserted. Torchlighters did their business near the north side because it was closer to the Nostra estate and to their array of warehouses. Everything should have been silent.