She fell down on the other side, and when she stood up, she was back in the attic.
Sighing, she went downstairs to spend some time with her family. But she couldn’t stop thinking about that door, and Penny, and the idea of making a key herself.
-seven-
Branwyn strolled through the mall at Senyaza Titan One, watching the people rather than looking in the shop windows. Corbin, she’d been informed at the checkpoint above, had already left town. They encouraged her to send him an email. She'd texted him instead, but he hadn't responded.
She wondered if charms could be sent via email. It seemed unlikely, which was a shame. And if Corbin was really on a mission, he probably wouldn’t have time to answer her questions, especially since she probably wasn’t going to be polite. She’d once tried sending an email disguising her true feelings and it hadn’t worked. Penny had explained and explained to her the technique of writing out how one really felt, then deleting all of the nasty things until what you finally had was chilly, formal, and impersonal. But all the same, Branwyn had found her fingers typing, almost of their own accord, something rather rude as a postscript.
This was, Penny had informed her, why she would never succeed in corporate America.
Branwyn sighed as she passed by a boutique window showing off a crimson and gold dress Penny would have loved. She missed her friend. The still figure in the hospital bed wasn’t her. And even that still figure was running out of time. She wondered, treacherously, if the problem was that Penny didn’t want to come back. If she’d truly loved her angel and mourned his loss. Corbin talked about damaged souls, but wasn’t that just a metaphor for heartache?
No, that couldn't be true. Penny would never leave the people she loved like that, not willingly. She had gotten in over her head, pulled into the secret world of the angels and the nephilim without even knowing it. And she'd held on this far, against expectations. If that wasn't proof, what was?
“Oy, girl—pigeon—Branwyn!”
Addressed thusly, Branwyn considered not responding. But Simon seemed to at least be making an effort. She turned to see him walking down the up escalator in order to stay in one place. He waved at her, his hand clutching a paper bag, oblivious of the people he was inconveniencing.
“Stop fighting the escalator, you idiot,” she called, hopping on the same one. He waved again and let himself be carried to the top, where he waited for her.
“Corbin’s left town,” he informed her when she caught up.
“Yes, I know. He’s a pathetic coward.”
Simon gave her an unreadable look. “I think he’s being rather noble, myself.” Then he grinned. “Besides, they wanted him to turn his eye on some old papers in Japan, see if they could shake something loose about—” he caught himself. “About a thing. Happening over there. A Special Investigation-y kind of thing.”
Branwyn eyed him. “Right. Is that all?”
He looked hurt. “Thought you’d want to know. Would you like to come down and hang out while I get ready for a mission myself? I’ve been checking out some stuff that might be, uh, relevant to your interests. I mean, if you’re not already bored with the wee sparkly ones.” He looked her up and down. “You look like the kind of girl who gets bored quickly.”
“Only if you’re boring,” she said sweetly. “Sure, why not.”
In the Special Investigations office, Simon pulled out a bottle of scotch, some duct tape, a box cutter, and a giant-sized bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He began to load all this and more into a heavy leather satchel, oblivious to Branwyn’s skeptical stare. The room was scattered with printed paper and opened dossiers that hadn’t been there before, including some dreadful-looking photos on the floor. Before Branwyn had a chance to examine them closely, Simon said, “Mr. Black, he’s our boss, he’s been riding my ass about the build-up of nasties since that fiasco that laid everyone up. Talked about cutting me off.” He paused, trying to cram a spool of wire into the bag. “You think he was kidding?”
“Does he joke like that a lot?”
Simon turned a puzzled gaze on her, then shook himself. “Sorry, forgot you don’t know him. Right, I wanted to show you.” He turned to his computer, then back again, and grabbed a bag of chips. Tearing them open, he offered them first to Branwyn before digging in himself. He looked a bit gaunt, Branwyn realized.
Back at his computer, he said. “Have you seen this video?”
He had a webpage open to the video that Branwyn’s brother Morgan had captured and uploaded to the internet. Branwyn watched again as a handsome street artist drew on giggling women with his finger. “As a matter of fact, I have. Why?”
Simon tapped the screen where the view count was listed. “Three hundred thousand views already.”
“That seems like a lot for amateur video of a street artist,” she observed. Then she peered at the screen. “But MorganTheGreat307 must be pleased.” She snickered quietly.
“It’s on a playlist,” said Simon. He switched to another window and started another video. In this one, a beautiful woman wearing very little moved down a sidewalk, dancing with trees that danced back. After that, Simon showed her several more.
The playlist was called “Urban Wonder!!!”. “The first one is also on a list called, ‘HOT STREET PERFORMERS,’” noted Simon.
“Oh? Let’s see it, then.” Branwyn reached for the mouse.
Simon sighed and clicked it open himself. Morgan’s video wasn’t the only one in both lists. There were more dancers in the second list, but the video where the male-female pair danced with audience members and the one with the animated chalk painting were both there.
When the playlist was done running, Branwyn sat back. “Well, that was fun. Now what?”
Simon took the half-empty bag of chips back from Branwyn. “They seem so harmless.”
Cautiously, Branwyn said, “Are we talking about faeries? Yes? They’re not all faeries, are they? I don't think the kid doing terrible card tricks could possibly have been one. All he had going for him was being cute, in a tweeny kind of way. I'm thinking his girlfriend made the playlist.”
“Who knows? I’m sure a few of them aren’t. What I don’t get—and, of course, it all happened before my time—is why they chose to exile those poor buggers instead of the kaiju. They got rid of some guys who mostly seem interested in music and dancing, and let the real monsters run around loose. I never hear stories about the number of corpses faeries left behind.” He gave the chips back to Branwyn and splashed some scotch into a mug.
“I don't know, read some fairy tales sometime. But yeah. They've been locked away so long, and it's hard to believe they're all equally bad. Even in stories, there's good fairies as well as bad ones.”
“Oh, fairy tales,” said Simon, in a way that made Branwyn suspect he was thinking about modern cartoons rather than the old stories she'd read with her Gran-gran. “They're scary for the wee ones, I'm sure, but some of the kaiju make Cronenberg look like a preschool teacher.”
Branwyn let it go, because she wasn't really interested in arguing for eternal imprisonment. She was inclined to think that life imprisonment even for humans was a bad idea. “That reminds me. Is there any chance you could Special Investigate the monster-type you smelled on me?”
Simon’s gaze sharpened. “Has he hurt you?”
“Well, no,” Branwyn admitted. “He’s causing trouble in other ways, though.”
“Eh. He does that, that one. Corbin’s not real fond of him. But he’s not a priority at the moment. There’s a lot worse than him out there, simply by scale of operation.” He scissored his fingers. “Gotta nip some of those before they show up on the map.”
“Well, as long as he’s in your queue.” Branwyn thought about him for a moment, first his eyes, and then his darkly amused voice, then made herself stop. “With the fae—maybe it wasn’t about who was dangerous,” she suggested. “Maybe it was about who was inconvenient. Monolithic power blocs don’t usually care about problems for
anybody but themselves.”
“I know there’s a lot of old nephilim families with faerie blood.” Simon drank from his mug. It had a unicorn on it. “A lot. And they don’t seem to hate their parents, either. It’s like they had forebears who never tried to kill them, or turn them into death machines, or anything. Amazing, really.”
Branwyn said, “Is that what you have?”
“Naw. Not like some, anyhow. My dad has mostly stayed out of my life. He never stopped liking my mum, even if I was an embarrassment. I never see him now.”
“Yeah, I know how that is,” Branwyn confided. “My biological dad suddenly decided he didn’t want kids when my mom was pregnant with my younger sister. Got the hell out of Dodge.”
Simon glanced at her, smiling. “So you broke your father of wanting more kids. Having known you five minutes, I can’t say that’s a big surprise.”
“I was a very sweet little girl,” said Branwyn, with some dignity. “Well, I was a sweet baby.”
Simon laughed. “Then you learned to talk, I bet.”
Branwyn frowned. “Are you always this bad at making friends?”
He pointed a chip at her. “That’s what I mean.”
“Hey, I have friends. I don’t have to resort to pulling strangers out of malls to watch YouTube videos with so I’m not lurking in my cave alone.” She said it without the venom she could have used, but she still watched the smile fade from his eyes.
He looked away. “Yeah.” Suddenly his computer seemed intensely interesting to him.
Branwyn tried and failed tried to remember Penny’s tips for smoothing over the awkward silences she always seemed to provoke. “So, hey, what can you tell me about Machines? The celestial kind, not the vroom-vroom kind.”
“And why would you be worrying your pretty green head about Machines?” he asked absently, closing windows on his computer.
“Oh, come on! You’re just trying to be a jerk now. I know I was nasty, but you started it.”
He blinked and pulled his attention away from the screen. “What? What did I say?” He seemed to replay the conversation in his head, then put his hand over his eyes. “Right. Modern woman. You don’t like that kind of talk. I’m sorry. It’s so easy to forget what era it is when I’ve been drinking. That’s kind of a lot,” he admitted, flashing a weak grin. “I mean, this era is gorgeous with all the various uses for electricity, very sexy, but the social rules seem to change every decade or so.”
It was Branwyn’s turn to fall quiet now. She didn’t like to think about how young she was compared to the circle she kept inserting herself into. Corbin swore to her he was only thirty or so, close to her own age. And while she knew Tarn was ancient, somehow his great age was swallowed up in the fact of his imprisonment, which she couldn't let go of. But somehow she’d thought Simon was also her age, despite what he’d said before.
“How many decades have you seen?” she asked cautiously.
He snuck a glance at the clock on his computer before answering. “Thirty-five? Thirty-eight? Something like that.”
Branwyn took a deep breath, then brightened. If she thought of his age like that, it wasn’t nearly as intimidating.
“I don’t know very much about Machines myself,” Simon went on conversationally. “I mean, who does? They’re bits of stuff from Heaven that celestials are afraid of. They’re rare outside of Heaven, and they do weird things sometimes. When we find them, we stick them in the Repository two floors down and lock the door. Out of my league, really.”
“Couldn’t you use them to finish off the kaiju? Forge them into arrowheads and spearheads and so forth? I know you guys have some.”
“You know, that very topic’s been bandied about lately. Used to be we only thought the weapon-shaped ones could be used as such, but for some reason, the idea of changing the miscellaneous bits into weapons has come up just recently. Can’t think why.” He gave her an inscrutable look. “Consensus seems to be that it’s a scary idea to alter something that may still be influencing the nature of reality.”
Branwyn gave him a keen look. “And what do the experts think?”
“Who’s an expert?” Simon asked with a shrug.
Branwyn was pretty sure she knew one or two, so she put that aside to ask somebody else about later. “Marley said you’ve got wizard skills. If I need my charms adjusted, can I come to you?”
Simon gave her a worried look. “Oh, please don’t. Corbin said if I inflicted my, uh, my Sunday morning spaghetti omelet on anybody else ever again, he’d curse me so all my booze turned to water.”
Impressed, Branwyn asked, “Can he do that?”
“I don’t want to find out! When that eye thing of his gets going, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”
“All right,” said Branwyn soothingly. “I’ll find somebody else.” And darkly, she thought about Zachariah.
*
Zachariah. Before his disappearance had kicked off Marley’s discovery of the secret world of celestials and nephilim, Branwyn hadn’t minded him. He was a guy Marley knew. He got her out of the house. He had cute kids and a lot of money.
But since he’d returned, things had changed. If he’d been interested romantically in Marley at all before, he’d been taking it very slowly. But now everything was different. He’d come back and officially hired her as the girls’ bodyguard-nanny and stepped up the level of his romantic attentions. Right as Marley was maybe, possibly getting something going with Corbin.
Branwyn thought he just didn’t like the competition and she didn’t like the kind of guy who would pursue someone just to keep her from being with someone else. And that meant she hated the idea of asking him for help. The question was: did she hate it enough to stop playing along with Tarn’s silly game? Especially given his offer to help Penny? She undoubtedly did need help with her charms; taking what Corbin had given her on a visit to anybody more hostile than Tarn would be like bringing nothing but a calculator to a gunfight.
She went to see Penny instead. It felt like the right next step.
When she opened the door of Penny’s room, she saw a slight figure hunched next to her friend’s form, dark hair veiling her face. The smooth brown skin and the expensive suit told Branwyn everything she needed to know, though. It was Penny’s mother, Viviana, and she was crying.
Branwyn tried to quietly close the door again, but Viviana glanced up and saw her anyhow. She wiped her eyes quickly and straightened, holding out her hands. “Branwyn. Come in. I’m sure Penny will be happy to hear your voice. Your family is well?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Branwyn shut the door behind her and moved into the room, allowing Viviana to take her hands and kiss her cheek. “Has there been a change in Penny’s condition?” She glanced at the new machine monitoring Penny's decline.
“No improvement,” Viviana said, a sob buried in her voice. “Come, sit down and talk with me.” She drew Branwyn over to the couch and sank into it.
Uncomfortable, Branwyn sat down beside her. There was a stack of tabloids on the arm of the couch, more than the ones Marley had been bringing in. They looked like somebody had been reading them.
“The doctors say, if someone is in a coma a certain period of time, the likelihood that they will wake up diminishes. You know this, yes?”
Grudgingly, Branwyn said, “Yes.” Viviana had consulted both the ordinary doctors that worked for the hospital and the specialists her connections had let her access immediately. She didn’t know that some of the technicians assisting those specialists had been Senyaza’s own specialists They hadn’t been willing to talk to somebody otherwise uninvolved, except apparently to get her legal permission for the damnable new monitor.
Viviana said, “I have been counting the days. The hospital has set up this new monitor. I let them, because what does it hurt? Penny would consent. But I think they will not get the information they are hoping for.” She peered intensely into Branwyn’s eyes for a moment, then sighed and looked away. A tabloid slid off the stack
into her lap and she replaced it. “My daughter has always been a good girl. Too good to attract this kind of attention, until now. Now I read this trash, because they are trying to find out what really happened to my Penny and I would like to know that as well.” She gave Branwyn another intent look and Branwyn held her gaze only with some difficulty. According to Penny, Viviana was famous in the movie industry for getting things done with a lethal efficiency. So rarely was that force of presence turned entirely on her that she was tempted to break down and tell her everything.
Viviana must have seen something in her eyes because she took Branwyn’s hand again. “I’m very glad you came by, Branwyn. I’ve been eager to have a little chat with you. You see, although you say you were there when she fell asleep, I can’t help but feel as though there is something you have not shared.” Her fingers tightened. “Anything else you could tell us might help, Branwyn. If they knew more—there are special treatments based on what happened, they tell me.”
Branwyn squeezed Viviana’s hand back, then pulled away. “What else can I say, ma'am? I didn’t see any signs of drugs. She didn’t have any bruises. She was sick and I went to stay with her, and then this happened.” She felt wretched. Not for lying to Viviana—that was just practical—but because she just knew the older woman was going to cry again.
She hated it when mothers cried.
“This happened. But what is this, Branwyn? Tell me again, because I don’t understand. And I do not understand why my daughter won’t wake up.” Her fist clenched on one of the flimsy magazines, crumpling it.
Branwyn opened her mouth, then paused. Lying was practical, but it wasn’t going to help Viviana feel better and it certainly wasn’t going to fend off tears, so why waste the effort? Why waste Viviana’s time?
Instead she said, “If I knew somebody who could possibly help, but it wasn’t… it was a sort of alternative medicine, would you be interested?”
Viviana narrowed her eyes. “You mean such as acupuncture?”
Infinity Key (Senyaza Series Book 2) Page 9
