She Who Sees Through Darkness

by Liz Ellor

  For decades, an elite group of spies within the CIA has kept the existence of magic secret from the world. Katrina Harris counted herself among their number, until a drunken brawl with a coworker got her fired. She’d do anything to re-enter the thrilling world of supernatural espionage—even infiltrate a terrorist cell without backup.

  Dr. Phyllis Harper has an Arctic fortress, a dozen magic-wielding soldiers, and a flock of genetically-engineered dragons capable of knocking American warplanes from the sky. All she needs are pilots. A chance encounter lets Katrina talk the doctor into recruiting her. If Katrina escapes Harper’s fortress with intelligence, she can convince her old bosses to take her back.

  But neither magic nor science can prepare Katrina to have a dragon in her mind. A creature cunning enough to ferret out all her secrets … and one whose own fierce memories tell Katrina she might be working for the wrong side.

  She Who Sees Through Darkness

  A Story of The Colder War

  © 2014

  Liz Ellor

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part 1: The Lawyer

  Part 2: The Mole

  Part 3: The Subject

  Part 4: The Traitor

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Part 1: The Lawyer

  Katrina Harris woke to the sound of violin music drifting down into her ears from the floor above. Annie. Her niece’s music plus the lumpy cushions under her head said she was at her brother’s place in Brooklyn, not the studio apartment in Alphabet City she split with five other staffers. How’d she end up here?

  Shawn. The memories returned. She and Kyle had found him waiting outside the bar when they’d climbed out of their taxi. Shawn had grabbed her arm and towed her away. She’d shouted at him—it was just for work, shouldn’t you be home with your wife, don’t you trust me—and he’d answered no and ushered her into his car.

  “I had a vision,” he’d explained when no one could hear them. “You would have relapsed. I saw you afterwards, sobbing in the bathroom.” A police car had shot by them, its red and blue lights dancing in his black and grey hair and casting shadows in his thin cheeks. “There was an eighty-five, ninety percent chance. You need to tell your boss.”

  “Senator Winters?” A strangled little laugh had escaped her. “She calls me her attack dog. She trusts me with her reputation. What’s she going to think if I tell her?”

  “That you’re a grown woman with a chronic mental illness who needs to stay away from bars. You’re two years sober. You’ve finally put your life back together.” They’d argued all the way back to his house, until she’d agreed to tell the senator and explain how work stress plus Kyle’s return made a toxic combination of triggers.

  Like hell I will, she thought, rolling off Shawn’s couch. The long tee-shirt she’d slept in billowed down past her knees. Admit to her tough-as-nails boss just how weak she really was? Emma Winters had once called the two of them kindred spirits. Katrina needed to believe that was true.

  Fuck Shawn and his visions. She herself was painfully ignorant of what, exactly, he saw. Part of the price of magic. It messed with family genetics, cutting fertility, leaving a whole child here, a disabled one there, and, in her case, one without any powers at all. She might have been a second-generation Descendant, but without the pyromancy that marked her bloodline, simply being a Descendant meant nothing. It wasn’t even something she could brag about—telling anyone about magic would constitute a breach of the Seal, which meant death for her and whoever she’d told. And since she lived in Shawn’s jurisdiction, he’d have to give the order for her death.

  Katrina found Anaïs in the kitchen, frying bacon, her unruly red hair floating in a cloud around her head. Anaïs’s blue eyes narrowed as they found her sister-in-law.

  “Do you have an iPhone charger?” Katrina asked. Her phone was dead. Her fingers itched to check her text messages.

  “Shawn and I use Blackberries.” She looked back down into the pan. Her tone hadn’t exactly been friendly, but Katrina couldn’t blame her. She’d been a third party in their marriage for too long. “And Annie’s phone privileges are on pause, since she told us she was going to a study group and went to a party instead.”

  “That’s too bad,” Katrina said. It felt like the appropriate thing to say.

  “You talking about me?” Annie—Antoinette Harris—glided down the stairs. She’d inherited her father’s long black hair and her mother’s pale complexion, her fingers delicate and her smile mischievous. “What are you doing here so early, Aunt Kat?” She looked at Katrina, who turned to look out the window. Fuck, she could turn into a little me.

  Shawn walked in, dressed in khaki pants and a polo shirt that squeezed tight around his forearms arms. The magic in his tissues and years of training meant he could, at forty-two, handle weights and take injuries that would destroy a man twenty years his junior. As an agent of Indigo, ninety percent of his work was spycraft: seeking Descendants who didn’t register with their local Indigo station, putting names to the faces of people glimpsed in visions, keeping the public convinced that Indigo’s purpose was monitoring the CIA’s internal financial assets. But ten percent of his work was eliminating rogue Descendants who threatened the Seal, and Shawn excelled at one hundred percent of his job. All New York’s Descendants, whether Indigo, civilian, or criminal, called him the ‘Living Flame.’

  The formidable Living Flame poured coffee into his travel mug. “Are you going home this weekend, Katrina?”

  “Probably.” The old family farm in the Adirondacks was a four hour drive from the city, but she hadn’t been back in nearly a month. “Need to do some cleaning. My marathon’s the second weekend in November. Five weeks left. Need to train.”

  “Rumor has it …” He paused and looked at Annie.

  “I’m going to be an agent, Dad. You can talk about this stuff.”

  Katrina took a long, bitter sip of coffee. She didn’t trust herself to comment.

  “Rumor has it there’s a valkyrie in town, asking questions about local history, especially the farm. I’m driving up tonight with everyone I can spare to investigate her. We’ll be gone all weekend.”

  Katrina whistled. The Harris family had belonged to Indigo since its inception. The cache of Indigo documents in their basement vault went back three hundred years, and the only people who’d be interested in obtaining them were among the most dangerous people in the world. People who wanted nothing more than to overthrow the Seal and watch the world burn.

  “How’s the Universal Vision look?” Katrina asked. For a second-generation pyromancer, Shawn’s clairvoyance was fairly weak. But every pyromancer in Indigo could foresee a threat to the Seal.

  “Fuzzy. There’s a low likelihood this woman will try to break the Seal any time soon.” Shawn’s dark eyes, twin to her own, narrowed. “That doesn’t mean she’s no threat. There’s the vault … and our intelligence says this one might have a criminal record. If you go home, keep the doors locked. Stay out of the woods and hold on to your gun.”

  “Will do,” she said, cheerfully. An image danced before her eyes: a furious valkyrie, transformed from human to monster, eight feet tall with feathered white wings, breaking into the old Harris House to rob the arsenal in the basement—and Katrina, her long black hair flying back off her face, golden-brown skin glowing with sweat, angled features set and deadly as she pumped the monster full of lead.

  “I mean it, Katrina. You’re not an agent anymore.”

  They might reinstate me if I killed a valkyrie. She shook off the fantasy. Indigo had already made one major exception when they’d hired her, a woman without magic. Considering why they’d fired her, she’d need to stop World War Three to get back in. Especi
ally since this valkyrie didn’t seem to pose an immediate threat to the Seal. “Any interesting cases this week?”

  “Rogue aeromancer in Chinatown,” Shawn said, wary. “Suffocated his wife and her lover. Anaïs fought him for control of the air while I got behind him.”

  Warm satisfaction bubbled up in the back of her throat—a diminished version of the rush that had come from stopping the bastards herself, but a rush still worth pursuing. “And? Any more new arrivals causing trouble? What’s the word from the international branch?”

  Anaïs broke in. “We also had to track down a teenage boy. He was planning to upload videos of him shapeshifting online. ”

  “Hard fight?” Katrina asked.

  “Hard? Of course not. He was a child. And his punishment … was severe. Third time this year someone’s tried that stunt.”

  Katrina knew Anaïs was trying to make her feel better about not being an agent any more. But Katrina wasn’t naïve, like Annie—she knew being an agent meant getting your hands dirty. Most of the people who threatened the Seal were criminals, people who cared for no law, who used their magic to rape, murder, and steal. But some were teenagers, or seniors with dementia, or mentally ill. The work wasn’t pretty. The world needed it, all the same.

  She’d seen Shawn’s face when the Universal Vision sharpened, indicating a breach of the Seal was near. He’d often described it to her: whole cities dissolving in chaos, werewolves openly chasing human prey, innocent Descendants murdered by suspicious neighbors and criminal Descendants killing hundreds, thousands. Ordinary spies took drastic action all the time. At least the agents of Indigo knew for sure their work upheld the greater good. They fight in the shadows. They keep the peace. No need for glory, or even a ‘thank you’. Katrina liked her job well enough, but fighting to protect the name of one of New York’s richest families felt tiny in comparison.

  She wolfed down her bacon and wrapped the toast up in a napkin. “I should go.”

  She read the headlines off the newspapers of other subway passengers and learned the campaign was in deep shit.

  Their offices were up on 88th and 3rd. Debris swirled against her legs as she walked, buoyed by the wind and kicked up by other pedestrians. Horns blasted. People shouted. Katrina’s eyes darted all around the crowd, scanning for threats. Useless paranoia. She wasn’t important enough for anyone to want to hurt her.

  Unless you counted Ford Maxwell. The portly campaign manager awaited her just outside the elevator, his flabby white cheeks now boiling red. “Why didn’t you answer your fucking phone?”

  “Ran out of juice.” She shrugged past him and pushed her way into the office. Rows of plastic tables filled the center of the room, each lined with phones and volunteers. Cheerful ‘hello, sirs!’ rose up over and over. Red, white, and blue ‘Winters for New York, Winters for Governor,’ posters covered the walls—in more than one case, covering cracks in the plaster.

  “Are you an idiot?” Ford said. “Carry spare batteries. Herself is on the way! We need to have answers when she gets here!”

  Katrina shared her cubicle with Nathan DeSoto, a campaign-finance expert Senator Winters had brought on board when her opponents accused her of taking illegal funds from the natural gas industry in March. Nathan had nose buried in his laptop out, gathering information on HIPAA.

  “Thank god,” he muttered when she sat. “Where were you last night? Ford’s been looking for you all morning.”

  “New boyfriend,” she lied, opening her laptop. “Who’s our leak? The doctor? His staff?”

  “Finding the leak’s your job. I’m only here because the Times hinted she used campaign funds.”

  “Fucking liberals.” Katrina said. Well, at least her job wasn’t boring.

  Jerry Court stuck his head into their cubicle. The kid was a decade younger than the other staffers, but his poll-tracking algorithms had correctly predicted the outcome of every 2010 midterm race three months before the election, and Winters only hired the best. “We’re fucked, guys!” He jerked his can of Red Bull at the ceiling.

  “I can prove she used her own money, Jerry,” Nathan said. “I’ve got the documents right here. We’ll release them—”

  “How she paid doesn’t matter. What matters is that every publication in the world now knows Senator Winters had a boob job while in office. Have you checked Reddit this morning? They’ve posted before and after pictures. ‘Senator Tinytits,’ they’re calling her. Frankly, I’m surprised it took so long for this to leak. It’s obvious. Guess everyone figured she’d get her butt-ugly face touched up before worrying about her tits.”

  Katrina squeezed her pen. “Watch your mouth, kid. That’s your employer you’re talking about.”

  “Hey, I’m an opinions guy. And that’s the general opinion of the Internet. Probably why she’s trailing by three points in men eighteen to twenty-four. Whatever. Let’s talk housewives, ages thirty to fifty. Core constituency. They had a few on GMA this morning—wives of big donors. All bitching about how they had to explain what breasts were to their kids. One more scandal, and they’ll throw their weight behind Prescott.”

  Katrina snorted. “Good luck getting our donors to support a man who loudly declares the Earth’s four thousand years old.”

  “Voters are idiots, Katrina.”

  High heels clicked on the tiled floor. All heads jerked up. Nathan wiped crumbs off his shirt. Katrina opened a binder to look busy. Then Senator Emma Winters walked in, her blond bob swaying. “Jerry, remind me never to put you in front of a microphone.” Behind her stood her son, Kyle Winters, who looked like he was about to puke all over his mother’s expensive jacket.

  He also happened to be Katrina’s oldest friend.

  “We’re going to spin this.” Ford walked in behind Senator Winters. “Got that, ma’am? It’s going to work out fine. We blame Obamacare. Physicians making patient records public? It’s fucking perfect. We go on the offensive.”

  “And when the soccer moms decide I’m the Whore of Babylon?”

  “Just tell them the reason you did it,” Kyle suggested. “It made you feel sexy.”

  The senator stared at her son like he was a badly trained puppy who’d chewed up her shoe. “Excuse me?”

  Katrina imagined doing what Shawn had asked of her, saying Ma’am, I’m an alcoholic, and I can’t watch Kyle when he goes to party, which is a key part of my job. No room remained in this campaign for the senator to indulge a hint of personal weakness, let alone indulge it in her personal lawyer. Instead, Katrina stepped forward. “Ma’am, what do you want me to do?”

  “You? Get your ass to the clinic. I want the leaker fired. Gone. Out on the streets. Take Kyle with you. Everyone else, my office, now. We’ve got to strategize—press conference at noon!”

  She moved like a hurricane, sucking up the other staffers in her wake, leaving Katrina and Kyle alone and staring at each other. His hazel green eyes were cloudy, unfocused.

  “Missed you last night,” he said, fighting past his hangover. “It was fun. Really.” He’d just gotten back in the country from a three-month jaunt in Europe. Before he’d left, he’d been making a run at responsible adulthood—investing in businesses, doing his taxes, going to bed at ten. Something had clearly happened to make Fun Kyle resurface, and to a degree she hadn’t seen in years. It was one thing to supervise him at family weddings and press conferences. Fun Kyle liked bars and clubs and trouble.

  “Bet it was.” Katrina gritted her teeth and hit ‘print’ on her laptop screen. “Let’s go threaten a doctor.”

  The drive to Long Island took them past the old mosque on Atlantic Avenue. Katrina’s mind flew to her mother. She said she prayed the family power would pass me by. Why? Why would she do such a thing? Didn’t she believe in me? Did she know what I’d become? The memory stung, even from a lifetime away.

  “The weather’s nice,” Kyle said. “For October.”

  Katrina grunted.

  Three news vans waited outside the Bellmonte Cli
nic. Katrina passed Kyle her attaché case and strode forward, a copy of the NDA in hand. A lawsuit became a bigger threat when people could see the contract they’d broken.

  One journalist jumped when he saw Kyle. “Mr. Winters! How does it feel to have your mother’s surgery public knowledge? Is the family embarrassed?”

  “We are—” he started.

  “No comment,” Katrina said.

  A woman thrust out a tape recorder. “Is it true she had breast cancer? Do you know how she paid? Was it with the donations from FuturePAC?”

  “No comment,” Katrina repeated, and grabbed the door handle. Locked.

  The receptionist watched the proceedings from the other side of the glass. She held up the papers so he could see. “I’m Senator Winter’s personal lawyer! Open up!”

  He got up and walked into the back office. A second later, he returned and opened the door. She and Kyle darted inside.

  “I’ll get Dr. Fisher for you,” said the receptionist.

  The clinic’s walls were soundproof. Katrina’s mind relaxed, as it so rarely could in the city. Soft New Age music played. A fountain gurgled. Stay on edge. She toyed with the idea it had been laid out this way as a trap for sharp-witted lawyers. They won’t trap me. I’m Senator Winters’ attack dog. Dangerous, deadly, not easily thrown by wind chime music and some lights on a dimmer. It wasn’t the career she’d dreamed of, but it was a career. I could say I’m fighting for something good. Fewer gun laws, low taxes. A nice increase to security spending to keep Indigo afloat.

  Dr. Fisher turned out to be a short man with a greying beard and a warm smile: a classic TV grandfather, not some insidious threat to mankind. She handed him the papers.

  “I’m so sorry about how all of this turned out,” he said as they sat in the front room. He’d had the receptionist bring him and Kyle herbal tea; Katrina had declined. “I was out drinking with some friends last weekend and said some things I shouldn’t about my clientele. Someone in the bar must have overheard. Mr. Winters, please convey my personal apologies to your mother.”