Vanity Scare

by H. P. Mallory

  “Darion said you made him look silly,” I put in.

  “I made him look weak, is what I did,” Dagan said. “He didn’t and doesn’t love her, but escaping with her has given him great cause to despise me. She’s a possession to him, and her disappearance made him angry because it called his security into question. Not unlike what the royal family might endure, should the royal jewels go missing.” He paused to lick his lips, apparently lost in thought. “Retrieving Osenna will salve his wounds, so to speak. Put his pride at ease.”

  “You fucked with his honor,” said Dulcie.

  Dagan nodded. “That I did. And it is a slight he apparently never got around to forgetting.”

  “So this, then,” clarified Christina, “is less about killing you than it is about overcoming you/”

  “Darion wishes to declare dominance,” Bram finished for her.

  “In a perfect world, all he’d have to do is ask,” Dagan said in the fakest wistful voice I’d ever heard. “But no. If Darion left me alive, it’s because he wants me to see something, or he has some specific and terrible plan for dispatching me once I’m done watching him rip me apart with his teeth. Metaphorically speaking.” He looked at Dulcie suddenly. “He is afraid of you, though.”

  Dulcie frowned. “Why?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You’re many terrible things. You’re strong, fast, and magically gifted. You’re capable in more ways than even a demon of his caliber could ever hope to be.” Dagan squinted, and his hand went to his mouth like he was having the kinds of thoughts that could get us all killed. Or at least something that would get him slapped.

  Not that he ever had literally any other kind of thought.

  “You were immune to his illusions, Agent O’Neil,” he added. “A product of the experimentation you recently endured?”

  Dulcie shrugged, but her nonchalance was clearly fake. The blandness in her voice was forced, and she was glaring at the table like she wanted to kill its family. “Probably.”

  He nodded. “You have the potential to unmake him.”

  “Yet he threw me across the room with just a thought,” she pointed out. “And I could barely move. Still can barely move.”

  “You weren’t paying attention,” Dagan answered. “Darion wouldn’t have been able to do what he did unless you put your guard down.”

  She frowned, but it appeared she had let her guard down because she didn’t argue.

  “As I said,” Dagan continued, spearing Dulcie with the intensity of his expression. “You could unmake him.”

  “I’m not killing your brother for you,” she answered.

  “Not even for a Scooby Snack?” Dagan quipped, batting his eyelashes at her. He had weirdly long eyelashes, actually.

  “Dude, seriously?” she asked.

  “I’m prepared to pay you, of course,” he told her. “Handsomely. More than you could ever hope to make here, I’m certain.”

  “No.”

  “Dulcie is not interested in your offers,” Bram interjected. Knight glared at him just as openly as Dulcie did.

  “I can fight my own battles, Bram, for fuck’s sake!” she spat at him. Then, she faced Dagan. “I’m not interested.”

  “Are you sure? I could find other ways to thank you, you know.” Dagan’s tongue skated across his lips. “Find a more creative form of payment.”

  “That’s enough,” Knight railed at the demon before Casey interrupted him.

  “Dagan,” said Casey, reaching for his belt. “You’ve been here for less than an hour, and I’m ready to shoot you myself. Please don’t make me arrest you for harassment.”

  “And conspiracy to hire a hitman,” I added.

  “But that sounds like so much fun.”

  As Casey stood, his eyes flashed with that weird blue glow-stick light that happens when a siphon is having homicidal thoughts, and the air around him crackled with a vague blue-ish electricity. Like those deep-sea jellyfish that glow in the dark, except the jellyfish is also charging you with a really big hammer. He looked a lot taller than he actually was.

  I tensed up. We all did. It was that awful, suction-cupped, airless feeling that happens when your friend’s mom starts yelling at you during a sleepover.

  “Dagan,” said Casey. “Enough. You and your idiot girlfriend brought that”—he pointed to the spot where Darion had been standing—“into my fucking city, and we’re apparently lucky Darion’s not crazy enough to kill all of us.” He pursed his lips and closed his eyes, looking approximately eight seconds away from ripping Dagan’s lungs out through his eyes. “Meg is dead, and I do not have the patience to deal with another interdimensional sociopath trying to take over the world.”

  A freezer-burned silence settled over the room.

  “Oh, fine,” replied Dagan. “I did have noble intentions, for whatever it’s worth.”

  “Did you?” Casey snapped.

  Dagan nodded, pointedly not looking at him. “Yes, I did. I went back in a vain attempt to reclaim a courage I never possessed.”

  “And to sleep with an old friend in a public fountain,” added Bram.

  “That, too.” He shook his head. “But I had every intention of besting Darion myself, even if the means are not exactly… honorable. Osenna would never have forgiven me otherwise.”

  Bram snorted. “Osenna would never forgive you if it was honorable.”

  Dagan made a pursed-lips-nodding face that said he agreed, at least mostly. “Yes, well. Perhaps I ought to castrate myself before Darion and do battle the old-fashioned way.”

  Everyone looked at one another in complete and total confusion.

  “…You mean ‘prostrate?’” asked Casey. “Prostrate yourself before him.”

  Dagan pinched his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, like he was fending off a headache. “Yes, that,” he said. “The day’s been long and unpleasant, and I left my words in a box at home.” He dropped his hand. “But castration would be one way to make a statement, wouldn’t it?” He frowned. “Although I’m not sure what that statement would be…”

  Dagan tutted and shook his head, a lurid, porn-star-teacher-who’s-about-to-ask-you-for-a-favor-in-exchange-for-a-passing-grade sneer pulling itself onto his face. He was moving weirdly slow, like an old animatronic with a low battery.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to see Osenna now,” Dagan announced.

  “No,” said Bram.

  “I have to see her.” Hades, he sounded so desperate. I almost felt sorry for him. For everything that made Dagan the worst person in the history of people, he was still just some guy who wanted to see his girl.

  “I cannot rely on the pair of you not to make another equally catastrophic decision on behalf of everyone who is now in express danger from your brother,” Bram explained.

  “I need to see her,” Dagan insisted.

  “I cannot be persuaded otherwise. I do not care where you go, but you absolutely cannot see Osenna, under any circumstances,” Bram insisted.

  “Bold of you to assume you can stop me.”

  “Bold of you to assume I will be the only one to try.”

  “Hey, um,” Christina put in. “Dagan? I think Bram is right.”

  He whirled on her. “And who asked you?”

  “You know Darion’s not just here for the scarf. He’s here for Osenna.”

  Dagan pressed his lips together and glared at Bram. Bram glared back. I kept waiting for one of them to stick out their tongue or just flip each other off, or do the little head-swaggle that goes with “I know you are but what am I?” Ultimately, they were both two flagrant assholes trying to protect their assets, but there was something so juvenile about the whole thing. It was almost funny.

  “He’s here to take Osenna back home,” Christina continued.

  “He is,” said Dagan.

  She sighed, reached out, and took Dagan’s hand. He seemed surprised by the gesture. He didn’t even leer. It was weird seeing his eyes do anything else.

  �
��Dagan?” Christina said. “Darion will be aware of where you are now. He’s probably hoping you’ll lead him right to Osenna, and that’s not what any of us wants, right?”

  “Right,” he admitted, sounding like a disappointed child.

  “It’s not safe for you to see Osenna then, do you understand,” Christina finished.

  Dagan ground his teeth. He didn’t say anything.

  Christina smiled. “We’re going to help you. We’ll find Darion and arrest him, or banish him, or even kill him, if that’s what has to happen.”

  She sounded like she was talking to a little kid. Like a social worker swearing to protect him from a violent parent or sibling. And it was working. Dagan looked at her with eyes that were suddenly much softer than they’d been before. He was… okay, more human isn’t exactly right, but he was more real. More like an actual living person with feelings and fears and bad memories and everything. It was so easy to look at Dagan and see a caricature of sex, vulgarity, and bad late-night TV, but I guess that’s a little true of everybody.

  “I don’t know your brother super well, obviously,” Christina added, squeezing his hand. In a moment of child-like vulnerability, Dagan squeezed back. He didn’t seem to realize he was doing it. “But I think it’s a fair bet that Darion’s not just here to take back what you stole. He’s here to hurt you.”

  Dagan’s eyes glazed over. Not a milky-white, oracle-having-a-vision glaze, not a deep-in-thought glaze, but a sharp, metallic, war-never-changes glaze. He knew this already. He was terrified of it.

  “What would be the easiest way to hurt you?” she pressed.

  We all knew the answer to that. Dagan and everybody in his little sphere of nymphomaniacs loved classic pain: blood and bruises and bites and, sometimes, broken bones. But this was a different kind of hurt. This was a new kind of internal bleeding.

  Dagan swallowed.

  “Osenna,” Christina finished. “You said Darion was abusive?”

  Dagan nodded. He swallowed harder this time—gulped, even.

  “Then he isn’t going to find her and leave,” she pointed out. “Darion is going to find her, and he’s going to actively use her to hurt you. And I’m sure you don’t want that.”

  Dagan shook his head. Christina looked ready to say more, but she didn’t have to. He was visibly shaken, probably less by the hypothetical and more by memories of what Darion had actually done to Osenna already.

  “What is your… recommendation, then?” he asked her eventually.

  “Stay here. Try and be patient, which I know is hard.” Christina shrugged. “But it’s really the best you can do right now. If Darion’s scared of Dulcie, she can protect you here.”

  “And who will protect Osenna?” Dagan demanded.

  Christina looked at Bram.

  “Provided you do not go hunting for her, Osenna is perfectly safe where she is,” said Bram.

  “Hiding won’t be enough,” Dagan argued. “She can’t be left alone.”

  “She won’t be.”

  “She’s alone right now,” Dagan argued, his eyes going wide.

  “Right,” Christina said but then quickly added. “But Bram is going to leave right now to go be with her.”

  Bram looked between Christina and Dagan like she’d asked the two of them to kiss. “I will what?”

  “You will go home,” instructed Christina firmly. “Check on Osenna and make sure she’s okay.”

  “We’ll send someone with you,” added Casey, who really didn’t want to let Bram go gallivanting off into the early afternoon without a babysitter. Not that anybody else did, for that matter.

  “Bram won’t be enough,” Dagan started.

  “Excuse me,” Bram began but Dagan interrupted.

  “Darion,” Dagan said slowly, “is a monster. Most of the people I knew in Dromir are monsters.” He paused. “And now Darion’s here. And he wants to drag Osenna back into the frozen hellscape we spent our entire lives trying to escape.”

  Christina watched him, listening patiently.

  Dagan exhaled like he was reminding himself how to breathe. “Don’t make me leave her alone for this.”

  Christina nodded. “We’ll figure something out, okay? Everybody, take ten, get some water.” She pushed her chair back and stood uncertainly. “Get your brains back together.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” confirmed Casey, and that was everyone else’s signal to take Christina’s words as an order.

  She looked at Dagan. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her. He sounded almost naked without the god-put-me-on-this-earth-specifically-to-fuck-anything-that-moves lilt in his voice.

  “Osenna will still be wherever she is once we’ve figured this out,” Christina reminded him.

  “But of course.”

  “I mean it,” she said. “You can wait anywhere on this floor, but do not leave the building.” She pursed her lips and gave him a levelling stare. “I don’t want Osenna to die because you love her too much, okay?”

  It’s a really good thing Christina is on our side. Sometimes, the way she manipulates people into not being total morons is a little scary. I’m sure she does it to me all the time.

  Dagan didn’t look entirely sobered, but he nodded. “Yes, Mistress Sabbiondo,” he said, and he bowed.

  It was such a weird feeling, being sorry for somebody so blatantly vulgar. Not that a bow is vulgar. Bowing is fine. It’s literally everything else about Dagan that gives me the heebie-jeebies.

  TWENTY

  Bram

  Before I was able to leave to check on Osenna, we were seen by medical personnel, magical and otherwise. It was determined that, yes, we had been subjected to an especially powerful and invasive illusion. Specifically of the fear-inducing variety, which I found especially vexing. I had not been properly afraid of anything since before my death, and I had not missed the feeling.

  Christina and Agent James disappeared in order to organize the search for Darion, a brief and twisting maze of red tape that apparently had to be navigated from the seventh floor. Dagan was taken to a room from which he could be monitored, and Quillan departed for the interrogation room in which Zhe Ping was currently residing. They did not expect Zhe Ping to tell them anything of special importance, but it was agreed that it would be foolish not to ask.

  I listened outside the door for several minutes to see if anything interesting was being said. Zhe Ping was cursing up a veritable maelstrom of obscenities in a language that was not quite Mandarin, but not quite anything else, either.

  “No, but what’s he saying?” Quillan was saying to an already frazzled translator.

  “Oh. Um. Hmm.” She listened and started deadpan rattling off his insults. “He says he wants to gouge out your eyes, pickle them, and make your grandchildren eat them… he’s going to gut you like a whale, I think? Or he wants to feed you to a whale… uh, he’s going to chop off your testicles and feed them to a llama? Or maybe a group of llamas?”

  “Llamas?”

  “I don’t know.” She paused. “Do you want me to keep going?”

  “No, thanks, I think I got the gist.”

  “Great.”

  Clearly, grand progress was being made. It is moments such as this in which I am especially glad that I do not pay taxes.

  The plan, as I understood it, was to interrogate Dagan and Zhe Ping and attempt to find Darion using the many resources the FBI had at its disposal. I had as much faith in this plan as I did in the smoldering ruins of the Association of Netherworld Creatures and the rotting corpse of Melchior O’Neil. I would do better searching for Darion myself. But I would not. Even if I were so inclined, it was midday. And though the sunlight penetrating the building could not harm me, it was still not my friend.

  Standing along the far wall of the vast room crammed with old metal desks and gray rolling chairs and cheap monitors, I wasn’t in a space that was especially bright. Many of the windows had the blinds at least partially drawn
to kill the glare on several outward-facing computer screens.

  But to me, it was near blinding. The contrast between the suffused light of an early Californian afternoon and the yellowish haze of even the softest lightbulbs was… astounding.

  No, astounding is the wrong word. Something that astounds does so with vibrancy and gusto. This was softer. This was the angelic whisper of a violin in a marble music hall, or the gradual appreciation one develops while assessing a large and vibrant painting.

  I stood not far from one of the windows, this one with no obstructions. Light poured through it like breath. Creatures, humans, selkies, trolls and vampires, strode through it without a glance. They did not burn. They did not flinch.

  I reached for it.

  Slowly, carefully.

  I stepped into the sun.

  And Hades. It was breathtaking.

  Outside the window was Splendor, spread out to the horizon like a deck of cards spilled across a table. Whatever it was about sunlight that so offended creatures of the dark was trapped on the other side of the window; the heat, though, remained. It warmed my skin in a way the fires of a hearth are incapable. It was a gentle warmth, a caress from the hand of someone who could never be properly erased from one’s memory. It was the touch of a dream, long locked away.

  It was real, alive in ways the night cannot match.

  I found myself wondering what the sea looked like at this time of day, and what the sand might feel like, hot and powdery, under my feet. I remembered the disparity of noises from night to day, the kinds of sounds that populated the brilliant streets and darkened corners of the world. The screams of sunlight and moonlight were very different things—one of joy, one of primal, animal terror.

  “Bram?” said Dulcie, interrupting my reverie.

  I turned, smile at the ready, and was met with a hand across my face. A quite brazen hand.

  Her slap rang like a tinny bell in a small room. My own hand instinctively rose to rub the spot on my cheek.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded in that fiery way of hers. All the furies of war and death and petty theft were carved into her face. Her mouth was partly open, braced for a snarl. Rarely had I seen her so incensed.