“But they can’t kill what they can’t catch,” Harmony said. “This is submarine warfare. They know we’re in these waters, somewhere, and vice versa. Our best bet is to keep moving, run silent, and fire torpedoes before they do. We can also continue to play on the courts’ antipathy for one another and occasionally benefit from mutual goals.”
“You’re not talking about an alliance,” said the woman from DC.
“No. Not a formal one. But Caitlin Brody, the enforcer for the demon prince of the West Coast, has already proved herself willing to help if we’re mucking up her competition’s territory. For instance, once we realized Nadine’s accountant was in Los Angeles, and she was moving truckloads of money through the city without permission—and without paying tribute—Caitlin granted us her blessing to operate in the city unimpeded so long as her name stayed out of it.”
“Wait,” the woman said. “You notified a representative of hell that we were moving against one of their own?”
April lifted her palms from the arms of her chair. She spread them gracefully.
“Politics, Senator. Hell is not a monolith. If anything, it’s considerably more fractured, and has more infighting than, well…Congress.”
“If it helps,” Jessie said, “think of ’em as mafia families. Which brings us to threat vector number two: the Network. The actual occult mafia, with outposts on at least a dozen parallel Earths, probably more, and led by alien entities calling themselves the Kings of Man.”
The man in the shadows, with brass on his lapel, coughed into his microphone.
“I’ve been reading this report about the Wisdom’s Grave incident. You’re certain about your conclusions?”
“One hundred percent,” Harmony said. “Jessie and I were there, along with multiple assault teams. The creature formerly identified as the King of Rust is a confirmed kill. The kings can be hurt. And they can be destroyed. We know it now, and so do they.”
“From what we’re picking up on signals chatter,” Jessie added, “the Network is scared shitless. Their big boss, Adam, is missing, and whatever else went down that night, it cut off their ability to communicate and get around like they used to. April, what was that metaphor you used?”
April kept her gaze on the screens, cool and steady, reading every expression as she spoke.
“Hercules and the Hydra. We’ve cut off the heads, but in this case, it was the Network’s body that died. The Hydra’s heads are still alive, still intact and extremely dangerous, but uncoordinated and biting in all directions.”
“What about these civilian contacts?” asked the woman from DC. “And the multiple disappearances in the days after? Marie Reinhart—”
“Leave it alone,” Harmony said.
The room fell silent.
“Excuse me?” the woman replied.
“Senator, with all due respect…leave it alone.”
“What I think my partner means,” Jessie said, “is Reinhart isn’t a danger to us. And if the day comes when she wants us to know where she disappeared to, we will know. Let’s move on. Our third and final primary threat vector: Robert Marius Diehl, technical and occult prodigy, closeted psychopath, terrorist, and Nazi fetishist, and former CEO of Diehl Innovations.”
“Bobby is on the run,” Harmony said, “and not just from us. The FBI wants him, and the IRS wants anything that’s left over when they’re finished. He’s fled to an offshore haven called ‘Xanadu.’ As yet, we have not been able to determine its location.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a risk,” said the woman from DC. “He’s a fugitive, his assets are frozen, and he can’t set foot on American soil without risking arrest or elimination, depending on who catches him first. I’d say he’s been dealt with.”
Harmony and Jessie shared a quiet glance. Harmony turned back to the screens.
“I wish I shared your confidence, Senator, but we’ve crossed swords with Bobby Diehl and his operatives on multiple occasions. The man tried to spark an occult apocalypse. He’s caused horrific civilian casualties, including a chemical attack on a small town, with absolutely no hesitation or regret. Yes, he looks like a cornered rat from where we’re standing, but that’s when a rat is most dangerous. He needs to stay a priority target until we’ve put a bullet in the bastard’s head, verified his DNA, burned his corpse, and scattered the ashes just to be certain.”
Harmony caught the vehemence in her voice, the anger burbling to the surface and spilling free, but she couldn’t stop it. She caught her breath and dug her short-cropped fingernails into her palms, digging half-moon welts.
“Strong words, Agent Black.”
Harmony fixed her gaze on the screen. She spoke slowly now, firmly, her rage a dragon on a short leash.
“Talbot Cove was my hometown, ma’am. I was the target of that attack. I was at ground zero when the gas bombs went off. So, yes. This is extremely personal to me. I won’t pretend otherwise.”
* * *
After the briefing, after the bank of video screens flickered and died one by one, winking out as the Sponsors went their separate ways, Harmony felt a tug on her sleeve.
“Have a minute?” April asked her.
Hammering echoed down the drafty hallways. And in the distance, the rumbling roar of a jackhammer as contractors dug out new territory. April gave her wheels a shove, rolling off to the side of the briefing room, and Harmony followed her.
“You should take some time off,” April said.
The idea was bizarre. She might as well have told Harmony she should start wearing a fish on her head.
“We don’t get time off,” Harmony said.
“Of course you do. I’ve been Vigilant’s in-house psychologist for years, Harmony. I’ve sent agents on mandatory recuperation leave more times than I can count.”
“That was before. Before—” Harmony waved a hand, taking in the bare drywall, the exposed wooden timbers. “This. Before the truth. Before we burned everything down and started to rebuild. There’s too much going on, too many operations in play. I’m needed here.”
“Yes. We do need you. We need you effective and at peak levels of performance. You’ve…taken some hits in the last year or so.”
Harmony folded her arms and turned her gaze. She stared at the dead video wall.
“Taking hits is part of the job. We take them so civilians don’t have to.”
“Bobby Diehl,” April said, “isn’t our only adversary who you have a personal vendetta against.”
She let that hang in the air between them. Harmony didn’t respond.
“Have you had a single night’s sleep since we began the operation against Nadine’s accountant?”
“I’ll sleep now,” Harmony said.
April eyed her over the rims of her bifocals. “Will you?”
“We’re one step closer.”
“To Nadine.”
“To ending Nadine.”
“You know,” April said, “what she did to you, in Chicago…your medical record affirms that the physical effects wore off some time ago.”
“The record says it, so it must be true.”
“But no one, especially not me, expects that the emotional effects did,” April said. “You were traumatized—”
Harmony turned to face her, eyes flashing.
“I was not traumatized. I was injured on a mission. It happens.”
“You were assaulted.”
Harmony flung up her hands, pacing, pouring her nervous energy out before it twisted up something inside her.
“Assaulted,” she echoed. “Facing violent altercations is part of the job.”
“That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it.”
Harmony patted her left shoulder. “I have burn scars on most of this shoulder. On my hip? Facing off with the Ballard Ripper left me with twenty-eight stitches. My ribs have been broken multiple times, and I stopped counting the scars on my back and arms years ago. There’s a reason I never wear short sleeves. I have been shot—”
“Not the same thing,” April said.
“Shot, in the line of duty, and you want me to act like what Nadine did to me was any different.”
April met Harmony’s anger with a wall of steely calm.
“Because it was, and you know that it was. You need to acknowledge it.”
“I need—” Harmony’s shoulders slumped. Deflated. She glanced at her phone. No bars down here, she just needed to check the time. “I need to get going. Appointment. I’m…I’ve been doing the float thing, like you suggested.”
“It’s a start,” April said.
5.
The first time Harmony laid eyes on a sensory-deprivation tank, she couldn’t shake how much it looked like a coffin.
She had already been dubious. The owner of the “clinic”—converted from a guesthouse in the Bethesda suburbs—was a neo-hippie who kept a wicker dream catcher dangling over her cash register and burned sage to ward off bad intentions. Still, April recommended her, and she trusted April. The tank sat in a small tiled room, industrially scrubbed and smelling of mingled antiseptic and incense. Off to one side there was a row of wall pegs and a bench for changing, next to a boxy little shower for before and after the float.
“And it’s just…water?” she had asked on her first visit.
The lid opened with a rustle. Pattie, the owner, gestured to the motionless fluid within.
“Water saturated with Epsom salt, for buoyancy, and heated to skin temperature. The idea is to make you as weightless as possible.”
Weightless was a good word for it. This was Harmony’s third visit, and now the process was routine. She locked the door and stripped off her catering uniform at long last. Her change of clothes was sheathed under dry-cleaning plastic, dangling from a peg on the wall. She showered, trying not to look at her quilt of scars or think about her argument with April, and approached the tank.
She stepped up, and in, and sank into the warm salty broth. Then she closed the lid of the tank and sealed herself in absolute darkness.
She floated.
There was no sound. Not at first. Then a distant thrumming, like drums on the horizon, their beats tinged with an electrical crackle. It was her pulse. Her blood pumping through her veins, singing out as she gradually lost awareness of her skin and muscles and bones. She simply was, a disembodied and weightless spirit drifting through the moonless dark.
The tangled chaos of her thoughts smoothed out, melting in the water’s warmth. She found herself in the moment before the magic, out on a vast plain of perfectly even grid lines, the world reduced to neon graph paper. She was alone here.
She wasn’t alone here.
On the far horizon, the lines of her perfect mind-grid went askew. A cold front crept in, ice frosting over the pure neon and cracking it. Lines sputtered and flickered out. With the cold came the first pangs of gnawing hunger. The hunger dug deep inside her, rummaging in her guts, and wrenched out flashes of memory to throw in her face.
* * *
They’d had her. Nadine was cornered, trapped in the bullet-riddled ruins of an underground nightclub, surrounded by the corpses of her hired help. Nadine had taken hostages. Harmony and Jessie had taken precautions; then they’d gone tactical. They thought they knew what the demon was capable of.
“I told you,” Nadine had purred. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
She put her hands on Harmony’s body. Then her mouth. Then her magic, pouring into her as she took an ice pick to Harmony’s walls and invaded her body and her soul at the same time. She didn’t remember much in the aftermath. She had helped Nadine escape. Tried to kill her own team. Jessie had to choke her out.
She mostly remembered sitting in the carnage, feeling…dirty.
Someone tried to touch her, a reassuring hand on her arm. She flinched.
“Babe,” Jessie said, “you’re not okay. And that’s okay, you get me?”
“I didn’t want that. I didn’t…want her to do that to me. I didn’t want it.”
Of course not, they told her. Nobody thought she did.
But she thought she did.
That was the most insidious trick of all, the core of a succubus’s power. It wasn’t enough that they could light you up with a single kiss, igniting every neuron in your brain, a rush of pleasure stronger than any drug known to man. It wasn’t enough that you knew, coming down, that as long as you lived you would never ever feel that good again. It wasn’t enough that they could stir their fingers in your brain and scramble you around, turn mortal enemies into lovers and your best friend into a threat.
The most insidious thing of all was that, in the heat of the moment, they could convince you that you were asking for it. And in the aftermath, when your senses returned, when you could look back with clarity and understand what had been done to you, that lingering doubt remained. That maybe you really did want it. Maybe you were guilty. Maybe you really were just as dirty as you felt, and you’d never feel clean again.
And with the dirtiness came the hunger. The full rush of a succubus’s curse was a drug. And like a drug, once you had a hit, you wanted more. You needed more.
The next time they crossed paths with Nadine, it was at a Washington, DC, fundraiser. They were both there on a mission. Harmony had to keep her cover, and so did Nadine; instead of open warfare, they had to settle for passing glances and veiled threats. Nadine didn’t miss a chance to slip close, putting her lips to Harmony’s ear, and twist the knife.
“I feel…close to you now,” she whispered. “After all, I’ve been inside you. I carved my initials in you. That’s forever.”
* * *
Focus. Breathe. Focus. Breathe.
Harmony floated.
She latched on to the distant drumbeat throb of her pulse. Sinking into the sound and pushing back the ragged knots at the edges of her serenity. She calmly smoothed the graph-paper lines, arranged them, brought order to the disarray.
A moment later they began curling and twisting back into knots. The cold was moving closer now, spreading tendrils of frost over her heart and turning the blood in her veins to icy sludge.
For a normal human, a succubus’s curse meant addiction. For a magician, it meant loss. Loss of her connection to the universe, as the hunger strangled her inner strength. The first time it set in, her powers had sputtered out right when she needed them most; her command of the elements, her rapport with fire and air, was gone.
She’d found a cure. A cure named Romeo. He was a cambion—demon-blooded, and the son of an incubus, with some of his father’s touch. A touch that satisfied Harmony’s aches and pains, made the hunger go away, and brought her magic back.
For a little while, anyway.
* * *
It had been a month since she last saw Romeo. They’d just finished a mission in Jersey City, running down the last of the traitors inside Vigilant Lock and performing a magic trick, making a body disappear. Jessie had wanted to go out drinking. Harmony said she had a headache and wanted to call it an early night. She waited until the coast was clear. Then she hopped in the back of a battered taxicab, shock absorbers squealing as they rocked across pothole-strewn streets.
A summer rain was pouring down, steaming off the pavement, washing the grime of the city off faded brick walls and down the crack-shot sidewalks. She found her sanctuary under a red neon sign, in a hotel that rented rooms by the hour. Romeo was waiting in room 19. Rain battered the window at his back, glazing the glass under rivulets of dirty water, lightning-flicker in the distance. Dust bunnies clung to the paper shade of a bedside lamp, and the weak bulb cast the room in long and dismal shadows.
“Hey,” he said. He loosened his silk tie with the curl of a finger.
“Hey.” Harmony’s eyes shot to the open bathroom door, to the rickety wardrobe, to the underbelly of the floral-quilted bed.
“What?”
“You tell me,” she said. “You look nervous.”
He forced a chuckle. “Gosh, can’t imagine w
hy. You know there’s a price on your head, right? Not just one. Every court on the East Coast wants you dead or alive. Nadine wants you alive, and not for anything good.”
“I know,” she said. “You could make a lot of money, selling me out. Setting me up.”
He raised his open hands.
“Hey. I’m not like that. You know I’m not like that. I’m not like them. I’m just sayin’, not for nothing, I could get in serious trouble if anyone found out I was seeing you.”
“And I couldn’t?” she asked.
“I know, you got a…a situation. Hey, c’mon, let me take your jacket. And your hair’s all wet. Hold on, I got a towel. Not their towels, this place is a dump, I brought my own. Here, sit, relax. I’ll put some music on.”
“Why?”
He fumbled for an answer.
“Just…trying to set the mood, that’s all.”
“I’m not here for the mood,” Harmony said.
She took an envelope from her inside breast pocket and flicked it open with her finger. A stack of green nested inside, three hundred dollars in bank-fresh twenties. She tossed it onto the mattress. His gaze dropped.
“Why do you have to be like that?”
“Like what?” she asked. “Do you not sleep with women for money? Because last I checked—”
“I sell romance. Fantasies. I make lonely women happy for a while.” He met her eyes, indignant now. “You don’t have to make me feel bad about it.”
“Not trying to.” She paused. “I respect what you do. Everybody has to earn a living. Nothing wrong with it.”
She raised her hand. Her fingers waved, vague, at the side of her head.
“I’m not good at…people,” she said. “Emotions, facial cues, sometimes I can’t read them right. So I upset people, and I don’t mean to.”
He set his phone on the bedside table. He tapped the screen and music welled up, soft, romantic, Italian maybe.
“There we go. Music makes everything a little nicer.” He gave her a sidelong glance, contemplative. “You just seem so angry. And you’re angrier every time I see you.”
“It’s not you I’m angry at.”
Right to the Kill (Harmony Black Book 5) Page 4
