Darkest Misery

by Tracey Martin

  Lucen had woken up and was staring at me while I put my boots on. “Where are you going so early?” Even half asleep, his voice was laden with distrust.

  “To Headquarters.” I’d thought everything through this time. He wouldn’t catch me so unawares and upset that I’d lie. I was going to Headquarters, after all. It just wouldn’t be my first stop.

  “For what? Yesterday you said you wouldn’t be in the meetings anymore.”

  “I won’t, but the Gryphons expect me to train, and I have a lot of training to do.” Also a truth.

  Lucen slid his arms around his pillow, his blue-green eyes appraising me and his tousled hair and naked torso calling to me. “You’re not sneaking away, are you?”

  “Do I look like I’m sneaking?” I kissed his forehead. “We’ll talk more later.”

  “We will, and don’t forget Gi and Mel.”

  I shut his bedroom door partway. “Already called them. They’re on their way.”

  I met my two sleepy bodyguards on Lucen’s front step. The Shadowtown street was quiet and the air thick with humidity. Today would be a scorcher. Not even noon and it was hard to breathe outside. Above, a thin cloud cover blanketed the city, not heavy enough to block out the sun, but enough to keep Shadowtown its usual gloomy self.

  A lone delivery van rumbled by, but most preds were like Lucen, asleep in their beds. The two with me were clearly not pleased to be among the exceptions.

  Melissa unlocked the car remotely as I trudged down to the curb. “To the damn Gryphon building, I assume?”

  I climbed in, grateful for the remains of the A/C-chilled air inside. “Eventually. First, I need to stop at my apartment.”

  It was a quick jaunt over the couple blocks, and driving was a waste of gas, but it would be handy to have the car when I was done. Melissa parked illegally by the door, and she and Gi did their whole bodyguard routine of checking the entry and clearing my apartment. After yesterday’s attack, I didn’t feel foolish letting them.

  Bemused, they stood around while I pulled my ancient suitcase from the closet.

  “You’re leaving already?” Gi asked.

  I didn’t have a whole lot of time to be picky about what I packed. A couple pairs of jeans, some shirts—I cursed, remembering I’d left my hoodie at Lucen’s. And what about weapons? Was the special clearance Tom had procured for me before the trip to Phoenix still good, or would I have to leave my knife behind? He hadn’t answered my emails yet.

  I counted out a week’s worth of comfortable but not particularly attractive underwear. “Yes. I’m sure you heard me yesterday. I’m going to France with the Gryphons.”

  “And Lucen?” Melissa idly picked up Misery and examined the blade.

  I found my passport and a bag of travel-sized bath supplies that I hoped were still good, and I threw them in the suitcase too. “No, so don’t you tell him anything. He hasn’t figured it out yet.”

  Gi shook his head and wandered into the galley kitchen that connected my bedroom to the living room. “We answer to Dezzi, not him.”

  “Good.” I shut the suitcase, feeling anything but.

  The day flew by once I got to Headquarters. It started with weapons training, then searching through Olef’s books, updates on Olef’s case from Andre’s team, updates about Mitch’s kidnapping from Tom, and finally—just when the lack of progress on any of those fronts was getting to me—I was presented with gifts.

  I opened the shopping bag Tom handed me. “What’s this?”

  “Supplies so your phone will work overseas,” he said. “I’ll take care of it for you later. Don’t tell me what you did yesterday, but when do you expect you’ll hear about progress?”

  “It could be a couple days. Ste…” I cut myself off so as not to incriminate Steph. “I had to borrow stuff from the goblins. A friend is working on some of the details. Another friend is going to question Claudius.”

  Tom’s lips might have twitched into something resembling a smile, but it faded quickly. “Check in with them once we arrive.”

  “I assume you know where we’re going?”

  There was no mistaking his happiness this time. “Home. For me, that is. I’ve booked you a hotel room within walking distance of World.”

  “Thanks.”

  I checked my phone for new messages, expecting to have heard from Lucen, but I had nothing. His silence nibbled away at me over the next couple hours, and eventually all those nibbles turned into a huge chunk of missing confidence. By the time we left for the airport, I felt as though part of me had been stranded at his apartment.

  Everything had gone smoothly until this point. Everything except saying goodbye to him properly.

  I swallowed as the security line inched forward, my unease growing with every foot of progress I made toward the scanners. What had I been expecting? I had snuck out, just like he’d said. I’d been intending to leave him behind all along.

  So had I believed he’d show up at Headquarters or the airport to give me a last kiss goodbye? To tell me Devon had convinced him to stay after all? That was stupid. Yet I didn’t like the uneasiness in my gut. The worry that I’d seen the last of him this morning.

  “Ticket and ID?” The TSA agent held out her hand.

  Numbly, I passed them over and made my way through the security checkpoint. With my shoes back on my feet and the scanner behind me, the unlikely possibility of Lucen arriving had passed.

  Guilty and nervous, I took out my phone when I reached the gate. Time was running out. We boarded in thirty minutes. If he was angry or upset or even on his way, I had to know. Bracing myself for what I assumed would be furious silence on the other end, I dialed.

  Lucen picked up on the second ring. “Was wondering if you’d call or if that would be too overtly friendly.”

  I winced at the hurt in his voice. “I’m trying to protect you from Claudius. I thought you might call when you had the chance.”

  “Believe it or not, I’ve been busy. I don’t like this, and I’m not happy. I think your determination to run off on your own is misguided.”

  “I’m not on my own.”

  “You’re pushing away the people who care about you. How is that not on your own? Me, Steph, and did you ever talk to your mother like you’d planned?”

  I wound my carry-on’s nylon strap around my hand in frustration. “I’m not pushing them away, or you. I’ve been preoccupied. As I explained, I’m trying to protect you. Why are you taking this so badly?”

  “Because I know you, Jess. You hate asking for help, you don’t trust other people, and you don’t listen to my good advice. This is not a problem you and one other Gryphon can solve.”

  “But it’s one I have to try to solve before anyone else gets hurts.” Pain stabbed me right between the eyes. I was not continuing last night’s argument in the airport terminal when all I’d wanted was to hear Lucen’s voice. “Are you planning on joining me anyway?”

  I heard voices shouting in the background, and something that could have been a motor. The Lair’s reconstruction must be underway. “No. I had a meeting with the triad earlier. Plans are changing here, and Dezzi wants me to stay.”

  “Plans are changing—what does that mean?”

  “You’ll find out.” His voice softened, and the noise faded in the distance as he must have entered a different room. “Please be careful, little siren. I hate not being there with you, and if there’s a traitor in the Gryphons…”

  I forced a laugh as Tom returned to the seat across from me. “Yeah, I know. I’ll be careful.”

  Not wanting to finish this conversation in Tom’s presence, I pointed to his coffee and wandered away once he acknowledged my intention. Lucen no longer sounded angry when we hung up a couple minutes later, more like resigned and unhappy. That made two of us, but I could get on the plane with less stress knowing I hadn’t left
a furious satyr behind.

  France—the country I’d been wanting to visit since the Gryphon’s New England Academy for the Magically Gifted made me choose between studying French, Spanish or Latin when I was twelve. Finally, after a long flight during which I’d been squeezed between a woman wearing too much perfume on my left and a guy who snored half the time on my right, I’d arrived.

  Tired, hungry and dazed, I’d arrived.

  This was not how I’d once anticipated arriving. But then I wasn’t here to sightsee or drink wine and eat cheese at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. I barely knew where I was going, and I didn’t have high hopes of being successful when I got there. The best I could say was that the odds of anyone here trying to knife me on a busy street were low.

  “I can read that sign and that one.” I gawked at the airport signage, testing my fading memories of high-school-level French.

  “Of course you can.” Tom yawned. “They have the English written beneath them.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Can you let me enjoy something about this trip? If the world’s going to end in a blaze of fury fire, I’m going to speak French and gorge on chocolate croissants before it does. My bucket list has a whole lot of French wine and pastries on it.”

  In response, Tom spouted something in rapid-fire French.

  I scowled. Naturally, he spoke it fluently, or fluently enough to get by while living here. “I think I caught every other word. Something about my life being backward?”

  His regularly scheduled smirk appeared, and he pressed on, leading me toward the train ticketing counter without bothering to translate.

  Deux billets et trente minutes later, I was seated next to Tom on a high speed train heading south. After explaining it would take two to three hours to reach Grenoble, he closed his eyes and went to sleep. Tired as I was, I couldn’t join him. I had a window to gaze through, and my brain was determined to soak up as much of the foreign countryside as it could.

  Even I couldn’t stay awake forever though apparently. Sometime after visions of farmland passed by, I was woken up by Tom shaking my arm. “We’re here.”

  Rubbing my eyes, I stumbled off the train with my luggage, thankful that excusez-moi was an easy to remember phrase.

  “My research assistant, Marie, is coming to pick us up,” Tom said, as we stepped outside. “We’ll get you checked into your hotel, then get to work. Jess?”

  I lifted my sunglasses to take in the full effect of the sun bouncing off the sleek buildings and the Alps rising in the distance. “Yeah, okay.”

  I expected Tom’s research assistant to be a young Gryphon, but Marie was older than either of us. Short and olive-skinned, she greeted me enthusiastically in French, then switched to perfectly fluent but accented English for the rest of the drive. I searched my memory for her name, but I couldn’t recall it being on that email chain I’d discovered, and I relaxed a little. She probably wasn’t the possible leak.

  Marie played tour guide, explaining to me how to use the tram and where I might want to go if Tom ever gave me time to leave the building. At last, we stopped in the shadow of a glassy high-rise bearing the Gryphon seal over the doors. A large plaque to the left sported a smaller version of the seal, and beneath it, the words Siège International.

  World Headquarters. Oh yeah, I’d finally arrived.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  World’s interior was as flashy as the exterior. Sleek, dark marble floors mixed with lots of glass, blue-tinted walls and modern curves to give the lobby an impressive air that was like neither Boston’s stately nor Phoenix’s southwesterly style. The high ceiling over half the room opened up to a balcony on the second floor, and all those windows let in a refreshing level of sunlight.

  For some reason, I’d expected World to bask in the Gryphons’ long, historical roots. Perhaps because I expected everything in Europe to be older than the U.S. Instead, the building and its inhabitants gave the impression of a cool, thoroughly modern and efficient magical police force.

  Beyond the architecture, however, the layout of the ground floor was all too familiar. After presenting my ID and being waved through the mundane and magical security checks along with Tom, he showed me the floor directory hanging by the elevators. Titles and place names were written in both English and French.

  “This building houses the Grenoble Office as well as World Office.” He gestured to the directory. “Upper floors are World. My office is on the seventh if you ever need to find me there. Basements One and Two are the archive levels.”

  Tom pressed the button for basement level one, and down we went. The doors opened into a small, well-lit room filled with tables and computers. A partition-like desk ran most of the length of the far wall, and behind it was a set of modern glass doors with a very obvious electronic lock.

  A young guy in a wheelchair sat at one of the tables, running a handheld scanner over a book. He glanced up and waved. “Tom, vous revenez.”

  “With a coworker,” Tom replied in English, apparently deferring to my ears. “Jessica, this is Umut. He’s one of our guardians.”

  “Guardians?” I asked once I said hi to Umut.

  Umut grinned. “Fancy way of calling us librarians. They like to make us feel special.”

  “You are,” Marie said. Turning to me, she added, “They go through a rigorous process to be hired.”

  I noticed Umut was wearing a T-shirt and khaki pants, not a uniform. Tom wasn’t wearing his at the moment either, considering we’d only arrived a few hours ago, but I hazarded a guess about Umut. “So guardians aren’t Gryphons?”

  “No,” Umut said. “I am a magical deficient, but an interested one. Must do something with that history degree, yeah?”

  “Nice to meet you, magical deficient. I’m a magical anomaly.”

  Tom’s cheek twitched with disapproval. “One of three.”

  “We assume there are still three.” With every day that passed since Mitch’s abduction, my hopes of the Gryphons and FBI locating him grew dimmer, and the statistical likelihood of ever finding him grew smaller.

  Tom had to be as aware of the grim outlook as I was, and he chose to ignore my comment. “Jessica is a Gryphon consultant from Boston. I need her to be given permission to access the archives. It falls under my clearance.”

  Umut nodded and beckoned us behind the desk. “Do you have a badge number?”

  I pulled out my ID to check since I’d never looked closely at it. “No number.”

  “You can use one of the Le Confrérie guest ones,” Tom said.

  “Off-hours access for the guest.” Umut sounded amused. “Part of that special project you two have been working on?”

  “Exactly.” Tom grabbed white cotton gloves from a container on the desk and handed me a pair. “All Gryphons who work for World have access to the archives during open hours. During those hours, there will always be a guardian, like Umut, here to record visitations and provide entry. The doors are always locked. Umut will take biometric data from you today, and you can choose a pin code. If you want access during off hours, those will get you in.”

  I twisted the gloves around in my hands. “Off hours? You really are planning on working me into the ground, aren’t you?”

  “The computers are a card catalog of sorts,” Tom continued, ignoring me. “Put in keywords, dates, whatever it is you think will help with your search. It will spit out a list of possible items that could apply. The code next to each item will tell you where it’s located. You can access basement level two once you’re inside the archive itself.”

  “Yes, sir,” I muttered.

  Marie smiled.

  Umut called me over so he could scan my fingerprints, and I entered a five-digit pass code into a machine that resembled the sort banks use to encode ATM cards. Afterward, Tom led me to a computer so he could explain how to use the system in more detail, and he showed
me the notes he and Marie had been keeping so I didn’t replicate searches they’d already performed or waste time looking up objects they’d already dismissed. The whole process took far longer than it seemed like it should, and by the time I was finally allowed to enter the archive itself, my energy had plummeted.

  A whoosh of cool, temperature- and humidity-controlled air rushed over me when the glass doors opened. The archive turned out to be nothing so much as a giant warehouse filled with row after row of shelves, each section of which was labeled. It was indeed much like a library, only the shelves didn’t just contain books.

  Tom gave me a rundown of how the shelves were ordered, and took me into the back where several additional rooms were sealed off. They were unlocked, he explained, but the items inside them had to be stored in unique environments.

  “The more dangerous magical objects are on the floor below us,” he said, stopping by the staircase down. “No one will stop you from going in there, but removing items from their rooms does activate the security system. You’ll have to explain why you need to do it.”

  “Odds of finding a Vessel in one of those rooms?”

  He shook his head. “First places I thought to search. There is nothing in the archives labeled as a Vessel or any variation thereof.”

  The next couple hours were spent with Tom and Marie, going over what they’d researched, how they’d done it and what new strategies we might want to try. My eyelids continued to droop, and finally Tom either took pity on me or realized he wasn’t getting anything else useful out of me today.

  “It’s about eight,” he said, closing the book we’d been staring at. “Maybe it’s time to take a break.”

  “Eight? No wonder I’m beat and starving.” Even as I said it, I yawned. “It’s been…” I attempted to do the math in my head and gave up. “Way too many hours since I last slept in a bed. I’m missing most of a day, or is it a night I missed?”

  Tom rubbed his temples. Though he feigned wakefulness well, his eyes were bloodshot. “I should get home. It’s been a while. We can get dinner first if you like. I don’t have anything to eat at home at this point.”