Lasting Fury (Hexing House Book 2)

by Jen Rasmussen

“Your whole colony, now,” said Thea. “Do you think you’ll apply to transform?” The thought of Flannery as a fury made her a little ill, but she hoped her tone didn’t show it.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Flannery said. “Nero would like me to, of course. But I’m not sure it’s what I want. I kind of feel like I’m still figuring out how to be a human, you know?”

  “I do know,” Thea agreed. “And believe me, learning to be a whole other thing is… complicated.”

  “So I’m just going to take it one step at a time, for now. I have to do a round of exploratories, just like you did. Find a job.”

  “Any idea what you might like to do?”

  “There are only so many positions they let humans have. I’ve been encouraged to consider HRI. They like to put humans in human-facing roles. But I didn’t know if that would be too weird for you.”

  This whole thing is bordering on too weird for me.

  “You wouldn’t be in Investigations?”

  “No, no. More like sales, or just a liaison, you know, helping out the people who are freaked out or have a hard time being around furies. Public relations work, maybe. There’s all kinds of stuff I could do, but I wouldn’t be in your group no matter what. I would be in the same building, though.”

  Thea resisted the urge to shout Mine! repeatedly, toddler-like, and instead kept her voice smooth as she said, “I don’t see why that would be a problem.”

  “Sure, why would it be?” Flannery asked. “Invading your turf is what I do, right? You’re used to it by now.”

  Thea laughed that off like the joke Flannery seemed to hope it was.

  “So will you do it?” Flannery asked. “Will you be my maid of honor?”

  “I’d be maid-of-honored,” Thea said.

  Was that another quip?

  It was a pleasant conversation, overall, but then conversations with Flannery usually were, when she got what she wanted. Thea couldn’t help but wonder whether planning a wedding—even a small, hurried one—would challenge her cousin’s newfound maturity and serenity.

  Thea’s work that morning consisted mostly of writing down a bunch of disjointed notes, then staring at them, trying to make sense of everything.

  Boyd Lexington had (maybe) helped Mr. Fanatic escape the lab. He and his family were manifesting sins. His neighbors probably were, too.

  Detective Holgersen was being discouraged from investigating furies at all, Fury Unlimited or Hexing House.

  And someone had left a dead bat on Thea’s pillow. Uncle Gary seemed particularly concerned about that last one. Thea couldn’t say she blamed him.

  She didn’t know how it all fit together, but Hemlock Heights was at the center of all of it. Which meant Fury Unlimited was at the center of all of it.

  Thea called Cora and asked her if she could meet for lunch.

  “Sure, if you don’t mind Elon hanging out with us,” she said. “I already told him I’d meet him.”

  “I won’t be interrupting couple time?” Thea asked.

  “I’m sure he’d love to have couple time interrupted right about now,” Cora said, but she wasn’t interested in elaborating on their problems. Thea could only guess that the news of Nero and Flannery’s engagement had gone over about as well for Elon as Thea had predicted it would.

  But they looked happy enough when Thea found them in the dining hall, laughing over a couple of burgers. After ordering one for herself, Thea got straight to the point.

  “I need a way to hack into Fury Unlimited. Documents, files, emails. Whatever I can get my hands on.”

  Cora shrugged. “Fine. Get a hold of one of their laptops or tablets.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” Thea asked. “It won’t be easy for me to get in and out of that building.”

  “No,” Elon agreed. “You’re way too high profile now. They’ve probably got your face on Most Wanted posters in the hallways.”

  “So steal someone’s laptop while they’re outside,” said Cora. “Preferably somebody with a lot of access.”

  “But they all live and work in the same building,” Thea said. “It’s not like I can intercept somebody during their commute.”

  “Give me a few days,” Elon said.

  “To do what?” Cora asked.

  He grinned at his girlfriend. “We can use Nero’s wedding.”

  Cora did not look like she liked where this was going, but Elon turned to Thea with a mock sigh and a sad shake of his head. “My girlfriend is pressuring me to commit. It’s making life in my colony hell. I’m considering moving to Fury Unlimited.”

  Thea raised an eyebrow and played along, pretending not to realize how uncomfortably close to the truth this was. “Are you, now?”

  “Just considering it, mind. I’d like to talk to a few people. Get a sense of the place.”

  “But that could be dangerous,” Thea said. “Remember what happened last time we had people go undercover?”

  “You don’t need to remind me,” said Elon. “I’d still need that cane if I didn’t have wings to get around with.”

  “But you’re still willing to do it,” Thea said.

  “Doesn’t matter!” Cora broke in. “I’m unwilling enough for both of us!”

  “Relax, you two,” Elon said. “I’m not going to steal anything for you. Or do anything that’ll get me into trouble. I will genuinely take interviews, before ultimately reconciling with my true love here.” He squeezed Cora’s shoulder. “And regretfully declining any opportunity I’m offered.”

  “So what would be the point?” Cora asked. “If you’re not going to take any tech?”

  “I’ll have a look around while I’m there,” said Elon. “Talk to some people. Try to get a sense of comings and goings. I might at least be able to identify some opportunities. Who knows, maybe they’ve got some disgruntled people of their own who’d be willing to double cross them.”

  Thea shrugged. “All right. Let’s see what comes of it.”

  They agreed that Elon would stage a couple of public fights with Cora, just in case, and avoid contact with Thea altogether for a few days. Meanwhile, Thea spent her time on the less exciting, but generally most productive, aspects of investigation: searching the internet, combing social media, making phone calls or sending emails when she thought she had a plausible enough story to get somebody to talk. She gathered all the information she could on the Lexingtons and the other residents of Hemlock Heights, and on anyone she could find who’d once been associated with the lab.

  That included her old friend Denise Forrester. Now that Holgersen had given Thea a first name, the doctor was easier to find.

  Thea knew that Megaira and Graves had recruited Dr. Forrester in the first place with a promise to cure her son’s cancer. As it turned out, that son was indeed in remission, and doing fine. But perhaps the burden of his illness had already done irreparable damage; the Forresters had divorced just eight weeks before.

  They’d also sold their house around the same time, and Thea wasn’t able to find Dr. Forrester’s new address. She probably could, with some digging, or maybe with Cora’s help. But she decided she would give Holgersen a chance to set up a civilized conversation first.

  If that didn’t work, she might have to pay the good doctor a visit. And treat her as a hostile witness. After the weeks of torture Thea had endured at that woman’s hands, the prospect wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  The Concerned Citizens For A Fury-Free County came back again at the end of the week, demanding that Hexing House be shut down. Or so Thea heard. She didn’t see them herself, because Alecto came by the Investigations office to warn Thea away from the gates.

  Thea’s coworkers popped their heads over the cubicle walls like prairie dogs, straining to hear the latest while Alecto talked to Thea.

  “Just stay inside for an hour or two,” Alecto said. “I don’t need any more pictures of you in the news.”

  “So they’ll take a picture of someone else,” Victor said. “What dif
ference does it make?”

  Alecto looked at Victor like he was an idiot. Thea couldn’t help but feel it was kind of nice to have that look directed at someone else for a change.

  “It won’t be a picture of someone who was at Hemlock Heights,” Alecto said.

  “Fine,” said Thea. “Say hello to Mr. Fanatic for me.”

  “I’m not going out there either.” Alecto looked around at the others. “In fact, I’d rather you all stayed away. I’ve got a few guys from Security making sure they don’t damage the gates or anything. Otherwise, we’ll just let them wear themselves out.”

  “You seem a lot more relaxed about them this time,” Thea said.

  Alecto’s jaw tightened. “Quite the opposite, actually. I’m afraid I’ll lose my temper if I go. And I won’t give their cause credence by engaging them any further, anyway. It was a mistake the first time.”

  Thea frowned. “They’re not actually hurting business? Holgersen said most of the world has dismissed that picture as a hoax, which would make the Concerned Citizens lunatics or con artists, right?”

  Now it was Thea’s turn to get the idiot look.

  “To most of the world, yes,” Alecto said. “But most of the world isn’t our client base. The ones who already know about furies, or would be inclined to believe we exist, now think we’re the lunatics. Evil ones, who set off deadly weapons in neighborhoods full of cute little human children.”

  “So it is hurting business,” Thea said. “Interesting.”

  “I don’t see what’s so interesting about it.” Alecto sighed. “At least the police stopped breathing down our necks, without me having to call in any favors to get them to go away.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Thea said. “Detective Holgersen also said he’s been straight-up told not to bother investigating furies.”

  That perked Alecto up. “Has he?”

  “He’s pretty mad about it.”

  Alecto chuckled. “So it was my sister calling in the favors. Now that’s interesting.”

  “What do you mean?” Thea asked.

  “I didn’t get them to back off,” Alecto said. “So it must have been Megaira.”

  “Why would she do that?” Victor asked. “She’s the one who tried to pin it on us in the first place.”

  “But it didn’t work as well as she hoped,” Alecto said. “So she went to plan B and shut the whole investigation down. Someone with enough authority to be troublesome must have heard our side of the story, and started poking around Fury Unlimited.”

  “Or it could just be that Holgersen’s boss is one of the ones who don’t believe in purple dragon people,” Thea said with a shrug. “And that’s why he told Holgersen to back off.”

  But Alecto shook her head. “Trust me, Maggie reached out to someone. We trade in hexes. Those are useful things, for a career in politics. We have friends at pretty much every level of government.”

  Thea stared at her. “You’re telling me you just, what, hex their rivals for them? What happened to not hexing anybody undeserving?”

  Victor, who had had many an argument with Thea over the concept of deserving, snickered. “Show me an undeserving politician.”

  Alecto nodded at him. “Pretty much that.”

  Thea sighed. She didn’t have the energy to take up another fight anyway. “Fair enough, I guess.”

  Holgersen called her that same night.

  “If you want to know about the protest, I wasn’t allowed to go,” Thea said.

  “I didn’t even know there was a protest,” said Holgersen. “Denise Forrester has agreed to meet with you, as long as I’m present and we’re in public. She seemed to think you have some way to appear human.”

  “I do. Where and when?”

  “You know the Fairview Diner off Route 63?”

  “I can find it.”

  “Brunch on Sunday, eleven o’clock.”

  Thea arrived at the appointed time to find Holgersen and Dr. Forrester already seated. The doctor shrank back in the booth when she caught Thea’s eye.

  Holgersen, on the other hand, didn’t even recognize Thea until she sat down. Then he stared at her for a solid thirty seconds, mouth slightly open, before Thea sighed and said, “No.”

  “No?” Holgersen asked. “No what?”

  “No, I was not on Celebrity Dance-Off. Is that what you were going to ask?”

  He looked completely befuddled, but Dr. Forrester smiled and said, “You were Baird Frost’s girlfriend!”

  “The Benjamin Stake guy?” Holgersen looked from Dr. Forrester to Thea.

  “I didn’t realize,” Dr. Forrester said. “I never knew you as a human.”

  “Funny, I was just thinking the same thing about you,” Thea snapped.

  “You’re quipping again,” said Holgersen. “It really doesn’t become you.”

  “And you’re just trying to break the tension,” said Thea. She looked back at the doctor, who looked nervous again.

  “Why didn’t you kill me?” Dr. Forrester asked quietly. “That last day, when you got away?”

  Thea shrugged. “It wasn’t necessary. Funny though, even though I didn’t kill you, when I very obviously could have killed you, you were awfully quick to accuse me of killing Boyd Lexington. And his family. And several of his neighbors. Despite the fact that I’d never even met the guy.”

  “I saw the picture of you, holding Talbott,” Dr. Forrester said. “And you were…”

  “I was…?” Thea prompted. She leaned forward to peer at—into—Dr. Forrester.

  Shame. There might not be a murdered boy clinging to her back, but she’s wearing shame, almost as thick and heavy as Mr. Delacroix was.

  “You feel guilty!” Thea said out loud. “It’s not that you think I’m so vengeful that I’d do something like that. It’s that you think I have a good reason to be.”

  Dr. Forrester looked away. “You were my only involuntary patient,” she said finally.

  A server came over with a coffee pot. After she took their orders and left, Holgersen said, “We may have gotten off on the wrong foot here. Rehashing the past isn’t going to help us. We’re all on the same side.”

  “Are we?” Thea asked.

  “Of course,” said Holgersen. “We’re all concerned about what happened at Hemlock Heights.”

  “But we all want different things,” Thea said.

  Holgersen raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “She just wants to protect herself,” Thea said with a nod at Dr. Forrester. “You want to know whether Seth Bates was hexed, right?”

  “Among other things,” Holgersen agreed.

  “So you’re worried that the hexing isn’t over yet.” Thea looked from him to the doctor. “I’m worried about when it began.”

  Dr. Forrester frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Boyd Lexington was showing symptoms of being under the influence of the superhex,” Thea said. “Long before Hemlock Heights.”

  “What’s this?” Holgersen asked.

  Thea told them about her visit with the Bowmans. “So what happened?” she asked Dr. Forrester when she was finished.

  Dr. Forrester shrugged, but her eyes slid away from Thea’s. “They must have been continuing their experiments in the neighborhood. Probably without the residents’ knowledge.”

  “Try again,” Thea said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Dr. Forrester did meet Thea’s eyes then, and her own were flat. “Nothing. That’s the most obvious answer.”

  Thea held her gaze, but she didn’t find any dishonesty. The shame was too strong to sense much else.

  “But it’s not obvious at all,” said Thea. “The thing with the superhex is, it’s super. It’s not a subtle thing. If they were regularly using it on the people at Hemlock Heights, what happened there would have happened a long time ago.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the superhex they were experimenting with,” Holgersen said.

  “Why would they nee
d to experiment with just regular hexes?” Thea asked. “They already know pretty much everything there is to know about those. They’d have no reason to risk that.”

  “I’ve done some checking around,” Holgersen said. “Sounds like most of the hexes you sell involve virtues. These people were manifesting sins, right?”

  “Right, but that doesn’t mean hexes that inflict sin are some new experimental thing,” Thea said. “They’ve been around for probably hundreds of years. They’re just less commonly used.” She sighed and leaned back to sip her coffee. “As you can imagine, the consequences of a virtue hex are easier to contain to just the target.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry.” The server approached, talking to Dr. Forrester. “We’re out of the French toast. Would you like to order something else?”

  Dr. Forrester blinked at her. “But it’s made of bread and eggs and milk. How can a diner be out of those things?”

  “It’s a special brioche for the French toast,” the server said. “We’re out of it. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “So make it with regular bread. You have regular bread, right?”

  Thea looked from the girl’s flustered face to Dr. Forrester’s hard one, and tried to read the doctor a third time.

  The shame was gone now, which was in itself odd. The vices and virtues furies sensed in people weren’t usually passing moods.

  Even odder, Thea couldn’t identify what had replaced it. It wasn’t one specific thing. More like a gathering cloud, one that was darkening and obscuring everything that was natural for the doctor.

  “Ma’am, would you like to see the menu again?” The server was asking.

  “Pancakes,” Dr. Forrester snapped.

  The girl hurried away. Thea sniffed, loud enough for Holgersen to give her a curious look, but Thea ignored him. She’d always identified sins and virtues most easily through her sense of smell. But she couldn’t get anything from Dr. Forrester, except maybe a faint touch of ozone that she might only have imagined, an offshoot of the image of a cloud.

  Storm coming?

  Dr. Forrester realized Thea and Holgersen were looking at her and picked up her coffee with a shrug. “What?”

  “Hope that bacon comes soon,” Holgersen said. “I always get cranky when I’m hungry.”