by Lyn Benedict
Powell and he made progress; the elevator doors grumbled but slid apart. “Go,” he told Sylvie.
Sylvie studied the gap. Definitely wide enough, split by two levels, leaving her with a choice—to enter the upper floor crawling, her gun hand hampered, or to drop an unknown distance into a darkness deep enough that her little penlight couldn’t begin to penetrate it. Neither idea appealed, but she chose to drop. Zoe, after all, was beneath them somewhere.
She passed Riordan the useless light.
She braced herself in the width of the space, heard voluptuous movement in the darkness, like velvet rolling over stone, and tightened her grip on her gun. One last breath, and she dropped.
The floor was farther down than she’d hoped—one of those office buildings that prided itself on high ceilings—and forced a grunt out of her. Her free hand felt damp marble; she smelled fear sweat and blood and bile, and it was cold enough she thought her breath must be clouding the air before her. It made no sense. It was Miami, for God’s sake, and the power was out. The rooms should be gaining heat, not losing it.
It was the cold of morgues, of underground mausoleums, dank like an abandoned animal’s lair. Empty of everything but death.
Sylvie’s fingers were sticky, clammy with old blood; she brushed them against her sleeves, felt the contaminant liquefy and seep into the fabric, chilling her. She was the only breathing thing she could hear, her heart a desperate drum looking for an echo. Death rolled over her like a shroud.
She was alone, and everyone else was dead and gone—rotting—and she was alone. Her breath seized.
Riordan dropped to the ground beside her, said, “When you enter a hostile room, clear the area and get out of the way, dammit, do you know nothing?” It was like a wave breaking. An external influence breaking. Her ears popped; the sound of the world returned in a roar of gunfire and Riordan muttering about untrained lone wolves with delusions of competence.
Even her skin felt dry and warm again, the cold blood only an illusion of some kind. She should have known better.
“Powell, get down here,” Riordan said.
Harsh panting was the only answer, and Sylvie turned. Riordan flashed the penlight once, briefly, and Powell jerked. His eyes had iced over, gone cataract white, faintly luminescent in the blackness. He pointed his gun at them, and said, “You’re trying to kill me! It’s a trap, and you want to grind me up in it!”
Sylvie darted away from the elevator doors, running blind in the darkness, away from Powell’s shooting after them. She heard Riordan keeping pace, a rhythm of footsteps and breath beside her. He veered suddenly, tackled her to the floor.
She punched him. He reeled, and said, “There’s a staircase, Shadows. You were heading straight for it. Say thank you.”
“You deserved it anyway,” Sylvie growled. “My sister’s somewhere in this nightmare, isn’t she?”
“She should be safe,” Riordan said. “Locked up nice and tight. Do you know what we’re dealing with?”
“Something that’s radiating influence. I think your men are killing each other, losing it like Powell did.”
“Like you did?” Riordan said.
Sylvie swallowed, said, “How better to know what’s going on than to let it affect me for a moment?” Sounded good. She wished it were true. “What about you. You going to start shooting at me?”
Her eyes were finally adjusting to the darkness. She couldn’t see anything much, but she got the sense of shapes, the slightly paler black where the walls were, the endless black gap where the stairs were, the moving darkness where Riordan shifted to a crouch. If she read the space right, they were on a balcony overlooking the lobby below. Stairs ahead. Offices to her left. A glass barrier between her and a long fall. Echoes of gunfire bounced off the ceiling and made it hard to tell if fights were going on above and below or just echoing upward. A sudden draft, a rush of displaced air suggested a body falling from above. The gruesome thud and crunch of that same body hitting the floors below suggested that both directions were treacherous.
Riordan swore quietly, said, “If I shoot you, Shadows, you can be sure I’ll be doing it of my own will. Not someone else’s.”
“You’re immune?”
“I’ve never been one for feeling fear. What are we facing, Shadows?”
“Headaches and a good possibility of bullet holes? I don’t know. I didn’t know in the elevator, and I don’t know now. I can make some guesses. It’s a monster. It’s not happy.”
“Can you kill it?”
Sylvie shivered. Her little dark voice whispered. We can kill anything. “First I have to find it.” That wouldn’t be hard, really. The monster would be ground zero, the only calm place in the midst of chaos, spreading its influence—those inky tendrils—wider and wider. “It’d be easier if there were lights. I thought you agency types were big on emergency power supplies.”
“We are,” Riordan said. “But our generators are inside the building. Vulnerable to bullets, or men under the influence.”
“Okay. Two questions. How many men do you have left?”
“None of your business.”
“If I have to fight my way through them, it is. I’m not bulletproof.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It bears repeating.” It was comforting in a panic-inducing sort of way. She might be immortal, but she was still human.
“More men than you’d like,” Riordan said. “We were transitioning from the hotel to this building after the earlier attacks on the other ISI branches, trying to minimize civilian risk.”
“Good job, then,” Sylvie said. “Too little, too late.”
“This is hardly the time to assign blame,” Riordan said. “Would you prefer to argue or survive?”
Sylvie hated to admit it, but he was right. “Fine. Second question. Flashlights?”
He passed her back the penlight, and she said, “That’s not gonna cut it. I need to see what I’m walking into.”
“Demanding,” he said. “Wait here.”
“Get two if you can.”
He shifted around her, made her realize that their drop-and-hide spot was more sheltered than she’d thought—she reached back, felt a jut in the wall. An alcove looking over the lobby. If this were a real office building, it would probably have held a water fountain.
She had time to think. Time to kill. She laughed, soundlessly, a little closer to hysteria than she’d admit. Hunting monsters in the dark to save her sister, and God, Demalion—where was he in all this? Locked up tight with Zoe? Safe? Or roaming the halls, shooting at everything he could. If Demalion was out there, prone to the same panic that Powell had fallen prey to, he’d be lethal. Paranoia plus psychic abilities? Ugly.
She wished she knew what she was dealing with. It wasn’t a succubus. Wasn’t anything attached to elements: no sand wraiths, no mermaids, no fiery salamanders, and, despite the smoky tentacles in the air, she didn’t think it was any type of air elemental.
It wasn’t a succubus, but it was something that worked on a similar principle. Used the body to overwhelm the brain. Whatever this was spread panic and paranoia as easily as a succubus spread lust and hunger.
Movement near her, and she turned, a “Took your time” on her lips. It wasn’t Riordan. She caught the faint glimmer of eyes with an icy shine and held her breath. The tainted agent went past, limping, his breath wheezing and whispering out insanity. Not my teeth. Can’t take them. Not for you. Kill you first.
Sylvie wiped her face. This was all a little too zombie apocalypse for her. She wondered if Zoe was terrified, pissed, or trying to work magic. She wondered if Zoe was still alive.
Riordan returned, passed her a flashlight, kept his hand over the switch, and said, “Don’t turn it on yet.”
“Not stupid,” Sylvie murmured. “You get one for yourself?”
“I did.”
“Good. While I’m hunting monsters? You’re going to fix the damn generator.”
7
Bureaucracy
& Other Monsters
ONCE RIORDAN LEFT HER SIDE—A BRUSH OF DARKNESS, HIS FOOTSTEPS fading, his warmth receding—and Sylvie was certain that she was the only living thing in close proximity, she hit the switch of the heavy Maglite. The beam shot out like a laser; dark, vaporous tendrils scattered beneath it, left roiling crimson ghosts behind. Sylvie swept the light across in precise arcs, illuminating the space around her, the stairs ahead of her—pale marble streaked with blood—a bulky shadow of a dead man on the first landing, two more on the landing below that, but overall, a clear enough path for her to tread. She raised the light higher—swept out across the lobby, dispelling darkness, swept the light across, down, over, and around, trying to memorize everything in a second’s worth of illumination.
Then she flicked the light off, traded positions for another sheltering alcove, this one in the doorway of an empty office. Once certain she had a moment, she closed her eyes and played it all back.
The lobby proved that the building had been designed to throw off any casual looky-loos who might suspect the bank was more than it seemed. The lobby was a classic bank lobby, a central atrium stretching up all four floors, the walls and floors a symphony of dark marble, pale inlaid wood, and polished brass and glass. Around the core, offices and hallways branched off, dark arteries that she diagnosed by their stubborn refusal to reflect light, and by the echoes of gunfire coming from them. Everyone in the atrium was dead.
Not everyone, her little dark voice reminded her.
Everyone, Sylvie insisted. The only thing standing down there wasn’t a person.
No matter what it looked like—a woman in a dark dress standing dead center in the atrium, surrounded by bodies, uncaring of the continuing gunfire, the shouting, or the blood wicking up her skirt—three floors below, stood a monster.
Something horribly, terribly unnatural that was mimicking a human form. Just recalling her made Sylvie’s heart stutter a beat.
Nightmares, her little dark voice said.
Her skin, her hair, her clothes were the void of a starless night; her face seemed featureless but for the gloss of eye shine, the sudden shocking scarlet of a tongue that had swept across her lips. That icy vapor swirled around her, waiting her commands. No, she was the vapor, a constant release and collection that blurred the lines of her being. Around her, agents died, and the perfect void of her face held a smile.
And somewhere down there, Zoe and Demalion.
Riordan was a bastard, but he’d reacted to this disaster as neatly as if he’d planned for it. She had her gun, a light, a motive to go down and solve his problem for him. To kill the monster between her and her sister. To save his wretched agency. Again.
All she had to do was kill the monster before the remaining agents, maddened by the monster’s presence, found her and added her blood to the scarlet slicks already greasing the floors.
Sylvie clutched the flashlight—the vapor pulled back from the light, that was something—and her gun. Anticipating trouble below, she was caught by surprise by the agent who loomed out of nowhere right next to her, his eyes frosted over, gleaming in the dark, his breathing harsh and giving way into manic babble. I’m falling. I’m falling. You pushed me. Falling.
She slashed the flashlight beam across his face, and he didn’t even flinch, blind to the real world, blind to the darkness around him. On his eyes, the frost crackled, and he leaped at her. She reversed the flashlight, caught him solidly in the head, and he dropped.
“Didn’t shoot him,” she muttered. “Hope you’re happy, Riordan.”
The stairs beckoned, and she started down them, the temperature plummeting with every step she took, raising goose bumps on her flesh.
Her shoes whispered on the edges of the stairs, the soft sandpaper guides warning her when to step, but they also woke rhythmic echoes of the babbling panic from the two affected agents. Not my teeth. Can’t take them. I’m falling. You pushed me. Bizarre. Disquieting.
Oddly familiar.
She ran her tongue over her own teeth, tasted the scent of blood in the air, and paused. Imagined tipping over a cliff and falling.
Nightmares, her little dark voice had said.
Not nightmares. The creator of them. Sylvie fished through her memory banks, overstuffed due to Alex’s nonstop researching. The Mora.
She tasted the words on her lips, realized she’d said it aloud, and felt the icy vapor pour up the stairs toward her. With one careless moment, she’d betrayed her presence to the monster.
As Demalion had said: Nothing got someone’s attention like the sound of their name.
* * *
“DO YOU COME TO CHALLENGE ME?”
The Mora’s voice, without even a shred of humanity in it, evoked the sound of a creaking door in a dark house, a footstep where none should be, the last breath of a man who had just stepped off a cliff. It made Sylvie’s steps falter; she tasted fear, felt sweat spring up along her hairline.
She kept her mind focused, one step at a time, following the remembered beam of light downward. The Mora waited below with the deadly patience of a high-ranking predator.
When Sylvie reached the lobby, black vapor swirled away from her like smoke in a draft and bared marble floors to her dark-adjusted eyes. A pathway, leading directly to the monster. “Why do you face me?” the Mora asked. “What makes you think you can?”
“I want answers.” She forced bravado into her voice, made it harsh and rough and vital. Everything this creature wasn’t.
“I have no answers for you,” the Mora said in her cracked-ice voice. “Only fears.”
Between one step and the next, the vapor rose over Sylvie and her flashlight like a cresting wave, and dropped her into a carousel of horrifying images. Sylvie’s parents dead. Demalion dead. Riordan gutting Zoe on a dissection table. Erinya devouring her whole. Nightmare imagery circling her like a swarm of stinging insects.
As if they were stinging insects, Sylvie swatted them away and kept moving forward. “I’ve looked into a Fury’s eyes. Your nightmares don’t compare to that. Tell me who sent you here.”
“Sent me? This is my city, my home. I traveled here in frightened men’s minds, coming across the sea. I thrive here, feeding my dreams into human minds, eating their last breaths as their hearts give out.
“Everyone is weak in their nightmares,” the Mora said. “Even you.”
More images, closer to home. Less death, more trauma. Failing her clients, failing Lupe, watching the city crumble about her, while she stood powerless, her gun emptied.
Sylvie took those nightmares and used them to hone her purpose. She wouldn’t fail. Her sister depended on her. “But you’re not feeding. You’re making a statement. It’s not your statement. Whose is it?”
“For all our kind,” the Mora said. “To show your world that they would do well to remember us.” The words whispered around Sylvie, brushed her skin like the first warning tingle of frostbite.
“No argument from me,” Sylvie said. “But why now? From what I understand—”
“You understand nothing—”
“—there’s not a lot of sharing and caring in the Magicus Mundi. A sand wraith, succubus, mermaids. You all get the same bee in your bonnet at the same time? No. Someone’s guiding you.” Her mouth and throat were sore, as if some part of her was shrieking under the constant bombardment of nightmare imagery. It was getting harder and harder to keep the Mora in focus. If she blinked, the real world, already hazy and dark as dreams, was replaced by the Mora’s questing imagery. Trying to find Sylvie’s weaknesses, the things that made her sick and mindless with terror.
“You’ll never know,” the Mora said, and the black wave of nightmare slammed over her, shoving her back physically, knocking her to the floor, pouring itself down her throat, through her eyes, and took her into dream hell. “You’ll die alone in your dreams.”
Unlike the mermaids and their killing waves, which wanted to crush the life out of her, this dark undertow took her out of hersel
f and dropped her into the Mora’s turbid, icy darkness. Took away all the images that she had been bombarded with, all the mundane horrors of losing family and friends, of her failures. Sucked into the Mora’s empty heart.
Alone.
Disarmed.
Naked.
Helpless.
Pain lanced through her joints—shoulders and knees and elbows and ankles—spears of dragging agony, and she jerked her head against the weight, trying to see. Trying to assess the threat, even as she tried to scream. Dreamlike, her voice was sucked away. Fine golden cables, slicked with her blood, jutted out from her body in a familiar pattern.
God’s little marionette, the Mora whispered, and flicked one of the cables. Sylvie’s body jerked in helpless reaction.
You can fight but only so far as he allows you to do. You’re prideful. Useless. A puppet.
No, Sylvie said. Silence throttled her, brutalized her throat.
All alone. Eternally alone.
Sylvie shuddered; the cables hissed and sang with her trembling.
You’ll kill or outlive them all.
You’ll be alone, and when he starts speaking to you, you’ll be grateful, so grateful for a voice that you’ll be obedient. A perfect killing machine, mindless, falsely rebellious … a lonely puppet.
Voice, Sylvie thought. There was already a voice in her head. One that never left her. One that even now swarmed up through her blood, through the dark backbrain in her mind, growling, flashing feral teeth. The cables pinning her shoulders snapped, lashed out into the darkness like striking snakes.
The Mora’s whispered torment stopped.
Sylvie felt her little dark voice, that bitter, angry piece of Lilith, clawing its way through her throat, bursting through that dream silence.
“The thing is,” Sylvie gasped, and her words birthed themselves physically, fell into her hands, each of them a gleaming silver bullet, “I’m not sure I’m alone in my head.”
A full clip of bullets, slammed into a gun created out of the dream-darkness, aimed unerringly at the darkest spot, the black-hole heart of the Mora. Sylvie pulled the trigger and filled the monster full of gun flare and silver light. The darkness spiderwebbed and dissolved like ink under bleach. The Mora shrieked, and Sylvie rolled to her feet, slipping on the wet marble, rubbing blood away from her ears, the corners of her eyes.
