The Power of Mercy

by Fiona Zedde

  At the edge of her awareness, she noticed her uncle drift away from the rest of the family and migrate into the crowd. In his bespoke iron-gray suit and smile meant to charm, he should have been reeling men and women alike into his orbit; after all, he was attractive enough, in the way that everyone in Mai’s family was. But people only came close enough to him to be polite, perhaps even to pretend to like him, their distaste apparent in the stiff way they held their bodies, in the way they didn’t look at him for too long.

  Mai breathed out her own dislike, trying but failing to wrench her gaze from her uncle and to will away the sudden tightness in her chest the sight of him caused. He turned, and Mai froze in the snare of his smile, ice coating her spine.

  A shoulder bumped into hers from behind, jostling the champagne glass in her hands and threatening to push her off the stilts of her shoes. She flinched. Only her quick reflexes saved her from drenching her shirt with the wine or stumbling into someone standing nearby. Mai had never been more grateful for rudeness in her life.

  “Cayman.”

  Her brother grinned at her, showing his perfect teeth. His square-jawed good looks and friendly smile were identical to their father’s. The only thing he’d inherited from Mandaia were her piercing wolf eyes. That was enough to make Mai glance away from him for a moment. She refused to look where she’d just seen her uncle.

  “Mandaia-Pili.” His grin widened as he called her by her full name. Mandaia the Second. She winced as if the name hurt. “Nice outfit,” he said, flicking a gaze over her sheer blouse and tuxedo pants. “I bet Mother loves it.”

  “Good thing I didn’t wear it for her.”

  “Or did you?” Cayman amped up his grin. “Whatever the end goal, you definitely got her attention.” He slid his hands into the pockets of his tuxedo slacks and tossed a casual glance around them. Although he would never inherit what their mother had—Families relied on female heirs—he took in the massive ballroom, with its endless crowd of beautiful people and the gold, silver, and marble fixtures, as if he owned it and Mai didn’t.

  Thanks to years of practice, she didn’t react. She deliberately trailed her eyes away from her brother to the sight of Caressa making her way through the thick crowd of Metas and their spouses, smiling and making small talk while heading for Mandaia, the real object of her attention. Caressa had always been ambitious in a way that Mai was not, stroking opportunities until she felt the perfect moment to strike. She was a brilliant strategist, something Mandaia had always admired. And respected.

  In their world, it was eat or be eaten, take or be taken, and Caressa had balanced her life perfectly on the knife’s edge of taking care of herself and making sure no one else took her. Her politics were brilliant, and even Mai, who hated the necessary Family machinations with every bone in her body, had to admire her.

  Mai’s own solution to survival was to stay away from the family and other Metas as much as she was able. It didn’t always quite work out.

  Beside her, Cayman plucked his ringing phone from the inside pocket of his jacket and spoke softly into it for a few seconds before putting it away. He looked more intentionally around the room then. After apparently not finding what he was looking for, he gave a faint shrug. He grabbed his phone again and fired off a quick text in a flurry of thumbs.

  “Mother was looking for you earlier.” He tucked his phone back into his pocket and turned back to Mai.

  “She always knows where to find me.”

  Her brother nodded. “True enough.” Then he gave up his pose of nonchalance and draped himself over the railing, elbows propped up on the swirled marble, grinning like the unpretentious, carefree boy he used to be before…everything happened.

  Something down below made his smile turn into a laugh, and he turned to Mai as if he was going to share the joke, then seemed to remember what they’d become to each other. Nearly enemies. His mouth thinned, and he looked back down at the moving crowd. “The only person she can’t find right now is Uncle Stephen. She’s calling for him with no luck.”

  “I’m sure he’s taking care of his own business. He’ll come back later to give her a perfectly acceptable excuse for his absence.”

  Mai didn’t care where Stephen Redstone had disappeared to. Her uncle was a state senator, hunting enthusiast, and raging asshole. He was also the favorite of her mother’s three siblings. This wasn’t his first sudden disappearance from an event her mother thought was important, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  “That guy is a dick.” Cayman sounded jealous. He was nowhere near the favored anything. The only advantage he had in the family, aside from his Meta power, was that he wasn’t Mai. “He could’ve at least waited until this whole bullshit was over before skipping out. Mandaia is pissed.”

  “I am no such thing.”

  Mai briefly closed her eyes and relaxed her hand around the champagne glass until she felt that it would simply fall from her hand and shatter on the floor. Her mother touched a palm to the center of Mai’s back, a warm and heavy weight.

  Anyone watching would probably think it was a touch of affection. But Mai felt the rake of her mother’s Power checking on her state of mind and making sure she functioned as she always had. A quick look that bypassed Mai’s deeper thoughts was the only courtesy her mother gave her. Mai clenched her teeth and bore the assault in silence.

  “I’m happy you were able to find your way here despite your prior obligations, Mai.” She took her hand away, allowing Mai a quiet breath of relief.

  “I told you I would come, Mother.” She took a healthy sip of her champagne, although she wished it were whiskey instead.

  “You just didn’t say what time you would come.” Her mother clicked her teeth around the last word. “I know. Always the trickster, Mandaia-Pili.”

  On unsteady legs, Mai moved away from her mother. One step and then two. “You don’t want me around any more than I want to be here, Mother. I was doing us both a favor by showing up as late as I did.” Mandaia released a harsh breath, and Mai frowned when she realized it was a habit she’d also picked up over the years. Her annoyance at it made her feel foolish. “I thought Stephen would occupy your attentions, and you’d forget all about your defect daughter.”

  Her mother hissed and struck, fast as a cobra, fingers digging into Mai’s elbow. “That’s unnecessary, Mai.”

  Mai nodded and pulled her elbow away despite the added pain of scraping her skin against her mother’s sharp fingernails. “This is my cue to leave, I think.” She stepped back another foot. “Give Father and Abi my regards. I’ll see everyone at the next family dinner.” She said the last words loud enough for anyone listening to hear. Mai had no intention of eating with her family ever again.

  Although Mandaia could have done any number of things to keep Mai at her side, she let her go, and Mai left the ballroom with her typical slow and swaying walk. Her heart thundered like the hooves of wild horses.

  Chapter 4

  At home, Mai couldn’t get her clothes off fast enough. Her blouse stank of her mother’s mansion, of the jasmine and other hothouse flowers that hung like funeral wreaths everywhere. She threw her clothes into the washer, dry cleaning tags be damned, and took a long and hot shower to scrub all traces of the gathering from her skin.

  But the shower didn’t scrub the afternoon’s events from her mind. So she buried herself in the work of grading papers and refining the syllabus for the new Caribbean literature class she planned for next semester. Soon enough, she fell into the rhythm of the tasks she loved, working late into the night and past her bedtime. Only when her eyes started to droop at 2:00 a.m. did she give up and get ready for bed. Thoughts of her students lulled her easily into sleep.

  Mai dreams of drowning. Terror soaked and panting, she struggles under the sheet, aware she is dreaming but unable to wake up. Her pulse tries to hammer its way from under her skin. Her heartbeat is deafenin
g. It takes a forever of incomplete breaths, but she does eventually manage to open her eyes. She gulps greedily at the air, still lost in the dream but closer to her own reality, staring hot-eyed at the bare, white ceiling of her bedroom. Her chest vibrates with fright while the memory of high water ripples behind her eyelids. Even semiawake from the dreams she’s had too often since she was a child, she still feels the phantom sensation of someone trapping her wrists above her head, water pressing against her nose, and a gentle hand holding her beneath the liquid surge.

  “Mama,” she whimpers in the prison of her sweat-damp sheets and feels shame for it.

  There was no one to save her then, and no one to save her now.

  Mai opens her mouth to scream.

  The jarring clang of her phone’s private ringtone yanked her fully out of the dream. Mai swallowed the aborted cry. Chest still heaving, she rolled over in the twisted sheets, grateful for her easy breaths, and reached for her iPhone on the bedside table.

  “Yes?”

  “Can you come now?”

  She squinted at the time. It was barely four o’clock in the morning. “I thought you wanted to see me Monday.”

  “That’s irrelevant now. Something else came up.” Although the voice on the other end of the line was smooth and unhurried, there was no mistaking the sense of urgency.

  “Alright. Give me forty-five minutes.”

  “Thirty would be better.”

  After brushing her teeth and changing into Mercy’s skin, Mai took to the rooftops and made it to the Midtown building in twenty minutes. It was an old structure that used to be a human police station until Metas bought it and made it their own.

  She dropped down from the roof, easily making the six-story jump to land on quiet feet in the narrow alley between two Meta-owned buildings. At this time of morning, Atlanta was mostly quiet, with only the occasional car passing on the street, the moon a high and bright crescent, and clouds drifting across the still-dark sky. The early fall breeze brushed over her mostly naked skin.

  When she stepped into the building, it was like a regular workday. Or in this case, early morning. High-wattage fluorescents spotlighted the dozen or so desks arranged in two neat rows in the large main room. At these desks were Metas all dressed in black—some seated, others standing. At the end of the short double rows of desks stood a door of frosted glass—a typical-looking if small police station staffed by Metas charged with investigating crimes by and against their own.

  Already used to her presence, few paid her any attention as she made her way toward the closed door. She knocked once before letting herself in.

  The office was large, more typical of a conference room with its centrally placed table, an equally long whiteboard spread across the front wall, and a set of windows with a one-way view of the tree-lined parking lot. Three enforcers stood at the back of the massive office. They were all dressed in black—long-sleeved shirts tucked into soft-looking denim and knee-high boots. Their red and yellow starburst insignias blazed on each shirt’s right breast.

  With arms crossed, the enforcers scowled at an electronic projection lit up in thin, blue light. Although none of them were obviously armed, they all exuded an air of deadly efficiency and purpose. Anyone, human or Meta, would be a fool to take them on, despite their faces, which even under the universally unflattering florescent lights were all grimly attractive—the apex of Meta beauty and power.

  “Sorry to drag you out of bed,” Denali, the region commander, said, although he didn’t look sorry, “but we have a situation.”

  Tall and with severe features that belied him being the most approachable of his colleagues, Denali gestured for Mai to come close. He didn’t turn from the projection casting eerie blue shadows over his face and those of the two others in the room, Nuala and Ty.

  “There’s been a murder, by a Meta.” Nuala, nearly as tall as the commander and with sleepy eyes that hid her laserlike attention to every detail, turned to Mai. “We found the body less than an hour ago.”

  Mai shuddered. What Meta would dare?

  Punishable crime was relatively low in their society. Every one of them knew that to attract the attention of the enforcers was to essentially surrender everything. Their power. Their money. Their lives. The enforcers always found who they were looking for, and there were no enforcer prisons.

  “Who’s this victim?” she asked.

  The name Denali said made Mai’s ears ring. “Excuse me?” She must have heard wrong. There was no way he just said—

  He repeated the name, but it wasn’t any easier to process the second time. Mai’s muscles twitched with the sudden need to put her body in motion, to leap across the room and get in Denali’s face, and demand he say those words one more time. She crossed her arms over her chest but otherwise stayed still.

  That doesn’t…

  Mai cut off her train of thought and forced all her disbelief to the back of her mind. “What happened?” She finally paced to the window, unable to bear the ticking in her muscles much longer.

  “The Absolution Killer.” Ty spoke up for the first time, his voice a hoarse menace, a permanent reminder of a Meta criminal who’d tried to crush his throat.

  As always, his broken voice made Mai want to touch her own neck in a useless gesture of self-protection. Instead, she drew in a slow breath and focused on the view outside the window.

  Absolution. That…makes sense.

  A killer who’d never been caught but always left clues about who they were killing, and why. Now that their latest victim was a powerful Meta, it only made sense to assume Absolution was a Meta too. A strong one.

  The trees across the parking lot rustled from the touch of a passing breeze, the sound like a flurry of whispers reaching out to Mai from the past. A faint, rattling noise distracted her stare out the window. Her fingers were trembling. Knocking against the windowpane. She clenched her hands tight and walked past the enforcers to look at the files spread out on the conference table.

  She touched one of the older ones, darkened and curled at the edges from repeated handling: Twenty-eight men and nine women killed over the last six years, found in very public spaces, their bodies maimed and facial features nearly unrecognizable from prolonged torture. And there had always been a note stuffed into their mouths after death.

  I CONFESS, the notes said. All of them were in the victims’ own shaky handwriting.

  The human police named the killer “Absolution” because of these notes, signs of the killer forcing these murdered men and women to acknowledge some crime they’d committed and maybe even seek pardon for them.

  By the nature of the torture—fingers smashed, genitals mutilated, orifices ruthlessly penetrated by foreign objects before death—the murders seemed motivated by revenge for sexual wrongs. During the five years Mai had been working with enforcers, the Absolution Killer had taken three victims in Atlanta alone. Unlike human law enforcement, not once had the Tribunal of Enforcers officially taken notice of the killer, who’d seemed to target mostly humans and a few low-power Metas. These Meta victims had lived completely as human and had been assumed to be the result of human/Meta mixing. Since the murders technically weren’t committed against Metas, or at least not within their walled-off society, the enforcers had largely ignored Absolution’s career. Instead, they had been amused by what they saw as an efficient human killer taking out the trash in his own community. But now…

  “What can I do here that you can’t?” Mai asked.

  Nuala made a sound that wasn’t a laugh. “You know the answer to that question.”

  Unfortunately, Mai did. As Mandaia-Pili Redstone, she had crucial access to this victim’s family that the enforcers did not. If she was reading the situation right, they also expected her to use that access to investigate every aspect of his life, find out what he’d done to attract Absolution’s interest, and hopefully fin
d a trail leading to the killer. She skimmed through the files on the table briefly looked at the electronic display she suddenly realized showed the locations of all known Absolution kills.

  “Okay,” Mai said. “I’ll do my best.”

  Denali drifted to her side, close enough to touch her. But he didn’t. “You can start by going downstairs with Nuala to the morgue and taking a look at what we have to work with,” he said. “The other Absolution kills were easy enough for a human. This one…” His shoulder brushed Mai’s, a wordless offer of apology after what he had just asked her to do. “A Meta clearly did this, and we’re going to catch them.”

  Mai drew in another long and silent breath, preparing to refuse. The photographs should be enough to lead her where she needed to go. But then she thought of another audience she was sure to have and its particular set of questions.

  “I’m ready whenever you are,” she said and swallowed the last of her unease.

  Death had never disturbed her. It came to everyone eventually. It would come for her soon enough. While she hadn’t managed to make total peace with it, it was not something she flinched from. And she would not start now, even when it was her uncle on the steel slab.

  Chapter 5

  When Mai saw Stephen Redstone’s face, her heart kicked hard in her chest. He had died screaming. No amount of sanitized lighting could hide that.

  “We waited until you came to start.” The Meta medical examiner grumbled this at Mai as she settled within sight of her uncle’s body. She swiped eucalyptus gel under her nose to dull the smell in the room, then crossed her arms tight over her chest. The ME picked up his instruments and began. He delicately plucked away pieces of the body, unfolding the story as clearly as if Mai had been there to see every moment of his torture.