by S. C. Green
Dorien nodded.
“He gave me medicine,” Diana said. “It tasted gross, but I feel better already.” She started coughing again.
Dorien turned to Alain. “She’s younger than I expected. Are you sure she’s the one for the job?”
“I’m sure.”
Dorien studied my face. Unlike Alain, his eyes didn’t wander over my body but fixed on my own. He seemed to be sizing me up.
Well, size away, Reaper. Two could play at that game. I glared right back. Finally, he stepped away and gave a sly smile.
“You’ll have your hands full with her,” he told Alain. “Don’t let her out of your sight.” He turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” Alain asked.
“Malcolm heard we brought in a couple of humans from the Rim. I am supposed to interrogate them, and you, to find out why they’re here and if they have any information we don’t about the gangs or the Rim. So I’m going to go make my report. From the look of her face”—He flicked an elbow in my direction—“you haven’t filled her in on all the details as to why she’s really here, so you probably want to do that now so she has the chance to walk away.”
“She’s not going to walk away,” I snapped back.
“What will you tell Malcolm?” Alain demanded.
“That you rescued a couple of humans from a wraith attack. One is sick and will need more medicine. The other...” He grinned at me in a way that made me feel naked. “The other wields some kind of psychic power we should probably study.”
My blood ran cold. How do they know? What are they going to do to me?
Dorien turned on his heel and stalked away. Alain shut the door behind him.
“Don’t worry,” Alain said, facing me. “He’s kidding. He’s not telling Malcolm anything. Your secret is safe with us.”
“I’m not worried.” A lie I hoped he wouldn’t notice.
He took a deep breath, his gaze darting between me to the window.
I narrowed my eyes. “You look nervous.”
“Is it that obvious?” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “It just occurred to me that I actually managed to get you here, which means I now have to explain what it is you’re going to be doing for me. And when you hear it, you might not want to stay.”
I frowned at the uneasy shiver rolling down my back. “This isn’t some kind of sex thing, is it? Because I’m not that kind of girl. I am, however, the kind of girl who’ll kick your ass if you even think about touching me.”
“It’s not a sex thing, Sydney. It’s …” He shook his head.
“I can’t do my job if I don’t know what it is.” I plopped down next to Diana on the bed and linked our fingers, her questioning gaze bouncing between Alain and me.
“My daughter, May, has been kidnapped. I need you to get her back.” He closed his eyes, and his face suddenly appeared drawn, tired beyond comprehension.
My chest tightened. I knew how worried I’d been about Diana after not being able to see her. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through with his own daughter.
But I didn’t know what he expected me to do. “I don’t usually deal in people. Besides, don’t you have a whole arsenal of Reapers and weapons at your disposal here?”
“You forget, I’ve seen what you can do. I know you can look through objects with your mind.”
Another thing I don’t usually deal in—people knowing about my “talent.” But too late now.
“Which family has her?” I ran through the names of the different crime families in my head. “If it’s the Dimitris, I can probably swing some kind of bargain, but I hope you have a decent stash of whisky—”
“It’s not the Dimitris. The wraith have her.”
“The wraith?” I snorted. “Well, then you can say goodbye to her. She’s a husk now.”
Alain shook his head. “No. They have her alive. They are holding her ransom.”
I blinked. Was he fucking serious? “That’s preposterous. The wraith don’t take prisoners. They suck energy first, ask questions never.”
“A note arrived here three days ago—”
I rolled my eyes up at the ceiling. “You got a note? Then it can’t be the wraith. The wraith can’t even hold a pen, let alone write a coherent sentence. And the wraith aren’t organised. They don’t have a leader.”
“I know this. Will you stop asking questions and let me explain?”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Fine.”
“The note explained that they were holding May in the Citadel, and that I would get her back as soon as I delivered the Mimir into their hands. The note was signed by someone named “The Mayor” and delivered to the Compound by a wraith wearing a red scarf. That seems to be a symbol of this so-called Mayor.” He sighed, his wide shoulders drooping. “The Council met and discussed at length, but they finally agreed that May—valuable as she is to us—isn’t worth what the wraith are asking.”
A red scarf? I’d seen a wraith in the tunnel with a red scarf. Coincidence?
I glanced at Diana, who must have grown bored of the conversation and was now stroking Blackie behind the ears. Already the colour was returning to her cheeks. “But you disagreed.”
“Of course I disagreed!” he snapped, his eyes wild. “She’s my daughter. I can’t—” He gulped. “I can’t leave her alone in there for the wraith to … to ....”
“Okay. Easy.” I disentangled myself from Diana and strode over to him, placing my hand on his arm in an attempt to calm him down so he wouldn’t freak Diana out. “What’s this thing they want from you, anyway? A menhir? Isn’t that a big chunk of pointy stone? Can’t you just give it to them?”
Alain dragged a hand down his stubbled jaw, his gaze pinned to the floor as if he might see this strange object lying there. “It’s a Mimir, not a menhir, and it’s an important object belonging to the order.”
“That’s very vague. What kind of object?”
“It’s an orb of swirling light. But what it looks like isn’t as important as its purpose. It’s how we travel between this world and the underworld. It’s like the keyhole to the doorway. We can’t allow the wraith to get their hands on it.”
None of this made any sense. “And what do the wraith want with this object? They know as well as you and I that they can’t stay in the underworld.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about the wraith and what’s going on in the Citadel.”
The Citadel was the huge complex rising up from the centre of the city. The wraith lived inside it, and no living creature had ever emerged from it alive. The Citadel completely surrounded the Brookwood Hill Cemetery—where the wraith had come from—and the Sunn Chemical Plant, whose chemical spill ten years ago had leeched into the soil and caused the dead to rise again as wraith. Around the Citadel was an area we called the Hub, which consisted of mostly high rise luxury apartment buildings and looted shopping malls. Rich people who still cared about being rich lived in the Hub, and those of us in the Rim either traded with them or stole from them. I’d been doing the latter in the enormous liquor cabinet of a penthouse when I was caught.
“Enlighten me.”
Alain glanced down at Diana and then back to me. “Do you want her to hear?”
“I’m only sick,” Diana piped up in a small voice. “I’m not stupid. The wraith killed my parents. I know what they can do.”
I quirked my eyebrow at Alain. “Diana’s lived in the Rim ever since it became the Rim. You don’t have to worry about her.”
“Very well.” He crossed from the door to the bed and leaned against the frame closest to me, his tall body towering over mine. “We’ve suspected for some time the wraith are transitioning. Huskings are on the increase across the city. The wraith seem to be stockpiling energy, and we haven’t been able to figure out how or why. That is, until we received the note. Somehow—and the how of it is still being investigated—the wraith are taking on a more solid form. Not all of them. It seems to be restricted
only to the wraith wearing red pennants, scarves, or handkerchiefs, and only when they’re still close to the Citadel. That’s why you were still able to roll right through that one you encountered earlier today.”
“You saw a wraith?” Diana stared up at me, her eyes wide with fear.
“Shhh, it was nothing.” I sat beside her on the bed, hugging her to my breast. “What do you mean, more solid form?”
“I’ve seen them manipulate objects. They’ve picked up pipes and thrown them at us. One of them even grabbed Dorien around the neck. He still has its thumbprints on his clavicle. And they seem more intelligent. They work together, signal to each other. Some even seem to have developed rudimentary speech.” His eyebrows drew together. “And these are just the wraith who step outside the Citadel—”
“You have no idea what it’s like on the inside,” I told him.
“Exactly,” he said. “And then this letter came. It clearly shows the wraith have a leader. They are organising themselves. And they have some grand scheme afoot that they want the Mimir for. So the Council knew they couldn’t give it to them, even though it’s costing them dearly.” He spat out the last word as if it were poison.
Realisation dawned on me. The Citadel’s high walls made of rubble and car skeletons and trees fused together in a tangle of petrified remains made it impossible for anyone to know what was going on inside. Unless, of course, you happened to have a strange ability to see through solid objects.
“Let me get this straight,” I started. “You want me to look inside the Citadel and see where they are holding your daughter?”
Alain nodded.
“That place is huge. I doubt they’re holding her close to the wall. I would have to actually go inside.”
Alain nodded again.
A shiver chased across my shoulders. I folded my arms across my chest. “No way.”
“That’s our agreement. This is the job you have to do.” Alain narrowed his eyes. “If you want the medicine for Diana, you’re going to have to do it.”
“You’re disgusting.” I hugged Diana even closer to me. “You would withhold vital medicine to make me go on this ridiculous suicide mission?”
“I’m desperate,” he whispered.
And I saw in his eyes it was true. He was stricken with grief over losing his daughter. His own Order wouldn’t help him. I was his only hope.
I’d taken up a life of crime in order to keep Diana alive. I knew a little of the desperation he felt. Even though he’d trapped me into it, I didn’t feel anger when I looked at him. I felt anger for him, for how powerless he must feel.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it. But answer me one thing. Why is your daughter so important to the wraith? What made them think they would be able to get their hands on this Mimir if they took her?”
“Because,” Alain said, his deep voice dripping with anguish. “May is our only hope for a future.”
3
“What exactly do you mean by that cryptic statement?” I was getting annoyed with Alain talking in circles, explaining but not explaining. There was something going on here, something darker he was trying to keep from me.
“May is the only female Reaper left in the city. She was to be bred to the most powerful men in the order to ensure our race never dies. She is our Babylon whore, our great hope. She is my life.”
“That’s sick.”
“That’s life in this fucking city,” Alain spat out, his dark eyes wild.
I said nothing.
A few moments of silence passed, and then he said, “I’ll get you some food.”
With that, he slipped out into the hallway.
I caught a glimpse of his face as he turned down the hall. He looked both stricken and furious. Clearly he didn’t approve of the Reapers’ plans for his daughter.
“Are we prisoners here?” Diana stroked Blackie as he nuzzled against her leg.
“I honestly don’t know.” I walked across the room to the window and peered down into the courtyard below.
Alain emerged from the lower floor and darted between the gardens to another doorway. Shortly after he disappeared, Dorien strode back through the courtyard, something black tucked under his arm.
Beyond the roofline of the Compound, I could see across the city. In the distance, the Citadel loomed—an ichorous protrusion of twisted metal and creeping stone. Ethereal white light emanated from tiny gaps in its petrified surface. I’d lived in the shadow of it for the last ten years, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was go inside.
Ten years ago, an accident at the Sunn plant leeched some kind of toxic chemical into the soil. I was living in my first apartment at the time—a rundown place with a leaky roof that was a far cry from the lush mansion I’d run away from—only a few blocks from the plant.
I remember watching from my window as the EPA arrived in droves to cordon off the area. There were tents set up on street corners to treat residents for symptoms like nausea and skin burns where they had come in contact with the soil. For weeks, they trucked in gallons of bottled water because ours was contaminated. I could no longer take my morning run through the quiet Brookwood Hill Cemetery—which occupied four acres of parklike grounds directly behind the chemical plant. This area had been completely sealed off.
I’d had an inkling something was seriously wrong when helicopters started to arrive, vans with darkened windows parked down my street, and army trucks rolled in to patrol the cordoned-off cemetery. Then the first reports started to hit the news. Residents seeing ghostly figures walking through walls. Shortly after, local residents showed up dead, their bodies devoid of moisture, their chest cavities emptied of organs, their skin and bones turned to a kind of dusty, crumbling stone.
The wraith had arrived.
The government sent in more soldiers, but all the firepower in the world couldn’t stop creatures who were already dead. The bullets passed straight through the wraith, and they turned the soldiers into piles of dead, dusty husks.
Drastic measures had to be taken. The government could have called in all the top scientists from across the world—China, Sweden, Germany, England, and Japan—and they might have all worked together to create a weapon that could neutralise the wraith and save the city. If life were a blockbuster action film, that was what would have happened.
What they actually did was surround the city in a large dome made of some kind of energy particle, sealing the wraith—as well as all the citizens—inside. We were erased, wiped from existence, left to eat each other or starve to death like spiders trapped in a jar.
The city still clung to life, tenaciously and violently. The wraith mostly stayed inside the Citadel, feeding off the energy leeched out by the dying chemical plant. They made forays into the city when they had a burning hunger for human energy. And we remained on the outside of the Citadel, our society slowly collapsing into anarchy as our resources ran thin. But if what Alain said was true, the wraith were plotting something. And if they wanted to abandon the Citadel completely to frolic with the humans…
This city isn’t big enough for both of us.
I turned back to Diana, who was staring at me with her eyebrows pulled together. “Are you really going to go inside the Citadel?”
“I don’t have a choice.” I glanced out the window again, my chest tightening with fear. Seeing the wraith in the tunnel was one thing, but actually walking into their domain, not knowing what to expect, was quite another.
“Please don’t do it for me, Sydney. I don’t need medicine. As long as I have you and Blackie, I’ll be fine.” Her lower lip quivered. She started to say something else, but a coughing fit stole her words away.
“You will be fine, because I’ll look after you. I brought you here, where it’s warm and safe and you can have things to eat that Blackie didn’t have to kill first. And besides, there’s a girl just like you trapped inside there. She’s probably alone and frightened. I might be the only one who can save her. I have to try. Do you wan
t me to leave her there to die?”
“I don’t want you to go away again,” Diana whispered, clutching Blackie so hard he meowed.
Hearing the waver in her voice tore at my heart. I’d run away from my oppressive parents at age seventeen, and lived on the streets for several months before I could afford my apartment. I’d met a lot of orphans on the streets and in the refuges—broken kids shuttled from one violent foster home to another. I heard dark tales of families fostering ten kids for the money but only providing food and clothing for two, foster siblings who were so messed up by the system they tortured animals and mutilated their own bodies, violent foster dads who took pleasure in beating those they were supposed to protect and—from the women I met who had haunted eyes and track marks down their arms—much worse things. Those kids had survived by learning to fight—to kick and bite until they were left alone—or to withdraw into themselves, living inside a fantasy inside their own minds. They were messed up, and living with them messed me up.
Diana had been orphaned, too. Her parents had lived next door to me when I moved into my Rim apartment, but they died in the early wraith attacks. I found her as a toddler, crying alone in their apartment, and I couldn’t just leave her there to die or become one of those street kids. She was such a kind spirit. I couldn’t bear the idea of her being broken by the same system that broke the others. I would look after her, be the friend I’d never had.
And I had to do that now, too. So I choked down my fear and plastered a smile on my face. “I’ll be fine. Alain is going to help me. The Reapers have weapons I can use to hold back the wraith, weapons we can’t get ahold of in the Rim. And I have my sight, which they won’t be counting on. I’ll be able to see the wraith before they’re anywhere near me.”
“What if I came with you?” Diana’s face brightened. “I could help you rescue May.”
“Not happening.” I sat next to her on the bed and patted her red hair just to feel the silky strands slide through my fingers. “If you came with me, who would look after Blackie?”
