by Kim Harrison
Taking a deep breath, Chris turned, spinning smoothly on the metal chair. Her expression was mocking, and her hair was starting to float. She was tapping a line. Jennifer flicked her attention between them, clearly nervous. “Don’t you have more cameras to install?” the distasteful woman said harshly.
In a noisy motion, the man stood, his cameras tucked in the crook of his elbow as he stiffly walked toward the edge of the clutter. “You are a cold, unfeeling bitch.” I heard him hit something out of my sight with a grunt, and Chris smiled.
Looking smug, she spun back to the machine. “I don’t think Morgan’s blood is going to be any different from any other corrs we’ve taken,” she said, and I became more uneasy. They knew my name. They knew the coven had labeled me a demon. I’d thought that I could ride this wild horse, but it was running away with me and I couldn’t get the bit out from between its teeth.
The machine whined harshly and spit out another curling bit of paper. Jennifer grabbed for it, taking a step back out of Chris’s reach. Her eyes widened, and an awestruck “Dudes!” slipped past her lips.
“Give it to me,” Chris snapped, lurching to her feet to take it. Frowning, she dropped back into her chair, sitting sideways so that she only had to turn her head to see me. I could tell it was bad news for me by the way Jennifer was shifting from foot to foot.
“Look at her Rosewood levels,” the younger woman said, pointing down over Chris’s shoulder. “My God! She should be dead!”
Exhaling, Chris handed the strip to Jennifer. “I’ve never seen such a narrow spike. Hold off on pasting it in the data book. I’m going to run it again.”
But Jennifer had already pulled a worn theme book from a cardboard box and was leafing through it. I recognized it as one of the books Chris had saved from the industrial park, and I was wondering about their backgrounds when Jennifer taped the strip in, then signed and dated it.
Her brow furrowed, Jennifer studied the page. I could see about eight strips pasted in. Eight people, six of whom were probably dead. Her careful data taking was going to land her in jail for murder. “You should be dead,” Jennifer said when she looked up.
“That makes two of us,” I snarled, and Chris chuckled as she popped in a new vial and hit the go button.
“A Rosewood spike doesn’t mean she is a demon.” Chris stood and stretched, going to stir the soup with a glass rod. “It means she’s a freak of nature.”
“But it’s the increased level of the Rosewood enzyme that’s killing them,” Jennifer said, her finger on my printout. “Not necessarily the transformations themselves. She should be dead with what she has. Clearly she’s got something, maybe another antigen, that’s counteracting the first, allowing her to survive. If we can find out what it is, then we can keep them all alive—”
“Why?” Chris interrupted her. “We’re not a hotel.”
“No, you’re a butcher,” I said, ignored, and Winona trembled in the corner. “Oh, crap, I’m sorry,” I whispered, and she drew back from me.
“Keeping them alive isn’t the goal,” Chris said, making me angrier yet. “Getting closer to the ideal is. As far as I’m concerned, the shortened life expectancy is a boon. What would we do with them otherwise? Stack them up like wood?”
My God, this woman was unbelievable.
Jennifer dropped her eyes, looking uneasy as she leaned against the counter and hugged herself. Clearly she had some smarts if she was spouting off about antigens. Maybe I could work on her guilt and convince her to let us go.
The machine spit out another strip of paper, and after Chris read it, she set it on fire using the Bunsen burner. “I have a better way to find out if she’s a demon or not,” she said, watching the paper go up with a weird green flame from the ink.
“What?”
Jennifer’s voice sounded scared. Hell, I knew I was, and I scooted forward to the front of the cage, getting into the light. “Yeah, what?” I said boldly, but I wasn’t. They had at least three drops of my blood left in that syringe.
Chris sauntered to me, crouching until the hem of her lab coat brushed the dirty floor. It was demeaning, being looked at like that, and I stiffly got to my feet, trying to hide where I hurt.
“The coven put charmed silver on her,” Chris said as she rose as well, her eyes going to my wrist. “She can’t do ley-line magic, but her blood is still good. I’m going to try one of those curses again—using her blood to invoke it.”
Oh. Shit.
I looked at Winona, my thoughts zinging back to that monstrosity of a broken body found in the basement of the Underground Railroad Museum. That had been done with witch blood. Using mine might have even worse consequences. “Don’t do this,” I said, retreating from the wire mesh. “Please.”
Seeing my fear, Chris smiled. “If it works properly, then Morgan is a demon and we have a good source of blood to pattern the synthetic stuff on.”
“Don’t do this!” I said, then jumped when Chris smacked the cage and Winona cried out.
“And if it doesn’t work,” the woman continued as she held the syringe with my blood in it up to the light to estimate how much was left, “we can use Morgan to shift the tolerance for the Rosewood antigens forward that much more.” Chris set the syringe aside and smiled. “Like every other chubi we’ve had.”
I pressed into the fieldstone wall, fingering my band of silver. This was bad. Really bad.
“Um,” Jennifer said, shifting nervously as she slid from the table. “He said not to do anything until he gets back.”
“The hell with him.” Motions stiff, Chris strode to a cardboard box and began digging through it. “I’m not going to sit on my ass and wait. I’m the one doing the science, not him. If she’s a demon, I want to know. Where’s that damned book? The one with no title?”
Book? With no title? Oh, no, I thought, fear sliding into me when Chris made a happy sound and lifted out an old leather-bound book with frayed pages and a broken binding. It was a demon text, filled with demon curses. I could tell from here.
“Uh, ladies?” I said when Chris dropped the book on an open space and pulled her folding chair up to it. “I know you’re all excited about thinking you’re the superior species and all, but you seriously need to rethink this.”
Chris’s lips pursed. “Oh, that’s interesting.” I stared as she whispered Latin, practicing. “I need a strand of hair,” she said, and I pressed deeper into my corner. Jennifer came to stand before the mesh door, and I growled at her, “Come in here, and you’ll find out how it feels to have my foot in your face.” But she only plucked a strand from the mesh, handing it to Chris and wiping her hand on her pants.
“I don’t like using magic,” she said, glancing at me. “Eloy says it’s evil.”
“Eloy is old school who calls blowing things up progress.” Chris held the strand up between two fingers. “He has his place, but it’s not making decisions. Magic isn’t what makes them animals. It’s that they prey on sentient beings.”
“Kind of like what you’re doing here, eh?” I said, but I was trembling inside. I had no idea what she was going to do, but it was going to be nasty.
Chris’s attention flicked to me, then back to the book. “Anoint the hair, and break it while you say Separare. It’s a communal curse, already twisted and just needing to be invoked.”
Separare. That was Latin for sunder, wasn’t it? Crap, what was she going to do? I pushed forward. “Don’t do this,” I said, gripping the mesh of the cage and giving it a shake. “I’m warning you!”
But what could I do, caged like a dog?
My pulse thundered and Winona looked up, scared, as Chris took a drop of my blood from the syringe and pulled my hair through it. “Separare!”
I braced for anything, staring as Chris’s eyes grew wide. With a howl of pain, she shoved the demon book off the counter. It hit the floor as Jennifer gaspe
d in fear, a few pages coming loose from the binding and drifting almost within reach.
“Chris!” Jennifer cried out as the woman gasped and hunched over in pain. “What’s wrong?” she said, holding on to Chris’s shoulders and trying to keep her from falling off the chair.
Was it the imbalance? I thought, feeling myself as if looking for a gunshot wound, but nothing felt different, nothing hurt. I heard Winona shift, watching now.
“Bitch . . .” Chris rasped, still hunched in pain as she glared at me.
“What happened?” Jennifer asked, bending over her in concern.
Chris shoved Jennifer away. “I’m fine!” she snapped, finally able to straighten up. Her eyes were bloodshot as she glared at me, her skin pale. “Not so helpless after all. Demon. Demon whore!” Taking a breath, she looked at her hands. They were trembling. “The bitch bounced the curse back at me.”
Jennifer looked confused, but I wasn’t. “Uh, if that band of charmed silver prevents her from doing magic, then how could she bounce it back at you?”
“I don’t know!” Shaking, Chris stood up, bending to snatch the pages that had fallen out and shoving them into the front of the book before turning to glare at me, reminding me of Jenks with her hands on her hips like that. “Maybe curses don’t work on demons. Maybe that’s why the last woman died so fast.”
Winona caught her breath, terror making her eyes wide.
I edged back from the front of the cage, relieved. The curse hadn’t bounced back because I was a demon. Like Trent had said, if the curse worked through the demon collective, it wouldn’t recognize me and would bounce back. I was safe. But Winona wasn’t.
“I’m going to try it on the other one,” Chris said, and a drop of ice ran down my spine. Winona had gone white, her fingers gripping her knees stiff and clawlike.
“No, you’re not!” I shouted.
But Chris was drawing a long brown hair through her fingers, coating it with blood. I looked at Winona. Oh God. I couldn’t stop this. “Winona,” I whispered, and the woman’s eyes met mine, scared. “I’m sorry.”
“Separare!” Chris shouted, and the strand of hair broke.
Winona’s eyes bulged, and she stiffened. Her desperate, despairing cry of pain echoed in the small area. She pushed to her feet, and I lunged for her, grabbing her before she could run into the wire mesh. I felt helpless, but I tried to make the pain go away by just being there, giving her something to feel besides agony.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, tears coming from me as she screamed in pain, her entire body stiff with it. “It’s okay. It will go away. I promise.” I didn’t know if she could hear me, but her screams turned to sobs as she shook.
“It worked!” Chris crowed. “Jenn! It worked perfectly! We have it! I can do anything!”
I brought my head up as I rocked Winona, the woman slowly starting to relax as the pain ebbed. The blond sadist was almost dancing, her finger and thumb red with my blood and the gluttonous light of power in her eyes.
“It’s getting better,” I said to Winona, wishing I could help her. “See, it’s going away.”
“I want to go home,” she cried as she slipped from me to the floor and huddled, her hair hiding her face. “I just want to go home.”
“Me too,” I said, feeling helpless. She’d be okay until they decided to do something else. “I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t be here.”
Gerald shuffled in, his expression irate and the cameras gone from his hands. “Keep it down,” he said, weaving past the woman in the lab coat doing a happy dance as if she’d made a touchdown. “I can hear you all the way to the stairway.” He looked at Winona, huddled in the corner with me, glaring at all of them. “What did you do?”
“It worked!” Chris sang, and Jennifer made notations in a second workbook, her expression pulled up as if she was smelling something rank. I knew it was the idea that Chris had done magic, not that she’d caused someone great pain. “I did a curse, and it worked. Morgan’s blood is demonic. We have working demon blood, and it didn’t cost my soul to do it!”
Which sort of answered the question of how they’d gotten a curse to hide that woman in the basement of the Underground Railroad Museum. They’d tried to get blood from a demon and had to settle for a curse to hide their mistakes. Whoever had twisted it was probably either laughing his ass off at their efforts or cheering them on to their destruction. God, I hoped it wasn’t Newt.
I’d had it, and I fingered my silver band, feeling long past stupid. I had been so blind, clueless. If I’d been a normal witch, not having magic wouldn’t have been a problem, but what ran in my veins was unimaginable power. It came with the ability to protect that power—and I had thrown it away. This was my fault. All of it.
“You made a woman feel pain,” I said sarcastically. “Congratulations. I can do the same thing with my foot and it doesn’t take a curse to do it.”
“She’s not a woman, she’s an animal,” Chris said, and my face burned.
The man frowned, then settled himself at the monitors, turning them on to show three new angles of dark basement. “Just keep it down,” he said, turning his back as if a woman sobbing in the corner was an everyday occurrence. “They have tours upstairs, you know.”
And now I knew it, too.
Jennifer slid her notebook in front of Chris, and the blond woman initialed it with a happy flourish. “I still don’t like you using magic,” Jennifer said as she put the notebook with the rest in the cardboard box. “It’s evil.”
“Magic is what is going to win this war,” Chris said as she returned to her demon text. “If all it took was men with guns, we would’ve won it already.” The zeal of the stupid in her, Chris began turning pages as if it were the winter solstice gift catalog, earmarking pages and cooing in delight at the new possibilities.
I gave Winona a last touch on the shoulder, then stood at the door to the cage. It was solid, locked with a chunk of metal. “You’re not going to survive this,” I said, shaking. I meant it to the bottom of my soul. I hated bullies, and that was all Chris was. A magic-using bully who had a problem with not everyone thinking as she did.
“I already have,” Chris said lightly. “Mmm. I’ve got her baselines. Let’s try the mutation curse.”
The mental vision of the woman buried in the basement rose up.
Jennifer turned from where she’d been arranging the sleeping bags. “To change her blood? Why? It’s demonic already.”
“Not Morgan,” Chris said, and I felt a wash of fear for Winona. “But we’ll use her blood, not the stuff from the previous corr. Since her blood can invoke demon magic, it will work and then we’ll have two of them.”
My lips parted, and I looked at Winona. She was as terrified as me, and she hadn’t seen the ruin of that woman buried in the basement. Jennifer had, though, and she looked uneasy.
“No,” I breathed, coming forward to hold the mesh and give it a shake. “Jennifer, you saw what it did to the last woman. It hits them too hard. For the love of God! Don’t do this!”
“Shut up!” Chris dropped the demon book on the table. More pages separated, leaking out like blood.
“He’s not here,” Gerald said, and Chris just about lost it.
“I don’t care!” she shouted. “If I say we do it now, we do it now! He could be in an FIB lockup for all we know! Get the corr out of the box and put her in the circle!”
Oh God, they were going to do it.
“You’re not touching her!” I shouted, heart hammering. Winona was behind me, pressed into the wall, but Gerald grabbed a forked stick and opened the door to the cage. I watched the key go back into his pocket, knowing I’d never get hold of it.
I jumped for the open door, only to find the fork on my neck. Choking, I found myself pushed to the wall, my fingers trying to make a gap to breathe. Winona was screaming, and someone reached in and
pulled her out. I tried to stop them, but Gerald knew what he was doing, and he didn’t let up until they had her out and on the floor in a terrified huddle.
He pulled the stick off me. I held on to it, hoping he’d pull me out, too, but I let go when his foot came at me. I should have taken the hit.
The mesh door rattled shut, and I howled in anger. “I am not an animal!” I screamed at them, rattling it some more. Winona was crying on the floor. Jennifer had sketched a modest circle around her in the open area, and Chris was looking at her notes, as calmly as if preparing a class lecture.
“Don’t,” I pleaded, my hands hurting, swelling where I’d hit the cage. “Please. Don’t. You’re going to kill her!”
“Not if your blood is as good as I think it is.” Chris looked up from her notes. “Get her out of her clothes. The last time we tried shifting one in his clothes, they stuck to his skin.”
Winona lunged for the gap in the boxes in a silent panic, only to be brought down by Gerald. I could do nothing as she fought him while he took off her clothes, and I screamed at them, crying at my helplessness. This was the ugliest thing I’d seen. I hated them. I hated that I was helpless. I hated that I was grateful the curse wouldn’t work on me and I wasn’t the one naked in that circle. “Why are you doing this?” I shouted, my voice harsh.
Winona sobbed, cowering in a pile of white skin and long brown hair in the middle of the circle, her skin red where Gerald had gripped her. Tears ran down my face. I swore I’d make them feel the same pain, the same hopelessness they were forcing on her. I didn’t care if I burned in hell for it. It was my fault.
“Why?” Chris let three precious drops of blood fall into a small copper pot that had taken the soup’s place over the Bunsen burner. The scent of burnt amber rose, and my gut clenched when Chris made an “mmm” of approval. “Your kind is unnatural. Your very existence is a blasphemy,” she said as she added what looked like a bit of shed snake skin. “If I’m successful, I can give humans back their rightful place. Maybe remove you altogether.”
