But then the serum started to work its magic, and the child’s piercing howl lost its edge—just the ordinary cries of an unhappy—yet harmlessly human—baby.
Sedna pressed the child to her breast, patting her on the back. “Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she cooed. Soon, the baby’s tears turned to hiccups, then snores, as she fell into a peaceful sleep.
Sedna gazed out at the horizon, where a storm was brewing, and sighed. “What are we going to do with you?”
The Letter
To my darling Cairn:
* * *
Let me begin by saying something I hope you already know: that I love you with every fiber of my heart.
It has pained me to keep secrets from you over the years—some trivial, some of great consequence—but it has always been to protect you. No doubt the contents of the journal, and now its jarring epilogue, have come as a great surprise to you and have inevitably reshaped the way you will remember me. My only wish is that in time you will realize that the elaborate measures I went to were the only exit I saw out of a dangerous and catastrophic eventuality.
By now you might know, or at least suspect, the truth I’ve guarded closely for half of my life, and the primary reason I left you the journal:
That Mami Wata, the child I rescued from that island, is the girl you’ve come to know and love as Delphine Simone.
Though I knew the incredible danger a goddess of her abilities posed to the public—though I saw the horrific act Themis prophesied Delphine would allegedly commit one day—I could not bring myself to end the life of an innocent child who didn’t know any better.
So I staged her death and went to great lengths to conceal her identity. I arranged for her adoption with a kindhearted doctor in Jamaica that I’d come to trust during my travels. In time, I secured their immigration to America. Her diabetes diagnosis provided an opportunity to discreetly inject her with a serum each day that would suppress her abilities. When she reached adulthood, I promised myself I would tell her the truth of her identity and wean her off the serum—my hope was that by then, she would have learned from her father and friends like you the sound ethical judgment necessary to use her ability only for good. I believed that growing up with such awesome power to instantly command what you want from others could lead to a proclivity for taking shortcuts, instead of what was fair and right.
The one thing I never predicted was just how close the two of you would become. I left the letter so that if anything should happen to me, you could be the one to deliver this life-changing revelation to Delphine. I trust you to choose the timing and method best for her, and to help guide her as she navigates this uncertain new chapter in her personal history.
For nineteen years, I have kept this secret from the Pantheon, from Themis, even from your father. I am sorry that I must now transfer this burden to you. But I fear the lengths some in this world would go to enlist the ability of a goddess of Delphine’s immense power and I trust you above all others.
Most importantly, I love you, both in this life and all that follow.
Always by your side,
Sedna
The Tea Party, Part I
Delphine gazed into the dressing room mirror as her trembling fingers struggled to fasten the peacock feather to her up-do. She rarely got nervous before a performance. Singing had always come naturally to her, whether she was serenading Cairn or belting her heart out to a room full of strangers.
Tonight was different. A televised performance, record label producers in the audience—there was so much was on the line with this Christmas special. Suddenly, she wished that she hadn’t banished Cairn. She’d assumed her girlfriend’s presence would throw her off, but now she felt unmoored without her here. Maybe it wasn’t too late—maybe Cairn could still make it and grab a seat in front, where she would smile up at Delphine right before she sang that opening note to “Away in a Manger” to let her know that it was all going to work out.
Someone knocked at the door, interrupting her reverie. Josie, the manager who’d replaced Alonso since his disappearance, poked her head into the dressing room. She had just finished the unpleasant task of convincing everyone in the audience to part with their cell phones—the last thing the recording needed was an obnoxious ringtone in the middle of the performance. “Ten minutes until curtain,” Josie said. “You hydrated?”
Delphine nodded.
“Good, just don’t piss yourself on stage.” With a wink, her manager disappeared.
Delphine wandered over to the dressing room window, which overlooked the Seaport thirty floors below. The streets bustled with rivers of people flocking in for the Boston Tea Party celebration, a massive block party to commemorate the historical event that had lit the spark of the American Revolution. She decided that the moment her big performance was over, she would ask Cairn to meet her down by the harborside so they could join the revelers.
Delphine’s wristwatch beeped just then, reminding her that it was time to take her insulin. She hiked up her sequined emerald dress and injected the syringe into her abdomen, expelling the contents into the fatty layer just beneath her skin.
She knew almost immediately something was wrong. A wave of vertigo rolled over her, and she struggled to keep her eyes open. She groped around blindly for her water but knocked the glass off the vanity. The sound of it shattering against the tile floor was distant and muffled.
Delphine slumped to the dressing room floor.
When she opened her eyes again, the sun shone bright around her. She was lying in the middle of a grassy field, squinting up at the sky, where hundreds of unnaturally giant birds darted in and out of the clouds.
Underneath the caws and screeches, she heard a droning sound she couldn’t quite place.
A familiar silhouette eclipsed the sun. Cairn stood over her, wearing a sundress. As she leaned down to offer a hand, she asked, “Are you ready?”
Delphine let Cairn help her to her feet. “Ready for what?”
Cairn pointed up at a nightingale the size of a school bus hovering in a lazy circle overhead. “To sing down the great bird for me, of course.”
Cairn raced south along the coast in the Lemon Shark, with Vulcan in the navigator’s seat beside her. She tried both Delphine’s and Nook’s numbers yet again to no avail.
When she had read the final journal entry, when it had sunk in that Delphine was Mami Wata, that her siren call could cast a spell over any mortal, Cairn had remembered the horrible prophecy Themis had shared with her. In that moment, she saw it all over again: the young woman singing in front of the glass as the plane flew toward the building. She’d been so distracted by the impending catastrophe that she hadn’t paid attention to the details.
That the floor-to-ceiling windowpanes looked identical to those in the Coconut Grove.
That the fireworks in the background could have been those planned for today’s celebration.
That the lyrics she’d heard—“Curoo, curoo”—belonged to an Irish Christmas carol, one that Delphine had included in her setlist for today’s holiday performance.
Themis had figured the whole thing backward.
By sending the Pantheon to that island to neutralize Mami Wata, she wasn’t stopping the prophecy from happening.
She was setting into motion the deadly chain of events that would inevitably cascade to this horrific moment.
That’s why the vision had come to Themis only after she’d chartered their journey to Sable Noir.
Cairn hung up when she got Delphine’s voicemail for the umpteenth time. “Any luck?” she asked Vulcan.
Vulcan shook his head. “Not yet, but I’ll keep trying.” He was on the phone himself, calling hotels in the Seaport. He’d concocted a theory that might lead them to Phobetor. While there were many hotels along the harbor, only two had a direct line of sight to the Coconut Grove. “He fashions himself an artist, and this is his grand masterpiece,” Vulcan explained to her. “He’s going to want a front-row seat to watch
it go down—and the mayhem that follows.”
The emergency dispatcher had been flooded for the last several days with people phoning in conspiracy theories about terrorist attacks, so when Cairn tried her luck, she’d been passed off to the tip line, like just another delusional wacko with a wild imagination.
This was no fantasy. Phobetor and Columbia had planned something terrible for the Seaport, and Delphine might just be its catastrophic centerpiece.
It was up to Cairn and Vulcan now to stop whatever atrocities lay ahead and save Delphine.
Because of the Boston Tea Party Celebration, the Coast Guard had blockaded the harbor closest to the Seaport, so Cairn had to reroute the boat for Rowes Wharf, almost a mile from the Coconut Grove. Even this far away, they could hear the echo of the crowds and music thrumming through the streets.
As they approached the docks, Cairn opened the satchel containing Delphine’s insulin—syringes she now knew had been mixed with doses of the anti-god serum developed by Dr. Sibelius. She took one for herself and handed another to Vulcan.
“I’ll take care of the boat,” Vulcan told her, replacing her at the helm. “You just get to the Coconut Grove.” He looked at her as though it might be for the last time.
She nodded and squeezed his shoulder. “If you find him, show Phobetor what nightmares are really made of.”
With that, Cairn vaulted out of the Lemon Shark before it had even stopped moving and hit the wharf running.
At the opposite end of the Seaport, far from the boisterous crowds, Nook cautiously approached a dockside warehouse. The metal roof was practically painted white with seagull feces, and he could hear the offending birds squawking unrelentingly in the harbor beyond. Hopefully, their noise would mask the sound of his footsteps.
For weeks, Nook had been chasing dead ends. Suspension from the police force be damned, Phobeter was out there, along with the client who’d hired him, and Nook didn’t believe for a second that the killings were done. If anything, the lack of bodies recently was foreboding, and he suspected something far more sinister was coming—and soon.
The breakthrough had come when he’d reviewed the CCTV footage of Tane’s fatal fall. Originally, the truck in which he’d landed had proved untraceable. The plates were forged. But then Nook started digging into the life of Aristaeus, the bee god who Phobetor had murdered and impersonated for the last year.
A truck he’d purchased for Ambrosia’s deliveries matched the make and model of the one in the video—and it was registered to this warehouse’s address.
As Nook passed the loading bay, his phone vibrated and he silenced it without checking the caller ID. The door was locked but the latch looked flimsy, so he drew his gun and aimed a hard kick at the wood.
The door cracked open like a gunshot. Nook entered with his Beretta raised. The walls of the warehouse were lined with wooden casks and steel kegs. The far end opened to the harbor to receive shipments of Nectar bottles by boat from Brewster Island.
Nook immediately recognized the truck from the video footage, though the removable roof had been reinstalled. He carefully checked the cab and the cargo bay but found nothing suspicious.
On the other side of the truck, Nook discovered a second set of tire tracks—recent ones—that had disturbed the dust on the concrete floor. The vehicle that had made them was nowhere to be found.
However, when he followed the tracks to the warehouse’s harbor side, he found a small mountain of an unidentified brown substance. At first, as the breeze swirled the ashes around, he thought maybe it was a fine, loose soil or an organic fertilizer. Aristaeus had cultivated all sorts of plants in his greenhouse.
But when he scooped a handful into his palm and sniffed, he made an unexpected observation:
“Tea …?” he whispered.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood upright. The eerie sensation that something was very wrong only intensified when he heard the faint thumping coming from the water. Cautiously, he stepped toward the dock’s edge and peered down.
The gentle waves were repeatedly slamming a dark lump against the sea wall.
Then he saw the pale face bob out of the tide.
Nook holstered his weapon, and with a groan of exertion, he reached down and pulled the body out of the harbor.
The corpse, already stiff with rigor mortis, flopped onto the floor like a soggy piece of driftwood. The skin around his mouth had turned blue, eyes bulged and glassy in death.
Nook didn’t recognize the victim, but from the logo on his outfit, he appeared to be a delivery man for a company called SereniTea.
Nook felt the warehouse spin around him. “Oh my gods,” he whispered.
As he raced out of the warehouse, he called a cop he trusted who was working security for the Tea Party event a mile away. When his friend picked up, he shouted, “You need to get everyone away from the water, and get the senator off that—”
On the other end of the line, he heard the explosion.
As Cairn journeyed toward the Seaport, she was quickly engulfed by the crowds flocking toward the celebration, thousands of people of all ages. They filled the streets, which had been closed to traffic for the event. Apparently, the threat of attacks wasn’t enough to scare the masses away, nor had the snow or chilly temperatures dampened the feverish zeal that had gripped the city.
Cairn fought her way across the Congress Street Bridge. As she jostled her way through a rowdy cluster of college students, one of them accidentally dumped his Solo cup of beer all over her. She growled in frustration as she gazed through the falling snow up at the distant silhouette of the skyscraper ahead, and the glass dome of the Coconut Grove at its summit. It couldn’t have been more than a half a mile away, but at her current pace, she’d be lucky to make it there within the hour.
She prayed she wouldn’t be too late.
The audience’s excitement only escalated as Senator Ra arrived. Cairn watched on one of the numerous Jumbotrons they’d stationed throughout the Seaport as he locked arms with his stunning wife, beaming at the crowds. Behind him, his grim-faced security detail attempted to secure the scene.
With the camera crew following their every move, the royal couple proceeded down to the water’s edge. Three ships floated out on Fort Point Channel, replicas of the original vessels involved in the Boston Tea Party—two whalers called the Beaver and the Dartmouth, and a rigged ship named the Eleanor. Reenactors costumed as 18th-century colonists and Mohawk Indians lined the decks.
As the Ras crossed a gangplank to board the Eleanor, Cairn spotted Quinn Cypress in the back of the frame. She waved a handheld recorder and shouted a question the camera didn’t quite pick up. The senator’s chief of security intercepted the journalist and roughly ushered her away.
Cairn didn’t miss the scowl that flashed across Ra’s face before he forced a smile again and waved at the adoring masses.
On the deck of the Eleanor, Ra stepped up to the microphone. “Good afternoon, Boston—and a happy inaugural Liberty Day to you and your families!”
The cheers around Cairn were deafening. The upside was that with the senator addressing the crowd, most people had stopped moving so they could watch him on the massive screens, allowing Cairn to more easily shoulder her way toward her destination. She imagined that Ra was eating up the attention, pleased by the spectacle of twenty larger-than-life reflections of himself grinning back.
Ra reluctantly raised a hand to signal for silence. “Two hundred and fifty years ago, this country’s forefathers rebelled against the draconian Tea Act with a measure of bold defiance. As sunset descended on Boston, more than a hundred patriots, led by the Sons of Liberty, stormed the East India Company’s trading ships and dumped hundreds of chests of imported tea into the harbor. It was one of the first sparks to ignite the American Revolution and eventually led to this great country’s independence. Today, I’m here to say that whether you’re descended from those original minutemen or you migrated here to our shores just yesterday, y
ou are all Sons and Daughters of Liberty.”
The audience roared until Ra hushed them again. “Now I know what you’re thinking,” he continued. “What kind of self-respecting sun god doesn’t arrange for clear skies and summer weather for the holiday he organized?”
A ripple of laughter from the audience. A drunk girl near Cairn squealed, “We still love you, Ra!”
“But I wanted the weather to be accurate to what those patriots experienced that historic day, and with the holidays just around the corner, I couldn’t think of a more iconically New England forecast than a little snow.”
On screen, Cairn saw Ra’s wife nudge him. “Wrap it up, honey,” Madison said just loud enough for the microphone to pick up. “I think these people are ready for some free champagne, am I right?” This was met with the loudest response of all until the windowpanes of the skyscrapers across the Seaport rattled.
Ra grinned. “Madison’s right—less babbling, more bubbly.” He pulled a magnum bottle from the ice bucket in front of him with one hand and drew a dagger from his belt with the other. In one swift cut, he sheared off the top of the bottle. A fountain of champagne gushed forth and his wife caught the overflow in two glass flutes.
Cairn nearly barreled right into one of the colonial-garbed waiters who were distributing champagne and sparkling cider to the audience for the big toast. As one, the Bostonians all followed the Senator’s lead and raised their glasses.
“To liberty and justice for all,” he boomed.
On cue, dance music pulsed from speakers throughout the crowd. Confetti shot from cannons, raining down in red, white, and blue.
“Now, let’s dump some tea, shall we?” He downed his champagne in one gulp.
At the word “tea,” Cairn paused in her tracks, a new wave of dread overtaking the old. She lingered at the bridge railing, watching the reenactors dump chest after chest of tea into the harbor. The dark powder from the wooden crates mingled with the falling snow as it drifted down to the water.
This Eternity of Masks and Shadows Page 23
