Kelsey drops quietly to the ground several yards away from them, landing barefoot on the wailing blacktop. Her clothes will be a problem soon—shorts and a tank top and no shoes in the middle of October—since her grotesque-form doesn’t mind the cold. Nothing to be done about it now.
With a deep breath, Kelsey reaches within herself for the closed door, the locked vault, the sealed box—every mental metaphor she used to suppress her blasphemous other half—and she spins the locks, releases the seals, turns the knob and pulls.
The Change snaps through her more swiftly than the first time, the pressure of being bottled up making for a rapid release. She wavers on her too-small human feet with their useless short toes and almost meets the pavement the hard way before her new sense of balance kicks in. The cold starts to seep into her weak human flesh. Time to get this over with.
Twisting a scrap of glamour around herself, Kelsey fashions a fluffy coat and shoes that do nothing to warm her shivering human-form. At least she’ll look a little less odd. She lifts the rest of the glamour slowly, sliding into the realm of human awareness as if strolling into view.
The tall detective notices her first and closes the distance in six strides. “Ma’am, I need you to get behind the line. This is a crime scene.” He puts a guiding hand on her elbow, though she does not let him pull her away.
“No explosives,” she says softly, looking past him at the remains.
He freezes. Then his hand drops from her arm to hang limp at his side. “What did you say?”
“You won’t find any traces of explosives,” she elaborates. “Just like the last one. Or have there been more?”
Not so subtly he sweeps back his trench coat to rest his hands on his narrow hips, the right one within easy reach of his gun. “If you could come with me, I’ll need to ask—”
“No. No police stations, no interrogation rooms. When you’re ready to talk, you tell me what you know about the case, and then I’ll take care of your problem.” She waves a hand in the vague direction of the carnage.
“Look, I don’t know who you think you are sweetheart, but this is a homicide investigation.”
“You’re out of your depth. You need my help. Call me when your ego deflates enough to admit it.”
Kelsey tosses a folded scrap of paper between his feet, and his eyes track it. By the time he glances up again, she has wrapped herself in the glamour and faded from view.
After her first Change, she went to Duncan for guidance. Or for penance, or absolution perhaps—she didn’t know what she expected from him, but whatever he could give, it had to be a step up from the hollow dread inside her.
She explained to him what had happened, though she doubted he hadn’t already heard a secondhand account. Still, he let her speak until she fell quiet, then let the silence stretch for several seconds.
Finally, he answered, “And what would you have me say to this?”
“Well,” Kelsey hesitated, knotting her fingers together. “Should I leave the clan?”
Duncan frowned. “I do not know. The city will decide.”
She looked away, cautiously persistent. “You could decide.”
“If you’re looking to me for a way out, for an excuse to run from your duties, you’ll not find it here.”
“We all know I am an abomination, not fit to serve the city.”
Duncan’s mouth quirked. “If you truly believed that, you would not need to ask my permission to go.”
One on the North Side, one on the South Side. Kelsey decides to wait for the detective’s call at an intermediate location, or as close as she can get to one. The Tribune Tower just north of the Loop has a glamour relay atop it and comes with additional benefits, such as five hundred feet of gloriously intricate neo-Gothic limestone façade. She lands on the highest peak of the building, with a pleasant view from above of the eight flying buttresses that circle the uppermost floors.
With architecture like that, the Tribune has its own grotesques, but luckily they’re away from their roost for the night. Kelsey needs to tap into the glamour relay, and she doesn’t want to be disturbed.
The relay consists of a pentagonal brass box and fifteen feet of antenna, and is one of several stations that spread the glamour through the city like an invisible web. Kelsey pops open a side panel and tinkers with the mechanical innards. The number she gave the detective piggybacks on the glamour network. It probably wouldn’t please the Engineer who made the network to know she uses it thus, but he’s an important being with more important concerns than Kelsey’s personal communications.
When she’s done tinkering she crouches, motionless. Kelsey is good at waiting, because she has to be. Finally, the air hisses with an incoming call. She places her palm on the slick brass to finish the connection.
She says, “Yes,” not really a question.
A male voice thrums through the air. “This is Detective Novak from Chicago Homicide.”
Ah, so tall and narrow has a name. “What can I do for you, Detective Novak?”
“You can tell me who you are and how you knew we wouldn’t find any traces,” he snaps.
“I knew there wouldn’t be traces of explosive because explosives weren’t used. And I am the person who’s going to stop your killer.”
He pauses. “Department policy doesn’t endorse vigilantes.”
At least he no longer seems to have her on his suspect list. “And how far have your policies gotten you on this case?”
He heaves an audible sigh. When he speaks, his words slur with sleep deprivation. “I’ve been standing in an empty alley for forty minutes, and I’m nowhere. I thought if I went back to the first scene, maybe I missed something … ”
“You’re at the scene alone?” That feels wrong. A place where such destructive power was recently released would still be weak, scarred, and a very vulnerable position.
“I mean, why here?” Novak rambles on, as if he hadn’t heard her. “If the murders are about showmanship, why do it outside in the rain where all the work gets washed away before anyone sees it?”
“Listen carefully: you need to get—” A vibration like static suddenly buzzes through the air, the call cutting off. For a split second, the whole glamour network flickers, making her breath catch as surely as a skipped heartbeat would.
“Shit,” Kelsey says to no one. Given the size of the network, even a slight fluctuation means a big power drain, and if the interruption wasn’t on her end it was probably on Novak’s.
It will take her whole minutes to fly to the first kill site. He might already be dead.
She feels the Old One from three blocks away, the city crying and cowering in all directions around it. It is unquestionably active, roiling with a sulfurous heat that chokes her as she approaches from above. For once, the Old One isn’t hiding in the glamour. Instead it twists the glamour into hideous malformations that nauseate Kelsey even before she glimpses them with her eyes.
The view of the alley nearly knocks her from the air. At one end, an enormous cloud of black smoke boils and churns, full of glowing eyes and gnashing teeth and other monstrous parts that smoke should not have. The smoke cloud seems to pulse and grow, promising horrible agonizing death.
At the other end, Novak is literally stuck where he stands. The pavement has come alive, crawling inexorably over his shoes and up his legs, and—to Kelsey’s ears—screeching like a torture victim all the while. Terror rolls off his skin in waves.
The Old One is toying with him, devouring his fear like candy. And it’s using the city’s glamour to do so.