Sylvie knocked louder, called Alex’s name. Guerro, her German shepherd, barked from inside, but Alex didn’t appear. Sylvie felt anxiety spike. If the ISI were under attack, they’d be looking for someone to blame. They had to know Alex worked for Sylvie, had to know she kept the backup files, had to know Alex was the one who coded them. By grabbing Alex, they’d have an all-access pass to Sylvie’s work history.
Just when her knuckles began to smart, when she considered breaking in to Alex’s little house, footsteps stumbled in her direction, and Alex mumbled, “Yeah. Coming.” The barking stopped.
She opened the door, leaned on the jamb, and stared at Sylvie with bleary eyes and smudged makeup that made her look like she’d decided to take up boxing. “Syl? It’s really late—”
“It’s urgent,” Sylvie said. “You all right?” She slipped past Alex’s slumped form, stepped into Alex’s living room, and suddenly wanted a real answer to that question.
Alex was obsessively tidy. Always had been. But her home showed signs of disarray. Not a lot—a pile of dishes in the sink, rinsed but not washed, a few pieces of clothing flung over the couch, a tangle of dog fur not immediately vacuumed—just the usual detritus of a day or two left untended. Still, it wasn’t like her.
“Just headachy,” Alex complained. “Had a lot of them of late. I tried to sleep it off.”
“Without taking off your makeup?”
“Syl, this isn’t an interrogation. What do you want?”
“To find out if Dunne was fucking with me,” she said, recalled to her purpose. “Demalion’s in trouble.”
“Fuck,” Alex murmured. She rubbed her face, pushed away the sleepy languor, and said, “Shoot.”
Sylvie filled her in, and Alex’s expression grew miserable. “Demalion’s tough, Syl. He’s survived worse.”
“Sort of,” Sylvie said. “Just … just do your thing. Prove to me that Dunne was being a godly asshole, making me pay for not doing what he wanted.”
“What did he want?”
Sylvie waved a hand, a not-talking-about-it-now gesture. “The facts, Alex? I really want to know whether Dunne’s on the up and up.”
Alex cast a last longing look toward her bedroom and dragged out her computer, blinked lashes gummed with mascara at the bright screen. “Give me a moment.” She flipped the laptop open, held it over her forearm, typed with her free hand, as if she wanted to get it done as quickly as possible.
“I don’t know if we can trust the news. He’s a god—”
“Wasn’t going for the news. Always go to the source,” Alex said. She clicked through increasingly troubling screens, and said, “The ISI. Have a seat. It’s going to take a bit.”
“You think?” Sylvie said. “They started battening down the hatches months ago.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Paranoid, bad-tempered bastards. But I’ve got an in.” Her lips curved into a tight smile. “Demalion’s passwords.”
His name fell into the space between them like a cold front. Alex’s smile wiped itself away, traded for a squirming awkwardness, the taste of premature grief.
Sylvie roughed her voice into working order, said, “He’s not dead yet, and he’s going to kick your ass for snaking his passwords. He’s stupidly loyal to that organization. Keep going.”
It was unnecessary advice. Alex’s fingers had never paused. “I’m hitting their memos to each other. Interoffice warnings. Red alerts, that kind of thing. Chatter’s real. Talk about Dallas, about Chicago, about Memphis.”
“Memphis? What happened in Memphis?”
“Something bad I’m guessing. They’re sending around a list of precautions to be made SOP … Syl.”
“What?”
“Another one just showed up. Savannah,” Alex said.
“There isn’t an ISI branch in Savannah.” Sylvie kept pretty close track of them. They covered twenty-nine American cities.
“Well, not anymore.”
Alex’s jaw tightened, a white sliver in Sylvie’s field of vision. Flickers of light against her skin, and she nodded. “Look at this.” She turned the computer toward Sylvie. “Security video.”
It wasn’t what Sylvie had expected. The ISI tended toward government bland, but this lobby was stark beyond that. She squinted. Was that security glass around the intake desk? Something blurred the men behind it, made them look oddly distant.
When the woman wandered into view, captured the camera’s eye, Sylvie was irritated, trying to piece together the nagging sense that she should know what this place was. Then the woman moved forward and shed her coat like a falling stage curtain. It fell fast and hard, as if it were weighted, but none of the security guards could look away from the woman.
She stretched long and lean and more naked than it seemed possible for someone to be. Her skin drew all attention, gleaming and alive with opalescence, as if milky feathers fluttered beneath her skin. She had bright eyes, supple limbs, a curling mouth as flushed as a fall apple. She held out her arms in invitation.
Sylvie’s mouth dried. The men behind the desk, behind the security glass, jerked to their feet.
It wasn’t a woman. Wasn’t a man, either. But it encapsulated the most appealing of both.
A succubus.
The men opened the door—it was security glass hemming them in—stepped out. Other men and women came out of the depths of the building, clustered around the succubus’s lithe form.
“Is that—”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said. “Succubus. But what it’s doing…
Sylvie didn’t understand it. Even if the succubus meant them harm, which it had to—no other reason for it to walk into the lion’s den—it couldn’t feed on all of them at the same time, and once it started to feed, it couldn’t keep perfect control.
The man closest to the succubus reached out, brushed shaking fingers over the perfect, pristine cheekbone. The succubus’s smile darkened. It bent smoothly, picked up its coat, revealed the weapon in it.
Sylvie sucked in a shocked breath.
This wasn’t feeding. This wasn’t hunger. This was slaughter.
The automatic weapon chattered in silence on Alex’s small screen. The ISI agents, lust-struck, had no time for lust to change to fear. The security glass grew starred and spattered with blood.
On-screen, the succubus dropped the gun, drew a finger through a spray of blood that stippled its face like freckles, and sucked it clean. Then it turned and let itself out. A bar of light—the front door left open—draped over the bodies.
“Savannah,” Alex said. “She killed all of them. Called them up and mowed them down.” She shook her head, shook away the nerves. “There’s no security footage in Dallas. Or Memphis.”
“What about Chicago?”
Alex bit her lip. “You sure you want to see?”
“Play it.”
Same thing. The lobby, familiar to Sylvie. There was the elevator where Demalion had cornered her, argued with her, before chasing her down the street and insinuating himself back into her life. She swallowed.
The beginning of the disaster was more subtle than Savannah’s succubus. So slow, it took Sylvie time to notice. Dust crawled across the lobby floor, a slow ripple of shadow. Accreting.
Not dust.
Sand.
It swirled, trickled upward like a pulled thread, fitting itself into the seams of the building. The agent at the front desk stood, approached, hand on his gun. He reached out toward that tiny spinning thread of sand; it drilled through flesh, through bone—he jerked his hand back, a hole pierced right through, started shouting for help.
Too late.
As if his blood was the catalyst, the thread of spinning sand exploded into a tornado. It devoured the retreating guard, silica slicing him to ribbon. The building shook and blurred. The last glimpse Sylvie had was a pair of shining eyes at the heart of the whirlwind before the camera failed. Not a spell. A creature of some kind.