“Of course he’s not,” Riordan said. Faint distaste drew his mouth down.
Before Sylvie could delve deeper, the elevator motor traded its whisper for a sudden whine and grind of machinery. The lights snapped off, plunging them into darkness.
Sylvie dodged Powell’s inevitable lunge, put her elbow into his ribs, put her gun to his throat, and pushed him back. He went.
“Shoot her, boss, don’t worry about me,” Powell said, voice strained.
Riordan sighed. “No one’s shooting anyone. Shadows, you doing this?”
“Trapped in an elevator doesn’t get me closer to Zoe.”
“Boss,” Powell said.
“Shut up, Powell. Listen. We have bigger problems than an unexpected stop.”
Through the muffling thickness of the elevator doors and shaft, Sylvie heard rapid cracks of gunfire and shouts made distant by architecture. A battle being fought.
“Shadows, let go of my man and let’s get this door opened.”
“How about instead of just plain out, we go up and out,” Sylvie said. “Just in case someone’s aiming those guns at the elevator door. Your doors might be bulletproof, I’m not.”
“My men are in trouble. I don’t want to waste time clambering up a shaft. We’re going through the doors,” Riordan said.
Even under stress, he sounded calm, in control. Sylvie envied him. She hadn’t felt in control for days. She released Powell. The big man shoved past her to help Riordan pry open the doors. Sylvie leaned against the back wall and tried to stay out of their way.
The air in the elevator, against the laws of probability, was cooling instead of growing stuffier with three people’s trapped breath and bodily exertion. She fumbled through her pockets, hunting for the tiny penlight she kept on her keychain. She pressed the button down, illuminating the small space before her. Something darkly vaporous jerked back from the light, streamed up into the elevator vent. It looked like smoke, but moved like ink in water, spreading and seeking.
“What was that?” Powell asked, jerking around in the shift of light and shadow. His eyes were wild. Riordan, Sylvie noticed, was unruffled.
“Your saboteur,” Sylvie said. “I don’t think it’s human. I think it’s come to finish the job the mermaids started.”
“Powell, the doors.” Riordan eyed Sylvie in the eerie greenish glow of the penlight, and said, “You ready?”
“Yeah,” Sylvie said.
“Don’t shoot my men. Shoot everything else,” Riordan said.
Powell and he made progress; the elevator doors grumbled but slid apart. “Go,” he told Sylvie.
Sylvie studied the gap. Definitely wide enough, split by two levels, leaving her with a choice—to enter the upper floor crawling, her gun hand hampered, or to drop an unknown distance into a darkness deep enough that her little penlight couldn’t begin to penetrate it. Neither idea appealed, but she chose to drop. Zoe, after all, was beneath them somewhere.
She passed Riordan the useless light.
She braced herself in the width of the space, heard voluptuous movement in the darkness, like velvet rolling over stone, and tightened her grip on her gun. One last breath, and she dropped.
The floor was farther down than she’d hoped—one of those office buildings that prided itself on high ceilings—and forced a grunt out of her. Her free hand felt damp marble; she smelled fear sweat and blood and bile, and it was cold enough she thought her breath must be clouding the air before her. It made no sense. It was Miami, for God’s sake, and the power was out. The rooms should be gaining heat, not losing it.
It was the cold of morgues, of underground mausoleums, dank like an abandoned animal’s lair. Empty of everything but death.
Sylvie’s fingers were sticky, clammy with old blood; she brushed them against her sleeves, felt the contaminant liquefy and seep into the fabric, chilling her. She was the only breathing thing she could hear, her heart a desperate drum looking for an echo. Death rolled over her like a shroud.
She was alone, and everyone else was dead and gone—rotting—and she was alone. Her breath seized.
Riordan dropped to the ground beside her, said, “When you enter a hostile room, clear the area and get out of the way, dammit, do you know nothing?” It was like a wave breaking. An external influence breaking. Her ears popped; the sound of the world returned in a roar of gunfire and Riordan muttering about untrained lone wolves with delusions of competence.
Even her skin felt dry and warm again, the cold blood only an illusion of some kind. She should have known better.
“Powell, get down here,” Riordan said.
Harsh panting was the only answer, and Sylvie turned. Riordan flashed the penlight once, briefly, and Powell jerked. His eyes had iced over, gone cataract white, faintly luminescent in the blackness. He pointed his gun at them, and said, “You’re trying to kill me! It’s a trap, and you want to grind me up in it!”
Sylvie darted away from the elevator doors, running blind in the darkness, away from Powell’s shooting after them. She heard Riordan keeping pace, a rhythm of footsteps and breath beside her. He veered suddenly, tackled her to the floor.
She punched him. He reeled, and said, “There’s a staircase, Shadows. You were heading straight for it. Say thank you.”
“You deserved it anyway,” Sylvie growled. “My sister’s somewhere in this nightmare, isn’t she?”
“She should be safe,” Riordan said. “Locked up nice and tight. Do you know what we’re dealing with?”
“Something that’s radiating influence. I think your men are killing each other, losing it like Powell did.”
“Like you did?” Riordan said.
Sylvie swallowed, said, “How better to know what’s going on than to let it affect me for a moment?” Sounded good. She wished it were true. “What about you. You going to start shooting at me?”
Her eyes were finally adjusting to the darkness. She couldn’t see anything much, but she got the sense of shapes, the slightly paler black where the walls were, the endless black gap where the stairs were, the moving darkness where Riordan shifted to a crouch. If she read the space right, they were on a balcony overlooking the lobby below. Stairs ahead. Offices to her left. A glass barrier between her and a long fall. Echoes of gunfire bounced off the ceiling and made it hard to tell if fights were going on above and below or just echoing upward. A sudden draft, a rush of displaced air suggested a body falling from above. The gruesome thud and crunch of that same body hitting the floors below suggested that both directions were treacherous.
Riordan swore quietly, said, “If I shoot you, Shadows, you can be sure I’ll be doing it of my own will. Not someone else’s.”
“You’re immune?”
“I’ve never been one for feeling fear. What are we facing, Shadows?”
“Headaches and a good possibility of bullet holes? I don’t know. I didn’t know in the elevator, and I don’t know now. I can make some guesses. It’s a monster. It’s not happy.”
“Can you kill it?”
Sylvie shivered. Her little dark voice whispered. We can kill anything. “First I have to find it.” That wouldn’t be hard, really. The monster would be ground zero, the only calm place in the midst of chaos, spreading its influence—those inky tendrils—wider and wider. “It’d be easier if there were lights. I thought you agency types were big on emergency power supplies.”
“We are,” Riordan said. “But our generators are inside the building. Vulnerable to bullets, or men under the influence.”
“Okay. Two questions. How many men do you have left?”
“None of your business.”
“If I have to fight my way through them, it is. I’m not bulletproof.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It bears repeating.” It was comforting in a panic-inducing sort of way. She might be immortal, but she was still human.
“More men than you’d like,” Riordan said. “We were transitioning from the hotel to this building after the earlier attacks on the other ISI branches, trying to minimize civilian risk.”