“Good job, then,” Sylvie said. “Too little, too late.”
“This is hardly the time to assign blame,” Riordan said. “Would you prefer to argue or survive?”
Sylvie hated to admit it, but he was right. “Fine. Second question. Flashlights?”
He passed her back the penlight, and she said, “That’s not gonna cut it. I need to see what I’m walking into.”
“Demanding,” he said. “Wait here.”
“Get two if you can.”
He shifted around her, made her realize that their drop-and-hide spot was more sheltered than she’d thought—she reached back, felt a jut in the wall. An alcove looking over the lobby. If this were a real office building, it would probably have held a water fountain.
She had time to think. Time to kill. She laughed, soundlessly, a little closer to hysteria than she’d admit. Hunting monsters in the dark to save her sister, and God, Demalion—where was he in all this? Locked up tight with Zoe? Safe? Or roaming the halls, shooting at everything he could. If Demalion was out there, prone to the same panic that Powell had fallen prey to, he’d be lethal. Paranoia plus psychic abilities? Ugly.
She wished she knew what she was dealing with. It wasn’t a succubus. Wasn’t anything attached to elements: no sand wraiths, no mermaids, no fiery salamanders, and, despite the smoky tentacles in the air, she didn’t think it was any type of air elemental.
It wasn’t a succubus, but it was something that worked on a similar principle. Used the body to overwhelm the brain. Whatever this was spread panic and paranoia as easily as a succubus spread lust and hunger.
Movement near her, and she turned, a “Took your time” on her lips. It wasn’t Riordan. She caught the faint glimmer of eyes with an icy shine and held her breath. The tainted agent went past, limping, his breath wheezing and whispering out insanity. Not my teeth. Can’t take them. Not for you. Kill you first.
Sylvie wiped her face. This was all a little too zombie apocalypse for her. She wondered if Zoe was terrified, pissed, or trying to work magic. She wondered if Zoe was still alive.
Riordan returned, passed her a flashlight, kept his hand over the switch, and said, “Don’t turn it on yet.”
“Not stupid,” Sylvie murmured. “You get one for yourself?”
“I did.”
“Good. While I’m hunting monsters? You’re going to fix the damn generator.”
7
Bureaucracy & Other Monsters
ONCE RIORDAN LEFT HER SIDE—A BRUSH OF DARKNESS, HIS FOOTSTEPS fading, his warmth receding—and Sylvie was certain that she was the only living thing in close proximity, she hit the switch of the heavy Maglite. The beam shot out like a laser; dark, vaporous tendrils scattered beneath it, left roiling crimson ghosts behind. Sylvie swept the light across in precise arcs, illuminating the space around her, the stairs ahead of her—pale marble streaked with blood—a bulky shadow of a dead man on the first landing, two more on the landing below that, but overall, a clear enough path for her to tread. She raised the light higher—swept out across the lobby, dispelling darkness, swept the light across, down, over, and around, trying to memorize everything in a second’s worth of illumination.
Then she flicked the light off, traded positions for another sheltering alcove, this one in the doorway of an empty office. Once certain she had a moment, she closed her eyes and played it all back.
The lobby proved that the building had been designed to throw off any casual looky-loos who might suspect the bank was more than it seemed. The lobby was a classic bank lobby, a central atrium stretching up all four floors, the walls and floors a symphony of dark marble, pale inlaid wood, and polished brass and glass. Around the core, offices and hallways branched off, dark arteries that she diagnosed by their stubborn refusal to reflect light, and by the echoes of gunfire coming from them. Everyone in the atrium was dead.
Not everyone, her little dark voice reminded her.
Everyone, Sylvie insisted. The only thing standing down there wasn’t a person.
No matter what it looked like—a woman in a dark dress standing dead center in the atrium, surrounded by bodies, uncaring of the continuing gunfire, the shouting, or the blood wicking up her skirt—three floors below, stood a monster.
Something horribly, terribly unnatural that was mimicking a human form. Just recalling her made Sylvie’s heart stutter a beat.
Nightmares, her little dark voice said.
Her skin, her hair, her clothes were the void of a starless night; her face seemed featureless but for the gloss of eye shine, the sudden shocking scarlet of a tongue that had swept across her lips. That icy vapor swirled around her, waiting her commands. No, she was the vapor, a constant release and collection that blurred the lines of her being. Around her, agents died, and the perfect void of her face held a smile.
And somewhere down there, Zoe and Demalion.
Riordan was a bastard, but he’d reacted to this disaster as neatly as if he’d planned for it. She had her gun, a light, a motive to go down and solve his problem for him. To kill the monster between her and her sister. To save his wretched agency. Again.
All she had to do was kill the monster before the remaining agents, maddened by the monster’s presence, found her and added her blood to the scarlet slicks already greasing the floors.
Sylvie clutched the flashlight—the vapor pulled back from the light, that was something—and her gun. Anticipating trouble below, she was caught by surprise by the agent who loomed out of nowhere right next to her, his eyes frosted over, gleaming in the dark, his breathing harsh and giving way into manic babble. I’m falling. I’m falling. You pushed me. Falling.
She slashed the flashlight beam across his face, and he didn’t even flinch, blind to the real world, blind to the darkness around him. On his eyes, the frost crackled, and he leaped at her. She reversed the flashlight, caught him solidly in the head, and he dropped.
“Didn’t shoot him,” she muttered. “Hope you’re happy, Riordan.”
The stairs beckoned, and she started down them, the temperature plummeting with every step she took, raising goose bumps on her flesh.
Her shoes whispered on the edges of the stairs, the soft sandpaper guides warning her when to step, but they also woke rhythmic echoes of the babbling panic from the two affected agents. Not my teeth. Can’t take them. I’m falling. You pushed me. Bizarre. Disquieting.
Oddly familiar.
She ran her tongue over her own teeth, tasted the scent of blood in the air, and paused. Imagined tipping over a cliff and falling.
Nightmares, her little dark voice had said.
Not nightmares. The creator of them. Sylvie fished through her memory banks, overstuffed due to Alex’s nonstop researching. The Mora.
She tasted the words on her lips, realized she’d said it aloud, and felt the icy vapor pour up the stairs toward her. With one careless moment, she’d betrayed her presence to the monster.
As Demalion had said: Nothing got someone’s attention like the sound of their name.
“DO YOU COME TO CHALLENGE ME?”
The Mora’s voice, without even a shred of humanity in it, evoked the sound of a creaking door in a dark house, a footstep where none should be, the last breath of a man who had just stepped off a cliff. It made Sylvie’s steps falter; she tasted fear, felt sweat spring up along her hairline.
She kept her mind focused, one step at a time, following the remembered beam of light downward. The Mora waited below with the deadly patience of a high-ranking predator.
When Sylvie reached the lobby, black vapor swirled away from her like smoke in a draft and bared marble floors to her dark-adjusted eyes. A pathway, leading directly to the monster. “Why do you face me?” the Mora asked. “What makes you think you can?”