“I want answers.” She forced bravado into her voice, made it harsh and rough and vital. Everything this creature wasn’t.
“I have no answers for you,” the Mora said in her cracked-ice voice. “Only fears.”
Between one step and the next, the vapor rose over Sylvie and her flashlight like a cresting wave, and dropped her into a carousel of horrifying images. Sylvie’s parents dead. Demalion dead. Riordan gutting Zoe on a dissection table. Erinya devouring her whole. Nightmare imagery circling her like a swarm of stinging insects.
As if they were stinging insects, Sylvie swatted them away and kept moving forward. “I’ve looked into a Fury’s eyes. Your nightmares don’t compare to that. Tell me who sent you here.”
“Sent me? This is my city, my home. I traveled here in frightened men’s minds, coming across the sea. I thrive here, feeding my dreams into human minds, eating their last breaths as their hearts give out.
“Everyone is weak in their nightmares,” the Mora said. “Even you.”
More images, closer to home. Less death, more trauma. Failing her clients, failing Lupe, watching the city crumble about her, while she stood powerless, her gun emptied.
Sylvie took those nightmares and used them to hone her purpose. She wouldn’t fail. Her sister depended on her. “But you’re not feeding. You’re making a statement. It’s not your statement. Whose is it?”
“For all our kind,” the Mora said. “To show your world that they would do well to remember us.” The words whispered around Sylvie, brushed her skin like the first warning tingle of frostbite.
“No argument from me,” Sylvie said. “But why now? From what I understand—”
“You understand nothing—”
“—there’s not a lot of sharing and caring in the Magicus Mundi. A sand wraith, succubus, mermaids. You all get the same bee in your bonnet at the same time? No. Someone’s guiding you.” Her mouth and throat were sore, as if some part of her was shrieking under the constant bombardment of nightmare imagery. It was getting harder and harder to keep the Mora in focus. If she blinked, the real world, already hazy and dark as dreams, was replaced by the Mora’s questing imagery. Trying to find Sylvie’s weaknesses, the things that made her sick and mindless with terror.
“You’ll never know,” the Mora said, and the black wave of nightmare slammed over her, shoving her back physically, knocking her to the floor, pouring itself down her throat, through her eyes, and took her into dream hell. “You’ll die alone in your dreams.”
Unlike the mermaids and their killing waves, which wanted to crush the life out of her, this dark undertow took her out of herself and dropped her into the Mora’s turbid, icy darkness. Took away all the images that she had been bombarded with, all the mundane horrors of losing family and friends, of her failures. Sucked into the Mora’s empty heart.
Alone.
Disarmed.
Naked.
Helpless.
Pain lanced through her joints—shoulders and knees and elbows and ankles—spears of dragging agony, and she jerked her head against the weight, trying to see. Trying to assess the threat, even as she tried to scream. Dreamlike, her voice was sucked away. Fine golden cables, slicked with her blood, jutted out from her body in a familiar pattern.
God’s little marionette, the Mora whispered, and flicked one of the cables. Sylvie’s body jerked in helpless reaction.
You can fight but only so far as he allows you to do. You’re prideful. Useless. A puppet.
No, Sylvie said. Silence throttled her, brutalized her throat.
All alone. Eternally alone.
Sylvie shuddered; the cables hissed and sang with her trembling.
You’ll kill or outlive them all.
You’ll be alone, and when he starts speaking to you, you’ll be grateful, so grateful for a voice that you’ll be obedient. A perfect killing machine, mindless, falsely rebellious … a lonely puppet.
Voice, Sylvie thought. There was already a voice in her head. One that never left her. One that even now swarmed up through her blood, through the dark backbrain in her mind, growling, flashing feral teeth. The cables pinning her shoulders snapped, lashed out into the darkness like striking snakes.
The Mora’s whispered torment stopped.
Sylvie felt her little dark voice, that bitter, angry piece of Lilith, clawing its way through her throat, bursting through that dream silence.
“The thing is,” Sylvie gasped, and her words birthed themselves physically, fell into her hands, each of them a gleaming silver bullet, “I’m not sure I’m alone in my head.”
A full clip of bullets, slammed into a gun created out of the dream-darkness, aimed unerringly at the darkest spot, the black-hole heart of the Mora. Sylvie pulled the trigger and filled the monster full of gun flare and silver light. The darkness spiderwebbed and dissolved like ink under bleach. The Mora shrieked, and Sylvie rolled to her feet, slipping on the wet marble, rubbing blood away from her ears, the corners of her eyes.
The darkness in the bank lobby changed, tinted toward a more regular darkness, one being slowly thinned by the false dawn penetrating through the glass facade of the building.
The Mora was gone; only a black stain and cracked marble showed where she had stood. Sylvie crouched, touched the floor, her fingertips mapping holes where imaginary bullets had had real impacts.
Sylvie backtracked, found the flashlight and her gun, both dropped when the Mora had attacked her.
In the Mora’s absence, the building seemed racked with silence, that hush after a disaster. It wouldn’t last long, and in fact, as soon as Sylvie thought that, she heard screaming—not the desperate shouts she had heard earlier, men and women reeling under the Mora’s manipulation—but true horror. Sylvie wondered bleakly how many agents were coming back to themselves with spent clips and dead colleagues at their feet.
Sylvie hated the ISI but could still spare a brief spurt of sympathy for that type of awakening. Then a woman’s voice rose sharp and shrill over the rest, echoing through the open spaces, and Sylvie thought, Zoe.
Her sympathy fled.
Hallways stretched off the lobby, dark holes in the world, and Sylvie tried to orient herself. The cells were near the garage. Which way is the garage?
Sylvie turned on the flashlight, wincing as it took out her dark-adapted eyes, hoped she wasn’t making herself a clear target, and chose a hallway.
Even with the flashlight’s beam, the hallways had dark edges. She juggled the gun and the flashlight, trying to keep the light far enough away from her body that a shooter couldn’t use it as a crosshairs.
Some part of her brain made a note: Buy tac light for gun. Too many of the things she hunted prowled the darkness.
Sound up ahead, almost animal. Rasping breaths, a low whine. Sounds that were entirely human. The rasp of fabric, the scrabble of hands on a hard surface. At least one agent, more likely two, still fighting, trapped in the darkness.
Or one agent and Zoe, trying to tear each other’s throat out.
Sylvie hastened into the dark more quickly than was wise.
THE FLOOR BENEATH HER WAS HARD AND SLICK, GREASED WITH what she hoped was recent waxing, a spilled drink, anything but the lake of blood she imagined. If it were blood, she’d expect to smell it, strong as sun-warmed pennies, but with the Mora-induced fighting, the entire building stank of blood and desperation. This was just more of the same.
A sudden sharp gasp, a pained groan, and a man’s curse—Sylvie hastened her steps. She recognized that groan, that curse, breathless with effort and pain—Demalion.