It was as though going through the door had eradicated them. There wasn’t so much as an auric signature left of them. The middle-aged man beating the girl had stopped to watch what happened outside the front door. He was a tall, pale man, with colorless hair and a burly musculature. Recognition dawned on me. The man inside, alone with a helpless teenage girl, was one of the Authority’s most notorious torturers.
I’d only ever seen him once, right before my adoptive father died, and he’d aged since then, but I recognized him all the same. The memory of Roman Necroline jerking me away from my favorite ice cream vendor when I was twelve played like a movie at the back of my mind. “That man tortures people like us to see what we’re made of,” Roman had warned me. “Memorize his face. And if you ever see him again, yourun.”
Roman Necroline had been a good father. Grief caught in my throat, replacing a child’s fear with a grown man’s desire to eliminate the threat the man before me posed. Now that it was quiet, a slow smile spread over the torturer’s face.
Still in my grip, Mike Fairchild began to laugh. “You have no authority here, Necroline.”
I shook him. “I haveallthe authority here, Fairchild.”
The smarmy little bastard smirked up at me, so smug I wanted to rip his face off. “There is only one Authority, Necroline, and it will never include abominations like you.All hail the Authority, under whose benevolence we flourish.”
The words were old. Ugly. From the days when our gods were relegated to Sainthood, and the Authority was declared the one and only spiritual force. A false front for worshipinggreed. Under the Authority, there was no god but capital. No salvation without money. Fairchild smiled at me, his plain, nondescript, pale face a mask of mediocrity. What lurked behind the mask was something far more dangerous. A zealot.
His words told me he believed something that not many humans still did: That the Authority was led by a god. A god that called on his people to trample one another to get ahead, and worse, that people like me were abominations of humanity, evil at our core, and that the world would be better off without us. Not many still believed this, though the remnants of the old ways clung to humanity like a stain. What had we stumbled into?
Eryx and Av stalked towards us, guns drawn. A tinny noise in my ear, like the whine of a mosquito, grew louder by the moment. Still gripping Fairchild, I looked inside the house again. A shimmer of something I hadn’t seen in years revealed itself in the doorway, just as Eryx approached. I threw Fairchild aside, leaping for my brother.
I caught hold of him just before he stepped over the threshold, yanking him backwards so hard that we tumbled down the stairs. “Hex boxes,” I hissed. “Look at the door.”
Eryx looked at the silvery glimmer in the threshold, then snarled as he rose, seeing what I did: two iron devices, clipped to the bottom of the doorway, that generated a bastardized version of a necromancer’s power. There was only one way to reverse-engineer the power of bringing what once was dead back to life, to concentrate it into pure death, instead of a cyclical life force. It was a bastardization of all that necromancers believed about the holy cycle of life and death.
Hex boxes were invented about a hundred years ago, their inception a horrifying tale of parapsych death that twisted necromancers’ power into something evil. Something with no respect for the soul, because, in general, as an organization the Authority did not believe in such “tall tales.”
The only thing that had stopped the production of hexboxes going mainstream was the general population’s mass hysteria that parapsychs would manufacture their own to use against humanity. That had been a brilliant rumor for the Consulate to conjure up, but it had done nearly as much harm as it had good.
For Fairchild to have the use of not one, but two hex boxes, confirmed he was not what he appeared to be. Who was he? Before I could ponder it further, an Authority guard appeared from the slender alley that separated the safe house from its neighbor, bully club in hand. Two more rushed out behind the first, their own guns drawn, equipped with silencers.
“You’re not leaving here alive, Necroline.” Fairchild laughed again. “And neither is that girl. I just wish I could make you sit and watch.”
Eryx launched himself at the guards. I turned back to Fairchild, but he squirmed out of my grip. Without thinking, I reached for his aura, whispering a prayer to St. Tanith for forgiveness. A necromancer should never touch the aura of the living, but I couldn’t let him get away.
But Mike Fairchild slipped away, without a hint of auric energy for me to grasp onto. And then he blinked out of reality in much the way a spirit might. My gaze darted around me, but I couldn’t find him until laughter coming from inside the house caught my attention. Fairchild was inside, with the girl and the torturer, and I was stuck outside. I rushed up the steps, gripping the doorframe, trying desperately to remember if there were any tricks to disabling a hex box.
“Get the car ready,” Fairchild told the torturer. “I’ll bring her out in a minute.” He drew a switchblade from the pocket of his tweed jacket. “Would you like to keep a little piece of her, Necroline? A pinky perhaps, or an ear?”
I snarled with rage, pounding the door frame with my fist. There was no time in recent memory that I had felt so helpless.
Fingers closed around my shoulder. I flinched, ready tofight, but when I turned, I came face to face with an ice-cold stare. Lara Achilles.
“Move,” she said, her voice deadly soft. Then she stared at Fairchild. “I’d run, if I were you.”
Fairchild just smiled. The expression faltered when Lara Achilles walked through the force-field of death the hex boxes generated, completely unscathed. In fact, her skin seemed to glow, having absorbed some essential power from the force field. She glanced back over her shoulder, her icy eyes glowing with an almost neon light. “Get to the back.”
I didn’t hesitate. I sprinted down the steps, moving impossibly fast towards the narrow alley, my legs pumping as hard as I could, with only a glance to spare for my brother and Av. They both stood in the garden, surrounded by bodies, mouths gaping open at a statuesque blonde woman, who frowned at the speck of blood on her gorgeous wool coat. Rhiannon Brontë was back, and she’d dispatched the Authority guards in the blink of an eye.
Even Eli Cabot’s miracle was no match for one of the Maere, swordless as she might be. A flurry of movement rushed by me, Ember Verona’s familiar scent filling my nostrils. I put more energy into my miracle-fueled speed and reached the back of the house at the same time Ember did.
Without a word of hello for me, she burst through the kitchen door, a dagger flashing in her hand as she slit the torturer’s throat and tossed him out the back. The movement was so quick and clean, I barely saw it. In only a moment, she’d dispatched a man so evil he’d haunted my dreams since I was a child.
We raced through the kitchen and through the narrow hall towards the front room. The old wallpaper in the hall was peeling, revealing layers upon layers of other patterns, other choices made and rejected over the years. Dimly lit sconces flickered angrily as we moved through the house. The safe house’s spiritguardians were furious. They’d been shut out of the front room, unable to help the Phoenixes, or the girl.
Ember reached the parlor door and pressed a hand to it. “More hex boxes,” she muttered, then glanced at me. “Stay put.”
I nodded as she pushed through the door, ripping the hex boxes from the door frame as she went, crushing them in her delicate fingers. It had been ages since I saw the Maere for what they truly were: lethal weapons.
I stepped into the parlor, not knowing what I would find, but Lara Achilles had the teenage medium in her arms. Fairchild was gone. The girl had lost consciousness. I could do nothing more than stand and watch as Achilles nodded to Verona, who reached down and pulled the hex boxes from the front door frame.
Her voice was so soft, I almost didn’t hear her, but Lara whispered to the girl, her dark head bent over the child’s, “The Angel hears your plea.”
