Lies & Omens

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?”

“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.