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.
Sylvie shuddered; the cables hissed and sang with her trembling.
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,
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.
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.
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—
God, she wanted lights!
For once, something in the world went her way. An angry mechanical grinding started, a motor revving up, then the emergency generator kicked in and set amber lights flickering throughout the building. Riordan had finally come through.
After the Mora’s darkness, it seemed as bright as sunlight and made her blink tears away. She found herself about to walk into a wall, thanked the lights for coming back at just the right moment, and made the hard jog to the right.
Demalion and an agent were a tangled knot half on the floor, half against the wall, both of them grimacing in pain. Demalion’s face showed a grim determination, while the agent’s showed confusion—coming out of the Mora’s spell, the realization there was no enemy. His grip slackened and Demalion lunged forward, head-butted him, and sent him to unconsciousness. Demalion rose, swayed dizzily, and said, “Bastard’s got a hard head.”
As if to prove it, the man started groaning and twitching again, fighting his way back to awareness. His gun holster was empty, and Sylvie sought the gun first, just in case. She found it, unfired, full clip, beneath a narrow, decorative table. When she turned, she realized she was leaving bloody footprints on the pale marble. Guess it hadn’t been a spilled drink after all.
“Where’s Zoe?” Sylvie said. “I thought you were being held with her.”
“Yeah. Your sister’s not real big on keeping her mouth shut, is she? Riordan’s guys drag her in, and before I can even start thinking of a way to get her out, she starts bitching at me, calling me by name.”
“You were going to get her out?”
Demalion shot her an ugly look. “Jesus Christ, Sylvie. Of course I was. She might be a pain in the ass, and a witch wannabe, but she’s your sister, and more importantly? She hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“Where is she?” Sylvie repeated. She didn’t have time to apologize, didn’t have time to explore the warmth that bloomed—he was choosing her.
Sylvie stifled a wild giggle. Choosing her was many things. Sensible wasn’t one of them. No one sane threw his lot in with her.
“This way,” Demalion said. He paused. “Grab his legs, would you? We’ll throw him in a cell. See how he likes it.”
Sylvie shook her head. “I want my gun hand free.”
“You killed the monster, right?”
“Monster’s gone. The agents aren’t.”
“You can’t shoot—”
“Demalion! Zoe. Now. Move.”
Demalion yanked off his belt, flipped the agent over, bound his hands together, and said, “Fine. But when he gets out of that—”