Lies & Omens

Truthfully, Sylvie was shocked he was still breathing at all.

He was … His skin was …

It lifted and curled away from him in a thousand little shags, blanched and bloodless. It reminded her of nothing so much as paper birch bark. It made him nearly unrecognizable. His head lolled on the pillow; flakes of him drifted away. “Who—”

Sylvie backed up, repulsed, then shook herself.

“Graves,” she said.

He tried to push himself up; close to death and still fighting. Still furious. A zealot indeed. His bare chest revealed four deep tears, edged in blood, and one shallow one; Sylvie thought of a hand pressing in, four long fingers and a shorter thumb.

“Traitor,” he breathed. His lips cracked bloodlessly. His tongue rasped against teeth made enormous by white gums pulling away. “In the ISI. Good Sisters. Key. Books.”

“What happened?”

“Warn—” He coughed, and his tongue blew away in the gust of his last breath. Sylvie reached out to check his pulse and his chest and neck and head disintegrated beneath her fingers. Not completely. A few curved fragments of bone remained, cradling a withered heart.

His hand fell to his side; his fingers hooked in his pocket, then crumbled likewise. His pants slowly collapsed as his body spilled out at both ends of the fabric.

Something chinked softly. Metal touching metal.

Key, Sylvie thought. His pocket. She reached in gingerly, hoping to God this wasn’t some kind of magical disease, that she wasn’t going to have to test her magical resistance against mundi plague. How would that work, would she lose a finger or two, before her resistance kicked in? She grimaced, tried not to think about it as she sorted through his remains.

A key fell into her palm. Small. She’d expected a locker key, or a safety-deposit-box key. Instead, she held a curio cabinet key. Simple. Uncomplicated. The kind of key that could be bypassed entirely with a paper clip.

Graves had thought it worth a dying word.

Sylvie toured the penthouse, found room after room full of white furniture. Nothing that the key fit. Nothing that looked like the books he’d mentioned. No reading material at all though she found several computers and an e-reader.

Graves liked technology.

Sylvie looked at the key again, looked at it more closely.

Smiled.

It was a key, but not the kind she’d thought. There was a glass bead at the tip, with a glimmer of light behind it. It was an electronic key, disguised.

She went back to his bedroom, grimaced at the remains on the bed, and started tossing the room as carefully as she could; she didn’t want to stir up his dust. Really didn’t want to breathe him in.

Behind a wall mirror, she found a safe with a blank black face. She waved the key across it and it popped open, a tiny vacuum dispersing.

A book.

Journal, rather. White leather. The man was compulsive.

Sylvie dragged it out, wondered what was in it that he had felt the need to hide. To bypass his tech toys and commit to paper.

Easy enough to find out.

She sat, gingerly, on the edge of the bed, flipped it open to the first page.

It finally talked today.

It asked for water.

Sylvie grimaced. Nice. A torturer’s diary.

I had it put in the tank, and it shrieked as its torn skin hit the salt water. Hovarth looked squeamish. Weak-willed. I told him to leave. Better not let him come back. The monster’s a seducer. I’d destroy it, but … I need it.

It knows things.

Things I need to know.

Things I will know.

Sylvie flipped ahead, skimmed through accounts that turned her stomach. Mentions of how well electricity traveled through salt water, mentions of food deprivation and sound bombardment and isolation.

Mermaid? Sylvie wondered.

Maybe Marah was right. Maybe Graves did have a way of making monsters obey: He broke them.

It talked again.

It told me that I was so busy worrying about the world, I was missing what was happening in my own house.

It told me there were those who had infiltrated the ISI.

It wouldn’t tell me what. Or who.

It laughed at me.

I left it in the tank for a week without food. Without any water but what surrounded it. In the dark.

I knew it would survive. I could hear it singing to itself at night. It made the weak-minded among us cry. I had to send them away.

That’s one thing the monsters have over us. Survival. Look at Shadows. She keeps surviving. Just a woman. On the outside.

I’d love to get her on my table.

Marah was supposed to bring her to me. Fickle, stupid, bitch. Thinks I don’t see her courting Riordan. Trying to get away from me.

Sylvie flinched. It was one thing to tell Demalion that the ISI wanted her dead and dissected. Another to come across Graves’s eagerness for it.

She slid off the bed, too repulsed to sit near his corpse any longer. Any sympathy she had for his outré death fled. She hoped it had hurt.

Something wrapped fingers like steel hawsers around her ankle and yanked her off her feet. She kicked out, thinking, Stupid, stupid, stupid!

The door had been locked, the apartment sealed. Dunne had dropped her inside and made a locked-room mystery of her presence. Graves had been still alive; his wounds fresh, his body whole. All signs that the monster was still here. Had only retreated to the nearest hiding space as a startled creature would. And she’d blissfully sat down to read on top of it.

The monster under the bed.

Sylvie’s kicking hit something that hissed, that felt like metal jarring her bones. She twisted, got free, her gun drawn, just as the creature scuttled out into the room, as ungainly as a grounded bat, but fast. Sylvie backpedaled with all her might, skidded to the wall, and braced herself for further attack.

It leaped to its feet, revealed itself to be human-shaped, skeletal, with a crumple of burned parchmentlike skin stretching from joint to joint. When it moved, it sounded like paper tearing. Long, bone-bladed fingers jabbed at her, and she jerked aside. Her ankle throbbed and trickled blood.

“Cost me the best part of my meal,” the thing hissed. “The last, labored breath.” A withered tongue flicked.

Night Hag, her Lilith voice reported. Feeds on suffering. Eats children and leaves dust behind in their beds. Parents think the children have been stolen, then the Night Hag feeds on their suffering for weeks.

Graves wasn’t a child, she thought. He hadn’t been suffering. How had the Night Hag gotten to him?

“You followed Graves home from work,” Sylvie guessed. Fitting fate for a torturer.

“His prisoner’s cries drew me in, but it was gone when I found my way into his labs. His frustration was sweet. I rode home in his bodyguard’s skin, ate him from the inside out, left him dust. Then slid in and sampled