Izzie pulled a silver necklace out of her other pocket, and fastened it around her neck.
“Does this mean we’re going steady?” Daphne said with a smile, and Izzie could see flames of desire wreathing around her head.
“Let’s get going,” Izzie answered, trying to maintain focus. “Patrick needs us.”
Izzie took point as they walked through the big glass doors into the lobby of the Pinnacle Tower, the hood of her jacket pulled down low over her face, hands shoved deep into her hoodie’s pockets. Daphne followed close behind, keeping Izzie between herself and the security guard behind the desk.
“The building is closed to visitors,” the guard said, putting down the magazine that he’d been reading, his tone gruff but unthreatening. “You folks are going to have to leave.”
Izzie could see the tinges of annoyance and boredom that flared around the man.
“I just wanted to ask you a question,” Izzie said, keeping her face concealed in the shadows of the hood. She kept walking toward the security desk, her hands in her pockets.
“No public restrooms.” The flames around the guard flashed with irritation. “And I don’t have any change to spare, either.”
Beyond the desk stood a bank of elevators, and the art deco bas relief for which the building was famous, and as Izzie approached the desk she could hear the chime of one of the elevator doors opening.
“We don’t need any of that,” Izzie said, coming within arms’ reach of the security guard.
A woman dressed in business casual stepped out of the elevator into the lobby, a keycard on a lanyard around her neck.
“Look,” the guard was saying, standing up from his chair with a weary sigh. “Whatever your problem is, I don’t care, okay?”
But Izzie wasn’t even listening to him anymore. She was having trouble not gasping in shock when she looked at the woman walking away from the closing elevator doors.
“Izzie . . .” Daphne said in a quiet voice behind her, pitched low enough that she was the only one to hear.
“I see it,” Izzie said without turning around. “I see it.”
Instead of the flames that she had seen when looking at other people since taking the ilbal, when Izzie looked at the woman walking across the lobby she saw tendrils of shadow that rose from her head and shoulders, that twisted and morphed as she watched, sometimes seeming like tentacles, other times like motes of floating darkness, but always writhing and churning around the woman.
She was one of the Ridden.
“Do it,” Izzie shouted.
From behind Izzie came the sound of thumping bass and grating guitar thundering from the boombox on Daphne’s back.
“Hey!” the security guard said, turning in her direction. “Turn that—”
But before he could get another word out, Izzie pulled the Taser out of her jacket pocket and jabbed the sparking end to his neck.
“Sorry,” Izzie said sincerely as pain tinged the flames that wreathed the guard. “I know you’re probably just doing your job.”
As the guard convulsed, and then collapsed with a thud to the cold tile floor, Izzie turned her attention back to the Ridden woman.
The shadows that snaked and danced about her head and shoulders had taken on a spiky quality, throbbing violently, and the woman looked momentarily disoriented and confused. Then the shadows seemed to surge, pulsating larger and then smaller, again and again, and, as Izzie watched she could see pinpricks of inky blackness begin to blossom on the woman’s exposed skin and rapidly begin to swell.
The woman turned toward Izzie, mouth hanging open as the inky blots flared on her face.
“Ke-ke-ke-ke.”
Izzie could almost see the loa forcing more of itself down into the woman’s mind, struggling to maintain control and reorient itself. And as it did, what little remained of the woman’s memories and personality was being consumed in front of Izzie’s eyes. The blots had already spread so much that the woman’s bare skin was almost completely covered.
“Ke-ke-ke-ke.”
The Ridden lurched toward Izzie, hands out and grasping. She had been passing close by when the guard had fallen, and was now just a matter of footsteps away. Izzie took a step backwards, and the Ridden came closer still. It might have been disoriented by the discordant music, and unable to perceive exactly where Izzie was standing, but it knew where she was just a moment before, and was clearly heading in her direction. It reached out its hand toward her, and was almost within reach.
“Ke-ke—”
A shotgun blast boomed out from behind Izzie on her left, as rock salt and silver shot ripped into the Ridden’s shoulder and arm.
The woman recoiled in pain, and as the blots on her skin quickly faded Izzie could see the shadows come pouring out of her, like smoke being sucked into a turbine. The shadows shimmered and dissipated into an unseen direction as soon as they disconnected from the woman’s head and shoulders, until a cold blue flame sputtered weakly around her drained body. She collapsed in a heap on the floor like a puppet whose strings had just been cut off.
Which in a way she was, Izzie realized.
“You okay?” she heard Daphne say from behind her, shouting to be heard over the music blaring from the boombox.
Izzie turned, and saw that Daphne still had the stock of the tactical shotgun to her shoulder, one hand on the grip and the other on the fore-end. The duffle bag lay on the floor where Daphne had dropped it only moments before.
“Yes, I’m fine.” Izzie pocketed the Taser, then knelt down to pull the other shotgun out of the bag. Holding it in one hand, she reached in and with her other hand took the stun baton out of the bag, which she then handed to Daphne. Then she zipped the duffel closed, grabbed its carrying
