Smoke & Mirrors Read online

  She stepped into the open. The tattered edges of her sleeveless, iridescent gown fluttered in the night breeze. Ankle-length hair, gray as the clouds, hung over her shoulders, shrouding one side of her skeletal face. Claw marks had torn lines into the front of her dress, coloring the fabric with dark dribbles of dried blood. Raising a bony hand, she pointed at me in silent warning.

  I was more concerned with the nasty bite-marks on her hand.

  Something had attacked her.

  The angle of the rips in her dress suggested a fierce strike the banshee was lucky to walk away from. The smaller, lesser lines on her arms were defensive, glancing blows. If she was hurting, there was no indication of it. Her sockets lacked eyes to reflect pain. They were black, bottomless cavities, as unnervingly wide and round as her toothless mouth; perpetually open in expectancy of her next feed.

  Wind gusted down the alley, blowing her scent toward me again. Closer now, I caught a hint of others mixed in. I sorted through the odors. Lyrriken. Canine. Wendigo. Human. Aswang. Ciguapa. And something… Feline? Huh. “Where the hell have you been?”

  She drifted closer. I imagined her furious, though I couldn’t tell. Banshee carried no emotional baggage for me to read. I’d tried once, shortly after my empathy emerged. But not a single imprint of trauma clung to their souls. Living in the moment, their species felt what they felt, and moved on. It was a, somewhat, enviable existence. If it wasn’t spent robbing others of their last, precious moments.

  We’d tracked her here. The meal she was after had to be inside one of the buildings. It didn’t matter if the doors were locked. Barriers meant nothing to a banshee whose prey was on the cusp of being ripe. Her body would alter from tangible to intangible in a hurried need to devour. I had to strike now.

  A sphere of fire formed between my hands. As I prepared to throw, laughter echoed behind me. I whipped around, checking for pedestrians. There was only an empty sidewalk. No car lights lit the puddled street.

  The banshee screamed. I pivoted back to a long, eerie scrape of metal on stone. Something large and dark filled my vision—a split second before impact took it away.

  The rounded walls stretched on forever. Exhaustion blurred the stones in and out of focus. Hulking shadows, bred from nothing, darkened the way ahead and behind. Sporadic, exposed bulbs hung throughout the old passage, stinking of age and dust. Their filaments buzzed with a repetitive zzzzt, zzzzt, zzzzt, dimming and flaring, as if someone were playing with the switch.

  Over and over, they buzzed. The same bulbs. The same walls. The same chips and dips in the timeworn floor. Everything looked the same. Smelled the same. I’d taken so many corners, lost so many hours; pulled forward by something I couldn’t see, touch, or even quantify.

  But it was here. It had always been here, somewhere in the old network of tunnels running beneath Sentinel City. Watching me, lurking out of view.

  Calling me…

  “Hey. You okay?”

  The tunnel walls faded and spun…

  “Nite—damn it, get up!”

  I opened my eyes. I was horizontal on the street. Water was seeping through my jeans. Pain danced in my head, back, and shoulders. “Where…?”

  Evans hovered over me, fretting. “Don’t move too fast. Your scales are cracked. File that under something I thought I’d never say,” he muttered, examining my bleeding head with a tentative hand. Tolerating it, I stared past him, watching a flutter of pale dress disappear into the shadows. A haunting scream followed.

  And I remembered.

  Alley. Gas station. West End. “Fucking banshee.”

  “Yes, she is.” Evans leaned back. “Damn, that’s a nasty cut. And you’re growing an egg on your head large enough to make an ostrich proud. How do you feel?”

  “Peachy.” With a grimace, I stowed my scales. Rolling out of the pothole I was lying in, I sat up with a groan. “What the hell did she throw at me?”

  He gestured at the dumpster resting on its side. Busted garbage bags and soggy boxes spilled out from the open lid. “The edge clipped you as you jumped clear. And damn did you go sailing.”

  “Feels about right. How long was I out?”

  “Long enough for me to make her angry.”

  “She was born angry.”

  Evans helped me stand. Water drained off my jacket. My jeans were soaked. Curls were stuck in the swollen gash on my forehead. As I pulled them loose, images from my moment of unconsciousness rushed in. I was used to my empathic visions leaking into my dreams. Recurring nightmares were one of the downsides of my ability. Only recently had those nightmares branched out from things I’d experienced, to things that didn’t make a damn bit of sense. This one was a little of both.

  The rounded walls it showed me were part of the extensive network running beneath the Sentinel. Built by the dragon elders before the city’s founding, the miles of underground passages led to an unknown number of exits to other worlds. Every tunnel looked the same. There were no directional markings, only the occasional rooms and doorways leading to the street. It would be easy to get lost down there, but I never had. I’d never felt the ominous sensation of someone stalking me. Never dreamt it.

  So why was I still feeling it now that I was awake?

  “Hey,” Evans said sharply, wanting my attention. “Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t look okay.”

  “I’ll live. Her on the other hand… Where did she go?”

  I followed him to the back door of the garage. “After you passed out, she went all ghostly and then,” he gestured at the bricks, “right through the wall.”

  “Yeah, they do that.”

  “I guess banshees really are ghosts. Traditional ghost-ghosts, not your kind of ghost,” he said, referring to the word I used to describe the manifestation of trauma that haunts a soul. Since learning of my empathic abilities, Evans had decided my ghosts and ghosts-ghosts were simply different versions of the same thing. We’d been debating the matter ever since.

  “She’s not a ghost. Banshee’s have a sixth sense about imminent death. It’s never wrong, and they’re drawn to it like a magnet—right through the walls.”

  “Like a death-seeking missile,” he grinned proudly.

  “Sure. We’ll go with that.” I gave the door a yank to test the lock. When it opened with ease, I shared a frown with Evans. The sign on the wall said the shop closed hours ago.

  “One of the mechanics must be working late,” he said. “We need to—”

  “Save him?” I blocked Evans as he moved for the door. “We can’t. Regardless of what she does, regardless of what we do, if someone in there is meant to die, they will.”

  “Then, her wails are a warning, like the legend says?”

  “Banshees don’t portend impending doom. That would imply they give a shit about other species.” At his puzzled squint, I said, “We’re all meals to her, Casey. She survives on the energy released by a dying body. Feeding hastens death several minutes, but it’s still not quick enough. So they bitch. Loudly.”

  “This racket she’s been making all over town is because she’s hangry?”

  “Her hunger isn’t like ours. It’s all-consuming, especially after waking from hibernation. They’re driven to gorge. But if they aren’t careful, taking in too much, too fast, sends them into a blind rage. Then, they go from scavengers to killers.”

  “Great. An unstable banshee with a deadly case of dieter’s remorse. Why don’t we ever get any normal monsters?”

  “We can discuss your definition of normal after we stop her.”

  Evans led with the automatic he’d borrowed from the cache of weapons hidden in the trunk of my jeep. I pulled a dollop of fire into my hand, and we entered the garage.

  He reached back for the light switch on the wall.

  I grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”

  “What’s less suspicious if someone walks by? Noises coming from a business that’s dark and closed? Or noises that might be explained if someone is working la
te with the light on?”

  I gestured my assent, and he flipped the switch with a quick smile. The expression came easy for him, but it wasn’t as carefree as it used to be. Not since the summer. Not since Marnie disappeared. When a maniacal dragon abducts your sister for breeding, it takes a toll.

  The fluorescent lights on the ceiling were old and poorly spaced, but they banished the shadows enough to illuminate the clutter inside the garage. Signs on the doors to our right indicated an office, a bathroom, and a store room. Ahead was the front entrance and reception desk. Left was the service area. Faint light was leaking out from between the cars.

  Moving in, Evans glanced at me. “I don’t get it. If the banshee legend isn’t from this part of the world, what’s she doing here? Why does everything come here?”

  “They don’t. The Guild has operatives in many countries on your world, put in place strictly to handle situations like this. But the number of viable exits is higher in this area. Maybe having the first one nearby somehow allows them to open easier. As far as the banshee goes… It’s common to combine or alter sighting locations to better hide the facts and propagate the legend. Truth is, her kind got around. After being seen by the humans too many times, they were banned from ever coming here again. It’s been decades since I’ve caught one sneaking in.”

  “If she likes to eat as much as you say, maybe her food source dried up, and she’s desperate to find another. Starvation is a strong motive for any species.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said, my thoughts turning to something that was more than capable of changing the most law-abiding creatures into violent foragers desperate to survive. I wasn’t sure how to classify it: an infection, ecological plague, or viral pollution? I didn’t have a tally on how many worlds were stricken, but once the black growth contaminated a land, it became slowly uninhabitable. If more creatures were being displaced, forced to look elsewhere for food and shelter, that would explain the spike in monster-related activity in the city. In the last two weeks alone, sightings had risen from manageable to worrisome.

  Spotting another glimpse of gray, I pointed to the service area, then his pocket. Evans stuck his other earplug back in as he peeled off right to circle around. I moved up to the bays. A lamp was clamped onto the open hood of one vehicle, aimed inward to illuminate the engine. Beneath it, on the floor, was the willowy form of the banshee, crouched beside the still body of a man in grease-stained coveralls. Life had creased his skin and thinned his white hair into downy wisps. There was no blood or visible wounds. The grimace twisting his weathered face implied heart attack or stroke.

  Sensing me, the banshee left the body and glided closer. Her lipless jaw twitched as she struggled to form words I would understand. “You…” she screeched. “I’m late. Because of YOU!” The word blew over me, high-pitched and quivering with wrath.

  I bounced the fire sitting in my scaled palm. “You snooze, you lose.” Catching sight of Evans behind her, I flung the flaming ball at her chest as he pulled the trigger. Our simultaneous attacks struck the banshee—and bounced off.

  I ducked behind a cabinet as fire boomeranged back toward my face. Evans, evading his own ricocheting bullets, dove into the well beneath the occupied lift. When the barrage ended, I took a quick peek. The banshee was back hovering over the old man’s body. She wailed softly, fretting her missed opportunity.

  Evans shouted from inside the service pit. “What the hell just happened?”

  “Forcefield,” I hollered back. “Made of the energy she stole from the dying.”

  “A force field of death? Really?” Excitement crept into his voice. “This just got awesome. How do we break it?”

  Sitting with my back against the metal cabinet, I mulled over his question.

  Her defense was finite. In the past, I’d simply waited for it to wane. But the basis of a banshee’s protective barrier was the accumulation of breaths drawn under extreme conditions. If any residue of the victim’s last emotions clung to the energy, she used to maintain her forcefield, I could find it. If I could lure it out, I might weaken her protection.

  More screams tore from the banshee’s throat. A lower, differing sound rode below hers with a series of clangs and a flustered, human cry. A booming crash followed. The noise echoed like rolling thunder through the garage, raising a veil of dust and a wide spray of glass.

  Startled, I peered around my cover. The car that was on the lift was now on the floor. With no tires to soften its landing, the fenders had smashed on impact. Windows had busted. One side of the back half had fallen into the service pit. Evans. Shit.

  I shoved the toolbox aside and ran. The banshee darted out, cutting me off. Her dark mouth wagged in a bold, vengeful cry, and I didn’t give a moment’s thought to if I could or should. I gripped her throat with a tight, scaled hand, ended her sound, and dropped my psychic guard.

  My gift had evolved since my last encounter with a banshee. Not even the smallest traces of pain could hide from me now. Most times, such tiny fragments barely registered on my radar. But I could let them, if I wanted. I could feel the specks of trauma clinging to the banshee’s form, the bits of terror, grief, and regret, tangled with her pilfered energy.

  The emotions were stowaways. She had no idea they were there.

  To me, the black crumbs shone like spotlights in the dark.

  Staring into the banshee’s cavernous sockets, I reached for the scraps of pain that had been hitching a ride with her meals—and grabbed on.

  As I hoped, the trauma and the energy were interwoven. I took one, and the other came with it. What sustained her body, though, was of no use to me. As the pain of her victims sunk in, the energy she’d worked so hard to collect sloughed off and dissipated into the air. And her barrier weakened. She vibrated in my grip as I took more, depleting her stores.

  When they were empty, the banshee’s body stilled. I released my grip, but she didn’t fall. She stayed, motionless and frozen, with her head tilted, as if my hand was still around her neck. She was static. Catatonic. It was an odd reaction, but the problem was contained. And I didn’t have time to grasp for explanations.

  “Casey.” Hope pushed his name louder from my throat as I ran. “Casey!” I dropped beside the partially obstructed pit. “Can you hear me?”

  A groan preceded his dusty head as it poked up. “Now who’s shouting?”

  Oil smudged his skin. His jacket was ripped. Scattered scrapes decorated his face and hands. “That was a damn lousy place to hide,” I scolded as I hauled him out.

  Ignoring my complaint, he rushed past me with a loud whistle of approval. “Damn, Nite. You found the off button.” Taking out his earplugs, Evans glanced back. “How did you…?” The question lost importance as he realized, “Shit. I missed the whole thing.”

  “Sorry,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. Knowing I had empathic abilities was one thing. Watching me use them offensively would only kindle his overactive imagination and prompt questions about my new-found trick. Questions I don’t have answers to, I thought.

  Evans circled the banshee’s stagnant form. “Is she dead?”

  Flame burst into my hands. “She’s about to be.”

  Two

  Dawn was a thin orange line on the horizon. After days of no sun, the distant glow was promising, but not much help. The decorative street lamps on the paved trail above us were dark, knocked out by the high winds. The scenic, elevated walkway bordering the river was not a priority on the city’s long list of repairs. Instead, portable lamps were brought in to combat the morning murk. Set up all along the bank, their snaking, multiple spotlights illuminated the rocky slope and the muddy strip of beach. Neither had fared well in the storm.

  It was only a few hours ago when the surge receded. The retreating river took a good portion of the land with it, dragging out sand and dredging up driftwood; uncovering things meant to stay buried. Debris still bobbed in the frenzied current. Wind played with the swells, keeping the shoreline high and the waves rough.
They swept in, flirting with the cluster of yellow evidence markers protruding from the muck.

  With a tug on his jacket, I pulled the man beside me back from the spray. Detective Alex Creed was too intent on the crime scene to notice things like wet shoes or the river stench on his pant legs. Me? We’d been here five minutes, and I was already lamenting the soaked hem of my jeans.

  Creed gestured ahead. “Legs.” Moving faster, he pointed. “There’s an arm. And that’s…” Walking closer, he slowed, screwing up his unshaven face as he studied the object. “A torso. I think?”

  “I hate puzzles,” I groaned, eyeballing the dismembered pieces scattered over the riverbank. “I’m going to need more coffee for this.”

  Creed frowned at the cup in my hand. “What’s wrong with that one?”

  “It’s cold.” I took a sip anyway. Cold was better than none. Though, it was hot, once, thirty-two minutes ago when he arrived at my apartment. Missing both his calls, and his knock, it took repeated chimes of the doorbell to get me up.

  Protecting the city by day as a consulting member of the SCPD’s new Unexplained Crimes Unit, and hunting unwelcome visitors from parallel worlds by night, didn’t leave much time for sleeping in.

  “There.” He pointed again. “Another leg.”

  “Are you sure? That's one too many.”

  His blue eyes caught mine, intense and inquisitive. “Is it?”

  I didn’t reply. I knew what he was thinking: Our victims aren’t human.

  It was a logical leap. It was also one of faith Creed had taken several times now, since the night a dragon, pretending to be me, tried to kill him. The incident left me little choice but to admit there were things in his world that didn’t belong. For obvious reasons, I’d declined confessing I was one of those things.

  “And that’s a head,” he muttered, wandering away.

  I stayed and crouched beside the waterlogged torso. The skin was discolored and bloated. If any blood remained inside, it wasn’t much. The wide bulk and lack of feminine breast tissue defined it as male. Decay, damp soil, and river stench combined to form a nice, stomach-churning fragrance. Whatever identifying scent the body once carried, it was long gone. The arms and legs were severed cleanly. In stark contrast, there was localized evidence of tearing and gnawing around the base of the neck, along with the partial impression of teeth. IDing the culprit by bite pattern alone wasn’t likely. Too much mud and soggy moss had accumulated in the wounds.