Pride and Poltergeists

  He said it as a joke, but Knight didn’t laugh. “How did you know where Dulcie was?”

  “Um,” I answered, my heart swimming with liquid dread. Time for the really bad news. “I … Dagan …” Just breathe, Sam. I released a quick breath and pushed my hair to the side, exposing the sinewy, grey burns on my neck.

  “Dagan did that?” Knight asked, his eyes flashing with pure heat.

  “No!” I nearly yelled before taking another deep breath. “Dulcie did.” I let my hair fall. “She attacked Splendor. I …” was the only survivor. I shook my head. “The ANC is gone. Not just ours, but all of them, almost every base we’ve got.”

  “Gone? What do you mean, gone?” Knight’s voice was quiet, tense. He sounded like he knew, or at least could guess what I meant.

  “She means, they went boom,” Kent said sadly.

  “Boom,” Knight echoed, shaking his head, but still not understanding.

  “The Darkness, or Meg, made Dulcie blow it up,” I said. “She’s … I don’t know, glamoured or possessed or something. I thought it was to prove that Meg had control, convincing her to wreck her own building … but Knight, it’s all of them. The LA offices went up within minutes of each other, Earthside and here. It’s a coordinated attack, Meg has control of all the bases, and she’s deliberately …” I stopped. “You’re not listening to me!”

  Knight was scowling, standing with his arms crossed, his face as stony as a pallbearer at a funeral. After a moment, he looked up. “Sorry, hang on. Bram. Where’s that book?”

  “What book?” I asked. Bram pulled a small, black journal from his pants pocket, wincing as though it hurt him to touch it. Knight took it from him with his free hand that wasn’t holding the briefcase to cover his nudity. He flipped the book over and opened it, reading something. He scowled even deeper, if that were possible.

  “Here,” he said as he handed it to me. “Take a look.”

  I immediately noticed the golden D stitched into the cover. My fingers tingled wherever I touched it so I guessed it was probably a spell to render the paper inflammable, or to keep any offensive magic being used in the room from leaking into its pages. A basic, double-sided ward, the kind of spell you cast when you don’t want something to light up like a Christmas tree if an intruder who can see looks for magic in your evil lair.

  “This is …” It had a physical weight to it, actually metaphysical, and the haunted aura of an abandoned church. It echoed of fixation, obsession, love gone sour … and a very particular emotion, something Meg had to have poured into it almost certainly by accident. Rowena was giving it a look, leaning in, and her onyx eye was glinting—she could feel it too, even from a distance. “Heavy,” I finished.

  “It’s Meg’s,” said Knight. “It’s a log of Dulcie’s life, the progression of her change, letters—”

  “Her change?” I said. “What change?”

  “Ah, yes,” said Ezra, stepping forward. He was homely for a vampire, a little more square than the other ones I’d met. It made him look more human. “When Dulcie was quite young, Melchior and Meg began to inject her with various things. Blood, ground scales, and the liquid essence of other creatures. The reason they did it is still a mystery, and we do not know why, but it managed to make her exceedingly powerful.”

  “The result,” Bram said, “is the new Dulcie. A living, walking weapon of mass destruction.”

  “Which could explain this …” I touched the burns on my neck almost subconsciously.

  “There’s a lot of not so great stuff in there,” Knight said, gesturing to the journal. “Sam, whatever they’ve done to her, it’s turned her into an impenetrable, magic tank.”

  “That doesn’t sound good at all,” I said. But it sounded right, and it matched up with all the destruction she’d wrought in Splendor. It really sounded like Meg was headed for war, but she already had what she wanted, didn’t she? Control of all the portals, and a litany of explosions that would keep anyone else from interfering. What more could she ask for?

  “Impenetrable? Damn!” said Kent. “This is gonna be a foon fight.”

  “There isn’t going to be any fight,” I said. “Dulcie’s still my friend!”

  “A friend who’s already tried ta kill you twice, darlin’,” Kent answered, unimpressed. “Ah’m sure she’s nice as anybody else, boot if she’s becoom a magic tank, I dunno what you expect us ta doo.”

  “I expect you to try,” I said, my voice rising. Casey laid a hand on my shoulder, trying to smile.

  “And we will,” he said. “I promise.”

  “But if we can’t get through to her,” Marcus started.

  “Then we’ll do whatever we have to do,” Casey answered with tight lips.

  “Do what you have to do?” Knight demanded. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Casey sighed. “Knight, I don’t know if you’ve seen Dulcie attack anything lately, but she’s insanely powerful now. Such as none of us have ever seen before! She’s that formidable. If we have a shot at her, we might have to take it, you know how this works. It’s a last resort, but if we’re not ready to make that decision when we get there, we’ll hesitate. However, we can’t afford to hesitate, not with Dulcie being whatever she has become now.” Knight took a deep breath and his knuckles went white from the fists he was making. Casey noticed it too. “I know, it’s awful, but it’s something we have to think about, and plan for.”

  Knight was silent. We looked at each other, hunting for the right words. I was trying not to think about if we had to pull the trigger on Dulcie. Knight would be killing the only woman he loved, and I’d be killing my best friend.

  “Just keep reading,” Knight said at last—clearly refusing to think about it any longer.

  I looked at him a brief moment, but there was nothing else for me to say.

  I kept reading.

  I flipped through the book, scanning the lines in confusion. Lists of Dulcie’s powers were enumerated as they manifested: the fire of the drakes, which she so clumsily used to burn me, the speed of the vampires, and line after line after line of Meg extolling Dulcie’s virtues. She sounded like a doting parent, or an adoring fan—the first hints of chronic obsession, something vampires occasionally experienced with their offspring.

  And then, the last entry. Black ink, and splatters of red. One line, no date.

  “It is time to end their Odyssey, and begin ours,” I read aloud before I clapped the book shut. “Well, then.”

  “That’s a bit—” said Judy.

  “Dramatic?” Kent supplied.

  “Yeah,” Judy answered.

  “Hardly,” Bram interrupted. “If anyone dares to wax poetic about someone’s impending demise, it absolutely has to be Meg.”

  Oh, shit. “Guys. Odyssey is capitalized.”

  Casey’s face fell. “Oh, shit.”

  “President Odyssey,” Judy said the words softly.

  “End their Odyssey,” I repeated as I shook my head, my shock raging through me. “Meg wants to assassinate her!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Sam

  “Maybe Meg wants to assassinate Odyssey,” Knight started. “Or maybe she just thought it sounded poetic enough to write it in her diary?”

  “Or it’s a planted statement, something to throw us off. Something she planned,” Marcus added.

  “Meg is more ambitious than she is intelligent,” Ezra replied, shaking his head. “Even on a good day, there is absolutely no way she thought that far ahead. Besides, she doesn’t even think that highly enough of any of you to guess you’d ever find it.”

  Bram twitched at hearing that, but he didn’t comment.

  “But why kill Odyssey?” Casey asked. “If it’s portal control, she’s already had that for ages. Why blow up the ANCs and wreck her ports? And why kill the president? That act, alone, won’t gain her any favors. Nobody will take her side.”

  I blinked. “Unless …” I started.

  “Unless?” Casey repeated blank
ly.

  Shit, shit, shit. “Unless that’s just something she told the kingpins to get them on her side.”

  “What? That she’d kill the president?” Kent asked.

  “No, that she would take control of the portals,” I reasoned. “That’s what Jax kept insisting was happening, and we still don’t have any reason to believe that wasn’t the case—or at least, that he didn’t think that was the case. But maybe Meg lied to the uppity-ups just to get their help.”

  “What kind of help would she need from the rings?” Ezra asked.

  “Manpower, for one,” Casey and Knight said at the same time.

  “Maybe she asked to keep the ring leaders off her back. The potion lords have maybe five working brains between them,” Marcus said. “If they found out Meg intended to monopolize the portals they use to transport their product, they’d start causing plenty of trouble. So, how do you solve that? By bringing them in on the deal, if only to get them off your back, right?”

  “And she probably also wanted access to the drugs, themselves,” Judy added, throwing a sidelong look at Kent. “Lots of things go boom if you know what you’re doing. She might have been looking for things like that mandrake-Adderall juice, you know, stuff to give her soldiers to get them all hot and bothered before a fight.”

  “Soldiers,” said Marcus. “Great. That’s a fun word to associate with an ego-maniacal vampire overlord.”

  “Overlady,” Judy corrected him. But somehow, overlady failed to have the same ring.

  “Okay, so let’s say for the sake of argument that Meg lied,” Casey started. “Just to get manpower and drugs. Fine. But the question still remains: where does assassinating the president come in to play?”

  I frowned. Casey was right. Anyway you looked at it, Meg had nothing to gain from Odyssey’s death. Killing the president certainly wouldn’t secure portal control, and would probably expunge every portal in the United States. Put them on total lockdown. She wouldn’t have access to the plane anymore, or the human customer base Jax was so revved up about. She had the whole circus of potion masters at her disposal, as well as that nameless mystery drug Jax mentioned, addictive as hell without any pleasantly fatal side effects—no side effects at all, actually. If Meg killed Odyssey, she would be cutting them off indefinitely from their primary demographic—those idiotic human teens, of which there was a small population in the Netherworld.

  Maybe killing the president was just some petty wish, a pipe dream that had nothing to do with Meg’s overall plan … If it were part of the plan, the world would go into a frenzy. Everyone would start bitching about the ineptitude of the Association of Netherworld Creatures and its potential involvement. After all the explosions, we were bound to get some of the blame. Whatever happened, the aftermath would be a PR nightmare …

  Wait.

  Meg had nothing to gain, and everything to lose by killing the president. So what would she lose? What did she dare to sacrifice?

  What would disappear if Odyssey died?

  Why did she take the ANCs? Why did she blow them up from the inside? Why did she try to make it look like it was our idea from the beginning? If the ANCs went down, so did the portals. Along with all access, regulated or otherwise, to the Earthly plane from the Netherworld.

  Shit, shit, shit, shit!

  Unless that’s exactly what Meg wanted.

  “Maybe she wants the ANC totally gone,” I said. “Just … gone. Obliterated.”

  Marcus shook his head. “Wouldn’t do her any good. Odyssey, or whoever replaces her, will have to put up an ephemeral blockade if the ANC goes down completely. Nobody could go in or out. If there’s no regulation, there’s no anything.”

  “Which is why it’s so weird that she keeps blowing up all the ANCs,” Casey muttered, drawing his hand over his mouth. “Meg had control, complete and total, and nobody knew it. Nobody. If she’d put more competent people in her offices, we’d never have noticed a damn thing. She removed all portal access and has complete and total legislative control over every aspect of Earthly preternatural existence, and what does she do? She blew it up!”

  “Oh,” Bram started with a frown. “Actually, Meg has my portal ripper.”

  I almost punched him square in the face, giving him a knuckle blast that would have shattered somebody else’s nose—but it couldn’t do a damn thing to Bram’s plastic skin. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and said in a voice shaking with rage, “What?”

  “We used it to get here in the first place,” Bram explained. “And Meg took it when Vander and I were … accosted by Dulcie.”

  And that matched perfectly with every horrifying thought I was having right then. “Then it never mattered?”

  Casey looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Meg doesn’t care about the portals,” I said. “She doesn’t care about keeping them open or closed. And Odyssey …” Oh, Hades, this is gonna be so bad.

  “Odyssey?” Casey prompted, but by that point, Knight already caught on.

  “If Odyssey dies at the hands of the ANC itself, it goes under for good,” Knight said, nodding. “Catastrophic failure, no recovery, no rehabilitation. Shit, this has nothing to do with getting access to anything.”

  “And everything to do with cutting it off,” I finished.

  “Ezra, you said that Meg—” Casey started.

  “Was the matriarch of an old house,” Bram finished for him. “Who now has a spiritual daughter carrying the essence of all the oldest races ever to walk the dark. She is more than ready to put the hammer down on the human scourge. Someone everybody in the underground will be salivating over, picking out the pieces of her that reflect themselves. Creating their version of the perfect Nether queen.”

  “That’s why the shapeshifter pretending to be your mom could handle the amulet,” I said. “That shapeshifter was probably part of the house that made it.”

  “Which means Meg has more than one of the old houses already at her disposal,” Ezra added. “Meg’s probably restoring the old order.”

  “And she has my portal ripper,” Bram repeated with another frown. “The portals in the ANC offices were rendered unnecessary from the moment they started exploding.”

  “And she’s got a way to get back once they’re all gone,” Knight added. “Blockades won’t go up immediately. She’ll have enough time to cross over to the Nether-side.”

  I scoffed in disbelief—not only at the crazy genius of Meg’s plan, but at how little time we probably had now to stop her. “So she can blow it all to hell and not have to stick around for the consequences. And Hades knows how many government plants are ready to corroborate any story she wants them to tell.”

  “That’s where all the congressmen have gone,” Casey said, in a voice thin with dread. “They know Odyssey’s directly in the line of fire.”

  I nodded. “Meg needs the government out of the Netherworld completely. We’re the ruling body right now, and the only infrastructure the Netherworld has. Without us, there’s nothing—an empty place Meg can fill with herself and the old ruling houses. Maybe she’ll come back for the potion rings, I don’t know, but right now, that isn’t the point. She’s taking down our order and restoring hers, the only way to keep us out for good is to convince the world it’s too dangerous for the supernatural community to have a presence on Earth at all, or for them to have a human presence in the Netherworld. She’s trying to scare the planet into isolating the Netherworld again—and she’s doing it by turning our regulators into terrorists.”

  “So this has now become a question of priority,” Knight started. “Whether we go after the Darkness or we go after Odyssey.”

  “The president’s safety is always the number one concern,” Casey answered immediately. “Meg will have to wait. We secure the president’s safety first and worry about Meg and Dulcie afterwards.”

  “That is, if Meg hasn’t already gotten to Odyssey,” I interjected.

  Casey faced me and nodded his agreement solemnl
y. “Yes, if Meg hasn’t gotten to her already.”

  “And there’s only one way we have to find that out,” I continued with a deep breath. “So we’re going after Odyssey no matter what?”

  “Yes,” Casey answered as he faced Knight. “Are you on board?”

  Knight swallowed hard. I could see that he wanted to go after Meg and, of course, Dulcie. “Knight, we will need all the help we can get—first with Odyssey and then with Meg and Dulcie afterwards. If we split up, we’ll be that much weaker.”

  He nodded. “I’m on board.”

  “First things first,” Bram nearly interrupted. “We need to get Vander some clothes.”

  “That’s true,” Knight said as he glanced down at the briefcase. “I’m getting sick of carrying this thing everywhere.”

  “Yeah, you should probably be dressed if we’re going to see the president,” I added with a nervous laugh. If we were lucky, this would amount to nothing more than a whirlwind meeting and quick crackdown on personal security, giving Odyssey enough time to do whatever she had to do to clean up this mess.

  “Hades, fine. Christina, could you get me some clothes?” Knight asked as he turned to face her. “I’m not sure why no one thought of that before,” he finished, eyeing everyone with irritation.

  “Including you?” I asked with a broad smile.

  “Including me, I guess,” he responded before his eyes fell on Christina again. “Ahem! I haven’t got all day and it’s cold out here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Christina answered with a frown.

  “Oh, I don’t know, maybe magick me up some clothes!” Knight responded with a “duh” tone.

  Christina scoffed. “From where, exactly?”

  Knight shrugged. “What do you mean from where? From your magic.”

  “From my magic,” she repeated incredulously.

  “Yeah. Dulcie did it all the time.”

  “Did what all the time?”