Stiletto (20 page)

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Odette, feeling that treacherous blush climb up her cheeks again. She concentrated, and the blood was sucked out of her face, leaving her even more light-headed. She cautiously took her hands away from her eyes. By now, her pupils had constricted as much as they could, but her eyes still felt like they were pulsating.

“Would you like an aspirin or something?”

“No, I’m not allowed painkillers yet, they’ll interfere with my system,” she said. “If you could just please get me out of this thing and let me sit down for a while.”

“Of course,” said Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes. He retracted the apparatus from around her head, put his latex-gloved hand in hers, and guided her to a chair. “Your shoes and handbag are right next to you,” he said. “I’m going to go help the others finish up the exams. You’re the first to be done, so you’ve got some time to recuperate.”

“Thank you,” said Odette, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice. The noise of the examinations was muted, but it reverberated through her head. She heard the doctor move away and risked opening her eyes a chink. Even through her contracted pupils, the room was blindingly bright, but she could make out people moving about.

Squinting, she could just see the bathroom door immediately to her left.
I’m going to sidle in there discreetly,
she thought,
throw some water on my face, put my stockings and shoes back on, and maybe have a quick therapeutic vomit.
She fumbled for her handbag and shoes, stood up, and, keeping her hand on the wall, awkwardly made her way to the bathroom.

As Odette stepped through the door, her sullen brain made several observations in rapid succession:

1. There’s much more of an echo in this bathroom than before.

2.  It doesn’t smell as bad in here as it did.

3. Someone has lowered the floor and added a step where there was no step.

4.  I am falling forward uncontrollably.

5. Someone appears to have replaced the dingy tiles of the bathroom with polished marble in a black-and-white-checkerboard pattern.

6.  I am able to notice this because I am now lying sprawled on the floor.

7.  My face really, really hurts.

All of these thoughts added up to the inescapable conclusion that she had, in her dazzled state, gone through the wrong door.
Please, God,
let me have gone into the men’s room,
she thought desperately.
Let me look up and see several men urinating into a trough and looking at me quizzically over their shoulders. Let me not have gone through the door I think I went through.
She took a deep breath and lifted up her face.

Wow. Thanks for nothing, God.

As she had feared, the elegant marble floor did not reflect a disgusting lack of equality in the standards of the Apex House lavatories. Instead, it reflected the fact that she was in the large, beautifully appointed foyer where the Checquy elite had gathered to greet their distinguished guests. She sighed and rested her cheek on the cool marble for a moment.

Finally, she got up on her knees and grimly waited for her eyes to reset. Slowly, details began to swim out of the blur of her vision. Through the clearing haze, she saw a small crowd of people standing at one end of the room. All of them were dressed in expensive-looking suits, and all of them were staring at her in astonishment.

They were not normal people. Quite aside from the fact that they all had exquisite posture, some of them were obviously not your standard-issue human beings. Odette’s eyes had scanned the group and automatically picked out the four people she least wanted to see. The members of the Checquy Court. Her treacherous memory was helpfully presenting little dossiers on them and their positions in the Checquy’s demented chess-based hierarchy.

The stately looking older lady with the dark chocolate eyes and disapproving expression is Lady Linda Farrier, one of the two heads of the Checquy. Viscountess in the British aristocracy. Spent a couple of years as lady-in-waiting to the last Queen. She can walk into people’s dreams and tinker about with their sleeping minds. Apparently, she once goaded an enemy of the Checquy into gnawing his own hands off in his sleep.

The blond man with the tan who is smoking a cigarette inside a government building is Major Joshua Eckhart. Chevalier — responsible for international operations. Superior tactician. Manipulates metal via touch. He can warp it, mold it, render it liquid. He killed Graaf Gerd de Leeuwen. Then he went out for a hamburger.

Next to him is the newest appointee to the Court, Bishop Raushan Attariwala
.

And there’s Rook Thomas, the only person who appears to be concerned about the fact that I just pitched face-first onto the floor.

Odette became aware of some flashes of distant light flickering in her vision.
Maybe I have a concussion,
she thought,
and this is all a hallucination.

Instead, it turned out that some photographers were present in order to record the historic meeting of the Checquy and the Grafters. The photographers, who knew a good thing when they saw it, were immortalizing this moment for posterity.

Terrific.

The car that came for Felicity was driven by an older man wearing tweed and a dissatisfied expression. Felicity had a sneaking suspicion that he was actually a retired Checquy operative who lived nearby and who had been abruptly reenlisted into service to ferry her back to London. For one thing, the car was an extremely nice Jaguar, and for another, there was a set of golf clubs in the backseat.

You never leave the Checquy,
she thought.
You may get your farewell party, your gold watch, and your pension, but one day, you’ll be called back out of retirement to smite evil or oversee an investigation or transport a girl in pajamas
and two pairs of bed socks.

“Felicity Jane Clements?”

“Yes,” she said.

He gestured for her to get in, and the car peeled off almost before the door was closed. She hurriedly put on her seat belt.

“Do you have my address?” she asked.

“You’re wanted at the Hammerstrom Building,” he said. “No detours.”

“Dressed like this?” she asked incredulously. He shrugged and then proceeded not to say a single word for the entire drive. To make matters worse, traffic between Ashford and London had been held up by an accident on the M20. Apparently, a truckload of carbonated beverages had overturned, and the subsequent chaos had resulted in miles of backed-up cars. The driver kept sighing heavily in a way that suggested he blamed Felicity for the whole thing, and it took her some effort to resist the urge to apologize.

Much to her surprise, she fell asleep. She woke up forty-five minutes later with a jerk and a gasp only to find that they had moved approximately twenty-five meters and that her face was welded to the shoulder strap of her seat belt by the copious amounts of drool that had seeped out of her mouth. Peeling her face away from the belt made a mortifyingly loud noise, and the driver’s mouth twisted in disgust.

Then, in the middle of
Essential Classics
on BBC Radio 3, it suddenly hit her. Perhaps she’d been unconsciously avoiding it, or perhaps the journey in Chopra’s arms through that strange place had done something to her thoughts, or perhaps she’d simply been too exhausted to think about it. But now it filled her mind.

They’re dead.

Her comrades Odgers and Jennings. Even Andrea Cheng, who, with her powers and her sharp mind, had always been able to escape any situation, was unlikely to have escaped the inferno. They’d been murdered in front of her. Now when she closed her eyes, Felicity saw Odgers lying on that floor, her blood pouring from her throat. Or else she saw Jennings, silhouetted in flames that boiled out of his own body.

I’ll have to face their families,
she thought helplessly.
Odgers’s husband. Jennings’s and Andrea’s partners.
It was the thought of Jennings’s little daughter, Louise — her own goddaughter — that really broke her. The knowledge that she would have to answer questions about Louise’s father’s death, and that she would have to lie. That girl would never know the truth.

“Nooooo...” She realized that she had actually made a sound, moaning softly despite herself.

Oh God, please make it not be true. Please, God.

To her horror and confusion, she started crying. Felicity was not a crier. If you wanted someday to be a Barghest commando, you did not cry. She had made a very deliberate decision never to cry again in her last year at school. She hadn’t cried when her class graduated from the Estate, and
everyone
cried then. She hadn’t cried last year when her boyfriend broke up with her because her schedule got in the way of their life. She hadn’t even cried when one of the team died on a mission in Wapping — not at the funeral, and not when they all went out afterward and got completely drunk and told stories.

But now it wouldn’t stop. Gasping sobs continued to bubble out of her. She tried to marshal her thoughts, to calm herself down, but she couldn’t focus. Her mind kept presenting her with images of her comrades — mental snapshots — and at each new picture, another wave of grief would flood through her head, prompting more sobs.

The driver eyed her sidelong and handed her a handkerchief from his breast pocket. It was not clear whether this was an act of gentlemanly compassion or simply his fear of her getting more fluids on the upholstery. He didn’t say anything at all, for which Felicity was grateful. They kept driving, and as they finally came to the outskirts of London, she managed to stop crying.
Maybe my body has just run out of water,
she thought weakly, and she sat, slumped in her seat, not looking at anything.

* * *

Pawn George Korybut watched, disbelieving, as the group of men and women in suits were guided down the hallway past his office. They looked normal but he knew what they were. It didn’t seem real. He’d known this day was coming, but he’d always secretly believed in his heart of hearts that the Court members would change their minds at the last minute and declare war on those abominations. They hadn’t. Instead, the Grafters were walking about in Apex House, treated like honored guests. For a moment, he felt like a frightened child back at the Estate.

As a rule, Checquy children didn’t scare easily. When your parents willingly give you to the government because you are inhuman, and your roommate has been known to inadvertently turn into a poplar during the night, and your mathematics teacher sometimes absentmindedly projects holograms of angry leopards during class, you become a trifle blasé. Horror stories tend to lose their impact when
you
are a horror. This effect was only amplified by the fact that much of the curriculum at the Estate was taken up with lectures on the various supernatural abominations they would be called upon to deal with when they graduated.

But the stories about the Grafters were different.

Those stories were a litany, passed down through generations of Checquy youth. They were history. They dated back to before the creation of the Estate, to a time when Checquy education had been based not on schools but on the tradition of master and apprentice. The stories told of the events of 1677, the year that the entire Checquy had been called to the Isle of Wight to defend Britain against invaders.

So dire was the Grafter threat then that the Rooks (at that time the military leaders of the Checquy) had rallied the entire organization. Not only the soldiers but the scribes and scientists, the craftsmen, the statesmen, and the men of the church — all of them had come to throw themselves at the invaders. Only the very youngest, the infants and the smallest children, remained on the mainland, guarded by unpowered Retainers. But there were child soldiers, apprentices still learning how to use their powers. They had marched alongside their masters, ready to do good toward their country. What they experienced would change them forever — those who survived.

There was never any question of quarter being given. The unannounced invasion, the inhuman army, and the atrocities committed upon the general populace had established that the rules of civilized warfare no longer applied. And so, unrestrained supernatural war commenced.

Events from the ensuing combat entered Checquy history. Pawn William Goode, after being disemboweled by a Grafter, haughtily re-emboweled himself and then backhanded his opponent, sending him flying nine miles. Pawn Morag Campbell ripped all the moisture from her foe, leaving behind nothing but dust, fractured bones, and a rather gaudy uniform. Bishop Rosemary Chuzeville summoned gouts of steam out of the turf and boiled Grafter soldiers in their shells like lobsters.

The child soldiers reached moments of glory as well. Twelve-year-old Sarah Jessup managed to hurl three hulking soldiers into the atmosphere. Henry Wright trapped one of the Grafter commanding officers in a pond — if one goes there and stands in the right place, one can still see his reflection, screaming to be released. Little Robert Savory, whose only power was the ability to increase the nutritional value of root vegetables, lured an enemy off a cliff through a combination of foot speed and sheer wits.

But for every victory, there were dozens of terrifying stories. Children were shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, burned. Christopher Madoc’s skin and clothes were permanently dyed by his sister’s blood as he tried to stanch the bleeding of her fatal wounds. Luke Hathaway’s skull was crushed beneath the boot of a Grafter foot soldier. Helen Murtaugh, brought face-to-face with the enemy, lost control of her own powers. Ribbons of black fire erupted from her spine, flogging the comrades around her and consuming her alive. Eventually, her master was called upon to put her down.

The Broederschap recognized the effect that the loss of each child had on the Checquy and began to target the youngest troops specifically. On the battlefield, they dispatched them as brutally as they could. At night, the Checquy camps were infiltrated and the children were snatched away, never to be seen again. The atrocities did not break the spirit of the British. Rather, they inflamed them. Rage drove the Rooks to throw caution to the wind and put their defenses aside to ensure that they brought their foes down. The Checquy moved forward, implacably, and scoured the land clean.