Embers (19 page)

Anya opened the plain white card. It said simply:

THE ONES YOU’RE LOOKING FOR.—D

The edges of the card were sharp against her palm as she wadded it up and threw the flowers in the trash. That son of a bitch.

She let herself into the house, but didn’t turn on the lights. Her answering machine blinked red: two messages from Katie, wanting to know if she was all right; a wrong number; and a salesman trying to peddle aluminum siding.

She felt incredibly heavy, exhausted from the weight of too much sorrow and frustration. Her clothes peeled off like a skin, and she climbed into the shower, letting the warm water rinse over her face and hair. The pirate rubber duck sailed in the shallow eddies at her feet. Careful to present her back to the spray, she tried to protect the tender burns on her chest. The demon-burn had begun to bubble and blister. Several of them had broken, seeping clear fluid. Her stomach turned when she looked at it, and she kept her gaze focused on the collection of rubber duckies canoodling in plastic joy on the shelf. At her feet, Sparky nipped at the spray of water.

It was then that Anya realized she was showering in the dark. She hadn’t noticed the lack of light at all. It should have bothered her, but Anya couldn’t summon up any additional anxiety from the recesses of her brain. It was all spent on Brian and on the case.

Anya brushed her teeth a half-dozen times, then gargled with mouthwash. She still tasted something sour in the back of her throat. Tying her rubber-duck bathrobe loosely around her, she climbed into bed. Sparky had left his Gloworm in the dead center, and he curled his body around it. He popped his tail in his mouth and she stroked his head. Poor little guy. Anya leaned over and kissed his leathery head. Though Sparky was assigned to be her guardian, she’d felt more like his caretaker in the past few days.

“It’s gonna be okay, Sparky. We’ve gotten through much worse. We’ll get through this.”

The Gloworm cast a soothing light that seeped into her dreams like light under a door.

Once again, she dreamed of the ice cave.

At her right hand, Sparky paced in a circuit, glowing amber. On her left, the little girl from the pop machine stood, her shoelaces untied. Ahead of her growled the unseen force that blasted heat down the slick walls.

But there was something else here. Something viscous and black as pitch, pooling on the white ice of the floor. It peeled itself up, swirling like ink in water, drawing itself into the shape of a human. It remained transparent, and she could see bits of the ice behind it. Ragged trails of ectoplasmic sludge trailed behind, as if it couldn’t entirely gather itself into a fully formed outline.

Sparky snaked before her, hissing, his gills splayed. Anya shoved the little girl behind her. “What the hell are you?”

It undulated before her, like an eel in unseen current.
“We’ve already been introduced.”

That voice. . . she recognized it from the botched exorcism of the other night, and the voice in her head in the interrogation room. It was Chloe’s demon.

“What’s your name?” Anya demanded. She knew that if a demon was asked its name, it had to answer truthfully. And truth was the first step to control.

“Mimiveh.”

“Great. Then, you won’t mind if I call you Mimi.”

The darkness lashed in irritation.
“Crass human.”

“What do you want, Mimi?”

The demon giggled. It swirled in the air, peering behind Anya’s back. Sparky lunged at it and came back with a jawful of shredded black mist.
“I like to play with little girls.”

Anya lifted her right hand as a threat. She’d devoured this demon once; she could do it again. “Forget it. You’re not playing with him. Or Chloe.”

The demon reached inky tendrils toward her face. Its touch burned as surely as the blisters on her chest.
“Then I guess I’ll have to play with you, instead.”

CHAPTER TEN

ANYA WAS DETERMINED TO FIND out everything about Drake Ferrer: who his high school English teacher was, where he bought his socks, whether he favored creamy or crunchy peanut butter. In knowing who he was, she would discover his weaknesses. It would only take a small weakness to cleave open and exploit, some small chink in the armor of his arrogance that she could use to trip him up.

She began with looking for large weaknesses by pulling his police file. Vross had said Ferrer had been the victim of a robbery. At her battered desk, Anya waited for the file to load over her slow connection to the city computers, drumming her pencil on the coffeestained blotter. An arrogant fool like that might have been flashing cash he shouldn’t have been. Maybe he’d been driving a shiny new car that someone else coveted. She expected that his flamboyance and self-assurance had caused someone to take him down a peg.

The police incident report popped up on her screen, a scanned image of a blurry fax from 1999. At that time, centralized computing for all fire and law enforcement agencies in Detroit hadn’t been instituted yet. The best she could get would be whatever bits of legacy data could be manually scanned in and stored in a friendly format.

She scanned the report. Looked like Drake Ferrer had been leaving a fund-raiser for the American Historical Landmarks Committee when he’d been jumped walking back to his car. By the reporting officer’s account, Ferrer said he had been confronted by three young men. He gave them his wallet and keys, but the boys weren’t in a mood to be placated. They beat Ferrer into unconsciousness, stole his car, and emptied as much of his bank account as they could via an ATM. Ferrer’s unconscious body was found beside a Dumpster by a garbage man some hours later, who radioed for help.

Anya clicked ahead to the next page. She leaned forward on her desk, steepling her fingers before her lips. A picture of Ferrer after the attack had been appended to the file. Both eyes were swollen shut, his face a mass of black and green bruises. A line of stitches crossed back into his hairline. Anya hadn’t remembered a scar; perhaps Ferrer had been able to afford some good plastic surgery. Other photos of his broken ribs, mangled hands, and purple-stippled back had shown that the robbers intended to leave him for dead. Ferrer had ruptured a kidney and lost sight in one eye, as a result. Anya thought back to watching him walk in the park, the slight limp that she detected as he strode through the grass.

She clicked forward to the notes of the violent crimes detective assigned to the case. The young men had been identified by ATM videotape. Two of the three were juveniles and served only six months in a juvenile institution until they legally became adults, then were released. The oldest perpetrator spent one year in state prison.

Anya clicked back to the unrecognizable photo of Ferrer. “I know what happened to you,” she told the photo. “But that doesn’t tell me who you
are.
”

She could see his battered body clearly enough. That much of a person could be easily cataloged, photographed, and analyzed.

But what she really wanted was to get into his head.

The main branch of the Detroit Public Library had been constructed downtown in the early twentieth century with funds—like hundreds of libraries in the era—donated by Andrew Carnegie. One of the stately Italian Renaissance buildings that sat back from the street on Woodward Avenue, a series of terraces staggered up its steps, over which arched windows watched. The library was constructed from the same pale limestone from which so many of Detroit’s enduring buildings had been hewn. In this day and age, Anya couldn’t imagine that much effort being put into any place intended to hold man’s endeavors. Quarrying seemed far too labor-intensive for a society preferring the polish of glass and steel.

But there was something to be said for old buildings, old ways, and old knowledge. Anya made her way into the great vaulted central hall of the library, supported by massive Doric columns. Above her, colorful mosaics of people and literary quotations stretched, depicting the River of Knowledge. A few homeless people sat asleep in the corners. Still, the atmosphere felt immediately soothing, tranquil. Anya tucked her notebook under her arm and passed through the turnstiles to the main stacks.

It had been years since Anya had been here. Her mother, a reference librarian, had taken her here every day in the summer when school was out. Her mother had been unable and unwilling to afford a babysitter to simply park Anya in front of a television for eight hours a day. At DPL, at least, her daughter would get some culture. Anya remembered sitting under the colorful murals in the children’s section, whiling away summer afternoons reading Grimms’ fairy tales or the adventures of Nancy Drew. She’d flipped through the picture books of dinosaurs, tracing around Sparky’s silhouette on the pages with her finger, trying to imagine what kind of egg Sparky had hatched from. Back then, wooden card catalogs stood like apothecaries in the main stacks, holding index cards sorting every imaginable topic by subject, author, and title. Anya’s mother had to hold her up to let her small fingers reach the drawers at the top. By the time she was in second grade, Anya knew the Dewey decimal system backward and forward.

But those days were long gone. The massive card catalog cabinets had disappeared, replaced by computer terminals on long tables. Anya slid behind a station. After brief navigation of the online catalog, she entered: Ferrer, Drake.

She received three hits in the stacks, mentions in architectural books. She jotted down the locations and climbed the great circular staircase to the upper floors to find them. She found all three on the shelves and lugged them to a reading carrel to page through the indices.

The first book was a
Who’s Who in Architectural Design
, a 1997 edition. Ferrer had his own entry, extolling how the native Detroiter graduated at the top of his class at the University of Michigan, double majoring in urban design and architecture for his undergrad. He’d gone on to win a fellowship to complete his PhD in architecture, publishing his doctoral dissertation as a book:
Classical Architecture in Urban Islands
. He’d won several prestigious awards in drafting and design, and there was notation that he’d joined a downtown architectural firm in Detroit specializing in urban redevelopment.

The second book held a chapter Ferrer had authored on historic preservation. The tone of the author was surprisingly warm, speaking of great affection for downtown Detroit landmarks that were being threatened by careless renovation and the ravages of pollution on limestone. It was clear from his remarks that Ferrer disdained the use of modern architecture that didn’t comport with the existing milieu.

In this town, any new construction had been considered to be a good thing, a sign of progress. Anya thought Ferrer’s approach, while full of sentimental aesthetic appeal, was unrealistic. Perhaps it could even be interpreted as elitist. People needed functional places to live and work, and condemning those places for being ugly seemed useless.

A textbook on urban planning included one of Ferrer’s sketches of a utopian mixed-use downtown space: a green park lay at the center of townhouses, shops, and office buildings. The elevations were pretty enough: brick and sandstone, calling for off-street parking and a police substation, modeled after mixed-use space in Japan. But Anya had never seen anything like it built in Detroit.

“Dreamer,” she said aloud, louder than she’d intended.

A soft shushing echoed over the room. Anya started; she thought she’d been alone. She looked back to see the figure of a ghostly woman pushing a phantom book truck down the aisle. She was dressed in bell-bottoms and a flower-print shirt, her hair long enough to brush her hips, held back in a macramé headband. A fringed belt was slung around her slim hips.

“I’m sorry,” Anya responded. She felt Sparky skim away from her collar to peer over her shoulder at the spirit.

The ghost of the librarian stopped in her tracks, then took a step back. Fear glittered through her wide eyes. “You heard me.”

“Yes. But I don’t mean you any harm.” Anya lifted her hands up in a supplicating gesture.

“But you’re—you’re like him.”

Anya was sure that spirits could sense something unusual about her. Perhaps they could sense the heat of the furnace that burned in her chest, knew that she could blow them out as easily as a child with a match.

“Like who?” Anya’s thoughts raced back to her conversation with Renee:
“He
supposedly ate all the ghosts in the library downtown in an afternoon.”
“Was it a man, blind in one eye, with a limp?”

The hippie librarian cringed. “Yes. That’s him. He took Stan and Marlo and the ghost of the homeless man outside. . . he even took the Viking guy from the archives, Sjorn.” Her eyes were wide with terror. “I hid from him in the ladies’ room. But now. . . but now, I’m all alone.” Her shoulders sagged.

Anya wanted to reassure her, but if she touched her, she knew that her hand would pass straight through the stylized hibiscus flowers on her blouse. “I won’t hurt you. I promise. What’s your name?”

“I’m Felicity.”