Soul Ink (4 page)

When someone says “Do something” and “and die,” that’s usually an excellent hint about exactly what you should avoid doing. And if my eyelids would have cooperated, I would have avoided it. The problem lay in the fact that this archangel embodied his name. Grace and glory given sentience.

Now I knew why Grimm had rendered him invisible. It wasn’t so he could attack me at will—more likely Grimm’s spell simply couldn’t cope with a being of this magnitude. I couldn’t force my eyes shut, so instead, I bit my cheek until the flesh crunched. Tears swarmed in my eyes, defusing his hold on me. I hunched over, hands over my eyes.

“Little one, look at me.” He spoke from right in front of me.

My hands trembled as I fought the desire to obey him. This wasn’t a compulsion, but a craving to do as he commanded.

“It is your choice,” came his whisper. “You can observe my transformation, but not partake in it.”

I nudged Ari with my foot, making sure I knew where she was, and squeezed the trigger, putting a bullet where I hoped he was.

“Fine. Be that way.” My head yanked backwards as he hauled me by the hair toward the altar. And Grimm’s spell couldn’t mask it. Couldn’t hide what lay waiting at the front. Cherub corpses lay mangled on the altar, a wafer-thin disc of black rock, whose crystalline veins seethed. Around the edge, skulls ringed the altar, each holding a rune more blasphemous than the one before.

“It is time for me to complete this ritual. I will use your blood to consecrate my gateway.” He flung me toward the altar.

“Grimm, get rid of your spell,” I screamed. Could he hear me? I had no idea. But I had an idea. One dependent on knowing what was truly what.

“Yes,” said Haniel. “You will die filled with pleasure.”

Grimm’s spell rippled and dissolved, hitting me with a wave of nauseating beauty. I glanced upward at the walls, tracing the outline of the stained glass windows. They had transmuted into living creatures, acting out the scenes. I bit my tongue until it bled to drive the images from my mind, then locked my eyes on the altar. Strains of celestial music teased the thoughts from my brain.

Somewhere, Haniel was speaking. And as usual, he was being a pompous ass. His glory. His ascendance and transformation. The skulls surrounding the altar lit up one by one, their eyes glowing red. And was that a knife in Haniel’s hand?

It was. So elegant and lovely. Perfect for carving with, a pain that would be pure pleasure. With mental strain hard enough to make the thought of my tattoo hurt, I slammed my fist down, smashing a skull. And again, and again. With each crack, a gush of golden mist burst out and evaporated.

Haniel shrieked, his wail the most beautiful cry ever, but I focused on the pain blossoming along my arm as I repeated my trick, then rolled off the altar. The pain served to shield me from the archangel’s magnificent rage. With my strong arm, I seized the edge of the altar, and with every bit of inhuman strength I had, I flung it like a discus.

Straight through a stained glass window depicting the Virgin Mary as a goat. The goat bleated a blessing as the window exploded outward.

Haniel’s eyes glowed with glorious anger, but he tore his gaze from me, and in a burst of mellifluous light, he disappeared. With Haniel’s departure, the radiance leaked from reality, leaving it white, puffy, and plain.

I put my hand on my bracelet, focusing on a shard of stained glass. “Grimm, we need help. Your little pest control problem just got a thousand times worse.”

•   •   •

I spent the whole trip back holding my tattooed arm down. If I let it hang loose, it moved of its own accord, which didn’t bother me while my fingers drummed on the wheel. When my arm decided to throw open the door and drag me out, that wasn’t so amusing.

Grimm refused to speak to me when we got back. At least he refused to speak to me about Haniel, his contract, or anything else of import. In fact, after examining Ari, he summoned us to his office.

“Go home, ladies. I order you both to proceed home. Ari, your spell-blindness is temporary. Few have seen an archangel’s true form and survived.”

“Makes you wonder how angels can walk among us,” I said.

Grimm shook his head. “Those who remain on this plane choose forms more appropriate. Arianna, in the kitchen are three packets of white salve. Dab one under your eyes and avoid magic for the next three days.”

After Ari left, Grimm turned back to me.

“That’s the generic mayonnaise, right?”

He nodded. “I will need to be absent for a time. The Agency can take a holiday.”

“That a good idea? Archangel on the loose, and you taking vacation?”

“I must meet with my contract handler to discuss certain details that have come to light. I won’t allow them to endanger you any further. I believe Paradisia’s problem would be best dealt with by their own. Take a day off, Marissa.” Grimm faded from view.

“Hello? Tattoo? This thing’s only getting larger. I can barely control it.” I held up my black and purple arm, which had stopped attempting to stab me in the ear with a pencil about the time the tattoo shrank past my shoulder.

The pen on Grimm’s desk snapped up and began flying across the paper in broad strokes. When it dropped to the floor, lifeless, a note remained.

See the curator of magical antiquities in Kingdom. Ask for the Press of Aiyn. And don’t make such a mistake again.

–G

I pocketed the note, picked up my princess, who had dutifully applied mayonnaise under each eye, and headed home. I can’t say which worried me more: that Grimm would challenge someone holding a contract over him, or that while he did so, Haniel was free to roam.

Liam came home smelling like a sewage truck. I sent him to the shower and bagged the clothing to burn later. While Ari cooked crepes and sausage, I announced the good news about our day off, and waited for Liam to smile. He loved relaxing.

Liam bit his lip. “I’d love to take a vacation, but we just found the alligator’s nest.”

“I thought that was earlier.”

“Another nest. This is the one with all the eggs in it. If I don’t go back there and make some flame broiled omelets, we’re going to have a disaster in the making.” Liam reached across the table to take my hand. “You understand, right?”

I understood. Well, part of me understood. Most of me was still either in shock that he’d turned me down or furious that he’d turned me down. “It’s a day off. A whole day of no one watching in the mirror. No emergency calls. No . . . nothing.”

Liam stood up and walked to the mantel, where he licked his fingers and then touched two candles. The candles burst into flame. “Blessing? Curse?”

My harathakin didn’t answer. In fact, while Haniel had done his “deprive Marissa of life” bit, they hadn’t so much as tossed a piece of garbage. Then again, two spell creatures versus an archangel wouldn’t be much of a fight.

“Can you see them?” I glanced to Ari.

“Still blind to magic, M.” For all Ari complains about how the spirit world distracted her, losing her sight, even temporarily, didn’t improve her attitude. “Grimm say how long he’d be gone?”

“One day.”

Liam nodded. “Which could mean the whole weekend, since tomorrow is Friday, right?”

I hadn’t considered it. “I’d notice if he were gone that long.”

“Yeah, but no one else would. I’ll bet you get the next three days to sleep late.” Liam rose and grabbed the plates, serving us dinner.

“You know what that means?” I asked, ignoring the pained expression that spread across Ari’s face. “We can stay up late. Talk.”

Ari looked like she’d swallowed a chunk of mana. “If you mean talk, I won’t need my earphones.”

I didn’t.

•   •   •

The next morning, after Liam dragged himself from bed and off to truck through the sewers again, I took my note from Grimm and prepared to go into Kingdom. Which meant checking in on my roommate. “Ari. You up for a trip to Kingdom?”

“Go away.”

“There will be coffee. And donuts.” As if Ari could resist donuts.

“Go away. I’m exhausted.”

I opened the door to her bedroom. “Why? You weren’t the one up all night.”

“Yes, I was.” Ari sat up in bed. “You need a gag. Or a soundproof bedroom. I need a pair of industrial earplugs and a few hours’ sleep.”

“We’re not that bad.”

“You are.” Ari rolled over and put her pillow over her head. “Good night, Marissa.”

So I left her.

The gates of Kingdom divide it from the rest of the city, which is convenient, since Kingdom and the city overlap. It’s basically a separate layer of reality, held in place by the gates. And if you thought the city was crazy, Kingdom would push you over the edge.

Though Kingdom was only open to those with a connection to magic, my harathakin, living creatures given to me by the fae, could let me access Kingdom on my own. One was a blessing, one was a curse, and both were at least mildly psychotic. I turned the corner, passing the gates, and waited for the magic to take hold.

With each step, a part of the city sloughed away. The air lost the ever present aroma of urine. The concrete shifted to sparkling marble. The crowds—well, the crowds changed, but that’s about all they did. Friday morning in Kingdom was a preparation for one hell of a party. By midnight tonight, the place would be so thick with spells and enchantments you’d have princesses hooking up with farm boys.

Many a man went to bed with a princess and woke up with a witch. It happened in Kingdom too.

The shops here sold everything a person might need for a fairy-tale life. Charms for when your prince wasn’t. Long dresses, which didn’t get caught in weeds or wick up mud. Veils just perfect for not quite being able to see a woman’s face, which came in handy if you were secretly passing yourself off as someone else. Or if you just didn’t feel like applying makeup.

Today, however, I was headed to the museum. Kingdom’s museum, which made it marginally less boring. A banner hung over the sandstone exterior. “Lance-a-lot: The exhibition of pig-stickers.” Unlike the post office, there was no line to get in.

I tapped on the first ticket window, waiting for the man inside to respond.

“Pssst. He’s dead.” The man’s voice came from behind me.

I glanced around to the other ticket taker. “As in—”

“Dead. Died two weeks ago, just after lunch.”

On second glance, the ticket taker did look lifeless, even for a government employee. I tapped on the window and he didn’t move. Again, not unusual for a government employee. “If he’s dead, what is he still doing there?”

“He was only four weeks from retiring. It would kill him to miss it by a few days. Can I help you?”

I shuffled to the second ticket booth and paid my money. “You’ve still got magical antiquities, right?”

He nodded. “Just past the display on living with pixies. If you reach the Hall of Warts, you’ve gone too far.”

With ticket in hand, I entered the domain of evil. Well, not evil, but boredom. Which could be kind of evil. Museum air has a certain quality to it, no matter where you are. It’s a scent that says “Somewhere in this building are mummified bodies. Not the ones outside in the ticket booth. No, old ones. We have them here.” It also says “We’re grinding them up and feeding them into the air-conditioning.”

The dust on the floor lay thick, only disturbed by a parade of school students being forced to take the field trip tour. They held on to the rope, not so much to avoid getting lost as to be dragged along with the group if they slipped into a coma from boredom.

I found the side hall labeled “Magical Antiquities.” I could have turned a tractor trailer around inside. And yet the whole thing was lit by five measly light bulbs. The exhibits themselves made watching leaves rot look interesting. Ancient scrying crystals (a fancy term for “glass beads”). Ancient divination pearls (glass beads). The shrunken heads of five hundred gnomes (not glass beads, but still boring).

Only one display held anything of interest, and that was due to the emblem on the brass plaque. A single rose in a ring of thorns, it matched line for line the scars on my left hand. The handmaiden’s mark. Symbol of the Black Queen. I still couldn’t look at it without feeling the thorns tear into me.

The case held a single sword, a blade that looked more like an overgrown thorn than metal. So this is what she used to kill people. I reached out to brush the edge of the blade.

And a light flashed, a siren blared. “Intrusion detected in Magical Antiquities,” said an automated voice. Actually, come to think of it, it might have been a man’s voice, but since it was a museum employee, it was hard to tell.

A moment later, an old man stumbled into the exhibit, a flashlight in one hand, a cane in another. “It’s true!” He turned and shouted. “We have a visitor!”

“Are you the curator?” I shouted, hoping he could hear me.

“I am,” he said. “The exit is right over there, if you’ve gotten lost. I’m so sorry. We used to have a light showing which way it was, but people would just leave.”

While my first instinct was to leave as well, I couldn’t without what I came for. “I’m looking for the Press of Aiyn. Is it here?”

His eyes widened. “You want to see something here? And you aren’t, I don’t know, sick?”

“Not far as I can tell.”

“This way,” he said, leading me to the far corner. There, a tuning fork the size of a guitar lay in a padded case. “This here is the only magical press ever created. Ansel Aiyn went on to invent the soul sieve, a much more efficient method of extracting spells.”

“How does it work?”

He choked out a laugh. “Damned if I know. Using it might destroy it, and the only thing we destroy here is curiosity.”

I reached out and flicked the fork, but resting in the padding, it didn’t hum. “So do I need to sign something saying I’ll bring it back?”

“Back from where?” He fiddled with his hearing aids. “The bathroom, you say? That way.”

I let out an annoyed sigh at all the times Grimm failed to mention details like this. “Do you have any idea who I am or who I work for?”

“No, young lady, I don’t.”

“Good.” I seized the fork from its display, setting off an alarm like a howler monkey, and sprinted for the nearest fire exit. As I threw it open, the chorus of alarms became a sea of shrieking. I had to disappear. Grimm would disapprove of killing guards, and based on the size and age of the guards I’d passed on the way in, just chasing me down the alley might kill them.

Rooftops were out. No way to climb with the fork, which weighed more than a bucket of cat litter. Even Kingdom police could spot “woman carrying three-foot tuning fork.” So I stopped at the end of the alley and pried up the manhole cover, then slipped down into darkness.

Kingdom’s sewers weren’t built large so women could walk upright in them. They weren’t built large to provide a perfect nesting place for mutant alligators. They were built large because Kingdom’s population of ogres produced more waste than the humans themselves.

In order to tell you how hot the sewers were, I’d need something to gauge against, like, for instance, the surface of the sun. Which was only a few degrees less hot, and I’m fairly certain less humid. The stench down there was practically a creature of its own.

You’d think the stink would be the same, and of the same thing.

You’d think wrong. Oh, the underlying stench was most definitely of toilet, but the scents mingled and mixed like colors on an artist’s pallet. So I tore my sleeve loose and bound it around my head, forming a not nearly effective enough breathing apparatus.

All I had to do was go with the flow far enough to hit the next pumping station. As I approached the next junction, the theme of stink became “rotten meat.” And a rumble through the tunnels came rolling like thunder. Reminiscent of a passing bus, except that this particular bus had evolved before the dinosaurs.

Why hadn’t I insisted on Liam coming with me? Oh, right. Because he was a free man. One day, I’d fix that in the normal, socially accepted manner. Maybe. Cursed with the power (and microscopic brain) of a dragon, Liam measured monster alligators in “boots per foot.”

I snapped open my cell phone. Damned cell towers gave me poor reception on a good day. The roaring, which grew louder by the moment, told me this was not a good day. And I didn’t even bring my anti-alligator ammo.

The tunnels opened out to a pumping pool, and there, a bad day went worse. At first, I wondered why Kingdom Sewage Services had allowed so many rocks to pile up. The pebbly surface of the rocks reminded me of something else.

A pile of eggs. A large pile of eggs, belonging to something large and angry.

I searched for the manhole ladder, because regardless of where I came up, and regardless of whether or not there were police in the area, it would be a lot better for my health aboveground. I spotted a set of iron prongs and clambered over the pile of eggs to reach them.

My foot slipped, cracking an egg. Inside, a wet form thrashed feebly and let out a dying squeal that echoed through the tunnel. Beneath me, the mound of eggs answered in muffled squeaks. And the world roared around me as an angry mother answered.

I caught the bottom rung, but the pile of eggs shifted beneath me, crushing more eggs. And the smell of death overwhelmed every other stench. Hand over hand, I climbed up toward the manhole cover and possible safety.

Two pegs from the top, the thrashing below went silent. I risked a glance into the pumping station below. A single red eye glared up at me, filled with primal hatred. I was safe though. Not even the alligator’s nose could fit in the narrow surface access tube.

She swung her head like a club, crashing into the pillar holding my ladder, obliterating it.

And I fell.