9: Elise
“We lost Francis.”
Elise fumbled with the shower controls. Surely, she had misheard her cousin, Clarice. She turned off the steaming water, and then flicked off the fan on the overhead bathroom heater. In the silence, Elise stood naked and dripping wet, struggling to contain her fear and grief to ask for details.
“Francis is dead?” Elise asked.
“He is?” Clarice cried with surprise and dismay.
“I’m asking you!” Elise said.
Clarice worked as a dispatcher at the Central Office. She was responsible for assigning missions to the Virtues and Powers of the East Coast Grigori. She would be the first person to know if something had gone horribly wrong with anyone in their family.
“No! At least, I don’t think so.” Clarice didn’t sound positive. “There aren’t any unexplained craters in New England. I checked. We just…lost…him.”
Elise took a deep breath as relief flooded through her. Francis was her baby cousin, the youngest child of her mother’s youngest sister. He had been a sweet, gentle little boy. He liked climbing into her lap to be held when he was a toddler. Even then, though, you could sense his potential. He was there, blistering on your awareness, even when he was asleep on your shoulder. He wanted to train with Elise, Clarice, and his older sister, Theodosia, in Greece to be a Virtue. God had other plans.
Last time she’d seen him, he’d been sitting in the smoking ruins of a tiny Greek village that he’d just wiped off the face of the planet, covered with soot and blood, wailing with remorse. As a Power, there were very few things on the planet that could actually harm Francis. He could, however, take out whole square miles of the landscape by accident.
“He’s worse than me with equipment,” Clarice continued, accompanied by the furious click of a computer keyboard. “I’m not sure how he goes through so many phones. He kills them nearly as fast as I mail him new ones. I swung a special corporate rate to buy cell phones in bulk. Twenty bucks a phone. If it was me, Grandmother would be howling at the cost, but Francis is a Power…”
“Clarice! Focus! How did you lose him?” Elise hit the speaker button, put down her phone, and picked up a towel to dry off. If this conversation continued in this direction, she was leaving her apartment in a matter of minutes.
The world outside Elise’s windows was still gray with wintry dawn. The holidays with the werewolves had reset her sleep schedule; she was no longer on vampire hours. The Wolf King, the prince, and all the Thanes had gone back to New York City in one big motorcade. Joshua had started school yesterday. She’d gotten up early despite her plan to sleep in.
“If I knew how Francis disappeared, he wouldn’t be lost.” Clarice huffed. “He’d be slightly misplaced—or something.”
“Clarice!” Elise cried.
“Theodosia had to drive through Vermont. She decided to stop at the monastery where Francis lives. He wasn’t there. She called me wanting to know where I’d deployed him to so she could check up on him. I haven’t talked to him for days! He should be home!”
Theo worked out of Bangor, Maine. Her district overlapped with the Viscount of Burlington’s territory of Maine, New Hampshire, and parts of Vermont. Francis had chosen the monastery to be close to his only sibling. The monastery was literally in the middle of nowhere, ten miles from the Canadian border.
“Maybe he went to the mall or to a movie.” Elise wanted it to be something simple and nondramatic. Her family had already lost one person recently, her cousin Cade, killed by the Wickers.
“No! Francis wouldn’t drive all the way to Boston to see a movie. Theo stopped to check on him because she had a weird bad feeling like that time in Greece!”
“Francis is in Boston?” Elise echoed. “I thought you lost him!”
“I found his car,” Clarice said. “I made sure that his vehicle came with OnStar, and it was activated before I had it delivered to him. After Greece, it seemed like a good idea. Francis never leaves the monastery unless I call him. Well…almost never. It’s not like there’s anywhere to go! There’s a ski resort but the one time he tried skiing, it ended badly for the mountain. He buys everything on the internet and has it shipped to him. Some of it is seriously odd. He’s into adult—”
“Where is his car?” Elise asked to stop the flood of information. She didn’t need to know Francis’ vices. They were probably minor compared to her dating a werewolf.
“The Alewife station’s parking lot,” Clarice said. “I hacked into their security camera system. I’m looking at his car right now. It’s just sitting there like it’s an ordinary car of an ordinary person that can’t reduce all of Boston to a smoking ruin. I feel so useless!”
Alewife station in Cambridge was five miles from her condo. More importantly, it was the terminus for the Red Line subway. It gave Francis a direct line into the heart of Boston.
“He’s not allowed that close to a city—is he?” Elise asked.
“Sort of!” Clarice wailed. “Dispatchers aren’t allowed to send Powers into heavily populated urban areas without approval from their tribal elder. We haven’t been able to deploy Powers into major American cities without notifying proper authorities since the San Francisco 1906 incident. That is always an interesting conversation to have with a newly appointed bureaucrat. But that ban only covers deploying a Power on an active mission, not them visiting those metropolitan areas. That’s just frowned upon since it’s a bad idea. Francis is fine with the informal restrictions—I think. He’s never talked about wanting to visit Boston. Besides, Montreal is closer, has no standing orders about Powers, and sorry, it’s way cooler. It’s like Paris without the jetlag. The thing is, sometimes God steps in and is all hands-on, and then it’s anything goes. Francis just ends up places, at the right place at the right time—like in Greece.”
One could argue that it was the wrong place at the wrong time considering the destruction that followed.
Either reclusive Francis was blatantly ignoring rules in place for over a century or God sent Francis to Boston. It was terrifying that the second seemed more likely. God had sent Francis to the little Greek village that no longer existed.
Elise wrapped the towel around her head. She was dry enough. She needed to find Francis before something horrible happened. “Theo is still in Vermont?”
“I just texted her. She’s heading to Alewife but it’s two hundred and thirty miles.”
It would take Theo at least three hours to get to Boston. “Okay. I’m on it.”
“I know you’re going to be mad about this,” Clarice said quietly. Carefully. “But you can’t tell Decker or the wolves.”
Elise swore. “Why the hell not?”
“Well, first off, we don’t want Francis accidently nuking the Prince of Boston out of existence. It would be hard on our political ties with our allies, not to mention the ensuing possible destruction that would follow if it turned out that Seth’s brother or his cousin isn’t strong enough to bear the weight of Boston.”
Yes, there was that. Elise pulled on underwear.
“Plus, there’s Theo to consider,” Clarice said. “She’ll be there by noon. Theo. Wolves. Not a good idea.”
“Why not Decker?”
“Normally I would say the more the merrier. Decker’s dowsing ability would be useful in finding Francis but it’s morning. Decker is dead to the world until sunset. Literally. If you try to leave Decker a message, Joshua might intercept it. He might think it’s his duty to help a friend find their lost family member. Most people would. It’s going to be hard enough to keep the prince out of this. If Joshua gets involved, then Seth will act.”
Elise winced as she realized that Clarice was right on all counts. It was one of the reasons that Clarice was the dispatcher: she could see patterns. “Okay. Mum’s the word.”
“Be careful,” Clarice said. “Francis wouldn’t do this on a whim. Something is very wrong. Either God sent him to Boston to nuke it to the ground or Francis has finally snapped. He’s been a little broken since Greece. Be careful.”
“I will.” She always was. It was why she was still alive.
* * *
Francis owned a big luxury Cadillac Escalade SUV. It wasn’t for vanity’s sake; not all monsters kept to paved streets. She owned a Jeep Wrangler for the same reason. Francis’s car needed to provide a safe, comfortable, and isolated retreat; Central couldn’t put civilians at risk by having him check into a hotel unless it couldn’t be helped.
The SUV had a bright yellow custom paint job, which was a surprise. Virtues drove vehicles that were “low profile” in nature. Black. White. Dark Blue. She supposed the yellow worked like a warning sign. The color said, “Danger, proceed with caution, avoid contact.”
Winter had just started in earnest in Boston, but it had already taken a toll on the Cadillac. Its sides were caked with mud and slush. Someone had drawn a smiley face in the dirt. It grinned at her, full of impish delight. Wash me had been scribbled under the smile but road dirt had changed the lettering until it seemed to spell out Watch me.
Elise eyed the car from the warm safety of her black Jeep. It could be her own paranoia being kicked into overdrive, but the Cadillac felt like a trap.
The SUV sat on the open roof of the parking garage. A foot of snow covered the Cadillac’s roof and windshield, serving as proof that the SUV had been there for some time. The cars surrounding it were clean; they were obviously driven by commuters who’d arrived early that morning to catch a train into the city.
Her phone played Clarice’s ringtone. Elise took it out and tapped the “answer” icon.
“It’s just sitting there,” Clarice whispered. “All innocent like.”
It wasn’t just Elise’s paranoia, then.
It was too quiet, she realized. There should be screaming and fire and blood everywhere. The world trembled when Powers went on a rampage.
If any other cousin was missing, she would believe something—a witch, a monster, a breach—had done something to them. She had been ignoring that possibility because Francis was a Power.
“Are you watching me through the security system?” Elise asked.
“Of course! I’m missing one cousin. I don’t want it to be two. The Cadillac has an OnStar system. I can disable its alarms and pop its locks when you’re ready.”
“Pop them now,” Elise said.
“Huh?”
“Just in case there’s a bomb wired into the locks.”
“Oh. Oh! Oh!” There was the sound of furious typing. “I hadn’t even considered a third party could be involved in Francis disappearing. You just don’t think ‘kidnapping’ when you’re talking about a Power. How would you even manage it? It would be like trying to pull the sun out of the sky.”
The SUV flashed its lights as Clarice unlocked it remotely.
“Huh,” Clarice said. “Well, I guess there’s no bomb connected to its locks. There still could be one tied to the ignition—don’t try starting it.”
“I’m going in.” Elise switched to a Bluetooth headset to free up her hands.
It was freezing on the windy rooftop. Elise pulled her scarf up high to protect her face. The blanket of snow cloaked the interior of the SUV from causal view. She would need to clean off its windows to see inside.
There were footprints of someone getting out of the driver’s side of the SUV. He or she compacted several inches of snow with what looked like size-twelve boots. The prints were still visible despite the hours of snow that had followed. It would be a mistake to assume it was Francis. Someone else could have driven the car here and abandoned it.
There were tracks on the passenger side, but they seemed too fresh. They most likely had been made by the driver of the car beside the SUV.
She brushed the wet clingy snow from the driver’s side windows so she could peer into the Cadillac. It was a lived-in car. There was a paper coffee cup in the center console. A box of donuts sat in the passenger seat. Oddly, a St. Christopher’s medal hung from the rearview mirror.
Elise frowned at the medal. To most people’s dismay, the angelic weren’t Christians. Their religion shared roots with Judaism. The Jewish religious leaders branched off as they decided that acknowledging the existence of angels was in conflict with the idea of one god. To the uneducated outsider, it would seem that the Virtues’ rituals were based on the Christian Bible, but they came from the part of the Talmud that formed the Old Testament. Her people saw Christianity as something that didn’t include them as they were bound to God by an ancient pact made days prior to the Great Flood. They had taken their name from what the Greeks had called them. “Grigori” was the Greek word for “Watcher,” as their angelic forefathers had been commanded to keep watch over humans and protect them from monsters. Salvation for them came from keeping their part of the bargain: to use their abilities to hunt monsters.
Francis might take refuge with the Catholic brothers, but he’d never actually pray to a saint. Why would he have a St. Christopher medal? Was this really his car? The backseat was a nest of blankets, pillows, coloring books, and stuffed animals. It looked more like a family car than something that belonged to a monster hunter.
“What’s in the car?” Clarice said. “I can’t see inside! You look really freaked out. Is someone frozen in there or something?”
“Clarice, did the monks provide Francis with a driver?”
“Oh God, I thought you knew. Galahad Percival Roustabout has been Francis’s driver since he came back from Greece. I didn’t think Grandma would allow it—Roustabout being fresh out of jail for manslaughter—but she seemed to think it was fated.”
“Manslaughter? What the hell?”
“It’s a long, weird story typical of our family.” Clarice loudly typed at her keyboard, multitasking as only someone with her talents could. “There were werewolves and hordes of monsters and people torn to pieces—one of them being Roustabout—but Francis raised him from the dead. Anyhoo, Roustabout was dead a good hour or so before Francis revived him, so he had a nice long tour of the afterlife. Francis claimed that he was a changed man. And he seems to be right. Roustabout is in the pipeline to become a Franciscan friar. Apparently, there’s a lot more to it than putting on the robes and shaving your head. Wait! Is Roustabout dead in the car?”
“No one is dead in the car.” Elise scanned the parking lot. “It’s empty. Are you sure that this Roustabout didn’t just steal the car and take off?”
“I told you! I don’t know anything!” Clarice cried. “I doubt it. Roustabout seems devoted to Francis. Borderline worship. Maybe not borderline—maybe whole hog. Francis is a Power. It would be like meeting Jesus in the flesh.”
“What does this Roustabout look like?”
“I have a full dossier on him. I’ll send it to you. Here’s a picture of them together.”
Elise’s phone dinged. She took it out of her pocket to look at its screen.
Francis owned a selfie stick. That was surprising. Their family normally avoided cameras. Their angelic blood gave them a supernatural beauty. It went beyond having symmetrical features, stunning eye color, great hair, and good skin. It gifted them with a magical glamour: an aura of attraction that they couldn’t turn off. It was a burden, not a blessing, as people didn’t see “them” but an idealized version of them. Most strangers reacted strongly to their appearance. People stared at them. Touched them. Tried to have sex with them.
The experience made most of her family abnormally self-conscious; they hated getting their pictures taken. Francis, though, had been in seclusion most of his life. He and Theo had been homeschooled. After he became a Power, it was too dangerous for him to go out in public. Theirs was a jealous and protective God; it punished anyone who was too forward with its Powers. Perhaps Francis hadn’t been subjected to the unwanted attention enough to be self-conscious.
Like most of their family, Francis had been a beautiful child. As a young man, he was stunning. He’d let his dark hair grow into a glossy mane of soft curls that made his eyes seem more unreal with their vivid blue color. He smiled widely at the camera. He was still just a teenager in the picture, slender in build. Francis had always been short for their family; his driver made him seem even shorter.
Roustabout was a big brute of a man. He wore a black tank top that showed off a muscle-builder body with every inch of his arms covered with tribal sleeve tattoos. Someone had tried to take out his right eye with a knife, leaving a scar from his heavy eyebrow down to his jutting jawbone. He had multiple piercings—his ears, his eyebrow, and his nose. In the picture, he had on a black knitted cap that covered any indication what his hair color was. Based on his thick eyebrows, she guessed that he had dark hair.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Elise said. “That’s Francis’s driver? Grandmother knew about this? She allowed it?”
“Francis doesn’t like to drive,” Clarice said. “He can do it but he’s not very good at it. He’s not very good at any of the necessary life skills for living alone.”
“He’s twenty. No one is good at that stuff at twenty. You only get better with practice.”
“Normally I’d agree with you, but he’s a Power and he has PTSD. I still don’t know how his washing machine could ‘startle him,’ but he kept reducing it and his laundry room to rubble. I thought I was hard on equipment, but I don’t take out the surrounding buildings when I break things. That’s why he’s at the monastery—it’s a nice peaceful place where someone else does the cooking and laundry. Besides, Florida was pissed at him after what happened in Miami. I’m with Francis on that, though: alligators shouldn’t be in public parks.”
Elise hadn’t heard about the alligator or the public park. “I thought he wanted to be closer to Theo.”
“That’s why he’s in New England and not on the West Coast. The brothers at the monastery haven’t complained yet but I get the impression he’s singed a few of them by mistake. Francis says they’re all afraid of him. None of them wanted to be trapped in a car with him, so when Francis asked for Roustabout to move with him, Grandmother allowed it. The man seems devoted to Francis. No matter what is going on, you’ll need to be careful of Roustabout. He’s a champion heavyweight mixed martial artist. He knows kickboxing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Muay Thai. What’s more, he’ll probably assume that you’re as dangerous as Francis. He won’t underestimate you.”
As if a mentally unstable Power wasn’t enough, he came with a brute of a bodyguard and/or kidnapper. Roustabout might be devoted to Francis, but Boston just had an infestation of Wickers that could corrupt the will of any human. The big question was, did Francis need to be saved or stopped or assisted?
* * *
Elise searched the interior of the SUV for clues.
The backseat had all the makings of a comfortable retreat. For stuffed animals, Francis had nothing as mundane as a teddy bear. His collection contained a gray elephant, a blueberry-ripple unicorn, a rainbow alpaca, a three-toed sloth, and a golden chicken. Two down pillows and an oddly heavy blanket completed Francis’s nest.
Francis liked to color to past the time. Francis used top quality Prisma pencils in a hundred and thirty-two carefully sorted colors, stored in the original tins. None of them seemed to be missing. His current coloring book was titled Color Me Calm: 100 Coloring Templates for Meditation and Relaxation (A Zen Coloring Book). It contained mandalas, geometric patterns, water scenes, flora, fauna, and natural patterns. Roughly a third had been carefully colored in. It would be quite beautiful except someone had written things like “I’m so fucking lonely” in the white spaces.
There was a wicker picnic basket sitting on the floor on the passenger side. It was packed with thick ham sandwiches on artisan bread, a roasted sweet potato wrapped in tin foil, and two organic apples. If it wasn’t sitting frozen in the back of a car, it would seem to indicate that nothing was amiss.
She moved back to the front seat to check the glove compartment. Inside she found a brown paper bag containing a box of yellow pills in blister packs. The brand name was Ativan, which she wasn’t familiar with.
Clarice called her. “What did you find? You’ve been digging around for ten minutes now.”
“What is Ativan?” Elise took a picture of the pills and sent it to Clarice. “Is it some kind of medicine for Roustabout or—is Francis sick?”
She’d always been told that Powers didn’t get sick, at least, not physically.
“I-I-I’m not sure.” Clarice said. “I talked to him, and he was saying things that—at the time—I thought was a joke. They might have been jokes. It’s just that afterward, I felt…unsettled. He might not be joking.”
“Like what?”
“Well, he talked about going to see a shrink for his PTSD, which isn’t that weird. But then he said that the discussion would lead to him confessing to be God in flesh. His entire problem stems from the fact he is God’s power given human form. Francis believed that explaining why he has PTSD would lead to his shrink to trying to commit him to some kind of mental hospital—which is possible—depending on Vermont’s involuntary commitment laws. I really should have looked it up after the second time he talked about it. I thought he was joking. It was funny the way he said it. He made it sound like people tying steaks to their body and going out into the woods to look for bears. You know how sweet and gentle he is. A regular psychologist would have no idea how dangerous he really is. Francis had this entire elaborate scenario mapped out that ended with him accidently killing the psychologist, the hospital staff and any police officers rallied for the committal. Francis said he’d feel so guilty that he’d raise them all from the dead. It would make the psychologist finally believe his claims, but it would be hard on their patient/doctor relationship.”
That was a fairly accurate prediction given Francis’s PTSD and how most psychologists didn’t believe in the supernatural. Elise wasn’t sure how the general populace became so ignorant of the truth. Sometime between the witch trials of Salem and the current day, the general populace lost its fear of things that went bump in the night. The chance of being killed by a monster was much higher than being attacked by a shark, one in five thousand to be torn to shreds on land as compared to one in three million bitten in the ocean. It was possible to survive a shark attack. A single nip from a monster—no matter how small a wound—would transform a human.
It was irrational that people were afraid of sharks but didn’t believe in monsters. It didn’t even make sense that the general population didn’t know that the danger was real.
“Ativan is a prescription medicine used to treat anxiety,” Clarice said. “I know that Roustabout isn’t seeing a doctor; I’m keeping tabs on him. I don’t think Francis is actually going to a psychologist. I do have him on the health plan just in case he did manage to accidently hurt himself and for some strange reason God didn’t instantly heal him.”
“If it’s a prescription drug,” Elise said, “one of them had to see a doctor.”
“Or Roustabout got them—somehow—illegally.” Clarice’s comment was underscored by her typing on her keyboard. “Huh. That blister pack is what emergency rooms use, not what is handed out to customers by drug stores. I know that neither one of them has been to the ER. Roustabout did spend ten years in prison for manslaughter before becoming Francis’s driver. It’s possible he bought the pills off the black market or stole them or…or…I don’t know…got them off of Craigslist. You can get weird shit off the internet.”
Elise eyed the unmarked brown bag she’d found the pills in. Virtues weren’t immune to diseases, just highly resistant. The few times she was prescribed antibiotics, the drugstore used white bags with the pharmacy name printed on them. A printout of her prescription and a pamphlet with warnings about the drugs’ side effects had been stapled to the outside. This package had none of the standard trappings. “You think Francis would actually self-medicate?”
“Oh, I hope not. The possible side effects of Ativan are scary when you consider Francis is a Power.”
“What side effects?”
“Confusion. Hyperactivity. Hostility. Hallucinations. Amnesia.”
A Power with amnesia and hostility issues: not a good thing.
Elise felt guilty that she hadn’t made the drive up to check on Francis personally. The six-hour round trip had seemed too much effort.
“None of the pills seem missing.” Elise offered that up as hope.
The rear storage was totally devoid of normal hunting weapons and paraphernalia. No gun safe, caltrops, traps, or bags of salt. Powers didn’t need such things—they were God’s ultimate weapon. Neatly packed into the space was a small tent, two sleeping bags, a duffel bag of clean clothes, a plastic baggie of new toothbrushes still in their packaging, a mega pack of wet wipes, a box of shop towels, and a canvas tote of “emergency food.” Francis had stocked chocolate energy bars, packets of hot cocoa, and a box of graham crackers and marshmallows to make smores. The rations made it look like he was going camping with Girl Scouts.
While the rest of the car looked like a lived-in mess, the back appeared to have been packed long ago for any unexpected overnight trip into the wilderness.
She’d learned all that she could from the car. She transferred the duffel bag of clothes to her Jeep just in case she found Francis covered in ash or drenched in blood. The question remained, where were Francis and his driver now?
“What have you found out from the security cameras?” she asked Clarice.
“I’m still working on that,” Clarice said. “I hacked into the live feed easily enough, but the history was a struggle. I’m in, though, and stepping back through the video to see when the SUV parked in that spot.”
* * *
Why was the SUV at Alewife station?
People used the subway system because they didn’t have personal drivers. Roustabout could have taken Francis to any place that he wanted to go and then waited with the SUV. Alewife was the terminus of the Boston subway; it sat facing Route 2 with its back to a bird-watching park. It was isolated from anything useful except hot coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts on the lower level. Not far away—but not convenient enough to walk in this subzero weather—was everything from supermarkets to hotels and even some Catholic churches. There was lots of free parking at the places that offered hot food, warm beds, or holy refuge.
Francis wouldn’t use the subway system for the same reason that most people wouldn’t juggle live grenades in a crowd: it was just too dangerous to innocent bystanders. It didn’t make sense for Roustabout to park at Alewife if he intended to pick Francis up someplace else. Did someone steal the car and leave it at the station? There had been no sign of tampering with the ignition.
The garage was too public and too secure for the SUV to remain unnoticed forever. Sooner or later, Clarice would have found it even without tracking devices. Or was that the point? Was the Grigori meant to find it?
Elise found no real clues in the SUV. If the vehicle was parked at the garage to lead her to the train station, then she needed to search the building with caution.
She unsheathed her twin daggers. They flashed in the pale morning sun. She knelt in the snow and rested the tips lightly against the concrete of the parking garage’s top deck. Intent strengthened her connection to God, the Almighty. When she was little, she had felt Him, patiently waiting for her to take up daggers and learn the rituals that would make her His tool.
Francis wasn’t given a choice. God had put him in harm’s path, forcing him to forgo learning the rituals and blades that put limits on the power waiting to flood into them. There were cautionary stories of angelic children who mistakenly believe they were intended to be Powers. Who opened themselves up to God’s full glory only to be reduced to ash by what they channeled.
She felt the warmth of His love gather about her. Lightning scented the air with the potential. She whispered the holy words that would shield her from taking harm from God’s power even as the ritual used His strength to conceal her.
“Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle; He is my steadfast love and my fortress, my stronghold, and my deliverer; my shield and He in whom I take refuge. Amen.”
Angelic wings—ghostlike in appearance—threw even fainter shadows on the snow. The ritual would cloak her from cameras and the naked eye of normal men. Francis would be able to see her, as would any werewolf, vampire, or other supernatural being. It would only offer limited protection. She would still need to search carefully.
* * *
Alewife station was a mix of concrete, steel, and glass dedicated to the function of protecting commuters from the elements while shuffling thousands of people on and off trains. The ticketing machines and fare gates were on the cavernous mezzanine with tall windows to let in sunlight. The floor was an odd mosaic of mismatched beige tiles. Everywhere were accents of red to remind commuters that they were boarding the Red Line. It was lacking anything else. No art. No seats. No clutter. No place to hide.
Noise echoed up from the platforms below. The loud rumble of trains. The occasional sharp squeal of wheels on rails. The announcements over the PA system. The dissonant nature was grating on her nerves. Sensing her without consciously noticing her presence, a flood of people wove around her, rushing off to work in Boston. It reminded her how much she hated crowds.
She thought of the stuffed animals and soft blankets that had been in the back of the SUV. Francis would have found this place nerve-racking.
The gates had tall panels of glass blocking access to the paid area; she needed a ticket to move through them. It seemed unlikely anyone would pay to set up a trap beyond the gates.
“Don’t assume anything,” she reminded herself as she fed money into the machine. It was the first rule of hunting. Assumptions were a trap; they limited your vision from all possibilities to just those that supported a preconceived notion.
She checked the restrooms that were accessible only to commuters who paid for a ticket. They were surprisingly clean, probably because of how early in the day it was. If there had been any clues to Francis’s disappearance, the janitors had wiped them away. Even the trash receptacles were empty.
The platforms were slightly more cluttered than the mezzanine level. There were advertising posters, soda vending machines, benches, and system maps. Tucked into corners, barely noticeable by the general public, were utility closets and storage rooms, all marked authorized personal only. One by one, she broke into them.
Machines. Cleaning supplies. No clues.
She was locking the last utility closet when Clarice called.
“I hate not being able to see you,” Clarice said. “I can see slight blurring on the cameras where you’re eclipsing objects, so I know that you’re fine, but it still freaks me out.”
“I’m done sticking my nose into places where I’m not supposed to go.” A gleam of white and the flutter of yellow down near the tracks caught Elise’s eye. “I think I see something down by the rails. Are there any incoming trains?”
“What? Wait. Let me check. Where did I put that tab?”
As Clarice searched out a train schedule and security cameras of the stations down the track, Elise took out her Bluetooth headset and put it on her left ear.
“Okay,” Clarice said after a minute of typing. “I’ve got eyes on all inbound and outbound trains. You’re clear for another ten minutes.”
Elise hopped down from the platform into the dark well that contained the steel rails. The gleaming white were feathers from a monster-size bird, six all total, drifting in the air currents trapped within the steep sides of the railbed. Each one was the size of her fist. She stacked them so she could hold all six in one hand. There was something very otherworldly about them. They gleamed, filling her cupped hands with pale white light. Tiny flecks of rusty red spotted the feathers, as if they’d been sprayed with cast-off blood.
The yellow was a scrap of plastic with Crime Scene printed on it. It was a fragment of police tape used to mark off crime scenes.
In the Boston Metro area, only forensic teams used this type of tape. Patrol officers were given rolls printed Police Line—Do Not Cross. The reasoning was that the printing was more multipurpose, allowing officers to do things like crowd control and marking off dangerous sidewalks and structures, without the ominous implication that the area was part of an active case.
If the police had marked this as a crime scene, something as unusual as the feathers would have been collected—unless a normal human couldn’t see them.
She scrambled up onto the safety of the platform.
“A train is leaving Davis,” Clarice said. Davis was the next station on the Red Line. “You’ve got six minutes tops.”
“I’m off the tracks.” She took out her phone. “Here, I’m going to Facetime you so you can see. Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Do you see anything?” Elise pointed the camera at her hand once the connection was made.
“I see the floor. I wonder why they decided to go with different shades of beige. I’m not sure if I like it or not.”
Elise sighed and canceled her cloaking ritual. “Now what?”
“Still seeing the floor. Should I be seeing something?”
Elise shifted her phone so it pointed at her feet. “What now?”
“I take it I’m looking at your boots. Very nice. Are those Ugg Adirondacks?”
“So you can’t see that I’m holding something?” Elise shifted the camera back to the feathers.
“I can’t even see your hand.”
The feathers were like her wings. They couldn’t be seen by most humans or through a camera lens. It meant no one would have seen the monstrous bird that shed the feathers. Whose blood speckled the downy white?
“Do you have access to the recordings from the security cameras?” Elise said.
“I’m stepping through it now while jumping through hoops with…Ah-ha! Yes, that’s what I wanted. Why did they make that so hard? What’s the difference between knowing where your car has been from where is it now? It’s your car! If I’d known they were going to make it this hard, I wouldn’t have just bought a black-market tracker.”
“Clarice!” Elise snapped.
“The car got here last night, around ten,” Clarice said. “And cameras say…” Some clicking of keys as she backed the security feed up to find the car parking. “Roustabout was driving it. Francis doesn’t seem to be with him. Oh, that’s not good. Roustabout is running and checking over his shoulder, like he expects to be chased by something. Shit, something wonky is happening with the security cameras. He keeps blinking out.”
“Like maybe a giant monster bird is eclipsing him?”
“Perhaps,” Clarice said. “What the hell? He was at the end of the platform all by himself—the camera blinked—and then he’s gone.”
Someone had sprayed blood all over the feathers.
“Can you check 911 calls for last night?” Elise asked. “Find out why a forensic team was down on the tracks recently?”
A train rumbled into the station, filling up the area that Elise had just vacated. It obscured the crime scene as Clarice searched. Passengers trickled off the newly arrived subway cars. Elise was glad that many had their heads down, studying their phones. Every male who glanced at her came to a full stop. She glared at them, wanting to be left alone. The joy of the Grigori glamour. It was more than just impossible beauty. It was the illusion of sexual perfection that most people couldn’t resist.
A hard glare and their own low self-esteem sometimes kept men from harassing her. It was the men who were cocksure of themselves that she needed to hit.
One by one, the new arrivals decided that either they weren’t worthy of her or that whatever business they were attending to was more pressing.
Elise sighed out relief when she was once again alone on the platform.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Clarice cried over the connection. “One of the subway drivers called in, saying someone fell onto the tracks as he was pulling into the station. He couldn’t get the train stopped in time. The John Doe was dead on the scene. An eyewitness said that he saw the man fighting with someone on the platform but couldn’t give a description of the attacker. The witness said that the John Doe was pushed.”
“Fighting with someone?” Elise repeated. Roustabout was a professional fighter. If his attacker was a normal human that a witness could actually see, maybe it hadn’t been Roustabout who ended up on the tracks. “Can you see anyone on the footage?”
“Not from the camera’s vantage point. I’m not seeing any possible witnesses until the train gets stopped.”
So, the witness was either lying or had a different vantage point than the camera or had enough spiritual power that they could see through whatever glamour was being cast on the area.
“Do you have any description on this John Doe?” Else asked.
Clarice snorted. “Male. White. Adult. It sounds like the body was in fairly bad shape after the train hit it. It’s at the county morgue.”
Elise closed her hand on the bright feathers. Where was Francis? Why wasn’t he in the car? Why would a monster bird be after Roustabout? Was it because it had already killed Francis? She doubted it. Monsters could rarely harm Powers, but it wasn’t impossible. If it had, though, she wasn’t going to be able to kill the bird by herself.
“Do you have an ETA on Theo?” Elise asked.
“She’s still over an hour out now,” Clarice said.
Theo had to be breaking the speed limit by thirty or forty miles per hour to be so close.
“I’m going to have to sweet-talk some of my contacts to find out what the police know about the dead man. Tell Theo to meet me at the offices of the chief medical examiner over on Albany Street.”