“Anak, wake up.”
Caren sat up in bed.
“Anak,” came Mom’s voice again. “Your friend Luke is here.”
At first Caren didn’t know where Mom was.
Then she spied her petite frame in front of the windows, dressed in the t-shirt and socks she always wore to sleep, bathed in blinding white light from outside. Still, smiling, staring out at something Caren couldn’t see for the brightness.
“Luke?” Caren echoed. “Where?”
Mom raised her arm and pointed out the window.
Caren got out of bed, in her oversized sweatshirt and bare feet, stumbled over, shielded her eyes, squinted into the light.
She noticed a shape in the distance, a slender shadow behind all the whiteness…which she now realized was snow, snow coming down in soft sheets, burying everything. Big bright flakes falling—soundless, except for a susurrus of static.
Caren looked back.
The house was gone, and Mom with it. Only whiteness remained, on all sides.
Facing front again, Caren saw the shape had gotten closer—was just a few yards away now, motionless as before.
It was Luke, like Mom had said. Luke in his quilted coat and mittens, wool knit toboggan pulled low over his ears mashing his bangs down flat against his eyelashes. Luke smiling his dorky dimpled smile. Snow falling all around him, and on him, sticking to his hair and lashes, piling high on his shoulders and the top of his head. Smiling, not moving, not blinking, while the surface of the snow crept up his ankles to the top of his boots, over his calves, flake by flake, past his knees to his thighs. Static slowly rising.
Move! Caren yelled, but her throat didn’t make the sound.
She tried to take a step toward him, but her feet wouldn’t budge. Looked down—saw her own legs buried to the knees in snow. Wiggled them frantically—then hurled herself forward with all her weight, a futile effort to dislodge them.
Raised her head. Saw snow piling up everywhere.
Didn’t see Luke anymore.
Until she did. But only his face.
Still smiling. Not blinking.
Surrounded on all sides by the mound of snow slowly sealing over it.
Static roaring.
Caren tried to reach out, but snow pinned her arms.
Luke’s eyes were gone now, buried in white. Nothing left but his nose and grinning mouth.
LUKE!
Caren jerked upright, heart hammering.
…Where am I?
Languid half-dark, half-harsh-light. Air dry and hot. No sound but the whirr of a decrepit space heater.
Not Mom’s house…not Caren’s own studio apartment.
There was a shape next to her in bed, facing away. Broad shoulders. Dark hair.
“Luke?” she whispered.
Then wakefulness dawned, with the knowledge, like a stone settling heavy on a riverbed, that there was no way in hell that was Luke sleeping peacefully beside her.
There followed nausea. A vague recollection of the early morning hours. Driving back from Arcadia in a stupor. Stopping into Voyeur for drinks because it was the only place she knew of that was open so late, and no way was she going home to her shitty apartment alone while it was still dark.
Getting half-wasted.
Sending a text message to Luke:
just another of ur disappearing acts. right?
When an hour and no response, and no read receipt either, a second text—this one to fucking Ellis:
dtf?
The rest was a blur.
Caren pawed around the bed, through the tangled-up sheets, through her clothes all mixed up with fucking Ellis’s, trying to find her phone.
When she couldn’t find it, she felt around again, more urgently.
Ellis stirred. Rolled slightly to squint over his wiry shoulder at her, his fine-pointed features screwed up in a sleepy grimace. “Caren, what the—?”
Caren ignored him. Started throwing bedclothes.
Then human clothes.
“Caren, what the fuck?”
She finally found her phone under Ellis’s boxers. Snatched it up, fumbling it like it was a wet bar of soap.
Gripped it tightly in both shaking hands. Opened her text thread with Luke.
Last message—
Unread.
Caren dropped the phone on the bed. Lowered her face into her hands. Pushed the heels of them into her eye sockets like she wanted to force out her eyeballs.
“Seriously though, what is up with you?” said Ellis. “You’ve been so fucking weird, ever since last night.”
Caren didn’t answer.
Ellis’s arms curled around her waist.
She pushed him off, staggered out of bed. Started assembling her clothes. Her chest was throbbing—nonstop since the night before, even worse than her head.
“This how it is now?” Ellis sat up, scratched himself, watched her dress with his arm draped over one knee. “You hit me up when you want the D, then take off first thing the morning after?”
Caren checked the time on her phone. “It’s—fuck—not morning, dude. It’s four fucking P.M., and I’m late for a thing.”
“What thing?”
“You still so thirsty, why don’t you call up your Khmun girl? What was her name, Khaleesi?” Caren yanked her shirt over her head, reached for her jacket.
“Kalliope. And come on, you gonna keep throwing that in my face forever?”
“Hey, it ain’t no thing. You were the one who wanted to be monogamous.” Caren sidestepped the peeling beanbag chair, the dangerously tall and lopsided stack of vinyls, a couple of open dog-eared daemonology tomes as she made a beeline for Ellis’s apartment door.
His voice followed her into the hall. “Hey, why don’t you give me a call sometime when you’re in less of a bitch moo—?”
Caren slammed the door behind her.
It was rainy out still. Tepid. The bus arrived behind schedule, because of course it did, because Philly.
Caren finally trudged into M&M Restaurant at four-thirty-three.
The little mom-and-pop diner was empty at this hour, except for its owners, Margaret, who welcomed Caren by name, and Martin, who was in the back slicing beef.
…And, of course, the familiar skinny white kid in the gray peacoat and glasses, who was sitting in the rearmost booth facing the door, nursing a glass of water.
Grenville’s round dark eyes followed Caren’s approach. “We should exchange cell numbers. I started to think you weren’t coming.”
“Yeah…sorry I’m late.” Caren slid into the other side of the booth, eyed a fat white envelope sitting on the table in front of her.
“Your payment for Navarrete.”
Caren pocketed it in her jacket. “Thanks. You know, you could have gone ahead and ordered food. You didn’t have to wait for me.”
“There’s nothing here I would consider eating.”
Caren shot a glance at Margaret and Martin, hoping neither of them had overheard.
She leaned forward and hissed at Grenville: “Who the hell are you, Marie Antoinette? The food here is to-fucking-die-for. What were you expecting, foie gras?”
“I wasn’t trying to be disparaging. I just observe a number of dietary restrictions, and everything on the menu here violates at least two of them.”
“Fucking…”
Caren waved Margaret over, put in an order for coffee and kielbasa.
As the proprietor walked away, Caren studied Grenville, who in turn seemed absorbed in studying his surroundings. There were Old-Worlders, Caren knew, who’d never set foot outside Arcadia, never seen a mundane. She wondered if he was one of them.
“You’re Fraternitas Mercurii, huh?” Caren eyed the ring on Grenville’s right forefinger that bore the seal of the elite all-male order.
“Yeah. But I can’t say much about it.”
“They try to burn you alive when you were a kid?”
“No. The Rite of Infernal Passage was officially banned about three years before I turned thirteen.”
“You mean after that one kid got cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey?”
“After the Phineas Gadshill incident came under public scrutiny…yeah.”
Caren fell briefly silent as Margaret returned with her coffee, mumbled her thanks.
Once she and Grenville were alone again: “Y’all are fucked up, you know. Just saying.”
Grenville traced his surroundings once more with his eyes, his head bobbing faintly like he’d lost himself in thought, then rummaged in the messenger bag on the seat beside him, producing a manila envelope. “Should I go ahead and brief you on the case so far?”
“Yeah, go wild.”
“Here are the ten locations where the killings took place.” Grenville slid a map out of the envelope and placed it on the table in front of Caren.
She looked at it. “That forms a fucking pentagram.”
“It does.”
Caren frowned, noting each of the locations. “Yeah, some of these places are heavily trafficked. Were there—?”
“Mundane witnesses? Yeah.”
“Explain to me how that doesn’t mean Lex violated the Occultation Protocols.”
“Lex used mind-wiped mundanes as weapons. Since the mundanes were tranquilized, they don’t and never will remember that magic was performed on them. And they themselves obviously didn’t perform magic while carrying out the public attacks, so mundanes who witnessed the attacks didn’t see any agent of Lex’s perform magic. It was actually brilliant, if you think about it. By targeting the Martial Magi using tranquilized mundanes, Lex forced the Martial Magi to defend themselves with magic—which means technically the Martial Magi ended up being the ones in violation of interfaction law. If any of them had survived, they’d be facing charges.”
Caren met Grenville’s eye. “You’re saying Lex is deliberately flouting Auctoritas Magicae law?”
“It looks that way.”
Caren might have almost respected it.
…If it hadn’t been for the collateral damage.
“I assume the major factions had to act fast to organize a cleanup,” she said.
“Yeah. Naturally they couldn’t do a perfect job…tracked down and mind-wiped witnesses, rounded up tranquilized mundanes who didn’t end up vegetative in mundane hospitals.” Grenville paused. “Made sure the ones who did didn’t make it out alive.”
Caren raised her eyebrows. “Shit… You serious?”
Grenville’s mouth twisted slightly, grimly. “They were walking husks,” he pointed out. “Good as dead to begin with.”
“Yeah…where’s the lie, I guess.”
“There were the cell phone videos to contend with. Of course any wireless signals in proximity went haywire once spells started flying, so no actual magic was livestreamed, but footage of the mobs did make it online. Tracking down and disposing of all recorded video of the magic activity wasn’t easy, but so far none’s leaked that we’re aware of.
“So what we’re seeing so far is mundane news outlets calling the incidents riots—reporting a lot of people missing, attributing weird injuries and memory loss to possible deployment of chemical weapons. Mundane conspiracy theorists flipping their lids. ‘The Midnight Riots’ already have their own subreddit.”
Caren raised an eyebrow. Kid was casually referencing subreddits. He couldn’t be as out of the loop as she’d guessed.
“The major factions have agents on the ground,” Grenville went on, “spreading rumors to help obfuscate the truth as much as possible. Pointing fingers at mundane gangs, dissident political groups. Extraterrestrials. Even mundane ‘magic’ adherents—Wiccans, Thelemites, Satanists.”
“Sounds like a fucking clusterfuck.”
“That’s the idea.”
“So then…”
Caren went quiet—and Grenville turned the map facedown—while Margaret dropped off Caren’s kielbasa.
The ratcatcher poked at her food, nibbled a small bite. Kielbasa was one of her faves, especially M&M’s kielbasa, but she hadn’t been able to muster up much of an appetite since last night.
Once Margaret was out of earshot, Caren jabbed her fork toward Grenville’s manila file. “What else have you got? Gimme the true fax.”
“I’ve got profiles on each of the mages who were killed. A list of names and basic info for the mundane casualties, those we were able to collect and identify. Reports on each of the crime scenes.” Grenville glanced over at Martin and Margaret, who were both busy behind the counter. “It might be better to go through all of it in depth someplace more private.”
Caren turned the map face-up again, studied it. “My place isn’t far from here,” she said absently. “We can head there in a bit. Uh…Grenville.”
“Yeah?”
She hesitated. “There’s ten locations marked on here. A name written next to each location. That’s telling me who was killed where, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. Well…twelve mages were killed. Not ten.”
“Right again.”
“So the other two…”
“Polyxena Severin and Luke Langit?”
“Right. Those two. They were…um. Where…were they…?”
“Are you asking where did they die?”
Caren started picking at her food again. Nodded.
Grenville was silent a moment. “We don’t know.”
Caren looked up, squinted at him. “What do you mean, ‘We don’t know’? Y'all recovered bodies, right? Luke was—all twelve victims were ID’ed by the Onomagnostikon.”
“That’s right, they were.”
“Well, then where the hell was Lu—were Severin and Langit?”
Grenville studied Caren. “He was someone you really cared about, wasn’t he? Luke Langit?”
“Why are you so fucking interested in that? The question I’m asking you has to do with the case.”
For the first time since Caren had met him, Grenville looked like he felt as awkward as he was. “I just thought…if that’s the case, I should warn you…you might find this detail really unpleasant.”
Caren stared at him. “What detail?”
Again, Grenville paused. “It’s…not known where Luke Langit was killed, or Polyxena Severin, because…remains of those two—and only those two—were recovered from all ten sites.”
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