Stiletto Page 5

“The living room,” said the man drily.

  “Is there anyone in there? Anything I need to be worried about?”

  “No.”

  “Jennings, that curtain makes me uncomfortable,” said Odgers. “We’ll be going there next, and if anything comes out, you smite it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jennings slung his weapon over his shoulder, lifted his arm toward the membranes, and flexed his fingers wide.

  Felicity kept her gun and her eyes firmly pointed at the man. Unfortunately, that meant that she got a good look at his backside. It was hairless, but then, so was the rest of him. Or at least, the parts that she could see. There was no hair on his scalp, but there was a set of curious bony ridges ringing his head. His skin was paper white and shone like glazed porcelain. As she peered closer, she saw that he was actually covered in tiny, perfect, polished scales. He was tall and slim.

  The man finished and took his foot off the pedal of the rubbish bin, sending the lid down with a clang. To Felicity’s consternation, he then turned around. He didn’t look over his shoulder, and he didn’t cover himself up. Despite herself, she looked at his penis.

  Okay, that’s . . . unorthodox.

  Instead of any form of genitalia with which Felicity was acquainted, the white man’s groin sported a smooth skin of those tiny white scales that shivered and locked together seamlessly before her eyes.

  The rest of him was similarly nonstandard. Like the back of him, the front of him did not have any hair. His skin glistened white in the light, and he was fairly muscular-looking. A ridge of scales rimmed his face, which looked normal and smooth apart from its pallor. Felicity guessed him to be in his late twenties.

  The most eye-catching thing about him (apart from the weird nodules on his head, the odd quality of his skin, and his lack of such traditional accoutrements as clothing and genitals) was the large crimson splash of blood on his torso. There was also blood on his arms, from the middle of his forearms up to his elbows.

  “Kneel,” said Odgers. “Hands on head.”

  “Of course,” he said as he knelt down smoothly. “I expect you are from the Checquy?” he asked, his accent seeming to skitter around the globe, as if he’d lifted pronunciations from multiple different languages.

  He knows about the Checquy!

  “We’re from the government,” said Odgers firmly, and the man smiled. He was not at all perturbed by the guns pointed at him. “Where is Melinda Goldstein?”

  “Through there,” said the man, jerking his head to the far side of the room, where the membrane hung down.

  “Is she alive?”

  “Ish.”

  Alive-ish, thought Felicity. Jesus.

  “Fine,” said Odgers grimly. “Now lie down with your face on the ground.” The man nodded and cleared his throat.

  “Skreeoh,” he said.

  “I beg your—” began Odgers, and then the music stopped and a horrendous shrieking sound began to rip forth all around them. It hammered through their heads. Automatically, Felicity began to hunch down, but—

  “Keep him covered!” shouted Odgers.

  “We’re clear!” shouted Jennings. “It’s coming from the walls!” Felicity saw the man tense his face, and then the floor beneath his feet and the ceiling directly above his head darkened, and the light was swiftly extinguished throughout the entire chamber. She caught a glimpse of him beginning to move just before the place was completely shrouded in darkness.

  “He’s bolting!” she shouted.

  “Shoot him!” barked Odgers, and the two women opened fire at the corner the Homeowner had been kneeling in. The rest of them held their positions as the muzzle flashes lit up the room for a moment. The screaming noise of the walls mercifully cut off with a tortured squeal, leaving everyone’s ears ringing.

  The strobing of the gunfire left afterimages glowing in Felicity’s eyes against the darkness, and she hurriedly slapped her visor down over her face.

  The room had apparently not taken well to getting peppered with bullets; the screaming had ceased, but a cloud of acrid black smoke was swirling through the space, along with the smell of burned hamburgers. Felicity could just make out that the corner of the chamber had been somewhat shredded, and the thick walls were oozing a viscous liquid. The rubbish bin of urine had been knocked over, with vile results. There was not, however, any sign of a white naked man or a white naked corpse. There weren’t even any white naked fragments.

  “I don’t see him!” she shouted. “Scan the room!” She peered around, gun raised, and saw that the others had flipped down their visors too. The valve-door had closed itself tightly; not even a trace of the seams remained.

  Then Felicity saw that Pawn Odgers was lying on the ground, her throat cut.

  “Oh no,” she breathed.

  “Clements, Chopra, flank me!” ordered Jennings. His tone cut through her horror, and she nodded obediently. The two of them moved to either side of the Pawn, trying to cover every direction the enemy might come from.

  “No radio contact with the team,” said Chopra grimly. “The door is shut.”

  “No sign of the target?” Felicity asked.

  “Maybe he escaped out the door?” wondered Chopra. “And then shut it behind him?” They looked around, peering through the smoke, and saw no trace of their quarry. The chamber was silent, apart from the dripping of the wounds in the wall.

  “Or he went into the other part of the room,” suggested Felicity quietly. “That bit behind those membranes, where he said the civilian was.”

  “We’ll take it,” said Jennings. “Burst through and secure the area. Standard trident assault pattern. If that sneaky fuck’s there, we kill him. Don’t hold back. Ready on three?” They nodded.

  “One.”

  Felicity’s hands tightened on her gun.

  “Two.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “Thr—”

  There was a swirling in the smoke, and the unexpected figure of Pawn Cheng manifested just in front of Felicity.

  “God, Andrea! Don’t do that!” Felicity gasped. That must have been what Odgers was muttering before, she thought. Ordering Cheng to accompany us. “I almost shot you.” Pawn Cheng, who had opened her mouth to say something, paused and gave her an incredulously pitying look. Then she shook her head and got straight to the point.

  “He’s on the ceiling!” the Asian Pawn shouted before evaporating away. As one, all of them looked up and saw the man crouched above them. Then Felicity’s visor flared blindingly as a horrendous torrent of green flames surged up out of Pawn Jennings’s open hands. The fire roared as it engulfed the ceiling, and the entire cube squealed and shuddered.

  Felicity ducked down automatically, away from the flames, and tore her helmet off. The heat was tremendous, and sweat was bursting out of her skin. She squinted and saw that Jennings had both his arms raised and his head thrown back. A deluge of emerald fire flowed out of his skin, even gushing up from his face and neck to spread across the ceiling. Felicity tried to shield her eyes from the glare. Beyond him, Chopra was also crouching away from the inferno.

  “Jennings, stop!” screamed Felicity. “Or we’ll all be killed!”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said a voice in her ear. She jerked away and saw the naked man was now crouching by her. He scuttled forward, moving swiftly even though he was bent double. She caught a flash of a white blade in his hands, and then he was standing behind Jennings. He swung and in one movement sliced through both the Pawn’s forearms.

  Jennings’s hands, and a good portion of his lower arms, spiraled away, green fire still spurting from them in little bursts. Felicity squeaked as sparks hissed in her sweaty hair, and then she fell back on her bottom when one of the hands landed right in front of her. The fingers clenched spasmodically, and small flames danced for a moment on the fingertips before dying away.

  The conflagration on the ceiling did not die, but it was no longer being fed by the Pawn’s will. The deafening roar faded, and th
ere was only the sound of cracklings and Jennings’s labored, gulping breaths. Felicity looked up, dreading what she might see. Her comrade was staring, wide-eyed, at his newly curtailed limbs.

  Then he began to scream, and blood sprayed out of his wounds and across the room, igniting in the air into liquid green fire. She flung up her arms to protect her face and felt burning drops patter across her armor. When she brought her arms down, she saw that flames were pouring out of Jennings’s forearms and flowing onto the floor. They were spreading out swiftly, like pools of water. Felicity and Chopra hastily scrabbled backward, away from each other. The naked man vaulted back too, up and onto one of the metal benches, and leaned against the wall. The flames were reflected in his strange, glazed-porcelain skin.

  “That really ought to have worked,” said the man to himself, looking a little crestfallen.

  “What are you?” Felicity spat. He didn’t even bother to look at her, just surveyed the scene with a mildly displeased expression. The flames did not seem to be exhausting themselves; they were climbing higher and spreading across the floor. The place had become an inferno. She looked around wildly for some way out.

  The ceiling was still ablaze, and the smell of cooking meat had given way to an acrid black smoke. Peering through the smoke as best she could, Felicity could see that part of the flesh had been completely burned through, and now the structure of the house was ablaze. The wall with the valve-door was covered in those lapping green tongues of fire, and the flesh seemed to have melted.

  We’re not going to get out of this, she realized. The flames were climbing the walls. Jennings fell to his knees, and though his clothes began to smolder, the fire did not touch his skin or hair. His screaming tapered off, and now he made a weak, moaning sound that was almost lost in the crackling of the flames.

  What do I do? Should—should I shoot him? wondered Felicity. It was far too late to stop the fire, but it might be a mercy of sorts for her comrade. The pool of fire had almost reached her feet. The heat was unbelievable; it burned in her lungs, and her armor seemed impossibly heavy.

  The metal of her gun scorched her fingers, and her control over her Sight splintered for a moment. Sensation and memory washed into her mind, and, despite herself, she briefly saw the gun’s inner workings.

  And then she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and Chopra was dashing in her direction from the far side of the room. He ran through the fire, past Jennings, and she could see that his clothes were alight. Flames splashed around his boots, and he was yelling from pain and determination.

  Chopra flung himself the last few meters toward her. He reached out his hand and she automatically grasped it. Even though he was aflame, she pulled him closer. She knew that her own clothes and hair were catching fire, but she wouldn’t let go. She did not want to die like this. Not alone.

  “I’m right here,” she whispered. “I’ve got you.”

  “It’ll be all right,” said Chopra into her ear.

  Around them, burning fat and flesh fell like glowing rain. Chopra’s arms tightened and the room wavered before her. Darkness rose up on the edges of her sight, and she felt her knees buckling.

  The last thing she saw was Jennings slumped in the middle of the fire. His armor and shirt had burned away while his skin remained untouched. Flickering green light still poured out of his wounds. I’m so, so sorry, Richard.

  The last thing she heard was the naked man musing to himself, “If I were to cut his head off, would that make things better or worse?”

  And then the darkness took her.

  5

  Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived a nice normal life. She liked to read and she liked to run and she liked stories about monsters. Her parents, who were university professors, were sometimes away doing research or giving lectures, but she was never lonely because she was part of a big family, with cousins and uncles and aunts and cousins once removed and great-uncles and great-aunts and cousins twice removed and great-great-uncles and great-great-aunts and a grandfather with so many greats that she lost track of them, and so she just called him Grootvader, which is Dutch for “Grandfather.”

  And she was very happy.

  Then, one day, Grootvader sat her down in the garden and explained that their family was not like other families. There were members of the family who were very, very clever, and knew all sorts of secrets, and made all sorts of discoveries, and created beautiful things. And because she was a member of the family, and a clever girl, she could, if she wanted, learn all the secrets, and make her own discoveries, and see and do and think things that no regular person ever would.

  If she wanted.

  It wouldn’t be easy, he warned her. She would have to study hard, very hard, and sometimes what she learned might be scary. And he would not love her any less if she decided that she didn’t want to do this. Her father had decided he did not want to learn the secrets, and instead he had learned all about fossils and married her mother, and he was perfectly happy.

  And if she decided that it was what she wanted, she would never be able to tell any outsiders about her studies or her discoveries or the family, because there were bad people in the world who would try to steal their knowledge, or take advantage of them, or make them into slaves.

  And if she decided that it was what she wanted, she would make enemies. There were monsters, real ones, that hated the family. The monsters had once tried to destroy the family utterly, and it was only by living in secret that the family could survive.

  And finally, if she decided that it was what she wanted, they would have to cut her open and make some changes inside her. And it wouldn’t hurt, or at least not very much, but it might be frightening.

  And she decided, after a bit of thought, that it was what she wanted.

  Twelve years later, the wisdom of that decision seemed somewhat questionable.

  I could literally be incinerated and devoured at this cocktail party, Odette thought. It could actually happen. I could get torn to pieces or turned into a starfish or smeared across the ceiling. All it would take is one of these Checquy monsters to have a little too much to drink and start thinking about how much he hates the Grafters, and I’m suddenly an echinoderm.

  There was a definite tension in the air as the party of Grafters emerged from the lift and looked around warily. The designer of the hotel had apparently liked the idea of people making an entrance via a staircase, because even though the elevator had just lifted them to the top floor of the building, they were looking down to the skyline bar on the twenty-eighth floor.

  It was a sophisticated space, with dark polished wood and elegant antique mirrors. At the far end, a massive curtain of glass looked out onto the city. It was an ideal place for the young and wealthy to stand around and eye one another over kumquatinis. Currently, however, it was closed to the public, and the patrons consisted entirely of Checquy executives.

  Some rather reluctant applause floated up the stairs once the Checquy noticed the arrival of the Grafters. This is so awkward, thought Odette. We’re having drinks with the very monsters that Grootvader warned me about. She could almost smell the hate radiating through the room. The new arrivals made their way down the stairs with all eyes upon them. When she reached the bottom, however, rather than following the rest of her delegation into the fray, Odette edged around the gathering until she reached the window. If I just stand here with my back to everything and look like I’m admiring the view, no one will bother me, she thought.

  Although her plan had been to pretend to marvel at the panorama, she found herself actually marveling at the panorama. The city spread before her to the horizon. I cannot believe I am in England, she thought. In London. I never in my life thought I would be in this country, in this city. It just wasn’t possible.

  She gazed at the skyline, at buildings she’d only ever seen in films or books. There was the London Eye. There was the jag of the Shard glittering in the last of the light. That top-heavy building
whose nickname she couldn’t recall. The Cheesegrater. The gigantic Fabergé egg that they called the Gherkin. The BT Tower. Her eyes tracked back across the landscape, cutting through the dusk, picking out the dome of St. Paul’s. Big Ben. Westminster Abbey. And hundreds and hundreds of rooftops.

  Amazing.

  Then her focus shifted so that she was not looking through the glass but rather examining the reflections. In the foreground, of course, was herself, an image she regarded without any particular enthusiasm. Her dress bugged her. It was not a cocktail dress. An uncharitable (but accurate) observer would have described it as more of a cocktail shroud.

  It was certainly not a dress Odette would have picked under normal circumstances, but it was politic. It hid her scars. Unfortunately, that meant covering most of her. As a result, she gave the impression of being someone’s disapproving maiden aunt.

  Behind her reflection was the movement of the cocktail party. She studied the guests critically. Men in suits and women in nicer dresses than hers. Some of the women wore business suits, but even those were exquisitely cut and tailored. Waiters passed through the party carrying trays of drinks and food. At first glance, it seemed quite a normal affair. But every once in a while, a shimmer of light would erupt from someone’s head, or a figure would vanish abruptly, or a guest would turn and reveal a set of stegosaurus-type plates emerging from the back of a tailored suit. She shuddered.

  And then, approaching her in the reflection, came a tall, handsome man.

  “Odette,” said a voice behind her. She felt a light hand on her shoulder and turned to look up into stern blue eyes.

  This was Ernst, formerly the Duke of Suchtlen and the undisputed lord and master of the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurkundigen. His body, which looked only about five years older than Odette’s, represented the most cutting-edge biotechnology on the planet. His mind held centuries of statecraft, espionage, and military insights. His hand held an hors d’oeuvre that had apparently suffered a catastrophic loss of structural integrity, leaving him awkwardly clutching the shattered remnants of a piece of toasted pita and some ground-up tuna and onions sprinkled with expensive herbs.