Chapter 35 Eryx
ERYX
All was dark. It seemed power was down all over the city. After the Phoenixes cleared the house, Av sent them off to coordinate their own teams. If the power was down, that meant subways were trapped. People needed aid and the Authority was always slow to provide.
Immediately, she was on the phone, making dozens of calls while I stared at the black landline phone hanging on the kitchen wall. I wanted to call Rhiannon, but didn’t want to distract her. I’d failed her.
Sera, Myrine—Briony. They were all gone. Something soft brushed my ankles. Stanley. The little poltergeist looked mostly normal at the moment, just an extra pair of glowing eyes in his soft head. I sighed, reaching down to pick him up, hoping he’d seen something.
But when he pressed his face to mine, there was no memory of what had happened. Only the worry that Briony was gone. I hugged him to my chest, murmuring, “Look for anything out of place,” before I set him down on the kitchen floor.
Ares came into the kitchen. “I can’t find any clue to where they’ve gone.”
“What about the cottage?” I asked.
Av shook her head, hanging up the phone. “The Phoenixes checked it. It’s locked, Eryx. They couldn’t get in. I think when we closed the breach, we might have shut the house off too. Maybe for good.”
I nodded. That made a certain amount of sense, I supposed. But then, where were they? I had a terrible feeling about all this. I watched as Stanley sniffed the air, as though he’d caught wind of something.
It was just as likely that he was sniffing the remnants of lunch as an actual clue. The beast was just about as useless as I was. He jumped onto the counter, scratching at the pen by the notepad, hissing.
“For fuck’s sake,” Ares sighed, grabbing the poltergeist and handing it to Av. “Do something with him.”
The feline howled at him, glaring with all four of his eyes. Ares crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s not helpful.”
Av frowned, watching as Stanley squirmed out of her arms to jump back onto the kitchen counter by the phone. He hissed at the pen again, and then head butted the pad of paper. Avaline moved to look at it.
“Don’t encourage him,” Ares said. “He’s already too much of a pest.”
Av grabbed a pencil from the mug that Ember kept next to the phone, and ran it lightly over the pad of paper. Ares smiled at her, obviously charmed by her efforts. It was hard not to love Av when she gave her all.
“Have you been watching Ghost Detective again?” he asked, naming Avaline’s favorite among reruns.
“Yes. Of course.” She raised an eyebrow, holding the pad of paper up. “But it worked. It’s an address.”
Ares scoffed, but he took the pad of paper, then frowned.
“Do you recognize the handwriting?” she asked.
My brother’s mind was the kind of steel trap that held information like what every person in this house’s handwriting looked like.
“No,” he said. “Has anyone but us been here for the past couple days? I used this three days ago to take the Taco Paradise order, and you can see this was written on top of it.”
Av shook her head. “No, just us…”
“And Myrine,” I groaned.
Ares gritted his teeth. “She’s betrayed our girls before.”
I pushed off the counter. “We have to get to wherever that is.”
Av held up a hand, as she took the pad from Ares. “Let me make a call first.” Ares glanced at me as she walked into the back hall, shaking his head. “Eli?” her voice called out before she disappeared. “It’s Avaline.”
Ares turned on the battery powered radio that sat just under the phone. He had to adjust the station several times, but a clear channel came in.
… ago the grid went out. The stock market has plummeted as billions of dollars went missing. The radio crackled, static obscuring what the host said… ports that the Asylum is on fire.
Ares’ phone buzzed. He answered immediately. “My love,” he breathed, stepping out onto the patio. Through the door he mouthed to me, Rhiannon is fine, but his eyes were dark with worry as he asked, “What happened?”
Rhiannon was alive, but I’d known she would be. The real question was whether or not she was all right. She certainly wasn’t going to be if I couldn’t find Briony and Sera.
Avaline returned, nodding towards Ares, a question in her eyes. “Ember,” I answered. “Sounds like they’re mostly all right.”
“Good,” she murmured. “Eli says services are down throughout the city. Someone cracked into every major electronic system in the Three Cities and overloaded it. The damage is…” she shrugged, raising her dark eyebrows. “Huge.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “And what about Eli?”
“Right,” Av said, nodding quickly. “He’s going to meet us a block from the address.”
“Why?” I asked, feeling snappish and impatient.
Av’s face drew in. “He got a message from Briony right before the power went out. All it said was, ‘AM 2 rendvs w Blr’.”
It felt like my brain was going to explode. I needed to know where Briony was, now. “What?”
Av flipped the notepad pages over and wrote down the nonsense she’d just said. As soon as I saw it, my heart stopped. “Admiral Myrine to rendezvous with Blaire.”
Av swallowed. “That’s what he thought too. He’s headed there now.”
The miracle worker had spent a lot of time with Briony since we rescued her from Mike Fairchild and his rogue branch of the Authority. They played chess online frequently, and talked about computers. It didn’t surprise me that he’d step in now to help us.
Ares stepped back into the house. “They’re headed back here. Max and Rhiannon aren’t with them. She sent them on with the queen. They should be here now.”
My heart stopped. I know it did. I closed my eyes. “If they came back here, and Myrine had betrayed them—she might have taken them all to Blaire.”
Av put a hand on my arm. “Eryx, she might be fine. Power’s down all over town. We don’t know that there’s not traffic. Obstacles.”
I shook my head. “And we don’t know that she’s not at this address, being handed over to Archibald Blaire.”
Ares held up his hands. “I will stay here and wait for Ember and the others to get back.” He paused, waiting to see if the two of us were going to keep arguing.
When Av and I both crossed our arms, like children in a momentary truce, he went on.
“They’re five minutes out, and we’ll be right behind you. ”
Av nodded, grabbing my hand and squeezing. “Let’s go.”
The address Myrine had written down was a warehouse in the Slaughterhouse District. Av and I parked three blocks away, and walked through the rain to the address across the street we’d agreed to meet Eli at.
A rat scuttled into the alley we’d ducked into, and without warning, shifted into a hulk of a man. Every time I saw the miracle worker he looked angrier somehow. He stepped under the awning Av and I were huddled into, the collar of his canvas jacket flipped up against the rain.
Av smiled cheerily at him. “That was a fun trick.”
Eli glowered at her. “It was an illusion.”
“It was a good one,” Av said, her tone encouraging.
The Thaumas second-in-command shrugged, but something around his eyes softened a little. It was hard to stay impervious when Avaline turned her sparkling personality on you. “Blaire’s inside. He’s got a girl with him I don’t recognize. No sign of our people though.”
“A child?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, she’s probably in her late twenties. Early thirties, maybe. Young looking—pretty. Human, I think…” Eli seemed to stumble over that idea, but kept going. “He’s got her strapped to some kind of gurney. She’s asleep, wearing a hospital gown.”
Av shook her head, huddling closer to me. “What the fuck is he up to? Is she an inmate from the Asylum?”
Eli threw his hands in the air, as confused as the rest of us. “What do you want to do?”
I took a deep breath. If the young woman was human, she was not our concern. But then, why had a human been in the Asylum? “You’re sure she’s human?”
Eli grimaced. “Sort of.”
“What does that mean?” I nearly shouted. We were losing time. If Myrine wasn’t here—if Rhiannon, Briony, and the others weren’t here—we had to figure out where they’d been taken.
Eli sighed. “It means that she seemed human, but there’s something weird about her. Something off.”
“We don’t have time for this,” I growled, turning back towards the car, stepping out into the rain.
The streets were empty in this part of town.
It was quiet now, with everything down, but soon people would start to panic.
I didn’t want to have to fight in the streets.
“If they’re not here, the best thing we can do is get home and figure out what to do next. ”
Av grabbed my arm. “Eryx. Blaire may know where Myrine is. I think we need to make a plan and go in.”
Eli nodded. “I agree with shorty here.”
Av slapped him, her hand barely reaching his chest. He smiled faintly at her and I realized she might be one of the few people, other than Briony, that he actually liked. “I’m not that short,” she hissed. “Sera’s shorter.”
Eli Cabot flushed red at the mention of the smallest Maere. If we weren’t in the middle of an epic shitshow, I might rib him about it. “So what do we do?”
Av’s eyes lit up. “Can you make me look like Myrine?”
Eli frowned, thinking it over. “It’s hard to create an illusion over an actual person that moves and speaks, but I can give you ten minutes.”
“Great,” she said, grinning like an elf. “You two sneak in behind me, and if anything goes wrong, you can bop him on the head.”
I blew out a wry laugh. “Simple as that.”
She squeezed my arm again. “I can do this, Eryx. We’ll find them.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s do it.”
Three minutes later, Eli and I were sneaking inside, behind what looked like Admiral Myrine.
The illusion extended far enough that Av even moved like her.
Eli had explained that even though he’d never seen Myrine, what was necessary was that Av had, and Avaline Reyes was nothing if not observant.
We had ten minutes to find out what had happened to our people.