Damnation Marked (8 page)

“Lovely?” she hissed between her teeth. The taste of ash crept over her tongue, thick and cloying, and began to slide down her throat.

She coughed. Gasped. Fell to her knees.

I wonder if he would be so enamored with a corpse.

“Elise?”

Someone else had spoken.

A dim glow reached her eyes, and after so long in darkness, it felt like burning arrows piercing straight into her brain.

The pressure in her throat vanished. She sucked in a hard breath.

“Over here,” Elise choked out, and the glow moved closer. It resolved into a figure, willowy and tall.

Nukha’il strode to her side, and with him came pale moonlight. It emanated from the wings folded neatly along his spine and flooded the tunnel.

She never thought she would be so glad to see an angel.

“There you are,” he said, his features sagging with relief. “When I found that boyfriend of yours alone on the rooftop…” Nukha’il shook his head, as if his fears were too great to utter aloud. “You look like you’ve survived.”

“Somehow.” She wiped her tongue with the back of her hand, but she couldn’t get rid of that ashy taste. “Remind me not to go spelunking alone again.”

“I would be happy to remind you if you give me warning beforehand.” Even though he continued to speak calmly, he managed to make it sound like an admonition.

Elise got to her feet, squinting around for a sign of what might have spoken to her before Nukha’il arrived. She wasn’t surprised to find them alone. “What’s on the other side of this collapse?” she asked, nudging one of the rocks with her feet. “Does this go into the Warrens?”

“I don’t know. I’m not familiar enough with the layout of the undercity.”

“Can you open it?”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “With a jackhammer.”

A knot of tension in Elise’s spine eased—just a fraction. She almost found the strength to laugh. But it quickly died in her chest.

“I’m lost.”

“Then it’s a lucky thing that I found you.” He held out a hand. She shook her head. “Still no? After all this time? I’ve flown with you before.”

“We can walk.”

“Suit yourself.”

He guided her back to the main cavern in silence. Eventually, she began recognizing her signposts, and she led the way to her ropes. Gripping the fiber was enough to calm her again, as if it were a lifeline.

Nukha’il watched as she harnessed herself again. “My wings would be faster.”

She bit back an angry response.

“Did you kill my flashlight?”

His wings drooped with embarrassment. “Sorry. I forget sometimes.” Her light flickered to life again. It was ugly and harsh after the gentle glow of his wings.

“Why did you come down here, anyway?”

“You asked me to check into the security of the gate. I thought you’d like to know what I found.”

Her hands stilled on the rope. “Has it been invaded by the darkness?”

“Not at all,” Nukha’il said, though he didn’t sound happy about it. “But I did find something interesting.” He hesitated, as though trying to choose his words. “It was a man. He was sitting on the gate’s dais when I arrived.”

Fear shocked through her. “A man? What was he doing there?”

“I don’t know. But he wants to speak with you.”

P
ART
T
HREE

Fallen

JANUARY 2000

S
omething was killing
babies. The disappearances could have passed for coincidence at first, but a pattern quickly became too distinct to deny: infants and small toddlers would vanish from their mothers’ beds at night, only to reappear weeks later, bloated and lifeless and miles from the places from which they had been taken.

The killer began in African villages and moved quickly. By the time the children’s bodies were discovered, the killer was already gone, leaving screams in its wake.

The kopis in Lesotho thought to cut open one of the bodies and was shocked to find it bloated by gas, without a single organ intact. Even the eyelids, when cut open, revealed empty pockets of air that reeked of brimstone.

Elise was passing through and heard about what was happening. It would have been hard not to—the entire countryside was in mourning. The cries could be heard for miles.

After questioning the local kopis—with the help of a friend who spoke a handful of English words—James extrapolated the pattern.

“The livestock dies first,” he explained as they walked the dusty road between villages. He had tied a cloth around his head to protect himself from the merciless sun, but his nose was peeling and crispy. “When there are no more pigs, one child disappears, and then a few more over the week. There is a lull for a couple of days. The locals find the bodies after that. It’s too late by then, of course, because the killer has moved on.”

Elise pondered this information. “Why pigs?”

“Don’t you think the question should be: why babies?”

“Everything eats babies.” She kicked a rock along the road with her boot. It skittered and danced over the dirt. “Maras. Ghouls. Lamias. Waiting to do it until there are no more pigs in town is the weird part.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree on which part is weird, I think.”

“Fine, Mr. Doesn’t-Think-Babies-are-Dinner.”

He laughed. “I’ll stick to James. Thank you.”

Elise didn’t smile back. Her brow furrowed with thought as she gazed at distant Masai trees and the huge, leathery forms of the elephants milling beneath them. “Why pigs?”

“I have no clue, but given the pattern’s ongoing northward route, we’ll likely have a chance to see soon enough.”

He was right about one thing: the murders continued north very quickly. But they couldn’t seem to catch up. Every time they arrived in a new village, the residents were just finding the dead.

Suspicious eyes followed them as they hurried past farms empty of livestock. They didn’t need to understand the whispers to know that rumors of white demons were spreading in their wake. To the locals, their appearance after the deaths seemed too soon to be accident. To Elise, they were frustratingly late.

They were sleeping in a hostel a few weeks later when villagers arrived with guns.

That was when they decided that they were done with Africa.

Elise and James moved to France, which had been picked with the rigorous selection criteria of “soonest flight that doesn’t land in Africa.” She stayed in touch with the kopis in Lesotho with the help of her friend Lucas McIntyre, who had contact information for most kopides and had better luck finding a Bantu translator.

But the Sotho kopis had no more useful information. Pig farms were recovering, no more children were found as husks, and the killer’s trail had gone cold.

Despite renting a lovely apartment on the ocean, Elise soon began spending a lot of time in internet cafes.

“What do you hope to find?” James asked when she returned to their room one night. He was casting fresh wards on their balcony, which would render anything that approached their railing unconscious. There was already a seagull sleeping on the planter.

She kicked off her boots and stretched out on the couch with a stack of printed news articles. “Did you know that China has the highest population of pigs in the world?”

“Does this mean we’re making another trip to China?” He drew a chalk line over the doorway. “You know I’m not a fan of China—or that entire side of the continent.”

Neither of them were. They had mostly avoided East Asia since James had found her in Russia, just to be careful.

“Not Asia this time. Cairo recently had a big outbreak of disease on their pig farms. They lost thousands of heads.” Elise dropped a stack of pages on the side table. “Guess what infant mortality rates in Egypt are like this month?”

“If you know where the killer is right now, then why are we reading news articles?”

“Because it will already be gone by the time we get there. We have to know where it will be next.
Before
it arrives.”

James dropped his chalk and sat beside Elise. He flipped through the articles she had dropped. “You’re dedicating a lot of time to this.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So I don’t think I’ve seen you this interested in anything before. Does this killer sound familiar to you? Is this personal?”

Elise’s lips pinched together. “Look at this.” She showed him printouts from the bottom of her stack. The infants all had skin in mottled shades of brown and black. The bodies were tiny.

He studied the young kopis while she was distracted. It was easier than looking at the pictures.

Elise wasn’t sentimental; they had seen dead children in one of their very first investigations together, and she had been as bothered by it as she was by any other dead human—which was to say, not at all. Her face didn’t show any hint as to why these deaths were different.

Not for the first time, he wished he could pry open her skull and read her thoughts.

The seagull on their balcony woke up, took three dazed steps, and flew away.

“What will our next destination be?” James asked

She resumed reading. “I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know in a couple of days.”

It turned out they didn’t have a couple of days. Pigs began dying in France that very night.

They took the train to a village in Brittany, where a farm’s entire stock had gone missing. The day was wet, gray, and miserable. James wandered the fields searching for footprints in the mud, while Elise tried to understand the farmer’s complaints through his thick regional accent.

It took an hour for her to rejoin James. Her face was pinched. “He didn’t hear anything. He didn’t see anything, he doesn’t fucking
know
anything. God, what an idiot.”

James gave her arm a brief, sympathetic squeeze before crouching by the fence again. He hiked up his pea coat so it wouldn’t drag in the mud. “See this?” Elise dropped beside him, leaning her shoulder into his. The wood had been burned. Yellow residue was left behind in a shape like two crescents. “Does that look like a cloven hoof to you?”

She tilted her head to the side. “Maybe one of the pigs fought back. Left a mark.”

“Or maybe our assailant has hooves.”

Elise scanned the edges of the farm as the wind whipped her scarf around her face. They were right outside a village, and there were no other farms with pigs for miles.

“We have to be on the streets tonight. It’s going to hunt.”

They took a room at a hostel. James napped through the afternoon while Elise kept watch on the street outside.

When night fell, they split up to search.

James walked through the darkness alone. A damp, heavy fog overtook the city, so he could see nothing beyond the next street corner.

There could have been anything in town that night, and he wouldn’t have known. There was no way to distinguish if his feeling of unease was truly due to eyes on his back, or paranoia.

He didn’t come across a single person on the street, but at midnight, he heard a cry—a single, sharp noise that ended as quickly as it had pierced the night.

He spun on the spot, searching for the origin of the shriek, but saw nothing. He couldn’t even tell where it had come from. The fog muffled every noise. The glow from a single streetlight radiated hazy haloes into the night, undisturbed.

The night was utterly silent after that.

Elise and James met the next morning near the shore. She was wind-blown, quiet, and disappointed. “Nothing,” she said in a grim tone that told him that she had heard the cry, too. They walked back toward their hostel, taking the long route past the docks.

That was when they discovered the bodies.

James’s heart sped as he realized what he was seeing in the early morning fog—three tiny shapes, too small to be fully-grown pigs, and too small to be adult humans.

Infants.

“They didn’t try to hide the bodies,” Elise said, crouching by the closest husk. It must have been a newborn. Its legs were twisted and froglike, the skin on its fists was peeling, and its eyelids were sealed shut by dried yellow fluid.

James coughed wetly into his arm. He hadn’t vomited at the scene of an attack yet, but the sight of a dead baby brought the flavor of last night’s wine to the back of his throat.

The sound he had heard at midnight replayed in his mind over and over again. The sharp little yelp. A sound of such pain and fear.

“Good Lord,” he groaned.

Elise stroked a hand down the side of the baby’s unmoving face. Her brow furrowed. It wasn’t sadness in her gaze—not exactly—but something else he hadn’t seen before.

Then she reached behind her and drew one of the swords. Before James could stop her, she sliced the body open.

He lost his fight against the nausea. He ducked behind a shipping container, braced his hand on the metal, and vomited everything he had eaten for the last twelve hours onto the asphalt.

E
lise didn’t listen
the corpse as James emptied his stomach a few feet away. The air that had been trapped inside the carcass smelled like brimstone, but there was a strange undertone to it—something familiar.

She leaned her nose close to the body to get a good whiff.

“Now that is dedication,” someone said from behind her.

It was a man’s voice, but not James’s.

She spun on her knees, bringing up her sword, and it connected with metal. Her blade bit into the rebar and stuck.

The person standing behind her was surprisingly handsome, in that drunken football hooligan kind of way. He had bright eyes, a square face, and brown hair that stuck up in the back. His jacket bulged under the arm. He had a gun.

“See? I expected that. I’m learning.” He dislodged the rebar from her sword and dropped it.

It took Elise a moment to bring a name to mind. “Malcolm. Right?”

“Bless the gods, she remembers me. It was the kiss, wasn’t it? Couldn’t forget that, could you?”

“What do you want?”

“Oh, I can think of a few things.” Malcolm grinned, but it quickly faded. His eyes dropped to the body on the ground. He swallowed. “McIntyre called me. He said the French kopis died last month—I think by drowning. He asked if I felt like covering this territory. Good thing I agreed.”