Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) (11 page)

“No. Diligence is kind of coppery. Like an old penny.”

“But my hope is it’ll be kind of like free association. From Uncle Gary to hay and sweat to other things, including that old penny smell.”

Elon broke into the target’s basement, where they stayed until after dark. They generally waited until everyone was asleep to hex someone who had small children in the house, so as not to scare the kids. Upstairs they could hear the sounds of running water, yelling, the TV blaring. Eventually there was more yelling—trying to get her kids to bed, it seemed—and then quiet.

They waited another twenty minutes before Elon crept upstairs. Another thing Thea had learned about furies: they could move with nearly absolute silence, when they chose to. She herself seemed to be getting a knack for stealth.

When they came into the target’s bedroom, Elon put his hand on the box’s lid and signaled to Thea.

Thea closed her eyes and thought of Uncle Gary. The smell of him. The feel of him when she hugged him, the solid, salt-of-the-earth presence that could solve any problem.

No, diligence, you have to think of diligence.

Recalling the smell of hay and sweat, Thea thought of Gary out in the fields at all hours, always late for meals, always trying to finish one more thing. For a second she could actually smell the hay, and then…

Copper.

Thea opened her eyes and looked down at the box, which Elon now held open. She could sense the hex. Like a vice or a virtue, it wasn’t anything she could see, but she knew it was there.

She grinned and nodded at Elon, who grinned back. Then he focused on the woman, gestured, and sent the hex floating toward her. She shifted in her sleep and made a quiet noise. Elon pulled Thea back into the shadows, then stepped slowly, softly, into the bathroom. Thea followed.

The target stirred. There was a rustling as she pulled some clothes on, then footsteps retreating from the bedroom. Elon opened the bathroom window, then picked Thea up and flew around to the other side of the house. He alighted in front of the kitchen window.

The kitchen was lit now. The target was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor.

“Most likely she’ll scrub until her fingers bleed.” Elon’s voice was conversational, unconcerned. “No distractions or interruptions. The kids won’t be up for a while yet.”

“And when they get up?”

“They won’t be neglected anymore.” He nodded through the window. The target was scrubbing faster, harder. “She will not sit down and watch TV, I can tell you that much.”

Thea shook her head. “But she won’t stop or rest? Sleep?”

“Not until the hex breaks.”

“And what happens if she dies of exhaustion first?”

Elon shrugged. “Possible. It happens.”

“How often?”

He gave her a stern look. “I haven’t got statistics handy. Why do you ask?”

“Because that’s no good for her kids either!”

“What can I tell you? This is justice.”

“And righteous vengeance,” added Thea, recalling Graves’s business card. She felt a little sick. Had she just been dismissing this case as an easy one a few hours ago? Had she just been
grinning
in that woman’s bedroom?

“It’s not my job to pass judgment,” said Elon. “HRI handles that. It’s just my job to serve it up.” He started to walk away, but over his shoulder he said, “Be best if you got used to it. You don’t want to be showing that weak heart to Alecto or anyone else.”

That weak heart
. Thea knew he wasn’t trying to be hurtful. To him, a
weak heart
and a
soft heart
were the same thing.

But she wasn’t so sure. She took one last glance through the window at the frenzied woman, then turned for home.

When Thea walked into Infliction the next morning, she was immediately called into Persephone’s office.

“There’s been a change of plans,” Persephone told her. “There was a case in Colorado that needed Elon’s specific skill set. I had to send him this morning, so you’ll be shadowing me today instead.”

Thea tried not to look as tense as she felt. If she found the whole process harsh with Elon, who was not only her friend but laid back almost to the point of playfulness, she could only imagine what it would be like to watch the bleak and imposing Persephone hex somebody. Thea just hoped she wouldn’t flinch.

“Since it’s just the two of us, we can do this quickly.” Persephone gestured for her to come around the desk and look at her computer screen.

The photo showed an olive-skinned man with an arrogant expression and too much product in his hair. “Our target is a fifty-year-old male by the name of Michael Marchesi,” Persephone said. “
Doctor
Michael Marchesi, as he insists on being addressed. He is being punished for the sin of pride with a hex of humility.”

“What does that entail?” Thea asked.

“Self-mortification, usually. It’s up to the target in part, you know, how some of these hexes manifest themselves. We’ve gotten lucky with a case that’s only an hour from here, and I’ve got limited time today, so we’re going to head over directly and do it in his office. It’s a little trickier, coming and going covertly in a crowded place, but not as much as you’d think.”

They were halfway there when Persephone said, “I hear you were finally able to sense the hex yesterday.”

Finally
? Thea cleared her throat. “Yes.”

“That’s good,” Persephone said. “After you sense it once, you can usually sense it pretty easily from then on out. Like an optical illusion or a magic trick—once you see the trick, you can always see it.”

Thea nodded.

“So I’ll have you try to inflict the hex today. Don’t worry, if you can’t do it, I will.”

“Okay. Any tips? I’m not sure how to actually move the hex from the box to the target.”

“Elon didn’t go into this with you?”

“Not really, no.”

“Okay, well, then I guess maybe it’s good I didn’t leave you shadowing him the whole time. You can sense the sins and virtues in your target right?”

“Right.”

“In this case, that will mean the sin of pride. And you’ll be able to sense the humility in the hex. With me so far?”

“Yep.”

“So, if you don’t mind my using the card analogy we use so often in training, it’s really a matter of swapping those cards.”

“Swapping? So I take the pride out altogether?”

“Well, you won’t be able to do that, exactly. But you can bury it with the humility. Cover it. Like when someone puts a card down in a game, and you throw another card that beats it on top of it. See?”

“Sort of.”

“The idea is to throw that humility on top, and throw it down
hard
. So hard that it takes over everything else. The hex is a very powerful dose of the essence of whichever vice or virtue it contains, so it’ll do the rest.”

“Okay,” said Thea, although she really wasn’t sure she had any clue how to go about it.

“Ready to give it a try?”

No
. “Sure.”

“Excellent.”

They went into the office under their human illusions, posing as cleaning ladies. “You’ll find people often fail to notice custodial workers,” Persephone told Thea. “It’s an excellent cover that we use quite often.”

Dr. Marchesi was vain as well as prideful, and visited the men’s room fairly frequently to comb his hair, of which he seemed especially proud. It wasn’t long before they had an opportunity to wheel in a janitorial cart when he was the only occupant.

“Get out of here,” Marchesi snapped at them. “Aren’t you supposed to check whether there’s anyone in here first?”

While Persephone apologized, Thea quickly opened the hex box. Persephone was right, it was much easier to sense this time. She didn’t even have to close her eyes and think of anybody humble. She caught it immediately, a smell like cotton.

Holding the box in one hand and a spray bottle in the other, Thea sidled around the target.

“What are you doing?” he asked her. “Do you not speak English?”

Once again Persephone said something to distract him, while Thea focused on her task. She sensed the humility, the cottony smell. She studied the target and sensed his pride, a cloying smell, like bad perfume.

Cover the perfume with the cotton. It’s that simple. Right?

Elon always made a tossing motion, but Thea instinctively held the box up to her lips and blew, as if sending a cloud of smoke his way. She felt something in her eyes, like a flare of heat, and knew they glowed for a fraction of a second, the way Elon’s always did. A moment later, the humility had settled over Marchesi like a fog. He looked momentarily dazed. She took advantage of his confusion to focus her senses. No perfume.

Had she done it?

Still slack-jawed, Dr. Marchesi began to scratch at his wrist, hard enough to draw blood.

Persephone signaled for Thea to follow her out of the men’s room while he was still out of it, and they left the building much as they’d entered it, with no fuss.

“So he’s just going to hurt himself?” Thea asked when they were back out on the street.

“Like I said, it usually takes the form of mortification of the flesh.”

“Like the days where they wore hair shirts and whipped themselves?”

“I’m impressed. You know your history.”

Thea recognized Persephone’s expression, and understood
you know your history
to actually mean
you aren’t as stupid as you look
.

“Yeah, well, my mother was into that sort of thing,” she said.

They went to a coffee shop so that Thea, with Persephone’s supervision, could submit the report of her first ever hex.

“Okay, since it was your first one, I’m supposed to stay with you, and we’re supposed to observe him for several hours,” Persephone said. “But as I mentioned earlier, my availability is limited today. I’m going to take you to the target’s house. Most likely he’ll leave the office before long. I’ll leave you with the car, in case he goes out. Then I’ll come back around seven and see how it’s gone.”

“You’re just going to leave me in his house? What if he catches me?”

Persephone laughed. “He’ll be too preoccupied for that. As long as you’re reasonably careful and don’t do anything stupid, he won’t know you’re there.”

The house turned out to be a condo. Thea sat in the hall closet with the door cracked, in an awkward position that hurt her leg but gave her a clear view of the living room. Thankfully it was still summer, and Dr. Marchesi didn’t have a coat to hang when he got home.

She heard him shuffling around the kitchen, maybe making something to eat. A few moans of pain told her he was up to other things in there, too, but she didn’t dare move around the house. Surely he’d be in the living room soon enough. Most people watched TV when they were alone, didn’t they?

Eventually he came into her line of sight. Thea saw that he had scratches everywhere now, and several bruises. He carried a long butane lighter, the kind you used instead of matches to light candles, and a kitchen knife. He sat down on the couch and put these items on the coffee table in front of him.

He didn’t turn on the TV.

For the next hour, Thea watched him alternately cut and burn himself. Eventually, she could smell both the blood and the burned skin. He was becoming unrecognizable. Throughout that time he mumbled and insulted himself. He confessed his sins to whatever higher power he believed in.

Surely this wasn’t justice? It wasn’t helping this man to rehabilitate, either. At this rate, he would kill himself before he learned any sort of lesson at all.

Thea looked at her watch. Not quite five o’clock. She had two more hours of this.

She made it through one.

When Marchesi fell into a fitful doze, Thea stepped out of the closet and walked over to the couch. She remembered her first day at Hexing House, when she’d brushed the hex of serenity from Nero like a cobweb. She knew now that the generic hexes they sometimes used for exercises in the lab were mild doses, much weaker than the hexes they used in the field. But still, it couldn’t be that much different.

She focused on Marchesi, sensed the humility. Then she breathed deeply, as if she could inhale it away. It took her nearly half an hour, but she managed in the end. The hex dissipated as if it really was a lingering odor. Thea fled the house before he could wake up, and waited down the street in the car for Persephone to come back.

It only took her fifteen minutes to regret it.

She’d seen the file. The guy wasn’t merely ridiculous. He made people miserable with his arrogance. He caused harm with his pride. He was so certain that he was superior and right that he regularly defied policies, orders, even laws, and did what he wanted. And if it didn’t work out, he blamed others. Including the assistant who’d ordered the hex. Or ex-assistant. She was a single mother, and he’d gotten her fired.

Yes, this was a harsh lesson, harsher than she’d have chosen. But this man wasn’t worth risking everything she’d been working toward.

As expected, Persephone was not pleased when she came back.

“Graves said you’d shown some aptitude for removal,” she said. “I knew this was a risk, so I brought another hex. No.” She held up her hand when Thea made a move to get out of the car. “I’ll go myself. You’ll wait here.”

Persephone came back a few minutes later and gestured for Thea to move out of the passenger seat. “You can drive back.”

It punished Thea’s already stiff leg to drive, but she wasn’t in a position to complain. Persephone sat with her arms crossed, looking out the window and not saying anything.

When she finally did speak, what she said was alarming. “I’d hoped this wouldn’t happen. I actually had high hopes for you. Probably my expectations were too high. You’re human, and you’ve only been training a few weeks.”

“It won’t happen again,” Thea said.

Persephone huffed, not quite a laugh. “Thea, that was your test.”

“What?” Thea clutched the wheel.

“We don’t tell you about the final test the way we do the others. We don’t want you to have either a chance to steel yourself, or to get nervous and unravel. We treat it like a normal assignment.”

“You tricked me.”

“We treated you like we treat every other recruit. This is the program. That’s how the test works, and you failed.”

“But it’s not fair.” Thea struggled, with limited success, to keep the whiny child out of her voice. “It was my first try.”

“I repeat: that’s how the test works. We didn’t modify it to make it harder on you.” Persephone leaned toward her. “This is what being a fury is. You can either handle it, or you can’t.”

“But my month isn’t up. I can retake it.”

“I doubt it. We don’t commonly let people retest. If they fail and never grow wings, they’re given low-paying, low-responsibility positions that don’t require flight. Of course in your case, you weren’t born to the colony. You’re under no obligation to stay.”

“I beg your pardon?” Thea was glad for the anger swelling inside her. It made her less afraid. “You guys have already turned me into half a monst—fury! I’m supposed to do what, go back to my old life? With purple skin and purple blood?”

Persephone shrugged with a fury’s trademark lack of compassion. “Take it up with Alecto. You’ve got a meeting with her at ten tomorrow morning.”

“You set this meeting up before you came back? You were assuming I would fail?”

“Oh please, would you stop being such a
victim
? You would have had the meeting either way. It would have been a bit more pleasant had you passed, though.” Persephone shifted uncomfortably in her seat, muttering under her breath about it making her back stiff. “And you know, you’re not the only one put out by this. Had you passed and gotten your wings, we wouldn’t have to be driving back right now.”