Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) (9 page)

Cora gave her brother a dirty look. “You just live to get me into trouble, don’t you?”

Thea jumped at this new chance. “How much trouble? Is it a really big deal for you to look something up? A personnel file like that, or, say, a case file?”

“Depends,” said Cora.

“On what?”

“Why do you ask?”

Bolstered by her resolution to do better, Thea didn’t hesitate. At some point, she would have to trust someone, at least a little bit. “Did I tell you how Graves found me in the first place?”

“No,” said Cora and Nero at once. They both leaned forward. With a human recruit being such a rare and novel thing, Thea had no doubt that Nero would love to gossip about it.

“He hexed my cousin,” she said. “Then she disappeared. I came to help my aunt, who was going nuts with worry, and I ran across Graves.”

“And what, he just happened to notice your aptitude?” Cora asked.

“That’s exactly it,” said Thea. “I think he may have already known about it, or suspected it. Maybe it runs in families. I think he may have been targeting my family specifically.”

“Targeting you for what?” Cora asked.

“I have no idea, but he sure seemed interested in getting me here.”

“Sure. A human recruit gives him a certain notoriety.” Cora smiled. “And Graves has always loved attention. Hence the dapper suits.”

Thea shook her head. “There’s something off about Flannery disappearing like that.”

“What hex was it?” asked Nero.

“Sacrifice.”

He nodded. “It’s not an uncommon side effect, actually. People give up all they have. She’ll come around when it wears off.”

“Which is when?”

“When she’s learned her lesson.”

“That’s exactly what Graves said.”

Nero shrugged and licked chicken grease from his fingers. “Well, he was right. I don’t see anything suspicious about it.”

Thea bit her lip. “I’d feel better if I knew who took out this contract on her, or whatever you call it.”

Cora laughed. “We’re not the mob. We just call it ordering a hex. Or if we want to get fancy, ordering an infliction.”

“Fine. I want to know who ordered the hex.”

Cora narrowed her eyes. “Is that why you always seem so skittish? You don’t trust us? You think there’s some conspiracy going on, that Graves recruited you for some evil purpose?”

“I seem skittish because I’m skittish,” said Thea, ignoring the other questions.

Diana came to take their dessert orders. When she left again Cora said, “Fine. I’ll look into it. But case records can be tricky. It’ll probably take me a while to hack in.”

“It was an honest question, when I asked how much trouble you could get into,” said Thea. “I don’t mean to put you at risk.”

“Well, I’m pretty good at getting around certain things. But I have a favor to ask you, too.”

“Sure.”

“When you start stage three, you’ve got to shadow an Inflictor for a while, to learn hexing. Will you request Elon to be your mentor? Nobody will think anything of it, he’s the—”

“—best they have,” said Thea and Nero together.

Cora smiled, unabashed. “Have I mentioned that?”

“Once or twice,” said Thea. “Sure, I’ll ask.”

But Cora must have noticed the wary look in her eyes. She sighed. “Yeah, I know, I get touchy when he’s around pretty girls. But I know you now. I trust you.”

“Be better if you could trust him,” Nero muttered.

It was clear from the stiffening of her shoulders that Cora heard him, but she didn’t acknowledge it. “They’ll give you local cases, with you having no wings. All within a day’s drive. It’d be nice to have him in town for a while.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Thea went back to her residence that night feeling glad to have friends, and even gladder that she might be making some progress at last. She was glad she’d passed her test, glad she was one step closer to being viewed more like an insider than an intruder. Glad, she reflected as she
protracted
them, to have claws. She could think of several situations in which they might be handy.

All in all, it had been a pretty good day. Maybe the best since she’d gotten Aunt Bridget’s call.

But her flare of hope was extinguished when she went to brush her teeth.

GO HOME SLUT

It was scrawled across her bathroom mirror in red paint, the shade of human blood.

Leaving signs and notes was one thing. Actually getting into her residence was quite another. Had she remembered to lock the door on her way to dinner? Surely she had. She never forgot to lock the door.

What would they have done if they’d found her home?

Thea had already checked the bells three times, as was her ritual when getting ready for bed. She went and checked them twice more. Then she fished around in her closet until she found something she’d been very proud of herself for putting away: her roll of tape. She stretched three long strips of it across the crack in her door.

And here she’d been thinking of putting away the bells, too. So much for that.

Thea felt completely drained by the time she got into bed, and fell asleep almost immediately. But it seemed the power she’d finally managed to rally during her test was not ready to go dormant again.

Burn, witch.

She was inside Flannery’s head again, seeing things through her eyes. The clown on the cow, the human-headed birds, the headless girl. The girl walked up to Thea-Flannery and offered a bloody balloon. Thea shied away, not wanting to touch it.

Then the string of the balloon wasn’t a string anymore, but a snake. Thea struggled, but she was still unable to leave the bed. The snake plopped out of the girl’s hand and began to wind its way around Thea’s arm.

While the little girl’s laugh floated toward her from a body that had no mouth to laugh with, Thea watched the snake—still with the balloon tied to its tail—sink yellow fangs into her skin. She tugged and tugged at her arm, but she couldn’t get away.

Except then she did get away. She yanked her arm back and the restraint broke so suddenly, she smacked herself in the face. A spray of blood hit her cheek, and she screamed.

It wasn’t Flannery’s voice; it was her own.

Thea woke up thrashing and yelling. With an effort, she stilled and breathed slowly, until the panic released its grip on her lungs. It was dark, and everything was quiet.

Just a dream.

But then: the jingle of a small bell.

Or not.

Shaking, almost weeping, Thea forced herself to turn on the light and walk a circuit of her residence. There was nobody else there.

But the tape across her door was torn. And there was blood in her bed.

There was a long, thin gash down the inside of her right arm. So thin it might have been made by the sharp, slender tip of a fury’s claw.

Stefan shook his big square head, although Thea couldn’t tell whether it was in amusement or disbelief. She guessed a combination of the two.

“You don’t feel like training today,” he said. “What do you think this is, a spa?”

“I didn’t say I don’t feel like it. I said I don’t think I can.” Thea leaned one shaking arm on the conference table and sat, although she didn’t like being in a position of having Stefan tower over her. She’d meant it when she said she didn’t think she could train; she felt weak and dizzy, and wasn’t at all certain she could keep standing. “You can see I’m sick.”

“Well, I’m not your babysitter. Take a sick day and go to Wellness if you want,” Stefan said. “But you’ve got three weeks left to pass the next two stages of the transformation, and they’re both harder than the first. I suppose you were proud of how quickly you went through stage one, but it still leaves you with far too little time for the other two.”

Philip and his cronies came in as he was finishing this little lecture. Philip snickered at her. “Your face looks awful.”

She protracted her claws and turned her hand, showing them off. “And your fingers look bare.”

Thea stood again before he could reply, and with a nod to Stefan (which was not returned), she walked out.

Outside, she stopped the first fury who was walking rather than flying, a young girl who politely told her that the Wellness building was at the back of the campus, near the residences. Thea thanked her and headed in that direction.

She didn’t want to report the attack, certainly not to Stefan. Given the message on her mirror, she was pretty sure Philip was behind it, but she’d been dreaming about Flannery when it happened. That meant it might also tie into her cousin, and if it did, Thea didn’t want to involve anyone else. She didn’t know who she could trust.

But now she didn’t think she had much choice but to tell someone. She was feeling sicker by the minute. She rolled up the sleeve she’d been careful to keep pulled down in front of Stefan and the others, and looked again at the angry red scratch on her arm. The swelling hadn’t gone down, and a mottled bruise covered her purpling skin from elbow to wrist. Thea suspected that whoever had done this had poisoned her.

She hoped, as she walked into Wellness, that furies had the same kind of rules about doctors and confidentiality as everyone else did. It wasn’t a big building, more like a house than an office. The foyer had been converted to a sort of lobby, and a fury with salt-and-pepper hair and a bow tie sat behind the desk.

“Excuse me, is there any way I can see a doctor?” Thea asked him.

He told her in a haughty tone that he was the physician and head of the department, and introduced himself as Langdon. It seemed his receptionist was out that day. How Thea was supposed to know this was beyond her, but he seemed offended by her mistake. It soon became obvious that showing great volumes of respect was the way to get this man on her side, so she played her part. He was kind enough in return, but he didn’t believe her story.

“You’re saying someone broke into your residence and scratched you with a poisoned claw?” he asked when he was finished examining her.

“Actually, I’m thinking it was a needle, not a claw.” Thea held out her bruised arm so he could see it again. “There might be a little hole there, where the scratch starts. Once I had blood drawn and the whatever you call the person that takes blood—”

“Phlebotomist,” Langdon said with a sniff.

“Phlebotomist, right, well she screwed up,” said Thea. “I got a bruise that looked just like this.”

“All right. So you’re saying someone broke into your residence and injected you with poison.”

“Yes.”

“For what purpose?”

“I couldn’t say.” She hadn’t accused Philip directly. The less said, the better.

Langdon shook his head. “Your blood pressure is a bit low, but other than that you seem perfectly healthy for someone in the middle of a transformation. Your body is changing rapidly. It’s not unusual to feel out of sorts. And as for the scratch, well, how long have you had your claws?”

“Only a day.”

“And you were asleep when this happened?”

“Yes.”

“There you go,” he said, as if she’d just explained it all. “You’re not used to having claws. You had a nightmare. They came out, you scratched yourself.”

He took some blood from her, although Thea suspected he only did it to make her feel better, and he wasn’t really going to test it. He seemed pretty comfortable with his explanation.

“Why the limp?” he asked as he escorted her back to the foyer.

“My leg was broken almost two years ago.”

“And you’re still limping from that?”

“It was broken in eight places.”

He didn’t ask how that had happened, only told her to wait while he went back into his office. When he came out, he gave her a handful of teabags and said, “We’ve got some remedies here that humans haven’t got access to. Ask them at the dining hall to steep it for you. It won’t reset your bones, but it will help with the stiffness. Feel free to come back for more when you run out.”

Thea thanked him, but she had no intention of drinking anything he gave her. She didn’t know him, and she didn’t know who his friends were. She couldn’t be sure his dismissal wasn’t an attempt to cover up what had really happened. Whatever that was.

She went back to her residence for a nap, and felt better when she woke up, then better still once she’d had some lunch. So if she had been poisoned, it wasn’t meant to kill her.

Later, Thea told Cora and Nero most of the story, starting with the message on her mirror, although she left Flannery out of it. They both seemed to think Langdon’s explanation the most likely.

“We’re a mischievous breed,” said Nero. “I pull pranks myself all the time, not that I’m that mean-spirited about it. The thing with your mirror was a joke. But attacking you? Whole other thing. Philip wouldn’t risk getting into that kind of trouble just because of some training rivalry.”

Thea was a little hurt that they didn’t believe her, but it seemed best to drop it. Stefan, jerk though he was, was right: she couldn’t spare any time right now. The clock was ticking, and she only had three weeks to somehow change her blood and grow wings.

Because Stefan was busy with his stage one students, Thea’s second stage of training began more pleasantly than the first. She spent a day alone in a conference room with a stack of self-study materials, learning the basics of identifying lust, gluttony, envy, greed, unkindness, selfishness, pride, dishonesty, sloth, faithlessness, and, of course, cowardice, which Thea was fairly certain she already knew enough about.

Over the next week, she met with various volunteers in their offices, taking their tips on how to find the vice cards in people’s decks, and practicing. There were fewer volunteers for this than there had been for virtues, and Thea had to see some of them more than once. Few people were as interested in exposing their sins.

In the meanwhile, her skin continued to take on a purpler and purpler hue, until by the end of her second week at Hexing House, it looked the same as Cora’s. It set off Thea’s blue eyes, and although she wasn’t sure how she felt about the blond hair with it, overall she liked it better than she’d expected to. “Zombie chic,” she told Cora one night. “Maybe we should go out into the real world and start a trend.”

But the other change associated with stage two—blood—was much less fun. Thea didn’t have any more dreams, but she woke up twice more feeling weak and faint. Her whole body ached most of the time, as if she had the flu. It was hard to tell what was just the change to her blood, and what might have a more sinister cause. But her bells never rang, and she never woke feeling a strange presence in her room.

Eventually she was declared ready to test for stage two of the transformation. It went much like her first test had. It was harder, it turned out, for her to see the bad in people than the good, but eventually she met the minimum requirements—barely—for passing.

When it was over, Megaira gave her another vial of what tasted like nothing but felt like poison. And then Alecto cut Thea with her claw, straight across one cheek.

Thea’s blood ran thick and purple. She was most of the way there.

Cora knocked on her door at dinnertime that night, with a picnic basket and a bottle of wine. “I got them to pack it to go,” she said. “I’ve got a little stage two graduation gift that you’ll want to talk about in private.”

“You found something?”

“I found nothing. Which is something.”

“Let’s pour that wine.”

When they were settled on the couch with their plates Cora said, “I got access to all the records from the last six months. There are none of any cases or orders involving your cousin, unless she’s in there under a false name, and that in itself would be a red flag.”

“Why’s that?”

“We’re really careful with our records. HRI makes sure everything is one hundred percent accurate, and they do a thorough investigation of every target and client. They have to make sure everything is on the up and up, see. It would be a nightmare for Human Relations if we went around hexing people who didn’t deserve it.”

“So it’s not possible that there was a case involving Flannery that just didn’t get recorded or filed?”

Cora shook her head. “Extremely unlikely. She still might have been hexed, but if she was, it was black market.”

“Meaning what?”

“Sometimes members of the colony take matters into their own hands, for extra money. Like if a case was turned down by HRI, they’ll take it under the table. That usually means the investigators determined that the target didn’t deserve the hex.”

“Well, Flannery didn’t deserve it. You think maybe that’s what happened, and now Graves is trying to cover it up?”

Cora shrugged. “Could be, but I don’t see why Graves would take that kind of risk. He doesn’t need the money. And it’s a really serious offense. You can lose your wings.”

“What do you mean, lose your wings?”

“I mean they literally cut your wings off. And then you’re sentenced to menial labor for nothing but room and board for the rest of your life.”

“I had a target in my exam, the virtues exam,” said Thea. “Sounded like she was doing menial labor as punishment, but she still had her wings. Alecto said she was a thief.”

Cora refilled their glasses. “Losing your wings is the worst punishment we have. It’s reserved for very serious crimes. But anything that puts our working relationship with humans in jeopardy qualifies. Like I said, we can’t be seen as criminals who hex people wrongly. It has to be justice. Our livelihood depends on that image.”

Thea scowled. “Not to mention it’s just the right thing to do.”

Cora waved that away. “Of course,” she said, but it didn’t sound like it was a very big concern for her.

Thea set down her glass and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. “Well, Graves is trying to cover
something
up.”

“Yeah, I guess he must be. But why?”

Thea hesitated, but she’d told Cora so much already. She might as well tell her about the visions, that horrible circus. Slightly lightheaded from the wine, she even took out
The Book of Flower Friends
.

“So you’re psychic.” Cora didn’t seem grossed out by the old book. On the contrary, she ran a finger lightly over the blood stains. “That makes sense. We already knew you had heightened senses for certain things.”

“My mother thought it was the work of the devil.” Thea shrugged. “But the point is, I’ve never known anything I’ve seen to be wrong.”

“Well, it’s at least a little wrong. Your cousin’s obviously not off somewhere with the dead balloon girl.”

“But she might think she is. Nightmares. Hallucinations. Maybe they’ve drugged her. I don’t know.” Thea divided the last of the wine between their glasses. “But whatever it is, you’ve just confirmed that Graves has been lying to me about Flannery this whole time. And about who knows what else.”

“So, confront him.”

Thea smiled. Typical fury, wanting to rush in with the most aggressive plan possible. But Thea wasn’t a full fury yet, and she didn’t yet have a fury’s fearlessness. Or recklessness. She looked at Cora and shook her head.