Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (2 page)

But now, months after Graham had been stopped, all those damaged rats were still around, doing their thing. Swarms had continued to emerge across the city. In addition to swarming, all that togetherness led to rat kings. Those got a lot more media attention than the swarms. Not only were they weird and horrifying, but they couldn’t move very well, so they were easy to film — a custom-made viral sensation.

New Yorkers are a tough bunch. Most people rolled their eyes and joked about it, but there was a vein of anxiety under the humor.

I’d gotten a little taste of the city-wide tension a few days back when I’d paused to listen to a street preacher in Times Square. He was claiming Armageddon was at hand. His reasoning went like this: the rat kings were the warning signs of a huge army of rats massing beneath the city; when they came pouring out, they’d all be carrying fleas infected with a genetically modified version of the Marburg virus that had been stolen by Islamic terrorists from a secret government laboratory in Area 51; the plague was actually the “noisome and grievous sore” of Revelation 16; New York was the great Babylon and everyone here carried the mark of the beast, so we were all going to die in the epidemic.

His unique blend of religion,
au courant
conspiracy theory, and science fiction had attracted quite a crowd. People were making fun of him, yeah, but not everyone. You could see them scattered through the crowd, the ones who were listening quietly and looking worried. You could almost hear them thinking,
This guy’s too nutty to have it right, but sure as shit
something’s
going on
.

It was those quiet folks who made people like Andy and me nervous.

Furthermore, from what I’d seen on TV, scientists were paying attention, and that was a lot worse. I’d seen one rodentologist say the NYC finds had “increased the number of known rat-king specimens worldwide by almost fifty percent.” He’d looked a little weirded out. Scientists aren’t supposed to get weirded out. When they do, people in high places take notice.

Again, not good. Not if you’re someone tasked with keeping weirdness under wraps.

So we Nolanders had been hunting down rat kings for months. And thank god we had, because there were actually a lot more than the sixteen the public knew about — all in all, we’d found seventy-five of the things.

I eyed the alcove in front of me. Make that seventy-six. Poor rats.

“Okay,” I said with a sigh.

After a few moments, the living rats went still. They were dead.

Andy had explained his method before: he put a barrier of compressed air around them and then pulled the oxygen out of it, leaving pure nitrogen inside to breathe. It’s a painless way to go. With nitrogen, you don’t feel like you’re suffocating.

Andy was gifted in working gasses. He could harden them into near solidity, separate them from one another, and move them around. All in limited quantities, of course — he was a strong worker, but not super-strong.

Grimacing, he retrieved the pile of rats, using the air-barrier as a carrying bag.

I couldn’t sense the barrier at all. To me it looked like a big ball of dead rats was just floating along under his hand.

“How many do you think are in this one?”

He gave the mass an experimental bounce. “It’s pretty big. I’d say at least fifty.”

I pulled out my phone. “Shoot. We’re supposed to meet Zion in ten minutes.”

Andy gave a little groan. No one liked pissing off Zion.

“Let’s push on to the Canal Street station,” he said. “It’s closer than going back.”

We hurried north through the darkness.

Zion was waiting for us at the clock kiosk in Grand Central. She was leaning casually between two of the little windows, doing something on her phone. She was wearing black leather from collar to ankle, finished with orange suede zippered booties.

If I tried that get-up, I’d look like Halloween walking. On her, it was kickass.

She looked up as we approached, the bluish light of her phone’s screen playing across her dark skin. Silently, she arched one eyebrow. The eyebrow said,
You. Are. Late.

Zion was a tracker — a very good one. She could find almost anything, so long as it was in range. She’d been canvassing the city for swarms and rat kings a couple times a week for months. It was largely thanks to her that most of the rat weirdness had been kept out of the public eye.

In addition to being sub-zero cool and very talented, she was also sort of touchy. After helping us locate another rat king down on the station’s lower track level, she copped some attitude about putting them in the trunk of her car. She was really into her car.

“Those barriers had better hold, Andy.”

“Rock-solid.” He shook the smaller one we’d just nabbed. “See? You can’t even smell it.”

She looked skeptical. “If they leak, you’re detailing my trunk.”

“No problem, sweet cakes.”

She rolled her eyes, grumbling under her breath. I knew she wasn’t really angry. It was almost impossible to get mad at Andy. Even Zion couldn’t pull it off.

Once the rat kings were stowed, I settled into the Panamera’s luxurious back seat. Zion turned on some classical music, and Andy started ribbing her about it.

Cordus’s estate was twenty miles north of the city on the west side of the Hudson. Given the late hour and Zion’s driving habits, the trip would take less than forty minutes.

I tuned out the conversation in the front seat and started running through noun declensions under my breath. I’d had the day off from studying Baasha, the
lingua franca
of the Second Emanation, but I’d be tested on it tomorrow. Baasha had six cases in the singular, five in the plural, and four genders. It made French look like a day at the beach. I’d always prided myself on being a good student, but this was a lot of work.

Wergovisom, wergovisoh, wergovizey, wergevisad, wergovizyo, wergevizy
— a working performed by a beast, rather than a person.
Wergevisoh, wergovizys, wergovizymos, wergovisoshom, wergovizysu
— the plural.
Wergovizyha
— the dual.

The dual number annoyed me. Why go through all this fuss to differentiate two from one and three-or-more? It was silly.

I tried to pack my irritation away. Learning Baasha was among the many things I
had
to do these days. I resented it more than my other tasks because I was the only person around who had to do it. I heard on a daily basis what a “special opportunity” I was being given. “Baasha is for Seconds, not Nolanders,” my tutor liked to say. “Your mistakes defile it.”

I locked my jaw in place to keep my teeth from grinding together. Getting mad all over again wasn’t going to help.

“I’m sorry,” Andy said from the front, “it’s just trying so hard to be sophisticated. It gives me a headache.”

I could tell from the way her head moved that Zion was rolling her eyes. “It’s not trying to be sophisticated. It
is
sophisticated.”

“This is satellite, right? There’s gotta be an ’80s station.”

“Andrew Duff. Touch my radio, and you will be in a world of hurt.”

“Whatcha gonna do? Track me to death?”

The soft classical was replaced with a throbbing beat.

Zion jerked in her seat. “Absolutely not! My car is a ‘Tainted Love’–free zone.”

Andy was braver than I was.

I looked out the window and tried to concentrate.
Asidhovisom, asidhovisoh, asidhovizey, asidhovisad, asidhovizyo, asidhovizy
— a knife whose blade has two cutting edges.

Andy dumped a shovelful of dirt into a hole in the ground and tamped it down.

We’d left Zion’s car in the garage beneath Cordus’s house. Zion had headed upstairs right away, no doubt to plot her radio-related revenge. Andy and I had stepped outside to bury the rat kings.

“You did a good job tonight, Beth. I’m glad Mr. Yellin sent you our way for a day.”

“Thanks. I’m glad too. Really glad.”

Andy grinned.

Yellin was my tutor. He’d taken over my training when Cordus left town. It’d been mostly language study ever since. That and memorizing the names of the powers, their lands here and in the S-Em, their in-laws, their third cousins thrice removed, the names of their childhood pets, their favorite kind of fish … the man was obsessed with the nobility of the other world. But helping me learn to recognize the presence of workings, like the barriers Andy had made? No, he wasn’t interested in that. It was frustrating. If Cordus were still handling my training, I might be seeing through fully by now.

Andy shifted another shovelful and then looked up at me, smirking. “You want to dig the second hole?”

“Sure.” I reached for the shovel.

He pulled it back. “Shut up. I was kidding. Girls can’t dig holes.”

“I dig holes just fine.”

“Didn’t know you swung that way, hon.”

I groaned. “That was painfully bad, Andy.”

“You lay a belt-high floater over the plate, I gotta take a swing.”

“Am I supposed to make a joke about ‘floaters,’ now?”

He looked pained. “Please, don’t even.”

I laughed, and he grinned at me, shaking his head.

I hung out while he buried the second rat king. Then we put the shovel away and headed around to the front of the house. We climbed the broad white marble steps that led from the driveway up to a tall portico. Andy pushed open one of the twelve-foot-tall double doors and we walked into the mansion’s towering entry hall. A great silver chandelier — a replica of a tree limb studded all over with tiny lights — glimmered above us. Twin staircases curled up the sides of the room. It was all done out in white marble.

As soon as I stepped on that floor, I could feel the cold seeping into the soles of my feet. A lot of the mansion was like that: frigidly opulent.

Fortunately, we were allowed to alter our own living spaces as we saw fit, and over the last few months, I’d done as much work on mine as my limited stipend allowed. It had begun to feel homey.

And I had friends. That made the place a lot nicer.

“Wanna have a beer before bed?” Andy asked. “Theo said to give him a call when we got in.”

“Yeah, beer. Definitely.”

We didn’t have to call Theo. We found him sprawled on one of Andy’s leather couches, reading a novel. He had a bottle in the crook of one arm and was using a working to pull a ribbon of beer out of it and into his mouth.

Theo could do amazing things with water and water-based fluids. I’d seen him ice over a pond so we could go skating in July. I’d also seen him boil a pot of soup without using the stove. But his combat skills were what made him valuable to Cordus — shields and blunt weapons made of super-dense water, jerking all the liquids out of someone’s body, that sort of thing.

I admired the thin golden spiral of beer. That he could pull off delicate work like this was particularly impressive. It meant he actually practiced instead of just relying on what came naturally through his gift.

He glanced up at me, and the beer ribbon started running through a complex series of loops. It took me a second to realize it spelled “Hi Beth.”

Andy snorted. “Show off.”

Theo grinned. “Damn straight.”

Andy dug a couple beers out of the fridge, and we sat around chatting and eating nuts and popcorn. Mostly I listened as the guys gossiped about the state of the organization. I knew they were worried about how things were going in Cordus’s absence. I tried to pay attention, but I was tired, and they were mostly talking about people I didn’t know — folks stationed in the south, the west, up in Canada. I found myself zoning out. Whatever the problems, Cordus would fix them when he got back.