Johnny, where she was fighting in silence with someone else, a tall woman in a long red-brown robe, hair a wild, dark cloud around their heads. I stepped forward with the board, then hesitated—what if I hit Johnny with that nail? Would she catch something? Some contagion of Theirs, making humans into these grey things?
A second later the question was moot; Johnny threw the woman over a chair and kicked her so hard in the face that I heard a rattling crunch, as if she’d stepped on a cockroach. The woman tumbled to the ground and rolled, fetching up against a man I hadn’t even seen, already fallen. Johnny was gasping, one hand still extended protectively towards her pile of books and papers.
“What the fuck was that?” I croaked. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m—they—are you hurt?” she said, grabbing the light and holding it over her head. “You’ve got marks on your neck.”
“I’m okay.” I giggled hysterically even before the next sentence left my mouth, feeling it as both a gag and a gag. “Think I just murdered a guy though, the airport guy—or I dunno, if he’s not dead, he’d better be able to live with part of his head on the floor.”
“Nick, don’t—”
“‘Mamaaaaaa,’” I sang, “‘just killed a man—’”
“Nick!”
“‘Put a gun against his—’”
“Stop butchering Queen and calm down for a second, all right? They weren’t alive any more.”
“I killed a dead guy?” That did stop me, and I stared at her, the green eyes glittering not with tears but with prodigy mode, now that I knew what I was looking for. Yes, there—the halo of golden dust, her time ticking away. It faded as I watched. No wonder they had found us. She’d been using it since we got in here. And the longer she used it, the brighter it must have been to them, like a searchlight beaming into the sky. “You said human servants.”
“I didn’t say alive ones.”
“What are you supposed to do with a dead servant?”
“The Ancient Ones used to do it all the time,” she said. “Tariq is the expert, but I gather that human thralls, they’re called y’tan rek’wh, they’re not dead, they’re not alive either, they’re not lalassu, spirits in human form. All their life force is drained out of them, fueling the magic of their master.”
“An Ancient One.”
“Drozanoth, more likely.” She took a breath and let it out in a long fluting whistle, like a strange bird. “It’ll need to start over now. It’s spreading itself thin, even with these increased levels of magic. Trying to keep a lot of plates spinning, keeping its thralls going, preparing for the alignment, calling out to Them, finding us.”
“Is that what the cats saw?”
“Probably. The Society uses them as spies because they can see magic and magical beings. It would probably only work in Fes.”
“So. But. I mean. The upshot is, I’m not a murderer?”
“No,” she said sharply. “Don’t think it. Drozanoth is the murderer here, not you. Not us.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I just do not know how you, as a scientist, handle this shit. I just don’t.”
“If anything, I think it informs my science,” she said. “I’m always looking for the explanation that rules Them out, since I can’t deny that They exist. I want to know Their purview. Where Their limits lie.”
“Because They’re where science stops and magic starts,” I said. “And you went ahead and became a scientist anyway.”
“I had to. I had to prove that there could be one covenant that didn’t go wrong. And I can still prove it.”
The last fumes in my tank ran out and I simply sank to the chair at her study carrel, trying not to look at the bodies behind her. What about their families? How would they find out? How were we going to get rid of the bodies? What were we going to do, what incriminating evidence had we left behind? This was far worse than anything we’d done so far, no matter what she said. They would still be alive if we hadn’t come.
I was shaking so hard my teeth were clattering together in a steady buzz and my stomach hurt, a long dull ache like a noise in the distance, like the buzzing, furious chant I thought I’d heard for a second just as the board connected. I hadn’t even realized I had picked it up with the nail end out. I hadn’t even looked. “Oh God, what are we doing here?” I whispered as she turned back to