Chapter Text
"You're not a very good liar, Gideon," said Dulcie. She didn't sound mad or even disappointed, like Pyrrha would have. "But don't let it trip you up. In fact, it might work out best if you try to say as little as possible."
Gideon watched raindrops patter on the outside of the car window, obscuring the night in a mosaic of light and shadow. The rain usually had a calming effect on her, but she'd been tense ever since she arrived back in Drearburh. It was already a miserable, damp city when she left ten years ago and time had only made it sadder and wetter.
"I don't even know what we would talk about," said Gideon. "It's not like we have anything in common, since I am a good girl and she is an ancient unholy abomination."
"Let's go with fae rules. Do not tell her your true name, do not accept any gifts, and do not let her take you to a secondary location."
Gideon turned to face the woman sitting next to her in the backseat of the sedan, ready to complain that fairies weren't real but serial killers very much were. She reconsidered at the look on Dulcie's face. Despite her lighthearted tone, she did seem genuinely concerned.
Gideon dialed back her response. "I don't think that last one is a fae rule."
"Yes, it is. See that? I just lied to you. It was easy." Dulcie sighed. Her hulking bodyguard looked briefly away from the road to glance at them in the rearview mirror. "I’m sorry. I should have done a better job of hiding you."
"Don't be sorry. If it wasn't for you, I'd already be dead. Well, double-dead." Gideon fidgeted with the corded leather bracelet that Pyrrha had given her nearly a decade ago. She'd said it was a good luck charm, made to ward off danger. It was one of the first lies she told Gideon. "No one anticipated that she would be awake again so soon. Will she be able to tell that I’m–?"
"I don't know."
The car slowed as they turned onto a street lined with old, expensive homes. The kind that Gideon would never be able to afford, but might be able to inherit if she killed the right person. Protesilaus parked the car and Gideon reached for the door, pausing when Dulcie's cool hand grasped her own. Gideon looked at her expectantly, but Dulcie struggled to concoct a last minute wisdom or piece of advice to impart on her ward.
"See you later, alligator," Dulcie said at last.
Gideon snorted a laugh. She raised Dulcie's hand and kissed her knuckles. "In a while, crocodile."
It was stupid, but it was easier for Gideon to pull up her hood and step out into the rain with the thought that someone would be waiting for her to return. The car pulled away from the curb as Gideon ascended the stairs to a red brick house with a matching crimson door. She didn't have to knock–someone let her inside as soon as her boots touched the welcome mat. Gideon hadn't been this close to one of the Seventh’s thralls since she was a child, but there was no mistaking them; there was a scar of a Roman numeral on the young woman’s neck, bracketed by a pair of puncture wounds.
Gideon swallowed down the bile that rose in her throat and followed the thrall into a parlor. Dim candlelight revealed her surroundings, their flames steady in the quiet. The room was decorated in cream colored fabric and dark wood, and the door was shut behind her, making her feel like an animal trapped in a very fancy cage. Gideon did not sit on either of the little couches and remained on her feet, waiting.
The skin on the back of her neck prickled in warning. Gideon held herself together when a voice whispered very close to her ear: "I'm so sorry to make you come all this way, but I don't regret being able to finally meet you."
The candles flickered and the vampire stepped into the room from between the shifting shadows. Blood stained the front of her pale dress and her red lips stretched into a smile, baring her sharp teeth. Her eyes were the same radioactive blue from Gideon’s nightmares.
"I am Cytherea Loveday, though you may know me as the Seventh progenitor," said the vampire. She moved like wind rippling through tall grass, her bare feet light and graceful as she crossed the room to drape herself elegantly on one of the couches. "Who do I have the pleasure of sharing this evening with?"
Gideon pushed back the hood of her jacket, scattering water droplets and revealing her mess of red hair. She watched Cytherea carefully, but there was no trace of recognition on her face. "Gideon Nav."
"That's quite a name. A bit too on the nose." Cytherea smiled like they were sharing a secret. It would have charmed Gideon if she wasn't already aware of what she was. "Nav means corpse."
Gideon had not known that but it didn't surprise her. The people who selected that name had been terribly morbid. She kept her tone low and even when she spoke. "A new name for a new life."
Cytherea's expression was a perfect mimicry of human sympathy. She gestured to the other couch and Gideon sat across from her, a small coffee table separating them. "Cytherea was not my human name, either. I did not choose it, but I have grown into it."
The vampire paused and Gideon wondered if she was meant to offer some kind of platitude, but she remembered Dulcie's advice and remained silent. The moment passed.
"I'm so glad you came to see me, Gideon. Every time I wake up, it's a different world out there. I like to indulge in these little traditions as a way of keeping a routine, and because I enjoy meeting the new blood. Tell me, when did Dulcinea turn you?"
"Six months ago," said Gideon, which was when she acquired her most recent set of falsified legal documents.
"Practically a baby," cooed Cytherea. "What do you think of our world so far?"
"I haven't seen much of it," said Gideon. "I spend most of my time with Miss Septimus."
"Is that so? Perhaps you need to get out more often." Cytherea turned her unnaturally blue eyes to the window and the rain outside. "Our world is shrinking, Gideon. We–the other progenitors and myself–used to like it that way. It was easier to keep the hierarchy and separate ourselves from the human world when there were fewer of us. But now I fear that there are too few remaining, so it is wonderful to have you as the newest member of our family."
Gideon’s jaw clenched, but the door opened and distracted her with the arrival of another thrall. Unlike the woman on door duty, this one was more typical of what a vampire looked for in a servant; someone strong enough to lug a body around and healthy enough to be a semi-regular blood donor.
The thrall had brought an older man with her and forced him into the parlor. He was very ordinary looking, the only unique thing about his appearance being the blood spattered on his hands and bathrobe. It did not seem to be his own, but he was pale and frightened, collapsing onto his knees as soon as he was released. Tears streaked his face and he stared unseeingly at the hardwood floor. Cytherea smiled unkindly at him, her tongue gliding over her teeth.
Gideon understood all at once: this was not the Seventh's house. This was just where she was having breakfast.
Cytherea grabbed the man's hair and lifted him by his head like a ragdoll, bringing him closer so that her teeth could reach his neck. Gideon felt the eyes of the thrall on her and resisted the urge to ball her hands into fists. She tried to keep her expression neutral and forced herself not to look away. His limbs convulsed as Cytherea drank deeply.
"Where are my manners?" Cytherea laughed and casually extended her arm towards Gideon, her hand still fisted in the man's hair. His body dragged along the floor, breathing shallowly through his open mouth as rivulets of blood stained his clothes. "Can I offer you a refreshment?"
"I'm fine, thanks."
"Are you sure? If you'd like something else, I'm sure we have a newer vintage."
Gideon shook her head and Cytherea shrugged, releasing the man. He instantly crumpled, smacking his head loudly on the coffee table before landing in a heap on the floor. Gideon flinched at the sound, only slightly, but it was enough to draw interest. Cytherea tilted her head to the side and smiled coyly.
"There isn't much point in me poisoning you. I'm sure you've heard about our games, but I like that Dulcinea has a cute little plaything. Or could it be that you have another reason to refuse me?"
"I'm still getting used to it," said Gideon. Pyrrha insisted that all good lies had an element of the truth in them.
"Ah, sweet child. I can see why she likes you." Cytherea looked thoughtfully out the window at the rain again, already forgetting the dying man at her feet. She absently ran a thumb over her lips and licked the blood from it before turning back to Gideon with a smile. "It's been a while since I've met one of my fledgling's fledglings. I'm tempted to spoil you, but you'll first have to indulge me. I have a job for you, darling Gideon."
To Gideon's enormous relief and surprise, it was a literal job: Cytherea ordered her to gain employment as a security detail at the downtown morgue. It was for the graveyard shift and she was instructed to keep an eye out for the new hunters that would soon be assigned to Drearburh.
Gideon, very wisely, did not inquire as to what had happened to the old pair of hunters or why the new ones would be looking for information at the morgue.
Ultimately, it was incredibly boring and a waste of time, but it could have easily been so much worse. Sometimes Gideon had to help move a cadaver or two, but most of her shift was spent channel surfing through the roulette of late night cable. The evenings belonged to her and the TV mounted in the corner of the reception lobby. After a few weeks of this, she settled into her new routine.
Gideon was watching an old slasher film in black and white when she heard the door open behind her. The footsteps belonged to someone small in stature, but moving purposely. Too small to be a cop, and working alone meant it wasn't the hunters. It was well past midnight and Gideon could already tell that they were going to be a nuisance, so she didn't immediately react to their presence.
"Good evening. I am requesting information regarding–"
"Shh," Gideon reclined further in the padded office chair, "it’s getting to the good part."
A hand snatched the remote off the welcome desk and turned the television off.
"Hey!" Gideon sat up and swiveled around to glare at the newest thorn in her side.
"I am requesting information on–"
Hair like a dead crow and matching lightless eyes. An angled, dour face that only a cryptkeeper could love. Gideon hadn't seen her since they were children, but the way that Harrow stared back at her meant that there was no way she was mistaken.
"Griddle."
"Don't call me that," Gideon said reflexively. Her palms prickled and her body began to tense at the memory of fire and death. She dug her fingers into the arms of the chair, anchoring herself firmly in the present.
There was something almost soft about Harrow's dark eyes and the way she looked at Gideon, but then she closed them. She took a breath and when she opened them she was back to being Harrow-hard-ass Nonagesimus. She gave the impression of being bored and annoyed by Gideon’s unexpected appearance, which was so nostalgic that it made her heart ache. "I am requesting information regarding a corpse that arrived here earlier today."
Gideon kept it totally level as she shoved a clipboard across the desk at Harrow. "Okay. Fill out a form and present valid identification."
Harrow gave her another patented Nonagesimus look. This one asked if she was being stupid on purpose. "I was hoping to conduct an off-record examination."
"On what authority?"
"You know what authority," snapped Harrow. She eased up a little as she realized that her success was completely dependent on extracting a favor from her childhood nemesis. "I had an arrangement with the previous desk clerk."
"Tough shit. Sounds like you interrupted my movie for nothing."
"I'm just trying to do my job, as you very well know." Harrow sighed. She really did seem tired. "Please, Gideon."
Goddamnit.
Gideon made a show of sighing even more deeply and pushed herself up from the chair. She left the desk and slowly circled behind Harrow, daring her to look back. Harrow remained as immobile as a statue, though one hand tightly gripped the strap of her satchel and the other was tucked into a pocket of her coat, probably holding a weapon. Gideon turned the lock for the front door, clicking it into place with a sense of finality.
"Come on," said Gideon, passing by Harrow again without looking at her. She tapped her ID badge on the locked basement door and it beeped open. "What's the name of your stiff?"
"Palamedes Sextus."
"Yikes," said Gideon's mouth before her brain could catch up.
"What?"
"Uh, he must have been bullied nonstop as a kid." Gideon remembered the name because she remembered the corpse. She hadn't seen inside the body bag that she helped move downstairs, but she'd been told that they had to scrape parts of him off the room where he died. And now Harrow, of all people, wanted to take a look at him. "Did you know him?"
"Yes," replied Harrow, without inflection.
The florescent lights flickered to life as they descended the stairs. Everything down here was sterile white and gray stainless steel. Gideon took her time locating the right cabinet, trying to decide if she actually wanted to be responsible for showing Harrow a mangled body. Neither of them were strangers to death, but it was different when it was someone you knew. Especially if their end had obviously been a violent one.
"You're stalling," accused Harrow. "Why?"
Gideon grimaced. "It's pretty bad. I don't think—"
"Of course you don't." Harrow had apparently already forgotten that she was here at Gideon's whim. "This work is my birthright, Griddle. I've seen bodies in all states of horrific disassembly and decay. Will you allow me to do my job, or will you continue to treat me like a child attending their first vivisection?"
"You never stopped being a huge bitch, huh? Fine. Let's give you an eyeful of ol' SexPal." Gideon flicked open the cabinet and rolled out the shelf.
From the shoulders down, he was a scrawny nerd in a handmade sweater who might've dropped a jar of tomato sauce on himself. From the neck up, he was more hole than head. Gideon had seen enough gunshot wounds to know that this wasn't one, but she wasn't sure what else could make someone's head explode like that. She expected Harrow to tell her, to say something like, 'this was obviously caused by such and such and you'd know that if you weren't so terribly plebian, Griddlecakes,' but she was suspiciously quiet.
Gideon was shocked to catch Harrow blinking back tears. She didn't cry, but her lips pressed into a thin line and there was a worried crease in her brow. Her fingers trembled as she reached for the corpse's hand and held it with both of her own.
Gideon looked away, feeling more of that strange tightness in her chest. "Sorry about your boyfriend." She corrected herself: "Ex boyfriend."
"He was a valuable colleague." Harrow reached across the body for the other hand and Gideon realized that she was checking the knuckle tattoos, which read BOOK CLUB. "And an irreplaceable companion."
Even this small display of vulnerability was enough to unnerve Gideon. The Harrow from her memory was as unfeeling and solitary as an obelisk, standing alone and above everyone else. She wasn't someone who had friends, much less cared about the person a corpse used to be.
Harrow pulled on a pair of leather gloves before poking around in the head wound. She had put away emotion and was back to business, inspecting the exposed parts of the skull and meat. As she worked, Gideon took note of the other ways that time had altered her; Harrow's ears were riddled with piercings, her hair was an unkempt and overgrown buzzcut, and she was perhaps slightly taller than she'd been at ten years old. All of her features were sharper, having shed the soft roundness of childhood.
"What do you think did this?" asked Harrow, with the cadence of someone chatting idly about the weather.
"Since you're here, my first guess would be vampire, but that's not the answer you're looking for," said Gideon. "Well, it wasn't a fucking gun. The way it..." She hesitated, hard, and glanced surreptitiously at Harrow. This was her friend.
"Go on," prompted Harrow.
"It almost looks like he exploded, not imploded. If someone beat his head in, the skull would have caved and there'd be bits of bone everywhere, but a lot of it is missing." Probably the parts of him that they scraped up, Gideon did not say.
"Sextus always wore corrective lenses, but there isn't any glass in the wound either. Was his the only body like this?"
"Yes? I usually don't do a lot of looking, I just listen to the morticians gossip. But yeah, the only other ones we got in today were an old person and a stabbing. A normal stabbing, not—" Gideon gave Palamedes an apologetic look "—whatever happened to him."
The relief on Harrow's face made Gideon embarrassed to witness such a range of emotion on her. But more than anything else, she seemed tired. Harrow stripped off her gloves and quickly packed her satchel. "Then, his partner lives. I need to find her."
Gideon returned Palamedes Sextus to the refrigerated cabinet and followed Harrow up the stairs, her mind whirling. So, SexPal was definitely a hunter. But if Harrow wasn't his partner, what did that make her? Was she one of the replacements? Gideon had never considered herself a friend of Harrow's, and up until twenty minutes ago they'd each thought the other was dead, but she didn't want to tell Cytherea about her.
Harrow paused with her hand on the door to the street exit. “If you continue to work here, our paths will cross again. Should you wish to avoid that, then I recommend a different line of employment.”
“Gotta pay the bills somehow.” Gideon shrugged. “Did you drive here? I'll walk you to your car.”
“That is unnecessary.” Harrow pushed on the door, but it was still locked.
Gideon smirked and reached past her, opening it with a flourish. "Yeah, cause Drearburh is known for its super low crime rate," she said sarcastically.
It wasn't raining, but the street outside the morgue was damp and had the wet city stink of car exhaust. Gideon wrinkled her nose in displeasure as they walked in the pale light of street lamps to where Harrow had parked her beat-up black hatchback. The tinted glass made it impossible to see inside, but Gideon couldn't sense another person near them.
“Where's your partner?”
“This again?" Harrow's breath fogged the air. Gideon's did not. "What makes you think I would waste my time on something as frivolous as a romantic entanglement?”
Gideon recognized the typical Nonagesimus deflection. “You know what I mean. Hunters are supposed to work in pairs, as a rule.”
“It's a guideline, not a rule.”
“Yeah, a guideline to not getting murder-killed. Are you even registered with the hunters’ association?”
“Are you?”
They regarded each other with suspicion.
Gideon had no proof, but her gut told her that Cytherea was responsible for the death of Palamedes Sextus. If Harrow pursued his killer with the single-minded intensity that Gideon expected her to, then their paths were going to cross very soon.
Cytherea wanted information on the new hunters that would be assigned to Drearburh, but Harrow was conducting an unofficial investigation. Therefore, Gideon didn't have to tell her jack shit.
Pyrrha had told her to play the part and keep her head down, but Pyrrha wasn't here.
Gideon had wanted Cytherea dead for a very long time.
She took a marker out of her shirt pocket and wished that she had been wearing anything other than her douchebag security uniform for this reunion. "Give me your hand."
After a moment of hesitation, Harrow held out her hand, palm up. She allowed Gideon to push up her coat sleeve and mark the inside of her wrist with black ink.
"Text me," said Gideon. She was careful not to touch Harrow's skin with her own, lest she notice that Gideon was a little too cold, even for late winter. She signed her name under the phone number, just to be an ass. "I'll help with whatever stupid shit you're up to.”
Harrow looked from the number to Gideon. Her eyes narrowed with distrust. "Why?"
“I'm bored." This was true. But also, "I think you'd make an ugly corpse, Nonages–"
“Nova,” Harrow said quickly. She checked the empty street once more. “Nonagesimus is dead, along with the rest of her family. My name is Harrow Nova.”
Gideon nodded and resisted the temptation to pry further. If she were to ask how Harrow survived the fire that had separated them, then Gideon would have to tell her own story. Those secrets couldn't be unearthed until after they had buried Cytherea. "I'll see you around, Nova."
"Yes," said Harrow. Her sharp eyes assessed Gideon, and seemed to find confirmation of whatever she was looking for. "I suppose you will, Nav."