Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) (10 page)

“It’s not like he’s just going to give me the truth for the asking. Tipping him off that I’m onto him can only hurt me. Flannery isn’t the only one in danger.”

Cora reached for Thea’s arm. The scratch wasn’t scabbed over anymore, but it had left a thin red scar behind. “This is healing up okay. You think this was Graves and not Philip?”

Thea raised an eyebrow. “You’re conceding it was someone besides me?”

Cora sighed. “Your take on it seemed far-fetched. But now…”

“Now I’m suggesting there’s a conspiracy to cover some unknown crime, and that seems like a better story than Philip just being an asshole?”

“Actually, yes. Someone trying to cover their tracks might be more willing to risk a serious offense, versus someone who just doesn’t like you.”

“A serious offense like what?” Thea traced the scar with her finger. “If they wanted to kill me, they could have done it while I was sleeping. What were they doing to me? And why did Graves want me so badly? And what did he do to Flannery?”

“All very good questions,” Cora said. “I have no idea, but I guess we’d better figure it all out.”

“And quietly,” said Thea with a sigh. “Before they decide it’d be easier to just kill me, after all.”

“Your target is Gregory ‘Greggy’ Rockwell, a forty-two-year-old white male.” The head of Infliction, a grim, gray-haired fury called Persephone, clicked a key on her laptop and a picture came up on the conference room screen.

Thea had been afraid that Alecto was right, and she might be too soft-hearted to hex anyone. But as she took in the broad, fake smile, the square chin, she thought it might not be that bad. Gregory Rockwell reminded her of Baird.

“He’s being hexed with honesty, as punishment for the sin of falseness,” Persephone went on. “He’s conned several elderly people out of their retirement funds. One of them committed suicide. It was her niece who hired us. Apparently he managed to escape official human punishment through some legal maneuvers.”

“Sounds pretty bad, but I’d probably hex him just for going by
Greggy,
” said Elon.

Persephone ignored the joke. “The address has been sent to your tablet along with the rest of the file. It’s his home. Reports indicate he’s there by four in the afternoon, most days, but occasionally he makes a stop and you may have to wait until five. The neighborhood is not gated, but there are a couple of nosy neighbors.”

“Seems pretty straightforward,” Elon said.

“Yes, easy in and out for you.” Persephone took a black box from her briefcase, and two vials of liquid. “I wanted to start Thea with a simple one. Your hex.” She handed Elon the box. “Please confirm serial number…” She looked back down at her screen and rattled off a bunch of numbers, which Elon also seemed to be reading from the side of the box.

“Confirmed,” he said.

Persephone typed something, then handed him the vials. “And your illusions. Oh! And here are the keys.” She gave them to Elon but smiled at Thea, quick and tight-lipped. “I’d forgotten. We don’t drive to our cases very often.”

Elon put on a fedora that matched his suit, making him look the part of a covert agent on a mysterious mission, and dropped the keys into his pocket. “All right then, let’s head out.”

Thea thanked Persephone and then, because the meeting seemed so formal, shook her hand. Persephone seemed to approve, and gave her a businesslike nod.

“You’re in good hands, Thea. Elon is one of the best.”

“So I’m told.”

They left Infliction and started across campus to the south gate, where there was a small parking lot. While they walked, Elon acknowledged several greetings from above as furies flew past, and Thea noticed a few feminine stares. She remembered Nero muttering about Cora not being able to trust Elon, and wondered whether the fault was with Cora for being jealous, or Elon for being untrustworthy.

“She was right, this is a good one for you to start with,” Elon said. “It’s probably the most common hex we sell. Everyone’s a liar, right?”

“How exactly does it work?” Thea asked. “I saw Nero use hexes, when I first came here, but I didn’t understand what he did.”

“Each hex is target-specific and single-use. They use some of the person’s DNA to make it, so it can’t be stolen and used on anyone else.”

Thea frowned at that. “But he was trying to hex me, to test my hex resistance.”

Elon whistled. “Hex resistance, huh? Cora didn’t tell me that. I don’t think we have anyone else in the colony who can do it, do we?”

“Graves said not.”

“Nice. Probably give you a leg up when it’s time to get into a department. RDM would like that, and it might be handy here in Infliction, too.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. But my point was, nobody took my DNA.”

“They probably used generic hexes that hadn’t been finished for a case yet. But it’ll still only work once and on one individual person.”

“And how do you actually use it?”

“Well, you need to sense it first. They taught you the deck of cards technique for sensing vices and virtues?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well forget that here. It doesn’t work for a hex. Some furies see it as a liquid, or a blanket they put over the target. Some think of it as a cloud. Some don’t visualize at all. They sense the hex more like a sound, and then it’s almost like shouting it at the target. Just remember, it’s not a spell. It’s a thing. Just not a physical thing.”

“So how do they put it in that box if it’s not a physical object?”

“It’s an enchanted box. We have a limited supply, and we can only make them when we’ve got an enchanter in the colony, which is only once every couple of generations or so. So you have to be careful. Persephone keeps records on every box that goes through our department, and woe to the Inflictor who damages or loses one.”

“Am I supposed to know what an enchanter is?”

“Someone with magical ability a couple of levels above what we normally have.” By then they’d reached the parking lot, and Elon approached the closest of six identical black SUV’s. “Basically, manipulating vices and virtues is just manipulating certain specific kinds of energy. There are other kinds of power that use energy differently. Clairvoyance, telekinesis, that kind of thing. And then there are enchanters, who can manipulate matter and energy in really advanced ways. Like the illusion that covers this campus. And…” He handed her one of the vials that Persephone had given him. “Human illusions. Drink it once we exit the campus.”

“It will make me look human?”

Elon nodded. “Two purple people, one with wings, both with claws, can look a little conspicuous if they stop for gas or lunch. These will last about twenty-four hours.” He opened the passenger side door for Thea. “Ready to inflict some pain?”

“Well, when you put it like that.” Thea kept her voice light, but the phrase had made her a little uneasy.

She expected that discomfort to get worse as they drove away from Hexing House, back into what was no longer her world. But it didn’t. She looked out at the strip malls and fast food restaurants, the families in their minivans and the farmers in their pickups, and she felt… nothing.

“I expected to miss it,” she said.

Elon glanced at her. “What? The human stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess it’s good you don’t, because there’s no going back. Drink your illusion.”

There’s no going back.

That made Thea feel a little wistful, maybe, especially when she thought about Aunt Bridget’s farm. But she was surprised to find that even when the fact of giving up her humanity was put so plainly, she still felt barely a pang. Maybe her heart was getting fury-hard, and she was losing her capacity for sentiment. Or maybe being human had just never worked out all that well anyway.

Thea opened her vial and sniffed before she drank. It didn’t smell like anything. It didn’t taste like anything either. She didn’t feel any change, but when she looked over at Elon, he wasn’t purple anymore, and she couldn’t see his wings. He still had the same dark hair and brown eyes, but his skin was a rich beige that suited him much better than zombie-purple-gray.

When they parked down the street from Greg Rockwell’s house three hours later, Thea watched from the shadow of a maple tree as Elon rang the doorbell and hexed Rockwell without ceremony. She saw Elon make a tossing sort of gesture, and she saw the moment the hex hit the target. But the hex itself, she couldn’t sense.

Rockwell put his hands on his temples, like he just drank a milkshake too fast. Then he blinked at Elon and said, “Whatever you just did to me was bad, wasn’t it?”

“Depends on your outlook,” Elon answered.

“I deserve bad things.” Rockwell looked shocked at his own words. “That’s not what I meant. Actually it was exactly what I meant.” He struggled to put a smile on his face, “I meant, do you want to come inside and talk this over? I’m sure there’s been a misunderstanding.” Without a pause he went on, “Of course there hasn’t been a misunderstanding.” He bit his lip in frustration, then said through his teeth, “Can I not lie?”

“Nope,” said Elon. He tipped his hat to Rockwell and turned away.

“How long will he be like that?” Thea asked when they got back in the car, but she held up a hand before Elon could answer. “And don’t tell me until he’s learned his lesson.”

Elon laughed. “But that’s the truth.”

“Fine, but what does that mean? How can you tell when he’s learned his lesson?”

“It’s not for me to tell,” Elon said. “It’ll resolve itself.”

“How?”

“All right, let’s take today’s hex as an example. Almost nobody is one hundred percent honest, right?”

“Right.”

“But almost nobody is one hundred percent dishonest, either. They’ve got some of both. They’ve got the opposite virtue to keep the vice in check. See?”

“I think so.”

“So a hex forces that kind of equilibrium. The target’s inflicted with a strong dose of the opposite virtue—in this case, honesty—to contend with his vice—falseness—until they come into balance. In rare cases, we inflict someone with a vice instead, if there’s enough excess of a virtue to cause problems. But that doesn’t happen often.”

“And this balancing just happens within him,” Thea said. “We have nothing more to do with it?”

“Right.”

She frowned. “So that would mean we’re done with Rockwell. Case closed.”

Then why was Graves still hanging around the orchard three days after Flannery disappeared?

“I’ll come back to observe him within twenty-four hours, then track him for a few days,” said Elon. “Other than that, it’s just paperwork.”

Except Flannery hadn’t been at the farm anymore to observe or track. Maybe Graves had stayed behind to see if anyone suspected anything, so he could cover his tracks.

Maybe he stayed behind to frame Pete.

Thea had noticed that her claws sometimes protracted of their own accord when she was angry. She had to remind herself not to squeeze her hands into fists, thinking about Graves planting Flannery’s blood in Pete’s car.

For the next week and a half Thea went back and forth with Elon, hexing various targets, checking in on the recently hexed, filling out reports. She learned the basics—especially of the reports, which Elon delighted in having her do for him—but she wasn’t able to sense the hexes until they were actually on the target.

“I’ve only got four days left. I have to learn something besides how to fill out forms,” Thea said to Elon on the way to their sixth case. She thought this would be another of the easy ones: a hex of diligence, as punishment for the sin of sloth. They’d learned in their prep meeting that the target’s four-year-old son had nearly died, and would bear horrible scars for the rest of his life, thanks to her being too busy watching reality TV to notice he was setting fire to the kitchen.

“Can’t teach you how to inflict a hex until you can sense it being there,” Elon said. “I wonder why it’s so hard for you, when virtues and sins were so easy.”

Thea shook her head. “I guess it’s because these are disembodied. Once they’re attached, I can sense them then. Like once you put the hex of honesty on the con man, I could sense his honesty.”

“Then you need some personal connection to it.” Elon considered this as he drove. “I wonder if you thought of it differently. How are you sensing them? Visualization?”

“Actually, smell mostly,” said Thea. “Courage smells like dirt, and so on.”

“Okay, good. Who do you know that’s brave?”

“My Aunt Bridget. Cora.”

“I know Cora doesn’t smell like dirt. What about Aunt Bridget, does she?”

Thea frowned. “No. But I suppose if I was focused on her courage she might. Aunt Bridget has always smelled pretty much exactly like her kitchen. Gravy and muffins.”

“Well, it still might work, if you associate her with the virtue.”

“What might work?”

“Today’s hex is diligence. Who’s the hardest worker you know?”

“My Uncle Gary, but he’s dead.”

“Not Baird Frost?” Elon gave her a teasing smile. “He seems to work a lot. What’s he up to on
Benjamin Stake
movies, seven?”

“I don’t associate Baird with many virtues.”

He looked surprised by her stiff tone, and left it at that. “Okay, so let’s take your Uncle Gary. Can you remember what he smelled like?”

“Hay and sweat.”

“So when I take the hex out today, I want you to close your eyes, and think of him, okay? Diligence won’t smell like hay and sweat. Or does it?”