Rising Fury (Hexing House Book 1) (8 page)

“Nope,” said Cora. “He handles the job placements and everything, but it’s not like there’s a lot of recruiting to do, given we don’t do it outside the colony as a rule. And he does the transformation training, but everything else is done by people from the individual departments. I do some tech training myself.” She signaled for another glass of wine. “One person is plenty for his job.”

“Speaking of tech.” Thea took a deep breath. “I have a favor to ask. We don’t really know each other well enough for favors yet, so if you think it’s too risky, just say so.”

Cora smiled. “We’ve already established that
just saying so
is my thing.”

“But risky favors are our favorite kind,” said Nero.

Thea almost asked Cora right then and there to find Flannery’s files for her, but she wasn’t ready to trust her quite that much yet. Better to test the waters with something smaller first. “It’s just, they won’t let me have any outside contact while I’m training, and I’d love to let my aunt know I’m okay. She hasn’t heard a word since she dropped me off and she’ll be really worried. I thought if maybe one of you guys could email…”

“Is that all?” Cora laughed. “What’s your aunt’s email?”

Thea smiled. “Even in a time of senior citizens doing online dating, Aunt Bridget still can’t figure out how to use email. You can write to my friend Pete, and he’ll tell her. Just, don’t mention Hexing House or what I’m doing here. He doesn’t know about it.”

Nero leaned forward and stage-whispered, “He’ll probably get suspicious when he sees the wings.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”

“So what should I say, then?” Cora asked.

That was a good question. Where could she claim to be, that would justify her being away from him and Aunt Bridget right now? Or that would explain why she wasn’t writing to him herself? They even had internet access on planes now.

Well, Aunt Bridget must have told him something. Let her work that part out.

“Just say I asked you to get a message to Aunt Bridget, telling her I’m okay. You don’t have to say any more than that. Then if Alecto finds out you sent an email for me, she’ll see the content is harmless. No trade secrets being spread to suspicious yam farmers.”

When Thea got back to her residence she sat down with
The Book of Flower Friends
, as she had the night before. For the third time since Flannery disappeared, the old book failed her. Thea couldn’t understand it. When she’d touched Hester, she’d had her first vision since she was a girl. She’d been able to do all sorts of things when they were testing her. She thought her powers were waking up here. Were the flower friends just out of juice, or something?

Considering she had no idea how or why the book worked, she supposed there was no hope of figuring out why it didn’t anymore. Just one of many things she couldn’t figure out, and transformation training was bound to bring her plenty more.

But she was wrong about that, at least in the short term. Stage one was much easier for Thea than it seemed to be for the others. The exercises were mainly about sensing people’s virtues and identifying them clearly. Stefan’s tip about visualizing them as cards was helpful, but not as helpful as her memories of childhood. She began to sense virtues in all sorts of ways, but they were still more like scents to her than anything else. As a girl, even before she knew or understood words like
shame
, she’d always known they were there. They were just part of sensing a person, like hearing their voice.

The new hires practiced on one another, and sometimes on volunteers who came in. But Thea noted that Stefan wore one of the amulets Nero had shown her on her first day there, and never took it off. Apparently he wanted to keep his own secrets.

Her classmates, hostile to begin with, only became more so as Thea quickly surpassed them in skill. Florence openly accused her of cheating, insisting there was no other way a mere human could pick up something faster than those who were born to it. The boys, who apparently thought themselves witty, took to writing
Go Home Slut
in her notebook, or on slips of paper tucked under her water bottle. On one occasion, they made a sign and taped it to her residence door.

In the meanwhile, Thea had dinner with Cora every night, sometimes with Nero, sometimes with others. Elon was there on occasion, but he traveled a lot on cases. Nero privately told Thea that it was a good thing for Cora, that Thea had come along when she did. Cora’s closest friend had recently died of cancer.

It surprised Thea, that such a mundane thing as a disease would affect furies the same way as humans. They seemed so much stronger. But then, Aunt Bridget always said that cancer was stronger than all the saints and apostles put together. They’d lost Uncle Gary to pancreatic cancer just before Thea took up with Baird. She still missed him, but a part of her was glad that he hadn’t lived to see what she’d become.

Thea and Flannery hadn’t talked much since then, apart from holidays, and those were bound to be awkward with Pete around. So it was strange to have a girlfriend to laugh with and confide in again. Strange and dangerously welcome. Thea told herself that none of this was real, that she was an undercover agent here. There wasn’t anybody at Hexing House she could really trust.

As the days went by, Thea’s skin tone began to change. Not by much—it certainly wasn’t purple yet—but it was taking on a sickly gray cast. Yet she felt anything but sick. She felt stronger than she had in years, maybe than she ever had. She found she needed less sleep, and fidgeted if she sat still for more than an hour. It became addictive, this feeling of vigor, almost of
might
. She continually reminded herself that Flannery was the reason she was here. But she was beginning to want to stay, to want to transform, for an entirely different reason: for the first time since This Unfortunate Incident, the constant, crushing burden of fear began to ease.

She put away her packing tape, and thought she might even try a night without the bells, soon.

And it was an even bigger relief than she’d imagined it would be. So big that it almost didn’t matter that these monsters cursed people for a living, and that some of them had probably done something awful to her cousin.

On her fourth day of training, Thea woke to find that seven of her fingernails had fallen out. The next day, the rest were gone, and her fingers ached so badly she could hardly hold her spoon at breakfast. Her hands didn’t look any different, but they felt like they’d been crushed.

That same morning, Stefan pulled her aside as she came in and informed her that she was ready for testing.

“How does that work?” Thea asked.

“The same as practice,” he said. “You’ll be given some subjects, volunteers from around the colony who will remove their amulets for you. Each one has at least five virtues in their deck. Normally, a fury has to identify at least three in each subject to pass. But since you’re human, the change is more drastic for you. You’ll have to identify at least four.”

Of course. Thea was past the point of being surprised by Stefan’s—or any fury’s, really—bias against humans. She just nodded and followed him to a conference room down the hall. He left her alone there to go back to his students, but it wasn’t long before Alecto, Graves, and Alecto’s sister from RDM—Megaira, Thea remembered—came in. Alecto’s braids were an unruly mass around her head, but Megaira’s were pulled back into a neat ponytail. Graves, per usual, was wearing a well-tailored suit and impeccably clean, expensive shoes.

They told her they were there to judge her test. All three had laptops, which they set up at the table.

“No glass room this time?” Thea asked.

“It’s not necessary,” Alecto said. “You’ll only be identifying virtues. There won’t be any hexes involved.”

Graves patted Thea on the shoulder and wished her luck. The other two just took their seats and waited.

The first volunteer was easy. He came from a large family, it seemed, and was all about loyalty, protection, nurturing. Thea suspected he would have been easy to read even for somebody who couldn’t see virtues. The second and third were tougher, but she managed them, after one tricky moment of sensing what she thought was cold-hearted ruthlessness, but eventually realized was courage in its hardest form. Thea wondered if that guy might be related to Alecto.

The fourth and final volunteer was a sullen-looking, very old fury whose wings were drooping and tattered. She was angry, defensive, unhappy to be there. It seemed she’d only “volunteered” because it meant the morning off from the janitorial work she did, and had been doing for the last several years as punishment for some unnamed crimes.

In other words, this was a woman without any obvious virtues. After the first introduction, Thea wasn’t allowed to talk to her or ask her questions. She could only stare, listen, smell, feel, and hope for the best.

Ten minutes went by without her finding a single thing, and she had to find four virtues in this fury to pass.

Thea closed her eyes and breathed deeply. The clove smell was there, of course; she had begun to suspect that was fury’s blood. Virtues were much more subtle and tough to pick up, more like the idea of a scent than the scent itself. She took several more deep breaths, and there was something there, something like rain.

“Purity,” Thea said. “There’s one.”

“Purity from someone who was punished for thievery?” asked Alecto.

“No, it’s a different kind of purity.” Thea frowned, trying to figure out what she meant. “There’s an innocence of…” She closed her eyes again. An innocence of what? Sex? Guile?

“It’s malice,” Thea said at last. “It’s an absence of malice.” She looked across the table at her judges.

Graves frowned at her and shook his head. “Absence of a vice is not the same as a virtue.”

“No, I guess not,” agreed Thea. “But there
is
purity there, in the sense that she’s never wished another person harm, at all. She stole for selfish reasons, I would guess, not with the intention of hurting anyone. A victimless crime, maybe, something she thought wouldn’t be missed, or that could be spared. I bet she was no good at hexing, either. She wouldn’t even want to hurt a human.”

Alecto tapped some keys and frowned at her screen, perhaps checking Thea’s accuracy against the old woman’s personnel file. Finally she looked up and nodded for Thea to go on, her face blank.

“And temperance,” Thea said. “She’s even-tempered. She’s not driven by anger, and she can always manage to be patient.”

The old fury scowled at Thea, but it looked more like embarrassment than annoyance. Her eyes had gotten misty. Thea wondered if it was the first time anyone had ever spoken of her good qualities. Or at least the first time in a long time.

“Humility,” Thea added. “She doesn’t think much of herself. She settles for being a worse person than she’s capable of being.”

“That’s three,” said Megaira. “You need one more. Remember, she has at least five.”

Thea stepped closer to the woman, who flinched, but held her ground. Thea closed her eyes.

Purity is the rain smell, and that fruity thing, or is it floral? Either way, that’s humility. Temperance is the one like sea air. What else is there?

She sniffed, embarrassingly loud, but now was not the time to be shy. She had to do this, she had to pass, or else… what?

For Flannery’s sake, of course. Thea had to become one of them, make them trust her, gain access to them and their secrets. That was why she came.

And if that wasn’t the only reason, she didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to dissect any other motives for wanting to prove herself, not when she had to focus. Her eyes were still closed, and it seemed her fingers ached even more in the dark and quiet. Behind her someone started tapping a pen on the table.

It’s like the barn. I don’t even know what about the barn, maybe it’s no one thing, but it reminds me of it. Back when Uncle Gary was alive, and there were cows and horses.

“Fidelity,” Thea finished at last.

She opened her eyes to see Alecto raising an eyebrow at her. “You wouldn’t consider stealing from your own colony to be cheating?”

“Of course it’s cheating, but that speaks to honesty.”

“It speaks to loyalty, too.”

“Yes, but fidelity isn’t just loyalty. It’s also faith. This woman believes unconditionally. She’s believed in something—no, some
person
, I think—even when they were abandoned by everyone else, and at great cost to herself.”

“That sounds like a guess,” said Megaira. “We need something more solid.”

Burn, witch
, Thea thought, although she wasn’t thinking of Megaira.

Sensing virtues wasn’t all she had. She’d seen Mr. Delacroix’s shame, but she’d also seen Bobby Higgins’s ghost. And it wasn’t some fury-like quality that had made it possible for Mrs. Delacroix to bury her son, in the end. It was that thing Thea’s mother called witchcraft.

Burn, witch,
she thought again, and focused on the old fury one last time.

She felt a quick tug, then a push. There were glimpses, like looking out the window of a fast-moving train. A male fury, as sullen-looking as the old one was; a small hand, clutched inside a larger one; a crooked smile on a little boy’s face. The sullen-looking fury again, screaming, something horrible was happening, a tearing sound. Was that his wings?

Thea opened her eyes, unaware until that moment that they were closed again. “Your son?” she asked. “Dale, was that his name?”

“Bale,” the old fury said. “He died of a broken heart. They took his wings. They wouldn’t believe him. Nobody ever believed him but me.”

Thea looked at Alecto, just in time to see a look of frustration and distaste cross her face, before Alecto resumed her usual professional mask.

That look was how Thea knew she’d passed.

The old fury was dismissed. Alecto nodded and muttered something to Megaira, who rummaged around in her bag. She finally pulled out a vial of something and handed it to Thea.

“Drink,” said Alecto.

Thea knew better than to ask why. She did as she was told. The clear liquid had no taste, not even like water.

“Now give Maggie your hands,” Alecto said.

Thea held out her hands. Megaira’s claws came out, but Thea barely registered it as whatever she’d just taken hit her, and a searing pain rolled through her head, down her arms, like a shock. She gasped and tried to pull back, but Graves was holding her wrists, and Megaira was slashing. There was a spurt of hot blood. Was it falling on her feet? Thea felt herself folding, and barely managed to keep herself from fainting dead away.

Then all at once, her head cleared. The pain in her hands was gone.

When she looked down at them, she saw claws. Long, sharp, purple claws. Thea found she could retract them, then extend them again, as easily as she could bend her knuckles.

It was only when Graves started laughing that Thea remembered where she was.

He nodded at Thea’s claws as she brought them out again and said, “The proper term for that is
protract
, by the way. Surest way to get yourself mocked is to tell someone here you
drew
your claws, as if they were swords.”

Thea blinked at him. What was he talking about? She felt fuzzy-headed and weak. “Um. Thanks.”

He clapped her on the back and laughed some more. “You think that hurt? Wait for stage two.”

“Wonderful,” said Thea. “Can’t wait.”

Megaira sighed and closed her laptop. “I have to get back to work, if there are no other candidates today?”

Alecto shook her head. “She’s ahead of her class, I’ll give her that. There’s one other who’s doing better than average, but he’s still probably got a few weeks left.”

Megaira shook Thea’s hand. “Well, congratulations, Thea. The first stage is the easiest and the shortest, normally, but you’ve got some great potential.”

The sisters left the room, but Thea took Graves’s elbow to hold him back. When the others were out of earshot she said, “You said you’d try to track down Flannery.”

“And so I have been. I haven’t got anything definite yet. One possible lead about her turning up on a ranch in Montana.”

“Montana? Why the fuck would she be in Montana?” It came out harsher than Thea had intended.

“Like I said, it’s just a possible lead. I called in a couple of favors to get a human private investigator to check it out. I’ll let you know if it comes to anything.”

“And that’s it? Montana is the best you’ve got?”

“Staffing is tight right now. Everyone is overworked. And this is not an approved project. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to be patient.”

Thea stalked back to her residence, but by the time she was halfway there, she knew it wasn’t Graves she was angry with.

She’d seen into that old fury’s mind. Focused, willed herself to do it, and then simply
saw
. Yet night after night, sitting with
The Book of Flower Friends
, she couldn’t see Flannery, someone she’d been connected to since girlhood. Why was that, exactly?

It wasn’t the book that was betraying her, she suspected, but her own subconscious. She’d given up everything, up to and including her humanity, and taken a huge risk to find Flannery. But maybe some small part of her didn’t really want to succeed. Because of old resentments; because she wanted to stay at Hexing House and keep getting stronger; because she was still afraid of closing her eyes and finding herself trapped with a headless girl carrying a red balloon.

She needed to do better.

That night at dinner, Thea steered the conversation around to Nero’s coworkers, and to Hester in particular. It was easy enough. Nero had proved to be a relentless gossip, and it seemed Hester was the source of several rumors.

“She’s gotten really flaky lately,” he said. “Making all kinds of mistakes in the lab, and mistakes in that lab can be dangerous.”

“Even with your amulets?” Thea asked. “You can’t be hexed with them, right?”

“We can be hexed,” Nero corrected. “They block magical intrusion to a degree, so you can’t see our vices and virtues. But if a hex is powerful enough, especially if it targets something we’ve got pretty high up in the deck, it’ll hit us.”

“So has Hester gotten into trouble?” Cora asked.

“That’s what I was about to ask you,” said Nero with a grin. “She got pulled into Mag’s office today. They were in there for maybe half an hour, and then Hester left. Middle of the day. Didn’t clean out her desk or anything, so she wasn’t fired, but she did not look happy. She looked really out of it, actually. I was going to ask you to have a peek at her file, see if she was drunk or something.”