Velveteen (20 page)

“That’s where you’re wrong, banshee. You’ve got eternity.” Velvet glanced toward the first cell. A naked man glowed through dirty smudges, his eyes grim with hate as he followed her progress. He began the cacophony of hissing she was accustomed to on each of her visits.

“Hisssss!”

“Hiss, yourself!”

The prisoner rushed to the cast-iron bars of the cell and hissed even more vehemently. He was joined by the woman in the neighboring cell, her face so black with mud from the cell floor that her eyes floated between the bars as though the darkness of the Cellar were some cartoon blackout.

Velvet quickened her pace, heading for the far end of the hall.

The Cellar ran on for several miles in different directions, mazelike. But at the first intersection, there was a central holding cell used for interrogations of new prisoners.

The banshee waited for her there.

Before the cage a single ladder-backed chair sat lonely in the hall. A ball of gaseous flame hung above the circular cell like a substitute sun, illuminating the cavernous Cellar to some degree, but not enough. Velvet sometimes wished she could witness the full scale of the place, imagining that it stretched on forever. That would, of course, freak her out, and so she didn’t think about it much.

She eased herself into the seat and stared at the solid representation of the ghost before her.

As dark as night and not from ashing but mud, the banshee paced the edges of the cage, the grit of a thousand years whirring beneath his feet like sandpaper. He passed her several times before he spoke, each time sneering or glaring or presenting some other expression that let her know she’d made him very angry.

“Time to use your big boy words,” she said.

“You’ll get nothing from me, body thief.”

“Why so nervous, then? There’s nothing I can do to you. You’re already dead.” Velvet tried to sound sweet. “And I certainly mean you no harm.”

He stopped and gripped the bars, the sound of his dirty fingers curling around the metal akin to the dry-paper rustling of a reptile slithering. “You and I both know that’s not the case.”

Velvet’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Do we?”

“We do. So what’s it to be, a nerve reading?”

It took all of Velvet’s willpower to still her expression and appear unscathed by the banshee’s remark. How did he know about Salvage techniques? Sure he was a body thief, and a strong one, but as far as she knew, none of the teams had been led by the kind of vile villain that would end up going banshee. The council would never allow it. Nerve readings were a highly secretive talent, one that took months to acquire. Velvet herself wasn’t all that good at picking around inside a purgatory-bound soul, but this fiend didn’t need to know that.

“Perhaps.” She crossed her legs elegantly and relaxed into the chair a bit. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Thank you, Dr. McKellar. “Well, then, if you’re aware of what I can do, why don’t we spare some time and just get to the question and answer portion of this game show.”

“Ooh, yes. Let’s do.” He grinned, a glow breaking through a crack in the dried mud beneath his chin like light catching on a choker.

“Let’s start at the beginning. Did you acquire the captured soul yourself, or did you find him on some antiques
store shelf or something?” Velvet knew the answer to this one without the banshee uttering a word, but it never hurt to start small.

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I imprisoned the soul. Masterfully, too. Just slipped it right inside that crystal ball like an eight ball in the pocket. But that’s not the information you’re after. You want to know when the departure is coming.”

She did indeed want to know that, but it hadn’t occurred to her that he’d offer up such important intelligence. She nodded.

“Well, I won’t tell you,” he said smugly.

“Of course not. That’d be too simple.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, then, let’s stay with the incident at Madame Despot’s Fortunes and Favors.”

He nodded in an overly congenial sort of way.

“What was the purpose of possessing that particular woman?”

“The choice of Madame Despot was entirely incidental. A mere hack as a medium, the woman was less talented than a late-night infomercial psychic. She simply had a space for me to ply my trade. A comfortable one, too, don’t you think? Roomy.”

Velvet considered the Goth trappings of the fortune-teller’s rooms, creepy but warm. She had to admit she kind of loved it, but that was beside the point.

“Well, if you know so much about my ability to nerve read, then you must’ve been aware that we’d isolate your
activity from the shadowquake. Did you think we wouldn’t come for you?”

“Of course I knew. We expected it, with a disturbance of this magnitude.”

Ah. He’d slipped. “We?” she said, smiling slyly.

“I meant that in the royal sense.” He bowed deeply, flourishing the movement with a flutter of his wrist like she’d seen many times in movies about kings and queens and such.

“I don’t think you did.”

“Well, regardless of what you think, little girl, I meant what I meant. Or we meant what we meant, as the case may be.”

More rigmarole, she thought. A word her mother used to use when Velvet was being “gamey,” as she’d put it. Most of the time, Velvet was just trying to talk her way out of some mess or another, missing curfew, getting an F on a science test, roughing up her brothers.

Same thing with this guy.

“It doesn’t make sense. You say you expected us to come. Well, then, why do it? An act of civil unrest? Terrorism? Have the revolutionaries turned to shadowquakes to make their point?”

“All of the above.” The banshee cackled and slapped his knee, clearly impressed with his response.

Velvet was not.

“What’s your name, banshee?” she asked.

“I’m certainly not going to tell you that.”

“Yes, you will.”

“No, I …” His voice trailed off. His eyes widened.

Velvet fondled the key and the charms dangling from its thick pinch point. She pieced out the sterling image of the skull and held it between her index finger and thumb. It was so delicate.

And the key was so sharp.

She lunged forward, throwing her shoulder against the bars of the cell, with such speed and ferocity that the banshee didn’t have a chance to back away. The key punctured his glowing forehead. He bucked a moment, spasming, fists pumping around the bars, and then he dropped to the dirt floor like a sack of flour. Velvet dropped to her knees along with him, the ribbon attached to the key still around her neck, linking her to the fallen soul. He was on his face, one arm extended past the bars nearly to his armpit. She maneuvered around and rested her weight on his bicep.

“Try getting up,” she whispered. “Just try it.”

All around her the hissing of the inmates echoed, becoming louder and louder as it washed through the prison like a tsunami. She wished that hushing them were as simple as screaming “Shut up,” but that had never worked before, and it certainly wouldn’t have worked then. She lifted his head and felt for the edge of the charm. What she found there made her stomach jerk inside her. The fall had forced the charm deep inside. She shuddered, braced herself, and gave the ribbon a tug.

Once. Twice.

A thin drizzle of clear ooze dropped from the hole and puddled in the dirt. It glowed there for a moment, and Velvet resisted the urge to vomit upon seeing the squirming
phosphorous worms that she knew were only displaced nerves. Pressing her fingers around the edge of the charm, she asked again, “What’s your name?”

She closed her eyes and let the banshee’s thoughts flood into her. There was blackness mostly, a dark as evil and unwelcome as the curling inky shadows that filled the streets during a shadowquake. But occasionally, and only briefly, those black clouds broke and Velvet could see his memories, sparking from his phantom nerves.

A street in Chinatown, but not from the Asian section of a city in America. It was from Vermillion there in purgatory. Velvet had never been to the district, but she’d definitely heard stories of it. Exotic and grand, Vermillion’s walls were laced with Salvaged pagoda tiles and hung with paper lanterns folded around the gaslight globes. A gigantic tower of stacked roofs was the district’s station. The Grand Pagoda sat atop a cliff, an atoll amid the murky glow of the city, the ascent to it cruel and forbidding. In storefronts, crimson robes and scrolls and ancient musical instruments hung from hooks, instead of the more traditional roast duck. She saw a narrow stairwell and a door with a sign that read Dr. Chan’s Homeopathy. Underneath that, intricate Chinese characters were carved directly into the door. As the door opened, she saw not a waiting room full of ailing patients but a printing press and stacks of paper as high as the ceiling, each piece imprinted with a similar logo.

A red panda.

The darkness clouded her vision again. She dug the charm deeper into the banshee, nearly all the way up to the knotted
velvet ribbon. But Velvet was already listing into a deeper trance, and the sound of the banshee’s cries muffled to whispers.

Then she was walking down a thin alley. Cracks split the stone walls at regular intervals, and above her the sky was black, not with the ink of shadow but with an all too regular view of nighttime. No souls passed over. None.

She shivered. Something horrible was going to happen.

Horrible.

Her head was filled next with a confusing collage of crystal balls all lined up in rows on metal shelves, stacks of the paper figures—a few so closely resembling Manny it seemed she’d have had to sit for the artist while he or she worked—leaned limply against the wall like the fallen victims of a firing squad, and the sound of a man laughing, his cruel snicker a warning of horrors to come. The laughter brought her mind instantly back to Bonesaw.

He’d chuckle under his breath as he did his worst—as though the curls of skin he removed were wooden shavings from a perfect, adorable decoration he was carving, and not disfiguring torture.

The dread fueled her anger. The images flickered and decayed, and Velvet slowly returned to the Cellar, to the droning hiss of the prisoners.

It was enough.

She had her lead.

In front of her, the banshee was seizing like bacon in a frying pan. She scowled at the evil soul and let him squirm a few moments more before jerking the charm from the wound in his forehead.

He let out a long scream and scuttled into the center of the cell, beyond her reach. “You only think you know,” he whimpered.

“I know enough,” Velvet said bluntly, rising to her feet and brushing her knees of dust. She turned to leave him alone in the dark.

“Wait!” he called after her. “You’ll need to know a lot more if you expect to stop what’s already in motion.”

“Oh? And you’ll tell me?” She didn’t bother to turn back and look at the soul.

There was a slight pause, and then he offered a weak, “I might.”

His was a feeble ploy and a complete waste of Velvet’s time. The banshee would no more tell her his secrets than she would ever visit him again. Little did he know, this would be their last contact. It was enough to learn that Nick’s soul imprisonment was connected to the departure, as were the crystal balls. But for as many leads the interrogation derived, there were twice as many questions.

Were the paper figures the key? The effigy had certainly played no small part in the revolutionary’s plans this evening.

She’d have to talk to the only person she knew skilled in making such intricate things from paper. Mr. Fassbinder. He was sure to point her in the right direction.

She smiled wanly at the prisoner.

“I might be back. You never know,” she lied, and marched straight to the stairs, past the cursing souls in their cells.

The last one hissed, “He knows your sin.”

This time Velvet hissed back.

S
low shimmying descents were perfect for napping. Something about the rhythmic clanking of the railcar’s wheels and the droning whoosh of air against the windowless frames lulled Velvet like nobody’s business. And God did she ever need the rest.

She leaned her head against the wall and leveled her eyes on the horizon, where the inky sky met the gray rooftops and ash fell like dreary rain on the black umbrellas of a funeral. The night was circular, she decided, a tedious loop of tasks and responsibilities. Moments recalling moments, followed by the same and more of the same.

The exhaustion was taking hold.

After the events in the Cellar, Velvet had met with Manny in her private curtained sitting room, candles beating their shadows against the fabric walls like a stiff, quiet breeze.
They’d both agreed that the visions required the utmost discretion.

“The revolution is amping up,” Manny said, her eyes downcast, the glimmer fading with her mood. “It has to be stamped out before something terrible happens. Something horrible.”

Velvet leaned forward in the wingback chair, her fingers tracing the ridges of its dense brocade. “Do you think this goes beyond the Latin Quarter? I mean, if Vermillion is involved.”

“No. I don’t think so. The disturbances have been fairly isolated to our district. And, let’s face it, the Latin Quarter has always had its share of rabble-rousers. We’re a militant bunch. We’re fighters. You know that better than anyone, I suspect.”

Velvet nodded. Their team was consistently called to consult with other districts when the other districts experienced problems. Primarily because the Latin Quarter’s Salvagers never hesitated to settle issues with violence. Their reputation as the muscle was both well-earned and widespread. And the citizenry of the Latin Quarter weren’t a whole lot different—back alley brawling was a favorite pastime. Maybe they’d learned to raise their fists instead of their voices in the same way a child learns to be abusive by watching her parents. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. Was that the saying?

That didn’t explain Velvet, though.

Not at all.

Manny delivered her directive with a sigh. “Follow up on your leads, and I’ll set someone to the task of investigating
this Vermillion connection. You’ve done righteous work this evening. It’s appreciated.”