Velveteen (6 page)

The scene played out on the stage in slow motion, Miss Antonia plunging her hand deep into the box, jiggling it around while seeming to leer in Velvet’s direction—of course that last bit might have been a figment of Velvet’s imagination. Miss Antonia snatched out a tiny folded slip of paper and toyed with it, her long fingers manipulating the folds until she was holding it out before her.

Miss Antonia snapped the paper tight and started to say, “This evening’s distraction comes courtesy of Ms.—”

Velvet hung on the woman’s words, her fingers aching from the grip she held on the wooden seat beneath her. But the Salvage mother didn’t finish her statement. Her eyes were glued to something going on above them.

Several dozen heads turned skyward.

There, beyond the gas lanterns strung from their black rubber hoses, in that square of night where the passing souls—the lucky ones—moved on to better places, an inky tentacle of shadow curled over the inner stone wall like a greedy tongue.

“S
hadowquake!” someone screamed, or several someones—it was hard for Velvet to tell over all the screaming. The courtyard had erupted into chaos, and not because Velvet had been granted another salon free from the dreaded storytelling—though on any other night that would certainly have been cause for celebration.

Residents stumbled over toppled chairs and crawled across tabletops. The earth shook beneath them, steady one moment and then suddenly as rough and purposeful as if someone had set the ground to vibrate. Furtive eyes blurred into smears of light, like fox fire hanging in the humidity of a swamp.

Above the crowd, a great bank of obsidian fog billowed and roiled, blotting out the view of the forever night sky. The fog swelled slowly, infiltrating the upper floors first, and then expanding, pressing downward toward the courtyard.
Residents flooded from both stairwells into the throng. A single black tentacle took shape out of the curling inky shadows. It was joined by several more that slithered down each of the four walls of the courtyard, coiling around the gaslights, shading them so perfectly, it was as though the lights had been snuffed out. No one could ever recall witnessing the source of the wicked appendages, but Velvet imagined a mammoth black kraken unfolding itself from some yet unknown crack in the afterlife and looming over them.

Seeking.

As if the dark itself had taken shape to teach them a lesson about who was really in charge.

Miss Antonia cried out to the gathered residents, “Get to the strongholds!”

She snatched the box and scuttled off the edge of the stage, scything through the tumult of the crowd to reach Velvet and her team. She shouted over the din, “This is a bad one!” Her eyes skittered toward the approaching tentacles. “Get your team to the station! And you—” Miss Antonia stuck a finger into Kipper’s chest. His fiery eyes extinguished, replaced by full-on sad puppy. “—are not going with them. Get these people to safety!”

The boy nodded, then bounded into the crowd, arms outstretched to corral loose souls. He herded them away from the walls and toward the open area before the stage, Collectors and Salvagers alike. They faced out, every eye glued to the approaching horde of tentacles and compacted against one another, a widening circular mass. Their screams were now terrified whispers.

Velvet noticed a straggler.

Bethany, frantically scrambling toward the center of the room, suddenly stopped dead in her tracks. The girl’s face went slack, and Velvet knew instantly why. A shadow tentacle curled around her waist and drew her backward, knocking over chairs and upending tables with her limp form. It lifted her petite figure a few feet off the ground and then stopped still. Velvet’s heart sank. The girl’s feet were twitching, and her face took on a look so unambiguous, an advisor wasn’t necessary to instruct onlookers of its meaning.

Horror.

The unseen owner of the shadow tentacles didn’t eat the souls. It didn’t take them away or bring them to some secret lair.

All of the tortures were quiet ones.

To project. To play out its victim’s greatest fears on the screen in the back of their brain. Full-color 3-D horror, HD with Digital Surround. Or so Velvet had heard from the gossips in the square.

She had a strong stomach for lots of things. Violence. Gore. Sex. Even cruelty. But the look on Bethany’s face was pure, undiluted terror. Velvet wondered what the thing was showing the girl. What it would show Velvet if it had the chance. The wave of emotion struck her like a fist to the throat. Her mind was back in Bonesaw’s shed.

Her skin, shredded.

Grated.

Tendrils of gristle shook in the killer’s teeth as he barked with laughter.

Velvet shook it off and glared into the darkness. A hollow
roar echoed through the courtyard, interrupted briefly by the clatter of tiles sloughing from the rooftop like dandruff. The unseen kraken on the move. She didn’t need Miss Antonia to tell her twice. Her team was the best for a reason, and while they were usually tasked with routine reconnaissance, they lived for a chance to take down a bad guy. And every time they’d had a shadowquake—every single time—there’d always been a bad guy doing something awful in the daylight as well.

Witches, banshees, whatever—Velvet and her team were on it. Like black ops but ghosts. Ghosts with very specific abilities.

Velvet, besides being the team leader, was a body thief, which, when asked about it, she usually described like so:

“Remember that movie
The Exorcist
? Well, think of me as a demon … only hotter, obviously, and not evil. I can squeeze right into a body without them even noticing and work my mission without leaving a scratch on them.”

Quentin pulled off a similar deal with dead bodies, but it’s too soon to talk about the specifics, as it’s completely disgusting. “The muscle” was really too simplistic a description for Luisa and Logan’s duties as poltergeists. They were experts at causing trouble, getting into fights, and generally messing things—and people—up. Plus, their ability to create distractions
always
came in handy.

“Come on!” Velvet yelled for Quentin, Logan, and Luisa to follow her as she darted for the front door, cutting between toppled tables and hurdling chairs along the way. A tentacle crept toward the entry alcove from above, forcing
Velvet and the rest into a low scrabble as they barreled beneath and past its beseeching undulations.

Outside, the glass-shaded streetlights shattered and showered the cobblestone with shards as tiny as sleet, leaving the gaslights transformed into flaming torches whipping in the miasma of molten tar descending on them like an eternal night. There weren’t many tentacles outside, but the few that Velvet’s team witnessed had already found an audience for the horror show. Slack citizens hung in the air around the square like sad gray ornaments on a dying tree.

“Velvet!” a froggy voice called out from the darkness.

She didn’t need to look up to know Quentin was making his shaky way toward her. Velvet pushed herself up into a crouch and reached out for his hands just as the boy stumbled and crashed onto his knees with a painful groan.

“Oh, crap!” she cried out. “Are you okay?”

The scrawny kid rubbed at his knees while bracing against Velvet’s shoulder just to stay upright in the constant rumbling. Everything about the boy was thin, from his gangly limbs to his awkwardly narrow head and barely visible lips. He’d have looked like a pencil if it weren’t for his chillingly lovely eyes, alive at that moment with terror. “This is the worst it’s ever been,” he said. “Somethin’ real bad is happening!”

“No shit!” Velvet shouted.

He craned his head to glare in the opposite direction. “The twins were right behind me!”

Velvet glanced over his shoulder, and sure enough, Logan and Luisa emerged from the smoky haze of the shadowquake, grimaces of frustration plastered on their normally
calm faces. They clung to the building’s mortar lines spotlit by one of the few remaining streetlamps, like the twins had been mistakenly forced into a jailhouse lineup.

Fear was a temporary thing for the twins, who were the best poltergeists to come along in decades, or at least that’s what the station agent said, and Velvet was totally in agreement. Logan and Luisa could scare the crap out of the worst kinds of villains and, as their months together had shown, took great pleasure in crushing skulls, when they had to … and even when they didn’t.

“We gotta get to the station!” Luisa cried, her tone battened with dread.

“Now!” shouted Logan from over her shoulder, his eyes wild with excitement. It was looking like that brawl was definitely going to happen.

They were right, of course, and were voicing the obvious. The station housed the primary cracks between the world of the living and the dead. That Velvet had found another and hadn’t reported it was, well, beside the point at the moment, but nonetheless bad. Even now, the station agent would be gathering intelligence about the source of the shadowquake. Her visions might not nail down what horrible event was occurring in the daylight, but she’d get a clear enough picture so that Velvet’s team could focus on the journey.

Velvet watched the sky. The shadows struck and recoiled off each other, battling to be first to the mountain. She felt a surge of adrenaline roil through her, and the light within her glowed brightly through tiny cracks in the ash she wore, like magma peeking through fractured rocks.

She bolted for the funicular ramp.

The wooden carriage itself might turn out to be useless, with the ground rolling as it was, but they could always climb onto the tracks and use them to get up the hill to the massive station at its peak. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that; it would take forever to hike the several miles to the top, especially with the ground convulsing like an epileptic. Velvet could barely see six feet in front of her now; the clouds of inky crap had descended into her line of sight. She vaulted over the rail and onto the raised funicular platform, the others moving like a wolf pack behind her, fluidly, in unison.

Despite the situation, she knew she was grinning. Maybe not in the same way that Logan was, in gleeful anticipation, but her excitement was there on her face.

It always was when there was a mission.

Nothing could keep her mind off her troubles with Bonesaw like a big giant commando operation–inducing catastrophe.

Dropping into the pit where the railcar traveled, Velvet closed her eyes and crouched to feel the bronze rails. The rocking and rolling was stronger there, and she had a difficult time distinguishing the feel of the ground’s shaking from the vibration of metal against metal. It was subtle at first. An infinitesimal shudder ran through her grayed skin, just a hint of what was rolling toward them, cutting through the shadows like a knife.

“There it is,” she said.

Quentin nodded hopefully.

There was a consistent tremor driving through the bronze.
The railcar was still functioning
. She turned and looked down the track. Realizing it could be several feet away, barreling toward her, and she wouldn’t even know it through the curtain of darkness, Velvet jumped up and scrambled back onto the platform.

“Is it comin’?” Logan searched her face for the answer. Sometimes he was so dense.

“Well, duh!” Velvet snapped. “I just jumped out of the way, didn’t I?”

He planted his hands on his hips and looked from her to the thick gray mist and back to her, then back to where the railcar should be, a sneer spreading. “Yeah. Like you were about to get splattered, then … uh. Nothing.”

Velvet waited a moment, wishing for the wooden train to appear, and then acquiesced. “Sorry! I meant to say, ‘Yeah, it’s coming.’ ”

A squeal pierced the night as the heavy bronze plow of the railcar cut through the shadows and into the station. The contraption was packed with souls. Gray powdered arms thrust from glassless windows set in the doors—each row of seats had its own—and behind those, faces twisted into masks of terror floated in the dark depths of the carriage. The shouts began almost instantly.

“We got no room!”

“Don’t even try to get on!”

Velvet stepped forward and yanked the nearest door open. A small woman in a pillbox hat, nose pinched and upturned, held the soul of a plump baby in her lap. She hadn’t bothered to make it gray with ash, and it glowed eye-achingly
bright. Velvet raised her hand to shield against the glare of its firing synapses. Clearly she couldn’t ask this woman to vacate her spot—that would be terrible. Not to mention rude. She leaned inside the cab and assessed the other passengers; most couldn’t look away fast enough. Velvet spotted a pair of young men in ratty baseball caps pulled down over their eyes, one fidgeting with his bill.

“You two!” she shouted, and when neither glanced her way, Velvet motioned for an elderly woman sitting in the row beside them to get their attention.

One peered up from his spot, his shoulders wilted, shamed, and rightly so.

“Salvage business!” Velvet yelled menacingly. “Make room or suffer the consequences, dingleberry!”

She ducked out of the cab and slammed the door. Then she stomped to their section, tore open their door, and jerked them out by their worn hoodies. They fell into the benches on the platform and scowled.

“No worries, gentleman,” Luisa said as she strutted past. “I’m sure there’ll be another car along in no time.”

As if to punctuate the joke, a wooden roof tile from a nearby building shook loose and slapped one of the guys in the back of the head.

“Yeah!” Logan chuckled. “You’ll be perfectly safe here. What are you worried about? Dyin’?”

“Dying!” Quentin howled with laughter as he slunk past the pair. “That’s a good one, Logan. ’Cause they’re already—”

“Yep.” Logan stopped him with a hand on his chest. “That’s why it’s funny.”

Quentin clammed up and slid in after an old woman. Logan followed. Velvet followed Luisa into the row vacated by the two boys and slammed the door behind them.

She thought about the faces in the crowd—so many her age, some younger and some a bit older. It seemed that purgatory was built for the young, those who died far before their time and with so much left to learn. They’d be there forever. But youth is resilient, as the station agent was so fond of saying. That’s why Velvet had been enlisted—and Logan, Luisa, and Quentin—to track down souls that should have made it here but didn’t for whatever reason. She just wished there were more accidental causes and fewer nefarious ones.