Chapter One
“You should kill me,” I said.
FBI Agent David Acton nodded and handed me a
cup of coffee. “That is not going to happen.” I suspected he was horribly
biased. Not killing me was a horrendous mistake that he was going to regret,
but he liked me enough to sleep with me on occasion. That might be clouding his
judgement. This might just be one of those relationship-ending disagreements
people talk about in bad movies.
I sat in his sedan, wearing his spare
clothes. I’d been naked when he found me. I supposed I was still technically
naked. The reality-warping illusion that made me look human was somehow letting
me wear David’s off-label linen khakis and his extra white cotton shirt. I was
also wearing a simple wooden disk on a leather strap. It had no carvings or
visible spell work, but to magical eyes it glowed like a star. That held the
glamour that made me look human. Without that, I wasn’t going to fit into this
shirt that smelled of leather and Stetson cologne. I wasn’t sure I could
explain that to him, though. I could barely explain it to me.
The clothes were fine. The smell was the
problem. It wasn’t unpleasant. David’s unique scent was almost as comforting as
the man himself. My sense of smell was alien to me now. It gave me too much
information and I was unsure how to process it. For the first time I smelled
the heavy chemicals, the twinge of artificial musk. Beneath that was a deeper
signature, something of coffee, exhaustion and the indefinable scent of him,
leather and spice. The subtle thread that helped bind our relationship, now
yanked from mild context and expanded a thousand-fold. I’d buried myself in his
arms more than once, inhaling deeply of that scent. It offered comfort with no
strings, needs met, long languid sighs between bedsheets, a business made of
tongue and teeth. But that was all gone now. It had to be. I could have no
possible hope for any future.
There was a monster in these soft, quiet,
Texas back roads. It lurked in the post-storm silence, in the drip of rainwater
off mesquite brush and live oak branches, in the shadows cast by the last
storm-clouds racing across a sky going dark with threatening night. The monster
was big, the size of a large, tall man, with webbed and clawed hands. It had
huge baleful yellow eyes. Its skin glowed with deep water phosphorescence, a
tentacled and tendrilled obscenity. It hungered for wet and raw meat. The pulse
of every creature, from the small rabbit nearby to the man beside me, made its
mouth fill with venomous saliva. It had magic that had fueled the nightmare
stories historians kept under lock and key. It didn’t know how to use that yet.
I was terrified it would learn.
I wore the illusion of humanity, as borrowed
as Acton’s cheap suit. The monster was me.
The knowledge held me in its teeth, paralyzed.
Every movement shook. Every sensation was numbed by terror. The monster I had
become wasn’t a danger, it was a disaster. It didn’t even belong here—oh god,
did I feel that I did not belong here—but belonged to the Deep. The places of
dark and heavy water, where the glow of its blue tendrils could be lost in the
regular ebb and tide of the sea. The only thing you could do with it was kill
it. Which meant the only thing I could do was die.
It wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me.
But it was.
I wasn’t human anymore.
This kept surprising me. It wasn’t that I
forgot, because I couldn’t. Every bit of sensory input screamed it. Every brush
of fabric against my skin, the exponentially more complex cries of the world as
the sun slowly sank past the horizon…none of it was familiar. And yet I found
room to think of other things. A reflex for normalcy. Here’s a phone. I should
call someone. Here’s a thermos. I’m thirsty. Here’s someone I love. I want to
touch them, hold them, let them hold me. But wait, none of that matters
anymore. The enormity of my transformation blotted it all out. I looked human
only because something big, bigger than any other power I had ever known or
heard of, had decided I was necessary.
Necessary. This was necessary.
Reality crashing in, over and over, tidal
waves against a shore. My thoughts were disjointed islands, now normal and
placid in greens and blues, now volcanic and ashen. Shame and hope, charring me
down in between.
I wanted to eat the man standing over me.
I wasn’t going to. Clearly, I had enough
self-control to avoid pillaging a countryside (not that there was much to
pillage. It’s the Texas backcountry. Pillaging options are cows, manure, and
maybe if you’re lucky a couple cotton bales.) But the fact that it was even a
possible choice…I wanted to throw up, but I didn’t know if ravenous drooling
bloodthirsty monsters did that sort of thing.
David wasn’t alone. His companion was absent,
but I could scent the other person. Scent. Like a dog. Or maybe something more
reptilian. I tasted the flavors of the air. Once each breath got a
little bit past my glamour, the whole world exploded into a myriad rainbow of
complexities. David was musk and leather, cheap deodorant, and cologne, brown
tones in the luxurious compliment of fine wine. This other man, whoever he was,
smelled like a bonfire. A good one, with the low heat of resinous incense and
burning cedar wood, the kind surrounded by ritual work, by dancers in spangled
silks, by altars to gods more benevolent than cruel. David had given me this
other man’s coffee. He hadn’t said as much, but David had spent enough time at
my house for me to know how he drank his caffeine. Just enough cream and sugar
to cut the bitterness. Like me, he was used to chugging the stuff on route to
one disaster or another. This bonfire-stranger liked theirs with cardamom,
cloves, and cinnamon, the bitterness complimented instead of muted. It was
stronger than anything I’d ever tasted before, in ways I couldn’t just chalk up
to having an entirely different tongue. A part of me wondered if this was someone
David had known before—
Before.
Before my ending, my change, my
might-as-well-be-death transformation. Crashing back down over me, grinding me
to dust. Breathless and reeling all over again, traitor memory turned to
whiplash.
Life had bifurcated. Before, I was human,
something I’d taken for granted, my flaws suddenly laid bare in stark relief.
I’d downplayed my own attractiveness because social pressure made pride in your
appearance uncomfortable, a negative. Brown hair, brown eyes, slender, white.
I’d read like a checklist of idealized features and I’d somehow tried to play
coy about it.
Now I sat in the after, and everything was
ashes.
You’d think that an “after” as monumental as
this one would have a better car. It was FBI standard issue, the same make and
model as Terrestrial Affairs’. Boring. Dull. Though at TA, we tried to avoid
beige and black so as not to spook the clients. Who would be spooked anyway. Government
cars usually look the part. But if this had to be the last car I ever sat in
(and I was convinced it had to be) I wished it had been David’s Scout. That was
a good little car…though, regretfully, we’d never gotten a chance to make good
memories in the rear bedspace.
And now I’d ever be behind the wheel again.
Our job as TA agents was to keep monsters alive, but things like me were the
one gigantic exception. And I didn’t have the option of keeping it secret,
either. In the moments before I killed my captors, I’d texted my boss to let
her know what had happened to me, so that someone would be able to stop them if
I failed.
They’d had to die. My captors. I felt no
guilt. What they’d done to me, they’d done to others. Hundreds, maybe even
thousands of others…except I had only been transformed. I’d kept my essential
me-ness, my sense of self. There was still something here that could call
itself Astrid Stone. The other victims had been obliterated.
And now it was supposed to be my turn. Why
wasn’t anyone putting me out of my misery?
A small part of me, squished down to a basic
instinct, knew that I was catastrophizing while wallowing in a mire of self
pity. If I were my own client I’d be sitting me down with a glass of cold water
and a snack, and I’d make me breathe into a paper bag or count backwards from
ten. Terrestrial Affairs Agents are more glorified social workers than anything
else. I’d coached more than one shifter—usually werewolves, but there’d been a
couple other varieties—though the first real waves of panic. But I’d never
practiced using these tools on myself. There’d been a smug superior assumption,
now shattered, that I was never going to need them. It was as if my clients had
to be forced into survival, but I could have the privilege of my world ending
before the consequences kicked in.
Reality, I guess, doesn’t work that way.
We sat in his car, equidistant from Houston,
Refugio and San Antonio. If Texas has a spirit, it’s this place. No big city
brightness to wash the stars away. The sky burned orange as the day went to
embers, trees throwing skeletal black fingers across the apricot clouds. This
was big sky country, where openness made you feel naked. There’s just you, and miles
of empty, haunted mesquite.
Maybe I could have found some lovely romantic
comparison to take my mind off the lonely dark. That was how I functioned,
before. Look at the world and find the glimpse of paradise masquerading as
someone’s trim little garden. Luxuriate in the stretch of beach no one has stepped
on yet. But to find peace here, you couldn’t have your skin crawling at the
most basic idea of who and what you were.
Somewhere in the pitch blackness around me were
the destroyed remnants of other ex-humans. A man named Hawthorne Hunter had
brought us together. He had changed us because he was looking for something bright
and wonderful that, if he’d found it, would have shattered the world. Hawthorne
hadn’t cared what his actions freed. Only that he escaped the consequences
while reaping full benefits.
We monsters of the deep places are supposed
to all be under the control of the One Below. It was a singular creature,
something of such great indolence and enormity that the sense of His body was
suffocating. The individual minds of the Deep Ones rolled in His grip like
marbles, held and repressed while that thing's terrible will filled every
corner of mind, blotting out any chance for self.
He nearly had gotten me.
I’d fought him. And by doing so I had played
into my captor’s hands. Hawthorne Hunter wanted an immortality serum. He needed
the blood of a free Deep One to make it, and none had existed. They were effectively
extinct. The species did not breed. They reproduced through forced assimilation…and
in doing so, obliterated what Hawthorne had needed. And he had thrown countless
lives and minds into the bottomless well of the One Below's hunger in his
search for something like me. A human who, on the cusp of change, could rip
their mind free.
And I was free, for all the good it would
ever do me. There was no space in the world for me like this. No protocol for
freedom, no exceptions to the rules. I had changed, and I had killed Hawthorne,
and his wretched sister, and every one of his captives.
I didn’t know if that was enough to save me,
or damn me to the same hell that they deserved.
I sipped Acton’s offered coffee because it
kept my mind busy. The sensation of liquid was strange. At some point my mouth
quit being part of the glamour I wore, the mask that somehow allowed something
of my shape and size to sit here in human clothes. The taste multiplied
exponentially, and I couldn’t decide if I enjoyed it. The depth of taste, in
other circumstances, would be fascinating…but it reminded me that in my other
form, I had more than one tongue. If I thought about that too long, I would
never stop screaming.
It
also reminded me I was thirsty. No. I was dry.
People died out here in the brush for want of
water, hundreds each year. The green of mesquite and scrub was like a dry mist
in drought season, the ground reddish and cracked. Most of the deaths were
illegal immigrants, dropped off somewhere before the checkpoints at Sarita and
Falfurrias and told to walk to Houston. They were given no supplies, not even a
change of clothes. Sometimes there would be emergency stations with gallon jugs
of water and a satellite phone to call for help, but nationalist militia groups
sabotaged these, pouring the water onto the ground, slicing the bottles so they
cannot be refilled, ripping the wires out of the phones so that help cannot be
summoned. I wasn’t the only monster out here in the brush.
The nighttime air was mild, but I wanted water.
I wanted food. I wanted to drop this disguise of fake humanity because I
could feel my true form piled up against it, like girth against a corset. I
wanted none of that. I wanted to die.
But my life was no longer my own. I’d made a
deal for this illusion of humanity, this little disk and leather strap wrapped
around my throat. I had no idea what my benefactor was. Fae? Some kind of god?
Something else? But I owed him. And that meant I had to keep on living.
Wind whispered around us, David and I. Since
finding me, he’d been on the phone. Calling his superiors, the police, the
Rangers. There weren’t a whole lot of warm bodies available right now. We’d
just had a tornado blow through here; judging by the debris trail, it was a big
one. Speaking of which…
“Why are you here, David?” I asked. I didn’t
mean to complain about the timing, but it felt hinky.
He frowned into his phone, then looked up at
me. David was pretty. He hadn’t caught my eye when we met because his pretty
had been hidden under the veneer of government agent-man. My ex-husband, Jonas,
had been that movie-star dazzling that could make even an undead heart go
pitter-pat. David wasn’t as sharp-edged, but that was a good thing. Shining
blue eyes, brown hair short on the bottom and shaggy on top. He was like a warm
fire on a cold day, the kind that came with contentment and hot cocoa. His
smile was killer, because it was genuine.
“We got a tip. A recommendation that we come
out here and spend some time looking around.” David didn’t sound happy.
There was a very short list of people who’d
known I was out here. All of them should be dead. “Who told you?”
“You sure you want to know?” He said, and
sighed.
That meant it was bad. If it wasn’t bad, he’d
have told me. “Might as well,” I whispered.
He set a hand on my shoulder. Comforting.
Reassuring. “Michael Hunter.”
Well…shit. That really wasn’t good,
though Michael Hunter did technically count as dead. He was the Vampire
Master of Houston, somebody I’d pissed off comprehensively in a record amount
of time. He was also Hawthorne Hunter’s brother…and my ex-husband’s son. Still,
that was like a mafia boss calling the FBI on the whereabouts of the last poor
shmuck who dinged their car. It didn’t sit right.
Oh, why bother? It wasn’t like I was going to
be involved in this case, or any case. Ever.
David’s hand stayed on my shoulder, radiating
the warmth of human contact that I did not deserve anymore. I wanted to shrink
from his touch. What lay beneath his hand had as much to do with humanity as a
volcano does to stone.
That was my last name. Stone. Agent Astrid
Stone. I had to remember that because I was fraying around the edges like a
cheap rug. Anything to cling to would help me keep the essence of me-ness.
Anything that would let me do my job.
That used to be working for Terrestrial
Affairs. TA agents aren't cops. Our job is to act as a kind of investigatory
body and social services for residents of this plane of existence. We protect
the magical from the mundane, and vice-versa. Network ghosts to exorcists.
Council werewolves through the bad parts of the change. Make sure freshly dead
vampires make it to the blood bank in time. That kind of thing.
Except I didn't think it was a we
anymore. My friends would be on their way to work the horrific crime scene
contained by Hawthorne's house. And to kill me.
If they were smart, they would bring my ex-husband
along for the ride. Jonas Hunter had taken his name from the Hunter Lodge
system, an organization of vampire hunters that he ran. They weren’t exactly
shadowy but they didn’t like the spotlight. And the one reason they were
tolerated in the modern legal climate was…well, they eliminated things like me.
Jonas was very good at killing Deep Ones. I’d
watched him do it.
Jonas was Hawthorne's father. I had killed
two of Jonas's children. His daughter Irene had been there too, a willing and
eager participant. I could not and did not regret it. I had faced, during the
incalculable battle for my mind, the complex and damning contradictions between
who I wanted to be and reality. I was better than a murderer, but not by that
much. Maybe Hawthorne and Irene could have lived. But anyone who could destroy
so many people in a quest for immortality was the kind of rabid dog that needed
putting down.
Discovering why his children had to die would
probably destroy Jonas.
Hunters are a necessity in our world. As a TA
agent, my mandate and theirs had often clashed. They have a black and white
view where I am paid to admit shades of gray. When Terrestrial Affairs runs an
exorcism, it's a therapy session with fireworks. We are just as invested in
getting the spirit safely out of the host as we are in the host's safety. When
a Hunter runs an exorcism, the ghost is toast. But there are big things out
there that TA doesn't have the guns or connections to handle, that Hunters do. Deep
Ones are on the top of that list. My friends would not touch me now with a ten-foot
pole. Jonas would, if that pole were a moon-silver pike he could aim for my
vitals.
I had explained all of this to David,
multiple times. Maybe a little hysterically, but my self-loathing felt cool,
logical and entirely justified. I’d thought David understood. Instead, he canceled
the call for an ambulance and called his superiors, taking and making more
calls between plying me with clothes and intensely strong coffee. He was questionably
vague, instructing his people to call my director as soon as they could. Which
meant the unavoidable interagency pissing contest was predictably under way. And here I was without popcorn.
Could I even eat popcorn anymore?
FBI does not like how inclusive Terrestrial
Affairs tends to be. It’s the nature of the job. Here in Texas we had a big
Hispanic population, so experts on South American magic were a must. The native
creatures survived colonialism better than their patrons, so we kept experts in
Aztec, Inca, Coahuilteco, and Karankawa lore on payroll. And because America is
a melting pot, we have experts in Islam, Paganism, Shinto, Hindi avatars, Slavic
religion, basically anything that might buy a house in our jurisdiction. We need
these people. We pay through the nose to keep them.
But the FBI likes to pigeonhole people into
threat categories, and they aren’t too nice to the brown colored pigeons. And
while they are getting better about it, we had transfers from the Dallas office
that remembered running a literal gauntlet after 9-11, clocking in to work
bleeding with contusions, and various LEOs would just stand to one side and
watch. New York had to pay some hefty bonuses to keep their Muslim, Hindi,
Persian and Yazidi staff from quitting. Those of us in the deep south had done
without for a very long time.
And there was always the chance that we
weren’t getting better at blunting hate; others were just better at enduring
quietly.
Either way, my life depended on how well my
boss felt like playing inter-agency happy families. I knew she went to war for
her people. I just didn’t know if I counted anymore. She kept a polished and
functional lion spear in her office. It was her grandfather’s, well worn. Her
hands fit on the shaft with a competence anyone sane had to respect. In short:
she was scary. I just had no clue which side of scary was going to be pointed
in my direction: the shield or the blade.
David Acton might very well be the only thing
standing between me and an early grave. I just wasn’t sure if I wanted him to
stand or move.
Why would a Master Vampire call the
FBI?
“Michael Hunter called you?” I asked. “Why?
And how did you know to come here?”
“He said he’d heard from Hawthorne. We’d put
out an APB for the two of you, when you disappeared from the pump station,”
David said. We’d been thwarting one of Michael’s more rebellious members when
Hawthorne abducted me. “He gave me a list of addresses. We’d already been to
two of them. We saw…” He trailed off, glancing at me.
“Mummified Deep Ones?” I guessed. The ones
I’d seen had been dark as dried blood, desiccated down to the bone…and still
living. Things like me could survive being mummified. Not a reassuring fact.
“Yeah,” David said.
Memory threatened to eat me alive. “Did you
kill them?” I asked. I remembered the ones I’d killed. Nothing should be alive
like that. Twitching. Suffering.
“Yes,” David said.
“Good,” I said. “How many other addresses are
there?”
“Just one. I’ve got the FBI on it. They’re
calling your people. They’ll wipe out the rest of what Hawthorne was doing.”
Which meant Jonas was going to find out.
Maybe not about me, not right away, but he’d know about Hawthorne. And Irene…if
the tornado hadn’t taken it, her body still lay on the floor of Hawthorne’s
makeshift torture trailer. I’d killed her with my claws and teeth. It wasn’t
like you could hide it.
“Why was Michael calling you?” I said.
“Master Vampires don’t do favors for free.”
He grimaced. “Yeah. Well. We’ll talk about
that in a minute. I just want to make sure—”
A flash of light cut him off. Oranges and
reds, hot and pure flame. Followed by a boom that shook the entire car. The
windshield cracked from the impact. And off to the left, in the darkening sky,
rose a mushroom cloud of smoke and fire, thick with toxic power.
TURN TO STONE will be avaliable on Amazon in October 2021