She Who Sees Through Darkness

Part One

Author's Note: This novella is part of my Wyverns of Mass Destruction series, which you can learn more about at wyvernsofmassdestruction.com

Katrina Harris woke to the sound of violin music drifting down into her ears from the floor above. Annie. Her niece's music plus the lumpy cushions under her head said she was at her brother's place in Brooklyn, not the studio apartment in Alphabet City she split with five other staffers. How'd she end up here?

Shawn. The memories returned. She and Kyle had found him waiting outside the bar when they'd climbed out of their taxi. Shawn had grabbed her arm and towed her away. She'd shouted at him—it was just for work, shouldn't you be home with your wife, don't you trust me—and he'd answered no and ushered her into his car.

"I had a vision," he'd explained when no one could hear them. "You would have relapsed. I saw you afterwards, sobbing in the bathroom." A police car had shot by them, its red and blue lights dancing in his black and grey hair and casting shadows in his thin cheeks. "There was an eighty-five, ninety percent chance. You need to tell your boss."

"Senator Winters?" A strangled little laugh had escaped her. "She calls me her attack dog. She trusts me with her reputation. What's she going to think if I tell her?"

"That you're a grown woman with a chronic mental illness who needs to stay away from bars. You're two years sober. You've finally put your life back together." They'd argued all the way back to his house, until she'd agreed to tell the senator and explain how work stress plus Kyle's return made a toxic combination of triggers.

Like hell I will, she thought, rolling off Shawn's couch. The long tee-shirt she'd slept in billowed down past her knees. Admit to her tough-as-nails boss just how weak she really was? Emma Winters had once called the two of them kindred spirits. Katrina needed to believe that was true.

Forget Shawn and his visions. She herself was painfully ignorant of what, exactly, he saw. Part of the price of magic. It messed with family genetics, cutting fertility, leaving a whole child here, a disabled one there, and, in her case, one without any powers at all. She might have been a second-generation Descendant, but without the pyromancy that marked her bloodline, simply being a Descendant meant nothing. It wasn't even something she could brag about—telling anyone about magic would constitute a breach of the Seal, which meant death for her and whoever she'd told. And since she lived in Shawn's jurisdiction, he'd have to give the order for her death.

Katrina found Anaïs in the kitchen, frying bacon, her unruly red hair floating in a cloud around her head. Anaïs's blue eyes narrowed as they found her sister-in-law.

"Do you have an iPhone charger?" Katrina asked. Her phone was dead. Her fingers itched to check her text messages.

"Shawn and I use Blackberries." She looked back down into the pan. Her tone hadn't exactly been friendly, but Katrina couldn't blame her. She'd been a third party in their marriage for too long. "And Annie's phone privileges are on pause, since she told us she was going to a study group and went to a party instead."

"That's too bad," Katrina said. It felt like the appropriate thing to say.

"You talking about me?" Annie—Antoinette Harris—glided down the stairs. She'd inherited her father's long black hair and her mother's pale complexion, her fingers delicate and her smile mischievous. "What are you doing here so early, Aunt Kat?" She looked at Katrina, who turned to look out the window. She could turn into a little me.

Shawn walked in, dressed in khaki pants and a polo shirt that squeezed tight around his forearms arms. The magic in his tissues and years of training meant he could, at forty-two, handle weights and take injuries that would destroy a man twenty years his junior. As an agent of Indigo, ninety percent of his work was spycraft: seeking Descendants who didn't register with their local Indigo station, putting names to the faces of people glimpsed in visions, keeping the public convinced that Indigo's purpose was monitoring the CIA's internal financial assets. But ten percent of his work was eliminating rogue Descendants who threatened the Seal, and Shawn excelled at one hundred percent of his job. All New York's Descendants, whether Indigo, civilian, or criminal, called him the 'Living Flame.'

The formidable Living Flame poured coffee into his travel mug. "Are you going home this weekend, Katrina?"

"Probably." The old family farm in the Adirondacks was a four hour drive from the city, but she hadn't been back in nearly a month. "Need to do some cleaning. My marathon's the second weekend in November. Five weeks left. Need to train."

"Rumor has it . . ." He paused and looked at Annie.

"I'm going to be an agent, Dad. You can talk about this stuff."

Katrina took a long, bitter sip of coffee. She didn't trust herself to comment.

"Rumor has it there's a valkyrie in town, asking questions about local history, especially the farm. I'm driving up tonight with everyone I can spare to investigate her. We'll be gone all weekend."

Katrina whistled. The Harris family had belonged to Indigo since its inception. The cache of Indigo documents in their basement vault went back three hundred years, and the only people who'd be interested in obtaining them were among the most dangerous people in the world. People who wanted nothing more than to overthrow the Seal and watch the world burn.

"How's the Universal Vision look?" Katrina asked. For a second-generation pyromancer, Shawn's clairvoyance was fairly weak. But every pyromancer in Indigo could foresee a threat to the Seal.

"Fuzzy. There's a low likelihood this woman will try to break the Seal any time soon." Shawn's dark eyes, twin to her own, narrowed. "That doesn't mean she's no threat. There's the vault . . . and our intelligence says this one might have a criminal record. If you go home, keep the doors locked. Stay out of the woods and hold on to your gun."

"Will do," she said, cheerfully. An image danced before her eyes: a furious valkyrie, transformed from human to monster, eight feet tall with feathered white wings, breaking into the old Harris House to rob the arsenal in the basement—and Katrina, her long black hair flying back off her face, golden-brown skin glowing with sweat, angled features set and deadly as she pumped the monster full of lead.

"I mean it, Katrina. You're not an agent anymore."

They might reinstate me if I killed a valkyrie. She shook off the fantasy. Indigo had already made one major exception when they'd hired her, a woman without magic. Considering why they'd fired her, she'd need to stop World War Three to get back in. Especially since this valkyrie didn't seem to pose an immediate threat to the Seal. "Any interesting cases this week?"

"Rogue aeromancer in Chinatown," Shawn said, wary. "Suffocated his wife and her lover. Anaïs fought him for control of the air while I got behind him."

Warm satisfaction bubbled up in the back of her throat—a diminished version of the rush that had come from stopping the bastards herself, but a rush still worth pursuing. "And? Any more new arrivals causing trouble? What's the word from the international branch?"

Anaïs broke in. "We also had to track down a teenage boy. He was planning to upload videos of him shapeshifting online. "

"Hard fight?" Katrina asked.

"Hard? Of course not. He was a child. And his punishment . . . was severe. Third time this year someone's tried that stunt."

Katrina knew Anaïs was trying to make her feel better about not being an agent any more. But Katrina wasn't naïve, like Annie—she knew being an agent meant getting your hands dirty. Most of the people who threatened the Seal were criminals, people who cared for no law, who used their magic to rape, murder, and steal. But some were teenagers, or seniors with dementia, or mentally ill. The work wasn't pretty. The world needed it, all the same.

She'd seen Shawn's face when the Universal Vision sharpened, indicating a breach of the Seal was near. He'd often described it to her: whole cities dissolving in chaos, werewolves openly chasing human prey, innocent Descendants murdered by suspicious neighbors and criminal Descendants killing hundreds, thousands. Ordinary spies took drastic action all the time. At least the agents of Indigo knew for sure their work upheld the greater good. They fight in the shadows. They keep the peace. No need for glory, or even a 'thank you'. Katrina liked her job well enough, but fighting to protect the name of one of New York's richest families felt tiny in comparison.

She wolfed down her bacon and wrapped the toast up in a napkin. "I should go."

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