The Hatter is Mad: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 2) (4 page)

It was kind of a sick joke to be standing next to a statue of me sacrificing myself in a past life. To put it plainly, I didn’t like it here because I couldn’t just be me. I had to apologize for being Dirge and
not
being Dirge every second of every day.

This was also why I dyed my hair black. Since Dirge and I both had lavender hair, the similarity in our appearance often made people uncomfortable. Unfortunately, my hair sheds dye like a dog sheds hair during summer, and I needed to dye it every few days just to keep it from returning back to its normal shade of soft lavender. Over the last few weeks, I just hadn’t had time to color it, and now the dye was almost entirely gone. I grumbled to myself and reached up to tuck my hair beneath my cap. Maybe no one would notice if I kept it hidden?

The entrance to the city was blocked by an immense gate that was painted green, but most of the paint had long since flecked off to reveal the rusty metal beneath. The pointy ends at the top still looked razor sharp, but those sharpened ends were mostly for looks. The entirety of the city was covered by a magical field that could turn even the most adventurous bird into fried chicken. There was only one way inside: through the gate.

The one-armed Mitsoumi Mawara was standing just inside the gate, staring at me so hard I thought he might make me spontaneously combust. Apparently when you risk everyone to bring someone back from the dead, and she isn’t exactly what you wanted, you get upset. Yup. That’s right. Most of the people involved in my whole ‘resurrection’ thing didn’t like me and why? Because I wasn’t Dirge Meilan.

His green eyes burned, and I knew he was angry with me because the normally friendly Mitsoumi Mawara was not speaking. Usually, he didn’t ever shut the hell up.

“Take a picture, it will last longer,” I growled.

Without a word, he pressed a button on the inside of the gate with his good hand. Scars radiated outward from the stump of his missing arm across the majority of his well-muscled body, yet even with one arm, he was still so handsome that if I didn’t know him so well, I might have forgotten how to speak.

The gate creaked open, and I stepped into the magical city of Lot. The air around me tasted almost like cotton candy. It bristled with power, running over my skin like a lover’s warm breath. The pavement inside was still cracked from when Dirge exploded, and the buildings had that dilapidated look that things have in the years following a natural disaster.

Part of the reason the Dioscuri let me run away was because they didn’t have the time, energy, or manpower to do anything about it. I mean, hell, the war ended almost four years ago and Lot was still barely habitable. My guess was that it’d take another decade before more than the most critical systems were rebuilt. I guess that should have made me less surprised that they didn’t stop Grollshanks… but that was their job, damn it.

Mitsoumi sat down on the grass behind the gate. I wasn’t sure if he was actually watching the gate or not when he let me in. Why was he, the heir to the royal throne, here? Typically no one watched the gate. All I needed to do was place my hand against it, and it would have opened for me, assuming my mother hadn’t revoked my access.

“You should have been more careful. I could have been a doppelganger or something. I could have tried to eat your face. Doppelgangers have been known to do that,” I said, holding my hand out for identification.

He scowled. Instead of reaching out to me, he ran his hand through his short silver-blue hair. It was one of his best features. Like me, he was one of the few Dioscuri with abnormally colored hair. Sure some of them dyed their hair outlandish colors, but to have colored hair was rare. It was one of the reasons we got along so well.

“Why are you being such a jerk?” I asked finally.

“Because I’m mad at you,” he replied before glancing past me and staring at nothing in particular.

“For what?” I asked but he didn’t respond to me. I sighed and shook my head. “Whatever.” I put on my big girl pants, smiled my biggest smile at him and made to walk past him toward the information center.

Mitsoumi’s body tensed as though he had been waiting for this moment for a long time. I could just imagine the conversations he had with himself in the mirror. The wind swept by and mussed his silver-blue hair but still he made no outward movement against me.

“Mitsoumi, I know you’re thinking, ‘if only I was there… maybe I could have done something…’ but it’s a lie. It’s a lie you should know as well as your brother. Dirge would have done whatever she damn well pleased. You couldn’t have prevented her death, just like you couldn’t have stopped Warthor from using your brother to resurrect her.” I shook my head. Mitsoumi’s brother, Masataka Mawara, never really recovered from that. “I’ve told you this before.”

“Masataka will get over it,” he said and his voice was far off, like he was looking into the future and forgot he was supposed to be in the present.

“He tried to put his trident through my chest the last time I saw him,” I snarled, barely resisting the urge to shake him. I still had the scar from it, but that wasn’t the problem exactly. The problem was I’d never seen someone filled with as much hate as I’d seen on Masataka’s face. Honestly, I hadn’t even known it was possible to hate someone
that
much. “That doesn’t seem like something someone who will ‘get over it’ does.”

“It wasn’t personal.” Mitsoumi shrugged, and it was like he was saying,
what do you want me to do about it, exactly?

“I was a little kid, and your brother tried to kill me.
A little kid!
” I screamed, taking a step toward him, my left hand clenching into a fist. “He was supposed to be my friend, supposed to look out for me, to train me, and instead? Instead, he tried to cut out my heart in the middle of a forest with no one watching.”

“You stopped him.” The tone in Mitsoumi’s voice seemed almost bored. He reached down and his fingers brushed along the pommel of his weapon, and I wondered if anyone was watching us. If someone was, I wondered what would happen if Mitsoumi Mawara, heir to the royal blood line, decided to attack me. Would people step in? If they did, would they help him or me? Even as the thought slipped through my mind, I was pretty sure I knew the answer. They would help him.

“And when you found us?” I sighed and turned away from him. “You left your brother bleeding on the grass and carried me here. Why?”

He shrugged. “And you never reported what my brother did to you. Why?”

“Would it have even mattered?” I asked and blinked to keep the tears from rolling out of my eyes and down my cheeks.

“It mattered to me,” he said. I felt his hand touch my shoulder. It was so surprising that I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Your mother would have executed him for that, and you know it.”

“My mother is careless and sloppy. It’s like the details never matter, only the big picture. She’d have killed Masataka, and it would have been my fault.”

Mitsoumi cast his eyes heavenward as though wondering if it would rain. “I won’t say saving his life wasn’t the right thing to do, but you should have talked to me about it before you falsified the report.”

I glanced at him. The tension faded from his face, shifting the corners of his mouth until there was almost a smile. I was going to say something, but he gestured toward the crater. In the epicenter of the blast zone something gleamed brightly. It was impossible, but there they were, driven blade deep into the ground: Set and Isis. The twin swords that made up Shirajirashii were completely unscathed, buried in the ground to the midpoints of their oppressively white blades.

Since I’d broken Shirajirashii in a fight with a vampire last year, I hadn’t bothered to rebuild the weapon. Because I was using Haijiku, I never really saw the point. I had earned Haijiku. I slew its owner and took it as a prize. Shirajirashii, on the other hand, was the weapon I had used in my previous life as Dirge Meilan, and in the end, it had killed her.

Sure, Dirge had known using Shirajirashii’s power would kill her. She had even counted on it to kill her. Dirge was willing to die for the safety of people who didn’t even like her. Dirge was willing to die so long as it meant she killed the enemy. Dirge was a martyr for the Dioscuri, and now she was dead.

Part of me still didn’t know why she had done it. It was one of the questions about her death that plagued me at night. Why had she sacrificed herself?

The other was why using Shirajirashii had killed her? Why did she wind up exploding? It was the main reason the weapon made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like wondering whether I was going to explode if I used the weapon. It wasn’t like anyone knew why it went off the way it did. There had been theories but no hard facts. For whatever reason, I couldn’t remember the details of that final battle, and I wasn’t sure why. Even though I was pretty certain I’d have found a different way to stop the demons during their attack, Shirajirashii still scared me.

I shook off the thought and let out a deep breath. Part of the problem with Shirajirashii was simply that when I used the weapon, people compared me to my former self. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted from the Dioscuri anyway in this regard. It wasn’t like I wanted people to thank me or anything like that for what Dirge did, if anything, I wished the comparisons would stop. But an extra cookie at meal times? I could have been down with that.

I sighed and stared at the weapon embedded in the stone below. Why had it reappeared in the center of her crater? Without thinking, I leapt down, landing a lot harder than I would have liked. I glanced at Mitsoumi several yards above me and wished I’d brought rappelling gear. Getting back out was going to be a pain.

I turned toward the gleaming swords and made my way over the glassy terrain. The heat of the explosion had been so hot the crater was lined with a thin layer of glass and falling inside it was the cause of more than one injury among inquisitive visitors who wanted to see where Dirge had died. I had more than a few scars from climbing down here when I was younger. Part of me hadn’t known why I had done it, but something about the spot felt peaceful. And yes, I realize that sounded crazy, but it was true.

Even from here, I could feel the power of Shirajirashii flow through me, running over my arms like lotion on a dry day. I shut my eyes, swallowed, and put my hands on their hilts. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but as I touched them, it felt like coming home. Whatever my problem was with being Dirge Meilan reborn, I knew one thing to be certain. This weapon was mine and running away from that fact wouldn’t change the truth of it.

I bit my lip and put on my big girl pants. It was time to claim my birthright. I pulled them from the blackened earth.

Chapter 7

Lot’s information center was mostly taken up by three enormous computers. Thick black and purple wires pulsed around them like living things. Magical energy hung like a thick fog that sort of smelled like ranch dressing and grape popsicles. They didn’t even have screens, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, they had huge glass orbs, reminiscent of a lava lamp, bubbling inside them.

These three computers were known by the Dioscuri as the fates, and for all I know, they were actually inhabited by the three sisters themselves. The computers, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, were responsible for tracking all the supernatural activity on Lot. If these machines wanted to find you, they would. They were able to accept huge amounts of data and spit out decisions… but they didn’t always agree. Sometimes each one had its own idea of where a potential target could be.

However, just because they could do something, didn’t mean they would, which was why there was always someone here. Someone who would see other alarms go off and react accordingly. No one knew why the fates decided to let some activities go and warned about others, but one thing was certain, those computers helped a lot more people than they hurt.

Books were strewn about the room haphazardly as though someone ransacked the place frantically searching for something. Some guy wearing goggles with a wrench in his pocket struggled to figure out why smoke was coming out of a rather large control panel. It struck me a little odd I didn’t know his name. It felt like I should, like his name was right on the tip of my tongue.

“Hello,” I said. It came out a little bit louder than I intended. The man whirled around in alarm, his face ashen as he tried focusing on me. Thick black and white hair framed his face. I don’t mean to say he had salt and pepper hair either. The lock of hair in the center of his head was as white as snow and the rest of his hair was as black as pitch. It sort of reminded me of a skunk. I don’t know why, but I was fairly certain it naturally grew that way.

He reached up and pulled his goggles off, staring at me with one gray eye and one blue eye. I shuddered. Again, not sure why, but something about the sight of him sent icy toads bounding down my spine. Maybe it was his weird fur-lined collar or maybe it was the way he kept licking his lips. Either way, it was chilled me to my core and the thought of being near him sickened me.

“Miss Callina, that’s what they are calling you now, eh?” His voice had a raspy slurp to it as though he was sucking on his tongue as he talked. I was going to respond, but he continued not caring whether or not I spoke. “I suppose you’ll be wanting something. You always do. Always wanting things from me but never giving me things. I like things too. It’s nice to get things. But you won’t have thought of me, will you? I would have thought of me, but you would not have and now you’ll be wanting things from me…” He leered at me, and I barely resisted the urge to back slowly out of the room.

“Yes, always wanting things from me,” he repeated. He kept talking like that, saying the same things over and over. Was he trapped in some sort of infinite feedback loop? As the seconds began to come dangerously close to minutes, I cleared my throat. The sooner I got this over with the sooner I could abandon this creepy little man.

I swallowed and put on my best big girl voice. “There was a disturbance in my region this morning followed by a teleportation. Do you have anything like that on record?”