Chapter 9

Dáire had been a man once. Tall, lean, dark hair too long, green eyes too rich. What lived in his skin could still pass for him at first glance, until that glance lingered. The changes were subtle as if the creature inside him still shaped him. His brow was thicker than his forehead supported, nose a little flatter in its transformation into slits. Upper jaw top-heavy with more teeth than it could support, the lower unable to fully close around the thick extra canines he now possessed. Nothing about his face matched what Icarus’s animal instinct said it should.

He was broad-shouldered and muscular in a way that looked forced upon him--lumpy, misshapen, born of speed instead of deliberation. The man was taller than Icarus expected. He stood a head or so above most, but Dáire was a little over eye level to him. Skin pale, blotchy, covered in a lace of grey veins that pulsed with a faint perversion of light in time with whatever remained of his heart.

Icarus kept his eyes fixed on the creature, watching the unnatural shine in them. There was no iris or pupil, just an ink-black marble set in gray-veined sclera. In his periphery, he saw the perversion of its hands. Elongated fingers tipped with nails twice the length of any man’s he had ever seen--an ombre of white fading into a rotten brown-black. The way the lamplight bounced off of them whispered of their sharpness. 

Dáire straightened, then bent into a crouch. He snarled and scanned his opponent in haste. Calculating, he stepped back. His head cocked one way, then another, examining the priest poised before him. Thin, bloodless lips curved into a vicious predator’s grin and he straightened again to his full height. One of his disfigured hands reached and flexed towards the dark alley beside them. 

When it spoke, its voice came in a discordant whine. Two tones locked in combat, strangling each other in his speech, “The boy would like to play with swords? Then we shall play with swords.”

Icarus adjusted his grip. Movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Shadows. Undulating and writhing like snakes trapped in a bag. They reached and stretched into the creature’s hand, reforming and reshaping until Dáire had the shape of them he wanted. 

A lightless black sword. Straight-edged, cross-hilted, all its edges blurred where it touched the low lamplight. The creature shifted its stance into one Icarus did not know, but the threat of it was clear. It spoke again, making his ears ring.

“I have learned the art of blades for hundreds of years,” it moved, testing the edge of the perimeter. “Let us see if you might say the same.”

The abhartach launched itself at him, a striking adder. Icarus half expected the shadow blade to pass right through his until the two met in a blocking arc. Metal sang, sigils flared, and Icarus shoved hard. Dáire ground his sword when he withdrew, sparking the metal. He carried the momentum into a backhanded swing that met Icarus’s defenses again. He pressured the priest forward in a hail of fluid strikes--one after another, step after step, shoving him closer and closer to the edge of the salt ring. 

Icarus counted his steps--one, two, three, four--and ducked a hard vertical slash, darting to the side away from the edge. Dáire hissed and came for him again, a never-ending hurricane of motion. Icarus blocked again and again, stuck in a defensive loop. His arms burned furiously, a dull ache setting into his thighs as he absorbed blow after blow. He grit his teeth and pulled a hand off the hilt, flexing his palm. Blue flames coiled and he thrust the barely-formed handful of fire towards the creature. 

It scorched across Dáire’s middle and he let out a howl of surprise. It created an opening the span of two breaths. Icarus did not waste it. He rolled his wrist in an upward slash, carrying the motion into a backhanded arc. Dáire parried, Icarus spun and feinted before lashing a thrust towards him. Metal met papery flesh that parted around the thing’s shoulder. The sigils steamed, threads of ghostly blue-white light rising and straining towards their target. 

Dáire brought his sword of shadows down like a hammer against the flat of Icarus’s enchanted blade. The force of it jerked the priest nearly to his knees, tearing it free from the bloodless muscle. Dáire’s hand shot out to chase the blow, knife-sharp nails raking towards his face. Icarus dodged--barely--and felt the sting when his skin opened along his cheek. He followed the dodge into a roll in an attempt to regain his footing. 

The abhartach chuckled. The sound came out alien, something pulled out of a rift torn in the concept of noise. Its posture straightened, shoulders shrugging out tension, head rolling as if warming up for the next match. Icarus rose to his feet and kept his guard in front of him. He took a moment to glance outside the circle, seeking Maren at its edges. 

Her face was tight, drawn, glittering with sweat even in the dim light along the street. Her hands moved in a complex series of twists and patterns, then something seemed to fight back and forced her sigil to unravel. He had never really understood how it worked for her. Now, however, was not the best time to wonder. 

He flicked his attention back to the creature with a scowl, “Don’t tell me you’re tiring out already, old man.”

To his surprise, it gave him a throaty laugh that felt bizarre and genuine. It actually found him amusing. That was disconcerting. “You are a lad of impertinent countenance. I do so enjoy a spritely human.”

Icarus was very sure of the grim implication of “enjoy” in this context. Dáire lifted its hand and examined the nails it had raked across his face. To emphasize the point, a too-long tongue--thick, charcoal, a grayscale abomination of what should be a blood-flush appendage--lazily cleaned blood off. 

Icarus made a noise in disgust, “You don’t bathe often enough for that.”

The monster stiffened. So did Icarus. It stared at its fingertips as if listening to something they said in confidence. Its eyes widened, mouth arcing in what passed for a grimace of surprise. It turned its head towards him and examined him as if it had not quite seen him until that moment. 

Icarus adjusted his grip. His heart was suddenly audible in his ears. He glanced at Maren again, uncertain and unwilling to let it show. The way it watched him made his skin ripple in discomfort. It was seeing something he could not, observing a new factor that was not there before. 

It moved with blinding speed, so fast it dawned on Icarus how much it had been toying with him thus far. Irritation flared white hot before it died just as suddenly. He gasped in surprise when its face was directly in front of his. 

He threw himself back over the edge of the salt line with a second to spare. Dáire’s face was level with his, as close as the thing could get it against the barrier a toe’s width between them. Its nostrils flared, inhaling him. Icarus decided he did not enjoy being inhaled by a fae demon or whatever this thing was. 

Its face was a mask of concentration before it straightened again, shadowy sword tip dropped toward the stones. It reached towards the barrier and tapped it. Magic crackled and arced from the place it touched like lightning along the horizon, “Blood of the Deceiver.”

Icarus froze and lowered his sword, his voice barely above a whisper, “What did you say?”

The abhartach took a step back to get a better look at the priest. His appraisal was sharp, simmering with what could be rage or respect depending on what he found, “You are not him. But you carry him in you. You are of his blood.” Dáire bared sharp teeth, “Tell me where he hides and I will spare you.”

“What are you talking about?” His pulse was thunder in his ears, “Do you mean… do you mean Daedalus?”

Dáire growled and slammed a fist into the barrier, sending muted blue light spiderwebbing outward, “Speak no more of the cursed Deceiver! Tell me where he is and I will spare you, violent Father.”

“Icarus,” Maren warned from across the circle, her concentration frayed when she split her attention and the blue threads in front of her shuddered. “Do not engage him.”

He ignored her, “What of him? What do you mean by Deceiver?”

The once-man growled low in its chest and pointed the tip of the sword at the priest, “The son of the Deceiver speaks lies as his father did. We will not entreat with you. Tell me where he is!”

Icarus could not think. Twice in as many weeks his father’s name had left the mouths of fae. Not in fifteen years had he heard Daedalus’s name spoken so often since the investigation closed. It was not a coincidence, he was not foolish enough to believe in those. His hands were numb, he was too aware of his breathing. He calculated the risks before he replied. 

“I don’t know where he is,” he tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. “Why are you looking for him?”

It laughed, low and throaty and wrong, “I do not hunt the Deceiver, but if I happen upon him or his kin I am keen to extract a toll of revenge.”

“Why?” Icarus knew better than to speak to these things, but his head was foggy and spinning. He thought of his fruitless board, that pointless box from Father Reed, the bodach that taunted him in the end. All of it had resulted in helpless nothingness. No clues, no information, no forward momentum. Until now. Maybe. 

It studied him, frowning over its parted mouth. He could sense it gauging him, testing his sincerity. Then, unfortunately, it smiled. Vicious, violent, full of menace. It chuckled grimly, “The son does not know the father. Interesting.”

“Speak plainly!” Icarus snapped. His patience with whatever games were afoot in his father’s ghostly footprints had long since worn thin. He brandished his sword and let the sigils burn a little brighter, “Speak and I will make your death swift and painless.”

The thing waved a dismissive hand and shook its head, “You are as a gnat to a bull, priest. Step beyond your cowardly salt and I shall show you your insignificance.”

It stepped back towards the center of the salt circle and spread its arms wide. Blood boiled in Icarus’s veins. Heat crept along the back of his neck, radiating out of his stampeding heart. He clenched his teeth so hard he tasted iron. 

Pale God above, I am so fucking tired of this.

Dáire turned away, as though no longer perceiving Icarus as a threat to be concerned with. It made the rage and fury worse. As it paced the edges of the ring, a strangled cry so human it startled him out of his fugue. He honed in on its source. 

Eilonwy. 

He had forgotten about her. Now she stood at the edge of the circle--too close for his comfort for a person untrained in exorcism magics. She covered her mouth, eyes wide in terror. She trembled so violently he could see her fiery red curls tumbling free of their ribbon. The monster stared at her, a flicker of something like recognition in it. Its face contorted, the twisting, unmolded shape of it seemed to writhe as if in conversation with the thing living inside it.

She managed to find her voice enough to lower her hands, “What have you done to my brother?”

It exhaled hard and let out a low rumble from its chest, “I have done nothing which was not invited.”

“Invited?” Her expression shifted from terror to revelation, “Dáire asked you for this?”

“Dáire invited me. It seems he felt the power I might give him was worth the sacrifice,” it bared its teeth in a smile and studied her a few moments longer. 

Icarus seized the moment of distraction and stepped inside the barrier. He sprinted and launched himself at the creature. He slashed wildly and felt the blade bite into dead flesh. He threw a hand towards the monster and drops of faefire landed in a blistering hail on its skin. It snarled and grabbed his wrist, yanking hard, and kicked his feet out from under him. Icarus let out a cry when it twisted just at the edge of breaking bone. It slashed once, angry and unfocused. The shadow blade carved deep into Icarus’s shoulder and he howled at the sear of pain.

“Maren!” 

The abhartach let out an inhuman sound from a mouth that opened too wide, even for its offensive jaws. It held him at its mercy and whirled back to Eilonwy, eyes alight, “What would your mother say about all of this, little maiden?”

Despite the pain in his captive wrist, Icarus managed to look at the young woman. This was all going so terribly awry. And where the fuck was Maren’s sigilwork?

Everything happened in a matter of seconds. Recognition. Fear. Confusion. Outrage. 

Eilonwy’s eyes shifted to Icarus for just a split second. A moment. Enough. He saw the movement like a premonition. Her foot moved. Subtle, shielded by her heavy skirts. She reached out with the toe of her sturdy shoes. 

Then--to his horror--she scuffed the salt. 

Icarus let out a roar caught between words and sound. He thrashed his sword towards the monster, cutting deep into its thigh. It drove the thing to one knee, both of them tumbling sideways onto the cobblestones. 

Maren cried out, “Icarus, now!”

She cast the intricate, winding sigil like a net of blue light into the broken circle. It seared into the stonework. Icarus wrenched his arm free and scrambled when the thing clawed furiously for him. Blue threads rose up from the stone in tendrils of light and snared its arms, wrapped around its middle, its throat, its legs. The sword of shadows evaporated when the abhartach clawed at the magic choking its airway. It made a strangled sound when the sigil drew taut and forced its arms to its sides. 

Chest heaving, shoulder throbbing, Icarus got to his feet. He turned his face to the clouded night sky overhead and closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Maren grunted, straining as she wrapped the other end of the threads around her wrists. Her heels dug into the uneven ground while the abhartach struggled against her hold.

“Do it, Icarus! For God’s sake, I had to improvise! It won’t hold!” She shouted. 

He ignored the pain and hefted his sword into one hand, looming over the restrained creature thrashing on its knees. He studied its broken, irregular face with a sneer, “Why did you call my father the Deceiver?”

“We don’t have time for this!” Maren screamed at him and tried to recenter her hold. 

The abhartach snapped its teeth at him and glared, its voice a rasp against its bonds, “Because he deceives.”

“How?”

“If you want answers, priest,” it spat the word at him, “you shall not get them from me. Ask the Inquisitor your ilk love so much.” Icarus’s face must have betrayed his ignorance. It let out a hoarse laugh, “I do not answer to you the way your Order’s chained dog does. Kill me and be done. You will have no more.”

True to its word, it went silent and Icarus knew he would not get anything else from it. His mouth twisted in frustration. So many secrets. So much obscurity. So many half-truths and obfuscation. So much of his father and so few answers. 

Before Maren could cry out again, Icarus raised his sword and sliced into the neck of the thing that had once been Dáire Callahan. Metal cleaved through muscle and bone, hitching once at the vertebrae. Its body stiffened. Head--severed at the shoulders--hit the ground with a hollow thump. The rest of it followed. 

Maren gasped and the sigil’s light evaporated in a white-blue mist. She doubled over, hands on her knees, and gulped in air like a desert would rain. He stared down at the collapsed, headless corpse. Its otherworldly features faded back into the man he once was. No blood poured from the wound, just flesh and bone that looked as though it had died some time ago. He was not really looking at Dáire, though. His attention was fixed someplace in the middle distance, lost in his own anger and swirling maelstrom of thoughts. 

Startled out of his contemplation, Icarus whirled on Eilonwy. 

Only to find nothing. She was gone.

He opened his mouth, the sound of his scolding caught in his throat and replaced with something perplexed. He turned to Maren. She stared down the darkened road for a moment, then met his eyes with a shrug. He looked back one more time and blinked like that might give him clarity. He sheathed his sword and went to his fellow heretic priest, offering a hand when she straightened. Of course, she declined. 

“I don’t know exactly how,” he stared into the dark, “but I feel like we’ve just been played.”

She rolled her shoulders with a thoughtful nod, “I’d be inclined, Father Icarus, to agree.”

Chapter 10

“For God’s sake, Icarus, stop carrying it like that!” Maren hissed at him, trying to keep her voice down as they worked. 

Icarus’s face twisted into a grimace. He held the burlap sack out in disgust. No longer bewitched, the flesh was beginning to rot. Quickly. Wetly. “Why? Does it look like I’m carrying a head in a sack?”

She sighed in consternation. A sickening crack punctuated by a wet thud marked the completion of her work--an iron spike straight through the heart of the body. Finished, her tools made their way back into her satchel. She faced him, hands on her hips, and scowled, “You are a child sometimes. If you don’t have the stomach for it, give it to me and you can dump the rest of him in the river. Your choice.”

He looked from the bagged head to the body lying atop the stretcher she rigged up. Tossing it beside the abhartach, he picked up one end and motioned for her to pick up the other, “Not keen on the dividing and conquering plan anymore.”

His shoulder protested the weight, but it would manage. Blood seeped through the bandage Maren hastily wrapped around it to remind him his body disagreed with this decision. Pain dulled to an afterthought as they moved in silence toward the river. Maren pulled the head off the stretcher and they tossed the corpse unceremoniously into the water. What remained of Dáire’s body sank like a stone. Icarus had expected something more dramatic. Steam, maybe. Disappointing.

She motioned for him to follow and they walked in the direction of the Church of Saint Lazriel--slower than they should have. Her eyes were fixed on the spires in the distance, his on the road under his feet. He broached the silence with caution.

“It called him the Deceiver,” there was no need to specify whom he spoke of. “What do you think that means?”

She glanced at him and met his disbelieving gaze. There was a long pause before she readied her answer, “I think it means there are a lot of things going on that make me open to many possibilities.”

His head swam, his chest burned. He rubbed a fist against his breastbone and tried to take a deep breath. It shook too much when he let it out, he was very weary of secrets. Something else was bothering him like a nettle chafing in his brain. He frowned, “Who the fuck is the Inquisitor? Does he mean Reed?”

Maren’s lips tightened. She said nothing. That, in a roundabout way, told Icarus everything. 

“You know what it was talking about.” 

Briefly, she looked like she might not answer. Then, “I know rumors. Nothing more.”

“Northing more, she says,” he chastised and rolled his eyes. “Like what?”

“Like there are lower chambers,” she played absently with the tail of her low braid, “Beyond what we’ve both been allowed to see.”

He huffed in irritation, “Yes, Mare. The Archives and storage vaults. Old converted cells where heretics like us used to languish until we died. An oubliette, even. Much to the great shame of the Church, I’m sure. What do we use it for now, tossing in rogue paperwork until it confesses?” 

“Lower,” she sighed, pointedly ignoring his targetless barbs. “The Sisters used to speak of something called lower vigils. I left for the priesthood and never learned precisely what they meant.” 

He studied her for any hint she was hiding something more. Of everyone, though, she was the one who did not lie to him. At least not in a way that mattered. Accepting her truth, he nodded. 

Maren had initially planned to become a nun, one of the various orders of Sisters who served the Pale God in different ways--salt magic, wax magic, a dozen other forms of calderism unique to their orders. He never asked about the details of her original path, she never offered them. Thus they existed in symbiotic avoidance.

“We should talk to Reed,” she muttered after silent consideration. “You’ve an outstanding favor to call in. Perhaps this is it.”

The church formed ahead of them like a stormcloud on the open sea. Black silhouette set against a blacker night sky overhead. No moon lit the path, but it did not matter. Icarus knew it by heart. They followed the walkways and crossed to the enormous iron gate set into a stacked stone wall. It seemed laughable to believe this low wall and a single gate protected the spirits of the dead from the disorder of the living. Yet here it was--miraculously unhaunted, if his sensitivity to that sort of thing could be trusted.

Rust flaked under his palm when he pressed the gate lever and pushed. It swung inward with a groan and Maren entered first, Icarus behind her. An enormous oak tree grew in the far corner of the graveyard. They made their way towards it and he grabbed the shovel from its half hidden position at its trunk. They had decided to dig where recently-turned earth would not be discovered until it was too late to say for sure when it had been disturbed. Most priests who wandered the graveyard were usually old enough to be shopping for personal real estate, Icarus doubted they would have the sight to notice something like that anyway.

Point firmly in the cold ground, he heaved his weight against the shovel with his good arm. It was only fair. After all, Maren had carried that disgusting head through half the city. When it was deep enough for her approval, she tossed the whole sack in and he covered it again. Dawn had begun to announce its arrival along the horizon line when their grotesque task was finished. He sighed, returned the shovel to its hiding place, and brushed the dirt off his hands. 

They watched the fresh patch of earth for a while before the risk of their discovery began to grow with the light, “Do we know this will work?”

She shook her head, “No.”

“Well. That’s unfortunate." They walked in silence--exhausted, not enough left for thought in either of them. Their office building materialized in the tired fog that began to whisper through the city.

“Mare?”

“Mm?”

“What the fuck do we do about Eilonwy?”

***

After a rather uncomfortable few hours on a couch not designed to support a sleeping human body, Icarus was stuck in a chair with his shirt around his waist. He yelped and jerked his arm back, but Maren’s grip on him was firm, “You should’ve been an executioner!”

“Torturer.” She corrected and pulled the needle through his skin in another precise stitch, “And if you keep flailing like a drunk seagull it’ll be worse.”

He made a warning sound between his teeth, but kept his arm still. He glanced at the now-empty cork board by his desk and tried to distract himself, “Do you think it was just too much? She took off into the dark? Made her way home?”

She paused to think before returning to her painful work, “I’m not sure.”

He frowned and fought the instinct to pull away when the needle pinched his skin, a half-empty glass of cheap whiskey his only anesthetic. He swallowed the rest with a shudder, “She did it on purpose, Mare. I know she did. I watched her look right at the salt and scuff it. Panic makes no sense. Who intentionally breaks a salt line and then panics about the results?”

“You’re overestimating how often the public use salt lines,” she mused with raised brows. She was right, of course. It was his bias to believe everyday Dubliners regularly cast down salt barriers to trap demons and fae on the loose, “We’ll dose when I’m done with this and then we can talk about it, yes?”

His sigh was full of drama. He pawed uselessly at the decanter just out of reach. Eyes wide and watery, he gave Maren a pleading look. An imperceptible twitch at the corner of her mouth betrayed her displeasure, but she poured him another measure anyway. 

“You’re turning into a caricature,” she warned when he drank half of what she had poured. 

He smirked, sticking a leg out to lounge in mock bravado, “A drunk Irishman? I’d never. Those pub degenerates drink because they’re Irish, I drink because I’m dying slowly. Big difference.”

She flicked her fingers in a targeted, sharp slap to his wound. He doubled over--mouth open in a silent scream, cold glass pressed against the newly-stitched cut. She pointed at him in accusation, “You’ll not disparage our heritage and reduce our people to drunks. That’s English propaganda.”

He hissed against the blur of pain, pulling the glass away to inspect the damage. Perfect sutures held it closed, blood beaded faintly between two of them. He whimpered in annoyance, “Fine! Pale Sons and Daughters, I was only joking.”

“Our people are not a joke.” She stood, hands on her hips, and motioned to the sofa, “Now, sit. We dose and then we go to the station.”

The decision to close the case in person went unspoken. Clouds of unease still gathered around Eilonwy--namely, the complete lack of her. Icarus glanced at the door on occasion, finding empty air. A woman so tormented by the loss of her family, her brother’s monstrous transformation, and now she was nowhere to be found was not a good combination. 

After the disastrous start to all this, he had not broached the subject of payment. Maren would probably have sent him into the river after the abhartach if he had tried to charge for their services. If it turned out Eilonwy had done something nefarious, however, he had every intent of demanding payment in full. He took the Eidolon Maren handed him with his blue-tinted fingers, dropping back against the sofa and waiting for the visions to kick in. 

The thunder of the faraway river hit him first this time, followed closely by asynchronous birdsong. Colors erupted--yellow gorse, blue amethyst sky, slate gray basalt. He peered down at the waterfall below, no rainbow rose to greet him this time. Shapes he never registered flitted about in the mist and he spotted them before he turned away. Petals kissed his fingertips until his foot caught the blasted root and sent him tumbling out of the otherworld. 

He sighed at the familiar longing in his chest. The urge to go back hit harder sometimes and weaker others, today it had chosen the former. Maren’s sclera still gleamed and he took the opportunity to finish the abandoned glass of miserable whiskey before she stirred. It seared the longing right out of his throat. Wiping her hands on the front of her black shirt, Maren stood and blinked away the last of her vision a moment after him.

“Ready?” If she knew he snuck another drink, she said nothing. He suspected she knew. 

***

The Fairview constable station was small, too small for the level of activity taking place inside it. Icarus grunted against the faint pounding in his temples and reached for his flask. He grimaced when his hand met empty space. Maren scanned the milling crowd. Someone shouted at a uniformed officer in the back, a line formed in front of a receptionist brimming with anxious tension, the curtains were drawn tight on the Chief Officer’s clear-paned door. Two investigator-priests with their red cords conferred with a separate line in the nearest corner, smaller and calmer than the poor addled receptionist’s. Priest frocks calmed people down, gave them a sense of order in the midst of disorder. 

Icarus tugged at the tab collar and pocketed it with a sidelong glance at Maren, “Air’s odd today. Let’s not make it odder.”

She did the same and followed him, still watching the slow-churning crowd, “Jumpiness after a murder.”

“I’m sure more than one saw Dáire just minutes ago,” he rolled his eyes. They walked to the Chief Officer’s door and Icarus rapped his knuckles on the glass, disregarding the closed curtains’ evident plea for solitude. 

The two investigator-priests eyed them with an expression of unplaced recognition, one paused to confer with the other. Icarus raked a hand through his hair and kept them in his periphery. He was not in the mood to verbally spar with a pair of ex-brothers while keeping a burgeoning mild hangover at bay. His arm itched. The door cracked open and they were let inside. 

The chief constable was a man clearly unaccustomed to putting so much effort into his role. Fairview was quiet, for the most part. It was a neighborhood of occasional pub brawls, the odd domestic disturbance, and some public intoxication. Not grisly murders and the wave of paranoia that followed them. He ran a hand over his rapidly thinning hair and sat down hard in his already strained chair behind a plain wooden desk. Weary brown eyes settled on them. 

“With the Church?” His brow furrowed when he noted the missing collars. 

Icarus pulled his out and waved it like a flag of surrender, “Didn’t want to impede the work of our brothers outside.”

The man grunted, satisfied with his answer. He opened a folder and scanned its contents in an insultingly poor performance of business. The two priests sat in the chairs opposite him and exchanged a look. Icarus shrugged. 

“Sir,” Maren offered, leaning forward to be certain he heard her, “we’re here about the Callahan case.”

He stiffened and raised his head to them. He futilely attempted disinterest, but the color had drained from his face. The folder closed slowly in his hands and he set it aside, steepling his fingers on the wood, “Everyone and their mothers. I’ve got no updates for you. We don’t have any word from the Church investigators yet-”

Icarus held up his hand in an imitation of a wave, “That’s us. We’re from the Church here to bring you word.”

The chief looked surprised, “Father Aaron and Father Colleen were assigned the case-”

“We’re independent investigators hired by the Callahan’s daughter,” Maren supplied, firing off a reprimanding look at Icarus. 

He frowned and drew out a thicker file, leafing through its contents. Icarus continued, “We identified the creature and set it to rights. Disposed of it according to well-sourced requirements. It was an old thing--an abhartach. Like a vampire from the Eastern countries too sentient for its own good. Its body is in the river and its head is buried on consecrated ground. Shouldn’t be bothering your fine corner of the world any longer.”

The man seemed perplexed for a moment. He scanned a yellowed piece of paper, flipped it over, flipped it back. He glanced up at them and Icarus recognized his expression--wariness. Icarus leaned back and stole a glance at Maren. She was watching the chief with a puzzled tilt of her head. Whatever bothered him neither of them liked.

“Hired by their daughter, you say?” The chief’s voice was an octave too high with suspicion.

Icarus nodded, “Aye, that’s what we said. Came to our office and hired our services direct after the eldest brother showed…signs. I can retrieve the contract if you give me-”

“The Callahans’ son perished in the attack.” His frown deepened. He ran a hand over his well-trimmed beard. 

Icarus stopped. He did not know what to say to that. How could he? He had stared into the malformed body of their eldest son. He had parted the once-man’s body from his head himself. Did the chief mishear him? Was this some residual bewitchment the abhartach left in its wake? A sign it was not truly dead?

“Their eldest son,” Maren spoke softly against the tightness in the air, “Dáire Callahan. He’s the one who went missing.”

The chief sniffed and turned the folder so they could read. A family tree and registration for all immediate family members, “They ain’t have a son named Dáire. Their daughter was eight. I doubt she’d have hired a couple exorcists, like. Pardon my skepticism. ‘Less she was a daring eight-year-old.”

Icarus stared at the records. He flipped through them. Then again. A third time. Maren took them from him and reviewed them more carefully. She turned each record over and took her time in the thick silence. The blood rushed in Icarus’s ears. He could not reconcile what he was seeing, what they had experienced. He fixed his eyes on the chief’s and shook his head in disbelief. He did not believe it. He could not. Not when his own eyes told him otherwise.

“Their eldest daughter, Eilonwy. She sat in our offices. Held hands with my secretary,” he rambled as if these moments could force a new truth into existence. The calculating hand he had run through his hair made its way back again, this time clumsy with self-doubt. 

It dawned on him slowly. Sun easing from behind a thick fog to shed light on crucial details he had not stopped to consider. He looked to Maren wide-eyed and bewildered. She met his wild stare and waited.

“We never took her address. We never took her fucking information.” They had never confirmed her identity, never established a mailing address. There was no contract to show the chief because they had never drafted one. Eilonwy had always--miraculously--found them. 

His head pounded. Sweat made his hands clammy. What the fuck is going on.

Chapter 8

Maren’s mouth was set in a grim line--part worry, part annoyance he had waited until the morning to tell her. Icarus ran a hand through increasingly unkempt hair and made a mental note he would immediately forget about needing a trim. The image was seared into him every time he blinked--two glittering eyes reflecting light that did not exist in the alley, the feeling of foreboding that swept over him like a winter wind. He stared at the tips of his fingers, already starting to turn azure even after such a short burst of magic. He frowned. 

“You need to dose,” she pushed off the low file cabinet and placed the ampule on his desk. 

She left him alone without another word. Off to theorize, lost in the map she was making in her mind’s eye. They had not quite gotten to her new research in light of his exchange with the creature the previous evening. 

He sighed and cracked the glass, leaning back in his chair. The pearlescent liquid hit his sclera with a burn that was more about surprise than the Eidolon. His slip into the hallucinatory space between worlds was swift. Reality sighed open around him. Eyes closed, the sound of birdsong sharpened in his ears. 

When he opened them again, he was standing in the familiar field. He reached out to brush the soft petals of gorse stalks. Illusion or not, they always felt real to him. A sea of yellow blooms stretched out to the horizon, continuing infinitely as far as he knew. He tried to take it all in. Churning indigo waters effervescent with life he could never quite see when he looked over the edge of the canyon. Light bent through the spray in a peculiar rainbow. It did that on occasion--shifting bands of pastels from one angle, jewel tones from another. He never knew what prompted it to show one time but not another. Another mystery of wherever the Eidolon carried him.

Staccato laughter drifted on the gentle breeze that tugged at the stalks under his hands. He sighed. It was absurd that in this place outside of time he managed to feel a modicum of peace. He looked down at his fingers and noted the faint shimmer in the blue receding before the color drained away. When the distant flutter of wings sounded, he was not quite ready to go. Then his foot found the ever-familiar root and he tumbled back into reality again

Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. That was all the Eidolon ever gave him and it was never enough. Therein lay the danger of Eidolon, unfortunately. Plenty of priests and common folk lost themselves to the Blue Fever--a sort of emotional addiction to the in-between and the euphoria it left in its wake. Too much and a person wasted away, not thinking to eat or drink while lost in the haze. He never questioned why someone might chase that high. Some days he considered it himself.

He got to his feet with a private groan of protest. One burning shot of whiskey later and he headed for Maren’s office. Her commitment to organization was both a marvel and the bane of his existence. Antithetical in every way to his organized chaos, she kept everything in labeled boxes and had a system other people could comprehend. He hated it. 

She turned to look at him, glancing to his now-normal fingers and back to her cork board. New information was pinned--notes she had made and a hastily sketched copy of the sections in the book she had harangued the librarian into giving her. The rendition of the woodblock print was especially terrifying. Maren was many things, an artist was not one of them. 

“An abhartach,” she gestured, “is a nocturnal fae creature. Not much about them, unfortunately. They’re not a common species.”

“Right. So how do we get rid of it?” He pretended to review her research, but they had done this dance for too many years to fool her anymore. 

She folded her arms and looked at her feet, “That’s the problem. We don’t.”

“Mare?” He raised an eyebrow at her, a sinking feeling in his gut. 

She sighed and gestured to one of the tacked-up sets of pages, “They don’t possess, they turn. He isn’t possessed by an abhartach. He is one.”

He cursed under his breath as he read, “Damnú air.”

“Unfortunately, this isn’t a magic problem. But it is still our problem,” she ran a hand over her face. “We have to tell Eilonwy.”

“She likes you. Might forgive you when you tell her we’ve got to behead her brother,” he winced at the sharp punch she landed on his arm. “All I’m saying is I don’t think she’s my biggest fan and me telling her might elicit a… reaction.”

Maren appraised him, “If she already hates you, what’s hating you a little more?”

***

He never did figure out a reply to that by the time they had Eilonwy seated across the desk from him. She sat straight, rigid in the stiff black brocade of her mourning gown. She was still not permitted access to the bodies of her family, despite vehemently arguing with the faithful coroner about their immortal souls. If she was still red-eyed from crying about it, Icarus could not tell under the fine mesh of her short funerary veil. 

“Say it again. Slowly.” Her tone was clipped, so cold it might snap if he put too much weight on it. 

He cleared his throat and wished she would dispense with that idiot veil so he could hold her gaze properly, “He isn’t possessed by an abhartach. He just is one. There’s no exorcism to be had. According to our research--which I assure you we have done a considerable amount of--the only option is… to separate the head from the body. Body goes into running water, head goes into consecrated ground.”

“With an iron nail through the heart,” Maren amended. If he could kick her without being noticed, he would have. That detail was one he would have preferred to keep between them. 

Eilonwy sat unmoving across from him, impossible to read in her perfect silence. He had not forgotten his discussion with Maren about all her peculiarities. This stillness she cultivated was starting to become one of them until she spoke again. 

“Will that bring him peace?”

The question caught him off guard, particularly the tone she asked it with, “Will it-? I- I can’t answer that for you, my lady. All I know is it’s how it must be done if we want to rid the city of him.”

She lifted her hands and rolled up, pinning it in place. She was clear-eyed, practiced, sharp with a brimming intelligence she had kept poorly hidden. A flicker of grief escaped from its hiding place, though, and he softened to her a little. Try as she might, he could see the way her tenuous thread of hope had just snapped. The green of her eyes brightened like a hawthorne under the light of the full moon, then she blinked and it was gone. He rubbed at his eyes and cursed his bad sleep. 

“If he’s not possessed and he were to somehow be… restored,” she took a shuddering breath, black leather gloves creaking with the tight fist she made out of sight, “he would be tried and hanged for what he did.”

“Possibly,” Maren shrugged, “but restoration is, unfortunately, not an option in his case.”

Eilonwy lifted a hand in a polite bid for silence, “He would be tried and hanged if it were. Either way, Dáire’s fate is sealed. It would be cruelty to bring him back, but it would be a mercy to end him before he continues down this murderous path.”

For all her sharpness and fire, Icarus had to respect her ability to take what the Pale God handed to her with grace. He exchanged a look with Maren that caught her attention and her eyes narrowed, “What else?”

“We-,” he sighed and tapped his thumbs against each other atop his threaded fingers, “We’ll need your help drawing him out to us. It followed me last night-” he held up a hand to stop her questions before they started, “-and I’m fairly certain it’s because my colleague and I smelled like you. When it didn’t attack me, I think it’s because it was confused why the trail of you faded.”

They had pieced it together. It was strong enough, could have lunged for him and been done with it. Faefire or no, Icarus had a throat to rip out the same as any man. It had observed him, watched him. The more they read, the more it made sense. 

“Part of your brother was still… himself for some time. We aren’t totally clear on the mechanism for what turned him into this thing, but part of him remained who he was for a while at first. It’s why he killed a few orphans and… ladies of minor public concern,” he glanced to Maren in an appeal to transfer this horrible conversation to her, but she pointedly refused him. “The final rite of transformation is to drain the life of those he loves. After that, when all ties to his old self are severed, he enters the final stage of his transformation into this… thing.”

Try as she might, Eilonwy could not conceal the tremor that had overtaken her. She swallowed hard, staring past him at the frosted glass limned with early afternoon light for a while. Resolutely, she set her sight on him again, “What’s the final stage?”

“We don’t know,” Icarus willed the apology into his tone so he would not have to say it aloud.

She exhaled hard, annoyance replacing the grief for a moment, “And you need me to lure him out.”

He nodded, singular and sharp. The plan was simple enough to be stupid, but if the abhartach could not tell the difference between someone who had touched his sister and Eilonwy herself Icarus had little faith in its intellect. Trap it, question it, kill it. The only wildcard was how it would react to Eilonwy when they used her as bait. 

***

Icarus bounced his leg as he leaned against the stacked crates in the alley. There was a blank spot in all of this. An empty palace where information should have been. He folded his arms tight across his chest and stared between the cobblestones at his feet. Running back through the case had not helped. Still, he smelled it like a bloodhound and could not let it go. 

Fae and demonic traces had resonated. While he could explain them away, none of them fit in a way he found satisfying. Maren--if she had been troubled by it--said nothing. Even when they set out in the cold to prepare, she made no mention. So here he was peeling apart the layers in silence waiting in the damp, foggy dark for a monster. 

His hand slipped into his coat and he rattled his flask, lamenting not topping up before they left. He drained what was left and took a steadying breath. Simple as the plan might be, plans had a funny way of getting away from people. He was not such a fool to believe himself immune. 

There was still something fundamentally wrong with this whole care. He could not put his finger on it. Whatever was being concealed skirted the edges of his awareness and stayed just out of reach. He had hoped the remnants of his flask might help turn over some stone of knowledge to illuminate the mystery-

The air changed. 

He stiffened, head cocked, listening. Shadows grew longer at the mouth of the street. The amber light of the streetlamps change as if drained by the inky darkness trailing behind the slow-moving, familiar figure approaching. 

He stayed out of sight, fingers wrapped around the hilt of his knife. His awareness sharpened, keen on the weight of his sword strapped to his back. The chill in the air hollowed out--cold in a way that had nothing to do with winter. 

One breath.

Two.

Footsteps echoing in an even tempo. Eilonwy kept her shoulders straight from what he could see of her, staying even and standing tall. If she were afraid, he could not tell. The creature trailing at a distance too close for his liking, however, could probably hear the mad hammering of her heart. 

Every muscle wound tight like a spring. Hand ready at the edge of the small blade. If this did not go colossally fucking sideways, he could grab Eilonwy in a pinch if he was ready. She was closer now. Almost there. His pulse slowed, breath even and deep. One hand flexed when the calm of battle washed over him. He whispered a prayer to the Archangel Lazriel, Right Hand of the Pale God, for strength and speed. 

He slashed his forearm and drew his sword. The alley flared with blue firelight, abruptly channeled into the metal where it flowed into every sigil like molten iron. In the same breath, he stepped into the street.

“Go!” He shouted to Eilonwy. 

She lifted her skirts and broke into a run. He stepped forward, careful to miss the salt line--the most critical part of their idiotic plan. Twin pinpricks of light raged and widened in the dark. Light refracted from some corrupted inner place. A howl filled the air--bitter with fury, agony, a thousand trapped souls emanating their last fearful cries in one single haunting bellow.

It moved, slower than he anticipated. In the muted light of the gaslamps, the abhartach allowed itself to be revealed. He raised his sword in a high guard, barely inside the strike from the thing’s long, talonlike nails. He shoved and it took a surprised step back. 

“Maren!” He roared. 

The thing that was once a man straightened and whirled in time to catch Maren closing the final line of salt along the road. Its howl turned into a shriek--violence and peeling metal rolled into one hideous noise. With a whisper, Maren’s hand hovered over the grains and they began to glow. With its path sealed and its movement enclosed, it turned to the only thing that remained inside the battleground it was trapped in. 

Icarus. 

Chapter 7

Icarus flinched when the coroner flicked back the sheet to reveal the mutilated corpse of the older woman. He fumbled in his pockets for his rosary and took a few deep breaths before making himself look. This part never got easier. 

Maren leaned over the body and inspected the jagged, torn flesh at her throat. She sighed, directed at him, “You split a bodach’s hand in half.”

He grimaced, “It’s different when it’s… us.”

She made an affirmative sound and continued her inspection. He noted the coroner taking an additional step back at the mention of a fae. A sour taste bubbled in his mouth. He rolled up his sleeves and touched the head gently, shifting it from one side to the next. It moved easily, too much give in the absence of tendon and flesh. 

“Stop,” Maren lifted a hand and he obeyed. She used a thin silver stylus to prod at the slackened, graying skin. For a moment, he could not see what gave her pause. Then, almost as if it materialized in front of him, he saw it. 

Puncture marks. 

Four. Needle-thin. Almost missable in the bend of the woman’s neck--Colleen Callahan, Eilonwy had told them. Maren lifted her eyes to his, mouth curved in a faint frown. 

“Mangling’s for show then,” he sighed and tried to set Colleen back to neutral. It took a few tries and started a battle in his stomach for its contents to stay where they were. 

“It clawed out her throat, everything is ripped but not in tatters. This was calculation, not rage.” Maren handed the stylus back to the coroner who used it as an excuse to disappear into the washroom. 

He leaned back and folded his arms, “There was so much fucking blood in that room, Mare. I can’t figure out why there were signs from both. Fae and demons collaborating is unheard of, they try to tear each other apart when they cross paths.”

“This is one wound. One creature,” she eyed the rest of Colleen’s body with clinical detachment, “one thing that’s part demonic and part fae.”

He laughed involuntarily, “Please. If something like that existed, we’d have heard of it by now. It’d be tearing through the streets.”

“Who’s to say it isn’t?” Before he could respond, she flagged the coroner, “How many cases have you had recently with marks like that?”

The man, flustered, kept a distance when he followed the line of her finger. He shook his head, “Three or four, but they can’t be related. They don’t come in looking a mess, like. Just with those little marks and missing half their weight in blood.”

“And nobody’s reported this to the Church?” Icarus snapped his eyes to the man. Behind their muted grey-blue, a storm brewed.

The older man shrugged helplessly, “We did, but they said not to worry. They’ve all been urchins or whor- ah… women of ill-repute, no family to follow up. It’s just me, like. I don’t have the manpower to stay atop all the cases that come through.”

Icarus’s fingers dug into his forearms, “So no urgency because they were just parentless children and women working to survive.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“I know what you didn’t mean,” he flared, “and you’d do better to speak of all the Pale God’s children with respect. His son lived among the harlots and lepers, fed the starving, restored sight to the blind. As a man of faith, I’d expect you to want to walk the same path as the Pale Son.”

He jerked his chin to the cross at the coroner’s throat: straight line slashed perpendicular a third from the top with two slanted lines. He hurried to tuck it behind his shirt, a flush in his cheeks, but offered no apology. Icarus hated one thing more than the Church--hypocrisy. Not up for a sermon, he waved his dismissal and cleared the room in several long strides. He snatched his coat from the hook when he passed.

The midwinter air was brutal, despite the heavy wool. He lit a cigarette while he waited for Maren to do whatever her salt magic let her do with a body that dead. Smoke filled his lungs--sharp and punishing. He closed his eyes and let his head tip back until it met cold brick. None of it made sense. The sky whirled gray and patient above him, waiting with him in the midday light of the alley. He took another drag and the door opened. Maren glanced at the lit paper and back to him in mild disapproval. 

“What? Not like it’s going to kill me,” he smirked, dropping the spent butt and grinding it under his heel. “Something’s wrong with this case, Mare. I don’t like it.”

She nodded and pulled her gloves over small hands. They walked towards the tramway, both lost in calculations and webs of detail neither of them were quite ready to share. He ran back through Eilonwy and how she had spoken about her brother. Maren pointed out her reluctance to give his name after she left, Icarus had not noticed. He shared his observation about the strange sing-song way the woman spoke. They had agreed something was amiss, but decided to handle her case anyway. Whatever secrets the woman may have held, there was a creature in the night murdering people to deal with.

His thoughts drifted back to his father and the box of dead ends that made up the Church investigation. He could not lie to himself anymore, not after staring into the mutilated throat of a dead woman. There was no magical arrangement of evidence he could concoct that would let him see whatever the investigator-priests had missed. That box was worthless and he was right back to where he started. 

Only worse. At least before the bodach he had made some form of peace with the loss of his father. Now, he had to sift through all the complicated emotions about it again. It always nagged at him--a truth he put considerable time, effort, and whiskey into ignoring. 

He would not know peace until he knew what happened to Daedalus Ulrich. 

Maren made a disagreeable sound at the ticket counter and corrected the clerk, “Trinity College Station.”

“College Sta-?”

“The library.”

Of course. The library. Leave it to Maren to find an excuse to disappear into research. He could not blame her, she was good at it. Research had been her only anchor keeping her sanity on the ground after everything that happened to her. They had met when that anchor had started slipping away. Destiny, Icarus used to joke. Over the years, he secretly wondered how much of a joke that really was. 

The library doors stood open, too ridiculously large and loud to keep them closed considering the foot traffic this brilliant building directed. It was something of a legend, the Trinity College Library. Three floors, plus more basement vaults and archives, covered floor to ceiling in thousands and thousands of books. Romantics spent time writing stories about it, academics spent time whispering curses at the romantics for taking up so much table space, and the occasional cast-out duo of priests spent time rifling through obscure books nobody paid a mind to in the dustiest corners of the room. 

He could not say he loved it, not like Maren. It was a place that felt like time took a breath, though, and he could appreciate that. The air was thick with the hushed movement of students and researchers and would-be authors, each of them leveraging the silence to express their frustration with each other in that passive way academics always manage. Dust motes drifted through the slices of silver early-afternoon light cutting through the floor-to-ceiling windows into the wide open space below--they danced on the heels of every passerby, kissed the cheeks of bookworms who came too close. There was a strange man-made magic in this place that even he could not ignore. 

Maren set him to work immediately. She dropped him off at an empty corner table and lit the reading lamps. When she came back, she dropped a cracked leather book in front of him with a thud. He lifted his arms in aggravation, she fired a look that humbled him back into his uncomfortable wooden chair. They collapsed into a focused silence scanning through all manner of terrible beasts and monsters. When one book yielded no answers, Maren disappeared to grab another. After a while, a library assistant had picked up the pattern and began quietly building a stack for them at the edge of their table. 

Icarus rubbed his eyes, every handwritten page blurring together and refusing to stick in his mind any longer. He was in the process of sighing to get Maren’s attention when her hand shot out and stopped him. She turned the book in front of her and shoved it towards him. 

He stared at the woodblock image. A man. Spindly, tall, long hair wiry and sparse. His teeth gleamed in a broken-mouthed smile--two stepped canines on either side of his jaw. The eyes felt wrong, but Icarus could not say precisely why. One clawed hand raised in a gesture, long index finger drawing his attention to the bedraggled corpse lying at his feet. Blood pooled around the throat of his victim. Along its neck--four puncture marks. 

Icarus’s blurred vision sharpened. The scrawling text was half faded, but legible enough.

Abhartach

He lifted his cool eyes to Maren’s and she pulled the book back to her. She closed it and stood, he followed her lead while she went through the painstaking process of convincing the librarian to let her take it out of the building. 

While she negotiated for her hostage, Icarus paced along the facade. He unscrewed the lid of his flask and let the liquid fire burn away his mind-fatigue. Abhartach. He could not recall this creature, not from any of his training. The name, though, felt familiar. He rolled the word around in his mouth, trying to place it. Another long swig slowed his thoughts enough to pull it apart. Still, its familiarity evaded him. 

“Special consignment, I’ve been allowed three days,” Maren stuffed the ancient tome in her bag and walked past him. 

He followed and cupped his hand around an unlit cigarette until the paper caught, “I don’t know it.”

“Neither do I," she sighed and wafted the smoke away from her face, “which exacerbates concern.”

Night folded in around them, blanketing their path back to the tram. When they stepped off, it had fully embraced the sky above. Buildings went quiet, most windows dark and lightless. Pubs teemed with patrons, oil lamps swung idly when caught off guard by an evening breeze. Maren touched his arm and motioned with her head. Her street was lit, which felt important to Icarus for a distant reason he could not name. 

“I’ll glean what I can and get back to you in the morning. Slán, ” she offered a light squeeze before disappearing. He waited and watched until she rounded the corner that led to her door. 

Hands shoved into his pockets against the burgeoning chill, he carried on down the road in the dark. His thoughts drifted everywhere. Abhartach, Colleen’s body, Eilonwy’s avoidance, the bodach’s words about his father. There was a thread connecting them just out of reach, lost to some angle of light he could not catch. He felt it in his bones, deep in the marrow. Whether the evidence was plain or not, it was there. Waiting for him to find it and pull. 

Rocks skittered in the dark alley to his side. Something raised the hairs on the back of Icarus’s neck. He froze. The familiar electricity of the unnatural moved like static in the air. His attention focused on the road to his flat he had turned down without thinking. 

Darkness. Not complete, but looming. More gaslamps were out than normal, casting the cobblestones in unfamiliar shadows. He inventoried them and caught the telltale signs of deliberate sabotage in a handful. His mind attempted to rationalize it. He did not exactly live in Dublin’s most lavish neighborhood, but it was not the boarding house slums either. Despite the attempt to label the low lighting just another act of mischief, the serpent of wrongness slithered through his thoughts.

Another sound came from the alley. He turned his head--slow and casual. Any moment, a drunk or a dog would come stumbling out. That was all. He was acutely aware of the pulse in his veins. All of his senses sharpened. The air smelled of coal and spilled beer and something old. Something that should not be here. Every laugh, a shift of fabric, a scrape of boots carried on the breeze for his inspection and were all found wanting. Whatever he was listening for would not carry on the wind. Instinct told him that. 

The alley was engulfed in shadows. Blacker than the night had any right to be. A dark so total it made his skin ripple with gooseflesh. Everything about that impenetrable tenebrous wall was flawed. Incorrect. Out of place.

From deep within it, two lights shone faintly--close together, pinpricks of silver against the void of darkness beyond. Dim, far away. Animal instinct corrected the miscalculation. Not dim. Small. Close. Lingering just at the threshold of shadows. 

His muscles coiled, something older than time surged to the forefront. It took hold like the hand of a lost Old God attempting to move his body without his consent. His heart stampeded wildly. His mind screamed. run. Run. RUN. RUN!

He could not move. He had to know--to see, to be sure. Time dilated. Everything slowed. He stopped breathing.

It blinked. 

A flash of silver and blood spilled from his arm. Hands flexed. Azure flames burst from his fingertips. He slashed his hand towards the darkness. Faefire rained down on the shadows, sending them scattering. It hit the stone in furious droplets and dissolved with an impertinent hiss.

Nothing. 

The darkness inhaled sharply, sucked away from the light of his fire as if it had never been. Icarus stared down the alley, the only sound now the slow drip of his blood onto the street. He knew without a shadow of a doubt. 

Someone was being hunted. 

Chapter 6

Cameras flared, filling the air with an irregular explosion of bulbs and sulphur. It was a battlefield of photography, freelancers and journalists vying over the no man’s land of misery for the best shot. Icarus scowled at the chaos and turned up the collar of his dark wool coat. Maren paid them no heed and watched the comings and goings of the officers and investigator-priests sent by the Church. 

“They’ve no clue what’s happened,” she muttered.

He raised a brow and tried to see the scene through her eyes, “How d’you figure?”

She indicated a pair of priests with their red cords of station mingling near the door, “They haven’t moved in ten minutes. None of the officers have approached them. There’s another who’s come in and out twice carrying nothing and wringing his hands.”

“Clueless morons.” He huffed and looked for a break in the crowd along the barrier. 

She touched his elbow, “I’ll look for the girl.”

He nodded. If anyone would know where a grief-stricken woman might hide, it was Maren.

He made for the only open space between the makeshift perimeter. Nobody questioned him when he moved through, tab collar flashed strategically. No standard policeman wanted to expose themselves to the supernatural and were glad to relinquish leadership over cases like this to whoever showed up with confidence and a collar. This is what the Church did--investigated crimes of the demonic and fae while the police handled crimes of the human variety. They worked in tandem, symbiotes in the biosphere of justice. It was stranger to see one or the other instead of both. 

“Gentlemen,” Icarus approached the pair of dawdling priests he did not recognize, “working hard or hardly working?” With hardly a head nod, they scattered. He tucked his arms around him against the chill with a bitter shake of his head, “Cockroaches from a lantern.”

At the threshold, he paused. Detectives moved like ants ferrying food back to the queen--evidence that would amount to nothing put in paper envelopes like it might solve this puzzle of slaughter. The room was thick with knowing the futility of its effort. When he stepped over the threshold, a hush fell among the crowded front room. He ignored the stares, eyes tracing the remnants of the bloody tide that had washed over the floor and rear wall. 

The hair on the back of his neck raised. He frowned and stepped farther into the room. An officer risked stepping close, “What’s the word?”

He meant the assessment of the fools loitering outside. Icarus huffed air through his nose, “I’m the second opinion. Step back and let me opine.”

He waved the officer back with a sharp gesture. The others clung to the walls in response. It always did fill him with a sick sort of joy to wield authority like that. A sour remnant of revenge against the loss of his former station. He pushed it out of his mind and concentrated. His rosary was in his hand, thumb worrying the beads slowly. 

He hit the fifth bead before the hazelwood hummed faintly under his finger. That was odd. The rosary responded to an inversion of Calderism--demonic magic. A wooden bloodhound that could sniff out the presence of dark magic. He crouched and pulled the silver knife from its hidden place against his hip, pricking the meat of his palm. Blue fire licked at the tips of his fingers and he touched them to the wood. 

One of the officers gasped, crossed himself, and turned away. Shallow superstition apparently did not escape the metropolitan minds of the city. He scowled and ignored the man, listening to the whispers of the wood under his hand. 

He heard it clear as day: the ceaseless susurration of hushed voices that always followed in the wake of the fae. 

His frown deepened. That was odder. 

Outside, weaving through the crowd, Maren scanned the faces and tried to suppress her disdain for the open-mouthed gawkers hoping to catch a glimpse of the violence within. She let the boiling water of her outrage run its course, setting it to the side when she had enough of its scalding distraction from her task at hand. 

With a slow breath, she let the path of grief unveil itself in her mind’s eye. Her feet carried her to the fringe of the crowd, away from the spectacle of the modest home. She saw the shadowed street corner--far enough to be isolated, near enough to watch the comings and goings, and under the awning of enough shadow to give the illusion of safety. Standing beside a stack of unopened crates, a figure with shoulders drawn tight around herself like she might fight off the cold reality of her new, terrible life. 

Eilonwy Callahan. 

Maren approached well within her line of sight, hands raised in contrition as if soothing a spooked horse. Her lips tightened in a neutral expression, but the ghost of empathy still haunted their corners. 

“Miss Callahan?” She spoke clear and low, “Do you remember me?”

Forest green eyes flashed to hers with such sharpness it made her pause. She stood straighter now that she was fully seen. There was a tempest brewing in the young woman Maren was prepared to absorb. It was the least she could do. 

“So now that they’re dead, you come to help me.” It was not a question, “I saw your coward of a boss go inside. Come to save the day when there’s no longer a day worth saving.”

Maren waited in silence, taking every testing cut in stride, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want this.”

“‘I’,” Eilonwy rolled the word around on her tongue, “not ‘we’. Interesting choice of words, Father.”

“That’s correct,” Maren saw no use hiding the truth of it. “My partner wasn’t himself. You paid the price for his distraction. I can’t undo this, but I can help to stop it happening again.”

Eilonwy fancied herself unreadable and she let her. Maren held the silence, waiting as it stretched to the point of discomfort. Still, she held. Silence was a powerful tool not enough people knew how to use. Something twisted in Eilonwy’s face. She crumpled and the tears began to fall. Maren closed the distance between them and wrapped her arms around the woman’s trembling shoulders. They sank down to the damp cobbles, Eilonwy clinging to her like a lifeboat. She wept until there was nothing left to weep, until her gasping sobs became dry wheezes that could no longer bear the weight of her sorrow. When she was drained, exhausted, and empty, she leaned back just enough to wipe a gloved hand across her eyes. 

Maren dug until she found a kerchief and handed it to her in patient silence. She let her hold on as long as she needed, siphon whatever strength she believed she could from the priest. An attempt to return to scrap of cloth was gently declined, a sacrifice in the name of restitution for something that could never be restored. 

Eilonwy crossed the long, mournful space between them. Her voice was a rasp of what it had been, “I should’ve sought your help sooner. It’s not entirely your fault.”

“Drowning in shoulds will kill you,” Maren eased to her feet and helped Eilonwy, still shaking, off the ground. “Would you let us help you now?”

Eilonwy hesitated, her face a shifting image of complex thoughts she did not need to speak aloud. It settled in a firm, determined furrow. She nodded. Her eyes--the dark, thick green of an old growth forest--seemed to be a few shades lighter. Maren blinked and they had returned. A trick of the light and the shine of fresh suffering. They flashed behind her shoulder. Maren did not need to turn, she knew the hurried elongated gait that made its way to them. The slight hitch in one of his steps a satisfying reminder of the cost of his distraction. 

“Miss Callahan,” Icarus paused and made no move to touch her, “I need you to tell me everything you can about your brother.” Maren shot him a look that could dim the sun, “And… I’d like to apologize to you. Futile, small, and useless as it might be now.”

Eilonwy’s face shuttered from him. She wielded the silence the same way Maren had. A quick learner, Maren mused with a note of pride. After it became clear he was not sure of her goal, Eilonwy narrowed her eyes at him, “You’d like to apologize? Then by all means, Father Ulrich. Apologize.”

Her sharpness was a blade and he winced when it cut. Its wound bled guilt into his soul and his shoulders rounded in recalcitrance. He shifted uncomfortably under its weight, “I’m sorry, Miss Callahan. Truly. I am sorry.”

The words sounded so pointless, so small. A raindrop in the ocean of loss that separated him from her. None of it undid what had been done and none of it unmade the remorse he would carry with him for his part in it. 

Add it to the ledger of my sins, he scolded himself. 

She held his stormlight blue eyes for a punishingly long series of breaths before issuing the faintest nod, “Unfortunately for us both, there aren’t many places for me to turn now. But I need an assurance, Father Ulrich. You will never dismiss me again. Am I understood?”

He nodded in contrition, unsure how to respond to that. Sometimes, he knew, people needed to say something that helped them feel in control during the uncontrollable. If this was what she needed, he considered it owed to her.

*** 

Edith started at the sight of Eilonwy. A hand flew to her heart and she was on her feet at the other side of the desk. Her weathered palm found the young woman’s and her face fell in a genuine tableau of sympathy, “Oh thank the Lord Himself he came to his senses. You poor, darling thing. I am so sorry for your loss.”

She, of course, meant Icarus. The priest folded his arms more petulantly than he knew he was entitled to, but he did not interrupt them. Eilonwy smiled with as much warmth as she could manage. Politeness, more than a genuine feeling. She reminded him of Maren for a moment--practical first, emotional second. The women embraced and exchanged kindnesses in low voices he tried not to eavesdrop on. 

Maren leaned towards him, quiet, “What did you find?”

“Confusing things,” he reached into his pocket habitually and rubbed the fifth rosary bead. “Nothing straightforward. It’s strange. Obvious demon signs, but obvious fae signs, too.”

“Collaboration?” She mused, always open to even the most dismissable theory. To her, all options existed at the same time with the same likelihood until proven otherwise. 

He considered it with a slight shrug, “Not sure. It felt… combative.”

“Confrontation?” She folded her arms and watched the two women embrace for a final time. 

Quiet conversation cut to a premature end, they ushered Eilonwy into Icarus’s office. His board contents had been neatly taken apart and stored in its box off to the side. He bristled. Edith had unlocked his office to make her point. Scolding him through tidy, organized dismemberment of his work. She had not, in fact, been his bear at the mouth of the cave. He begrudgingly knew it had been better to show Eilonwy a blank wall instead of the chaos she would have remembered, but that was not Edith’s original intent. Gratitude threatened him anyway, but he paid it no mind. 

“When we spoke,” he needed to distract himself from his brewing temper, “you mentioned a fight but no wounds. Can you describe what you mean?”

She pointedly watched his hands when he poured himself a drink. He raised it before catching her and--against his better judgement--handed it over. She took it, he poured another for himself, and knew better than to offer one to Maren this early in the day.

“He had blood all over his shirt and shoulder,” she drank slowly, gaze far away, “and on his neck, in his hair. But when I told him to come to me, he wouldn’t. I could only glance for a moment before he rushed to the washroom.”

“And you saw no wound?” Maren leaned against the long wooden cabinet. 

Eilonwy shook her head, “None. I… grew up in Fairview. Before it started coming up, like. Patched a lot of reckless friends and careless neighbors. My brother among them. I know what to look for.”

Maren caught something in the moment, “What’s your brother’s name?”

The woman’s movements changed. Subtly, but still there if one knew where to look. Maren was very good at knowing where to look. She became measured, calculated, movements more a performance than an action. Over a name, a fact Maren logged for dissection later. 

“Dáire,” she offered a heartbeat too slow for the routine question. “My elder brother.”

“And he lived at home with your family?” Icarus could sense something in Maren he could not place, but he picked up enough on that detail. 

Eilonwy’s eyes returned to him, “Fell on hard times. Moved back home a year or so back.”

The air hummed for a second. He redirected the subject, “What sort of hard times?”

“Not sure exactly,” she released the sense of performance, back to herself again. “He’d moved north a while, to Slaghtaverty. We hadn’t heard from him for months, then suddenly he writes that he’s in hardship, needs to come home.”

“And the night of this incident,” he continued,” tell me about it.”

She frowned, brows knit as she tried to recall the details before she shared them, “He said some friends from that life were in the city and left to meet them for a pint. Dáire indulged, especially with his fortune taking the turn it did. I didn’t think anything of it until he returned and fled to the washroom.”

Icarus tapped a stylus against the desktop. He was not taking notes, he had little need to anymore. The metronome habit helped him think, “What time did he return?”

“Late. Close to dawn.”

“And after?”

“He worked evenings at the docks, I only saw him for dinners on occasion. It wasn’t long after that he started skipping those, vanishing into the city those nights.”

“When you say something was masquerading as him,” Maren interrupted their flow, “can you explain what you mean?”

Eilonwy’s hand tightened and she drained the rest of her glass. From the flinch in her shoulders, it burned, “It would be him, but… not exactly right. Say things in almost the way he would, move close enough to how he moved. But the tone would be off, the words he chose, the way his shoulders couldn’t stay in time with his steps. Almost like…”

Maren probed the edges of her wounded memory lightly, “Like what?” 

“Like he would rather be crawling.”

Chapter 5

I’m losing my mind, Icarus decided. He surveyed the exploded contents of the file box scattered around his office. He had not slept or seen the inside of his flat for two days. How could he? It had settled in when he finally worked up the nerve to look inside and start reading through the investigation. 

Daedalus was not dead. Disappeared, sure. Habeus corpus--that you have the body. Quite literally, there was no body therefore the Church could not conclude there was a crime. Yet they had still deemed Daedalus deceased at the end. Why? What was he missing that made them so sure?

Somewhere in his bone marrow Icarus had always known the investigation was incomplete. What could he have done other than resign himself to their findings, which was a lot of absolute nothing. Now, staring at the contents of what made up the barest of minimums the investigators had put into locating his father, he could see exactly how many gaps existed in their work. Holes. Canyons of emptiness. 

He slumped into an armchair and stared at the wall. Whiskey swirled in a glass with a twist of his hand before he swallowed whatever was left and dropped it. He had meticulously copied every artifact in the box and made duplicates of photographs and newspaper clippings, then pinned them in groups by evidence type. Then hated that, pinned them again by timeline. Hated that, pinned them again by importance. 

His vision blurred and he rubbed at his eyes. 

“When did you last sleep?” He jumped. Maren made no noise on the carpet of their office. Normally, he liked it. She snuck up on unruly clients and set them off balance. Directed at him, though, he loathed it. 

Icarus shrugged, “Last night, I think.”

“Hm,” she scanned him, the half-empty decanter, then his wall of madness. “You should go home for a few hours. I’ll keep your research safe.”

There was no condescension in it, not from Maren. Never would be. If anyone understood his revived obsession, it would be her. He knew she was right. Not sleeping would not lead to less mistakes, nor would several glasses of cheap liquor, but he could not bring himself to rise and leave. Instead, he leaned forward and steepled his fingers, opening and closing them methodically. 

“It doesn’t make sense, Mare.” He shook his head, “Their concluding report is so certain he’s dead, but I can’t find anything in there that justifies it.”

She stepped farther into his office and examined the board. After walking its length twice, she looked back at him, “How might a bodach fit?”

“Sorry?”

“Consider it was a bodach who said it. If we’re looking for connections to your father, how might a bodach specifically be connected?” She softened her tone as best she knew how, “And consider how a bodach’s nature might be. You can’t rule out it may have simply lied.”

He frowned, the beginning of a fight brewing between them, “Even if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t answer the glaring holes in their documentation.”

“Redactions,” she had not meant it to come out as sharp as it had. “Who’s to say they didn’t seal some portions? It would explain their surety.”

His mouth tightened into a stubborn line, hands clenched, “I checked the appendix, it’s all here. They didn’t say anything about-”

“How often has the Church lied to us?” She folded her arms casually, “Why would they lie any less now?”

He opened his mouth to argue, but drew a blank. His chest was tight, head pounded, throat parched. He ached too much for this argument and had no idea how to even start it if he wanted to. He looked back at the board and shook his head, “I’m missing something.”

“I’ve no doubt.” She touched his shoulder lightly, a form of apology, “I know how it feels, you know that. I’m not dismissing you. I just don’t expect us to find the answers in that box from an order of priests who have no problem disposing of evidence.”

A knock sounded in the doorway and they both turned. Edith glanced at the board and paid it little mind. Icarus and his eccentricities were part of the job, “Pardon the intrusion. You have a client. No appointment, but you seemed… available.”

He sighed and waved at her, “I’m not. Take a message, we’ll call on them later.”

Unfortunately, small offices leave little room for privacy. A woman leaned around the other side of the doorframe, face drawn and grey. Her rich green eyes were dull and red from crying. She was Edith’s height, long-limbed and lithe without being skeletal. Her fierce red hair had been tamed in a flourish of plaits atop her head. When the light struck a loose wave, it turned gold. If she had not looked so forlorn, she would have been quite pretty. 

Her skirts whispered when she crossed into the room uninvited, gloved hands twisting in the handle of her purse. For a moment, she looked like she would burst into tears. She took a deep breath and blinked resolve back into her sharp-angled features, “Please. I don’t know who else to ask for help.”

Maren shot him a look and Icarus argued with her in silence. As always, he reneged and moved to sit behind his desk, “Sit. What’s your name?”

“Eilonwy Callahan,” she settled in the chair opposite before holding out her hand. “My family live in Fairview. They’re good folk. I keep my own apartment in Cabra, so I can only tell you what I’ve seen when I stop by.”

He shook it gently, “Alright, Eilonwy Callahan. What seems to be the problem you can’t get solved?”

She hesitated and stared at her palms for a while. Long enough Icarus glanced up at Maren to urge her intervention, “Something dark has made a nest inside my brother. Nobody believes me. When I--they can’t see it when they look at him, but something in him is… wrong.”

It was her tone that sparked the interest in him. He leaned forward, “How do you mean?”

“His eyes are the wrong color in the dark.” Her gaze snapped up to meet his so suddenly he sat back again, “They reflect the light even when there is none. When he speaks, I hear two voices sometimes. Nobody else seems to notice it. I--I don’t know why I do. He came home the other night and looked as if he’d been fighting someone, but I couldn’t find a wound. He passed out for two days. When he woke up--I don’t know. It’s like my brother was… gone. Something else was playing the part of him. Wearing him like a costume.”

Maren had eased herself into the other remaining chair. Edith stood in the doorway, attention rapt. Icarus noticed, but could not explain what was happening. The woman’s voice captured their attention in a peculiar way. Every word left her like a muted note in a song, drawing them in. It did not make him uneasy, though it probably should have. Her manner of speech was calming despite the grim contents. 

“Please,” her tears threatened to fall, “nobody believes me. The Church won’t even let me speak to someone about it. Even if I’m wrong, I--I just want to be sure.”

He sighed and looked towards his blown-open investigation, then Maren, then Eilonwy. She was clearly distressed and needed someone to tell her what to look for. He knew turning clients away was foolhardy as close to broke as they were, but he could not just abandon his investigation to start a new one. 

Eilonwy sensed the hesitation in him. Her hand shot out and grabbed his fingers with more strength than he expected from someone so slight, “I’ll pay double your rates. Just for you to speak to him. Ease my fears.”

With a pat of his free hand over hers, he began the slow shake of his head, “I’m sorry, Miss Callahan. We’ve got a full caseload right now. If you leave your number with Edith, she’ll call when-”

She withdrew her hand and stood. Her straight-backed posture commanded the room and she gave him a curt nod, “I see. So she’ll call me after it’s beyond help and my brother is dead or a murderer."

Icarus frowned, “Beg pardon?”

“Whatever is in him, Father Ulrich,” she held his gaze. The room bent around her, making her seem taller, “It’s going to kill him or someone else. But it means death. I feel it sure as I will feel the winter wind when I step out of your offices--alone with no recourse.”

Eilonwy turned abruptly and left. Edith parted for her and watched as she hurried down the stairs. The small bell shuddered when she slammed the door behind her. Maren and Edith descended on him immediately. 

“Icarus,” Maren warned, “we can’t afford to ignore her case and work on yours for free. You know that.”

“You most certainly do not have a full case load,” Edith chided at the same time.

He groaned and waved both of them off, “I can’t drop what I’m working on to help her! There’s Netherists aplenty in Dublin, it’s not like we’re back in Baldongan. She’ll move on to the next office and be fine. As for our finances, the payment from Reed will clear in a day or two. We’ll be fine for a few months.”

The women exchanged fearsome looks. Edith, this debate well below her pay, closed the door with an indignant humph that made her position on his white lie very clear. Maren stared down at him, arms now tightly folded across her chest. He would not meet her face. He knew what he would find there--the argument he had not been able to start earlier. 

“Icarus.”

“Maren.”

“Icarus.” She slammed her hands on his desk, forcing him to look at her. Her eyes were alight, caught between empathy and anger, “Listen to me. I know finding your father is important. I know this case matters to you, it’s everything to you. But what on earth is going to change in a few days’ time that hasn’t budged in fifteen years?”

He was quiet, leafing through every reply he could think of. She mistook his racing silence for defiance and leaned forward in determination to make her point clearer. 

“We have a job to do,” she spoke firmly but kindly, “and we can’t stop doing it because of a bodach that may or may not have been trying to throw you off at the midnight hour of its life.”

He stared at his thumbs and picked idly at a hangnail. It was not that doubt had failed to cross his mind. Quite the opposite. Everything about this stroke of madness was buried to its neck in doubt. She was right about the Church probably hiding evidence or sealing it away. She was just as right about the bodach lying to him. Still, something needled at him he could not shake. Fatigue was an option, but this had followed him since he left Father Reed’s. 

“Next case that comes in,” he exhaled, “I’ll say yes to it. Ten minutes or ten days from now. Alright?”

She stood straight again and studied him carefully. After she ran her mysterious calculus, she nodded, “Fine. But I want it known that I don’t like this and I think we should have taken her case.”

He made a gesture of absolution in the air, “So it is known.”

***

In the morning, lost in the dreamless sleep of the exhausted and drunk that never fully satisfies the truly tired, Icarus slept loudly on his long office couch. Maren kicked him in the shin and threw the paper in his face before he could shout his protest. 

“Read!” she snarled at him. Her genuine anger was a rare thing and it startled him into immediate compliance.

He rubbed his leg and sat straight, trying to blink the sleep away so he could see. He shook the paper out and saw it splashed across the front page. Enormous boxy letters taking up a quarter of the space above the fold. 

GRISLY MURDER IN FAIRVIEW! POSSESSION? OR PSYCHOPATHY?

His stomach dropped into his feet. He was going to throw up. Rationalizations constructed themselves swiftly through his mind. Surely it was a coincidence, Fairview was not exactly a posh neighborhood. There were dozens of families with questionable sons in that part of the city. 

But Icarus was too seasoned at this to believe in coincidences.

He scanned the text and frowned. Two adults, a teenager, and a young child. Throats mangled, found by a neighbor in the morning who dropped off bread every other day. Bodies almost drained of blood, coupled with a grim photograph through some shuttered side window of a kitchen splashed with black like an ocean tide had rolled through it.

Throats mangled, he reread the line several times. 

“Mangled,” he muttered and took the mug of coffee Maren shoved at him. Her displeasure was very clear, “Not cut. They used that word.”

“Cut is a toss-up,” she was working very hard to bridle her fury, “but mangled is always one of them.”

She did not need to elaborate. Demon, most likely, but fae were not to be ruled out. They were violent, angry little things when they wished to be. Demons rarely mangled, they loved the torment of cutting and terrifying their victims before they died. Fae took a more animalistic approach when they committed violence like this. His sleep-addled mind tried to roll through the possibilities. 

“We have to find her,” Maren was staring out the window into the swell of morning grey. “She said Cabra and she’s not listed in the paper.”

He put it down and ran a hand over his face, draining the coffee and ignoring the burn he knew he would suffer on his tongue with a wince. On his feet, he paused to check the mirror behind the couch. He looked like a wraith. They could not go anywhere if he did not tidy himself up a little, otherwise they might think he was the possessed missing son. 

“Give me ten minutes,” he ushered Maren out the door. 

Ten minutes later, tidied and in a fresh black shirt knifed at the neck by the crisp white tab collar he so enjoyed wearing, he shut the door to his office and locked it. No taking chances with the material he had pinned up in there, even with Edith standing guard like a bear at the mouth of its cave. 

Maren briskly took the lead, pulling away from him in her hurry. His strides were longer and she could not stay out in front of him for long. He laid a hand on her shoulder and she whirled. For a moment he expected her to shout at him, but she just stared placidly up at him. He hated when she shut him out like that. It made him feel like a child set in the corner for bad behavior. 

“She won’t be at Cabra,” he offered, trying to make peace with her, “she’ll be at the family home in Fairview.”

“How do you-?”

“Where did you go when they found yours?”

Maren’s face rippled with some memory Icarus only ever touched when he needed to. She nodded and waited for him to redirect them. She did not pull away from him this time, sticking shoulder to shoulder while they walked to the tram. In the din of the car, he leaned so only she could hear him. One hand found her shoulder with a firm squeeze. 

“I was wrong, Mare. We should have taken it. I’m sorry.”

She looked him over, weighing the heart of his apology against the feather of her anger. In a quiet decision only he could see her make, her expression opened back up to him and he dropped his hand. He knew better than to draw attention to it. Now, he had to focus on finding Eilonwy and dissecting what force had chosen her brother as its vessel of violence. 

Icarus continues!

Chapter 4

Icarus couldn’t breathe. Not for a lack of trying, the Pale God knew. His collar felt too tight. The room was too oppressive. His cassock was too thick. He was shedding layers and opening windows before he had a moment to think. Cold country air slammed into his lungs, but made no difference to the smoke that filled his head. He turned without thinking and stalked across the room.

Maren watched him like a tamer would a lion. She set bowls and herbs back in their proper velvet-lined places in her kit. When he crossed the room, she turned haphazard with a curse under her breath. He threw open the door and moved wraithlike down the dim hall. His long legs carried him quickly to the stairs. 

“Icarus,” she warned, trying to catch up to him, “whatever you’re going to do, don’t.”

Nothing but the rush of wind and the low whine of his own shock rang in his head. Distantly he heard her, but that was a problem for another time. He hurled open the door, hunting down the trembling figures of the Donaghue family a dozen yards from the house. Margaret stood half-collapsed against her father, watching. Her eyes went wide at the sight of the priest. His face twisted, fingers stained a bright cobalt that had begun to thread through his wrists and creep up his arms like angry painted vines. 

Icarus jammed a finger at her, “Where?!”

“What-” her voice cracked.

“Where did you go to pick thyme or flowers or whatever asinine thing you were doing!?”

Maren’s hand closed on his upper arm. She planted her feet and held. He twisted, she dug in. Her grip tightened with every attempt he made to pry her off. He turned his wild eyes on her and tried to wrench her fingers from him. 

“Get off me! I have to-”

“Get a hold of yourself, Father,” she hissed. A jerk of her chin sheared the anger off the top of his perception, “You’re scaring them and you need to dose. We both do.”

He stared more clear-eyed at the huddled mass of figures standing in the cold yard. Argus held an arm out, shielding his family from the wrath of the exorcist. Maggie curled behind him, her husband trying to turn her away from the scene. Both young daughters peered out from behind their father in fascination. 

Icarus inhaled sharply and stepped back. He looked down at his hands. The spreading lace of Rot up his forearms pulsed blue-white with every rapid beat of his heart. His breath still came too hard, too stunned. He could not look at this horrified family, could not face the manifestation of his own ire. 

He kept his voice a whisper, but the fight had drained from it, “I need to know where she was. Maybe there’s an entrance, a sidhe, some crack in the Veil-”

“We’ll get to that,” Maren eased her grip enough to ensure he was not about to turn and shout at Maggie again, “but we have to dose. You’ve got ampules?”

Reality sharpened abruptly. He saw the cobalt veins climbing Maren’s arms, the way his bones ached everywhere it touched. The Rot cough started simmering in his lungs. Air hit his bluish skin like fire to a wheat field. He nodded to clear the fog from his head and her hold on him released. They dug in their pouches and withdrew small glass vials. Maren leaned around him to address the Donaghues. Her tone was soft, assuring, trying to reverse whatever damage Icarus had done. 

“We need to stay the disease. May we use your front room?” She waited. Argus made an affirmative sound, but did not follow them back in. She could not blame him. 

The two priests settled on the straw-stuffed mattress that passed for a couch. Glass ampules cracked and they mimed a toast before dropping the iridescent, waxy substance into their eyes. Icarus blinked and hissed against the faint sting. His pupils flared, then constricted. Maren’s head already lolled back, jaw slack, eyes filmed over in brilliant blue. It took a few more seconds before the euphoria hit him. 

The sounds of spring danced through his ears and his body went limp. Birds, chimes caught in the wind, distant laughter of people and something inhuman mingling together in the wind. He was no longer on the couch, not in the farmhouse, nowhere near Baldongan. A field spread out before him, dropping off the edge of a stepped basalt cliff. He could hear the water churning below before he leaned over to see.

Rich indigo swirled in the river cutting through the canyon. Creatures pirouetted through the spray, riding the light where it fractured into rainbows. Somewhere overhead, the pulsing air of impossibly large wings caressed his face with each beat. He walked through the field to nowhere, letting his hands brush the stalks of bright yellow gorse.

Something snared under his foot. He dropped his gaze to the earth, but his feet were lost in the peculiar haze of the false reality. A few steps later, it happened again. Not a snare--a tug. He tried to see what moved in the undergrowth. Nothing disturbed the glittering mist around his ankles. He walked a few measured steps before it yanked him so hard he tumbled headfirst into the earth.

Icarus hit the floor of the farmhouse so hard it knocked him out of the Eidolon haze. He cried out, his head striking an uneven floorboard. Maren shook off the euphoria like a dog coming inside from the rain. He rubbed at the edge of his forehead, reluctantly letting her check for marks. 

Pursing her lips, she sighed, “Unfortunately, you’ll live.”

He shot her a sour look and rubbed the last of the Eidolon from his eyes. A lightness had seeped into his limbs. He tried to focus. The hallucinations were always the same. A field, a waterfall, a massive salmon. Something would make sounds or he’d catch music. Then he would be back in the regular world still vibrating from the intoxicating effects of the only thing that kept the Rot at bay. 

“You can’t run out there like a madman again,” she warned him. “The last thing we want is this village thinking we’re Rot-crazed. You know what they’d do if they did.”

He did, in fact, know, “I just want to find out where she went, retrace her steps. You heard the it. It… knew him. Knew me. I have to at least ask.”

Her cool eyes bored into him, “He’s been missing for years. Fae are deceivers. If it knew you could cast it out, maybe it just took a last stab at your confidence.”

He hesitated. She was right. Everything about the situation screamed that she was right. Still, something about its wide-eyed wonder he could not shake. It did not feel like deception or an attempt to rattle him. It felt like a message. She released him, aware there was no stopping him once he was set on something. 

He tried not to stalk back out this time. The Rot signs had faded and the color in his hands had mostly returned. He looked less crazed, less full of fury. Argus still kept his family in close reach. Maggie stayed tucked into Connor’s side. The young man puffed out his chest, ready to defend his wife until Icarus raised his hands in surrender. 

“I apologize,” he directed his words to Maggie, “but your bodach said something to me and it’s important I look into it. Can I ask you some questions?” When Argus looked poised to decline, he added, “I’d have to do a debriefing either way. Church requirements.”

Church requirements seemed to give the man pause. Whatever he felt about the Netherists in his home, the Church had his utmost trust. He did not interrupt, but he did not invite Icarus to continue. The priest took this as assent. 

“I need you to tell me everything you remember. Where you went, what you saw. Leave nothing out,” he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a notebook and pencil. “Smells, sights, sounds. Anything. Even if you think it was a trick of the mind, tell me.”

He tried to keep his hands steady, not to interrupt her when she spoke, not to barrel her with questions about what she knew of his father. He questioned her time under its control -- what had it said, thought, done, told her. No stone left unturned in his inquisition, not this time. Icarus was not always thorough in the aftermath, he chose to let Edith handle the interrogation when clients dropped off payment, but this was different. 

Unfortunately, Maggie recalled very little. She had described it like being in a dream or sleepwalking, nothing concrete made its way back to her. He snapped the book shut. She jumped. Ruefully, he smiled with as much assurance as he could muster, “You’ve been a great help, Margaret. We’ll investigate and let you know if we need anything else.”

Argus cleared his throat and pulled her back into the protective circle of loved ones. He held his own question on his tongue for a long time, shoulders slumped as they always did when a man lacked surety. He made himself meet Icarus’s impatient gaze. 

“This is far south for a bodach, is it not? They’re a Scottish sort, I’ve heard.” He frowned and waited for Icarus to nod, “Does that… mean something?”

Icarus tucked his notebook away in an effort to buy himself a few moments to respond, “Not sure. Maybe. If we need anything else, we’ll be in touch.”

He did not wait for an answer, leaving the family boring wary holes in his back. Maren stood like a statue guarding the edge of the property. Her head tilted, eyes narrowed, and flicked to him. He knew that look. Helpful though they might have been to this family, they knew what they were. His outburst had not helped. The Donaghues wanted to forget the ordeal as soon as possible and a pair of Netherists standing in their yard were preventing that suppression. It irked him more than he wanted to admit -- choosing to forget something so devastating instead of understanding it. Willfully ignoring instead of healing. 

Oh well. Not his family, not his problem.

He mounted his horse and followed Maren on the long, damp road back into town. They made short work of packing up and delivering their report to Bishop Franklin. He seemed anxious to ask about their plans to depart, which Maren assured him would be immediately. Staying in a town where they were very obviously unwanted was never part of their plan. It chafed how used he felt when it was done even after all this time. 

Small towns breed small minds, he thought bitterly. It was unfair, but not as unfair as throwing away the only people who could help them over Church superstition. 

The train lurched its departure and only when they had started the journey back to Dublin did Maren let herself relax in the microscopic way only Icarus seemed to notice. After a half hour, she seemed to focus on some distant problem buried in the wall of the car. Her arms folded across her chest and she made a low, questioning sound. 

“Father Reed asked for you off record,” she rubbed her chin absently, “and then the bodach mentions Daedalus by name.”

“Already been turning it around in my head,” in truth it was so tightly wound in his mind he could not turn it anymore. He was too seasoned at this to believe in coincidences. Too many missing pieces to this story. He was remarkably tired of missing pieces when it came to his father. 

They had not planned it aloud, the decision to go to Father Reed’s offices went unspoken as most things did between them. The pair of them stalked the too-familiar route from the station to the Church of Saint Lazriel. The strangeness of it had not quite worn off for either of them. Returning as outsiders to the building that had once been like a second home still felt alien, off somehow. 

The cathedral sat like a sentinel guarding the city from Trinity College across the bridge. Built like a nightmare captured in stone, carved to reveal all the things that might happen to a sinner if they failed to abide by the Pale Doctrine’s rules. Its spires clawed at the grey sky overhead, each ornate statue stretched like a talon desperately reaching for the Pale God’s infinite forgiveness. Along the archivolts scenes of demons radiated along every voussoir until they reached the tympanum - an intricate scene of the Archangel Lazriel valiantly holding back the monsters to protect the massive double doors. Each door held the unpainted visage of a wooden saint - Saint Lazriel and Saint Patrick. Beneath their hands lifted in mirroring benedictions, the massive iron rings sat waiting.

They were quite immune to the dramatic effect of the place by now. Icarus heaved, the door that was Saint Patrick gave, and they disappeared inside. 

When the door to the main offices crashed open, the secretary started. It took her a moment to register who she was looking at. She blanched. Futilely, she stood to stop them, “You don’t have an appointment-”

“Noted. Thank you Berta,” Icarus brushed her aside. 

Priests situated at scattered desks looked up at the commotion. A few exchanged nervous glances. One attempted to intervene. Father Aaron, if Icarus recalled him right. New to the cloth when he was seen out the doors and asked not to return unless requested. He was a bigger man than Berta, broader than Icarus, and they had to pause to maneuver around him. 

“Icarus, you’re not supposed to be here unless summoned,” Aaron frowned, “and you weren’t. Why are you here?”

Icarus sighed heavily, “Due respect, Father Aaron, but this is between myself and Father Reed. So please, kindly, get the fuck out of my way.”

Aaron’s hard eyes dropped to the white tab collar and his frown deepened into something colder, “You’re not supposed to be wearing that anymore. You were-”

“Stripped,” he tried to move around the larger man, but was thwarted, “I know. But here’s the thing about being stripped. It goes both ways. The Church can’t tell me what to do, including what to wear. Get out of my way.”

Maren held her case in front of her, voice like a breaking pane of ice snapping the room in two, “Aaron.”

The larger man stopped. He turned his attention to her, but not for long. None of them could ever hold her gaze for more than a few seconds. At first, she hated it. Now, it was the source of her power in this building. 

Cowards. 

“I can’t just let you-”

“Move.”

Silence blanketed the room. So thick and loud it made Icarus’s ears ring a little. One breath passed. Then another. 

Aaron stepped aside. When they passed him, Maren kept her unblinking eyes on him until he sat at his desk and turned back to his work. She caught the flush in his cheeks with a secret satisfaction, then turned and followed after Icarus. 

He did not bother to knock. It would ruin the dramatic effect he felt entitled to. Father Reed’s head snapped up from his desk. He blustered until he registered who had dared to throw open the door and interrupt his work. Icarus had expected outrage, frustration, surprise. Instead, he watched the old man’s brows knit together in comprehension. He sighed, nodded, and gestured to the two empty chairs in front of him. 

Maren glanced at Icarus. They exchanged raised brows and eased into their seats. He had planned to come in and have a yelling match with the old priest, not be prompted to have a seat. Reed’s sheepishness is what lit the fire in Icarus’s chest again. 

“You son of a bitch,” Icarus kept his voice low until Maren leaned back to shut the door with a sweep of her hand. He leaned forward, jamming an accusatory finger into the wooden desk, “What didn’t you tell me? How much did you fucking know?”

Reed, long since accustomed to Icarus and his temper, leaned back in his chair. He lifted his thin-framed glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, “I’m sorry, my boy. I just needed… I wasn’t sure. That’s all.”

“How much -- and I ask again -- did you fucking know?” Icarus raised his voice enough to be clear he would keep going. 

Reed nodded to himself and ran a hand over his mouth. He made himself meet Icarus’s sharp, angry stare and sighed, “I wasn’t sure. Father Simon called from the hospital and updated me on what happened. He said it asked ‘for the one with fire’, then tossed him into a wall and broke his legs.”

The huffed laugh of Icarus’s outrage struck every corner of the room, “And you decided this was unimportant to share? It fucking asked for me, Reed. And you’re telling me you weren’t sure. You’ve got other priests in here lighting fire with their hands? Lots of us waddling about, yeah? It meant me. You knew it and you lied by omission.”

He stood now, vibrating with rage. He knew he was cast out, he expected to be obfuscated or kept in the dark about things. This was not Church business, though. This was his business. This was his father. He took to pacing, running a hand through tangled blond hair that was starting to get irritatingly long. When he rounded on Reed again, the man recoiled at the shadow in his face. 

“Do you want to know what it said to me?” He raised his eyebrows in mockery, “Yeah? It said ‘Daedalus sends his regards.’”

The air in the room went cold. Reed froze. Maren studied him from her quiet position in the chair tucked farthest from the scene in front of her. She watched as the older priest’s expression halted -- broke apart, reformed into something new. Curious, she kept still. People tended to reveal more when they forgot you were there. It helped when someone else drew all the room’s attention.

“Daedalus sends his regards,” Reed repeated. “I’m sorry, son. I don’t know what to say. The Church Investigators closed that file years ago, he’s been presumed dead-”

“For fifteen years, yes, thanks. I’m sure you all did a bang on job, but I want the files,” Icarus seethed through clenched teeth. “I’ve blindly trusted the Church enough, you’ll understand if I’d like to take a look at your work.”

The tension between them thickened. Maren thought she could see it if the light struck the space at the proper angle. Blinking, it vanished. Reed stayed under that reformed expression he had cobbled together, his affirming nod too stiff and his blank face too forced. 

“I’ll have to requisition-”

“Now,” Icarus warned. “Or would you like me to call on Cardinal O’Donnell and inform him of your personal request for my involvement? I’m sure he’d be pleased as punch for an excuse to audit your office.”

Silence again. Oppressive, heavy with the threat of bureaucratic violence. Reed hunted for a way around the demand, Icarus hunted for red tape to cut him off. They stared at each other, unsure who was predator and who was prey. For a moment, Maren could picture Icarus backing down. She shuddered at the thought. Then Reed broke away and got to his feet. His motions were wooden, straining against whatever invisible shackles had been placed around him about this case. 

He unlocked the storage closet and disappeared inside. Rustling paper, the smell of old parchment, hissing cardboard, and the curse after a shuffling thump followed him back out. When Icarus snatched the file box from him, he was almost insulted by how light it was. He stared at the blank top, suddenly unsure what to do. In part because he had not expected to get this far this soon, but also because he was not precisely sure what he planned to do with it.

“I can give you five days. Make your copies,” Reed offered, his contrition seemed genuine enough. He reached out to cover Icarus’ hand with a reassuring pat, “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you.”

“You should have,” Icarus tried to frown, but his anger had always burned hot and fast. “Don’t do it again.”

Maren opened the door and let him pass. She lingered in the doorway, watching Reed’s wistful face followed her comrade. He looked at her only when Icarus was out of sight. 

“He’ll find it,” she said. Cool, factual, as though they were on the same page, “Whatever you’re hiding from him, he’ll find it.”

She closed the door, not bothering to wait for a reply.

Icarus continues. Just mass posting a bunch of chapters because I did a ton of work on this. As always, any comments or demands for changes or notes are beyond welcome so feel free to hurt my feelings. I'm very tough to rattle.

Chapter 3

The horses were the first to sense the wrongness of the thatched farmhouse. They whinnied and hesitated, attempting to turn back on their own. Icarus coaxed his with gentle clucks and whispered words of affirmation. Maren stroked the neck of her mare until she calmed enough to be tethered at the hitching post. They observed the house first -- windows shuttered, one left open for light revealed empty panes where glass should be. 

No animals bellowed in the field. No chickens clucking content or sheep bleating with impatience. It was eerily quiet. Groaning wood pulled their heightened attention to the door. A man -- mid forties, gray at the temples, impressive mustache obscuring his mouth -- stood wild-eyed and exhausted. He beckoned them to the house and disappeared back inside. 

The two priests exchanged a look and Icarus took the lead. Mud gave under his boots unpleasantly. He wiped his feet on the woven straw doormat and paused at the threshold. From his pocket he withdrew a rosary, polish long since worried away. He wrapped it around his hand and stepped inside. Behind him, Maren reached into one of her pouches and withdrew a handful of salt mixed with dried thyme and yarrow. She poured it from her hand like a funnel in a perfect, practiced line along the doorway before stepping over it into the large living room. It glowed faint ivory in the dark. 

The man wiped his hands on a towel, too tired to study them or be concerned about what they were, “Thank you for coming on short notice, Father… ah…”

“Ulrich. Icarus, if you like,” he supplied and gestured, “and Father Maren Fowler. You must be Argus.”

Argus eyed the line of salt with a weary nod, “Aye. A salt magician. Been a long time since one has been ‘round these hills.”

Maren inclined her head before taking in the room. When she spotted the two terrified faces huddled on the straw-filled sofa, she tilted her head in greeting, “Dia dhuit. Hello.”

The girls were younger than he had expected, probably twelve and fifteen. Margaret’s file had her at nineteen, but it did not register exactly how young that was until then. Much too young for whatever was happening to her. They scrambled to the corner of the mattress and huddled together. It seemed they still had the energy to bend to ignorance about what they were. 

“I’ll take you to her,” Argus offered with a note of apology he would never speak aloud, “Connor has been keeping vigil by the door.”

They climbed the creaking stairs and caught the whispering prayers in the breeze that crossed the paneless windows. Margaret’s husband sat propped against a sealed door papered with pages of the Pale Doctrine likely set by Father Simon during his first attempt. At the sight of the two priests, he scrambled to his feet and thumbed his rosary. 

“Dia dhuit,” he nodded, dark hair falling across his forehead he attempted to flick away, “thank you, Fathers. Thank you for coming. My wife…”

“Tell us how it started,” Icarus scanned the pages and read the prayers and spells, giving Connor something to do while he did.

The trembling young man nodded, “Yes. Well. She said she was going to the field to pick wild thyme and rosemary. She was always vigilant about those things, always keeping the doorways protected. Anyway, she was late coming back. Very late. We were getting ready to search the fields when we saw her.”

“Walking up the road like she was sleeping,” Argus interjected. “She didn’t react until I shook her, then she screamed like I’d woken her from a nightmare.”

“She slept for two days,” Connor continued, “and barely ate. She was paranoid, far away. I caught her talking to herself in the middle of the night, standing in a corner of the room. Then… then she started… knowing things.”

“Things she should not,” the two men spoke like a call and response, filling in the beats for each other when it was too much, “about me, Connor, her sisters. Her mother. When she broke the chickens’ necks, we called for Father Franklin to come sit with her a while. After that, she terrorized her sisters. Hiding under their beds, dragging them into closets. She stabbed Molly in the leg with a fork and we couldn’t let her roam around anymore so we… shackled her. Made sure she stayed put.”

Connor was nodding along, tears shining at the rim of his eyes. Icarus took a step back from the door, “Franklin said she… skitters. Can you explain that?”

The men exchanged alarmed looks. Neither of them moved to speak and he did not offer an alternative to the question. Behind the door, he heard something shuffling. Slow at first, then faster. Wary. Unsure. It sensed him on the other side. 

“When she moves,” Argus swallowed hard, “she crouches low, like she’s walking on her finger and toenails. It makes this scratching sound on the wood. When she’s in a fury, her hands burn the floorboards.”

“She hides under the bed?” Maren probed and moved to stand beside Icarus in the cramped hallway. They were both listening, gauging their unseen opponent before the battle had begun.

“Y-yes,” Connor affirmed, “but she shouldn’t be able to. It’s too small. Her… her limbs… they don’t move right. None of her does. Her eyes are too big. She bends… wrong.”

Neither priest asked more questions. A gesture from Icarus and Argus handed him the key to the door. When it was apparent they were not needed, both men backed to the far end of the hall unwilling to fully retreat to the perceived safety of the living room. Icarus slid the key in the lock and paused. He wrapped his rosary around his hand and raised two fingers to make the sign of the cross. 

He turned the key and the lock clicked, the door opened at the lightest press of his fingers. He crossed into the room and stopped when he was just inside. Thyme and yarrow filled the air when Maren laid a crisp line of luminous salt at the door. She kissed her rosary beads nestled against her knuckles and signed the cross before stepping over the threshold. 

The air flexed. Too warm, too weighed down by something that had no name. He was already sweating under his cassock. This part rarely bothered him anymore, they all tried the same things. One trick ponies, the lot of them. He hesitated at the door and let his eyes adjust to the abnormal dark. He spotted the faint shine of eyes in the corner. Often mistaken for a trick of the light, the eyes always glowed a little when they were occupied by a second presence. 

He walked slowly, keeping a wide berth, “Well, look at you. Why don’t you come here and let me see you?”

The laugh was preternatural, clearly not the voice of the slight woman it set up shop in, “Why don’t you come here and let me touch you, priest?”

It tracked him as he moved from the door to the opposite wall of the room. They sized each other up. Icarus kept his movement calm and deliberate. He unzipped the Dopp kit and withdrew his copy of the Pale Doctrine, placing the pouch on the windowsill. It crouched on all fours, tucking itself farther back into the corner. 

He kept its attention on him, let it ignore Maren. The other priest opened her rites kit and withdrew an old brass bowl pressed with sigils, scorched on the inside from overuse. She filled it with dried mugwort and thyme, then set it ablaze. The smoke drifted through the air and its attention snapped to her. She froze -- waiting, watching. 

“Why don’t you save us the trouble and give me your name, demon?” Icarus’s voice stayed level, almost bored. The subtly off-human face turned back to him. He could feel its annoyance building.

It laughed, low and dark, “The last priest said the same thing. Look how that turned out for him. How’s the leg, by the way?”

Maren moved cautiously. Her hand slipped into the bag of salt and she began to pour. The two priests moved in a slow arc, opposite directions. Icarus kept it on him while she worked. These things always fixated on whoever was the loudest, they could not split their attention the way a human could. 

“If you won’t give me your name,” he smirked his challenge in the dark, “then I’ll take it.”

He touched the first page of the Pale Doctrine and the paper turned incandescent, off-white and gentle. No need to jump right to the blue-tinged blood magic. Test it first, see if it was just weak Calderism and typical Church failure. He tore the page free and cast it in front of the creature. 

“Saint Lazriel the avenging angel, sword at the gate, wielder of holy fire,” Icarus watched the shifting light behind the eyes, “I call thee down into this vessel to cast your light upon this darkness.”

The page went rigid and melded into the floor. The creature stepped towards him, curious, and leaned over it. It snickered and ran a nail over the paper, tearing it at the corner.

“Wield me as your blade and avenge the Lord our Pale God’s sacred creation,” another torn page, another rigid paper. He tore and spoke, his tone deep and rising. Each one forming a slow, deliberate half-circle around the figure, “Strike this creature from untainted flesh and banish this abomination under your burning gaze back to the monstrous realm from which it comes!”

The chain slithered and clanked when it pulled tight. Margaret’s body lunged across the room for him. A roar in its throat snagged against the shackle around its neck. It stopped short of reaching him. Claws raked the air. Its face contorted. Icarus examined it. The eyes bulged, too big for the head and pupils too blown into the sclera to be natural. Its mouth split almost to the ear, teeth doubled in its jaws. Finger joints were over-long, talons instead of nails, dark with splintered wood and blood. 

He tore another page, “Reveal yourself and be unmade in the eyes of the Lord.”

Unbothered by its effort to reach him, he pressed the luminous paper to its forehead and it snarled. Body rigid, cramping, curling in on itself like a dying spider. Icarus knew better. He rolled his eyes and tore another free, layering it over the last.

“I said reveal yourself and be unmade in the eyes of the Lord!” He shouted and tore, layering, repeating, demanding. The body jerked and flailed with each new sheet over its skin. It sank and thrashed and wailed. 

The pale light flickered and failed. Gospel fluttered from its face to the bedroom floor. A low, bitter laugh filled all corners of the room. Walls bowed and tilted, “Your Pale God has no power here, Father.”

Spit sizzled at his feet. Icarus frowned and sighed, “Show yourself, whatever you are.”

“You’re not even trying,” it chuckled and eased disjointedly to its too-long feet. “At least make this interesting!”

“I didn’t need to try,” he smiled. A menacing thing stretched across his haggard face, “I needed to buy time.”

The creature faltered and stepped back, looking around in a rising panic. Just in time to see Maren completing her wide circle of salt. It rushed her and shrieked. Too late. The salt ring gleamed, illuminating the bedroom, and pulled them back into reality. She was unmoved by its violence, patient on the other side of the ring.

“Not a demon,” she tilted her head. “Why don’t you show us what you are?”

It snapped its jaws futilely at her, raking and lunging. Every effort it made to reach across the barrier blocked by a wall it could not overtake. Each strike made the magic in the salt flare. 

“You bitch!” It frothed and stalked the ring, looking for weak points. Maren never left weak points.

Icarus pulled the stole from his shoulders and rolled up his sleeves. He plucked the silver knife from its hidden place in the knotted fabric around his waist and tossed it into the air with cocky flourish. With a practiced hand, he caught it by the handle. The creature stopped moving and stared. Something behind its warped expression adjusted. It recalculated according to the mathematics written on his arms. When he raised the knife to his palm, it tried to recoil. The salt flared when its back hit the invisible wall. 

He opened the skin, so accustomed to the bite he no longer felt it. Maren drew hers across the meat of her forearm. Mirrors of each other, two priests sinking their teeth into magic they should not be able to taste. Blood splattered along the floor and began to steam. Electricity crackled across the beams, crawling down skin and settling deep into bone. He let his head fall back and sighed into the feeling, the power. It coursed through him, pumping into his veins with every beat of his rotting heart. 

Maren’s hands moved swiftly in the air. A trail of blue-white light followed the patterns she sketched. He kept her movement at the edges of his vision when he came back to the present moment. His hands flexed and he felt heat gather in his palms. Thin blue flames lapped painlessly at his fingers, eager for his command. 

He stepped over the salt. Sound muffled. 

The creature lunged. 

He sidestepped and struck his fist into its shoulder. It reared back and doubled down. He met the vicious blows with precise strikes, the fire sizzled against its exposed skin. Forearm met the space between thumb and forefinger. Flesh scorched. It withdrew screaming. The thing dropped to the ground and skittered towards the edge of the arena -- because that was what this had become. The place where the ritual of combat was performed. 

“Corrupted priest,” it hissed through gritted teeth. “Tainted. Rotten. Obscured from the eyes of your worthless God.”

He rolled out his shoulders and moved along the ring, “I sacrifice my immortal soul as an instrument of the Lord. I will be greeted in Heaven by archangels. You, on the other hand, will simply turn to dust.”

It scrambled low, gouging floorboards in its haste to strike his leg. He kicked it in the face. It tumbled onto its back and he closed the gap. When it drew up on its knees, he saw the sigil shuddering to life under Maren’s practiced coil of her hands. She cast her fingers forward as if throwing a lifeline. What was etched in the air seared into the ground under the creature. Whatever curse it uttered died on its tongue. 

The sigil writhed. Spirals lashed its wrists and held the monster on its knees. Another forced its head back and exposed its throat. Icarus loomed over the trapped thing and shouted. The timbre of his voice split into two tones layered endlessly over each other, “If you will not be unmade by the Lord, you will be unmade by me!”

He gripped its face under his palm. It screamed against the burning magic in his hands. He jerked its head back as if trying to shake something loose. One brutal thrust of his hand. Another. Then another. Something broke free from the woman’s body. 

The dark silhouette lay motionless, but time was limited. He undid the shackle at Margaret’s neck, cupping her face in his palms. She stared at him, her face very human and very frightened. Wild-eyed, her terror rose and she twisted to see what had been thrown from her. He kept her fixed on him.

“Margaret, I need you to get up and get out of here,” he murmured quickly, “and do not break the salt. Do you understand?” She nodded, but he could see in her face she was not hearing him. He released her and snapped his fingers when she began to scramble, “Do not break the salt!” 

She slowed, another nod more lucid than the first, “Y-yes. Yes.”

Her movements were shaken and careful. She hiked the hem of her nightdress and put all her focus on stepping over the line as deliberately as she could. When she was over it, she ran. Maren touched her shoulder intending to assure her, but the panicked woman was unaware of anything except leaving that room. They listened for the cries of reunion in the hall, the hurried thunder of steps down into the living room, out the front door. 

The two priests redoubled their attention to the black, wicked shape that had begun to rise. At first the shadow was unfocused, then its edges began to sharpen. Joints popped, limbs forced back into place. It was disoriented, shaking its bulbous head to clear the fog. Maren began to twist her fingers again. She wove the pastel blue light like threads on a loom, embroidering complex patterns into empty space. Icarus reached back for the hilt of his sword and drew. The moment the blue fire in his hands touched the metal, neatly etched sigils flared to life along the flat of the blade made by Maren’s own hands. 

The thing focused on him now. Its too-wide jaws hung open, thick drool making a wet repetitive plop as it coursed over jagged teeth. Oblong limbs like bone under skin the color of muddy water stretched too tight. Its oversized eyes slit like a serpent’s, yellow-green and curious. Its toothy grin went wide with pleasant surprise. 

“Faefire,” its tone was a raspy, graveled sound. “A manhuman wielding faefire! Rarity, rarity!”

The glee gave Icarus pause. He narrowed his eyes and rolled the sword in his wrist before leveling it in an offensive stance. They never commented on the way his Netherism manifested before. The newness made him uneasy. 

It was different for all Netherists, tapping into faerie magic was unpredictable. Some were necromancers, some alchemists, others sigilists like Maren, but the creature was right -- Icarus had never met another Netherist who manifested faefire. He ignored the buoyancy in the thing’s attitude and took in its stretched out shape, the malformed head. Clearly not a bánánach. 

“A bodach,” he muttered and the creature took several too-fast tottering steps towards him. 

He swung the blade in a wide arc. It swerved away. He rode the momentum into a backhanded crescent. It hit home and carved into a leathery shoulder. Blue fire trailed every swing of the blade as if its echo was delayed. Dark ichor seeped from the wound, swallowed by the faefire channeled through steel. A high-pitched squeal tore from the creature and it lashed out at his leg. Talon caught fabric and ripped into his thigh. He growled against the flare of pain and danced backwards, mindful of the perimeter. 

He shook the ichor from his sword and waited. It studied him and dropped low again, elbows and knees bent backwards. These were fast monsters, contorting themselves to pass through reality faster than a human. The shell created by the ring protected their fragile pocket in time and kept the creature from warping its movement. Icarus slashed downward and nicked its bent-in elbow, parrying the low strike of its leg to draw a wound in what would be its calf. 

“Mare,” he warned, “help would be just lovely right about now!”

“Coming,” she grumbled. Sweat formed on her brow. Fragile threads of light wove into each other and she flicked her wrist, inverting a letter older than stone, “Bodach is different.”

The bodach squealed and bounded across the circle. He ducked. It slammed into the barrier and rolled with the force of it. Icarus cut vertically, blasting power through his hands so hard each sigil pulsed cobalt. The expulsion rocked the air and sent the bodach tumbling backwards. He sprinted across the circle and stabbed down hard. It moved away barely a breath ahead of him and he caught its ribs instead. Bone exposed through torn skin, the pale slate of fae skeleton bright against the ugly dark skin. 

It rolled back towards him and curved its other arm down, talons pinched together in a spear. He turned and braced, sword angled over his shoulder to block the coming blow. Its fingers split apart. He turned the handle, edge slicing between them. The monster screamed. It pushed, splitting the web of its hand even more. It was cutting its own arm in half to get to him. The sound made his stomach flip. Wet and crackling and full of rage. A creature willing to break itself into pieces to destroy him.

“Mare!” He shouted. His heart was pounding. He tried to divide his attention to its legs, catching movement by his feet. It was pressing him back. If he moved farther, he would break the salt and it would escape.

She grunted and the floor beneath him turned to embers, her pattern branded the boards and reached for the creature’s limbs. It fought the black tendrils that snared it. Each charcoal tentacle immobilized a limb, torso, neck. The bodach was spread wide and vulnerable, ruined hand flopping uselessly. Icarus exhaled and let his shoulders drop. She doubled over against her thighs, shoulders heaving in her battle for breath.

The bodach stared at him, an eerie calm juxtaposed against its desperate thrashing a moment before. He rolled the blade in his wrist and trained the point at its heart. 

It smiled. 

He hesitated. It strained against the binding to lean forwards—he hated that uncanny smile. With a spike of effort through his shoulders, faefire flashed up the metal. He drove the point home. 

It gasped. Worse -- it started to laugh. Its appendages began to smolder, the silver-black cinders gleaming as they worked quickly up its limbs like parchment to a candle. Before it was well and truly alight, while it still had the faculty to speak, amusement danced in its eyes. 

“Daedalus sends his regards.”

Cold shot through him. Eyes wide, limbs frozen, unable to move. Icarus stared slack jawed at the burning creature’s corpse. When the blue wispy light of its Eidolon appeared, his body would not obey. 

Maren stepped in and snared it in a vial before it vanished. She tucked the glass back into the slot on her belt and watched the ash disintegrate. After a long time in the trailing silence, she looked back at him. Sword pointed uselessly to the ground, face blank, Icarus could do nothing but stare. Her brows knit, mouth curved in a worried frown—a shift in her expression so rare he could count on two hands. She moved to stand in front of him, her hand fell heavy on his shoulder. All he could manage were two words barely above a whisper.

“My father.”

Alright. I had a hiatus moment because I LOCKED IN and went wild with writing a book versus OpEd pieces, but I'm returning to continue posting and sharing pieces of Icarus. My current obsession is Icarus and thus I will share what I'm working on here in its rawest form!

Chapter 2

An elbow jammed into his ribs and ripped him out of a rather pleasant whiskey-induced coma. Icarus rubbed at his eyes, muttering against the pain. They had stopped moving, Maren was staring at him with the slightly shifted expression he knew as irritation. He sat up, running a hand through sleep-tousled hair. They dressed and made their way off the train. Clouds obscured the midday sun, but it made his head crackle anyway. He shielded himself against the light and blinked, trying to get his bearings.

There was no station directly in Baldongan, they had taken a few hours to reach Rush instead. Maren wanted to plead with the Franciscans to borrow their horses, but he hated the Franciscans and immediately squashed that plan. Instead, he overpaid to borrow a pair from a small stable nearby. The clerical gear always did garner him more goodwill than he deserved. 

He swung himself into the saddle and kept pace behind Maren. Civilization thinned the farther away they got, fog took its place along the road, cobblestones vanished into packed dirt that turned muddy with the weight of moisture in the air. The quiet took on a life of its own around them. Obscured, cattle grazed and huffed invisible alongside them. Rare roofs peered at them in the mist, but no lights sparkled in their windows. 

His grip tightened on the reins and he frowned, “I don’t have a good feeling about this, Mare.”

She shook her head, “I don’t either. You said Reed told you it blew the gas mane and cut the town’s power, yes?”

“Aye,” he recalled, “tossed Father Simon like a loaf of stale bread when it did.”

Their silence became tactical. Listening for anything off, any odd pacing, strange cries. Gulls punctuated far overhead. The town emerged from the mist slowly, lethargically. At the first strike of a hoof on stone, a shutter slammed closed. One door opened enough to see, but not be seen. A figure in the fog hurried across their path before either of them could call out. 

“Whole town’s spooked by a Bánánach?” He wondered aloud and reined the horse towards the cathedral marking the center of town. 

It loomed over them, watchful in its vigil of the people of Baldongan. The doors were shut, Icarus noted when he tethered the reins. They stood shoulder to shoulder and assessed the building as if that were their possession victim now. Unease always built in both of them before entering a church. Enough poor experiences had that effect.

He broke first, a never-discussed impulse to take the lead and let Maren have her thoughts in peace. The door opened with a light push of his fingers and he dipped inside. It was a clean, pleasant, warm place with all the classical trappings a country church could expect. 

And it was packed entirely too full of people. 

Heads turned by the dozens to stare at the intruders. When Maren was behind him, the heads lifted higher in surprise. Neither of them moved, but he felt her fingers twitch against his leg. A silent planning session for how they were to escape if this was a congregation full of demon-puppeted bodies. It was an absurd thought, but the tension was so high it felt reasonable in the moment.

Footsteps on the long, red velvet runner snagged his attention. A man jogged towards them in full Sunday liturgical garb. On a Tuesday. His face was strained, but alight with relief. He motioned to the congregants to return to whatever they were doing before their visitors had arrived. 

They were reading passages from the Pale Doctrine, Icarus noted. The text that governed the religion and magic in the world, typically reserved for clergy and exorcists. Whatever spooked this town had done a tidy job of increasing Mass attendance for the foreseeable future. 

“Please, come,” the bishop instructed and waved them through the narthex into the office tucked away beside the stairs. He sighed heavily the moment the heavy door closed, “Lord, protect us. I am so glad to see the two of you.”

“You were expecting us?” Mare probed.

He nodded with enthusiasm, “Oh yes. When Father Simon was unable to help Margaret, he said Father Reed would likely send you to finish the job. Said you’re the best at… untraditional work.”

“Netherism, Bishop Franklin,” Icarus named it, knowing the flinch he would evoke from the man. “We’re Netherists. You know that, yes?” The bishop nodded, “Then say it. Call us what we are properly. Mincing words is for cowards and liars.”

Franklin paled at the fire in his tone, “O-of course, my apologies. Netherists, yes.” He cleared his throat, “Do you know where to go? Who she is? What it could possibly be?”

Icarus kept his cold, stormy stare on the bishop without the polite break society typically required, “Margaret Donaghue. She lives some ways up the road with her father, husband, and two sisters. Mother died a few years back. Signs started showing after she vanished for several hours longer than expected.”

“Yes, signs. Speaking in Latin she has no education in,” he cleared his throat, “propensity to cause pain to herself and others, nightmares, waking in strange places with no memories. Objects started moving around her without explanation. Then the second stage began. Her violent behavior and abhorrent words were out of character. The threats and fear became too much so the family restrained her. They reached out to me, I sent for Father Simon, and… now I suppose you’re here to finish the job.”

“Mm,” Maren hummed. She was walking a slow perimeter around the office, pausing at a painting of Saint Brigid, “What else?”

“Pardon?”

She turned and set her studious eyes on him. He squirmed, “It’s not a typical possession, otherwise Father Simon would have been successful and moved on. He wasn’t. So what else?”

A long, secretive breath lingered between them. She never flinched when someone tried to play chicken with her. Hoping she would back down or social conditioning would make her too polite to press. Not Maren. Not ever. It was something Icarus loved about her. 

“She… skitters. Under the bed. Contorting herself in a way she shouldn’t be able to,” Franklin swallowed, “and her fingers leave scorchmarks on the wood.”

Icarus whistled, Maren remained steady. Annoyance ticked at the muscle beside her eye, “And did you share this with Father Simon prior to his visitation?”

Another long silence. Franklin shook his head and let it hang, “We… we didn’t want him to-”

“Send someone like us?” She supplemented without needing him to confirm, “We’ll settle into the dorm and visit the Donaghues in the morning. I hope your lesson from this is not to feed small minded biases that could end up getting people killed.”

Icarus followed, spreading his hands theatrically as if he could do nothing about her. The bishop did not look at them when they left. Icarus followed with a new straightness in his spine, going so far as to dare the sets of eyes stealing glances from pews to speak. They unloaded their gear from the horses and used the rear entrance to the clergy quarters. Spartan, but comfortable and amply lit which was a surprising rarity in places like this. 

He claimed one bed, she claimed the other, and he clapped his hands together, “Right. Let’s find the local pub and get proper housed while the night is young.”

“You need to be alert tomorrow,” she rolled her eyes at him, but he knew she would come anyway. 

“I will, I will!” He backed towards the door, she followed as if she wholly intended not to. 

Houses lit with candles and fires lined the road. Streetlamps burned with oil fire instead of gas. The village pub was no exception. Quiet, but not the kind that settled in with familiar faces and friendly banter. The kind that ate away at the thin social fabric holding everyone together in a small town like this. Paranoia laced with fear of things they did not understand. Icarus resented the mindset, but it was not his to change. That was Franklin’s problem.

He flagged the barman and returned with two double shots of the worst whiskey he had ever tasted and two pints of watery beer. Maren grimaced, shuddering at the taste, “Did they give us this pisswater on purpose or do you think this is just what they drink?”

He smirked and threw back his whiskey in a single gulp, “I’m pretty sure they’re sending a message.”

“Hate us until they need us then hate that they need us,” she raised the pint glass and toasted him. They faced the patrons to make it clear that bad beer was not going to scare them off so easy.

Wood scraping wood signaled the true beginning of their evening. Maren returned to her impassible calm, but Icarus grinned wolfishly into his glass. Priest or not, he was itching under the tension in the room to trade blows. He drained his beer and the second whiskey. She kicked him under the table. 

The man who dared to approach them was a classic local. Big, bearded, on the wrong side of old, and full of the hatred superstition brought with it. He stood a pace or two away from them while he weighed how badly he wanted to say his piece. Icarus held his stare in defiance, tapping a steady beat on the table while he waited for the man to decide how the evening would go. 

“If you know what’s good,” his voice was low, meant to be a threat, “you’ll go soon as it’s done. We don’t want your kind ‘round here.”

“What kind’s that exactly?” Icarus leaned back in his chair until it hit the wall.

The man eyed him, “The kind that deals with occult corruption. You… Pyrrhists.”

He spat on the floor, wiping the curse from his mouth. Icarus scowled then, tipping forward and standing in a fluid motion. He had always been tall, but compared to this squat old man he towered. He rolled his sleeves up to the elbow, slow and deliberate. The man glanced at the lattice of old and new scars cut straight and perfect into his skin. He blanched just a little. 

“Pyrrhists,” Icarus nodded slow and considering. “That’s what we’re calling the people here to save your neighbor from damnation. Your priest failed. Your bishop failed. We’re here because we do not fail. And this is your reception? Bigotry founded on fiction because of something you don’t understand?”

The man shrank back, but retained his wary front, “You bring faerie magic and corrupt the holy Doctrine with it. You rot from the inside in divine retribution from the Lord. We were not meant to pollute His Doctrine with unholy abuse.”

“Then tell me, old man,” Icarus leaned down to make a point, issue a challenge, “how do you expect to fight the Devil if you can’t even get into the arena?”

“Enough.” Maren’s arm cut the space between them. Her gaze on Icarus made him ease back, shoulders relaxing. She turned her cold attention to the stranger, “Thank you for your town’s hospitality, we will pray for your safe journey home.”

The man stepped away, uneasy, and tipped the brim of his hat to them both. Politeness, not kindness. Never kindness. Men like that might respect the collar, but they did not respect the work. Icarus unclenched his hands and waited until the pub door shut before rounding on her. They stared at one another until he released the furious breath from his lungs. She was right. It was not worth the trouble. 

He took his anger out on the local whiskey instead. Night had long since fallen when he slumped against Maren’s shoulder on the slow walk back to the dormitory. Streetlamps fought the rolling small town fog in vain that seeped from grassy fields. His gait uneven, staggering, loudly singing a sour rendition of The Wild Rover missing half the words. She grimaced against his unpredictable weight. 

“You promised you wouldn’t drink this much,” she scolded.

He thrust a finger into the air, “No! I said I would be alert tomorrow. These are not the same thing, my friend!”

“Keep it down,” she buoyed him through the low iron gate, “you’ll wake the whole bloody town. And Lord knows they like us so much already.”

“Let the simpletons hate!” He shouted over his shoulder, rewarded with a jab to his ribcage. She dropped him without ceremony onto his bed and lifted his feet. Distantly, he knew she was tugging off his boots and tried to remember to thank her in the morning. The comforting, dreamless nothing swallowed him up before he could finish forming the thought. 

A phantom of sunlight knifed across his eyelids and speared his brain. Everything ached -- and not in a slow, gradual way. All at once. His headache was punishing. He groaned against the pain and ran a hand down his face. Time forced him to sit up and the room bowed in response. 

“Serves you right,” Maren chided. She was folding her things on her crisply made bed, arranging her rites kit while she kept an eye on him. On the time, really, but he liked to think it was him. 

He did not argue. No point to it. She was -- as so often the case may be -- correct. He got up and fell into the familiar routine of preparation. Hair washed, rinsed with blessed basin water he took a moment to splash on his face and under his arms. The cold startled the sharpest parts of the hangover out of him. He stared at his reflection in the mirror longer than was customary. Stubble lined his chin after a few days of ignoring it, toying with the idea of growing a full beard he would probably hate. Dark circles blotched his skin that would not fade until he slept a full, unencumbered night. Which he would not. His skin was paler than usual thanks to the early winter blocking out the sun. Eyes the color of captive stormlight stared back at him -- alert, bright, more aware than the fading ache of alcohol implied. He was more ready than outside observers would assume.

He dressed methodically. Black full collared cassock, black pants, worn leather cinched around narrow hips, and unpolished black boots. He tied the wide, black cloth belt around his waist in a left girth hitch and tucked the ritual knife into the tightest part. His shoulder slipped into the belt of his fitted shortsword sheath, which he adjusted out of habit anyway. Empty vials clinked in the creased leather Dopp kit, mixing haphazardly with the handful of ampules full of pale iridescent liquid. A copy of the Pale Doctrine nestled among the glass, replaced in silence by his colleague. 

She snapped her kit shut and turned to him. He envied her in her clerical shirt and pants, white tab collar neat as a pin against the black fabric. She kept two pouches heavy with salt slouching against her hip, attached to a wide leather belt studded with empty vials at the ready. She lifted the purple stole to her lips, kissing it before arranging it over his shoulders. 

“Shall we?” He gestured to the door.

She nodded and they left the silent dormitory behind, stepping out into a world that did not want them nor admit to needing them in it.