The new moon rose over Kaelor on a Thursday night, invisible against the starless sky, a dark coin slipped into the pocket of the heavens. Lina spent the day in a state of heightened alertness that bordered on mania, checking her phone every few minutes for news of Elora Venn's death, refreshing the websites of the major newspapers, monitoring the police scanner that she had purchased years ago from a surplus electronics store and had never had occasion to use until now. The scanner crackled with the mundane chatter of a city going about its business: traffic stops, noise complaints, a domestic disturbance in the river district, a petty theft at a convenience store near the docks. Nothing about Venn. Nothing about Savar. Nothing about the Mouth.
At seven o'clock in the evening, Lina received a text message from Donal Keane: "Subject is at the Hillside residence. Full detail in place. No unusual activity." She replied with a brief acknowledgment and returned to her vigil. The Hillside residence was Venn's private home, a modernist structure of glass and steel that perched on the edge of the wealthiest district in Kaelor like a bird of prey surveying its territory. It was surrounded by a wall, monitored by cameras, protected by a security team that Keane had spent years recruiting from the elite units of the Voranian military. If any place in the city was safe from Savar's ritual, Lina told herself, it was the Hillside residence.
She did not believe it for a moment.
At nine o'clock, she tried to eat a meal and managed three bites before her stomach rebelled. At ten o'clock, she called Thessaly Orin's number again and got the same automated message, the same cheerful voice telling her that the subscriber was unavailable. At eleven o'clock, she opened Savar's journal and read the entry on the third ritual for the dozenth time, trying to find some detail she had missed, some clue that would tell her when and where and how the Mouth would strike.
The entry was more detailed than the previous two, as though Savar had grown more confident in his method and more willing to document it. He had obtained a scarf that Venn had worn at a rally three months earlier, a silk square printed with the Compassion Without Limits logo, which she had discarded in a trash bin behind the stage after the event. He had been waiting, he wrote, for the new moon, when the Mouth's power was strongest and the barrier between the living world and whatever lay beyond it was thinnest. He had prepared the invocation, a longer and more complex version than the ones he had used for Torr and Paxt, and he had made the blood offering, a deeper cut than before, a greater commitment. He was ready.
The entry ended with a single line, written in smaller handwriting, as though Savar had been speaking to himself: "The Mouth is hungry. I am hungry. We are becoming the same thing."
At midnight, Lina's phone rang. The caller ID displayed a number she did not recognize, a local Kaelor exchange. She answered it on the second ring.
"Ms. Varda." The voice was male, calm, professional, and utterly devoid of warmth. "This is Donal Keane. I'm calling to inform you that Elora Venn is dead."
Lina closed her eyes. The cold sensation at the base of her skull spread down her spine and into her limbs, a numbness that had nothing to do with temperature. "How?"
"I was hoping you could tell me." Keane's voice did not waver, but there was something beneath it now, a tension that suggested he was holding himself together by force of will. "She was in her study, alone, with the door locked from the inside. The windows were sealed. The security cameras show no one entering or leaving the room since she retired there at eight o'clock this evening. I had two men stationed in the hallway outside her door and two more in the garden below her window. No one heard anything. No one saw anything. At eleven-forty-five, when she failed to respond to a routine check-in, I forced the door."
"And?"
"And she was dead. She was sitting at her desk, in her chair, with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes closed. She looked peaceful. She looked like she was sleeping. But she was not breathing, and when the paramedics arrived, they found no pulse and no signs of trauma. The preliminary assessment is cardiac arrest, but the paramedics said there was something strange about her skin. A discoloration on her chest, just above the sternum. They couldn't identify it. They said it looked like a burn, but not a burn from heat. A burn from cold."
"An angular spiral," Lina said. "Coiling inward, with straight lines and sharp corners. Like a mouth swallowing itself."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. When Keane spoke again, his voice was quieter, more controlled, the voice of a man who was confronting something that his training had not prepared him for. "Yes. That's exactly what it looked like. How did you know that?"
"Because the same mark was found on Harlen Torr and Oren Paxt. And because the man who killed them told me he was going to kill Elora Venn, and I tried to warn her, and she didn't listen."
"You know who did this."
"I know who, and I know how, but you're not going to believe the how, and I don't have time to convince you. Where is Venn's body now?"
"Still in the residence. The coroner's office is sending a team, but they haven't arrived yet. The police have been notified, but I wanted to call you first. Ms. Venn told me, before she retired to her study, that if anything happened to her, I should contact you immediately. She said you were the only person who would understand what had happened. I didn't understand what she meant at the time. I think I'm beginning to understand now."
Lina felt something shift in her chest, a complex emotion that she could not immediately identify. Venn had listened to her warning after all. Venn had believed her, at least enough to leave instructions with her security chief. And Venn had died anyway, because belief was not enough, because understanding was not enough, because the Mouth did not care about belief or understanding or the carefully constructed defenses of wealth and power. The Mouth cared only about guilt, and in the Mouth's judgment, Elora Venn had been guilty.
"Mr. Keane," Lina said, "I need you to do something for me. I need you to preserve the mark on Venn's body. Don't let the coroner wash it off. Don't let the police dismiss it as a hoax. Take photographs, detailed ones, and send them to me. And I need you to secure Venn's study exactly as it is. Don't let anyone touch anything until I get there."
"You're coming here?"
"I'm coming there. I need to see the room. I need to understand what happened. And I need to find something that Professor Savar may have left behind."
She hung up before Keane could ask any more questions. She pulled on her coat, checked that Savar's journal was still in her inner pocket, and left her apartment. The streets of Kaelor were quiet at this hour, the bars and restaurants closed, the sidewalks empty except for the occasional stray dog trotting along the gutter with its metal tag glinting in the light of the streetlamps. Lina hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address of the Hillside residence, and the car slid through the darkened city like a fish through deep water.
The Hillside residence was ablaze with light when Lina arrived. Police cruisers were parked at the curb, their lights flashing, and uniformed officers were stringing yellow tape around the perimeter of the property. Keane met her at the gate, a tall, broad-shouldered man with a face that looked like it had been carved from granite, and escorted her past the officers and into the house.
Venn's study was on the second floor, a large room with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the city. The room was furnished in the minimalist style that Venn had favored in all her residences: clean lines, neutral colors, no clutter. The desk was a slab of pale wood, and behind it, still seated in her chair, was Elora Venn.
Lina had seen death before. She had studied autopsy reports and crime scene photographs, had stood in rooms where violence had been done, had looked at bodies that had been broken and torn and ruined. But she had never seen anything like the expression on Elora Venn's face. It was not peaceful, as Keane had described it. It was transcendent. It was the expression of someone who had seen something extraordinary, something that had filled her with wonder and terror in equal measure, something that had stopped her heart not with fear but with awe.
The mark on her chest was identical to the one Lina had seen in the photograph of Harlen Torr: the angular spiral, the sharp corners, the center that was not quite closed. It was darker than the surrounding skin, a deep blue-black like a bruise that had been frozen rather than formed by impact. It did not look like something that had been applied from the outside. It looked like something that had risen from within, a stain that had seeped through the layers of Venn's flesh from some deeper source.
Lina examined the room while Keane stood guard at the door, his face a mask of controlled professional concern. The windows were sealed, as Keane had said, the locks engaged from the inside. The door had been forced by Keane himself, the frame splintered around the lock plate. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no sign that anyone but Venn had been in the room. The only unusual detail was a faint smell in the air, a scent that Lina recognized from her own apartment on the night she had attempted the ritual: cold stone, ozone, and something else, something that she could not name but that made her think of old churches and deep caves and places where the light had not reached in a very long time.
On Venn's desk, arranged neatly beside her folded hands, was a piece of paper. It was the same heavy, cream-colored stationery that Lina had found on her own desk days earlier, and on it, drawn in charcoal or dark pastel, was the angular spiral of the Unclean Mouth. Beneath it, in Savar's neat handwriting, was a single word: "Remember."
Lina picked up the paper and slipped it into her pocket. She looked at Venn's face one more time, at the expression of transcendent terror that had been frozen there by whatever had stopped her heart, and she felt something shift inside her, a door opening onto a room she had not known existed. She had been trying to understand Savar, to follow his logic, to trace the path that had led him from grief to murder. But she had been thinking like a journalist, like an investigator, like someone who believed that every mystery had a rational explanation if you looked hard enough. She had not been thinking like someone who had summoned the Mouth herself, who had seen the candle flame turn blue and felt the temperature drop and watched the obsidian fragments glow with a light that had no source.
She had been trying to understand Savar, and she had failed, because Savar was not operating in the world of rational explanations. He was operating in the world of the ritual, the world of the Mouth, the world that existed on the other side of the door that she had opened in her own apartment on the night she had spoken the Kalandri words and felt something answer.
"Ms. Varda." Keane's voice broke the silence. "The coroner's team is here. They're going to take the body. Is there anything else you need to see?"
Lina shook her head. "I've seen enough. I need to go. I need to find Thessaly Orin."
"Who?"
"Professor Savar's graduate assistant. She disappeared two days ago. I think she may have gone after Savar herself. I think she may be trying to stop him." Lina turned toward the door, then paused. "Mr. Keane, I need you to do one more thing for me. The fourth name on Savar's list is Merrick Dorn, the Chief Justice of the Federal Supreme Court. I need you to warn him. I know he has his own security, but they need to understand that this threat is different. They need to understand that walls and locks and guards will not be enough."
"And what about you? What are you going to do?"
Lina thought about the obsidian fragments in her safe, about the journal in her pocket, about the words that she had spoken in her darkened apartment and the blue flame that had answered. "I'm going to finish what I started. I'm going to understand the ritual well enough to stop it. And if I can't stop it, I'm going to find Savar and make him stop it himself."
She left the Hillside residence and walked through the streets of Kaelor as the first gray light of dawn began to seep over the rooftops. The city was waking up, the early commuters and delivery trucks beginning their daily routines, the world continuing to turn as though nothing had happened. But something had happened. Three of the most powerful people in Voranis were dead, killed by a force that the modern world had forgotten how to believe in, and the man who had summoned that force was still out there, and the list was not yet complete.
When Lina reached her apartment, she found a package waiting for her on the doorstep. It was a small cardboard box, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, the kind of package that might contain a book or a gift. There was no return address, no postmark, no indication of how it had arrived. Lina carried it inside, set it on her kitchen table, and opened it with the same careful precision she used for everything.
Inside the box, nestled in crumpled newspaper, were the obsidian fragments from her safe. Savar had been in her apartment again, had opened the safe whose combination he should not have known, had taken the fragments and then, for reasons she could not understand, had returned them. Beneath the fragments was a piece of the same cream-colored stationery, and on it, in Savar's neat handwriting, was a message:
"You tried the invocation. I felt it. The Mouth felt it. You are closer to understanding than you realize. But understanding is not the same as commitment, and the Mouth requires commitment. You must choose, Ms. Varda. You must choose whether you are a witness or a participant. The next ritual will be the most difficult, and I will need your help. Meet me at the Dog Run at midnight on the night of the next new moon. Come alone. Come ready. The Mouth is waiting."
Lina read the message three times, then set it on the table beside the fragments. Savar was not hiding from her. He was inviting her to join him. He had seen her attempt the ritual, had felt her presence in whatever dark current connected the summoner to the summoned, and he had decided that she was not a threat to be eliminated but a potential ally to be cultivated.
The choice he was offering her was the same choice she had been avoiding since the night Thessaly Orin had shown her the storage room and the fragments and the list of five names. She could continue to be a witness, documenting the deaths and the rituals and the slow unraveling of the SIR law's architects, or she could become a participant, joining Savar in his campaign of supernatural vengeance against the people who had let his daughter die.
She thought about Mira Savar, the ten-year-old girl with the ungovernable hair and the paper bag of overripe plums, whose last photograph had been captured by a security camera that had recorded everything except the moment of her death. She thought about her own brother, Callen, beaten into a coma outside a bar in the docklands, and the police officers who had decided, without any apparent investigation, that he must have fallen down a flight of stairs. She thought about the six years she had spent documenting the failures of a system that was not merely broken but designed to fail, the thousands of pages of evidence she had compiled, the dozens of cases she had brought to journalists and prosecutors and politicians who had promised to act and then done nothing. She thought about the SIR law and the activists who had celebrated it and the politicians who had voted for it and the judges who had upheld it, and she thought about the children who were still walking to school past packs of tagged strays, and the families who were still living in neighborhoods where the law protected the dogs but not the people.
And she thought about the blue flame, the cold light, the presence that she had felt on the other side of the door, the thing that had been waiting for a very long time for someone to call it.
The new moon was in twenty-eight days. Lina had four weeks to decide what kind of person she was going to be.
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