Harley Merlin and the Cult of Eris (Harley Merlin, #6)

Finch whistled. “Nice job, Merlin.” His voice had already been altered to sound like Pieter, after Wade had radioed in to Astrid to get the devices going.

“Do I look like her?” My own voice sounded weird and echoey, and definitely not my own. I ran a hand through my hair and felt how short and strange it was.

He nodded. “Spitting image. That Chaos inside you must be incredible if you can do such a good shift the first time. Usually, they’re a complete disaster. Limbs in all the wrong places. That kind of stuff.”

I gaped at him. “You didn’t think about telling me that before we came here?”

“What would be the point? You’d freak out and lose your nerve. You did good, Sis. Adrenaline works for you.”

“We got lucky,” I muttered.

“Hey, luck is nothing to sniff at. If it works.”

I looked toward the street. “Should we get on with this?”

“Thought you’d never ask.” He grinned as he led the rest of the way to Azarius. He was enjoying this. Either that, or he was teasing me to cover his own fear. I didn’t know which I preferred.

We stepped through the kiosk and headed down a set of dingy steps, emerging into another world entirely. Cobblestone streets stretched out before us. It was medieval, almost, with Tudor-style fa?ades to the buildings that made me feel like I’d entered a time warp. Overhead, an endless night swirled through the bubble’s roof, lighting everything up with a silvery glow from the constant moon. Hooded figures wandered the streets, some already drunk, others brawling on the cobbles. There were shops of all kinds and a bevy of bars and pubs along the main route.

“There.” Finch pointed up ahead to a wooden sign, which was swinging even though there was no breeze. Azarius. We approached it with the attitudes of the Mazinovs, adding a little swagger.

Stepping into the gloom of the dive bar, we headed straight toward the bar itself. It smelled of stale booze and sweat, combined with the acrid tinge of smoke. There weren’t too many people inside, but the whole place had a creepy 1700s vibe to it, complete with nooses dangling from the walls, ancient torture devices, and old witch trial announcements taking pride of place in rusty frames. There were paintings, too, of witches being burned at the stake. A stark reminder of a very dark time in magical history. From what Finch had told me, this was where a lot of criminal magicals were known to come and go about their evil business, so it was no surprise that Naima had chosen this spot to do her recruiting.

“Is she here?” I whispered as we sat up on rickety bar stools.

Finch smiled. “Do you see a tigress lurking anywhere?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Looks like we’ll have to wait.” He flagged down the bartender and ordered a drink. “Do you want anything? A Witch’s Brew, perhaps?” He scanned the list of drinks.

“There isn’t one called that.”

He smirked. “There is. Or a Hangman’s Delight, maybe?”

I eyed the dirty counters and moldering fridges. “Nah, I’m good.”

“Suit yourself.” A strange green-tinged drink arrived in front of him a few moments later, in a filthy glass that turned my stomach. He didn’t seem to care, taking a deep sip and leaning back in satisfaction. “It’s been so long, my old friend.”

“I keep forgetting,” I said. “I guess you can’t get these where you’ve come from.”

“They don’t exactly have a bar in Purgatory, no.”

We sat in awkward silence for a while as he contentedly sipped his drink and subtly tried to bob along to the heavy metal music blaring out of the speakers. “Does Mrs. Anker know what happened to you?” I figured it was a decent question to break the tension.

“I don’t know, to be honest. She sort of ended her duties with me when I turned sixteen.”

“Did you get along with her?”

Finch shrugged. “I guess. I’ve had a lot of time to think about this. My suspicion is, Katherine never wanted me getting too close to her, so she’d been told to punish me randomly, probably to stop me from getting too attached. The outbursts were always unexpected. She was nice enough, for the most part. Heavy drinker. Had a bunch of stories about some guy she used to love. Never married, even though she was a ‘Mrs.’ I think she wished she’d married that dude, so she conjured up a fantasy. She was odd, but never really cruel. She punished me, the way she’d likely been asked to, but she never went too hard on me.”

“How did you end up with her?”

“Random selection. Mrs. Anker didn’t know Katherine all too well. She was more scared of her than anything, for obvious reasons.”

“Would she be worried, if she knew where you’d ended up?”

He chuckled bitterly. “Worried? I doubt it. She probably doesn’t remember me leaving.”

“Still, that can’t have been an easy childhood, ferried between Mrs. Anker and Katherine.”

“Ease up, Dr. Phil. Both our childhoods sucked. End of story. But at least you weren’t indoctrinated from an early age.”

I smiled. “No, I guess not.” I paused, steeling myself. “There’s something I’ve been wondering about.”

“And I bet you’re going to ask me.”

“What was the point of you releasing those gargoyles? What did you want to achieve?”

He looked at me in surprise. “It was a power play, to show what Katherine could do—how easily she could bring down a coven and reveal the magical world to the human world. It was supposed to be a hefty warning, and the start of her world domination. She wanted the humans to discover a small fragment of our world so that the magicals would have to take drastic action to cover the mess. Action that needed Katherine, I guess. She wanted to rise from blood and destruction and chaos and be a savior.”

“Sounds like her,” I murmured.

“You know, her influence over those monsters has always creeped me out. She used to talk to Purge beasts all the time in her Bestiary and get me to watch. The gargoyles were always her favorite. The rest didn’t really listen to her so much.”

“I wonder why.”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they sense something in her that they like.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the sound of the door opening. A figure walked in, but he wasn’t anyone special—a gruff-looking dude in need of a drink. He came to the bar and ordered, taking his drink and striding over to a secluded spot in the shadows. Through the foggy haze of bluish smoke, I noticed another figure I hadn’t seen before. They were sitting in the farthest corner, tucked away behind the leather arm of a booth. They wore a hood low over their face and were drinking alone. I watched a waitress approach to ask if they wanted another drink, but the terror drifting off her was overwhelming. The waitress was scared of the hooded figure, whoever they were.

I opened out my Empathy and sent it toward the hooded figure in the hopes of gauging their emotions. The feelings that came back were vague and diluted, but they were definitely there—insecurity and humiliation, but also a whiff of affection and a strong current of determination. I hadn’t expected those kinds of emotions from someone who had the waitress running scared. There was something else, too—a distinct sense of toxicity. It was a familiar sensation, and one that I’d experienced before, in the Bestiary. The figure felt like a weird version of a Purge monster. It reminded me of Tobe, in terms of intensity.

Naima.

“She’s over there,” I whispered. “At least, I think it’s her.”

Finch smirked and set down his drink. “Well, there’s only one way to find out. Just be ready to back me up if this goes south. We might need to make a run for it.”

“What?” I tried to protest, but he’d already gotten up from his stool. To my surprise, he wasn’t headed for the hooded figure. Instead, he made a beeline for two men sitting at a nearby table, minding their own business.

“Hey, we don’t want your kind in here!” Finch barked, and he launched two blasts of Fire at the two men, forcing them to jump from their chairs to the floor. I gaped at Finch. I had no idea why he’d targeted those guys.