A Local Habitation

Terrie stared after her. “What?” She turned toward us, repeating, “What?”


“Peter’s dead,” I said, walking over to get a cup of coffee. Gordan moved to a table and sat, burying her face in her hands.

“But—what—when? How?”

“During the blackout,” said Quentin.

“They cut the power, killed the generators, and then killed him. Probably to get our attention.” I sipped my coffee. “They got it.”

“Oh,” whispered Terrie, eyes wide. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. I know what dead looks like.”

“Oh, Maeve, Peter . . .” she said. “He was such a wonderful engineer . . .”

I opened my mouth to snap, and stopped as I saw the look on Quentin’s face. He was watching Terrie with utter adoration, caught up in her pain. That made even less sense than my anger. He’d been temperamental but sane through this whole ordeal, facing everything with calm equanimity. So why was he getting involved now? They’d flirted, but they hadn’t had time to fall in love, and something in his expression reminded me uncomfortably of my own when I was looking at Alex.

I was saved from following that thought to its logical conclusion when the door swung open and Jan and Elliot stepped into the room. Elliot was shaking and glassy-eyed. At least his voice was steady: he answered when I asked if they’d seen anything in the hall. They hadn’t. Not a damn thing.

Explaining what we knew didn’t take long; there wasn’t much to tell. Elliot crossed the room and put his hands on Gordan’s shoulders, but didn’t interrupt. Jan nodded, confirming my story, then offered some useful information—I hadn’t thought to check the generators for loose wires, or realized that their internal systems would record and time stamp the power outage.

Elliot, Quentin, Jan, and I went back to the generator room, leaving Terrie and Gordan behind. Even with the power on, the knowe didn’t seem any friendlier. Some kinds of darkness have nothing to do with whether there’s light.

The wards on the generator room were undisturbed. Quentin released them, and I stepped inside, taking a moment to study the scene before I let the others in. Peter was still intact; the night-haunts weren’t coming. The forensic tests I could perform—checking for footprints, tracks, and blood trails, noting the wounds and their locations on Peter’s body—took only a few minutes. Jan ran the tests on the equipment; there were no loose wires, and the generators time stamped the power outage at 7:49 PM—not exactly the witching hour. No leads there.

I looked to Jan, frowning. “Could he have turned the generators off as he fell? Could this have been a coincidence?”

“No way,” Jan replied. “You have to trip three breakers and press a button on the back of the main generator if you want to shut the system down. Failsafes.”

“Why do you know that?” She’d rattled off that chain of actions a little too glibly for my tastes.

Tiredly, Elliot said, “Jan does a lot of our hardware maintenance, especially now that we’re on a skeleton crew. She has to be able to kill the power in case of an emergency.”

“Plus, I designed a lot of these systems,” Jan said.

Elliot smiled wearily. “That, too.”

“Right,” I said, raking my hair back with both hands and sighing. “So it was intentional.”

“Looks like it,” Jan said. “Unless a dying man knows what fuses to pull.”

“Okay. Let’s get moving.”

The four of us wrapped as much of Peter’s body as we could in a sheet, careful not to break his wings, and we carried him down to the basement, clearing off a counter before laying him down. Elliot shuddered the whole time. He was starting to look rumpled; I was worried that our Bannick was going to pieces.

“What do we do now?” he asked, not looking at me.

“Now we hunt,” I said. I looked to Jan, expecting an argument, but she nodded. “Elliot, you’re with me; Quentin, with Jan. If you see anything, don’t investigate. Just run.”