Oblivion Heart (Darkling Mage 4)

My heart thumped. “What do you mean? Is everything okay? Is it Prudence?”

There was a pause on the phone. “Well, not exactly. I’m with her right now. Dust – there have been more deaths.”

My mouth went dry. “How many?” I managed to force out.

“Lots,” Gil said. I heard Prudence’s voice in the background. “More than a dozen, apparently. Some dumb college kids did a viewing party.”

“To view what, exactly? I mean – oh. Oh no. You’re not serious.”

“They watched Mona’s last concert,” Gil said evenly. “Dust. Even a recording of the performance is enough to kill the normals.”

Chapter 22

My heart was stuck in my throat. “And they died from just watching the recording?”

Prudence looked around the room, her nose wrinkling. It was far too soon for the corpses to begin stinking up the place, but there was no getting around the smell of blood. So much blood.

“Not just watching it, Dust,” she said. “We’re pretty sure even just hearing it is enough to kill normals. Look at these corpses – the way they fell, they couldn’t have been watching the TV. One of them was even in the kitchen.”

Prudence and Gil had asked me to meet them at this address, which Bastion had tipped them off about. We were waiting for him to join us at what was obviously a rental house shared by some college students. I’d deactivated the glamour on Carver’s ring – but not the cloaking, mind you, I’m not crazy – because there was no one to see me there anyway.

Everyone who once lived in that house was dead. They’d asked their friends over to watch Mona’s performance, and now about fourteen of them were splayed out on the floor, leaking blood and brains from every orifice. A television hissed in the background, the screen flickering, flashing.

“How did they even get a recording of the concert?” I said. “Everyone died.”

“But there may have been a few magical attendees who fled the premises, remember? And who’s to say that someone didn’t sneak a couple of smartphones off of the corpses?”

Who would even do that? Possibly the same individual – angel, demon, unicorn, who the fuck even knows anymore – who happily murdered a hundred humans, that’s who. And now they were out there with a recording of a killing song.

I raked my fingers through my hair in frustration. “How in the hell are we going to have any hope of tracking down a video on a rogue cellphone?”

God, this was my life now. Much more of this and I was going to scratch myself bald. We had to hope that these people hadn’t already sent off copies of the video to their friends, to chat groups, hell, to social media. Was this why Mammon wanted the Tome? Did the demon princes have designs on a grander scale now that their little experiment had succeeded?

“A counter spell,” Prudence suggested. “Reversing the arcane flow would sap the destructive energies distributed across copies of the performance. If we find the Tome, we can cancel it all out, render every recording useless.”

“Then we nip the problem in the bud,” I said. “I spoke to these entities called the Sisters.”

“Sisters?” Prudence blinked. “The Norns?”

Gil cocked his head. “Or the Greek Fates?”

“Honestly? No idea.” And, echoing the Sisters’ sentiments, I added, “I’m not sure it matters. But they told me where to find the Tome of Annihilation. Well, they hinted. I’m pretty sure it’s at the Comstock Building.”

Prudence narrowed her gaze, her face going deadly serious. “The Comstock Building. Valero’s media nerve center. The one that houses a bunch of the city’s broadcast studios. That Comstock Building.”

The tone of her voice was far from reassuring. Quite a few news outlets were grouped under Comstock Media, many of them stationed in the same building. Archibald Comstock was a powerful man, made more powerful by his near-total monopoly over the local media.

The news. A broadcast. If the killing song could be transmitted over a recording, then surely –

“Oh, fuck,” I moaned, slapping myself in the forehead.

“Fuck is right,” Gil said, frowning. “We should round up everyone we can and strike at the Comstock Building.”

“Right,” Prudence said, already tapping away at her phone. “Where the hell is Bastion? He told us to meet him here.”

“I’ll get in touch with Sterling,” Gil said.

I reached for my phone, unlocking the screen to call Carver, when I realized that a call was coming in at the exact same time. It was from a number I didn’t recognize.