Black Wings, Gray Skies (Black Hat Bureau 4)

“Does anything of the original owner remain?”

“No.” She jolted. “Can you imagine?”

About as well as I could picture wrapping myself in a bandage made of human skin.

“Are you implying,” Asa cut in, “that the rogue is kidnapping human children as surrogates?”

“We have our own creation stories.” Jilo’s nails clicked on the cement. “The same as everyone else.” She flicked a tiny wrist. “I won’t bore you with details, but there are some who believe it’s true. Every word.” A beat lapsed while she cleaned her whiskers. “Even the parts about the first boo hag, Sorie, who craved the companionship of another creature like himself so desperately that he split himself in half, creating a child in his image.” She scratched behind her ear. “That child matured, followed in her father’s footsteps when she too became lonely, and thus began the propagation of the species.”

“Asexual reproduction?”

“More or less.” The squirrel leapt from the street onto the wrought iron fence. “It’s a myth.”

“Then how were you born?”

“I wouldn’t say born.” She wrinkled her nose. “We lack the plumbing for that.”

“Okay.” I played along. “Made? Created? Burst into existence?”

“If I knew that,” she said wryly, “we wouldn’t be a species on the brink of extinction, would we?”

“Yet you told us about the myth.” Asa drew nearer. “You think your rogue attempted it?”

“Oh, sugar, plenty of folks attempt it. We’re dying out, and times are desperate, but there’s no record of anyone surviving. Either half. If they make it that far. Most don’t. It takes grit to rip yourself in two.”

“If your rogue was successful,” Asa said, studying her, “why would the grume turn out a miracle birth?”

“Marah…” Her dark eyes glistened when they met mine. “She broke off too much and not enough.”

Clay tried for a sympathetic ear. “What does that mean?”

“We can’t contain them. They’re too hungry.”

“There are two of them.” I gave that revelation space in my head. “Are they both preying on children?”

“Marah hunts for Sorie.” Her voice went soft. “That’s what she named him. Sorie. After the story.”

Again, Clay stepped in with an empathy I couldn’t fake. “Why target kids?”

“To be allowed to live, he must learn control.” Her fingers curled into tiny fists. “Children are a bite-sized meal. They’re good practice for teaching him how much to eat and when to stop. Except it doesn’t work like that. He’s always hungry, and she’s always feeding him. She can barely eat without Sorie begging for her scraps. Marah’s control is thin. She’s going to snap, and when she does, she’ll devour this city.”

Thinking back to the body at Folly Beach, I asked, “Is Marah using the unraveling spell on the children?”

Whatever the grume called it, it wasn’t that, but Jilo caught on to my meaning fast enough.

“She uses their…wrappers…as lures for the next victim. That, and her avatar as an educator.”

“She was posing as Tracy Amerson.” I heard the pieces click together. “How long was she the teacher?”

“Six months.” Jilo grimaced. “We thought it might help, being around children all day, but it only made her more desperate for her own offspring. We didn’t realize what she had done until the second human child went missing.”

What she implied, that Marah was hunting within the school system, left me hollow and aching for those parents.

But it wasn’t as simple as Marah bringing home a new student each time her offspring got hungry.

One of the victims was from out of state. He wouldn’t have been enrolled in her jurisdiction.

There was more to this, things Jilo wasn’t telling us, but we needed as much from her as we could get.