Verdance was a strange name for a city that spent half its year barren, with nothing more than icy wind to keep its residents company. The dense cloud cover pressed the frigid temperatures down, resting deep in the bones of anyone who was foolish enough to be outside at dusk.
Still, she found her fingers reaching for her cigarette case and a match book, the tiny flame insufficient to heat her frozen hands as she walked, the dying spark withering in the biting wind. The end of the cigarette blazed into life, the bright, saturated orange ember a stark juxtaposition to the dark, grey evening as it drew in around her, the cold as inescapable as the shame that she’d never managed to quit. She’d gotten close, once, before everything caved in on itself, before she was left on her own to survive the Verdance winters, before she was forty-eight years old and surviving on a diet of smoke and booze, heading home too late in the evening after another disappointing day.
She stopped outside her building, wanting to go inside, weary from the cold and hungry for the relative warmth of her apartment, for the feeling of her fingers defrosting, but she wasn’t about to cut a smoke short. Breath curled from her mouth as she leaned against the brick, the roughness chewing through her thick winter coat as if it was delicate silk. In Verdance, nothing was gentle. Not anymore. Not since the Rupture tore everything apart.
Another inhale and she closed her eyes, savoring the taste of ash and tobacco as it gathered at the back of her throat, whispering for more. She was almost out of cigarettes. The paper burned slowly at first, struggling to catch in the biting gusts that swept past her shoes, old and creased, yet polished to an almost mirror shine. She struck another match, but the flame was extinguished before it met the end of her cigarette. She grumbled under her breath, hunting in her pockets for another book of matches, and finding none. Of course. What else could she expect from Verdance other than disappointment and irritation, laced with a side of contempt and a heaping portion of begrudging duty to the city that had taken her in all those years ago?
Going to bed without a smoke was like going to bed hungry: unfulfilled, agitated, and filled with a general sense of injustice. A quiet, gnawing need chewed through her thoughts, interrupting anything that wasn’t a meditation on just how much of a disappointment she was to herself.
Virginia pulled her coat close, her breath rising from her lips in frustrated tendrils as she fumbled for the key to her building. Shadows, it was cold. She regretted that she’d waited so long to return home, but there was an unwelcome emptiness that sometimes crept under her door, seeping into her like half frozen molasses.
The key slid easily into the lock, and she shoved the heavy metal door open with her shoulder. The corridor was almost as cold as the outside. Her landlord was cheap as the grave, and it showed in the frosted hand railing that led up the stairs. Her worn brogues slid against the wood, the panels creaking with every weary step.
Fourth floor. Apartment J-22. Virginia froze at the sight of the dark silhouette standing outside her door, already slipping her fingers into the silver knuckles she held in her pocket. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“I live across the hall. I’m your neighbor,” the figure responded, the hood of their cloak obscuring their face. Virginia never spoke to any of her neighbors, and as such, didn’t know their faces. She didn’t know their names, either, and that’s how she preferred things to remain.
“What do you want?”
The overhead light in the corridor flickered, the crass yellow glow painting them both in a jaundiced tone, the amber shadows a strange contrast to the deepening darkness outside the window at the end of the hall, the side table beset with dead flowers someone had left there months before. The figure twisted their hands, wringing them anxiously. “Someone on the second floor told me that you’re a private investigator.”
“If you’re looking for your long lost family or whatever, you can come to my office on Phoenix Avenue. Number eleven.”
The figure shifted uncomfortably. “It’s kind of an emergency.”
“Call the cops, then.”
“I can’t.”
Virginia pressed her fingers through the knuckles, balling into a fist, hidden inside the deep pocket of her overcoat. “If it’s illegal, I can’t help you.” Her shoulders tensed, waiting for a fight. It wasn’t impossible that one of the runaways she’d returned home had grown up and come looking for revenge, or whatever passed for justice in Verdance those days.
“No, it’s not illegal, it’s…”
“Spit it out.”
“My brother is missing, has been for two weeks. He’s…” the figure tugged at their hood. “Different.”
“Right.” Virginia stepped closer, releasing the grip of her fist, but keeping the knuckles in place over her still-frozen fingers. “What is he, then?”
“Do you promise you won’t turn him in?” The figure asked, a tinge of desperation coloring the tone at the edges, betraying their aims more than their nervous fidgeting had.
“Can’t promise that until I know what he is. You know the law.”
“I know, I know, but they said you could help, you know, in situations like this.” The figure chewed their lip and pressed their palms together in a gesture that looked a lot like praying, the way people had every Sunday before the residents of Verdance had largely abandoned the churches after the Rupture.
Virginia sighed, rubbing at her temple. “You aren’t going to give up, are you?”
“No, ma’am,” the figure replied, shaking their head. “My brother is all I’ve got left in this world, and I won’t abandon him. Please, I’m desperate.”
“Come on, inside.” Virginia kept the silver knuckles around her fingers, even as the frigid metal bit into her skin. “No sense in talking about this in the hall.” She pressed to the door, looking over her shoulder at the figure. “Step back. I’ve been around the block enough to know that you look like someone with plenty to hide, and I have no desire to bleed out on the floor today.”
“I’m sorry.” The figure stepped back, leaning against their own door on the other side. “I’m Ursa.”
“You already know my name, so I’ll refrain from sharing it.” Virginia opened the door, flipping the switch on the wall. “Come on.”
Ursa entered the dimly-lit apartment, her pale hands almost translucent even under the incandescent bulb. “Your apartment is nicer than mine,” they said.
“So what’s the problem with this brother of yours?” Virginia asked, flipping the deadbolt. She had little interest in small talk, and even less in the matters of interior design. Besides, if her apartment was that much nicer, she could only imagine the state of Ursa’s. The entire building was old, drafty, and poorly maintained, but it was better than the streets, if only by a narrow margin.
Ursa clasped their hands in front of them, pulling back their hood. “He went missing.”
“Yes, I gathered that much, but I’m going to need more than that to go on.”
“He has the ability to shape shift.”
Virginia tossed her keys on the table with a loud clatter, already bored of a case she could already predict the outcome of. Missing people were a dime a dozen in Verdance since the Rupture. “He shift in front of the wrong person, maybe? Plenty of crews always looking for someone who can easily slip the net.”
“He’s a good kid, he—”
“Kid? How old is he?”
“He’s twenty.”
“Hardly a kid, he’s an adult,” Virginia replied, bracing a hand against her kitchen counter. “Cops probably wouldn’t help you anyway, not for grown shifter. They might file a report, but that’s all you’d get out of them these days.” Virginia sighed again, the weight of another hopeless case already settling into her chest. “You know as well as I do that—”
“I do know, and that’s why I came to you. Some say… some say that you’re the best.”
Virginia let loose a derisive scoff. “Depends who you ask.”
“The last time I saw him, he was heading off to work that morning.” Ursa tugged down their hood, revealing a delicate frame and a fine dusting of scales, barely visible along their collarbone.
“You too, huh?” Virginia said, gesturing.
“It runs in the family.”
“What day was that, when you last saw him?”
“Thursday, two weeks back.”
Virginia pulled a small notepad from her pocket, leaning against the wall as she scribbled barely legible notes on the unlined pages. “Anything unusual?”
“No.”
“No new friends he’s been hanging around, no new crews hanging around his neighborhood?”
Ursa closed their eyes. “No. Benjamin is a quiet boy, he lives here with me. So unless you know of any crews—”
“There aren’t. I make it my business to know who’s hanging around this neighborhood.” Virginia took a small notepad from the inside breast pocket of her coat, worn and bent at the edges, the accompanying pencil worn down to an almost useless nub. “Alright, how about work? He have any problems there?”
“He’s always been shy. He used to have bullies in school, but he graduated a few years back.”
“Names?”
“I don’t know,” Ursa replied, shaking their head. “I’m sorry, I… it’s hard, you know, trying to work, to keep a roof over our heads, to stay hidden, and—”
Virginia held up a hand. “Yeah. I get it.” She scribbled a few notes in the margins, sucking her teeth as she wrote. “Where does he work?”
“He works as a janitor in the school on Ninth Avenue.”
“The preparatory school?”
“He’s worked there for about six months. It was hard for him to find a job. You know how it’s been.”
Virginia nodded. “He’s not the only one, that’s for sure.” She was already calculating how she’d get to the school without hitting rush hour traffic. “Parents?”
Ursa straightened their posture, worried eyes now steely. “As far as Benjamin and I are concerned, we have no parents.”
“I know the feeling,” Virginia mumbled.
“What?”
She glanced up, blinking away the comment. “Nothing. Okay, no ransom notes, no other clues? He vanished?”
“I know that he didn’t turn up for work that day. He walks, I was still on shift.” Ursa pulled at the edge of their coat, pulling threads from the fraying cuffs. “The school said there was nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Hmm. I think I’ll be the judge of that.” Virginia pursed her lips. It would be an early start, then. She hated schools. Little dens of chaos and trauma, ripe for abuse. “I’m going to need a description.”
“Here’s a photo.” Ursa handed over a wallet-sized picture, almost overexposed. “I know it’s not very good, but it’s the only one I have of him.”
“It’s enough. Eye color?”
“Same as mine. Grey.”
“Does he…” Virginia gestured to her own collarbone, an eyebrow raised. “Visible?”
“No.”
“Well that’s something, at least. Not as easy to spot.”
“There was a time we were proud of our differences, Ms. Vane.”
“That was before all these crews made it their business to snatch up anyone who can be useful to them. Before the government made it their business to do the same. It’s all part of the same cycle.” Virginia snapped the notepad shut. “Without sounding indelicate, I am not a charity.” She slid a card across the table. “These are my rates.”
Ursa nodded. “I’d pay anything to have Benjamin back, even if it means mortgaging my own kidneys.”
“Is there any chance at all that your brother took off?”
“No.”
“Are you completely sure? Young shifters have a knack for disappearing into the wind, only to reemerge a year later a few states away.”
“I am completely sure that my brother wouldn’t do that. He knows that we’re all each other has. We have to stick together. He’s been doing well at work, and he was about to start some night classes for architecture in the spring.”
“You wouldn’t believe the number of kids I’ve pulled out of backstreet drug dens, completely messed up on Nether.”
Ursa shook their head again. “No. It won’t be Benjamin. He wouldn’t touch that stuff.”
“You’d be surprised. Not every mythic can cope with how things are these days.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“Alright,” Virginia said, holding her hands up. “If you say so.”
“You have to find him, Ms. Vane. He’s all I have left in this world. Without him, I—I don’t have much reason to keep on trying to get us out of this place.”
“This apartment, or this city?”
“Both.”
Virginia nodded, the deep, inexorable need to escape not an unfamiliar one. “Verdance is not the same place it was twenty years ago.”
“Is anywhere?”
“No. Not since the Rupture.” Virginia studied Ursa’s face for a reaction, finding none. “I’ll head to the school first thing in the morning, see if I can’t track down a lead. Chances are he’s just hiding out somewhere. It’s rarely anything else.”
“Thank you, Ms. Vane.”
“I’ll keep you updated.” Virginia unlocked the door, opening it. “As soon as I know anything, you’ll know, so don’t be creeping around my door at night. You’re lucky I didn’t make the assumption that you were trying to jump me.”
“Do many people—”
“More than you want to know.”
Ursa pulled their hood back up before stepping into the corridor. “I apologize for surprising you at home. With my schedule, I’d never get to your office during opening hours.”
“Good night,” Virginia said, closing the door. Shadows, the adrenaline was just sitting in her veins now, itching for some kind of release. She locked the door, checking it three times to be sure, still on edge. It wouldn’t have been the first time that some grave slug had tried to wait for her at home, though historically, it had never ended well for the other party.
She hung her coat on the hook, unholstering her pistol and laying it on the counter. The silver knuckles rattled against the stained wood, dappled with water rings from years of sticky summers and condensation that dripped down the side of a glass as she pored over another fruitless case.
The radio crackled with static as she honed in on the police frequency, bent over the counter as she adjusted the knobs, the fuzz over the airwaves a constant frustration. Police scanner radios were technically illegal, but always useful. She had a few open cases that had hit a dead end, and any news could jog a new lead. She examined the photo Ursa had left, black and white, one of the edges folded and yellowed from being carried around in an empty wallet. Benjamin was a good-looking kid, with a sharp jaw and wide, soulful eyes. Photos rarely told the full story, but he didn’t seem like a troublemaker. More like a sad boy with a broken family and no friends to speak of other than his sibling.
Virginia poured gin into a glass, swirling it around. She’d forgotten to get food on the way back, and there was nothing more than stale crackers in her apartment. The taste was off, as though they’d absorbed the flavor of failure right through the cabinet doors. She pushed them away with a betrayed scowl, sipping at the gin instead. The taste was acrid in a welcoming way, like a half-burned pine forest after a lightning storm, or the smell of rain against ash as it washed down the city’s storm drain. Both familiar. Both drawing memories to the surface she’d prefer stayed buried.
Odd, then, that it was her choice of drink, given its effect on her, and there was no explanation for why she continued to indulge in things that only reminded her of pain.
She sank down into the overstuffed chair in the corner, patched with mismatched thread and fabric from years of use. The radio droned on with reports of alley fights, crew sightings, and some slimy fungus of a man being arrested for fraud. The last one would probably be front-page news in the morning. It’s not as though Virginia Vane was the only one with an illegal police scanner. The damned journalists all had them, too. So did the attorneys.
Gin skidded down her throat, nestling warm in her stomach. It was a comfort on cold nights like those, when the chill crept beneath the windowsills like fingers from the grave, waiting to welcome her into their frigid embrace. The landlord was uninterested in turning the heat on unless the pipes were in danger of freezing, so she’d gotten used to the glacial winters. They beat the humid, cloying summers, at least.
A gentle scratching at the window pulled her attention, even though she already knew it would be that damned cat again. “Alright, alright,” she relented, pushing herself out of the chair with a heaving effort to open the window just wide enough to let in the little beast, and an icy draft followed after. “You’re late for dinner,” she scolded, turning to the kitchen to open a can of tuna. She hated the smell, all metallic and fishy, but it was the only thing the cat would eat, and from its fragile, underweight frame, she knew that wherever it belonged, it wasn’t finding enough there.
She dumped the tuna into the cat’s bowl and watched it eat, each bite dainty and polite despite the ribs visible through the solid black fur. The cat sat after it finished, licking its chops and showing off an impressive set of fangs.
“You can stay the night,” Virginia offered. “It’s damned cold out there.”
The cat responded by leaping up onto the side table again, staring wistfully out into the frozen night.
“As you wish.” Another frigid gust sparked through the window as the cat slunk back into the night, disappearing down the fire escape and into a back alley.
Virginia plunged back into the chair with a quiet exhalation of breath, not so much a sigh as an admission of guilt. She pressed reading glasses onto her face, skimming a book on demonic entities she’d gotten from the library. It was a rare copy, out of print now—the researcher who wrote it had spent the rest of his days as an academic outcast. A pity he had been proved right with the Rupture, but only after he’d spent ten years cold in the grave. She’d spent years trying to track down a copy. The local librarian found one in three hours.
She was so immersed in the chapter about symbiotic possession that she nearly missed the police dispatcher calling for a unit to attend the scene of an unidentified body. Young male, between seventeen and twenty-three, found half-buried in the quarry at the outskirts of the city. Virginia’s stomach clenched, knowing what it probably meant.
Tugging her coat around her shoulders, she was halfway down the stairs of her building before the dispatch call even ended.
Ryann Fletcher Writes 