Rapture by Kameron Hurley Page B

What she was was written in the lines of her face. The tautness of her body.
    “What can I do for you, bel dame?” she asked the shadow.
    “I heard you were a woman,” the hunter said. “And a powerful magician… once.”
    “I’ve been a lot of things,” she said. “Once.” Her memories suddenly stretched and flexed, unfolded—delicate as a locust’s wings. It was an overwhelming vista, a gasping, stomach-knotting glimpse into blood and darkness and absolute power. Power that blotted out the sun. She gasped.
    “You bloody fucking bitches!” she screeched, and jerked at her bonds. The chair rattled.
    The Plague Sisters reached for the syringes.
    “You bitches!”
    The bel dame waved the sisters away. “I’m searching for a bug,” the bel dame said. “Someone willing to go back into the desert. Someone not afraid of my kind.”
    She hissed and bared her teeth at the bel dame. “No. You want someone’s head. A bloody fucking impossible one, if you’re willing to wake me up.”
    “It’s not yours I want. If anyone wanted your head, we’d have taken it a long time ago.”
    “It’s not your kind that captured me,” she said. “I was far too clever for you.”
    “Nor my kind who keeps you,” the bel dame said, cocking her head at the sisters. “So you’ve nothing to revenge yourself on with me. No… you have another group all together to revenge yourself on, yes?”
    “Who do you want?”
    “We’ll come to that. But first I need to know if you’re capable of protecting us again.”
    “You know I am.”
    “Good. I have a target for you.” The bel dame rubbed her hands together, opened them. A grainy blue-gray mist appeared between her hands, and took the shape of a woman. In that moment, she wondered if her impression of this bel dame was correct. There were no bel dame magicians. Shifters, yes, but no magicians. I still have no sense of her, she thought. The blindness was crippling. Like being half a person. Demimonde, the Ras Tiegans said. She had had a Ras Tiegan lover once, hadn’t she? A bitter girl with a fragile heart.
    “You see this woman?” the bel dame magician said.
    “I’ve seen many women.”
    “I want her dead.”
    “That’s all?”
    “That’s all. She exiled herself sometime after her… retirement. Few know where, but with the pardoning of so many criminals, there are a good many powerful ones on their way back to Nasheen. They will have old scores to settle with her. I have it on good authority that she’s conspiring to make trouble for the Families.”
    She laughed. “What is she, a mutant? A rogue conjurer?” She leaned forward, bared her teeth. “Tell me something nasty came down from the moons. One of those organic demons, or a blood djinn—”
    The bel dame shook her head. “She’s just a woman.”
    “You would wake me for… a woman? Just a woman?”
    “There is far more than one head at stake. But I must see if your… rehabilitation has been effective.”
    “To see if you can control me?”
    The bel dame did not answer.
    She laughed. “Does she have a name?”
    “Do you?”
    “I suppose I must.”
    “And does it matter?”
    “Not now.”
    “I’m counting on it.” The bel dame slapped her hands together, and the mist cleared.
    “I’ll get you more information after your deprocessing. You and her will have some things in common. Hard to catch. And powerful. Far too smart for your own good. You understand?”
    “Send a monster to kill a monster.”
    “Something like that. One more thing. She will not show herself easily. You will have to root her out. Exploit those with an interest in her—and those she has an interest in. They may not be trustworthy, but they will be skilled. Can you kill her?”
    “You know why I’m here?”
    Some emotion passed over the bel dame’s face. Something like dread or fear. Finally. “Of course. Everyone knows why you’re here.”
    “Everyone who remembers.”
    “Yes. Though all the ones who were there