Was it because of the emergency? Was Sonja’s normal reserve gone because of the sense of urgency?
Cordelia’s eyes flicked downward and saw that Sonja was wearing sensible ladies’ loafers.
Aw, man. Cordelia had just made an enormous mistake in life choices. There was no life-threatening emergency involving Brendan. And she was an idiot.
Sonja would never wear loafers. She would wear stilettos running a marathon.
“Sonja” turned and scoffed at her, waving her towards the door. “What are you doing just standing there? Come on, we need to get inside and not even I have this sort of clearance.”
“So that’s why you needed me, huh? My thumbprint?” Cordelia asked.
The fake Sonja did her best to look confused. “What?”
“Who are you really?” Cordelia asked.
“Sonja” faltered a few times to start an excuse. Finally, she rolled her eyes and pulled a rather large handgun from her bag. “Ugh, I should have known you would be a pain in the ass about this. Fine.”
With the gun barrel trained on her, it occurred to Cordelia that running the moment she’d realized something was amiss probably would have been a good idea. She was just full of bad decisions this evening. Meanwhile, the bones under Sonja’s skin shifted, broadened, until Bernadette Canton stood before her.
Cordelia stumbled back. “What the shit!”
Her mother smirked at her. “I assumed you would be more comfortable with Sonja. Or at least that you’d be more likely to do what she said, if she said it with enough authority. Almost everybody in this place seems terrified of her. But maybe you’d prefer me in this form?”
“God, no. What are you?” Cordelia asked.
“I’m a mimic, sweetheart. I’m one of the oldest shifters there is, but I shift into people instead of some animal. I can be any person I want,” Bernadette said, grinning.
Cordelia gasped as Bernadette sauntered down the stairs and circled, keeping the gun trained on her. “You’re the one I’ve been seeing with my mom’s face! Was it you that morning with Brendan? When he was so weird and cold? You asshole! You made me think I was crazy!”
“Well, honestly, Cordelia, it wasn’t really that difficult to make you think that, was it?” Bernadette asked.
“How did you even know what my mother looked like? It’s not like I have a fucking photo album in my house,” she demanded as Bernadette forced her to back up the stairs towards the door.
“Google. You’re using your real name, right? Well, your mother’s had a tragic ‘help me find my daughter’ Facebook page for ten years,” Bernadette said.
Cordelia sighed. “Of course she does. Look, could you please take off my mother’s face? She’s a much better liar than you are. And this clumsy bullshit is making me feel bad for her, which I find unacceptable.”
“You can be very nasty when you want to be,” Bernadette mused as she stripped out of her shirt. The decision to strip made sense as Bernadette’s mid-section ballooned into a man’s barrel chest and an enormous beer belly. Cordelia watched in horror as her mother’s face inflated, becoming bulbous around the chin and cheeks. She couldn’t even enjoy the sight of her mother with jowls as the face shifted into a more familiar alignment.
“Aw, Walt, no! I thought you were my friend!” she cried.
Walt shrugged his rounded shoulders. “You know, it’s sad how many times I’ve heard that over the years. No, little girl. I’m not your friend. I’ve been working for the League since before there was such a thing,” he sniffed. “I’m older than anything you ever met. You stay in a place long enough, stay quiet, people forget you’re there. I’ve watched the very thing I established to help my kind turn into a privileged, overcomplicated nightmare. We’re cowering in the shadows when we have the power and the wisdom to run this world. I’m tired of cowardice and I’m tired of caution. I’m tired of watching humans burning through every good thing in this world while we debate the gentlest way to tell them we’re sharing that world with them. But I’d been away from the inner workings for too long to make any changes through the League. I had to make what you might call a sideways run at it, using my old contacts, the influence I had left. Do you know how humiliating it is, to come to a backwater like this and pretend to be some common shifter?”
“That’s not really at the top of my list of concerns. You know I’m not going to cooperate, right?” Cordelia asked.
“I could always shoot you, cut your hand off and unlock the door myself,” Walt suggested with a smirk.
“Yeah, that would be a problem since you need me alive to work it,” Cordelia snorted.
Walt rolled his eyes and pulled a small plastic bag out of his pocket. He held it up so she could see the wickedly curved blade inside. She could see old bloodstains on the handle and recoiled.
“You’re going to cooperate,” he told her. “You’re going to help me get into the trailer. You’re going to connect to the entity in the box and convince it to rip the sky wide open. Then you’re going to help me load it into the transport box I happen to know is in there, and we’re walking out of here. And then we’re going on a little tour. We’ll take the casket all over the world and open up rifts on a global level. Because if everybody is magique, we don’t have to worry about negotiating with the humans. And you’re going to do all of this because if you don’t, I’m going to lock you in a room so full of murder weapons and serial killer souvenirs that you’ll go stark raving mad within minutes.”
“You make a compelling argument,” she grumbled. “You dick.”
She didn’t feel bad about introducing profanity to the bayou. He deserved it.
He jerked at her sleeve, and Cordelia could only be grateful that he wasn’t touching her skin as he forced her thumb against the keypad. The door buzzed and sprung open. For a fleeting moment, Cordelia thought about how she might be able to press the giant red RECORD button on the wall, but the first thing Walt did was smash the button off the wall and fire at the cameras, preventing her from remotely alerting the League office that something was amiss. Then he attacked the monitoring panel, so the League office wouldn’t even get a notification that her heart rate was through the roof. Because she was being held at gunpoint.
Shit.
Walt’s back was turned to her and she happened to see his phone outlined in his back pocket. It was one of those old-fashioned flip-phone models so dear to Walter’s demographic, with an extendable antennae tip just barely peeking out of the denim.
This would be the most important lift of her life and she had less than seconds to plan for it. She had to be stealthy and cunning and undetectable, which would be a hell of a lot easier if her head wasn’t throbbing like a bass drum from being this close to the artifact.
Picturing her hand as a snake sliding through water, she plucked the tip of the antenna between her two fingers and let his own motion pull away from her, leaving the phone in her hand. She shoved it in the back of her waistband under her shirt, before he could turn and see her. She glowered at him.
“I need you to open the glass box, put your hands on the casket, and talk to her.”