Chapter 39 - Part 2: Roundtable (Patreon)

Morgana let the silence run. She turned the laptop a few degrees toward herself, glanced at whatever was on it, and left it open. "Well. We're alone, or as alone as this building gets. What is so important that it can't be said in front of two men who've held clearance longer than Agent Clarke has been alive?"

I breathed in. The office had no camera I could see, but it also had a laptop open at an angle I couldn't read, a drop ceiling, and a woman behind the desk who had been running this place for longer than the building had stood. If there was a recorder in the room, it had been there before I sat down. But there was no version of the next minute where I got up and left.

"The man who went missing. Liam Dawnstar." I kept my hands on my knees. "That's me. Whatever happened on the sixteenth of August, I collapsed in my flat and woke up in this body. I don't know how. I know that it did."

Morgana's face did not move. She looked at me for a count of three. "Interesting." She said it flatly. "It's also not possible. A mortal soul does not relocate into a living demon. There is no mechanism for it."

"Apparently there is."

"Apparently." She let the word sit.

Faith leaned forward in her chair. "Director, she confirmed things. Things only Liam would know. Not the kind you'd find in a file. Personal things." Her hand had gone to her collarbone, and she took it down. "There's no way she looked them up."

"And you haven't considered," Morgana said, "that a succubus with a man alone in a room for an evening could have those things out of him by dawn. Seduction is what the species is for. Torture works as well, if slower."

"No, but—"

"But nothing. Let me finish." Morgana turned one hand over on the desk. "I have considered it. It's the obvious read, and it fails on its own weight. If a demon had spent a night taking a man apart for details of his life, she would not walk into my office and claim to be the man himself. It's the one story that gains her nothing and asks me to swallow the most." She looked back at me. "It's too bizarre for a demon to bank on."

"So that's it," I said. "You believe me."

"Believing is a strong word. I've believed very few things in a very long life, and most of them turned out to be wrong." She closed the laptop halfway. "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, for now, on the strength of how badly the lie would serve you if it were one. Is there anything else you'd like to add before I decide what I'm looking at?"

Faith's eyes came to me and stayed.

"One thing." I sat back. "The body isn't a random pureblood's. It belongs to a daughter of Lilith and Lucifer."

Morgana's hand stopped on the laptop lid.

"You mean, that Lucifer?" Faith's voice had dropped.

I nodded once.

Morgana pushed the laptop the rest of the way shut. She did not look at it. "Let me be certain I have this right. You are telling me that the soul of an engineer from London, with no occult background of any kind, is currently sitting in my office inside the body of a princess of Hell. The daughter of the two beings who built the place."

"She'd been in a coma for thirty years when it happened." I turned my palm up. "If that helps."

"It does not help."

Faith made a sound that was not quite a word and put her hand flat over her mouth.

Morgana pressed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and held it there. When she let go, the skin stayed pale for a second and then coloured again. She reached under the desk, and a drawer slid open, and she took out a pad of paper and a pen and set them square in front of her. She did not uncap the pen.

"From the beginning," she said. "All of it. Don't skip a day because you think it doesn't matter. I'll decide what matters."

"It's a lot of days."

"I have time."

I looked at the pad, and then at Faith, who had taken her hand away from her face and was watching me with her jaw set. I looked back at Morgana.

"The seventeenth of August was a Sunday," I said. "I'd been trying to call Faith all morning, and she wasn't picking up."

*

"—and that's basically how I arrived at this office."

Morgana had filled two pages by the end of it, her pen moving in short economical strokes I couldn't read upside down. Faith had gone somewhere in the middle, called out by a knock and a murmured word from Morgana that hadn't invited discussion. Five hours, near enough. My legs had gone stiff from sitting.

Morgana set the pen down parallel to the pad. "It paints an interesting picture." She said it the way she might describe weather. "Ghost possession, we've catalogued extensively. Reincarnation, less common, still documented. Body-swap magic exists, though it's rare and always intentional, always with a caster on one end pulling the strings." She looked up. "This isn't any of those. If your account is accurate, you're the first case of its kind we've recorded."

"Great," I said. "Can you find my old body?"

"Straight to it."

"That's why I'm here."

She turned a page back, checked something, turned it forward again. "There was an aethereal reading done at the flat. We ran it after the initial disappearance report. Nothing outside baseline fluctuation."

"Tristan found something. A residue he didn't have the equipment to identify."

"I recall you mentioning it." She didn't sound impressed by the mention. "The man is unorthodox. He also gets results our people occasionally miss, which is the only reason we've never shut him down properly. Might be worth pursuing on your end."

"My end. Not yours."

"The Agency prefers not to entangle itself with Tristan Vance unless the case demands it. He's bad luck. Ask anyone who's worked with him twice."

"So I deal with him."

"You already are." She picked the pen up again, looked at it, set it down. "In return, I'll have the reading data pulled and gone over a second time. Different analyst. If there's something on it we missed, it'll be found."

"Thank you," I said anyway.

"Don't. I haven't done anything yet."

"You're considering it. That's more than I had an hour ago."

That got the smallest curve at the corner of her mouth, gone before it committed to being a smile. "Only because if you're telling the truth, you're a well nobody's ever had access to before. Think what could be learned. HSU protocols alone could be rewritten from the ground up."

"So that's what I am to you. A source."

"That's what you could be to a lot of people, which is different from what I intend to make of you." She said it without heat, like she was correcting a measurement. "Not that I could, even if I wanted to. Your parents would bring the whole of Hell through that door if a hair on your head went missing on my watch."

"They aren't my parents."

"The body's, then." She tipped her head, unbothered by the correction. "I'm telling you this because you're the daughter of the two most dangerous beings in existence for as long as you're wearing that face, and it seemed more useful to buy goodwill of a Hell's princess with the truth than to manage her."

"I'm not really a princess."

"You're wearing one." She stood, smoothing her jacket, and reached for the desk phone. "Anyway. I think we've kept the others waiting long enough."

"In any case." She reached under the desk and pressed something I couldn't see. "The two of them have been standing in my corridor for long enough, and Galahad won't sit down out of principle. I think it's time we brought them back in." She pressed a button and said two names into the phone. "Lancelot. Galahad. You may come through."

The door opened before she'd finished the second name.

*

Galahad came in first and stopped two steps inside, coat still on. Lancelot followed and shut the door behind him with one finger.

"Sit if you like," Morgana said.

Neither of them did. She stayed standing herself, one hand resting on the pad she'd filled.

"For now, Miss Nightstar is a guest of this branch. Level two clearance. Log it under my authorisation."

"She's a demon," Galahad said.

"Yes."

He turned his head slightly, the way you do when a word arrives in the wrong order. "Level two is what half our field agents carry. Clarke carries level two."

"I'm aware. I wrote the tiering."

"Then you know what it opens."

"Better than you do." Morgana squared the pad against the edge of the desk. "I've judged her presence useful to the Agency's interests. For now."

Galahad's jaw worked once. He looked at me, and I let him. Whatever he was weighing, he wasn't weighing it against my face.

He let out a breath through his nose. "Then I'll trust your judgement in this."

"I knew you'd see it."

"That isn't what I said."

"It's what I'll write down." Morgana pulled the chair back under her desk and didn't sit in it.

I stood. My knees complained about the five hours. "Can I see Faith now?"

"Agent Clarke was called out," Galahad said. "An hour ago, perhaps less. An urgent matter."

"How urgent?"

"Three bodies in a stairwell in Deptford and something still in the building." He said it flatly, the way you report a delivery. "She went with a full team. She'll be some hours."

"The lady has time on her hands, then." Lancelot came off the wall. "Would you care for a tour of the building in the meantime?"

"I didn't come here to look round, I can wait."

"Nothing passes an hour better than looking round." He was already halfway to the door. "I'll take her. You have my word she comes back in one piece."

Morgana sighed and reached for her laptop, opening the lid without looking at it. "Fine. Don't use it to avoid your work for too long."

"You know me."

"That is exactly why I said it."

Lancelot let that go past him the way he'd let the shoulder of the door go, and turned toward me with his hand out, palm up. "If the lady would kindly follow me."

I looked at Morgana. She'd found what she wanted on the screen and lifted one shoulder without lifting her eyes, the same shrug I'd have given a colleague asking whether they could take an early lunch.

I took the hand. It was warm and dry and closed on mine with no more pressure than the handshake he'd have given a stranger in the lobby.

"Galahad." Lancelot paused with his other hand on the door. "Coming along?"

"I'll stay. There's additional business." Galahad hadn't moved from his two paces in.

"Suit yourself."

The door swung out into the corridor and the carpet took the sound of our shoes. Behind us, Galahad's voice started low, and Morgana's answered it, and the door closed on the rest.