Beeswax and lemon polish, warmed in the sunshine, were punctuated with scatterings of perfume, cologne, lotion, and hair products.A few of the latter were based on flowers or spices, but more reeked of chemicals, their pungent traces making her wrinkle her nose in distaste.It was distracting, like the jewelry people wore, with the chemical reaction between the ore and the oil in their skin giving off a metallic tang.
She excluded all of that, too.
The air was getting clearer as she worked, yet still busy.This room was used often, with a great many people coming and going.A few dozen were here now, their smells bright and sharp, like their tongues as they surged to their feet, with a flood of questions aimed at the woman behind us.
The Pythia, I realized, had tagged along, but lagged behind so as not to interfere.But the people saw and swamped her, stirring up the scents in the room like a stiff breeze, loud, strident, impatient.Which increased exponentially when she abruptly ordered them all out.
“Do you know who I am?”A man demanded shrilly, reeking of the gin and tonics he’d had with lunch.
“What do you mean, leave?”Another man in an expensive suit demanded, with the air of someone used to being obeyed.He had cancer; my counterpart could smell it on him—advanced, inoperable.He probably wanted to know how much time he had left.
“I have anappointment!”That was a woman, her sweat threatening to swamp the expensive perfume she wore, despite the room’s air conditioning.No hint of illness there, but a brittle self-control that almost crackled when she moved, like a shell of ice.Like the cold, banked anger that fed it, screaming silently for vengeance.
“See Françoise,” the Seer murmured, as the vampires who remained mobile began ushering them away.“To reschedule.”
That sparked a flurry of further protests, along with the emotions that accompanied them, threatening the entire, ephemeral scent painting hanging in the air.And the vampires crowding in didn’t help!I wanted to scream, but my counterpart just waited, standing there like a statue, until the angry people left and the picture slowly came together again, if slightly pulled out of shape.
There were layers of scent here, far too faded for my nose to have picked up, but hers was sharper.She could see things going back weeks, and “see” was the right word.Because as I watched, her power raised a roomful of ghosts.
I stared at them in shock, although they shouldn’t have surprised me.I had seen scent people before, as my wolf’s senses could also conjure them up, if the traces they left behind were strong enough.But the images that my mind reconstructed were washed out, distant, ephemeral memories of people and animals left hanging in the air until a breeze tore them to shreds, less useful than the forensic spells I normally employed instead.
But here...
There was the orange-red figure of a woman, her scent translated into color in my counterpart’s mind for easier classification, like the clothes downstairs.She was glowing like a miniature sun, except at the edges, where the colors were beginning to bleed into the tints of the room because she’d been here days ago.But the core remained solid, bright, and almost as clear as if I was looking at her.
I could practically see my reflection in her highly polished, patent-leather shoes, discern the haze of hairspray around her elaborate updo, and detect the linen suit she wore—grassy, subtle, sweet.Her ankles were primly crossed, her hands folded calmly in her lap, but the pose lied.Her anxiety roared at me, so intensely that I wanted to flinch back, but I wasn’t running this show.
The woman next to her was the opposite, anxious, yes, but in a happy, excited way that translated into a bright teal with yellow sunbursts.She was hoping to be told that the object of her passion felt the same.I could see the handkerchief she twisted in her lap, glowing almost neon with her pheromones and longing.
A nearby man, meanwhile, had a dark gray aura that radiated stress.Possibly financial, as the stronger emotions—love, lust, anger, and grief—were absent.There were only brooding gray skies that followed him like a cloud as he paced up and down near the windows, the color dripping down on him like rain.
My counterpart dug deeper, going further back in time.Where more and more scent beings had been shredded into vibrant pieces that swirled around the room like bright scarves, shouting their worries at us in broken snippets of emotion.And there werehundreds.
I tried to pull back because it was too much, too fast, but she didn’t let me.She was getting close now, her nose twitching up a storm, drawing a flood of emotion to us, including from several men who had been propping up the opposite wall weeks ago, their auras bleeding into each other—dark, sinister, dangerous.She could smell the blood magic on them, but I doubted anybody else could, as it was well hidden.
As I watched, some kind of shadow being, invisible to human eyes, separated from one of the men.It flickered through the scent painting like a shark gliding through water, searching for prey.And searching successfully, as it avoided witch and vampire alike, all the way to the throne...
Where it encountered something it didn’t expect.
I hadn’t, either, because there was no fanfare, just a single man who stood behind the Pythia’s throne, his body wreathed by three different kinds of magic.And two of them weren’t ones I knew.One of those was probably fey, as it had a hint of their strangeness, but the other...
I had no idea about the other, and that alone was enough to rock me back on my heels.It was likely something demonic, as they only had about a million kinds of magic, corresponding to their many races.But even more worrying than the fact that he was carrying three, often contradictory, magical auras was the fact that the man himself seemed perfectly normal.
Even to my counterpart’s nose, he smelled of nothing more than his morning coffee.Yet he suddenly threw a cloud of magical force so strong that it shredded the shadow being where it stood, burning it right down to the ground.And did it so fast and so subtly that I doubted anybody else had even noticed.
The image snapped, the little vignette fading back into the morass of overlapping scent stories, and I tried to resurface again, desperate to force my way back to the present.But it was difficult, for the stories went back formonths.And the feelings that accompanied them were so strong that I could taste them in the back of my throat, could track them with my own accelerated heartbeat, could feel them as if I was experiencing them myself: anxiety, hopefulness, boredom, impatience, anger,fear—
My counterpart paused on that last one, her nose scrunching.There was fear, and then there wasfear, and this was the latter.The heart-pounding, bitter taste-inducing, cold sweat on a warm night, breath-catching form of the emotion that had no place here.
That kind belonged in a different time, when just surviving another day counted as victory.When it could make someone used to constant vigilance drop everything andlisten,food forgotten in their mouths as they fought to hear over their own heartbeat.Straining to know what was out there, what was hunting them, what wascoming.
It was still found in this world in places like war zones and back alleys.It stained the inside of soldiers’ combat gloves along with their sweat, and rode the rapid breathing of trafficked women and children in the back of trucks, bumping toward an unknown destination.It shouldn’t be here, in the Pythia’s beautiful reception room.
And yet, it was.
I was vaguely aware that our caftan, which, despite my orders, must have come from the crazy shop on the drag, had been cycling through the emotions we were sensing in a swirl of psychedelic colors.But at that one, it stopped and flooded black with pointed red spikes.They crackled across it as my counterpart slowly sifted out all of the remaining scents to focus on the one she wanted.
It was elusive, weeks old, and badly decayed, but it was there, right there, right…there.We moved to where it was deepest, like a well of dark energy on the honey-colored planks of the floor, and then just stayed there, soaking in it.Fear.
