"Let me talk to the kid." Ellis said.
Daniel frowned. "Why?"
She almost laughed. "You're like a robot. Don't feel confused, you know I'm right. When was the last time you had a normal conversation with someone outside The Agency?"
2015, Daniel thought. He'd been 10 years old. She had a point, even if it hurt his ego. He had no clue how to talk to a kid. He nodded.
Out the window on the second floor of the Peters house, you could see the black masks searching the grounds. It was late enough that they were turning on flashlights. Beams of white light swept back and forth across the carefully maintained lawn and rose garden in tight patterns. The old man would be able to see that too. He looked back down the hall at the door where three black masks stood. Bennet had sent them upstairs on his way down to co-ordinate the search. He saw a yellow tag on their rifle magazines. Silver bullets already loaded.
A shout came up from below. Several of the searchers had clustered around a bush. Someone ran over with a shovel. Moments later, Daniel's phone buzzed in his pocket. It was an agency issue smartphone, preloaded with secure messaging and file storage. No one had ever sent him messages before.
BENNET: FOUND BLOOD.
BENNET: ROSES. NORTH LAWN.
Daniel hurried down the stairs, earning a stern look from the Housekeeper, Sarah. She was in the kitchen, making some food for the old man.
On the lawn, a dozen soldiers clustered around a rapidly growing trench. Some were setting up floodlights, the rest were digging.
Bennet looked cheerful. "We found blood! Tell 'em how you found it French."
French grinned— perhaps unseemly. "Check this out" she said, beckoning Daniel over to a flower bush. White petals were stained with something red. Blood, human blood.
"I've got an FBI badge!" Ecks shouted.
Three missing victims the FBI agent at least had been here. The last light of the sun had vanished over the horizon. Daniel and the soldiers were standing in a sea of darkness. He looked up at the house, directly up was the master bedroom. The curtains were drawn.
A woman's scream broke the night.
Bennet's radio crackled to life, but Daniel was already running back to the house before he could hear what was said. Ellis was waiting on the landing. "The old man's dead" she said. Daniel rushed past her, up the second flight of stairs, and into a flurry of activity.
"This soon?" Bennet asked. He'd somehow caught up with Daniel. Ecks was there too.
He was right, Daniel realized. The sun had just set.
Sarah stood frozen by the door of the bedroom. Inside, Peters was splayed across the floor. He'd been stretched out, like a plastic doll left in the sun. Like a set of clothes someone had worn and then left on the floor.
Ellis audibly gagged and Daniel belatedly realized why she'd been in the hallway. "Where's the kid"? Daniel asked.
"In her room." Ellis said.
Sarah pushed off the wall. "I'll go get her." Her voice sounded hollow.
"Wait." Daniel said. The air reeked of magic. "I need to know what you saw."
Ellis glared at him. He knew she was right, he was being unkind, but a man was dead.
"Nothing." Sarah said, "I came in and he was like that. All— Used."
An apt word.
"Okay, Sarah" Ellis said, "Why don't you go keep Wilma away."
The housekeeper nodded and shuffled off.
"Well?" Daniel asked, "Was she telling the truth?"
Ellis frowned. "She was really scared. It's hard to tell."
"That's all you got. Scared?"
The Tracer glared at him. He sounded like every agency suit she'd ever had to work with, and he knew it. "And hungry, but I don't think that's relevant."
"Probably not." Daniel knew he should apologize, but he didn't. Some lingering anger at what had happened yesterday kept him from doing so. Bennet interrupted, thankfully, by shouting "CLEAR!" so loudly they both jumped.
The room was, indeed, clear. Aside from the blood and the corpse. Daniel frowned. Something else was missing. "Ellis, do you feel the magic?"
She nodded. "Less of it."
"The source isn't here anymore."
Whatever had killed Peters had left with him.
"The housekeeper wasn't telling the truth." Ecks said suddenly. He'd been interviewing the door guards behind them. "Or at least, the whole truth. She went into the room and closed the door before screaming."
Daniel looked at Ellis. They both moved at the same time, the child's bedroom at the other end of the hall. "What did the kid say?" Daniel asked.
"Nothing important. She was scared. Her grandfather had been acting strangely."
"Might have been magic. Something to do with the source in that room."
"Or it could have to do with the people dying around him."
The door to the child's bedroom was closed, Daniel tried the handle. Locked.
"Bennet!"
He was there, ready to kick it in, when it clicked open. Daniel hastily put his gun away, but the kid didn't seem to notice. Wilma stood in the doorway with wide eyes. Daniel knew from experience they were a little too wide, which was probably a sign of shock.
"What happened?" she asked.
Ellis was there. "We're looking for Sarah. Did you see her?"
Wilma shook her head. Daniel took a step back and pulled Ellis with him. He had to bend down the slightest bit to get next to her ear.
"What are we missing?" he hissed.
"The maid she said. Which was the literal answer, but there was something else off. The magic that suffused the house, seeming to be in every room except for the Master bedroom. The timing of the killings. There was something that could only happen at night.
Ecks was talking to the kid. Good. Daniel pulled Bennet over.
"Could the housekeeper be using magic as a weapon?" he asked.
"No." Daniel said definitively. "If the housekeeper wanted to kill people, Ellis would have noticed." Ellis wasn't sure how to take that. Her forehead creased slightly.
Bennet shrugged, "but she's missing."
"So are four other people." Ellis pointed out.
"It's not the house." Daniel said, working through the options. The magic had moved. Sarah had been somewhere in the hall. Meters away from them, before she'd reached the locked kid's room.
"If there was anything else, anyone else, in the house— I would be able to tell as well." Ellis said.
That was news to Daniel. He was misusing her. Underusing her. Some combination of both. This was not how he'd hoped his first mission would go.
"Ellis. I need you to be one-hundred-percent sure about this." he said. She nodded.
He looked past Ecks and raised his voice. "Wilma. Did you lock the bedroom door?"
The girl looked up suddenly. "Yeah" she said. Daniel wouldn't have known either way. He could look for micro-expressions, but that only worked on people he knew, really. The girl was a blank slate. He looked at Ellis.
"True" she said. She sounded sure.
Back at Wilma. "Did anyone come in after you locked the door?"
The girl blinked slowly. Some people say that correlates with lying, which can be true under some circumstances. "No, not until you came."
He really couldn't get anything from her. Slow blink, clenched fist, tense forehead. Variable signs of stress and relaxation. Random, and meaningless. Daniel was glad for Ellis' help.
"True."
"One hundred percent?"
"One-hundred-percent true."
"Anything else?"
Ellis shrugged. Then half-smiled. "Running theme, she's hungry."
Sarah had been making dinner no one had gotten the chance to eat.
Ecks sighed. "It is dinner time."
"No like, really hungry." Ellis said with a laugh.
Wilma nodded.
"Then Ecks, why don't you and Ellis, and Wilma all go downstairs and get something to eat."
Ecks and Ellis shepherded Wilma down the stairs taking care to block her view into her grandfather's bedroom. Wilma was moving awkwardly, perhaps more shaken up than he'd thought.
Bennet looked at him. "What are we dealing with?"
Daniel wanted to put his fist through the wall. "I don't— I'm working on it."
"Give me what you have."
"It can only act at night. It's scared of us, which is why it moved as soon as it could. This means it must be smart. At least a Class II." Bennet swore but nodded. Daniel racked his brain. At this point it was easier to think out loud. "I know what it isn't: It's not some phenomenon ingrained in an object or the house. The magic in the house is moving around. And it's not some invisible or hidden creature unless it can shield it's presence from Ellis somehow."
"Is that possible?" Bennet asked. "I've never worked with her before."
"Maybe, but it would have to also walk right past me without anyone noticing."
"Christ, it did, didn't it." Bennet said. "We were on the stairs before the body was cold. There was nowhere for it to go."
Daniel belatedly looked at the other rooms on the floor. Bennet caught the glance and swore again.
"I'll order a search."
"I'll be with the body."
More black masks came inside. Several stood at the base of the stairs. He could hear them banging down doors upstairs, searching the house downstairs for the Housekeeper.
Daniel stood over Peters body. It was gross, in the way that old men are, and in the way that corpses are. His initial impression of it as stretched out was wrong. It wasn't that there was more stuff, but less. The ribcage and other boney areas were the same, normal. But where there should have been flesh and muscle and organ supporting skin, the body sagged inward. It was like whatever had killed him; had hollowed him out first.
This should have taken time, hours, minutes at least. Daniel was still missing something; he could feel it.
"DANIEL" someone shouted. He turned and saw the impossible.
Bennet emerged from the other end of the hall with someone, a child. No. The same child Daniel had just left with Ellis.
"She says the housekeeper was acting scary, so she hid."
The housekeeper that had gone missing. The child with Ellis had been walking funny. The same way Sarah had shuffled off, seeming hollow after Peters had died. Hollow. It was all coming together, and Daniel hated it. He grabbed the girl and pulled her chin up. She yanked back, afraid. Eyes watery. He grabbed her wrist. Pulse pounding.
Different from the strangely acting child who had replaced the too hungry maid, who had replaced the oddly behaving, too hungry, house owner. Or maybe— they had all been the same creature. Maybe the thing that had one hundred percent locked itself in this same room moments ago was the phenomenon they had been hunting. And he'd sent Ellis away with the thing that was ever so hungry.
Daniel swore loudly, causing the child to cry.
He spun and ran as fast as he could. He jumped down the first flight of stairs, pulling his glock out as he slammed into the landing. He took the second flight two at a time, bursting into the entrance hall at a dead run.
Left. Down the hall with the red carpet, past the stone entrance way. Maybe there was enough time.
Ecks froze when he saw Daniel, sprinting, gun drawn, towards the kitchen. Daniel shouted, "The girl was in the bedroom!" and Ecks— thank God, understood immediately. He tried the kitchen handle and found it locked. The soldier kicked in the door; its old wood buckled immediately. Daniel slammed into it with his shoulder and burst past through a shower of splinters into the room.
Two identical women stood in the mansion's kitchen. One Ellis loomed over another holding a knife to her throat. It was Ecks' turn to swear.
They looked identical. The one with the knife, standard Agency issue, glanced up. Then began a sharp cut. The other looked at Daniel with wide scared eyes. The same look she'd had when Davis had opened the door to the interrogation room last week. The Ellis on the ground was so scared Daniel could hear her heartbeat from across the room.
Daniel sighted, aligning the forward gun-sight between the two night-sights at the back. Building the castle, like they'd taught in training. He took a deep breath and shot knife-holding-Ellis three times in the side of the head.
The silver tore through her head, ripping it apart. Boiling as it did. It's costume, Ellis' olive-brown skin fell from the monster's face one flake at a time. It still lunged with the knife, but Ecks was already there. He must have been moving for the knife as soon as they got into the room. Daniel had never appreciated a soldier more.
Ecks tore the monster off Ellis and threw it to the ground where it twisted and flaked through its death throes.
Ellis scrambled away from the monster, slammed against the wall, and slid back down it. She was breathing in short hitches as the adrenaline ripped through her system. Daniel suddenly felt the absence of every breath he hadn't taken on the way down the stairs.
He leaned back against the same wall, sliding down next to her.
They sat like that for a moment, Ecks watching them, while catching his own breath.
Finally, he spoke first. "How in the hell did you figure that out?" he demanded. Daniel let an exhausted smile sneak onto his face. "I've got good eyes."
Ecks swore again, then straightened up. "I'll get a bag for— that."
Then it was just the two of them. Ellis' breathing had slowed down though he could still hear her heartbeat pounding away.
"I could see you from all the way on the stairs. You were terrified." she said quietly. There was an unspoken question. He'd been worried about her.
Daniel found himself meeting her eyes for the first time since the interrogation room. Brown, with flecks of green. Like a wave churning up sand on the beach. He looked away. "I don't hate you, Ellis. I dislike you a normal amount."
Ellis sighed; the ghost of a smile flickered on her face.
"True." she said.