Chapter 1: The Break-in and The Banshee
The problem, Harini had decided, was that Marlowe considered furniture a legitimate food group.
"Those are your coals," she said, pointing at the shallow iron basin she'd set on the kitchen floor. Beside it sat a beefsteak the size of a car tyre, still bleeding pleasantly. "Underworld coals. Very expensive. Death shipped them himself, which I promise you was a whole form."
Marlowe, hellhound, large as a sofa and roughly the same colour as one, lay with his enormous head on the arm of Jason's leather couch. One amber eye regarded her. The other eye was closed in what she recognised, from long experience, as calculated indifference.
"You have a steak." She tapped the cutting board for emphasis. "A very good steak. Jason bought it. Well, Jason stole it, but the principle of purchasing stands."
His tail thumped once against the cushions. The cushions, notably, were already dented into the shape of his jaw. There were also, she had noticed that morning with mounting resignation, teeth marks along the couch's left arm, a pucker of ruined leather where he'd chewed thoughtfully during an especially boring Tuesday.
"If you eat the couch," she said, crouching down so they were eye to eye, "Jason will be sad. Jason is sad very rarely and very badly, and I have made a personal project of reducing his sadness, so you would in fact be sabotaging my entire romantic strategy." She scratched behind one ear the size of a dinner plate. His hind leg kicked. "Eat the coals. They taste like betrayal and brimstone, which I'm told is a delicacy."
He yawned, displaying a throat you could post letters into, and put his chin back on the armrest. Directly on the armrest with the teeth marks.
"Marlowe."
From inside the canvas bag slumped against the bookshelf came a low, rising moan, the sound of a kettle about to commit a crime. The banshee was bored again. Boredom, for her, escalated along a strict ladder: humming, sighing, moaning, wailing. They were at rung three.
"Don't you start," Harini told the bag. "One of us having a tantrum is plenty."
Marlowe's head lifted at the sound, ears swivelling. He had a complicated relationship with the banshee; he found her unsettling and demonstrated this by sitting on anything she liked. Harini saw the calculation move behind his eyes like weather.
"No. Whatever you're thinking, no."
The lock in the front door clicked.
Harini did not look up immediately, because the sound was familiar in the wrong way; it had the cheerful amateurishness of someone picking a lock with actual picks rather than magic, and there were exactly two people Jason had mentioned recently who fit that description of menace. She looked up anyway, one hand still in Marlowe's fur, and found the door swinging open on two figures in the hallway: a boy about her own age in a brown jacket, and a blonde girl in purple, both wearing the specific frozen expression of people whose plans had not accounted for the current scene.
The scene being: a woman with a wand tucked behind her ear, hand-deep in the fur of a sofa-sized black dog with ember-red eyes, an iron basin of faintly glowing coals on the kitchen floor, and a bag in the corner that had just begun, softly, to wail.
"Huh," said the boy. "That's."
"Hi," said the blonde, hand already drifting toward her hip where, Harini noted approvingly, a collapsible baton lived. "Are we interrupting?"
"A bit," Harini said. "I'm in the middle of a negotiation." She turned back to the hellhound. "This is actually perfect timing. Marlowe, witness. If you eat the couch in front of company, that's a public incident."
Marlowe huffed a breath hot enough to warm her forearm from a foot away.
The boy had produced his phone. Of course he had. Harini watched him photograph her, the dog, and the coals in quick succession, thumb already moving with the terrible purpose of a man composing a message. The blonde girl stepped inside and shut the door behind her, which Harini appreciated; it was draughty in Crime Alley and Marlowe caught colds in his middle two stomachs.
"So," the blonde said. "Jason's not here."
"No, he's out with his minions right now," Harini said. "Roy and Kori. Something about a weapons cache and, I believe, a boat. Kori wanted the boat." She stood, brushing fur off her knees. "They'll be hours. Kori is very thorough about boats."
The boy and the blonde exchanged a look with an entire conversation in it. Harini was mildly autistic, not unobservant; she could read that look fine. It said: girlfriend, dog, glowing coals, evaluate threat.
"Tim," the boy said, not lowering the phone. "Tim Drake. This is Steph."
"Stephanie Brown," said the blonde, and then, because she was who she was: "Are you a threat assessment or a guest?"
"Both, probably. I'm Harini. Would you like tea? Jason has proper tea now because I bring it. He used to have only coffee, which, honestly, criminal." She was already moving to the kettle. "There's a jam sandwich situation as well, if tea's not enough. The banshee ate most of the good biscuits, but she's between jobs and I try not to police her grief snacking."
The wailing from the bag rose a register. Tim's phone camera came up again.
"Is your bag screaming," Tim said.
"Only when she's bored. Or employed. She wails the same either way, it's a union thing." Harini set three mugs out, then reconsidered and got four, because Marlowe liked tea poured over his steak and it was only polite. "Sit down, honestly. You've already broken in, the hard part's done."
Steph did sit, perching on the opposite end of the couch from Marlowe, who turned his massive head to track her with the mild menace of a very large dog deciding whether a stranger was furniture. Steph scratched her own knee and did not flinch, which Harini marked down in her favour.
"We picked the lock," Steph said. "Which, credit, your pins are, like, teaching-level. Jason should really upgrade."
"He knows. He refuses. I think he likes knowing people can get in, emotionally." Harini flipped the kettle on. "Why did you break in, out of curiosity? Roy said the family knew about me and were collectively fine about it, but Roy also said a boat was a sensible purchase, so his assessment of others has known gaps."
Tim lowered the phone an inch. "He told Roy and Kori. He told nobody else. Which means nobody else knows, which means," he gestured with the phone at the entire apartment, "we had to check whether the unusually good mood was a brain tumour or a person. It's a person. With a hellhound."
"Formerly a brain tumour concern, currently a person," Harini agreed, and poured the tea. "Milk's in the jug. Sugar's in the jar, and the jar is not enchanted, I checked, don't ask why that needed checking."
Steph took her mug and immediately pointed at the iron basin. "So the coals. Are those for the dog or are they decor? Because I have questions either way."
"His dinner. Beefsteak and underworld coals, that's the balanced meal. He's refusing them in favour of the couch." Harini crouched again and held out the steak, now with a splash of tea over it, because Marlowe liked the tannin. "Marlowe. Look. Dinner."
Marlowe looked. At the couch cushion under his chin.
"He's on a hunger strike," Steph said, delighted. "For the couch."
"He's on an idiocy strike. He doesn't understand his own weight. Last week he sat on my chest to wake me up and I couldn't breathe for a full minute." She wagged the steak hopefully. His tail wagged in return, transactionally, without any commitment to movement.
Tim had retreated to the kitchen doorway, and Harini could hear the small wet sounds of a message being typed with intent. She did not need to see the screen. She'd lived through enough family dinners to know what a screenshot felt like in the air.
"You're texting the family," she said. "The one with Batman in it."
Tim did not look guilty, which she respected. He looked like a journalist closing a scoop. "Yeah."
"Will it say something accurate, or something with capital letters?"
"Capital letters," Steph answered for him, grinning into her tea.
"Fine. Add that the couch is at stake. That's the actual emergency."
The bag wailed. Properly, this time, full banshee register, a sound that peeled the air and rattled the window glass and made both the intruders' hair stand on end. Marlowe's ears flattened. He stood, all four legs, a horse's worth of dog unfolding off the couch, and Harini saw the exact moment the boredom, the wailing, the two strangers, and the refused dinner combined into a single simple hellhound conclusion.
"No," Harini said. "Marlowe, no, don't you dare sit on the couch, that's not, that is not the solution to anything."
He sat on the couch. The whole couch. His haunches settled onto the cushions like a landslide accepting a valley, and the frame groaned, and something in the leather made a sound like a small apology, and the banshee, from the bag, went abruptly silent in what Harini could only interpret as applause.
"Marvelous," Harini said. "Thank you. That's the couch that ate the steak's dignity."
Tim was filming now, openly, panning from the sunken couch to the glowing coals to the bag to Harini, narrating under his breath with timestamps. Steph had abandoned decorum entirely and was on the floor by the basin, holding a coal up to the light, watching it gutter with the little volcanic sunset colours of somewhere much warmer than Gotham.
"It's warm," she reported. "Like, haunted-warm. Is it haunted?"
"It's underworld. Adjacent. The distinction matters to lawyers in the afterlife and nobody else." Harini sat down on the sofa's surviving arm, next to Marlowe's shoulder, and scratched it while he beamed like the criminal he was. "So. Now you've broken in and seen everything. What's the procedure? Does Batman send a van?"
"There's no van," Tim said, with the weary emphasis of a man who had explained this before. "There's just Bruce, standing somewhere, silently."
"That's worse."
"He'll want to meet you," Steph said. "Eventually. He'll pretend he doesn't. He'll install a camera in the hall."
"He can't," Harini said comfortably. "The apartment has wards. Anything he plants will fill up with about four hundred spiders' worth of detritus from the Alley, and he'll spend a week cataloguing it before he realises he's studying garbage." She sipped her tea. "Alfred will want to meet me first anyway. Someone has to arrange the tea correctly, and that man has standards I could learn from."
Tim and Steph looked at each other again. This look was longer. It contained, Harini thought, the whole shape of a family's paranoid history, and also the specific fizz of a very fun secret they were now holding collectively against Bruce.
"So," Tim said, sitting down on the couch's one exposed cushion, which creaked a warning. "Witch, though. Actual magic. Like, what's the actual scope, because Barbara's going to ask and I'd like to have a head start on not knowing anything."
"Barbara will want to make a database," Harini said. "Everyone wants to make a database. Death has a database. It's on fire."
"Why is it on fire?"
"Because it's the underworld, Tim, everything's on fire. Would you like more tea?"
The banshee, sensing that the boredom threshold had been crossed back into tolerable, began humming a low, almost sweet dirge from the bag. Steph turned toward it, mug cradled in both hands.
"Can we," she started, "open the bag? What's the etiquette? I don't want to be rude to the screaming woman."
"She'd love a visitor. She's been starved of gossip since Roy left." Harini leaned over and unzipped the top flap. A pale face with hair like wet smoke rose out of the gloom inside, mouth opening in a welcome that was, in structure, a wail, but in intent, a hello. "Banshee, this is Stephanie and Tim. They broke in. Tim's taking pictures for his family chat."
The banshee produced a single perfect shriek of joy that knocked a picture off the wall. Marlowe, from atop the broken couch, moaned his own deep harmony. The apartment filled with the combined sound of a hellhound and a banshee greeting guests, which, Harini reflected, was the most normal thing that had happened in this room all week.
Tim's phone buzzed with its first reply. He glanced at it, and his face did something complicated.
"Dick says," he read aloud, "question mark, exclamation mark, question mark."
"Tell him yes to all three," Harini said, and passed the banshee a biscuit through the bag flap.