My stomach clenched hard. If I had eaten recently I would have vomited.
“They call it taking out the trash,” Michael continued. “Pretty shitty, huh?”
“Very,” I said. “What’s that phrase? Epic fail. Yeah—of their humanity.”
After the meal we drove LaDonna around to a few of the sights. Like everyone who came to San Francisco, she wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Victorian houses. I offered to take her out to dinner, too, but she admitted that she was meeting Itzak when he got off work.
“Cool,” I said. “Let me guess. You’re trying to recruit him.”
“The thought had occurred.” LaDonna flashed me a wicked smile. “Fred’s retiring.”
“Who?” Ari said.
“The guy who used to do stuff to stuff,” I said, “like that modified camcorder.”
“Ah.” Ari gave me a sour look. “I suppose one could define that as doing stuff to stuff.”
“Well, I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Device engineering, perhaps?”
“Oh, okay, if you want to be stuffy about it.”
Ari did not get the pun. I returned my attention to LaDonna. “Did you want to come over to our flat tomorrow? Ari and Itzak will be working on the security system. You can see if he’s qualified to be the new Fred.”
“Itzak already mentioned that, yeah. I’d like to. Thanks.”
We dropped LaDonna off at her hotel so she could change for dinner, then drove home. I tried to settle down with my research materials, but I felt oddly restless. I kept getting up to prowl around the flat and look out each and every window. I thought maybe I was expecting another vision, but none materialized. I wondered if my brief sight of Interchange had disturbed me more deeply than I’d realized at the time.
While I wandered around, Ari was trying to work at the kitchen table. Finally, he gave it up and shut down his laptop.
“Do you want to go out to dinner?” he said.
“We might as well,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know I’m being annoying, but I just can’t seem to sit still.”
I changed into my black satin-backed crepe dinner suit and a pale gray silk shirt. We decided on the Japanese place up on Noriega, where we both liked the food. Or at least, I liked it enough to be able to get some of it down. I was beginning to realize that if he was hungry, Ari would eat anything put in front of him. How else could he eat his own cooking? As usual, Ari insisted we take a table where he could keep his back to the wall and get a clear view of the front door.
I was crunching along on a tempura shrimp when I felt someone watching me. The sensation had not quite reached the level of triggering a SAWM or ASTA, but it registered an interest stronger than idle curiosity. I dropped my napkin on purpose and used picking it up as an excuse to glance around me. None of the other diners were looking my way. I had a few more bites of food, then felt the sensation again. As casually as I could, I turned in my chair, pretended to stretch my back, and looked behind me.
In the far rear corner of the restaurant a blue-violet figure stood beside an empty table. Someone female—I could pick that much up psychically—stood very still and watched me. Although I couldn’t be sure, I thought she had black rosettes tattooed on her neck and bare shoulders. The image flickered once, then disappeared. The sensation of being watched vanished with her. I turned back to a normal position and realized that Ari was watching me.
“What were you seeing?” Ari said.
I leaned forward and spoke softly. “Another blue-violet apparition like the one Saturday. I still can’t figure out who or what she is, though.”
“Oh, splendid! Perhaps you might tell me when you do.”
I wrinkled my nose at the sarcasm and picked up my chopsticks.
I saw, felt, or heard nothing untoward for the rest of our meal. When we got home, I changed into jeans and a T-shirt, then logged onto the Agency site—no new mail. I filed a quick report on what I’d seen in the restaurant, then logged off. Ari took his laptop and a selection of keyboards into the kitchen.
Since there was nothing on TV that I wanted to watch, I returned to my computer. I brought up the file with the Hisperic text I’d found in Dad’s old desk. Thanks to Ari’s notes on the Hebrew words and Dad’s notes on the Old Irish, I’d pieced together entire sentences here and there. The most significant so far was “Each angel has a proper color to its wings that signifies the gate before which it stands.” I was willing to bet that those colors also coordinated with the set of boxes in the wall safe.
All through the document I found odd strings of vowels that appeared completely random. Dad had annotated them as “scribal errors? some sort of stupid nonsense.” My research into Chaos magic, however, tipped me off to the truth. They were chants, meant to be spoken aloud in a particular way, “intoned,” to use the churchman’s word, or “vibrated,” to use the magician’s.
As I looked over the pages containing the vowel strings, I noticed one where Dad had added a note stating that the particular angel’s wings were blue-violet, the color of the sphere thrown by our would-be burglar and of two of the apparitions I’d seen. I logged off, shut down the computer, and went into the kitchen.
“Ari?” I said. “I’m going to go into the bedroom and try an experiment.”
He answered in Arabic. I took this as a sign that he was working.
In the bedroom I turned on the nightstand light, then shut the heavy curtains over the windows to keep the sound inside. I stood at the foot of the bed and laid my printout down on the paisley bedspread where I could read it. The page defined its chant as “aaaa ooo ee aaaa iii.” I spoke in an ordinary voice and tried out various systems of assigning sounds to those letters. The Latinate version produced a slight sense of excitement, so I stuck with that.
I adjusted my stance to let my lungs expand as freely as possible, took a deep breath, and began vibrating each sound the indicated number of times, one letter per time. The first run through gave me a complex sensation: close to sexual arousal, yet my mind seemed clear, not muddled with lust. Qi was flowing, I figured, and tried again. The sensations increased to the point where I was panting on the edge of a mental climax.
I summoned up a memory of the color blue-violet from my work with crayons and ran the chant again. The chant ended in a yelp as the floor fell away from under my feet.
I dropped, then flew, swooping through the air. I looked down and saw below me a nighttime marketplace. The plaza, easily as large as a football field, glowed with tiny lights like strings of white Christmas bulbs. Spindly wood buildings, most three or four narrow stories tall, clustered at the edges of the open space. Moving among wooden booths and tables were people—not humans, I realized, but a species shaped much like us, big-hipped bipedal women.
Bright cloth wrapped their hips but left their arms and breasts bare. Each woman had three pairs of small breasts marching down her chest. They wore their blonde hair so short it looked like fur. It was fur, I realized, mostly blonde but dotted with black spots. In the dim light the scene looked slightly out of focus, but they seemed to have dark rosettes tattooed on their shoulders and necks. I was finally getting a clear look at my apparitions. Leopardlike, all right, but I couldn’t tell if they were were-leopards or some species derived from the big cats.
I had no real control over the vision. I’d swoop down, then suddenly rise straight up and twist in a wind that blew only on the visionary plane. When I flew high, I looked around to get a fix on the landscape. The marketplace stood in the middle of a city lit randomly by patches of white lights. At one edge of the city I saw dark water, a bay, ocean inlets. At the other rose an oddly familiar pair of hills. Twin Peaks! I recognized their shapes at last and oriented myself. I was seeing a version of San Francisco.
At one point I sank toward the ground at the edge of the plaza. Just when I thought I was going to touch down, my fall stopped itself, and I hovered some eight feet in the air. A leopard woman saw me. She stood ta
ller than the rest, and around her spotted neck hung a weight of silver chains. Her small, curled ears sat much higher up on her head than ours do. She looked up and opened her mouth in a snarl. I saw her white cat fangs clearly despite the dim light.
“You! Here?”
Her words formed in my mind. She sounded as surprised as I felt. The vision caught me again and spun me around, swept me up and sent me reeling into the sky. I was considering chanting to see if I could bring it under control when an alarming truth occurred to me.
“Crud! I don’t know how to get back.”
That break in concentration saved me. I felt myself falling from the interior height and hit the bed that I’d last seen in front of my body. For a moment I stuck, half on and half off the mattress, then slid to the floor onto my knees with my face pressed against the bedspread, an inelegant end to the trance.
I looked up to see a horrified Ari staring at me from the doorway.
“Are you ill?” he said. “Why were you moaning?”
“Was I moaning?” I scrambled to my feet.
“I heard this ah ah oh oh sound. I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Chanting. Vision-inducing chanting.”
My knees threatened to give way. I sat down on the end of the bed. Ari walked over to stand in front of me.
“Are you sure you don’t need to see a doctor?” he said.
“Yes. I’m fine.”
“You’re drenched in sweat.”
“That’s from Qi, not a fever.” I realized that my shirt was sticking to my body. My damp hair hung in tendrils around my face. “I shouldn’t have tried that experiment. Should have done more research first.”
Ari sat down next to me on the end of the bed. The lamplight gleamed on his dark hair and turned his eyes into pools of shadow. I could feel his body warmth and smell his clean flesh, but I wondered if I wanted to kiss him or bite him. He would taste good, I figured, salty warm raw meat. Ape: Nature’s perfect food.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” Ari raised a suspicious eyebrow and moved over a couple of feet. “You’re drooling.”
I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and reminded myself that you should never eat the one you love. I put my hands on my breasts to check: yes, only two. Inadvertently, I’d made a psychic link with the species I’d glimpsed. Perhaps the woman who’d spoken to me had forged it. Whatever else those ladies were, they were carnivores to the max. When I looked at Ari, I fixated on the pulse throbbing in the big vein in his throat.
“Nola,” Ari said, “answer me!”
I wrenched my gaze away and held up one hand for silence. I took a deep breath and began counting backward from a hundred. The link remained strong. Ari moved farther away to the corner of the bed. I could feel that he was ready to spring to his feet. I visualized a flaming torch and saw it circling my body. The link flared and died. I gasped for breath, then steadied.
“Are you back?” Ari said.
“Yeah.”
I’d spoken the truth—almost. I’d destroyed the direct link. Yet a trait of their species resonated with an archetype buried deep in my own psyche and brought it to the surface. I found myself thinking of the Bacchantes. The ancient Greek chant echoed in my mind: IAO, ee ah oh.
“The way you were looking at me—” Ari said.
“Yeah, I know. Not nice. I’m really sorry.”
“You were in full trance?”
“Till I fell to my knees. And then I got stuck in a lesser trance. Kind of a hyper phase out.”
“Are you going to drift off again?”
“I hope not. I feel light-headed and kind of weird, like my body’s a helium balloon.” I raised my arms over my head, then let them fall back to my sides. For a moment I lost track of my hands. The skin on my back felt icy cold.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Ari said.
“Well, there’s sex.”
He stared. Perhaps I’d been a bit abrupt.
“I feel like I’m not really back in my body yet,” I said. “If you made love to me, it would help.”
He continued to stare.
“Well, you asked,” I said with a snarl. “Is this any worse than you wanting sex to get back to sleep?”
“No. Sorry. It just seemed like rather an abrupt change of subject.”
He smiled. I laughed, but my face seemed to belong to someone else.
“We could do something special,” I went on. “I don’t suppose you have any classified information I need to wheedle out of you.”
Ari shrugged and stood up. “I could invent some,” he said. “It’s almost dawn in Damascus, anyway. I’ll go shut the laptop down.”
“Okay.” I found myself wondering how it would feel to sink my nails into his shoulders. I could lick the blood as it flowed. “Uh, darling, while you’re at it, why don’t you get those handcuffs?”
His smile deepened to a grin. “Very well,” he said. “You liked that, did you?”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. It’s for your own good. Why take a chance on my self-control? Once we get started, I might not have any.”
“Oh? Are you telling me that making love to you tonight could be dangerous?”
“Yeah, I am. So if you don’t want to—”
“Quite the opposite, actually.” His Qi level spiked along with his grin. “I’ll just go get the handcuffs.”
I should have known.
While I changed into the black thigh-high stockings, I concentrated on the details of my current reality: the solid wood floor under my feet, the cool air on my body as I stripped off my sweaty clothes, the mesh of the stockings and the pinch of the garters on my skin, the pool of lamplight in our familiar room. I’d made a good start on regaining body consciousness by the time Ari came in.
He tossed the pair of steel cuffs onto my pillow, then caught me by the shoulders and kissed me. At the touch of his mouth on mine, the leopard woman archetype sank farther into the depths of my mind. He picked me up and carried me to the bed, then sat down next to me and kissed me again. I felt my body respond—my body, not someone else’s. My humanity came back stronger with every kiss and caress he gave me.
The vision, the voices, the Chaos attacks—everything disappeared as my world shrank down to Ari’s lovemaking. If I was his sleeping pill, I realized that night, he was my drug of choice.
CHAPTER 7
BY MORNING THE DRUG HAD worn off, but the city of the leopard women had faded from an emotional threat to a detailed memory. I lay in bed and thought about the woman who’d spoken to me. I wondered about the weight of her jewelry. I’d seen no one else in the marketplace wearing those silver chains, so possibly they marked some kind of status in her society. At the least they probably meant she was wealthy. Be that as it may, she’d made it clear that she disliked me. The feeling had become mutual.
Ari insisted on feeding me, though I drew the line at his favorite breakfast: a peanut butter and chopped pickle sandwich. Instead, he set a plate in front of me with one overcooked fried egg and a couple of pieces of cold, greasy, British toast. When he spread jam on them, I was too depressed to argue.
“It would be Sunday,” I said. “I won’t hear from anyone in the Agency till tomorrow. About the apparitions, I mean.”
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t do any more research on your own.” Ari rubbed the side of his neck. “I’ll admit that being bitten was a new sensation, but there are limits.”
“Oh, come on! I didn’t even break the skin.”
“This time. That’s what I mean about limits.”
I smiled and forced myself to start eating the egg.
While we were cleaning up after breakfast, my sister Kathleen called. Our mutual friend, Mira Rosen, had finally delivered her baby the night before.
“It’s a boy, just like she thought,” Kathleen said. “Ten pounds, two ounces.”
“Oh, God!” I said. “No wonder she got so big!”
Ari looked at me with a raised eyebrow. W
hen I clicked off, I relayed the news and explained my remark.
“I remember her from that party,” Ari said. “The therapist.”
“That’s right, yeah. You’ve got a good memory for people.”
“It’s part of my job.” Ari paused to shut the dishwasher door. “Do you want children someday?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because our jobs are too dangerous. Some philosopher guy said that having children means giving hostages to Fortune. If we had kids, they could end up being just plain hostages. I’d be worried sick about them all the time.”
“True.” Ari pounced. “But you’re thinking in terms of having my children. If we had kids, you said. You’re beginning to come round.”
I snarled; he grinned.
“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Why do you think I’m going to break down and agree to marry you?”
“Because you’re too intelligent not to. Obviously, I’m the perfect man for you. You must see that. So why not marry me?”
“I never knew that arrogance was part of perfection.”
“I didn’t say I was perfect. I said I was the perfect man for you. There’s rather a difference.”
“Yeah? Well, tell me, Mr. Perfection, do you want kids?”
“No, for the same reason you don’t. See? We even agree on that.”
I stomped into the living room and sat down at my computer desk. I had my Gnostic research to distract me from both the leopard women and Ari’s obsession with marriage, but Ari followed me.
“I’m going to go downstairs and do my exercises,” he said. “Are you sure you won’t—”
“Very sure.”
“We’ve got some rope in the trunk of the car. Did you jump rope when you were a girl? You might find it enjoyable—”
“No, nyet, nein.”
Ari sighed and set exasperated hands on his hips.
“My beloved darling,” I said, “I’m sick and tired of you leaning on me like this. I’m an adult. I don’t have to go back to gym class. Please just drop it.”
“Well, for the love of God, I’ve got to do something for you.” He spoke quietly, but the words ached with frustration. “I can’t get at those spotted bitches or that sodding priest, either, the one who keeps bothering you.”
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