Sanctuary

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Firebird?” Mif’tal mocked, ignoring Lorne completely. “Did you see any fire on it? Or a bird?”

  “It’s been painted—and badly, I might add. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was a Firebird.”

  “Camaro.”

  Urf’dil crossed her massive arms over her chest and blew out a puff of air. “Lorne, tell him to behave himself. He’s just so argumentative lately. He still thinks we used to drive a Nash Rambler, and I have to tell him we never did. I think he confuses it with our old Plymouth Valiant.”

  This was something Lorne really didn’t want to get into the middle of. All he wanted to do was find Fred, not play Dr. Drew to a couple of combative kooks. And how could someone confuse a Rambler with a Valiant? But somewhere beneath their bluster was the chance that one, or both, of them had seen something useful. He needed to pry it from them if he could.

  “Look, Mif’tal,” he said, leaning toward the male and speaking in a conspiratorial stage whisper. “You’re probably right about the Camaro, but it doesn’t really matter in the long run. Why not just say it was a Firebird, for her sake? What’s the harm?”

  The Nemchuk gnashed its many teeth at him and lowered the bony ridge over its eyes. “Because,” Mif’tal said slowly, as if addressing a not particularly bright child, “it wasn’t a Firebird!”

  Lorne buried his head in his hands, elbows resting on the glass tabletop. “Can we agree that it was a car?” he asked plaintively. “Four wheels, some doors, maybe some windows?”

  “Of course it was a car,” Urf’dil said. “I really don’t see why you’re making such a big deal about this.”

  Why me? Lorne wondered. Why does it have to be me all the time?

  He believed they really wanted to help. At least, they’d claimed that they did, and he had no reason to doubt. Nemchuks were clannish demons, keeping to themselves and as far from human society as they could manage. Most, in fact, lived in remote rural areas—northern Scotland had a big community, as did central Mexico and the Russian Steppe. But some had settled in cities, including a small group that had somehow found its way to Los Angeles and decided to stay. They moved about in the dark, wearing clothing that shielded them from any human eyes to which they might accidentally be exposed. But Mif’tal said they had heard that Angel was a great hero to a lot of demons—he’d heard about the Scourge, and how Angel and a half-Brachen named Doyle had saved a lot of Lister demons. Urf-dil had interrupted to insist that they had, in fact, been Lubber demons, but Lorne had been able to set the record straight on that score. Angel, he said, was not particularly popular among the Lubbers, while Listers practically worshiped him. So they truly did desire to help, it seemed.

  Lorne just wasn’t sure how much more of their brand of help he could stand.

  These two had sung for him already, but the most he had learned was that they would remain together—driving each other crazy—until Urf-dil’s death many years hence.

  “Okay,” Lorne said, taking a deep breath and calling on any reserves of patience he might once have had. “We’ll accept that it was some kind of car. And did either of you love-muffins happen to see who or what was in the car?”

  “Sure,” Mif’tal said. “I had a good view. Five demons, with semiautomatic weapons.”

  “Five?” Urf-dil countered. “Are you nuts? There were only four of them, and those guns were full auto.”

  Mif’tal shook his head so fast, Lorne was afraid it might fly off. “No. I’m telling you, I counted five. And any fool could tell by the sound they were semi.”

  “Let’s back up a minute,” Lorne interjected, trying desperately to bring some kind of sanity back to the conversation. “Are we sure it was demons in the car, and not humans?”

  “I know humans when I see them,” Mif’tal insisted. Lorne had to figure that was true. For all their fearsome appearance, Nemchuks were largely harmless to humans. His characterization earlier of the demon as a big pussycat wasn’t that far off the mark, except that cats could turn on their humans in a heartbeat. Nemchuks had no particular love for humans, but they bore the species no ill will. Their lack of affection for humans stemmed more from their fear that humans would attack them, driving them to extinction as they had so many other races in the years since they had taken dominance over the earth. “These were not human.”

  Urf-dil raised her clawed hands into the air and waved them about. “Hallelujah,” she declared. “He’s right about one thing. They were definitely not human.”

  “Could you tell what they were, then?” Lorne asked, thrilled that at least there had been one area of agreement. “I’m guessing by not human you don’t mean something like dogs or llamas, but more something of the demonic persuasion.”

  “Too dark,” Mif’tal said flatly. “But I can tell you one thing: Urf’dil has never known squat about guns.”

  “I was blinded by the headlights,” Urf-dil said, more or less simultaneously. “But I know what automatic weapons sound like.”

  “You know, if you guys don’t want to help…” Lorne began. Much more of this bickering, he thought, and I’ll be the one reaching for an automatic weapon.

  “No, we do,” Urf-dil said, suddenly sincere. She touched Lorne’s hand with her claw. “Angel’s never done anything bad to us. We have no hard feelings toward him. I’m really sorry that his friend is missing. Honestly, Lorne, if there’s anything we can do, if we saw anything that might help him, just let us know.”

  “What she said,” Mif’tal added. “We do genuinely want to help Angel out if we can.”

  “Then can we declare a cease-fire for long enough to get through this?” Lorne pleaded. “I don’t have all night. Well, I do—I’m the original night owl, you know? But we don’t know if Fred does, and she’s what’s important here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Urf’dil said. She looked at her mate with what Lorne assumed were the Nemchuk version of soulful eyes. Or, heaven forbid, bedroom eyes, he thought, immediately wishing for a brain shower to wash that mental image away.

  “Is there anything else you can think of that might be helpful?” Lorne pleaded with her. “Anything out of the ordinary that you noticed?”

  “The whole thing was a bit out of the ordinary,” Urf’dil pointed out. “But I do remember one thing: I thought I smelled cinnamon.”

  “How could you smell that?” Mif’tal demanded. “There was a burning building across the street, guns were being fired—how could you possibly smell cinnamon over the smoke and soot and gunpowder?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said, almost sweetly. “I just have a very strong sense that I did. Like a sense memory, almost—if I put myself back there, mentally, I get a strong whiff of it.”

  Lorne took a physical whiff of the air, just in case she was picking it up from someplace more local. No cinnamon, he thought. Maybe a couple of demons in here who haven’t been bathing as regularly as they should. And demon b.o.—that’s the worst.

  “Didn’t you think you smelled vanilla on the night of our pairing ritual?” Mif’tal asked her. There was a mocking edge to his voice.

  “Now that you mention it, yes,” Urf’dil replied. The edge there, Lorne guessed, was suspicion. “And I also remember that my sister was wearing vanilla at our ceremony. I always meant to ask you about that.”

  Mif’tal laughed, a truly unpleasant sight that involved his several rows of teeth clacking together, strings of spittle joining them when they pulled apart again. “If you think I’d have anything to do with that ogre of a sister you have, you’re even crazier than I thought!”

  “Now, Mif’tal,” Lorne said, putting his hands out to pacify both of them. “Remember our purpose here. Let’s not get nasty.”

  “You want to talk about nasty, take a look at that sister sometime. She could get a job sitting outside a doctor’s office, making people sick.”

  Urf’dil turned in her chair so that she was facing away from the table, and her mate. “Lorne, I will do whatever I can to help An
gel and Fred, but I won’t sit here and have my family insulted by that…that ridiculous male.”

  “He’s sorry,” Lorne said, hoping it was true. “He’s really, really sorry.” He turned to Mif’tal, a plaintive expression on his face. “Aren’t you?”

  “You can tell her that I’ll apologize right after she does.”

  “For what?” Lorne asked. Didn’t I not want to get in the middle of this? he thought. Now look at me—if this isn’t the middle, I don’t know what is.

  “Ask her.”

  “What does he want you to apologize for?”

  She didn’t even look at Lorne. “I’m sure I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

  I have new respect for marriage counselors, Lorne thought. Also hostage negotiators and anybody with the patience not to go berserk when surrounded by lunatics. “Okay, we’ll do it the hard way,” he said. “Mif’tal, is there anything else you might have seen, or heard, or smelled, that could in any way be significant?”

  Mif’tal hmmmed for a long time. Finally, Urf’dil interrupted. “He doesn’t want to hear you clearing your throat. Tell him about the Polgara.”

  “I wasn’t clearing—Lorne, tell her I wasn’t clearing my throat. I was thinking. And then ask her what Polgara she’s talking about.”

  “He wasn’t—oh, you heard him,” Lorne snapped. “What Polgara?”

  “When I remembered the cinnamon, it drew me back there, in my mind’s eye. And I thought I remembered seeing a Polgara demon standing right around Fred just before she disappeared. It seems like I even remember seeing it reach for her. But that’s when the shooting started and we all ducked.”

  “There was no Polgara,” Mif’tal declared. “You weren’t even looking at Fred when the shooting started—you already said you were looking at the car, miscounting demons, and misidentifying weapons.”

  “I got a glimpse of the car,” she argued. “But then I turned—maybe it was as I was ducking—and noticed Fred. I’m sure it was a Polgara.”

  “Maybe your sister was the sane one, after all,” Mif’tal said. By now he and Urf’dil were both turned completely away from the table, facing in opposite directions.

  Maybe life-bonding isn’t all it’s cracked up to be by the family values types, Lorne thought as he rose from his chair. “Thanks, you guys,” he said. “If you think of anything else, I’ll be around. Anything related to this, I mean. And that you both agree on.”

  “You’re welcome, Lorne,” Urf’dil said, sounding a bit miffed at Lorne’s parting entreaties.

  “I hope they find her,” Mif’tal added.

  A Polgara? There hadn’t been a Polgara in the club all night, Lorne knew. He’d have noticed if there had been. Which didn’t necessarily mean there hadn’t been one lurking outside.

  But if Fred had been taken by a Polgara, she’d be a meal by now.

  And that was too horrible to even think about.

  Chapter Five

  The first thing she noticed was the headache, throbbing, as if every drop of blood that passed through the veins in her head carried a small explosive charge with it. For a while, the headache was her entire world. She couldn’t remember pain like that ever in her life; she couldn’t remember a life before the pain. She could only pray there would be a life after.

  A bit later it occurred to her to open her eyes. She started to do so, but the motion sent a lance of fire through her temples, so she stopped with the eyelid a quarter open, admitting a little bit of light but nothing else. Still is better, she decided. No movement at all. Movement is really, really bad.

  But thinking, she realized, thinking doesn’t hurt so much.

  She could think without moving. When that enlightenment hit her, though, the first thing she thought was the obvious: Where am I?

  She decided to go for the eye thing again. She would have gritted her teeth, but that would have required yet more movement. Just the one eye, she thought, that’ll do for now. I have another as backup if I need it.

  And so, doing her absolute best to ignore the screaming pain caused by the barest fluttering of her eyelid, Fred opened her left eye.

  And saw floor.

  A nice hardwood, she thought. Could use some work. But it’s not made of rock, so that’s a good thing. There were deep scratches in it, dust worked into the scratches. The finish was dull, without that gleam that lives inside good hardwoods but that needs tender ministration to bring out, polishing and rubbing and love. The pool of blood that would have been there if one of Angel’s edged weapons really had been buried in her skull wasn’t there, so most likely that wasn’t the source of her pain.

  She could see maybe six square inches of the floor. Probably a little less.

  But you’re a physicist, she thought. If you can only see six square inches of the floor—thirty-nine square centimeters—there has to be a reason, and that reason will be grounded in your understanding of the physical world.

  And you’re thinking—I’m thinking of myself in the second person, which is odd. But at least I’ve fixed that part.

  A little success felt good, even though it was admittedly a very tiny triumph. So she turned to the next issue at hand, which was why she could only see a tiny patch of floor with her single open eye. She considered this from a variety of angles. Maybe she’d suffered partial blindness. This theory, she realized, could also explain the headache. The blinding headache, she thought, a flash of inspiration that almost made her smile until the slight upturn of her lips caused the pain to come roaring back like a hungry lion released from its cage.

  But then another possibility occurred to Fred. Perhaps it wasn’t blindness at all. And there didn’t seem to be anything obstructing her view that she could make out from here. So maybe it was a matter of positioning.

  When it finally came to her, she wanted to smack herself. Except not.

  I can only see a small area of floor, she thought, because I’m facedown on that selfsame floor.

  This theory had the taste of truth to it. Of course, as with any theory, it was only a hypothesis until it was tested and proven. Testing it, though, would mean more motion, hence more pain. And I’m not sure I can really take more pain without screaming, she thought, and if I screamed, that would really really hurt and then I’d just have to hope I could scream my head off, because I definitely wouldn’t want it anywhere near me.

  While she considered this predicament, she fell asleep again.

  She was remembering a day, a long, long time ago. She had just been a little girl, nine, she thought. Maybe she had recently turned ten, or was about to. Somewhere in that zone, though, she knew. She had been outside under a bright, hot Texas sun. The sky was a gigantic, inverted bowl of pure blue, cloudless, the color of jeans worn to the point of perfect softness, of the awning at Fields’ Drugs, where they had the old-fashioned soda fountain and made the world’s best milk shakes, of the sea off South Padre Island, where her parents sometimes took her on vacation. The horizon was perfectly flat; the only thing that stuck up above the horizon line in any direction was the house her grandparents lived in. She knew that beyond the house there was a barn and a silo and a corral, but from this angle they were hidden, invisible. She also knew that beyond the miles and miles of fields there were roads, and towns, and even big cities, pulsing with life. There were oceans out there, and other continents, other countries, other people. And still farther, even beyond those things but no more invisible, from here, there were other stars and those stars had planets, and because, as it had been explained to her, there were billions upon billions of stars, that meant there were billions upon billions upon billions of planets, and somewhere in all those planets there might well be one with life on it, and if there was then there would likely be a little girl like her, looking out and thinking about other little girls, far, far away.

  She gazed up into that blue, blue sky, trying to pierce the veil of color, to see through the blue. There’s nothing blocking my way, she thought, nothing like the
farmhouse between me and the planets, just sky, and sky’s transparent, isn’t it? She stared into the sky and started to turn in slow, lazy circles, hands out for balance. As she turned she felt her summer dress lift, like a ballerina’s, with each circuit she made, and as she turned faster it lifted faster and it made her laugh. So she kept turning, staring straight up over her head and spinning, arms flashing at her sides, eyes trying to tear away all the space above her, until finally she became so dizzy that she fell down and struck the back of her head on a jagged bit of stone sticking up through the rich Texas earth. It hurt, and she thought maybe she was bleeding, but she couldn’t check it because the world was spinning in an irregular pattern, practically looping around on itself and doing its best to throw her off, and until the world slowed down she had to hang on with both hands.

  By the time she made it back to her grandparents’ farmhouse, her scalp was matted with her own blood and her summer dress was ripped in several places and she’d even been a little bit sick, out in the fields. But her head would heal and her dress could be mended and her hair would wash, and she had made a very important discovery about herself and her world.

  “When I grow up,” she had announced that night at dinner, “I want to be a scientist. I want to be the kind of scientist who can figure out stuff, like stuff about the world. Why does it turn so fast and why can’t you see through the blue part and how are we down here connected to people we don’t even know exist on other worlds?”

  She didn’t know it at the time, but she had just discovered physics. The study of the world, why it is the way it is, what holds it together.

  And it all started, she remembered, when she hit her head on a rock.

  Fred knew there was a reason she was remembering that day, and after thinking about it for a while decided that it must be because of the pain in her head. She realized that she’d been asleep, and dreaming of that time, but here she was awake again and that pain was still there. Maybe a fraction of a fraction of a percent better than it had been, but still bad enough. She considered for a moment, and decided that she’d better risk opening her eye again. Maybe the hardwood floor had been the dream part. Maybe when she opened her eye now she’d be on South Padre Island, with an ice-cream cone in her hand and the headache would be an ice-cream headache and her dad would rub the back of her head and it would all be better.