by Jenn Stark
“We do have a connection.” The fact that Nikki had gotten poisoned because she was with me made me feel far worse than the fact that someone out there had enough of my DNA that they could formulate the toxin specifically for me. Still, it wasn’t completely unreasonable. I’d spilled enough blood over the course of the past decade that someone paying attention could easily have taken advantage of it. And it wasn’t the main issue now.
I refocused on Nikki. “How in the hell did you manage to get sucked into the In Between?”
“Honestly, I’ve no idea. Brody told me that’s where you were heading off to, and I suppose I had it on the brain. I was drifting in and out of a half slumber, listening to the chirp of the monitors, when something took a turn. It was like I was trying to wake up but couldn’t, and every attempt I made to get closer to the light…”
“Nikki, never run toward the light. I thought you knew that,” I cracked, even as my voice wobbled.
She wasn’t listening to me anymore, however. “There was a light coming in from the doorway, I think…” Her voice grew softer, more indistinct as she tried to remember. “There was definitely a doorway, and it was filled with light, not just a sliver, but as if someone had pushed it wide. And I knew I had to get back to it, but like I said, I couldn’t. There was something in the way. First it felt like a sort of thick air and then it was bodies. Short and scrubby bodies with claws.” She shuddered. “Teeth too, I suppose. I flailed out and caught one of them, and the moment I felt the skin beneath my hand, I attempted to read its memories, and boom. There went my eyes.”
My own eyes recoiled in their sockets in sympathy. “That must’ve hurt.”
“It didn’t.” She shook her head. “Nothing hurts here, except the knowledge that you’re being hurt, if that makes sense. Because if you’re hurt, if you’re wounded, if you’re weak, you can’t get out.”
“Holy crap,” I muttered, trying to put together pieces of lore versus my own experiences in this nightmare called the In Between. “What kind of rule is that?”
She turned toward me, looking surprised. “I think that was something I managed to parse out from the garbled thoughts of the…whatever the hell those things were that were on me. Monkeys. They were like really fat, furry monkeys. Long arms, long fingers. And teeth. Definitely teeth.”
“Imps. They’re called imps.” I shivered, looking around. The chittering noise in the gloom, beyond the reach of my wings or whatever I was going to call them, had started getting…louder. “Magic is suppressed here, but I was able to call mine if I went deep enough. You managed to survive because you also dove down deep and didn’t give up. Both of us are pretty special people, but—”
“But we’re not the only ones who’ve ever figured that out. I don’t remember any near-death experiences that involved death monkeys, though. Everyone always seem to focus on the bright light. So we clearly took a wrong turn in here.”
“We definitely did.” I thought of the surging rock wall in the section of the In Between we’d raced through in Dublin. Clearly, there were a lot of creatures lurking in the darkness of the In Between that weren’t friendly toward humans. I’d need to be a lot more careful in the tomb passages, if I ever got back there. Which, given what I now knew about Miranda/Bartholomew, I expected I would.
Nikki swung her head as if seeing something that wasn’t there. “The light is important, though. It’s like—I mean, it’s obviously a doorway, but I couldn’t quite work out whether I only could go through that door, or if there were other doorways I could try, and then I thought I saw, I had to have seen…”
“More doors? More passages?” I’d run parts of this maze when trying to get to Simon and William. I understood her confusion all too well.
She nodded. “There were more. There were definitely more ways out, but where those ways led, I have no idea. And then the monkeys came. Which sort of took precedence.”
“They chased you deeper into these caves?”
“I didn’t want to go, I remember that now. I wanted you to find my doorway, if that makes sense. But once my sight went…” She shuddered. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been down here. It seems like a long time.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure time passes differently down here or up here or wherever the hell we are. But we need another of those doorways now.” I narrowed my eyes, staring around the gloom, my spiffy new wings twitching on my back. “Or do we?”
Nikki snorted. “Unless you want to deal with another attack of zombie monkeys, yeah. I’m pretty sure we do.”
“I don’t think so.” I held out my hand for Nikki, and she grasped me by the forearm. I drew her closer to me, under the canopy of my crackling wings. “Not anymore.”
“You realize you burn my clothes off me. I’m going to be showing up wherever the hell it is we’re going without proper attire.”
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” I said. “As long as you’re good rocking Celtic caftans.”
“Darling, I’ve done some of my best work in Celtic caftans.”
Grinning into Nikki’s beautiful, restored eyes, I destabilized.
Crackling out of the In Between was surprisingly successful, with a few caveats. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten about the enormous wings growing out of my back, which resulted in the process having far more of a sense of self-immolation as Nikki yelped in alarm until I managed to tuck them away, wincing as they melted back into my back. I didn’t know if they’d pop back out if I ever had need of them again, but, something else to add to the list of “what new fresh crazy is this?” It was getting to be a long list. We sizzled out of existence, then emerged once more in the middle of Miranda’s garden—accompanied by the sound of falling crockery.
“You…” Lily the cashier stood in front of a shattered teacup, her eyes bugging wide. I winced as I turned to Nikki—and yup. Totally naked, her hair a corona of short chestnut-red locks: Nikki’s real hair, wild and wonderful and free.
“We need some clothes,” I ordered, as if showing up in a Dublin shop with my shoulders on fire was completely normal. “Like, right now.”
Lily squeaked. “Of course, but—”
“No buts.” I turned to the door back into the shop, shoving it open. As I recalled, there was a complete side room filled with long, flowing shifts, hair accessories—even the obligatory fairy wings. “No wings,” I said, pushing Nikki inside.
“You suck the fun out of everything,” Nikki shot back before I closed the door on her.
I grinned and shook my head, then stepped back out into the courtyard. I looked back at Lily, who was still swiveling her head back and forth. “What?” I pressed. “What is it, what’s wrong?”
“Ah…Miss Wilde?”
Two members of the Irish police stood in the center of Miranda’s quaint little garden, staring at me.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Ah…hi there,” I said as I turned to face them more fully. “Any of you happen to know the time?”
They gaped at me another long moment, then the officer on the left, a tall, slender man with a hangdog expression and coal black hair, glanced at his watch. “Eleven thirty,” he said in a rough brogue. “What exactly did we just see?”
“Me crashing my own tea party?” I asked brightly. I eyed the shattered teacups. “I don’t suppose you have extra?”
“I’ll get more,” Lily chirped, desperate to make her escape. She vanished back inside before anyone could stop her. I wondered if she knew where Simon was, and I secretly hoped he’d managed to escape before the Garda had shown up. I knew Death had. You rarely caught Death unawares; she’d sort of cornered the market on that little trick.
Speaking of tricks, I had just left the In Between. “And the day? If you would?”
“April thirtieth,” the second Garda officer said, this one a stern, willowy blonde. At least she’d managed to keep hold of her teacup.
“Good, good,” I said. No time
at all had passed, apparently. That meant I still had more than twelve hours before Beltane started…plenty of time. No, really.
I gestured to the tables at the center of the garden. “You guys expecting other company, or do we have time to talk?”
“We have time,” the male Garda officer said curtly, and his sudden, unexpected animosity brought me up short, fraying the last of my nerves. “You don’t. We’ve just gotten word from Interpol that you’re in town, involved with Conal McCarthy’s proposed demonstration on St. Stephen’s Green. We’ll not tolerate any foolishness, and that’s a fact. We know your history, we know your organization, and we’re prepared to restrain you forcibly, if necessary. You should know—”
I didn’t mean to do it. I wanted to work with these people, and I wanted them to want to work with me. But the adrenaline of finding Nikki where I’d found her—looking as she had—was still sluicing off me like a waterfall, and my pulse was still jacked way too high.
Adding to that, I was tired of being treated like the ball boy of the Arcana Council, when I was arguably the whole damned team wrapped up in one.
I lifted a hand almost casually, overcome with the need to flick his words away like flies, and two things happened almost at once. Instead of my hand exploding with blue fire, it glowed once more with a steamy, rich crimson flame that undulated and whispered and scurried across the space between us. With a playful slap, it knocked the male officer’s cup out of his hand as he stood, transfixed. The cup toppled to the cobblestone path, shattering to bits. Neither officer moved for a moment…and then another moment…and then I realized they weren’t moving at all. I’d frozen them, exactly like I’d frozen the Emperor at the Council meeting. I couldn’t stop time, exactly, but I could stop a person or two. That was good to know.
I strolled past them, taking a seat at the table and leaning back, before I waved the smoky red flame away.
“Bill!” The female officer stared at her partner, then at the ground, then back at the space where I’d been. The male officer, presumably Bill, still stood frozen, but no longer through any effect I’d cast. Then he also snapped his gaze first to where I’d been, then to where I now sat, his face mottling with fury.
“It would seem that I do have time you don’t,” I said, patting the table. “Now, why don’t you sit down before we break more of Miranda’s tea set?”
As if drawn toward me on a string, the two officers made their way to the little table and perched gingerly in the chairs. “What the bloody hell is going on?” Bill demanded. “What sort of trick was that?”
“It’s not a trick, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I don’t mind going open kimono here, and there is a lot of information I can provide you in a very short period of time, but I want some assurances in return.”
He straightened, because I was finally speaking in a language he understood. “What sort of assurances?”
“You don’t persecute the Connected unless they harm someone else.”
“Connected,” he repeated with a sneer. “Now you sound like one of them.”
“I am one of them.”
“No—I mean the Neo-Celts and their acolytes, that’s what I’m talking about. Not you. You’re something else entirely, but we know that. We’ve been notified by Interpol about you, and we’re watching. We may not understand quite what to do with you yet, but we are aware that you exist. But you are an anomaly, Ms. Wilde, and anomalies can be compartmentalized. What we’re dealing with in McCarthy’s organization is far more dangerous.”
“You think so,” I deadpanned, but Bill was on a roll.
“The idea that there are more people like you, lots more, the kind of people who can take over a place with specific skills that no one else has? That’s not going to go well. Because those are also the kind of people who get other people killed.”
“A couple of key notes here,” I said, reasonably enough. Despite my little temper tantrum, I needed to keep myself reined in. Again, I didn’t have to like the Garda, but I did need to work with them, at least for another several hours. “There are more of us than you think there are, although arguably there aren’t more than a handful with my kind of abilities.”
A strange, dangerous light flickered in the Garda officer’s eyes, and maybe because I’d had a recent jolt of Nikki, I knew what he was thinking. Not in the sense of reading his memories, but knowing the language that was running through his mind. I speak fluent asshat.
“The trouble with the idea that you’re forming in your brain, Officer, is that there is that handful. And I can assure you, this handful of people, properly motivated, could blast the crap out of most of the developed world. Which will leave you with a much bigger problem. So you should know, you can’t neutralize me. You can’t simply take down the people you think are the mightiest Connected in a surgical strike. You can’t even launch a campaign of suppression, because your biggest nightmare happens to be the Neo-Celts’ fondest dream: waking up the Connecteds who don’t realize what lies within them. So the more attention you place on the viability of ordinary humans being special, the more you open a Pandora’s box you’re not going to be able to shut again.”
“Interpol isn’t the only government agency tracking this,” Bill said, changing tacks. “We’re all watching you—you and these Connected types. You can’t just go around waving your hands and claiming you have powers. It doesn’t work like that.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t,” I acknowledged. “But we don’t have time to discuss exactly how it does work. Right now, I mainly need for you to stay out of my way while I neutralize the very real threat that the Neo-Celts represent in the next twenty-four hours.”
“Just because you can toss a little crockery around doesn’t make you God,” the female Garda officer interjected, clearly still frosty over my display of psychic abilities. I shot her a glance.
“The trouble with that, ma’am, is that you have no idea what I’m capable of, because news flash, I don’t either. And while that makes for a somewhat fraught situation on my own part, it should make you very scared.”
She stared levelly back at me. “Are you threatening us?”
“Not at all. You’d both already be dead if I swung that way.”
“I think this little conference is at an end,” Bill said, his tone icing up. “You insist we cannot tell you what to do, but neither can you go around telling us what to do.”
I sighed. This was why I should never be involved in negotiations. “I’m not telling you to do anything, I’m suggesting you reconsider your stance on McCarthy’s group. Until they prove otherwise, maybe treat them like ordinary citizens. Good people trying to figure out who and what they are, which you could say about most of us.”
“Those good people are currently preparing demonstrations this very day that could easily turn violent and could become a rallying cry for similar demonstrations around the world,” Bill responded flatly. “We need that like a hole in the head.”
I lifted my brows. “Today? Beltane isn’t until tonight.”
“I’m aware of that, Ms. Wilde. But we’ve been hearing from Interpol that movement has already started in the streets of a dozen major cities. It looks like they’re starting early.”
Conal, you sneaky bastard. “Well then, let me do my job,” I said. “My job is to remove threats to the Connected community. What Conal is planning—today, apparently—could present a viable threat. Or it could be a peaceful self-help movement that sputters out almost before it gets started. Do you really want to exhaust your people chasing down a pipe dream that might never prove to be more than just words?”
Bill dismissed my words with a wave of his hand. “You’re talking in circles. First you say the Neo-Celts represent the risk of inciting a global community of psychics, next you’re saying Conal McCarthy is no more dangerous than a Girl Scout leader urging her troop to sell cookies. Which is it?”
“I don’t know,” I prot
ested, as reasonably as I could. “Because I haven’t confronted the man. I need to do that, first. Pretty much today, it would seem. But I’d like to do it without staring down the barrel of one of your guns.”
We argued back and forth like that for another ten minutes, and it was all I could do not to pressure the man’s mind magically. I wasn’t sure how that attempt would go, but I could definitely understand the temptation. It was that temptation that scared me more than anything else that’d happened today. I didn’t know where this curious path would lead, but I already wasn’t liking it.
Finally, Bill pushed back from the table a second time. “We have to go.”
“We haven’t resolved anything.”
“We won’t resolve anything. We will watch Conal and his people, and we will wait, and the moment we decide they’re a threat, we will act. Whether that is on your timetable or ours is irrelevant to us. What matters is that the threat is neutralized before it gets out of control.”
“Of course,” I murmured. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it likely was already out of control.
“Where will you be?” Bill asked me abruptly. “You should know we have surveillance on you.”
In an epic effort of maturity, I didn’t snap back the first thought that came into my mind. Or the fourth or fifth or even the ninth. The tenth one, however, managed to slip through. “I’ll be sure to say hello as I lose them.”
The door to the courtyard opened, and Lily finally emerged again, distinctly tea-free. “Sir?” she asked tremulously. “There are some people here who need to see you. They say it’s urgent.”
“Of course.” Bill nodded at me, and together, he and his partner made their way to the door. I sincerely hoped Nikki had fully clothed herself by now, but given that she hadn’t made another appearance, I suspected she was availing herself of all the woo Miranda/Bartholomew had to offer. I started after the officers as they disappeared through the front door, but hesitated, letting it swing shut instead. That way lay surveillance I would need to evade, and even though I’d be able to accomplish that in short order, it still was a tedium I didn’t mind putting off for a moment. And the garden seemed unreasonably serene, the very air fluttering with promise.