by R. L. King
Sam shook his head. “No, not here. Dr. Millroy said he’s lost a few test subjects, and it wouldn’t be safe to start killing people here. Can’t draw that kind of attention to ourselves, especially not this close to the end.”
Trin nodded reluctantly: the idea fascinated the Other inside her and piqued her own sadistic curiosity, and she made a mental note to get hold of some of the substance later. For experimental purposes, of course. “Yeah, I guess. We’ll talk more about it later, after. You’re right: I can cause my own fear if I need to, but it might be fun to play with, after this is all over. Save me some, okay?”
“Of course,” Sam said mildly, closing up the bag.
Trin didn’t sit back down. “I guess I should probably go talk to Aisha and make sure she’s got everything finalized. Just make sure nobody backs out. We need everybody on the same page.”
“Not a problem,” he said.
Given the fluid nature of relationships in the dusty fishbowl that was Burning Man, Jason wasn’t sure whether Luna would even want to see him again when he stopped by her camp bearing a six-pack he’d liberated from the cooler back at his own camp. He didn’t think anybody would mind: Stone wouldn’t touch anything this plebeian, after last night Verity didn’t want to look at alcohol again, and Sharra had her own stash in her and Verity’s tent. In any case, he more than half expected to find Luna hooked up with someone else.
Instead, she was kicked back in a hammock strung between an RV and the back of her camper. Her face lit up in a big grin when she saw him. “Hey, you,” she called languidly. “You came back.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked, returning the grin and holding up the six-pack. “I come with refreshments, too.”
“He’s cute and he brings beer,” she said, chuckling. “Can I keep him?”
“He’s all yours,” Jason assured her. There was a definite odor of the heathen weed hanging around the camp, but for once he decided it didn’t matter. He’d realized early on that if he limited his choice of potential companions this week to only those who didn’t do at least a little weed, he’d be stuck with mostly little girls and old women—and even the old women weren’t a sure bet. “I wanted to come by last night, but—”
“Don’t worry, baby,” she said with a mellow wave of her hand. “You do your thing, I’ll do my thing, and if our things match up, then—” she waggled suggestive eyebrows at him, reaching out to run her hand down his chest, “—we’ll do our thing together.”
Jason was fine with that. His thing and her thing had matched up quite nicely the night before last, and he was hoping that they might do so again tonight. He handed her a beer and popped one for himself. “How come you’re just hanging around here and not out seeing the sights?”
“Oh, I just got back,” she said. “My friends are out doing something—they might come back later tonight, but I doubt it. I was just gonna have a little something to eat and go see if I can find anything fun to do. Want to join me?”
“Sounds awesome,” he said. He didn’t add, as long as some of the fun things involve you out of your sundress, but he didn’t think he needed to. She seemed quite on board with that idea.
They got back to the camper several hours later. It was a little too chilly for the hammock now, so they headed back inside with the rest of the six-pack. “Mmm,” she said, snuggling into him. “This is nice. You never told me—what do you do in the real world?”
“Oh, this and that,” he said. “Mostly I help manage an Indian restaurant in the Bay Area.”
“Oh, wow,” she said. “I love Indian food. I’m from Berkeley. Grad student. Fine arts.” She leaned in and kissed him, getting her hand under his tank top and shoving it up.
“Mmm, nice,” he murmured. “What kind of fine arts? Wait, let me guess. You’re—a painter.”
“No, silly.” She finished getting his shirt off and tossed it aside. “Dance.”
“Mmmm,” he said again. “Yeah, I should have guessed that.”
“I love dancing,” she said. “I love music, and just moving.” To demonstrate, she began writhing against him. “Do you like moving, baby?”
“Oh, yeah…” His voice was sounding husky, so he gave up using it and set about communicating another way.
Afterward, she lay with her head on his shoulder, stroking his chest. “You know,” she said, “I could get to like this…”
He nodded. “Yeah, me too.” He paused, unsure of whether he should continue. “You know...”
“What?” She kissed his chin.
“Well—Berkeley isn’t that far from Mountain View. Maybe we could get together sometime—if you want, I mean. No pressure.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “Maybe you could teach me to dance. I warn you, it’ll be a challenge.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said slyly. “You move just fine, by me.” She stretched, arching her back like a cat and giving him a most pleasant view. “Hey, you want to see me dance?”
“Right now?” he asked, intrigued.
“You are funny,” she murmured. “No, silly. Tomorrow night, at the Burn. I’m part of this big dance thing.”
“Nice,” he said, stroking her back. “What kind of big dance thing?”
“Oh, just something they’re putting together. I got recruited for it a couple of days ago.”
“Recruited? I thought things around here were a lot more, you know, spontaneous.”
She nodded. “It’s mostly spontaneous, but there’s some choreography to it too. Lots and lots of people, all moving together. Kind of weird, though.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah. The steps are weird. The lady running it said it was really important that we got them exactly right, or it would ruin the energy, you know? I can dig that. Hey, it’s her groove. You should see the steps, though—sooo precise. Never seen a dance like that. It’s like some kind of rain dance or ritual or something. It—” She cocked her head at him as he suddenly stiffened. “What?”
His gaze locked on her. “Did you say—like a ritual?”
“Yeah…” She slipped her arms around him and pulled him back toward her. “Come on, baby, it’s no big deal. I’m not a devil-worshipper or anything. They’re not sacrificing any goats. It’s just a trippy little dance to see off the Man.”
Jason pushed himself up to a sitting position. “Hey,” he said, “I gotta go. I just remembered something I need to do, and it’s important. Can I come back later?”
She frowned, her forehead wrinkling. “Now? Can’t it wait?” Her voice was husky with frustration. She tried to pull him down. “Come on…we’ll have a quickie.”
Jason sighed, frustrated himself, wanting it every bit as much as she did. What she’d said was probably nothing. He probably wouldn’t even be able to find Stone to tell him. But if it wasn’t, and he let it go— “Can you tell me what the lady running the dance looks like?”
“Why are you suddenly so interested?” Her expression was somewhere between suspicious and confused.
He leaned in and kissed her forehead. “I kinda need to talk to her about something. Can you tell me? And where to find her?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know where to find her. The rehearsals are all the way over on the other side, by the edge. There’s another one tomorrow, if you want to talk to her then.”
Damn. Tomorrow’s probably too late if this is important. “Just tell me what she looks like, okay?”
“Baby—”
“Please,” he said. “Tell me, and then we’ll have our quickie. I’ll come back later, I promise.”
“Fine, fine,” she said, not sounding happy about it. “She’s black, around forty or so, hot for her age. Really short hair. I just don’t know why you want to—”
“Thanks,” he said, leaning in to kiss her. As he did, his brain suddenly presented him with a thought: what if Luna’s Evil? Oh, shit…
He kept his promise, but he was on his guard the whole time, and he could tell she wasn’t satisfied. Damn
it—this better be worth it, Al, he thought sourly as he said his goodbyes and hurried off.
Trin headed out to find Aisha, but she’d barely gotten out of her own camp when Aisha herself came hurrying toward her. “I need to talk to you,” the dancer said, glancing around like she expected someone to be following her.
Trin’s eyes narrowed. What the hell was it now? “Let’s walk,” she said, not wanting to take Aisha back to the tent where Sam was still fiddling with his little vials. They started off toward the center of the playa, pretending to be taking in the sights. “Tell me there’s nothing wrong now, this close.”
“Not sure,” Aisha said. “It might be nothing. Not taking chances, though.” She told Trin about the soldier and the story he’d told about the two new dancers and the man with the “art project.”
“Shit,” Trin grunted under her breath. Aisha was right: it could be nothing more than a couple of stoner hippie chicks seeing something they didn’t understand. But with Stone and the others out there somewhere— “You’re sure they said the papers he had looked like ritual diagrams?”
Aisha nodded. “That’s what the soldier said. He said they thought the guy was part of the dance group.”
“Did he get anything about what he looked like? Where he is?”
“I don’t think it’s Stone, if that’s what you’re worried about. He said the guy’s maybe late 20s, blond, thin but buff, and tan.” She described the area where the soldier had mentioned the two had found his tent.
“Hmm…” Trin kept walking. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like him at all. And it doesn’t sound like his apprentice’s brother, either, not that he knows fuck-all about magic.” She let out a loud sigh. “I guess I should probably hunt him down, though, and see what he’s about. It’s always possible he’s using an illusion. And if he’s another mage maybe we can use him.”
Verity got down to business.
She finally felt better after her alcoholic adventure the previous night, and was on her own tonight: Sharra had camp duty for the next couple of hours. She’d taken one of the bikes (making sure to stuff a patch kit in her bag so as not to repeat Jason’s performance from the other night) and set off determined to locate some sign of the Evil.
It would certainly be convenient, she had often thought, if she could actually spot the Evil. Unfortunately, like mages, they blended invisibly with the general public unless they did something extraordinary, and even then it was difficult to tell. There were plenty of nasty people out there who weren’t possessed by extradimensional spirits. In fact, the Evil were even harder to spot than mages, because while mages didn’t normally show up even on magical sight, you could often find traces of arcane energy hovering around them if they’d been casting spells recently, or if they had any spells active on them. The Evil, on the other hand, were simply humans who were possessed, and the spirits inside them didn’t show up to magical sight. Stone had developed a method of detecting them, but it was so imprecise that all it would do in an area this small was verify that they were somewhere in the vicinity.
More problematic was Verity’s special power, and her difficulty in using it. It would make things infinitely easier if she could simply choose to eject an Evil spirit (she called it “evicting”) from a host, because except for the most powerful of their species, they could not survive for more than a handful of seconds without a host. If they were evicted without another suitable host nearby, they simply evaporated in a puff of grayish smoke. Verity was never certain whether they were destroyed or just sent back to their home plane, but for her purposes it didn’t matter. They were gone, and that was all that counted.
The problem was, she couldn’t do it on command. If an Evil-possessed individual were to walk up to her right now and greet her politely, the odds were considerably less than fifty-fifty that she’d be able to kick the spirit out of its host. As hard as she tried to get better control over her ability, it stubbornly insisted on only working when she felt threatened or endangered by the Evil. Genuinely threatened, that was: she couldn’t just manufacture fear where none existed. That was the way Forgotten powers worked: their own way. You didn’t control them, they just helped you out when they felt like you needed it.
Idly, she wondered if there were any Forgotten here. It seemed like a perfect kind of place for them: a haven for unconventional people who didn’t like to follow rules, full of other people who didn’t judge anything you did as long as you were cool to each other and respected the spirit of the Burn. She hadn’t noticed any signs of Forgotten symbols anywhere near any of the camps, but she hadn’t really been looking. Right now, she didn’t have time to make it a priority, either. It was already Friday night—the Burn would happen in less than twenty-four hours, and then the whole thing would be over. That meant that if the Evil were here and had anything planned, they’d have to pull it off between now and tomorrow night. Verity’s money was on sometime during the Burn, when the vast majority of the attendees would be focused on the same thing. It made sense.
Since she had no chance of finding the Evil, her best bet was to try finding their mages. They had to have at least one, if they were planning a big magical event. Even if they were wrong and the Evil weren’t responsible for the disappearance of Pia Brandt, they couldn’t even hope to build a portal or conjure a spirit without some heavy-duty magical punch. That kind of punch couldn’t hide forever—not from someone determined to find it.
She swung off the bike and moved out of the flow of traffic, laying it down and settling herself in the dust next to it. Switching to magical senses, she scanned the area in hopes of spotting a telltale glow that indicated a spell surrounding a tent or RV to indicate a ward, or one or more people glowing with magical energy.
She didn’t see a damn thing.
Frustrated, she got back up again and picked up the bike. At this rate, her search would take all night—if she could even finish it tonight. She couldn’t scan while riding; there were too many people moving too erratically, so shifting her awareness was just asking for an accident. On the other hand, if she took the bike back to the tent she’d waste precious time, and if she had to walk she’d barely cover a quarter of the playa before dawn. Even with the scans she and Sharra and Stone had done throughout the week, there were still big chunks of the territory they hadn’t covered yet.
She pondered: maybe she could catch a ride on the back of one of the mutant vehicles, and just magically scan as she went. She couldn’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t work; the zoned-out look that one got when using magical senses was mirrored in many of the drunk or high individuals wandering the playa, so she wouldn’t even look out of place. But it was still so slow. The decorated vehicles barely moved faster than a walking pace, stopped often, and had to negotiate their way past crowds of people who had little or no awareness of anything around them.
If only there was a way she could get some height, so she could scan a larger section of the playa at once. She could levitate—that was one of the earliest spells Stone had taught her when she started her apprenticeship—and she could turn herself invisible for brief times, but she’d never tried doing them together. She didn’t have anywhere near Stone’s raw power, and even he couldn’t hold a good invisibility spell for longer than a couple of minutes without tiring himself out. So how was she—
A slow grin spread across her face as she remembered an important bit of information that had eluded her.
She didn’t have Stone’s raw power normally. But they were sitting on a frickin’ convergence of ten ley lines! All week she’d felt the power thrumming through her, and found all the magic she’d attempted to be both easier and more powerful than she was normally able to accomplish. Stone was just commenting earlier in the week about how much more potent his abilities were—surely hers had increased proportionately.
She made up her mind before she could talk herself out of it. She rolled the bike over to a wooden stand where a bunch of people in green T-shirts were handing
out free power smoothies, asked one of them to keep an eye on it for a few minutes, then hurried off to find a secluded place.
Casting the spells was easy—much easier than she expected. Still, she didn’t count on having too much time before the invisibility spell fizzled, so she worked quickly. Invisibility first, levitation after, and seconds later she was zooming upward, high over the playa. She bit her lip, nervous, as she’d never gone up this high before and didn’t particularly like heights, but when she felt the spell slip she quickly got hold of her concentration and focused. She’d have to hurry.
Shifting to magical senses, she focused on one side of the three-quarter circle that made up the playa and swept her gaze around, starting on one side and working her way along the circle toward the other. Immediately a few areas lit up, indicating a magical presence around them. She spotted the glow of the wards around her group’s tents instantly: they were easily the brightest of what she saw. She didn’t have any way to write down their locations, so she focused on remembering where they were relative to their home base. There were five all together in addition to theirs: one on the far left side near the 9:00 street, two next to each other around 6:30, and two separate ones near the 3:00 party zone.
Beginning to feel the edges of fatigue, she decided not to try to pick one and levitate herself down toward it. The last thing she needed was for her invisibility spell to fail when she was ten feet off the ground and make a big impression on whoever saw her floating up there. She’d only gotten away with the levitating golf balls the other night because there were so many people that nobody could identify who was causing it, and half of them probably thought they were seeing things anyway.
She touched down, made sure nobody was looking, and dropped the spells. Then she reclaimed her bike and pedaled as quickly as she could back toward her tent so she could mark down the locations before she forgot them. After that, it would simply be a matter of determining an order and checking them out. If she hurried, she might be able to finish them all before dawn and report back to the others.