by R. L. King
The Other inside her didn’t need her to explain her idea to it: it was getting the thoughts as fast as they came to Trin. And when the idea was fully formed, she felt its approval.
Smiling, she covered the hypos and tucked them away in her little bag, swapped her jeans and T-shirt for something more alluring, touched up her make-up (no illusions this time—too much chance of detection) and set off in search of Stone.
This was going to be fun.
Jason checked in at the tent only a few minutes after Trin left, though of course he had no way to know that. “You seen Al?” he asked Sharra.
She put her book aside. “Yeah, he stopped by a little bit ago. Not sure where he was going, though—he didn’t say. Something wrong?”
He sat down in another chair. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He told her about what Luna had said about the dance that looked like a ritual, and the fortyish black woman who was in charge of it. “I just wanted to find him and tell him about it. What do you think? Does that sound like something that we should be worried about?”
She shrugged. “No clue. Those kinds of rituals aren’t my strong suit. It could just be some kind of hippie rain dance or something. That kind of thing goes on around here all the time.”
“Yeah, probably. But she made a point of saying they had to follow the steps really precisely. Even if it’s nothing, Al will kill me if I don’t tell him about it so he can check it out. You see V around anywhere?”
“Not for quite a while. I think she was gonna go look for signs of magic around the area. I don’t expect her back till dawn.”
Jason sighed, regretting not for the first time that in their flurry of planning and packing, they’d neglected to bring along radios or walkie-talkies to keep in communication. “Okay. I guess I better get started hunting for Al, then. Tell him about this stuff if he comes back, okay, and that I’m looking for him?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said.
Stone thought that he might be more useful if he headed back to his tent and spent some more time studying Pia Brandt’s papers and Stefan Kolinsky’s ritual instructions. Despite his focused scrutiny of the area using both magical and mundane sight, he had found no signs of any magical activity, nor anyone who looked like Pia Brandt.
Not having any idea what the rest of the Evil looked like was proving to be a massive disadvantage when it came to trying to locate them. He wished again that he’d brought along an Evil detector, even if the only thing it did was set his mind at ease that they were actually here.
The temptation to just give up the search for a while and see if he could track down Wendy and Rosie for another mutual massage was strong: his shoulders and upper back ached from the tension of constant searching, and he thought he might have picked up a sunburn earlier in the day despite his liberal application of suntan lotion. The British, he decided, were not meant to be in the sun. He was glad, at any rate, that he’d grabbed a shirt from his tent when he’d stopped by; as effective as the disguise might have been, it was getting a bit chilly out here for it.
He stopped a moment outside a tent manned by a group of athletic young people doing some sort of highly flexible acrobatic act involving chairs, poles, and hoops. They moved with fluid grace, and had attracted quite a crowd gathered around to watch the show. He scanned them for magic, thinking they might have powers of a more physically based nature, but saw no telltale glow around either the performers or the crowd.
“Wow,” said a voice behind him. “I’d break every bone in my body if I tried that.”
He turned to see a woman standing near him. She was tall and blonde, a few years younger than he was, with intelligent green eyes that sparkled with amusement as she shifted her gaze between him and the performers. She smiled when he looked at her.
He returned the smile. “I think they’re boneless,” he said. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“Probably,” she said, laughing. “I’m Tanya, by the way. And you look kind of lost. Don’t tell me, let me guess: you’re here with friends who talked you into it, and you can’t wait until it’s over so you can get back to civilization.”
“Spike. Is it that obvious?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I’m getting good at spotting the type,” she admitted. “Plus, I kind of am the type, myself.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “I’m from the Bay Area. Usually I work in an office, but a couple of girlfriends convinced me to come along. ‘It’ll be fun,’ they said.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’ve got dust in places I don’t even want to talk about. I think I’d give my next five paychecks for a nice hot bath right about now.”
He chuckled. “Believe me, I sympathize.” The acrobats had now stacked a series of precariously balanced chairs and one of them was climbing to the top of the stack. “Bay Area, you said? What part?”
“West San Jose.” Both her eyebrows went up. “Are you from that area too?”
“Palo Alto,” he said, nodding. “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if half the people here weren’t from somewhere in that vicinity.”
“You’re probably right,” she said, still smiling. She turned her attention back to the acrobats, and applauded with enthusiasm when the climber managed to make it to the top of the stack and perch there with uncanny balance.
Stone watched the acrobats too, but he split his attention between them and Tanya. She looked somehow familiar, but he couldn’t place where he’d seen her before. Something about her eyes. He did a surreptitious scan for magic but found none: she had no spells active on her, nor any magical items. He chided himself for his suspicion and focused back on the acrobats until they finished their act.
As the crowd members applauded, beginning to dissipate and move off in various directions, Tanya smiled at him again. “It was nice meeting you, S. Always encouraging to find another reluctant Burner.”
“Indeed,” he agreed. He thought about inviting her back to his tent for a while, but Sharra was probably still there, and it would be awkward, especially after the scene with Wendy and Rosie.
“Hey,” she said, almost as if reading his mind, “Maybe this is too pushy, but would you like to come back to my RV for a little while? I’ve got this killer six-pack of microbrew that I’ve been saving for the right moment. I was starting to think I might have to take it back home with me.”
Stone pondered. He needed to be getting on about his search for the Evil—but he’d been searching for them for the past several nights with no success. He decided he could spare an hour or so, especially given that Tanya wasn’t that far from him back in what he was increasingly thinking of as ‘the real world.’ If they hit it off, he could consider pursuing something with her once they were back home. If so, at least something positive might come out of this trip.
“I’d like that,” he said. “I can’t stay long, though—still have a few things I need to finish tonight. I—er—promised my friends.”
“No problem,” she said. “C’mon. It’s not far from here. We can have a drink, warm up a little, and see what happens from there.”
Stone glanced at his watch. He still had plenty of time, especially if he used a levitation spell later to get some height on the search. He smiled, nodded, and fell into step next to her.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Friday
Verity’s frustration grew. Her search was, if anything, proving less fruitful as she went along. After leaving the two adjoining camps of the group that included the young party mages, she set out for the east side of the playa to check out the two camps she’d spotted over there
As she pedaled, she continued trying to scan the crowd for Dr. Brandt, but had a strong suspicion that if the German portal researcher was here at all, the Evil were keeping her well under wraps to prevent her from being recognized. And if that were true and she wasn’t actively using magic (which she wouldn’t need to do if all she was doing was working out scientific diagrams for portal construction), then Verity didn’t
see any way she or any of her friends would be able to find her.
Discouraged, she began to let her mind explore the possibility that they might fail: that the Evil were, in fact, right here under their noses and would be able to carry out whatever plan they’d been carefully setting up. That they would be able to somehow pull off a massive ritual to bring a permanent portal into being and flood the Earth with Evil spirits, or summon some kind of super-powerful entity that would scoop up the Evil from their own dimension and plop them down here.
She didn’t understand how either of those two plans would work: Stone was right when he commented that, despite her clear and demonstrable intelligence, her understanding of magic was more on a natural, innate level. As much time as he spent trying to explain the complex mathematical formulae required to add new spells and techniques to the magical body of work, she struggled to get her mind around them. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the math—she’d always been good at math in school. It just didn’t seem to her to be the proper way to do things.
Maybe that was why she was so good at things like healing spells, while Stone excelled at the kind of magic where you had to be able to hold multiple patterns in your mind at once and manipulate them. To Verity, magic didn’t seem like it was about manipulation, but about working with the inherent magical forces that suffused everything in the world. Either way, though, she didn’t have to understand what the Evil were trying to do—she just had to help stop it.
If they could even find it.
What if the Evil did succeed? How would it change the world as they knew it? When the two unstable portals—the ones they’d destroyed—existed, they let through a more or less steady flow of Evil, interspersed with intermittent periods where they had to “recharge” before they could begin functioning again. If the Evil’s plan this time was to create a permanent portal—probably one that worked in both directions—then would she and the others even have a chance of destroying it? No doubt the Evil would guard it with everything they had, and with a free and constant influx of new recruits coming over, it wouldn’t be at all hard for them to infiltrate the military, the highest echelons of politics, and the top levels of business and industry. Once they had their power bases firmly in hand, it wouldn’t be long at all before they cordoned off the entire area surrounding the portal and shot anyone who got close to it. If all of that happened, even if Stone was able to pull together a large group of mages to respond, she doubted they’d be able to do anything effective against it.
And once they had this portal up, what was to stop them from setting up more?
She shivered, and not just from the growing chill in the air. Unpleasant thoughts, for sure.
An even more unpleasant one popped into her brain and shocked her: Obviously Dr. Pia Brandt was integral to the Evil’s plan. Would they need her to pull it off? Had she done everything they needed her to do already, or would they be unable to proceed if she wasn’t there? If so, and if Verity were able to find her—what then? If she couldn’t evict her Evil because her Forgotten power wouldn’t cooperate…would she have the courage to kill her outright? Certainly she had the power: her offensive capabilities had grown stronger over the last few months, and Stone had finally taught her the lighting spell he’d been promising. If she could catch Dr. Brandt by surprise, she had the means to kill her, or at least put her out of action long enough that she might as well be dead.
But could she risk killing do it?
Even to save the world from the Evil?
She didn’t know. Killing in self-defense was one thing, but doing it in cold blood seemed too much like murder for her tastes. She wondered if Stone could do it—and decided that he probably could. She wasn’t sure how that thought, or the fact that it had come to her so quickly, made her feel.
As she kept up her slow pace, gaze swiveling back and forth as she scanned the faces of the people around her on the way to her next search location, her thoughts turned to Stone. When she had discovered she was a mage—when he had discovered it, in fact—she hadn’t had any experience with magic or the supernatural side of the world. To her, a seventeen-year-old girl who had only recently come off a horrific period of insanity that had stolen most of her teenage years, Stone had seemed like a lifeline in a raging, uncertain sea. Confident, powerful, and seemingly endlessly knowledgeable about both the practice of magic and the society in which it operated, he had graciously agreed to take her on as an apprentice when she’d asked him to. He’d even offered to introduce her to other mages who might be willing, so she didn’t have to feel like she wasn’t given a choice. But no, at that point she had been through what felt like hell with both him and Jason, and the thought of doing her apprenticeship with anyone else had been out of the question. Besides, he had known her mother, even if she herself had not, and her mother was the reason she was a mage at all.
Stone had been—and was—a good teacher. There was no question about that. She was sometimes amazed at how fast her training was progressing; he seemed willing to go as fast or as slow as she wanted to, as long as she worked hard. That was the only sin as far as Alastair Stone was concerned: he didn’t mind if you didn’t get something, and would patiently explain it as many times as he needed to until you understood, but slacking pissed him off. She’d tried it a couple of times when she’d been tired and unwilling to work, and the resulting shots from his laser-like glare were enough to get her back on track.
So yeah, he was a good teacher. But lately—and she almost felt guilty whenever this thought entered her head—she’d been feeling increasingly like their styles weren’t as compatible as she thought they were. Hell, before she hadn’t even had a “style”—she’d been like a baby bird who eagerly gobbled up all the bits of knowledge he had fed her. But as she’d grown as a mage, both in power and in her own knowledge, she began to realize that her feeling for magic was less related to wrestling it to her will and more to feeling it around her like a fish would feel the currents of a river.
She’d tried explaining it to Stone a few times, but her words always got tangled up and he, while accepting that what she was saying was true (“magic is different for everyone,” he’d told her more than once), didn’t seem any more comfortable with her style than she was with his. It didn’t mean they couldn’t work together—obviously. But during her time away from him when she was back east with Sharra, she had discovered that her girlfriend’s somewhat “hippy-dippy” (Sharra’s own words) style was closer to hers than Stone’s was. That was what had started her thinking.
What this all meant, she had no idea. Just something to file away for later. Right now, she needed to focus on what she was doing. She picked up her pace a bit, maneuvering the bike through the throngs of people and hoping that she’d find something useful at the next site.
Tanya had a neat little motorhome next to a camper and a pair of tents on the other side of the playa from Stone’s camp. He smiled as he spotted the bumper sticker from a rental company on the back of the RV. “You had better luck than I did, I see.”
“How so?” She dug a key out of her bag and opened the door, motioning him inside.
“My friends and I rented one of these, but it broke down on the way. Damned inconvenient. Fortunately, they’re far more adept at this sort of thing than I am, and had insisted that we bring tents. Otherwise—” He shook his head, spreading his hands in a gesture of I don’t know what we’d have done.
“That sucks,” she said sympathetically. “At least you’re getting the ‘full Burning Man experience.’” Her tone and finger quotes suggested that she didn’t think any more of such a thing than he did. “I’ve heard that especially for your first time, you’re cheating if you don’t sleep in a tent and try to live as simply as you can.” She snorted. “No, thanks. I like my creature comforts. And speaking of creature comforts—” She motioned for him to sit down on the sofa, opened the small refrigerator, and pulled out a couple of frosted brown bottles. She popped the tops off both,
handed him one and sat down next to him, holding hers up. “To—being dust-free.”
He chuckled. “And proper showers,” he added, clinking his bottle into hers. He took a long drink—it was cold and tasted wonderful. “So,” he said, “You work in an office, do you?”
She nodded. “Insurance. I’m kind of an office manager. I make sure everybody’s doing what they’re supposed to be doing and that we don’t run out of staples and copier paper. All very exciting. What about you?”
“I’m a teacher,” he said.
“Really? What do you teach?”
“Sort of—anthropology,” he said. He wasn’t sure how ‘Occult Studies’ would go over; even if he wasn’t in disguise, women tended to look at him funny and find reasons to vacate the premises when he admitted his real area of expertise. He usually tried to keep it vague until he and the woman in question had a chance to determine if they were compatible.
“Interesting,” she said, leaning back and looking out the RV’s front window. She took a drink of her beer and reached up to flip off the overhead light. “That’s better,” she said. “The lights in this thing are a little harsh. Plus everybody can see in unless you put the curtains up around the windows.”
Stone didn’t mind at all. He leaned back and smiled. This was the first chance he’d had to relax since Wendy and Rosie had happened by his tent. He wasn’t fooling himself: that whole thing had been nothing more than a nice, mutually pleasurable diversion, and he wouldn’t have let it go much further even if Verity and the others hadn’t blundered in on it. Rosie and Wendy had been far too young and—well, uninhibited—for him. But with Tanya he felt more comfortable: she was closer to his age, definitely attractive, and seemed intelligent. He just wished he could shake the feeling that he’d met her somewhere before.
He turned to her, studying her as best he could in the dimness without being obvious about it. She had short blonde hair, a strong face, and wore a long-sleeved, scoop-neck knit shirt and tight jeans. He decided he might be getting her confused with Sharra, as the two of them did share a general resemblance. That had to be it.