by C. T. Adams
Lucas made a low sound deep in his chest that would cause most lesser Sazi to grovel at his feet, and power crackled around him as he stalked forward, enough to make the lamp flicker. Human lips pulled back from his teeth in a very inhuman gesture, and the air suddenly reeked of anger, power, and fear. “You have no concept of what is at stake here. How dare you think you can stand in judgment of us when you don’t have a goddamn clue what’s been going on. You’ve wrapped yourself up in your warm little cocoon, leaving the dirty work for everybody else and now you think you have the right to act superior?”
Rick snarled and swatted at the stinging cloud of magic that Lucas attempted to throw around him. His own power flared with an electric heat as the last of his shields crumbled. The barriers between them melted. Rick felt Lucas’s rage, but also his guilt at the truth of the accusation, and the fear of some shadowy, overwhelming…something he knew was about to descend but couldn’t quite put a finger to.
It wasn’t until Amber spoke, her voice filled with wonder and sadness, that everyone began to understand just how powerful Rick’s gift of empathy had become, and just how hard it had become to control. “Rick, you weren’t just suffering from burnout when you left Wolven, were you?”
He struggled against the pull of emotions like a swimmer fighting a riptide. His voice sounded breathy when he replied, and dizziness overtook him.
“No. I needed to get far, far away from everyone—human and Sazi—until I could get control over my gift.” He turned to Lucas with panic probably plain on his face. “Do you have any idea what it was like? To know exactly how the victims of my questioning felt, because I was feeling it with them? You’re asking me to test my hard-won control out among the humans and possibly confront a woman I deserted when she needed me. What happens if I fail? What happens to everyone if the emotions overwhelm me or if I start projecting my own emotions outward? Do you have any idea of the panic I could cause in a major city? The riots I could start without even realizing it?”
Rick shuddered at the flash of a memory that brought him such pain, such shame. He slammed his shields down, cutting the flow of emotion to the others off an instant too late. The room was awash in pain and guilt, rage and fear.
“This,” Rick snarled back. “is why I live in the middle of godforsaken nowhere, and why I left Wolven. It’s also why you should probably find somebody else to run your little errand.”
Lucas glared at him, his massive hands clenched into fists. But it was Charles who spoke, the words hissed through his clenched teeth from emotions that he recognized weren’t his. “There isn’t anybody else.”
Rick scented the lie in the air between them, and gave the other man a look of utter disdain before snorting his disbelief.
“Fine.” Charles took a slow, deep breath. He very deliberately sat down, leaned back in the seat, and sighed. “There isn’t anybody else I’d expect to survive.”
That, at least, was the truth. But there was more going on here than anybody was saying.
“You do realize that Josette—” Rick stopped to correct himself, “That is, Aspen…may have disappeared by choice? What if she saw all this and realized that she was a danger to the rest of the seers? Or that she needed to get here to be with the others? What if she’s on her way to us?”
Lucas nodded. “We’ve considered that. It’s why we need to send someone to her that she trusts. I’m not certain that the ways things are right now, she’ll trust any of the rest of us.”
Rick picked up his cup and took a long pull of the nearly cold coffee before setting it back onto the end table. “If I agree to do this, and I’m not saying I will, I’d need to know everything she’s liable to be seeing that would spook her enough to make her take off.”
Lucas was bleeding suspicion and raised his own shields until Rick couldn’t feel him anymore. He’d been careful to put on the Wolven cologne when he went outside earlier to check the SUV with Bruce, so his scent didn’t give away his mood, but he’d forgotten just how easy it was for Rick to read him. The old wolf’s expression grew flat and impersonal. “You’ll be told everything you need to know.”
Rick shook his head. “Not good enough.”
The two men stared at each other across the room. The silence thickened and magic filled the air. The temperature rose until sweat beaded each man’s brow. Rick knew Lucas could beat him. Hell, anyone in the room probably could. But he didn’t care. He wouldn’t back down. This was too important. Josie was too important. If they were going to use his relationship with her as a tool to get her to cooperate, he wanted to be damned sure it was for a good cause. He’d seen too much, done too much to simply trust anyone—especially those in the Sazi hierarchy.
“Mon Dieu!” Amber spat the words out and the air crackled around her. A French accent filled her voice, the same thing that used to happen to Josette when she was too stressed. “Time iz too short for theez. Just tell him, Charles, or I swear to the heavens that I will!”
Lucas made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat, but Charles just sighed with resignation. Apparently, he knew exactly what his wife was capable of. “If we don’t find Aspen in five days, every seer in the world will be dead. Within a week after that, the council will fall. After that, the remaining Sazi and humans alike will all be nothing more than cannon fodder, as something unimaginable—and I don’t use that word lightly, it’s hidden even to the best of us—sweeps over the world like a plague.”
Rick stared into the other man’s eyes. The intensity of his belief was a thrum like a bass drum that pounded at his temples. “How in the hell did it come to this?”
“Whoever we’re dealing with is good. Very good. They’ve exploited every weakness we have to the point where I don’t know who to trust.” Lucas rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “In fact, it’s so fucked up we haven’t even got a clue as to the extent of the mess. Worse still, we don’t know who we’re fighting.”
Rick’s eyes widened. “I can’t believe Fiona let it get this far. I mean, whatever faults she may have, she was one hell of a good agent.”
Lucas’s flat, cold statement had enough truth inside to chill his blood. “Not good enough. Not nearly good enough for this.”
Charles sighed. “Someone has apparently been planning this for decades, possibly centuries.” He shuddered and was forced to steady himself against the nearest wall. Pain rolled off him in waves, but he fought through it. “Another vision is trying to come, but it can’t get through the block. It hurts like a son of a bitch.”
It was the pain that did it. Rick probably would have done it for Josie anyway, just to see her again. But Charles had been his mentor and was the closest thing he had to a father. It took a lot to bring the ancient polar bear, once worshipped by the humans as a god, to his knees. He turned his gaze to each of them in turn. “Tell me what I have to do.”
Chapter Five
IT WAS STILL painful to move, but Josette did it anyway, digging deep into the packed sand to reveal a plastic Bubble Wrap envelope that was thankfully still buried at the base of the old hickory. Once it was unearthed, she carried it in her teeth and used her nose to follow the path of the snakes back to where they’d hidden their vehicle. Her little Jeep, which had been in the attached garage, was nothing more than a lump of steel by now, but she doubted the snakes would need theirs.
They’d left it a surprisingly long way from the house. She was forced to make a good five-mile trek to find it hidden in the brush just off one of the side roads. A black SUV with tinted windows and all the luxuries a yuppie on vacation could want. The snakes had left it unlocked with the keys in the ignition. There had probably been aversion magic protecting it originally, making humans and Sazi alike unwilling to venture close. But the snakes were dead, and the power for the spell had died with them. So here it sat, ready and waiting for a pair of people who would never return. It was practically a gift.
Still, Josette sniffed around it carefully before
she risked opening the door. There was no scent of explosives; no trap that she could see. Peering through the window she saw a black nylon duffel on the passenger seat. It was unzipped, and she could see it was stuffed with the kind of cheap “one size fits all” clothing Sazi always kept on hand. There were wigs, too, one blond, two dark brown. That was no surprise. Most reptilian women had little or no hair in their human form. They wore wigs to “pass” in normal society.
Josette shifted into human form and pulled open the passenger door. When nothing bad happened she let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and quickly began rummaging through the duffel. There were clothes for both men and women. She also found a Latina women’s wallet. There was a driver’s license in the name of Maria Ortega, with a matching credit card. There were no other cards and the picture sleeves had been removed, probably to keep it from looking achingly empty. Most people filled their wallets with photos of loved ones. Not having any would be obviously odd.
There was a little over seven hundred dollars in cash of various denominations tucked in the billfold, some loose change in the coin purse. Documents for the car rental in Maria’s name were neatly folded into a side zipper pocket of the bag. The vehicle was due back to the Avis rental agency at 7:00 P.M. the day after tomorrow. That gave Josette more than enough time to get things done. Also in the pocket was a matchbox from the Fontana Bowling Alley in Flagstaff and a key. It looked like it should fit into an Old-fashioned pay locker of the type that used to be in bus and train stations before terrorism became an issue. The number on its orange plastic head read 145. She resolved that when she made it to Flagstaff she’d check out the Fontana, see if the key worked at a locker there. There might even be a clue as to who was behind this. Probably not, but it was certainly worth checking out.
She put the items back into their compartment, zipping it closed before choosing an outfit to wear. There was the equivalent of two outfits each in the bag for both the man and the woman. She chose a plain black T-shirt over a pair of black jogging shorts with white stripes running down the size. They were a little baggy, but not too bad, particularly when she tightened the drawstring sewn into the waistband of the pants. The pair of women’s running shoes in the bag were about a half-size too large, but she put them on anyway, lacing them as tight as she could so that they wouldn’t be any more uncomfortable than necessary.
Josette could hear cars in the distance. They were moving eastbound along the main road, going fast. Probably the cavalry coming to investigate the smoke. Not wanting to be spotted leaving the scene of the fire, she decided to look through the envelope, which she’d never opened in the years since she’d paid for the work to be done.
Examining the package, it didn’t look like it had been opened. Yusef, one of Charles’s guards, did identities on the side and did them very well…for the right price. He’d sealed it very carefully, even going so far as to sign across the sealed flap after he’d glued it, and then taped the whole thing with two or three layers of the kind of clear shipping tape that had reinforced threads running through it. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could have tampered with it without leaving plenty of evidence, and she hadn’t noticed the scent of anyone when she’d been digging.
She felt her shoulders relax fractionally, and the knot of terror in her stomach unwound a little. Perhaps things weren’t as bad as she’d feared.
She pulled a Louisiana driver’s license out of the envelope first and saw a picture of herself smiling at the camera. “Josette LaRue.” She said the name softly, getting a feel for it. It wasn’t bad; certainly better than some of the names she’d worn and discarded like clothing over the long years of her life.
The first few days were always the hardest. It was difficult answering to a new name, remembering a complicated past you’d never lived. It was like breaking in a new pair of shoes. Also, there were the little things you needed to do to create an individual identity. What was her favorite color? What music did she listen to? Did she have any hobbies? These weren’t the kinds of things you find on a driver’s license or birth certificate, but they were just as important as good documentation in making a believable identity. A twenty-year-old probably wasn’t going to be hooked on Sinatra and Elvis after all.
With nearly unlimited time to work, Yusef’s artistry had been given full rein. There was a two-page summary, birth and marriage certificates, death certificates, a driver’s license, and a passport in the envelope. There was also a vehicle key, and the address of a storage unit where it was most likely stored. And there was cash; quite a lot of cash by thumbing through the large denomination bills. Most commerce moved electronically now, but there was nothing quite as untraceable as hard currency.
She pulled the summary from the package, scanning it quickly. Josette LaRue had been born Josette Reynard to an American father and French Canadian mother. At age eighteen she’d moved to New Orleans where she met and married Jacques LaRue, a Cajun who had, alas, been a small-time crook. The divorce had been finalized a mere three years later, while Jacques was in the federal penitentiary where he died two years later.
There had been a house in New Orleans, before Katrina. She could have moved there, if she’d chosen to activate the identity earlier. Unfortunately, the map showed that it had been in a neighborhood that was destroyed in the flooding. It was probably too late to make a claim for benefits, but Josette LaRue wasn’t wealthy enough to let something like that go. So, sometime in the next few days she’d need to start the paperwork in motion.
Overall Josette LaRue had led a rough life. But she was a survivor, at least that would be how she thought of herself. Josette decided that the story would be that using a little money she’d inherited from her father, she was starting a new life at thirty.
Based on that history she decided on a personality that wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, but was definitely different from her normal routine. Josette LaRue would be someone who liked to walk that fine line between flash and trash. Her favorite color would be red. She’d wear dangling earrings and rings on every finger, with bright nail polish on both finger and toenails. Her tops and jeans would be worn a little too tight, shorts and skirts a fraction too short. She wouldn’t be caught dead outside the house without her makeup on. As for hobbies, well she’d like to dance and shoot pool, and she could drink a strong man under the table when the occasion called for it.
Looking at the envelope in her lap she felt a wave of sadness and she ran a light finger across the deep indents of his signature into the tape. Yusef was dead and she would miss him. She’d seen his betrayal coming long before he was killed in Boulder the previous winter. She felt a little guilty both that she hadn’t warned Charles that his favorite guard would betray him, nor had she warned Yusef that he was making a terrible mistake by siding with Jack Simpson in a war he couldn’t win.
It had been a hard decision. She’d liked Yusef. She knew how much his betrayal would hurt Charles. But she also knew that if she’d interfered, there would have been other, worse things happen as a consequence.
It was one of the hardest things about foresight—having to choose when to interfere and when not to. It hurt her more than she had ever admitted to stand back and do nothing when terrible things were about to happen. Tasha’s scorn had stung deeply, but there was no way Josette could ever expect her to understand. There were probably harder things in life than looking someone in the eye knowing what would happen and keeping every bit of that knowledge from your expression, even from your scent…but she hadn’t run into one of them yet.
Her sister Amber wondered why she had chosen to live alone in the middle of the desert. In truth, it was simply easier. Yes, it slowed the visions, helped her control her gift, but it was more than that. Isolation had kept her from having to face people. It was a little lonely sometimes, but for the most part she hadn’t minded.
With deft movements Josette stripped Maria’s identification and credit card from the wallet, and slid
the new ones in their place. Everything else she slid back into the envelope, and then zipped the envelope into the duffel.
The address printed on the key tag matched that of the vehicle title. Pony, New Mexico, wasn’t a town she’d heard of before, but she’d have bet that Yusef chose it for its remoteness and relative quiet. Hopefully, it would be the perfect place to get herself together before contacting her family. She knew she had to do that. It was part of the future she’d seen in every vision so far. Flagstaff and the Fontana Bowling Alley would have to wait.
She was as ready as she would ever be. It was time to stop procrastinating. Still, she couldn’t help casting one long last look across the fields to where her home had been. Blinking back useless tears, she climbed behind the wheel of the SUV. Moments later, tires spitting gravel, she pulled onto the highway and drove away for the last time.
Josette drove all through the remainder of the night and into the next day, stopping only to gas up. She finally stopped just after dawn to grab some food at a truck stop that advertised “24 Hour Breakfast.” It was a buffet, but the meat was fresh and good. Nibbling on a slice of wheat toast, she looked through the newspaper, searching for anything odd about the explosion that might have made it to the national press. An advertisement on one page reminded her of a request she’d made offhand to Yusef that she hoped he’d followed. He’d asked about her car preference and, on impulse, she’d decided on a convertible. It was as close as she’d ever get to the sensation of riding a motorcycle, something that both Rick and Raven adored.