Inside Straight

by Mark Henwick

  “That was the stuff the Hecate said about inhibitory systems?” I interrupted. “Perhaps you can turn that into words a dazed and confused bitch can understand.”

  She laughed and moved to sit beside me.

  “Yeah. Inhibitions. Imagine whatever you wanted to do or say, you went right ahead, immediately. Didn’t give it a second thought.”

  “Got that bit. You wouldn’t want me out in society.”

  “Especially if you’re a powerful paranormal. Now, some of those inhibitions which stop you acting like that might be intrinsic, and some the result of conditioning. Am I using words that are simple enough for you, in your dazed and confused state?”

  “Y’know, if I could spare enough attention to hit you, I would.”

  “Good. You’re getting better; Gwen’s making progress. So, you have this structure of inhibitions, and the first working was eroding it, a bit at a time.”

  There was a movement on the trail, like the flap of clothing. It was only clothing—a keffiyeh tied to the barrel of a Kalashnikov probably. A test to see if I’d shoot at it.

  I let my breath trickle out slowly.

  Focus.

  A man dashed across a bare patch. Another.

  I shot the third before he was halfway across.

  Two more showed over the top of their cover and I shot one of them.

  Turned and raced up another fifty yards.

  Settled down to wait again.

  “Go back a bit,” I said to Gabrielle. “The Hecate... Gwen... said you recognized the working because you found Denver community Adepts with it. You mean wandering around with their inhibitions damaged. They were doing what? Zapping people who cut them off on the highway?”

  “Yes and no. Yes, we found them like that. No, because the inhibitions were being replaced by compulsions to obey commands.”

  “This has to be an attack on the Denver community,” I said. “Obey who? And why me as well?”

  Gabrielle shook her head. “There were no handy little labels to tell us, and the whole thing was subtle enough that the Adepts themselves didn’t realize it. But who do you think?”

  She moved closer. I could make out enough to see she was watching me intently.

  Despite everything, my brain seemed to be operating.

  “You’re suggesting this was Weaver?”

  “Could be.” Her tone was very careful. Very casual. As if she didn’t want to push me.

  “No,” I said. “No. Can’t be.”

  “Still got its hooks in you, hasn’t it? It’s really good. Very clever. If it’d been a full-on compulsion you’d probably have noticed, and Flint and Kane certainly would.”

  I was shaking my head, but I couldn’t deny it was the obvious conclusion. Why would I want to deny it? Had Weaver behaved in a way that would make me want to trust him? Or the reverse?

  What if it was exactly the other way around? What if all this was the result of the Hecate...

  “Someone said something about a trapdoor?”

  “That’s the really evil part. Again, Flint and Kane would have spotted a spell obviously designed to kill you. Instead there were these subtle spells doing hidden things, right up until they were discovered. At which point they merged and transformed into a lethal working. You got dizzy and ten minutes later you would have been dead of a brain aneurysm.”

  So... not the Hecate. Probably. If she’d wanted me dead, she could have killed me in the spirit world. And it would hardly be a help to getting Kaothos to trust her if I died. But what if she’d just wanted me to do what she told me?

  What if this is all a double bluff?

  Think!

  Weaver: he had threatened me in the club. He and the other two from the Denver community had been trying to force me to say where Tullah was. Kane had distracted them, and their working fell apart before they could finish. He’d been smart enough not to try it again with us alerted.

  Then he’d tried to play Mr. Nice Guy.

  And just before Gwen had joined us by projecting her aura into the club, he’d touched me on the back of the hand, as if he’d been trying to catch my attention. I’d got a static shock from his touch.

  Again, when we’d been leaving his house and he’d put out his hand to shake.

  No. This is ridiculous. Paranoia.

  Or was it like Bian said? Paranoia might be what kept me alive.

  “What does Bian think?” I asked Gabrielle, while I tried to churn through the convoluted reasoning of who’d done this to me.

  “She hasn’t killed us yet.”

  I laughed again, silently this time.

  A rock way down the track seemed to shimmer. No way that was heat haze at this temperature. One of them was trying the same trick I was using—disguising his head and rifle with his keffiyeh. Except I was watching him and he was looking for me.

  Small target. Difficult shot.

  Let all my breath out. There were tiny movements; his barrel was following the track upwards as he searched for a clue to where I was hiding.

  Breathe in. Smooth. Slow. Pressure on the trigger growing.

  He was nearly looking at my hiding place.

  The M-14 kicked, as if it had a mind of its own, and the shot was something separate from the rest of me.

  I could see his head snap back and the Kalashnikov jerked, pointed downward, went off.

  Something was unraveling, like a thread, inside my mind. As if the Hecate had cut the last anchor point that had kept me going back time and again to defend Weaver.

  Nothing moved on the track.

  “He touched me in the club,” I said. “Just before the Hecate spirit-walked in to join us. He touched me on the back of the hand. It felt like a static shock.”

  “Very slick,” Gabrielle said. “Never heard of it done like that before. A little distraction while he invests the working into you.”

  “And again, at his house.”

  “He wouldn’t need to do it twice. What had changed?”

  Smart question.

  “I’d just told him I was going to talk to you today.”

  “That’s why this working is so much more powerful. He boosted it and made it rapidly lethal if Gwen happened to discover it. Which she did.”

  It felt strange to be talking about this like it was some classroom theory. This was a working that was trying to kill me right now.

  “Shouldn’t Kane have noticed it? It was right in front of him.”

  “No. Not unless he was actually watching for it. These workings are really cunning. They look harmless, unless it gets looked at—then suddenly, it’s deadly.”

  “I didn’t think you could do things like that,” I said. “Certainly not someone like Weaver. He wasn’t even leader of the Denver community, and yet he’s some kind of ninja spell-master? And anyway, this wasn’t the sort of thing the Denver community did, was it?”

  I couldn’t reconcile my image of Tullah’s mother, Mary, who’d been leader of the community, with this description of malignant spells and lethal traps.

  Meantime, I needed to remember: I could die here. The track down the mountain was too quiet. If they were moving, and I couldn’t see them, it could mean they knew exactly where I was. They could be trying to flank me.

  “That’s exactly the way we’re thinking,” Gabrielle said, as if it were only some puzzle she was attempting. “If there had been this level of mastery down in Denver, we’d have heard of it. We think... well, that’s a part of what we came to talk to you about.”

  She shut up suddenly. I had the sense she’d said more than she’d intended.

  My gut tightened.

  Danger. Multiple sources. Back in Denver. And here. Close. Very close.

  In that Ops 4-10 operation that lent its appearance to this spirit world scenario, the guys chasing me up the mountain had known about the extraction. That’s what they’d been trying to stop, and they’d known I was holding them up.

  Here, in the spirit world, I sensed the attack was
about to change. As if that last thread that the Hecate had cut had caused an unexpected effect elsewhere.

  A trap within a trap.

  My eukori reached out, and the dark power was there, just as it had been at the Were challenge. The same sense of strength rolling off it in waves. The same promise: learn to use this power and all your problems end.

  Another trap.

  I could see it with eyes that were open somewhere else. I could see it was connected to the same working that was attacking me. That’s why Weaver’s working had become so powerful, so quick. It was using my own strength against me.

  Turn that strength back on it.

  My whole aura reached for it.

  Death or life. Mine.

  Linked to me through her aura, Gabrielle gasped as pain flooded through me.

  I did what instinct drove me to. I couldn’t achieve it alone, but I could use Gabrielle’s knowledge like I’d used Kane’s.

  “Gabrielle. I’ve got an idea. I’m sorry—”

  “Go! Quick!”

  I reached through her, all the way back to Manassah in the physical world and I pulled.

  In front of me here, four men, widely separated, broke cover barely thirty yards away and started sprinting toward me. Screaming and shooting. They couldn’t aim a rifle for shit while they were running, but among four magazines of thirty rounds, they might still have a bullet with my name on it. Would have, if they got close enough.

  I shot the one on my right, moved in one, squeezed, missed.

  Too much attention on what I was trying to do with the power.

  Not enough time!

  A bullet whipped past my ear.

  Then I felt a shift, like the earth itself punched me.

  The third guy was pointing at me. I could see the perfect circle of the barrel. See his finger pulling the trigger again. I was dead.

  And then there was a clatter of rapid shots.

  Julie and Keith, pulled here into Gabrielle’s spirit world, just as I had been. Reacting on instinct. Saving my life.

  One down. Two down. I got the last one.

  As he died, his Kalashnikov slid out of his grip. It landed in the dust by my feet.

  “Done,” whispered Gabrielle. “Shit! Talk about a close thing.”

  And the mountains turned to mist.

  Chapter 38

  I came around to the sound of Diana and Kaothos repeatedly asking for me while tense arguments raged in the background.

  Bian was cradling my head and half my House loomed anxiously over me.

  I sat up and flapped a hand at the camera so those at Haven could see I was all right.

  The conversation going on was tangled. The Hecate’s patient removal of the workings had triggered the last trap and nearly killed me. That was true, but without her, the workings would have killed me anyway, or made me crazy. And nearly killed didn’t count, as far as I was concerned. Besides, the Hecate and Gabrielle hadn’t been trying to kill me. Those workings had.

  Threaded through that discussion, they were trying to understand how the workings actually operated. Workings which leeched the victim’s own energy to power themselves were sophisticated, but a fairly common model, apparently. The domino effect, feeding the energy from any working that was stopped onto the next, that was highly unusual and complex. It was that sort of secondary, anti-tamper style trap that had come closest to killing me at the end.

  Gabrielle explained the theory of how Weaver had invested the workings in me by a simple touch, which led to the question of how Weaver had gotten so powerful. Alice couldn’t believe it was him, but there seemed to be no other candidates.

  Then there was the part where Gwen gave her opinion that some of the damage to my inhibitory systems was older; it had to date from before Weaver. She claimed Weaver’s workings had attached themselves to structures that had been harmed before and insufficiently repaired.

  That went down well with Diana and Alice.

  “This is getting ridiculous. You can’t make adaptive workings like that,” Alice insisted. “You started off talking of workings so cleverly structured that they respond to threats. Then you’re claiming Adepts in the Denver community have been invested with these without realizing it, so not only incredibly complex and powerful, but able to be cast without the victim even being aware.”

  “Maybe you’ve never seen this level of skill out here, in the Rockies,” Gabrielle snapped back.

  “But we have seen it before,” I said, slapping the table to get their attention.

  It worked. They went quiet. It was uncomfortable to have the Hecate’s ice-cold stare directed back at me. For a moment I sensed the shimmering vastness of a figure around her. Then it was gone. No one else seemed to notice anything.

  Had that been her spirit guide? What was it?

  I’d already sensed Gabrielle’s spirit guide without really thinking about it: a red hawk. But her leader’s? Apart from these glimpses I thought I caught, nothing.

  I shook my head to clear it.

  “We saw workings like this,” I said. “Back in the fall, at the last Assembly we held in Haven.”

  Alice and Bian got it. They’d been there. They immediately knew what I was talking about.

  “Explain,” the Hecate said.

  “Two Athanate had workings invested in them, forcing them to betray us. As soon as they were discovered, the workings switched purpose. They didn’t kill the victims, though.”

  “What did they do?” Gabrielle asked.

  “Erased their minds,” I answered with a shudder. I could remember, far too clearly, the awful, utter blankness on the faces of Marlon Pruitt and Judicator Philippe Remy.

  “We didn’t know enough about Remy’s movements before the Assembly,” Bian said quietly. “But we could account for almost all of Marlon’s time for months back. It was what confused us—we thought there wasn’t enough time to put him under such a strong compulsion, which is what we decided it was.”

  “Very similar in outcome,” the Hecate said. “I admit, I think it would be too much of a coincidence for these two scenarios, the Assembly and the Denver community, not to be related.”

  “So who do we think was responsible for Pruitt and Remy?” I asked. “If Weaver had been involved back then, Mary would have known.”

  Tullah’s mother was still leader of the Denver community at that stage, and she’d been sharp enough to have known what was going on in the magical community.

  “What about Matlal?” Pia suggested.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Bian said. “Matlal tried mind games on Amber in the Assembly and she kicked his ass. No way he was a master Adept, capable of this kind of powerful working.”

  There was a sudden silence in the study.

  “He tried an Athanate compulsion and failed? That’s why Basilikos threw him out as their leader?” The Hecate’s voice was sharp. “Because it was so extraordinary that a young Athanate could beat him.”

  We might as well have put out a tasty bone for a well-trained dog; Gabrielle was practically quivering.

  “What if the extraordinary thing wasn’t his weakness?” she said and paused before going on: “What if it was Amber’s strength?”

  Bian pursed her lips. “More likely it was Matlal’s Diakon, Vega Martine, who gave him the appearance of strength. Now, she could be a master Adept, but she wasn’t in the Assembly, so she couldn’t help him.”

  I remembered Vega Martine with a chill.

  Yes, I’d agreed she had to be the power behind Matlal, but if she’d had this kind of strength with magic back at the time of the Assembly, my gut feeling was she’d have used it somehow, and she hadn’t.

  Gabrielle wasn’t listening to Bian; she was focused on me.

  “What if that contest with Matlal was the first time she used her hidden powers?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not like that. I can’t do anything by myself. I have no real ability. I need to use other people’s skills.”

 
; “I don’t believe that, but think back, Amber.” The Hecate stood and leaned forward over the table. “What do you remember about beating Matlal?”

  Bian tensed, but the Hecate made no other move, and my flesh wasn’t creeping, so she probably wasn’t doing anything magical.

  “Pain,” I said. “Anger. His attack was a direct Athanate mental attack. He was strong and he was angry. It’s like being hit in the head by an icepick.”

  I closed my eyes and let my memories of that day come flooding back: Jen kidnapped and tortured. Crashing in through the warehouse doors to rescue her. Jen killing Hoben, but being so badly wounded she almost died. And yet we’d still had to rush to the Assembly, get past the Lyssae and then endure the unending political attacks on me and my House, from both Panethus and Basilikos. And at the end of it all, the final insult, Matlal’s mental attack.

  Bian had been holding me back the whole Assembly. I’d been so angry most of the time, I’d wanted to kill people right there, and Matlal broke something in me, and gave me an excuse to fight back with everything I had.

  Which was a buried anger, anger so violent and formless it made my whole body burn.

  I was speaking without being aware of it and stumbled before finishing: “I just took all that anger and pain, and I pushed it back through the channel he opened into my head. He collapsed and I thought that meant he wasn’t the strong one. That it had to be Vega Martine.”

  “He ‘broke something’ in you,” the Hecate said with heavy emphasis. “And then you reached down and found a well of emotions like pain and anger that you thought must be your own. You didn’t need to manipulate it, Amber. You didn’t need skill. Once he’d opened that channel, all you needed to do was fire it back down at him.”

  “If it was the same shit that you pulled through me, I’m surprised you didn’t snuff him out with it,” Gabrielle said. “He’s gotta be strong to have survived.”

  Diana brought us to a halt then and made us go through, step by step, what had happened over the last few days. The kidnapping to get our attention, the spirit jump into the trees, the crows used as spies, the meeting down at the club, the werewolf challenge from El Paso, how I’d killed Victoria, the visit to Weaver’s house out in Erie.