A Host of Furious Fancies
Page 56
The phone was ringing as he got into the apartment, and when he looked at the counter, it registered 27 previous messages.
“Eric,” he said, picking it up.
“Eric!” Ria sounded absolutely frantic. “Where were you? I’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon!”
“Not everybody’s cellular,” Eric said irritably. “Sorry. Bad day. What’s up?”
“Kayla’s coming. Today.” Ria made it sound as if Kayla was a combination of the Black Death, the Four Horsemen, and the IRS. “And I’m stuck in this damned meeting—in fact, I’m supposed to be in there right now—and I can’t get away. I don’t know how long I’ll be. Her plane’s coming in at three; I’ve sent a car for her, but I don’t want her coming back to an empty apartment. Could I have the driver drop her at your place? I swear I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Eric had never heard Ria sound so rattled. It struck him that she owed Kayla and Elizabet a great deal. Taking care of Kayla properly on Kayla’s arrival in New York was probably as important to Ria as being a good teacher to Hosea was to him, and she was probably just as uncertain of her ability to do it right.
His black mood vanished. “Hey, Ria. Don’t worry about it. Have the guy drop her off here. We’ll order pizza and watch DVDs until you get here. Promise.”
“Thanks.” He heard Ria breathe a deep sigh of relief. “I hate to ask, but could you possibly call Anita for me and tell her? She’ll phone the car. I have got to get back in there!”
“Sure,” Eric said. “Knock ’em dead.” The phone went dead before he’d finished speaking.
Well, that takes care of the rest of the day. He looked up the number and made the call to Anita, then went to look over his DVD collection, wondering what sort of movie Kayla would like. “Hey, Greystone,” he said aloud. “Company for dinner.”
Hosea came in about half an hour after that, looking very much like someone who’d spent a hot August day cleaning out a non-air-conditioned basement.
“Better hit the shower,” Eric advised him. “A friend of mine’s going to be here pretty soon. Name’s Kayla. She’s a Healer. Going to be going to school up at Columbia—but not living here,” he added, noting Hosea’s faint look of alarm. “I’m just taking care of her until Ria can pick her up.”
“Ayah, a shower sounds good. I feel like I’ve been juggling pianos,” Hosea said ruefully. “But I got all that lumber moved out of there, and after I scrub it down with lye soap, I can paint it up spicker than span.” He shot a curious look at Eric. “A Healer, say you?”
“That’s right,” Eric said. “But I’ll let her tell you about it herself. Wait till you meet her.”
Hosea headed for the shower.
* * *
:They’re comin’ ’round the far turn: Greystone told Eric about five minutes later.
“That was quick,” Eric said. He thrust his feet into sandals and headed for the street.
The car was just pulling up as he reached the sidewalk, which felt very much like walking into an oven at this time of day, as the concrete gave back a day’s worth of stored heat. Ria’d sent her personal car: a maroon vintage Rolls Royce limousine. The driver—in matching livery, right down to the archaic jodhpurs and riding boots—climbed out and walked back to open the passenger door.
Kayla wasn’t waiting for him to get there. Eric saw the door swing open and a . . . vision . . . in glitter and Spandex stepped out of the car.
The last time Eric had seen Kayla, the sixteen-year-old had been heavy into punk, right down to the safety pins in place of earrings. But two years was an eternity in a teenager’s life.
Things had changed.
She still had the black leather jacket—and was wearing it, in defiance of the weather—but now it seemed to glitter in places. She was wearing artistically-damaged fishnet stockings, and on her feet were spike-heeled pointed-toed ankle boots with more straps than a Bellevue special. Between the ankle boots and the leather jacket was a black lace tutu, the layers of black lace tulle glittering with purple and black sequins and standing almost straight out.
Kayla reached back into the car to grab her backpack, and blew the driver a kiss before striding across the street to Eric. As she approached, Eric could see that she’d carried out the glitter-Goth look in all aspects: her hair was dagged and shagged, dyed flat black with indigo and fuchsia streaks. Her face was powdered dead white, eyes heavily lined in kohl and mascara, and mouth painted a glistening red-black. Silver batwing earrings dangled from her ears. Under the jacket, she was wearing a very tight cropped tank top with a black velvet rose pinned to the neckline.
“Hiya, Eric,” Kayla said. She held out a hand. She was wearing fingerless lace mitts—black, of course—and her nails, still cut back almost to the quick, were painted black with a dull silver glitter overlay.
“This is a new look for you,” Eric said. A lot more high-maintenance than the old one, but he guessed Kayla’d finally gotten used to the fact that she had a home and a family, and didn’t have to scrabble on the streets just to survive. He waved to the driver, who’d followed Kayla across the street.
“Are you Eric Banyon?” the man asked.
“That’s right,” Eric said.
“I just wanted to make sure the little lady got where she was going,” the driver said. “I’ve got a daughter about her age.” He smiled and went back to his car.
“Sheesh,” Kayla muttered, embarrassed.
“Hey, you know Ria’d have his head if he let anything happen to you,” Eric said. “C’mon, let’s get upstairs. It’s hot out here, and you must be about to fry.”
“Nice place,” Kayla said, looking around the apartment. She set her backpack down on the floor and peeled off her black leather jacket. Her shoulders glittered with a mix of makeup and sweat. “Nice air conditioning,” she added a moment later. “Gotta say, Eric, you do know how to land jelly-side-up.”
Hearing voices, Hosea came out into the living room. He was wearing jeans and a new white T-shirt, his shaggy blond hair still damp from a hasty shower.
“Hey,” Kayla said appreciatively, “you didn’t tell me Chippendales was in town.”
“This is a friend of mine,” Eric said. “He’s staying with me until his place is ready. Hosea Songmaker, meet Kayla Smith.”
Hosea stepped forward and held out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Kayla took it. If he noticed her outlandish costume, he didn’t indicate it by so much as an eye blink. Eric could see the look of concentration on her face as she made sure her shields were in place—any touch was intimate if you were an Empath—but then he saw her relax and give Hosea a genuine smile.
“Any friend of Eric’s is a friend of mine,” Hosea said firmly in his slow pleasant drawl. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Healer Kayla.”
“And yours . . . Bard,” Kayla said after a short pause. “Hey, Eric, you didn’t say you were collecting ’em.”
“Just a happy accident,” Eric said. “Hosea came to the city looking for someone to show him the ropes, and I guess I’m elected.”
“I couldn’t ask for a better teacher,” Hosea said. “But you must be plumb tuckered out from all that traveling, Miss Kayla. Would you care for something cold to drink? There’s lemonade, fresh-squeezed, and every kind of water you can imagine.”
So that’s why we’ve got all those lemons.
“Lemonade, please,” Kayla said. She glanced toward the sound system. “Mind if I check out the tunes?”
“Mi casa es su casa,” Eric answered in bad Spanish. “Feel free. I don’t know how long Ria’s going to be—she said she’d get here as soon as she could, but—”
“But Ria’s a busy girl, yadda,” Kayla said. “Glad you kids are getting along,” she added absently, drifting over to the wall of CDs.
“You know you look like Tinkerbell on drugs, don’t you?” Eric said to her back.
Kayla turned and flashed him a smile. “Gotta blend in with the natives, right?”
“I’ll try anything once—twice if I like it,” she said, in answer to his quizzical look. “So, Hosea, how’d you find out you were a Bard?”
“Eric told me,” Hosea said, swallowing a mouthful of pizza. “I just thought I had a little shine, but I guess there’s a name for everything. And you?”
“Oh, I brought somebody back from the dead, and things went on from there.”
* * *
As soon as the Portal closed, sanity returned. The geas that Aerune had placed upon him along with the silver antlers was gone; Elkanah’s mind was clearer than it had been in weeks. He saw it all now. The Sidhe lord had used him as a Judas goat—let him think he’d escaped, let him think that searching out Campbell was his own idea, though it had been Aerune’s magic that had led him to her and then led him back here, to a place Aerune could claim her easily.
He’d been a fool. A pawn.
And to top it all off, the bitch had poisoned him. Elkanah could feel the T-Stroke burning through his system. In a few hours, he’d be dead.
But there was something he had to do first. Not for Campbell’s sake. But because there were innocents in the line of fire, and because those innocents had to be saved . . . or at least warned. He staggered toward the van, fighting the wave of drug-fuelled oblivion.
He did not reach it before he fell.
Another Monday night in Paradise, Jimmie Youngblood thought, piloting her blue-and-white through the traffic snarls of Lower Midtown. She felt better than she had in weeks—hell, months—as if the wave of Impending Doom had finally broken, or at least as if some part of her mind had finally reached an accommodation with whatever unspoken warning had disturbed her for so long. She felt released, but unsettled. Maybe Eric had been right: some problems just went away, and you never knew afterward exactly what they’d been.
Her radio woke to life, spitting out a jumble of ten-codes: someone had set a van on fire near the Lincoln Tunnel, local units please assist. She checked and confirmed she was the closest unit, turning her vehicle in that direction. The dispatcher would alert the fire department, but she’d get there first.
As soon as Jimmie saw the smoke, she could feel something tangled up with it, like an astral riptide undercutting reality. Power. Someone down here was using magic—bad magic. It brought all her uneasy feelings rushing back—and worst of all, there was something oddly familiar about the source.
Bomb? Phosphorus grenade? Salamander? Someone isn’t having a lucky night.
She barely remembered to give her 10-20 when she arrived. Traffic was already snarled behind the charred wreckage—even at ten o’clock at night the Lincoln Tunnel was busy. She pulled her unit around to block the tunnel completely, hearing the wail of other sirens in the distance. Fire Department and Traffic Control, right on schedule. But she was the first on the scene.
She climbed out of her unit, staring at what was left of the van. It wasn’t just burning. It had been torched—the tires were melted pools of rubber on the blacktop and the van itself was too charred for her to know what its original color had been. No need to worry about the gas tank exploding—from the looks of things, it already had.
Or else whatever brought it here didn’t need gas to make the engine run. . . .
Worst of all, she knew that something had gotten out of it alive. She could see puddled footsteps where the blacktop had melted in the street, as though something very hot had just . . . walked away. Something that reeked with Power like a spill of fresh blood.
No time to call the others in on this. She had to find that thing before it hurt anyone else. That there were no casualties already was a minor miracle. She grabbed her nightstick and her vest and followed.
The blocks around the Tunnel were a wasteland of urban decay spawned by the new Conference Center, which was a mixed blessing. With the Javits Center empty, there were few pedestrians around to get in her way, but a lot of empty lots, parking garages, and derelict cars to provide cover for her wandering perp. The tracks stopped at the edge of the concrete pavement, but she could still see signs of his handiwork.
Here, a charred stump that had been a living tree. There, a half-melted basket full of trash, still burning. A smear of cinder on the side of a building, just where a tall man might rest his hand. And all around, the reek of baneful magic like a choking cloud—magic born of pain and death and suffering.
She stopped long enough to shrug into her Kevlar vest, though she doubted that something that would stop a bullet would stop whatever she followed. She had the sense that what she followed was wounded and in pain, but no less a danger for all that. She reached down to shut off the radio on her belt—no point in alerting her quarry, and no help she could summon in time would be able to face down what she followed. She’d made that mistake once. Never again.
Oh, Davey. You shouldn’t have had to die for me to figure that out. She spared a brief thought for the other Guardians, but it would take too long to summon them as well. She had to contain what she followed before innocent civilians met the same fate as the charred van. She could smell the burning on the air.
Ahead of her was an alleyway, leading between two derelict buildings. Behind them was an empty lot, the building it had once contained gone to bricks and rubble—a favorite hangout for junkies and rent-boys. The alley was the only exit. Whoever it was—whatever it was, she had it cornered now.
There were no lights on the street. The only illumination came from the last dregs of summer twilight, and the sky glow from the city itself. She hesitated. Stupid to go in without backup. That’s why they call it Tombstone Courage. . . . She forced herself to stop, to use her radio, tell them her position, tell them she was in hot pursuit of the arson suspect. It didn’t matter now. By the time her backup got here, it would be over, one way or another. The dispatcher told her to wait, of course, but even as she heard that rational, sensible counsel, Jemima Youngblood knew she couldn’t wait. Lives depended on her. She could already smell smoke.
She drew her gun and stepped into the alley, letting out her breath in a long sigh as she saw it was empty. But the fire glow painting the far end told her she was right. The empty lot was burning.
She hesitated, thinking again of warning Toni and the others that magic was afoot once more. She was reaching for her cell phone when the scream came, a scream of primal agony, of someone being burned alive.
She ran toward it, cursing her luck.
The screamer pirouetted like a top in the middle of the empty lot, wrapped in a shroud of flame, howling out his fear and pain to the night. He was burned past saving—she knew that already, from the black and ruined skin she could see through the flames that covered him—but she had to try. She knocked the shrieking dervish to the ground, beating at the flames with her bare hands while his skin flaked away like charcoal from a half-burnt log. His blood boiled on the surface of his skin, and before the flames were gone, the screaming stopped. He was dead.
“Jimmie.”
A familiar voice, filled with pain and sorrow. A voice she had never expected to hear again. She looked up slowly, not wanting to see. Her searching hand closed over empty air—she’d dropped her weapon trying to put out the fire. She had a backup strapped to her ankle. Still kneeling, she reached for it, slowly, burned palms stinging and tearing.
“Jimmie. Little sister. What are you doing here?”
Her fingers touched the metal of the gunbutt.
“I’m a cop, Elk. Like you were, once.” She held her voice steady by a great effort.
Elkanah Youngblood stood a few feet away. He was naked, his bronze skin covered with soot and fresh burns.
Power radiated from him like light from the noonday sun, but he wasn’t another victim. He was the source. All around him, everything that could burn was burning—weeds, garbage, wood.
Pyrokinesis. Without control, the fires that he set were burning him as well, eating him alive.
But that shows up early, in childhood, and Elk never—
“I have to tell you—” he said. “I have to tell—” He staggered toward her. His eyes were white, blind with heat. “You have to stop—” He moaned, a long sound of agony and despair.
“Don’t come any closer!” She felt blisters break as her fingers closed over the gun. A .38 snubnose—useless at a distance, but not against a naked man at nearly point-blank range.
“You have to stop him!” Elkanah howled. “Jimmie—please Campbell—Aerune—Stop—”
He fell to his knees, reaching out to her as he died. Her scream melded with his own as the fire consuming him from within burst forth from mouth, eyes, ears . . . from his outstretched hand, still reaching toward her.
Burning everything he touched.
Burning the world.
The phone had rung about fifteen minutes ago. Ria was finally out of her meeting and on her way to Eric’s. When it rang again, Eric thought it was Ria calling back, saying something else had delayed her.
“Banyon.”
“Eric.” Toni’s voice, so hoarse and distorted that at first he didn’t recognize it. “Is Hosea there?”
“Toni?” Something was horribly wrong—but what? He’d had no warning. He could hear the ragged sobs around the edges of her voice every time she inhaled. “Yeah, he’s here, but—”
“Jimmie’s . . . in Gotham General. It’s bad. She’s asking for him. How soon can he get here?”
“We’re on our way.”
The others were already on their feet, alerted by his face and voice.
“Jimmie’s in the hospital. She’s asking for you,” Eric said to Hosea. Lady Day would get them there fastest. He sent a call to the elvensteed and felt her worried reply. “C’mon.”