Mama Samm D'Arbonne folded her immense hands in her immense—er—lack of a lap. "Now don' you be worryin', Mister Chris. I speaks with Miss Lupé every day since you ups and disappears. She be fine an' Miss Marie be seein' that she have plenty of protection while she a guest of Orleans Parish."
I gave her a glancing scowl: she knew I hated her Aunt Jemima act. It worked for the rubes who knew her as a mild-mannered fortune-teller—reading palms, cards, tea leaves, whatever the customer would fork over the most cash for. But that was all shuck-and-jive, sleight-of-hand costuming for her true gifts. And she wasn't so mild-mannered with her backroom clientele.
"I want to see for myself. I want to see Lupé."
Fenris started to rise but Volpea yanked him back down as Mama Samm shook her immense head. "Now, Mister Chris, you knows that won't do! She don' want to see you and New Orleans is our friends as long as you stays north. You try an' go down there and there be nothin' but trouble!"
Volpea fixed her gold-brown gaze on me and tried a smile. It almost touched her eyes. "You know the agreement, Mr. Cséjthe. You must understand why Marie Laveau cannot allow you to enter her domain."
"Yet you can freely enter mine," I growled back at her. "Right?" I turned back to the fortune-teller. "I need to know that she's safe! I need to know that our unborn child will be safe! That Jenny and Kirsten—" I broke off; saying entirely too much in front of Laveau's eyes and ears.
"That is why they are here," Mama Samm answered, her gesture taking in the two weres. "I was preparing to visit New Orleans when you disappeared. Now that you are back, I can go."
I cocked an eyebrow and gave her The Look. I didn't need to say anything. It was well known that she was no fan of Marie Laveau. Once upon a time the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans might have been a sister practitioner but, more than a hundred years before Mama Samm was even born, Marie had been turned by a vampire and was said to have lost her way on the Invisible Path.
I guess I was too tired to do The Look properly. She returned my gaze with a calm expression and said: "Madam Laveau has been preparing a solution to Deirdre's problem and needs my assistance. I will have the opportunity to look in on Lupé and Dr. Mooncloud personally as your surrogate. So, if there's anything you want to send them, have it ready by tomorrow morning and I'll take it with me."
"The only thing you won't be sending," Fenris rumbled, giving me a little less of a neutral expression, "is yourself. That's why we're here."
And there it was.
It wasn't just my physical presence the other enclaves feared. It was the fact that I could bloodwalk—project my consciousness from body to body, possessing others and wrecking havoc on small populations if I so chose.
As in New York, six months ago.
And beyond that, there was the danger that any enclave permitting my freedom within their borders would risk the appearance of an alliance with the Bloodwalker. Any suggested alliance and they, too, might become anathema within the undead communities, risking censure, war, annihilation from all of the other demesnes.
So Laveau and Pantera had sent a couple of enforcers to make sure that Mama Samm traveled light when she came to visit. No smuggling rogue semi-vampire shades inside her own head when she came a-callin'.
Bugger.
I held up my hands. "Okay. We'll keep it long distance. For now. As long as I'm satisfied that they're safe and happy. Otherwise all bets are off."
Fenris didn't like it and started to say so. Rather than give his protests any further attention, I asked our fortune-teller: "How come you didn't foresee my abduction or the location where I was being held?"
"No one ever expects the Elvish Inquisition," Mama Samm answered placidly.
I barely had time to get my eyebrow back up before Zotz chimed in. "Time does not pass in the same manner within a faerie mound. This suggests a distortion of the time/space continuum and could explain why the juju woman could not scry your location."
I was very tired and had run out of expressions so I took another sip of the cooling O-Neg in my mug. It was starting to coagulate. Like my brains. I really needed to wrap this up and crawl between the sheets. "Okay," I said, "aside from the Elfsteinian Clock Paradox, what else do we know?"
"Perhaps your nanobots have activated," Olive offered. She held up a small, steaming pitcher. "Freshen your drink?"
I blinked. "What?"
Mama Samm nodded, causing the great, white turban atop her head to wobble like a bobble-head mummy. "Think about it. At any time were you glamoured? Bespelled? Under any form of enchantment?"
I shrugged. "If I was, how would I know? Besides, they kept me drugged."
"And what would be the point of that if their majicks were not for naught?" the fortune-teller elaborated.
"Not for what?"
"Neutralized," Olive translated, pouring more sanguinary snackage into my mug before I could stop her.
"Elven magic defeated by nanotechnology?" I sighed. "It's about time that crap those Nazi boojums injected into me did something worthwhile." The nanobots that swarmed through my bloodstream and crawled through my tissues had yet to activate in any meaningful way. Beyond setting off the security scanners at the airport, that is.
Zotz nodded sagely. "The magic of the Sidhe is nullified by cold iron."
I started to take another drink but stopped. "Whoa, Bats! When did you become an expert on the Fey Folk?" The ancient demon's preferred method of information gathering and research was watching television. Lots and lots of television. It was only in the past month that I had been able to get him a library card and out the door to a more literary form of inquiry and examination.
"Lately I find that it is not enough to learn the ways of this time and culture," he said. "I think it wise to understand the ways of those tribes and forms which exist outside of natural law and perception."
"So you're deep in the stacks, dusting off tomes that pull back the veil on the unseen kingdoms?" I tried of sip of my now "freshened" drink. Too hot now. And the older contents had curdled a bit and risen to the top. No wonder jugulars were still the carafe of choice for the fanged crowd.
He shook his head. "I use the library's computers to surf the internet. Did you know that 'fairy' also means homosexual?"
I started to choke. Olive reached over and laid a manicured hand on his shoulder. "When Mister Chris is able to talk I'm sure he'll want to tell you how unreliable the internet can be as a research tool."
Zotz considered and nodded. "That would explain the librarians' consternation over some of the source materials that I have accessed."
"Consternation?" I repeated weakly.
"They seemed quite distressed."
Fenris cleared his throat after half a beat. "What are nanobots?" he asked.
Glances were exchanged. Perhaps too much personal intel already had been.
"We have some personal business to discuss . . ." Mama Samm said with a slight nod of her head.
" . . . and, rather than bore our guests," Olive added diplomatically, "why don't you take them up topside, Jamal? Where they can enjoy the sun."
We all turned and looked at Olive's nephew. He had tucked himself down against the wall, next to the corner fireplace, across from the helm. The shadows and his dark skin had provided camouflage up till now. Twin qualities of stillness and silence conjoined to chameleon him out of sight and mind. The gangly teenager unfolded slowly, standing up, still not uttering a word.
Jamal had been quite loquacious for the first seventeen years of his life. Perhaps I should rephrase that: Jamal was quite the chatterbox for the entire seventeen years of his life. Which had ended last year in the destruction of the BioWeb laboratories. Now he just sat or stood very quietly until asked to move. He performed simple tasks with an economy of movement. He never slept. Instead he would gaze straight ahead, his cloudy eyes unfocused, and seem to listen to distant music no one else could hear. He never spoke unless spoken to. And never answered in more than one or two syllables.
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I could never decide which I felt the most guilt over: that running errands for me had put him in harm's way and, eventually, brought about his murder?
Or that, in bringing him back to the land of the semi-living with an infusion of my own tainted blood, I may have done more harm than good?
Fenris got up and stood near Jamal. "No need to keep us occupied out of earshot," he said. "We can get in a little run, pick up some supplies, pack, make preparations for tomorrow's return trip." He looked over at Mama Samm. "Unless you'd like to leave later today?"
"Honey, I gots to sleep before I makes a long drive down to Nawlins. I's an old womans." The serious voice was gone and the old shuck 'n' jive mask was back, firmly in place.
Volpea stood a bit reluctantly, I thought. Both enforcers were probably under orders to bring back as much intelligence as they could gather. So whatever we didn't want to discuss in front of them was surely eavesdrop-worthy.
"Jamal will see you to shore, then," Olive said.
Jamal didn't require a direct order. He seemed to process well enough most of the time though you'd be hard pressed so find anyone more close-mouthed about it. But he made no further movement toward the door.
"Jamal?" Olive asked.
Her nephew's lips moved. A sound of sorts emerged.
"What is it, baby?"
"Tu-lu," he finally muttered.
"What?" I'm not sure who asked that question. Maybe we all did.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Tulu," Jamal rasped, "R'lyeh wgah'nagl ftagn . . ."
We all sat there for a minute, stunned. Was it that Jamal had spoken in multiple syllables? Or that the words coming out of his mouth were pure gibberish? Or that the gibberish sounded like some actual, foreign language?
Some terrible, unspeakable language?
Perhaps it was the effect of strange sounds emerging from the vocal apparatus of a dead man.
And then Jamal raised his hand and gestured toward me with a drooping, clawlike hand. "He's coming, Mister Chris! He will wake and the world will fall into dreams of madness!"
And then he started to scream.
Chapter Three
If this was one of those "dreams of madness," it didn't start out so bad.
I was eight years old again along with Scotty Steadman. Cecil Rosewood was barely seven but acted nine.
As the school system didn't offer "accelerated alternatives," they had declared Rosewood an honorary eight-year-old and bumped him up to Mrs. Standhart's third-grade classroom.
It wasn't an immediate fit. Rosey was smaller than the rest of us. Worse, he was smarter than the rest of us. Since Steadman and I were less intimidated by either factor, he ended up under our social tutelage, running with the two of us even when school was out: evenings, weekends, summers yet to come . . .
We had just spent another Friday night in Scotty's tree house, and then slipped next door, down into the family room in my parent's basement: the Saturday morning ritual of cartoons and breakfast.
It was already warm out and Steadman was totally at home in his Underoos—both fashion statement and practical choice as the sleeping bags had turned us all sweaty and disheveled. The Steadmeister held the opinion that pajamas were too babyish for such mature eight-year-olds as ourselves. Easy enough to say when your underwear approximates Batman's crime-fighting costume. It lent an air of daring to the skinny, freckled kid—something that would otherwise elude him into his all-too-brief adulthood.
Scott Steadman would die in an automobile accident at the age of twenty-three.
Cecil Rosewood, whom the rest of our classmates called "Poindexter," went the sartorial opposite. He wore jammies with feet. Perhaps his mother made them: Sears & Roebuck had phased out pj's with enclosed footwear back when I was graduating toilet training. If it hadn't been for the mashed potatoes, we would have ragged him unmercifully. Rosey had made the groundbreaking discovery that—properly stuffed with mashed potatoes—pajama booties approximated the low-g effects of a moonwalk for a third-grader playing astronaut.
Poindexter was a pioneer.
As for me? Since my mother was of the opinion that underwear—even the sort designed for the Bat-cave—was inadequate for warding off the effects of pneumonia, the best compromise I could affect was shorts and a T-shirt. Neither super-heroish nor outfitted for out-of-this-world EVAs.
Neither one thing nor the other.
It was a condition I would come to know much more intensely many years after Scotty Steadman's bones were moldering in Hattonville Cemetery and Faith Rosewood miscarried Cecil's only son after three healthy daughters.
That's the problem with dreams: you know too much and understand too little.
Like the debate the three of us were presently engaged in.
"He's a fairy," Scotty insisted, watching Winky Dink cavort across the TV screen with his cartoon dog, Woofer.
A local independent station had unearthed the ancient, black-and-white cartoon series as an alternative to the networks' Technicolor toon franchises. It had to be cheap: my parents talked about watching it when they were kids. As far as I knew, no one watched it now. Winky Dink and Me was just time filler and background ambience until Transformers came on. Only occasional bursts of noise and action penetrated our sugar-driven, breakfast-cereal buzz as we argued and debated the greater mysteries of life. This morning it had started with the philosophical question of whether Superman was really Clark Kent or whether Clark Kent was really Superman.
"I don't get it," Rosey had kept protesting. "They're the same guy. It depends on which clothes he's wearing."
In search of a more debatable topic we stumbled onto religion.
"Hey, Poindexter," Scotty had challenged, "can God do anything?"
"Yeah, sure." Rosewood's family, name notwithstanding, were devout Catholics. Then, sensing a trap: "Anything He wants, that is."
"Can He create a rock that's so big that even He can't lift it?" Scotty beamed, inordinately pleased to have poised such an airtight conundrum.
I expected Rosey to laugh it off after a moment—Catholics, in my eight-year-old estimations always had that theological Get Out of Jail Free card. Nuns and priests on TV and in the movies were always invoking it.
But Rosewood wasn't defaulting to the old "It's a mystery" line. The emotions flickering across his puffy features were moving from confusion to consternation. He was taking Scotty's challenge seriously.
And therein lay a path to madness.
"Not to worry, Poindexter," I said, poking him with my elbow, "I got this one." I turned to Scotty. "The answer is yes."
Steadman's eyebrows fairly danced. "So, you're saying that God could create a rock that's so big, even He, Himself, couldn't lift it?"
I nodded. "That's right."
Steadman let out a laugh like the bray of a jackass. "So, if this rock is too big for God to lift, then I guess it's not true. If you said that God could do anything—that's one thing He couldn't do! He couldn't lift the rock!"
I'd actually asked my father this one a while back. Grownups are supposed to know all about stuff like this. Unfortunately my dad must have missed the handout on this one. His answer was basically "why would God want to do something like that?" Obviously, He wouldn't. End of story.
My father would never understand the rules of debate with the Scotty Steadmans of the world.
I, however, got a crash course every week. I shook my head and smiled. "Not true. He could lift it because He's God. God can do anything."
Scotty's smile slipped a little. "Wait a minute. You don't understand," he said. And laid it all out again like I was some sort of feeb.
I nodded again. "God can do anything," I repeated. "He is so powerful that He can create a rock too big for Him to pick up."
Scotty's smile was back. "So, if He can't pick it up—"
"Oh no," I interrupted. "He can pick it up. He's God: He can do anything." My smile, on the way up, passed his, on the way down.
"But—but—wait—"
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br /> I waved my hand dismissively. "Don't worry, I got it. God can create this rock that's soooo big that even He can't pick it up."
"He can't . . ."
"But since God can do anything, He can pick it up because He's God." I grinned at Rosewood who seemed to be warming up to my philosophical take on kindergarten cosmology.
The Scottster, however, was starting to look a little pissed. He knew I could keep this up all day and the only way to beat me at this game was to—well—beat on me. Friendship is, at times, a veritable balancing act and the scars of failure can be more than metaphors.
"I got a question," Rosey piped up, defusing the moment. "What's Winky Dink supposed to be?"
That was a very good question.
We turned and paid a little more attention to the star-headed cartoon currently trekking across Marshall McLuhan's post-cultural apocalyptic wasteland.
Whereas most animated characters have heads too large for their bodies, Winky Dink had a balloonlike cranium that made the other toons look like pinheads by comparison. Crowning his hydrocephalic head was a five-pointed hairstyle that looked like he was wearing someone's Christmas tree star for a beanie. Add in lousy art direction, crude animation, and facial features that resembled those of a rabid squirrel on crack (not that we had a clue regarding any of the pharmacopoeia of recreational substances as of yet) and you had the makings of a forgettable cartoon.
Except for a rather unique premise . . .
Each week The Dink (as Scotty liked to call him) embarked on a new adventure and encountered a series of obstacles in his two-dimensional world. At several points in each story, the program host—a real, live human being—would interrupt and ask the audience for help. None of that "make a wish" or "think really hard" or "clap your hands" baby crap to keep-Tinkerbelle-from-dying nonsense. The Dink needed his audience to use "magic crayons" to draw a bridge or a ladder or something of practical value to help him get out of a jam. Long before interactive television or home video games, the Dinkster required active audience participation.
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