Biting the Bullet

by Jennifer Rardin

  “Oh yeah.”

  So Cassandra made a deal with the devil, who took Anastas Ocacio for a long, bumpy ride that left him screaming for mercy. “It took them three days to find all the pieces of him,” Cassandra finished. “And by the fourth I had found my way off the island. I had also found a holy man.”

  “So he removed the Mark?” Dave asked.

  “No. But he blessed the water that I washed my eyes with. And he gave me a special prayer that protects me against the demon’s return. As long as I do those two things every day as soon as I wake, I’m fine.”

  “Wait a second,” said Cole. “Do you mean to say you’ve been washing your face with holy water for the last four centuries?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without fail?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or else the demon will come get you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. I’m trying to remember the last time I did anything for even a month straight.”

  “You shave.”

  He scratched at his beard. “Usually.”

  “You brush your teeth.”

  “That’s true.”

  “It is that routine for me.”

  “You know what? I think I’ll avoid demons anyway.”

  Cassandra nodded, the ghost of a smile flitting across her face. “It’s probably for the best.”

  Bergman said, “So it sounds like Jaz just needs to wash the spot with holy water. Except” — he looked at me — “do you even know where the spot is?”

  I thought of the Magistrate poking a finger at my forehead. And my mom rubbing my noggin raw as she said plaintively, “It won’t come out.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I believe I do.”

  Chapter Nine

  AfterabriefintermissionduringwhichIanointedmyownforehead,learnedCassandra’sprayer,andfelt suitably guilty for not summoning a minister to oversee the whole shebang despite the obvious danger it would’ve caused her — I moved on to the next order of business.

  “So, now that the Magistrate can’t come after me, why do you think he let me go the way he did? Why make me think Matt rescued me?”

  “It depends what he knows about you,” said Dave. “Looking at it from a military perspective at least, you’ve got to wonder what he stands to gain from your release if he thinks you’re just some girl as opposed to —”

  “A Sensitive who has died twice and been brought back twice by Raoul. To fight for Raoul.”

  “So, assuming the Magistrate somehow has access to your background, how much do we really know about Raoul?” asked Dave. We looked at each other. Not a lot. There was that undercurrent that, when you started to translate it into words, began to erode. And made you look idiotic for trusting it. All we really knew for sure was that he was a force for good in the world. That we worked for him. And now I might be in trouble as a result.

  I reached into my jacket for my cards. I wished I could shuffle them, but for now it would have to be enough just to hold them in my hand and pace. “Okay, let’s put ourselves in the demon’s head if we can. What do they always want?”

  “Souls,” everybody chorused.

  “He could’ve had mine easy. I was good and stuck, but he let me go.”

  “Bait for the bigger fish?” suggested Dave.

  “As in Raoul?” I asked. “If I thought Matt was working for Raoul in another capacity, would I go running back to him, demanding an explanation? Yeah, maybe. Even if it meant certain death for me. In which case, the Magistrate could easily follow me, because of the Mark. He could grab Raoul while he was sitting there with his defenses down and, no doubt, take me along with him.”

  “Should you warn him?”

  I frowned at my brother. “Don’t you two ever talk?”

  He suddenly found the curtain rod fascinating. “This is the job I was meant to do. I figure if he has a problem with my performance he’ll let me know.”

  Okay. So maybe Dave was more of a consultant. Like Bergman. And Raoul was waiting for just the right time to access his skills. Which might take forever if they had to actually talk. Because communication is such a two-edged sword for guys. On the one hand, they almost always mean what they say. Refreshing, I know. On the other hand, getting them to actually say it can be like coaxing a corpse to tap dance. Not that it can’t be done. But it’s so freaking exhausting. Not to mention the cost in heavyweight fishing line and Savion Glover videos.

  I sighed. “Yes, I’ll speak to him. By the way, Grace isn’t your mole. Vayl and I have been taking turns watching her almost since we arrived. We found her behavior the most . . . suspect,” I told him, feeling slightly apologetic now I knew she was innocent. An ass, yes, but a loyal one. “She hasn’t been in this room at all.”

  “So who do we have left?” Dave murmured sadly. “The mole is either Cam, Jet, or Natchez.” He went to the bench and sank down onto it, clasping his hands between his knees, staring at the ornate carpet. Cassandra followed, sat beside him.

  “Can you tell us more about these men?” she asked.

  “What about you?” he snapped. “Why can’t you just tap them and tell who’s betrayed me?”

  She flinched, almost as if he’d hit her. “I’m sorry,” he said instantly. “I just can’t believe . . . you can’t imagine what we’ve been through together.”

  “Our original plan was for me to try to divine their purposes,” Cassandra assured him. “Unfortunately, something happened to me the moment I touched you. I was afraid to speak. And I wasn’t sure until I linked with Jasmine just now. And nothing happened. Then I knew. I’ve gone muddled.”

  I guess we were all kind of gaping at her like seals at the zoo, hoping for a jaw full of fish. Tears sprang to her eyes. “It’s not something over which I have any control. One doesn’t plan for these things!”

  “What do you mean by muddled?” I asked.

  Cassandra tended to play with her hands when nervous. Since she wore multiple rings on her long, slender fingers, it was a wonder little golden circlets weren’t popping off her knuckles like tiddlywinks. She darted one glance at Dave and then refused to look at him anymore as she told me, “Sometimes a Seer who is overwhelmed by a strong emotion becomes so inundated by all the wonderful possibilities that emotion opens up to her that she can See no other visions. That is what has happened to me.”

  It took me about a half a second to get it, and then, oh baby, did I! “You mean —”

  “Yes,” she interrupted, “exactly.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Cole. He moved to sit on the valet chair. His costume looked odd to me, though his beige-and-white-striped shirt and olive-green pants weren’t that different from any of the other guys’. Then I realized I was missing the red high-tops he typically wore. “Are you, like, too scared to See?” he asked her.

  “No.”

  “Then what is it?” asked Bergman.

  Cassandra gave me a pleading look.

  I shook my head, too unsure of how I felt about the event to actually describe it aloud. “I think you’re going to have to tell them,” I said.

  “Now?”

  Dave took Cassandra’s hand in his. Her eyes went wide and a bemused sort of half smile spread across her face as he said, “Look, I’d appreciate anything you can do. Wondering which one of my brothers stabbed me in the back is pretty much killing me.”

  “I want to help.” Cassandra ducked her head. “I just can’t right now.” She shrugged, spoke in a voice so low I think only Dave and I heard her. “Maybe love really is blind.”

  Dave stared at her for a couple of beats before his whole countenance lifted, as if a plastic surgeon had slid a computer printout in front of his actual face and said, “See, I can make you look ten years younger!”

  Before our newest couple could get with the romance, I turned to Bergman. “We need to figure out how our traitor is contacting the Wizard. Nobody left the farmhouse, but either the Wizard or one of his apprentices knew to raise those zombies. What’s tha
t tell you?”

  “The mole was probably carrying a bug. Or, more likely, had planted it on somebody else. So the Wizard knew all about the reavers. But he still had to signal the necromancer to raise the zombies, because he wouldn’t have risked coming close enough for you or Cole to sense him.” Bergman looked at Dave, who couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off Cassandra, who suddenly found the bedspread fascinating. “Yo, Romeo.” Bergman waved his hands, like a flight deck crew member clearing his pilot for takeoff.

  “Uh, yeah.” Dave smirked in a way I hadn’t seen him do since he was eighteen. Good grief, what had happened to our badass military man? Had he truly been taken down by the blurry-eyed psychic?

  “I’m thinking silent signal,” Bergman went on, eyeing the couple doubtfully. I wasn’t sure they were listening either. “There are a couple of different methods they might have used. We can test for them if you want. Of course we’ll have to fly to Mars for the equipment, but I’m sure we’ll be back in time for supper.”

  Bergman raised his eyebrows at me as Dave glanced at Cassandra and nodded. “He’s got it bad,” Miles whispered.

  “And vice versa,” I replied.

  “What’re we going to do?” Cole muttered. “We need Dave in his right mind. After all, he’s kind of in charge.”

  Actually, if you wanted to be anal about it, Vayl was in charge. But I wasn’t in the mood for technicalities at the moment. I took a second to observe my twin as he leaned toward Cassandra, whose hand he had not relinquished, and murmured into her ear. For a second I couldn’t place his expression, it had been that long since I’d seen it.

  “He’s also happy,” I told them. And I realized, whether Vayl had been right or wrong about my reaction to it, I had to back off and let this relationship run its course. “Let’s give him that, at least for the next few minutes.” I was pretty sure neither one of them noticed when we left the room.

  Chapter Ten

  Cole, Bergman, and I reconvened in the girls’ bedroom. After a repeat of the flying card trick, we discovered no bugs. Not surprising. Still, we all huddled on the silver-framed bed and spoke in the hushed voices of those who are about to tell some truly gruesome ghost stories.

  “Okay,” I said, “we have three suspects who we need to learn a lot about in a short amount of time without them realizing we’re doing research. Any ideas?”

  “Get ’em all drunk and hire some strippers,” Cole said immediately. “You’ll find out everything you need to know in twenty minutes.”

  “Nice plan,” I drawled, “in Miami. However I feel there might be a shortage of strippers in Tehran. And I believe you informed us the preferred drink here is tea.”

  Cole, having run out of fingernails, began gnawing on the button of his shirt. He spat it out immediately. “Plastic sucks,” he said. “Dammit, I need gum!”

  “I’m out,” I replied. “Here, chew on this.” I shoved up the sleeve of my light blue tunic, unbuckled the sheath I kept strapped around my right wrist, laid the syringe of holy water on the bedside table, and handed him the rest. “I imagine it tastes like old shoe, but the leather’s probably good for your teeth. Plus, maybe it’ll help zap your brain back to reality.” I shook my head. “Booze and strippers. Geesh!”

  Bergman tapped me on the knee. “I’ve been thinking about the ways the mole might be contacting the Wizard.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’s carrying a transmitter on him, no doubt about that. But it may even be embedded under the skin, so I wouldn’t recommend searching for it as your first means of digging him out. He’s got to have a way to either power it up or key it to send messages. So we need to watch for odd gestures that don’t seem to fit with what he’s saying or doing at the time.”

  “That seems easy enough,” said Cole. He began touching himself in random places. “These are my dad’s old baseball signals,” he told us as he pressed his thumb to the side of his nose, tugged his left earlobe, and slid the side of his hand across his chest. “I’m telling you to bunt, run like hell, and then if they throw you out at first, go to the concession stand and get me a Dr Pepper.”

  “I hardly think it’ll be that obvious,” said Bergman.

  “You never know,” Cole insisted. “When a guy’s scratching his nuts, they don’t always itch.”

  “Okay.” I held up my hands. “No more testicular discussions. No more baseball. Though I can see how you got from one to the other pretty quickly, Cole, I am now certain the heat that built up inside that semi trailer during our ride here has boiled your brain. Bergman, anything else we should look out for?”

  He began fiddling with his bootlace. “It seems stupid when I think about saying it now.”

  I wasn’t sure how a guy with a genius the size of a small country could still worry about looking foolish in front of his buds, but I was beginning to think his troubles would drastically reduce if he could just find himself a good woman. Somebody to give him a daily dose of feel-good whether he needed it or not. I sure didn’t have the patience for it. “Dude, spit it out. If we laugh, you can punch us both.”

  “But not in the arm,” said Cole. “I’m still sore from all those shots they gave us before we flew over here. You can punch me in the stomach, but give me time to get ready. Houdini died because some guy didn’t warn him first, you know.”

  I regarded Cole with the thinning patience of a kindergarten teacher who has neglected to take her Zoloft. “What the hell is up with you?”

  “I am experiencing a deep-seated need to blow a bubble,” he informed me. I took his right hand, which held my syringe sheath, and shoved the leather in his mouth. It was like giving E.J. her pacifier. Instant relaxation of the facial muscles. Full-body quiver, as if a wave of stress had just exited his epidermis. And yet, at the back of his eyes lurked a tight black ball of tension that promised to explode the second he stopped chewing. Nope, Cole wasn’t just stressed about the lack of bubble gum. Something much bigger had him twisted like a pretzel. I could probe, but I’d never get anywhere with another guy in the room. It was part of their Code. I didn’t understand it. But I respected it. Like demanding silence while using the urinal. Some things men just wouldn’t say in front of other men. I turned to Bergman. “Go on.”

  “You guys are Sensitives, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, it seems to me the mole might be an other. He could be communicating with the Wizard through telepathic or other nontraditional means. In which case one of you should be able to sense him.”

  “But we haven’t,” I said.

  Bergman nodded. “All that could mean is that he’s somehow shielded himself. In which case, you might be able to sense the shield.”

  Cole and I looked at each other doubtfully. In the short time we’d known each other we’d learned our Sensitivities differed quite a bit. We could both detect vampires. But only I could tell when reavers were around. Cole was better at picking out witches and weres. And the powers our Sensitivities gave us differed greatly as well. The fact that so far neither of us had noticed anything amiss among David’s crew didn’t do much for Bergman’s second theory. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to give it a spin,” I told Cole.

  “So what do we do?” he asked. “Walk right up to them and give them a sniff?”

  Sure, I thought, turning my card deck in my hands, three highly trained Spec Ops troops aren’t going to suspect a thing when we start nosing around their business. Especially after they start comparing notes. I had just opened the flap so I could get the cards out when an idea hit me. The ideal way to study our suspects without them ever wondering why we were giving them the once-over. “Cole,” I said, “why don’t you go see if everybody’s up for some poker?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Iranians dine on the floor, so, since we didn’t have a table handy for poker, we sat on the living room rug in front of the fireplace. It reminded me strangely of Girl Scout camp, when we’d play Snap and Crazy Eights inside our tents after the marshm
allow toasting and song singing had run its course. We formed a circle, most of us cross-legged. Only Dave and Cassandra were missing. They’d chosen to spend the afternoon in the kitchen, drinking tea and gabbing like a couple of beauticians. In any other situation I’d have needled Dave so hard he’d have resembled a coke addict. But in front of his crazy loyal crew I bit my tongue and filed it all away for future use. He’d be home for Christmas one of these days and then, whap! Watch that boy squirm!

  “Okay, what do you say to this?” I asked as I removed my deck from its somewhat limp and discolored holder. “Dealer calls the game and the wild cards. Ante is seven thousand, nine hundred rials.” We’d all been issued plenty of Iranian currency before we left. I’d just told the guys it would cost them about a buck apiece to get into the game. They’d been around this part of the world long enough to know exactly what I meant.

  Everybody seemed agreeable, so I split the deck and bent the halves, thumbing the edges toward each other as I’d done tens of thousands of times. The cards flipped out of my hands like they’d grown springs.

  “Very funny,” said Cam, the twinkle in his eye making light of the sarcasm in his tone. “Tell us, Jaz, just how do you win a game of fifty-two-card pickup?”

  Everybody laughed. But me. Okay, don’t panic. Your fingers probably just spasmed. Maybe you’re not getting enough potassium. I gathered the deck together and straightened it. Okay, concentrate. Pretend you’re just learning. Like Granny May is sitting beside you, patiently mapping every detail of each move. I watched my fingers begin the familiar motions that had become a balm to me, a rare and precious soothant to my savaged soul. They stopped working right around step three. As if they’d taken some major muscle damage while I wasn’t looking.

  At least my poker buddies didn’t laugh this time. Maybe they noticed the look on my face. I tried to school in blankness, but my inner bitch wouldn’t allow me to deny the awful, dawning truth. She sat on her customary bar stool, nursing a whiskey sour, checking her reflection every minute or so, swinging a black-stockinged leg just enough to make the guys around her hope her red leather miniskirt kept riding up.