He shrugged. “I never figured on losing.”
I spread my hands out on the countertop. The left one now bare. The right sporting a glittering reminder of how many battles I’d won. “I didn’t think about it much myself until Jessie brought it up. And then what she said made a lot of sense. She was just doing what she thought she needed to in order to save her soul, Dave.”
As I spoke, his lips drew back farther and farther, as if he’d bitten into something rancid. “She was my wife. And yet she didn’t trust something that sacred to me. If only she’d explained —”
“Could you have let her go?” I whispered. “Could you have stuck a crossbow in your wife’s chest and released an arrow into her heart, knowing the alternative was eternal life, right here on earth, with you at her side? Come on now. I could barely bring myself to do it, and I was only her sister-in-law.”
He rammed both fists onto the counter. “Why are you bringing this up now? I have to be sharp for tonight and you’re tearing my damn heart out!”
Why did I suddenly remember all those afternoons we’d spent pounding Play-Doh into pancakes in Granny May’s kitchen? Evie had wanted to play house, which was hilarious in retrospect, since not one of us knew how a normal family functioned. I’d reluctantly agreed, but Dave had taken one look at our yellow, blue, and red clay breakfast and decided to transform it into a sport. Five minutes later we’d transformed the pancakes into Frisbees and set up a course with Granny May’s Tupperware bowls that would’ve impressed an Olympic committee.
I said slowly, “In case something goes wrong at the takedown, I wanted things to be straight between us.”
“Are you asking me to forgive you?” Dave asked. I thought he sounded more grieved than aggravated. But when he scratched his neck, I was reminded I still couldn’t speak freely.
“No,” I said, surprising myself just as much as him. “I just needed to explain how it went down. And to tell you I’m sorry.”
“Why?” He didn’t bother to hide the bitterness in his voice. “Jessie knew you’d keep your promise and you did.”
I bowed my head. “You gotta have a big streak of ice running through your heart to follow through on a vow like that,” I told him. “I’m apologizing for being that cold.”
Dave nodded. “You did what Jessie wanted. And if she was right, I should be down on my knees, thanking you. I know I should . . . ”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just glad you’re still talking to me.”
“Well, you did have to travel six thousand miles to have this conversation,” he reminded me. We both managed a smile. The very same one, in fact. One of those things that makes it weirdly wonderful to be a twin. “Then again,” he went on, “you did bring Cassandra with you. That in itself deserves high praise.”
“So you guys are getting along pretty well, huh?” My gut twisted slightly at the thought, but I realized it wasn’t for him; it was for me. For him I wanted only happiness.
“She’s . . . amazing. I think I could spend my whole life talking to her and never get bored. I haven’t gotten to see her much today though. We’ve been really busy running through the scenario. Getting prepped. Lots of last-minute stuff I probably should’ve taken care of yesterday. I’d like to see her before we go though. Maybe I’ll go check on her now.”
Holy crap! Dave’s about to crash the we-know-you’re-the-mole party. May Day! May Day! In my mind I could hear jets crashing and ships exploding. This was not going to be pretty if I couldn’t think of a good distraction. And my mind was a sudden and total blank!
I followed Dave out the kitchen door, my jaw working like I’d just bitten into a caramel, but nothing came out. No brilliant delay tactic. Not even a bad joke to give me five seconds to pray for a miracle. As we went past the living room I caught Cam’s eye and began to do wild charades. I jumped up and down. Made last-chance-motel faces. Pointed at Dave and then at the closed door toward which he headed. The one behind which Cassandra and Bergman had been laboring all day to develop a device that could remove the Wizard’s control from him.
“Yo, boss,” Cam called. “Question for you.”
“Hold that thought,” Dave called. “I’ve got business.”
Jet dropped something. Broke something else. Said, “Shit!” as loud as he could manage. The din would’ve brought an entire fire-house down the poles to investigate. Dave kept walking. I’ll say this for my brother: He’s got focus.
I was seriously considering grabbing a bust of Iran’s latest president, which was sitting on a pedestal between the bedrooms, and clubbing him over the head with it when Cassandra emerged from the girl’s room.
Part of my Sensitivity opens me up to very strong feelings among my fellow humans. Boy was she ever glad to see him. And likewise with my twin. In fact, if the house had been empty, I was pretty sure they’d have greeted each other in an entirely different manner.
“Where have you been all day?” Dave asked, his voice low and, for the first time in a long time, excited.
She smiled. “A little project for Jaz. She’s not very pleased with this Seer Vayl has taken up with.”
Dave glanced over his shoulder, but I’d already sidled around him. He still managed to catch my eye before I entered the bedroom. “Everything okay with the vamp there, Jazzy?” he asked.
“Nothing I can’t handle,” I assured him. I shut the door before I could catch a glimpse of them making googly eyes at each other. Yuck.
“Bergman!” I whispered, tiptoeing up to him like Dave might have just thrown Cassandra out of his way and pressed his ear against the door. Hey, I’ve seen weirder things. Sad. But true. He looked up from the temporary work station he and Cassandra had set up at the dressing table. They’d left it against the wall so they wouldn’t have to worry about disturbing the attached mirror, and scattered their tools across it. Bergman’s computer hardware and the gear required to modify it buddied up with Cassandra’s herbs and potions, all of which surrounded the Enkyklios. I sat at the chair beside Bergman’s that Cassandra had obviously just vacated. “Any luck?” I asked. He nodded as he peered through a magnifying glass at an item he held with tweezers. It was about the size of a watch battery, but it glowed the red of the rubies in my ring. “We think this will do the trick,” he said.
“Okay.” I gulped down another urge to cry. This was so not going to work if I was going to blubber every five minutes. I resolved to have a huge emotional breakdown the second I stepped foot in my apartment. I’d supply myself with chocolate. A gallon of cookie-dough ice cream. Two boxes of Kleenex. And maybe a good tearjerker to get me jump-started. The Pursuit of Happyness always did the trick. Yeah, that sounded like a winner.
Having planned ahead, I now felt better. At least, better able to function. “Okay. How does it work?”
Bergman took a while to answer. Finally he admitted, “I’m not completely sure. Cassandra has made it able to follow the path of the ohm.”
When my eyebrows shot up he explained. “That’s what they call the item a necromancer uses to control his, uh, zombie with.” He gave me an apologetic frown. “Cassandra finally got hold of this woman she said you guys tried to talk to before the mission even started. What was her name?” He had to think a second.
“Oh yeah. Sister Doshomi. She had a story on her Enkyklios that basically explained Dave to us. He was made the second way, the way Hilda — remember her, the woman whose daughter died — who ended up as the great necromancy professor?” I nodded, feeling a jolt of sympathy for the woman who’d lost everything and still managed to reach across time to help me. “Dave was made the way Hilda suspected. The way she actually discovered before she was murdered.”
He cleared his throat. Looked at me sympathetically, like we were at a funeral, which it kind of felt like we were. “Jaz, Dave’s not just a regular zombie. He’s a zedran. Which is why there’s an ohm in the first place. You know, so the Wizard can communicate with him from a distance.” Maybe sensing that I was having
a hard time digesting all his information without falling off my chair, he rushed on. “The good news is, the ohm has to be made from the Wizard’s own flesh. So once we get it out of Dave, actually once the retriever we’ve built gets it out of him, we can use it to find the Wizard.”
“How?”
“Cassandra knows a spell.”
That got my attention. I laid my hand on Bergman’s forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because only three weeks ago if I’d have said the word ‘spell’ to you, you’d have burst a blood vessel.”
He nodded slowly. “It’s why I wanted to come.” He put everything down and sat back. “I didn’t count on meeting Natchez. But I guess I was hoping to find somebody — or something — like him on this trip.”
He shook his head in amazement. “The man knows how to live, Jaz. He’s not afraid of anything that I can tell. Not of getting sick. Or working something new into his repertoire. Or trying something totally off the wall. Did you know he once saw a woman on the street that he just loved the looks of, so he asked her out? Just like that! I mean, she could’ve been psycho. She could’ve had four different STDs.”
“And?”
“She was fine! They went out a few times. Didn’t have enough in common for a longer relationship and parted friends. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“He’s the same age as me, Jaz, and he’s lived, like, twenty lives compared to mine.”
“Do you really envy him as much as it sounds? I mean, if you’d spent all your time jumping out of airplanes and climbing mountains, you wouldn’t have come up with even half your inventions.”
He clasped his hands between his knees and slouched in his chair, like I was one of his professors reprimanding him for not handing in his paper its usual two weeks in advance. But when he looked at me it was with a new defiance in his eyes. “I hate being a wimp. Feeling this paranoia so extreme it’s burning knots in my chest. Like the world’s going to end if I don’t protect myself well enough, if I take one step in the wrong direction. You can’t imagine how bad it sucks.”
Actually I could. After I lost Matt, Jessie, my crew . . . the Agency kept a sharp eye on my sanity. Rightfully so, since I could feel the shards of it slicing against the inside of my skull every single day. And I’d developed a few bizarre habits that were tough to hide. Among them a tendency for my brain to stick on a word like a bad stutter. Also a habit of blacking out at the worst possible moment. Fortunately I’d been able to toe the line long enough to get my head on fairly straight. I said, “So what’s your next step? Surfing those massive Australian waves? Skiing the Alps? Exploring the wilds of Burma?”
Bergman cleared his throat. “Actually, I thought I’d just explain how the retriever works. And then, you know, after this mission’s over? Maybe take a vacation to Cancun. Buy some funky clothes and tell the girls I’m a musician. You know — see what happens.”
I chuckled. “Sounds like an excellent place to start.” I scooted my chair forward. “So show me.”
He handed me the magnifying glass. “It’s the same principal as the bug card. Only with a magical wallop. You introduce it into Dave’s body. It zeroes in on the ohm. Attaches to it. Disables it. And then reemerges.”
“How does it get in and out?” I pictured it like the killer pill he’d made to zap one of the vamps we’d targeted during our last mission. We’d tried to get him to eat it, so I was seeing Dave wolfing this thing down in a cheeseburger or whatever equivalent we could drum up on short notice. Given our current location it would probably be hidden among some rice-stuffed veggie leaves. Bergman took off his glasses, cleaned, and reset them on his face. His hands shook slightly as he worked the frames. “Cassandra says, in order for the magic to be effective, the retriever has to take the same route as the ohm.” He stopped, waiting for me to figure it out. It took less time than I would’ve liked. I felt my lips draw back from my teeth in a snarl as I said, “You mean we have to cut Dave’s throat?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Dave and his crew took off before Vayl woke. The idea, in order to “fool” the Wizard, was for them to leave early, make sure the place was thoroughly scouted and covered before we arrived to carry out the assassination. We’d actually run through the scenario the night before, after Soheil left. Though, with everyone in the know, it seemed an empty exercise. Even the mole understood we’d never join them. Because we would head to the “right” location.
They left the house in twos, with Dave and Amazon Grace in the first pair. That gave me a chance to powwow with the rest of his crew. We met in the living room, Cam, Jet, and Natchez leaning against the back of the couch as I explained about the retriever while Cassandra and Bergman backed me up when they came up with the hard questions.
The guys didn’t like the mode of delivery any more than I did.
“Listen, before we slice into the man’s throat, isn’t there any way we can make one hundred percent sure he’s the mole?” asked Natch.
As Bergman threw him a sympathetic look I said grimly, “He’s it. And it’s not like we’re going to jam a dagger into his carotid. It’ll just be a little incision. Just enough to insert the thing.” I hope.
“When?” asked Jet.
“After the mission is over. Vayl and I will handle it.”
“Whoa, wait a minute,” said Cam. “We’re his men. We’re going to help get this monkey off his back.”
Chorus of hell-yeahs from the other guys.
My mind immediately jumped to the mahghul. Would they gather for an event like the one we were planning? I reminded myself to check the roof the next time I stepped outside. I said, “This isn’t some kind of intervention where we all sit around and whale on Dave for spazzing on our Monday-night football parties and showing up drunk at our weddings. This is a violent attack on a military officer, during which he will die. Not” — I held up a finger to ward off the slew of questions I could see coming — “because of the cut on his throat. But because as soon as the Wizard’s control is released he’ll go back to the state he was in before the Wizard took him. Which was dead.”
I could hardly bear to look at their faces, tight with pain and despair. It made it nearly impossible to contain my own. Which was why I totally avoided looking at Cassandra. Thank God she kept silent. If I’d have heard one hint of a sob, I’d have lost it. I went on. “If we’re lucky, he’ll come back. Like I did.”
I gave them a brief sketch of my own revival, Raoul’s hand in it, and his willingness to take on Dave if my brother made the choice. I hesitated, not wanting to utter the next words, knowing they had to be spoken. I’m so sorry, Cassandra. “But you have to know, he may choose to stay gone. In which case, it would suck for you to have touched a superior officer with the intention of harming him. And we all know nobody will believe the Wizard had a hand in his passing, because we won’t be able to prove he had control over Dave in the first place.”
We wouldn’t be able to prove anything about the Wizard, which was why, after all this was over, Danfer would go head-hunting and Pete would have to give him mine. I’d be unemployed. Out of the job that had sustained me through the worst tragedy of my life. Dammit! Wasn’t there a single bright spot in this whole, muck-ridden mess?
Of course there is, Jazzy, Granny May said from her spot at the bridge game she kept going near the center of my temporal lobe. She set a coaster under Bob Hope’s water glass, the game temporarily suspended while Abe Lincoln made popcorn. As bright as a spotlight, if you’ll just look hard enough to see it.
I’m looking, dammit! But at the moment all I could see was Cam, watching Cassandra, who’d sought the comfort of Bergman’s arms at my last pronouncement. “Oh, he’s coming back,” Dave’s right-hand man said confidently, giving our Seer a wink when she finally turned to look at him. The cheerful optimism on his scarred face made her sit up straighter and say, “How can you be sure?”
“Woman, I’ve seen the way he looks at you. And vice versa. No fully functioning man gives that up willingly.” Cam nodded. “He’ll be back.”
I wished I could feel so sure. Unfortunately I knew how tough his return trip might be. But I kept my mouth shut for once, and in the end I convinced Dave’s unit to leave freeing him to us. We said our goodbyes and they left. At which point Vayl emerged from the guys’ room. He wore a button-down shirt of dark purple silk that flowed off his broad shoulders and caressed his chest. His coal-black trousers hugged his lean hips with the help of a matching leather belt, and I was sure his shoes had been crafted by a master cobbler who, like his great-grandfather before him, still plied his trade on the streets of Milan. On one hand I could’ve scooped that seething mass of masculinity and power into a waffle cone and savored dessert for the next forty-eight hours. On the other, I badly wanted to kick his ass.
Because he’d taken my blood, Vayl was attuned to my emotions. So he turned to me in surprise, detouring through the living room on his way to the kitchen.
Uh-oh.
I’d been leaning against the couch in the spot Cam had vacated. Now I backed behind the love seat, keeping it and our consultants, who still sat on it, between my boss and me. “Hey, how are you?” I asked, keeping my voice level, trying not to glare. I’d already chosen my fights tonight. Ours wasn’t included. Vayl gave Bergman and Cassandra a nod that they took as dismissal. They helped each other up, stumbling over each other’s excuses to leave.
“Wow, look at the time,” said Bergman. “I’d better go get the TV van ready for later.”
At the same time Cassandra said, “I’m going to work on that spell you’ll need to locate the Wizard. Perhaps it will help clear my head. If I could just squeeze one vision out of this fog that will help David . . .
” She trailed off and let Bergman help her from the room.
“They’re good people,” I said as various doors closed behind our consultants. Too good to be soiled by contact with the likes of us. I was thinking no more missions for either one for at least six months.
Biting the Bullet Page 23