A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  “I don’t think I can eat all of it, though,” I said regretfully. “I won’t be burning off any calories teleporting or doing any other… transformations… tonight. Why don’t you ask for an extra fork?”

  He did just that, and loaded it with enough cake to give me pause. “I hope letting you have a fork isn’t going to be a decision I regret all my life.”

  “It’s hard to get through life with no regrets,” Lensky said, demolishing another level of my dessert. “For instance…”

  “Yes?”

  He surprised me by putting his fork down and changing the subject. “Have I completely alienated you this week? If so, I’m sorry. Well, even if not, I’m still sorry. I know I’ve made some inappropriate comments. I’m really not like that… most of the time. The thing is that it’s hard for me to look at you without thinking about sex, and the more I try not to think about sex the more those kinds of remarks come out.”

  When the man decided to quit fencing, he really let it rip, didn’t he? I had a little trouble swallowing my comparatively modest bite of chocolate and chocolate with chocolate icing. “You haven’t… alienated me. Although you have made some extremely inappropriate comments.”

  “But you like me anyway?” He sounded anxious.

  “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have let you buy me Truite Meunière and Mort au Chocolat.”

  “Oh? What would you have let me buy you? Coquilles Saint-Jacques and Iles Flottantes?”

  His accent was atrocious.

  “Nothing at all,” I said, first taking advantage of his distraction to finish off the chocolate cake.

  “In that case… “

  “Not going to happen. I already decided that,” I told him.

  Damn the man, he still looked hopeful. “Then you were thinking about it?”

  I nodded. “And what I was thinking was that the last thing I need is to get involved with someone who practically has his boarding pass for a flight back East.”

  “Long-distance relationships can work.”

  “Sometimes. When the parties have enough in common.”

  “We have a lot in common.”

  “What, exactly? Apart from the fact that we’re both thinking about sex right now?”

  His silence was answer enough. I filled in the blanks for him. “You’re going to go back to your normal life among normal people, and after a little while you’ll be embarrassed that you were ever crazy enough to hang out with someone who can do magic and who wears a talking turtle as a belt, and you won’t really want me to come to Washington even if I can figure out how to jump that far, and I… don’t want to have that conversation.” I had to blink fast and swallow hard to get the last phrase out.

  “What conversation would that be?”

  “The one where you explain how you like me as a friend but you don’t really want me to come to Washington.”

  “Actually, I live in Virginia.”

  “Tomato, tomahto,” I said.

  “And I didn’t think your magic tricks involved predicting the future.”

  “This one doesn’t require second sight.”

  “Dammit! Can’t you give me credit for not being quite that shallow?”

  “No. It’ll hurt too much when I’m wrong. Isn’t it time to go yet?”

  “It certainly is,” he said, pulling out a handful of bills and throwing them on the table. “Past time.”

  Chapter 19

  Despite our unceremonious departure from Chez Nous, we were rather late getting to the party at Whitney Harris’s house. This was all Lensky’s fault and absolutely not my idea. He claimed that he got lost on the way to the house and that his GPS sent him up to the top of Mount Bonnell. Oh, all right, it was true that the GPS directions he was getting sent him there, but was that an error or had he given it the wrong address accidentally-on-purpose? I hadn’t watched when he was entering it. Also, I told him the road we were on would dead-end there, and he didn’t listen.

  Mount Bonnell isn’t much of a mountain, in fact hardly even a hill. But it falls off steeply to the west and gives a good view of the river. Lots of people go there at night. Purely to appreciate the view, naturally. And nobody disturbs the people sitting in parked cars below the stairway to the top of the hill. Wouldn’t want to interfere with their aesthetic experience.

  That Lensky not only knew where to park on the way to a party in a lake house, but knew to conceal the address he gave the GPS from me, demonstrated once again that his intelligence-gathering abilities, or his agency’s, were superb. Mind you, I didn’t object. We spent about an hour in his car while he tried to persuade me to change my mind about our relationship. I will say that he could be extremely persuasive. But I had promises to keep and a party to go to, and before we became unforgivably late I sat up, ran my fingers through my hair a couple of times, and reapplied lipstick.

  “I really do have to go to this thing, you know. And I want to get there before Dr. Verrick leaves, so I can get credit for showing up.”

  “You are showing a great deal of up,” Lensky murmured, tracing the outline of Texas with one finger. But he started the car, I pulled my skirt down, and this time he did give the GPS Whitney Harris’s address.

  The Moore Foundation parties were always at Whitney’s house. The Foundation itself was housed in an unimpressive square building just off Balcones. Whitney Harris personally was housed in an extremely impressive modern house right on the lake, all glass walls and jutting shapes and spiraling iron stairs: a much better venue for a party.

  Lensky whistled when we drew up in front.

  “I thought you’d say that. Quite the showplace, isn’t it?”

  “How the hell does she get flood insurance?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t.” Men. Show one of them a major work of modern architecture lit up like a fairy castle, and they talk about insurance. I’d always heard that the Harrises were richer than God; Whitney could probably replace this house out of the family’s petty cash box.

  He kept on muttering about things like insurance and mortgages and how much did the Foundation pay this woman, anyway? until we crossed an open deck and merged with the party that was spilling out of sliding glass doors and creating a serious noise pollution problem on the lake.

  Just as we got there the music changed to something I knew all too well. “Oh-oh,” I murmured.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Listen.” Not easy, over the alcohol-fueled chatter, but the music was getting louder as we spoke. “Recognize that?”

  “Isn’t it the theme from Star Wars?”

  I would have thought that too, if I hadn’t been living with Ingrid for almost a year. “Nope. She’s persuaded somebody to put on Wagner. That’s Ride of the Valkyries.” Which Ingrid considered good music to wake up by… or to create havoc by.

  The music seemed to be coming from under our feet. I edged through the crowd until I could look over an iron railing at a room half a flight of stairs below us. It was kind of like tracking a hurricane: what first looked like random movement gradually coalesced into a spiral shape moving through the crowd and spreading chaos behind it.

  And the leading edge of the spiral was Ingrid, almost falling out of an extremely low-cut sparkling silver dress, the infamous horned helmet over her flowing gold hair, leading a conga line.

  Lensky whistled again. “Who’d have guessed it?”

  “It’s certainly a creative adaptation to the loss of her sword. I didn’t even know you could conga to Wagner.”

  Ingrid’s voice rose above the music and laughter. “Another hero for Valhalla! And another! And another!” Laughing, the men she tapped chugged their drinks and joined the conga line. Ingrid saw us watching and headed her train of victims towards the stairs.

  Two of them sat down on the stairs and gave up on the conga line, and the rest fell out of step but managed to hang on somehow. Ingrid was flushed with excitement. The guys not actually behind her in the conga line were flushed with the hope that
with the next dance move she might actually fall out of that dress.

  “And Dr. Verrick gives me grief about indecent exposure,” I said to Lensky. “Hi, Ingrid. That’s a nice dress you’re almost wearing.”

  “A foretaste of the rewards awaiting heroes in Valhalla! Heijaha!”

  To my recollection of Norse mythology, Valhalla was more about getting drunk and fighting than about fondling semi-clad Valkyries, but Ingrid always did have her own unique interpretation of these things.

  “This could be bad,” I told Lensky. “Not only is she wearing the magic horned hat, but also she’s let her hair down.”

  “She certainly has,” Lensky said, looking more appreciative of the view than I really appreciated in a man who’d just been trying to talk me into moving to the back seat of his car.

  Our interchange caught Ingrid’s attention and she tapped Lensky on the shoulder. “Come with me to Valhalla, hero!”

  “Uh-uh,” I said, getting between them. “Lay off, Chooser of the Slain. I don’t choose that you should slay this one. Yet.” I could always change my mind if he got obnoxious again.

  “Let him choose! Will you have a hero’s death and unending mead in Valhalla, or will you die a slave and be buried in the dirt?”

  I nodded at Lensky. “Ah, if you pick the Valhalla option, pay up first, okay?”

  “Pay?”

  I indicated Ingrid’s helmet. “You bet five bucks she wouldn’t wear it.”

  “None of my bets are paying off,” he grumbled, giving me a dirty look and five dollars.

  The music was dying down and the conga line – excuse me, the Chosen Slain – were starting to grumble. “Restart!” Ingrid called, and the Ride of the Valkyries began again. “To the mead-hall!” She led her Chosen Slain back down the stairs and towards the bar. Always a popular direction, that.

  I looked at Lensky. “How chivalrous are you feeling?”

  “Want a dragon slain?”

  “No, I want a drink, and the Valkyrie’s Slain are blocking the bar.”

  “It might be better if you fetch the drinks. At least she’s not going to try to take you to Valhalla.”

  A reasonable point, that. But before I could address it, a hand emerging from the crowd offered me a frozen Margarita. “No salt, no lime, am I right?” Bob Burkett smirked down at me.

  “Bob, this is Bradislav Lensky, who’s consulting with us at the Center. Brad, Bob Burkett, one of the trustees of the Moore Foundation.”

  Lensky narrowed his eyes. “Is this one of the men involved in the sandal incident?”

  Bob looked down his nose at Lensky. “Consulting. Is that what you call it?”

  Heaven knows what he meant to imply. But before any more less-than-friendly words were exchanged, the music changed again, this time from Wagner to something with a beat. “Lia, they’re playing our song!” Bob said. “Dance with me!”

  “Can’t dance in these sandals.”

  “Yeah,” Lensky put in, “she can barely stay vertical in them.”

  I glared at him. “Too bad you’re so unlucky in your bets.”

  “I can fix that,” Bob Burkett said, putting his hands around my waist and lifting. “We’ll just dance like this, my Greek goddess, my sweet.” He swung me round and we merged with the crowd of people shuffling and swaying in time to the music.

  “My margarita!”

  “Get you another,” Burkett promised, somewhat breathlessly. “Just as soon as – the music – stops!”

  Before he’d finished that promise, a guy with a short white beard tapped him on the shoulder. “My turn, Burkett!”

  Bob passed me to him and struck out for the bar. I hoped he was sober enough to remember that I still wanted a margarita. No salt, no lime.

  I didn’t remember White Beard’s name, but I thought he was on the U.T. Board of Regents. It didn’t really matter, as within three turns he passed me off to the idiot who’d tried to drink champagne out of my sandal at the last party, and who was now trying to waltz to music that was seriously waltz-unfriendly. Andrew – Andy – somebody? At least being carried like this meant that I wasn’t getting my feet stepped on.

  Unfortunately, it also meant I had no way to resist when Andy Whoever decided that we should be dancing cheek to cheek. I just had to hang on and hope somebody else cut in fairly soon.

  After a few turns I decided that Andy’s motives were pure. He hadn’t tried to feel me up. Most likely he just found it easier to balance my weight like this; it took serious wrist and arm muscles to hold even a small woman up and away from your body.

  Lensky, now, could probably have done it all evening with no strain.

  Just as I was thinking this, he floated into view with, oh joy, the margarita Bob had given me just before starting this mad dance. “You can put me down now,” I told Andy.

  “Ah, but why would I want to do that? Dance with me until dawn, my darling Lia!” He was slurring his words more than a bit, and I began to worry about being dropped. And probably trampled in the crowd.

  Two large, strong hands took my waist from behind. “You heard the lady,” Lensky said. He pulled, Andy lost his grip, and for a moment it looked as though we were about to make Moore Foundation history by all three hitting the floor when two of us weren’t even drunk.

  Lensky set me on my feet. During that slightly unbalanced moment he’d managed to turn so that he was between me and Andy. “I’m beginning to understand,” he said grimly, “why Verrick warned you to mind your manners.”

  “Me? That’s not fair! I am totally innocent. I haven’t been picking people up and whirling them around.”

  “No, but you enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

  “Not nearly as much as I would have if anybody let me finish my drink.” Lensky had stashed the margarita glass in the hands of a statue – well, I thought the flat black pieces were hands, anyway. They were the right height relative to the rest of the piece, which would make the red cube the head and the long white springs the legs and torso.

  It wasn’t a frozen margarita any more; more like a tequila slushie. A melting one. I took care of that and looked around for a refill. The bar, sadly, was still mobbed by Ingrid’s admirers.

  Lensky took the glass out of my hand. “You don’t need any more.” He gave the crowd a disapproving stare. “None of these idiots need another drink. They can’t afford to drown any more brain cells in alcohol.”

  “Who died and made you God?”

  He raised his hands. “Fine. Fine. Go drink yourself into a stupor if that’s what you really want. With a little luck you’ll destroy so many brain cells that you can’t do math any more, and then you can be a normal person and get married and make some poor schlub’s life miserable.”

  “Party pooper.”

  “Party animal.”

  “Tyrant.”

  “Where’s Ben?”

  You could get whiplash trying to follow Lensky’s style of conversation. “I don’t know, why?”

  “Having seen the effect you and Ingrid have on this party, I am naturally curious as to what manner of havoc Ben is creating.”

  “Oh, well, he was going to bring Annelise. I expect he’s trying to act normal.”

  Seldom have expectations been so thoroughly shot down.

  Just in case, I listened for a few minutes. The party noise seemed to be at a constant level now. If Ben had been, oh, dancing the Mexican Hat Dance, there would have been another epicenter of noise and chaos around him. Wouldn’t there?

  But there was a disconcerting silence somewhere to our left.

  “Where are you going?” Lensky demanded when I grabbed his hand and started slithering through the crowd on the left.

  “Can’t say.”

  “Then why are you in such a hurry to get there?”

  I didn’t have the energy to explain that I did actually know where I was going, in the sense that I was chasing down the location where there wasn’t any noise. What I didn’t know was how to describe it. Living room
? Second State Drawing Room? Treaty Chamber? Whitney Harris’s house was too modern for any description. Rooms furnished with modern sculpture and African tribal masks and chairs sculpted from unusual materials opened one into another, or occasionally into short hallways, with no particular pattern that I’d ever been able to identify. I made up names for some of the rooms just so I could keep them straight in my head.

  The mysterious silence was beyond the Hall of Ugly Sculpture where we’d been standing, through the Chamber of Masks and catty-corner to the Sultan’s Harem Pillow Collection. And, hallelujah, the room we were headed for was where one of the tables of party food had been set out and, for a miracle, nobody was screaming.

  Um, not exactly hallelujah.

  Not at all, in fact.

  If the spectators weren’t screaming, it could only have been because they were in shock. Annelise was standing in the middle of the room, with iced petits fours and lobster rolls and stuffed mushrooms and chocolate-dipped strawberries sort of dancing around her, and she looked absolutely terrified. Ben, standing by the food table, was muttering to himself and making little hand gestures, and I could just see tiny blue-white points of light at the tips of his fingers.

  The idiot. Of all the times and places he could have chosen to experiment with his stars, this had to be the worst. Granted, he seemed to have excellent control, and I probably shouldn’t choke him with his own petits fours until he told us how he’d achieved it. On the other hand, a quick glance around the room showed three Trustees of the Foundation, two Regents, half a dozen legislators, and assorted spouses and dates, all of whom were going to be in for years of therapy if I didn’t clear this up quickly.

  And I had come out without my stars. I didn’t even have Mr. M. to help me.

  “Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen!” I shouted, moving towards Ben and catching flying hors d’oeuvres with my left hand. I extended my right hand towards Ben’s hands with their aureole of white dots. Hoping. I didn’t have more of a plan than that. But the stars had come to me first and it seemed just possible that they’d imprinted on me. Come to mama, I thought at them. I envisioned an open curve along the line of my open hand, with points of light flocking into it.