Mad Maudlin

by Mercedes Lackey

  Now she could pick up a little. Enough to know that this was a lie. David knew Parker Wheatley very well, and didn't like what he knew.

  "I believe that Mr. Wheatley thinks he's hunting paraterrestrials—whatever they are," Ria said. "It was the part where he was proposing internment camps for psychics that I found particularly charming, though. Awkward if this should get out."

  David looked up sharply.

  "Is that a threat, Ms. Llewellyn?"

  Ria uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. "David, LlewellCo is a multibillion dollar multinational company with a finger in a lot of pies. At the moment, one of our partnerships is prospecting for oil in Siberia, and they're using dowsers to locate likely drilling sites. A lot of companies use dowsers to locate everything from water to underground power cables, because they happen to be very effective. And dowsers are psychics.

  "I've already been a ninety-day wonder, and frankly, I'm sick of it. Believe me, I have no desire at all to step back into the spotlight for any reason. But the idea that some government agency is going to start a, well . . . witch-hunt . . . it's just going to cost everyone time and money."

  "I'm sure your fears are groundless," David said, getting to his feet. "May I keep this?"

  "Of course," Ria said, getting to her feet. "I appreciate your time."

  * * *

  One down, Ria thought, standing on the steps of the building a few moments later. The November wind was icy, and she wrapped her cashmere trench coat more tightly around her, turning the collar up to cover her ears.

  "David" would know he didn't have the original copies of the information in that folder, and if he was good at his job, he'd probably have someone follow her—purely as a routine check. Let him. She could get rid of a tail if it ever happened to be necessary, and meanwhile, she might as well take the CIA on a tour of the sights of Washington. Tonight she had an appearance to make at a charity gala at the Kennedy Center—LlewellCo had made a large contribution, so Ria might as well show the flag—and there was always the interesting possibility that David's inquiries might bring some of Wheatley's goons sniffing around her as well.

  She'd enjoy that. She really would.

  * * *

  "You do understand, don't you, Ms. Llewellyn, that The X-Files is a television show?"

  "I'd appreciate it if you didn't try quite so hard to belittle my intelligence, Agent Babcock. I'm not the one who's set up a secret government department to chase elves, gremlins, and little green men," Ria responded tartly.

  Another day, another appointment, this time at the FBI. The J. Edgar Hoover Building.

  "So far we only have your word for that," Babcock said.

  "I'd be delighted to find out I'm mistaken," Ria said, backing off a little. "It would also be somewhat comforting to know that this was a legitimate government department operating entirely within the terms of its mandate. And since it's operating on American soil with American citizens as its proposed targets, forgive me for assuming you'd either know, or want to know about it."

  Babcock looked down at the folder in his hands. "I can't comment on that," he said.

  "I appreciate that," Ria said. "And I'm not asking you to tell me anything. Look, anybody with the price of a newspaper knows that the intelligence communities are engaged in one hell of a turf war right now. And one of the ways to hang on to your turf is to make yourself look big and important and indispensable. So what if somewhere there was a little research project that developed delusions of grandeur? That's all it would take, Mr. Babcock."

  Nathaniel Babcock had been the special agent involved with sorting out the tangled Threshold mess, so Ria'd had a lot of contact with him over the last several months. She'd decided to take her material to him rather than to someone higher in the organization for just that reason. He already knew her, and—for as much as it was worth—she knew that she'd managed to impress him as being relatively sane and level-headed. And all the information she'd brought him so far had panned out.

  She could tell that he'd rather not be hearing about this now. There were already a few rumors floating around Capitol Hill about Wheatley, enough to have filtered down even to Babcock's relatively unexalted level. Wheatley's position apparently wasn't all that secure. But Babcock himself wasn't highly placed enough to take on a crusade of this nature, and hesitated, for a number of reasons that seemed good to him, to push the matter with his superiors.

  Even though she was disappointed, Ria could sympathize with his position. There wasn't much hard evidence in what she'd brought him. And whistle-blowers didn't have a long life-span in any field.

  He looked down at the folder again and sighed, suddenly becoming more human. "I know we've both seen weirder stuff, Ms. Llewellyn. But this . . . ? Internment camps? It's loony, Ms. Llewellyn. Nobody can just wave their hand and make things like that appear. And besides . . . half the police departments in this country have used psychics on their cold cases at one time or another. For terrorists, maybe, down in Gitmo, but . . . nobody'd go along with this."

  "They would if somebody scared them badly enough, Mr. Babcock," Ria said softly. "And I think it would be a very bad idea if they did."

  "So do I," Babcock sighed again. "Look, I'll put this in a report and pass it along up the chain. But without something harder to attach to it . . ."

  "I know," Ria said. He'd do that much for her, she knew, but he was right: without hard evidence, the report would just vanish into somebody's file cabinet. Without a smoking gun, it would be hard to get anyone excited. And Beth Kentraine—the only human Ria knew of who'd actually encountered any of the PDI's operatives—would make a very poor witness to Wheatley's criminal behavior.

  "Well, thanks for seeing me at least."

  "A pleasure as always, Ms. Llewellyn," Agent Babcock said, rising to see her out.

  * * *

  Maybe I'm too old for this, Kayla thought to herself, dragging herself into her apartment and collapsing onto her couch with a grateful sigh. She was only a few years older than the kids up in The Place, and it hadn't been so very long since she was living the very same way, but it seemed so much harder now. Maybe because now she wasn't running away from everything, focusing all her energy on looking no further ahead than tomorrow. She had a future now, something none of those kids would have if they kept on the way they were. But most of them had already given up and stopped fighting.

  Like Jaycie.

  Magnus and Ace couldn't see it, and for a while Kayla hadn't been able to spot it either, but the kid was some kind of stoner. She couldn't figure out what his thrill was, though. He didn't smoke, she'd never caught him doing anything harder, and she was positive he wasn't spiking his Cokes. But he was zeeing out most of the time, and it was like neither of them noticed. She'd overheard them talking. Ace thought he was sick. Magnus was sure he was okay.

  Yeah, like anybody who sleeps twenty-two hours a day's in the bloom of clean-bodied health.

  Maybe she could do something for him. Pull him back from the edge; sweep the junk out of his system. It wouldn't keep him from poisoning himself again—however he was doing it—but maybe it would scare the three of them enough to listen to her, so they'd go into that program of Hosea's. She didn't know how long Ria was going to be in Washington, but Anita had her number there if Kayla really needed it.

  Or maybe Eric would be back by then.

  She was putting off checking her messages, because she didn't want to hear any more bad news. But there was no point in delaying the inevitable. And maybe it would be good news. For a big change.

  Reluctantly, Kayla heaved herself up off her futon and went into the kitchen to play back her messages.

  A couple from friends from school, sounding like strange messages from another world. One from Hosea, wanting her to come see him before she left again this evening. And one from Dr. Dunaway.

  "I'm afraid I don't have any good news for you, Kayla. Eric hasn't been admitted at any of the city hospitals. Give me a call or stop
by my office between two and three. I'm free then."

  Kayla glanced at the clock automatically. Only ten o'clock. Hours before she could call.

  And Eric was not in the hospital, not anywhere that Lady Day could find him, not anywhere that Jeanette could find him.

  They were starting to run out of options.

  Okay. I'm really scared now. Does that help matters?

  She went back to the living room and huddled on her futon, trying to think.

  And trying not to cry.

  * * *

  There was a courier package waiting for Ria when she got back to the Watergate. Someone was certainly following her, but they were far away enough that she could only pick up the faintest wisps of intention, not enough to tell her who they were.

  She picked up the package at the desk, glancing at the return address. New York. Something that Anita had sent down, then. She tucked it under her arm and went up to her suite, wondering what could be that important. She'd be going back in three days, and her staff was well-trained; people who felt they had to run to the boss with every little thing didn't last long at LlewellCo.

  She went up to the suite and stopped just inside the door. One spell assured her that it was empty now. A second . . .

  Oh, this is very interesting . . .

  She'd had visitors.

  Ria watched as the shadows she'd evoked with her second spell moved about the suite, searching it thoroughly. It was unlikely they'd find what they'd come for, however: not only had she locked her last set of documents in the safe that came with the suite, she'd taken the precaution of rotating it outside of Time with a simple spell before she left. They could search until Doomsday and not find it.

  Though apparently Doomsday had come early this year. . . . Ria watched in profound surprise as the colorless shadows quickly located the safe and swung open the hinged cabinet that concealed it. The four shadows clustered around it for several minutes of elapsed real-time before closing the cabinet again and moving on; apparently, while they could locate it, they were unable to break her spell and get inside.

  They moved on, performing further actions in ghostly pantomime. What they were doing wasn't that hard to figure out. Their mission complete, the ghosts packed up their equipment and left. Reflexively, Ria stood aside to let them pass, even though they weren't really there, then walked into the middle of the room, knowing that her every move could be heard—and probably seen—by whoever had bugged her suite so thoroughly while she was out.

  There were actually very few candidates for that particular honor, considering how easily they'd found the safe—and how long they'd spent trying to get into something they shouldn't have been able to see at all.

  How very nice of Mr. Wheatley to take an interest. But since there aren't any residual traces of magic here, I'm very much afraid all of his little toys are about to . . . fail.

  It wasn't as easy for her as it was for Eric, or for a pure-blooded Elven Magus. Their magic was innate, born in the blood. All of Ria's sorcery was hard-learned, a matter of years of training, study, and practice.

  But it was no less effective for all of that.

  She raised her handbag higher on her shoulder and summoned up her shields to full strength, making sure her own electronic equipment was inside them. She'd be wanting it later, and nothing outside her shields was going to be particularly reliable after what she was about to do. Then she called up a particular spell she was very fond of—she'd used it a number of times before—and flung it out to encompass the entire suite.

  The room lights flickered for a moment and then steadied. There were a number of hisses and pops from unlikely locations as tiny surveillance devices and their batteries gave up their stored power and memory.

  Once her spell had run its course, she walked through the living room, office, and bedroom, making sure.

  The phones were all dead. So was the television/TiVO/DVD/CD player. There was a black smudge on the inside of the lamp over her desk. The lights in the bathroom had exploded in a shower of broken glass.

  Ria searched through the debris until she found the camera, a tiny object barely the size of her thumbnail. Naughty, naughty, gentlemen, putting a camera in here. She went back through the rest of the suite, searching until she'd collected most of the now-lifeless objects. Several in the lamps. One on the back side of the headboard of her bed.

  :Now,: she said, sitting down on the couch and cupping them in the palms of her hands, :speak to me, creatures of crystal and fire, and tell me what you know. . . . :

  It wasn't difficult to get them to give up their information. The bugging devices had been carried and placed with intent, and each had been individually assembled, so they retained more information than objects that had been mass-produced and expended carelessly. Though they were small, they knew their purpose, where they had come from, and who had brought them here.

  A man named Nichol had led the team. Wheatley had found out she was asking questions about him, and wanted to know how much she knew. That answered the "why" of them looking for the safe. As for the "how" of them managing to spot it . . . Kentraine had said that the PDI had some technological method of cutting through the illusions the Sidhe could wrap around themselves, as well as the ability to render themselves magic-resistant and more-or-less invisible—to elves, if not to humans. And it looked like their detecting abilities might extend to sorcery, as well as Elven magery, even if they hadn't been able to break her spell.

  Ria set the handful of hardware on the coffee table and regarded it. It was lovely evidence . . . only it didn't point to anyone in particular unless you had psychometric abilities. Anyone with money and connections could dip into this particular bag of tricks these days, and off the top of her head, Ria could name half a dozen people who would have a reasonable motive for wanting to spy on LlewellCo, including both the men she'd paid visits to here in Washington. And while being kidnapped by Wheatley might be an entertaining way to turn over that particular rock, she really had too much on her plate to waste her time playing out that particular end game.

  So.

  She leaned back, only to be distracted by a crackle of paper. The package from New York.

  She fished it out from behind her and tore it open. Inside was a note from Anita that said: "Dear Ria: this came today by special courier marked 'Extremely Urgent,' so I'm overnighting it to you."

  The package inside was wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine, and sealed with red sealing wax, superscribed in characteristic Spenserian script. The Post Office would have had no idea of how to handle it; Ria noted it had been delivered "By Hand."

  It was a report from Inigo Moonlight.

  He said he'd call, Ria thought to herself, vaguely piqued. But when she unwrapped the thick sheaf of documents she realized why he had not.

  My Dear Miss Llewellyn—the cover letter began, handwritten, of course; she supposed the man had never even heard of the typewriter—I believe I have unearthed the identity of the young person who has come to the attention of our Mr. Wheatley, and if I am correct in my deductions, this individual is a wholly innocent pawn in the schemes of that madman. A Mr. Marley Tucker Bell has been missing from his home in Baltimore, Maryland, for the last ten days. Following his disappearance, both his home and his place of business, one Bell Books, a shop which deals in new and used books of the sort commonly termed "occult," have been thoroughly searched, and several interesting items have been abstracted from each venue. I attach an annotated list of the items. Mr. Bell has for some years been engaged in the practice of the Art Magickal, with a particular specialization in goetic evocation and historical research, and I believe that it is through his agency that Mr. Wheatley has discovered the existence of De Rebus Nefandis, and the fact that this volume might well serve his larger purpose. We must not think too harshly of Mr. Bell, however, for few individuals are prepared for the shock of coming face-to-face with True Evil, and I very much fear that our young friend has been exposed to some ph
ysical duress to gain whatever cooperation he may have provided. I attach several photos of Mr. Bell, should you chance to come across him in your travels, for it is my conviction that he would under normal circumstances be most unwilling to assist Mr. Wheatley in any operation that this fiend in human form should contemplate. Supporting documentation and my further report is enclosed. As always, I remain your humble and obedient servant, Inigo Moonlight.

  Ria paged through the papers until she got to the photos—several 8x10s that looked like candid shots, obtained Heaven knew how. They were pictures of an enormously average-looking young man—late thirties, she supposed, with the faintly transparent look of Tidewater aristocracy; a face and bone structure that hadn't much changed since it had been exported from England around 1600, and one that would look equally at home beneath a Puritan crop or Cavalier curls. Or, as it was now, in an entirely modern—if a bit Young Republican—haircut. Marley Bell looked like a slightly naive college professor, of the sort that called up most women's mothering instincts. And while Ria had none of those to speak of, she was quite certain that Mr. Bell was in need of help just now . . . assuming he was still alive.

  She pulled out the picture of Bell dressed in an argyle sweater-vest and white shirt, behind the cash register of what Ria supposed must be Bell Books, and studied it critically. Wheatley had kidnapped him. And—if she could place any credence in Moonlight's hunches at all—was trying to use him to punch a door through to Elfland, with or without the help of a 9th-century grimoire. Or had been, ten days ago.

  She didn't think he'd succeeded. It took a Bard, not a Mage, to pierce the Veil Between the Worlds, and even then it was possible only in certain times and places—and with a Node Grove to anchor the newly-formed Nexus besides. Even the Sidhe Magi Major couldn't do it themselves, with all their power.

  This was the break she needed. An actual crime to tie Wheatley to—and hang him with.

  But it would be ever so much more useful with the testimony of a witness.