Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

They both paused and stared at each other. She was marginally calm, and emotionally exhausted, as she always was in the wake of a panic attack. This state of false quiet would hold, she hoped, at least until they were on the plane. Grey did not ask “Will you be all right?” or even “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Instead he said,

  Slinging her laptop bag over her shoulder, and grabbing the suitcase, she went out the door.

  Before she could change her mind and hide in the back of the closet.

  The vehicle was exactly like the one that Vickie had driven when she showed the Russian around; broadcast-powered and silent, and as sleek as something out of a fifties science fiction movie. Vickie pitched her suitcase in the trunk with their gear, and her laptop bag into the back seat, which she had all to herself. Bulwark drove, the Djinni sat silently beside him, in the kind of stony silence that suggested they had been shouting at each other at the tops of their lungs before she left the apartment building. Bulwark did all the talking on the way to the airstrip.

  “As you know, New Orleans was hit hard last year by Hurricane Irena, and the invasion finished what Irena started,” he said, in that matter-of-fact voice she remembered from the agents who had run FBI briefings when she’d assisted her parents as a teenager. That was supposed to be against the rules, of course, but when you were a member of the metahuman Paranormal Division, otherwise known as the Spook Squad, rules got broken. A lot. Bulwark hadn’t been in the Bureau, but he was ex-military, and a lot of the buzz-cuts in the Bureau were too. Jarheads, mostly. She had him pegged as an ex-Marine, though that detail wasn’t in his file. Probably, being a meta, he’d been in one of the meta Marine squads that officially didn’t exist. Hell, he probably knew Semper Fu. “There’s not a lot of detail on what actually happened, but the end result is that the city government is fundamentally gone, and the city is being run by the Krewes now.”

  Djinni glanced at him, jarred out of his silence. “The wha—?”

  “Social organizations, or they were,” Bulwark answered Djinni smoothly, without missing a beat. “Originally founded for the purpose of running the Mardi Gras parades.”

  “Hold up, yer sayin’ the guys that toss beads and build floats are runnin’ the damn city?” Djinni sounded incredulous, and Vickie didn’t blame him.

  “You have to be a big man in the area to get invited into a Krewe,” she said softly, looking steadfastly at her hands. “They don’t let just anyone in. Before the invasion, these guys financed the parades, and that doesn’t come cheap. They have warehouses, businesses, a lot of them are restaurant owners so they have food—and some of them are supposed to have ties to organized crime.”

  “So when all hell broke loose and the city government collapsed, the Krewes had local organization and resources. They took over, and what was left of the police mostly defected to them.” Bulwark sounded mildly approving of what Vickie had contributed. “Now the city is divided up by parish, and each parish is being run by a different Krewe. There’s some gang warfare going on, too, because the remains of the out-of-town gangs didn’t exactly have the same borders drawn up that the Krewes did. We’re going into a hot situation. I have a local contact, but I don’t know how much help she is going to be.”

  Djinni muttered something Vickie couldn’t hear.

  “Some of the Krewes are…” she swallowed. “They’re into voudoun.”

  Djinni groaned. “That would be why we have you along, I suppose,” he said sarcastically. “To protect us from zombies.” He shook his head. “Hell, I’ve seen plenty of zombie movies. Just give me a shotgun, a flamethrower and some grenades. We don’t need an amateur getting in the way. And besides that, Tomb never had anything to do with hocus-pocus.”

  “Tomb didn’t, but his brother is a prominent voudoun priest,” Bulwark retorted, as Vickie burned with mingled anger and embarrassment. “And when Tomb got out of prison, he went to his brother, who is protecting him. We will need Operative Nagy to deal with the brother while you get to Tomb.”

  The Djinni shook his head again, and lapsed into a sullen silence that lasted the rest of the way to the airstrip.

  She got out of the car first, and found herself unexpectedly struggling with her suitcase, which had gotten wedged in by the men’s gear. With a growl of impatience, Djinni reached for it at the same time that Bulwark did, and for the first time since she had come out of the building, both were close enough to get a hint of the faint amber scent she had showered in and smoothed on her scarred and welted skin.

  That was when it happened again. Both of them winced, and this time, looked quickly at her. Their pupils dilated for a fraction of a second. Bulwark’s breath caught in his throat, and the Djinni went very still.

  It was only a moment. Then things went back to normal as the Djinni wrenched her bag out and shoved it at her, and Bulwark extracted several heavy duffels in a methodical manner. Neither of the men had noticed that the other had reacted to the same breath of fragrance, but Vickie had, and they had reacted exactly the same way. Mentally she filed that away as something to be looked into later, and dragged her bag to the plane. It was going to be a long trip.

  * * *

  “So Echo is sending agents to fetch Tomb. How very amusing.” The impeccably dressed black man sounded exactly like the actor Geoffery Holder, if anyone in the room was old enough to remember what those cultured and faintly sinister tones sounded like.

  “I thought you didn’t care ’bout Tomb Stone,” the bearer of that information ventured, as Le Fevre’s two muscle-boys nodded gravely. The muscle-boys were sweating. Hardly surprising under the circumstances, but Bocor Le Fevre was pleased to see it. Let them take note of the hazards of failure.

  “And I do not. Tomb Stone’s metahuman talents are no use to me. But his brother will protect him, and when he moves to protect Tomb, he will leave his flank unguarded. In fact”—the man steepled his fingers together—“it would not surprise me in the least if Jacob Stone thought that the Djinni was here, not on behalf of Echo, but on behalf of some new gang.” His teeth gleamed whitely in the darkness, and caught the light radiating from the well-dressed creature crouched over its prey in the center of the room. The creature’s face was an approximation of a black man’s, but with gashlike features, and its suit was of a 1920’s cut with lapels edged in feathers and long white ribbons. “I believe that just might pry the Stone brothers out of their lair. Why don’t you run off, there’s a good fellow, and spread that particular bit of misinformation for me?”

  The djab in the suit made a mock bow to Bocor Le Fevre. “You keep your bargain, I will keep mine.” The djab returned to his meal, the no-longer-screaming body of Le Fevre’s former bodyguard, who had failed to keep the men of the Kronus Krewe out of the Django warehouse that was Le Fevre’s headquarters. There was no blood, of course, and there were no outward marks on the body, but what the djabs did as they feasted on life-force was far more painful than any physical torture, and could be far more prolonged. Le Fevre had silenced the screams as soon as they began, for they annoyed him after a time, but the meal’s bulging eyes and expression of ultimate horror were enough to let the current bodyguards know just how terrible it was to be turned over to one of the Bocor’s allies as a meal.

  The Bocor bowed back. “When we have Jacob Stone, you may eat him.”

  The spirit radiated an unhealthy, greenish light for a moment. “I look forward to that hour.”

  Le Fevre thought for a moment. “And while you are at it…bring me the links to those spirits of the Red Djinni’s enemies that are within my reach. I want to find his weaknesses.”

  ”That is easily done,” the djab chuckled. “The Djinni has many dead enemies, and they would tell you these things for nothing. You have but to summon them. I will get you names.”

  Le Fevre laughed, as the djab faded away, off to possess as many people as he could to spread the disinformation that the Red Djinni was forming a new gang, and w
as here to recruit Tomb Stone, whether Stone wanted to come or not. The djab’s meal writhed and mewled, more than half mad now. Le Fevre beckoned to his bodyguards and gestured towards the man that had brought word from the leaky information sieve that passed for Echo HQ in New Orleans these days. “Take that away and put it in my workroom,” he said, with a faint smile. “My ally will want it when he gets back.”

  The men shuddered, and complied.

  * * *

  The Echo craft was eerily silent. There was no roar of jet engines outside the fuselage, which made the sullen quietude inside the craft that much more unnerving. There were only four sets of seats here, as the rest of the craft was given over to cargo space—two pairs of seats facing each other on either side of a narrow aisle. The Red Djinni had the left-hand four all to himself; he had jammed himself into the corner of the window seat on the front-facing bulkhead and brooded, legs thrust aggressively out into the space between the seats, effectively taking up as much of the space as possible. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he had not once removed his signature scarf, so all that could be seen of his face were his eyes, glaring sullenly. Bulwark and Vickie perforce had the other four seats. He took the front-facing pair; she got stuck with the rear-facing ones. Then again, motion sickness was the least of her worries. The way that the Djinni was glaring at her, you would have thought that she had mortally insulted him. And as for Bulwark, he had gotten even more reserved, if that was possible. She still couldn’t figure out what she had done to either of them to make them act this way.

  “This meta we’re after—Tomb—” she said finally, just to break the silence. “Why is he called that?”

  Bulwark smirked. “You ought to ask Djinni about that. He’s the one that worked with the man.”

  The Djinni grunted. Bulwark gave him a sardonic glance. “Be nice. Tell the lady.”

  “She’s your pigeon. You tell her.”

  Bulwark rolled his eyes. “You know how it is. A lot of metas like their nicknames or aliases to be bad puns on their powers. His real last name is Stone, and he plays dead.”

  Her brow creased, but Djinni interrupted impatiently. “He doesn’t just play dead, he is dead. No pulse, no breathing, uses no oxygen, the whole nine yards. You can seal him inside an airtight container, fold him up however you want him before he stiffens up, and ship him inside any place you want to get into. Then when you’re ready, he comes back to life and lets you in.”

  She felt her eyes widen. “A self-induced hibernation without a cryogenic chamber?”

  The Djinni shrugged. “Damned if I know. He always said he was dead. He didn’t bleed either. You could stab him and he wouldn’t feel it, or bleed more than a couple drops. The only thing he didn’t do that a dead man would was rot.”

  “But how did he know when to wake up?” Of all the strange metahuman powers she had ever heard of, this was one of the strangest. But she could think of a thousand ways he could be useful…and certainly he must have been invaluable to a professional thief.

  “Beats me. He would only say ‘the loas tell me,’ whatever the hell that means.”

  She blinked, her ever-present fear ebbing with something this fascinating to think about. She turned to Bulwark. “You did say his brother is a voudoun houngan, right? Or is he a bocor?”

  “So I’ve been told. I’m not sure what that means. I don’t know the difference.” Bulwark eyed her with speculation.

  “A houngan is a kind of priest, in a religion that is as much magic as mysticism. A houngan is…oh, this is oversimplifying by a huge margin, but he’s a ‘white’ magician in the popular parlance, though that is a dangerous term to apply to voudoun.” She bit her lip. “Forgive me if I assume too much, but I suppose you don’t know much about the magical, nonstandard religions. All right: take it that voudoun is a religion in which guilt and sin are minimized or absent altogether, and you might sum up the philosophy as ‘if you aren’t harming anyone or scaring the horses, do what you want, and if someone hurts you, or tries to, give as good as you get.’ ”

  Djinni cackled nastily. “Sounds like my kinda church!”

  Bulwark gave him a withering glance. “I’m sure.”

  Vickie shrugged. “It’s not Christian. It borrows heavily from the trappings of Catholicism, but that was largely so that the African slaves that practiced it could continue to wear their emblems and signs and have their religious objects without having to hide them. Santeria, which is associated with Hispanic-dominated Mesoamerican descendants, does the same. However, in keeping with a lot of primal religions, the practitioners of both voudoun and santeria openly use magic.”

  “Yeah, right.” The Djinni’s eyes were sardonic. “To delude the rubes in the pews, no doubt.”

  At that moment, she badly wanted to perform some small bit of magery, just to wipe that hidden smirk off his face. Three things stopped her. One, discipline—in the hard school in which she had learned you did not do magic just to show off, for magic was fueled to a greater or lesser extent by a mage’s own power, and what you wasted in display was power you might need in the next moment for something important. Two—until she did something that could not be ascribed to a metahuman ability, she had no way to prove she was a mage and not a meta. And three—he wasn’t the one who had dragged her out on this job. The person who had, Bulwark, already believed. After this, it was unlikely she would ever see the Djinni again, or so she devoutly hoped. Trying to convince him was a waste of time and energy.

  So she just continued with her explanation. “Now, it is a religion, which means there is a mystic, occult component to it. In this case, a good half of what gets done on behalf of the voudoun practitioner is done, not by the magician himself, but by the loas, greater and lesser. The lesser ones are simple spirits of the dead—ghosts, but with a kick, since belief in them gives them power and energy and that enables them to act in the physical world. The greater…” She hesitated. “…well, the greater are the gods and goddesses of voudoun. Except that these gods and goddesses come and take over the bodies of the worshipers. It’s called ‘being ridden,’ and it’s a great honor. The lesser loas can also ride the worshipers but can’t do the sorts of things the deities can.”

  Bulwark’s brow wrinkled. “You mean demonic possession?”

  She shook her head violently. “They aren’t demons, and it’s voluntary, at least for the most part, although on occasion a ‘good’ loa might take over someone who is in need of a lesson and administer a spiritual reprimand and punishment. Anyway, that’s where the magic and the mysticism overlap. Contacting the dead or the—otherworldly—isn’t a metahuman ability like psionics, and it isn’t strictly magic either. It’s a third thing.” Like having an angel talk to you. She took a deep breath. At least Djinni had shut up, and Bulwark seemed to be listening, even if this must be sounding like something so far out of his experience that it amounted to a totally alien culture and mind-set. “That’s the—for lack of a better term—‘good’ voudoun. There’s a black magic voudoun too. Those practitioners are called ‘bocor,’ and they are all about power. Whatever stands between them and what they want gets flattened, period. So you can see, it makes a big difference whether Tomb Stone’s brother is a houngan or a bocor.”

  She didn’t go into the other intriguing aspect of this—that Tomb’s power was certainly metahuman, but it was clear he shared some of his brother’s mystic ability too, if it was true that the loas told him when to “wake up.”

  “The counterpart to the houngan’s loas are the bocor’s djabs,” she continued. “For all intents and purposes, you might as well call them demons. And if Stone’s brother is a bocor, that is what we will be dealing with.”

  Djinni rolled his eyes, and shook his head, and his hard tone made it clear he thought she was a fraud, and if he had his way, he’d throw her out the plane door and let her apport herself home. “Lady, I don’t believe in magic, or pixie dust, demons, ghosts, or elves.”

  Was she mistaken, or w
as there a trace of regret in that last?

  He flexed his fingers, and made a fist. “Whatever mumbo-jumbo this guy is pulling on the rubes in New Orleans, he’s not gonna be pulling it on me. So you do your hand-waving for Bull since he wants it, if you can manage to stay on your feet long enough, and stay outta my way. I’ll handle Tomb Stone, and his brother too. You’re about as much use to me as a librarian.”

  She flushed with anger and shame, and turned away, staring out of the window. She wanted to give him a snappy retort—the old Vickie would have—but the words got stuck in her throat. Instead she hunched her shoulders and fought down the tears of frustration and pain. He’d gone beyond being rude. Now he was deliberately being cruel.

  “Ignore him,” Bulwark said, with a hard edge to his words. “You don’t answer to him, you answer to me.”

  She ducked her head as a kind of answer; that seemed to satisfy him, and he left her alone, taking out a sheaf of papers to study. But the Djinni kept giving her looks that felt like barbs, and she flushed uncomfortably, and finally she undid her seatbelt and headed for the lav. As she did so, a breath of the amber scent she found so comforting followed her, and once again, she saw both men react strongly to it, their pupils dilating. The Djinni stiffened all over for a moment, and if his glare had been a bullet, she’d have been dead.

  Safe in the privacy of the lav, with the door locked, it suddenly hit her. Both had reacted to her scent. Both had reacted to her name. Now, she had never to her certain knowledge met either of them, she doubted either of them would react that way to a man, so it had to be that they were each reminded of some other woman named Vic. Two women, named Vic, who both favored amber as a scent, was well within the realms of coincidence. But three? Three in the limited circles of metahumans? Amber was not a common scent; it had been popular a few years ago when she picked up on it, but since then she’d had to order it specially.

  Scent was a potent trigger of memory. And she would bet her last dollar that they were reacting to the memory of the same woman. Not just any woman, but one that meant a lot to both of them. Djinni, especially…he’d started acting like a jerk right after he heard her name. And once he’d had her scent? He’d turned cruel. As if he thought she was somehow purposefully trying to impersonate this woman, whoever she was. With a reaction that strong, it hadn’t just been friendship between them. It was harder to tell with Bulwark, but the fact that he reacted at all tended to make her think the same.