"Someone has to,” he responded tersely. “And I don't make that kind of mistake."
"Self-assured, aren't we?"
"I can't speak for you, ma'am, but I know I am."
Renee laughed again. “A sharp mind and a sharp tongue. I guess I should be used to that, considering who I married. I'd invite you to the club, but I have a feeling you'd prefer to remain in the shadows for a while longer."
His eyes narrowed. “How much did you overhear?” he asked.
"Enough,” she answered. “Plus Ben's mind is like a sieve right now. He's replaying the whole conversation in his head. Quite unconsciously, I assure you."
Ben felt a shiver climb his spine. Damn psychics.
She turned her eyes on him and broke into a wide grin. “You don't shield worth a shit, Ben. That's something you're going to have to learn if you're going to be a LEOPARD. We can't have you giving everything away to the first telepath you run across."
"Gee, thanks,” he growled. “If you overheard our conversation, you probably heard that I'm going nuts here, right?"
"I already knew that. It's pretty obvious. But you're almost done. You've only got a week left of seclusion—then you get to rejoin the real world."
"Such as it is,” Cory remarked dryly. “I really must be off before I'm missed,” he said. “But, again, it was very nice to meet you.” He nodded to Renee and stepped into nothingness.
"God, I hate it when they do that,” Ben grumbled darkly.
"He's a mage,” Renee replied. “That's how they get around."
"Fine. I guess I can live with that. So how's he getting through the wards?"
She looked thoughtful at that, then shrugged. “You'll have to ask Thoth about that. As far as I know, he shouldn't be able to."
"Damn mages,” Ben snorted. Especially a particular red-haired, female one. What are you up to, Amanda? Is this something you and Athena cooked up between you, or have you just lost your mind?
Thirteen
Six weeks of intensive training tucked under his belt, Ben dodged out the door before the echo from the dismissal died out. He trotted around back to the garage, fumbled his keys out of his pocket, and nodded his way past Ralph, the staff mechanic.
The big, typically surly fellow hid a grin behind a large, grease-stained hand as Ben climbed atop his motorcycle and thumbed it to life. Deep down he wanted to shift, to run, but it was enough for now just to get away from the Academy for a few hours.
He roared out of the garage, down the driveway, and flew through the gates before they'd even opened all the way. He hit the wet street and skidded, throwing his boot into the glistening asphalt to keep the bike from spilling over.
The back tired chirped as he throttled up and sped down the road.
Ten minutes later he pulled into the alley behind Loki's lab and climbed off the bike. He took a deep breath of the tangy air blowing off the bay. He nearly jumped three feet when the night came alive and solidified next to him in the person of a familiar form in a black oilskin trench and wide-brimmed cowboy hat.
"Christ! Don't do that!"
Cory—Raven, he reminded himself—fired off a quick grin. “I recommend decaf."
Ben delivered a piercing glare the vampire didn't seem to notice. “What are you doing here?"
"Gee, Ben, it's nice to see you, too."
Ben shook his head. “It's always good to see you ... Raven. Are you following me?"
"Pretty much, yeah."
"Why?"
"You may be in danger."
Ben snorted. “Danger? You're kidding me, right?"
"Not really. I know you're planning on ignoring my advice and Renee's outright order to stay away from Amanda. What I don't get is why you came here to Loki's lab first."
Ben stared at him through narrowed eyes for a moment, then shrugged. “How'd you know?"
"That you were going to ignore our advice? Seemed pretty obvious—besides, Renee can read minds, remember?"
Ben grunted a vague reply and turned toward the laboratory's main door, a hunk of steel with a single closed panel about chest high beside it. He trotted over, popped the panel, and pressed the ‘call’ button with a single vicious jab of his thumb.
"Going to Loki to intercede with his wife isn't going to do you any good,” Raven said, materializing behind him. “He just won't."
"Thanks for the input,” Ben growled. “But maybe I want to talk to him about something else."
"Yeah, sure. I'll buy that. You selling any bridges, too?"
Ben managed to avoid having to answer the vampire's sarcasm when the door popped open with a thick hissing sound. He led the way inside and they both stood inside the small cubicle as the outer door slammed shut and the air cycled swiftly around them.
Raven regarded him oddly with his radiant cobalt eyes. “If you ask Loki to talk to Renee, he just might do it. And you just might piss off the one person no one in this city wants to piss off."
Ben let out a gusty sigh. “For someone who spends all his time skulking around in the shadows, you know entirely too much about the inner workings of this place,” he observed suspiciously. “Don't you have a predatory vamp to kill?"
"Not at the moment, no. Hades has been preoccupied lately. Hasn't made anymore. I know what goes on around here because I pay attention, Ben, something you should also be doing. Everything might look pretty simple on the surface—the PAC, the Academy churning out agents, the meta-heroes doing their thing—but it isn't anywhere near as simple as it looks.
"Renee runs the LEOPARD division, but she doesn't really want the job. Amanda was supposed to take command of MAD, but this little ... separation ... seems to put some holes in that plan.” He said this last with a wry twist of his lips, indicating his skeptical view of the whole situation.
"You don't think she's actually left the agency, do you?"
"Do you?"
"I don't know. That's why I want to talk to her!"
"And if it's some kind of undercover op, you're going to walk in and screw it up, maybe put her life in danger. Is that what you want?"
Ben shook his head as the inner door hissed open. Loki stood several feet within, dressed in a lab coat with a single black rose crammed unceremoniously into the button hole on the lapel. He greeted them with a wide grin. “What a surprise. You boys are just in time."
"Just in time for what?” Ben asked with a frown. He liked Loki, but the guy made him edgy. He had entirely too much of the mad scientist vibe about him for Ben's comfort levels.
"Follow me,” the immortal said cheerfully, turning and practically bouncing down the hallway to a door at the very opposite end. He turned the knob and shouldered his way in as the vampire and werewolf trotted in behind him.
This lab space was positively brimming with metal shapes gleaming like polished chrome and fiber-optic cables strung from one end to the other. In the center of what seemed like a riotous piece of modern art mayhem stood something like an arch, formed out of what looked to be miniature steel girders, pockmarked with riveted holes at six-inch intervals.
Another lab-coated specimen, this one a skinny guy in his late twenties wearing glasses and a bare fringe of hair around an otherwise unmarked pate, crouched over an access panel near the large base of the arch, a small electric screwdriver whirring in his hand. Ben recognized him as the Advanced Technologies instructor from the Academy. He knew him by sight, but his AT class wasn't scheduled until after break.
"We've got company,” Loki announced. The balding man turned and fastened an intense gaze on the two young men before letting out a moderately loud grunt of either greeting or dismissal and turning back to the panel.
"What the hell is that?” Raven asked, circling the contraption. Between the large concrete base and mass of fiber-op cables stretched hither and yon, it took up a good thirty square feet in the center of what was probably a square sixty by sixty room.
"It's a proto-type worldgate,” Loki told him, earning a puzzled scowl for his
troubles.
"A what?"
"It's supposed to be a portal into alternate worlds,” Loki offered in brief explanation. Raven returned a baffled look but continued to skirt the machine, apparently not interested in any further elucidation.
Ben sure was, though. “So parallel worlds do exist?” They'd touched on the subject at the Academy, but in nowhere near the detail he would have liked. He'd always been an inquisitive soul. “How many?"
Loki thought about it, then shrugged. “Who knows? Thousands? Millions? The scientists used to think time was like a single stream flowing from the past into the future, thus emerging the concept of paradox—you know, what would happen if you could travel back in time and kill your own grandfather? Ridiculous notion, that. Why would anyone want to? Anyway, what would happen would be the creation of another universe in which you never existed. The universe in which you did exist would continue on the way it had been.
"That, of course, is a very simplistic model, but I think you get the picture."
"Sure ... I guess. What else?"
"Well, Chaz and I are about to activate the damned thing and step through it."
Ben blinked, not quite sure he was hearing right. It sounded absolutely insane. “But ... do you know where it'll take you?"
Loki shrugged. “Some other Earth."
"And how are you planning to get back?"
The balding man—Chaz? Ben reminded himself—poked his head around a bundle of fiber-op cables. “I've designed a return key module."
Ben frowned. “Have you tested it?"
The whole time Raven stood back, watching silently like a statue carved from alabaster, wrapped in black oilskin. If the notion of stepping through a doorway into another world bothered him, he didn't show it. Ben found something unsettling about his friend's stillness, as if he'd become a corpse in true, propped up against the back wall.
"Is it ready?” Loki asked Chaz.
"I think so."
Think so? Ben shook his head in disbelief. ‘I think so’ certainly wouldn't cut it with him. Not if he was about to step through a strange portal into an alien world. He'd want to be able to get back instantly if it became necessary. “So, have you sent anything through to scout around?” he asked. “Y'know, like on that TV show on the Sci-Fi channel? They always send a robot drone through before stepping through themselves."
Loki stared at him as if his eyeballs had sprung out of his head and were dangling on tiny metal springs somewhere in the vicinity of his chin.
"See,” cut in Chaz, “I told you we should build a robot."
"No robots!” Loki growled, but the glint in his eye was one of humor, rather than anger. Chaz exchanged glances with Ben and shrugged expressively.
"Fine,” he sighed. “Like I said. I think it's ready."
"Good. Activate it."
Chaz walked over to something that looked like it might be a control panel, covered as it was in switches, dials, buttons, and knobs. A string of multi-hued cables snaked out of its base and intersected another string of cable somewhere near the archway. He turned a knob or two, clicked a dial, threw a switch, and a powerful, bone-shaking hum enveloped the room.
Light sprang up within the arch, a swirling miasma of color so vibrant it made Ben sick to his stomach to even look in its general direction. He turned toward Raven, who eyed the thing with evident curiosity.
"You have the module?” Loki asked Chaz, who gave him a ‘don't be stupid’ look in response before holding up a small, cell-phone like object. “Good to go.” He stripped off his white lab coat, revealing a pair of faded Levi's and a black pocket tee.
"You're going like that?” Chaz asked, plucking a garment off a small table and shoving his arms in. It was a vest festooned with dozens of various-sized pockets bulging with mysterious items.
Loki turned a suddenly piercing gaze on Ben. “You coming, wolf boy?"
He shot a look at Raven, who shrugged. Figures. He doesn't care either way. Trapped in this world, trapped in another. What difference doesn't it make?
In a perverse fit of pique, Ben turned back to Loki and nodded. “Sure ... why not?"
"I thought you might see it that way,” the immortal replied, flashing him a broad wink. “How ‘bout you, Raven?"
"Will it be night there, too?"
"Of course,” Chaz cut in. “We don't know much about the place at all, but we know that much. It's just like our Earth, at least as far as celestial events are concerned. It orbits the same sun at the same rate, has a moon, and sits on one spiral arm of the Milky Way."
Raven gave him a hard stare. “Fine. Why are we standing around jawing, then?"
Loki's mouth twisted into a wry smile as he motioned toward the gate. “If you're in such a hurry, be my guest."
Raven pushed himself off the wall, strode over to the shimmering curtain of light, and leaped through. Loki cracked his knuckles and followed. Chaz paused, glanced at Ben, then stepped through himself.
Ben hesitated for a long moment, then, swallowing his nervousness, took the blind leap through the chromatic curtain.
* * * *
When the universe stopped spinning he found himself sitting on a patch of grass with the tang of the cool Puget Sound air thick in his nostrils. Raven crouched beside him, looking concerned. “Are you okay?” he asked, laying a hand on his shoulder.
"Yeah.” Ben stood, suppressed a wave of dizziness, and glanced around them. A few small houses, barely more than huts, sat perched on the hillside around them. Down toward the waterfront he saw a row of similar houses, and a large beach strewn with what looked like canoes. Behind them, uphill, he saw a gravel road and a single covered wagon with a burning lamp casting shadows off the tiny covered porch.
He deliberately and consciously dilated his eyes so he could read the block lettering on the side of the wagon. The four of them exchanged surprised glances. “Doctor Coyote's Traveling Medicine Show?” Chaz murmured, clearly amused.
"Not a word,” Loki hissed. “Not one.” His eyes had taken on an evil caste Ben had never seen in them.
Raven snickered. “So, should we go up and visit this Dr. Coyote?” he asked innocently, ignoring the immortal's dark look with singular aplomb.
He didn't wait for an answer, instead trotting up the hill toward the wagon without a backward glance. Ben trailed behind him, shaking his head. Grumbling under his breath, Loki followed. Chaz brought up the rear.
Ben didn't reach the wagon itself before a dark form unfolded itself from the porch, leaping down to the gravel road. “Hello, stranger,” he said, then stepped into the circle of light cast by the hanging lamp. Ben nearly gasped aloud. He was looking at Loki. A Loki with longer hair, with beads woven into its copper strands, but Loki nevertheless.
This Loki frowned, glancing between Ben and Raven, who'd moved up beside him. “Say, aren't you ... Ben Dalmas, the pugilist? I thought you were in San Francisco, fighting Bones Forsythe. And ... you're Kid Midnight, aren't you?” His gaze swept past them, down the hill, and his face grew pale. “Wait—who are you people?"
Loki—the Loki who'd come through the worldgate—stopped dead in his tracks and stared at his doppelganger with an unreadable expression on his face. “Dr. Coyote, I presume."
Dr. Coyote blinked down at his double with a shocked look. “I think you'd all better come inside."
* * * *
It had been a long day. Jaz settled down on her bed and kicked off her shoes. She'd been trying to talk the faculty into letting her go barefoot around school, but word had come down from Thoth that it simply wouldn't be appropriate. His exact words, from what she understood.
She'd almost started doing it anyway, but she'd learned from experience how Thoth dealt with defiance. Walking around for a week with a thick tail prone to sweeping objects off of tables, desks, and counters proved to be such a nuisance she wasn't about to risk going through that again.
She could leave the grounds now—finally—but honestly had nowhere to go. She
didn't feel comfortable roaming the streets aimlessly anymore, though it was difficult for her to make this admission to herself.
Have I lost my edge? she wondered. Maybe she had. She couldn't begin to imagine living the life she'd had before she'd met Baraz, and particularly now that she'd found the relative comfort of the Academy to compare it with.
But she was bored half out of her skull. She leaned back and put her hands behind her head, staring up at the ceiling. A mere effort of will brought up her magesight. She watched as threads of mana squiggled their way through the room. I wonder how they summoned those creatures in the park, she thought.
She murmured the words they used under her breath and waited. After a few minutes, she realized nothing was happening and sighed. She sat up and snatched a passing thread, feeling it twine itself through her fingers. Deep within the spirits she'd seen there'd been sigils, like spells, composed of several different threads woven together. Could she re-create one of them?
What she was about to do was forbidden—she knew, but she wasn't sure she cared. That something was forbidden had never meant a lot to her. Who was anyone else to forbid her anything? They're not the boss of me, she thought with a mental laugh.
She snatched another thread out of the air and knotted the two together. Her focus grew intense as she held the new sigil tightly in her left hand and reached for another. As she pulled this one close to the others, it began to writhe, as if trying to escape. She gritted her teeth and forced into against the rune, the strands kicking against her grasp with renewed vigor.
They'd never taught her this ... in fact, she'd picked it up by watching the more experienced mages putting their spells together. What she was doing was risky. No, it was downright dangerous. She squeezed the sigil tighter as she reached out and pulled in another strand.
It whipped around, one end thrashing against her other hand. If she didn't know better, she would've sworn it was trying to free the sigil from her grasp. She dug her teeth into her lower lip and forced her hands together. The thread resisted, wrapping around her left wrist and stiffening itself so she had to fight it to shove it into place.
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