Wanderers 4: A Tough Act to Follow (The Wanderers)

by Richard Bamberg

  “Sure, I remember, what’s that got to do with a force blast?”

  “Same thing. You have to be able to control where it goes and how much energy you’re putting into it. You don’t aim the blast with a finger or a hand, but with your mind.”

  “But you’re always pointing a fist or your palm at your target,” I argued.

  “That’s me showing off. It really wows the bad guys when you point at them and then hit them with a force blast that knocks them into next week. Why do you think I have the tattoo on my belly if it needed my hand to aim it? I would have put it on my forearm or fist if that were the case.”

  “Okay, I’ll need practice before I start using it,” I said, and then the thought struck me. “But this is great news, Boss. Now I can get my tats faster and be a bigger help when we fight.”

  Rafe frowned and I could feel his concern.

  “What now?” I moaned. “Don’t you want me to be able to help? You have to admit you’re fighting more and more and if Rowle is out there you’ll need me.”

  He shook his head sadly. “It’s not that I wouldn’t appreciate the extra firepower on my side. It’s that we’ve always learned our spells and earned our tats. I told you I didn’t like that remembrance spell for learning and now here you’ve burned another tat that I don’t think you’re ready for.”

  Cris had been silent up until now, but she spoke up, “Rafe, I think Tess is right. You need her as strong as she can be if you too are going to keep fighting. So she learns faster, isn’t that a good thing for both of you?”

  “Cris, love,” Rafe said, rolling onto his back so he could see both of us. “I know you mean well, but you know so little about the Wanderers and how we train. Simply having the tats isn’t enough. You have to learn how to use them or you could end up causing more harm than good. We’ve been training the same way for millennia, this way has proven itself to work. Now Tess is wanting to shortcut that method. Just because its change, doesn’t mean that its progress.”

  “But it doesn’t mean that it isn’t either,” I argued.

  Rafe frowned. “You two should not be ganging up on me. You are my apprentice, not Cris’s and Cris, you, while smart, charming, and intelligent are not a Wanderer. I’m the mentor. It’s my decision how things work. This isn’t a democracy.”

  “Boss, I’m not saying I won’t do as you ask. You are the boss, except maybe while we’re in the bedroom. I’m just saying that you should consider and not just dismiss this out of hand. Give it some thought; train me to use the force blast. If I don’t learn at the level you expect then I won’t bring it up again.”

  “But,” Cris added. “If she meets your expectations, then you will let her add tats faster.”

  Rafe looked from Cris to me and then back. “Why is this so important to you, Cris?”

  She leaned forward and cupped his cheeks in her palms. “Because, you duffus, you’re important to me. You both are. I would fight with you if I thought I could help, but since I can’t, I want you to be as strong as you can be.”

  She released him and gazed at me. There were tears in her eyes.

  “I don’t think I could stand it if one of you were killed,” she added and then wiped at her eyes with her blouse sleeve.

  I took one of her hands at the same time that Rafe gathered her other one in his larger fist. We sat that way for several minutes, our emotions flowing together, as each of us tried to comfort the others. Eventually, Rafe reached for his grimoire.

  “What’s next?” I asked, trying to hide my excitement of getting yet another tat.

  “Healing, which you already have so try to avoid ‘accidentally’ burning this one again,” Rafe said with more humor in his emotions than I thought appropriate.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said and then winked at him.

  He grinned and held the book above his head as he found the correct page. It was an early page, as it was in my own grimoire. Rafe read over the spell, studying the tat’s pattern, and then he spoke the remembrance spell again. I felt the snap of energy as it completed.

  “Okay, here we go again.”

  I steeled myself for the sudden flash of pain and felt Cris doing likewise. I met her gaze and felt such affection for someone who was willing to go through so much pain without any gain for herself. I could see why Rafe had fallen for her.

  Stabbing pain radiated from above Rafe’s heart as his flesh glowed in the pattern I recognized as his personal healing spell. I sucked air and tried not to tense up against the pain. In seconds, the glow faded and the pain began to ebb.

  “Well, that one wasn’t so bad,” I said between gasps.

  “Maybe because only one of us was burned,” Rafe commented dryly.

  “True, can’t argue with that. Do you want to go right into another one?”

  “No, let’s take a short break to let the pain subside. I’m in a hurry, but there’s no point in killing ourselves.”

  He canceled the circle’s energy and dropped out of our meshing as he rose to his feet. Cris and I maintained the mesh and watched him rise. I could feel Cris’s desire to drag Rafe off to bed again and it made me long for another bout with them both. She turned to me and smiled as she felt my thoughts.

  Rafe offered a hand to Cris and me. We each took one and rose beside him.

  Cris raised a hand to where Rafe had burned the tat on his ribcage, just above his heart. Her fingers traced the memory of the pattern. “Fascinating that you can burn a tattoo in your flesh without leaving a sign of it on the outside.”

  “Lucky really,” Rafe said. “I read Bradbury’s Illustrated Man as a kid. I wouldn’t want to go through life with that many tattoos.”

  “I’ve read it too, although I didn’t read it until after you left last fall. I’ve never had a tattoo and very little desire to alter my skin. That you had all these tats made me want to learn something about it.”

  “And?” Rafe asked.

  “Perhaps, Illustrated Man wasn’t the best book for learning about tattoos.”

  Rafe laughed. I didn’t get it, but then I’d never read the book.

  “Maybe you should have read the back cover before picking it up,” Rafe said.

  “Yes, something I usually do, but I downloaded the Kindle version.”

  “Oh?”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted. “But since I’m the only one who hasn’t read it, could you tell me why it’s amusing?”

  “The book is a collection of short stories with the common theme being each is represented by a tattoo on ‘The Illustrated Man.’ It has little to do with tattoos,” Rafe said.

  “Imagine my chagrin,” Cris said.

  I shrugged. It didn’t seem that funny to me.

  “The coffee has been ready. Can I pour you a cup?” Rafe said, crossing the circle’s perimeter and moving into the kitchen.

  “Yes, thank you,” Cris said.

  “Me, too,” I added as I headed for the bathroom. I used the facilities and peered out the small window at the trees on the cabin’s uphill slope. It was dark and I triggered my enhanced senses tat. The night lit up, but other than some granite boulders and a little undergrowth, there was nothing but evergreens. I was still jumpy from being woken up by that damn Cyclops. Rafe said it was one of the Titans. What was a Titan anyway? I’d have to ask Rafe about it when we had a moment.

  I cancelled my tat and went back into the main room.

  Cris and Rafe were leaning against the kitchen counter and sipping at their coffee. Rafe held a mug out to me as I approached and I took it, gratefully.

  “Want to move in front of the fire?” Rafe asked, looking at Cris.

  She still had the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Joe’s cabin didn’t have central heat, but the fireplace was beginning to warm the room up, or so I thought, but as I’ve found, temperature variations don’t bother Wanderers.

  “That would be nice,” Cris said.

  The three of us went to the leather-clad sofa. Rafe tossed a fe
w more logs onto the fire and then turned. Without speaking, Cris and I had sat to either end on the sofa, leaving just enough room for Rafe to sit between us. He did so without comment and found Cris and me leaning against him while we watched the fire.

  “This is nice,” Cris said.

  “Hmm, yes,” I echoed as I felt her thoughts turn toward making love to Rafe on the rug in front of the fire.

  “It’s nice,” Rafe added. “But it’s not getting the solution to my problems any closer.”

  “Spoil sport,” Cris said.

  I could feel her desire being tamped down. For a moment, I thought it was Rafe’s doing. God knows he tried to do it often enough when he started training me. But no, he still wasn’t in the meshing. Could he do it without being meshed? Nah, probably not.

  I was itching to do the things Cris was thinking of, but I knew how Rafe was when he got his business on. It would be difficult to drag him into bed until he accomplished what he was after. Right now, that was to get more of his tats restored. I couldn’t blame him. He still had less tats than I did and I’d only been burning tats since November.

  I finished my coffee and noticed that most of Cris’s randy thoughts had faded away. I guess she’d given up on getting him into bed anytime soon.

  For a brief moment, I thought about seeing if she wanted to join just me in the bedroom. But I shook the thought aside before she picked up on it. Sex with Cris and Rafe was great, but it wouldn’t be the same without Rafe. I was still getting used to the fact that I had actually shared a man with another woman. Other than kissing my BFF once in junior high, just to practice before we had a boyfriend to practice with, I’d never had any sexual contact with another woman. That is, until last night.

  I felt Rafe’s eyes on me and dropped those thoughts. He smiled then and downed the last of his coffee. “Well, break’s over. I’m ready to burn another tat.”

  I stared at him. He had felt my thoughts. Maybe not the details, but enough to know that what I was thinking was going to have Cris randy again. The rat. I bet he did dampen her emotions. I was halfway tempted to tell her, but rethought that idea. Rafe was the boss when it came to training and fighting. If he wanted to get back into the circle, it was my duty not to interfere. It’d be another matter when he called it a day. Then we’d see what Cris thought about having her emotions toyed with. I gave him a sweet smile and wondered if he’d picked up that last thought.

  Chapter 37

  raphael

  I managed, with the ladies assistance, to get three more tats restored by the time the sun had crept well above the eastern plains. We’d broken our meshing and dropped the circle. Now the girls were showering while I started breakfast. I’d have joined them, but Joe’s little cabin had a small shower and two was the limit. While I regretted not being in on the cleaning, the thought of those two beautiful women sharing a shower was enough to make me want to drag them both back to bed. But business came first.

  While the last rasher of bacon was cooking, I broke a half dozen eggs into a bowl and raked the chopped onions and green peppers in with them.

  I had my wind tattoo back on the upper side of my right forearm, my fire tattoo back on the underside of the same forearm, and my levitation tat back on my right thigh. Tess already had a wind tattoo and that had made things a little more bearable, but she added the fire tattoo and the levitation tat when I did and that was why I called a stop. The pain from burning one tattoo was bad enough, burning two simultaneous in my arm and Tess’s had been too much for me to keep putting Cris through.

  I needed to concentrate on finding Alex and Rowle. Maybe Verðandi would be willing to help locate them.

  The eggs were cooking in the bacon grease and I’d dropped the toast when the bathroom door opened and Tess and Cris came out. They both had towels wrapped around their torsos that went a few inches down their shapely thighs. Cris had another towel wrapped around her head, covering her long hair, while Tess’s shorter hair was brushed back and rapidly drying in the thin mountain air.

  They were still laughing about something while they came to stand on either side of me. I tried to concentrate on the eggs and not the feminine beauties separated from me by thin cotton towels.

  “Need any help?” Tess asked.

  “You could put the juice on the table. No, let Cris do that and you get the glasses and silverware.”

  “Okay,” they said in unison. As they parted, they both had hands sliding across my back.

  I turned off the gas and transferred the eggs to a large bowl. Carrying it to the table, I set it down next to the plate with the bacon and looked to see what I’d forgotten.

  “Honey or jam?” I asked.

  “Honey.”

  “The blueberry jam.”

  “Okay,” I said and fetched both from the cupboards.

  While Tess grabbed the coffee pot, Cris poured orange juice, and I sat in the middle seat, between the women.

  Breakfast took less time to eat than it did to cook and soon we were relaxing and finishing the last of the coffee.

  “So now what?” Cris asked.

  “Well, as soon as I get the dishes cleaned, I need to see about locating Alex and Rowle.”

  “You aren’t ready to take on Rowle,” Tess said in a tone that left no room for argument.

  “That may be, but I need to find them. Actually confronting Rowle about kidnapping Alex will come later.”

  “You think that’s how he got Alex to go with him?” Tess asked.

  “For all practical purposes, yes. It’s not like Alex could have refused him,” I said as I went to the steel double sink. I put the plug in the left side, added a little soap, and turned on the water.

  “So how do you intend to locate them?” Cris asked.

  “Yeah, Rafe. How are we supposed to find either one of them? If I’d been thinking ahead, I could have asked Alex for a favor like that lock of hair Cris gave you, but I didn’t know diddly back then.”

  “I think I can do a locator spell. Alex is my son; if I use my own hair and work the locator spell correctly then I should be able to get it to find my offspring.”

  “Seriously? That would work?” Tess asked.

  “I think it would,” Cris said. “There’s no reason to not have a genetic bond in the spell. I’ve never heard of anyone using a locator spell that way, but it should work.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” I said transferring the plates and utensils to the sink. Suds were halfway up the sides and I turned the faucet down and moved it to the side of the sink that held the drying rack.

  “Ah, Rafe?” Tess said. “Could that be how Rowle keeps siccing things on us?”

  I cocked my head to the side and stared at my apprentice. “I hadn’t thought about it, but locating Alex who’s only one generation removed from me would be much simpler than trying to use a genetic trace on someone who is five or six generations removed.”

  “Would it?” Cris asked.

  “I can’t be certain, but it seems logical. Alex has to have half of my DNA, while Rowle and I couldn’t share but a small percentage of that.”

  I lightly scrubbed each of the dishes, rinsed them, and moved them to the rack to dry.

  “But Rowle has had a few hundred years to learn how to do magic. Maybe he found a way to do it,” Tess said.

  I frowned and then shrugged. “It might explain how we keep being attacked when we’re someplace that should be safe. If that’s how he’s doing it, then I don’t see any way to stop him from finding us whenever he wants.”

  Cris coughed and I turned to see a wide grin spreading across her face.

  “Is there something you find funny in all this?” I asked.

  “Little bit. There’s magic that the great and powerful wiz…Wanderer does not know how to do?”

  I finished the last utensil and pulled the plug on the sink. While it drained, I rinsed my hands and triggered my fire tat to dry them.

  Turning to Cris, I crossed my arms across m
y chest and eyed the lovely lady. “You want to expand on that comment?”

  “You are so damn powerful that I just expect you to know everything I know and more. Finding that there’s a gap in your knowledge is kinda funny.”

  I pursed my lips for a second and then shrugged. “Okay, I never claimed to be all knowing. What, in particular, do you know that I don’t?”

  Cris looked smug and I thought of putting her over my knee and spanking some of that smugness off her face. Instead, I simply waited.

  “Boy, he’s certainly easier on you than he is on me,” Tess said.

  Cris raised her eyebrows. “Oh? How would he act with you?”

  “On occasion, when I’ve been particularly sassy, he’s been known to spank my bottom.”

  Cris’s eyes widened. She eyed me and a coy smile blossomed on her face. “You would spank me for teasing you?”

  “If you couldn’t be reasonable,” I said nonchalantly.

  Tess giggled. “Yeah, of course he’d have to get you out of your clothes first and we all know what that would lead to.”

  I gave Tess a frosty glare, but she’d seen it before and knew it for what it was.

  “Hah, don’t give me that look,” Tess smirked. “You already said we have things to do and there wasn’t time to go back to bed.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I knew that having two of you was going to double the trouble of one.”

  Cris sauntered over to me, wrapped her arms around my waist, and wiggled. “Are we that much trouble?”

  I couldn’t fake anger with these two. I sighed deeply. “No, not trouble, but I’m still getting used to having Tess around and having another woman here is–”

  “All your dreams come true?” Tess interrupted.

  “Please–”

  Cris stepped back and put a hand over her mouth.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s true. I can see it in his eyes,” Cris said.

  Ah, crap. It’d been hard enough keeping anything from my apprentice when we’re meshing daily, but adding a soul-reader to the mix made things impossible.