by Elsa, Sandra
Harrison pushed my hair behind my ear then ran his hand over my breast, continuing down to rest it on my hip. I could still see Dark-hair’s eyes in the rearview mirror, disappointment flooded them. He was a subtle interrogator. I’d known it from his first question, but I didn’t see how the things he wanted to know could hurt me, so I complied.
After a bit, my nerves couldn’t take anymore though. No matter how polite and friendly Jordan Drover appeared to be, I would never trust him.
“I feel we shared an intimate moment on the hilltop back there,” Dark-hair said. “I don’t suppose you’d have lunch with me and explain what exactly we did?”
“By listening to the conversation in this car you know as much as we do. If you’ve made a study of me—and I’m sure you have—you know I talk about myself somewhere between rarely and never. The only reason I answered your questions thus far are because it works better for me if you have to track them down instead of me. I have better things to do with my time.” I wrapped an arm suggestively around Harrison’s thigh, even though I was pretty sure Dark-hair couldn’t see it.
“So you admit,” Jordan gloated, “you do need us.”
“Need? No. That particular mess is all of your making though. I don’t see why I should have to deal with your enemies. I would hope at this point, Harrison and I will be rejected as easy targets. I definitely see this as an instance of you needing me, and I’ve cooperated as much as I plan to.”
“Why won’t you assist us, Mrs. Kendrel?” Dark-hair sounded sincerely curious.
“Because every time I open my mouth you collect another point of information, and I don’t like giving me away. Don’t take it personally, but just because I’ve permitted Harrison to step over the line of trust/distrust, don’t make the mistake of thinking I trust any of the rest of you.”
“There’s Mage Jallahan.”
“My father, and he proved himself long before I ever consented to meet him.
“And Ms. Kendrel.”
“That’s Jallahan now, and stop stating the obvious.” I didn’t exactly trust Nan, but I wasn’t going to mention that in front of Harrison. Mostly it was a matter of insufficient contact.
“And your friends from District Eleven,” he persisted.
“Unregistered.” I pushed my foot into the back of President Drover’s seat and said, “And going to stay that way, Sir.” I made sure I didn’t make it a question.
“You realize if all talents were registered, those siphons would not have been successful for as long as they were.”
“No duh…If all talents were registered they’d be the first ones you’d look at when others started disappearing.
“Exactly. Those people could have been spared a horrible death.”
“Maybe. Were they all magic users? A lot of them looked homeless. And if I’d been homeless I would have bowed my head and moved to District Seven rather than live on the streets.”
“Even those who weren’t talented, and to answer your question, about twenty percent weren’t, would have been safe if we’d known we had siphons in our midst.”
“But you have to face facts. People are born all the time who are completely unaware of their talent. And those who know about it, don’t want to move into an elitist District so they can be belittled by people who probably aren’t their superiors, but will act like it anyway. You’ve got to know nobody likes District Seven.”
Jordan Drover laughed. “The situation has been brought to my attention over the past couple of months. What do you see as our biggest failing Mrs. Kendrel?”
“Your fucking arrogance.”
“Our arrogance? Don’t you share that failing with us?”
“It’s not arrogance if you are better than the rest of the world. And I don’t generally treat other people like they’re dirt under my feet.”
“You do a fair job of stomping on me.”
“I was starting to wonder if you were a masochist. You keep coming back for more.”
“So enlighten us, what arrogance offends you so?”
“The arrogance of a man who feels he has the right to take his buddies out and do things against other peoples’ will. Things that are most definitely not in the other person’s best interest. Are you sure you want me to go on?”
He glanced over at Dark-hair and shook his head. “I’ll give you that point. But can you argue with the results?”
“Absolutely I can argue with the results. My mother had a friend with a marginal talent. She was dropped back off in District Eleven with an infant and a couple thousand dollars. I know she wasn’t the only one either. Those of you in Seven think the untalented don’t count.”
“I’ve spent fifteen years implementing laws to see to it that the untalented are taken care of and provided for.”
“Because you have to. Because if you tilt the scales too far they will get rid of you, persuasion and all. I doubt you’ve ever done anything without first considering how it could benefit you.”
Dark-hair was beginning to look agitated, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I was being completely disrespectful to his employer or if I was starting to piss him off in general. His eyes swept from mine in the mirror up to Harrison’s. “You let her disrespect your father and all your friends like that?”
“She has good cause. I confess, when I first met her, I found her hatred of anything from District Seven a bit hard to take. But that was mostly because it made it hard for me to get close to her. She’s not completely unreasonable. If a person proves themselves, she’ll allow it. I think maybe one or two of my friends were accepted last night. Jallahan talked her around for his own case and father has got to know how hard that was. After what Frankie told me, I can’t believe my mother tolerates father as much as she does.”
“Why should we have to prove anything to her?”
“I did because I wanted her to accept me. Because my talent as a matchmaker showed me my soulmate and she hated me.”
“Match—“
“Yes, I’m a matchmaker. Until I was trying desperately to make her comprehend my insanity, I never admitted that to anyone outside my family.”
Dark-hair grinned. It looked off on his serious professional face. “And she believed that?”
“Fortunately we’d already had confirmation from a slightly more typical and less biased matchmaker; one of Frankie’s acquaintances, whom she trusted.”
“So it’s not magic she doesn’t trust.”
Harrison gave a sharp bark of laughter and ran his hand down my side. “She’s the most powerful mage on the planet, and she doesn’t even need her talent to have every mage in District Seven chasing their tail in a circle. But she uses it when it’s needed. If she didn’t trust it, she wouldn’t rely on it.”
“Tired of having people offer you their sympathy because your wife has no talent?” Jordan asked. “You feel you need to make her more than she is?”
“I’m not exaggerating anything, Father; you know that. And I don’t care what anybody says, particularly not Grandmother. If Frankie’d been brought up in District Seven, she would have become president by the time she was twenty.”
“Don’t think you’re just the tiniest bit biased, do you, Son?” Jordan Drover looked decidedly uncomfortable with Harrison’s statement.
“Fortunately for you,” I said, “I wasn’t brought up in District Seven, and I have no political aspirations.” Not that I agreed with Harrison, but I had no problem letting Jordan stew on the possibility that I was stronger than him.
“She hasn’t even been properly trained,” Dark-hair said.
“Give us time. She’s constantly learning. Everybody thought nulls no longer existed, who’s going to train her? We’re learning together by trial and error.”
“And the trick you used back on the hill?”
Harrison grinned down at me. “We were making love when she absorbed a spell I was holding. Jerry saw her aura absorb my colors until it integrated into null space. We’d been
working on minimizing the effort it took for me to use illusion to conceal her, so I already knew what I was facing. I dove in to collect what was mine. It’s damn hard to do. I didn’t stay to enjoy the landscape. Until this morning when I ventured forth to see just exactly what Flanders was threatening us with, I didn’t realize my spells weren’t the only ones there, figured they’d fade after a bit. If I had, I’d have figured out how she could retrieve them by now.”
“Are you sure you want to teach her something like that?”
“Most definitely.”
Jordan stared at Harrison for several moments. “What sort of spells does she have access to?”
“I haven’t done an inventory. Like I said, it’s hard on both of us.”
“Anything in teal?”
“Quite a few. I was wondering who that was. It had to be a major fight.”
“Domingo.” Jordan Drover and I said on nearly the same breath.
Dark-hair jerked the steering wheel and stomped the brakes as he spun about to stare at me. “’She killed him?”
“It was self-defense,” I snarled, while glaring at Jordan. “I take it you don’t share everything with your security team.”
“Mr. Jamison felt it prudent to withhold the information that you killed a thoroughly trained battle-mage.”
I leaned up and noted all the other vehicles were out of sight. That’s why this ride was so hellishly long. How slow were we going? Another glance reassured me we were at least still on the causeway to Two-Three-Seven. “He was out of his head on Jin. He’d already killed two innocents. I saw the shot, I took it. And what the fuck is a battle-mage. We haven’t needed a military since the world died.”
“Thus his insanity,” Jordan shrugged. “Fully trained and completely unnecessary. No way for him to vent.”
Dark-hair pulled back on the road. “A bullet shouldn’t have killed Domingo. Shouldn‘t have even gotten close to him.”
“Why? Because of those piffling little shields of his? He did appear rather surprised when I turned them off. I let him expend his talent on me while the civilians ran. Once I had a clear shot, I took it.”
I closed my eyes and ran ideas through my head. Pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of history clicked into place. When I opened them, I stared straight at Jordan and said, “So even without knowing it, I was cleaning up your messes seven years ago. Deny that Mage Domingo was your answer to my trolls. You owe me.”
He didn‘t bother attempting to proclaim his innocence. “He killed eight mages and two pickets before he escaped from District Seven.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t confined him, those people would still be alive. The woman he killed had three young children--”
“And the young man was engaged to be married,” Jordan finished. “You may think me heartless, but I saw to it, their families were taken care of.”
As if money could assuage the pain of an absent loved one. The man was crass. “So was he a rare talent or a genetic mutation.”
“Rare talent.”
And all yours to destroy-- I wasn’t completely stupid; I did manage to keep that inside my head.
“If he hadn’t grown up in District Seven he may be running the world now through force of arms,” Jordan said as though arguing with the thoughts inside my head.
“If he found someone to train him, he might have tried.” I hesitated to push my point further but after a moment I finished, “Or, if he turned out a madman no matter where he grew up, he might have run into someone capable of taking him out before he killed twelve people.”
“You strengthen my argument to have someone like you inside District Seven not outside on the streets where no one knows you exist.”
“Like me? You mean a null? One of the people the residents of District Seven tried to kill off? I simply meant someone capable of seeing his insanity and diagnosing it for the hazard it could be, before he got too dangerous.”
Jordan looked uncomfortable. He stared at me as though assessing how much I might actually know of the history of nulls. “Mages recognized the kill policy for the mistake it was.”
I laughed, “Which brings us back to thirty odd years ago, doesn’t it? You were only continuing something started five hundred years back. In fact the only reason you tolerate so much shit from me is because you hope to continue something you started back then.”
He sucked in his left cheek and stared at me, then glanced out the corner of his eye at Dark-hair. I began to think he wasn’t going to respond and closed my eyes to shut him out. Finally he said, “The two of you chose to marry. You claim you will also choose children. I had nothing to do with that. In fact I’d have snatched him away from you if I could have. If you had picked up the phone the night he came to you, and said, ‘President Drover, your son is in my house, please come get him.’ That is exactly what I would have done. You would still be a private investigator. I would not be reevaluating my plans, and eventually my son would have started speaking to me again.”
“Sorry. Nobody over the age of twenty should have to do what their parents tell them to do. He asked me to help him survive outside District Seven, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was sending him back there. Slavery went out over a thousand years ago. Besides, he was smart enough not to tell me who his father was. Figured that out all by myself when Detective Thompson called Wally the next day.”
“All I’m saying is, this was not my doing, so don’t compare it to what went on in the past. Although I confess the thought of the grandchildren you will raise, does temper me some.”
“And all I’m saying is, that’s the only reason all my ancestors didn’t die five hundred years ago. Though I do admit to wondering why there aren’t more of us if we breed true.”
“So your father didn’t cover all the facts.” He sounded smug that Jallahan had not given me all possible information.
“He hit the pertinent points,” I snipped. He wasn‘t in the same class as my father he had no right to judge him.
“Well, to round out your education, were you to conceive with a completely untalented human, the resulting children would not even be nulls. And most of the originals probably did just that. Not only are there more untalented humans to choose from. It seems nulls are hardheaded. If your ancestors are anything like you, they probably married the talent out of the bloodline just so their children could never be used to increase our strength again.”
“Then again, there could be dozens…or even hundreds of us all over the globe. How would you know?”
He raked a hand through his hair, the humidity of outside had it flopping in his face. Two or three inches long; I wondered if he’d ever worn it long like Harrison did. “Since you were practically under my nose and in and out of HQ and it took a siphon and a matchmaker to force you into the open, I suppose I couldn’t.”
“Two siphons. And a really gorgeous matchmaker.”
Dark-hair grinned at Harrison in the mirror. His face sobered as he asked his employer, “You’re telling me it never occurred to you to check on the person who took out Domingo, Chief?”
I saw Drover‘s temper flare at being questioned by an underling. He studiously kept his face turned toward me and Harrison, but he did respond. “I was so relieved to have him dead, I didn’t want to stir up questions by personally looking into it. Jamison told me he was no longer a problem, that was all I needed to know. I assumed, since he was killed by a silver bullet, some crackpot got a lucky shot at him. An error on my part, I see now.”
I sat up enough to look outside, hoping the dome would be in view. It wasn’t. “Crackpot?”
“You used silver.”
“I was hunting a Were who killed a twelve year old girl. Domingo got in my way. Like I said, you owe me. I don’t even carry silver unless I’m certain I need it. Can’t afford to waste a six-hundred dollar bullet.”
“And yet you had two cases in your safe.”
“Spend much time pouring over that inventory did you?”
“Why didn�
�t you just switch weapons?”
“Because my Were was on the far side of the traffic circle where Domingo lost it. I may be cheap, but I’m not a fool. With a known Were enemy in the neighborhood you don’t disarm yourself.”
“And did you get your Were?”
“He’s who I was after. Of course I got the Were.”
“Mr. Jamison didn’t report any other bodies.”
“I try not to kill. I shot Domingo then ran like I didn’t want to be found—which I didn’t. Got right behind my target and stabbed him in the shoulder with a dagger with silver flakes embedded in it. As your Were can attest to, my blades aren’t lethal to a Were. I turned him over to Wally when he arrived in response to ‘shots fired, mage involved’. To the best of my knowledge, he’ll be in District Fourteen-Seventy-Three until hell freezes over. Or overcrowding encourages euthanizing the most violent.”
“You say you turned him over to Sergeant Wallin? I was informed Alban was first on the scene.”
“What difference does it make? Alban’s an idiot. I’ve never gotten along with him. If Wally hadn’t showed up, I’d have dragged Jorik to HQ myself.”
“So to you, Domingo was a dot on the page? He was in your way, as you went after a murderer?”
“Something like that. He signed his own ticket when he killed that mother in front of her kids. Was he smoking Jin when he lived in District Seven?”
Jordan Drover turned his head from where he’d been staring down at me and met the dismayed gaze of Dark-hair. After a moment of speechlessness, Dark-hair said, “To the best of our knowledge District Seven doesn’t have a drug problem.”
“Think about it folks. The siphons had large quantities of drugs in their home. We know they’re associated with other mages. Harrison and I stumble into drug dealers and shoot it out with them. Another person, who District Two-Three-Seven believes is higher in their food-chain, requests information from the registry. Why place the request unless he expected to have help granting it. Now the registry has recently had an influx of new blood due to failures being punished for not recovering the president’s son. So when the request comes through, it gets reported and rejected, rather than handled by whoever the subject in Six-Two-Two thought it would go to. Find out who would have been on duty that night and you’ll narrow your suspect pool considerably. Long and short, District Seven has a drug problem.”