by Eileen Wilks
They started down the steps to the lower deck. “How angry will your Queen be that you shared that information with Cullen? And with me, for that matter.”
“Eh!” His mouth turned up, but this wasn’t one of his freshly-minted smiles, for his eyes stayed dark with trouble. “As you pointed out, we’re going up against a god. I’m betting she’ll understand.”
TEN
SOMEONE new sat at the big table, talking to Cullen, when Kai went back inside—a tall woman with short blond hair and beautifully intricate tattoos. Cynna Weaver was Cullen’s wife, a former Dizzy, former FBI agent, new mother, and a very strong Finder. She was also the Rhej of Nokolai Clan, with Rhej being a term no one could define very well for Kai, save to say that it did not mean priestess.
Kai sat down across from her. “Hi, Cynna. No Ryder?” Kai loved babies, and Cynna and Cullen’s little Ryder was beyond adorable.
“She’s full, happy, and fast asleep under Marianne’s watchful eye. Isen called me to see if I wanted to join your task force. I do.”
Nathan spoke gravely, but humor lurked at the back of his eyes. “You’re welcome to join us, but I understood you were likely to be asleep by now yourself, worn out by the rigors of parenthood.”
Cynna rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. I fall asleep on the couch once, and this never-needs-sleep wolf I’m married to—”
“Once?” Cullen said, his eyebrows lifting. “Once? I know math isn’t your thing, but I’m pretty sure you can count above ‘one.’”
“Speaking of sleeping on the couch . . .” Cynna gave Cullen one of those couples’ looks, the kind that outsiders can’t decipher but know carries meaning. He grinned and leaned close to whisper something that made her grin right back.
Isen spoke dryly. “Now that we have, once again, covered the topic of Cullen’s sex life, perhaps we could talk about the god who’s sending chaos into our world. Cullen? Was the explanation you received worth the vow?”
“Yes and hell yes. Two hundred percent worth it. A thousand percent. The ramifications . . . but I won’t go there right now. Like Nathan said, Dyffaya has a helluva lot of magical power to toss around because chaos energy generates it in crazy-big lots. He probably can’t use much arguai against us, though, for complicated reasons, so spiritual attacks are less likely than they were when Nam Anthessa was intact. The only way he can act in our realm is through the chaos energy created by the knife’s destruction. That will be used up eventually, but we’ve no way of knowing how long that might take, so Nathan would like me to speed things up. He wants me to devise a way to safely destroy chaos energy.”
Cynna frowned. “Is that even possible?”
“Not very, but what he told me makes it slightly less impossible.”
She didn’t look reassured. “We don’t even know what this chaos energy is, so—”
“You may not, but I do.”
Her frown tightened another notch. “Is that what you can’t tell us?”
“In part,” Nathan said, “but part of it you can know. We discussed that before you arrived. Chaos energy is a tangle of magic and arguai—what you call spiritual energy—with a kernel of chaos at its center.”
Arjenie frowned. “I keep wondering why it stayed here after the knife was destroyed. I got the impression your Queen didn’t expect it to.”
“No,” Kai said. “And that bothers me. She tends to be right about that sort of thing.”
“It seems pretty obvious to me,” Nettie Two Horses said.
Kai turned to her, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“This god must have worshipers—or people who serve him—here.”
“I don’t see how,” Cullen said. “Or why that’s so obvious, for that matter, but I’ll defer to your expertise on spiritual matters. If you say having worshipers here would keep the chaos energy in our realm, fine. But how did he have time to acquire any? The only worshiper he had when Miriam and Nam Anthessa nearly yanked him into our realm was Miriam.”
Nettie gave him the kind of look teachers have been giving students for generations. “The only one we know about.”
“And yet,” Isen said, “I think I see what Cullen means. Manifesting in our realm was hugely important to Dyffaya, yet the only worshiper he used in his attempt was poor Miriam. If he had others, why weren’t they present at the rite?”
Nettie shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t have the kind of hold over them he did over her, so he couldn’t count on them to be okay with all the throat slitting. That’s particularly true if they serve rather than worship.” She looked around the table. “You lupi should understand the distinction between service and worship.”
“Service would be a bit tepid for Dyffaya,” Nathan said. “He’ll want to be worshiped.”
Nettie nodded slowly. “If so . . . worship has to be genuine to be useful to a deity. Miriam may have started out as a true believer, but in the end she was under compulsion. That wouldn’t feed or anchor him. He may have been picking up followers all along because Miriam’s compelled service didn’t feed him.”
“Eh.” Nathan drummed his fingers on the table thoughtfully. “I can’t say I understand how deity functions, but worship is surely the most recognized way to link a godhead to a realm. Occupied godheads are different from the unoccupied ones, of course, but—”
“Wait a minute. Occupied and unoccupied?”
“That’s a sidhe concept,” Kai explained. “They believe that godheads exist whether or not there’s a being connected to the quality or qualities being worshiped, and they have a cultural preference for godheads that aren’t personified. Most of them worship beauty, for example, but it’s considered rather déclassé to worship one of the gods or goddesses of beauty. Although some do, especially among the lower sidhe.”
Nettie’s snort made her opinion of that clear. “I’d like to turn Coyote loose on them. He’s personified as hell.”
“Actually,” Cynna said, “Godheads are also a lupi concept. I can’t say much—it’s secret lupi stuff—but the Lady speaks of occupied godheads. She makes a distinction between those occupied by former mortals and those occupied by Old Ones. This Dyffaya isn’t an Old One, so—”
Ackleford broke in impatiently, “Look, maybe all this godhead shit matters in some way I don’t see right this fucking minute, but what do we do with it? What’s the plan? How do we keep this Dyffaya from grabbing more people?”
“Does he need more people?” Cynna asked.
“We’d best assume so,” Nathan said. “He grabbed the toddler and sent her back. He grabbed Britta and kept her. He tried to grab Kai. That failed because—”
“That’s unproven,” Ackleford said. “It’s a strong possibility, not established fact.”
Nathan looked at the special agent. “It’s what happened. I know he tried for Kai.”
Ackleford met his look with his trademark scowl. “You can be as sure as you like. Doesn’t mean I am. I repeat—do we have a plan?”
“Basically, I want to cut Dyffaya off, make it so he can’t act in our realm. If he has worshipers here, he’s got more of an anchor than I realized—and we need to find them. Special Agent, I’d like you you to find out everything you can about the people who were present at Fagioli today. It would make sense for the god to have one or more of his worshipers present when he acted. Meanwhile, Cullen will try to come up with a way to get rid of the scattered chaos energy. Cullen says he needs to see it. I’m hoping a Finder might be able to help with that.” He raised his eyebrows at Cynna.
“Yeah, well . . .” She grimaced. “The problem is getting a pattern I can use for a Find, when chaos is the opposite of pattern.”
That started a discussion about patterns and Finding that quickly got too technical for Kai. She knew the basics, but what in the world did “null-sequenced pulses” mean? Nathan seemed to get it, or at least he was able to follow
well enough to ask the right questions. The upshot seemed to be that Cynna needed a pattern for the particular flavor of magic chaos energy generated—which meant she needed to be present at a chaos incident or very soon after one occurred.
After that, Nathan explained why he thought Dyffaya had less spiritual power to use against them than he had before. “But,” he added, “we can’t assume he won’t mount any spiritual attacks. Corruption’s the easiest for him, but it’s also the easiest to spot. It’s essentially selfish—that little voice that says it’s okay to have what you want, no matter what. Watch for those kind of thoughts in yourself and others. Persuasion—that’s more subtle, a way of tilting your thoughts in a certain direction. It can fly under the radar, but will be harder for him to use without the knife to direct it. Still possible, though. Of course, if you actually touched chaos energy, Dyffaya could persuade you of pretty much anything. Put you under compulsion, too, though that’s a magical trick, not spiritual.”
“Hold on,” Ackleford said. “Wasn’t everyone who was bitten today touched by this chaos energy?”
Cullen answered that one. “Nope. The butterflies were created using chaos energy, but what they transmitted was a magical hook, not a spiritual one.”
“You’re sure about that?”
Cullen shot him an irritated look. “I can’t be a hundred percent sure because I don’t see spirit. I see magic. But spiritual energy causes a perturbation in magic that I can see, and I didn’t see it in the hook I was able to study.” He tipped his head, looking at Nathan. “Sam told us you were immune to persuasion.”
Nathan rubbed his nose thoughtfully. “I can be fooled, but not that way. Persuasion is all about fooling you into accepting thoughts that aren’t really your ideas at all. Dyffaya could maybe put a thought in my head. He couldn’t make me think it was mine, which makes it easier to push it right back out again. But . . .” He looked vaguely embarrassed. “It’s just a knowing, not something I learned, so I can’t tell you how to do it. I can say that knowing your true name helps, but that’s no help for most of you, is it? Having a strong faith helps, too. I’m hoping Nettie has some ideas about protection.”
Nettie advised them to pray frequently, if that was part of their faith tradition. Meditation was good, too. Even if they weren’t especially religious, a religious object might offer some protection if they had a strong emotional tie to it—“like your grandmother’s cross or Bible,” she said, “if your grandmother was a believer.” The older the object, the better. She also said that Cynna was probably protected by the Lady, and Isen might be as well. The lupi all nodded. No one explained.
Kai didn’t ask. Lupi weren’t quite as big on secrets as elves, but they came close sometimes.
After that Cynna wanted to talk with Isen privately, Nathan wanted to talk to Nettie, Cullen wanted to argue with Benedict, Benedict wanted to go home, Arjenie wanted Cullen to stop arguing, and Ackleford wanted to talk to Kai. He asked her to walk out to his car with him because he had “a couple questions.”
She could only think of one subject he was likely to ask her about. She was right.
“I need to know more about Hunter,” he said as they walked out into the cool night air.
“And yet you’re talking to me, not him.”
“Some of my questions might piss him off. I don’t mind pissing people off. Sometimes you get better answers that way. But Seabourne tells me the sidhe are touchy and hold a grudge, so I wanted to know what I shouldn’t ask him about.”
He was not, she noted, worried about pissing her off. People mostly didn’t. Somehow she never struck anyone as scary. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Elves are touchy, but Nathan’s not an elf.”
“So what the hell is he? I mean . . . he used to be some kind of dog, right? A hellhound. But his Queen did a big spell on him a long time ago, and poof.” He made a circling gesture, as if stirring a cauldron. “Now he’s . . . what?”
Kai’s lips quirked. Calling a hellhound “some kind of dog” was accurate—in the same way that calling a dragon “some kind of lizard” would be. “He’s Wild Sidhe and he’s a man. He lived as a human for a long time, Special Agent. That doesn’t make him one, but he’s not that different from us, either. Just think of him as a man with an unusual skill set.”
He snorted. “Unusual skill set. Sure. What exactly are Wild Sidhe?”
“That’s a pretty large question. The short answer . . .” She thought for a moment. “They vary a lot, and some are one-offs—an individual rather than a species—but they’re all nature-beings, mostly animal, though some look human or elfish, and a few resemble some kind of plant. Ents, for example.”
“Ents? Like in The Lord of the Rings? You mean they’re real?”
She grinned. “I’d never have taken you for a Tolkien fan. You have unexpected depths, Special Agent. Yes, ents are real, rare, and powerful, but you won’t find any here.”
“I’ve got a son. Two sons, but it’s Brian that’s the Tolkien fan. He had to see all the movies.”
Two sons, yet here he was at nearly midnight . . . “It must be hard, being away from them so much.”
“Divorced,” he said glumly. “Their mom moved to Albuquerque and . . . shit. How did you do that? That’s not what I want to talk about.” They’d reached his car. He turned and leaned against it, crossing his arms. “I’m trying to get a handle on how Hunter thinks.”
“I don’t know how to answer that. If you want to know what I see in his thoughts, that’s confidential.”
“No, I’m not talking about that shit. More like . . . he talks about knowing stuff as if the knowledge arrives from outside him. Like he doesn’t need any logic to reach a conclusion. Is that for real? Is he, like, a precog or something?”
“Oh, I see what you mean. No, it isn’t any kind of precognition. More like instinct on steroids. Magic gives his instincts a boost, but the process isn’t that different from you’ve experienced, I bet. You’ve been an agent a long time. You probably have an instinct for when something’s off—when a witness is lying, or when the obvious answer doesn’t quite fit.”
“Sure, sometimes. But when I look back I can usually see that something was there, tipping me off, even if I couldn’t see it at the time.”
She nodded. “Nathan’s instinct is like that, only whatever triggers it may be so small it’s invisible to anyone else even when he explains. But it’s accurate. When he says he knows Dyffaya wanted to grab me, I take that as fact.”
He looked down, scowling at his feet as he thought that over. Finally he gave a nod and straightened. “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks for the explanation.”
Kai wasn’t sure he believed her, but it was probably enough that he wasn’t dismissing Nathan’s instincts completely. She told him good night, but instead of going back inside right away, she let her feet meander down the road.
She ought to go in. She needed sleep. It was the last, sticky end of a long and twisty day, one that had pivoted over and over until she wasn’t sure which direction she faced, much less what lay ahead. But all that twisting about had left her mind too crowded for sleep to elbow its way in. As she moved, she began picking at the logjam of thoughts, and found them hung up on the same one that had kept intruding earlier.
Nathan was on a Hunt.
There were hunts and there were Hunts. That’s how Kai thought of the difference, at least—a typographic shorthand for what she saw in his thoughts. During his long years of exile, Nathan had learned to hunt when there would be no death at the end of the chase. He’d hunted criminals and arrested them. He’d hunted children, too—lost or stolen children—and restored them to their families. Those were lowercase hunts. However satisfying he found it to recover a kidnapped child, it didn’t wake his deepest instincts.
What she thought of as a Hunt, Nathan called a true hunt. A true hunt ended in his quarry’s death.
Always. She’d seen that this was a true hunt in the amethyst glow that sharpened every curl and swirl of his thoughts, but she would have known even without her Gift. Even Benedict had sensed the change. Nathan was on a Hunt, and his instincts were true.
But how could he Hunt and kill a god—one he couldn’t even reach? One whose body had died three thousand years ago?
ELEVEN
WIND whispered through the darkness, carrying messages and mystery. Among the messages were sage and dust, the distant howl of a wolf, and the nearby sound of a car starting.
That would be Ackleford leaving, Nathan thought as another wolf answered the first one. He leaned on the railing at one end of the deck behind Isen Turner’s home, absorbing the wind’s messages and thinking about the mystery.
Memory was a capricious bugger, wasn’t it?
Nathan had come to Earth on a Hunt. His Queen had set him to find and kill a renegade mage who’d thought to evade her justice by hiding here, outside her realms. It had been a long Hunt. By the time his quarry lay dead, the magic here had grown so weak he couldn’t leave. He’d been trapped—trapped on Earth, trapped in the man’s body his Queen had imposed on him for the Hunt.
For years he’d dreamed of being a hound again. In those dreams he’d run on four legs with the wind streaming past, filled with the joy and power of the body he’d been born with. For years he’d hated those dreams, hated them bitterly, for he always woke to the knowledge that never would he feel that, be that, again. But time performed its healing. Eventually he’d come to treasure such dreams for the beautiful memories they were . . . although by then, they’d come only rarely.
How long had it been since he dreamed his way into his birth form?
Long and long, he thought, though he couldn’t put a number on it. Yet here was memory pressing on him as if blown in by the wind. Memory of another night, one so far in the past it should have picked up all sorts of lint and fuzz over the years.