by Eileen Wilks
“True.” Brooks had fallen silent, then sighed. “Chaos does make a mess of the possibilities. I’m not getting anything helpful now. Earlier it was clear that you were essential, but everything’s jumbled at the moment.”
Essential? What did that mean? “I’m not in charge, though,” she’d said quickly, wanting to be clear on that before he disconnected. “Not of your investigation.”
“Not just now.”
Kai was thinking of that ominous “not just now” as they headed for the scene of the transformation on foot, having parked the car several blocks away. She wanted her hands free in case she needed to draw Teacher, so she carried the essentials in her pockets: phone, wallet, charms, eye drops, and glasses, in case the drops didn’t do the job. Arjenie was toting a backpack that held her tablet and a number of spellcasting components.
The weather was San Diego gorgeous, balmy and bright. Plenty of tourists and locals had been enjoying Old Town when the chaos event hit, and they were all trying to leave at once. The mayor had decided the entire area needed to be evacuated. The guards, Arjenie, and Kai had to swim upstream against a tide of people going the other way. A news copter hovered overhead, but Kai didn’t see any reporters among the crowd.
They were bound to be around, though. Kai hoped to avoid them. She didn’t have any official role, so she had no obligation to talk to them. And if Ruben Brooks wanted to change that—if he was crazy enough to try to put her in charge—she would simply say no. She wasn’t qualified. She was a mindhealer, not any kind of cop, and while her Gift could be helpful in an investigation, it didn’t do a damn thing to tell her how to conduct one. Besides, she wasn’t dominant in the way the lupi used the word. She didn’t need to be in charge. She wanted to get Nathan and Dell back. And Benedict and Cullen. Britta Valenzuela, too.
But could she say no? If the strongest precognitive in the nation, maybe in the world, thought he needed her to be in charge . . . that’s tomorrow’s battle, she told herself, shorthand for something her grandfather often said: when you fight tomorrow’s battle, you fight an enemy that doesn’t exist and miss the one standing in front of you.
“Police cordon up ahead,” José said.
“They should be expecting us,” Kai said. She had her ID ready. “Can you see the transformed building?”
“Not yet. It’s in the middle of the next block, past where the street turns.”
Their goal was Whaley House—the place billed as “the most haunted house in America.” Naturally.
The cops manning the cordon were, indeed, expecting her and Arjenie. They knew about Kai’s knife, too. Or so she assumed, because all three of them frowned at the scabbard at her waist but didn’t comment on it.
They were not expecting six armed lupi. “My fault,” Kai said. “I should have let Special Agent Ackleford know we had an escort. I need them to come in with us. If you need his okay for that, then call him, please.”
One of the cops did that. He was fortyish, with dark skin, glasses, and a receding hairline. His uniform sleeves had chevrons on them. Did that mean he was a sergeant? Maybe a corporal. Did police have corporals? If she was going to work with cops she needed to learn that sort of thing.
Arjenie spoke low-voiced. “Do you have any idea what we’re going to do when we get there?”
“Other than having Doug sniff around, you mean?” Doug was one of the guards who’d been at Fagioli, and Isen had made sure he got a good sniff of the vine before it was burned. He’d detected a scent common to both sites, so they wanted to know if he smelled it here, too. “I’ll check for intention. Beyond that, I’m open to suggestions.”
“Lily always says it’s a matter of asking the right questions.”
“I’m stuffed with questions, but how do I know which are the right ones?”
“Ask them all?”
The older cop gestured at them. “You’re all to be admitted. Sign in, please.”
Kai thought it was pointless to keep a record of who entered a scene that had probably held hundreds of people before being evacuated, but she signed dutifully. While the others did the same, her mind returned to the call from Ruben Brooks—who might or might not decide she was the one to take charge of things officially.
Did Nathan really expect her to do that? To take over the investigation?
How could he? Even if she were willing and able, it wasn’t up to her! And he had no right to expect her to step in when he hadn’t even discussed his plans. No, he’d gone out of his way to keep her from guessing what he meant to do. If he’d expected her to take on his responsibilities, he should have—
Whoa. When she started diving into shoulds and shouldn’ts, it meant she’d stopped looking for answers. All she’d find in that pool were reasons to be mad, and she didn’t need more of those.
“Thank you,” the cop with the clipboard said when the last of the guards had signed his sheet of paper. The one with the chevrons on his sleeve said, “Akins, escort these people to the special agent.”
In other words, don’t let the weird, armed civilians wander just any-old-where. The third cop told them to follow him, please. The guards formed up around Kai and Arjenie and they set off down the middle of the street. It looked like everyone but the official types had left the cordoned-off area.
What did Nathan expect?
Put that way, the question almost answered itself. He expected her to have his back. To be his partner on this Hunt.
He hadn’t treated her like a partner. He’d hidden his plans from her. He must know she’d be mad about that, but he’d expect her to set that aside and . . . shit. Trust him. Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what he expected. For her to trust him to do his part of the job. To stop Dyffaya, and then to do everything possible to get himself and the others home safely.
But that was his job. Not hers. She couldn’t get to the god, and even if she could, she couldn’t stop him. No, her job lay in this world, and never mind what Nathan expected, because thinking about that just made her mad and miserable.
What did she expect of herself? What was up to her?
The answer came a bit more slowly this time, but it came. If she couldn’t stop the god, maybe she could distract him. Slow him down. To do that, she needed to figure out what he was after, then make it really hard for him to get it.
“All right,” she whispered. “I’ll do my part, but you’d damn well better come back.”
Arjenie tipped her head. “What?”
“Oh.” Kai felt her face heat. “I was talking to Nathan. He’s not here, but . . .” She shrugged.
“I know what you mean. I’ve been holding conversations with Benedict.”
“But not out loud,” Kai said dryly. “I’d have noticed. Um . . . where is he now?”
Arjenie nodded toward the west.
It had to be reassuring, that sense of where her lover was. Frustrating, too, she supposed. Presumably Arjenie could stand in the precise spot where her bond told her Benedict was, but they’d still be separated by the barrier that lay between the godhead and what people liked to think of as reality.
“How’s Dell?’ Arjenie asked just as softly.
Kai took a moment to focus. Faint, so faint, but . . . “She’s anxious about something or someone. Tired. That’s all I can—wow.”
They’d rounded the curve in the road. Ahead of them was a cluster of people in and out of uniform in front of what used to be Whaley House.
“It’s a hobbit house!” Arjenie exclaimed.
What had been a two-story Greek Revival house was now a single story—the upper one. It looked as if half the house had sunk into the ground, then someone had drawn a blanket of grassy sod up over the remaining above-ground part, tucking it in. Wildflowers grew cheerily amid the tall grass. The second-story porch—now the first story—still boasted a white picket railing, but the rest of it . . . “It’s
supposed to be brick, right? You said it was brick.”
“From the Whaleys’ own brickyard. Yes.”
The walls were a mass of vines. Blooming vines. Yellow, orange, purple, pink, blue . . . if there were still bricks beneath the flowers and the twisted mass of vegetation, Kai couldn’t see them. The vines avoided the windows, though, leaving their blank glass faces staring out at the street unimpeded. Three floor-length windows opened onto the porch.
“Ackleford said everyone got out, right?” Arjenie asked.
“Yes.” There’d been a tour group in the house when it transformed, but no one had been hurt. “Maybe they got out through the windows.” And it was time to get to work. Kai dialed up her Gift and looked for any lingering traces of intent. There were plenty of thought-remnants on and around the newly transformed structure, but so far she didn’t see any that . . .
“Michalski, are you here to work or do you want to play tourist a while longer?”
That, of course, was Special Agent Ackleford. He stood in the center of the knot of officialdom clotted up in the middle of the street facing what used to be the Whaley House. In addition to Ackleford, Kai counted three uniformed cops, four men in bad suits who were either cops or FBI agents, one man in a good suit, and one lone woman—the female FBI agent who’d been at Fagioli yesterday.
“I am working,” she told him, but started toward him anyway.
José must possess some kind of radar. He didn’t glance at them for an instant, but the second they started moving again, so did he. “José, I don’t think you need to guard us from all the nice cops.”
“No, ma’am,” he said politely. And stayed in front of the two of them until they reached the law enforcement types, only then stepping aside.
“You get your psychic trauma fixed?” Ackleford asked.
“Yes. I need to finish checking the site, but first I have a question. Did you get names and pictures of everyone who’s been evacuated?”
Ackleford snorted. “Not with the rush the mayor was in. Got his panties in a twist, scared to death a tourist might get hurt.”
One of the others spoke—the one in a good suit. He was a tall, hefty man, with sandy hair quietly going gray and no-nonsense glasses. “Wouldn’t have made much difference if we’d tried to take names, and it would’ve been a huge job. Too easy for someone to slip away without my people spotting him or her. My name’s Franklin Boyd.” He gave Kai and Arjenie each a nod. “Assistant chief of police. I believe you’re the experts we’ve been waiting for?”
Reminded, Ackleford introduced Arjenie, calling her “an FBI researcher with a strong background in Wiccan spells.” When he got to Kai he frowned. “What the hell do I call you?”
Her mouth twisted wryly. “I’m the closest thing you’ve got to an expert on sidhe magic and religion—specifically, one pissed-off chaos god. I’m also a mindhealer,” she added to the assistant chief. “My Gift lets me see the colors and patterns of thoughts, which is why I need to look over the transformed building carefully. Intent is a component in spells, and it often leaves traces—remnants—I’m able to see. We don’t know if that will be true with chaos-fueled transformations like this one, but it bears checking out. I understand there haven’t been any injuries this time? Not so much as a scratch?”
Franklin Boyd shook his head. “We’ve had the paramedics check everyone who was in the building at the time of the incident. No broken skin on anyone.”
“And no one’s missing.”
“Not that we can determine.”
Was this a snatch that hadn’t worked? Kai frowned. “I’d like to send Doug over to sniff out the transformed building. He—”
A load of bricks smashed into her. Training took over; she went limp as the bricks followed her down, flattening her, and she heard someone shouting, “Sniper!” even as the loud crack! of a high-powered rifle sounded. Someone cried out. A second shot came almost on top of the first and Arjenie joined her on the pavement, her eyes wide and startled, flattened beneath a blond-haired lupus. Doug. Doug had tackled Arjenie.
More shots, crazy loud, each one jerking her heart rate higher, coming from close by—cops or feds or maybe those of their guards not currently pretending to be body armor. She couldn’t see, didn’t know what the hell was happening.
“We need to get to cover!” the bricks on top of her shouted in José’s voice. “Doug, carry Arjenie. Everyone else form up—”
“No!” Kai tugged her left arm free. “Thirty seconds. Give me thirty seconds.” She’d practiced this one, practiced it over and over and over—surely she could make it work now. “Arenthyla-en-ná-abreesh—” She rushed through the syllables, the images that went with each rolling through her mind automatically as she pressed her thumb to the palm of her hand and drew hard. Power rose within her, shooting down her arm—“makabaj: ta’vo!” She flung out her arm, fingers and thumb spread wide. Felt power rush out with the snap of a spell well-wrought.
Someone cursed.
“Now we can take cover without being shot at,” Kai said. “The spell won’t last long, though. I had to cast it too wide.”
“What did you do?” José asked urgently.
“Gun control, sidhe-style.”
TWENTY-ONE
JOSÉ chivvied Kai and Arjenie under cover quickly—the wide, shaded patio between the two buildings occupied by Café Coyote, across the street from the hobbit house.
“That was you who shouted sniper, right?” Kai asked him as they stopped beside a table where two people had been eating tacos before being evacuated. “What did you see?”
“Gun barrel. Pure luck I saw it in time.” He was grim.
“That’s not luck. That’s good training and practice. If you hadn’t been looking everywhere—not just at ground level—you wouldn’t have seen it. Thank you. But I thought I explained earlier about my vest.”
“You said it’s probably bulletproof. Probably isn’t enough.”
“It’s more bulletproof than you are.”
“And I heal better than you do. You’re bleeding.”
“I am?” Only then did she notice the stinging. She raised a hand to her cheek. “It’s nothing. I scraped it on the pavement. Is everyone okay? Arjenie, you weren’t hit, right? But you got knocked down. Did—”
“I’m fine.” Arjenie cut her off in an abrupt way that wasn’t like her. She looked shaken, but she’d scooped up her backpack from where it fell when Doug tackled her and held it in one hand now. “He was aiming at you.”
Kai’s eyebrows shot up. “You saw him?”
“No, but the policeman who was shot—you were between him and the sniper. If José hadn’t knocked you out of the way—”
“A policemen was shot?” Her heart jumped back into alarm-mode.
Doug spoke. “I don’t think it’s too bad. Look, here they come with him now.”
Two of the men in suits had made a chair with their arms to carry one of the uniformed cops. They were accompanied by Boyd, Ackleford—who was talking on the phone, unfazed by being in the middle of a fire fight—and the female FBI agent. Blood covered one side of the wounded man’s face and turned the shoulder of his crisp blue uniform dark and shiny. A head wound? Yes—his black hair was soaked with it. But he was conscious, even able to hold on to the shoulders of the men carrying him. They lowered him carefully into a chair. “EMTs will be here in a snap,” Boyd told the man. “We’ll have you taken care of real quick, Ruiz. You’re going to be fine.”
Boyd looked around in that assess-the-room way most cops had. It reminded her of Nathan. His gaze latched onto Kai. He strode toward her. “What the hell did you do?”
“Made everyone’s guns stop working. It’ll wear off soon.”
“When?” he demanded.
“Another five or ten minutes?” She paused, considering. She had put a lot of power into the spell. Too much
, considering she didn’t have Dell to draw on. She’d panicked. Kai grimaced, acknowledging that. “Maybe more like fifteen or twenty.”
“I need to know when my people’s weapons will be operational again, damn it!”
Kai matched him scowl for scowl. “I gave you my best guess. I haven’t field-tested the spell under these conditions.”
Ackleford walked up, shaking his head. “Funniest damn thing I ever saw.” One corner of his mouth crooked up. “Like we were all kids playing cops and robbers.” He held out a hand, shaping it like he was holding a gun. “Bang. Bang.” He shook his head again. Now both sides of his mouth crooked up—his version of a belly laugh. “Like a bunch of kids. Funniest damn thing I ever saw.”
Boyd stared at him. “Are you nuts? One of my men is wounded, and that—”
“You need to get a goddamn sense of humor, Boyd. Your man’s okay. Bullet barely grazed him. Didn’t even knock him out.”
“She kept us from nailing that perp!”
Ackleford snorted. “Which of your men is good enough to nail a perp from nearly two hundred yards away with a handgun? That’s assuming he could even see the bastard. I sure as hell didn’t.” He cocked his imaginary gun, sited. “Bang.” Grinned—at least that twitch of his lips might be taken for a grin—and holstered the nonexistent weapon. “We’d have more people hurt or dead if she hadn’t put the woo-woo on that bastard’s rifle. He could’ve picked off another three or four of us, easy, before hightailing it.”
Boyd gave a grudging nod. “Maybe so. Maybe so. How far does this damn spell extend?” He directed that question at Kai. “My people are going after him. It would be good to have some idea of when and where their weapons will work. Or the sniper’s.”
“I’m not sure. I understand why you need to know, but—well, I meant to cover a quarter-mile radius, but I think I overshot.”
Another uniformed officer came up to him, this one with a gold bar on his collar. Lieutenant? Captain? He and Boyd started talking, Ackleford answered his phone’s urgent chirping, and a pair of EMTs came in from the other end of the mall-like patio with a gurney.