Unbinding

by Eileen Wilks

  “What about the other sites? Did they tell you about them?” Arjenie asked.

  “I heard about the airport and the convenience store—and thank God no one was nearby when that went up. The gas pumps made quite a fireball. And Tuttle Park. I heard what happened there. Did they ever find all the toads?”

  Arjenie shook her head. “I don’t know. I do know that two people have been reported missing in El Cahon. They’re assuming the toads bit them.”

  “So what happened at the Federal Building? Casualties? People missing?”

  “No one’s reported missing, and last I heard no one had died. But there were a lot of injuries, some of them pretty serious. After the building sealed itself shut, this pink vapor came out of the ducts and people went all sorts of crazy. A bunch of them held a party with dancing and sex. Most of it was consensual, but not all. Others went fighting mad. A lot of people were hurt that way. The other injuries were more random. One man ate pencils, which doesn’t sound so bad, but the splinters cut him up inside. Another started a fire at his desk. He wasn’t hurt, but two others got burned trying to play with the flames. A woman ran into a wall over and over until she knocked herself out.”

  “Ugly.” Kai frowned and counted. “So as far as we know, no one’s missing from the Federal Building, the convenience store, or the hobbit house. He snatched two people each from the airport, the Fowler Building, and the mall, plus five at the zoo. That’s eleven. Add in Britta Valenzuela from yesterday and our people from this morning, and he’s got sixteen hostages.” Had that been only this morning? Gods. Kai rubbed the back of her neck.

  “What happened at the mall, anyway? All I heard was that people had been bitten.”

  “The chaos event hit a pet store. All the cages vanished and all their occupants were transformed, except for the bunnies. Scaled puppies with vampire teeth, flying snakes, oversize lizards running around on legs like a dog’s, birds with teeth . . . and they were all terrified. Their bodies were horribly altered, and all around them people were screaming. Of course the animals ran, which made people think they were chasing them.”

  “They weren’t?”

  Kai shook her head. “The poor things just wanted to get away. There was this one puppy . . . half puppy, half lizard, I guess, but his head and legs were all puppy, and so were his thoughts. They—the cops—when I arrived, they wanted me to find the transformed creatures. I told them sure, I could do that, and I could tell which ones were under compulsion, too, and if they weren’t being compelled I could control them so we could get them caged safely.”

  “You can do that? Control animals?”

  “Most of the time, if it’s just one at a time. It’s not compulsion, mind—I just soothe them, make them comfortable with me. I can’t do anything with insects,” she added, thinking of the butterflies. “They don’t have enough in the way of thoughts. I can’t even put them to sleep.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that, either.”

  “It’s not always useful. It takes a lot of power to send sleep, and it wears off unless I trance and anchor the instruction, and that’s too much like interfering. Even with animals, I don’t like to interfere that much with free will unless I absolutely have to. Mostly it’s easier to use a sleep charm.”

  “You didn’t put the chameleons to sleep.”

  “They were already under someone else’s control. I would’ve had to put Dyffaya to sleep for that to work.”

  “That makes sense. So you found the transformed animals?”

  “Oh, yes,” Kai said grimly. “This puppy was the first one. He was terrified. I sent a lot of soothing and called him to me. He crept out from under a table—we were in the food court—all bewildered, but wagging his tail. It was a lizard’s tail, heavy and scaled, and he had bigger teeth than puppies are supposed to, so I guess he looked scary. But he was whimpering and so hopeful that we’d fix things.” Her mouth tightened. “One of the cops shot him.”

  “Oh, no!”

  Kai blinked back tears. Stupid to cry over a puppy when so many people had been hurt or killed today, but she kept seeing that scared, hopeful puppy-face . . . “That puppy was not a danger to anyone. I had him calm, and he had no intention—imposed or native—of biting anyone, no compulsion . . . and I know the cop couldn’t see that, but I’d told them. But no one was listening to me yet.”

  Arjenie’s eyebrows shot up. “Yet?”

  Kai grimaced. “I lost my temper. Set off a flash-bang.”

  Nick spoke from the front seat. “She doesn’t mean the military kind.”

  “Flash-bang is Nathan’s word for the spell,” Kai explained. “The sidhe call it something else, but Nathan taught it to me, so I use his word. It’s very Shakespearian—all ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”

  “But with plenty of that sound and fury,” Nick said dryly. “I was impressed. The cops were, too.”

  “At least,” Kai said, vaguely embarrassed, “they did start listening to me after that. And it mattered that they listen. Not just because I didn’t want to see helpless animals killed, but because I needed to see the animals. I’d spent hours studying Dyffaya’s work in the compulsions laid on his followers and in the scraps of intention I salvaged from the hobbit house. I knew I’d recognize the patterns of his intent, and I was sure I could sort out scraps of general intent left behind from the general chaos event from compulsions laid on individual animals. I figured Dyffaya’s blood-hooks would be carried by animals under compulsion, you see. And it worked. I could spot the animals with the tags easily.”

  “That’s going to be useful. Had he tagged many of them?”

  “Just the bunnies. Not the puppies or the lizards or the toothed birds. None of the scary creatures. The bunnies, because people weren’t scared of them. They’d pet one or pick it up—and get bitten.” Kai sighed. “Two people are missing.”

  “Were there a lot of injuries? To people, I mean.”

  “Yes, but most were minor. Bites, of course. A broken leg when someone got shoved off the escalator in the panic. The worst injured were the ones who were shot.”

  Arjenie’s eyes went big. “Shot?”

  “Yeah. A civilian idiot decided to go hunting. He wasn’t the ace shot he liked to think—hit a man by accident, but that didn’t discourage him. He kept shooting at this lizard thing and put a bullet in a woman’s chest. She was still in surgery, last I heard. He was under arrest and screaming about his Second Amendment rights.” Kai sighed again and leaned back against the seat. “Tell me how it went at the zoo.”

  “There’s five missing.”

  “Five? But that’s more than twice as many as he’s grabbed at other chaos events! And it’s an odd number. I guess we were wrong about him grabbing people in pairs.”

  “No, he still grabbed in pairs—he just grabbed more pairs. Originally there were six missing, but one was a little boy and Dyffaya sent him back, just like he did that toddler at Fagioli.”

  Kai thought about that. “It sounds like children won’t work for whatever he wants with these people—but he isn’t killing them. He’s returning them. Do you think he’s reluctant to hurt kids?”

  “Maybe. It’s possible that the godhead itself kicks them out for some reason, not the god.”

  “Thinking about the godhead makes me dizzy. Could there have been more than one chaos event at the zoo, and that’s how he grabbed so many people there?”

  “I don’t know how to tell. There were two transformations—the wasps and some of the trees. The trees didn’t do anything, though. They didn’t sprout thorns or poke people with their branches, though they look weird enough to behave that way. Gorgeous, but weird. I’m pretty sure the wasps were the only things delivering hooks. Everyone who vanished had been stung. A few hundred people were stung who didn’t vanish, of course. There were a lot of wasps.”

  “How much of a lo
t do you mean?”

  “Thousands, maybe. Your fire charm plus the wind charm worked on the swarms, but then they stopped swarming. I had no idea how to find them all. I was really glad when that Unit agent showed up.”

  Arjenie had called Ruben Brooks to say they needed help. Brooks had responded by sending a Unit agent to take charge of the investigation. Kai knew that much from talking to José earlier, but that’s all. “So who is this agent? What do you think of him or her?”

  “Her. Special Agent Karin Stockman. She’s over forty and very confident, very experienced. She’s not Wiccan by faith—she told me that right off the bat—but some of her training is Wiccan. That was obvious when I watched her cast. She has an excellent vermin spell, different from any I’ve seen before. It’s designed to repel flying bugs, which isn’t unusual, only it isn’t a ward. I’ve never seen a vermin spell that wasn’t a ward, have you? She modified it on the spot to attract instead of repelling. That kind of inversion can be tricky, but she handled it beautifully. It gathered the wasps so she could deal with them. She’s a Fire Gifted,” Arjenie added, “so once she got them together, she burned them.”

  Kai frowned. “They must have been just wasps by then.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think even an excellent vermin spell could collect creatures that were being directed by Dyffaya. Which means that by the time this Karin Stockman showed up, the god wasn’t actively directing the wasps. That doesn’t mean they didn’t need to be disposed of. Aside from saving a lot of people from being stung—they were pretty aggressive, I understand?”

  “Very.”

  “And just because the god wasn’t directing the wasps doesn’t mean they weren’t delivering hooks. They had to be destroyed. Why don’t you know that vermin spell?”

  “Well, it isn’t part of my family’s lore, so—”

  “No, I mean, why haven’t Unit people pooled their spells?” Kai sat up again. “Maybe not every spell, but Unit agents should do more sharing than they are. There should be some kind of common pool of spells that all Unit agents can learn.”

  Arjenie shrugged. “I don’t see how that could work. Most of the spells I know aren’t mine to give away—they’re the coven’s, so I’d have to ask my aunt’s permission. I’m sure I’m not the only one in that situation. And anyway, I’m not an agent. I’m just a researcher.”

  A researcher who could call the head of Unit 12 and get him to send an agent. “Still,” Kai said, “hoarding knowledge is the way the sidhe do things. We probably caught it from them, this idea that spells should all be kept secret instead of sharing the knowledge.” She brooded on that a moment. “And that’s enough about my hobbyhorse for now. You didn’t really tell me what you thought about Karin Stockman.”

  “She was a police officer in Connecticut for twenty years before the Unit recruited her.”

  Kai’s eyebrows lifted. “You don’t like her.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but you’re being so careful with what you do say. Come on, Arjenie. If she’s going to be a problem—”

  “She really is good at her job. And she really didn’t pat me on the head and tell me to run along home. It just felt that way.”

  “One of those, huh? Is it the law enforcement background?”

  “Oh, yes. She and Ackleford seemed to hit it off, by which I mean they were both rude and neither of them minded. It was funny to watch them sneer at each other. I think she discounted me mostly because I’m a civilian—”

  “You work for the FBI.”

  “I’m an info geek, not an agent, plus I’m too girly. Some of the older female agents are like that. They had to out-guy the guys when they started out in the Bureau to get any respect. I bet Special Agent Stockman learned to cuss and spit early on. Well, not literally, but you know what I mean.”

  “I do.” Kai had met women like that, who’d come up in a profession back when they had to claw their way into the boys’ club. Most of them were great people. A few, though, had learned to despise their own sex. “I wonder why she hasn’t called me.”

  “She’s only been here a couple hours.”

  “And she’s been busy since she arrived,” Kai conceded. “But she flew in, didn’t she? She could have called me from the plane or the airport. Seems like she’d want to talk to the one person who knows something about the god.”

  “Give her time. I’m sure she will.”

  “Hmm.” Kai had not wanted to be in charge. She had no right to complain if the person who’d been put in charge didn’t do things the way Kai thought she should. But dammit, the woman ought to call her. Maybe it was okay if she didn’t call right away, though. With a sigh Kai leaned back again. This time her eyelids drifted down. “I won’t say this was the longest day ever, but it ranks way up there.”

  “Mmm.” Arjenie sounded as beat as Kai felt. “We did learn a few things. Dyffaya doesn’t grab people at every chaos event, and he doesn’t have to grab just two at a time.”

  “True. And so far he’s used a living agent, plant or animal, to deliver his hooks.”

  “That’s something, I guess. I’m not sure what, but . . . did you learn anything more from studying the god’s followers?”

  That made Kai smile grimly. “Two things. First, they’re linked in some weird way. I’ve never seen anything like it. Second, Ackleford was right. They’ve been booby-trapped.”

  “What?” Arjenie sat up. “How?”

  “There’s a trigger. It’s so subtle, so carefully planted . . . I nearly missed it. If I’d been at full strength I probably would have missed it because I would’ve been trying to fix things instead of studying them. The trigger’s tied to the most obvious place to start lifting the compulsions,” she added. “Not that ‘obvious’ is a good word for it. ‘Only’ fits better, as in, the only place I’ve found so far.”

  “What does the trigger do? Could you tell?”

  “If it’s tripped, it sets off a cascade that destroys their minds. All their minds, I think, even if I only tripped it in one of them.”

  “That’s hideous. Horrible.”

  Kai nodded. “All of that. There’s something odd about that trigger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like I’m still missing something.”

  “Maybe you’ll figure out what tomorrow, when you’re rested.”

  Kai nodded again without lifting her head. She’d rest her eyes a moment, she decided. Just a moment . . .

  She woke when the car stopped, disoriented. Blinked herself into something resembling awareness. “Guess no one tried to kill us on the way here. I didn’t . . . that truck.” A 1979 Ford truck in the original orange and tan, faded and peeling, sat in front of Isen’s house. “I know that truck.”

  She threw open the door and bolted out of the Town Car. The front door of the house opened. A short, square-built man with long white braids and skin burned dark from a life spent outdoors stood in the lighted doorway. “Yázhi Atsa!” he called in his gravelly voice—Little Eagle. Only one person in all the realms called her that.

  Seconds later, Kai was held tight in her grandfather’s arms.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THEY were back in the clearing where they’d first arrived, though it looked different now. The same impossibly tall, black trees surrounded it; the same glowing ground cast an eerie, upward radiance. But the clearing was larger now. And populated.

  Eleven humans, a werewolf, and a chameleon sat in a circle some fifty feet in diameter, waiting for a god. No recliners this time. The land itself rose in tidy mounds to form their seating, with the tallest hump reserved for the absent god. The humans and the lupus ate fruit and cake and drank wine as they waited. The chameleon appeared to be napping.

  Those mounds had sprouted a profusion of exotic and improbable flowers.
Very festive. So were the garments Dyffaya had chosen for his imported audience—short silk tunics in bright colors. Cullen’s was spring green. That was no more his choice than was his seat for this show, but that was how Dyffaya wanted it. At the moment, Cullen was chatting with the dark-haired woman on his right.

  Nathan and Benedict’s garb had been chosen for them as well. They wore the liarda that were traditional for slaves condemned to fight in the pits of Kakkar, a particularly nasty portion of an unpleasant realm. Liarda were basically leather jockstraps, and not particularly comfortable.

  Nathan waited, too, but outside that festive circle. As did Benedict . . . but not with Nathan. Opposite him, opposing him in space as he soon would be in fact.

  They’d gotten most of what they wanted. Most, not all. The negotiations had cost Nathan and Benedict some pain, but nothing they couldn’t heal. The god hadn’t wanted them too damaged to fight, and Benedict’s healing was slower than Nathan’s. What Nathan did not understand was why Dyffaya hadn’t threatened to burn a school or some more random strangers. Nor had he threatened Cullen’s life. Maybe he didn’t believe the sorcerer was important enough to them to make it worthwhile. Maybe he had some use for Cullen that required him to be uninjured.

  Or maybe he’d been in too much of a tearing hurry to bother. The bargaining had taken place at well more than arms-length—Dyffaya continued to be careful about letting Nathan get close—and in a ridiculously short time. Only three hours. When Nathan acquired Kai’s knife it had taken two full days, and that had been a friendly negotiation. He’d expected this negotiation to take several days, and had hoped to draw it out for a week or more.

  Dyffaya had accepted the not-killing part of the bargain almost too easily. It was the not-harming part he refused to consider. “Don’t be absurd,” he’d said. “I’ve already bound myself to a situation that may result in your death. I assume your lady would consider your death a grievous harm.” Nathan had suggested they define “harm” in such a way that grief was omitted. Dyffaya had said loftily, “The binding doesn’t work that way. You’ll excuse me if I do not explain precisely how it does work.”