by Eileen Wilks
Until today. Today, when Dyffaya had popped in right after “breakfast”—one of the two meals that appeared every day—his mood manic, his comments teasing and elliptical. Nathan gathered the god had something big planned for Earth very soon. Some kind of chaos event, yes—Dyffaya said more guests would be arriving soon—but bigger somehow. Grander. Something that mattered greatly to the god, that moved him closer to some dearly held goal. And Nathan couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
But it was tomorrow, not today, that had driven him away from their camp. Tomorrow, when he and Benedict would fight again . . . for the last time.
The problem with running away was that you still had to return. Nathan was on his way back now, uneased and uncertain. He saw three possible outcomes to tomorrow’s battle. His own death. Benedict’s. Or Dyffaya’s.
This time he had to get close. Dyffaya had been damnably careful, but they had to make him forget care this time. Nathan had to get close enough to use Claw—
Something leaped down from the top of the bank right ahead of him. His hand flashed—but he stayed the impulse in time, leaving Claw sheathed in its pocket of elsewhere. “Do you know how close you came to decapitation?” he demanded.
“Edgy, are we?” Cullen Seabourne said. The sorcerer was completely recovered from his near-starvation, though still a few pounds under his original weight. He held a rock in one hand. It was the size of two fists and fairly round. Nathan had found it on one of his explorations of the area.
Nathan took a slow breath, calming himself. “One of us is.”
“Getting yourself pumped up to kill Benedict, or practicing running away?” Cullen said that with a fine sneer—while his hand flashed through another message: Dyf fucking magic not working.
Spelling everything did make for short, sometimes odd messages. Nathan understood this one well enough, though. “I don’t want to hurt him. You know that.” While he spoke he signed, more magic sick?
Two bad, Cullen signed back. Three more sick. “Yeah, right. I just imagined that was your blade that went through his lung.”
“Did you come out just to give me a hard time?” Mary? he signed.
“I was bored. Don’t be so bloody sensitive.” Cullen signed a quick no and tossed the rock at him. “You up for a game?”
Nathan caught it. “I suppose.” He tossed it back, then signed, Dyf planning big event. More guests soon. He was slower than Cullen; it took a while to get all that spelled. While he did, Cullen tossed the rock from hand to hand, offering ludicrous bets on the outcome of their upcoming game. Giving a reason for the pause.
“You can go first.” Cullen tossed the rock back.
Nathan caught it. “Let’s go, then.”
They headed down the creek bed toward the clearing, exchanging a comment now and then, but not signing. Too hard to watch each other one’s hands when they were walking.
For the past two weeks, over Nathan’s and Benedict’s objections, Cullen had been sneaking off to watch Dyffaya play with his beguiled “guests.” He’d gotten it into his head that the god was spending too much of his time at sex, that it had to be a cover for or a means to something else. He’d been convinced that the god lacked the Sight and wouldn’t spot him.
He’d been right. It remained a crazy, dangerous thing to do, but he’d been right. The god hadn’t spotted Cullen, and Cullen had clearly Seen that Dyffaya was performing some kind of body magic during sex.
Sex magic had been around for thousands of years, but for pretty basic stuff—as a way to generate, share, or occasionally steal power. It could be combined with other types of magic, but this was the first Nathan had heard of using it in conjunction with body magic. According to Cullen, Dyffaya was using copulation to make complex and delicate changes in his sexual partners’ bodies. Subsequent spying had convinced Cullen that Dyffaya was trying to keep his beguiled guests from succumbing to magic sickness. He’d tried to explain why he thought this, but the subject was too technical and complicated to be conveyed well through short, spelled-out conversations.
If that was the god’s goal, he was failing. One of the beguiled people had already died; seven of the others had been showing symptoms. Now Cullen said two of them were in bad shape and three more were sick . . . which meant all of them had magic sickness.
All but the last one to arrive, that is. That woman had showed up the night Nathan learned who Dyffaya’s ally was. The god had to grab people in pairs, and she’d been the unfortunate extra person snatched so Dyffaya could bring his confederate here for a little sex and planning.
Dyffaya didn’t allow them to speak with their audience between fights, and this woman was slotted to be part of the audience, whether she liked it or not. But Cullen had seen her on his spying trips. She was a tall woman in her mid-fifties, with short brown hair. He’d overheard her telling one of the others her name. Mary. Mary Boyd.
The interesting thing about Mary was that Dyffaya hadn’t beguiled her. Cullen thought, based on overheard conversations, that he hadn’t fucked her, either. Maybe she was the control. While the god experimented on the others, he could observe her and see if she sickened faster or slower.
Or maybe he just wasn’t sexually interested in her. Who could say?
When they reached the clearing, Benedict was running through a series of exercises. He spared them a quick glance, but didn’t speak. Even if he only addressed Cullen it might be construed as communicating with Nathan, and they were scrupulous about appearing to observe the restriction. Appearances matter when you’re trying to deceive a god.
Cullen and Nathan went to the far end of the clearing, where their makeshift pins waited. The pins were eight lengths of wood jammed in the ground. On one of his exploration trips, Nathan had found a long, narrow limb from one of the black trees. Breaking it into pieces had been difficult, but they’d managed.
“You can go first,” Cullen said, confirming what Nathan had suspected when he caught the rock. Cullen had more to say and wanted his hands free. They often used the game to disguise a signed conversation.
Their version bore little resemblance to real lawn bowling. They had to throw, not roll, the “ball.” It was almost impossible to knock down more than one pin at a time, so the idea was to knock one down with each throw; you kept throwing as long as you knocked down a pin. Miss, and it was the other guy’s turn. You got a point for knocking down all eight pins on the same turn, and game was six points. Since the rock was only fairly round, pitching it accurately was tricky, and it took a solid hit to knock a pin all the way down. A game could last for hours, if they wanted it to.
Cullen moved down near the pins. One of their rules was that the person who wasn’t pitching retrieved the rock. This placed him where the other could easily watch him signing. Nathan made a show of warming up his arm.
Dyf caught me last night, Cullen signed.
Nathan scowled at the rock in his hand. Shifted his grip slightly. Cullen was here, alive and not missing any limbs, so some of the worst consequences of being caught hadn’t occurred. Nathan swung the heavy rock back and threw.
One pin down. He made the sign for a question.
Cullen sauntered over to retrieve the rock. Dyf laugh. Funny I watch won’t do.
Not hurt? Nathan signed.
Hurt no damage, Cullen signed on his way to Nathan.
One type of body magic caused excruciating pain without damaging the body. Nathan didn’t let himself grimace or otherwise show his sympathy. Dyf touch to hurt?
Cullen nodded.
All elves possessed some body magic and some ability to use illusion, but the two Gifts did not arrive in equal balance. Some were innately better at illusion, others at body magic. Before he became a god, Dyffaya had been an adept. Like most adepts, he’d been able to use both Gifts very well—but he’d been a true master at illusion, not body magic.
The qu
estion on their minds had been whether Dyffaya needed to touch people to use body magic. Some adepts didn’t, and Dyffaya didn’t even have a normal body. Yet he seemed to need to use his version of a body when performing body magic, didn’t he? Sex was a deep way of touching another body.
Now Cullen said that the god had touched him to cause pain. It wasn’t proof that he had to touch, but . . . How you spotted?
Mary wandering saw me.
Mary Boyd had wandered away from the site where Dyffaya kept his guests? Mary okay?
Punish Mary hurt no damage.
Touch Mary to hurt?
Yes. Cullen handed the rock over to Nathan. “Lucky pitch.” And signed rapidly, Dyf no Sight. Touch to hurt. We try it yes?
Nathan’s heart beat a little faster. What Cullen had proposed was risky, very risky, but . . . tomorrow yes, he signed back.
“See if you can get lucky again,” Cullen said. His voice was bland, his movements normal, and his eyes gleamed with wild amusement. “You’re going to need it.”
That was likely true, in a perverse way. Nathan had just agreed to let Cullen stop his heart in the middle of tomorrow’s fight . . . if he could. That’s where their wishing turned perverse. The spell only worked for Cullen half the time. With luck, this would be one of the times it did.
THIRTY-FIVE
ACKLEFORD had an old-fashioned paper map in his car that was very helpful for laying out a three-mile grid for searching the city. To Kai’s surprise, Ackleford wanted José to drive. She understood why when the brand-new Unit 12 agent took a laptop out of the trunk and settled into the back seat with it. He meant to treat the car as his mobile office.
“Before you get too involved with whatever’s on that laptop,” she began.
“Reports. You said this might take a while.”
“It probably will. Before you start in with your reports, I need to tell you something. I think I’ve figured out what Dyffaya wants. Look at what he’s been doing—staging big, splashy events. Extravagantly weird stuff, scary stuff that’s sure to be featured on every news show in the nation. He wants attention, and he wants—”
“Hold on a minute.” He grabbed his phone, tapped the screen. “How long has it been since Hunter destroyed that knife?”
“Three weeks and . .” She counted quickly. “Six days.”
“But nothing happened until day before yesterday. That’s what we thought, but maybe he’s been acting like a damn stage magician, keeping us focused on the splashy while he grabbed people left and . . . Ackleford here,” he said into the phone. “I need you to get the city’s missing person reports for the last twenty days. See if there’s been more than usual. Especially look for any doubles—for people who might have vanished two at a time. I need—what?” he snapped at Kai, who’d twisted around in the seat to get his attention.
“Fires,” she said urgently. “Have them look for missing people who have some connection to a fire.” Like the one at Franklin Boyd’s house last night. Maybe Dyffaya could snatch people without a big, showy event. Maybe he had some way of storing the excess magic to use later, but he’d still be using chaos motes. Even a god was likely to spill some of that energy—and fire was tied to chaos.
“Look for any connection to fires,” Ackleford repeated. “Hell, just get the reports of fires for that period while you’re at it.” A pause. “Hell, no. I need this yesterday. Pull in Dunn if you need to . . . No, not yet. Call me when you know something.” He disconnected. “What were you saying about what this Dyffaya wants?”
“Worshipers. That’s the reason he’s spent magic so lavishly—to create these big, splashy events. He wants to be worshiped. To get that, he plans to scare the shit out of everyone. He’s undermining people’s confidence in the police, the FBI, in every kind of authority. He wants everyone scared enough to try anything, even worshiping him, if that will save them.”
“Huh.” Ackleford’s eyes narrowed. “And yet he’s been doing fine at splashy without those four. Now all of a sudden he needs them, and he needs Stockman out of the way at the same time. And we can’t be sure who else in the SDPD has been co-opted by that asshole god.” He thought some more, nodded, and picked up his phone again.
“What are you doing?”
“Agreeing with you. Brooks wants a Unit agent on the spot to deal with whatever’s coming. Something big, he said. I can’t do the woo-woo shit like Stockman, but I’m a goddamn Unit agent now, so maybe I’d better do what only a Unit agent can.” A short pause. “Yeah, it’s Ackleford again. I need to talk to Brooks.”
“But what are you doing?”
This time he grinned—a real, mouth-stretching grin. He looked like a sour, middle-aged shark about to chomp down. “Calling in the goddamn Marines.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
He’d already tapped his phone. “Hell, no. Got a hunch. Besides, can’t call in the locals, not with Boyd—Ida. Ackleford here. Need Brooks again.”
Kai listened, fascinated, to the conversation between Ackleford and Ruben Brooks. Ackleford was just as rude and sarcastic with his new boss as he was with everyone else. After some back-and-forth, he handed her the phone. “He wants your input.”
She took it. “This is Kai.”
“Derwin tells me you believe Dyffaya’s goal is a religious protection racket.”
“Uh . . . I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes.” What else could you call it when the god used fear to force people to turn to him for protection from him?
“He believes Dyffaya has something spectacular in mind that requires the four people who’ve gone missing. Since I have a strong hunch that something big is going to happen soon—probably within a few hours—I agree. Being unable to rely on the local police force is a problem, but bringing in the Marines is a rather extreme solution. Is that your idea or Derwin’s?”
Kai glanced at the man in the back seat. “His.”
“Ah.” A moment’s silence. “Lily tells me that Derwin has a slight patterning Gift. Very slight, she says, and he prefers to believe it doesn’t exist, but it’s not blocked. It does explain why an otherwise by-the-book agent occasionally leaps off a cliff—and lands on his feet. I suppose if I’m going to give him the status of a Unit agent, I’d better allow him to act as one. Thank you. I’ll speak with Derwin again now.”
Kai had given the phone back to Ackleford—who was a patterner. That blew her mind. It was a very slight Gift, Brooks said, but still . . . she glanced at the rune she’d drawn on José’s cheek. With a patterner in charge, that rune might not be entirely meaningless, after all.
Ackleford got his Marines—two full companies from 1 Marine Expeditionary Force based in Pendleton, with air support if needed. He would, that is, as soon as he knew where to put them.
For the next two hours, Ackleford worked, José drove, and Kai kept an eye on the charm in her palm. Like most charms, it needed skin contact to work. Ackleford smoked five more cigarettes. He accepted calls and made them. He spoke with Major Joseph Simmons of the U.S. Marine Corps—the CO for the two companies that were standing by to deploy—several times.
From one of his calls, they learned that the fire at Franklin Boyd’s house had been reported by a neighbor, not Boyd. The fire truck had arrived at 2:15 A.M. and was met by Boyd in his pajamas. He told them the fire had been started by a lighted candle that got knocked over. It had been small and he’d put it out. The firefighters confirmed that the fire was extinguished and left.
“Where was Mary?” Ackleford demanded of his subordinate. “Mary Boyd, his wife. Kids are grown and gone, but Mary should’ve been there. She wasn’t mentioned in the report?” A pause. “Find out.”
Another call was about missing persons reports. The agent hadn’t correlated the reports with fires yet, but in the past four weeks, twenty-seven people had been reported missing in San Diego County due to “unknown circum
stances.” That was a significant uptick. The agent had found several reports that might be pairs—people who’d gone missing on the same day. And one of the missing person cases had been closed when the man’s body was found several miles from his home. He’d died without a mark on him—just like Britta.
Kai’s job—aside from watching the charm—was to keep track of their progress on the map. She distracted herself by talking to José. Turned out he was the oldest of four children. He had two half-sisters and a half-brother, all of them born to his mother after she moved back to Mexico and married. He’d been raised by his father and hadn’t met his siblings until he was an adult because of his stepfather’s prejudice against lupi. His brother had bought into that prejudice and didn’t want anything to do with him, but he saw his sisters occasionally and obviously valued that contact. One was married and had three children; the other was quite a bit younger, something of a late-life baby. She was attending university in Sonora and would graduate this year. José was clearly very proud of her. Kai had a suspicion he’d helped her financially, but he didn’t actually say so. “You grew up at Clanhome?”
“Nearby. Back then, my dad worked at an engineering firm in the city, so we lived there and went to Clanhome most weekends.” He smiled. “I loved weekends. Growing up clan is like having dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles. More uncles than aunts, but still, plenty of family.”
“When I was growing up I wished for a big family, but I was an only, and so were both my parents.”
“Coming up on an exit,” he said. “Do I take it?”
“Yes, that finishes the last leg of this section. You’ll need to go south on—stop the car.”