I had no idea how they kept track because the process wasn’t what I’d call clear cut. Groups drifted apart to converse on tight private bands and then randomly yell their votes. Ski would boom back, “Noted!” It was enough to give me a headache. The ayes currently outweighed the nays from what I could decipher in the confusion.
Silver whispered on the sly through our bond, “I think I’m gonna like DIC if good ‘ole Ski’s any indication. Then again I don’t know DIC yet, so we’ll see.”
I groaned and sealed in my mirth. “For the love of Annis, you better not ever call Deep Ice Clan that spiffy little acronym out loud or I’ll sing Row, Row, Row your Boat all night long for a week, Sister!”
James picked up on our conversation. “Be serious, Silver.”
My twin let out a mental raspberry.
Corinne added her experience with the Council to the mix. “In the Web, Ski is a powerful ally but geographically it would suit us better to make nice with Reno and Soto’s Mesa Verde Clan in Arizona. Deep Ice is too far off in Anchorage. Mesa is the nearest clan to us in the States besides the Rolling Hills Clan in Oklahoma. After that you’re looking at Orange Grove Clan in Florida and Big Boy Clan in North Carolina.”
Bemused, Mez asked, “Big Boy?”
Surprisingly Kal answered, “It is a type of red seeded plant grown to eat in North Carolina that I have enjoyed fresh off the vine. The soil there is rich. I will take you to try some, Nefa.”
Their family tête-à-tête was interrupted by Ski’s shout for attention. “There is no abstaining from the vote! If you refuse to put in the Speaker gets your slots! Put up or shut up! You have thirty more seconds to decide. That means you too, Bull Seat!”
Reno’s smoldering ember core flared with irritation. “Nay!”
I called out, “Hey, Soto, no matter what way you vote I’d like a do-over. I promise to play nice and visit Mesa Verde or have you back as an honored guest to Wind Runner. Are you game?” The spontaneous offer made me cringe inside. James gushed pride and Silver spewed indignation. I felt squished between the diametrically opposed reactions until Corinne sucked them away. Her mercury core wobbled at the added weight and I worried.
Ramon’s forest green was more of an aura than a planetary crust encircling his softly glowing orange center. I wondered at the connection between his and Maggie’s Web lights and if it had anything to do with their inclination as healers. Silver was more skilled in that department than either of them, but her light didn’t hold a lick of orange in it. Maybe it was just coincidence.
His answer was slow in coming as he mulled over our offer bathed in Reno’s disapproving glare. “Nay.”
He paused after Ski’s answering, “Noted!” to address me directly and publicly. “Perhaps we were all quick to judgment. We should learn more of one another and then decide if our clans can handle a cordial alliance. I invite you to Mesa at your earliest convenience.”
Reno burned brighter and then left the Web in a blast wave of pure fury.
The Speaker, who I was beginning to believe, had been picked for nothing other than his ability to yell over the top of everyone, called out, “Listen up, Weavers! Final tally!”
Groups broke and realigned into the arena-like formation again. When silence reigned Ski announced, “The Ayes have it by a margin of two. A formal ceremony of Seat assumption will be held in a week’s time for the three genetic legacies. No further Council meetings will be held on this matter until that time. This gathering is dismissed!”
Corinne whispered, “Welcome to political folly, Ladies. I’m not sure if we just won or lost.”
Silver lifted eyelids to see the shadow of a cloud passing the glass of the skylight overhead. A shiver of apprehension went over her scalp that made her jaw tighten and her head twitch. When she shifted her legs they were too long and thin. The way her clothes settled on Kara’s darkened skin felt off.
Something wasn’t right besides being inside a dead friend. The air had a hint of crisp burnt metal and a humming in her head sounded suspiciously like Cass’s voice on mute. It faded in and out. She strained to catch the ghosts of unintelligible words.
She sat with shoulders hunched forward and stomach muscles clenched with the strain of her desire to catch even a wisp of the former connection. The faint whispers ceased right as Kal yelled her sister’s name.
“Cass!”
Silver watched in horror as her seemingly dead sister flopped to the floor.
Chapter Fifteen: Only Partly Dead
I opened my eyes and stretched stiff joints. A high pitched whine in my throat accompanied the pleasurable exercise of temporarily underused muscles. The air was occupied by rolling pixie dust motes, glittering magically in a sunbeam from one of the skylights. My ears tipped me off to the wrongness first—a cottony buzzing filled my canals—and then I noticed the metallic taste at the back of my throat.
Gerome’s voice coming from Corinne’s mouth was the next clue. “We don’t have much time, Cassandra. Listen well.”
Kevin shifted by Corinne but it wasn’t really Kevin at all. Something about him looked…old and female. Maybe not old exactly, but I could tell his squatter wasn’t comfortable and it showed in the way one hand picked at his nails in the nervous gesture of a woman.
I tried to take a breath to ask a question and realized my heart wasn’t beating. Panic must have bloomed on my face because the Kevin that wasn’t Kevin spoke.
Her voice was thick with a Spanish accent. “We have no time to explain more. To talk like this we borrowed some of your life and gave you some of our death.” Her voice switched to her native tongue seamlessly. “Nieta que nunca supe pero todavia sabemos.”
I understood the foreign words as if I still had an Axsian translator glued to my temple: Granddaughter I never knew but still know. So this was Noemi Covarrubias, Gerome’s mother—my dead mother’s mother.
Gerome cleared Corinne’s throat and the manly sound was odd coming from her thin neck. “You need to stop delaying and look through our memories. Read the note, Cassandra!”
A strange tearing split my cotton-filled eardrums and Kevin’s body convulsed on the couch. The dust motes turned black and the scene started to fry apart like burning projector film. Corinne’s lips twisted and blistered as Gerome spoke one last time, “Read the note, Cass!”
The next thing I knew a painful pumping on my sternum replaced the disorienting feeling of half-death. James shouted something as another compression hit my chest, but I wasn’t coherent enough to figure out what it was. Someone tilted my head back and breathed into my mouth with an exchange of air that smelled like Cocoa Puffs. My head cleared with a blast of phantom fire and I spasmed, flailing wildly and making brief painful contact with my would-be rescuers.
Silver threw her arms around me and pinned me to Kara’s chest. She was trembling like a leaf and her cheek against mine was wet with tears.
“Damn it all, Cass, don’t you ever do that to me again! You are not allowed to die!”
James tugged me out of my sister’s arms. “Let her get some air, Silver. We need to take her vitals too.”
I grabbed his hand before he could place two fingers over the pulse point on the inside of my wrist. “I’m fine, James. It was sort of like those dreams I have but different. They didn’t get a chance to explain but I think that’s because we were breaking the rules. Wherever the dead go, I was partially there and they were partially here—kind of, I think.” My other hand rose and I rubbed between my eyebrows with my palm at the confusion hiding behind layers of flesh and bone. I realized I was lying on the floor between the white couches, and the coffee table was at a crooked angle as if someone had shoved it quickly out of the way.
Corinne snapped from above. “Who is ‘they’ and why would they want to speak with you? How do you know this isn’t some sort of stress hallucination or a Web attack by the Soul Eater?”
I looked up into a face that wasn’t occupied by a dead family member anymore and inha
led air-conditioned oxygen with relief. “Gerome and Noemi. I was informed I should read the note my uncle left me and wade their memories. They didn’t tell me why, but obviously it was urgent or they wouldn’t have risked me dying for real.” I decided to ignore Corinne’s hallucination accusation because I didn’t have the words to explain why I knew it wasn’t temporary insanity on my part. “Regardless of how it might look, I don’t think they were actually trying to kill me, Corinne.”
Kevin snorted. “They shouldn’t call on you like that again unless they do wanna kill you. That was some freaky shit and we’re all pretty used to freaky around here. Your eyes, man, your eyes were scary.”
I frowned at James and Silver. “What happened on y’all’s end?” My chest was sore from James’ compressions and my lungs burned like they’d been starved, which they had, but otherwise I felt okay, if a little tired.
Silver collected herself, smoothing back her hair behind her ears and when she started to speak her lips quavered for a moment until she got it under control. Mez used his larger frame to nudge Corinne and Kevin out of his way before he knelt behind Silver and placed his hands on her shoulders. She stroked his dark fingers absently. “We came out of the Web and Kal noticed first. He yelled your name and then you slid like a dead fish onto the carpet. James got to you first and saw your eyes. They were cataract white and unblinking. You weren’t breathing, and I couldn’t sense you through our bond at all.” She blinked back tears as her throat clicked in a dry swallow. “I thought you were gone.” The unspoken ‘like Kara’ was so strong it danced like an emotional windstorm through our bond.
I waited patiently for James to finish taking my pulse because I knew it would make him feel better and then I struggled to my feet. “I’m very much alive, and I have STD.”
Silver slapped a palm over her unexpected laughter and everyone besides James looked confused until he elaborated in clipped emotionless words. “Shit To Do.”
Kal stood unobtrusively behind Kevin and crooked his finger at me in a come-hither manner. I stumbled over and he engulfed me in a hug. The next thing I knew, warmth covered my back as Silver’s borrowed body joined the party. Kal grabbed me by the nape of the neck then slid his palm to just under my ear. I assumed Silver was getting the same treatment. The tiny lines around his fake human eyes were deeper in worry as his gaze darted back and forth from my face to Silver’s.
“I do not know what games Annis plays with your lives but I do not find them amusing, Cilda. Do as your Eam asked with caution. Do not do it alone.”
Kal released us both gently and the tips of his fingers caressed my jaw with affection as they withdrew. He and our uncle Gerome had been friends of a sort, and I knew he grieved for his loss. At the same time, I also knew he wasn’t happy with the way his friend had left things and the risk he’d just posed to my life. Silver’s forced body switch wasn’t pleasing him either.
Corinne drew our shields back in place and it felt like armor instead of a malleable energy cocoon. When I did a one-eighty, James was motionless next to the spot where I’d collapsed, his features carefully blanked.
Green eyes burned holes in the wall as James asked the room, “What now?”
A blaring fog horn sound came from someone’s pocket and James scrambled to dig his phone out. When he succeeded in liberating the thin shiny rectangle he punched the screen a couple times and the tin-can voice on the other side was audible to the room.
“Control to Lee?”
James stretched his neck and gave a little chuff in the back of his throat before he answered, “This is Lee.”
“I’ve got a visitor at the gate without an invitation that refuses to leave.”
One eyebrow went up and James looked a question at me. I shrugged and mouthed, “Chavarria?”
James ordered, “Send the video feed to my phone and I’ll look. Hold for now, Control. Lee out.”
Control wasn’t a person it was a position. Whoever was assigned the lead for security duty got the title, and only the most level headed were asked to serve because they were the Weaver equivalent of 9-1-1.
James tapped his phone twice and the handheld rectangle became a tiny monitor that showed a black and white image of a car. The grill had a sturdy wrap-around push guard over it, so the Ford symbol on the Crown Vic’s front was nearly obscured. It was an unmarked car, so it could be LPD, FBI or DPS; who knew. The face behind the wheel answered the question as Detective Koenig yelled out the driver’s side window into the front gate speaker. He punched the steering wheel over the horn and left his fist there. We could hear the faint mournful wail as it traveled through the atmosphere all the way from the gate to our home.
James cleared his screen and dialed then put the phone to his ear. “Control, this is Lee. Let him through and have him wait in my office. We’ll be there shortly.”
I volunteered, “I’ll go with you.”
He nodded.
Corinne turned on her heel, headed toward the kitchen mumbling and grumbling about needing more coffee, and Kevin followed in her wake.
Kal flung his duster away from his hips, stuffing his thumbs inside the outside edge of his front pockets. “I could accompany you but it would serve no purpose. Should you have need of me, I will be in my Earthly surface abode exploring the human domestic duties of daily life.”
Silver snorted. “Could you not just say you’re doing chores?”
The strong scent of ozone and emptiness was my twin’s answer as Kal teleported away.
Mez chuckled and the thick Shar-Pei wrinkles at the top of his nose formed as his eyes smiled. “My Eam has become enamored of the vacuum cleaner. He likes the noise it makes and the lines in the carpet. Sometimes he draws pictures. I am not allowed to ruin his work for days at a time so I must bend from room to room. Kal is…different here than on Axsa; more light-hearted than at home.”
Silver smiled back at her love. “I’ve noticed. It’s a good thing not a bad thing. Maybe Earth is far enough away from the past that he can relax.”
Seriousness gathered in the reflective black pools of his eyes and his nictitating lens fluttered in a nervous gesture. “Perhaps it is so, Leoght Cor.” Mez touched the end of my sister’s nose through her shield and grinned. “I will leave you for a time so I may use your inefficient waste receptacle to void my bowels.” He’d been suitably shocked that water, a valuable resource on any planet, was being used for sanitation purposes.
I rolled my eyes. “Get out of here!”
Mez vanished and the scent cloud he left in his wake was tinged with a tang of worry. What could worry possibly smell like? It was elusive and sharp with a coppery aftertaste, as if I’d breathed in a blood mist. My twin’s whiskey eyes lightened even more and I knew she smelled it too. We didn’t need any telltale aromas to tip either of us off to his concern—his habit of being the least serious when he felt the most serious was a dead giveaway.
Silver tagged along with James and me. We decided to hoof it to the Security Office as we weren’t in a hurry for a face to face with a pissed off LPD Detective to either defend or explain our actions. The day was shaping up to be cool and pleasant. The powdery smooth topaz blue sky overhead stretched from horizon to horizon. Nary a cloud was in sight. The wind was whispering seductively in the trees around us rather than the restless gusting force we felt yesterday. Silver frowned at the lack of clouds as if they didn’t meet her expectations, and I wished I could hear her thoughts to figure out why.
A few neighbors were out, using the good weather to pull weeds or mow their lawns. Some enterprising clan members had placed personal touches on the outsides of their new homes in the form of yard decorations and multi-colored pansies by the curb or on mailboxes. These were things that gave me hope.
Tim, our compound mechanic, sat on his porch looking woebegone. His oil-stained hand waved and I broke away from my silent companions to traverse the cracked concrete of his drive. The cement was older here, and I had a suspicion this might have bee
n one of the first homes built for this development. Tree roots had pushed two slabs at an angle and the trapped dirt had become home to tenacious weeds and hardy grass that no winter freeze could eradicate.
Some enclave residents were assigned with multiple families to a household and others, like Tim, were all alone in five and six bedroom houses. Noises had been made and complaints had been voiced, but I argued against redistribution and stressed patience. Gerome had to have had a reason for the placements, but I couldn’t fathom it yet. Silver thought it meant refugees from other compounds would end up here if the Warps attacked, but I wasn’t sure. We’d know when we knew.
I could hear the scuffle of unhurried footsteps behind me as I came to a stop inches in front of Tim’s broken down steel toed boots. A quarter sized chunk of brown leather was missing on his right foot, exposing the protective metal underneath. He wasn’t shielded because it was impossible for Corinne to cover every Weaver in the enclave. Our blonde ice queen needed to mutate or pass her gift to someone besides us, but it hadn’t happened yet.
Tim had one elbow leaning on a Dickey covered thigh with the speckled filter of a cigarette clamped between his index and middle finger. His thumb flicked the end and ashes drifted unnoticed to cover his wrinkled khaki pant leg.
His bloodshot eyes rose from the shaded cement steps and met mine head on. “You need to assign somebody for me to train. I ain’t gonna live forever.”
I kept my face as serious as his. “No, you’re not, especially with that nasty habit.”
His free hand jumped up as his fingers and thumb came together to ape a mouth talking. “Yada, yada, yada. I’ve heard that shit before from people that are already dead, so I ain’t gonna listen to it from you when you’re young enough to be my granddaughter, if I had any damn kids—which I don’t.”
PHOENIX (The Weaver Series Book 4) Page 13