But of course, when one person falls in love, it doesn’t follow that the other person is going to do the same. Or at least, not with the person who loves him.
And if the person falling in love is me? Well, in that case . . . I already knew it was going to end in tears.
* * *
“. . . so there was this artifact that the Hungarian side of the family had, that went all the way back to the Romans. It hid the bearer from the fangs. Small problem: once every twenty-eight years it had to be renewed with the blood of an innocent child, by which I mean”—Vickie made a throat-slitting motion, barely visible in the gloom where they were waiting—“and once every ninety-nine, it had to be done with the blood of twenty-one innocent children. Charming, huh?”
The Djinni rolled his eyes. “I swear, you’re making this up. It sounds like some god-awful drive-in flick from the sixties.”
She managed a feeble smile, the merest flash of teeth in the dark. “Yeah, well the Dark Ages were evil and brutish. You could pretty much find dead or dying kids anywhere without having to kill any yourself. And my family line is pretty serious about fang-hunting. It started getting really problematic the closer we get to modern times. Nobody really wanted to start offing infants until Uncle Bela got his hands on it. That was when this guy I had the hots for in college turned up. Alistair Greenstall, and I swear, in college he was okay. I mean, I know all about good girls always falling for bad guys, but when I knew him he was fine. One thing led to another, and the pillow talk turned into ‘how can you let him have this thing when you know he intends to repower it?’ And that was where I let my hormones do the talking. And it turned out Alistair was a Renfield.”
Red frowned. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“It’s out of Bram Stoker’s book. Handy term for what the Hunters call people who are still normal who serve the fangs.” She shrugged. “Some people will do anything for the promise of power. Magic wasn’t enough for Alistair. Or maybe I should say, the magic he had wasn’t enough for Alistair.” Vickie paused as the memories flashed through her mind. She was actually pretty proud of herself. She’d gotten choked up a time or two, but she hadn’t lost it. It just took some controlled breathing, a few choice, silent mantras, and a lot of willpower.
“Victrix, you don’t have to go on . . .”
She waved him off and continued. “Let me cut right to the chase. I grabbed the dingus from Uncle Bela; as per the plan, Alistair and I were going to ambush him when he came after us. Alistair bailed when I wouldn’t just hand it over to him for safe-keeping. So I broke the dingus just as Uncle caught up with me. Uncle was very mad at me. Mage battle ensued. Uncle Bela is a fire mage, and what he lacks in understanding of the modern world, he more than makes up for in experience. You know the saying, ‘old age and treachery beat youth and idealism hands down.’ I lost. So, that’s how I ended up like this. It never was losing control of magic, it was being a hormonal overachieving kid out of college, falling for the wrong guy and pissing off someone bigger, stronger and nastier.” She pondered that for a moment. “Not that I wouldn’t have gone after Uncle Bela and taken that thing from him when I found out he was going to murder all those kids to repower it . . . but without Alistair in the picture, I would have gone to Hosteen Stormdance and got him to get me backup if my folks wouldn’t agree to help. That was where I was monumentally stupid.” She licked her lips. “Just goes to show that Mom was right. You just can’t trust vampires.” She cupped her hands and brought them to her eyes, cueing the little spell that let her use them like real binoculars. “No sign of life at the alleged rendezvous, by the way. Are you sure this was good intel? Did it sniff of something not on the level from Verd?”
“No,” Djinni said. He crouched next to her, bobbing gently on the balls of his feet. “Verd’s got a particular style. He either knows something’s so concrete he doesn’t even bother to hide what he’s doing, or he goes for the extravagant to beat you over the head with how clever he is. This is pretty run of the mill, probably masterminded by one of his flunkies. Small stuff, by the smell of it. Simple munitions deal.”
“Yeah, well the last ‘simple munitions deal’ we knew about netted the Rebs a freaking shoulder-held missile launcher. I can really do without them picking up a satchel nuke or something.” She shifted her position, missing her zero-gee chair.
“Yeah, well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To keep an eye on things, to make sure they don’t get out of hand.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “To watch. Which, I’ll remind you, I would be doing with a cup of coffee and a Reuben from my chair right now if you hadn’t persuaded me I needed ‘fieldwork.’”
Red didn’t answer. It wasn’t the coffee, or the damned sandwich, that Vickie was missing. It was her fortress of an apartment she craved. It was the security, the safety of it. Overwatch was a good idea, but he knew, in his bones, that she needed to get out of that hole and start pushing her boundaries. Now. Or one day she’d never be able to cross the threshold. Even up here, in the relative safety of unlit rooftops and sheltered by a rough canopy of camouflage tarp, he could tell she felt exposed. Across the street, the warehouse was dark. Two in the morning in an unused section of the industrial district. It didn’t seem to matter, he might as well have asked her to sprint across I-285 during rush hour. Still, baby steps. The girl needed to feel the night air, to get back to acting like a human being and not a troglodyte.
Sharing stories had been his idea. He could feel her bursting at the seams. It wasn’t a particularly cool night, but she was shivering. It seemed best to get her talking, and what better topic than what had scarred her, both physically and emotionally, so totally, all those years ago? Finally get her over that hump. Desensitization. She had been reluctant, at first, but once the floodgates were open she went on a tear. Red sat and listened, trying not to interrupt. She needed this.
“So that’s why I just don’t think of magic as something that causes me problems, since . . . I’ve been practicing discipline since I started. Now, it’s more like art. Magic is just . . . so elegant.” She was peering through her hands again. “Am I boring you? I’m probably boring you. You always say I talk too much.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “Keep going.”
“Math. I love the math. When you finally get everything lined up, it just . . . I dunno, it sings. It’s like Bach.” She paused. “I wish you could see it the way I do, but everybody sees magic differently. My mom sees it as needlework, tatting or knitting or something. Dad doesn’t see it at all, he’s just a werewolf.” She giggled nervously. “There’s your drive-in flick. I Was a Werewolf for the FBI.” She paused again. “So . . . you can tell me to shove it and never ask again, but why is it you’ve got such a burr up your butt about magic? You obviously know a lot about it, and most people who’ve cracked past magic doesn’t exist can’t get enough of it.”
He considered that, and shrugged. “Let’s just say that the magicians I’ve known were not as fastidious in their approach as you are. They were junkies, of a sort, and I was along for the ride. How do these things always begin? We were young, cocky, and there just wasn’t enough of a rush to feel sated. I was the one who brought us together. I think I was on a losing streak at the time. I needed a new gang. The one I found was different. Not your usual group of metas, these guys were based in weird powers of the arcane and occult. Individually, they were small time. When I brought us together, they found a way to tap into each others’ potential, and as a group, they found a way to overcome each others’ vulnerabilities. As for me, well, you’ve channeled through me, you know how easy it is. I have no talent whatsoever, but as a medium I was like a sponge. I could hold power like a battery and they could direct it to do just about anything they wanted to. Together, we got stupidly strong, stupidly fast.”
“Oh . . . hell.” She sounded stricken. “We’d postulated that could happen, that kind of spontaneous synergy, but we’ve never seen it in the wild. I’d bet your
ability to be a medium is meta in origin. I’ll let some people know. We need to keep an eye out from now on before things escalate.” She shook her head. “We’re kind of a chaotic bunch, but there are people who try and . . . cut that kind of trouble off at the pass. Not block it or burn it out! Not unless we are dealing with sociopaths. But . . . teach ’em before they get themselves in trouble, I guess.”
Red shrugged again. “I don’t think we would have listened to anyone outside. We were all caught up in our own cleverness. The closest we had to any kind of moral compass was Tomb, but even he was riding the wave of our successes . . .”
“Tomb?” Vickie interrupted. “Tomb Stone? That’s where you know him from?”
“The one and only.” Red grimaced behind his scarf. “Why do you think he only exploits part of his gift anymore? He could have kept going, but after what happened . . . he lost his taste for it. He leaves the heavy lifting to his brother now. Anyway, we got to a point where we rarely had to leave the safety of our den to pull jobs. Our typical nights were spent in our base. I’d be the focus, sitting dead center. The others would form a circle around me. Tomb could conjure spirits and wraiths. Martin was the geo. He could grant them substance and ground them to this plane for a while. Justine was the pyro, in case the summoned needed a little firepower. I was the medium, directing them with my will. Like I said, it was a rush. As far as we were concerned, we were perfectly safe. If things ever got hairy, Tomb would break the summoning and they would vanish in a flash of fire and exploding rock. No one ever traced anything back to us. We did a lot of smash and grabs that way.”
Vickie gestured to him to slow down. “Whoa, let me make a couple notes. That’s . . . wow, I’ve never heard of anyone working like that. I need to work on the math.” She tapped a couple of things on her PDA.
“Talk to Tomb sometime,” the Djinni said. “Just get him drunk first. He doesn’t like talking about those days.”
“Or I can ask his brother first.” Her voice softened a little. “Jacob is a really good man, Red. But . . . what did you do before all that? Nobody wakes up one morning and says, ‘Hey, think I’ll start a metahuman gang.’ Well . . . okay, nobody but Verd.”
Red favored her with a pitying look. “Really, Victrix? You’ve read my file, you can piece it together.”
She gave him back a skeptical one. “There’s next to nothing in your file, Red Djinni. At least, nothing before you got hooked into Echo. You are the Great Enigma. Lots of conjecture, lots of rumors, damn little in the way of facts.”
“But enough,” he said. “I guess it’s obvious I was careful, by the lack of evidence, but it’s clear I ran with mercenary groups, your standard small-time gangs of thieves, even a meta group here and there. And solo, sure. What do people with those skills and abilities do, Victrix, if they’re not off saving the world?”
“Well . . .” she shrugged. “Making a living. I mean, I can give you a long list. You—you could have made a good living being a body double or stand-in for just about any studio, you know. It wouldn’t have been the same adrenaline rush, I guess.”
“And the rush kept me going, most of the time,” he admitted. “Still does, if I’m going to be honest.”
She sucked on her lower lip. “Yeah . . . given the pain you’re in all the time . . . yeah, there’s no way you could keep going without a rush.”
“Back then, it kept us experimenting. We were pushing the limits, things started to get dangerous. We started leaving the base, doing open rituals without safety nets. Tomb was conjuring some pretty wild constructs. Martin was doing reversals with his protections, getting downright aggressive with offensive spells. And Justine was out of her mind, openly channeling fire. At the end, we were about ready to take on Echo. We got hired to do a frame-up. It was trickier, since I needed to be out there doing the impersonation while the others were miles away in our base. Turns out it was our last job. We’d tried our luck one too many times, I suppose. It was the distance that did it. Justine just couldn’t hold it together. Her fire backlashed, incinerated her body. And she was still mind-riding me . . .”
“. . . oh hell . . .” Her hands spasmed into fists. “. . . Red . . .” She shook her head wordlessly.
He paused to steady himself. “Yeah, I guess you know what happened next, since I’m still here and eyeballing the ladies and not the guys. It was over fast enough. Girl had power, just nothing approaching discipline. She tried, dammit, but I ended up smothering her. That’s how it ended. My will, wrapped around hers, and I felt her die.”
Tentatively, she put one gloved hand on his. But she didn’t say anything. Not “I’m sorry,” not “Shit happens,” and not “It wasn’t your fault.” All platitudes he might have lashed out at. He could feel her shivering, however; trembling with barely-controlled reaction. The image of Justine’s body burning away was probably pretty hard for her to take.
Wordlessly, he gripped her hand, and let it go as he came to his feet. There, in the warehouse, he had caught a flash of light.
“Showtime,” he said, grimly. “Start it up, Victrix.”
That instantly put some steel back in her. She did something on her PDA, drawing a diagram on the plate with her finger, and touching the center of it, then keying in a couple of numbers. They began to receive sounds of people walking inside a large, echoing building. Good. Her little arcane-powered bug was up and running, sending feed to her headset and his.
There was some grumbling, some cursing, and finally the footsteps came to a halt.
“Can you zero the bug on their position?” he asked.
She nodded. “Give me a sec to bring up the vid feed.” This seemed to involve some more complicated number-punching, but the little screen finally lit up with the POV from a warehouse shelf. “I don’t suppose you remember the raid on the Echo Vault?” she asked, as the view rotated, and slowly moved.
“Christ, how could I forget?”
“Well, after you and I swapped places, we did some snatches there, like you said to in the planning stage, in order to cover up what we were really taking. I got a box of these little spy-balls that were one of Verd’s failures. He couldn’t make them fly, and he couldn’t come up with a compact enough power source to run them for long. I can power them, make them fly and make them invisible. This is my first live run. I’ve done . . . bunches . . . that weren’t on mish.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right. That Echo Vault.”
“And no, I won’t send one into the ladies locker room at Echo Med.” She looked up briefly, with a raised eyebrow. “But if you ask nicely, I might send one to Lady Godiva’s Gentlemen’s Club.”
“Don’t bother,” he replied. “I’ve got backstage privileges.”
They watched the vid feed as the spy cam took to flight. Vickie piloted with her tongue stuck in the corner of her mouth, which looked oddly childlike and endearing. The view rotated a lot as she checked her positioning so she didn’t run into anything. Finally it settled on an overhead shot of two groups converging.
“Looks like we’ve got an arms deal,” the Djinni said grimly. “Odd, I don’t see any of them carrying any cases.”
She boosted the volume; the voices came in clearer.
“. . . thought you said he was a meta?”
One man, clad in typical Blacksnake armor, had stepped forward, his hand resting gently on his sidearm. He watched as the opposing Rebs looked to their leader, a heavily tattooed thug in a mullet who flashed him a near-toothless grin.
“Wha’ make you think he ain’t?” The Reb leader scoffed, beckoning another to come forward. From the shadows a scrawny boy crept up. He was nervous, his eyes darting back and forth between the Blacksnake goons and the Rebs. He held himself with his arms, his breathing shallow and stuttering.
“Oh lord,” the Blacksnake op said, dropping his guard as he rubbed at his eyes. “I think I understand your desire to trade. I take it this one isn’t up to your standards?”
“Kid don’t have what it takes
to be one of us, do you, Pike?” The Reb leader leered at the boy, who shied away. “Still, we heerd y’all want metas, and y’all got good spendin’ cash. We don’ hear ’bout how picky y’all are about ’em.”
The op ignored that, and began to size the boy up. “That your name, kid? Pike?”
The boy nodded, and stammered a “Yessir.”
“Well, at least you can talk. Not like that last mute idiot we took off your friends’ hands.” The op sneered at the Reb in the mullet, who just shrugged as if he didn’t care. He probably didn’t. Why should he? Cash talked bigger than words. “So, Pike, what is it you do?”
Pike looked up at him. He was obviously confused.
“He mean what yer power, boy,” the Reb leader laughed. “He wants ta see it.”
Pike nodded, a bit foolishly, and closed his eyes. His skin began to darken, then swell, and with a noisy crunch, his now bulbous flesh collapsed on itself to form a scaly carapace. His face contorted in apparent agony and he fell to his knees from the effort of transformation. He took a few deep breaths, and stood up. He looked as nervous as ever.
The Op looked genuinely pleased. “Not bad, not bad at all. Looks like he’s gained some muscle from it. That shell looks like it’ll be tough to penetrate. I’m almost surprised. You Rebs could use someone like this. Why you letting him go?”
The Reb leader laughed again, and motioned to strike the boy. Pike shrieked, his hands flying up to guard against the incoming blow. When nothing happened he lowered his arms, though not completely.
“Oh,” the op said. “You people really are morons. A few sessions with a good deprogramming shrink and we’ll have him—never mind. Let’s talk price then, shall we?”
From their perch across the street, Red and Vickie watched and listened. Red felt a tide of disgust rising in him. He rose to his feet with a grunt. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve heard enough.”
Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle Page 17