Once Bitten, Twice Shy

by Jennifer Rardin

  Cole said, “Why do we need God’s protection in this, Cassandra?”

  “These symbols,” she said, “are powerful runes designed to trap the soul after death to keep it from ascending.”

  I recalled the scene in the restaurant, when Charlie’s beautiful blue soul went flying into the wild blue yonder. What if it had remained stuck there, straining to be free? The image made me flinch.

  Cole shook his head. “How is that possible?” he asked.

  Cassandra made a visible effort to pull herself together. “When people die violently, their souls do not immediately break free,” she explained. “During that short delay, the soul can be contained inside the body by branding these runes on the skin around the death wound.”

  “So”—ugh, I can’t believe I’m saying this—“then what do you have? Zombies?”

  “That is a possibility.” Cassandra looked as revolted as I felt. “Another explanation is that a “rail,” or hell-servant, trapped the soul until his master could arrive to eat it.”

  I couldn’t help it. My mind suddenly supplied a picture of a red-skinned, horned demon picking its teeth with a purple claw as a waiter cleared the dishes from its table.

  “How was the soul?” the waiter asked.

  “Not bad with butter and lemon,” the demon replied. “In fact, I’d have to say it was finger-lickin’ good.”

  I know, I know, not funny.

  “Aside from the obvious biblical explanations,” I said, “why would a demon eat souls?”

  Cassandra shuddered. “For the fun of it,” she suggested, “or perhaps because it had been called to do so by a vengeance-minded human who was willing to pay the price.”

  Great, that’s what I need right now. It’s not enough that I have to stop a megaterrorist from spreading some godawful virus. Now I get to chase down a psychotic netherworlder with the munchies too.

  “There is a third possibility,” Cassandra said.

  “What is it?”

  “Demons are not the only monsters who eat souls.” She nodded at the symbols Cole had drawn. “The woman who taught me this language told me a story once, of an evil emperor named Tequet Dirani who made it his passion to rule, not only this world, but all the worlds beyond this one. He summoned a Kyron to help him.”

  “What’s a Kyron?” asked Cole.

  Cassandra started to look ill as she described something that sounded more like a George Lucas creation than the real deal. “It is a beast built for destruction. Its presence can herald a plague or a nuclear meltdown. And it can rip through the walls that divide universes like a wrecking ball.”

  “Sure sounds like a demon to me,” Cole murmured.

  “Not at all. It will destroy for any cause, good or evil. It is, like the djinn, at the mercy of its master’s whim.”

  “Only genies don’t scarf down somebody’s essence every morning for breakfast,” I pointed out. “So how do you master something like that?” I wondered. “How do you beat it?”

  Cassandra didn’t realize I was waxing rhetorical.

  “You control it with food,” she said. “Souls, to be specific. Likewise, you might be able to beat it by starving it.”

  “Is that how the emperor’s Kyron died?”

  “Oh, Kyron don’t die,” Cassandra said earnestly. “They simply become weak enough to bind.”

  Somehow I didn’t think she meant bind as in “Yo, Henry, go get me some rope.”

  “Bind how?” I asked, feeling suddenly exhausted. I eyed one of the couches speculatively. How offended would Cassandra be if a perfect stranger collapsed there for, oh, say three days, more or less?

  “According to the legend, a powerful mage bound the Kyron by making her forget her own name.”

  “That must have been a major bump on the head.”

  “Indeed,” Cassandra agreed. “It would take more than a mild concussion to forget the name Tor-al-Degan.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Wait a second,” I demanded. “Are you telling me the Tor-al-Degan is real?”

  Cassandra nodded, clearly puzzled at my question. Apparently she’d never heard of the Sons of Paradise or their “mythical” goddess. And just as obviously, we at the Central Intelligence Agency were going to have to update our intel on Assan’s sect.

  “This is important, Cassandra.” I leaned forward, trying to see beyond the depths of her dark eyes, into those invisible planes only she could access. “Could this Tor-al-Degan be unbound somehow? Brought back into the world?”

  Looking at the door as if she’d badly like to make a run for it, she licked her lips and nodded. “Are you . . .” She cleared her throat and tried again. “These writings and my stories. They have led you to some new understanding?”

  For a few oh-shit seconds my mind tried to go somewhere, anywhere else as a powerful fist of foreboding sucker-punched me in the gut. I noticed the light dusting of freckles bridging Cole’s nose. Cassandra’s lipstick was the same color as the dress I’d worn to Assan’s party. And I’d chipped a nail. Suck it up, girl. This ain’t going away. “Yes,” I told Cassandra, “this puzzle is becoming clearer.”

  The Raptor must have allied with the Sons of Paradise because he needed their goddess, their Tor-al-Degan. Cassandra had described her as a plague beast and their virus sounded that scary.

  As far as motive went, the Raptor couldn’t get enough power if you hooked him directly to a generator. The Sons of Paradise, led by their new hero Assan, would love the idea of wiping out Americans with some horrifying disease. Aidyn would crow like a proud papa as his killer germs laid the land low. I wasn’t sure where the senator fit in, but it probably involved multiple cameras and a toothy grin.

  The how and where of their plan escaped me, but that didn’t really matter at the moment, because I knew the when. Tomorrow night was the ritual. They should all be there. Vayl and I just needed to go back to Plan A. Grab Assan. Make him talk. Take him and his cronies out. Maybe we could do it in one sweeping gesture. Can anybody say Boom?

  Before I could ask Cassandra if she thought Kyron could be defeated by a well-timed explosion, Bergman slunk into the room.

  “What?” he asked, immediately suspicious as I stared at him, so enmeshed in this new knowledge and how best to deal with it that I wasn’t quite able to muster a common pleasantry.

  “Nothing much,” I finally managed. “Just gaining a little enlightenment.” Talk about understatement. That was like saying Vesuvius’s eruption was a slight blip in Pompeii’s weather pattern.

  Bergman looked around the room furtively. If you didn’t know him, you’d suspect he’d just robbed a liquor store. He carried that air of guilt with him wherever he went.

  “I’ll fill you in later,” I said. “We’ve, uh, that is . . . We’ve found out what we needed to know so, now that you’re here, we’ll get out of Cassandra’s hair.”

  I stood up, digging in my pocket for a twenty.

  “No, please,” said Cassandra, “there’s no charge.”

  “My boss blesses you,” I said. I leaned across the table and held out my hand, my Military Brat Politeness Training temporarily overcoming common sense. “Thanks for your help. You’ve been a godsend. Vayl and I will be in touch.”

  She shook my hand, barely squeezing in response to my firm grip. Then her focus shifted, and I knew I was screwed. I tried to pull my hand back before she could connect with spirits I wasn’t ready to face. But her vision had nothing to do with worlds beyond death.

  “David is in danger,” she said tightly. “You must tell him to stay away from the house with the pink door. It’s rigged to blow.”

  She dropped my hand and sat back in her chair, looking like somebody who’d just debarked from an intense roller coaster ride. She murmured something that sounded like “Who are you?” But I could barely hear her beyond the roaring in my ears. It was as if the explosion had already happened inside my head. The blackness stormed over me like a level-five twister, a miles-wide black-on-black r
unaway train I could never hope to stop.

  But I tried. For David’s sake I fought to stand, to simply stay upright and functional while my own wild-eyed psyche tried to bowl me over. This time it worked. The force that had, for so long, squashed my awareness and pushed it down into unconsciousness now tugged at me, pulled me forward so fast I felt dizzy with the rush. I felt supercharged, as if I could see everywhere all at once, be anywhere I wanted to go, do whatever I wished. The way I figured it, this was no time to kick Tinker Bell in the teeth. I wished to be with David, wished hard, like when we were kids and Tammy Shobeson had me down in the dirt, demanding that I call myself and my snake-eating, son-of-a-bitching dad a dirty, rotten coward.

  There was a moment when the blackness seemed to offer up a navigational beacon, my own personal yellow brick road on which to set a new land-speed record. Later I would gain the knowledge I needed to slow that trip down, put it into some kind of perspective. But now it seemed instant, a Jell-O pudding trek that put me where I needed to be, in the middle of Desert Nowhere in the dark, in the heat, slamming into my brother, through him, screaming, “David! David! David” in a voice so loud and shrill I expected some unseen enemy to lob a grenade my way just to shut me up.

  David stood still, a sheen of sweat covering his artificially darkened face. Night-vision goggles covered his eyes, but I knew what they looked like. I faced their twins every day in the mirror. He carried an M4 in one hand and a radio in the other. He looked so fit, so healthy, I just stood there for a second and watched him breathe.

  “Jaz?” he whispered.

  “You can see me?”

  Immediately he shook his head. I could almost read his thoughts. Nope. Can’t see a thing because this was not covered in Special Forces Booklet 14A. But he reached out his hand, poked it through my stomach and out my back. The same hand went immediately to his forehead and banged on it hard. “What a helluva time to start hallucinating.”

  He turned his back on me, and over his shoulder I saw the house, a squat little square with dark, dark windows and a pale pink door. His team surrounded it, crouched in the shadows like latter-day ninjas, awaiting his orders.

  “David!” I jumped in front of him, holding up my hands, failing to stop his slow advance. “The door! The pink door! It’s booby-trapped!”

  “Quit freaking out, D.” That’s what he called himself during his damn-I’m-stressed pep talks. “It’s all been scouted. It’s all good.” The hand with the radio moved toward his lips.

  “Goddammit, I didn’t come all this way to blow smoke up your ass, Daz. Don’t go through that door!”

  He looked straight at me. “You haven’t called me Daz since West Virginia. Not even in my dreams.” It was my pet name for him, the one I’d used to remind him he was a part of me despite his hip friends, his athletic prowess, his ability to make even little old librarians laugh.

  “You haven’t called me at all,” I whispered.

  He murmured orders into the radio and waited. Neither of us spoke. I didn’t want to spook him further. He didn’t want to understand how I was, and wasn’t, there. I heard frantic whispering.

  “You were right, Jaz. The door is wired like a bale of hay.”

  “Good. Good. I’m glad you listened. Thanks.”

  “Thank you.” He shucked his goggles and looked at me then, making sure I saw that he meant it for himself. But he meant it even more for his team, seven men and two women who kicked terrorist ass all over the globe without most people even knowing they existed. “It’s . . .” He grimaced. “It’s not easy keeping them all alive. I know that now.”

  It was the closest he’d ever come to apologizing about the rift he’d opened between us.

  I just nodded. “I have to go.” I had stood in the eye of the storm as long as I could. It was pulling me back, now, blowing me home.

  David held on to me with his eyes, which had suddenly filled with alarm. “How did you do this, Jazzy? You’re not . . . dead are you? Because you look awful damn ghostly standing there.”

  “No.” I laughed uneasily. “Of course not. I’m just weird.”

  Relief cleared David’s expression. “Okay, then. I’ll . . . I’ll call you. Soon. I promise.”

  “I’m holding you to that one, Dave. Take care.”

  I let the storm whip me away from my twin and his crew. Back to the gypsy den I flew, dropping into myself at a jarring rate of speed. I gasped and looked around. Lucky me, somehow I’d made it onto one of the couches. Cole, Bergman, and Cassandra hovered over me like emergency room nurses.

  “Wow, what just happened?” I asked. “I mean, what did I say?”

  “Not much,” Cole told me. “You just went white and started to sway, so we sat you down here. You said ‘David’ a few times. Is that your . . .”

  “Brother,” I supplied. “My twin.”

  Cole looked impressed. “A twin. Wow. I’d have bet money they broke the mold after you.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  Cassandra was wringing her hands, looking more and more agitated. “But, now, surely there is someone you can call? Someone who can stop David before . . .”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, inserting worry into my voice. No sense in sharing the story of my latest adventure right now. Maybe later, when I could figure out a way to keep it from sounding like a bad episode of Star Trek.

  I dug my phone out of my pocket. “Is there a place I can talk privately?” I asked.

  Cassandra nodded, ushering the men out of the room and gently closing the door.

  I dialed a number without even thinking about it. I was probably even more surprised than Albert when he answered the phone to find me on the other end.

  “Dad?”

  “Jasmine? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, now. There was something, but it’s okay.” I stopped. Had to. Tears had thrown a hitch into my voice, and the next step was crying on the phone to Daddy. No. Way. Maybe Albert sensed that because the next thing he said was, “The nurse came. Damnedest thing, Jaz, she’s a he! I mean, Shelby’s a fella. He was a medic in the army. Can you believe it? Plays a mean game of poker too.”

  “Really? That’s great!” I put so much bright and perky into my tone a cheerleader would’ve gagged.

  Albert took a second to wipe the crap out of his ear; then he said, “Jasmine, hang up. I’m calling you back on the other phone.”

  “Okay.” I disconnected. I sat on the couch and waited, and when the phone rang I punched the button and said, “Dad, you don’t have another phone.”

  “Yes, I do.” He sounded more serious, more like the dad I’d grown up admiring and fearing, than he had in years. “It’s safe to talk. I have a scrambled line.”

  “Did you just eat a big piece of chocolate cake? Because you said ‘scrambled line’ when I’m pretty sure you meant to say ‘scrambled eggs.’”

  “I’ll make this quick, because Shelby’s in the kitchen whipping up a meal he says I’ll actually eat and I don’t want him getting curious. I have a scrambled line because when I retired from the service I did some freelance work for the CIA. Still consult for them from time to time, which is why I still have the phone.”

  “But . . . you retired because of the diabetes. Why would—”

  “Didn’t have it then,” said Albert. “What I did have was some expertise in military intelligence the CIA thought they could use. The diabetes, well, that turned out to be a case of life imitating lies.” He paused, giving it time to sink in. Then he went on. “I know what you do for a living, Jaz. Have from the start. So when you call sounding like you just dodged a cannonball, I’m naturally going to want to help out. So, first of all, are you really okay?”

  I thought about it. “No, but I’m not in any danger.” After another second I added, “At the moment.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” When I didn’t answer right away, he said, “Dammit, Jasmine, don’t make me beg. I’m so frigging tired of being a useless old man, I’m ready to
volunteer. Yeah, I said it! Volunteer, like some God-fearing, church-going, one-foot-in-the-grave bastard who thinks he can save his shriveled old soul by doing five hours of good works a week.”

  Only my father could have that kind of perspective on volunteerism. Twisted old poop. And yet, since we still didn’t know the identity of our leak, I really could use somebody with his contacts. And it sounded like he could use the exercise, so to speak.

  Feeling like I was taking a gondola ride through Surreal-land, I said, “Actually, Albert, there is something you can do. Can you check out some senators and one petite secretary for me?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It must’ve been Albert’s military background, because, man, when he dropped a bomb the entire country shook. I was still as jittery as a hurricane survivor in New Orleans, and I was sure that somewhere in Alaska some poor Inuit had just taken a tumble from his sled for the very same reason. Thirty seconds ago I’d discovered my dad was not only a mostly retired consultant for the Agency, but he also maintained a few connections in Washington, DC, who could make my life much easier and quite a bit longer. Now I’d believe anything. If Cole and Bergman rushed in and told me pterodactyls were circling Cassandra’s building, I’d run to the window to get a good look.

  Speaking of which, they were about ready to burst in, despite my request for privacy. I could feel their anxiety through the door. I sighed. Already I missed the good old days when being Sensitive only pertained to vamps, and even then their feelings never entered into it. I also thought it would’ve been convenient to be able to open the door with a simple wave of the hand. Unfortunately my newfound abilities didn’t lean that way. Maybe I could buy a really well-trained dog.

  Sighing, I lurched to my feet and opened the door. They weren’t pacing in the hallway as I’d expected. They were pacing in Cassandra’s apartment.

  “It’s all right,” I said as I entered the room. They didn’t exactly leap at me. In fact, Cassandra stayed in her tall wooden rocker and Bergman continued skulking back and forth behind her royal blue couch. Cole came and took my elbow, led me to the couch’s matching recliner, and gently sat me down.