by Eileen Wilks
Ruben matched his nod. “Rule. You slept well last night?”
“Very well, thank you. And you?”
“I slept well, also.”
Charles snorted.
Lily glanced down, her eyebrows raised. He still looked like he was sleeping.
“Charles,” Ruben said dryly, “does not approve of our little experiment.”
Nokolai Clan was the majority owner of a perfectly good house in Georgetown, which was somewhat closer to the political action than the Brookses’ home in Bethesda. Lily had stayed there several times. Rule was the public face for his people, and he came to D.C. occasionally to advocate for them. The house had recently been renovated, too—the basement could now sleep up to sixteen guards. But she and Rule weren’t staying there this time. Ruben had suggested that they could sell the Georgetown house and stay with him and Deborah when they needed to be in Washington.
War was expensive. The clan could use the profit from the sale. First, though, they had to find out if two Rhos could share space comfortably—with “comfortably” being the key word. Rule and Ruben could share space if they had to. They were both aces at control, they liked and respected each other, and neither of them would attack or knowingly offend the other. But lupi need hierarchy. They need to know whether they’re the dominant in the room, and each man’s instinct would push him to test the other in subtle ways. When they asked about each other’s sleep last night, they weren’t being polite. They were gathering data.
After a pause Ruben added, “Though I did have an odd dream.”
“Shit,” Lily said. She and Rule looked at each other. When an off-the-charts precog said he had an odd dream, you wanted to pay attention. Ruben’s Gift usually manifested as hunches. Crazy accurate hunches. Lily knew of only one time that Ruben’s Gift had escalated into out-and-out visions. Then, the fate of the world had hung in the balance. But those had been visions, not dreams. “Or maybe not. I hope not. Is a dream the same as a vision?”
He smiled, but it was a bit crooked. “No. For some reason, on the rare occasions that my Gift tries to tell me something about my own future rather than larger events, it often manifests as a dream. Precognitive dreams are distinctive in that they’re unusually vivid and memorable. Also, they tend to recur, and are often couched in symbolic terms. This one certainly was.” Ruben’s tone indicated that he did not approve of dreams that failed to state their meaning clearly. “It may be that I have an enemy I’m unaware of. There were a lot of masks in the dream. But that wasn’t what I came up here to discuss. Deborah wishes to know if you’d prefer cantaloupe or strawberries.”
“Strawberries,” Lily said. “Maybe if you told us what, exactly, you dreamt—”
“I don’t think that would help.” Ruben looked abstracted, as if he were listening to another conversation. His face cleared. “At least that much is plain. It won’t help to tell you more at this time. Strawberries, you say?” He gave them a pleasant nod and headed back downstairs.
FOUR
IF Ruben Brooks looked like the stereotypical geek with a splash of nerd, his wife, Deborah, was a dark-haired version of the cheerleader every geek is supposed to lust after. She might be past the age for turning cartwheels in front of the crowd at the big game, but her type of beauty didn’t diminish with the years.
Books and covers, Lily thought as she followed Deborah down the basement stairs, heading for the workout room. It wasn’t that the packaging didn’t matter. People responded to it, so it made a difference—but only because of how it affected what was inside, not because it reflected the inside. She knew without asking that Deborah had never been a cheerleader. Deborah was rich, beautiful, and painfully shy.
Lily had been glad to learn that because at first she’d thought her boss’s wife was stuck-up. That might have been partly her own bias—it was all too easy to assume that rich and beautiful meant stuck-up—but not entirely. Deborah did freeze with those she didn’t know well. Once she got past her shyness, though, she was warm and funny and brutally honest. Turned out she could shut down completely with people or she could be wide open. She had trouble with anything in between.
“You’re sure you don’t mind if I go first on the treadmill?” Lily asked.
“Not at all. I’m hoping you’ll run so long I won’t have time to get on it at all. I hate the stupid thing.”
“I’d much rather run outside¸” Lily agreed. That, unfortunately, was out of the question. She’d gotten one bodyguard—and friend—killed because she wanted to go for a run when she was away from home. No way would she put her people at risk like that again.
“I meant that I hate running.”
“Oh.”
Deborah paused at the foot of the stairs to glance over her shoulder with a dimpled smile. “You don’t understand that at all, do you?”
“No,” Lily admitted. “I love running.”
The stairs ended in a short hall. Deborah headed to the right, toward what was obviously the workout room. Lily followed her. “My friend Cynna feels the way you do. I sort of get it. Some parts of working out are tedious. Take crunches. Who could enjoy crunches?” Lily did them because she needed to, not because she enjoyed it. She ran because she needed it, too, but that need was only partly about staying fit.
“I certainly don’t. I used to enjoy Pilates class, though.”
Lily’s hostess had had to give up a lot when her husband was turned into a lupus and inherited the Wythe mantle. Pilates class was the least of it. “I’m not much for exercise classes. Sometimes I get competitive.”
“No! You?”
Lily grinned. “Hard to believe, I know.”
“I would have thought competing with others would make you enjoy classes more, not less.”
“No, because it puts my head in the wrong place. I would’ve thought classes would be a challenge for you, too.”
“You don’t have to talk to anyone when you’re working out. Just smile and nod. I can do that. Here’s your indoor running machine. Shall I show you how to use it?”
“Nice,” Lily said. The treadmill was top-of-the-line, as fancy as anything she’d seen at a gym. The other equipment in the small room looked like good quality, too—weights, a pair of reclining benches, a stationary bike, and a big exercise ball. Lily started playing with the settings on the treadmill. “Looks like it does everything but move my legs for me.”
“It was my parents’ Christmas gift to Ruben. Their way of apologizing for the way they reacted to the unpleasantness last year.”
Deborah’s voice was tart enough to make Lily think she hadn’t entirely forgiven her parents for their assumptions. Ruben had been framed for a nasty murder, part of the Great Enemy’s plans for world domination, and Deborah’s folks had believed the frame. “Your feathers are still ruffled.”
“I’m working on it. This was a thoughtful gift,” Deborah admitted. “They have no way of knowing that he’s not in a constant state of rehab for his condition anymore.”
And there was the reason all the upheaval of Ruben’s conversion to lupus had been worth it for Deborah. The condition that had been slowly killing him was no longer an issue.
Deborah lingered beside the treadmill. “Um . . . may I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Lily said promptly, though she considered that among the world’s silliest questions. The idea behind the question, she supposed, was to warn someone that your question might be offensive and get forgiveness in advance. But if the question was offensive, it would still offend. And why would you want to warn someone anyway? It just put them on their guard. That was no way to get answers. But Deborah was being diffident, which was right on the edge of shy, so Lily didn’t explain any of that.
“It’s about your health,” Deborah confessed. “The condition that has you on indefinite leave.”
“Okay. What did you want to know?”
Deborah blinked as if she’d expected more. “Um . . . what’s wrong?”
Lily’
s eyebrows shot up. “Ruben didn’t tell you?”
“No. He said it was temporary, that it would resolve itself in time, but he didn’t say what it was. He wouldn’t,” she said matter-of-factly. “Ruben sees health issues as very personal, not something he could repeat without your permission.”
“It’s not a big deal. A big pain, yes, and it’s secret as far as most of the world goes, but not from you. I’m, ah, having hallucinations. Not all the time,” she added hastily. “Sometimes I don’t have one all day.” And sometimes she had two or three, but never mind that. “It’s a side effect of my mindspeech training.”
Deborah blinked again. “Your what?”
“With Sam. The black dragon. Ruben didn’t tell you about that, either?” Obviously not, from the look on Deborah’s face. “It turns out that a capacity for mindspeech is part of the package that comes with my Gift.”
Deborah’s brow wrinkled. “I’ve never heard of touch sensitives being able to speak mind-to-mind. I don’t see how the two are related.”
“I can’t explain it.” To explain she’d have to tell Deborah where her Gift came from, and she wasn’t supposed to do that. Which was just as well, because then Deborah would want to know how she could be magically descended from a dragon, and she didn’t understand that, either. “Normally touch sensitives don’t know about the mindspeech deal because the ability remains latent if it isn’t trained. Sam offered to help me train mine.”
Deborah looked puzzled, then nodded. “Because of your grandmother. There’s some kind of tie between them, isn’t there? But this . . . your condition . . . it’s temporary? You’ll stop having these hallucinations soon? I’ve always heard that telepathy is hard on the person experiencing it.”
That was a nice way of saying that telepaths always went crazy. “Mindspeech and telepathy are both aspects of mind magic, but mindspeech isn’t telepathy. They seem to us as if they’re the same thing because they both deal with thoughts, but . . . well, the way Sam put it once is that all colors look the same to a person blind from birth. He’s certain I won’t turn into a telepath, even if I do develop real mindspeech.”
“That’s in question?”
Lily nodded glumly. “Sam doesn’t know how much I’ll be able to do after this period of adjustment is over. Or how long the adjustment will take.” Probably more than a week, he’d told her. Probably less than a year. The thought of it lasting anywhere near that long made Lily break out in a cold sweat.
“Oh, dear. That’s so vague.”
“Yeah. I am not good at being on medical leave.”
“You hate it.”
“I’d rather get a root canal. Or talk to reporters. Or fight demons. Or be locked up in a small room with my Aunt Jei.” Lily paused. “Strike the last one. That would be worse.”
Deborah laughed and patted Lily’s arm. “Remember that it’s possible this will only last a couple weeks. Though I can see by your expression,” she added, a dimple quivering at the corner of her mouth, “that you consider optimism unnatural. I’ll quit bothering you now. I did want to know what was wrong, but you don’t have to talk about it.”
“It’s good that you know. This way I can bitch about it if I want to.”
“Feel free.” Deborah moved over to the bench. “I’m going to get those annoying crunches out of the way.”
“You’re not an eat-dessert-first person, I take it.”
“No, I want my spoonful of sugar after I’ve taken the nasty medicine. Don’t you?”
“That’s an optimist’s view. I think you noticed that I’m not an optimist.” The treadmill wanted to know all about Lily. Her weight, her age, her height—and why did the machine need to know that?—her resting heart rate. Desired speed, intensity, and length of workout.
This was like speed dating. Any second now it would ask for her astrological sign.
“What do you mean?” Deborah asked.
“You trust that there will be a spoonful of sugar.” And a “later,” but Lily was trying not to be too much of a downer. She must have succeeded because Deborah laughed again—albeit a bit wheezily, because she’d started her crunches.
Lily finished telling the nosy machine what it wanted to know and hit start. It did. As her feet fell into an easy rhythm, her mind went back to her last session with Sam. As usual, they’d been at his lair just outside San Diego, in the wide, shallow cave he’d excavated in the west side of San Miguel Mountain. The white candle she’d grown to loathe was stuck in the sand. He’d lit it with a thought, then told her to find him in the flame.
That was all he ever said. She’d been trying to find him in the candle’s flame for months. Nothing ever happened. Oh, when she first started the lessons, she’d thought she’d “found” him a couple times, but she must have imagined it. Either that or she was going backward, because for months now there’d been nothing. The same nothing had happened at that session, too, for minute after slow, dragging minute . . .
* * *
IF she weren’t so bloody stubborn, she’d quit, but she hated to give up. Maybe, like Cynna said, she was congenitally incapable of giving up. But if Sam still thought she had some chance of learning something . . . unless he was playing an obscure dragon joke on her, dragging her out here week after week for no—
The candle melted. Between one heartbeat and the next, it turned into a puddle of wax. The rock walls of the cavern melted, too—turned liquid and shiny as they ran and reshaped themselves into an enormous mouth. The inside of an enormous mouth spiked with teeth taller than she was, and there at the back of the mouth was the gaping hole of the throat. She was sitting on the tongue, which rolled beneath her, propelling her back toward the dark maw of the gullet—
Obvious, a cold mental voice said, yet powerful.
The mouth was gone. She was sitting on the sand again, with the black dragon coiled at the back of his cave. The candle was intact, but unlit. A wisp of smoke drifted from its wick. “What—what—”
You have made progress. There was, for once, a hint of emotion connected to that crystalline voice, but it was so faint Lily couldn’t identify it.
That was progress? Lily’s mouth was dry. Her hands shook, and her head was starting to throb. “The mouth—being swallowed—that was an illusion?”
It was a hallucination elicited by an experience that your brain lacks the referents to process. You are now on a cusp. You will continue to experience such mental states intermittently until your brain is able to process the unfamiliar input it is now receiving. There is a small chance that your brain will be unable to adapt, in which case your nascent mindspeech will become permanently blocked. Human brains are quite elastic, however, within certain parameters. It is your minds that resist change, and your mind has now accepted this new input. I estimate the chance of a permanent block forming at less than five percent.
Now she knew what that faint thread of emotion was. Satisfaction. “You were expecting this to happen. You wanted this to happen.”
A goal is not an expectation. Today’s breakthrough was the goal of this stage of your lessons. You have frequently wondered what purpose was served by sitting in a dim cave staring at a candle. I will now explain. Human brains are heavily weighted towards visual processing. They also seek stimulation while preferencing the familiar. The candle provided a visual focus that engaged your visual processing center. Staring at it became familiar to the point of boredom, while repeated exposure to my mind gradually stimulated your nascent ability into what might be called wakefulness or openness. Both are imperfect metaphors for the process, but your language lacks a precise term. This combination of boredom plus awakening was necessary. On those few occasions when you have briefly accessed your ability, you were not sufficiently bored. Your brain shut off the unfamiliar stimulus before your ability could fully open. Or fully wake, if you prefer.
She had no damn preference which word he used. She wanted it to go away. “And now it’s awake and I’m going nuts. And this is what you
wanted?”
You are not “going nuts.” Neither your brain nor your mind have been damaged, nor should they be as long we avoid contact during your period of acclimatization.
“I didn’t hallucinate when I mindspoke with Drummond, and my alert brain didn’t shut that down.”
He was a ghost. Your connection was largely spiritual. Spirit is exempt from logic, so I do not attempt to explain it.
Lily scowled. Her head hurt, dammit. “How long will this go on?”
Your experience of this period will be unique to you and is therefore unpredictable, though I would be very surprised if it were less than a week or more than a year. It is likely that most sensory distortions will be not be as disturbing as the one you experienced a few moments ago. My mind is exceedingly stimulating to a human mind. Such stimulation was necessary to wake your mindspeech, but is now dangerous and will remain so until your brain learns to process the input it is now receiving.
Wait a minute. Her brain was receiving that input right now? She didn’t notice anything. Nothing but a damn headache.
The headache is a product of your having established contact with my mind, however briefly. For now, I am suppressing certain paths. This is an emergency measure, as such suppression has a dampening effect on other brain functions.
“Then once you stop suppressing it, I’ll start hallucinating?” Panic hit. If Sam’s suppression was the only thing keeping her from hallucinating now that her mindspeech was awake, and her “period of adjustment” went on for months—
Stop. Think instead of reacting. I told you that “waking” was an imperfect metaphor. Your ability was not truly asleep before, nor is it now awake. At the risk of providing you with another mechanism for drawing incorrect conclusions, I will offer a different metaphor. Mind is a product of consciousness which interacts with matter and with magic in detectable ways. Your Gift has always sensed magic. It has now developed a channel—attempt to remember that this is metaphor—through which it senses minds due to the way they interact with magic. There are millions of frequencies available on this channel. Many of them will remain inaccessible to you; you will not acquire the ability to truly read minds. It is quite possible that you will never do more than sense them. It is also possible that, depending on what form this sensing takes, you will eventually be able to initiate mindspeech with a few, many, or even most of the minds you encounter. During the period of acclimatization, your Gift will be constantly, randomly sampling nearby minds. Most of the time you will be unaware of this, but occasionally your Gift will encounter another mind that resonates with yours in a way which stimulates it. When this happens, you will hallucinate until your Gift stops sampling that mind. This process cannot be placed under your conscious control until your brain has acclimated.