License to Ensorcell

by Katharine Kerr

  “Castration,” I said. “That’s it!”

  “I beg your pardon!” Nathan snapped.

  “Nothing personal! I’m trying to remember what cult had leopards and the priests castrated themselves.”

  “Oh. Cybele, the Great Mother.”

  “That’s it, yeah, thanks.”

  Nathan took another bite of his sandwich, ate it, then wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “Would it be intruding,” he said, “to ask why you were trying to remember that?”

  “Just an everyday thought around here.” I drank some of my coffee. “Seriously, though, it was the word ‘spotted’ that sent me off into that trance. I saw an angel who talked about heresies. Cybele goes back too far to be considered a Christian heresy or any other kind of heresy. The ancient world didn’t think like that.”

  “Quite so, every god welcome in the pantheon and all that. Are there any Christian cults that leopards figure in?”

  “No, not that I ever heard. It’s time to hit the Internet, I think. I’ll see what I can Google up.”

  Nothing, as it turned out. I found thousands of pages about Gnostic heresy and heresies in general, and even more about Satanism, but no cults that featured leopards or anything spotted. I had reached the point of giving up when Nathan had a brilliant thought.

  “Wait,” he said. “We were discussing Kurdistan. Any heretical beliefs would have to fall away from Islam, not Christianity.”

  “Of course! How dumb can I get?”

  After a few muddled minutes of trying various search terms, and quite a few more of link surfing, I finally hit the target, or to be precise, my web browser did.

  “Peacocks, not leopards,” I said. “Ever hear of the cult of Tawsi Melek?”

  “Melek? A king, is it?” Nathan said.

  “That’s what this article calls him, yeah. The Peacock Angel or the Peacock King.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Neither have I, and apparently we’re not alone in our ignorance. It’s pretty obscure. There are some remote tribes in Kurdistan who worship this guy as the ruler of this world and the universe.” I skimmed down the screen. “The believers say he’s a holy emanation of the supreme god, the first emanation in fact. He went on to create the physical world following the supreme god’s instructions, with a lot of lesser emanations to help.”

  “Ah. Sort of a divine foreman.”

  “Yeah, but the Islamic clerics brand him as Satan. I’ll bet the Christian ones would agree.”

  The angel appeared beside my computer desk. He smiled at me and raised both hands in blessing. “Coat of many colors,” he said.

  “Why couldn’t you just say peacock?” I said. “It would have saved me a lot of time.”

  “There are no peacocks in our holy book.”

  And with that lovely bit of chop logic, he disappeared.

  CHAPTER 6

  “I SUPPOSE,” Nathan said in a profoundly weary tone of voice, “I’m going to have to get used to you speaking to things that aren’t there.”

  “It would help you maintain peace of mind, yeah,” I said. “An angel just confirmed my guess about the peacock king cult.”

  “Brilliant. How I am going to tell that to Sanchez?”

  “No need for sarcasm.” I considered the legitimate question behind the tone of voice. “For one thing, we can’t be sure that Johnson and DD belong to it. These angels I see aren’t real, you know. They’re just visualized symbols from my own mind, so they’re not particularly reliable.”

  “You can’t know how glad I am to hear you say that.”

  “What?” I said. “You didn’t think they were real, did you?”

  “No, I thought you thought they were.”

  I swiveled around in the computer chair. He was looking at me without the slightest hint of a smile.

  “I’ve never met anyone like you in my life,” Nathan continued, “not even when I was a child among the nutters. How am I supposed to know what you believe?”

  “That’s a reasonable question, actually. You can always just ask.”

  “There are times when I don’t even know how to frame the question.” He crossed his arms over his chest and glared.

  I glanced around fast, but no Sister Peter Mary materialized. She must have missed her cue.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, “except I’m sorry. If it weren’t for the State Department, you wouldn’t have to deal with any of this. They’re the ones who put your agency in touch with mine.”

  “Fine!” His voice climbed a couple of notes up the register. “Blame the sodding government!”

  “Who else am I supposed to blame?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Blame is a stupid word to use, anyway.”

  “You’re the one who introduced the concept into this discussion.”

  Nathan growled at me, very tigerlike, then caught himself. I could see his face change as he made himself relax. He stopped hugging himself to keep the rage in, sighed, looked away, swallowed heavily, all of the little techniques they teach people in anger management classes. I could practically check them off a list, which made me realize that he must have taken a course of those classes. What would he be like in a real rage? Though it might have been an interesting scientific experiment to provoke him and see, I decided to play it safe.

  “I really am sorry,” I said. “It must be hard, working with someone as weird as I am.”

  “You’re not weird,” he said. “That’s the problem. You look and act completely normal about everything except for these—these things.”

  “Things like Image Objectification of Insight and then the LDRS, you mean?”

  “And walking trances.” He glared at me. “You implied you’d never fallen into one before.”

  “I haven’t, no. I don’t know what caused it, either.”

  I had a theory about that trance, but I refused to share it with him because of the direction it might lead us—lust, again, or more accurately—peace, Sister Peter Mary—Qi. Nathan extruded Qi every time he looked at me. I picked it up, responded with Qi of my own, and ended up with far too much energy. Some of it automatically sublimated into various odd states of consciousness, including walking trance.

  “I’ll try to avoid them in the future,” I said. “You’re right about eating now and then. Fasting does do weird things to the mind.”

  “Yes, I saw a lot of that when I was a boy.”

  I caught something in his voice that I’d never heard there before: sadness. I longed to say, “Tell me about your mother, Nathan,” then decided I’d been foolhardy enough for one day. He ended the conversation by standing up and taking our empty plates into the kitchen.

  “I’ve got to check in with Sanchez.” He reappeared briefly in the doorway. “Forensics should have reported back to him by now.”

  Sure, I thought. And you want to bury the whole subject of your childhood, too. By now it should be obvious that I majored in psychology in college. I went on for a master’s in the vain hope of understanding myself and my family better. Although I learned a lot about normal people, psychic traits and the like lay way beyond mainstream research. I could hear Nathan talking in the kitchen. In a few minutes he returned and sat down next to me on the couch.

  “How’s the police hunt going?” I said.

  “At a fairly brisk pace. They’re putting his photo on all the TV news stations and their Internet sites.” Nathan looked relieved at the change of subject. “Running the usual computer checks. Searching for Romero’s clothes, which would have been blood-soaked had she been wearing any. They couldn’t find them at the scene, so they’re assuming Johnson took them as a fetish object.”

  “That’s a disgusting thought.”

  “Serial killers do disgusting things. In the two cases back home, the police found the corpses naked, too, don’t forget. So it looks like a behavioral pattern if you don’t understand what actually happened.”

  “Yeah. She wouldn’t have been wearing anythin
g but a wolfskin that night.”

  “Shall I tell Sanchez that?” He made an attempt to smile. “At any rate, while I was on the phone just now, the report on that television truck did come in. Forensics found a fingerprint inside the TV repair truck’s door that matched the print they’d taken from Romero’s body.”

  “So that’s a confirmed link.”

  “Yes, with both William Johnsons.”

  “They’re absolutely sure the other one’s still in the slam?”

  “If you mean in prison, yes. Sanchez actually went so far as to call the warden at the Soledad State Prison to make sure.”

  “So much for my hope that he’d escaped and no one had noticed. But this means either our William or the mysterious DD killed that poor guy just to have a cover story when they went hunting for Pat’s journals. Not nice boys, these.”

  “Quite so, assuming they knew about the journals.”

  “Well, true. They obviously didn’t know that I had them over here.”

  “Yes, but I meant, did they know that the journals existed?”

  “Gotcha. Yeah, all the Hounds kept journals. They read aloud from them at their meetings.”

  “So DD would have known Pat kept them. He’d suspect that Pat had written about him and his ‘something big.’ Very good.”

  “It’s possible that Johnson had finally traced them to Michael just before I took them. I put wards on them, so the trail would have stopped there.”

  Nathan considered this for a moment, then shrugged. “It makes as much sense as anything does in this situation,” he said. “What we have to concentrate on now is finding Johnson and his wolfish friend.”

  “I should do another LDRS.”

  “Is that really—” He broke off. “Yes, good idea.”

  What had he been about to say—is that really safe? Of course it wasn’t, but I still needed to do it. I considered building myself a Shield Persona first, but doing so would have drained a part of my energy. The loss, coupled with the difficulties that Nathan’s presence caused, would have left me too off-balance to be effective, especially against a strong opponent like Johnson.

  After last night’s adventure I’d left my supplies in the kitchen. I sat down at the table, focused on a blank piece of paper, and sent my mind out to Johnson. Nothing. Absolutely nothing came to me. I looked up to find Nathan hovering in the doorway.

  “He seems to have left the planet,” I said. “And yeah, that’s a joke. I can’t pick him up.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?”

  “No such luck. No, he’s just very good at hiding would be my analysis. You know, if we went to his last sensed location, I might be able to pick up his trail again. No guarantees, but it’s worth a try.” I stood up and began gathering my crayons. “I’d better take the tools of the trade with us. Let me just get a plastic bag.”

  “It’s stopped raining. Didn’t you notice?”

  “Uh, no. Sometimes I forget about things like that. Weather, you know. And outside.”

  “Outside your mind, you mean.”

  He’d nailed that. I turned and looked out the kitchen window. The clouds above were pulling apart off to the west. Shafts of late afternoon sunlight broke through like pillars of light among the distant houses.

  Most people think of Golden Gate Park as the home of museums, the Japanese Tea Garden, and other such tourist attractions. To the west, though, lies the real park, the one we locals use, a string of meadows with artificial lakes tucked among trees, some planted to look wild, others walled in concrete to give children a safe place to sail toy boats. “Portals of the Past,” the doorway to nowhere, that is, stood on a strip of grass beside a sort of shallow bay on one of the smaller lakes. Behind it trees and shrubs screened it from the busy street just a few yards away.

  That far west Nathan found parking easily, right in front of the lake. We walked around on a dirt path to the newly restored pillars, part old marble, part new concrete carefully painted to mimic marble. I noticed that the shallow water of the little bay had turned green and thick with algae, though the main part of the lake looked clean enough. By then the sun was doing its best to drive away the rest of the rain clouds. Dappled light fell across the grass, then faded back to cold gray as the atmosphere won a round. Out on the lake a flotilla of ducks swam toward us.

  “Sorry,” I said and waved my empty hands. “No food, guys.”

  They turned and quacked off, muttering about misers in Duckish, I assumed. We’d just reached the Portals when my cell phone beeped: Michael.

  “Hey, bro,” I said, “what’s up?”

  “Lots.” He sounded triumphant.

  Briefly, I feared that he’d managed the wolf transformation after all, then I remembered that the moon was waning. “I take it you’ve got something to tell me,” I said.

  “I wanted to thank you. How’s that, huh? I read one, and now she’s going out with me.”

  It took me a moment to supply the antecedents: girl who liked vampire novels, my advice that he read one of them, her decision to date my little brother.

  “That’s really cool,” I said. “When?”

  “Tonight. I did a lot of work in the yard with Uncle Jim, and he paid me for it.”

  “That’s double cool. Is he over his snit?”

  “Oh yeah. He always gets over it sooner or later.”

  “Good. I—damn.” The phone cut out.

  Michael redialed immediately. “That was weird,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “In the park by one of the lakes. The Portals of the Past. Know what that is?”

  “The—oh, yeah, the weird doorway.”

  “It is weird, yeah, seeing it just standing in the shrubbery.”

  “No, I mean really weird. The energy—”

  The phone cut out again. I’d just recharged it that morning. Michael got through one more time.

  “Maybe that’s what wrong with our phones,” he said. “The energy there. Can’t you see it?”

  “No, I sure can’t.”

  “That’s really weird, then. I know I didn’t just imagine it.” He paused for a long moment. “Look, I’ve got to go get cleaned up and stuff. Call me tomorrow, will you?”

  “For sure,” I said. “Have fun tonight!”

  “I will. Bye.”

  I clicked off and put the phone back into my jacket pocket. Nathan was leaning against a convenient tree and watching me with a slight smile. I couldn’t call it a fond smile, but it came close enough to make me uneasy.

  “My brother,” I said, then remembered that I have a couple of them to differentiate. “Michael, the youngest one.”

  “The one who wants to be a werewolf?”

  “Yeah, but he’s over that, thank God and the little fishes. I think he wanted it more to feel like part of the family than anything, although he did talk about impressing his girlfriend.”

  Nathan’s expression changed to the reproachful stare.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “He wanted to be a werewolf so he’d feel like part of the family.”

  “Um, well, yeah, I guess that would strike you as kind of odd.”

  “Just slightly.” He peeled himself off the tree. “I suppose I’m getting used to them.”

  The family, I assumed he meant, and let it lie. Michael’s comment about weird energies concerned me more at the moment than Nathan’s feelings. The space between the pillars appeared perfectly ordinary, as did the weathered marble lintel above them, which at the moment dripped stray drops.

  “That’s strange,” I said.

  “Strange how?” Nathan used his long-suffering voice.

  “You can’t feel it either, huh?”

  “Feel what?”

  “Something between the pillars. A weird energy, Michael called it.”

  “No, I can’t. Can you?”

  “No, and that’s what’s so strange.”

  Nathan muttered something under his breath, then climbed the marble steps and walked
through the pillars before I could stop him. Nothing happened, other than his reaching the other side. He held one hand up near his hidden shoulder holster and peered along the path into the shrubbery, then shrugged and walked back through and down.

  “I don’t suppose you felt anything strange,” I said, “when you walked through the doorway.”

  “Nothing, no.”

  “All right. I guess you’ve got to be attuned to it or some such thing, which makes me wonder about Michael. He may be developing a talent.”

  “There was a time,” Nathan said wistfully, “when I would have heaped scorn on everything you’re saying. No more. Ah, the good old days and all that.”

  Although I was tempted to try walking between the pillars myself, I decided on discretion, not valor.

  “Rats,” I said, “it’s too wet to sit on the ground, and I want to do an LDRS.”

  “Then let’s go back to the car.”

  Once I settled myself in the backseat, where I had more room to draw, I got my pad and my crayons out of the tote bag. A voice in my head told me, “He’s come back.”

  I saw. I drew lines of gold along the moldings of what seemed to be a huge room, oblong splashes of dark red, furniture with slender bowed legs—pictures on the wall, beautiful pictures. The view moved and swirled. I felt someone else’s mind reaching for mine. With a shake of my head I broke away and concentrated on tearing the sketch off the pad. When I handed it to Nathan in the front seat, he frowned as he studied it.

  “A posh hotel lobby?” Nathan said.

  “Maybe. Or a living room in some mansion? You mentioned that Johnson had plenty of money to show around. He must have either money of his own or a well-off backer of some kind.”

  “If they’re dealing Persian white, of course they have money.”

  I collected my crayons and stuffed everything back into the canvas tote. Briefly, I sensed the wall again and one of the paintings—a Watteau, nothing an individual would own.

  “Art museum.” The Collective Data Stream rose up and bit me. “Like the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It used to have stuff like that in its galleries anyway. They changed things around before I got back, so I don’t know how much of the old stuff is still there. But I’ve picked up Johnson in that area before. Land’s End, it’s called.”