Chapter Thirteen:
Blackbird Fly
Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee
Greymalkin rubbed up against Vickie’s leg, purring. She scratched his ears as she stared at the blinking cursor. At this point, she had made contact with every magician on her extensive list. Some few had replied, most with extreme caution. A handful had indicated they would consider signing up with Echo. The rest would either answer her, or not. And until she started getting definitive answers, she was stalled.
There were not enough metas. The mages were afraid, all but the scant handful that were passing themselves off as metas—or who, like her, were both meta and mage. And they should be afraid; in the past, the Nazis of the Third Reich had more than dabbled in the occult, they had made themselves masters of it. There was no telling if this new lot still had that mastery. If they did—magicians were in danger. The use of magic was an inexact science. It was all a matter of knowledge and training and will, and there were always X factors that could skew things, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of the Unseen.
On the other hand, Vickie had seen and felt nothing yet to indicate that the Nazis had even the remotest knowledge of magic now. And if that was true, then magic and mages could be what tipped the balance, exploiting a hole in their strategy they didn’t know they had.
Again, she heard her new friend Bella’s voice in her mind. Start small. Meet people a few at a time. And get yourself in shape. They offer to train all of us in freerunning—Le Parkour—Echo OpOnes and Echo SupportOps especially. Just like they offer to train us in first aid, paramedic training, hand to hand and firearms. That way even the ones with no powers or tiny powers can escape if they’re trapped, even if they don’t have a ton of athletic ability. And the ones that do, they’re like monkeys on steroids. They can get across a town faster than anyone without a chopper when there’s gridlock. Go to the Parkour classes. That’s a start.
Well, she’d looked up Parkour. She’d downloaded a ton of video. It didn’t look that different from some of her early physical training. She didn’t need to go to the classes, face all those people…but she could use the Parkour course at the Echo campus. She could practice on her own. Maybe she’d meet one or two people there at a time. That would be doable.
She shut down the computer, and went after her sweats, ignoring the armor on the stand. It wasn’t time yet for that.
As always, she left the light off in the bathroom, changing in the comforting darkness. She did it all by feel: wrapping wrists and ankles for extra support; adding socks; long, lightweight sweat pants and long-sleeved shirt with a hood; gloves—this time with traction palms. She was as ready as she was ever going to be.
Grey gave an approving flick of his tail as she snagged her Echo-logo vest that marked her as an OpOne with a right to be on the campus and carried an RFID tag sewn inside. She pulled it on over her shirt as she walked to her car.
The drive was one she had made only once before, when she’d gone to meet with Bella and that Russian woman. She forced herself to be calm. She told herself that the course would be empty. It was the middle of the day, so who would be out there training or warming up?
And after passing the gates unchallenged thanks to her ID, and passing the buildings still being reconstructed, she parked her econobox in a lot with only a scattering of vehicles and found that the course was, indeed, empty. She assumed it had always looked like this, and it was unlikely the attackers had bothered doing anything to a place that had already looked like a war zone. Building façades with wrought iron and steel balconies and windows faced reproduction ruins; from what she had seen on the videos, this place was a freerunner’s idea of heaven. Everything here was designed to be climbed, jumped, or otherwise traversed.
Once, she would have thrown herself joyously into the challenge.
Now, she stood there staring at it, her palms sweating.
Start slow. No one said you had to be one of those amazing French monkeys the first day. And warm up before you try anything. Then follow the Parkour creed: move forward. Always forward.
Forty-five minutes later, she was sweating, shaking with pain, and ready to cry with frustration. It wasn’t just that she was out of shape. It was that her body didn’t do what it used to. Scar tissue pulled and hurt as if it was ripping open, and she had scarred tendons in her ankles and wrists as well as scarred skin. Her balance was unreliable, thrown off again and again by unexpected pain. No! her muscles would scream, often right in the middle of something, and she’d fall, saved only because she still knew how to fall, thank the gods. Tuck in her head, arms pulled in and hands protected, twist so she’d roll diagonally across her back from shoulder to rump, scrubbing off momentum steadily instead of suddenly.
And then, when she was most unbalanced, mentally and physically, flailing with heart and soul, came another push.
“Yer doin’ that all wrong, ya know.”
Fear stabbed her, and she whirled.
A tall man, meta tall, which meant he towered over her and made her feel like a child. Bare chest, black pants, black boots, some sort of red scarf wrapped around face and head swathing his shoulders, matching red wrappings around his wrists. A memory that did not fail her, although everything else did, identified him from all the Echo files she had studied, committing to memory all the faces of the metas that survived. Fear had driven that close study. Fear and paranoia. You might have to work with them. Know everything about them so they can’t hurt you.
Memory put a name to the not-face, the costume, the narrowed eyes that were all that was visible beneath that hood and wrapping.
Red Djinni.
And fear rose up to choke her, for she had no ammunition, no information. His file was mostly barren of everything but speculation.
“I suppose you can do better?” she said, the words coming out harsh and grating. Drive him away with them. Make him not want to share the course with a virago. That was all she could think of to do.
“You’re damn right I can,” he replied, with an undertone of a sneer. “Come on. Show me what you’ve got.”
All right. She’d meant to come out here and maybe encounter one or two other people. Granted one of them wasn’t supposed to be Red Djinni, but…she set off at a run and made the first set of obstacles.
He was ahead of her, moving at blinding speed, with extra double and triple somersaults, flips, even backflips. It made her angry, as muscles cramped and burned, everything tightened and pulled, like worms of fire under her skin. He waited for her at the first checkpoint. “Holding back?” he mocked.
“Just…getting started…” she said through gritted teeth, fighting pain, fighting to stay balanced, fighting to keep from running away. He shot off ahead of her again, traversing things she hadn’t even realized were obstacles, with the careless nonchalance of a gibbon. She pushed herself harder.
“Yer fallin’ behind, darlin’,” he mocked at the second checkpoint.
“I’m not your darlin’,” she snapped. Bad enough that he was doing this, after seeing what a fumbling infant she was at this. Worse to rub it in like this, to humiliate her. The anger was almost the equal of the fear, and she pushed herself harder still and felt all her muscles trembling with reaction and pain, her stomach in cold knots, her eyes stinging. She was trying, dammit! Why was he making a fool out of her for trying?
He was off again, making it all look as easy as breathing; she was half blind with pain and unshed tears as he waited at the third and final checkpoint. “You should try doin’ this with a Nazi on yer tail,” he goaded. “Now that’s some motivation.”
“I did, thanks,” she panted, stumbling to the end of the course, where she leaned against the wall, not out of breath, but gasping with so much pain that even her fear was temporarily gone.
And then, a new voice behind her made her freeze with the start of an attack.
“Enough with the horseplay, Djinni. We’ve got a job to do. I sent you over here to assess the new recruit, not show off for her.”
Another male voice, deep, authoritative, unamused. Djinni came down out of the tops of one of the building façades in a series of extra-spectacular flips, landing in front of them. “What horseplay, Bull?” he asked, a glint of challenge in his eye and more than a hint of mockery in his voice. “Just working out. That a crime?”
The voice behind her snorted, and the owner of it stepped around her to stand almost toe to toe with Djinni. He was a head taller than the Djinni, with long white-blond hair in a tight ponytail, chiseled features, and the usual sculptured body of most of the metas she was familiar with. She felt like a deformed dwarf, and shrank inside herself. Perfection. They were perfection. And she was a ruin…
“Assessment?” The second man’s tone was brisk and impersonal.
Djinni’s casual air of superiority vanished, and the laughter disappeared from his eyes. When he spoke, his tone matched Bull’s. It was cold and professional and unmasked. “She is physically unable to perform at our level, Bull. She’s got some fire, but she’s using most of it to keep from bolting. I recommend against. Put her in the field on our retrievals, and we’ll spend half our time watching out for her.”
The brutally accurate picture made her cringe and shrink even smaller. Two strangers, two strange men, looming over her—it was pushing her fear. Hard. Add to it what they were saying…
“Operative Nagy, I presume?” the newcomer said, deliberately turning away from Djinni to look courteously at her. He pronounced it “naggy.”
“Nahzh,” she managed to get out, correcting his mispronunciation. “Vic. Nagy.”
They both stiffened a little, then—she saw it, she was good at reading body language—forced themselves to relax. They’d reacted to her name. Her first name. Not in recognition of her, personally, it was more like a wince in reaction to the name itself. As if the name was painful, and they were wincing away from the pain.
And neither of them had noticed the other doing it.
“Operative Nagy,” the man said, with the correct pronunciation. “Tentatively OpOne, active. You’re listed as a magician?”
She nodded stiffly. Djinni snorted.
“Then I’ve asked Echo to assign you to my team for a retrieval. I’m callsign Bulwark, Echo OpTwo. We’re going after someone who’s being protected, I am told, by another magician, and I need a magician to counter him.” He smiled pleasantly. Or it would have been pleasant if she hadn’t been so frozen with fear. “Fighting fire with fire, so to speak.”
He could not have chosen a worse simile, given that she was already on the edge of a panic attack. It was her turn to be engulfed in memory.
Fire…the flames roared up around her and the pain, the pain, she was going to die…She couldn’t breathe for a moment. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t speak. Fear held her and shook her like a dog shakes a rag toy, when a spark of brightness, of more fire, up in the heavens behind the two men made her glance up. And with the look, somehow, she made contact.
She couldn’t have said how. She wasn’t a psion. Yet she felt something touch her mind, assess her with compassion, and reach out to her. And that voice, that she had heard once before, echoed in her mind, washed over her, through her, mind and spirit; another fire, but one that countered the fear and the pain for just a moment. This was more like a caress, or like a mother’s embrace, that only manifested as firelike, but couldn’t possibly harm.
Peace. Be still.
It was only a moment, just long enough for the tiny glint of flame to wink out again, but it was enough, enough to break her out of the attack, and though she was still stiff with fear, she could, at least, speak again. “I—I’m not supposed to be doing fieldwork yet—” she stammered. Hadn’t he seen for himself? Hadn’t he heard the Djinni? She wasn’t ready. She burned with shame. Would she ever be ready?
“You are the only Echo magician in Atlanta,” Bulwark replied, a touch of hardness under the veneer of pleasantry. “I’m afraid you’ll have to make an exception for this retrieval. You’ve been assigned to work with me on this. We leave as soon as you’re ready. We’ll be going to New Orleans.”
His tone left absolutely no doubt in her mind that if she did not go with him voluntarily, he was perfectly prepared to force her. She went unbalanced for a moment, her vision briefly graying out. She scrambled for a way to get away from them long enough to get some control back. Maybe to get away? If she could lose them long enough…“I-I need to get back to my apartment. Leave my car. Change. Pack?”
He nodded. “That would be wise. We may be gone a few days. Red Djinni and I will follow you in an Echo vehicle.”
To make sure she went. There would be no escaping into the maze of Atlanta. No hiding in her apartment. She didn’t even try to protest; she sensed it would be useless. Instead she turned and stumbled a little back to the parking lot, fumbling her keys out of her pocket.
Behind her, not even trying to lower his voice or disguise the contempt in it, she heard the Djinni say, “Jesus, Bull! What’re you thinking, hauling that along with us?”
“We need a mage,” Bulwark said calmly.
Djinni snorted again. “What’s she gonna do, pull a rabbit out of a hat to distract Tomb until I can pin him down? When are you going to stop insisting on bringing dead weight on these jobs? She’s useless, Bull! She won’t stand—”
By then she had reached the shelter of her car, gotten inside and slammed the door on the last of whatever it was that the Djinni was saying. As she pulled out of the lot, hot, angry tears burned down her face. Useless. Of course she was useless. The Djinni had hit the bull’s-eye. She was useless. To them. To anyone. To herself. Useless, hideous, worthless…she cried, hopelessly, all the way home.
They pulled in to park behind her, but didn’t get out of their vehicle. It looked as if they were still arguing. That was fine. She didn’t want them in there with her, in her sanctuary, violating it. She didn’t want the Djinni to have the satisfaction of seeing her in tears. She ran up the stairs and fumbled the door open, slammed it behind her, and wondered, for a moment, if she could just lock up again and pretend she didn’t hear them out there, hear the phone, hear her Echo radio.
But no. No, she had to go through with this. If she didn’t, they’d come after her anyway. And she had to go through with this because maybe, maybe, she might be able to do something. She had a responsibility. She had to try.
The panic attack ebbed, and with the easing of fear came the expected aftermath. Her gorge rose, nausea overcoming her.
She ran for the dark bathroom, threw up in the toilet, stripped off the soaking-wet sweats, and ran a brief shower. They could wait for that. She didn’t want to be in a closed car stinking of sweat and vomit.
She used half a bottle of mouthwash and scrubbed every inch of herself furiously, using amber-scented soap and shampoo to eradicate the last of the stench, rubbing her burnt skin with the amber-scented lotion that was the only thing that helped. Then she re-dressed from the skin out in cotton underwear, black socks, black cotton knit trousers, black turtlenecked, long-sleeved T-shirt, black gloves, boots. She pulled the suitcase out of the storage closet, and packed more of the same. She paused for a moment, then added her lightweight armor to it. Not the heavier battle suit on the stand, but the chain mail equivalent. She could manage that. And she might need it. The mail, made of tiny black metal plates of an alloy that would surely puzzle the Echo scientists sorely, would stop bullets as well as the Echo nanoweave. She’d proved that before. And in New Orleans, in the wake of the Invasion…she would need something that could stop a bullet. Black-handled atheme went into the sheath in her boot. The techno-mage’s road kit, unused for so very long, went into her laptop bag. She scooped up the contents of her bathroom shelf and dumped them on top of the armor, and stuck a sample-sized bottle of mouthwash in a pocket just in case she had another attack.
She turned to find Grey sitting behind her, looking at her with bemusement. <A trip?>
“Fieldwork.” She went to the kitchen and made sure the connections to his refrigerated watering fountain were still solid. “You’ve got two weeks of kibble in the dispenser and I just cleaned your box—”
<Please. If I need to go, I’ll walk through the walls. If you are going to be gone for two weeks, I do not want to use the box. Is the cable bill paid?>
“Yes.” She unplugged her keyboard and plugged in the one with the mousepad and the oversized keys. Ironically, Grey had trouble using a mouse. “There, you can surf too. I’ll be checking my email.”
They both paused and stared at each other. She was marginally calm, and emotionally exhausted, as she always was in the wake of a panic attack. This state of false quiet would hold, she hoped, at least until they were on the plane. Grey did not ask “Will you be all right?” or even “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Instead he said, <If you need me, summon me. Good luck.>
Slinging her laptop bag over her shoulder, and grabbing the suitcase, she went out the door.
Before she could change her mind and hide in the back of the closet.
The vehicle was exactly like the one that Vickie had driven when she showed the Russian around; broadcast-powered and silent, and as sleek as something out of a fifties science fiction movie. Vickie pitched her suitcase in the trunk with their gear, and her laptop bag into the back seat, which she had all to herself. Bulwark drove, the Djinni sat silently beside him, in the kind of stony silence that suggested they had been shouting at each other at the tops of their lungs before she left the apartment building. Bulwark did all the talking on the way to the airstrip.
“As you know, New Orleans was hit hard last year by Hurricane Irena, and the invasion finished what Irena started,” he said, in that matter-of-fact voice she remembered from the agents who had run FBI briefings when she’d assisted her parents as a teenager. That was supposed to be against the rules, of course, but when you were a member of the metahuman Paranormal Division, otherwise known as the Spook Squad, rules got broken. A lot. Bulwark hadn’t been in the Bureau, but he was ex-military, and a lot of the buzz-cuts in the Bureau were too. Jarheads, mostly. She had him pegged as an ex-Marine, though that detail wasn’t in his file. Probably, being a meta, he’d been in one of the meta Marine squads that officially didn’t exist. Hell, he probably knew Semper Fu. “There’s not a lot of detail on what actually happened, but the end result is that the city government is fundamentally gone, and the city is being run by the Krewes now.”
Djinni glanced at him, jarred out of his silence. “The wha—?”
“Social organizations, or they were,” Bulwark answered Djinni smoothly, without missing a beat. “Originally founded for the purpose of running the Mardi Gras parades.”
“Hold up, yer sayin’ the guys that toss beads and build floats are runnin’ the damn city?” Djinni sounded incredulous, and Vickie didn’t blame him.
“You have to be a big man in the area to get invited into a Krewe,” she said softly, looking steadfastly at her hands. “They don’t let just anyone in. Before the invasion, these guys financed the parades, and that doesn’t come cheap. They have warehouses, businesses, a lot of them are restaurant owners so they have food—and some of them are supposed to have ties to organized crime.”
“So when all hell broke loose and the city government collapsed, the Krewes had local organization and resources. They took over, and what was left of the police mostly defected to them.” Bulwark sounded mildly approving of what Vickie had contributed. “Now the city is divided up by parish, and each parish is being run by a different Krewe. There’s some gang warfare going on, too, because the remains of the out-of-town gangs didn’t exactly have the same borders drawn up that the Krewes did. We’re going into a hot situation. I have a local contact, but I don’t know how much help she is going to be.”
Djinni muttered something Vickie couldn’t hear.
“Some of the Krewes are…” she swallowed. “They’re into voudoun.”
Djinni groaned. “That would be why we have you along, I suppose,” he said sarcastically. “To protect us from zombies.” He shook his head. “Hell, I’ve seen plenty of zombie movies. Just give me a shotgun, a flamethrower and some grenades. We don’t need an amateur getting in the way. And besides that, Tomb never had anything to do with hocus-pocus.”
“Tomb didn’t, but his brother is a prominent voudoun priest,” Bulwark retorted, as Vickie burned with mingled anger and embarrassment. “And when Tomb got out of prison, he went to his brother, who is protecting him. We will need Operative Nagy to deal with the brother while you get to Tomb.”
The Djinni shook his head again, and lapsed into a sullen silence that lasted the rest of the way to the airstrip.
She got out of the car first, and found herself unexpectedly struggling with her suitcase, which had gotten wedged in by the men’s gear. With a growl of impatience, Djinni reached for it at the same time that Bulwark did, and for the first time since she had come out of the building, both were close enough to get a hint of the faint amber scent she had showered in and smoothed on her scarred and welted skin.
That was when it happened again. Both of them winced, and this time, looked quickly at her. Their pupils dilated for a fraction of a second. Bulwark’s breath caught in his throat, and the Djinni went very still.
It was only a moment. Then things went back to normal as the Djinni wrenched her bag out and shoved it at her, and Bulwark extracted several heavy duffels in a methodical manner. Neither of the men had noticed that the other had reacted to the same breath of fragrance, but Vickie had, and they had reacted exactly the same way. Mentally she filed that away as something to be looked into later, and dragged her bag to the plane. It was going to be a long trip.
* * *
“So Echo is sending agents to fetch Tomb. How very amusing.” The impeccably dressed black man sounded exactly like the actor Geoffery Holder, if anyone in the room was old enough to remember what those cultured and faintly sinister tones sounded like.
“I thought you didn’t care ’bout Tomb Stone,” the bearer of that information ventured, as Le Fevre’s two muscle-boys nodded gravely. The muscle-boys were sweating. Hardly surprising under the circumstances, but Bocor Le Fevre was pleased to see it. Let them take note of the hazards of failure.
“And I do not. Tomb Stone’s metahuman talents are no use to me. But his brother will protect him, and when he moves to protect Tomb, he will leave his flank unguarded. In fact”—the man steepled his fingers together—“it would not surprise me in the least if Jacob Stone thought that the Djinni was here, not on behalf of Echo, but on behalf of some new gang.” His teeth gleamed whitely in the darkness, and caught the light radiating from the well-dressed creature crouched over its prey in the center of the room. The creature’s face was an approximation of a black man’s, but with gashlike features, and its suit was of a 1920’s cut with lapels edged in feathers and long white ribbons. “I believe that just might pry the Stone brothers out of their lair. Why don’t you run off, there’s a good fellow, and spread that particular bit of misinformation for me?”
The djab in the suit made a mock bow to Bocor Le Fevre. “You keep your bargain, I will keep mine.” The djab returned to his meal, the no-longer-screaming body of Le Fevre’s former bodyguard, who had failed to keep the men of the Kronus Krewe out of the Django warehouse that was Le Fevre’s headquarters. There was no blood, of course, and there were no outward marks on the body, but what the djabs did as they feasted on life-force was far more painful than any physical torture, and could be far more prolonged. Le Fevre had silenced the screams as soon as they began, for they annoyed him after a time, but the meal’s bulging eyes and expression of ultimate horror were enough to let the current bodyguards know just how terrible it was to be turned over to one of the Bocor’s allies as a meal.
The Bocor bowed back. “When we have Jacob Stone, you may eat him.”
The spirit radiated an unhealthy, greenish light for a moment. “I look forward to that hour.”
Le Fevre thought for a moment. “And while you are at it…bring me the links to those spirits of the Red Djinni’s enemies that are within my reach. I want to find his weaknesses.”
”That is easily done,” the djab chuckled. “The Djinni has many dead enemies, and they would tell you these things for nothing. You have but to summon them. I will get you names.”
Le Fevre laughed, as the djab faded away, off to possess as many people as he could to spread the disinformation that the Red Djinni was forming a new gang, and was here to recruit Tomb Stone, whether Stone wanted to come or not. The djab’s meal writhed and mewled, more than half mad now. Le Fevre beckoned to his bodyguards and gestured towards the man that had brought word from the leaky information sieve that passed for Echo HQ in New Orleans these days. “Take that away and put it in my workroom,” he said, with a faint smile. “My ally will want it when he gets back.”
The men shuddered, and complied.
* * *
The Echo craft was eerily silent. There was no roar of jet engines outside the fuselage, which made the sullen quietude inside the craft that much more unnerving. There were only four sets of seats here, as the rest of the craft was given over to cargo space—two pairs of seats facing each other on either side of a narrow aisle. The Red Djinni had the left-hand four all to himself; he had jammed himself into the corner of the window seat on the front-facing bulkhead and brooded, legs thrust aggressively out into the space between the seats, effectively taking up as much of the space as possible. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he had not once removed his signature scarf, so all that could be seen of his face were his eyes, glaring sullenly. Bulwark and Vickie perforce had the other four seats. He took the front-facing pair; she got stuck with the rear-facing ones. Then again, motion sickness was the least of her worries. The way that the Djinni was glaring at her, you would have thought that she had mortally insulted him. And as for Bulwark, he had gotten even more reserved, if that was possible. She still couldn’t figure out what she had done to either of them to make them act this way.
“This meta we’re after—Tomb—” she said finally, just to break the silence. “Why is he called that?”
Bulwark smirked. “You ought to ask Djinni about that. He’s the one that worked with the man.”
The Djinni grunted. Bulwark gave him a sardonic glance. “Be nice. Tell the lady.”
“She’s your pigeon. You tell her.”
Bulwark rolled his eyes. “You know how it is. A lot of metas like their nicknames or aliases to be bad puns on their powers. His real last name is Stone, and he plays dead.”
Her brow creased, but Djinni interrupted impatiently. “He doesn’t just play dead, he is dead. No pulse, no breathing, uses no oxygen, the whole nine yards. You can seal him inside an airtight container, fold him up however you want him before he stiffens up, and ship him inside any place you want to get into. Then when you’re ready, he comes back to life and lets you in.”
She felt her eyes widen. “A self-induced hibernation without a cryogenic chamber?”
The Djinni shrugged. “Damned if I know. He always said he was dead. He didn’t bleed either. You could stab him and he wouldn’t feel it, or bleed more than a couple drops. The only thing he didn’t do that a dead man would was rot.”
“But how did he know when to wake up?” Of all the strange metahuman powers she had ever heard of, this was one of the strangest. But she could think of a thousand ways he could be useful…and certainly he must have been invaluable to a professional thief.
“Beats me. He would only say ‘the loas tell me,’ whatever the hell that means.”
She blinked, her ever-present fear ebbing with something this fascinating to think about. She turned to Bulwark. “You did say his brother is a voudoun houngan, right? Or is he a bocor?”
“So I’ve been told. I’m not sure what that means. I don’t know the difference.” Bulwark eyed her with speculation.
“A houngan is a kind of priest, in a religion that is as much magic as mysticism. A houngan is…oh, this is oversimplifying by a huge margin, but he’s a ‘white’ magician in the popular parlance, though that is a dangerous term to apply to voudoun.” She bit her lip. “Forgive me if I assume too much, but I suppose you don’t know much about the magical, nonstandard religions. All right: take it that voudoun is a religion in which guilt and sin are minimized or absent altogether, and you might sum up the philosophy as ‘if you aren’t harming anyone or scaring the horses, do what you want, and if someone hurts you, or tries to, give as good as you get.’ ”
Djinni cackled nastily. “Sounds like my kinda church!”
Bulwark gave him a withering glance. “I’m sure.”
Vickie shrugged. “It’s not Christian. It borrows heavily from the trappings of Catholicism, but that was largely so that the African slaves that practiced it could continue to wear their emblems and signs and have their religious objects without having to hide them. Santeria, which is associated with Hispanic-dominated Mesoamerican descendants, does the same. However, in keeping with a lot of primal religions, the practitioners of both voudoun and santeria openly use magic.”
“Yeah, right.” The Djinni’s eyes were sardonic. “To delude the rubes in the pews, no doubt.”
At that moment, she badly wanted to perform some small bit of magery, just to wipe that hidden smirk off his face. Three things stopped her. One, discipline—in the hard school in which she had learned you did not do magic just to show off, for magic was fueled to a greater or lesser extent by a mage’s own power, and what you wasted in display was power you might need in the next moment for something important. Two—until she did something that could not be ascribed to a metahuman ability, she had no way to prove she was a mage and not a meta. And three—he wasn’t the one who had dragged her out on this job. The person who had, Bulwark, already believed. After this, it was unlikely she would ever see the Djinni again, or so she devoutly hoped. Trying to convince him was a waste of time and energy.
So she just continued with her explanation. “Now, it is a religion, which means there is a mystic, occult component to it. In this case, a good half of what gets done on behalf of the voudoun practitioner is done, not by the magician himself, but by the loas, greater and lesser. The lesser ones are simple spirits of the dead—ghosts, but with a kick, since belief in them gives them power and energy and that enables them to act in the physical world. The greater…” She hesitated. “…well, the greater are the gods and goddesses of voudoun. Except that these gods and goddesses come and take over the bodies of the worshipers. It’s called ‘being ridden,’ and it’s a great honor. The lesser loas can also ride the worshipers but can’t do the sorts of things the deities can.”
Bulwark’s brow wrinkled. “You mean demonic possession?”
She shook her head violently. “They aren’t demons, and it’s voluntary, at least for the most part, although on occasion a ‘good’ loa might take over someone who is in need of a lesson and administer a spiritual reprimand and punishment. Anyway, that’s where the magic and the mysticism overlap. Contacting the dead or the—otherworldly—isn’t a metahuman ability like psionics, and it isn’t strictly magic either. It’s a third thing.” Like having an angel talk to you. She took a deep breath. At least Djinni had shut up, and Bulwark seemed to be listening, even if this must be sounding like something so far out of his experience that it amounted to a totally alien culture and mind-set. “That’s the—for lack of a better term—‘good’ voudoun. There’s a black magic voudoun too. Those practitioners are called ‘bocor,’ and they are all about power. Whatever stands between them and what they want gets flattened, period. So you can see, it makes a big difference whether Tomb Stone’s brother is a houngan or a bocor.”
She didn’t go into the other intriguing aspect of this—that Tomb’s power was certainly metahuman, but it was clear he shared some of his brother’s mystic ability too, if it was true that the loas told him when to “wake up.”
“The counterpart to the houngan’s loas are the bocor’s djabs,” she continued. “For all intents and purposes, you might as well call them demons. And if Stone’s brother is a bocor, that is what we will be dealing with.”
Djinni rolled his eyes, and shook his head, and his hard tone made it clear he thought she was a fraud, and if he had his way, he’d throw her out the plane door and let her apport herself home. “Lady, I don’t believe in magic, or pixie dust, demons, ghosts, or elves.”
Was she mistaken, or was there a trace of regret in that last?
He flexed his fingers, and made a fist. “Whatever mumbo-jumbo this guy is pulling on the rubes in New Orleans, he’s not gonna be pulling it on me. So you do your hand-waving for Bull since he wants it, if you can manage to stay on your feet long enough, and stay outta my way. I’ll handle Tomb Stone, and his brother too. You’re about as much use to me as a librarian.”
She flushed with anger and shame, and turned away, staring out of the window. She wanted to give him a snappy retort—the old Vickie would have—but the words got stuck in her throat. Instead she hunched her shoulders and fought down the tears of frustration and pain. He’d gone beyond being rude. Now he was deliberately being cruel.
“Ignore him,” Bulwark said, with a hard edge to his words. “You don’t answer to him, you answer to me.”
She ducked her head as a kind of answer; that seemed to satisfy him, and he left her alone, taking out a sheaf of papers to study. But the Djinni kept giving her looks that felt like barbs, and she flushed uncomfortably, and finally she undid her seatbelt and headed for the lav. As she did so, a breath of the amber scent she found so comforting followed her, and once again, she saw both men react strongly to it, their pupils dilating. The Djinni stiffened all over for a moment, and if his glare had been a bullet, she’d have been dead.
Safe in the privacy of the lav, with the door locked, it suddenly hit her. Both had reacted to her scent. Both had reacted to her name. Now, she had never to her certain knowledge met either of them, she doubted either of them would react that way to a man, so it had to be that they were each reminded of some other woman named Vic. Two women, named Vic, who both favored amber as a scent, was well within the realms of coincidence. But three? Three in the limited circles of metahumans? Amber was not a common scent; it had been popular a few years ago when she picked up on it, but since then she’d had to order it specially.
Scent was a potent trigger of memory. And she would bet her last dollar that they were reacting to the memory of the same woman. Not just any woman, but one that meant a lot to both of them. Djinni, especially…he’d started acting like a jerk right after he heard her name. And once he’d had her scent? He’d turned cruel. As if he thought she was somehow purposefully trying to impersonate this woman, whoever she was. With a reaction that strong, it hadn’t just been friendship between them. It was harder to tell with Bulwark, but the fact that he reacted at all tended to make her think the same.
She would bet her last penny that neither one of them had any idea that the other was holding the memories of the same person, too. And if either of them figured that out…
Wonderful. As if this wasn’t already a fun-filled excursion…
The stress built, and she threw up in the toilet. Again. When the spasm was over, she flushed it and clung to the sink for a long time, weak and shaking, before fishing the bottle of mouthwash out of her pocket and using it.
Now they would both probably think she was bulimic.
It just got better and better.
* * *
Echo had taken over one of the older French Quarter hotels for crew quarters, and it was still worse for wear from the hurricane. The hurricane and the invasion had hit the Big Easy with a one-two punch from which it would probably never recover. There were more National Guard, Blacksnake, insurance adjusters and journalists than tourists on the streets, and most of the hotels were three-fourths empty. Small wonder Echo had been able to take over this hotel. The room Vickie got was tiny, but at least it had a working shower and she didn’t have to share it with anyone. She took down the mirror in the bedroom and put it behind the dresser, taped a towel over the one in the bathroom, showered and changed again, and washed her own clothing out in the sink, hanging it to dry in the shower stall. No way in New Orleans was she going to allow anything personal of hers to leave the room in the hands of a stranger. She left orders with the staff that her room was strictly off-limits to maid service, and put magical wards around it to ensure no one could get in—or if they could, at least she would know that they had.
And as for ordinary access, she had ways of dealing with that, too. The hotel might have been old, but it used mag-strip key cards. With a feeling of weary amusement, she unpacked her laptop and her road kit, and after a half hour of hacking the hotel computer system, made certain no one could get into her room with any key card but hers. The Echo people here had left some gaping holes in their security, relying on the hotel computer to control access to the rooms like that. She was only a midlevel hacker, after all, when you discounted what she could do with a magic interface. She made another mental note to leave things in better shape before she went home.
She looked with longing at her antianxiety meds, but didn’t take any. They interfered with her ability to use magic, and to see the otherwise unseen. She’d have to tough this one out. But at least now she knew why Djinni was being an asshat, and as always, knowledge gave her a kind of defense. Maybe even a touch of sympathy. Whatever had happened, it was pretty clear Djinni and this woman had not parted company amicably, and he was still raw over it.
Bulwark’s contact was a woman named Mel, who tended bar in the Quarter. They found her chewing out a pair of men in Blacksnake uniforms, which brought a smile to Bulwark’s face, and when she had thrown them out and turned her attention to them, Bulwark had gotten down to the business of asking questions. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been a lot that Mel could tell them. The best she could do was to send them to two little shops, off the tourist maps, where the local practitioners got their supplies. Careful inquiries there yielded nothing, although at Bulwark’s insistence, it was Vickie doing the asking, and not either of the two men. In keeping with the way a local would, she left her cell phone number on a piece of paper—not a card—to be passed on to Jacob Stone, but she rather doubted anything would come of it. It was not as bad as it could have been. Bulwark’s presence kept pretty much everyone at a respectful distance. But she was still cold and shaking when they returned to HQ.
Meanwhile, Djinni was off on his own trail of inquiry, which she presumed to be among the criminal element. Until he came back, she did what she did best—research, via her cell modem and her laptop. Her road kit, assembled before her interesting times, held ziplocked bags of carefully coiled jumpers, probes, specialty tools and splicers, soldering gear, clips and patch cables, crossovers, quasilegal tone generators, and even an acoustic coupler powered by a 9-volt battery. There’s no school like old school, her old code-wizard pals would say. She still had a certain number of contacts and favors owed at the FBI, which meant that a lot of information she might not otherwise be able to “see” was available, if you were clever enough. When Djinni turned up again, his manner was still sullen, so she guessed he hadn’t had much success. Fortunately, she had.
They retired to the suite Bulwark shared with Djinni. Until this moment, she had done nothing an Echo detective with an understanding of the occult underground couldn’t have done. But the sooner they found Tomb, the sooner she could get home, away from both of them, and hide in her sanctuary again. So it was time to do what she was here to do, whether Bulwark knew he needed this or not.
“I can find Tomb for you,” she said in a flat voice, before Bulwark could start in on some new plan to hit the streets, which was the last thing she wanted to do. “But I need something of his. A signature would do. I did some research; he had a bank account at the Gulf Coast Bank and Trust. His signature card should still be on file in the French Quarter branch.”
Djinni stared at her blankly; Bulwark, speculatively. Neither said anything, as her nerves stretched and frayed. “I’m not sure I understand what you want us to do,” Bulwark finally said.
“Get me the signature card!” she snapped. “Get that, and I can find him!”
“But it’s after-hours—” Bulwark began.
Her temper disintegrated. “And he is a professional thief!” she hissed, pointing at a startled Djinni. “How hard can it be to get a signature card out of an unsecured area in a small branch bank?”
“Why don’t you just magic it out?” the Djinni sneered.
A vein in her temple started to throb, and she clutched the table as a wave of nausea assaulted her. “Because there are rules to how this works, and I can’t,” she replied through clenched teeth. “I don’t do breaking and entering. You do. Just get me the damned card.”
And with that, without another word, she shoved herself violently out of her chair and staggered out the door and down the corridor to her own room. She managed to get there without throwing up for a third time, and she sat in the bottom of the shower with hot water drenching her until she was sure she wasn’t going to. Then she wrapped herself in the hotel robe and shivered under the covers until she was sure she wasn’t going to have a crying jag. When the knock came at the door, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“It’s Bulwark,” came the voice, before, shaking with reaction, she could ask who it was. “I have the card.”
It took a moment before she could answer. “Shove it under the door,” she said in a choked voice.
There was a soft sound of paper over carpet. When she peeked out from under the bedspread it was there, next to the door. She closed her eyes, and took long, deep breaths. Then she got up and went to work. And when she was done, she dressed in her black coat of mail, her heavy leather combat pants and boots, picked up her kit, and headed for the suite.
The arguing was audible halfway down the hall. She almost turned back around and went back to her room, but—the sooner we get this guy, the sooner I can go home. That was enough to keep her going. She longed for her sanctuary as saints were said to long for heaven…The door to the suite wasn’t quite shut, so she shoved it open with her foot since both hands were full of laptop and mage kit. Harder than she intended to, as it turned out, or else it wasn’t as jammed against the carpet as the one in her room. It slammed open against the wall, effectively putting an end to the argument and putting her full in the glare of Djinni’s outraged stare, and Bulwark’s frustrated one.
“Fat Markey’s Bar, on Peachtree between Wayon and Beau Sol,” she said.
“What?” Djinni demanded, as Bulwark said, at the same time, “Tomb’s in a bar?”
“I told you. I found him. That’s the good news. The bad news is that his brother almost certainly knows I was looking for him and he’s probably on his way to warn him or protect him or both.” The wards on Tomb Stone were very good, and she had been in a hurry. She had likely tweaked them. Not enough so that Jacob Stone would know who had been looking, but enough for him to know that someone had been.
“Let’s move.” Bulwark was on his feet and reaching for his kit, as Djinni impaled him with a glare.
“You believe this crap?” he shouted in outrage. “You’re going to send us out on a wild goose chase into the middle of gang territory because some bulimic tea-leaf reader says our man’s in a—”
Nerve and temper snapped at the same time, and temper won. “Shut the hell up!” she shrieked, almost losing the grip on her laptop. “I don’t answer to you. I answer to him! And I want to go home!” The last came out in a wail, and tears of anger streamed unheeded down her cheeks. “I don’t care what you think! What I do follows laws and logic, and works, and I will be damned if I let the target get away and end up here for weeks because you are too fricking stubborn to believe someone who has done this all her life and done it for the FBI is a useless crackpot!”
Her voice spiraled upwards with each word until it cracked on the last one.
Absolute silence. Both men stared at her with eyes gone wide, and a little shocked looking.
“Now get your gear and get the car and get in the car, because we have maybe twenty minutes to get to him before his brother does!”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Bulwark, and he did a quick pat-over of his equipment.
Between the welter of emotion and all the stress, Vickie went a little blank for a moment, because the next thing she really knew, she and her kit and laptop were in the front seat next to Bulwark, with the Djinni in the back. Her laptop was open and running on the cell modem. The GPS rig was giving him directions to the bar, while the cantrip packet linked via a USB cable to her dowsing program was giving her a steady blip, still, on the dot that was the bar. She may have blanked, but it seemed she had been giving the men sensible answers, because her awareness picked up in the middle of one.
“…agion. That means that anything that has been in contact with someone before is always in contact with him. Of course, that can wear away—if something passes through enough hands, it’s like a scent that wears off. In fact, that’s a good analogy, because if you know what you’re doing, or you know someone who knows, you can ‘wash’ that scent right off of things. That’s why mages are more careful about Contagion than serial killers are about leaving their DNA lying around.” She took a deep breath, blinked, and kept on. “That’s why I went for the bank signature card. Not too many people handled it, it’s old, and I was gambling that Jacob completely forgot about it. And I was right. This”—she pointed to the cantrip packet, in the center of which was the card, folded in an intricate pattern—“works just like an antenna for my dowsing program.”
“Wait, wait, you use a program?” The Djinni sounded a little dazed.
“I’m a techno-shaman. It’s what I do.” Her head was pounding now. Her stomach was in knots. “A lot of great magicians were the rock-star scientists of their day. Wizards and witches using magic in the old days were like modern researchers discovering how stuff all around us works. What looks like quaint bone-rattling to you now was the CSI of its day. And it still works. Some of it gets updated though. Almost all my investigative magic interfaces in some way with modern technology. That’s why the FBI still uses me. Like they did before…” She gulped, as the old pain threatened to engulf her, and she fought her way through it. “…before I got…hurt. With the things I do, people like me, we don’t…we don’t heal up like other people do. Some things just don’t get better. Our wounds are more like soul damage or brain damage than…” She took another deep breath to steady herself. “It doesn’t matter right now. What matters is those—”
Scattered red and green dots were moving on the blue one that was their target. “The red ones are djabs. The green ones are loas. There’s either one or two voudoun workers out there, heavily cloaked, and I can’t tell if it’s a bocor that can control both djabs and loas or a bocor and a houngan, but in either case, we are going to reach Tomb about the same time they do.”
She heard the sound of—something odd—going on in the back seat. “Then let the games begin,” said the Red Djinni, with grim elation. “It’s about frickin’ time.”
“You let me handle the spirits,” she said sharply. “You take them on only if they possess someone.”
“Hey, the spooks are your problem, darlin’, just like you say.”
She kept her eyes on her laptop screen. They were almost there…and so were the spirits.
Bulwark spoke as the bar sign came in sight. “Djinni, go in the bar and try to talk to Tomb. I’ll go around the back in case he tries to make a break that way. Nagy, do…” She glanced at Bulwark, who shrugged helplessly. “Do whatever it is you do.”
She shut the laptop and shoved it under the seat. It was not going to help her now. Now…it was time for old-fashioned combat magic. She hoped she would not have to call on Gaiaic magic too; it was crude stuff, good for use in the open, between two large opposing forces, but woefully unsuited for use inside a building—unless you wanted to bring the building down.
She and Djinni flung themselves out of the car as Bulwark slowed it, but didn’t stop. With a shriek of tires, he spun it around the corner, heading for the alley behind the bar. Djinni bounded inside. Vickie pulled her atheme from her boot and followed. She stopped at the door, called up energies from the Earth, and sketched a series of lines and glyphs in the doorway with her knife. They hung there, glowing, for just a moment. If Djinni had been looking at them, he would have actually seen them. He wasn’t, of course. He was peering into the darkness of the bar as the jukebox wailed Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”
When he saw who he was looking for, he straightened up from his crouch, and strolled in a leisurely fashion to the sole occupant of the farthest table. The jukebox chose that moment to quit, and the Djinni’s voice, though soft, seemed very loud in the silence. “Hey, Tomb.”
Tomb Stone looked up.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Tomb threw his table at the Djinni, and made a break for the back door. Djinni vaulted the obstacle and went after him. The front door was assaulted by half a dozen men, of whom four crossed the threshold and dropped like someone had smacked them with a two-by-four as the spirits controlling them were stopped by Vickie’s protections, but two more stumbled through and kept coming. One lurched for Stone. The other grabbed a chair and threw it at Djinni, and a bizarre sound like a half-dozen wet switchblades came from the red-wrapped man’s direction.
What the—
Vickie didn’t wait to figure it out. She yelled. Djinni turned in time to see the attacker, and that was when she saw what she must have heard. The Djinni’s hands had sprouted long, sharp claws on the end of every finger. He slashed before she could warn him that the person the spirit was riding was probably innocent—then, as the claws hit, she saw what he had probably already seen, the gang tats on the man’s biceps, neck and bald head.
No, he was certainly not innocent.
The man screamed—and the djab burst out of his open mouth, just as another man—and something else—made it through the front door.
This man was bare-chested and tattooed too, but no street gang had ever invented these tattoos. Vickie’s guess as to the identity of the man was confirmed when Tomb shouted his brother’s name, and scrambled to his side. Jacob Stone and his giant companion stepped to protect Tomb and to face down Red Djinni.
“You—” said the magician, coldly. “You are a murderer and a thief. You stink of the blood of the innocent. You are lawful prey.”
Djinni sneered and crouched. Wait, wait—blood of the innocent? Lawful prey?
Vickie had no time to think about that, for the strange-looking creature at Jacob’s side lunged for Djinni. It was crudely man-shaped, a thing that looked as if it had been constructed from a mishmash of found swamp objects. Twine and wire bound together cypress knees, Spanish moss, bits of boat and trolling motor, planks and fishing poles, rope, and more. It may not have been fast, but there was no doubt that it could hit like a tank. It shattered the nearest table with a fist instead of shoving it away, creating a spray of splinters rather than just breaking it. That was when Vickie knew with despair that she was going to have to wreck the bar.
She called the Earth, and the Earth answered.
New Orleans was built on swampland, so what came to her call this time was not an upthrust of rock, bursting through the floor of the barroom, but a geyser of mud. It knocked the magician off his feet. It plastered his creation to the ceiling; then when Vickie released the Earth again, dropped it into the hole she had created. It thrashed. She told the muck to become a sucking mire. It thrashed more, and the more it thrashed, the more it sank, as Jacob Stone cursed and looked wildly about for the magician that had entrapped his magic-born servant.
But now the bar had been invaded by the next wave. One lot assailed the front door and about two in every six made it inside. More were trying to come in through the back. With one eye on the thing sinking into the pit she had created, Vickie cast a wary eye at the back, which was being blocked by Bulwark. There was a glossy bubble around him, just filling the space in the doorway, though the wood of the doorframe bulged and was creaking a bit. Men ridden by spirits pounded on the bubble with fists, bits of wood, and machetes, none of which got through, though they were inflicting plenty of injury on themselves and their fellows as their blows rebounded uncontrollably. Djinni was piled on by three men, each wielding machetes in one hand and chair legs in the other. But that was, by far and away, not the worst of the assault.
That, only two people in the bar could see.
The air was aswirl with spirits, and Vickie had her hands full fending them off Djinni and Bulwark. Bulwark’s bubble did nothing to keep them out. Djab, they had to be—she could see that when they did manage to get through, and raked their long talons over one or the other of the men, a spark of life-force drained away at the touch. Or rather, drained from Djinni—they tried the same trick with Bulwark, but he was protected in some additional way. They screamed in silent protest, but mostly they couldn’t get through to drain him.
You are lawful prey. Was that it? Had the Red Djinni’s past finally come back around on him? On rare occasion, houngan did call djab, when the target was a murderer, rapist, or some other violent criminal…lawful prey. Maybe Bulwark was “innocent” enough to gain some protection from that alone.
But Djinni clearly was more than they had reckoned with. He hardly seemed to notice the drain. He fought like a berserker, going down under a pile of assailants, then throwing them off and going after them in turn. But the spirits riding them were as fast and as cunning as he was; they might not be able to do much damage to him, but he was having a hard time laying so much as a claw on them.
With a kind of muffled wail, the last of the construct vanished into the mud. Vickie drove the water out of the mud pit, trapping the thing. That was when Jacob Stone, face twisted with fury, finally found his rival mage and locked eyes with her, and she felt the fear rise up in her and choke off her breath. No, not just fear, it was her fears personified, made real and solid, a clutching hand at her throat.
She couldn’t breathe.
Her protections on Bulwark and Djinni failed. Djinni went down under an avalanche of bodies, physical and ghostly. One spirit inside the bubble managed to get enough power to manifest physically for a moment, and used that moment to bring two translucent hands down on Bulwark’s head, knocking him out cold. The bubble failed as he crumpled, and the men who had been struggling to get in through the back now came pouring inside.
Her lungs were burning. She struggled against the fear, the thing that was cutting off her air, and her vision started to fail. Jacob Stone stared triumphantly into her eyes and grinned.
And a spirit materialized out of the back bar and engulfed him. He screamed, the cry of a man who sees his own death coming and is helpless to stop it. The choking hand of fear let Vickie go.
Experience and intuition directed her. Not one, but two…bocor and houngan, and we’re being used…
Operating on instinct alone, she gulped in air, stumbled across the bar and slashed her atheme across the back of the thing that was killing Jacob Stone. She did it in no particular pattern, but the thing howled, and pulled away, leaving Stone half conscious, but still alive.
That was when the Djinni erupted from beneath his pile of assailants with what looked like a two-by-four in his hands. He spun in a furious circle, and a moment later, stood panting, bleeding from dozens of stabs and slashes, his signature shoulder wrappings torn half off, exposing an ugly, strangely wrinkled-and-scarred mass of tissue at his neck. He was battered, but alive, eyes furious.
Staring at the thing that had attacked Jacob Stone.
He could see it!
It must have drained enough life-force from Stone to be able to manifest in the real world. It stared back at him for a moment, then shimmered as all the other spirits in the bar became very, very still. The humans still being ridden dropped to the ground as their riders let go of their “mounts” to lend what must have been their leader additional strength. Whoever this djab answered to, it was not Jacob Stone.
It shimmered again, became amorphous…and then…where the spirit had been, was a woman.
A meta, that much was obvious from the costume. And stunning, absolutely stunning. She had a face that could have graced a magazine cover, and the body of a goddess. Even among metas, who so often seemed to have a heightened physical presence, she was beautiful. The fury drained from Djinni’s eyes in an instant, and he began to tremble, visibly. The lovely woman held out her hands to him, her expression half promise, half pleading. He took a single, stumbling step towards her.
Epiphany whacked Vickie in the face. That’s her. That’s the other Vic. And this woman had to be dead, or the djab could not have assumed her form. There were rules to these things…
Djinni took another step towards the vision, eyes glazing over. Vickie watched as life-force began flowing from him to her. The creature smiled. Will. He has one of the strongest wills I’ve ever seen. Will is magic. As long as he fights her, the djab can’t drain him. But if he gives it to her—
And a red rage took hold of Vickie.
“Get off him, you bitch!” She wanted to scream it, but all she could do was choke it out. She called up every last vestige of magical energy inside her, everything she could gather from the Earth Her Mother, and threw it, not at the creature, but at Red Djinni. “Djinni, you asshat, wake up! Vic is dead and that is not her!” She put all the force of will and power she could into her words, rendering them into an impromptu spell, and punctuated her shriek with a beer bottle that hit him in the shoulder. Then, as the Djinni started back for a moment, some of the dazed look leaving his eyes, she remembered something else.
Salt. Blessed salt. The one universal component for dispersing ghosts. And djab were nothing more than very, very powerful spirits of the dead. She spotted her kit on the floor within reach, mud-spattered but intact. Closer still were the remains of the bar, and despite the mud spatters everywhere, the bowls of bar peanuts and pretzels were within even easier reach. Bar snacks were always heavily salted, to encourage more drinking. She grabbed every bowl she could reach, and chucked them at the powerful djab, which roared a bone-chilling howl. The disruption of its manifestation was palpable, and Vickie used that moment to retrieve her bag. She broke its zipper in a frenzy, and pulled out the stapled paper bag of blessed salt. Tearing that open, she hurled it in an arc, and sprayed the creature with the contents.
It screamed, as did every other spirit in the bar. The form of the lovely metahuman woman melted away and reshaped itself into that of the hideous djab, and it flung itself on Vickie, still very, very much in the physical plane. Once again, she found herself fighting for her life, as the creature slashed at her mail with claws as long and wicked as the Djinni’s. They caught and penetrated the mail, and the links joining the plates gave. The djab ripped a gash in it, slashing the shirt underneath, exposing the mass of hideous burn scars that laced her from neck to toes. She managed to kick it off with a surge of power; it lunged for her again as she looked up at it, rage gone, so terrified she had been reduced to nothing but incoherent whimpers.
Which was when Jacob Stone, with a roar, stood up and called upon the god Ogun to “ride” him. And Vickie blacked out.
* * *
She came to lying on a bed. Not hers, not her hotel room; this room had the preternaturally neat look of one inhabited by—
“—a classic case of leaping before we looked,” said Bulwark in the other room.
“Ah, you are awake.” Jacob Stone had a Jamaican accent, not a New Orleans one. “I told them to leave us alone in here, that you would be fine.”
“Fine is relative,” she croaked. Then she remembered, and her hands clutched frantically at the blankets. “Did anyone see?” she choked out, panic rising to engulf her. “Did anyone—”
“Only me, I think. I served as your nurse.” He patted her hand reassuringly. “I have in my time seen much worse, but my loas told me that you do not wish any eyes to fall on you. So I covered you, I carried you myself, I put you here with my own hands. And here—” he gestured at the hotel bathrobe lying at the foot of the bed. “You can put that on, if you are ready to go to your room. I could not enter it, nor could Bulwark, nor the staff.” He chuckled. “They are most vexed. That is clever work.”
She was going hot and cold with shame. “There was a bocor—”
“Who used us against each other, yes,” said the elder Stone. “Adolphe Le Fevre.” Stone’s long face looked sour. “He has been a thorn in my side since the invasion. He is under the impression that I want what he wants.”
In the other room, Djinni was laughing, as was a stranger. “Tomb, I thought we taught you better. And you believed those jackasses? Why would I telegraph my moves that way?”
“If you had simply waited until you knew we were in the city and put a tail on us, you would have seen we were coming from here,” Bulwark said mildly. “We weren’t trying to hide our movements.”
“Ah well, my brother would say, ‘The guilty man flees where none pursueth.’ ” There was a sigh. “Here I was, tryin’ to stay straight, an’ you show up, Red. An’ people are tellin’ me you’re startin’ up a new gang—”
“Control of this parish?” Vickie hazarded. Stone nodded. “As my brother said, just now. He cannot imagine that I only wish to be left in peace to heal and help those who come to me.” He shook his head. “This is not my city, and I am not needed in Kingston. I can go anywhere. I told my brother as much, so we will both join your Echo. There is a greater enemy to be countered than Le Fevre.” He got up from the chair beside the bed. “There is your kit, there is your computer, and there is what is left of the metal shirt. I think it can be repaired.”
“It can—” She was, once again, too exhausted for a panic attack. All she wanted now was to get herself and her stuff back to her room, cocoon herself in clothing again, and go home.
“Then I will join the others. I think you should too, once you are composed.” He gave her a measured look. “I think it would be courtesy, at least.” He left, closing the door behind him. She pulled her aching body out of the bed, muffled herself in the bathrobe, and grabbed her gear. All four of the men in the other room looked up as she opened the bedroom door.
“When you’re cleaned up, come back here, Op Nagy,” Bulwark said, formal, but friendly. “I’ve got a food delivery coming.”
“Yeah, Tomb told us not to order from the kitchen; it stinks,” the Djinni said.
The other Stone, whom she had barely gotten a glimpse of until now, spread his hands wide. “What can I say? They brought their own cook. To New Orleans? A crime.”
She ducked her head and scuttled off to her room. Once inside, she put down her things and sat on the bed with her face in her hands. Her throat ached, and in fact, she hurt all over, more than the usual ongoing pain; there were taped-up tears through the scars from the djab’s talon slashes, and probably huge bruises under the scars, and the scars hurt and hurt…It was the touch of magic, she realized. She’d been warned about that. She went to the bathroom and slathered on her lotion, defiantly. To hell with them. She hurt, and they could just get over their fricking reflexive reactions to her perfume.
And then, she realized, she was officially off-duty now. It was over. With a feeling of release, she grabbed her meds and swallowed down a pain pill and an antianxiety pill, dry. By the time she was dressed and, she supposed, looking fit to be in company, they had started to work. She rejoined the others. The food had arrived, and for the first time since this had started, she felt like eating.
They had saved a chair for her, placed a little apart from the rest, placed a little in shadow. Whose work had that been? Jacob Stone’s probably. She took the plate he passed over to her, already laden with red beans and rice, crawfish pie, and jambalya, and met his eyes. They were kind eyes. She managed to smile.
“Good job, team,” Bulwark said, raising a glass of beer. “Tom, Jacob, I’m glad we sorted things out. Nagy, I’m going to recommend upgrading you to OpTwo. Good work.”
“OpTwo?” Djinni objected. “Bull, she might not be as useless as I thought, but c’mon…”
Vic, who felt the angry flush in her cheeks once more, thought of any number of retorts but paused instead. The Djinni’s tone, while still snarky and caustic, had softened somewhat. Moreover, something had softened between them, though Vickie couldn’t figure why he would have let up any on her. But as for her…that glimpse of his neck, and of his naked soul when he thought he was looking at a lost love…she couldn’t be angry with him right now. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was because she was too tired, but probably not. If she was hurting, and walking wounded, well, so was he.
“Useful enough to save your sorry ass, Red,” Bulwark observed, and before Djinni could react to that, continued, “If it hadn’t been for that tracing she did, you’d still be hunting.”
Red considered that. “Point.” He turned and gave her the briefest of nods, perhaps the closest thing to an apology he could manage. “Guess you psions have your uses.”
“Magic,” Bulwark corrected. “And she did a good job in the bar too, even if we are going to have to pay for her wrecking it.”
He said nothing about the illusion of the other Vic. So he didn’t know…and if Djinni remembered, he wasn’t saying. Better if he didn’t remember.
“That didn’t go as badly as it could have,” the Djinni muttered. “You might even say we won.”
* * *
“Well, that did not go as well as it could have,” Le Fevre mused aloud. His chief djab was not happy, but it could not deny that it had not done what it had been tasked to do. He had placated it with permitting it to feed on some of those others who had failed him. It would take some time before it undertook any great tasks for him again, but he could make do with lesser spirits.
Meanwhile, the Stones, elder and younger, were leaving. The Echo mage, the only other possible person who could oppose his rise to power here, was leaving. That left the field open to him. Unlike some others of his kind, Le Fevre was not interested in pursuing personal vendettas. There was only so much magic to be used, and why would anyone of sense use it to get revenge instead of power?
So…
“In fact,” he observed to the empty room, “I would say I won.”