Chains and Memory (29 page)

He was supposed to be keeping an eye out, but things kept distracting him. First Neeya, then a woman who reminded him of the one with the petition outside the Metro, albeit younger. “Excuse me,” she said—adding, after a moment of uncertainty, “Mr. Fiain.”

“Yes?” Julian asked, wondering if she was going to ask when the speeches would start or anything else in that vein. A number of people had already mistaken him for staff, apparently assuming the wilders were all here to support the sidhe and their cause.

“I saw that interview the other day,” the woman said. “The one with that girl, Kim? Is what she said true—about the shield?”

Were other Fiain getting this question? Probably. If he'd thought about it, he would have suggested they put together some kind of informational pamphlet to hand out, or a packet he could send from his port to anyone who was interested. As it was, he had to field her questions on the fly, torn between the chance to recruit support and the need to do his duty. Yes, the deep shield was unpleasant. Yes, he would like to see it replaced by something better. Yes, if she'd like to write to her senator and representative, that might help. He escaped with a feeling of relief.

Which vanished an instant later, when a wisp of contact brushed his mind. Nothing so solid as a thought, but even a trace was enough to make the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

It was one of the sidhe. And it was coming from the west, near the bank of the Potomac.

He didn't want to draw attention to the spot, but he wasn't foolish enough to head that way without alerting anyone.
Possible disturbance near the Ted Kennedy Memorial,
he sent to Carvalho, the unit captain for his area.
I'm going to check it out.

Acknowledged,
Carvalho sent back.
Re-check in five minutes, or I'll dispatch support.

It took him most of the five minutes to get there, but near the memorial, the crowds thinned out abruptly. There seemed no reason for them to be avoiding the area, until Julian saw something flicker. Movement . . . in the stone pedestal beneath the president who had guided the U.S. through First Manifestation.

Green eyes, blinking in the midst of marble. Then a mind, touching his on a band so tightly shielded, Julian didn't think even one of the sidhe could have maintained it beyond line of sight.

Listen carefully,
Falcon said.

With sunglasses on and my hair down from its usual ponytail, I looked sufficiently unlike the golden-eyed wilder who'd appeared on Artemis Chang's show that I could move through the crowd mostly unrecognized. One teenaged girl who stopped to talk to me figured out my identity partway through the conversation, but I was able to escape before she advertised that fact to the entire world.

It was still enough to make me question the Corps' decision to put me in the field. Would one more body on the streets really make a difference? The crowd wasn't as huge as it might have been—I suspected the White House had announced the Seelie visit on short notice precisely to keep half the country from showing up—but it was still impressive, with thousands of people milling around the western end of the National Mall. A stage had been constructed in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and currently a Wiccan priestess was reciting some kind of opening prayer, but where I stood, on the northern bank of the Constitution Gardens Pond, the atmosphere was more like a county fair. People chatted excitedly with one another, or engaged in magical displays that had me twitching. Every time a pyrokinetic set off a burst of light in the air, I wondered for an instant whether it was a bomb.

Even if it were, it probably wouldn't do much harm. We'd warded this place to hell and gone against fire and other such threats, and had teams of empaths ready to intervene if the mood got too rowdy. The trick was to spot those things before they grew beyond anybody's ability to control them.

I wasn't likely to be the one to see it coming. I knew I ought to be centering myself, putting myself in a light precognitive trance. I was good at that kind of thing, and it might give us a few more seconds of warning. But my thoughts were scattered all over the map.

The search for a shield replacement consumed half of my waking thoughts and all of my sleeping ones, except when I was actively working on something else. I was haunted by a message Michele had dug out of the dedicated account, from a woman who said she'd given birth to a wilder fifteen years ago. She pointed out that the pregnancy was normal—no psychic disturbances to warn her. So either the activation of a wilder's gifts was triggered by separation from the mother, or the mother's own abilities naturally suppressed those of her child until then. Both interpretations offered hope. What nature made happen, we could surely replicate on our own. If we just
tried
.

And underneath that, something else. A scab I couldn't stop picking at, even though it hurt, even though all it could do was make me bleed.

The deep shield.

Why?
Why did removing it kill the wilder? I couldn't believe the answer was “carelessness.” They knew how difficult it was to install; if they didn't care enough to be cautious in removing it, they wouldn't have tried in the first place. Which meant that even extreme caution wasn't good enough. What happened when they tried, that made it so lethal?

Maybe it changed after the initial placement. Maybe it sent out tendrils, threading itself through the psyche, growing like a cancer . . .

I didn't buy it. The shield wasn't a cancer or a bloody starfish. Even if it
did
grow, you could cut off the tendrils to get the main structure out; the shield wouldn't grow back or metastasize or anything like that. Besides, Julian had made precisely one comment on it after we left FAR, before lapsing into silence: “I saw it, Kim. The anchor was right there in front of me.”

The shield had an anchor point. That matched what I'd gleaned from my research and Liesel's. But what was it? What could be so vital to life, it killed someone if you broke it?

I stopped dead on the path, so abruptly that someone slammed into me. I didn't even hear what he said; I was staring straight ahead, at a guy selling bottles of water, until my vision started to swim and I realized I'd forgotten to breathe.

The instant air returned, my thoughts flew outward, seeking a mind I knew almost as well as my own.

Julian. It's the
geas
. The shield is anchored to the
geas
.

~

Kim's message hit him a split second after Falcon's, and it rooted Julian to the spot.

The
geas
. The magical compulsion laid on the human-sidhe crossbreeds by the Seelie, before the two worlds parted. That was what he had seen in Kim's spirit, the anchor at the heart of the deep shield.

In legend, breaking a
geas
was fatal.

He didn't care that he was standing rock-still, staring at the base of a statue like he'd lost his mind. At the moment, nothing mattered but Falcon's presence, and Kim's revelation of the truth.

You knew.

With telepathic contact this close, Falcon couldn't possibly miss his meaning. The sidhe said,
That is not my purpose here.

I don't give an iron damn,
Julian shot back.
You knew, and you didn't tell us. Did you see it in me, after you rescued me from the Unseelie? The
geas
, and the deep shield built on it?

That doesn't matter.

Like hell it doesn't!
He didn't want to restrain his anger; he wanted to rip apart the glamour concealing Falcon at the base of the statue, all but his Seelie-green eyes. Duty stopped him. That might well provoke exactly the sort of incident he was supposed to prevent.

Thinking that recalled him to where he was, and what he was doing. Julian swore under his breath and reached for Carvalho again, hoping he wasn't too late.
Reinforcements not needed.

I was just about to send them. Notify if the situation changes.

Falcon said,
You are wrong. You
will
need reinforcements.

Right then, Julian would have laid money that Falcon would need backup, not him.
Take it off,
he said, throwing the thought like a punch.
Remove the
geas
. We don't need it anymore; the world isn't going to forget about magic again. And we'll defend the rest of them. We don't have to be compelled into it. Remove the
geas
, and the shield will go with it. We'll be free.

He could feel the snarl on Falcon's face, even if he couldn't see it. The sidhe were capable of something like anger—but not compassion.
Do you think my refusal was simply because of your ignorance? The
geas
and this shield of yours are a necessary defense against the Unseelie. Against being
used
, as you feared before.

We have other defenses! And what if the Unseelie learn how to trigger the shield? It isn't a wall to protect me — it's a knife at my throat.

Julian stopped, not because he was done, but because he couldn't go on. Falcon had him in an adamantine grip: his body, his mind. He was a mouse, caught in the talons of the sidhe's namesake.
This
was the source of his own gifts; this was the true thing, of which he was merely a bad copy, just talented enough to be vulnerable. Even a single sidhe was more than the most powerful wilder could hope to face down.

That isn't true.
The denial slipped free of Falcon's grasp. Kim had fought a sidhe in Talman Library and survived, even unprepared, untrained. At the time, she was just an ordinary blood. Robert picked a fight with another one and lived to tell the tale. And even if Falcon was more powerful, even if most of Julian's gifts were dwarfed by the sidhe's, he had a weapon none of Falcon's kind could not withstand.

Panic wouldn't do it. The animal terror that lived deep in his mind, lashing out at anything that tried to chain him, could not break Falcon's grip. Instead he thought of Kim.

She would be waiting for his answer. He focused on that, on
her
. The blazing hope that had accompanied her telepathic message, the
joy
, realizing that she had solved the riddle. The agony he felt when they gutted her, and his determination to set her free — her, Neeya, himself, all the Fiain who walked the world and would come after they were gone.

It burned within him like fire, and Falcon's control fell away.

The sidhe stepped forward, out of the concealing glamour, heedless of who might see him. One pale hand was raised in a warding gesture. “You fool,” he growled, biting the words off. “This is not the time for us to quarrel.
Look!
Even now, your enemies take the stage!”

Julian didn't want to look, didn't want to drop the momentary advantage he'd gained. But he could not ignore Falcon's words, and so he turned, looking down the path that led to the Lincoln Memorial, and the stage there.

Five sidhe were on the platform, and the priestess at the microphone had fallen silent. At this distance, Julian could not see their eyes—but he didn't have to.

“I came to warn you,” Falcon said. “But you would not listen.”

~

I'd expected some kind of reply from Julian: skepticism, curiosity, the fierce and single-minded force he directed against his lifelong foe.

All I got was the awareness that he'd heard me—and then his attention went somewhere else.

Almost
all. I could tell he was over by the Ted Kennedy statue, which made no sense at all. We'd each been given an area to monitor, and his was around the D.C. War Memorial. Why was he on the far side of the Korean War Memorial?

I wanted to go look, but that would mean abandoning my own area. I cursed under my breath, wishing I'd insisted the two of us to be stationed together. When I tried to reach for him again, I bounced off. He was holding a tightly shielded conversation, and had no attention to spare for anything else.

Had he alerted his captain? I assumed so; Julian breathed this kind of procedure, much more than I did. But I didn't like the feel of—

No. It wasn't Julian's situation that had me on edge. That was my precognitive gift, trying to get my attention, but I was a gods-damned idiot, distracted by my own issues, and didn't pay attention until too late.

Silence fell over the crowd, rippling outward from the stage. Five figures were climbing the platform, and even from a thousand feet away, I recognized them as sidhe. The priestess stared at them as if she didn't know whether to bow or not. She faded back, offering them the microphone with one faltering gesture, but they ignored her and the device both. When their leader spoke, her voice carried by magic from the stage to the Washington Monument.

“Men and women of the mortal world,” she said, “we come to you from the Unseelie Court, to tell you that you have been lied to.”

Even the sounds of the outside world faded away: traffic, the wind, the rival march being held farther down the Mall. The entire crowd seemed to be holding its breath, every pair of eyes riveted on the stage.

“You have been told that the Seelie Court are your friends,” the Unseelie woman said. “And you have been told that we are your enemy. I am not here to tell you that we are your true friends. We are not. We care little for you, and will not pretend otherwise. But the care you believe you have seen from the Seelie is nothing more than a pretense.”

Her calm, level voice was mesmerizing, magnetic—and
wrong
. I shook my head abruptly, teeth clenching so hard my jaw ached. It was a telepathic effect, an entrancement designed to hold everyone's attention, keep them still while the Unseelie woman talked. For a moment there, it had even ensnared
me
.

But I might well be the last person in the world they could hold for long. I hated them too much.

A swift glance around showed me restlessness in a few places. Those were likely people who felt strongly about the Unseelie one way or another; some of the marchers were fans of
all
sidhe, while others wanted a formal alliance declared with the Seelie for war against the other Court. The rest gazed wide-eyed, obedient to the call. The net had even caught our defenses. My unit captain was staring at the stage, brow slightly furrowed, but not acting—not yet. Some of the mundane police exchanged frowns; those were probably baselines, harder to affect than the psychics. But at this moment, nobody seemed to know what to do.