Cool Hand (14 page)

“I can understand Alexander, of course,” he said. There was pain in his words. I wanted to make that pain stop. I wanted to say that I would turn Ursula away, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I bit my cheek to stop myself from speaking and tasted blood in my mouth.

“I can understand Olivia, if indeed you can offer her something I cannot. Because of Olivia, Ricky is torn. I can understand that, too. But Ursula? She’s doing what I tell her, but I can feel her drifting away, more and more every day.” He spoke quietly, almost softly. “What have you done? How have you seduced her away from me?”

I was panting with effort, sweat beading on my brow. There’d been no words, but I had promised Ursula. A promise that I wouldn’t break.

“I. Won’t. Say.”

It was painful. Painful to remain sitting, painful not to tell him, painful not to throw myself at his feet and ask forgiveness.

The old-fashioned telephone on his desk rang.

For a second he let it ring. I knew the exact moment his attention turned away from me; the gorilla got off my chest.

“What?” he snarled.

He hadn’t been expecting a call, clearly.

“I’ll be outside,” I said, my voice wavering.

I staggered on legs that felt like I’d run a marathon. At the door, I managed to glance back. His brow was furrowed and his fist gripped the phone tightly. He ignored me and I slipped out.

I didn’t want to eavesdrop on his call. It was polite for me to take myself out of the room.

I could tell myself those lies all afternoon.

The fight had gone out of me.

I made it to the porch and collapsed on the steps like a broken doll.

I was so tired. Not just from struggling with Felix’s dominance, or the constant stress of keeping my Were and Athanate under control. I couldn’t sleep without my personal nightmares exploding out of my head, and hadn’t been able to do better than doze for a week now. I was working purely by being hyped up, and when the adrenaline ran out, so did all my strength.

I’d fought against becoming Athanate before I’d met the Altau. But difficult though that meeting with Skylur had been, it’d given me a glimpse of hope and purpose to my life. The physical advantages, the heightened senses, the sheer possibilities had swept doubts away, even when everything had become so much harder and darker.

And now I was doubting my decision again.

Every turn seemed like a trap, every decision wrong, and more than wrong. Every decision had the potential for fatal consequences, not just for me, but for all those I cared about as well.

Skylur out of contact. Diana missing. Naryn unheeding. Bian mistaken about Jaworski. Things going on that I had no knowledge of, which affected what decisions I could make.

And hanging over all of it, the lowering clouds of Emergence. The whole world could get torn apart in a struggle between paranormals and humanity, Athanate and Were, Basilikos and Panethus, if a single misstep was made.

I was nothing. I had no great power to influence the way Emergence went in any positive direction. Unfortunately, I could sure turn it negative.

I was just a pawn between Skylur and Felix, both so much more powerful than I that I could barely hold myself together in their presence unless they were being kind to me.

Skylur wasn’t around. So the siren call in my head was to go back inside and throw myself at Felix’s feet. Beg for his dominance, beg him on my knees, let his dominance roll over me and take all those decisions away. Give him all my problems and I would be free. And a slave too, of course.

A slave. But if I couldn’t make a decision, then I couldn’t make a wrong decision, could I?

Something whispered in my ear that complete surrender would also be the safe route to take against going rogue. I frowned. Was that right? Struggling to be me was the weakness that the disease of insanity would exploit?

If it was, then mindless obedience would be better than rogue, wouldn’t it?

I wrapped my arms around my knees and dropped my head onto them, a fog of despair welling up inside me.

It’d been a long time since I’d felt this kind of bleakness.

Ops 4-10 had taught me to trust my training and my instincts when there wasn’t time to think my way around a problem. Top had taught me one more important guide I could use: my sense of morals.

But I didn’t have the information and the clear brain I needed to think my way around paranormal problems. Not all the instincts that the army had taught me were the right instincts to deal with Athanate, Were and Adept. And as for my moral compass—well, things seemed right to me now that wouldn’t have back then. How could I trust myself?

Skylur and Naryn thought Diana might still be on a mission.

My instincts said she wasn’t, and Bian agreed with me.

What was I basing it on? That she’d seemed reluctant to go? That I felt she’d be in touch as soon as she could? If not with me, then with Bian. But how could I trust my instincts after knowing her such a short time?

I couldn’t change my mind about Naryn. He was wrong about Diana. I didn’t care that he and Skylur had worked together for hundreds of years. He was a good Diakon, but that didn’t mean he was a good leader.

In the meantime, Felix didn’t want me to go, but he wasn’t my immediate alpha. Could I argue that? Were didn’t like those sort of quibbles.

If I went and brought Diana back, it would be worth it. I’d handle all the fallout.

If I was wrong or I failed in any way, I would make things worse. Hundreds of things could go wrong. Bian would be in more trouble. I might sabotage Diana’s effort to get Romero back into the Panethus camp. Or New Mexico was full of hostile Were and Basilikos Athanate and I could start an all-out war, causing the discovery of the paranormal and the resultant apocalypse.

I couldn’t move in any direction. It was like being hog-tied.

A familiar engine noise caught my attention and I looked up. David wasn’t here, and there was no sign of the pink Merc, Ursula’s van, or Evans’ truck. The whole ranch felt empty again. Duane and Martha were probably busy with the dead man up on the hill.

I wondered idly if they’d bury him where he fell, or take his body down to the fertilizer factories they ran for just that purpose.

A vehicle came into sight. The engine I’d heard belonged to the Hill Bitch, the monstrous Jeep I’d borrowed from Altau, and Tullah drove it right up to the porch.

She opened the door and leaped out.

What’s the rush? No point in any of it.

She hadn’t gotten that message. “Come on,” she said. She grabbed me by the arm and hauled me to my feet.

“What?”

“No time,” she snapped and started to pull me to the car.

Her eyes were red. She’d been crying.

Problems with her boyfriend, Matt?

More shit I can’t deal with.

I loathed myself as soon as I thought that.

I pulled back and pointed vaguely at the ranch. “Felix,” I said. I couldn’t seem to string a sentence together. Everything was catching up to me, and I couldn’t think. How could I handle everything coming at me, if I couldn’t think? In Ops training, we’d learned techniques for coping with compromised cognitive abilities from torture, sleep deprivation or drugs. Somehow, none of those techniques were working for me.

“Felix is being handled,” Tullah said. “Come on.”

The car door was open and she was pushing me into the passenger seat.

“Got to talk to Felix,” I insisted. “He wants me to go talk to Mary. Rituals. I should be in New Mexico, but I can’t go. Everyone says so.”

“Yes, Boss,” she said in the tone you use to placate children, as she fastened my seat belt.

She slammed the door and ran back to the driver’s side.

There was my Mossberg shotgun mounted on the rack at the back of the cab. I didn’t remember putting that there. Now I was losing track of my weapons. Not good. Something was stacked in the flatbed under a polythene sheet. There were bags on the back seat.

“What’s happening?” The adrenaline started to clear the fog in my brain. The Hill Bitch growled back down the slope and through the gate. “What the hell’s going on?”

Tullah bit her lip and gunned the engine. The Hill Bitch fishtailed on the gravel, shook herself like a gun dog, and took off down the road. To the right.

“Wrong way,” I said, and pointed back to Denver.

She shook her head, turning to look at me. “I’m sorry, Boss,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

I tried to struggle back to full alertness, but it was too late. I realized Kaothos had already snuck up on me and the bitch had her claws deep in my head.

The lights went out.

The late afternoon sun warmed my face.

I couldn’t say it woke me, because I hadn’t been asleep so much as unconscious.

I could hear children playing nearby, which reassured me. I sensed Tullah close to me, and Mary. And Kaothos, lurking. They knew I was conscious; one of the problems of being kidnapped by paranormals.

“I hope the three of you understand I’m really pissed,” I said without opening my eyes. For some reason I was wearing someone’s sunglasses and a Stetson. And my patched-up stockman’s coat with the collar turned up, as if to keep the wind off my neck. I had to look like a convalescent cowgirl just out of the hospital.

“You needed a rest.” Tullah’s voice was defensive.

“A rest? You can call it arrest, but you’re not police, so it’s abduction.”

It felt
good
to indulge my petulant inner child.

Somewhere in my head, there was a hissing, like rain on fresh, smoking tarmac. Dragon laughter. One of these days I was going to find some sneaky power that I could use to creep up on Kaothos and knock her out. See how she liked it.

Sweet of her to get my jokes, though.

“If you’re quite finished, do you want to talk now, or should Kaothos just knock you out again?” Mary had her no-nonsense voice going today.

I opened my eyes.

No nonsense, and layers of underlying tension, even fear. Jokes aside, there was something very wrong for them to behave like this.

My senses automatically expanded, searching for threats. I sneezed. There was a bouquet of flowering plants on the park bench next to me—a mix of purple and blue: wisteria, fireweed and hyacinth. The blended smells sent my nose into overdrive—honey, burnt cork, berry and lemon. Mary had been smoking, too; there was a tang of tobacco lingering.

But, apart from the assault on my wolfy nose, there was nothing to concern us.

We were in a city park. Groups of children and parents played snowball games or chased each other across the white fields. Traffic passed on a highway not far away.

It wasn’t a Denver park. A glance at the sun and I figured I’d been out for less than an hour.

“So what are we doing in Colorado Springs?”

Tullah gave a little smile. Mary snorted.

“Breaking up
your
logjam,” Mary said, staring at me with her head back in an almost arrogant pose. Her hair was caught up in a headscarf and she was hiding behind huge Jackie O sunglasses.

Tullah glared at her. “It’s
not
that, Ma. We don’t have time to argue.”

I cleared my throat. “Any time now. In little words, and plain sentences, so I can understand.”

It wasn’t Mary who started.

“You remember Ken Weaver?” Tullah asked.

He’d really done something to upset her; Tullah’s anger was boiling out of her.

Ken Weaver was an Adept in the Denver community, quite senior as far as I knew. I’d met him when I visited Mary and Liu at the Kwan. It was a big step for an Adept like Weaver to make. Adepts regarded all Athanate as evil, only allowing that they might not start off that way. Older Athanate and Basilikos? The spawn of hell. No exceptions. Only Mary and Liu had accepted I might not be completely evil.

Weaver had taken one look at me and declared me Basilikos.

The problem was that, in curing Jen after she’d endured a day of torture and rape, I’d tried to fix too much. Unsure of my Athanate powers, I’d gone past the bodily injuries and pulled all the emotions of the day out of her head. That meant they ended up in mine.

I wasn’t sorry. It might even have been the element of healing that was necessary for Jen.

Unfortunately, it was a disaster for me. Quite apart from blowing my own mental fuses, it was making me more likely to go rogue through either the Were or Athanate side. And Weaver had been right in a way; it did make me look more like Basilikos—as if I’d been feeding on fear.

Had it given me a taste for it? I suppressed a nervous shudder.

“Yeah. I remember him,” I said.

“He’s taken over as head of the community.”

“And this is not good news?” I was getting antsy. I really didn’t want to get involved in Adept politics and I didn’t see why I’d needed to be kidnapped to be told this.

“Not for us and not for you,” Mary snapped.

I’d never seen her quite like this. Angry, but not necessarily at me. More the sort of unfocused anger of a proud woman forced to act. I knew Mary had been the head of the community and had lost that position for daring to be associated with me as an Athanate. ’Cos of the ‘all Athanate are evil’ thing.

Again, it was Tullah who took over.             

“Amber, we have to be back on the road in ten minutes. Just listen, please.”

I caught the demon as it was about to point out I was listening, but all I’d heard was them dancing around something they didn’t want to say.

“Weaver’s used his position as the community head to start an investigation on Ma and Pa and me.”

“What for?” I couldn’t help interrupting.

“Those ex-special forces guys, what do you call them, Nagas? When they attacked the Kwan, Ma and Pa killed them.”

No complaints from me.

“Weaver’s within his rights. Any lethal use of the energy by Adepts has to be sanctioned. Of course there wasn’t time, and under normal circumstances the council would just retrospectively agree. The problem is the way he’s acting before calling the council to debate it. We think—”

“Hold on a second,” I interrupted. “What about Longmont? Kaothos and you blew up a whole factory full of Matlal and ZK.”

Mary and Tullah looked at each other.

“Longmont’s being blamed on the Athanate,” Tullah said. “Everyone felt it, but no one recognized the signature of the working and they all made assumptions about Alice Emerson. We haven’t set them straight, but we’re pretty sure Weaver knows the truth because…”

Her voice died away and Mary took over again.

“Because he did call a council, but that was to have them put a lock on Tullah. The excuse he used was that she is coming under proscribed influences. They never liked the idea of Adepts like Emerson working with the Athanate, and now they have ‘proof’ that Emerson uses lethal and indiscriminate force.”

A lock. That meant a working of the energy on Tullah to prevent her from using her own power. No wonder she was so upset.

I got up and gave her a hug, scant comfort though it was.

“I’m sorry, Tullah,” I said.

“They can’t find out about Kaothos yet,” Tullah said, blinking back tears, “so I couldn’t fight it. They wouldn’t understand her.”

“I’m sure Weaver knows, and he understands perfectly well,” Mary said. “One aspect anyway. He wants to get Kaothos’ power under his control. To do that he’ll make up anything about you, Amber, as an Athanate, and link it all in with Noble and Gray.”

“We killed Noble,” I pointed out. “But you’ve got a problem with Nick?”

“I didn’t have a particular problem with Gray, certainly not once I met him,” Mary said. “But again, Weaver is technically correct. Skinwalkers are proscribed because of their use of energy.”

“But he’s just another Were. All Were use the energy to change.”

“The Were use it in a minor, fixed way. It’s purely instinctive. A skinwalker uses energy consciously and has to grow his capacity and knowledge with each new shape he chooses. If there’s an Adept law greater than the one about not using the energy to kill, it’s the one stating that only Adepts trained by a community and working within a community can use major workings of the energy.”

That sounded like legal bullshit to me, but I kept my mouth shut.

Tullah sighed. “The council have issued an order that Emerson, you and Nick all need to be brought before them. Teams of Adepts are out looking now.”

“We need to warn—” I started, but Tullah grabbed my arm.

“All done, Amber. We got the whole House together while you were busy. Nick’s gone back to ground. Everyone is aware. We even sent messages to Naryn and Felix about what was happening. Alice has been sent to New York by Naryn. She called in while she was on her way to the airport. David made sure she got on her flight.”

My head was spinning.

“Felix…he wanted me to go to the Adepts and learn about any ritual that could help the pack. That’s not going to happen…” I stopped, and thought a step beyond that. How would Skylur or Felix react if the Adepts imprisoned me? “Hold on, Weaver’s practically declaring war on the Athanate and Were! He’s insane.”

“You’re getting the picture,” Mary said. “Weaver doesn’t think it’ll come to that. He’s stupid but he’s sly. He’s got the council so worked up about everything, they’re actually not thinking any of it through. We need time for them to come back to their senses, or something dramatic to happen—short of declaring war—to wake them up.”

“We can’t let them get hold of you, Amber,” Tullah said. “They know about the hybrid Athanate and Were, which is bad enough. We can’t let them know you’re also an Adept.”

“Until we’re ready and can show you’re trained,” Mary said. “And they can’t get hold of Tullah and give her a good examination either, because of Kaothos.”

“Until we’re ready, again,” Tullah said. “So your House has come up with a plan. We need to go away and find Diana.”

“My House—” They ignored me and kept speaking.

“And train you in safe use of the energy.”

“And find out about rituals to help the Were change.”

“And form a community.”

My head was going back and forth like I was watching a tennis match.

“Jen and Alex said they’ll have to stay in Denver,” Tullah said. “It’d be too obvious if they left. So, you’ll be away from some of the temptations of biting. If you need it, Jen will organize transfusions at a private clinic in New Mexico. Alice told us transfusions can work for a while to delay the need for Blood. We’ve all agreed this is the best plan.”

My House is railroading me. In a good way, I guess.

But going into New Mexico with only Tullah as backup, and her unable to use Kaothos?

Then again, maybe the low profile would actually work in my favor…

Or had my House caught my erratic decision-making from me?

“There’s another thing,” Tullah said. “Bian sent us a message through Alice.”

“Naryn will think you’re at Coykuti. Felix will think you’re at Haven or at the Kwan.”

“Kaothos will be there to help you. Nothing major, but sleep and so on.”

Knocking me out would be more accurate.

“Victor’s taking over the PI business temporarily, and Jofranka will just work the front office while we’re away.”

“Stop,” I said. “Stop. Look, some great ideas here, but there are a whole bunch of things you haven’t thought through.
I
need to go down to New Mexico, yes, but both Naryn and Felix have told me just today how dangerous it is, and forbidden me to go anywhere near New Mexico. They’re serious about the danger; Tullah coming along is not an option.”

Mary stood up. “We don’t have time to argue, Amber. Weaver will be alert. Whatever I do, I can’t completely mask my signature in the energy, so if we stay here any longer, someone may turn up. I’m in enough trouble as it is. Now, you need Tullah to help find out about the rituals, and you need Kaothos because otherwise you can’t rest. Can’t have one without the other. And you and Tullah searching for Diana will be better than you alone. It’ll be less dangerous for both of you than staying in Denver.”

Tullah pulled me up with her and started dragging me back to the car.

“I’ll explain more later,” she said. “But we’re only doing what you’ve taught me. When it’s impossible to do everything, we should do the things we can that make the most difference. Find Diana. Get Larry’s kin to safety. Find out if there is anything in the Spirit Dance rituals we’ve heard about that will help the Were. And so on.”

“What exactly have you heard about rituals?”

“There’s an old Adept in New Mexico, Chatima, one of the last shaman-Adepts, like your great-grandmother. She lives down near Albuquerque and we’ve passed a couple of messages back and forth with her about the Spirit Dance. We think she’ll help.”

“Keep away from the other Adepts in New Mexico,” Mary said. “I don’t like the sound of them. There’s a…brazenness about them that isn’t healthy. Tullah will need to explain about shaman-Adepts, too.”

Mary had brought the pungent bouquet from the bench and she pinned it on me, then passed her fingers through the flowers.

My skin prickled; she was doing a working.

“That will work for a couple of days. They’ll help confuse the Weres’ sense of smell. The Athanate will still feel your marque,” she tapped the side of my head, “but that’s not so directional.
Don’t
try channeling any energy. Adepts will spot that right away.”

My head was still spinning. I was going to have to trust them on the planning for this.