Cool Hand (3 page)

THURSDAY

“It’s not funny.”

The more I insisted, the funnier everyone thought it was, until I had to start laughing as well.

There was more than a little hysteria in some of the laughter.

We’d killed the Matlal. Regardless of the fact that they deserved it for what they’d been doing, it wasn’t something to be dismissed and shrugged off.

We’d saved the children, every one of them that’d been alive when we hit the ranch, even the poor kid on the altar.

And we’d taken no casualties, except for one stupid bitch who’d managed to get herself stabbed in the butt with a screwdriver.

Yes, all in all, a success. But all of us would remember the streaks on the altar at the top of the pyramid.

If laughing at me stopped everyone from thinking about that, I’d take the hit.

It was coming up on dawn. We were back at Jen’s house, Manassah. Bian was there. Nick had arrived at the site after I’d been stabbed and then disappeared again without explanation. Tom had stayed at the ranch to supervise the destruction of the site. Elizabetta and the rest of the Altau had taken the children and gone on to Haven.

Their charges included Gerardo, the little rat who’d stabbed me, now doped into submission with strong sedatives.

Turned out I should have listened to Bian. The children had been brainwashed into believing a twisted travesty of the world around them, where only House Matlal were their friends, and suffering was their holy path to redemption. Everywhere else, they were told, other children were being lured into a path of eternal damnation by the temptations of the world. Burgers and video games were the worst things I could have offered Gerardo. Those hoarse words he’d whispered to me—he’d been asking me to kill him to spare him from damnation. And I’d gone and hit every one of his preprogrammed buttons until he’d thought I was the Devil herself.

Those deaths: sacrifice on the altar made them messengers to the gods, guaranteed rebirth as the blessed Matlal Athanate if they went bravely.

Which explained what the children thought was going on. What the hell had the Matlal troops thought they were achieving?

Unfortunately, they were beyond answering now.

Jen was trying to get me to drop my jeans so she could put some antiseptic on the wound.

“Of course it hurts,” I argued. “But I’ll heal. That’s what Athanate do.”

Bian, of course, was also trying to get me to drop my jeans.

“I did say I could kiss it and make it better,” she said, draping herself over a long-suffering David and looking at me with smoky eyes.

“It’ll get better on its own,” I insisted.

“Butt,” she drawled, stretching the word out till everyone was laughing again, “it could get better quicker.”

“At least let’s have a look at it,” Jen said.

“Hell, yeah,” Bian said, earning herself a glare from Jen.

Pia was being no help at all; she was falling around giggling.

“For goodness sake.” Jen grabbed me around the waist from behind. “Alex, give me a hand here.”

Oh! Now that was different. My kin were cooperating.

It surprised me enough that they managed to capture me between them. Alex held my wrists, and I didn’t want to struggle too hard. His own wounds weren’t healed. He’d taken a lot of damage from fighting Noble’s magically-enhanced wolf a couple of days ago. All of which he’d made worse by dragging the corpse the whole way down the mountain.

Kin cooperating instead of arguing…I’d go along with that. It was a start.

While he held me from the front, Jen reached around and opened my jeans, to catcalls and hoots of laughter from everybody else.

“Stop it!” I yelled. No effect.

She pulled the side down, just enough for everyone to see the wound in the middle of my right cheek. Blood had caked in my jeans and panties. It stung as Jen pulled the fabric clear. Of course, now it started bleeding again.

Thanks to my Athanate immune system, infection wasn’t going to get a hold. The tear to skin and muscle would knit together in a couple of days. In a week or so, my body would have completed the repair so you’d never have known I’d been stabbed.

Tonight, however, it hurt.

I didn’t care. Everyone was winding down. That felt great. I decided to surrender to whatever indignities they wanted to heap on me and relaxed against Alex.

Deep
breaths. He smelled so good. Wolf and man.

Kin. Purr.

I gently pulled free of his grip and snaked my arms around him, burying my face in the crook of his neck. His arms went around me in return and held me.

I closed my eyes. It felt so damned good. Even if my head was too screwed up to take any more advantage of him, I could just drown in this feeling.

I stopped caring what they did to me. My eukori reached out and tangled with his. His dark aura seemed to shiver, then lost its shape and flowed over mine.

Together we reached out a little further.

Jen’s eukori was clamped down; she’d had a heated argument with Bian before conceding that Athanate healing would be better than standard medical antiseptics and analgesics.

Bian’s eukori was tight and secret as usual.

The others were open. Not all the House was here, and among the missing was the aching void where Melissa should have been, with her quick, sharp observation—forever silent now. Pia and Alex sensed my sorrow and filled it with their peace and love.

While I nuzzled Alex’s neck, Jen wiped the wound down with a wet cloth and reluctantly let Bian have her way with me.

“The things I do for you, Round-eye.” Bian laughed.

I could smell the bitter-fruit scent of aniatropics, the bio-agents she was producing in her saliva which would help heal me quicker.

Her tongue touched me and I flinched.

“If anyone dares take a photo of this, I’ll have their hide.” My words were muffled against Alex’s neck.

The pain in my buttock eased away. I could sense the aniatropics seeping into the damaged muscle, speeding the process of knitting it back together.

Then the door burst open and Julie stood there.

“Ahhh! Nooo,” she yelled, covering her face. “I can’t ever un-see that.” She was blocking the doorway and turned to speak to someone in the hallway outside. “No! You can’t come in yet,” she said to whoever it was.

Yet another person lining up to witness my humiliation. I tried to care, but I was too comfortable. It felt like I had no bones at all. If Alex hadn’t been holding me up I’d have ended up as a puddle at his feet. I hadn’t felt this relaxed in ages.

“If this is some kind of initiation ritual for House Farrell,” Julie turned back to watch, “I think I just lost my application form.”

I chuckled and reached a little more with my eukori. The combination of relaxing and mingling eukori with Alex’s seemed to boost the range a little. I could feel Jen and Bian. David and Pia. Gary and Leon, Pia’s red-haired kin twins. Julie, happy colors drifting through her. And…

I jerked my jeans back up. My heart went into overdrive.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Bian said.

“I don’t even want to know about that,” Julie said. “But guys, guess who Agent Ingram just dropped off.”

She stepped out of the way and Keith came in, grinning broadly and managing to look a bit shy at the same time.

Keith. Her husband. My ex-boyfriend.

Julie was part of my House. Whether she knew it yet or not, I knew it.

Keith…
Oh, yesss
.

My fangs came out, aching with hunger, and I lunged toward him.

Bian and Pia had me backed up against the wall.

“She’s coming back.”

There was a moment’s confusion, but I knew I had a real problem when I heard them speaking about me instead of to me.

Then I remembered. My guard had been down. Keith had come in and I’d lost it. If it hadn’t been for Bian, I’d have reached him.

Great
way to welcome him.

I squeezed my eyes shut and made sure my jaws were clamped closed. The fangs were gone, but I was still getting the throbbing in my jaw. It felt like anything could set them off again.

I wasn’t fighting now. I wasn’t doing anything but breathing and trying
not
to think of Blood. Which was hard. My body ached for it.

“Amber?”

“Here,” I muttered.

“You’re fine.” Bian was using her Diakon-serious voice. “You’ve had a slip. No big deal.”

“Can’t,” I said. “Can’t bite. Promised Diana. Wait for her. Dangerous.”

“Yeah, and don’t forget, invitation only.”

All of which was a problem.

“What happened?”

That was Jen, her voice sharp with worry.

“She’s passing through crusis. It’s a phase—” Bian began.

“She knows what crusis is,” Pia interrupted. “I’ve explained it to her.”

“Okay. Everyone calm down and back off,” Bian said. She waited. She was putting out pacifics in her pheromones and her voice had the force of command. I could feel the tension dissipate a little. I kept my eyes closed; it felt like it helped. David got the others to sit, and Bian led me to the sofa. Alex and Jen sat on either side of me. More than anything else, that made me feel better. Bian knelt in front of me, still holding my hand.

“You hearing me, Amber?”

“Yeah.”

“Towards the end of a normal crusis, Aspirants get periods of irrationality we call crusis mania. Now, your crusis is all bunched up, unpredictable and—how do I put it—complicated with you being hybrid Were as well.”

I huffed. She wasn’t overstating it. The Were side of me seemed to thrive on letting go and following instinct. The Athanate was all about maintaining control. I was a hybrid that the Athanate told me they’d never seen before. Athanate and Were don’t cross-infuse, yet here I was. I’d successfully changed to wolf and my Athanate fangs had manifested.

Unpredictable? More accurately, they had no idea what I was going to do.

“On top of that, you’re the leader of House Farrell, with an additional set of expectations and urges.”

“Got that,” I muttered.

Pia moved around behind the sofa and her thumbs began to press down into my shoulder muscles, forcing me to loosen up.

“You want to walk me through what happened?” Bian said.

It wasn’t a request. I opened my eyes to look around. Everyone else was gone. It was just my kin, David, Pia and Bian.

“I was feeling great,” I said, “leaning on Alex and just soaking up a good feeling from everyone.”

“You mean literally?” Bian said. “Using eukori?”

I nodded.

“You could reach everyone in the room?”

“Yeah.”

She seemed surprised. “Okay. So, you were all relaxed. Then what happened when Julie and Keith came in?”

“I don’t know exactly. It wasn’t Julie. I just saw Keith and I thought…he’s not House Farrell. He’d be a great addition to the House. Then it felt like a sort of insane jealousy and I had to have him in the House.”

That moment of lost control might cost me Julie. I’d have a hard time convincing Keith to stay now. And that was before I got to start worrying about how Alex was reacting to this.

“Easy,” Pia murmured, sensing my mood and digging the thumbs in even harder. “We excuse people who have lapses when the mania hits. It happens.”

Much as I appreciated the support, Pia was wrong. She meant that Athanate going through crusis in a safe, controlled environment were allowed lapses. I wasn’t in that environment. I had to be out here in the human world, and I couldn’t afford a lapse like that in public.

I
had
to get myself under control.

Alex’s hand slipped onto my thigh and squeezed gently. A little of the tension eased.

“Let me guess,” Bian said. “You two were an item back in the army?”

I nodded miserably.

Alex squeezed again, and Jen took my hand in hers. My kin were upset, but not more than I was with myself. What if that’d happened outside, on the street?

“Okay,” Bian said. “Let’s look forward. We’ve dealt with the last of the Matlal. You’ve reached a compromise of sorts with the pack. Until Basilikos actually does something major, or something else changes, there’s no immediate call on you. Sounds like an opportunity for recovery time.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Jen said.

Yeah, it was. Unfortunately, my paranoia didn’t think this recovery time was going to last more than a couple of hours.

“Just like Alex needed recovery time to heal his wounds,” Bian was continuing, “it’s the same sort of idea with crusis. You need to rest, you need to sleep, to let the brain deal with all the changes that are going on inside you.”

“Amber’s not sleeping well,” Jen said.

“I bet,” Bian snickered.

“No, it’s not that—”

“I’m fine.” I stopped. “I don’t need a lot of sleep.”

“You need it to integrate the changes, Amber,” Pia said.

“And to keep you sharp.”

“I’m fine,” I said again. “Never been better. My reactions are quicker, all my senses are stronger, my body—”

“Really?” Bian dropped my hand and walked across to the door. The others were in the hall outside. Bian grabbed Julie and pulled her back in.

Julie’s face was still pale with anger at the stunt I’d pulled on Keith.

“I’m sorry—” I started to say, but Bian cut me off.

“Deal with that later,” she said. “Julie, Amber reckons she’s operating at peak performance. What do you think?”

“Tell them,” I said. She was quiet. “Julie?”

Her jaw was set in a hard line and her eyes were unflinching.

“Sorry, Boss. Not only what just happened. You’re off your best. A long way off. Second guessing yourself. Erratic.”

“What?” I couldn’t believe it. “Gimme an example.”

“Last night. No way the kid should have caught you like that. Wouldn’t ever have, back in the unit. Not focusing. It’s as if you’re burning out.”

“That’s not fair. He was just a scared kid, and I was distracted by David calling me. And I’d been breathing in that wacky smoke…”

If I kept talking, I might convince myself. I could see the rest of them, however, weren’t buying it. I shut up.

The trouble was, even if they were right, no matter how much I needed a rest, I couldn’t afford it. And I didn’t want to talk about what happened when I tried to sleep.

I was already a dangerous dilemma for House Altau.

Once I’d committed to becoming Athanate, I’d shot through into the final phase of crusis quicker than they believed possible. Athanate could not give birth. The only way to increase numbers was by infusing humans. The process of infusing caused the crusis, which normally lasted months, every Aspirant having to be shepherded through by a skilled Mentor.

If some Athanate variant in me had reduced that period to days, it was an enormous gain for the Athanate. If it reduced the risk of the process failing, it was an even bigger gain.

But now I was also infused with Were.

If I, in turn, infused a human, would they become a hybrid like me or an ordinary Athanate? Would it be quick? Would it be safe?

What if I bit another Athanate? I had to, as House Farrell; all the members of an Athanate House exchanged Blood.

Was this variant Blood I had a huge new opportunity or a dead end?

Diana had said she would run some controlled tests on me. I didn’t trust anyone else to guide me through this, not even Skylur—and certainly not Naryn. Skylur’s newly returned Diakon and I didn’t see eye to eye on—well, anything. Bian and Pia, as skilled as they were, weren’t skilled enough. And Diana had gone missing down in New Mexico, where House Romero might have crossed over from Panethus to Basilikos.

If House Altau couldn’t trust me not to go biting humans, there was one obvious way to deal with it. Lock me up. I’d had enough of that in the army Obs unit, after I was bitten—not to mention my little stint in the psych ward, thanks to Noble.

And Altau didn’t even know the full extent of my problem. In addition to the Athanate and Were, I had a spirit guide, Hana. That made me an Adept as well.

I didn’t know what Athanate thought about hybrid Athanate and Adept. I did know the Adepts’ opinion, which was that this mixture would be as volatile as the rest of it.

Jen and Julie were right. I wasn’t sleeping. I dozed, but every time I sank down toward deep sleep all the monsters in my head came out to play.

I was fifteen when my dad died. He’d been a practical man every bit as much as a great father, and he’d helped me imagine a strongbox in my mind, where I could lock up everything bad that happened to me. Like him dying.

It’d worked from that time on, and I had lots of stuff that went in there. But two years ago, during that night in South America when I was bitten, things had started to happen that didn’t fit so well into the strongbox. That’d been made worse by being used like a magic lightning conductor by Tullah’s dragon spirit guide, Kaothos, when we rescued Jen. And then I’d used Athanate healing powers on Jen without really understanding what I was doing.

All on top of mind tampering that Petersen had used on me when I was being experimented on in the army observation unit, Obs.

If I understood Pia and Bian right, I needed sleep to recover, but now whenever I tried to sleep, the strongbox failed and all my nightmares came out to haunt me.

The rest of the room continued talking, unaware of the circling thoughts in my head.

“So what can we do?” Alex asked. “We’re Amber’s House. That has to count for something. We have to be able to help.”

“You can,” Bian said. She started to count things off on her fingers.

“Biting anyone isn’t a good idea for Amber at the moment. She’s not in control of herself and the sensations would make that worse. So keep Keith away from her, for instance. Anyone who you think might be a good candidate to join the House. Amber would probably agree and Athanate instincts might kick in.”

They were all nodding. I wished they wouldn’t talk as if I wasn’t there.

“Same goes for sex,” Bian said.

“What?” Both Jen and Alex.

“Guys, along with being a really fun thing, sex is important for Athanate. It lights up parts of the mind that bypass controls. Inhibitions get lowered and for new Athanate, there isn’t much distinction between sex and feeding. It could get out of hand real quick.”

Jen and Alex looked shocked, but they didn’t argue.

“Pia, David, if she’s not in bed and asleep,” Bian said, “I want one of you with her at all times. I know you work for Jen now, but you’ll just have to schedule it somehow.”

“This is just a phase, isn’t it?” Jen said. “Diana will come back, and Amber will be all right?”

Bian’s lips pressed together in a thin line. “Diana is the one to fix this,” she said.

Neither Jen nor Alex missed the evasion, but they didn’t say anything.              

What if Diana couldn’t fix me? I’d go rogue or turn Basilikos. Either way, I’d made Diana swear to kill me if I did.

The rest of them looked at each other and nodded again. It was like a club I was excluded from.

“Okay, I—”

Bian’s cell bleeped at her and she frowned at a message on the screen.

“It’s Gray,” she said to me. “He wants to meet both of us as soon as we can. I guess that’s going to be when we’re done with Naryn.”

“Naryn?” I said.

She sighed. “Look, even though crusis mania isn’t unusual, we still have to report any incidents. And the pair of you need a meeting to clear the air anyway.”

Great. I wouldn’t have minded Skylur knowing about the mania, and I only wished Diana was here for me to tell. But Naryn would love to have an excuse to lock me up, and/or disband House Farrell. Bian read my face. My relationship with Naryn—or lack thereof—was no secret. “Give me a couple of hours with him first,” she said. “You rest. Chill. When I call, have Pia bring you out to Haven. If you’re still in one piece after Naryn’s finished with you, we can go together and see what Nick wants.”