Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3 (16 page)

Mitch and Jones were still at their table, though Janie had disappeared, presumably heading back to work, and Lewis’s steps slowed. He hated going back with nothing, and he glanced again at the Western Union office. In the magazines, guys were always digging telegrams and half-finished messages out of the trash, but he couldn’t see himself getting away with that. Maybe it was time to try this seeing thing again. It had worked before. He rested his shoulder against one of the arches, let his eyes cross just a little, trying to picture what had happened the day before, what the redhead had seen. He felt his breath slow, the engine noise receding, caught a glimpse of — yes, Davenport at the counter, passing two slips to the clerk. And then the image was gone, and he swayed, dizzy, before he caught his balance. He pressed his hand hard against the concrete of the arch. If he was going to try this, it was probably time he asked Alma to teach him properly….

“I know what you are doing,” a woman’s voice said, in Spanish.

He looked up, startled, and an older woman in a maid’s uniform locked eyes with him.

“You should know better.” She had one hand in the pocket of her apron, and he knew she grasped her rosary.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in the Spanish of his childhood, and her eyebrows rose.

“Then you most certainly should know better —”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “But it’s important, señora, I promise. I’m trying to prevent harm. A grave evil.”

He wasn’t entirely sure where those words had come from, but they seemed right. The woman regarded him a moment longer, then nodded, slipping her hand out of her pocket. “What do you seek?”

“A — man,” Lewis said, with just enough hesitation that he thought she understood. “Older than I by some years, gray at the temples. A well-dressed man, I think, and traveling alone. I need very much to find him.”

She was silent for a moment. “There was such a one yesterday. I clean the offices here, you understand, and I was at the telegraph when he came in. A dark one, that, so I made myself very small. But he was here, and he sent two telegrams — which I think you saw? But I do not think he took an airplane.”

“Thank you,” Lewis said. Impulsively, he caught her hand, squeezed it gently. “Thank you very much.”

She colored, and for an instant Lewis saw the girl she had been, young and slim and bright-eyed. “Be very careful, my son,” she said, and turned away.

Lewis made his way back to join the others, knowing from their expressions that their luck hadn’t been much better. At Mitch’s nod, he pulled out a chair and joined them.

“Any luck?”

“Just with Janie,” Jones said, with a grin that didn’t reach his eyes, and Mitch sighed.

“He didn’t buy a ticket under his own name. He might have been using someone else’s, or he might have hitched a ride off the books, of course.”

“I don’t think so,” Lewis said. “I asked around the hangar. Nobody there had carried anybody like that. He was here, though, and sent a couple of telegrams.”

“How the hell did you find that out?” Jones demanded.

“I found somebody who saw him,” Lewis said. “So I don’t have any idea who it was to, or anything like that.”

“That’s not much,” Mitch said, and sighed. “Jerry said he lived in Glendale, this is probably the closest Western Union office.”

“Yeah.” Lewis rested his elbows on the table, glad to be off his feet. “Ok, now what?”

“Back to the hotel,” Mitch said. “And hope Al and Jerry turned up something better.”

Chapter Ten

A
lma and Jerry didn’t talk much on the way to Henry’s house. There wasn’t really a conversation she wanted to have in front of the cabbie. Everything she could think of would end with “Don’t you think Gil would have said that it is our problem?”

Of course Gil would have. He would have considered it work put before them, a mess that had landed on their doorstep, and hence their problem. If you sign up to save the world, it isn’t always exactly convenient. You do the work that is set before you. That’s the company plan.

She’d been lazy since Gil died, lazy and demoralized. That wouldn’t do in the long run. They had to get back up on the horse and try again. If that’s what Jerry was doing, she ought to back him up, not provide an impediment. After all, she expected as much from him.

It was with that in mind that she got out of the car in Henry’s drive, the houseboy coming down to hold the door for her and then for Jerry in turn. Miss Patterson was nowhere in evidence, and Henry came to meet them just inside the door himself.

“About last night,” Jerry began.

Henry cut him off, leading them at a quick pace toward his office. “It’s all settled. I’ve sent a man to Union Station to check on outbound trains, but of course it’s too much to expect that Davenport would still be hanging around the station. He’s had hours, and it’s a busy terminal. Hell, he may have even left yesterday.”

Jerry’s jaw clenched, and not entirely from stumping down the hall at Henry’s pace, so Alma forestalled him. “Yes, we’d thought of that. We’ve sent Mitch and Lewis to Grand Central.”

“Oh, good.” Henry looked pleasantly surprised as he rounded his desk, and Alma shut the office door behind them as Jerry sank into the chair. “They’ll be able to get more out of aviators than my man will.”

“Yes, that was what I thought,” Alma said patiently. Henry never would have doubted that Gil had two brain cells to rub together, but she was, after all, only a girl. Even if that was calling mutton lamb, as she was thirty-eight.

“The real question isn’t where Davenport is,” Jerry said. “But what he plans to do.”

“What it plans to do,” Alma said.

Henry sat down on the other side of his desk, running one hand through his hair distractedly, and Alma thought that Henry really did look distressed. He might prefer the glamour to the actual work, but he did have a sense of responsibility. “And how are we supposed to guess what an infernal entity thousands of years old wants?”

“Not simply blood,” Alma said logically. “If it just wanted to kill, the thing to do would be to lie low in Davenport’s body and commit murders under the radar.”

“Do we know it hasn’t done that?” Jerry asked. “This is LA. Surely there are unsolved murders?” He looked from one of them to the other.

Henry swallowed. “We don’t know that,” he said finally. “What we do know is that we have to catch that thing and stop it before Davenport can do anything else.”

“It’s not Davenport,” Jerry said, shaking his head as though bothered by a pesky fly. “It doesn’t matter about him, don’t you see? And that’s why the police can’t stop this. They can arrest Davenport, but the entity can jump to a new body. They’ll take Bill Davenport away in handcuffs, and tomorrow one of the policemen will be its host. Only we won’t know who. This thing can keep jumping from one host to another, so it doesn’t matter who they arrest. It’s going to keep doing this until we banish it or bind it.”

Henry put his elbows on the desk. “How do we do that?”

“I don’t know yet.” Jerry’s eyes were frank. “But I do know we’d better not lose track of him.”

“If he left by plane,” Henry began.

“He could have gotten a long way since yesterday,” Alma said. “But fortunately we still have the tablet.”

“A material link,” Jerry said, as Henry frowned. “The entity was once bound by the tablet, so the tablet can serve as a material link for an operation intended to find it.”

Henry nodded slowly. “Ok. What do you need me to do?”

“A candle would be nice,” Alma said. “And an atlas.” She glanced around the bookcases in his office. “I expect you have an atlas?”

“Of course,” Henry said, getting up and rummaging around on one of the shelves. “What else? Do you want to use the temple?”

Jerry looked at Alma, then shook his head. “Not if it hasn’t been cleaned since Davenport used it. We’re fine in here. I assume you’ve got regular house wards?”

“Of course,” Henry said, setting a taper in a bronze Mexican candlestick down on the desk beside the Motorist’s Atlas of the United States.

Alma let out a deep breath and sat down in the chair as Jerry got up, trying to compose herself. He put one hand on her shoulder briefly, and she smiled up at him. “Just like old times,” she said.

Jerry nodded, reaching in his pocket and pulling out a steel handled penknife. He flicked it open one handed, the sharp blade catching the light of the candle flame as Henry pulled the curtains at the window. “Which way is….”

“That way,” Alma said, nodding toward the door.

Jerry smiled. Jerry’s lack of a sense of direction was a long standing joke. He turned around, his back to her, facing east, and she heard him take a deep, centering breath. Henry sunk back into his desk chair, and Alma closed her eyes. This part was Jerry’s, and she had best use the time to relax.

Another breath, and Jerry began, the Hebrew syllables falling resonantly from his lips. “Ateh malkuth ve-gevurah ve-gedulah le-olahm.” She did not need to see the movement of the blade tracing patterns of fire across his body. She could feel it like a familiar whisper, like the rustle of silk. “Amen.” She could feel the knife lift again, marking the pentagram in the air, feel it like the glow of the candle before her.

The sound of his footsteps was muffled by the thick carpet, but she felt him pass her, journeying clockwise around her to face the bookcase to the south. Again the movement of the knife, blade channeling will.

Another set of steps, now to the windows that let over the swimming pool, his back to Henry as he inscribed the symbol to the west. It felt like a breath of rain, as though a cool wet wind had stirred the curtains, and Alma bent her head. The first time she’d seen this she’d been frightened. Gil had reached over and squeezed her hand. Now it was comforting.

Again, and Jerry was facing north now, another inscription before he moved back to where he’d begun, sealing the circle he had traced around. “Before me, Raphael,” Jerry said, his back almost against hers. “Behind me, Gabriel. On my right hand Michael, and on my left Uriel. About me shines the pentagram, and within me the six rayed star.”

Alma opened her eyes. Though nothing had physically changed, the room seemed lighter, cooler. Jerry bent his head for a moment like a man in prayer, then turned about, closing the penknife. “I think we’re ready.”

“Ok,” Henry said.

Wordlessly, Alma flipped open the Motorist’s Atlas, turning to the road map of southern California, while Jerry unwrapped the tablet and laid it on the desk beside her. It gleamed dully in the candlelight. She took a deep breath and reached up to unfasten the chain around her neck, pulling the necklace off and laying it in front of her. She’d gotten used to wearing her wedding ring on a chain around her neck when she flew, because she hated having anything on her hands, and now it seemed like a compromise. She wore it next to her heart, not on her finger as a reproach to Lewis. Nor could she bear to leave it off entirely. There might be a time when she did. Almost surely someday there would be a time when she did, but not now.

Henry’s eyebrows rose, but he said nothing.

Alma refastened the chain, resting her right elbow on the desk and looping the chain around her ring finger, raising her arm at ninety degrees to the surface, so that the wedding band hung free beneath her palm an inch or two above the atlas. It turned slightly as it swung, the script inside the band catching the light. “Ok,” Alma said, looking up at Jerry.

He nodded and moved the tablet closer, until the fingers of her left hand rested lightly on the edge of it. “She’s going to find the connection,” Jerry said quietly to Henry. “A creature like that leaves a big footprint, and we have a material connection with the tablet.”

Metal. Alma closed her eyes again, her fingertips just touching the edge of the tablet. Incised metal. Lewis had tried to see, had tried to open a window into the past using his untapped clairvoyant potential. Alma had none, but she knew how to use what she had. Metal from the breast of the earth, lead forged long ago. Metal in her other hand, the gold ring swinging in the loop of its chain, turning and catching the light of the candle flame. Red fire. Forger’s fire. Tablet and ring were both born of flame, both born from the breast of the earth.

Show me
, she whispered silently. Not Jerry’s focused will, not the power of words, but more primal than that. Like calls to like. Flame calls to flame, metal to metal, and the tablet to the creature it bound so long.

And the last piece. Earth rendered into symbol, not in the banishing pentagrams of Jerry’s ritual phrases, but in the prosaic and easily understood symbols of the road map. Here are the Sierra Nevadas, here Banning Pass. Here is the highway that runs across the desert to Las Vegas, here, just as she had seen it from the air days ago, a ribbon on the map making plain the memory in her mind, the snake of black asphalt through red land. The map was a skillful symbolic representation, everything to scale, and like the best correspondences there was nothing occult or obscure about it. Anyone could understand it. And hence it had more power, not the power of secrecy but of omnipresent belief.

Show me
. She felt the pendulum begin to move, the ring swinging in wide circles. It tugged. It pulled. This way. She heard Henry stir, and perhaps he would have said something, but Jerry forestalled him.

“Give her time,” Jerry said.

There was a rustle, and for a moment the pendulum hesitated. Paper moved. Jerry was turning the page in the Atlas. She must have tracked off one border or another.

Show me
. Not nearly so far north as Las Vegas. The desert unspooled in her mind, rail lines running straight as a ruler across the land, like looking down from 5,000 feet, cruising along. Williams Junction. Flagstaff. Gallup.

Another stirring. She was running off the map again, Jerry turning the pages, flying east as though she were winged herself, flying into afternoon. The shape of the plane raced ahead of her on the ground, her beloved Jenny. Albuquerque was an oasis of green, round circles of irrigation bright against the desert, growing oranges and lemons in the May heat.