Shades of Gray: A Jude Magdalyn Novel (10 page)

I waited for a moment, unsure if she was finished. “So, you’re saying that being a street-urchin is really an advantage, and I wasn’t being all that flippant when I said that earlier.”

“No, you were, but since it was truthful it was in the best interest of the moment to ignore the flippancy.” Gillian’s eyes were scanning my face, searching for something. I didn’t have a clue what, and I had doubts on finding out without dragging it from her. I sighed, as ready to change the subject as she was.

“There’s my good news for the night.” I rubbed my arms, slightly chilled. “Now that things can only go downhill, I guess it’s time to go meet the Council.”

Chapter Ten

As soon as I entered
the informal parlor I knew I’d been absolutely right. The night was going downhill, and fast.

A pair of ice-blonde twins, a good ten years younger than me, shot me a pair of eye-fucks. A rail-thin, twitchy, man sat scratching in the far right corner, jonesing for a fix of whatever he preferred to poison himself with. To the left of the fireplace an elderly woman snored. She appeared the most approachable out of the bunch.

It was the priest standing to the side of one of the tall guillotine windows, hands clasped behind his back that sent a frisson of fear down my spine. With everything I’d gone through, to be scared of a priest was tantamount to finding out Superman was afraid of a mouse. Unless you’ve been raised in a Catholic orphanage, most people don’t understand being afraid of priests and nuns.

He turned away from the window, a knowing smile creasing his face. I’d been caught staring. Damn. He was younger than I would have expected, no more than forty-five, but looked old for his age. It suggested he’d seen too much, too young, for it to not show on him somehow. His smile was friendly, borderline sympathetic.

“I thought the Church had a thing about psychic powers. Like they’re not real, or they’re from the devil.”

His cheeks flushed a delicate pink. His smile grew into one I couldn’t call sheepish. “Well, what the Church doesn’t know won’t hurt it, will it?”

Before I could think of a suitable remark, a voice across the room boomed out. “Gillian, bring the girl over here so I can get a good look at her. You know I can’t see that well these days.”

A chuckle made the rounds, and broke some, but not all of the tension. Shaking her head, Gillian guided me to a tiny woman perched on one of the endless amount of chairs around the room. I noticed more than a few of the people present bowed their head as we passed, although the Ice-T’s, as I was starting to call the twins in my mind, continued with their demon stares. I made a mental note to re-watch Village of the Damned to see if any of those kids made it out alive - and where they might have gone if they did.

We stopped in front of the old woman - there wasn’t another way to describe her. She had to be a hundred years old, and she looked like she would blow away into little particles with one good, strong wind. Her hair was long and unbound like Gillian’s, although where Gillian’s had gone the silvery color dark hair turns as it ages, this woman’s hair was snow-white. Her hands, when they latched onto mine and tugged me to my knees in front of her, were as wafer thin as the rest of her looked.

Slowly, she patted her way up my arms, inward to my neck, each touch a little gentle glide. I kept my face motionless as her fingers roamed over my features and ran through my hair. When she let her hands drop back into her lap, I let out a small sigh of relief.

“Well, as best as I can tell, you don’t have that horrible Roman nose your father did. How your mother ever got around that, I’ll never know. But at least you got his skin tone, as opposed to that milk-white of your mother. She always looked half-dead, even before she was.”

The boom of her voice was more staggering up close than it had been across the room. Her words startled me and knocked me from my heels to my butt. I heard a quickly muffled giggle behind me, and I had the sudden urge to see if I could call a little wind to mess with the perfect hair of the Ice-T’s. Instead, I addressed the possibly crazy woman sitting in front of me.

“How is it you can’t see my nose, but you can see the color of my skin?”

She loosed a foghorn laugh. “Gillian, you’ve not told this child nearly enough. Girl, I’ve been blind my whole life, but the forces that be were kind enough to grant me a second sight of sorts. Small compensation, but sometimes you take what you can get.”

I waited, certain she wasn’t done talking. I’d discovered the older a person gets, the less likely they are to confine answers to a simple sentence or two. Experience proved me right. “Feeling you up, which definitely wasn’t as much fun as when I was younger and out on the town, is just to make sure the picture in my head matches reality. For all I know, you’ve got a few of those crazy piercings in hidden places, and as far as I’m concerned they can stay hidden.”

“Great-grandmother Lisette, you do remember the conversations we’ve had about inappropriate comments.” A man around my age pushed off one of the bookshelves. He blended into the background enough for me to not notice him and his sudden appearance startled me He stepped forward into the lamp light and I gave myself a mental shake. He was the kind of person you didn’t not notice.

He wasn’t tall, close to my height, but well-proportioned. I had the idle thought he was hopefully that way all-over, and I bit my tongue. My hormones were problematic enough around Williams, I didn’t need to add a yen for a Council member into the mix. His skin, the same golden hue as mine and presumably my father’s, set off the chestnut colored waves around his face. His eyes, when they met mine, were a nice, ordinary sort of brown, and amused.

He held a hand out to help me up and not to appear ungracious, I took it. He pulled me to my feet with hardly any effort, and I wondered where all the men worked out. I shoved the thought away quickly, and tried on a smile, a different sort of look for me. “Thanks.”

“No problem. Great-grandmother Lisette tends to forget what’s acceptable for public comment and what isn’t.”

“I do no such thing, boy.” The old woman, Great-grandmother Lisette as he’d called her, banged her tiny fist on the chair of the arm. The force in her voice danced goose bumps over my skin. “I’ve reached an age where I can say whatever I damn well please, whenever I damn well please. One of the few benefits of getting old, I say.”

“Yes, Great-grandmother Lisette.” The un-named man rolled his eyes, making me smile wider. I didn’t detect a hint of sarcasm in his voice, but his great-grandmother did.

“Stop rolling your eyes, Theophile. One of these days you’re going to do that, and they’ll end up pointing in opposite direction, you mark my words.”

“Theophile?” The question popped out before I could practice the same thought-censoring Great-grandmother Lisette couldn’t quite get down. Her grandson blushed, and it reminded me of a priest caught watching two healthy, young people semi-flirt.

If this wasn’t my own version of hell, it was getting pretty close.

“Old family name. Most people just call me Theo.” His hand was still holding mine, and the warmth coming off him was like being in a cocoon enveloping me. I was aware of Gillian behind me, and wondered how she was taking the idea of another guy on the scene, so to speak. When I pulled my hand away and turned back to her, a puzzled expression covered her face, but nothing approaching the disapproval the same gesture from Williams would have garnered.

“Perhaps the Prophecy could take some of her valuable time to greet the rest of the Council. If it’s not too much to ask?”

The prissy, nasal voice could have only come from one of two people. Although which was going to be virtually impossible to tell. I felt more than heard Gillian sigh next to me, and I got the feeling the two little demon brats were about as high on her list of favorite people as they were on mine. In other words, they could drop off the face of the Earth and I wouldn’t notice or care, unless it was to do a happy dance.

“Jude Magdalyn,” Gillian shot a warning glance at the twins, careful to keep her hand on my elbow as she steered me in their direction. “These young ladies are known as Lies and Guile.”

I waited for an explanation. Four, five minutes ticked by, but nothing came. I wasn’t going to ask why, because if I had this thing down, they were supposed to volunteer information to me. If I had to verbally compel them to do something, I would look weak in front of the other people present, and that little bit of information would wind its way through the whole Covenant. Not going to happen.

Finally, the one on the right - Lies, I think, let out a huff of air, stomping her foot once. The one on the left, Guile - I hoped, narrowed her eyes. “We don’t like you.”

“Well, that’ll just keep me up every night for the rest of my life.”

She swung her arm suddenly, fingers curled and ready to claw at my face. I grabbed her hand, twisting her wrist sharply. She gasped, and her sister let out a sound perilously close to a growl. “We really don’t like you.”

I smiled, although it wasn’t kind like the priest or Theo’s had been. “That’s fine. I don’t have a problem telling you that I think you’re both first-class bitches, and I don’t like you either. But until I’m dead or replaced, you’ll respect me.”

“Or what?” The one who hadn’t been stupid enough to try and swing on me asked, her voice on a lower register than I would have thought possible given the earlier nasal quality of their voice. I sighed, shoved the stupider one away from me, sending her into her sister and the pair of them to the floor.

“Or I’ll see the pair of you replaced.”

“You mean dead.”

I shrugged my shoulders, sliding my hands into my pockets. “Whatever. I’m not real picky about how some things go down.”

“Girls.” Gillian spoke up, her tone taking on the scolding edge I was all too familiar with. “Let’s see if we can control our tempers for at least tonight.”

“Finally time somebody stood up to the pair of them. Little demons,” the priest grumbled loud enough for the room to hear. No one commented, and I wondered if they had the same feelings or if they were just enjoying the show.

“Perhaps it might go faster if we simply stood and told who we were.” Finally, somebody with a smart idea. I swiveled my head to see who was doing some thinking, and zeroed in on the man who looked like an addict. My surprise must have shown on my face, because he sent me a bitter smile. “Not exactly the look of a man who has a thought or two, is it?”

With no polite way to answer the question, I shrugged again. The man rose from his crouch, bending at the waist to send me a bow of sorts. “Rian, at your service. As best as can be managed.”

“Whenever he’s not higher than a kite,” one of the twins muttered. I resisted the urge to slap them both across their angelic faces, just to make sure I got the right one.

Rian didn’t need any help defending himself. His eyes flashed with something akin to hate, and his hands balled at his sides. “Some of us were given more difficult tasks than being bearers of ill-will, Guile. If I only had to stand in a room and breathe to accomplish my goal, I daresay my life would be much easier.”

“What task do you have, Rian?” I interrupted the flow of words before they grew any more virulent. I could feel Gillian stiffening with indignation behind me; anything to keep her from going on a tirade was a small price to pay.

His eyes fell, almost as if he was ashamed. “Visions of the future. Which wouldn’t be so difficult, except for the… side effects.”

Now my curiosity was peaked. “Side effects?”

Rian nodded, turning and lifting the back of his shirt. I gasped, because his back was covered with scars uncannily similar to my relatively fresh marks. Dropping his shirt, he said, “I trust no more explanation is needed.”

“You saw what they were going to do to my father.” Picking my way through the maze of furniture, I stopped in front of him. Like Theo, he was about my height but sickeningly thin, his hair limp and dull. Rian lowered his eyes to the floor, nodding his head.

“Since that time, I’ve done my best to repress the visions.”

“Against the advice of the Council,” one of the twins interrupted nastily. I ignored her, although I could tell by the soft thump and the squeal following it that someone, probably Gillian, had smacked whichever twin had talked. I rolled up his left sleeve, studying the track marks.

“With heroin. Not the best choice, given the possible side effects of the trips.”

“Members of the Council are generally as tough to kill as the leader.” Rian smiled grimly. “I can handle a lot of heroin.”

I thought for a moment, mulling the situation over. He was as valuable a weapon as any, and considering the current climate I couldn’t afford to have him stoned out of his mind. “So you block the visions with heroin, because they’re not just painful mentally, but physically.”

When he made a defensive noise, I pursed my lips and shook my head. “I’m just making sure I have it right. No judgment, I’m not a fan of S&M myself. If you could have the visions without the pain, would you come off the heroin?”

Rian’s eyes met mine, and through the haze of withdrawal I could see the hope and longing in them. “How?”

I tilted my head to the side, eyes closed. At some point during one of Gillian’s lectures - there were far too many of them to keep track of - she’d brushed over something about being able to take in other people’s pain. Part of the healer deal, although she still hadn’t explained it to me.

“Jude, there is a fine line between making sacrifices and throwing yourself into the fire.”

I ignored Gillian, trying to remember how she said it could be done. Both parties had to be willing to transfer the pain. The healer had to be strong enough, mentally and psychically, to do the transfer. I slid my hand down to grasp Rian’s, my free hand going to his other hand. I eased up the grip, until my hands were hovering right over his.

There was something I was forgetting - or didn’t know. There was a lot I didn’t know, and it was becoming frustrating. How was I supposed to lead hundreds of people without any idea what any of us were capable of?

Hands grasped my elbows, and by the scent enveloping me, I knew it was Gillian. Her low voice, murmured in my ear as when she’d explained how to call air. It blew lightly over my skin, drying the sweat dripping down the side of my face.

If calling air had been difficult, this was impossible. It was like doing brain surgery in the dark with no experience. Which, I guess, is what I was doing. Setting up levees, keeping some things out, letting others in. I wasn’t foolish enough to take all the pain - if Rian stubbed his toe, I wouldn’t know about it unless he told me.