Cool Hand (18 page)

“Not that it’s going to be a problem,” Tullah said hesitantly, looking away, “when you’re sure you’re okay.”

My Athanate flexed in pleasurable anticipation.

Hana vanished. I took a break in the bathroom to calm down. Not what I needed at the moment—my Athanate getting hot to bite again.

I came back and climbed into bed. Kaothos had vanished too, and I found I wasn’t in the mood for Magic 101.

Tullah didn’t take the hint.

She sat in the lotus position on the edge of her bed and clapped her hands together, smiling like a primary school teacher.

“Now class, pay attention.”

“Do we have to?” I whined, laying it on. Couldn’t give my apprentice an easy time.

“Yup. The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll be finished.”

“Mary said we shouldn’t do any channeling.”

“Everyone can channel a tiny bit. That creates enough background noise that what we do won’t register at all.” She clapped her hands again. “No more excuses. Now, there are reasons Adepts don’t explain about the energy, and one of them is it’s very difficult. If you’re teaching someone something physical, or scientific, you can show them. You can go through the working from the first principles. There are rules. It works every time, or there are reasons why it doesn’t. There are words for everything that people agree on, more or less.” She hugged a pillow to herself. “The energy isn’t like that. Every interaction is personal. I can’t really tell you what it will feel like for you. I can’t tell you how to do something. I don’t have the words to best capture what you need. I can’t give you a book of rules. I won’t be able to explain why it doesn’t work sometimes. All I can do is guide your learning, but that’s a long process.”

“Wow, I feel better already.”

There was a sizzling laugh in the darkness. She was still here, of course.

“Attend to your lesson, pupil.”

“Go lie on a hot rock, lizard.”

“Hold on. Can I block Kaothos?” I asked. “Prevent her from knocking me out?”

Tullah nodded. “Just the same as you prevented Matlal from attacking you by making a mental barrier, you can do the same for Kaothos.”

There was an unspoken
at the moment
behind her words which gave me a shiver.

“Diana taught me to fuel that with anger. Does that mean if I lose the anger, I lose the ability?”

“No. Once you’ve done something like that it becomes easier to do it again, and then it starts being something you want to do. Like Dominé was saying about
vasana
. That’s why we have to be so careful with the energy.”

This was making me feel so much happier. Not.

“Chatima said there was a difference between shamanic and, what was it, ‘new ways?’ What’s that about?”

“As good a place to start as any,” Tullah said. “Modern Adepts regard shamanic workings about the same as completely untrained workings.”

She scratched her head. “The modern way is to work everything from first principles. All very formal. You don’t learn to set something on fire, you learn to vary its temperature until it reaches the point it catches fire. That kinda thing.”

“Shamanic works much more on intuition and feel. Visualization and ritual. Your spirit guide helps. They’re like a reservoir of instinct about what will work. And of course, they’re a better channel to the energy.”

“Does that mean I’m wasting my time until Hana starts talking to me?”

“No, we can get you doing some small workings, in preparation for when she recovers. And the necklace probably doesn’t need Hana.”

“Okay. I guess it’s shamanic.” I rubbed the beads between my fingers. I liked the smoothness, the warmth they seemed to hold.

“Yeah. The working certainly isn’t a step by step. Ma might be able to understand it, but most Adepts would just get confused.” She clapped her hands. “Let’s try lesson 101. It’s common to shamanic and modern. Close your eyes.”

When I’d obeyed, she went on. “As you know from Ma, magic isn’t the word we use. We just call it energy. We don’t know where it comes from or where it goes to, but I want you to visualize it flowing through you. Try to think of it like air, or pure, pure water, welling up inside you and flowing out in every direction.”

I focused on my breathing. Something I couldn’t see or feel that came from somewhere I didn’t know, flowing through me to somewhere else I didn’t know.

Yeah.
But the breathing helped.

“Everyone has it and everyone touches it a little. What Adepts do is consciously weave and sense the energy. Power is how much you can change the flow and how far or how long you can do it.”

I remembered lying on the sofa at Manassah, half-dreaming, my eukori reaching out and touching the sleeping minds of my House. And the Call of the pack.

So maybe I could think of eukori and the Call as touching and sensing this energy. That made it more real for me.

“One reason we don’t like to call it magic, is that magic is supposed to do completely impossible things. You can’t turn time backwards. You can’t turn a car into a cow. The energy does real things, and to use it consciously, you have to visualize what you want it to do in a consistent way. But we’re not going to do that yet. I just want you to keep your eyes closed and try and visualize the energy flowing through you.”

My usual meditation method was visualizing my movements through the martial arts forms taught to me by Liu, so I had practice in these sort of mind exercises. It felt odd to sit and visualize my body being still and something else moving. I tried thinking of wind blowing in my face, or water flowing down my body.

From inside
, Tullah had said.

How could I imagine the feeling of something flowing out of me, like I was leaking? Those images weren’t helpful. It wasn’t working.

I was about to open my eyes again when I thought of sand.

Mom and Dad are laughing. I’m sitting on the sand in the Great Dunes Park down in southern Colorado. Desert sand with the mountains as a backdrop. Big blue sky above. I’m holding up handfuls and letting it trickle out between my fingers. It’s so fine, it’s like holding water in your hand. The wind catches it and makes fantails down the side of the dune.

I’m fascinated by it. I try counting seconds—one thousand, two thousand, three... How long does it take for a handful to escape? How many grains of sand in a handful? How many in a dune?

As I stopped looking for it, I felt the energy flowing through me, like a million tiny particles blowing away in the wind.

My eyes were still shut but I could feel the room around me.

“Sand,” I said. But not like sand. Falling away in every direction, even upward. And falling out of Tullah, and some of what fell out of Tullah fell into me, and the other way around as well. “Cool.”

Then I noticed the flickering darkness around Tullah and, without thinking, I stretched out my real hand toward her.

I got a zap like an electric shock.

“Oww!” I jerked upright in bed. “That freaking hurt.”

Tullah looked at me in amazement. “Kaothos? You didn’t—”

“No. Amber did it herself. She acted as a natural sink for a tiny bit of the working of the lock.”

“But I didn’t get a shock when I touched her before.”

“As you visualized the energy, you were channeling it. That’s what connected with the lock.” Tullah was still sitting, but she was practically bouncing on her bed. “Let’s try something.”

The reawakened enthusiasm in her was wonderful to see. She’d brightened my life all those long days when all I’d had to worry about was where the next paycheck was coming from and what the Colonel might want me to do. And whether I was turning into a vampire. It felt good to see it again. But…

“You’re sure this isn’t this going to register with the local Adepts?”

“You won’t be able to do anything that strong.”

Famous last words,
I thought.

Tullah ignored my caution. “Come on, lie back and think of sand.”

I did, but for all the excitement of the first step, the second step died of boredom a half hour later. However she had me try to envision it, I couldn’t make the flow of sand vary. She wanted me to make it spin, like an eddy in a stream, or ripple. I couldn’t.

Tullah tried to pass it off as unimportant. “First attempt. It’s nothing.” But she was disappointed, and I guessed I was too.

Was it my fault? Or was it because Kaothos had burned out Hana? Or was it that I didn’t really have any capability, other than as a sort of sink for other people’s workings?

In the end, we turned out the lights and lay down.

“What about the stuff Chatima said about patterns in the necklace?” I said.

“Huh? What’re you talking about?”

“Nothing.”

As I’d half suspected, part of Chatima’s message had been for my ears alone. Which meant I would have to work it all out alone. Wonderful.

Tullah’s thoughts were elsewhere.

“Y’know the wait staff in the club,” she said. “The boys. Were those nightsticks down their pants, or, I mean are they like, for real?”

“Ohhh, you noticed,” I said. “Only one way you ever gonna find out, girl.”

Which meant I was laughing as the reptile struck again and I went out like a snuffed candle.

FRIDAY

The next morning, the search started off every bit as grindingly dull and unfruitful as I’d promised Tullah and Jofranka that PI work could be. I liked that it was a salutary lesson—not so much that I was participating in it.

After breakfast, we started with reception desks at downtown hotels and worked outwards in a spiral. We took in car rental companies and cab stands. Bars and clubs would have to wait for later in the day. We showed Diana’s photo, checked them off the list and moved on. Of course, the staff at many of the places we visited worked shifts, so we’d need to visit them again.

Pia had found the names of a couple of hotels that Diana had used before. There, I left a copy of her photo and a burn phone cell number to contact me.

Around mid-morning, I walked in and then straight back out of a hotel, pushing Tullah in front of me. There were werewolves in the hotel.

A tense few minutes followed, but Mary’s bouquet seemed to have worked; no one came out looking for us.

We took the opportunity to sit in the Hill Bitch for a while, drinking takeout coffee and watching to see if there was anyone obviously sniffing our trail.

Nothing.

I couldn’t put Agent Ingram off any longer. Tullah set up the laptop and latched onto a couple of unsecured WiFi connections. Matt’s program, still using the tap-dancing octopus animation, made a secure connection with a remote server on the other side of the world and then opened a telephone line for me.

“Now I’m a-guessing I know who this is,” Ingram drawled when he picked up. He had tracers on his phones and was always mildly upset when Matt’s software defeated them.

“Howdy,” my demon answered before I could stop it.

Agent Ingram ran an FBI project called Anthracite, their continuing mission to seek out strange new organizations hidden in the USA, because they were out there somewhere. I didn’t believe there was even a suggestion of X-Files in their brief, but Ingram himself was both mentally flexible and dogged in pursuit. If it was out there, he’d find the truth. The paranormal world was running out of shadow to hide in.

He’d been distracted by unraveling Ops 4-16, but he wouldn’t forget there was something else out there. My task was to introduce him to Diana and see if we could use Project Anthracite to help manage the process of Emergence without the catastrophic effects that would result from premature discovery of the paranormal world.

Yeah, Ingram was important, but my demon didn’t care. Luckily, neither did Ingram.

“Howdy right back at you, Ms. Farrell. Now, would you be available to come talk today?”

“Unfortunately not, and the people I want you to meet are all unavailable. I’m working to fix things right now.”

“And
where
would you be working to fix things, if I may ask?”

Damn.

“Ah. That’s kinda operationally sensitive.”

“I did say, Ms. Farrell, that whatever patience Job has seen fit to pass to me personally, the FBI cannot wait. I do recall, I did also ask that you not wander away.”

“I know. I’m sorry, but it’s unavoidable. I’m doing everything I can. Give me a couple of days. Please.”

A couple of days could mean three, right? In a few days, maybe I could squeeze a couple more. How long was it going to take? The longer it took, the more difficult that meeting was going to be.

“Hmm. I
am
busy with the documentation your Colonel Laine has provided to me. Handy, since those Naga folk did such a good job of destroying everything on your old base.”

Thank you, Colonel.

“Can I ask how it’s going?” I said.

He snorted. “More tangled than a backwoods family tree.” He sighed, and I imagined him lifting his boots onto his desk. “That up-front committee, with the fancy acronym, JF-CoStPROE, they were in cahoots with Petersen and his bosses, whoever
they
may be. There were five of them on the committee. Three dead and two left the country, far as we can tell.”

“Dead? Killed?”

“Officially a suicide, a car accident and a mugging gone wrong.” I could tell what he thought of those. “And those Nagas, most of them left in planes that flew over Mexico and out into the Pacific till their tanks ran dry. No flight plan, no communication with ATC.”

“Parachuted somewhere quiet,” I said. A whole battalion, probably gone over to Basilikos.

“We figured.” He was quiet for a moment. “Lots missing from those records, Ms. Farrell. Got holes like a back road speed sign in Henderson County. Nothing on the colonel’s last job, for instance.”

He was referring to Obs, the Ops 4 medical research department. The department which would have records of me and the whole story of prions and Athanate and Were.

When I didn’t respond, he went on: “The people who worked there seem to have disappeared, and your former colleagues have been unwilling to speculate on what went on in the research area. Or what it meant with respect to you.”

“I guess we’ll have a lot of explaining to do.”

“You surely will. A week and no more. I thank you, and good day to you, Ms. Farrell.”

I turned the laptop off. He’d seen through my ruse of asking for a little and a little more. When he said a week, he meant it.

“Come on, time to get back on the trail,” I said to Tullah, and we set off on a second round of door to door.

It was as fruitless as the first.

The highlight of the morning came from a small independent car rental company. The owner had a Weimaraner, a big dog with the blue-gray hair and the mad yellow eyes they sometimes have. He also had an irate customer on the phone, and he wasn’t paying attention. The hound had picked up on the emotions and decided we might be partly to blame. He escaped from behind the desk, knocking his human over in his frenzy.

The owner was scrabbling on the floor, trying to get back up, swearing at the dog, apologizing to his customer (who thought he was being sworn at) and trying to shout warnings to us, all at the same time.

The mutt, meanwhile, had taken one sniff of me from close up and sunk down with his jaw on my boots and that
I didn’t mean it, please love me
look in his eyes.

“Hey, look out!” The owner crawled through the desk gap after his hound. “He’ll have your arm off, soon as look at you. Duke! Duke! Here boy, here.”

“Yeah.” Tullah and I were kneeling down, patting him. “Who’s a good boy, Dukey.”

I couldn’t adopt him into my pack, so poor Duke got left behind with his puzzled owner, who hadn’t seen Diana.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

“See anything suspicious?” Tullah said as we finished our coffees on our second break, sitting in the Hill Bitch and watching the street.

I shook my head.

I was itchy with apprehension. That could be anything. My training said I’d stuck my head above the parapet in enemy territory and there was a limit to how long we could do this before someone did come sniffing.

My head told me that this was safer than the alternatives.

The burn cell trembled silently in my pocket.

“Rock and roll,” I said.

It was a text:
Abt yr frnd. CTN. Lobo campus @1pm. Duck pond. I’ll find u.

CTN: can’t talk now, as Tullah had to explain.

Why not?
I wondered.

Lobo was the nickname of the University of New Mexico, a couple of blocks from where we were parked. Of course, it also meant wolf. I could so do without the eerie coincidences.

Tullah had her laptop sucking on some unsecured internet connections and showing the street map of the university area. The Duck Pond was right in the middle of the campus, in a park area. She pulled up a couple of pictures of it.

She wasn’t looking happy. “Trap?”

“Not an obvious place for it. Lots of people around.” I shrugged. “We can’t ignore it. Let’s see if we can turn it on its head, though.”

I looked through the gear Tullah had packed for us in the back. The fright wig was likely to draw attention to me rather than the reverse, so I ignored that. I tied my hair in a quick bun on top of my head and covered it with the Stetson. Slipped on sunglasses. Running shoes. Tullah had a man’s linen jacket which was a bit small for me, but I put it on over the HK shoulder holster and pushed the sleeves up. I hid Mary’s bouquet in the pocket. Either it was losing its potency or I was getting used to the smell, but I wasn’t sneezing now.

Tullah had gone into a store nearby and bought a bright red UNM hoodie with a stylized wolf on the back. She tied her hair in a ponytail, flipped the hood up and wore sunglasses. She put her Sig in a belt clip holster hidden beneath the sweatshirt and spent a minute figuring out how to get it clear for a draw.

“Okay?”

She nodded. We had fifteen minutes.

“You walk about thirty yards behind me…what?”

She was shaking her head. “I’m the one who looks more like a student, Boss. You look different than you looked earlier, but we can’t do anything about your height. If I’m in front, we have a better chance of spotting someone before we’re seen. And Kaothos will be able to tell me if someone we met this morning gets close to me.”

It would give me a better view of what was happening. I had to concede.

If there was nothing that alarmed us after a circuit of the pond, and we found someone we’d talked to in the morning, one of us would approach him or her. Otherwise, we’d pull back and send a text to try and set up a meeting somewhere of our choosing.

Tullah started walking toward the university and I started talking to Kaothos. We found we could still communicate at twenty paces, but not at thirty, so I stayed twenty paces behind her.

“Tullah, what’s with the sacks of fertilizer in the back of the Hill Bitch?”

“Cover. Gives us an excuse to drive around and ask for addresses, for instance. Y’know, pretending to be delivering the stuff.”

“Way complex, ’prentice. You didn’t have to pay for them, did you?”
The fertilizer was from Larimer Agricultural Fertilizers, the Denver Weres’ factory that they used to get rid of bodies. That gave me a little shudder. The processed remains of the Nagas killed on Coykuti might be included in those bags.

“Nah. Those were just some Alex had in his shed.”

Kaothos made Tullah’s voice sound like hers. It felt odd, and we had to carefully mentally speak the words we wanted Kaothos to transmit, but it might be useful. Kaothos assured me that it was undetectable, and we had one of the small intercom systems as backup if we needed it.

“Noticed anything surprising this morning?”
I asked as we crossed Central Avenue, the old Route 66.

“Yeah. No Athanate.”

I’d wondered if she’d noticed the absence of Athanate marque.

As for the local pack, there was the one hotel that had Were inside. But out on the streets, there’d been traces of Were marque everywhere. And even keeping my Were to myself, I could feel the Call from the locals. I was in another pack’s territory. It made my wolf anxious; not a big thing, just a constant awareness of her watchfulness.

Of course, I was also in another Athanate House’s mantle. I should really have been as concerned about that as I was at being in another pack’s territory.

We arrived at the Duck Pond and I followed Tullah around it, falling further back. I was the ambler, walking slowly and talking on my cell. Tullah was the busy student on her lunch break, mixing up walking with some general loosening exercises.

Anyone we’d met this morning could have been in disguise, just like we were, but there was no one who looked familiar. The meeting time came, and we made one more circuit. My paranoia started to blossom: the jock in the jacket that looked too warm for the weather; the group that stood to one side arguing with lowered voices; the old woman clutching her bulging grocery bag. And was that my bracelet starting to itch? Could I trust it if it did? Or didn’t?

The sun was bright and the park was getting busier as more people came out for their lunch breaks.

Then I was alongside Tullah, taking her by the elbow and pulling her along. “We need to move.”

She was getting very good; she didn’t immediately look to see what it was. When we passed a trash bin, she half turned, pretending to throw some litter in. She saw what had made me make a move.

“You have a phobia about clowns, don’t you?” she said. “Was this a childhood trauma? Did the nasty clown make you cry at your fifth birthday party?”

“Very funny. Keep walking.”

I’d been spooked by clowns once before when I was out with Tullah, and it’d been a false alarm. It wasn’t this time. The clowns moved differently as soon we started walking away. How they hell had they made us?

“There are several advantages to the clown disguise,” I said, quoting the Ops 4-10 manual. “The appearance is disarming for most people; no one automatically suspects a children’s entertainer. Afterwards, the incongruity of it makes people suspect their recall is faulty. The disguise can be complete; the makeup or mask is part of the uniform and makes the person unrecognizable, even with facial recognition software. The clothes are traditionally loose-fitting, allowing space to hide weapons and a different set of clothes—”