Unbinding (35 page)

A
CKLEFORD
had an old-fashioned paper map in his car that was very helpful for laying out a three-mile grid for searching the city. To Kai’s surprise, Ackleford wanted José to drive. She understood why when the brand-new Unit 12 agent took a laptop out of the trunk and settled into the back seat with it. He meant to treat the car as his mobile office.

“Before you get too involved with whatever’s on that laptop,” she began.

“Reports. You said this might take a while.”

“It probably will. Before you start in with your reports, I need to tell you something. I think I’ve figured out what Dyffaya wants. Look at what he’s been doing—staging big, splashy events. Extravagantly weird stuff, scary stuff that’s sure to be featured on every news show in the nation. He wants attention, and he wants—”

“Hold on a minute.” He grabbed his phone, tapped the screen. “How long has it been since Hunter destroyed that knife?”

“Three weeks and . .” She counted quickly. “Six days.”

“But nothing happened until day before yesterday. That’s what we thought, but maybe he’s been acting like a damn stage magician, keeping us focused on the splashy while he grabbed people left and . . . Ackleford here,” he said into the phone. “I need you to get the city’s missing person reports for the last twenty days. See if there’s been more than usual. Especially look for any doubles—for people who might have vanished two at a time. I need—what?” he snapped at Kai, who’d twisted around in the seat to get his attention.

“Fires,” she said urgently. “Have them look for missing people who have some connection to a fire.” Like the one at Franklin Boyd’s house last night. Maybe Dyffaya could snatch people without a big, showy event. Maybe he had some way of storing the excess magic to use later, but he’d still be using chaos motes. Even a god was likely to spill some of that energy—and fire was tied to chaos.

“Look for any connection to fires,” Ackleford repeated. “Hell, just get the reports of fires for that period while you’re at it.” A pause. “Hell, no. I need this yesterday. Pull in Dunn if you need to . . . No, not yet. Call me when you know something.” He disconnected. “What were you saying about what this Dyffaya wants?”

“Worshipers. That’s the reason he’s spent magic so lavishly—to create these big, splashy events. He wants to be worshiped. To get that, he plans to scare the shit out of everyone. He’s undermining people’s confidence in the police, the FBI, in every kind of authority. He wants everyone scared enough to try anything, even worshiping him, if that will save them.”

“Huh.” Ackleford’s eyes narrowed. “And yet he’s been doing fine at splashy without those four. Now all of a sudden he needs them, and he needs Stockman out of the way at the same time. And we can’t be sure who else in the SDPD has been co-opted by that asshole god.” He thought some more, nodded, and picked up his phone again.

“What are you doing?”

“Agreeing with you. Brooks wants a Unit agent on the spot to deal with whatever’s coming. Something big, he said. I can’t do the woo-woo shit like Stockman, but I’m a goddamn Unit agent now, so maybe I’d better do what only a Unit agent can.” A short pause. “Yeah, it’s Ackleford again. I need to talk to Brooks.”

“But what are you doing?”

This time he grinned—a real, mouth-stretching grin. He looked like a sour, middle-aged shark about to chomp down. “Calling in the goddamn Marines.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

He’d already tapped his phone. “Hell, no. Got a hunch. Besides, can’t call in the locals, not with Boyd—Ida. Ackleford here. Need Brooks again.”

Kai listened, fascinated, to the conversation between Ackleford and Ruben Brooks. Ackleford was just as rude and sarcastic with his new boss as he was with everyone else. After some back-and-forth, he handed her the phone. “He wants your input.”

She took it. “This is Kai.”

“Derwin tells me you believe Dyffaya’s goal is a religious protection racket.”

“Uh . . . I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes.” What else could you call it when the god used fear to force people to turn to him for protection from him?

“He believes Dyffaya has something spectacular in mind that requires the four people who’ve gone missing. Since I have a strong hunch that something big is going to happen soon—probably within a few hours—I agree. Being unable to rely on the local police force is a problem, but bringing in the Marines is a rather extreme solution. Is that your idea or Derwin’s?”

Kai glanced at the man in the back seat. “His.”

“Ah.” A moment’s silence. “Lily tells me that Derwin has a slight patterning Gift. Very slight, she says, and he prefers to believe it doesn’t exist, but it’s not blocked. It does explain why an otherwise by-the-book agent occasionally leaps off a cliff—and lands on his feet. I suppose if I’m going to give him the status of a Unit agent, I’d better allow him to act as one. Thank you. I’ll speak with Derwin again now.”

Kai had given the phone back to Ackleford—who was a patterner. That blew her mind. It was a very slight Gift, Brooks said, but still . . . she glanced at the rune she’d drawn on José’s cheek. With a patterner in charge, that rune might not be entirely meaningless, after all.

Ackleford got his Marines—two full companies from 1 Marine Expeditionary Force based in Pendleton, with air support if needed. He would, that is, as soon as he knew where to put them.

For the next two hours, Ackleford worked, José drove, and Kai kept an eye on the charm in her palm. Like most charms, it needed skin contact to work. Ackleford smoked five more cigarettes. He accepted calls and made them. He spoke with Major Joseph Simmons of the U.S. Marine Corps—the CO for the two companies that were standing by to deploy—several times.

From one of his calls, they learned that the fire at Franklin Boyd’s house had been reported by a neighbor, not Boyd. The fire truck had arrived at 2:15
A
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M
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and was met by Boyd in his pajamas. He told them the fire had been started by a lighted candle that got knocked over. It had been small and he’d put it out. The firefighters confirmed that the fire was extinguished and left.

“Where was Mary?” Ackleford demanded of his subordinate. “Mary Boyd, his wife. Kids are grown and gone, but Mary should’ve been there. She wasn’t mentioned in the report?” A pause. “Find out.”

Another call was about missing persons reports. The agent hadn’t correlated the reports with fires yet, but in the past four weeks, twenty-seven people had been reported missing in San Diego County due to “unknown circumstances.” That was a significant uptick. The agent had found several reports that might be pairs—people who’d gone missing on the same day. And one of the missing person cases had been closed when the man’s body was found several miles from his home. He’d died without a mark on him—just like Britta.

Kai’s job—aside from watching the charm—was to keep track of their progress on the map. She distracted herself by talking to José. Turned out he was the oldest of four children. He had two half-sisters and a half-brother, all of them born to his mother after she moved back to Mexico and married. He’d been raised by his father and hadn’t met his siblings until he was an adult because of his stepfather’s prejudice against lupi. His brother had bought into that prejudice and didn’t want anything to do with him, but he saw his sisters occasionally and obviously valued that contact. One was married and had three children; the other was quite a bit younger, something of a late-life baby. She was attending university in Sonora and would graduate this year. José was clearly very proud of her. Kai had a suspicion he’d helped her financially, but he didn’t actually say so. “You grew up at Clanhome?”

“Nearby. Back then, my dad worked at an engineering firm in the city, so we lived there and went to Clanhome most weekends.” He smiled. “I loved weekends. Growing up clan is like having dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles. More uncles than aunts, but still, plenty of family.”

“When I was growing up I wished for a big family, but I was an only, and so were both my parents.”

“Coming up on an exit,” he said. “Do I take it?”

“Yes, that finishes the last leg of this section. You’ll need to go south on—stop the car.”

José didn’t quite stand on the brakes, but they stopped dead in the right-hand lane of Kumeyaay Highway. Which the cars behind them didn’t appreciate, but no one hit them, so Kai didn’t care. The charm in her hand was glowing. Faintly, but it was glowing.

She swung her arm left as far as she could. Then right. No perceptible change. She unclicked her seatbelt and leaned over into the backseat. The glow dimmed slightly. At least she thought it did. “We’re right on the edge of its limit. Keep going straight, but not fast.”

She got herself straightened out again and watched the charm intently. In the realms she’d be doing this on foot or the back of a horse. Plenty of time to adjust at that speed. Not so much at highway speeds, though José was going slower than the rest of the traffic.

“That’s what you get?” Ackleford said. “It lights up?”

“Like a game of hot and cold. The closer we get, the brighter it glows. When we get really close it starts blinking.”

“Huh.” A moment later he spoke again. “All right, Major, start rolling. We don’t have an exact location yet, but we’ve narrowed the area and those ICVs of yours aren’t exactly fast, so . . . section Two-Nine, as discussed. Generally speaking, you’ll be heading toward Old Town.”

Old Town. Where the hobbit house was. Kai’s heart began beating faster. “In Faerie, if you wanted to stash four people where no one could get to them, you’d put them behind a good, strong ward.”

“Yeah, so what? We aren’t—shit. Fox said there was a ward on that place, didn’t she?”

*   *   *

K
AI
stood in the open-air mall that connected the two buildings belonging to the Café Coyote. The charm in her palm was blinking madly. José stood on her right, watchful and wary. Ackleford was on her left.

The streets and businesses in Old Town had reopened today, though the ones immediately adjacent to Whaley House remained closed. Ackleford’s ID had gotten them through the barricade, though it had been a near thing. One of the cops had tried to detain Kai. Ackleford had told him no, only with rather more words—words like “fucking” and “goddamn.” It had worked, though it might be only a temporary reprieve. But temporary might be enough, if they could figure out how to get past that ward.

The hobbit house looked like it had yesterday—green and gaudy with flowers—only with not so many cops surrounding it. The weather was different, too. Low-hanging clouds had moved in, covering the sun.

“I don’t like it,” José said.

“I’m not crazy about the idea,” Kai said, “but we’re low on options. It’s probably a fire ward or a keepaway. Arjenie said it was using a lot of power, and those are the most common high-power wards. They’re also some of the quickest to set, and this one went up fast. If it’s a fire ward, the amulet will protect me. If it’s a keepaway, that’s mind-magic. Either my shields will block it and I’ll be able to go through, or they won’t. In which case I won’t be able to pass, and we’re no worse off than we are now.”

“There are other kinds of wards,” José said. “And sometimes Cullen sets multiple wards.”

Kai was trying hard not to think about some of the wards she’d heard of. Like mind-wiper. That was a nasty bit of business. “But keepaway is quick and the others take longer. Building wards in layers takes a lot longer. One day isn’t enough time for layers.” A sidhe lord who wanted to keep something safe might set several layers of wards—simple repulsion, keepaway, fire if the keepaway didn’t work, with maybe a mind-wiper or heart-stopper as the last resort if the others were breeched. But wards often didn’t play well with each other. Setting up multiple layers might take that lord weeks, even months.

Of course, they were dealing with a god, not a sidhe lord.

“Marines will be here in about ten,” Ackleford said. “We’ll wait on them.”

“Are you going to have them shell the hobbit house? Because I don’t see what they can do about a ward other than . . .” Suddenly Kai’s skin crawled. The hair on her arms stood up.

“What is it?” Ackleford looked around, scowling, as if he felt it, too.

The air swam with magic and imminence, the certainty of something about to happen. Like standing right where lightning was about to strike, or watching the curled mountain of a tsunami wave hover over you. Dread woke in the pit of her stomach. It was a sensation she recognized. “Someone nearby is performing a Great Rite.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means we just ran out of time.” Kai drew Teacher and started forward.

Both men stepped out from the shelter of the open-air mall with her. “Neither of you can cross that ward,” she snapped. “You won’t help me by burning up.”

Ackleford grunted. “Maybe not, but I can shoot through it. It didn’t stop that paper Fox slid through it. It won’t stop bullets. Speaking of which, you need a gun.”

“I can’t shoot one.”

“You can stick someone with that oversize knife, but you can’t stand to fire a gun?”