Still Not Dead Enough , Book 2 of The Dead Among Us (7 page)

Ag growled, “Don’t be a fool. The Summer Knight must not know of this.”

~~~

As Paul stepped onto the street outside of Katherine’s office, a strange otherworldly screech sent a shiver down his spine. It was not unlike the high-pitched cry of a hunting hawk. He paused on the sidewalk, looked up toward the sky and caught a hint of movement out of the corner of his eye. Something flittered high above, just at the roofline of the buildings around him. Perhaps a hawk of some kind, but so obscured in shadow, try as he might he couldn’t focus on it, couldn’t discern its true nature.

Twice more, on his walk back to his apartment, he heard the strange shriek and looked up, but never saw anything that might utter such a cry. It must have been a hawk or a falcon that had drifted into the city and become confused by the cacophony of sights and sounds. Easily explained, though he couldn’t as easily put the encounter out of his mind, and it continued to bother him late into the night.

~~~

As the airplane banked, far below the cluster of skyscrapers that was Dallas came into view. Colleen had spent the entire flight drilling Paul in various exercises that would help him control what other practitioners sensed in him. “No spells on the plane,” she’d said. “We’ll just work on control. It wouldn’t do to light the plane on fire.”

Colleen, McGowan and Katherine were all obviously a bit uneasy about him meeting this Salisteen. It had become clear that Colleen, McGowan, Karpov, Salisteen and a few others were in a league all their own when it came to throwing around this magic stuff, and there was more to this than just making a good impression on Salisteen. But Paul didn’t know how much more, and though Katherine had joined them on this trip to Dallas, she’d remained distant. Paul could no longer count on her to fill him in on what he didn’t know.

“That’s much better,” Colleen said. “If I didn’t know to look, I wouldn’t know you were a practitioner.”

Paul had worked hard to camouflage his abilities. Colleen had told him that only a few months ago he’d stood out like “. . . a petulant child throwing a temper tantrum at a sedate gathering of older people.” It had helped considerably that he’d learned to
see
the maelstrom that hovered about other practitioners.

“By the way,” Colleen said, “you’re less subject to an arcane attack when you shield yourself that way. That maelstrom, as you call it, is linked to your aura, and when you suppress its perceptibility to others you prevent them from manipulating you or attacking you through it.”

Paul had spent weeks trying to accomplish this level of control.

“Tell me about Suzanna,” Colleen said without warning.

“Suzanna!” Paul said, a bit startled by the sudden change of subject. “What brought that on?”

“If you can talk about her, and still maintain your shields, then I’ll know you’re getting the hang of it.” She hesitated for a moment, as if trying to decide if she’d tell him more. “And I’m curious. I suspect there was a reason you two were attracted to one another, so I’d like to know more.”

Paul recalled the evening he’d met Suzanna. “There’s not much to tell. We met in college, in our senior year. Met at a party thrown by a mutual friend. Hit it off right away, started dating, fell in love. Couldn’t afford to get married right away, so we worked for a couple of years before tying the knot. Couldn’t afford to have children right away, so we worked for a couple more years before having Cloe. Nothing really unusual or special about us. Quite ordinary, in fact.”

“And the friend who introduced you?”

“He didn’t really introduce us. He just threw a party and we both showed up, happened to run into each other. Pure chance.”

She raised an eyebrow skeptically. “There may not be a lot of chance where you’re concerned. How did Suzanna die?”

Paul really didn’t want to look into that dark hole in his soul. “She just disappeared one day, gone without reason or a word. I spent a week just crazy-nuts trying to find her. Then the cops identified her body in a car accident, totaled it, head-on with a big truck. I’m pretty certain they figured it was suicide, though around me they only dropped a few hints about that. More in the questions they asked. You know: was she depressed? That kind of stuff.”

“And you didn’t believe it was suicide?”

“No,” he said angrily. “I checked into it, studied up on it. She didn’t show any of the symptoms. Not a one.”

“And Cloe, what about her?”

That hole was even deeper and darker, and he had trouble getting the words out. “Couple months later, hit-and-run, right outside her school.”

Colleen reached out and put a comforting hand on Paul’s shoulder. “What about Suzanna’s parents?”

“She was an orphan, didn’t really have any. She’d spent a lot of years in foster homes, but never more than a few years in any one place, not long enough so anyone really thought of her as their daughter. She grew up surprisingly normal, for all that.”

They both sat there in silence. The pilot announced their final approach into DFW. The attendants picked up the trash, the plane maneuvered around a bit, then settled into the long, straight path to the runway. The plane jerked and the wheels screeched, and the plane coasted to a stop at the end of the runway. The engine pitch rose again and the pilot taxied toward their gate.

“Paul,” Colleen said. “There’s something I’ve suspected about Suzanna for some time now. And I think you just confirmed my suspicions.”

Paul felt anger swelling up within him as he looked sharply at Colleen and said, “I don’t want to hear anything bad about her. She’s gone, so leave it at that.”

Colleen shook her head. “No, Paul. It’s not bad. I just think she was a Sidhe foundling.”

“What’s a foundling?”

Colleen hesitated. “Your apartment had the scent of long-term Unseelie habitation. Not the kind of scent you’d detect with your nose, but rather an arcane residue. It’s considerably diminished, which would be consistent with the fact that Suzanna has been gone for more than a year, but it’s unmistakable.”

Paul’s patience had shredded. He tried not to sound angry as he again demanded, “What’s a foundling?”

“I’m guessing a Sidhe woman of the Unseelie Court took a mortal lover, bore a child, was pressured in some way to give up the child or wanted to hide the birth, left her here as an orphan in the Mortal Plane. Possibly never had contact with her again.”

“But Suzanna never had any Sidhe powers.”

“All Sidhe have extraordinary powers in Faerie, but one must be a mage, a wizard or a witch, to have powers here in the Mortal Plane. If Suzanna was merely half-Sidhe, but not a mage, then however powerful she might or might not have been in Faerie, she would have been quite normal here.”

Paul stared at the back of the seat in front of him as the plane pulled up to the gate, the chime sounded, the passengers stood and began gathering up their possessions. Colleen stood, then leaned down close to Paul’s ear, “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

Paul stood, and as he did so Colleen smiled at him and said, “By the way, you held your shields nicely while talking about Suzanna and Cloe.”

~~~

It would be rather easy to learn where they lived, the little Mexican boy and the pretty Mexican girl. He’d just follow them home, but he’d do so carefully. He couldn’t follow behind them in his car, barely moving along at two or three miles an hour. That would be pushing the limits of the spell that hid the car. And it would be far too dangerous to walk behind them; they were just ambling along and he’d have to walk too slowly. No, much too obvious. But he’d done this before, and it was easy.

After the bus dropped them off he waited and watched them walk up the street, the engine in his car idling. As they approached the corner he backed out of his parking place and drove slowly across the mall parking lot. He pulled out on the road just as they turned the corner and walked out of sight. He drove slowly down the street, and by the time he turned the same corner, they were just reaching the next corner, and by the time he passed them they had walked straight without turning. He continued on and didn’t look back. Patience. It required patience to do this right.

The next day he approached them from the opposite direction, saw them continue to walk straight for another block. The next two days he stayed away, and the following day he confirmed the next turn in their walk home. Now it was time to stay away from the entire neighborhood for a while. He’d come back in a few days, a long enough absence to insure that some observant parent didn’t spot a pattern and take notice of his car.

He now knew the pattern of their day, knew the school they attended, the route the bus took to bring them home and the bus stop. Eventually, he’d watch each of them walk right up to their front door as he drove past.

Soon,
the voice said.
Soon.

Chapter 4: The Hunt

Salisteen sent a chauffeured limo for them. The passenger compartment—
back seat
really didn’t do it justice—had two seats facing each other, with plenty of leg-room for all. Paul and McGowan sat in a seat facing Colleen and Katherine. The limo also had a wet bar, TV, the works.

As the limo drove out of the airport Colleen and Katherine were quietly discussing something, so Paul asked McGowan, “I take it she’s loaded.”

“More than me, kid.”

“Are all top practitioners loaded?”

“Pretty much.”

“Why?”

“Better to have money than not.”

Paul tried a different approach. “I guess I really mean how? Do you predict the future or something and invest in the stock market? Something like that?”

McGowan frowned and considered Paul’s question carefully. “It’s pretty hard to predict the future. Only some of us can do it, and then only to a limited extent. I can teach you a couple of incantations, the same ones good old Nostradamus used, but the results are always vague and subject to wide interpretation. That was his big problem, eventually drove him nuts trying to figure out what the results meant.”

McGowan looked at Paul carefully. “But that’s not what you’re really asking. Is it?”

“No. I’m just wondering if you game the system in some way.”

McGowan shrugged. “Most of us don’t need to. We tend to live rather long lives, and because we are practitioners, opportunities do come our way. But if you wanted to game the system and make some money, you’d have to be careful what you did. You might spell some dice and win big at the casinos, and they’ll let you win once or twice then cut you off. And a couple of them—though they don’t realize it—employ practitioners as heads of security. Practitioners are good at spotting anyone trying to beat the system. And they consider it cheating, so you might end up with your legs broken.”

McGowan looked at him pointedly and frowned. “You want to get rich?”

Paul shook his head adamantly. “No, not that, I’m just trying to understand the rules.”

McGowan pursed his lips and thought carefully. “There aren’t many. I suppose the big one is: don’t bring mundane attention to your abilities, or those of others. There was a time when strong practitioners were respected, and often employed as royal advisors and counselors. But then we went through that nasty time when they burned witches at the stake, and that left us all a little shy about notoriety. You want to murder someone, you want to use your power to do it, that’s between you and the law, as long as they don’t find out about your abilities, though I personally don’t like criminals and might just choose to see justice done. On the other hand, you start leaving a string of bizarre, unanswered killings behind you, and there’ll be no
maybe’s
about it. There are several of us who will definitely step in and stop you, permanently.

“Say you figure out an alchemical spell for turning lead or iron into gold. Go ahead, make yourself rich. But don’t make so much gold that you start affecting world financial markets. That might prompt someone to start asking the kind of questions we don’t want asked. We’ll step in.

“And you already know about setting a demon loose in this life, either purposefully or by accident, we’ll step in. We’ll get rid of the demon, then sit down and have a talk about how we can be certain you won’t do it again. And if the talk doesn’t reassure us sufficiently, you probably won’t survive it.”

McGowan kept referring to
we
, as if there was some organization. “Who’s
we
? Is there some group, or council or something?”

McGowan shook his head. “There’s about a dozen of us worldwide that are in a league all our own. There’s me, Karpov and Colleen. You’re about to meet Salisteen. Then there’s Charlie Stowicz in New York, three or four in Europe, three or four more in Asia, couple in South America, one in Australia. We’re a pretty stubborn, contrary bunch that, by and large, don’t usually get along well. But there are certain things that’ll make us band together.”

McGowan chuckled, laughing at some private joke. “That Russian wants us to get organized, write down rules, have an executive council. We’d have rank based on power; the more powerful you are, the higher your rank. All that kind of stuff.”

Paul grimaced. “And I suppose Karpov wants to be the head of this executive council?”

“Exactly,” McGowan said, shaking his head sadly. “Though the rank-power relationship thing already exists in a de facto fashion. It’s only natural.”

“Where would that put you?”

“I’d be up there, kid. I’ve been at the top of the feeding chain for a long time.”

“And me?”

McGowan looked at Paul as if appraising him carefully. “Too soon to say, kid. Clearly you’ll be well above the middle ranks. But how much above, only time, practice and experience will tell. And you are unique.”

“The necromancer thing?”

“Ya, the necromancer thing?”

“Sounds like there’s a bunch of factions. What faction are you part of?”

McGowan shrugged and grinned. “You might say I’m one of the leaders of the anarchist faction: no organization, no committees, and we already have enough rules.”

Paul thought it through carefully. “So you help me out, you teach me, I’m the sorcerer’s apprentice and all that, and I’ll naturally feel indebted. So you’ll probably gain a supporter, and who knows how much rank I’ll be able to put behind that support.”