The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (48 page)

Miriam stared at her in slack-jawed amazement. ‘That’s brilliant!’ she said. ‘Hang on – ’ her hand instinctively went to her head. ‘Hmm.’

‘You won’t have to shave,’ said Paulie, ‘I know exactly what to do. You know those henna temporary tattoos you can get? There’s this dot-com that takes images you
upload and turns them into tattoos, then sends them to you by mail order. They’re supposed to last for a few days. I figure if you put one on the inside of each wrist, then wear something
with sleeves that cover it – ’

‘Wow.’ Miriam instinctively glanced at the inside of her left wrist, smooth and hairless, unblemished except for a small scar she’d acquired as a child. ‘But you said
you’d been thinking about something else.’

‘Yup.’ Paulette upended her shopping bag on the table. ‘Behold: a pair of digital walkie-talkies, good for private conversations in a ten-mile radius! And lo, a hands-free
kit.’

‘This is going to work,’ Miriam said, a curious smile creeping across her face. ‘I can feel it in my bones.’ She looked up. ‘Okay. So tell me, Paulie, what do you
know about the history of patent law?’

*

It took Miriam another day to work up the nerve to phone Roland. If she went outside she could phone him, either his voice mail or his own real-life ear, and dump all the
unwanted complexities of her new life on a sympathetic shoulder. He’d understand: That was half the attraction that had sparked their whirlwind affair. He probably grasped the headaches she
was facing better than anyone else, Brill included. Brill was still not much more than a teenager with a sheltered upbringing. But Roland knew just how nasty things could get.
If I trust
him,
she thought.
Someone
had murdered the watchman and installed the bomb in the warehouse. She’d told Roland about the place, and then . . .
Correlation does not imply
causation,
she reminded herself.

In the end she compromised, taking the T into town and finding a diner with a good range of exit options before switching on the phone and dialing. That way, even if someone had grabbed Roland
and was actively tracing the call, they wouldn’t find her before she hung up. It was raining, and she had a seat next to the window, watching the slug-trails of moisture run down the glass as
her latte cooled and she tried to work up her nerve to call him.

When she dialed, the phone rang five times before he picked it up, a near-eternity in which she changed her mind about the wisdom of calling him several times. ‘Hello?’ he asked.

‘Roland. It’s me.’

‘Hello, you.’ Concern roughened his voice: ‘I’ve been really worried about you. Where are – ’

‘Wait.’ She realized she was breathing too fast, shallow breaths that didn’t seem to be bringing in enough oxygen. ‘You’re on this side. Is anyone with
you?’

‘No, I’m taking a day off work. Even your uncle gives his troops leave sometimes. He’s been asking about you, though. As if he knows I’ve got some kind of channel to you.
When are you going to come in? What have you been doing? Olga had the craziest story – ’

‘If it’s about the incident in her apartment, it’s true.’ Miriam stopped, glanced obliquely at the window to check for reflections. There was nobody near her, just a
barrista cleaning the coffee machine on the counter at the other side of the room. ‘Is Edsger around? He hasn’t gone missing or anything?’

‘Edsger?’ Roland sounded uncertain. ‘What do you know about – ’

‘Edsger. Courier on the Boston–New York run.’ Quickly Miriam outlined her encounter with the courier. ‘Did he arrive all right?’

‘Yes. I think so.’ Roland paused. ‘So you’re telling me somebody tried to kill you in the warehouse as well?’ A note of anger crept into his voice. ‘When I
find out who – ’

‘You’ll do nothing,’ Miriam told him. ‘And you’re not going to tell me you can provide security. There’s a mole in the organization, Roland, they’d work
around you – and I’ve found out something more interesting. There’s a whole bunch of world-walkers you don’t know about, and they’re coming in from yet another world,
where everything’s different. What we were talking about, the whole technology transfer thing, it can work there, too. In fact, that’s what I’m doing now, with Brill. The politics
– do you know anything about Baroness Hildegarde’s interests? Olga said she’s going to try to get the Clan committee to declare me incompetent. Before that happens I want to be
able to make her look like an idiot. I’m working on the other side, Roland, in the third world, building a front company. So I’m going to stay out of touch for quite a bit
longer.’

‘Can I see you?’ he asked. A pause. ‘I really think we’ve got a lot to work out. I don’t know about you.’ Another pause. ‘I was hoping we could . .
.’

This was the hardest part. ‘I don’t think so,’ Miriam heard herself saying. ‘I’d love to spend some time with you, but I’ve got so much to do. And there
isn’t enough time to do it. I can’t risk you being followed, or Angbard deciding to reel me in too soon. I want to, but – ’

‘I get it.’ He sounded despondent.

‘I’m not dumping you! It’s just I, I need some time.’ She was breathing too fast again. ‘Later. Give me a week to sort things out, then we’ll see.’

‘Oh. A week?’ The distant tone vanished. ‘Okay, a week. I’ll wait it out. You’ll take care of yourself? You’re sure you’re safe where you
are?’

‘For now,’ Miriam affirmed, crossing her fingers. ‘And I’ll have a lot more to tell you then, I’ll need your advice.’
And everything else.
The urge
to drop her resolve, grab any chance to see him, was so strong she had trouble resisting.
Keep it businesslike, for now.
‘I love you,’ she said impulsively.

‘Me too. I mean, I love you, too.’ It came out in a tongue-tied rush, followed by a silence freighted with unspoken qualifications.

‘I’d better go,’ she said at last.

‘Okay, then.’

‘Bye.’ She ended the call and stared bleakly at the rain outside the window. Her coffee was growing cold.
Now why did I
really
say that?
She wondered, puzzled:
Did I really mean it?
She’d said those words before, to her husband – now ex-husband – and she’d meant them at the time. Why did this feel different?

‘Damn it, I’m a fool,’ she told herself gloomily, muttering under her breath so that the waitress at the far end of the bar took pains to avoid looking at her.
I’m a
fool for love, and if I don’t handle this carefully, I could end up a
dead
fool. Damn it, why did I have to take that locket in the first place?

The raindrops weren’t answering, so she finished her latte and left.

*

She spent the next three days exercising her magic credit card discreetly.

Angbard hadn’t put a stop on it. Evidently the message had gotten through:
Don’t bug me, I’m busy staying alive.
A garden shed, a deluxe shooting hide, and enough
gas-powered tools to outfit a small farm vanished into the trunk of Miriam’s rental car in repeated runs between Home Depot and Costco and the new office near Cambridgeport. Miriam
didn’t much like the office – it had a residual smell of stale tobacco and some strange coffee-colored stains on the carpet that not even an industrial cleaner could get rid of –
but she had to admit that it would do.

They moved a couple of sofa beds into the back room, and paid a locksmith to come around and beef up the door frame with dead-bolts, and install an intruder alarm and closed-circuit TV cameras
covering the yard and both entrances. A small fridge and microwave appeared in the kitchen, a television set and video in the front office. Paulette and Miriam groaned at each other about their
aches and pains, and even Brill hesitantly joined in the bitching and moaning after they unloaded the flat-pack garden shed. ‘This had better be worth it,’ Miriam said on day three as
she swallowed a Tenolol tablet and a chaser of ibuprofen on the back of her lunchtime sub.

‘You’re going across this afternoon?’ asked Paulie.

‘I’m going in half an hour,’ Miriam corrected her. ‘First trip to see if it’s okay. Then as many short ones as I can manage to ferry supplies over. I’ll take
Brill through to help get the shed up and covered, then come back to plot expedition one. You happy with the shopping list?’

‘I think so.’ Paulette sighed. ‘This isn’t what I was expecting when we got started.’

‘I know. But I think this is going to work out. Listen, you’ve been going crazy with the both of us living on top of you for the past week, but once we’re gone we’ll be
out of your hair for at least five days. Why don’t you kick back and relax? Get in some of that partying you keep moaning about missing?’

‘Because it won’t be the same without you! I was planning on showing you some of the good life. Get you hitched up with a date, anyway.’

Miriam sobered. ‘I don’t need a date right now,’ she said, looking worried – and wistful.

‘You’re – ’ Paulette raised an eyebrow. ‘You still hooked on him?’

‘It hasn’t gone away. We spoke yesterday. I keep wanting to see him.’

Paulette caught her arm. ‘Take it from me: don’t. I mean, really,
don’t
. If he’s for real, he’ll be waiting for you. If he isn’t, you’d be
running such a huge risk – ’

Miriam nodded, wordlessly.

‘I figured that was what it was. You want him whether or not he’s messed up with the shits who’re trying to kill you or disinherit you, is that right?’

‘I think he’s probably got his reasons,’ Miriam said reluctantly. ‘For whatever he’s doing. And I don’t think he’s working for them. But –
’

‘Listen,
no one
is worth what those fuckers want to do to you. Understand?’

‘But if he
isn’t
– ’ it came out as more of a whine than Miriam intended.

‘Then it will all sort itself out, won’t it?’ said Paulette. ‘Eventually.’

‘Maybe.’

They broke off as the noise of the door opening downstairs reached them. Two pairs of eyes went to the camera. It was Brill, coming in from the cold: She’d been out shopping on foot,
increasingly sure-footed in the social basics of day-to-day life in the twenty-first century. ‘I look at her, and I think she’ll be like you when she’s done some growing
up,’ Paulette commented.

‘Maybe.’ Miriam stood up. ‘What’ve you got?’ she called down the stairwell.

‘Food for the trip. Do you have a spare gun?’ she asked.

‘Huh? Why?’

‘There are wild animals in the hills near Hasleholm.’

‘Oops.’ Miriam frowned. ‘Do you really think it’s a problem?’

‘Yes.’ Brill nodded. ‘But I can shoot. He is very conservative, my father, and insisted I learn the feminine virtues – deportment, dancing, embroidery, and marksmanship.
If there are wolves, I’d like to have a long gun for dealing with them.’

‘Well, in that case we’ll have to look into getting you a hunting rifle as soon as possible. In the meantime, there’s the pistol I took from the courier. Where did you stash
it?’

‘Back at Paulette’s home. But I really could use something bigger in case of wolves or bears,’ Brill said seriously. She shoved her hair back out of the way and sniffed.
‘At least a pistol will protect me from human problems.’

‘Try not to shoot any Clan couriers, huh?’

‘I’m not stupid.’

‘I know: I just don’t want you taking any risks,’ Miriam added. ‘Okay, kids, it’s time to move. And I’m
not
taking you through just yet,
Brill.’ She reached for her heavy hiking jacket, pulled it on, and patted the right pocket to check her own gun was in place. ‘Wish me luck,’ she said, as she walked toward the
back door and the yard beyond.

CLEANING THE AIR

Miriam snapped into awareness teetering on the edge of an abyss. She flung herself sideways instinctively, grabbing for a tree branch – caught it, took two desperate
strides as the ground under her feet crumbled, then felt her boots grip solid ground that didn’t crumble under her feet.

‘Damn!’ She glanced to her left. A large patch of muddy soil lay exposed in the middle of the snowscape, exposed on the crest of a steep drop to a half-frozen streambed ten feet
below and twenty feet beyond what would be the side of the yard. ‘Damn.’ She gasped for breath, icy terror forcing her to inhale the bitterly cold air. She looked down into the stream.
If we’d rented the next unit over, or if I’d carried Brill over
– a ducking in this sort of weather could prove fatal.
Or could I have come through at all?
She
glanced up. She’d been lucky with the tree, a young elm that grew straight and tall for the first six feet. The forest hereabouts was thin.
I need to ask Brill what else she hasn’t
thought to tell me about world-walking,
she realized. Perhaps her mother was right about her being over-confident. A vague memory floated up from somewhere, something about much of Boston
being built on landfill reclaimed from the bay.
What if I’d tried this somewhere out at sea?
she thought, and leaned against the tree for a minute or two to catch her breath.
Suddenly, visions of coming through with her feet embedded in a wall or hovering ten feet above a lake didn’t seem comical at all.

She closed her locket and carefully pocketed it, then looked around. ‘It’ll do,’ she muttered to herself. ‘As long as I avoid that drop.’ She stared at it
carefully. ‘Hmm.’ She’d gone through about a foot away from the left-hand wall of their yard: The drop-off was steepest under the wall. The yard was about twelve feet wide, which
meant –

‘Right here.’ She took out her knife and carved a blaze on the tree around head height. Then she dropped her backpack and turned around, slowly, trying to take in the landscape.

The stream ran downhill toward the river a quarter of a mile away, but it was next to invisible through the woods, even with the barren winter branches blocking less of the view than the
summer’s profusion of green. In the other direction trees stretched away as far as she could see. ‘I could walk for miles in this, going in circles,’ Miriam told herself.
‘Hmm.’

She carved another blaze on a tree, then began cautiously probing into the woods, marking trees as she went. After an hour she’d established that there was no sudden change in the
landscape for a couple of hundred yards in two directions away from her little backyard. Sheer random chance had brought her through in nearly the worst possible place.