Unbinding (24 page)

“Is there a compelling reason to check out the first floor?”

“Other than the fact that it’s warded?”

“There is that.”

Arjenie had found two wards. The external one seemed to be a simple alarm that covered the entire house, but it had already been triggered. Some wards evaporate after being triggered; this one hadn’t, but neither had it been reset. Arjenie thought it was safe to cross, so she’d gone inside to check out the house. She’d found the second ward stretched across the stairs that led to what used to be the first floor.

“I’m not following you,” Boyd said. “I know you found a ward on the outside of the house. That’s why no one’s supposed to touch the house, though apparently it’s okay for you to do that. Now you’re saying there’s another one?”

Arjenie nodded. “Inside, on the staircase.”

“Which you’d know,” Kai said, “if you talked to Special Agent Ackleford. Arjenie told him about it.”

Boyd ignored her. “And you were considering crossing it? Don’t.”

Arjenie’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh? And you’re in charge here now, not the special agent?”

He had put Arjenie’s back up, hadn’t he? Kai decided to let her handle it while she went back to coaxing out the fragment of intention Boyd’s appearance had startled her into letting go of. This one was badly faded, but it had a lot of silver threads, which suggested it might be an important part of the overall pattern.

She’d stabilized the fragment already so it wouldn’t fade any further. That wisp of power would answer her call. She held out a hand and lightly brushed the sliver of lavender she could see. “Come on,” she whispered. It did, but grudgingly. It wanted to stay stuck to the vines. So had most of the others she’d found. Maybe the vines were imbued with a type of magic that attracted them. She fed a smidgeon more power into the coating she’d used to stabilize it . . . careful, careful, too much and it would simply burst.

Here it came.

She reached out with her left hand and picked it up. Not that her hand really did anything, but it made a great trigger for her Gift. She
knew
her hands could pick things up, so her mind automatically followed their lead.

Yes, lots of silver on this one. Maybe that would help. She tugged on the thin power cord where she’d hung her collection of fragments—a tattered collection of small lavender and silver blobs fixed to the cord like fish on a stringer. A dab of “sticky” power added the new fragment to the rest.

“That is the damnedest thing,” Boyd said. “Like watching a mime. I take it you’ve got your, uh, fragment?”

Kai nodded and stood, then twisted. Her back was stiff.

“So you found plenty of intention stuff here. That means someone did this on purpose.”

“Yes. We suspected that, of course, but until I found evidence of intention, the possibility remained that this was a random occurrence. We’re dealing with chaos, after all. Randomness must be part of the package.”

“Funny how different today’s incident was from the one at Fagioli. The attack here wasn’t magical. Any idea why someone would shoot at you?”

His colors were nowhere near as casual as his voice. Did he think he was asking a trick question? “I’ve certainly wondered about that. Why me? That’s what everyone asks when random badness strikes, but this wasn’t random.”

Arjenie spoke. “Just because he was aiming for you, that doesn’t eliminate the ‘random badness’ explanation. Maybe you were a random target. We’re talking about a god of chaos, so maybe he just wanted to stir things up. He tried to snatch you before, so why would he be trying to kill you now?”

“He didn’t kill her, though, did he?” Boyd observed. “Maybe the shot would have missed even if Mr. Alvarez hadn’t tackled her.” He looked at Kai. “Could be someone wanted you scared, not dead.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” José said from behind Boyd.

Boyd snorted. “What, you saw the bullet whizz past?”

“I saw where the cop was hit.” José tapped his head just behind the temple. “He’s the same height as Kai. If the sniper just wanted to scare her, he’s an idiot. An intentional near-miss on a head shot . . .” He shook his head. “If she moves even a little when he’s pulling the trigger, she doesn’t end up scared. She ends up dead.”

Arjenie frowned. “I’m wondering why there was a target at all. Why would anyone be shooting at anyone?”

Kai’s mouth twitched. “Oddly put, but it’s a good question. Why a sniper? Why switch from magical hijinks to material mayhem? Who does that benefit? And why wasn’t anyone snatched this time?”

“All good questions,” Boyd said dryly. “Got any answers?”

“No, but . . .” She sighed. “I probably ought to tell you something, though I don’t see how it fits. Or if it fits, for that matter. Ruben Brooks thinks I’m somehow key.”

Boyd frowned. “Brooks. The head of Unit Twelve. He’s some kind of precog.”

“Yes. And I don’t know why he thinks that. He doesn’t know why he thinks it. He also said that the probabilities are all messed up because of the introduction of chaos,” she added, “so he might be wrong.”

Arjenie tossed up her hands. “I can’t make sense of any of it. But this has to be another chaos incident. Transforming a building that way has to mean chaos energy was involved, so it’s still all about this chaos god and what he wants.”

The obvious reached up and smacked Kai in the face. “Oh. Shit. Yeah.” When the others looked puzzled, she explained. “He’s already got Nathan, but he’s not finished, is he? Revenge isn’t all he wants. Maybe that isn’t even his primary goal.”

“What he wanted before,” Arjenie said slowly, “was to enter our realm. To get a living body so he’d be fully alive again.”

They looked at each other. “I don’t see how—”

“Doug’s back,” José said. The big wolf trotted into view, trailed by his temporary official partner. Doug sat next to José and made a low, whining noise. “Can’t Change back yet?”

Doug shook his head and pawed the ground once with his right foot.

“He thinks it’ll be another hour,” José explained. “Doug’s got a great nose, but he can’t Change too often, not without a boost from his Rho or Lu Nuncio. But we’ve got a few signals he can use to tell me some basic stuff.” He looked at the wolf. “Tell me what you smelled.”

Doug sniffed loudly and nodded firmly. He tilted his head to the left, flattened his ears and lifted them, then raised his right rear foot and held it in the air briefly.

José spoke. “Doug got a solid scent. The smell is new to him, female, and . . . our designation is ‘other,’ meaning not animal, lupus, or human.”

“Female?” Boyd said sharply, at the same moment Kai and Arjenie repeated, “Not human?”

Doug nodded vigorously.

“He didn’t recognize the scent,” José said, “so we can’t get much more information from him until he can Change and tell us more about—”

“Michalski!” Ackleford yelled from across the street. “Fox! Get over here.”

Kai rolled her eyes. “I’m not your subordinate!” she called back.

“Get your butts over here anyway.”

Kai scowled and glanced at Arjenie, who shrugged. “It must be important.”

So they headed for Ackleford, who was talking into his phone, though he did put it up when they reached him. “We’ve got another chaos incident. This one with casualties. Someone’s taking credit, and they want to talk to you.”

“I
T’S
beautiful,” Arjenie said quietly. “Vicious, but beautiful.”

Kai nodded as she looked out at the beach.

Out on the clean white sand was a monster. Inanimate now, but monstrous. And, yes, beautiful. It looked like a serpent, that long, glittering strand, like a serpent made from gems and light. But it was glass, not jewels, thrusting up from the sand. Thousands of shards of colored glass made up that long, undulating shape. Big ones, little ones, glass in every color of the rainbow.

Sharp, sharp glass.

From here on the boardwalk, Kai could see two large red splotches on the sand. There were more, she knew, but she couldn’t see the others, perhaps because of all the thought bubbles—hundreds of them, it seemed, remnants of horror ripped from the minds of those who’d been here.

“You see any of that intention stuff?” Ackleford asked.

“I can’t tell from here. There’re a lot of remnants to sort through.” She didn’t dare dial her Gift down as much as usual. Someone had tried to kill her once today. People who claimed they were connected to this chaos event insisted that she be brought here to talk to them. It didn’t take a genius to wonder if the idea was to give the shooter another chance. Her Gift might give her a bit of warning. Not that there was a pattern for, “I am about to kill you,” but she could watch for compulsions.

Something tugged at her consciousness. She turned, frowning.

They’d followed Ackleford here, parking the big Lincoln and the guards’ Toyota amid all the official cars. Their eventual goal was the main lifeguard tower farther down the beach, but Kai and Arjenie had wanted to see the scene first. To reach the boardwalk they’d passed through a parking lot crowded with people who’d been present or nearby when the chaos event hit. They’d drawn some stares. Doug was still a wolf.

A whole slew of police officers were on the scene, many of them busy interviewing the witnesses, one-on-one. One of those witnesses suddenly had Kai’s complete attention.

“. . . chased us! I never saw anything like it. Then that piece, that blue piece, it just pushed right up. You can see it, right next to the part that looks like a grape popsicle, only sharp. Phil didn’t have a chance. It was just
there
, pushing into him, and . . . will he be all right?”

The speaker was young. Sixteen or seventeen. Tanned and fit, he sat hunched over on the low wall that separated the boardwalk from the sand. He was shirtless and barefoot, with khaki shorts of the saggy, baggy sort young men his age were so fond of. Heavy blood spatter decorated one side of the shorts.

“He’s at the ER by now,” the uniformed officer with him said soothingly. She was young, too. Not as young as her witness, but not that much older. Her hair was blond and shiny. “They’ll take care of him. I need your name and address.”

“Mark. Mark Weinerman. 4322 Harrow Drive. I should’ve gone with him. In the ambulance.”

“They’ll call his folks from the ER. Does he live here?”

“Yeah, yeah. We all do. Penny.” He sat up straight. “Shit, poor Penny. She and Phil, they’re a thing. I need to find her.” He stood. “I need to find Penny.”

Out on the white sand, one coil of the glass monster looped around an abandoned volleyball net. Of the ten young people who’d been playing beach volleyball, seven had been taken to the ER. So had twenty more people of varying ages. No deaths, not yet, but at least two were in critical condition.

Two more had vanished. One of them was named Penny.

“Come on, Michalski,” Ackleford said impatiently. “The people you need to talk to are up at the lifeguard tower.”

“I . . . just a minute.” The young man’s colors were dark, but so were those of most people here. But something was wrong with him, something that wasn’t wrong with the others. “I need to see his patterns better,” she said abruptly, and turned.

“Hold on. Is he possessed or something?”

“No. It’s not that. He needs me.”

“Damn it—”

She didn’t stay to see what else he had to say. Her Gift was pulling too hard.

The young blond officer was trying to calm Mark down, telling him again that Phil was at the hospital, that the doctors were taking care of him, and he could call his friend Penny in just a minute.

It wasn’t working. He’d started jittering from foot to foot. “I need to go. Where’s Phil? Where’s Penny? I need to find them.”

“Mark,” Kai said. She moved in front of him and stopped. “My name is Kai. I’m a mindhealer. I’d like to help you. May I?”

He looked at her, but not as if he saw her. His eyes were glassy. His colors were dark, dark, but it was the pattern she saw overtaking them that worried her—a turbulent, disruptive pattern. “I should’ve gone in the ambulance.”

“Miss,” the officer began.

“I can help him,” Kai said, “if he gives permission. Mark?”

“All that blood. They took his leg, too. In the ambulance. It wasn’t on him anymore, so they took it with them. I didn’t want to sit next to his leg. I should have gone.”

“Look,” the cop said, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but—”

“Mark.” Kai put her hands on either side of his head and sent a tiny pulse of shaped power through them:
calm
. Not enough to interfere with his thoughts permanently, or make this any less his choice, his decision. Just a brief respite. “I can help you, but only if you say it’s okay.”

Someone seized her arm. “Hey,” the officer said. “I’m talking to you.”

Vaguely Kai heard Ackleford’s voice. She tuned it out. The hand on her arm fell away, and at last Mark’s eyes focused on her. Drowning eyes. “Help Phil,” he whispered.

“Phil has other people helping him now. I want to help you.”

“I didn’t get hurt. Everyone else did. I ran away.”

“You’re hurt. Will you let me help?”

Mutely he nodded.

She hated to trance in public, especially without Dell or Nathan to watch over her. Half the time she couldn’t do it with strangers around, but that wouldn’t be a problem this time. Not with her Gift pulling so hard. “We need to sit down.” She took his arm, guiding him to sit on the wall again. She sat beside him and took both his hands in hers.

The smallest intervention possible
—
that was always the goal. Eharin had told her so over and over, often accompanied by a disparaging glance or a comment about how powerhouses like Kai seldom developed any delicacy. It was too easy for her to hammer in her amendments.

There’d be no hammering today. Her headache might be gone, but she was still depleted. Kai reminded herself of that as she took a slow breath and slid into healing trance.

*   *   *

N
ATHAN
reached for the next handhold. When he, Benedict, and Dell came this way before, they’d followed a narrow valley that ran between the two impossibly high peaks on either side. That valley was gone now, filled in by a mini-mountain. Much lower than the peaks on either side, it had still presented them with a challenge: Dell couldn’t climb it. Not this part. She’d indicated that she wanted them to take this route, however, and after a bit of discussion they’d agreed. Once they started the climb, she’d led her little harem away to find another route.

Nathan hoped she knew what she was doing. He was getting increasingly frustrated by the inability to communicate with her. No doubt Dell was frustrated, too—but not enough to change forms. Not so far.

From what they could tell about the passage of time, they were overdue for a load of salad, or whatever other meal their host might offer. The lupi were feeling it, too. “Maybe he wants to see which of us turns cannibal first,” Benedict said. “His kind of bastard might be amused by that.”

“Too easy,” Cullen said. He was winded and trying to hide it. “Where’s the drama when the answer’s obvious?”

The first part of their trek had been easy enough. Even this stretch wasn’t bad . . . for Nathan and Benedict. Benedict had taken the rear position so he could keep an eye on Cullen, help out if necessary. Not that anyone said this out loud. Instead, the two lupi had been alternatively speculating and bickering since they began the climb.

“My control’s better,” Benedict agreed. “I don’t know about Nathan, though.”

Cullen snorted. “Not what I meant. You’d be first to chow down.”

“You’ve got a damn poor idea of my control.”

“You’d eat me with plenty of control,” Cullen assured him. “But if the god stops feeding us, obviously I’ll die first, given how underfed I already am. Therefore, I’d get eaten first. Not by Dell, who needs blood, not flesh. Not by Nathan, because I’m pretty sure he can’t starve to death.”

“Is that true?” Benedict demanded. “You can’t starve?”

“I’m unlikely to die of it.” Especially in a place this rich in magic. He’d lose weight, he’d get very, very hungry, but his healing wouldn’t let him actually starve to death. “Your healing doesn’t keep you alive if you go without food?”

“I don’t think so,” Benedict said slowly. “Now that I think about it, though, I’ve never heard of a lupus dying of starvation. That’s not to say it’s never happened, but I haven’t heard about it. What about you, Cullen?”

“Never heard of it happening, no, but that doesn’t mean we can’t starve. We’re very capable predators, though we may eat things we shouldn’t if we get too hungry.”

“I always figured we’d starve faster than a human would. Healing itself makes us hungry. How could it cure what it makes worse?”

Nathan spoke curtly. “Healing keeps you from starving, but it doesn’t cure hunger. At least, my healing kept me alive. I don’t know what yours does or doesn’t do.” He reached for the next hold, wanting to climb faster, as if he could escape what he carried with him. Foolishness, but he did not like those memories.

“You’ve experienced it,” Cullen said quietly from below him. “Not simple hunger. Starvation.”

“Yes. The rock’s not as stable here as I’d like,” he warned them as he moved the toes of his right foot off an outcropping that felt a bit crumbly. Almost at the top now. “Whatever it’s made of, it acts like sandstone. If you . . . eh.” The smell was faint, but it stood out in air so nearly dead. “I guess we won’t have to find out who eats who just yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I smell chicken. Barbequed chicken.”

*   *   *

A
S
the world dimmed and faded, Mark’s color’s sharpened into a glowing darkness, a writhing forest of murky grays, browns, and purple. Flickers of his natural green and yellow showed, but they were being overwhelmed by the tangled pattern of wrongness.

Kai’s thoughts faded, too. All was instinct, the imperative of her Gift pressing on her. Showing her what to do. She squeezed off a nubbin of power. It hung in the air in front of her, an iridescent soap bubble the size of her thumbnail. Yes. Yes, that should do.

Now she had to watch, to study the turbulence, waiting for the prompt of her Gift. There. She pushed her thought-bubble forward . . . and it entered Mark’s thoughts, drawn into the churning mass, yet still separate from it. Wait, wait . . .
now
. She popped the bubble and the iridescence flowed out, coating his thoughts.

Time to do the real work. That iridescence was hers to order, and she did, using it to slow the turbulence, then to amend it . . . just a nudge, the tiniest of nudges here, and over there, now breathe a momentary calm and see how that settled—yes, a hint of green reappeared. Not hers. His. That’s right, that’s what she wanted, for his thoughts to form their own links, the patterns native to him. The turbulence was less now, especially at the center, and oh yes, there was the weak part, the spot she had to brace. The pattern there, deep at the base of his thoughts, was so thin it was almost gone. That’s what her Gift had dragged her here for.

Everything she’d done so far was temporary. Most of her work was. Minds usually healed on their own, given time. She helped them heal faster and more completely by encouraging some thought patterns and blunting the effects of others, but her amendments were usually temporary.

Not this one. What she did next would be permanent. No one but another mindhealer or a dragon would be able to change it. Mark would live with what she did now for the rest of his life, so it had to be right.

Kai created another thought bubble, this one milky, not transparent. She studied it and the place it would go, the thin place that needed reinforcing. Something still didn’t feel right. She watched his thoughts arise, watched them filter through the weak place deep in his mind . . . oh, there it was. A thread had broken entirely. Such a tiny thing, but without it, he’d never be whole.

She’d need more power. She fed the bubble carefully, forcing it to stay small. When it gleamed hard and bright like a pearl, she moved it into place. Careful, careful . . . stretch it out and anchor it here and here. Leave the base free to complete this portion of the pattern while wrapping the top part around this delicate arc. Now breathe motion into it. Motion meant resilience, room for growth and decisions and changes . . .

Yes. Done. With an effort, Kai pulled herself back. All the way back. “There,” she whispered, and withdrew her hands along with her Gift. “Mark. How do you feel?”