Water to Burn

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Authors: Katharine Kerr

BOOK: Water to Burn
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Table of Contents
 
 
 
“THE WAVE, WELL, IT SEEMED TO COME OUT OF NOWHERE, THIS GREAT RUSH OF WATER, LIKE A GREEN WALL.”
 
“It pulled both children into the sea, I take it,” I said.
Reverend Wilson nodded. “Cody managed to get out again. Brittany didn’t.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Wilson choked back a sob. “The oddest thing, though.” He glanced at the huddled group behind him, as if reassuring himself they were still safe. “The wave, it was like it had tentacles or hands. It was reaching for our kids, I swear it, with strands of seawater. I could feel a malignancy in that wave. Satan, I suppose, bent on murder.” He gave me an odd twisted smile, all pain and black humor. “The police think I’m crazy. Do you?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it was Satan, but if you say you felt something malignant, you could be right. I don’t know yet, but I’m not dismissing what you say.”
“Thanks.” He gulped for breath, then turned away. “It meant to take them. I swear it.”
I let him go back to his flock. Ari rejoined me.
“I’ve seen enough,” I said. “Let’s get out of everyone’s way.”
We crossed the highway, but at the head of the path down, I glanced back at the ocean. I saw, just for a brief moment, the figure of an enormous woman standing on the sea. The fog wrapped her with gray mourning clothes, and a dead child lay across her outstretched arms. I knew then that the girl had drowned.
Available from DAW Books:
 
The
Nola O’Grady
Novels:
 
LICENSE TO ENSORCELL WATER TO BURN
 
 
Katharine Kerr’s
Novels of Deverry,
The Silver Wyrm Cycle:
 
THE GOLD FALCON (#1)
THE SPIRIT STONE (#2)
THE SHADOW ISLE (#3)
THE SILVER MAGE (#4)
Copyright © 2011 by Katharine Kerr.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54333-7
 
All Rights Reserved.
 
 
DAW Book Collectors No. 1557.
 
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
 
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
 
 
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Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
First Printing, August 2011
 
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
 
S.A.

http://us.penguingroup.com

In memoriam
Michael Plotts
1960–2009
an honorable officer of the law
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
Many thanks to Howard Dunstan, Kate Elliott, JD Glass, Jo Kasper, Madeleine Robins, Karen Williams, and Cliff Winnig for sage advice during the writing of this book. And a special thanks to Rebecca Caccavo for her research into the arcane matter of Bay Area teenage slang.
CHAPTER 1
 
 
I
KNEW THAT SOMETHING WAS WRONG with that fog the minute I saw it. When you live in western San Francisco, as I have for many years, you come to know fog in all its aspects—the chilly blankets of late summer, the soft-focus mists of autumn, the near-rains of winter, the delicate wisps of spring—but none of them have faces. This one did. A dark gray face, about three feet high, pressed against my kitchen window and stared at me while I drank my breakfast coffee.
“What do you want?” I said to it, as politely as I could manage. “Got something to tell me?”
It shook its huge head no, then mouthed a word.
“Help?” I said. “You need help?”
It nodded yes, then pulled back. I got up from the table and took a long look out of the window at the ground, three stories below my apartment. Fog hung low over the rooftops of the local shops and the Persian restaurant across the street. Long tendrils of gray damp swayed in the wind and wrapped themselves around the electric cables above the streetcar tracks like ocean kelp on a slow tide.
Fog Face kept drifting back and forth outside. Yet no one walking by or waiting at the streetcar stop seemed to notice anything unusual, even though a sudden flood of water lapped around the concrete island out in the middle of the street. One of my IOIs again, I figured. That’s slang for “Image Objectification of Insight,” where a psychic like me sees intuitions or flashes of data as literal things or events outside of herself.
It pays, however, to treat them as real, because sometimes they are.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll be glad to help, but I don’t know what you need.”
I heard the sound of waves, breaking on a shore, a rocky shore or a graveled beach, because the sound rumbled and chattered. It turned into the noise of the N Judah streetcar, screeching to a halt at the passenger island, which had become dry again. For a moment more Fog Face looked up at me. It frayed out into normal fog and disappeared.
I’d gotten an answer, even though I had no idea of what it meant. Most people assume that when you’re a psychic investigator, information and messages bombard your mind with no effort on your part. Once in a great while they do, but you’ve still got to interpret the ambiguities. Ambiguities always abound.
I picked up my coffee mug and sat back down to think. The message pointed to the ocean, possibly as a source of the Chaos eruption I was tracking. That’s my job, tracking down outbreaks of Chaos into the normal world and then dealing with them.
My name is Nola O’Grady. I won’t name the government agency I work for; it’s so secret that even the CIA doesn’t know it exists, and a good thing, too, because they’d probably try to snag some of our funding. Only two outsiders have access to the Agency, and they both work for a top-secret office inside the State Department. Technically I was the head of the new San Francisco bureau, the Apocalypse Squad. My staff at that time consisted of two stringers and a bodyguard, nothing, in short, to pump up anyone’s ego, especially since the bodyguard was probably spying for the Israeli government on the side.
“Nola?” Ari Nathan, the bodyguard cum spy in question, stood in the kitchen doorway. “Who were you talking to?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It only had a face, no body.” I considered its silent plea for help. “I don’t think it was a Chaos creature, but I’m not sure.”
“What are those things you throw at your apparitions?”

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