Apocalypse to Go

by Katharine Kerr

  As we walked down the hall toward the living room, I heard women’s voices, arguing. Aunt Eileen was one, and the other—

  “Oh, shit!” Michael said. “It’s Mom!”

  He turned and ran back to the stairs. The miserable little coward had gotten halfway up before I mentally registered the news. I was tempted to follow his example. Instead, I squared my shoulders and walked on into the living room. Why hide? Mom had already figured out that I was in the house.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said. “Condescending to say hello to me, are you?”

  Deirdre O’Brien O’Grady, five foot two, slender, her graying hair dyed a tasteful auburn, set her beringed hands on her hips and glared at me with cold blue eyes. Yet she was smiling with the little twist of the upper lip, the flare of one nostril, that we all called her sneer. She was wearing a boxy pants suit in powder blue, with matched pearls at her throat.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. “I thought you never wanted to see me again. Just trying to do what you asked.”

  “The one time you ever did.” She made a girlish giggling sound—I wouldn’t call it a laugh—and went on looking me over with the cold stare, her usual minute assessment of my hair, clothes, body. “At least you’ve finally lost all that weight,” she said eventually. “But you could get some better clothes now that you can fit into them.”

  Aunt Eileen was hovering, watching her sister, glancing now and then at me. I was determined to avoid a screaming fight in front of her, and in front of Ari, too, who was standing on the other side of the room, his eyes narrow, his mouth slack in disbelief. I noticed that he’d put on his jacket, probably to hide the shoulder holster.

  “I was just introduced to your boyfriend,” Mom continued. “The latest one, I suppose.” Her eyes flicked his way, then back to me. “How many does that make, anyway? Five? Six? Or do you even bother to keep count anymore?”

  My good intentions vanished. “What’s wrong?” I said and smiled. “Envy’s a sin, you know.”

  Mom caught her breath. From somewhere upstairs a sharp cracking noise rattled through the living room. The windows trembled and boomed, but the glass held unbroken.

  “Oh, come on!” I said. “Why can’t you just say it instead of sounding off in the aura field?”

  “What? Do you honestly think I did—it must be Michael and his damn firecrackers again.”

  One section of the brocade sofa lifted about three inches off the floor, then dropped with a groan.

  “He’s not hiding under there,” I said. “Why the hell can’t you just admit you’re as talented as the rest of us? This stupid charade—ever so middle class, are we? And for the wife of a man in the building trades! Crap, look at you! The way you’re dressed! Do you think you’re the bloody Queen of England?”

  Mom stared at me openmouthed. I realized that I’d just hurled all the insults Dad used when they were fighting on the same theme. I squelched a temptation to apologize. Mom turned to Aunt Eileen.

  “I’m leaving,” she said. “I don’t have to stand here and be insulted.”

  “No, you don’t.” I found something original to say. “You can be insulted anywhere you go. It’s your hobby, isn’t it? Indignation.”

  An invisible hand grabbed a thick bunch of my hair and yanked. I yelped. Mom smiled at me, turned on her heel, and stalked out. She slammed the front door behind her so hard that the windows rattled again, this time from natural causes.

  Aunt Eileen let out her breath in a long sigh. Ari stopped lurking in the hall and hurried over to me. He slipped an arm around my shoulders and hauled me in to rest against him. I leaked a few tears onto his chest, then pulled myself together.

  “She dropped by unannounced,” Eileen said to me. “I’m so sorry, dear.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I lost it.” I wiped my face on my shirtsleeve. “Ari, will you forgive me for being a jerk?”

  “What makes you think you acted badly?” Ari said. “She has to be the most appalling woman I’ve ever met.”

  I decided that falling in love with him had been one of my better decisions.

  “She really was responsible for those—” Ari hesitated. “Those phenomena, I suppose you’d call them?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Behind every so-called poltergeist lurks someone just like my mom.”

  “I really wish she’d married again,” Aunt Eileen said. “She was very beautiful when she was younger, you know. That’s where Kathleen and Sean get it from. Deirdre had her chances, even with everything.”

  “Everything,” I glanced at Ari, “means all of us kids, with Pat’s lycanthropy thrown in as a bonus.”

  Aunt Eileen nodded in sad agreement.

  “Why didn’t she marry again, then?” Ari said.

  “She was staying faithful to my father like a good Catholic widow should.” I tried to keep my voice level, but Aunt Eileen winced at the sarcasm. “I just don’t understand that.” I turned to her. “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged and gave me a watery smile.

  “But now we know he’s not dead.” Michael came strolling into the living room as calmly as if he hadn’t run for his miserable life a few minutes previously. “Why won’t she believe us?”

  “Because it only hurts worse, dear,” Aunt Eileen said, “knowing he’s alive but can’t come back. Do you remember what he wrote about having to wear that StopCollar thing?”

  “Well, yeah.” Michael frowned down at the rug. “Y’know, I feel lousy about this. Maybe we never should have shown the letter to her.”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but it’s too late now. We did.”

  CHAPTER 2

  ARI AND I LEFT MY AUNT’S around eight o’clock that night with my notebooks, enough leftover food for two dinners, and a special family photo album and scrapbook that Eileen had put together for us. As usual, I insisted that I drive. Unless you’ve been a passenger in a car driven by a macho Israeli guy, you don’t know what “fear of death” means.

  We’d just turned onto Sloat Boulevard for the last leg of the trip home when Ari’s shirt pocket began to beep. He pulled his cell phone out of the pocket and glanced at it.

  “Drive faster,” he said to me. “Someone’s trying to breach the security system.” He pressed a couple of buttons on the phone. “I’ve alerted the police.”

  As I tapped the accelerator, I thanked Whomever that Ari wasn’t doing the driving. If he’d been behind the wheel, we would have careened through the streets at eighty—needlessly, thanks to our souped-up Saturn’s interesting features. Whenever we approached a red light, I pressed a button on the steering column, and the light turned green. Turning corners at fifty—no tipping, no screeching, no problem. We made it back to our pair of flats in record time.

  As I turned off Noriega onto 48th, I saw a squad car pulled up in front of our building. I parked in front of the building next door. Before I could turn off the engine, Ari had opened the door and gotten out. He ran down the sidewalk ahead of me and joined the pair of uniformed officers who were standing under the streetlight. I locked up the car in case someone was lurking nearby. I caught up with Ari just in time to hear an officer say, “No sign of forced entry.”

  “Good.” Ari was holding his Interpol ID out where they could see it. “Do you think we could have a look through the front window with your torch? Er, flashlight.”

  As they went up the front steps, Ari returned his ID to his inner jacket pocket. The second officer nodded at me to indicate that he knew I was there, then walked over to lean against the squad car and look up at the top flat windows. Apparently, I was supposed to feel protected.

  Thanks to the streetlights I could see up and down 48th. Down by the corner on Moraga a man was standing, hands in his jacket pockets, watching. I sketched a surreptitious Chaos ward and sailed it his way. When it hit, nothing happened. One of the neighbors, I assumed, being curious. He proved my assumption right after a minute or two by taking keys out of a pocket—I heard them jingle—and letting himself into
the building on the corner.

  Ari and the other police officer came trotting down the steps. I heard the cop saying, “… get a tech out here if you want.”

  “I’ll dust for any prints,” Ari said. “But I’m assuming he was wearing gloves.”

  “Yeah, probably so,” the officer said. “If there’s any more trouble, Nathan, call us.”

  “I will, and thank you.”

  The officers returned to their squad car and drove off. Ari glanced my way.

  “Is it safe to put the car in the garage?” I said.

  “Yes,” Ari said. “When the officers turned onto 48th, they saw someone hurrying down the front steps. He had a motorcycle in the side drive. He took off up Moraga before they even reached the building. They had no real grounds for pursuit.”

  “Okay.” I paused to look up at the top floor. “Let me run a quick SM:L.”

  The search mode turned up nothing of interest in the top flat. “The front door into the bottom flat,” I said, “has had its Chaos wards erased. The guy knew what he was doing when it came to that kind of surveillance. Not so much with electronics, huh?”

  “No. I take it he was no ordinary thief.”

  “No, ’fraid not. He must have sensed your alarm going off. I can’t tell if he felt it psychically or if he had a gadget.”

  “Did he get inside?”

  “I doubt if he could have opened the door before he sensed the alarm. Erasing a Chaos ward takes time.”

  We did a second thorough check of the building and the garages in the rear before I drove the car in. Ari held the leftovers, my notebooks, and the photo album while I stood under the porch light and placed new Chaos wards on the downstairs door. He watched my hands as I did.

  “Would someone have to touch the wards to erase them?” Ari said.

  “Nope. It’s all done with Qi.”

  “Then I wonder what set off the alarm.”

  “The Qi, probably. It’s a biomagnetic force. If you know how to use it, you can set up an energy field or channel it into something approaching a beam. How sensitive is the system?”

  “Very. It can respond to a listening device aimed its way, for instance. Qi, is it? I’ll take that under advisement.”

  Before we went in, Ari reset the alarm on the lower floor by pressing buttons on his cell phone, which was not, as you’ve probably guessed by now, a standard issue model. When we arrived upstairs, I turned on a few extra lights. The idea that some Chaos operative had been hanging around my home base left me nervous. We searched the flat but found nothing disturbed. We both settled down to check our inboxes, Ari on his laptop, me at my desktop in the corner of the living room. I’d received nothing from AOS14, but while we’d been at Aunt Eileen’s, Y had answered my question.

  “Before you turn the flash drive over to Spare,” Y said, “vet him and get back to me.”

  His caution made perfect sense. Neither of us wanted Belial, that murdering Chaotic cephalopod, turned loose into the multiverse by an accomplice.

  “Nola?” Ari said.

  “Yes?” I left the trance state and turned in my chair to look at him. He was sitting more or less upright on the couch with his laptop on his lap.

  “I was just checking the records for the security system,” Ari said. “It says that an energy release by an unknown device triggered the alarm.”

  “Okay. It was the Qi discharge, then, I bet, when he erased the wards. Say, while you’re there, would you see if that cat-person apparition left a trace? It was around one o’clock when she appeared.”

  Ari nodded and clicked on a few icons. “Yes,” he said. “Unknown device energy discharge at thirteen dot oh four o’clock, security node seven.” He frowned at the screen. “Accompanied by a one second spike in ambient level of background radiation.”

  “A big spike?”

  “No, just a blip.” He glanced at me. “Nothing dangerous, I’m glad to report.”

  All of this data told me that the apparition had been produced by some sort of device rather than being a purely psychic phenomenon. Yet Ari had heard and seen nothing when it first appeared. I had another puzzle on my hands, one that the SAF:L I’d run earlier had linked to the Chaos magic symbol. I opened a new file and made a few notes.

  I returned to answering my e-mail. When you’re part of a large bureaucracy, even a secret one like the Agency, you end up spending a lot of time on e-mail. The Apocalypse Squad got its share. Thanks to multiple encryption systems, it’s just plain safer than cell phone calls. Since all the big phone companies archive cell messages on their server network, my agency, like the CIA, forbids its agents to use texting even for personal communications. A careless message might reveal where an agent lives, for instance, or other dangerous fragments of data.

  When I finished, I swiveled around in my computer chair to see what Ari was up to. He’d put his laptop on the coffee table.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about the unpleasantness with your mother. Is it because of her example that you won’t marry me?”

  I sighed. “I don’t see why you’re so obsessed with the idea of marriage.”

  “You’re like the roadrunner in those cartoons, always speeding away from me. That makes me the coyote. Of course I want to catch you. Not for my dinner, though.”

  “Gee, thanks! Meep meep!”

  He smiled and patted the cushion next to him.

  “I am not coming over there if you’re going to keep talking about getting married.”

  His smile vanished. “Why are you so dead set against it?”

  “I don’t want to be married. It’s not you. It’s the institution. I don’t want to be in an institution.”

  His glare deepened.

  “That’s a joke,” I said. “The institution part, I mean.”

  “I understood that. I merely resent you joking about this.”

  My brain finally spat out the information that I’d hurt his feelings.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This discussion makes me really anxious. I don’t mean to trivialize the subject.”

  He softened the scowl to exasperation.

  “Look,” I went on, “why can’t we just have some kind of modern committed relationship without all the legal hassles?”

  “Because as far as I know, you’re not committed to anything. Especially not to me.”

  I started to reply, then realized that I’d never told him I loved him, not once, not even in bed.

  “For all I know,” Ari continued, “you’re hoping I’ll be sent back to Israel, and you’ll never have to see me again.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What is true, then?”

  I felt my aura shrink and harden into a shell of Qi around me. I longed to cower inside it and throw wisecracks his way, but I refused. I walked over to the couch and sat down beside him.

  “Well?” he said. “Do you want me gone?”

  “No. Don’t be stupid!”

  “That’s something, I suppose. A sign of affection in its own way.”

  “Oh, stop it! Ari, I love you. I love you a whole lot, and I can’t even imagine being with any guy but you ever again.”

  The way he smiled, with a wave of relief and joy mingled together, shattered the aura shell. When he held out his arms, I slid over and cuddled up. I rested my head on his chest and heard his heart pounding.

  “You’re shaking.” He kissed me on the forehead. “You need to marry me for your sake as well as mine, you see. That way you’ll know I’m never going to leave you.”

  I pulled back so I could see his face. He was grinning.

  “You never give up, do you?” I said.

  “Of course not. Why should I? I’m right.”

  “You’re lucky I love you, or I’d kick you so hard—”

  He laughed, then kissed me for real. I felt the Qi begin to flow between us. He nuzzled the side of my neck and slid one hand down to my lap.

  “Do you want to work anymore tonight?
” he said.

  “No.” I felt my desire as Qi warmth, a sweet, troubling warmth wrapping around both of us. “Let’s just go to bed.”

  “Hmm.” He let go of me and moved a little away. “I don’t know.”

  “Say what?”

  “Perhaps I should hold out for marriage. No more sex until you—”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “No, actually, I wouldn’t.” He grinned at me. “But you sounded appalled at the very thought.”

  He was right, damn him, but I refused to admit it. When I started to get up, he caught my hands and pulled me back down. Before I could object, he kissed me again. I did my best to stay cold. Two can play at that game, I thought. Which is possibly true, but I wasn’t one of the two. At the next kiss I melted right into his arms.

  My research ended up waiting until the next morning. I logged onto the desktop first and brought up a page that described the original Austin Osman Spare. I even found a couple of pictures.

  “Huh, listen to this,” I told Ari. “The guy I know as A. O. Spare had a dad who was a London police officer. I wonder what he thought of his son turning into an artist and a magician?”

  “Rather a lot, I should think,” Ari said. “None of it favorable, at least as far as the magic’s concerned. I take it he didn’t join the force like his father.”

  “No. He seems to have had a really miserable life, poor guy. One of those great British misfits. His magical studies were what was important to him.”

  Ari rolled his eyes at that. I logged off and turned to my old notebook, which I’d filled with tiny writing in violet ink, a habit I’d dropped when I was nineteen. The sight took me back to my teens, a place I didn’t want to go. I concentrated hard on the matter in hand.

  Spare had started with Crowley’s concept of magic as a system of producing changes in consciousness. He took it several steps further by refusing to endorse any one system of magical or spiritual practices. By conflating various systems of ritual magic, meditation, and shamanistic techniques, he aimed to produce artificially what my Agency and I would call genetically determined psychic talents. Whether or not a practitioner could use this magical smorgasbord safely was another matter. I was glad I’d never tried it.