Her name was Charlotte Wilson, and the accent was Australian. Her teams called her “Shar.” She had her shit together.
Her medic had appeared within thirty seconds of Dan being dead, the spell dissipating around the museum, and several thousand people collectively freaking out. He’d been invisible and, because he was very wisely averse to being around while people were committing violence, had been waiting outside in an SUV.
He’d grabbed Shar and had her arm mended to the point where it wasn’t causing her pain within seconds.
Then they’d come for me.
It had gone something like this:
You’re coming with us.
No, I’m not.
How are you going to stop us?
Uh… good point.
Let’s go.
As soon as we piled into the SUV, the medic, whose name was Antonio, pushed his thumbs against my temples, closed his eyes and started muttering. I didn’t have the will to tell him not to. Whatever they were going to do, they were going to do. I might as well go along with it.
To my surprise, all that happened was that my head started to clear, and the shock to my nervous system began to fade.
Shar jumped in shotgun, and a driver in black tactical gear hit the gas.
“So, you’re just going to leave everything back there the way it is?” I said.
“What do you want me to do?” she said. “I don’t have the resources to clean up something like that. Not my problem anyway.”
Antonio shrugged as he pulled his hands away from my head.
“We do extraction and termination. Someone else gets to handle the mess.” He made a face. “Although it’s just a bit worse than we expected this time.”
I’d think so.
How would a Praecant, or even more than one Praecant, handle a thousand plus people, all with phones and Internet connections taking pictures of the destroyed art? Not to mention the multiple bodies and all the blood.
That raised another question for me. People had been taking pictures of the art while they were there since Dan had set up shop. Yet, no one had noticed even in the pictures that things were wrong. Did this mean that somehow his spell had been viral, able to even follow digital images transmitted over wireless carriers? It didn’t make sense. That wasn’t possible, even with magic, per my current understanding.
I had hundreds, probably thousands of questions just like that one, building up in a massive hopper in my head. I needed to start writing them down, then going after the answers.
Well, assuming that Charlotte and the remains of her crew weren’t going to kill me.
And on that topic, might as well get it out there…
“Are you going to kill me?” I said.
She turned herself sideways in the front seat so she could see me in the back.
“I’m supposed to,” she said. “Well, I was supposed to.”
“That’s encouraging,” I said.
“Right, I’m still technically supposed to, but I’m leaning toward ‘No’.”
She got a strange look on her face, like she had come across some kind of difficult puzzle and was enjoying it.
“I mean, you’ve broken one of the Compacts,” she said, “but honestly, those are stupid. Half of my job involves breaking the Compacts.”
“Where are we going?” I said.
She ignored the question.
“In purely practical terms,” she said, “what you and your dog did back there was pretty bad ass. Speaking of your dog, how’d you manage to be mates with a little god?”
A god.
That was a good question.
“Haha,” she said. “The look on your face. How about ‘extradimensional entity that used to have worshippers on Earth’? That sound better to you? ‘God’s’ a bit shorter.”
“I guess it is,” I said.
She turned back around.
“I have a million questions,” I said.
“So do I,” she said. “But right now you look like hell. Blood all over. We’re going to head out of the city to a consulate. We’ll get you fixed up and then talk about what happens next.”
They seemed reasonable, but my weekend tactical training whispered in my ear.
Don’t let them take you to a second location.
Of course, that was hilariously misguided. We’d left the Carnegie Museums looking more or less like an abattoir. If they’d wanted to kill me, I would just have been additional chum strewn about the floor.
But still.
In the car in the city, outside of the museum, magic didn’t work. Yes, they still had firearms, but they wouldn’t be nuking me from orbit if I tried something. I was at least on some kind of equal footing here.
The “consulate” was probably far enough outside the city that magic worked just fine there, and then I would be completely at their mercy.
Once again though, that was stupid. She could put a small caliber bullet in my head right now, and no one in the world would ever find out. Clearly, the paranoia of the last several days was still hanging heavily in my mind.
“Hey,” I said.
“What?” said Shar.
“Can we stop the car?”
“You gonna yak?”
“What? No. Just, please can you stop the car?”
I saw her close her eyes to think. I got the impression that she was operating outside of her normal parameters. Improvising. The Beretta 92f came into view, and she absently scratched the top of her head with it.
“Morris,” she said, “pull over.”
Morris?
We were near the Point, close to the West End Bridge. He pulled us over beside Gateway Center 2.
“What?” she said.
“Can we get out for a minute?” I said.
“Nope. Negative. I pulled over. Now say what you’ve got to say.”
I felt trapped. I was trapped. Despite Antonio’s ministrations, my brain wasn’t working correctly. I’d just wanted a moment to collect myself when I wasn’t speeding toward some other horrible experience.
“I…” and then I think that somewhere else, I started to cry. Some other me. But here, I sat in silence, unable to speak.
These are the things I wanted to say:
I didn’t want any of this to happen.
I miss my old life.
I’m sorry that people got hurt and killed.
I’m sorry that I did bad things.
I would like to stop doing these things.
To their credit, they just sat and waited. It took a while.
I realized that I had my eyes pressed closed. I didn’t want to open them yet. I was trying hard to breathe normally, but every few seconds, I shuddered. I formed a cup with my hands and put it over my nose and mouth.
I parted my lips slightly and was able to force out some words. They were quiet.
“Can you-”
They waited. I gestured vaguely toward my head.
“-can you make this go away?”
I opened my eyes, and she was looking right at me. There was sympathy there.
For real, I think.
“I can,” said Antonio, beside me.
“But he’s not going to,” said Shar. “I’m not going to let you off that easily. I get that you’re having a tough time right now, but the only reason you’re still alive is that I think there’s a bunch of value in the stuff you’ve been doing. I don’t care that it’s breaking the Compacts, and I don’t care that you’re partially responsible for the deaths of several members of the Congress of the Pittsburgh Neutral Territory. I don’t. Other people do, but not me, and since I’m the one they send around to do this kind of thing, I’m making a field call.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” she said. “And in exchange for that, you’re going to work for me.”
“I am?”
“Damn right you are. I don’t really know this city, and we have to set up shop here now that everything’s gone to hell. I have a bunch of Praecants, but gues
s what they’re good at? Magic. And we all know that doesn’t work so well around here. I need an ace or a joker or however you want to think of yourself. What do you say?”
“So, I work for you or you kill me?”
“You’re smart.”
“Can I make some requests?”
“You can make them. No guarantee you’ll get them though.”
“Gwen. I assume you have some kind of file on her?”
Shar nodded.
“Can we get her? Dan had a bunch of people looking for us, and she’s probably still in danger.”
Shar did a kind of crooked smile.
“I’ve already got two people on her,” she said. “They haven’t messed with her, but we’ve got her under watch. They’re armed. None of the losers who were working for Daniel will get to her.”
Of course, the original plan probably did not include them protecting her. The fact that there were people already keeping tabs on her meant that she was probably included in the now on-hold execution schedule that featured me as the headliner. It was nice of her not to mention it.
“Thanks,” I said. “Second thing then, can I not go to the consulate? I’d kind of just like to go home.”
“I had a big afternoon planned,” she said. “You have a bunch of information that I’d like to get. I probably have a bunch that you’d like. And we need to come to some kind of agreement.”
“I will. We will,” I said. “I promise. I just…”
I needed to feel like this was over. I needed to be able to lay down in my bed for one night and feel like these things that had been chasing me for so long weren’t waiting just around the corner to destroy me. Like I wasn’t being pursued or driven headlong over a cliff.
“I’d really like to sleep in my own bed tonight. You’re probably used to dealing with Praecants, but I’m just a regular person. I can’t turn invisible or fly or teleport or mind control anyone. If you’re worried I’m going to run off, put some guards outside. I assume you’ve searched my house, so you already know there’s nothing in there I could do anything with.”
She thought for a moment.
“Suit yourself,” she said. “And I’ll give you a few things that might help you sleep better, for free.”
“Uh, okay.”
“Just to show you my offer’s on the level. Number one, I think that Dan had you under some kind of spell, at least until you all killed Guster. Not sure what changed after that, and I don’t think he was actively controlling you. He probably did something to make you more disposed to go along with him and less inclined to question things that didn’t make sense.”
And that… sounded right. I knew I hadn’t been thinking correctly, but I’d always just chalked it up to lingering depression or head trauma. It had never been overt, but looking back not just on what had happened recently but throughout the time I’d known Dan, I was surprised at the way I’d just accepted things he’d told me.
“Thank you,” I said. “That does make me feel better. I guess.”
It sort of did. The notion that I hadn’t been one-hundred-percent responsible for my recent actions was some kind of relief. However, the notion that I’d not been myself for so long held some other, more subtle implications that I figured I’d be trying to work through for a while.
“Number two is about what happened to your family. I had people do some magical and mundane digging. It wasn’t a gas explosion.”
That, I already knew. The thing that had appeared inside me back in the museum shifted, flexing its scaly legs. My pulse quickened.
“It was probably what we’d call an Aulk. Kind of looks like a deer, but bigger, plus it has some special features. They’re rare in populated areas, and when they’re hurt, they tend to go off like a bomb. Maybe it had been hit by a car. Who knows? But if one of those lost it in the middle of a crowd, the results would be pretty bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They were.” The scaly thing didn’t quite know what to think. I felt it crawl away, somewhere.
“Forty-eight dead, and you were in a coma for months. Sounds about right,” she said.
Forty-nine, I corrected in my head. The newspapers never count the dogs.
It had been magic. Not that I had any doubt of that now. I’d been around it enough that once the memory had been uncovered, the flavor was unmistakable.
But it hadn’t been Dan. I’d been wrong about that. I was glad I was wrong about that.
“I don’t even know what to think,” I said. “But thanks. Can I go home now? Can we do the whole debriefing thing tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Why not?”
She turned to the driver.
“His place,” she said.
We drove away from the curb, and he pulled a u-ey.
I sank back into my seat and closed my eyes. I tried to breathe, like I’d done when Dan was lighting my nerves up with fifteen million volts. It worked better like this.
One.
Two.
Three.
Gwen.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Babd.
Six.
A flash of Carol Dee turning into a bag of pulverized bones.
Seven.
The look on Brigit’s dead face as the Being from the Outer Forth pulled her into nothingness.
I opened my eyes.
Maybe I’d count later.
I watched the city go by and found that my head was resting against the cool glass of the window. Shar, Antonio and Morris were talking about stuff like it was a normal day, and I phased out. I heard the sounds of them talking, but it didn’t mean anything to me. Like they were speaking in some language that sounded familiar, but I actually didn’t know.
I rode like that, and the bumps and potholes we hit seemed to bounce my body without effect. It would effortlessly return to a state of rest, like it was unwilling to fight the motion but ready to reform toward its original configuration when the motion had passed.
Eventually, the car stopped.
“Here you go,” Shar said.
The doors unlocked.
I stepped out.
“We’ll pick you up at 10 a.m. tomorrow. That work for you?” she said.
I nodded.
“Don’t go anywhere,” she said.
I shrugged and shook my head.
I watched them pull away, then walked the few feet to the stoop of my house. I realized that I didn’t have a key and didn’t have Fox to make one for me.
Of course I didn’t.
I laughed.
Of course I’d asked them to bring me home, and I couldn’t even get in. I’m not the key hiding type, so I’d have to break a window or kick the back door in.
Not now though.
I was still wearing all of the leathers, although I’d taken off the hat, and they were heavy.
I stripped off the long gloves and thick apron and piled them in front of the door. I sat down and unzipped the boots. I didn’t have the energy or leverage to pull them off.
It would have to do.
Someone had once told me that thoughts and feelings were like cars, and if you practiced enough you should be able to sit comfortably by the side of the road and watch them buzz by. Maybe they were interesting or disturbing, but as long as you just let them be themselves and didn’t get too jazzed about it, you’d be fine.
I tried to do that, but I think it was a case of way too little, way too late.
Images kept assaulting me from the past week. Sounds. Feelings.
They were coming all at once, and I had no real way of dealing with them.
The cars that I was supposed to be passively observing ended up doing a kind of crash-up derby thing, and metal and body parts started flying.
Time to switch visualizations.
And honestly, I wasn’t even sure what had happened to me. I knew what I had experienced, but there were so many holes in it. So much I didn’t know. I knew that I was different than I
had been two weeks ago, but I couldn’t tell how. I still felt like me, but at the same time I thought that the me of two weeks ago wouldn’t recognize the me of today. Maybe the Praecants could help me to piece it together.
That was something, maybe.
Focus on the positive.
I’d broken at least one of the sacred Praecant rules, they’d sent someone to kill me for it, and instead of that happening they’d offered me a job.
That was okay.
I was friends with a minor god.
That had to be good.
I’d invented an entirely new branch of technology. Of course, I’d ended up using it purely for mayhem, but it turns out that may not have been entirely my fault.
That was decent.
And I’d gotten something back. Something I’d thought was lost to the organic damage of a major concussion. Memories of my family.
Something nagged at me.
Gwen. I got that she didn’t want to talk to me, and rightly so, but she would be worried. I knew it. If I was hoping to actually sleep tonight, she certainly was too. Would I have been able to sleep if I didn’t know if she were dead or alive?
My bluetooth piece was still in.
“Fox,” I said.
“Yes?” His voice was as even as it had been since he’d learned to talk. And why wouldn’t it be?
“Please call Gwen for me. If she doesn’t answer, leave a voicemail. Tell her that I’m safe-”
“Okay.”
“Scratch that,” I said. I’d figured that she wouldn’t want to hear from me, and that having Fox call was the best move. But screw that. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll call her myself.”
“Okay,” said Fox.
“I’m going to close the connection now,” I said. “I’ll call you later if I need anything.”
I’d have the Praecants collect him and the hardware from the hotel tomorrow.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and hung up. It was damp. My pants were soaked with sweat.
I’d call her myself.
But first, and yes I knew I was stalling, I checked the local news to see if there was any mention of the museums. Indeed, there was already. It was just “breaking news” stuff from the scene, police lines, possible terrorist activity, crazy eyewitness accounts. The Praecants had their work cut out for them.
Good luck to their bizarre, scheming asses.
Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog Page 33
