Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

  “Guess I should have listened. The way the rabbi freaked like that, I thought you was after him for sure.”

  “A reasonable supposition,” Ari said. “But wrong.”

  “Look, Sarge,” I said. “Thanks. I mean, jeez, really, thanks. I might have another twenty to give you later—” I glanced at Ari and raised an eyebrow. “Like, an advance on what you’re going to owe me, huh?”

  Ari pulled out his wallet. “Very well, but you’d better not run out on me now.”

  “Nah. You’re the only guy I, like, look forward to.”

  Ari handed Sarge a twenty. “I must admit,” he said, “it gripes me to see a veteran like you out on the streets. What’s wrong with this sodding country?”

  “I kind of wonder myself,” Sarge said. “Thanks.”

  I started to read the rest of Dad’s letter in the car, in between bursts of giving Ari directions. “I didn’t think they’d come that far to fetch me, or I never would have let myself have the luxury of a family. I love you all, and I miss you. I can’t tell you how much I miss you.” At that point I began to cry. I put the letter back in the inner pocket and found some old tissues in another.

  “I’ll finish it later,” I said.

  “Good idea,” Ari said. “We’re nearly there.”

  While I was wiping my face, I blotted off the worst of that red lipstick, too.

  San Francisco General Hospital sits over on Potrero Avenue on the fringe of the Outer Mission district. The red brick buildings with their 1930s Deco trim stand behind a green lawn and a wrought iron fence, topped with spikes to keep the druggies out of the dispensary. Reb Joseph Witzer, they told us at the public entrance, had been admitted to one of the wards in the new building, a huge gray concrete monster looming behind a parking lot. As we walked over to the front doors, I began to tremble, because despite the late afternoon sun, I felt cold, a deep numbing chill.

  “What’s wrong?” Ari said.

  “I don’t know. Some kind of warning, I guess.”

  As abruptly as it had started, the shivering stopped.

  At first, the woman at the admissions desk refused to tell us the rabbi’s location. Ari brought out his Interpol ID, which made her phone the head nurse of the shift to ask if Witzer could see visitors.

  “Ari,” I said, “is your mother’s first name Shira?”

  “Yes.” He gave me a sharp look. “How do you know that?”

  Rather than answer, I spoke to the guardian dragon. “This is the man the rabbi keeps talking about. Could you tell the head nurse that seeing him will help calm her patient down?”

  She nodded and did. The ploy worked. We got permission.

  We went up in the elevator, got lost, found the room eventually, a long narrow space, painted a cheerful yellow, with four beds in it. Two were empty. In the third lay an elderly African-American man who muttered and tossed his head back and forth. I noticed that he’d been strapped down. In the last bed, by the window, lay Reb Ezekiel. A small lamp clipped to one of the monitors above showered a pool of light onto the floor beside the bed. We could see, but he lay in comfortable shadow.

  Dressed in a hospital robe, he looked more like a stick of driftwood than a man. His gray hair, peyes and beard were long, combed back but matted with sweat. His scrawny hands clutched the blue blankets. Tubes in his nostrils connected him to an oxygen tank. He lay so still that I had a bad moment of wondering if he’d died, but his eyes snapped open, dark eyes glittering in a mass of fine wrinkles.

  “Hah!” he whispered. “Not the other one. Shira’s boy.”

  “Yes,” Ari said. “And this is Nola O’Grady.”

  Ezekiel turned his head a couple of inches in my direction. He rested, breathing heavily, then whispered, “The letter?”

  “I have it,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Good man, your father. He protected me.” Ezekiel closed his eyes again. “From the gangs.”

  “What was he in for? Can you tell me?”

  “Transport across the world line.” Ezekiel coughed, a horrible rasp. I grabbed some tissues from a box on the side table and held them in front of his mouth so he could spit. “Not the accessory.” He fell back against the pillows and gasped. “They never could prove the shootings.”

  A nurse came hurrying down the line of beds. She looked at me and tapped her wristwatch in a significant manner. I nodded to show I’d understood and dropped the tissues into the wastebasket.

  “Ariel.” Ezekiel opened his eyes again and looked at Ari. “They’re coming. One of them is already here. And there are agents, human agents.”

  Once again, he coughed with that horrible rasp. I held the tissues and wiped his mouth for him. He smiled in thanks, then began to speak in Hebrew. Ari leaned close and murmured something in the same. Ezekiel went on speaking for a few minutes until he began to wheeze, choking, it sounded like, on his words.

  “It’s the fluid in his lungs,” the nurse said. “You need to go.”

  “Right,” I said. “Is it viral?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  I realized then, with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, that Reb Ezekiel would die before the night was out. I didn’t need to be psychic to see it. Ari spoke another sentence or two to the old man, who smiled. We let the nurse usher us out.

  Neither of us spoke as we left the building. As we were walking across the parking lot, I glanced back at the massive concrete slab. The west-facing windows gleamed with gold fire. I began to shiver again, so badly that I summoned Qi from the sunset air just to keep from fainting.

  “Let’s get you home,” Ari said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess this is some kind of premonition. Something not nice may be going to happen.”

  As soon as we were seated in the car, the cold shivers disappeared. Maybe they were just repeating the message about Reb Ezekiel’s coming death, or so I told myself. The reassurance lacked conviction.

  I read the rest of Dad’s letter on the way back to the flat. “I can’t tell you how much I miss you. When I get parole they’ll put the StopCollar on me, so I’ll never see you all again. I’m paying for something that’s a crime here but not where you are, a serious crime, though it never harmed anyone. Forgive me. If I could explain I would, but I don’t know if you’d understand or not. They took me away too soon. I don’t know what talents you or the other children developed, though I’d bet even money that Dan’s the most normal of all of us. Maybe Maureen turned out normal, too. Sean and Kathleen—they’re the kind of people who always find someone to take care of them. You, I trust to take care of yourself. I worry about Pat in particular because of those lines on his palms. And Michael, my poor little Mike! The seventh gets the worst of it. I know. I’m one. I hope and pray to God that you’re all well and safe. With all my love. Remember me. Tell your mother I’m sorry we fought so much. Dad.”

  I sobbed, I’ll admit it. I read the letter again and sobbed all the way through it. Ari said nothing, just drove grimly on, the best thing he could have done.

  By the time we reached our flat, I’d gotten control of myself. I washed my face and changed into a pair of jeans that fit so I could breathe and an indigo-and-white print blouse. I put the letter and my cell phone on my desk next to the computer, then flopped onto the couch.

  “You look exhausted,” Ari said.

  “I am,” I said. “But I should take the letter over to Aunt Eileen, so she can give it to Mother.”

  “Tomorrow will do.” Ari sat down next to me. “It’s been thirteen years. One day more won’t matter.”

  “You’ve got a point there.”

  He was watching me in wide-eyed expectation.

  “Okay,” I said. “It looks like my father was a coyote, all right. He transported people across deviant levels. Apparently, that’s a crime wherever he is. They have something called a StopCollar that he’ll be stuck wearing when he’s paroled. I’m guessing that it interferes with the world-walker talent. Maybe with others, too,
I don’t know. But he doesn’t think he can make it back here. I got the impression that he’s a couple of levels away, not just one.”

  “He seems to have befriended Ezekiel in prison.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what Zeke’s doppelgänger did over there, but whatever crime it was, Zeke didn’t have to wear the collar, so he could world-walk home once he got out. He took the letter as a favor, I guess, for Dad.”

  “What was the name of the prison? Did your father say?”

  “Moorwood. It’s printed on the paper.”

  Ari thought for a long minute or two. “I don’t know of any prison with that name. I can look it up, but it sounds British to me. Except it can’t be, because it’s not.”

  “It’s got an H Block.”

  “That’s significant, yes. I suppose.” Ari made his growling noise. “I don’t know what we can believe anymore. A perfectly logical assumption here might have nothing to do with the reality over there.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s true. What did Zeke say to you? Will you tell me?”

  “Certainly. He thinks that the invading aliens have a spy here already. He says the spy followed him across. Brother Belial? Then Caleb might be one of those human agents he spoke of.”

  “He sure could. Zeke told Sarge some garbled story about the aliens soaking him with water. That could mean a rogue wave that didn’t actually drown him. I’m seeing karmic gravity at work in this, pulling everything together into one big ugly mess.”

  “Karmic gravity? Oh, yes, you did mention that once. You were having a joke on me.”

  “No, I wasn’t. It’s actually a real principle. You can call it synchronicity if you prefer.”

  Ari said nothing in the first real act of tact I’d ever seen from him. His SPP radiated a firm belief that I was crazy in my own lovable way.

  “Well, look,” I said. “Gravity is a property of mass, right? You get enough mass together in a lump, and it’ll exert a pull on other objects.”

  “After a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “Okay. So you get enough psychic mass together, and the same thing happens. You, Itzak, Reb Zeke, me, Mike, Dad’s gate to another level, both of your jobs and my job—here we all are in San Francisco, and we’ve created a gravitational pull. On top of that, you and I busted the coven together. I ensorcelled Doyle, and you—uh, well—disposed of Johnson. That made a karmic link. All of this together pulled Belial right into our orbit.”

  Ari considered, then shrugged. I gathered he was unconvinced.

  “I suppose we’d need to put my mother on your list, then,” he said. “Ezekiel asked about her. He wants to go to London to find her, once he recovers. But he’s not going to, is he?”

  “Recover? No. Sorry.”

  “I’ll have to call Tzaki and tell him that the old man’s gone.”

  We observed a private moment of silence.

  “I wonder,” I said eventually, “if my mother will believe that the letter’s really from Dad?”

  “Judging from everything you’ve told me about her, I’d say no. Give the letter to Eileen, certainly, but let her decide what to do with it.”

  My first thought: I wasn’t asking your advice. Second thought: but you’re right.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that. Michael needs to know, though. And soon.”

  “Of course.” With a sigh, Ari stretched his legs out in front of him. “Apparently, I have a doppelgänger. Reb Ezekiel called him Ari Nataniel. He thought I was him, that day in the park.” He paused for another sigh. “I rather dislike all of this. Alien spies. Doppelgängers.” He turned his head and gave me the reproachful stare. “Werewolves.”

  “Life’s hard, buddy,” I said.

  Ari growled and crossed his arms over his chest. I let him simmer while I considered one of Dad’s remarks in the letters, about the lines on Pat’s palms. I’d never noticed them. Now I wondered if they had indicated the lycanthropy gene. If so, Dad would have been able to warn us before Pat’s first change. Doubtless, he could have handled the problem a lot better than we all did. I began to feel personally aggrieved by the justice system of whatever world had taken him away.

  Ari abruptly spoke. “At the end of our visit, I promised Reb Ezekiel that I’d stop the alien invasion. He badly wanted to hear that. I wanted to give him what peace of mind I could.”

  “That was really good of you.” I remembered the cold premonitions I’d had in the hospital parking lot. I could think of a number of things they might mean and decide to start with the most extreme.

  “What if he was right?” I said. “If there’s going to be an alien invasion, stopping it would be a swell idea. I’m sure the Agency will provide you with backup—me, that is.”

  Ari uncrossed his arms, turned toward me on the couch, and opened his mouth. He stayed that way for another minute or two, openmouthed and reproachful. Finally he said, “Do you really think that—”

  “I don’t know if there will be or not. I’m just saying. It doesn’t have to be flying saucers, y’know. That was his interpretation, but he was self-taught. I get the impression he never understood the ambiguity principle.”

  “Which means?”

  “The word, invasion, could mean anything from armed aliens in flying saucers down to an uprush of psychotic images into his own consciousness from the unconscious mind. There are all kinds of possibilities in between—illegal aliens from deviant levels, terrorists, stuff like that.”

  Ari slumped down on the couch, rested his head on the cushions, and muttered something in Hebrew.

  “I’m going to report all this to the Agency,” I went on. “Huh, the higher-ups have been calling us the Apocalypse Squad. They thought it was a joke, but they’re all psychics, too. Maybe they struck a target that they don’t even know exists.”

  “My father was right. I should have been an insurance adjustor.”

  I always took the reference to insurance adjustors as a signal that Ari had reached overload on the subject of psychic truths. One more, and he might experience mental meltdown.

  “Let’s go have some dinner,” I said. “I’ll just call Michael first.”

  “Brilliant.” He sat up straight. “And when the letter’s been taken care of, we can go to bed early.”

  “Sure. After all, I owe you twenty bucks.”

  He glowered. I sighed.

  “That’s a joke,” I said.

  “It’s not very funny.”

  “It really bothers you, doesn’t it? When I pose as a sex industry worker, I mean. Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? I should think it would be obvious.”

  “Strange. You’re a holdover from the Victorian Age, and here I never noticed.”

  “Besides.” The glower increased. “Sex industry worker? What sort of stupid euphemism is that?”

  “It’s the preferred term around the Bay Area. The women use it themselves.”

  Across the room, my cell phone rang. I stood up to fetch it, but Ari caught my wrist.

  “Do you have to answer that right now?” he asked.

  I considered as it rang again. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s Michael.”

  Ari let go of me, but his Qi felt ready to hit “boil.” I went to my desk to answer the phone.

  “Hey, Nola,” Michael said. “Did you want to talk to me, like maybe a minute ago?”

  “I sure did. Hang on a sec.” I glanced back and saw Ari straightening all the books and papers on the coffee table. Anger management had kicked in. “I can talk now. What is this, you knew I wanted to talk with you?”

  “I heard it loud and clear.”

  “It sounds like you’ve got another talent coming online, the family mental overlap.”

  “Epic cool! Better than a cell phone, huh?”

  “Kind of. It’ll be erratic at first, though. They all are. Look, I’ve got something here in my flat that you need to see. I’m trying to figure out when we can get together.”

  Ari stopped stacking the books by
descending size and scowled at me.

  “It’s about five o’clock,” I said to Michael. “Would you be up for a late dinner out? Say at seven?”

  “I can’t. It’s a school night, and Aunt Eileen would raise serious hell. I could come over right now for a little while. I can borrow Uncle Jim’s truck.”

  “Okay. How about you get here in an hour? I’ll see you then.”

  We signed off. Ari appeared calmer, but I felt his Qi gather and begin to flow toward me. I registered an oddly neutral quality that could have flipped into either rage or desire. I stayed standing in case the Qi swung the wrong way.

  “Where were we?” I said.

  “I was merely pointing out that I dislike seeing you strut around in public in tight clothing.” His British accent was getting thicker by the word. “You’re not a prostitute, and I don’t like you pretending to be one.”

  “I really don’t understand that. I can understand how you’d be uptight if I actually turned tricks, but I never would. I mean, yuck!”

  “The men seeing you don’t know that.”

  I heard the ghostly voice of my old religion teacher from high school, Sister Peter Mary, whispering in my mental ear about the perils of slutty clothing.

  “Aha!” I said to Ari. “Some other guy might think I’m a hooker and look upon me with lust in his heart. Is that what bothers you?”

  “What man wouldn’t be bothered by that about the woman he—” Ari paused for a fraction of a second, “he was involved with.”

  The pause and reboot bothered me. He’d really wanted to say that he loved me. I saw another stake drop into place in the picket fence of domesticity.

  “Well?” Ari snapped.

  “Well what? I did it because I needed street cred if we were going to find Reb Zeke. It worked, didn’t it?”

  “I have to admit it brought results.” He scowled again. “But—”

  He hesitated. I waited, hands on hips. I kept my own Qi neutral, but if I was going to lead this team, I couldn’t let him steamroll me.

  “What other kind of cover story would you suggest?” I said.

  “If the need arises again,” Ari said, “perhaps you could just pose as a drug dealer or some such thing.” He paused again. “If you agreed.”