Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

  “Easily, except for the leak in the hose.” Ari sat down next to me on the couch. “I wonder if Caleb painted that symbol, the Chaotic magic thing. It still looks like a roundabout to me.”

  “I can see why, but—” I stopped in mid-sentence. “Interchange.”

  “That’s what a roundabout amounts to, yes,” Ari went on. “Though on the big motorways—”

  “Yeah, I know.” I held up a hand and interrupted. “Something just hit me. The deviant world level that Mike discovered. What if it’s an interchange between a lot of worlds?” I remembered the cartoon image of Swiss cheese. “Full of holes that lead to somewhere else.”

  Ari was staring at me. Words continued to rise into my consciousness. “Twelve gates to the city, but there are only seven arrows on that circle, so the symbol’s incomplete. So is that deviant level, incomplete, I mean.”

  “The way your mind works,” Ari said, “never fails to amaze me.”

  “I find it kind of surprising, myself.”

  “Your theory might explain the radiation. None of this makes sense, precisely, but I do see a logical thread of some sort here.”

  “So do I. Jumping around between worlds might let loose a lot of weird radiation. I don’t understand the science involved.”

  “Obviously.”

  “But doesn’t it seem plausible? About the interchange.”

  “Plausible enough to get on with. I suppose then that those Chaos lights could be bursts of energy from the interchange itself.”

  “It could be, yeah. Huh, I don’t know who’s doing the stenciling, but I bet he’s not doing it to give us useful clues.”

  “Clues? About what?”

  “The interchange concept.”

  Ari sighed and said nothing.

  “He probably never realized that I’d put it together,” I said, “unless it’s a kind of bait. He wants me to join him, whatever he is. I think. You know, this doesn’t exactly make sense.”

  “How unusual.”

  “You don’t need to be sarcastic. Hold on a sec.”

  I pried myself off the couch and went to my desk. I accessed TranceWeb and brought up my file of e-mails from NumbersGrrl. A quick search found the lines I was looking for. I read them aloud to Ari.

  “Human minds hate cognitive dissonance. Our species will struggle to complete every broken pattern we find no matter how absurd the completing elements are. If the folks on that deviant level know about nuclear bombs from some source of information, nukes would give them the rationale they need to explain their predicament.”

  “It certainly is a predicament,” Ari said, “with those rad levels.”

  I turned in the chair to look at him. “Yeah, there they are, trapped on the fragments of a world level, soaked in radiation from some lousy catastrophe.” I turned back to the screen. “Let me just run this by NumbersGrrl.”

  When I logged on, I found e-mail, flagged Urgent, from Y. He reiterated that he’d come to San Francisco himself if I wanted. He could also send another agent if I needed specific talents that he himself lacked. I thanked him but told him that I’d have to wait and see if the police could catch Caleb Sumner. If we took that slimeball out of the equation, it would be much easier to solve.

  As methodically as I could, I wrote a brief summary of my ideas about the interchange and sent that off to NumbersGrrl. I added a few bits of other information about the case, then logged off. When I stood up, I tottered in a sudden dizzy spell. Ari jumped up and hurried over. He caught me by the shoulders and steadied me.

  “You should take a nap,” Ari said. “Is there anything I can do for you? Get you some aspirin? Orange juice? A jumper?”

  I needed Qi. His concern, his need to do something, anything, made him give it off in a steady drift. Feeling the energy came close to making me salivate. I had a moment of sympathy for vampires. Rather than draining him, though, the way a vampire would have, I knew how to balance Qi and restore both of us.

  “There’s one thing you could do,” I said. “Come take the nap with me.”

  “You should rest, not tire yourself further.”

  “You’re never tiresome.”

  I reached up and put my hands on either side of his face. When he kissed me, Qi poured over me and made me sweat. I channeled half of it back to him. He picked me up and carried me into our bedroom.

  CHAPTER 16

  I DIDN’T GET AROUND TO CHECKING TranceWeb again until early Monday morning. Although I found nothing new, I reread some of NumbersGrrl’s e-mails. She’d answered one question that had been nagging at me.

  “I’m pretty sure that Belial escaped from Nathan’s monitor,” she wrote, “because the file hadn’t been saved yet. Recorded, yeah, but the recording wasn’t saved with a file name and location. My old prof at MIT is super intrigued with all of this, BTW. We gotta play things close to the vest from now on. He’d lie, cheat, and steal for the sake of Science though not for anything else.”

  I might have read more, but Ari stood next to my desk and scowled at me. I finally logged off and swiveled the chair around to scowl right back.

  “What—” I began.

  “You should rest today,” Ari said. “And have a proper breakfast. Remember what the doctor told you.”

  I suppressed the urge to say “yes, sir” and salute. “Don’t forget,” I said instead, “that we’re going to Aunt Eileen’s later.”

  “I haven’t forgotten. I’ll be checking in with the Pacifica police and our FBI contact all day, though. I might be called away if they have a solid lead on Sumner.”

  “I’ll go with you. I want to be there when they catch the little slimeball.”

  “Are you sure you’re well enough?”

  “Would it be smart for me to stay here alone?”

  Ari blinked at me. “No, of course not,” he said. “Sorry. But if we’re already at the Houlihan house, you should be safe there.”

  He had a point, not that I was going to grant it. “Maybe,” I said. “Look, I’m the one who has the best chance of spotting Caleb anyway. I should run scans for him.”

  “I don’t want you tiring yourself out.”

  “There’s nothing particularly tiring about running an LDRS or even an SM:P.”

  “Not unless you come up against someone who fights back. I happen to remember you telling me that the snap back felt like touching an electric fence.”

  He had another point, especially if Brother Belial had returned to help Caleb hide. I wavered, but I refused to give in to my fear.

  “I’ll try a general scan first,” I said. “If that goes well, I’ll zero in. If it doesn’t, I won’t.”

  “As long as you’re careful. Shouldn’t you eat first?”

  “Ari, would you stop it?” I may have spoken a trifle loudly.

  “No need to shout!”

  I glared at him. He gave me a weak smile and wandered away.

  On the general scan, I picked up nothing. When I tried to focus in on Belial, both with the LDRS and the SM:P, nothing was what I got again, not a single trace of him, not even a bubble, even though I repeated the procedure four separate times. Caleb, on the other hand, did appear on the SM:P. I saw him clearly, holed up in a cheap motel or hotel room while he studied pages in a book. Once, I saw him unfolding a paper map.

  When I tried an LDRS to get a glimpse of the outside of the building, I could see nothing but a faint impression of white stucco and a red-tiled roof, a description that would fit half the motels in California. It’s supposed to be Ye Olde Spanishy. On the non-psychic front, Ari had similiar luck. None of the law enforcement agencies involved had managed to find Caleb or his conspicuous white sedan.

  “Well, that tells us he’s in a motel with underground parking,” I said. “Or maybe a covered lot.”

  “A sodding lot of good that’s going to do us,” Ari said.

  I had to agree.

  For the dinner at Aunt Eileen’s, I wore my best trouser jeans and the green watercolor print top that
Ari liked because it had a deep V-neck. As long as we were among family, I noticed, he didn’t complain about my showing some skin. By then I felt well enough to drive. I insisted on doing so.

  On our way down to the car, we stopped for a few minutes in the lower flat. I showed Ari the spot where I’d seen the transparent woman.

  “That’s near the security node that registered the energy discharge,” he said.

  “Somehow I figured it would be,” I said. “Crud. I hope this doesn’t mean that I saw a real ghost.”

  Ari rolled his eyes and sighed. “More things in heaven and earth,” he said, “than are dreamt of in your sodding philosophy. Let’s go.”

  When we arrived at the Houlihan house, I saw a small RV parked at the top of the driveway. Once upon a time the vehicle had been white with a blue racing stripe, but over the years Aunt Rose had painted it all over with flowers, peace symbols, random paisleys, and photorealistic tigers peeking out of psychedelic shrubbery. Ari stared at the thing the whole way up the stairs to the front porch.

  “Aunt Rose,” I said, “is the second-oldest O’Brien sibling. She turned eighteen in 1966. Brace yourself. She doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, even when she’s really making sense.”

  “What?”

  “Drugs. Her mind’s a wreck, but what’s weird is she still has her O’Brien talents.”

  Ari’s shoulders sagged, but he manfully strode onward up the path to the porch. A grinning Brian let us in at the front door.

  “Aunt Frog’s in the kitchen,” he said. “Mom and Sophie are cooking. Dad and Wally and Mike are all out in the yard roasting chickens.”

  “Aunt Frog?” Ari said.

  “You’ll see.” I patted him on the arm to reassure him. “She likes the nickname, by the way. It’s not an insult.”

  In the kitchen, Aunt Eileen, with a barbeque apron over her black capris and ditzy-flower-print blouse, stood at the counter cutting butter into flour in a big white bowl. Sophie stood beside her and listened while Eileen explained the process. They both looked up and smiled at us, then went on working.

  Aunt Rose, dressed in her usual jeans and plaid flannel shirt, was sitting at the table. I’d always thought of Rose as obese, as vast and squat as the frog of her nickname, but with a sense of shock I realized that she was merely large, a tall, solid cylinder of a woman topped by a frizzy mop of pale gray hair. She had the usual O’Brien blue eyes, but her mouth was wide and thin in the lips, really kind of froglike. When she grinned at me, I could see that she’d lost a couple more teeth since I’d last seen her.

  “Here’s one of my favorite tadpoles,” Aunt Rose said in her low boom of a voice. “Get well soon!”

  Which was her way of saying, “I heard you were sick.” I sat down opposite her at the table.

  “I’m doing just that,” I said. “This is Ari, my boyfriend.”

  “If you get lost, just ask a policeman, huh?” Rose grinned at him and held out a mottled hand for him to shake, which, to give him credit, he did.

  Ari smiled, I smiled, Aunt Eileen stifled a laugh, and Aunt Rose said, “Reebeep, baby,” then rolled off a few ribbits in her best frog imitation. Sophie giggled.

  “You’ll get used to her,” Aunt Eileen said. “Coffee on the stove, Ari.”

  Ari fetched two mugs, handed me one, and sat down next to me. I caught a glimpse of his stony if pleasant poker face, but I avoided looking right at him. I might have gotten the giggles, too, but at his expense, not Aunt Rose’s.

  “Where’s the wolfhound?” I asked. “Or did you already drop her off at Kathleen’s?”

  “Lassie went home, yeah,” Aunt Rose said. “She’s got a bone in the oven.”

  “Are the puppies purebred?”

  “Papa was a rolling stone, wherever he wagged his tail was his home.”

  “Ah, too bad.”

  “A dog’s a dog for a’ that.” Aunt Rose shrugged. “Kathleen will love them no matter what they look like.” She rolled her eyes. “Ugly ugly ugly. Just my guess.”

  Sean and his lover Al arrived, then Kathleen and Jack. Al brought two homemade coconut cream pies. Aunt Eileen took trays of appetizers out of the refrigerator. I carried one of them out to the men by the barbeque. The family party swirled back and forth from the yard to the kitchen as various people got up, stepped outside to say hi, then stayed out there to talk while someone else came back inside. I noticed Ari and Sophie hang back at first, then slowly relax and join in the talk and the food and the drink. Ari even accepted a bottle of beer from Uncle Jim.

  So early in the evening the talk was all the music we needed, but later, I knew, someone would put a couple of Chieftains CDs on the stereo system. First Uncle Jim would start singing along, and Sean would join him. One at time, the other Houlihans and O’Briens and O’Gradys who could sing would blend their voices into the music. When the CDs ended, they would keep singing until long after midnight.

  I could remember a time when my whole family had attended these gatherings, back when my father was with us, and my mother and I got along, and Pat was a healthy little boy who ran around and played with his cousins. Now Pat was dead, my dad long gone. Maureen had moved away with her kids to put distance between her and my mother, and Dan was far away in the middle of a war.

  Watching everyone, listening to the talk and the laughter, I wished that we could stay forever at one of these gatherings, that the music would never die away, that no one would ever have to leave because they worked the next day or because the kids were tired or any of the practical reasons that ended every party. Yet, of course, the evening always grew late. That night, in fact, I was the first one who had to go.

  During the dessert my mind wandered away from the conversations going on around me. Although my Qi was recharging rapidly, I still had a ways to go before I regained my full strength. I found myself worrying about Belial, whose Qi level would be recovering just as mine was. If I could challenge him when my strength was high, and there were no irritating distractions like that damned idiot Caleb, maybe then I could win. The thought of facing him again made my stomach twist in sheer terror. My one comforting thought came from Cryptic Creep, oddly enough, who had called Belial a “small fry.” Comforting for the moment, that is—if Belial was a small fry, what were the big ones like? I decided I could think about that later. Much later.

  I realized in the midst of all this brooding that Aunt Rose had walked over to watch me, her smile gone, her eyes heavy with thought.

  “Many a mickle maks a muckle,” she said, then smiled. “You gonna finish that piece of pie?”

  “Nope.” I held the plate out. “Here.”

  She grinned and scooped the plate up, then turned to glance at Ari, who was listening to Brian tell some involved anecdote about a basketball game. She pursed her lips and let out a loud, sharp imitation of a British police whistle. Ari spun around, and his right hand grabbed air about halfway to his gun before he stopped himself.

  “A whiter shade of pale,” Aunt Rose said. “Take her home, but not to West Virginia.”

  “Right you are,” Ari said. “Nola, you need to rest.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  When we got into the car, Ari sighed, a long drawn-out sigh as if he’d been holding his breath for hours.

  “Well,” I said, “now you know that not everyone in my family is glamorous.”

  “Yes,” Ari said. “But you have to take the rough with the smooth.”

  I laughed, but the joke made me remember “Many a mickle maks a muckle.” I suddenly realized why that particular proverb had floated to the surface of Aunt Frog’s mind. Alone, I could never defeat Belial. But what if Annie and Jerry melded their minds with mine and loaned me Qi? I remembered Annie talking about her grandmother’s séances, and how the Qi had flowed around the circle. Together, we could give this so-called master more of a fight than he could handle.

  Even though Ari did the driving, I arrived home happy. There is nothing like seeing your wa
y out of a trap to elevate your mood.

  Before we could deal with Belial, however, I needed to get Caleb into the hands of the police. As I told Ari, we could never prove his complicity in Bill Evers’ murder, but at least we could get him back into jail on the extortion and firearm charges.

  “That will have to do,” Ari said. “Pity. You’re sure, then, that he was involved in the murder? We don’t want to let some other guilty party go free by focusing on him if he’s innocent.”

  “That’s true, yeah,” I said, “but I’ve never run across anyone else with the close connections to both Evers and Belial except for the two women who were in the coven. Do you agree that we can leave La Rosa and Burnside off our suspect list?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Look, let me run this down for you. See if it sounds reasonable.”

  “Very well.” He sat down next to me on the couch. “Go on.”

  “Here’s the likely scenario. Caleb bought Evers a drink or two to soften him up, then ensorcelled him so that Belial could fill his mind with evil thoughts. Evers was an addict. His law practice was failing. He’d taken part in some really silly fake occult stuff. He’d given a blackmailer information, which means he’d violated attorney confidentiality. He would have been reviled by the best names in San Francisco society if they had ever learned the truth. He might even have gone to jail.”

  “For the drugs if nothing else,” Ari said. “He certainly would have lost his practice.”

  “Right, and he’d have been disbarred. Belial could have planted the idea that suicide would solve everything while Caleb escorted Evers outside for his run to the bay. That young lifeguard, the good Samaritan we saw on the news?”

  “I remember him, yes.”

  “Well, he ruined the plan. When he tried to save Evers, it forced Brother Belial to take a direct hand in the murder with the rogue wave. And that’s what tipped me off. If Evers had just drowned himself the way they’d planned, I might have just accepted the whole thing as suicide. They knew about us, because we’d just interviewed Evers. I felt someone watching us when we left, but I couldn’t see anyone. They had to know I was a psychic, because Caleb told me that he’d picked Jack as a partner in order to get to know me. I’ll bet Belial put him up to that. So Old Bro took a big gamble when he drowned Evers, and he lost.”