Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

  Ari nodded, thinking it over. “What about that poor girl down at the beach?” he said.

  “Her death might have been an accident. I’m sure as I can be that I saw Caleb and his fancy white car that day, so I’m placing him near the scene. Did Caleb mean to kill someone? Maybe not. It would have taken him a while to learn how to control the waves. We’ll probably never know for sure why those two kids got swept into the water.”

  “What I’m wondering is if Belial wanted something to hold over Caleb.”

  “By involving him in a death? It could be, all right. The blackmailer blackmailed. Chaotics never really can trust each other.”

  “I see. You’ve certainly put together a plausible case.”

  My case would never stand up in any court, of course. Even if by some bizarre turn the police issued a warrant, how would anyone capture Belial to bring him to justice? His body—whatever that was like—existed safely tucked away on some other deviant level or even on some other planet. I had no idea of what was carrying his consciousness to our world, except that it had to be an energy field of some kind that would register on Ari’s special sunglasses.

  “It really bothers me, thinking of Caleb getting off so easy,” I said. “Even if he gets twenty years, he’ll be out of prison one day, while Evers and that child are dead forever.”

  “True,” Ari said, “but the law can only do what it may do. If the law recognized psychic talents, we could at least file an accessory to murder charge on the basis of what you’ve just told me. But it doesn’t, so blackmail and gun violations are the best we can do. Besides.” He slammed his right fist into his left palm. “Who knows what will happen to him in prison?”

  Sure, if we catch him, I thought. We had a decent chance so long as Belial stayed out of the picture. Because my scans had come so easily, I was tempted to assume that Belial had deserted his alleged ally. It was also possible that he was pretending to stay away in the hopes of catching me offguard. At the moment I had no way of testing either assumption.

  As long as Caleb stayed holed up in whatever motel he’d chosen and kept his car out of sight, the local police would never find him. They simply didn’t have the manpower to search every motel and hotel in the Bay Area, which has hundreds of them, for a nonviolent criminal like a blackmailer. With Caleb’s own talents, he would probably receive an ASTA if they were getting close to him or a SAWM at least. Warned, he could just skip out ahead of them.

  Spotting him, therefore, was my job. Since I was officially a cross-agency government operative in the eyes of the police, Ari could call in any information I might garner. I began running regular SM:P and LDRS scans that evening, every hour or so. I saw Caleb reading, eating junk food, and making marks on a map of Northern California. The scans lacked the focus for me to identify his marks, although I could tell he was putting them on the coastline.

  “My guess was right,” I told Ari. “The treasure’s keeping him here.”

  “Good. By the way, it’s after midnight. You really need to get some sleep.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t nag me.”

  “I’m your bodyguard.” He gave me a smug smile. “And you’re endangering your health.”

  I realized that my talents were beginning to fade out of sheer exhaustion. “Oh, all right,” I said. “I’ll go to bed.”

  That night I dreamed a kaleidoscope of images from the past few weeks. The last image woke me early on Tuesday morning. I opened my eyes in a bedroom filled with pale gray fog light. The clock read 6:15. Ari was sound asleep and snoring next to me. I elbowed him awake.

  “Oof,” he said. “What?”

  “Caleb’s on the move,” I said. “Let’s get up.”

  I threw on a pair of jeans and the same shirt I’d worn the night before. While Ari took a quick shower, I sat down at the kitchen table with my pad of paper and crayons. The minute I thought of Caleb, my hand grabbed a blue-green crayon and began to draw. The water and the tide line came effortlessly, followed by beige scribbles for sand. Clear enough, but exactly where on the thousand miles of California coast Sumner was remained a mystery. Most likely his location lay somewhere near the Bay Area, where Drake supposedly buried his gold, but that only narrowed the area down to a hundred and fifty miles.

  I switched to an SM:P. I got glimpses of Caleb, burdened by a backpack, walking along the firm sand at the water’s edge. He carried a long narrow object over one shoulder. A rifle? Not a good sign, if so. Again, he could have been anywhere on the coast of the greater Bay Area. Inspiration struck. I ran a Scan Mode:Object for his white sedan. While objects rarely provide the starting point for a scan, I had a deep emotional connection to that car because Caleb had used it during the attack. Nearly getting killed tends to set the vibrations in your mind.

  The sedan showed up as a misty white blob, touched with glints of gold, roughly car-shaped, parked in a small lot surrounded by beach grass and weeds. I let myself drift into a light trance, which clarified the scan on my inner monitor. I could move only a few feet within the image, but that was enough to see the landmark I needed.

  I left the trance state and ended the scan just as a damp Ari strode into the kitchen. He was wearing his gray suit slacks, a white shirt, and the Beretta in its shoulder holster.

  “Got him!” I said. “He’s on the beach near Mussel Rock in Pacifica.”

  “I’ll call in the location.” Ari took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. “Get ready to go.”

  I put on a pair of running shoes and a sweater. I owned a black anorak with the initials of my supposed government agency prominent on the front and back. I used it as little as possible since I didn’t really work for that group, but it seemed appropriate for this particular occasion. I grabbed my shoulder bag. Ari shrugged into his leather jacket. We trotted down the stairs and ran for the car. I pulled on the anorak before we got in.

  “I’ll drive,” I said. “You keep in touch with the cops.”

  Those extra buttons on the Saturn’s steering column proved their worth. Every time we drove along the Great Highway toward a red light, I pressed one, and the light turned green. Once we connected with Skyline, there were no more red lights, and I let the car show me her speed. Close to Pacifica, we had to leave the good roads behind and turn onto narrow access roads that led straight past the corporation yard of the local garbage company.

  The cliff across the water from Mussel Rock, part of a county park, launches plenty of hang gliders on weekends and summer days. Under a cold gray sky, with a west wind driving in from the ocean, the only cars were Caleb’s white sedan and a police cruiser. We parked on the far side of the cruiser. When Ari got out, a uniformed officer jogged over to confer with him.

  I left my shoulder bag under the front seat but took the car keys with me when I got out. I walked over to the edge of the lot. Far below, the ocean murmured and swelled onto the sand. The tide, I realized was coming in fast. The rock itself, which is shaped like a mussel rather than harboring a lot of them, loomed black and spiky some distance from the beach.

  The sea has eroded this stretch of coast into an alteration of deep inlets and jutting fingers of land. After our stormy winter, nothing but bare dirt and rock covered the faces of the cliffs, all of them unstable formations, especially with the tide rushing into the coves and foaming out again. Off to the south from where I stood, I saw a small figure. He had his back to the ocean and was staring at the jut of dark brown dirt directly above him. When I ran an SM:P for Caleb, it matched. I trotted back to the parking lot.

  “He’s down on the sand a couple hundred yards off,” I said. “We’d better hurry. The tide’s turned.”

  “I’ve already called in backup,” the police officer said. “I’ll call again and get a rescue unit out here.”

  “Brilliant,” Ari said. “O’Grady, give me the keys.”

  I handed them over. Ari unlocked the trunk and grabbed a coil of bright yellow nylon rope. I noticed a neat arrangement of boxes and bundles befor
e he slammed the trunk shut. He threw me the keys, and I put them in my jeans pocket. I could feel my heart pounding. Was Belial out there in the waves, sucking up Qi for an attack? I reminded myself that if he was, I could draw from the same source. Ari slung the coil of rope over one shoulder like a mountaineer.

  “Ready,” Ari said.

  “Good,” I said. “Let’s go, Nathan.”

  We jogged along a dirt road that ran parallel to the cliff top, then cut over to the grassy flat. At the edge, I looked down and saw Caleb directly below us, holding a shovel, not a rifle. Grooves and holes on the cliff face indicated he’d already done some digging. He might have thought he’d found the location of the treasure. He’d also trapped himself inside one of the coves. He stood at the narrow point of a dangerous V of cliffs. Beyond the wide mouth of the V, the beach had already disappeared under water, which was growing deeper by the minute. As we watched, a wave came foaming into the inlet. The white line of water stopped barely two feet behind him. He seemed utterly unaware of it.

  “Caleb!” I yelled down. “Start climbing! The tide’s coming in.”

  At the sound of my voice, he looked up and shaded his eyes with one hand against the glare of sun through fog. The morning sun hung low behind us to the east. He may not have seen us. He may not have recognized us if he did.

  “Get out of there!” I screamed. “You’ll drown.”

  Caleb spun around just as another wave broke and came rushing into the cove. This one splashed on his heels. He dropped the shovel and ran the last few feet to the portion of the cliff directly below me, right at the point of the V. He looked up and around with frantic movements of his head. The wave receded. Caleb found some sort of handhold on the cliff face, grabbed it, and pulled himself up.

  One hand at a time, one foot at a time, he scrambled up the cliff. Loose dirt and rocks fell away below him. Weighed down as he was by the backpack, he stopped some ten yards up to pant for breath. Distantly, I heard sirens announcing the approach of the police rescue unit. I ran a quick SM:Danger, which made me aware only of the incoming tide. I tried again with an SM:P for Belial and picked up nothing.

  “Drop the backpack!” Ari called out. “Don’t be stupid!”

  Caleb shook his head no. While I’d been running scans, Ari had uncoiled the rope. He flung one end over the side of the cliff. It dangled, bright yellow against the brown, about thirty feet above Caleb’s head.

  “Try to reach it,” Ari called down.

  Caleb started his painful climb once again. I looked out to sea and saw Poseidon rising from the waves in his glass-green chariot. In the roar of the tide, I thought I heard him call a command. He vanished, but a wave rushed into the cove and bit into the bottom of the cliff. When it slid out, it took a huge mouthful of dirt with it. I heard Caleb cry out, but in triumph, not in fear.

  Caleb stopped climbing, resting again I thought at first. He clung to an outcrop of what appeared to be stable rock with one arm and began to dig into the cliff with the other hand.

  “Hang it up, you idiot!” I called out. “The cliff’s falling apart.”

  “No!” His voice cracked and screeched. “I won’t leave it.”

  “You’re going to fall unless you climb—”

  “I won’t let you have it!” He screamed into the wind. “It’s mine!”

  A chunk of cliff the size of an economy car broke free and fell with a spray of pebbles and clods. A scatter of dirt dusted his shoulder as it passed him. The chunk crashed onto the beach below and splashed in the rising tide.

  “Get up here!” Ari tried again. “Grab the sodding rope!”

  Caleb ignored him and the rope. He wedged himself into a crack in the cliff face, clung to a projecting rock with one arm, and kept scrabbling in the dirt with the other. I heard police officers on the cliff top yelling as they ran toward us. So did Caleb. He yelped out a couple of incomprehensible words, shook his head, and kept digging with one hand.

  A crumble of dirt broke loose just a few feet from us and plunged to the beach below. Ari grabbed my arm.

  “Get back from the edge,” he said. “We could be caught by a landslide any moment now.”

  I started to follow orders, but Caleb suddenly shrieked aloud in triumph. He sank his arm into the fissure up to the shoulder and pulled something free, a long dirt-stained shape that looked like an enormous bone. I stopped moving, but Ari grabbed me around the waist from behind. Before I could complain, he dragged me away from the edge.

  Just as we staggered back to safety, the section of ground upon which we’d been standing gave way. I heard Caleb scream, heard a rumble like the sound of a wave—but a wave of earth and rock. Caleb screamed again, and the sound followed him down as he fell, twisting, shrieking, to the flooded shore below. Clods of dirt and lumps of—of something—tumbled down after him in a cloud of dust and a vomit of mud.

  I caught my breath and my balance just as the first officers reached us. Enough of the cliff had fallen away that we stood near its newly formed brink. I could see all the way down to Caleb’s body, lying flat on its back in a pool of seafoam. It was half-covered with dirt and rocks, as if the cliff had tried to bury its tormentor. Nearby lay the lumps of whatever it was that he’d given his life to find.

  “What—”

  “Bones of some sort.” Ari shaded his eyes and peered down. “Fossils, I’d say. A treasure, certainly, but not, I suppose, what he had in mind.”

  I took a few cautious steps toward the edge for a better look. I could make a half-educated guess as to what I was seeing. The huge skull had fallen on to Caleb’s chest with what must have been a crushing blow.

  “Yeah, fossils,” I said. “A mammoth or mastodon, I betcha. They used to be real common around here, y’know, in the Ice Age.”

  “Dangerous prey,” Ari said.

  “Yeah. Just think. Caleb is the first man killed by a mammoth in ten thousand years. Well, his spirits promised him he’d be famous. I’ll bet he makes the Guinness Book of World Records.”

  The ground under my feet trembled again. Ari and I turned and ran back to solid earth and safety.

  Since his heavy backpack weighed Caleb down, the police rescue unit recovered his corpse before the waves swept it out to sea. The backpack turned out to be full of books and maps, some stolen from research libraries back east, pertaining to Drake’s treasure. The rare volumes were soaked through and ruined, of course, another small crime totted up on Caleb’s tab.

  Caleb’s death was ruled an accident, another case of an unwary person trusting an ocean that could turn treacherous in a split second. A lot of people have died that way, trapped between a rising tide and the unstable ground of the northern California coast. The police could call it what they wanted, I decided. I knew better.

  Karma. The Great Wheel turns slowly, but it never swerves.

  Later that day, after we finished all the official procedures and filled out the forms, and I had reported to my real agency and Ari had contacted both of his, I called Caroline Burnside. At the news that one of Bill Evers’ murderers was dead, she laughed aloud.

  “I did a tarot reading for myself this morning,” she told me, “and it looked like something good was going to happen. Chalk one up for my cards!”

  By the time we got back home that night, the sun had set, and I felt ready to do the same. As I turned the car to pull into the driveway, the Saturn’s headlights swept across the front of the building and illuminated a streak of red paint.

  “More sodding graffiti!” Ari said.

  “But no interchange symbol this time,” I said, “just the Norteños tag.”

  “True. I wonder if that means something.”

  “Maybe. Whoever’s been putting it up might have finally figured out that I’m not interested in his message. I hope so.”

  Ari said nothing until I finished guiding the car into the garage. We got out, and I waited out in the graveled yard while he pulled down and locked the garage doors. We started walking toward
the front of the building to get in, since we’d bolted the back doors from inside.

  “About that symbol and the message,” Ari said. “Do you really think someone sent—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have any idea of who it might be?”

  “The only person I can think of is that guy Karo mentioned, the man who speaks to the Peacock Angel.”

  “Some kind of Satanist?”

  “I doubt it. I don’t much like him anyway. If it’s actually him and not some other new and improved weirdo.”

  Ari stopped walking. By the glow of the streetlight in front of our building I could see his reproachful stare.

  “Well, I’ve got to consider all the possibilities,” I said. “Sorry.”

  He groaned aloud and started up the stairs. I followed and let the subject drop.

  CHAPTER 17

  I WOKE UP EARLY AND FOUND HERCULES standing beside our bed, a massive blond guy wearing a tunic with a lion skin draped down his back. He rested a wooden club on one shoulder. Ari stayed asleep even when I sat up and turned toward the IOI.

  “Hi,” I said. “Something you want to tell me?”

  “Antaeus,” Hercules said. “Remember how I disposed of him?” He winked at me and vanished.

  Rather than try to go back to sleep after an apparition, I got up and took a shower. I crept into the bedroom to grab my flannel-lined jeans, warm socks, and the teal sweater. In his sleep, Ari turned over onto his back and began to snore. I dressed out in the hall, then went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  While I watched the water dripping through the grounds, I remembered who Antaeus was, a particularly nasty Titan who derived his superhuman strength from his mother, Gaia, a.k.a. the Earth. As long as he touched the ground, he was invincible. Hercules lifted him above his head and held him there until he was weak enough to strangle.