Bite Back 05 - Angel Stakes

by Mark Henwick

  In the way of these things, that shimmering thought that had been escaping me seemed to coalesce into a word as my attention moved elsewhere.

  Redemption.

  The sudden reappearance of that word in my mind confused me.

  Why did I have to redeem myself?

  Part of me just wanted to kill Forsythe and walk away. And part of me knew there was something important missing from that. My heart rate ticked up.

  Frustration. And anger.

  “I need to talk about something else,” I said.

  Anything.

  “Of course,” Diana said quickly.

  “Tullah.” I picked the person I felt most concerned about. “You said she was hiding from the Adepts. Have you heard anything? Is she okay?”

  Another glance between Diana and Bian.

  Even with everything they’d done for me, this was getting irritating. I understood all about the need to take it easy, not get me upset, but like any patient, I was getting cranky. Rational thought was losing out. And Diana had just sort-of suggested I was ready to move forward.

  “She’s still in hiding,” Diana said. “We didn’t really have time to explain before, and I’m not sure—”

  “Please,” I said.

  Strangely, Diana seemed to like it that I’d pushed back.

  Maybe that was how she judged when it was really time to move on—when I was strong enough to complain about being handled with kid gloves.

  I pushed that down to think about later. I was too tired now.

  “Very well,” Diana said. “I told you she was hiding from the Adepts, but I didn’t tell you which ones.”

  “The Denver community, I guess?” Tullah’s mother, Mary, had run the Denver Adepts, but the community had been taken over by an Adept called Weaver. He was bad news. He wanted to harness the power of Tullah’s dragon spirit guide for himself. I wondered if he had the power. I sensed Kaothos had been growing, even in the time Tullah and I had spent down in New Mexico.

  But Diana was shaking her head. “She’s hiding from all communities at the moment, but the real problem is not any local communities. It’s the Empire of Heaven.”

  I frowned. “But Liu and Mary asked me to contact the Empire’s Adepts and ask them for advice on creating a community for Kaothos. Why is Tullah hiding from them now?”

  Had I screwed up again?

  I’d persuaded Bian to allow me to talk in a video conference with Xun Huang, Diakon of the Empire of Heaven. During the conversation, I’d asked to speak to Adepts from the Empire, and I’d said dragon spirit guides were a subject of interest. The intensity of his sudden attention had been a bit unnerving, but there had been no indication he posed a threat.

  Bian said, “When you and the dragon broke the lock holding Diana, there was apparently a shock wave in the energy.”

  I was stunned. “That reached—”

  “All the way to China, yes,” Diana said. “Such an abrupt and powerful manipulation of the energy causes ripples that can travel around the world.”

  “The Emperor immediately dispatched Huang and a team of Adepts to New Mexico,” Bian said. “When they didn’t find Tullah or Kaothos, they widened the search. They did not,” she added, “contact us—or any of the Adepts known to us—to ask us to pass on an offer of assistance to Tullah. Mary and Liu found that…troubling.”

  So did I.

  “You think they want to take Tullah and Kaothos by force?”

  Bian shrugged. “Better to be safe.”

  “Don’t worry, they’re safe, and Kaothos is protected. Huang won’t find them,” Diana said. She pursed her lips. “Since you were the first person to raise this with the Empire, when Huang eventually comes here to Los Angeles, he’ll want to discover whether you have any knowledge of their whereabouts.” I opened my mouth, but she waved away any further questions. “You will be in no danger from Huang. Skylur and I will see to that.”

  Bian added, “Huang has to come to LA. His presence is allowed in the country only by Skylur’s guarantee of safety. The purpose of that guarantee was to get all the Houses to come here and debate the new Assembly. So, unless Huang comes to LA and engages with the debate, he’ll be trespassing in Skylur’s mantle and subject to the usual penalties. Ironically, this has all worked out to achieve one of Skylur’s objectives—to get the Empire to participate in the Assembly.”

  So I hadn’t screwed up. Maybe I’d even helped Skylur’s cause.

  “What are they like?” I asked.

  “The Empire?” Bian snorted. “Difficult. Arrogant. Powerful. Huang himself seems like the mildest-mannered Diakon you’ll ever meet, but there’s a reason he’s in his position.”

  Although Panethus had more Athanate as far as we knew, the Empire of Heaven was effectively one House, with every Athanate sub-House linked directly by oath to the Emperor. The same went for every pack of Were or community of Adepts in their domain.

  Diana smiled. “Now, let’s speak of other things.” She switched to Athanate, speaking slowly and clearly. “Tell me about the House Farrell charter that you and Pia are working on.”

  My days weren’t entirely filled with therapy sessions and sleeping. I worked out with Yelena and the others. I had teleconferences with Pia and David. I learned handy skills I’d been intending to for ages, like lock picking. And I worked hard to understand both the Athanate society I was now part of, and the language itself.

  Every visit, Diana spent time with the language. Sometimes we listened to the broadcasts from the conference. Skylur had hoped that being able to hear all the proceedings would convince a majority of Athanate Houses to go home and leave it to their representatives. That ploy wasn’t working yet, but the broadcasts went on, encrypted and streamed out through the dark web on a secure site run by Altau, called Tartarus. I’d had to look it up—Tartarus was the name of a region of hell in Greek mythology: an abyss of torment and suffering. I thought that suited the conference well.

  Diana spoke to me in the most simple phrasing, but Athanate was a maddeningly difficult language with a huge vocabulary and complex nuances: there were sixteen ways to say I love you. And at least thirty-two standard ways you could modify that phrase.

  I began to talk, breaking up complex ideas about my House. I wanted to include Were and Adepts and humans, as well as the recognized Athanate categories. How I thought rights and obligations balanced. What size my House should be. How we would run it. Modern thoughts on a culture that had existed for thousands of years. It was a good thing it was so difficult putting it all into simple sentences; I stopped thinking about how arrogant Diana would find my ideas.

  In fact, I was unable to think about anything else while I struggled to answer her questions. Good therapy, and no doubt her intention all along.

  And she gave no indication that she thought my charter was a bad idea, which I found encouraging.

  An hour later we were interrupted by a telephone request from Skylur; she had to leave.

  I expected Bian to join her, but since she’d lost the position of Altau Diakon to Naryn, her official duties seemed to have reduced.

  “You look as if you need to nap,” she said when I yawned. “Therapy does that to you.”

  “I’m not tired,” I lied.

  “Okay. You sit there anyway and I’ll make some tea.”

  I didn’t get to taste the tea.

  Chapter 7

  Morning, sort-of. It was either ridiculously early or way too late. My sleep cycles were well and truly messed up.

  As Bian had said, Athanate therapy did that.

  It also made me disoriented as I woke. Dreams and therapy sessions and things I did yesterday all blurred together.

  It helped to focus on the number of days, first off.

  Twenty-nine? No, thirty days.

  My therapy had been going on now for four weeks, since we came in from New Mexico.

  Four weeks of wearing it all down, as Speaks-to-Wolves called it. The memories I’d walled away: t
hose last few days at South High; losing my team in the jungle; Petersen’s Obs team experimenting on me.

  I’d stopped screaming.

  And even though I was now able to look at all of those memories without flinching, every session took its toll.

  I slept. Better than I had in years. And when I wasn’t in therapy or asleep, I drove myself. Partly a natural aversion to thinking about my therapy, and partly, I suspected, the light touch of Diana’s compulsion.

  Athanate language. Athanate law and customs. Working out till my muscles screamed. Sparring.

  Everyone took a turn at sparring with me, but my usual partner was Yelena. My platinum-haired Carpathian was good, almost as quick and nasty as Bian. Every session I learned new tricks as I earned new bruises.

  She and I shared the training of the rest of my House.

  Jen and Alex. Julie and Keith. And Vera. Yelena was much more careful with the others than she was with me—I took that as a compliment. And she was fitting into my House effortlessly. Which was good, because an Athanate House needs a Diakon as well as a Mistress, and I was coming to the conclusion that fate had handed me the perfect candidate.

  I enjoyed watching them all.

  Julie, Keith and Alex had been overconfident about their hand-to-hand skills. That had lasted exactly one session with Yelena.

  Jen was utterly focused on getting as much from every lesson as she could. She’d told me she never wanted to be in a position of feeling helpless again, and now she was doing everything she could to work toward that.

  But the best to watch was Vera. A couple of months ago, she’d arrived as a woman just starting to make a reluctant peace with the encroaching symptoms of age—her joints had hurt, her bones had been getting brittle and her memory had gotten a little erratic. Now she was hurling herself around gleefully on the practice mats. She’d rediscovered the invulnerability of being young, thanks to the rejuvenating effect of being bitten by Athanate.

  Bian had nominally been in charge of her treatment, but she’d delegated to Yelena.

  An arrangement that seemed to suit them both.

  When I’d had enough of hard mental and physical work, and needed to do something restful, I swam.

  Jen had found us a house in the Hollywood Hills, beyond the traffic-snarled grid of Sunset, in where the pale roads snaked up and up between steep sides and tall green hedges. A shimmering white house stacked against the slope that felt, from the inside, like we were living in a wedding cake: all split levels, interior balconies and spiraling staircases. It was owned by some movie star, presumably the same person responsible for putting a mirror on every wall. In its favor, it had the most beautiful infinity pool. No chlorine; a pure salt water cleaning system, and a view from the lip of the pool right down the valley and into the city itself.

  But all those mirrors and no Tara.

  As far back as I could remember, I’d been connected to my stillborn twin. Every day, I’d look into a mirror and see my twin as she would have been, and I’d talk to her. But since Carson Park, nothing. No Tara. No Hana. No twin sister. No wolf spirit guide. Silence.

  Diana said it would pass, along with the painful stuttering of my eukori. Patience, she said. I didn’t believe her. She was lying to be kind to me.

  It added up, every little bit of it, until I felt as if I’d been reborn in LA as a different person. To top it off, there was the sense of dislocation I felt from the sessions.

  It felt like I had to check, every waking moment, whether I was dreaming, or this was real life.

  But I normally slept like a kitten. So what had woken me?

  Alex and Jen were arguing in hushed voices outside the bedroom door.

  Business. Only deeply sick people would be up at this hour talking about their businesses.

  “You’re managing from here,” Alex said.

  “I’m managing because Kingslund Group has the structure for it, and David and Pia are running it in Denver day-to-day. I call in twice a day, I do teleconferences, I fly there for meetings.” She paused for effect. “You go hunting Basilikos with Altau security. Every day.”

  Jen was right. Alex’s company, Tallbarn Transportation, ran out of a couple of warehouses, a small office building and a truck parking lot. He was justifiably proud of it, but it was light on management. And it seemed that any time he wasn’t helping in a session with me, he was out on patrol with Altau.

  “Olivia’s in the office,” Alex said. “She knows the—”

  “She’s a secretary.”

  “And Ricky goes in.”

  “He’s not even an employee. You have two sensible alternatives—”

  “I know what you’re saying. You buy out Tallbarn or I go back to Denver.”

  “No!” Jen had a hair-trigger temper, and Alex was stomping on her buttons.

  “Shh!”

  Quieter: “I’m offering to put in a manager while we’re here in LA,” Jen said.

  Alex’s suspicion was obvious. “Why?”

  “To help. I have no hidden motive.”

  “What’ll it cost?”

  “Nothing!” The temper was coming back again.

  Jen and Alex had been one of my big worries since becoming Mistress of House Farrell. I loved them both with all my heart, and it pained me that they argued like this. It also damaged the House, having my kin continually at daggers drawn.

  I thought it’d been getting better.

  It had been getting better. A couple of weeks ago, Diana’s session had dug down into my memories of rescuing Jen from the factory at Longmont. She’d lived through hell that day—nearly died from the brutal treatment of Frank Hoben and his men. In trying to heal her, to save her life, I’d taken her emotions from that day into myself, and locked them in my strongbox. I’d struggled against releasing them during the therapy session; what was the point of sparing Jen that pain only to inflict it on her now, reliving it through me? But Diana had insisted; all the memories in the strongbox had to be dealt with. Even if they weren’t mine.

  Predictably, it’d turned into Jen’s therapy session more than mine. And I’d been in no shape to help her. It had been Alex who held her, comforted her with a tenderness that had squeezed my chest and throat. I’d hoped that had been a breakthrough for them.

  Apparently not.

  “Hey, trolls!” I called out. “If the sun comes up while you’re still arguing, you get turned to stone, don’t you?”

  “Shit!”

  The door opened and they came in.

  “You have to get up early anyway,” muttered Alex.

  “Course I do. Doesn’t mean I don’t hate you.”

  “Sorry,” they said together, and I laughed.

  The laugh cut off as I remembered why I had to get up early. It was time for me to venture out and prove that my ‘cure’ was going to hold up. Chills ran down my back.

  How ready am I?

  I pushed that away.

  “Are we good on business matters?” I asked.

  “We’re agreed,” Jen said firmly. “I’m loaning a manager to Tallbarn while we’re here in LA.”

  Alex took a breath to start arguing again, and I decided to play dirty.

  I rolled out of bed. My usual PJs were the emperor’s new clothes, but for once, I was almost decent in one of Alex’s long T-shirts.

  I slunk up and hugged them to me.

  Working through memories of rape and torture had killed any hint of passion between us in the last month, but Diana had eased off lately. We were getting near the end.

  Maybe there was more than one way of testing how well I’d been cured.

  It felt a little awkward to snuggle, but I kept squeezing both of them against me, and it wasn’t possible for them to hug me back without hugging each other.

  I didn’t bother trying to open my erratic eukori, but I didn’t need that to feel their love. It was like spring sunshine come to chase the chill of winter out of my bones.

  Now, that was worth getting up for. />
  Chapter 8

  It didn’t last.

  Barely a minute later the guards at the gate announced a visitor: Skylur. And a minute after that, he swept in, flanked by security, long coat flapping behind him.

  It was his first visit since we’d arrived in LA and I’d forgotten how powerful his presence was.

  He downplayed it. He shook hands with Alex and kissed Jen on the cheek. “I do apologize, interrupting you like this before you’ve even had breakfast.”

  I was still wearing Alex’s shirt, but I had had enough of a warning to pull on jeans and running shoes. Not really well prepared for meeting my boss. And I was rattled by his greeting—we kissed necks in the Athanate style.

  “And my second apology,” he said to the others. “This visit I have only time enough for Amber.”

  Jen started to speak, and he raised a hand to stop her. “I know we have to discuss the articles in the Wall Street Journal, but they will keep.”

  He took my arm and led me up to an enclosed patio.

  It was a wide room with bleached maple flooring and low sofas, overlooking the infinity pool and with a view across the valley where the sky was lightening as dawn approached.

  We sat facing each other, ignoring the vista.

  He looked at me, his eyes narrowed and searching. What did he see? I had no doubts that everything that Diana had found out about me, she passed to him. Could he see the evidence of all those events in my face? Was he looking for that?

  I suppressed twinges of worry and anger.

  It didn’t matter. I had given him an oath, and the terms allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wanted with me. Maybe this meeting was just to gauge if I was recovered before I appeared in front of other Athanate.

  So…I had to behave calmly in front of him.

  I was suffocating in this house. I needed to get out again, and any erratic behavior wasn’t going to achieve that.

  “I’ve been slow to thank you for saving Diana’s life,” he said. “I hope you understand that does not diminish how profound that gratitude is.”

  I had also disobeyed Naryn, and by doing that, disobeyed Skylur. Gratitude was not a reliable currency in the Athanate world.