by R. L. King
Stone sighed. “Raider, if you’ll be staying here for a while, we’re going to have work out some ground rules, aren’t we?”
Raider tilted his head but said nothing.
Oddly, given what Dennis Avila’s neighbor had told Stone, one feature seemed conspicuously absent from the scene. The neighbor had claimed he’d given Raider up because he’d “pissed all over everything,” but Stone found no evidence of that. Neither did he notice that the cat was particularly antisocial, beyond the standard fear any creature would have when placed in a new situation. Raider hadn’t even clawed at him when he’d thwarted his escape, but merely struggled to get out of his grip.
He reminded himself that Raider wasn’t staying. Once he’d done what he planned to do, regardless of whether he had any success, he’d find the cat another home. He wouldn’t take him back to the pound, of course: despite the fact that he had no desire to take on a feline roommate, he certainly wouldn’t consign Raider back to death row. That was something he could deal with later, though. For now, it was more vital than ever to see if he could get any useful information from the cat.
He wasn’t sure it was even possible to do what he intended to try. He’d gotten better over the years at reading objects, at picking up emanations from items with a strong emotional component associated with them. It was spotty and he couldn’t always get it to work, but when it did, he got images similar to those he’d gotten at the murder scene in Gilroy. Not enough to give him definitive answers—he’d never held a murder weapon in his hand and seen an image of the killer, for example—but usually enough to move him at least somewhat further along the path to discovering the whole story.
But that was with inanimate objects. As a living being, Raider had an aura just as any human did, but animal auras were simpler in nature and far more difficult to read past the basic “eat, fight, run, mate” drives.
Normally, Stone wouldn’t have even thought to try this, but given the horrific scene the cat had witnessed and the fact that he was obviously still suffering some degree of lingering trauma from it even after a month, it might be worth the effort. The worst that could happen was that it wouldn’t work—and maybe he’d get a few scratches for his trouble. And either way, he’d find someone who was good with difficult cats and see about finding Raider a new home where he’d be happy.
“Right, then,” he said. “Do you think you can behave yourself for a while? We’ll need a bit more room than we have in here.”
When Raider still didn’t reply, he scooped the cat up and opened the door, preparing to fend off a struggle all the way up the stairs.
However, as soon as the door was open and it became obvious they were leaving the small bathroom, Raider calmed down immediately. He still wasn’t happy—in Stone’s arms, he felt like a spring-loaded muscle covered in fur—but he allowed himself to be carried upstairs and deposited on the guest bed.
“Now, you behave yourself,” Stone told him. “No pissing on the bedspread, or it’s back to the bathroom with you. Got it?” He had no idea why he was carrying on a conversation with a cat, but given his preference for sharing his thoughts with human sounding boards, he found Raider to be a surprisingly acceptable alternative.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. Raider immediately moved to the other side and up near the headboard, never taking his eyes off Stone.
After a moment of contemplating how he was going to do this (inanimate objects stayed where you put them, and didn’t try to hide under the bed while you were taking readings from them), Stone took off his boots and swung himself up onto the bed, stretching out and taking deep, centering breaths. He didn’t know much about how to handle animals, but he did know that most of them were good at picking up emotional cues from the humans around them. Stressed human equaled stressed cat. Maybe if he could project an aura of calm tranquility, it might help Raider settle down enough that he’d at least stick around long enough for Stone to get a few impressions.
After a few moments, he turned his head to find Raider watching him from his perch on top of the pillows. “That’s it…” he murmured. “You just stay there for a few minutes like a good chap. If you don’t destroy anything, I’ll see about setting up a space for you in here. How’s that sound?”
Raider licked his front paw.
Taking that as a good sign, Stone shifted over to magical sight. Raider’s aura, like those of all animals, shone much dimmer than a human’s and extended only an inch or so from his body. It was pale green—almost all nonhuman animals’ auras were normally some shade of green—but shot through with angry red patches like the visual representations of sore spots. Something had happened either to or near this cat, without a doubt.
Slowly, so as not to startle him, Stone reached out his hand, stopping a few inches away from where Raider sat. The cat’s green gaze switched back and forth between Stone’s face and his hand; after several moments, he leaned forward and sniffed.
Stone let him do it for thirty seconds and then, still moving slowly, extended his arm just a bit further until he was scratching Raider behind the ears. “There you go…” he said. “Good boy.”
Raider didn’t seem inclined to move; in fact, he seemed to be enjoying the attention. A low, rumbling purr began—it wasn’t loud enough to be audible, but Stone could feel it under his hand.
This was about the best he could hope for. Continuing the gentle scratching, he locked gazes with the cat and narrowed his focus.
When he looked at an object with magical sight, one of two things happened: either nothing (if the object had no particular significance or emotional resonance), or a series of flashing images. The images were almost never coherent or sequential—they flickered and flitted like an old film projected on a bad screen. Objects with stronger resonance, such as a ring worn by a murder victim or the beloved toy of an abused child, provided more and clearer images, but Stone still often struggled with making sense of them. The process usually exhausted him, and he’d developed the habit of always carrying a small notebook and pen so he could note down the impressions before falling asleep or passing out.
Raider was different. He’d never tried this on a human before, at least not a living one, so he had no idea what to expect with the cat. As he stared into Raider’s green eyes, at first he didn’t get any images at all, merely impressions. Fear. Run. Hide. Faintly, at the edge of his awareness, he felt the cat tense under his hand. “It’s all right…” he whispered. “It’s all right…nothing’s going to hurt you here…”
Clearly he’d need to sharpen his focus even more to get anything. He’d told people on many occasions—reassured them, in fact—that mages couldn’t read minds. That much was true: as far as he knew or had ever heard, no mage had ever been able to reach into another being’s mind and unearth their deepest secrets.
But it wasn’t the whole truth. Most people, whether they knew it or not, were open books to those skilled enough to pick up their unspoken tells, emotional cues, and careful evasions. Even some mundanes could do it, and do it well—psychologists, good poker players, and stage mentalists based their careers on the ability to ferret out the things people didn’t want them to see. But when those talents coupled with the magical ability to see auras and the training to spot minute changes in their color and configuration, it wasn’t necessary to read minds. Some humans could hide their tells, but no mundane could hide his or her aura.
Raider, oddly, required more focus than a human would. Animals’ emotions were closer to the surface than a human’s would be, but they were also more alien, primitive, primal. Stone moved his hand down the cat’s back, tightening his hold just a bit as he concentrated on Raider’s eyes. “Show me what happened…” he murmured. His hand trembled just a bit, and the beginnings of a headache poked at him. He couldn’t keep this up much longer.
His mind slipped sideways as the impressions came in a flood:
Hom
e. Safe. Warm.
Friend. Big two-leg warm friend. Home.
Food?
Food!
Two-leg has food. Has something else, too. Want food?
No. Something bad. Stay away. Careful.
Two-leg puts food on floor. Sit. Eat food together. Good food!
Two-leg watch something. New thing. Strange smell. Dirt from outside and…something else.
Box. Little box. Smells old. More food? Maybe crazyplant?
Creep closer. Sometimes two-leg brings toy with crazyplant.
Two-leg opens box, takes out thing. Takes out other thing. Takes out—
No. Badthing! Badheartthing!
No! No! No! Badthing! Run! Hide!
Two-leg holds badheartthing in his paw. Stares.
Listens?
Hide. Hide. Don’t let badheartthing see you.
Suddenly blood! Sharp tangy-strong smell. Prey?
Not prey. Two-leg! Blood is from two-leg!
Heartthing pulses. Grows. Alive?
Two-leg falls. Blood gushes forward, covers badthing. Smell of blood fills room.
Badthing is moving!
Run! Hide!
No! Don’t let it see you. Quiet. Hide. Badthing will find you.
Badthing will kill you.
Something else in room. Strange cloud, drifting through air. Smells wrong. So wrong. Smells like death and pain and old, old blood.
Tense. Crouch. Stay still.
Cloud drifts over badthing. Badthing glows. Gets bigger. Pulses.
Two-leg friend is dead. His life-smell is gone. Now just blood. And meat. And badthing.
Another two-leg! Faint, glowing, but getting stronger.
Floating.
Badheartthing glows—but dark. Not bright. Pulses. Beats fast, like mouse heart.
Then it’s gone and there is just the new two-leg.
Hide. Don’t let new two-leg badthing see you. Be still.
New two-leg badthing backs away from box. Fear. Afraid of box and things inside.
Two-leg badthing waits. Long time.
Muscles ache from crouching. Heart pounds from fear. Don’t move. Hide. Don’t run.
New two-leg badthing is gone.
He is alone with his own two-leg.
No more warm two-leg friend. No more food. No more warm bed. Now just cold two-leg thing. Meat. Blood.
Run?
No.
Stay. Hide. Other two-leg badthing might come back. Don’t move.
Don’t move.
Don’t move!
When Stone came back to his senses, his right arm and chest hurt and his heart pounded as if he’d just run across town while pursued by a pack of werewolves.
He sat up quickly, glancing at the clock on the nightstand. He’d been checked out for around fifteen minutes. Not unconscious—he didn’t have the swimmy feeling or jackhammer headache he always got when he passed out from pushing too much magic. No, it was more as if he had been…elsewhere.
Raider was nowhere to be seen.
A quick look at himself revealed the cause of Stone’s pain: his bare arm was covered with several red scratches, some of which were still bleeding. He pulled off his T-shirt to discover a few more, shallower this time, on the right side of his chest. His cheek stung too, and when he touched it, his fingers came away dotted with red.
Clearly Raider had taken violent issue with his attempts at determining what had occurred the night Dennis Avila died.
Bloody hell. The images came back to him, as clear as they’d been during the strange vision. Ignoring the bleeding scratches, he pulled his notebook from his pocket and began dashing off everything he could remember before it faded. His heartbeat slowly returned to its normal rate, but he didn’t think he’d ever completely forget those images. Whatever Raider had seen, Stone now understood why the cat was acting the way he was. Hell, most people would be candidates for a few nights in a supervised environment with soft walls if they’d seen something like that.
And he hadn’t even gotten it all. All he got was Raider’s version—the fear, the overwhelming compulsion to stay still and not attract the notice of whatever that thing (badheartthing) had been. He couldn’t even begin to guess at the level of psychic emanations it must have been putting out in person.
He finished his notes—enough, at least, that he was confident he could elaborate on them in more detail later—and went in search of Raider. The scratches stung but weren’t serious, certainly not serious enough to take time for a healing spell, especially as tired as he was now. He’d tend to them after he found the cat.
Fortunately he’d had the presence of mind to close the bedroom door, so that narrowed down the potential hiding places Raider could have discovered. He checked under the bed first, but found nothing there but some old boxes, a lot of dust (he’d have to see about hiring a new housekeeper) and a pair of shoes he’d forgotten about. “Raider, where are you? I’m sorry I had to do that to you, but better out than in, right?”
There was no reply, but he hadn’t expected one.
In the end, he found the tabby crouched under the armoire. He almost hadn’t looked there, since the space beneath it hardly seemed large enough to accommodate him, but apparently cats could achieve a boneless state when they were sufficiently frightened. When he crouched down and took a cursory glance underneath before entertaining the possibility that Raider had managed to open the door and close it behind him, he spotted a pair of luminous eyes fixing him with an unblinking, terrified stare.
He sighed. “Raider…I’m sorry. I truly am. I don’t even blame you for scratching me up. I’d probably have scratched you too, if you did that to me. And if I had claws.”
He didn’t attempt to pull the cat out or even reach in to pet him. Raider was obviously a cat who needed some time to himself. “Tell you what,” he said. “I need to get cleaned up a bit and take care of a few things—suppose I just leave you alone for a while? I’ll bring your stuff up here and you can stay under there as long as you like.” He knew he was taking a chance given what Avila’s neighbor had said about Raider’s bathroom manners, but at this point he thought a few stains on the bedspread were a fair trade for what he’d inflicted on the poor creature in his pursuit of knowledge.
The only good part of the whole thing was now he had some more knowledge. And a few more avenues to pursue.
Chapter Sixteen
The next day Stone didn’t have any classes until the afternoon, so he set out in the late morning to hunt down the location where Avila had found the box. He was convinced the man had dug it up at his construction site—he had no other reasonable explanation for why it had been found near a dead man (especially one who’d worked as a backhoe operator only hours before his suicide) with fresh dirt around it. Besides, Raider’s vision had suggested he’d brought it home the night he’d killed himself.
He checked on Raider before he left. The cat was still under the armoire, and had touched neither the kibble in his food dish nor the litter box Stone had stashed in the back corner. If that didn’t change soon, he was going to have to find someone who knew more about cats than he did.
He had several angles to follow now, but finding Avila’s job site was probably the easiest of them, since it didn’t require talking with anyone who might get suspicious about his involvement. He’d brought along the same amulet he used at Avila’s apartment building, planning to use the “nerdy reporter” persona to get the information he needed.
A second—and more difficult—angle was to find out what had become of the box, and determine how hard it would be for him to get his hands on it. Since the police considered Avila’s death a suicide, did that mean they’d returned it to one of Avila’s relatives? Was it boxed up in some evidence locker in the back of a police station? Or most likely—given that the cops around he
re seemed to be fairly good at their jobs, at least as far as mundane cases were concerned—had they drawn the same conclusion he had, assuming that Avila had dug the thing up at his job site? If that were true, they might have given it to the owners of the property, or they might have handed it off to a museum or other expert in local antiquities for analysis. He made a mental note to check with Jason to see if he or Stan Lopez could find an answer to that question.
Right now, though, he wanted to see the place where Avila had found it. If one such object had turned up, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect more might have been buried at the same spot. He probably wouldn’t be able to find them, but if the ground was still sufficiently disturbed, it wasn’t out of the question. Worth checking, anyway.
The report Cheng had given him included Avila’s workplace address; he found it in an old blue-collar industrial park off highway 237, tucked between an auto-body shop and a metal fabrication firm. Convincing the bored-looking teenage girl behind the counter to look up the site for him was almost disappointingly easy: all he had to do was slip her a twenty and she searched through a series of files until she came up with the one he was looking for. She wrote the address down for him without even asking why he wanted it, and had gone back to the book she was reading before he got out the door.
The site itself was on the outskirts of Milpitas, a bedroom community just north of San Jose. Stone parked a block away, activated his illusion disguise, and walked the rest of the way over.
The job site took up more room than he’d expected. The development appeared to be in stages: one group of massive, vaguely Spanish-influenced homes was close to completion, another was a forest of skeletal wooden frames, and a third looked like nothing more than foundations. Far off in the distance, heavy machines rumbled around a fourth site like oversized yellow beetles, digging out still more foundations.
