by John Levitt
I let go of his arm and stepped back. The moment he gave the call, every person on Valencia, for as far as I could see, stopped moving. A second later, in perfect unison, a hundred heads swiveled toward me, and the same harsh noise erupted from a hundred throats. Grabbing this guy might have been a slight mistake.
Lou didn’t wait around to see what I would do next. He flattened his ears and took off down the street at a good clip. Ever the faithful companion. He’s always there in a pinch, but sometimes when I do something particularly stupid, he pretends to leave me on my own just to teach me a lesson. I had the feeling that one of these days he wasn’t going to be pretending.
I followed him, walking at a good clip myself, resisting the impulse to break into a trot. I glanced back over my shoulder to see what was happening with the people behind me and promptly ran into a woman in front of me. This time there was no hesitation; she made the same noise, only an octave higher. As soon as she did, people began converging on us. Even those from across the street had no problem getting there, since all traffic had also come to a halt.
Now was the time to utilize my store of magical talent, improvising to fit the situation. Only, we were in a singularity. In some of them, talent didn’t operate at all. In others it was intensified, and in still others it manifested in unexpected ways. That’s why if you ever find yourself in an unfamiliar situation, the first thing you need to do is test a basic spell, like igniting a piece of paper or casting a simple illusion. Otherwise you can end up making problems worse, not better. But I’d been so interested in what was going on around me I’d neglected to do that.
I picked up the pace and dodged by a couple of grasping hands. Lou saw I was in trouble and doubled back, throwing me a glance that said I would pay for my idiocy later on if he had his way. As two more of the crowd closed in on me, he darted in and sank his teeth into the calf of the closest one. That certainly earned Lou some attention. The bitee jumped and spun around, kicking out and reaching down to grab at him at the same time. Lou skittered out of the way and headed for temporary safety under a parked car.
I faded back and leaned against another storefront wall, trying to make myself invisible. Not literally; that would be too difficult even if my talent here turned out to be at full strength and under control.
True invisibility involves a tremendous expenditure of energy, even for the most powerful of practitioners. Plus, intense concentration. It’s like playing a complicated guitar solo as fast as you can—it can be done, but you can’t do anything else at the same time and you can’t keep it up for long. And of course one wrong note and you wink right back into visibility.
The usual way is a variation of an aversion spell. You make it so people are disinclined to look at you; their eyes just flick right by without their brain noticing. Considering the odd makeup of these particular denizens, that might work well. But it works best in a passive situation, like blending into a crowd. If you’re standing alone in the middle of a football field and someone is looking for you, sooner or later they’re going to notice you, no matter how good the spell.
The third way is the easiest, and that’s nothing more than laying an illusion over yourself. People can still see you, but they don’t realize it’s you they’re looking at.
I let out some talent and let it wash over me, concentrating on several of the people milling around the car Lou had ducked under. I took a little of one, a little of another, until I resembled a generic person, not myself and not any of them. I couldn’t see myself, of course, so I didn’t know how good the illusion was, but I did feel the surge of magical energy that told me my talent was still working. I also felt a twinge of fatigue, which meant that my power was severely limited here. I was going to have to do less with more.
Meanwhile, Lou was still hunkered down under the car. Two women had positioned themselves at the back end of the car while a man crouched down at the other end. Three more guarded the street side. The sidewalk effectively blocked the other direction so that Lou had no way out except through the gauntlet.
The guy at the front had crouched down and was cautiously extending his arm under the car, trying to snag Lou by his harness. He whipped it back just in time to avoid losing a finger. So far Lou was holding his own, but he couldn’t get out and sooner or later someone was going to come up with the idea of long sticks or something similar.
Just in front of the car, right past the engine compartment, an old oil stain discolored the street. I sucked out its essence and cast it onto Lou—an old trick I’d used before, but still reliable. Lou is supple and adroit, not easy to catch at the best of times, and now he had the added advantage of being slippery as a seal. That should do it.
“Lou!” I yelled. “Over here.”
Heads turned in unison again, but they couldn’t tell where the voice had come from. The second they turned their heads, he shot out of there like a greased pig at a fair. The guy in front made a quick grab, but Lou slipped through his fingers.
As he ran by where I was standing, I muttered, “Two cars down. Cover, and don’t move.”
One great thing about Lou is that in a crisis, he assumes I know what I’m doing even if he doesn’t understand it. Of course, a lot of the time I really don’t, but at least we don’t end up working at cross purposes. He continued on with the crowd in pursuit, ducked under the proper car, and crouched down without moving. I used the trash in the gutter and sent out another wave of illusion. In seconds, he took on the aspect of a pile of old and dirty rags, with a torn milk carton in the middle for good measure. The first of the crowd to reach the car threw himself down, looked under the car, then scrambled to his feet. A second later, he dropped again, making sure. As far as he could tell, Lou had vanished, sneaking out of the opposite side, perhaps. The rest of the crowd fanned out, checking under nearby cars and in doorways along the street. I joined in, poking aimlessly around, never getting too close to anyone.
After a while, the crowd lost focus; some of them kept searching randomly, but others picked up their looped dialogue and went on their way. In five minutes, the street was the same as it had been before I’d foolishly grabbed that arm. I circled around and continued strolling down Valencia past the car, signaling for Lou to follow. He wormed his way from car to car, hugging the street like a feral cat. At the intersection of Fifteenth, he emerged, no longer looking like a pile of rags, and we continued on our way.
No one gave us a second look. Either they’d forgotten already, or it no longer mattered to them. After we left the Valencia corridor, fewer people walked the streets, and most of them were far off, blurred by distance. That seemed typical; Valencia was a carefully constructed imitation, but the farther away we got, the less realistic it was. Constructs by their nature are limited; there was no way an entire major city, complete with masses of people, could be maintained.
We passed under the 101 freeway overpass and down Harrison. Usually Lou doubles back and twists and turns whenever he’s trying to find his way out of an unknown dimension or construct, but this time he kept up a steady trot, hardly looking right or left. Farther down on Harrison was the construction site where the energy pool sat—in the real world, at least. Eli and Victor had managed to tamp it down, which was a good thing, since more than one unpleasant creature had come through it in the past. One of its functions seemed to be to provide a path transport between dimensions, so it was a good bet that was where Lou was headed.
The construction site is also home base for Rolf, where he spends much of his time at night, he and a few others like him, doing a credible imitation of a group of homeless minding their own business. Rolf used to be a practitioner, but over the years he’d changed. He was something else now, mostly still human, but not entirely. I wondered if he, or someone like him, would be here. There was a lot I didn’t know about Rolf, and not much would surprise me.
A half hour later we were standing in front of the wire fence and gate that blocked access to the site. I hadn’t seen a s
oul on the streets for the last couple of blocks. The site was deserted and the fence around it had its usual strands of barbed wire on top. The gate was secured with a heavy padlock, but when I looked more closely at it I saw it wasn’t a lock at all, just a solid chunk of lock-shaped metal. Out here on the edge of the singularity, things were degrading.
There was no way of getting the gate open, but the strands of barbed wire weren’t any truer to life. The barbs weren’t true barbs at all—no jagged edges, no snagging points, and the wire itself was thin and easily broken. I climbed over with far less trouble than I had in the past, when I’d had to negotiate the real thing. Lou ran along the fence until he found a sloppy place where the fence bottom didn’t fully meet the ground, and squeezed under.
I kept an eye out for Rolf, but the place was deserted. The energy pool, however, was there and going strong. It’s usually almost undetectable in daylight, even to me, but this one was all too present. It swirled and leapt like a miniature whirlpool, flinging out tendrils of multicolored energy like spumes of spray off ocean rocks.
I edged up cautiously, keeping well back. We’d got the original pool contained, if not closed down, but this doppelgänger was fired up and pulsing with uncontrolled energy. I kept a close eye on Lou; he’d had a tendency before to become almost hypnotized by the pool, and wandering too close could have consequences.
He obviously thought this was the way out of here, and it made sense. But how to go about it wasn’t clear. We’d both been through the pool before, and it wasn’t anything I was eager to try again. Where we’d end up was anyone’s guess.
“Okay,” I said. “We’re here. Now what?”
Lou ignored me. He sat down and stared at the energy pool again, but now without that blank, hypnotized expression he’d had before. This time he wasn’t so much staring at it as he was studying it. His eyes flicked from side to side, and occasionally he would turn his head and focus on one area or another. I had no idea what he was looking for.
A half hour later, just as I was about to pull him away and tell him to get on with it, he finally seemed satisfied. He stood up, stretched, and glanced over at me. He gave a short bark, ran a few steps at an angle to the pool. Then he doubled back behind me, nipped at my left heel, and sat down in his original spot again. I got it.
“The next time you jump up, you want me to take off after you, right?”
He looked at me, puzzled. I tried again.
“Follow? You want me to follow?”
A short bark. Okay, we were on the same page.
He focused on the pool again and I watched him closely. A couple of times I saw his muscles twitch, and once, he leaned forward as if he were about to lunge, but they were false alarms. I tried looking at the pool at the same time, to see if I could get a sense of what was going on, but it was just a swirl of colors with no discernable pattern, at least to me.
When he sprang to his feet he almost caught me by surprise, but a quick warning bark alerted me. Then he was off, and I tore after him, almost stepping on his rear paws. We ran about fifteen feet, toward a jumble of broken concrete chunks. He vaulted over the pile and I followed him, hoping I wouldn’t twist an ankle when I landed. As soon as we were across, he doubled back and vaulted it again, then headed straight for the pool. I thought he was going to plunge right into it, but at the last moment he turned aside and vanished behind a pile of old rebar and metal duct pipes.
I stayed right behind him, and as I turned the corner I felt a familiar tearing sensation, the same as the last time I’d actually plunged through the pool. At the same moment, everything went dark. I thought for a moment something was wrong with my vision, but a half-moon in the sky made me realize it was now night. So we were back home—time dislocation was a common by-product of moving in and out of singularities.
My sense of relief lasted only a second. A noise behind me made me flinch, and before I could react someone bolted past me and out toward the gate. I started to go after him, but something else was close behind, moving past me like a breath of cold wind. Lou jumped two feet back, then moved up closer to me. I got a vague look at a shadowy something evaporating into the darkness.
The sight of yet another figure moving slowly toward us was not reassuring. It was more solid, large and menacing, scarcely human, gnarled and twisted and powerful. But I recognized it.
“Rolf?”
The figure seemed to diminish in size, subtly shifting and looking suddenly more human. Rolf came out of the shadows and looked at me in disgust.
I didn’t know if I was glad to see Rolf or not. He’d been a lot of help to me in the past and although I certainly didn’t consider him an enemy, I wouldn’t exactly call him a friend, either. An interesting acquaintance, perhaps.
He looked the same as always—except for those times when he didn’t. A rough face, wild hair, a stained army jacket, and a long beard plaited into dreadlocks. When people passed him on the street, they swung a little wider as they walked by without even realizing they’d done so. He wasn’t a threatening figure, not exactly, but he made people wary, like antelopes passing by a well-fed lion. No real danger, but you just never know.
“Rolf,” I greeted him.
“Mason.” He looked down gravely. “Lou.” Rolf took matters of formality very seriously, and to him, Lou was as worthy of recognition as I was. More so, probably. “You been playing with the pool?” he asked.
“Not by choice.”
He looked carefully at me. “Been somewhere?”
“Just took a short vacation. What day is it?” Rolf looked baffled. Keeping track of time wasn’t one of his strong points. “Never mind,” I said. He peered at me in the darkness.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that. There could be an accident. And what the hell was that?” He gestured out toward the darkness. “Friend of yours?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
Rolf came up closer and smiled, showing his disquieting collection of strong teeth. “Anyway, it’s good you dropped by. I got some information for you if you’re interested.”
“Always interested.”
“Got anything to trade?”
Another little quirk of his. Rolf was willing to provide information, but not from the goodness of his heart. Although sometimes it really was—but he refused to admit it. So he always demanded something in return.
“Not offhand,” I said. “Anything you particularly want?”
“Can’t think of anything. Shame, really.”
He hesitated. I could see he wanted to tell me, which meant whatever it was probably impacted him as well as me, but he still couldn’t get past his barter obsession. And I couldn’t offer him money, even if I had any to spare. That would have been a deadly insult.
“Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to have something.”
“Tell you what. Anything that helps me, I’ll return it in kind. You tell me what you know, and anything I find out that might affect you, I’ll make sure you know about it, too.” Rolf looked doubtful. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” I reminded him. “We’ve helped each other out before. A trade doesn’t need to be all at once to be a valid bargain.” That argument was weak and probably wouldn’t have swayed him if he hadn’t wanted to tell me anyway. But he did.
“True,” he said, pulling at his dreadlocked beard. “Okay, it’s not that big a thing anyway. A while back I was sleeping in my spot, right over there.” He pointed back in the darkness. “Then something woke me up, a surge of energy like I haven’t felt for a while.”
“From a person?”
“No, not exactly. It was coming from the energy pool. You guys had tamped it down pretty effectively, but this felt like it was coming to life again. I could sense it from all the way across the area. So I got up and quietly drifted over to where I could see.”
The thought of Rolf drifting quietly made me smile—he was large, bulky, and rock solid. But he could be hard t
o notice if he didn’t want to be seen.
“And?”
Rolf stared at me, his aspect subtly changing with a hint of his other, troll-like persona. He didn’t like to be interrupted, and my smile wasn’t helping.
“You want to hear about this or not?”
“Sorry,” I said. He waited a few moments until I’d been properly chastened.
“The pool was roiling around, almost like it had been before. And walking around it was a young woman, attractive, but I could tell she was a black practitioner, and a strong one at that. None of your evil wannabes.”
Jackie. If she’d been playing with singularities, it stood to reason she’d be interested in a gateway like the pool as well.
“Was she causing it?” I asked.
Rolf paused, considering whether this was a legitimate question or just another interruption.
“I’m not sure. She was walking around it, and every so often spoke a few words and made a few gestures. Each time she did, the pool jumped a little. But I don’t know if she was trying to build it up or shut it down, or just experimenting.”
Experimenting, I’d guess. But that wasn’t the only question. Normal people can’t perceive the pool at all, which wasn’t surprising, but practitioners couldn’t either, for the most part. Jackie must possess some real power, as if the illusion she’d set up hadn’t already told me that.
“Did you follow her?” Rolf pulled on his beard.
“Saw no reason to. I could find her again if I needed to. Once I get a look at a practitioner, I can catch their vibes anytime I’m near. The stronger the practitioner, the easier they are to sense.” He showed his teeth in what might have been a grin. “Kind of like Lou here, but nowhere near as accurate. But since you guys have been so interested in the pool, I thought you might be interested that a black practitioner was sniffing around it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s something to think about.”
