An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  “How? I told him exactly what I intended to do.” I rolled over with my back to him so I could warm my icy feet on his legs.

  “Aargh! Why do women have such cold feet? Given what you've told me about his attitudes, he may well think that there's only one reason a young woman would arrange to be alone with him.”

  “Oh, don't be silly. Even Prakash couldn't have his head that far up his – I mean, be that much of a pompous idiot. He knows about you and me; it's not like he thinks I'm cruising around looking to hook up with somebody.”

  “All the same,” Lensky said, “I think I should be there too. Just in case.” His voice sounded a bit strained and I turned so that I could see his face.

  “Brad, I really, really don't want you to do that. Don't you see, it'll just support his prehistoric attitude. He'll think you don't trust me to be alone with another man.”

  There was a not-exactly-restful silence.

  “Brad. You do trust me, don't you?”

  After our explosive near-breakup two months ago, this was treacherous ground. Practically a minefield.

  Finally Lensky sighed. “You I trust absolutely, Thalia. Him? Not so much.”

  “In the first place, it's not going to be an issue, because he may be prejudiced but he's not actively stupid. In the second place, even if he did manage to misunderstand the situation, I could deal with him without help.”

  I could feel the tension in Lensky's body, knew that he still wasn't happy. So I started something that would take his mind off Prakash Bhatia. After a few minutes he joined the program, and shortly thereafter I too forgot completely about the snotty intern.

  It would have been about that time on Wednesday night that Annelise pushed her luck just a little bit too far. Up to then the evening had seemed to be a glorious success. Shani Chayyaputra walked into the bar alone, Ben signaled her, she gave Chayyaputra a smouldering look, he bought her a drink and sent out his own signals. “The only problem was,” she said, “he was sending so many messages aimed at attracting me that he wasn't telling me anything useful. It was just a constant stream of the usual BS.”

  “The usual?”

  “You know. 'Blah blah blah I'm important, blah blah blah I have an expensive car, blah blah blah I'm rich, blah blah blah want to come for a midnight sail, sweetie?' The kind of trash men always talk in bars.”

  That may have been what inspired her to take it up a notch, venturing into territory she'd promised Ben she would avoid. She giggled, put her hand on his arm, laughed at his jokes, looked up at him through her lashes - a neat trick, that, seeing she was several inches taller than he was - and generally acted the part of the blonde bimbo who was very receptive to all his suggestions - but at a price. And it wasn't one that could be measured in dollars.

  “I told him that I'd simply love to go sailing with him but it had to look perfectly respectable because my father was so worried about letting me live in Austin that I just knew he was having me watched, and if he got a report that I'd done anything like going on a boat alone, at night, with a man, he'd cut off my allowance and make me come back home to Beeville and I'd just die if I had to spend any more time in that boring little town, but maybe tomorrow night we could, you know, double date with my roomie if he knew anybody for her, and I told him she was five feet eleven and blonde and she liked other blonds, so if he knew somebody who was taller than her and kind of fair complected that would be just perfect. And then we could all go on his boat together and that would be perfectly all right but we didn't have to stay together after we got out on the lake and I sure hoped his boat was big enough that we could have some privacy, you know what I mean?”

  “And he bought that?”

  “Sure seemed like he did, he was practically drooling down the front of my dress by then.”

  “He was,” Ben corroborated when they were filling me in afterwards. “I was beginning to wonder if I'd have to peel him off her by force.”

  “Silly, I've been dealing with men like him since I wore my hair in two pigtails down my back.”

  “And I bet you were adorable in pigtails. But if I'd been close enough to hear,” he glowered, “I'd have stopped you trying to set up Balan that way, and maybe none of this would have happened.”

  “You made yourself conspicuous enough as it was.”

  “Me? I didn't do anything!”

  “Except glare at us so much that even he noticed you! He said, 'I don't want to alarm you, but there's a shifty-looking fellow over in the corner who's been staring at you all evening. If that's who your father has watching you, I could neutralize him tonight.' And of course I didn't want him to do anything to you, so I said, 'No, that's just my ex. He's not dangerous, but he tends to show up in places where I'm having a good time and stare at me like that. Don't pay him any attention, he hates being ignored.' But I think he must have had you followed.”

  “He might have tried,” Ben said. “There were some grackles overhead when I left the bar, but I didn't think about that at the time. Anyway, as soon as I got into a nice patch of shadow, I teleported back to our place. He must have had you followed, Annelise.”

  “Wait a minute!” I interrupted. “Grackles? Is Chayyaputra really Raven Crowson - the Master of Ravens? Did you recognize him?” That man had nearly killed some of us last May. And then in October, using the name Jay Corbin, he'd tried to engineer the destruction of the Center by replacing Dr. Verrick with one of his stooges.

  “If I had recognized him,” said Ben, “I'd have been a lot more worried about the damn grackles. As I should have been…. He could have been Crowson, but it wasn’t obvious. Not with his hair slicked back in that creepy style, and his skin being a few shades darker…” He shook his head. “Now I can see it, yes. But not at the time.”

  “Annelise?”

  She shook her head. “I never really got a good look at Crowson. He was behind me that one time, you know? With a gun! I remember how his hands felt, and the way he smelled… Creepo-puta was using some gross lilac-scented hair gel that pretty much covered up anything else. And even if he did have power over the grackles, I can’t think why he would have had them follow me.”

  “I can,” Ben said grimly. “He had no intention of waiting until the next night to enjoy some ‘privacy’ with you, Annelise. I don’t like to think what might have happened if we hadn’t just moved in together.”

  “I could have handled him,” Annelise said.

  “A black magician, Annelise? And you have no paranormal powers at all!”

  “When it came down to it,” Annelise said, “I did handle him. Remember?”

  “A fluke. You got lucky. And it’s not going to happen again.”

  She gave him a disgusted look. “Of course not. He’s on to us now.”

  “Guys. Can you stop bickering and tell us what happened next?”

  What happened next was that as soon as Annelise got home and greeted Ben, their apartment was invaded by a whirling, chattering cloud of grackles that disappeared to reveal a furious Shani Chayyaputra. “Cheating whore! What is your real game!” he shouted, raising his hand to slap Annelise. Ben got between them, Chayyaputra shouted again and the grackles came back all around them, cackling and clawing. Ben reached for Annelise and caught her arm as the world tilted sideways and whirled around them. There was a stifling darkness, moving and full of black feathers; then they fell out of the cloud of birds into a small room with a stone floor and walls.

  Annelise was shrieking, “Let me go!” Chayyaputra had hold of her other arm. He aimed a sideways kick at Ben and made him stagger; then the birds swooped down again between him and Annelise and he kicked Ben again, this time in the head, and knocked him out.

  “What did you do to Ben?” Annelise screamed.

  “Not nearly as much as I plan to do with you,” Chayyaputra snarled. “You are in my land now. First I’ll show you what we do with teasing whores, then maybe I’ll let you buy his life by being very, very nice to me.” He grabbed the front of he
r dress and ripped downwards.

  9. Bollywood freestyle

  Thursday was a slow day at the Center. Ben didn’t even show up in the morning, and Ingrid was closeted with Colton, working on path-connected spaces and flight. I might as well have scheduled Prakash’s little educational session for ten in the morning, except that he wasn’t there either; presumably hiding out in the math department again. Fine by me; I was tired of the man and perfectly happy to spend a quiet morning refining my control of playing cards. My fellow reseachers had pointed out that I was a bad liar so many times that I had decided I needed an edge before we got into another poker game. Serve them right if they were so hung up on flashy stuff like flying that they never learned how to select the right cards out of a deck.

  By noon, though, the quiet was beginning to worry me. Annelise hadn’t stocked the doughnut tray that morning, and in between hunger pangs I called her cell phone, just to make sure she and Ben were all right.

  Voice mail.

  Ben’s phone? More voice mail.

  I left slightly testy messages for both of them and invited Lensky to take me to lunch at some place that actually had tables and forks and people bringing food to you.

  We were just back from that excursion when the peace of the third floor was shattered by a thump like Colton Edwards trying and failing to fly. Only for once, it wasn’t Colton sprawling on the floor; it was Ben, on the public side of the office, looking rather the worse for wear. Atop him was Annelise, who seemed to be wrapped in several yards of bright pink and green fabric with bells on the hem.

  Lensky came charging out of his office. “What happened to you?”

  Ben looked up at Lensky and put an arm around Annelise’s waist. “I can explain everything.”

  “I doubt that! But you may as well try.”

  He looked at me. “Ah, does Lensky know about, ah…”

  “He’ll have to now,” I said with resignation. I couldn’t meet Lensky’s eyes. “But you weren’t going to do that again after the briefing yesterday. You told me you weren’t!”

  “Do what?” Lensky demanded, and without waiting for an answer, “Exactly what have you maniacs been up to now? Jesus wept! It’s like trying to work with a pack of insane toddlers. Insane flying toddlers, God have mercy on me!” He turned his back on all three of us. “My office. Now.”

  He didn’t have enough chairs. Ben scavenged in Jimmy’s office and brought in a couple more chairs for himself and Annelise, moving slowly and carefully as though Lensky were an unexploded bomb. That was probably appropriate, actually. I was just glad that he had more targets than me this time.

  “Brad,” I said while Ben was micro-positioning chairs, “you know that thing where you promise not to get mad and pound the floor with your shoe? Well, this would be an excellent time to do that.”

  “What, hit someone with my shoe? Don’t tempt me!”

  “No, promise not to lose your temper. I think this is going to be somewhat complicated to explain, and we won’t be able to get it straight if everybody’s yelling.”

  “Too late,” Lensky said. “But don’t worry about that. I’m the only person who’s going to be shouting. The three of you are going to be explaining how a direct request to stay far away from Sandru Balan led to Ben falling out of mid-air and Annelise dressed like an exotic dancer and Thalia looking like the dictionary definition of guilty.”

  “Exotic dancers don’t wear nearly this much fabric,” Annelise said.

  Lensky sank down on his own chair, rested his elbows on the desk and his face in his hands. “Tell me that you can make more sense than that, Thalia.”

  “We just wanted to help,” I started. “And this began before you briefed us on Sandru Balan.”

  “But after I told you on no account to get mixed up with verifying Blondie’s – Balan’s – identity, right?”

  “Ye-es, but we weren’t going after Balan. We just thought it might be useful to find out a little more about the man he was meeting with.”

  “Shani Creepo-puta,” Annelise said.

  “Chayyaputra.”

  “I like my version better.”

  “Oh, and Jimmy helped us,” I said, “so you might want to invite him in here to be yelled at too.”

  Lensky glowered. “Jimmy is relatively sane. I bet he didn’t do anything worse than providing information for you three to misuse.”

  “Well, anyway…” I took him through the initial plan for Annelise to chat with Chayyaputra while his face got darker and darker and the vein on his left temple started dancing up and down.

  “And that was it,” I concluded. “Two evenings, and she never saw Chayyaputra, and after your briefing yesterday morning we agreed to shut the whole thing down. Didn’t we, Ben?”

  Ben danced around the topic evasively until forced to admit that all right, after I’d left Annelise had persuaded him to give it just one more night. Strangely, this made Lensky chuckle.

  “Now you know how I feel, Thalia, when I think you’ve promised not to do something and you weasel-word your way out of it. Okay, Ben, so what happened next?”

  “Annelise was wonderful,” Ben said warmly. “She saved us!”

  Annelise shook her head. “I had no idea that course Daddy made me take would really work. I never had to do it for real before.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Krav Maga,” Ben said. “With an ex-Mossad instructor.”

  When Chayyaputra ripped her dress off Annelise screamed again, but this time she threw herself forward while she screamed, her free hand held out in front of her. Her palm hit Chayyaputra in the nose and his head snapped back. She followed up by stamping her heel onto his foot, pushing down from her hips. A kick to the side of his knee had him on the floor. She finished with another stamp, this time on his tenderest parts. “Oh, my,” she said, looking down at his writhing form, “it actually worked!”

  Ben was on his hands and knees, his head swaying. Annelise grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet while Chayyaputra was still curled up and moaning. “We have to run!”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere!” There was only one opening in the stone walls surrounding them. Annelise dragged Ben through it, paused a moment to evaluate her options, and took off running to where the crowd around the building was thickest. “Sorry, excuse me, we need to get through here,” she babbled while wriggling between staring and pointing people. A flimsy wooden shack was in front of them; she and Ben ducked inside and found themselves half smothered in brilliant fabric.

  “Wait a minute,” she gasped.

  “What for?”

  She gestured at herself. Most of her dress had been left dangling from Chayyaputra’s hand. “I’m too conspicuous like this.” She rummaged through lengths of fabric and found one that she could tie around her waist as a sort of skirt. A second length went over her chest, covering most of the spectacular scenery revealed by her black lace bra.

  “Late again!” a little man screeched at the door to the hut. “You are being the American dancer, isn’t it? Jaldee karo, cannot wait all day! Musicians are expensive!” He turned and called over his shoulder, “Jaldee girls!”

  A bevy of pretty, dark-haired girls dressed in full skirts and scanty tops came running in, surrounding Annelise and drawing her back outside with them. “Wait,” she gasped. “I don’t – I’m not – “

  One of the girls giggled and chattered at her, with hand gestures. “No time to rehearse,” another one translated, “just do like us and follow the music.”

  Annelise felt like a giantess. A clumsy giantess. She was a head taller than any of the dancers and she had no idea what to make of their whirling steps and stylized hand movements. But there was a drum pounding out a heavy rhythm to accompany the flutes and trumpets. She sidled along the line, moving her hips in time to the music and smiling as if she had some clue what she was doing. The other dancers spun away from her, picked up vividly colored ribbons and threw them towards her; bright stream
s of color flashed over her head and clung to her shoulders. She pushed the entangling ribbons out of her face and tossed her hair. The dancing girls cheered and imitated her movements, shaking out their long dark hair.

  That was when she decided to take control of the situation. Whatever it was. She shoved a hip out and posed; the other dancers copied her. She waved her hands over her head, threw her hair back, took two kick steps, and pretended she was dancing freestyle – very free - at the Broken Spoke. The music went on and on and finally rose to a crescendo, then stopped.

  “Beautiful, beautiful!” exclaimed the little man who had upbraided her in the shack. “Verree ori-ginal, isn’t it? You are dancing for Bharat Studios only, no?”

  “Yes,” Annelise said. “I mean no. I mean – I need to go now.” She pushed her way past dancers and musicians and found Ben sitting in the middle of the costume shed, holding his head.

  “After that it was simple,” she said. “They were filming some kind of movie, I think, in front of this kind of temple-looking building where that bastard took us. But it was in the middle of a town.”

  “Simple!” Ben repeated. “No, it wasn’t. But Annelise was wonderful. She found out where we were and then she figured out how to get us back here.”

  “You didn’t just teleport back?”

  “I couldn’t get any sense of where Austin was,” he told me. “I thought it was because he’d kicked me in the head, but maybe it was just too far away.”

  “Much too far,” Annelise said firmly. “We were in a suburb of Mumbai, outside some shrine where they were filming a movie.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “Oh, this nice geek at the internet café told me. Then I got on the internet and IM’d Daddy – “

  “You had money? Indian money?”

  Annelise grinned at me. “Lia, one of these days I’ve really got to teach you and Ingrid how the world works. A pretty girl should never buy her own drinks. I really hated using your money at the Driskill, but I couldn’t risk being involved with somebody else in case Chayyaputra suddenly showed up. Anyway, the same principle goes for things like fifteen minutes of Internet time. It makes men happy to give us these little things, why deprive them of the pleasure? And it was much too risky to let Ben even think about teleporting all that way. It might have killed him! I asked Daddy to send one of the jets for us. I was a teensy bit worried about waiting around there in case the creep got over clutching his gonads and came after us again, but it happened that one of Daddy’s friends had a jet at Kalina – that’s the corporate jet terminal in Mumbai – and he sent a car and driver for us and flew us right back to Austin.”