“There’s something different about your voice, too,” she added.
“I see,” I said. My voice sounded the same to me.
“We don’t go until next week,” said Riley, clearly giving up that line of conversation as a nonstarter. “And the night before, those of us not on watch are going out to, I don’t know, celebrate or say farewell. Will you two go?”
Taro gently took her hand and bowed over it, kissing the back of it. “I am devastated that we will be losing you. If it does not conflict with my duties, I will surely be there to mourn your departure.”
I must have been smirking, because the look Riley sent me was slightly hostile. I straightened my mouth. “My apologies, Riley.” I had been laughing at Taro and his melodrama, not Riley. “Of course we will be there. I am very sorry to lose you.”
“Thank you.” Riley nodded. “I’m pleased you were able to get back before we left. I was worried we’d miss each other.” She headed off toward the kitchen.
Taro grinned at me then, a particularly wicked grin that I had seen many times before. He grabbed my hand, and the next thing I knew, I was running up the stairs behind him. I ran behind him to his door, through his sitting room, and into his bedroom.
His bedroom. I had always avoided it. I never wanted anyone to expect to find me in his bedroom. I had never had any interest in knowing what was in it.
Well, I had never wanted to have any interest in it.
Now I was being dragged into it and I was smiling at the feeling of wickedness it engendered. I was going to have sex with the Stallion of the Triple S in the Stallion’s bedroom.
He hated that nickname, so I didn’t use it unless I wanted to tease him. But it wasn’t one I’d come up with; it was too lurid for my taste. But he was known for sleeping with everything on two legs, though he claimed the numbers of rumor were highly exaggerated.
Taro closed the door and immediately curled his arms around my waist. “You have no idea how many times I imagined you in here,” he said, just before he kissed me.
I had lost all common sense, or sense of self-preservation, when it came to Taro. I’d fallen in love with him. With my own Source. One of the most stupid things I could ever have done.
The regulars liked to think of a Pair feeling nothing but everlasting love for each other. That assumption seemed to be supported by the fact that when one partner died, the other followed into death. But in truth, for partners to fall in love with each other was a complication that could have disastrous repercussions. No one had figured out exactly how the bond really worked, but it did affect the emotions of the partners. Sometimes it put them into a form of harmony with each other, sometimes it brought out the worst in each other, and sometimes it created weird possessive and obsessive behavior. Falling in love made the latter all the more likely.
Which was why the instructors at the Shield Academy—and no doubt the Source Academy as well—drilled the lesson into our thick skulls again and again and again. Don’t sleep with your Source. Certainly, don’t fall in love with your Source. If you become unstable, you won’t be trusted to guard any of the prestigious sites, and you don’t want to ruin your chances over something so fleeting and so stupid.
It had all sounded very logical to me. It had seemed even more logical after I was bonded to Lord Shintaro Karish, the Stallion of the Triple S, handsome and engaging and full of life. Aggravatingly handsome. Annoyingly engaging. Exhaustingly full of life. It would be dangerous for someone like me to get sexually involved with someone like him, because I was of a nature to take things more seriously, and he was of a nature to cast a wide net over the world in his search for pleasure. I wasn’t sure I could remain mature and professional once he moved on to new partners.
I still didn’t know if I could remain professional and mature once he was no longer interested in me. But it hadn’t taken me that long to come to want him, and he had seemed to want me, too. And although I knew I would end up paying for it in the long run, the damage I had been doing to our relationship by sticking to my principles, principles Taro didn’t agree with, could have lasted a lifetime. He had thought I was refusing him because I thought there was something wrong with him. If he had come to believe I thought him in any way inferior, we would have never recovered. It would have poisoned everything.
Besides, I wanted him. In a moment of clear self-indulgence, I had asked myself why I shouldn’t have him. And while I was leery of the turmoil I would feel once he made his waning interest clear to me, I didn’t at all regret the decision to enjoy him while I could. Maybe not the most sensible decision, but the right one.
So we indulged in a thorough homecoming, bathed together, and then headed out for supper in the most expensive tavern Taro knew of, to his surprised pleasure. “I’ll have you thoroughly corrupted yet,” he gloated.
“Corrupted?” I wouldn’t go that far. Perhaps he’d ruined me for other lovers, but that wasn’t his fault. He would be a hard act to follow.
“Before we were banished off to that damned island, you never would have consented to eating in a tavern like this.”
Shields and Sources weren’t required to pay for anything, as a sort of compensation for the fact that we weren’t paid for our services. That didn’t mean I felt we should always seek the most expensive of everything. We didn’t need it, and I couldn’t help feeling regulars would feel ill used if it became a habit. Still: “This is a special occasion.”
“Aye, sure. And the reason you agreed to stay at the Imperial when we first got back to Erstwhile?”
I shrugged. I had been very tired of living rough for a year, and not in the mood for an argument.
“Face it: I’m corrupting you,” he said. “Soon, you’ll be just like me.”
“Zaire forfend,” I muttered.
I ordered the buffalo broth, a dish unique to High Scape that I hadn’t realized I’d missed until I saw it written up on the menu board. And how could I have forgotten it? It teased the nose with heated spice and positively drowned the tongue in thick, savory flavor, the meat so perfectly tender it practically melted in the mouth.
Gods, I’d missed home. I almost couldn’t believe I was actually here.
The food was wonderful, but the meal itself was not restful. Taro was well-known in High Scape, despite the frequency and length of his absences. Every few moments, someone would stop to exchange greetings and chat for a bit. Taro would try to draw me into the conversations, but neither I nor his devotee of the moment was interested. I watched him laugh and smile, and I wondered which of these people he had already slept with, and which would succeed me.
I would not act foolish when I was replaced. I would not. I had some pride. In fact, if I had my way, I would know it was coming before he did.
After enjoying a light, creamy dessert—oh, I had missed dessert!—we left the tavern and decided to stroll about High Scape to reacquaint ourselves with our post. It wasn’t necessary in order for us to do our jobs well, but I was anxious to see the city.
High Scape was unlike any city or settlement I had ever seen, and so far I’d seen more settlements than I’d expected to by my age. It was divided by three rivers into six sections, called quads by the residents who apparently lacked a clear understanding of basic mathematics. Each quad had its own hospital and Runner Headquarters and government buildings. And each quad had its own character, largely influenced by the level of wealth enjoyed by its residents. The North Quad had the wealthiest residents of High Scape, and that was where we were headed. I rarely went there, having little reason to, and it was interesting to see the perfectly cobbled streets, the large, clean buildings with so much space between them, and the many large and leafy trees. As it got dark, lighters lit street lamps, adding a nice glow to everything.
A loud hissing sound, followed by a sharp pop that seemed to shake the night air, jolted out of nowhere. The shock of it pushed my heart right into my throat. “What the hell was that?” Taro demanded, and he leapt over the shor
t iron fence beside him. He didn’t immediately start running, as I had expected him to. “Ech!” he uttered. “Know what this is?”
I took a quick glance over the small field, seeing through the darkening air the scattering of small stone, iron and wooden posts. “It looks like an ash grove.” Where the ashes of the dead were buried in copper urns.
Taro shed his hesitancy and started running, presumably in the direction from which he thought the noise had come. To me, it seemed as though it had come from everywhere. I climbed over the fence with the plan of running after him.
But I took only two steps before having to halt. I felt something odd. Some kind of resonance. Or vibration. A quick look around gave no evidence of anything that could create such an uncomfortable sensation. It seemed to skitter underneath my skin. It was horrible.
“Hey!” I heard Taro shout, and I looked up to see him sharply change direction.
“What the hell are you doing?” I called, and I got no answer. Why was my Source racing about in the dark? Chasing around after people was rarely a good idea under any circumstances. To do so in the dark was just begging for a disaster. One of us was sure to trip over one of the grove markers and break a leg.
“Hey!” Taro shouted again. “Stop running! That’s an order!”
An order? Taro was no one to be giving orders. But maybe regulars didn’t know that.
In the midst of running in the dark and trying not to fall and kill myself, I felt Taro’s mental protections, the personal inner shields that guarded his mind when he wasn’t channeling, drop down. That meant I had to raise mine around him. Which meant I had to stop running, because I wasn’t sure I could run and Shield at the same time, and I wasn’t insane enough to try. But really, what the hell was he doing? There were Pairs on duty. It was their job to settle any disasters, and they would resent us for stepping on their toes.
Almost immediately, though, I realized Taro wasn’t channeling a natural event. When he channeled normally, he opened himself to the forces causing the disaster, and they rushed through him. In this manner, a Source drained a disaster of its power and diverted the forces in a harmless direction. But this time, he was pulling in selected forces, much fewer than usual, and he was directing them far more precisely than the raw power of a natural disaster normally allowed.
Taro was creating an event, not eliminating it. Damn it. I wished he would keep in mind that that was a skill he’d learned from a madman. It was unnatural to create disasters, and I didn’t know why he was doing it right then. There was no good reason for it.
There was nothing I could do, though, except Shield him and keep him from killing himself. I’d yell at him after.
The ground trembled beneath my feet. Another sign that this was an artificial event. If it were real, I wouldn’t be able to feel any of the physical manifestations. Taro would be stopping it before it got that far.
I hated earthquakes. I hated any kind of natural event, really. I was never supposed to have to feel any. That was part of what being bonded meant.
At least the tremors weren’t very strong. No serious upheaval in the ground. None of the markers fell over. Nor did it last very long. The tremors faded away with nothing, as far as I could tell, being accomplished. I waited, ready to Shield again. Maybe he would try something else.
Moments burned by with nothing happening. It was eerily quiet, and I couldn’t see anything. Zaire, this had been a stupid idea.
Then I heard, “Lee?”
And just like that, I was furious. “What the hell was that?” I demanded.
“There were people messing about,” he answered as he appeared from the darkness and trotted up beside me.
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know, but it probably had something to do with that racket we heard.”
“So you decided to run after them? To what purpose? What would you do with them once you caught them?” Other than get beaten black and blue, if they were doing something illegal. Though I had no reason to think they were doing anything illegal. Just because I wouldn’t imagine what anyone would be doing in an ash grove at night didn’t mean their behavior had to be nefarious. Maybe they were visiting the remains of a family member. I could imagine plenty of scenarios out of novels and plays where some exiled member of a family would feel compelled to visit the ashes of a loved one under the cover of darkness.
It was possible.
“I couldn’t do nothing,” he insisted.
“Were they hurting another person?”
“I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see.”
He’d be able to tell. Any such victim would have been left behind, or would have run off in another direction. “I can see you risking our lives to help another person, but who cares about markers in an ash grove?”
“The families of those whose ashes are buried under the markers,” he chided, trying to shame me.
He was unsuccessful. It was stupid to risk one’s life for stone, no matter what the significance. “What was the point of the earthquake?”
“They weren’t stopping.”
“And did the earthquake stop them?” I knew damn well it hadn’t because, clearly, they weren’t there. “Wait, you didn’t bury them, did you?” Because he could do that, too, and that disturbed me as much as his other unnatural skills.
“No, I did not,” he snapped. “And no, it didn’t stop them. Whichever Pair was on duty was trying to channel the earthquake. I didn’t want to get into a battle for control over it. That could get messy.”
It could get stupid, was what it could get. What was he thinking?
“Did you see what they were doing?” Taro asked.
“I haven’t seen anything.” I was only taking his word that there had been people in the grove at all. For all I knew, there’d been nothing going on and we’d been running around like idiots for no reason.
“Let’s see if we can find what they were doing.” Taro seemed enthusiastic about the possibility of finding something weird.
I really didn’t care. I didn’t like this place. It felt very strange, and I just wanted to leave.
But something small and white, almost glowing in the darkness of the night, caught my eye. Frowning, I stared at it, and as my focus cleared, other white somethings appeared. As I drew closer I was able to see that they were set in a sort of pattern. They were candles, unlit, and they made a circle. There was a line of a very pale powdery substance drawn from candle to candle, barely perceptible in the grass. The circle surrounded a marker. Dead center in the circle, a hole had been dug into the ground, and the marker had been uprooted.
I thought about stepping into the circle for about half an instant. Something about the whole scene made me very, very uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable in the “someone dug up someone’s ashes” sort of way, though that was disgusting enough. I felt jittery, like something inside me was screaming to run while something else within me was keeping me rooted to the ground against my will. My heart was pounding, my breath was short, I thought I might have been sweating, and I could tell I was trembling.
It was probably time to give up on that ridiculous dream of mine, that I could ever be the cool, calm, unflappable Shield I had been trained to be.
I sighed.
It was our first damn day back.
Chapter Two
Risa Demaris was a Runner. It was her task to hunt and catch criminals. It was a task demanding good health and an iron spine, but no family connections or education of distinction. From what I had observed—and Risa’s bitter comments—it didn’t pay very well, and I now had the experience to understand just what that meant.
Risa was a glorious woman. She was tall and beautifully shaped, strong and lean. Her skin was a gorgeous warm brown and her eyes were stunning. Really, if I was going to envy any woman for her appearance, it would be Risa.
She was wearing the uniform of a Runner right then, the tall black boots, the black trousers, the black tunic, and a black cape. She looked stern
and imposing. When she was not on duty, she wore flowing garments of bright orange and yellow and half a dozen pairs of earrings. In either scenario, she stood out in a crowd, and she liked it.
Risa was my friend, one of the few I’d been able to make in High Scape. She had been put to the task of finding Taro when he’d been abducted by Stevan Creol. She hadn’t been successful with it. I had, but only because I’d had a follower of Creol leading me every step of the way.
She wasn’t visiting us for a social call. The evening before, Taro and I had reported the disturbance in the ash grove to the first Runner we could find, but Risa had come to do a follow-up interview. She said people had been digging up ashes all over the city, which was apparently what Taro and I had stumbled into the night before, and her superiors thought we would be more comfortable being questioned by her, as we knew her.
I didn’t think I could possibly be comfortable with any conversation concerning digging up human ashes, regardless of the participants. Why would anyone want to mess around with that sort of thing?
“To start off,” Risa said, leaning back into the settee in my suite. “Do either of you recall any new details about last night? Something you’ve remembered since you spoke with Runner Elliot?”
“I have nothing to remember,” I told her. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Aside from the defiled marker.”
“Aye.”
“But, Karish, you saw people.”
“Yes, but not faces or hair color or anything like that. Except . . .” He trailed off, his eyes narrowing.
Risa leapt on him. Verbally, of course. “You’re remembering something.”
“Nothing useful. There was just something familiar about the way one of them moved.”
“But you have no idea why he seemed familiar.”
Taro shook his head and shrugged.
“Well, keep thinking on it.” She looked at me. “What about the grass immediately around the marker? Did you notice anything unusual?”
Moira J. Moore - Heroes at Risk Page 2