"They didn't choose," Beck observed. "So maybe it's still there, and can be tracked?"
"Maybe." Frog fiddled with his pen. "A ritual like that is old stuff, strong stuff. It’s the kind of magic that lasts beyond death. If it was strong enough, and if it was activated, we could use it like a scent trail and follow it up to the point where Rowan crossed the Veil. Assuming they killed him inside their village, it could conceivably lead us right to Clan Yew. At the very least it should lead us to someplace where the bombs didn't cover up their trail."
"How do we activate it?" Ness asked.
"I have no idea," Frog replied.
It seemed that everyone sighed. "Shit," Beck muttered. "You were getting me all excited there."
"Don't give up on me yet," Frog said with a slightly shy grin. "We do have quite a few texts on Elven magic. I can have my team search the database for a spell or formula that might help. We need to talk to SA-7 and find out if he knows about the link."
"I'm guessing he doesn't," said Sara. "Neither of them ever mentioned any change between them, and Rowan and I would have talked about it at some point in the last year if they'd realized it was there. That means it operates somewhere beyond empathy, somewhere deeper than conscious awareness of any kind. That also makes it a lot harder to work with, because it can't be controlled the way empathy can. We'll definitely need some kind of hardcore sorcery to access it."
"All right, then, get on it," Ness told Frog. "Sara, see if you can learn anything from Jason without telling him exactly what we're doing. I don't want him trying to take over the operation before we even know what we're in for."
"I don't want to lie to him," she said warily.
"Don't. If he asks you, tell him the truth. But if he doesn't, there's no reason to bring it up."
"Yes, ma'am."
"SA-8, I want you to assemble a strike team for when we do find these bastards. Have them ready to move at a moment's notice. They need to be your fastest, stealthiest Agents, and they need to have the stamina to travel on foot through thick cover, in case we have to go in covert through the woods."
"On it."
"Very good, everyone. Dismissed."
*****
Jason was sleeping now, thanks to Nava’s liberal hand with the prescription pad, but he wasn’t resting. His sleep was plagued with two extremes of subconscious misery: wistful dreams about his too-brief time with Rowan, or gruesome nightmares about his death. At times the dreams were almost formless, a vague misty image of the Elf and the overwhelming sense of fear and despair and loss.
Those were the worst; Jason could wake from the other nightmares and dismiss them because he hadn’t seen Rowan die and knew that, as little comfort as it was, Rowan had been killed instantly, blown apart by the bombs without a chance to suffer.
Three days passed in a haze of medication, whiskey, and television. He didn’t dare try and interact with anyone in the state he was in, for fear of biting their heads off. People made him tired, and angry, with their displays of sympathy and attempts to draw him out. He was on the verge of sealing his door shut or at least changing the locks so that Sara and Beck had to leave him alone.
When he wasn’t lying on the couch staring blankly at the screen, he was in the training rooms or at the range, beating and shooting his rage into whatever target was handy. Again, he avoided other people, even Beck, as sparring partners, afraid he might really hurt her if he lost control.
Friday night he was into the third hour of a BBC America Doctor Who marathon when someone knocked at the door.
He didn’t move, or speak; if it was someone with access to the door they’d come in anyway, and if not, they could fuck off.
Sure enough, Sara poked her head in. “You awake in there?”
He grunted in reply, and she came in and just looked at him for a moment, no doubt taking in the ratty t-shirt he wore and the three empty bottles of Jack on the coffee table, not to mention his unkempt and unshaven state.
“You look kind of hot with facial hair,” she noted, sitting down on the floor cross-legged.
“Really?” He asked without removing his eyes from the screen. “Beck told me I look like a pedophile.”
She snorted. “When was the last time you took a shower?”
He blinked, thinking back. “This morning after I came back from working out.”
“All right.” She seemed satisfied with that. “It’s good to know that even in mourning you’re not foregoing basic hygiene.”
He made an indefinite gesture at himself. “Gay. Remember? Gay, gay, gay.”
She grinned. “And you haven’t foregone snark, which is also a good sign.”
He looked at her and asked the question he seemed to be asking everyone these days. “What do you want?”
She bit her lip, glancing at the TV. “I think Nine’s better looking than Ten. What about you?”
“Answer my question.”
Sara shifted her weight, lifting one knee up below her chin and leaning on it, pretty clearly uncomfortable. “I need to ask you something, and I’m not sure how to go about it. Something official,” she clarified. “I just don’t want to upset you.”
Jason pushed the blanket off and sat up, crossing his arms. “Sara…my lover got blown up. It may not appear so, but I’m about as upset as I can possibly get unless you kick me in the crotch. Just ask your damn question.”
“All right.” She took a deep breath. “After the handfasting, did anything change between you and Rowan?”
The name stabbed pain through his chest, but he ignored it. “What kind of change?”
“Energetic. Did you notice any sort of new connection?”
He thought back, trying to stay as clinical as possible and not get caught up in the memories. “Not really. We were already able to share thoughts more easily since we had been sleeping together. I was doing musical healing work on him, and he was using his rethla wiles on me, so we swapped energy all the time.”
“Okay. Well, what about…what about now?”
“Now, what?”
“Can you sense anything now?”
He shook his head. “Sara…Rowan’s dead. There’s nothing of him left to feel.”
“You don’t know that,” she insisted. “What if there really is an afterlife? Elves believe in one. If he’s there, you could still be connected.”
He leaned back into the cushions, looking away, the hard stone of decades of atheism sitting prominently in his throat. “Nothing happens when you die. You rot, and that’s it. The rest is just people grasping at the last bit of hope that there’s a purpose to all of this.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I’ve never seen anything to contradict me.”
A thin smile appeared on her lips. “I might have something.”
*****
“This is just an experiment,” Frog said, rubbing one of the electrodes on his sleeve to brush a bit of lint from it. “Hold still.”
Jason rolled his eyes. “And the point is?”
“I want to see if the energy you were putting off, the stuff that disrupted the Ear signal, is still there. I’m almost 100% positive it was connected to Rowan, so if it’s still there that means it can reach beyond death, and we have a shot at tracking it.”
“Finding heaven isn’t going to do us much good,” Jason muttered. “Unless you know a way to bring someone back.”
“Definitely not,” Frog said shortly. “I’ve seen season six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hell if I’m ever trying that.”
Frog affixed the sensors to Jason’s temples, and another to his third eye, and then returned to his instruments. “Okay. Just relax.”
There was more to what was going on than what Sara had told him, Jason knew. She’d explained about the Ear static and how R&D wanted to learn more about it, but he had heard an edge to her voice she probably wasn’t even aware of, one that told him she was hiding something. Her posture had been defensive as well; humans always thought
they were such good liars.
Frog made a disgruntled noise. “Nothing here…can you try and focus your energy a little more? Think about him?”
“No,” Jason snapped. “I didn’t come here for a therapy session.”
“Just try it, please,” Frog asked. “Maybe you’ve dreamed about him since then, or something—the more recent the better.”
Unwillingly, he thought of the dreams, and shut his eyes against the violent images. Horrible as it was, he tried to force his mind to the second kind where Rowan was in pain, but at least alive, not bleeding out on the forest floor or burning alive and screaming.
“That’s better…keep going. Try to picture him clearly.”
Jason gripped the arms of the chair, warring with himself over whether to comply or to rip the electrodes off and storm out, but it was too late; his mind was already cooperating with Frog’s request, gently handing him a vision of Rowan, sitting beneath the Blessing Tree on a cool Fall evening, a book in one hand and an apple in the other. The mild breeze lifted a strand of hair into his eyes, and he brushed it aside, tucking it behind one pointed ear…he’d always loved Rowan’s autumn coloring…hair in shades of brown and maple red, eyes a clear amber that held both fire and water in their depths.
Rowan looked up from his book and smiled, as if Jason had come outside to join him.
Longing and grief in equal measure washed over Jason, and he put his head in his hands, mentally holding onto the image as hard as he could; it was all he had now. Memory. Pillows that still held the Elf's scent, a closet full of clothes he couldn’t part with, and memory of a time when he was happier than any vampire had the right to be.
He heard a noise from far away, and his eyes opened, the vision popping like a soap bubble.
He let out a long, shaking breath and turned to Frog. “Can I go now?”
Frog was staring at his monitor, his mouth slightly open, the light from the screens reflecting in his glasses so that his eyes weren’t visible but surprise plain on his face. “Um…just a minute…”
Whiskey. He needed whiskey. There was another bottle in his quarters. He could go back there soon and take a couple of Ambien and drink, and it would stop, the shaking would stop…
“Um…okay, SA-7, I think I have everything I need here. You can go on and go.”
“Fine,” he mumbled, jerking the electrodes off and all but stumbling from the lab.
He was halfway out of R&D when he stopped and frowned. Logic reasserted itself—what exactly was going on here? What were Frog—and Sara, for that matter—up to? There had to be a reason, and a pressing one, for them to rub salt in his wounds right now after Ness had been so adamant that he take time off. Research was hardly an urgent matter. What the hell were they doing in there?
He took several deep breaths to steady himself and turned around.
Frog started when he reentered the lab. "Did you forget something, Agent?"
"Yes, I did. I forgot to ask you what the point of all this was."
"Well…ah…you should really talk to Ness about it. I'm just taking the readings."
Jason crossed his arms. "Frog. Look at me. Enlightened self-interest should tell you that now isn't the time to fuck with me. Do you want to go home tonight and explain to Sage why your balls are stuffed in your mouth?"
Frog blinked for a moment, sputtered for another, then sighed and sat down on his stool. "All right. Agent Larson went to the bomb site and talked to it. She found out that the explosion isn't what killed Rowan. Clan Yew was behind it all, and they used the raid as a cover to kidnap him."
Jason was silent for a long time before he asked, in a deathly quiet voice, "Is he alive?"
"No. There's no reason to believe that. But we do know they were responsible. We're hoping that we can use the energetic connection between the two of you to find where he was really killed, and that that will lead us to Clan Yew."
"And when was Ness planning to tell me about this?"
Frog was paler than usual and looked a little frightened at the tone of his voice. "She didn't want to make things harder for you before we knew for sure."
Jason nodded. "Thank you, Frog."
He walked out of the lab and across the Floor, straight for Ness's office.
Part Eight
It was known that anyone caught out in the village after the night bell was subject to immediate arrest.
What wasn't as widely known was that the Guardians put their least experienced and least capable members on overnight duty, and their numbers were a third as high as the day shift, so it was entirely possible, if one were careful, to wander around the village all night without being seen at all.
It was also true that the night Guards had regular rounds that passed the same marker points at the same time every night; and the Temple itself, while more heavily guarded than any other building in the village, still only had one Elf stationed there at night, making a circuit of the premises every hour.
Having a Guardian of the Way for a lover was as useful as it was terrifying.
Kir slipped out of bed about three hours before dawn, reluctant to leave the warmth of Sethen's arms but intent upon his quest. As he pulled on his black uniform, he watched his sleeping lover's face in the faint starlight, wondering how much of what he knew about Sethen--or about himself, or about anyone--was really true. If the Council could so cavalierly wipe the memories of transgressors, who was to say that they couldn't change whatever they liked, fashion themselves a convenient army of blindly obedient Elves willing to take up arms against humanity...or even other Elves?
Kir, like anyone else, had fought with amnesia and the chronic certainty that there was so much more to himself than he knew, if only he could reach his mind far enough to one side or the other to find the memories again. And there had been moments...few, and denied by his conscious awareness...that he had seen the shadow of...someone else...in Sethen's eyes. A bewilderment dwelled there, even deeper than that of everyone else wandering around this place with half an identity.
Sethen talked in his sleep sometimes, and all this while Kir had dismissed the sounds as nonsense, but when he thought about it, it was possible the Warrior was speaking another language entirely. What language? Where had he learned it from? Who was he?
Who was Kir?
His head was spinning with the enormity of his thoughts, and he knew things were only going to get worse if he persisted in this mad course of action, but he had no choice. He had to know. The truth, however horrifying, had to be better than this.
He dared to lean over and kiss Sethen lightly on the mouth, half expecting him to stir, but the last several days Sethen had been sleeping like the dead, still with that soft little smile on his face that was so unlike him, and yet so alluring. Kir could have fooled himself into thinking that Sethen was dreaming of him, but he knew better. Wherever Sethen was in his sleep, it was far, far away from Kir.
He listened hard once he got outside, but the only sound was the wind through the trees. It was the darkest part of the night, when nothing stirred but old magic and restless spirits...and Elves on the verge of getting themselves in over their heads.
Kir took the main path past the row of houses they lived on, then stepped off into the tree-lined perimeter, as he had when he'd followed Sethen what seemed like a lifetime ago. He extended his awareness as much as he dared--he had no way of knowing if the Guardians could sense his energy, and stealth wasn't exactly his forte as a Healer. His heart was pounding in his ears, but he concentrated, and forced himself to stay calm.
The Temple stood whitely against the blackness of the forest, and one or two of the windows glimmered with candlelight, including those of the main hall where he knew there would be lights on at all times to symbolize the eternal Light of the Goddess.
Kir waited for several minutes, eyes fastened on the double front doors, until he saw movement. The night guard walked into view, then around the building and out of sight again. That would give Kir just lo
ng enough…
He made for the doors, moving faster than he could remember ever moving in his life (not that that really meant anything), and put his hands on the door pull, testing it carefully for locks or noise. As he’d suspected, it wasn’t locked, and one thing that could be said for Elven craftsmanship was that doors never needed oiling.
He peered inside, barely opening the door an inch, and again Sethen’s offhanded description was correct; there was nobody there, only a pair of candles burning on the altar.
Kir closed the door silently behind him and took a breath to get his bearings. He knew the Temple hall, of course, as well as anyone in the Clan did; it was the only room of the building anyone had seen and returned from intact. Moveable benches sat in stately rows up to the dais where the High Priestess gave her sermons every day. The benches were pushed back along the walls for the evening prostrations.
The Agency, Volume II Page 27
