“Yes.”
“Why aren’t we shooting?” Uffie said. “Why isn’t she shooting? We’re anathema, right? Bounty on our heads and all that?”
Persona put her hands on her hips, put out, and cocked her head to the side. “Aw, come on. You think I’m going to follow some stupid-piece-of-shit order by the so-called ‘Angelic Host’? They’re my enemies. They’ve always been my enemies. It’s my Mission to thwart those fucking idiot bastards.”
“Oh?” Elorie said. She held her right wrist in her left hand and snuggled under Dave’s arm. “You mean you’re not going to try and kill us? You can fix me without getting in more trouble?”
“Oh, you,” Persona said, with a haughty sniff, and peered down her nose at Elorie. “The troublemaker who likely triggered War’s Betrayal, the Great Anathema and the fall of the Divine Compact to Dubuque to boot. You want me to fix you?”
“If you felt that way, why’d you catch me?” Elorie said.
“Well, perhaps it’s because I love troublemakers.” Persona giggled and her voice went into girl. “So, have you decided who or what you want to look like? I think I’ve gone far enough in my studies that I could even turn you male if you wanted.”
Nessa lost her equipoise, breaking out in gales of hysterical laughter as Dave said ‘hey, wait a minute’ and everyone else paled, reddened or put their hands over their faces. She rolled around like a psycho on Persona’s flying platform, thoroughly enjoying herself.
Everything would be okay now.
Just a hunch.
56. (Dave)
“…named Nessa as their Daughter of Light,” Elorie said. Dave gazed out over the mostly bored audience, forcing himself awake again. They sat in Lorenzi’s mobile home, his latest excuse for a lair. Elorie’s verbal outline of her report had gone on for nearly an hour, and as a precaution, she insisted they stand hand in hand, covering each other with their immunities.
The formal written version of the report sat thickly in Lorenzi’s old hands. Bais – Satan – read over Lorenzi’s shoulder, muttering in random languages as she read along. Both Nessa and Ken refused to attend this meeting. Reed hadn’t showed either, sleeping in after a busy night, according to Lorenzi. Persona’s projection, lost in her own thoughts, sat as far from Bais as the small mobile home living room allowed. “Nessa, following some telepathic hunch or other, named you as the Watchers’ Father of Darkness. The identity of the third of their prophesized figures remains unknown.
“As you already know, from your phone call with Nessa, the secrets of the Watchers are deadly to know. All who know them become the enemy of the Angelic Host, and those of the 99 Gods not opposed to the Host. That is, all the Gods but Persona. The reason for this is moral contamination, we believe. The Watchers believe the Angelic Host are dead Ecumenists of your order, Mr. Lorenzi. The Watchers embody both good and evil, and they can contaminate the 99 Gods and turn them evil, as they are your infernal voices who contaminate magicians and turn them evil. To me – and only me, as others disagree – this is proof of what I believe the Watchers to be. I’ve left this for last because I’m the only one who truly believes this, so this is just my personal conclusion.
“John, I believe the Watchers are Gods in the same way that the 99 Gods are Gods.”
Lorenzi flinched. Then he shook his head.
Elorie put away her note cards, finished. “Any questions or comments?”
“No, none at all. You’ve done an excellent job, both of you,” Lorenzi said. “An incredible job, beyond my wildest dreams. I’ll take everything you’ve said into due consideration. Thank you.”
“That’s it?” Persona said. She leaned her projection forward. “All this mayhem and anathema and that’s it? Due consideration? John, people died for this information! What, you don’t believe us?” Dave suspected that Lorenzi didn’t believe anything the Watchers told them, even the hard-bargained information.
“There’s more going on here than someone as wet behind the ears as you are can understand,” Bais said. “Evil is a disease able to spread from one person to another, as each convinces the other that might makes right, moral short-cuts are good things, and your enemies are not human but other. If the Watchers woke from their millennia-old slumber and are active now, then they are truly a danger to us all, mortal, God and Telepath alike.”
“They sound like allies to me,” Persona said. “Why else would the Host be so crazy about keeping the information about the Watchers quiet if they weren’t afraid of them?”
“You, my dear, take wet behind the ears to new heights,” Bais said. “Tell you what. Instead of hiding out inside of Nessa, spend some time inside me. Doing so might help you grow up.”
“I’ll see you in hell, first!” Persona said.
“Then again, joining with me might not be enough to help you grow up.”
Persona growled, and her projection vanished.
Lorenzi sighed and turned to Bais. “Do you see any reason why we can’t release this to our allies? That is, our allies who are willing to join us in anathema?”
“None at all,” Bais said. “If they’re going to pay the price, they should at least get to hear the piper’s tune.”
“So, what do you think of Eklutna?” Dave asked, sitting on the diorite boulder on the trail leading up into the hills behind Nessa’s mobile home-infested property. Two days had passed since Elorie’s final report.
Elorie waved her head back and forth, and sighed. “It’s pretty. It’s cold. It’s, well, not home.”
At night, they slept in separate beds. In separate mobile homes.
“I just got told I couldn’t contact my ex or my kids,” Dave said. He couldn’t disagree with the beauty or the cold, though he thought more in terms of frozen hearts than bodies. Enough time here and he feared Elorie would become as much of an ice queen as Nessa, her heart lost and inaccessible. “Lorenzi gave me the ‘brace yourself as they’ll likely be used as hostages against you and you need to think of them as beyond your help and responsibility’ lecture. I’m not happy. I mean, Lorenzi just told me to consider my own kids as dead and buried. Want to run away, El? Skip this joint?”
“That’s my line.” Elorie sighed. She sat on the end of a log, a long-fallen sub-alpine fir, if Dave’s pathetic knowledge of vegetation hadn’t taking a long leap into the dark again. She didn’t meet his gaze. “I can’t tell if you’re serious or not. About what you said or about anything. Or about us.”
Us. Oh, crap, here we go again. “I’ve been giving you your own space, El.” They couldn’t talk without stumbling into each other and fleeing, both of them, their own feelings.
“You gave me so much space that I can’t tell what you think about me,” Elorie said, half stammering the last few words. She still firmly looked away and raised her left hand to just below eye level. “Hell, I can’t tell what I think about me either.” She paused. “My fear is that you’re too passive for me, and you hold too much back.”
Her ancient complaint, one going all the way back to their high school affair.
“Back in the Burçak underground, when I hung dying on the wall after the floor gave way in Arrhenius’s Room of Finding, I realized the reason my marriage with Tiff failed was I got too competitive for her. I went and pulled ahead in the business success race, ignoring the fact I needed her support for what I wanted to do with my life. What I did broke apart our team. El, when push comes to shove, I get all self-centered and bull ahead on my own,” Dave said. “I do this and bad things happen. I did the same thing when I chose Dubuque. I did it again when I stopped following your lead. I decided this is a problem, and I’m trying not to be that person any longer…but I’m not sure I can succeed.”
Elorie snorted, and then laughed. She looked over to him and smiled, a real smile that showed teeth and didn’t look at all forced. “Sure, whatever
you say,” she said, followed by a single giggle accent, B flat two octaves above middle C. “Don’t get rid of him altogether. The bull is the part of you I like. The bull’s the hero in you, your wild side.”
Dave wondered if he hadn’t just leapt from the Tiff frying pan into the Elorie fire, save he didn’t seem to be doing much of the choosing, in either case. “The jerk part of me? A hero?” he said, ignoring his mental allegorical shift of Elorie from the ice queen to the hot blazing fire department. Introspection – he introspected – was overrated.
Elorie stood, walked over to him, sat down beside him on the diorite boulder and put her arm around his now well-muscled shoulders. “You’re putting too much of the blame for the end of your marriage on yourself. I know that problem,” she said. “It’s what I think about when I think back on every failed relationship and every failed friendship.” She snuggled closer, so the only comfortable thing Dave could do was throw his arm over El’s shoulder. “Facing death repeatedly – I mean, how many times did Persona’s crap fail and my cancer come back? – didn’t show the world my best side. Nor did my time with the Watchers.”
To put it mildly.
“To put it mildly, Dave thinks,” Elorie said. Dave sighed. This sort of thing happened far too often to him these days. He wasn’t sure if he was spending too much time hanging around Telepaths or too much time doing Uffie’s training tricks, but something prodded his unconscious into over-activity. Uffie considered his ability to shield the minds of others a hidden potential worthy of training. “So you saw too much of me, the wrong too much. And this is the first time you’ve had a chance to sit back and think since the end of your marriage. I understand where you’re coming from, why you’ve pulled back.” She paused and looked him in the eye. “Do you want us to be an ‘us’?”
Blunt. “Yes,” Dave said, without hesitation.
“Then we should start doing something about our little issues, shouldn’t we? I do have a trailer waiting.”
“All done now, eh?” Elorie said, turning over to cuddle closer to him and making the trailer bed squeak. He didn’t remember the trailer’s bed squeaking before they started. Or that particular giggle in her voice. “You know, back to your earlier question. I think what’s hooked me into this mess is all the wonderful and strange people Nessa and Ken attract, not the two of them. Uffie is, I dunno, far more dangerous and intriguing than they are, dangerous because she represents the tip of yet another iceberg full of powerful and organized hidden people. What is the Indigo, anyway? How do they fit in? I also love the fact you’ve gotten her to teach you stuff, or at least try to. Oh, and then there’s Jasmine and Tracy and Tommy, who’re all neat people.” The Goth Princess, the Oriental Karate Queen and, well, Party Boy.
Dave nodded in agreement with her analysis. “I notice you didn’t mention Frank.” Evil Dude.
“You notice correctly,” Elorie said, a bit of the old neighborhood accent creeping back into her voice. She put him in the same category that Dave had put Jack. “And Bais! I could sit and listen to her chatter for years! She’s even found a way to tame Dr. Evil.” Lorenzi. Dave had to admit that Lorenzi had mellowed considerably in the time they had been on the quest. He and Bais had been training Elorie to control her immunities, when they had a few moments of free time.
“I wouldn’t put any bets on the permanency of the latter,” Dave said. “They are an interesting group, I’ll give you that. Although I find Reed as interesting as Jasmine. Please don’t tell them I said that, though, because for some reason the two don’t like each other at all.” As if there was a Gay vs. Goth repulsion field, socially, one he had never run into before.
Elorie sighed. “Reed’s a sell-out, in her eyes. He should be a reasonable person, given the not-quite-outcast status of gay men, but he isn’t. Too much time wearing a suit and tie. And, uh, Dave? I tried a bit to fix things but Jasmine thinks far worse of you. She still thinks of you as the opposition, exactly the sort of person who’d get suckered in by Dubuque and turned…dull.”
“That’s part of her charm,” Dave said. Then he laughed. “I’ve always been a sucker for women who think I’m utterly totally boring and pointless. I love convincing them otherwise.”
“I understand this in theory,” Elorie said, giving him the eye.
Dave snorted at her unveiled insult. “My real question is whether any hope remains,” he said. “We, as in the Telepath alliance, are the only opposition left.”
Elorie nodded.
“Do you have any hope left?”
“Dave?” Her eyes turned serious. “I understand, things are grim. Of the North American Territorials, only Orlando and Bob the Kid God didn’t join the City of God. All the free Euro Gods went into hiding. One of our most powerful allies, War, betrayed Portland’s Telepaths to Dubuque. Nessa’s doing the nesting mother routine – I’ve been there, I know it when I see it – and won’t be worth squat for months at a minimum. Dr. Evil’s flunky magicians are gone. There’s Bais, the biggest troublemaker on the planet, sitting in our camp, a snarky one woman wrecking crew who all by herself took down the Seven Suits…and all it would take to bring her ire down on us is one of us losing our cool around her. Objectively, we’re screwed six ways to Sunday. We might as well go build ourselves some spirit houses, cuz we’re gonna be needin’ ‘em soon.”
“I hear hope in your voice, despite your words.”
Elorie laughed. “Yah, perhaps. I’ve been through worse, long before I got roped into the Ecumenist quest, long before I got sick. You know my story. Helping hopeless situations, including my own hopeless life, is my job, dammit.”
“But… Okay, how?”
“You know the routine, what you told me back when we rescued ourselves from the Watchers. You put one foot in front of the other, take one step, and go on to the next, trying not to think too hard about how dangerous or futile everything is,” Elorie said. She grabbed Dave’s arms at the elbows. “Never give up hope. Never give up trying. Use every little bit of your strength, and fight, and think, and plan, and scheme, and work until you drop, exhausted. Then get up and do it again. And the next day. Our minds and our knowledge and our experiences are our leverage.”
Snort. “We settled an academic question posed by a magician who’s now had his claws pulled, who’s gone pacifist. That’s our experience.”
Elorie cocked her head. “We’ve got two goddamned aces in the hole, if we can figure out how to use them,” she said. “First, there are our immunities. I think we’re potentially as big a weapon as any two Telepaths, if not more, and nobody knows about people like us. Second, the Watchers. Nobody believes me, but, dammit, those Watchers are fucking Gods, just like the 99, but with their own screwy mythology, their own screwy prophesies and their own secret powers. They’re dangerous enough to make the Angelic Host jealous of them. Persona’s right. There’s something we can use here. There’s just gotta be.”
“I want to believe, but…”
It hit him, right then and there, with Elorie’s arms around him, her magic shields on full, his mind shields on full…he had seen the proof. His arms and legs went tingly. “Lorenzi flinched.”
“Dave?”
“El, when you gave your report and told him the Watchers were Gods, for a moment he believed you. He flinched. A moment later he shook his head and denied the fact. The flinch was belief, El. Logic isn’t stopping people’s belief, but some Watcher trick. A Watcher trick you’re immune to, and I am, too. Right now, at least.”
Elorie took a deep breath, then another. “Alright. Damn. This will make things a lot easier.” She took another deep breath, excitement on her face. “Is this another one of your woo-woo moments? A real honest-to-God telepathic hunch?”
Dave nodded. “Yah.” He licked his lips. “They’re Gods, too, just like you said. I don’t know how we can use the fact, or if I’ll still believe this when I’m not in your arms, or if we can convince anyone else, but there’s hope for us, and for our group. Also, let’s no
t forget what the two of us look like now. Our altered looks are going to be a big tool for us. Beauty is a form of power as well.”
Persona, the expert Hollywood-trained God, had remade the both of them. “I want to make them forget my former and well-mortal beautiful body ever existed by making someone better,” Persona had said, about Elorie. She had followed through on her word. Most of the changes had been subtle: a sixteenth of an inch extra bit of cheekbone here, a ten degree change of axis of one breast there. The overall effect was not at all subtle. Elorie had gone from stunning older model to, well, Dave didn’t have the words to describe Elorie now.
He didn’t think anyone had words for Persona’s masterpiece.
Persona, however, had studiously avoided him ever since he asked her if her current chosen identity name had anything to do with a certain Ingmar Bergman movie of the same name, about one person inadvertently taking on the identity of another. Persona hadn’t answered his question, which he took as a ‘yes’.
Dave knew how much he had changed. His changes had been far more noticeable than Elorie’s, and he even recognized his new self in the mirror – the bowel-clenching mirror vision the day his life had upended for good, just a little over six weeks ago. Nope, no more pot belly for him. No more middle-age flab. Much firmer chin. In Persona’s terms, ‘ripped’. Elorie had saved him, he thought, by telling Persona, repeatedly, ‘stop, too body-builder’. Persona had given him a six-pack but at least Elorie had dialed back his six-pack so it didn’t cast shadows. No more thinning hair, either. In true romance novel fashion, he now wore his ponytail length hair with a bow in back.
At least here in Alaska.
He loved it that random women licked their lips when he passed by. He had the muscles to rip phone books in half and jog twenty miles. He had even gotten a bit cocky and asked Jasmine to give him a little self-defense training, which had proven the difference between muscles and coordination and given him a lesson in abject humiliation.
He hadn’t quit, though, as whatever Persona had done to him had given him the recovery rate of a twenty year old. He could learn physical things again. That, he thought, might be worth a little humiliation.
99 Gods: Betrayer Page 71
