“You’ve been at this all day, Seth,” Jimmy said quietly beside me. “Maybe you should take a break. Try to relax some. Get some dinner, maybe.”
“I wish I could, Jimmy,” I said, rubbing my face tiredly. “But I’ve got to figure this out by dawn.”
“Yeah, and if you pass out ahead of time because you didn’t eat and didn’t have the energy to do it, that’ll help out how?” he said sarcastically.
That clicked in my head. “Not enough energy,” he said, and I recalled the first sprite I noticed the problem in, peering at the affected area. Then another brownie and another. A sprite and another. All of them, one after another, the problem was so similar I have no idea why I didn’t see it before.
My head shot up and I jumped off the rail, cackling and dancing around in circles. “Jimmy, you’re a genius!” I shouted. “Yes! Yes, I can fix this!”
“Whaddido?” Jimmy asked while watching me act the fool.
“I’ve been thinking the problem was the Changed,” I explained. “But neither Ethan nor I could see why they were evolving or why that related to the geas problem. The answer is, it’s not! This is more like a traffic problem. It wouldn’t have been a problem at all if my connection to Gilán were as strong in the beginning as it is now. I wasn’t quite strong enough—no, strike that, I didn’t push strong enough, hard enough, everywhere.
“Let’s go eat! I’m starved,” I said, suddenly hungry. “Where ya’ wanna go?” He was confused by the sudden change in my mood. Couldn’t blame him; it was a pretty radical change.
“I figured we’d go and get dinner at the mess with the other guys,” he said, pointing vaguely toward the north wing. I turned and looked into the dining room, up a floor from here. A change of perspective allowed me to see the service line as they neared their peak. It felt kind of weird that I could do that, feel that space so clearly in my mind that I can see it as if working in the cavern in my mind. Now that was an interesting idea. Could Gilán be the external representation of my cavern?
“Ugh, I don’t think so, Jimmy,” I said, turning back to him. “They really seem to be enjoying whatever that meat patty-thing is, and I’m sure that potato mash stuff tastes much better than it looks, but I think we can get a better cut of meat. You can afford it. I believe you still have a few hundred in your back pocket.” He grabbed at his wallet to renew belief in the cash I’d given him earlier. He’d held a lot more than that, so it wasn’t awe of the amount of cash. I didn’t understand, but I didn’t pry either.
“Yeah, I think I know where we should try…,” he said as he pushed evenly on the shield around Gilán. I released the field to him and followed him to a reasonably familiar place, in Atlanta. I’ve never been to this one, but it was a chain restaurant, a steak house. I wondered what it was about it that had indelibly inked itself in Jimmy’s mind that he was able to link himself to it and find it from Gilán. We came onto the sidewalk in the shadow of a tree, startling an older couple as they strolled slowly along, window shopping arm in arm.
Jimmy hopped up the wooden plank steps lightly and walked through the crowded lobby. I doubt he realized he created a wake for me to follow as people just parted in front of him. He’d never been quite this confident before, that people would just move out of his way and now they did and he didn’t seem to notice. And he wasn’t the slightest arrogant about it, more… child-like really.
I walked into the bar while Jimmy talked to the hostess and ordered a couple of beers, tossing my passport on the bartop first. The bartender picked it up, unsure of what he was looking at initially. Once he found my magically-adjusted birthdate, he handed me the wallet back and got the bottles. Jimmy sat down in front of the second bottle beside me.
“There’s a forty-five minute wait,” he said apologetically, holding something that looked like a cross between a coaster and a cigarette ashtray. “Is that o—” The thing he was holding started vibrating and lighting in electronic convulsions.
“Must be all that sexy bursting out,” I said to him, grinning and standing up. “Bet the table’s near the door, too. Pay the bartender.” He fumbled with his wallet and the blinking box for a moment, leaving a meager tip before I reached into his wallet and pulled another bill out. We’d have to discuss the inequities of tipped employees soon. And I was right about the table being near the front. There was a direct line of sight to the hostess stand and our table, and Jimmy worked it as hard as he could, preening and grinning with them every chance he got.
“Just remember to use protection,” I chuckled as I looked over the menu. “I have no idea how your geas will travel to your children and Gilán is very procreative right now.”
“What?” he asked, turning quickly to me in confusion and alarm.
“The geas is passed to children as part of gestation in the womb,” I explained still reading the menu. “There could be… complications.”
“I wasn’t thinking of bending one over the counter and screwing them right here,” he said fervently, then cocked his head back to the lobby, leering. “Although that sounds hot. Maybe we can come back after they close…”
“Jimmy!” I said, choking a little on my beer and knowing he was kidding all the same. His schmoozing was sophomoric at best, and admittedly, he had the teenaged hostesses tittering for him, but I’d already seen Peter and Dillon work a room without trying and don’t even get me started on the Faery bitches in heat or their mothers.
The waitress popped up then, forcing Jimmy to concentrate on his menu as I ordered, giving him only about a minute. I wasn’t the one oogling the jailbait. He then proceeded to order three times what he could possibly eat in an hour, as well as another round. She carded him. As he nervously handed her his driver’s license I quickly snatched it out of his hand before she got it.
“Is that your new one?” I asked disingenuously, working a little magic on the ink in the plastic card, adjusting his birthdate so that he’d be five years older than he actually was. I handed it to her, saying, “Glad you got that fixed.”
“Be right back with the beers,” she said with a smile, handing Jimmy his license then bouncing away, all blonde and perky. Jimmy leaned over the edge of the table and watched all the bouncing parts as she went, then glanced at his license before putting it back in his wallet.
“Cool!” he said quietly and looked up at me shaking my head. “What? It wasn’t that long ago that you were watching, too.”
“No, you’re right,” I admitted. “And I still do. I’m just not that obvious about it. And I have a much better… perspective about it now.” I took a long, slow draught from the bottle, emptying it, while Jimmy thought about that. It was like watching dominos fall in slow motion. He started sputtering out a laugh as he realized exactly what I was implying. I was just lucky he wasn’t drinking at that moment—a spit-take wouldn’t have been welcome, but I was shielded so I wouldn’t have gotten wet.
“Just how far out does your ‘perspective’ go?” he asked still grinning.
I shrugged as Steph, our perky, blonde waitress, came back with the beer and fried onion thing with bastardized Thousand Island dressing. Jimmy dug into the thing while I answered. The familiar scratches of shift to Gilán occurred. Peter shifted to his apartment. Richard followed a couple of minutes later. Then everyone moved over.
“On Gilán it’s everywhere, all the time,” I said, idly picking at the onion. It wasn’t bad, but I’d had a lot of fried food lately and wasn’t eager to add more to it. “Here it depends on several things, but honestly I’m still getting used to it. Basically about twenty feet out without thinking about it.”
“In a circle around you?” he asked.
“Spherically,” I said, feeling Ethan try pushing through the anchor, but I kept the pressure on. Not yet, I said and he relented. Peter didn’t.
Little Brother, please talk to me, Peter pleaded softly.
“I’m having dinner, Peter,” I said with aggravation.
“Just talk to him, Seth,�
� Jimmy said. “It can’t hurt to talk.”
“Yes it can,” I argued. I looked into Gilán at where Peter was standing, looking out over the gardens as the moon cast a pale gray light over the lake. Everyone sat around the table working on something, clustered into small groups. Mike had David and Steve at one end, rifling through stacks of paper and receipts. Kieran and Ethan were locked together in a staring contest, probably trying to work out the geas issue for me. “All right, Peter, stand up straight.” With a flash of “look away from us” energy into the restaurant, I shifted Peter to the table. I definitely like having the Elf-Lord’s power. To work so instinctively was freeing.
“Have a seat, Pete,” Jimmy offered, sliding over in the bench and taking his beer with him. He also caught Steph’s attention from several yards away and pantomimed several things that apparently she understood. I got “another couple of beers and read a book” so I missed something in the translation.
“We made some very bad errors today, Seth,” Peter started as he sat down in front of me, uncomfortable with both the subject matter and the location.
“Ya think?” I said sarcastically.
“Some of it I understand,” he said, ignoring my remark but it irritated him. “Most of it though, I don’t, so I need some help here, Seth. All of us are going through things that we’ve never done before and we have to learn to cope with that.”
“Tell me something, Peter,” I said, interrupting his ‘self-help book’ moment. “Last night when I left your apartment, did you have any idea that, maybe, just maybe, you guys had pissed me off a bit?”
Steph’s arrival gave Peter a moment to collect his thoughts as she set the beers on the table. “Would you like a menu, sir?” she asked Peter, holding out the colorful paper out to him.
“No, thank you, just bring me the exact same thing he’s having,” he said, his smile looking pained and fake. “And another beer, please.”
Once Steph walked away, Peter said, “Yeah, we all knew you were pissed, Seth, we just weren’t exactly sure why.”
“Dude, really? Excuse me a moment, I need to use the john,” Jimmy said, tapping Peter’s thigh noisily. Peter slipped out of the booth, letting Jimmy out and glaring at him as he passed. Jimmy ignored the stare in favor of a buxom woman three tables over who was not afraid to show off the goods and he was not afraid to look, even with the six-foot-four redneck sitting next to her watching some sports program on the bar tv and ignoring her. She watched Jimmy as he strutted by, but by that time his attention had selected another target. The Ode of Raging Hormones of the Teen-Aged Human Male. I glanced around the room and noticed that quite a few of the women in the room seemed… flustered by Jimmy’s passing. I think some husbands and boyfriends were going to get lucky tonight.
“Okay, we obviously missed something very obvious if he got it and we didn’t,” Peter snarked. I slapped my hand on the table hard and loud, grabbing Peter’s attention.
“Don’t get bitchy with him because you screwed up,” I growled at him as he steadied two of the three beer bottles on the table. “The six of you ganged up on me. You made decisions for me, without talking to me. And I even let you know I didn’t like it, but the very next day you did it again, not once, but twice, and, oh my god, how could any of you think that allowing Fuller back in after what I said was a good thing?”
Steph and Jimmy arrived together, so Peter just slid over. I wasn’t sure if the public place was helping Peter or hindering him. Here in public, he had to contain and measure his reactions carefully. If we were in private, he could have been more… dramatic. Now he had to think before he spoke. Once Steph had our salad plates down and empty bottles up and away, Peter was calmer.
“I hadn’t looked at it that way, Seth,” he said, pushing a tomato around his plate morosely.
Ethan pushed against the anchor hard, anxious. Seth, Peter is missing.
He’s with me, I told him. I ate my salad, giving Peter time to tell me what he meant by that.
“You may want to… elaborate on that,” Jimmy said quietly after a few moments. He met Peter’s glare evenly. “Hey, I know I have a lot to make up for and I’m still confident that he’s forgiven me for it.”
Peter stared at him harder for a minute and Jimmy ate his salad while Peter stared. There must have been some sort of testosterone-laden communication that happened that I just didn’t get because he broke off the stare and ate.
“We did gang up on you, didn’t we?” he said quietly.
“Yeah,” I said, pushing my empty plate to the side and gripping the beer with both hands.
“That wasn’t the idea, Seth,” he said with frustration. “We just wanted you to take it easy for the rest of the night. Damn, man, you’d been beaten and battered worse than any of us all day long. You deserved to take the milk run. If we had enough people, you would have stayed at home instead.”
“And then someone said something he shouldn’t have,” I said, testily.
“Well, Seth, you are scaring the hell out of us!” he snapped back at me. “Me, anyway. And your dad. He doesn’t know what to think. Damn, what am I saying? None of us do.”
“Here we go!” perky Steph announced herself, placing a prime rib on the table in front of me and a porterhouse in front of Jimmy. A second person started piling side dishes from a large tray on a stand onto every available empty place on the table while Jimmy’s eyes gleamed in anticipation. “Yours’ll be out in just a second, hon. Y’all need anything right now?”
Peter and I watched in fascination as Jimmy made two side dishes disappear before Steph stepped away from the table.
“Are you instantly metabolizing that?” I asked, still staring in awe. Jimmy clearly didn’t understand the question and didn’t let it slow him down. I sliced off a piece of the prime rib, dipping it into the horseradish and embracing my inner carnivore for a moment. Steph came back with Peter’s roast and cleared away probably half of Jimmy’s plates—the devastation of ceramic dead soldiers in front of him was extreme. The load of plates she carried back to the kitchen from Jimmy alone had to weigh fifteen pounds.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that, Peter,” I said, cutting another piece. “I’m faster than you guys so I scare you. I mean, what am I supposed to do with that? Not try my best to help people? To not help you and Kieran and Ethan and my parents and anybody else that might need me at any given time? Pick and choose who I move fast for? How does that work? Do I stamp numbers onto them astrally or something? ‘Do not exceed ten miles per hour’ here and fifteen there.”
I leaned in close over the table, looking up at him. “You might have talked about it but you didn’t think about it, now, did you? And have you recalled at any point that you still fight by tossing balls of green fire? I haven’t the vaguest idea how to do that!” I paused long enough to chew angrily at the piece I’d cut off and started mangling another.
“And what the hell are y’all doing even talking to Fuller for? Do you really think I’m being capricious here? Gimme a little credit. There is no way anybody is going to work with us in a positive way if they’re all walking over us. Well, guess what, brother mine, they are all walking all over us. We have very little political currency right now as a group and as a company. I have very little political currency as a Lord of Faery. Every bit of what I do have is ephemeral at best and you know it.”
I lost interest in eating and pushed my plate forward, nursing the beer instead. “Every time I turn around lately, somebody has been pulling a power play on us, trying to twist our arms and get us to do what they want, do things their way, or just die. Every organization over here has pulled one, with Fuller’s now at three. Now, I realize I lost my temper with Calhoun…” Peter grimaced at the mention of the man’s name. I think that deserved another beer.
When I looked around for Steph, I found Jimmy pantomiming complex signs again. He was also holding us slightly out of phase with our environment, almost shifting us over. It made us fuzzy
to anyone watching and our conversation was impossible to hear, much less follow. Best of all, it was easy for him to control. That was cool. I wondered if I could teach him to make a knowe.
I sighed, releasing a little tension. “Calhoun was my mistake. I let it get personal and I regret that. I trusted him and shouldn’t have. For Fuller, though, it isn’t personal. It’s purely political. Fact of the matter is, he’s been caught. It is not something I can ignore for the safety of Gilán or for our safety. I have no choice but to levy the strongest penalty I have. And considering it’s the only option I have, how can anybody object?”
“I… don’t think we looked at it that way, Seth,” Peter said quietly. “We just thought you were having a tantrum and needed a strong talking to. The US council is probably the strongest in the world right now and we didn’t want you just blowing them off on a whim.”
“Hmm. I would have thought it was the Chinese…” I said in an off-hand way.
“I’m sorry, Seth,” Peter said. “We should have talked with you at the beginning instead of pushing it on you.”
“Thank you,” I said and pulled a long, slow draught from my bottle, almost draining it. “Now what did y’all tell Fuller.”
“Gordon made it quite clear to everyone that since his home and his land was at risk, he would do whatever you said regardless of what Bishop wants,” Peter explained. “Your dad said he would talk to you, but didn’t promise anything. Kieran was quiet.”
“Well, that much is good. Not too much damage to contain,” I said. “What about Messner and his group?”
Sons (Book 2) Page 50
