Nessa smiled at the thoughts she caught from Ken. “I raped you, not the reverse.”
Ken winced and turned off the shower. Dirt, twigs and leaves caked the bottom of the tub. “What happened to you?”
“After I finished cleaning out Alt’s head, I had a fit. He was, um, attracted to me, and I had to remove his desire. Then I had a fit.”
Ken stepped out of the shower and tried to put her down, but she wiggled and stayed in his arms. He shook his head; instead of using a towel, he dried them telekinetically. “You were a mess. Your hair was all tangled and filled with twigs and leaves, and you smelled of wild animals and cathouse. Your clothes were ruined, so I left them where I found them.”
“You’re pissed at me.”
“I’m not sure,” Ken said. He carried her to the couch in the front room of Alt’s apartment. Alt slept in his bed instead of huddled on the floor where Nessa had left him. “I didn’t want to deal with you any more tonight. You were being intolerable again and I’d had too much of your ‘intolerable’ recently. Then you called me. I thought I had all your tricks stopped. I was wrong.” He paused. “I don’t like not knowing who I am.”
“Ken, you know that I do impossible things in my fits, things I have barely any control over,” Nessa said. Ken lay down on the couch and Nessa snuggled up beside him. One of Alt’s extra blankets wafted out, unfolded itself, and covered them. The blanket smelled of recent laundering. “I’m sorry about tonight. I get so worked up about failing. I couldn’t let this recruitment fail, and so I pushed too hard.” She rolled back, wiggling to stay on the couch, and stared at the ceiling. “I feel so insignificant. All my adult life, it’s been one failure after another, and I don’t like failing. So I push myself into things that are too difficult, too wrong, or too idiotic, which invites the next failure. The cycle continues. That’s me.”
“No failure here,” Ken said. “Save that I’m still not convinced that making Alt a mature adult Telepath in one night was a good thing to do. He’s out right now, but I can tell you succeeded. I wonder if there’s going to be anyone inside when he wakes up. If there is, he is going to hate you.”
Nessa laughed. “He’ll get over it. You got over it.”
“I was younger and infatuated with you,” Ken said.
“True. So’s Alt.”
“Which is the other thing pissing me off.”
“Not to worry. That’s been taken care of, now.”
Ken took a deep breath, called a comb, and started to work the tangles out of Nessa’s hair. She purred. “So this was on purpose?”
“As much as anything is when I’m having a fit, which is to say not. But I don’t disagree with myself about this. Now? I did the right thing.”
“I was afraid I’d done that,” he said, and patted her abdomen below her belly button. “Normally you have this cute little teek protection against pregnancy keeping the sperm out, but this time, the teek sucked them all into your uterus.”
“Yes. Twins, a boy and a girl,” Nessa said. True for real, although the fertilized eggs hadn’t yet implanted or anything of the sort, so things might still mess up. “You needn’t fear any more that I’ll go wandering on you. I’m going to be carrying your children. When all the biological stuff gets settled out, of course.”
“Nessa, this is normally a decision both members of a couple make,” Ken said.
“Sorry.”
“Like hell.”
“Biological clock?”
“You don’t really understand why you did what you did, do you?” Ken said. Nessa shook her head. “I guess I can’t complain too much, then. It is a Nessa thing to do. What was with the animals, though? You trying out for nature goddess or something?”
Nessa closed her eyes and turned away. “You could pretend you didn’t notice.”
“Not going to happen.”
“It might be something you don’t want to understand.”
“Bets?”
Nessa sighed. “I’m not going to vanish on you until these kids are adults.”
“I hear a ‘but’.”
He understood her far too well. She wiggled up closer to him. “But I have a scheme I’ve been working on for years and years, to expand my ability to merge with animal minds. A long time ago, I got to where I can reach all the way across the planet to a single animal. That’s how I helped my friend Uffie. I wanted more. Back in Eklutna I pushed myself to where if I’m going for coverage I can get about four hundred miles of Alaskan tundra and nearby ocean.”
“By coverage, you mean all the animals?”
“Uh huh.”
“How small?”
“Rats and baitfish.”
Ken grunted and made a ‘sssthk’ sound with his cheeks. “Then my instincts were right when I suspected you might have the power to have created the 99 Gods.”
“Bastard,” Nessa said, bit a few of his chest hairs, and pulled. “I’m not good enough to extend my coverage across the entire planet, at least with animals. It wasn’t fair of you to remind me of my failure.”
Ken ignored her whine, but thankfully didn’t mention a certain more showy episode from her past. “What sort of benefit are you trying to get out of this scheme?”
“What if all the wild animals understand people’s words and are smart enough to stay out of the way of humans? What if wild animals never attacked humans or ate people’s gardens? Wouldn’t the world be a better place? We would be able to let all the wild animals run free without all the worries.”
“You think you can do that? I thought you wanted to be one with Korua. Besides, this wouldn’t stick. Eventually, you’d die.”
“Eventually nothing,” Nessa said. “When I push myself into the animals, I leave my body behind. If I don’t come back, my body’ll die within days, if not hours. The only question haunting me is how long would I be able to stay what I became. That’s what I meant when I said I wanted to become another collective like Korua or Opartuth. I think, with their help, I can hold myself together to become effectively immortal. I have to become a collective first, or at least apprentice collective, before I can do the immortality thing. Not that me, as Nessa, survives the initial push. Whatever I became would be totally new.”
“How very Snow Queen. You’re crazy.”
“People have said so, on occasion,” Nessa said, a grin etching itself across her worn face. “But now you don’t have to worry about me doing this any time soon. Not with a couple of children to love and nurture, so they grow up to become normal instead of the scarred-up messes we are.”
“Oh, I’m sure that will work,” Ken said, half asleep. Nessa let him fall all the way asleep. She had more to talk about concerning their relationship, but this was enough for now.
“I’m awake,” Alt said, through the closed bedroom door. “Now that you’ve ruined my life, what do you want out of me?”
“We need to talk some more,” Nessa said. “You need to eat breakfast. You can’t hide in your room all day.”
Alt muttered a curse and unlocked his bedroom door. He stalked around his small clean kitchen and made himself breakfast. Nessa and Ken, Nessa in clothes Ken had fetched from the car, waited at the table. Alt sat and looked at his push-pin wall.
“My old analysis of the Gods is shit,” he said. “I can do better now.”
“Good,” Ken said. “Do so.”
Alt glowered and ate.
“We need you to find recruits for us,” Nessa said. She wasn’t sure Korua had planned things this way, but Alt’s abilities were a perfect match for their needs. “People who are willing to give up their lives for our cause. People with useful talents. Telepaths if you can find them, Mindbound if you can’t.”
“Mindbound? People you’re going to turn into Telepaths?”
Nessa shook her head. “Nobody can turn a Mindbound into a Telepath.” And keep them functionally sane in the process, Nessa amended. She didn’t blush, but came close. “We need Mindbound because Mindbound are naturally good
at resisting mental control, and the Gods are quite gifted in that area.”
“Then you’ll need people who are already so pissed at the Gods they’re willing to throw everything away of their lives to join you,” Alt said. The frown didn’t leave his face, but Nessa’s idea leeched some of the anger from him. “Single people, people without attachments.”
“Uh huh.”
Ken took out a jewelry box and opened it. “Nessa and I are wearing the wrong rings. Some of the people you’re supposed to find fit them.” Inside the jewelry box were two new, fancier, wedding bands. Nessa licked her lips, horny again.
Alt looked at the wedding bands on Ken’s and Nessa’s fingers, and shook his head. “Those two people aren’t ready yet,” he said. He spooned more cereal and thought; Ken put away the new wedding bands. “How’d I figure this out?”
“Your clairvoyance working with your hunches and your ability to read people’s thoughts and plans in their auras,” Nessa said. “What you showed me last night. You’ve got immense range and you use it instinctively. You’ve got real good hunches. Use your feel for things to find us the right people, then.”
Alt shrugged. “Okay,” he said, without the slightest hesitation or concentration. “There’s a young woman in Ohio, an um Mindbound who’s already looking for allies. She knows how to fight.”
“Good,” Nessa said. “We’ll get her next.”
“There’s also someone close to us who’s been watching us,” Alt said. “He’s not a Telepath or a God, but he’s got tricks like we do.”
“Name of John, right?” Ken asked.
“What?” Nessa said.
“Uh huh,” Alt said.
“Watching us?” Nessa said. “How?” Then she got it. So that was what Ken had been saying to Lorenzi when she had left the two alone to ‘negotiate’?
This wasn’t anything she wanted to understand.
“Who is he? What is he?”
“Let me tell you a story,” Ken said, and leaned back.
Nessa stood and paced while Ken told the story. What she wanted to do was bang her head against the wall. Lorenzi using his magic. She couldn’t imagine a worse disaster, save that, yes, the 99 Gods were worse.
She couldn’t find any chocolate, either. She had eaten the last.
30. (John)
John closed down the scry and sighed. He stood, bent over to pop his back into place with a grunt and stalked out of the hotel bathroom. Reed had taken over the faux office desk in their one bedroom extended stay suite, with his laptop computer (never on his lap, which confused John) attached to something he called broadband internet (John didn’t want to know, save that it didn’t use a cord or rope or whatever those strange things were called) and he sat in front of the computer, engrossed.
After the first scry, the novelty had worn off and Reed tired of watching over John’s shoulder. John got a doughnut from the box, a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker Reed had ingeniously mastered, and sat down on the now-folded-up couch. Lumpy, uncomfortable, folded up couch. John muttered a curse in Old German, disgusted. Reed peered up. He had dark circles under his eyes, out all last night, sampling the Moline nightlife. John weighed the possibility of danger in Reed’s nightly wanderings against Reed’s need to continue his screwy social life, and decided a curfew wasn’t warranted. Yet.
“What’s pissed you off?” Reed said.
Well, if John hadn’t wanted his emotions read, he shouldn’t have selected a Telepath like Reed. He took a sip of coffee. “Other than too much smog on the noggin’, I’m angry because Vanessa and Kendrick have changed sides. They’re now after Atlanta and Miami.”
“Damn,” Reed said. “Dubuque really got to them, didn’t he?”
John nodded. His eavesdropping spell had worked fine, save that the new Telepath had somehow noticed his spying. “Well, yes and no. They don’t trust Dubuque, and if they capture Atlanta or Miami, they’re going to turn them over to Portland.”
“You think they can pull it off, don’t you.”
John waved his hands in the air. “If they can recruit a couple of more Telepaths to their group and do so quickly, yes,” he said. He stared at the print of a Mississippi Riverboat on the far wall of the suite. The American penchant for bad art and prints thereof disgusted him, the worst of many annoying American character flaws. The flaw stemmed from their long-ago sacrifice of their aristocrats to karmically empower their absurdly large middle class. Quantity over quality, never a good trade, in John’s opinion. “Now, I suspect they’ll only get one chance. Once the Gods realize the Telepaths endanger them, they’re going to get frosted and it’s going to be open season on Telepaths. At which point they’ll join Dubuque’s personal entourage in order to survive.”
“If they’re on the other side, should we try and stop them?” Reed said.
John cleared his throat. “How, pray tell? I’m not a killer, and from abundant previous experience I know Telepaths of their power level cannot be swayed by mundane force. I can remove their personal abilities the same way I can remove the ability to be a magician, but they’ve seen the trick and they’ll never let me near them if I’m thinking of using the trick on them. Nor do I want to. I owe them too damn much to ruin. Nor am I going to warn Miami of a damned thing.”
“You’re really ticked.” Reed leaned back in the faux office chair and stuck his feet up on the table next to his tiny computer. The chair creaked ominously under his minor weight. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you so ticked off.”
“I thought they were on my side,” John said. “I was positive they were on my side.” Despite their protestations, he still thought of those two as children. Right now, he thought they needed spanking.
“Perhaps Dubuque got to their minds the same way he got to the minds of the other Gods?”
“Perhaps. This assumes our analysis is correct and Dubuque got to Portland, Phoenix and Montreal. For all we know, he persuaded them logically. We didn’t have an eye in Dubuque’s place when the meeting went down and all we have for evidence is what Atlanta told Vanessa and Kendrick and what Dubuque and his crew said and did when they met those two.” John finished his cup of coffee, put down a half-eaten doughnut, and stood. The room wasn’t large enough and wasn’t the least bit homey. John wanted to leave, get out into the countryside and breathe some real air for a while.
“Can you get an eye into Dubuque’s place?” Reed said. “He has quite a few flunkies, and surely you can get to his personal attendants somehow.”
“That’s very risky,” John said. He put his hands on his well-padded hips, threw back his shoulders, and stretched. Reed didn’t respond. “Unfortunately, this is a risk we probably need to take. I’ve already got some ideas about how to do it safely.” He didn’t like to expose his abilities so early in the game. He didn’t see any choice in the matter, though.
“Speaking of risks, I think we’ve got a problem,” Reed said.
“We’ve got lots of problems.” John glanced out the window, which showed a parking lot and a busy highway filled with morning commuters. While he had been scrying, he tried for the third time to contact his order, and as with his first two attempts, he hadn’t been successful. He had even called up a magical projection and traveled to their headquarters, which risked a chance they would decide to find a new magician-hunter and send the poor fool after John. He found the headquarters deserted. Not long deserted; the dust had been thin. He kicked himself that he hadn’t checked up on them more often in the last century, but he had found their attitude about the modern world difficult to stomach after the first World War. They had been hurt more by the loss of the old ways than he had, and the dissolution of the European monarchies and the Ottoman Empire coupled by the spread of their old bugaboo, democracy, had left his order both strapped for resources and alienated from the modern world. He only found one clue, a wadded up piece of paper in the personal trashcan of the order’s third in command. The scrap had mentioned speakers of Turkish and Armenian, suppli
ed a phone number for ‘the grotto Monastery’ (which John didn’t recognize), and used the phrases ‘ceiling as guide’ and ‘under storage rooms or dwellings? Seismic?’ He would have to research the terms in use. He wondered what his crazy order was up to this time. Moving about had never been their gig.
“Come over here, please, if you would,” Reed said, more firmly. “I want to show you what I’ve found.”
John dragged a chair from the suite’s dining room table over to Reed and sat down. He studied the screen of Reed’s so called ‘laptop’ and couldn’t understand anything. “Okay, I’m here. Goose it.”
Reed puzzled at him for a moment, and turned back to his computer. “First, we got an email response to the postings you had me put on various God-frequented message boards,” Reed said. He pointed to one of the overlapping screen documents. John read.
“So a couple of Gods are willing to talk to me and say they’re on the way,” John said. The signature at the bottom of the letter wasn’t a signature, but typed at the bottom were the names ‘Singularity’ and ‘Inventor’. “How do you know this is legit?”
“We don’t, though the email address used matches one ‘Singularity’ has used on four of the groups I’ve found.” Reed lost himself in thought for a minute. John had thought it screwy that some of the Gods communicated to each other using these internet group thingies. Reed had been bothered more by the fact these were open ‘user groups’ anyone could join, and the fact the groups hadn’t been overwhelmed by something called ‘spam’ and by groupies and worshippers. Reed’s mystery didn’t bother John. Some God had likely cursed them to work properly. Reed had just given him a funny look when he made the comment. “They said they’d pay us a personal visit. Doesn’t that mean your protections aren’t working and any of the Gods can find you?”
“Magic,” John said. “I want people to be able to find me who want to help, so I have my defenses set up for this. If they want to harm me, I can’t be found.”
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