“You have some friends in very high places, Frank.” Ben gave me a hard look that I couldn’t quite read. It was like he was trying to see if I had known about this ahead of time. “I tried to throw my weight around but they were intent on making an example out of you. Then a representative from the Committee shows up, on orders from Jae Kwon no less, and two hours later you’re free to go. Got any ideas why that is?”
I shook my head and tried to look confused. For some reason I just couldn’t bring myself to tell Ben the truth of what was happening. It was all too strange and unreal. It was asinine, really. He was probably the one person who could truly help me with this, but I just couldn’t do it. “No clue. Maybe they wanted to make a show of unity for the government, let them know that they wouldn’t let one of their own get flushed down the toilet without a fight.” I wished that was true, but I knew that the Council just didn’t want their new toy thrown behind bars.
“Uh-huh,” he muttered, entirely unconvinced. “You know, some of us have never really stopped fighting the war. It has been done for over thirty years now, but some people can’t or won’t stop. It’s true on all sides, whether it be a preacher who still dreams of wiping us out, or a washed-up old wizard who’s trying to make things right, or a psychic who never truly left his bunker in North Korea. Those of us who were there in the thick of it and saw the worst of it are still fighting, on a smaller, less visible battlefield perhaps, but fighting nonetheless.” He stepped closer to me and looked around the parking lot. When he resumed speaking he didn’t look at me. “I don’t know what they have planned for you, Frank, but I know I don’t like it. Not one bit. This whole thing stinks of the way the Ancients used their bloodlines to fight the war for them. They sat in some mansion in a secluded village while others bled and died for them. That started with small moves too; they built their power, shored up their resources and alliances with the wolf packs, and then attacked.”
“I’m not sure I get the parallel with what’s happening here, Ben.”
He looked at me then, those dark eyes piercing and flashing with anger, though I didn’t think it was directed at me. “Nobody ever sees it until it’s too late.” Noticing I had backed up a step at his intensity, he seemed to mentally shake himself. When he met my gaze again it was just plain old Ben, my teacher and friend, though sadness touched his eyes. “You know, Frank, when you were first given the commission as Oakland’s Inquisitor I asked the Committee to reconsider.” He saw the hurt in my face and hurried to continue, to soften the crushing words. “It’s not that I doubted your competence. You had been a police officer for three years and had come to us highly recommended by your human superiors, and the psychic abilities you displayed, while modest, could prove invaluable to us, especially the Recall. To be able to play back events in your mind as if they were happening right there in front of you? Nobody could argue that we didn’t need someone like that. How many death-sentences have we issued only to find out later that we killed the wrong para? You could have changed that if you had been assigned as an adjudicator.”
“An adjudicator? What’s that?”
“They were the judges of the Inquisition. The position was abandoned fifteen years ago once the fighting calmed to what the Committee deemed acceptable levels. We couldn’t spare the manpower for roving adjudicators, so the decision of whether a para accused of a violent crime was condemned to death was given to the sole Inquisitor of that city. The human government wasn’t happy, and neither were some of us, but most of the men and women in the field were thrilled to get rid of the one last layer of bureaucracy.” He waved his hand languidly through the air. “But I’m getting away from my point. I thought you would have been a perfect judge, but to give you a city? That didn’t make sense to me. Simon getting L.A. was a no-brainer because of the higher than average number of vampires there. Oakland is predominately magic-users so I had assumed they would send a wizard, or at least a mage who would complete his or her apprenticeship in basic training. But instead they sent a psychic who had spent his life among humans until his heritage was found out and he was forced to move to the merge and transfer to the police force there. Why?”
“My sparkling personality?” I said with a smile, trying to ignore what Ben was driving at. The fact that I had often felt over my head and unequal to the task set before me made it impossible.
He grunted something that might have been a laugh and said, “Things have been orchestrated to get you here, that much is clear, but for what purpose still eludes me.” His expression clouded and his eyes shone with an old fire. “All I know for sure is that Jae Kwon is not your friend. You may think that him getting you out of jail is a show of solidarity, but for him there is no such thing. There are only soldiers and officers in his world, and you, my friend, are a soldier.”
“Am I your friend?” I asked, echoing Clara’s question to me from the other day. “While I was sitting in jail I had a lot of time to think, and something that kept bothering me over the past week finally made a little more sense. You speak about Jae as if he were some master puppeteer pulling all of our strings from a thousand miles away, and maybe he is, but he at least is looking out for the greater good of our race. What about you?” Ben staggered back as if I had punched him in the stomach, his jaw agape. I had never talked to him like this before. “What is Terri to you, Ben?”
He backed into his car and slumped against it, all the strength seeming to drain out of him with every word I uttered. When he spoke it was a whisper that was almost swallowed by the wind. “You used your Recall on the necklace, didn’t you?”
“No. I just figured it out this morning. Something had been bugging me about the way you had been acting around her lately. And you had been here a lot in the last year, way more than an Inquisitor General should have been. I’ve been berating myself all this time because I thought that you didn’t trust me when it was really her you were looking in on.” I shook my head and laughed a humorless laugh. “You kept finding ways to keep the two of us apart, even though it was your idea that she become my apprentice. None of it made any sense until I remembered something Lily…the Demon said. She said “Clever witch. It must run in the family.” It didn’t mean anything to me when she said it, though I thought it was strange she would make reference to Terri’s family even though she was an orphan. Then I remembered that she called you a clever wizard back at my house. Coincidence, right? But then there was the necklace you had given to Terri to use as her focus for the spell and the emotion in your voice when you told her she reminded you of the woman who used to own it.”
“It was her mother’s,” he admitted with a sigh. “My daughter, a Wiccan high-priestess. She died of cancer when Terri was just two-and-a-half years old.”
“But couldn’t the healers—”
“It was so sudden,” he interrupted. “She had felt ill for a couple of days, but she assured me it wasn’t anything to worry about.” Tears dribbled from the corners of his eyes. He blinked rapidly and wiped the back of his hand across his cheeks. “The spells she had woven around herself dulled the pain but didn’t cure what was really afflicting her. She had complete faith in the magic of nature, but all it really did was mask the fact that there was something seriously wrong with her.” He laughed bitterly. “Sometimes I think that magic is more of a curse than a blessing.”
“I’m sorry, Ben.”
“It was a long time ago. The Second Cities had been established but the borders were still shaky. Mercenaries and mobs of revenge-minded humans were running around tearing things down as fast as we could build them. The SEC was still trying to find the balance of law enforcement. There were lawless lands and places where the use of a simple spell could get you burned at the stake. I told myself that I couldn’t raise a daughter on my own, and more importantly that I shouldn’t raise her. What kind of father figure could I be? I was so busy that I hardly saw her back then. The Inquisition was my life. And I had made more than my fair share of enemies along the wa
y. Who was to say that one of them wouldn’t come looking for a little payback once I had resigned and settled down. So I gave her up for adoption and went back to work. She was so young…I knew she wouldn’t remember me when she grew up, and I thought that was for the best.”
His heart broke with the telling of the story, and mine ached in response. “Some would call that a noble sacrifice,” I said in a weak attempt at making him feel better.
“Only an idiot would say that, and I know you’re not an idiot. But thanks all the same.” He wiped a stray tear and smiled awkwardly.
I waited a moment, unsure if I should push any further. Ben was obviously in terrible pain from a wound that might never heal, but I needed to know. “So you followed her life from a distance. And then?”
“And then you came along.” Another bitter laugh made his chest shake. “The Inquisitor of Oakland before you was a mage who could never quite make it to wizard level. He was a hermit and only came out of hiding under the worst circumstances. Then he was transferred and you showed up. Terri met you through the coven she sometimes worked with and from what I saw she was drawn to you like a moth to flame. I watched her get closer to you and become involved in what you did and I got scared. I saw her making the same mistakes I did and couldn’t bear to stand by and watch her get swallowed up in the Inquisition. She’s a strong, willful woman, and the path we walk called to her like it did to me. I might be the world’s worst grandfather, but I’d still do anything to give her the real life she deserves.”
Running my hand through my hair to hide the frustration I felt, I asked, “So why recommend that she become my apprentice after the Adam Drake bust?”
“Because she needed to see what we deal with on a daily basis. You know as well as I do that it’s one thing to be told the stories and another to live them.” He squinted as the sun peeked out from behind cotton ball clouds. “Remember our conversation on your porch a few nights ago, when I berated you for trying too hard to keep her out of danger? You asked me then if I remembered the first time I saw a dead child, and if I had nightmares about what we’ve been through. I do remember, Frank, and I have too many nightmares to keep track of anymore. I could tell Terri all about them but it wouldn’t dissuade her from her path, if that is what she chose to do. She needed to see it for herself. That’s why I was so mad at you for leaving her out of anything that could prove remotely dangerous; you were robbing her of those things that I needed her to see.”
My mind latched onto an idea. “So instead you made me the mental focal point of the spell to contact Jae Kwon. You figured she would know what all of the mental imagery represented and it would show her what a messed up wreck I am.” My voice had raised enough so that the guards looked over at us, and I fought to bring it under control.
“Yes, but what we saw there was…unexpected. Frank, what the Council has done to your mind amounts to rape. They violated the sanctity of your persona, adding what they thought would be useful to you and discarding everything else. I’ve never seen anything like it before. As far as I can tell they’ve broken all of their own rules on the applications of mind magic in order to reshape your psyche. Even Terri wouldn’t know exactly what she was seeing. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure what I saw.” He shook his head and looked at his feet. “But all of that aside, I didn’t realize that I had made a terrible mistake until it was too late. Whenever I saw the two of you look at each other I was blinded by fear for her future. The closer to you she got the closer her impending doom appeared to me. I didn’t understand how you felt about her until you came to us in the hospital ward. The way you looked at her, I could tell you didn’t just care about her welfare because she was your apprentice.” Looking at me through squinted eyes, he asked, “Do you love her?”
Wiping a hand across my face in a futile attempt to sweep away all of the emotions that came to the surface with that question, I sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about her. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted, but I know I’d be poison to her. A guy like me doesn’t deserve someone like her.”
“I felt the same way until I met her grandmother, Eleanor.”
Looking down at the pavement, I continued. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about her now. She saw one of those things that you wanted her to, one of those things that had to be experienced instead of related in story.” I couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of my tone.
“What are you talking about? I told you, she won’t understand what she saw in your head.”
“Not that,” I said, falling back against my car to mirror Ben’s exhausted-looking stance. “She saw me kill Christian.”
“She was there? I left a message for her at the hospital wing telling her where we were going but—”
“She used a cloak spell to sneak in. The Demon noticed her and froze her, but I know Lily would have allowed her to see what was happening.” The anger welled up in me and spilled over, my hands balling into fists, my knuckles whitening. “She would have wanted Terri to have a front-row seat when I blew his brains out all over the blacktop. It doesn’t matter that it was the right thing to do given the circumstances. It doesn’t matter that he probably would have been given a death-sentence anyway. What matters is that she saw me do it. There’s no undoing that.” I opened the door to my car and turned back to Ben. “Keys?”
He fished them out of his pocket and tossed them to me. “Listen,” he said, moving closer. “I don’t expect you to forgive or forget what I’ve done with you and Terri. Lord knows, I wouldn’t if I were in your shoes. But I hope that someday you’ll understand why I did it.”
Unfortunately I already did understand, but try telling that to your heart when it’s breaking. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if there’s a good reason or not, it’ll tear you up inside all the same. I started the car and rolled down the window. “So where do you go from here? I suppose you’ll be around for a while longer.”
“Sadly, no.” He smiled as he leaned onto my door. “I’ve been recalled to Seattle for debriefing. I’ll have to explain to some big-shot what happened down here, even though they already know exactly what happened.” The smile faded. “Frank, I need to know that what you found out about me and Terri remains our secret. She’s better off not knowing.”
“Don’t worry, Ben, your secret is safe with me. Besides, I don’t think Terri will be going out of her way to talk to me anytime soon.”
“Time will tell,” he replied. “One last thing before you go. The girl that Christian turned into his queen?”
“Cassie? What about her?” I fought off a vision of her being gunned down in her bed by Paulo. I could almost smell the reek of cordite in the air.
“Well, I took a look around the base after the fight and her body hadn’t been accounted for. Everything else Christian had brought back had collapsed when he died, but she was his crowning achievement. He did something different with the magic that animated her. It might have survived his death. Imagine how she must feel, stuck in a dead body, unable to move on and not even the man who was responsible for it dying can stop it.” He shook his head in disgust.
Gripping the wheel harder to keep my hands from shaking, I asked, “Why are you telling me this? Do you think I can do something about it?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “You weren’t the only one who had a couple of days to think. You know that spirit box that you used to trap the Demon? Well, they were never intended for use against Demons, it only would have held him a few days. They were originally created as a way to trap renegade spiritwalkers. Interesting how you found that one at the safe house near here isn’t it? Almost like someone had thought they might need one in Oakland, but there aren’t any spiritwalkers around here, are there Frank?” He patted the door, stood up, and walked back to his car.
37
“A spiritwalker, huh?” Simon sipped his beer and looked at me from his place across from me at my kitchen table. To his credit he was taking the news that I was his race’
s version of the boogey-man rather well. “You’re hardly as intimidating as the stories my people tell about your kind. No offense, little brother,” he added with a grin.
“None taken,” I replied around a mouthful of heavenly Chinese take-out. “I’ll just have to try harder in the future and work on my scary-face.”
Ben had left me alone in the parking lot of the STS building angry and confused. I had sat and stared at nothing for minutes before one of the guards came over to me and told me to get moving before they re-arrested me, this time for loitering. Having no desire to be in that cell again, I left and drove around aimlessly until nightfall.
Ben was leaving. I couldn’t get my head around it as I drove towards nowhere. He knew what was happening, what I was, and he was still going back to Seattle. How could he do it? Was his job done once he had driven a wedge between me and Terri? Were his regrets real, or feigned in order to keep me a compliant soldier? I didn’t find the answers to any of those questions on the windshield of my car, or on the street signs I passed, so I picked up some food and went home.
A note from Terri had been stuck to my door, addressed to me in her flowery script. In it she told me that she was sorry but she couldn’t be my apprentice any longer. She had seen the look of agony and indecision on my face as I had pulled the trigger and knew that she could never do what I did. She still had nightmares about Paulo killing himself in front of her, she confided. To take a life, she said, even one as heinous as Christian’s would be her undoing. She added that now she understood at least part of the reason for the scars on my mind. To do what I did and to have been through what I had, she wrote, and still be a caring soul took the strength and perseverance of a saint. The way she wrote it I could almost believe it, but then I reminded myself of all the people whose lives had been ruined as a result of Jae Kwon’s little experiment and I knew Terri was wrong. There was nothing saintly about me.
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