“Sweet dreams,” he told Lora as she went off to her room. He looked toward the sunrise, his mind already busy with plans for the day. Lora would attempt to spend her sleeping hours inside the mind of her future lover. When the attempt proved less than successful her frustration would be even harder to deal with when she woke. It was likely that Lora would be driven to do something foolish that would probably get her killed. What happened to the young vampire and her mortal victim wasn’t important; distracting Olympias was. Destroying her would be even better. Someone should have destroyed her before the vampire found her in the wild forests.
No, no, he warned himself as he watched the sky lighten, don’t let the hate control you. Tuck the schemes to rule the night away, put it deep, deep down where Rose will never try to look for it. You don’t own Rose yet, she owns you still. Let yourself love her, that’s easy, and all Rose cares about. Live your daylight life where there’s so much to do. He had an appointment to keep today, on Rose’s business, but first he’d settle down for a few hours’ sleep beside his vampire lover.
He took a long sip of tea from which the ice had long ago melted. “And for the gods’ sake,” he murmured, resisting the urge to lift the glass and salute the chariot of Apollo, “whatever you do, don’t let yourself live in the past.”
He prided himself on his honesty and clarity of purpose, so he let himself recall that in the past, Olympias had always won.
“Can you believe it?” Grace spoke to the rest of the Walking team as though Falconer wasn’t there, as the three stragglers shuffled in and took places around the meeting room table. “Mike was mugged last night.”
He lifted his aching head and said, “Colonel Falconer.” It would not do any good, of course, to remind the assembled crew of loons that he was their commanding officer. Even though he wore a suit—not his uniform during business hours—he did occasionally try to tone down the loons’ enthusiasm with reminders of his rank. Maybe all he really could claim to be was the senior loon, but he tried.
He wished he hadn’t told Grace someone had attacked him, but she’d made such a fuss about his bruises when he walked into the meeting room and found her already there. Maybe he’d blurted out the answers to her volley of questions because he’d been in such shock at seeing one of his people in early. Now that Sela, Jeremy, and Donald had dragged themselves one by one into the meeting room on the second floor of the highly classified Walker Project’s Rosslyn office space, Grace Avella began to regale them with the story.
Grace was a California girl who’d come to Washington to go to college. Donald was from the Midwest and studied at Gallaudet. Jeremy had been involved with various government psychic development programs for a long time before being accepted as a Walker. Sela was a single mother with kids in college. She’d been an admin assistant with the Bureau before taking on the same sort of job with the Walker Project as well as being one of the Walker team. Sela, Grace, and Donald had become involved with the project through volunteering for a university paranormal perceptions study that had initially screened more than two thousand people. Though these three were the only ones who’d made the cut into this highly classified program, none of the three seemed to realize how very special they were.
“Well, maybe not mugged, since he wasn’t robbed,” Grace rushed on. “Attacked. He doesn’t remember the details,” she explained to the others, her big eyes and pretty Hispanic features conveying righteous outrage. She gestured expressively at Donald as she spoke. “He remembers that it happened not that far from his house. In Georgetown, can you believe it? Okay, maybe it’s not that hard to believe; people get mugged even in nice neighborhoods. At least he wasn’t hurt too badly—but look at those bruises on his throat and jaw. This could be useful, though.”
Grace took a deep breath, which gave the others around the table a chance to jump in and get a few words out before Grace got going again. Falconer sat back and watched them. If he didn’t ache all over, both body and brain, he might have smiled with a certain paternal fondness at the four Walkers. Okay, they were loons, but they were his loons.
Donald was deaf, but he could sign as fast as Grace could talk, and he did so now. Everyone else on the team more or less understood and used American Sign Language. “Useful how? You’re looking gleeful about our leader’s getting hurt. Why?”
Grace’s enthusiasm flowed out and filled the room. Falconer thought even the psychically blind could have felt it. What Grace had in spades was what could be called charisma, he supposed. Everyone in the room had it, in one degree or another. He guessed even he qualified.
He looked suspiciously down the table at Grace. “What brings on this wave of emotion you’re leaking? Joy at my pain?”
“No! But I think your pain offers us an opportunity.” Her glance took them all in. “Why don’t we try to find out who mugged Mike?”
“I don’t think that’s—” Jeremy began.
“We’ve been talking about trying some nonlinear Walking, haven’t we?”
The others nodded.
Jeremy cast a sheepish glance at Falconer. “In unofficial discussions, sir.”
“What do you mean nonlinear?” Falconer asked. He hated when they tried to change procedure on him, which they frequently did. “The parameters of our project clearly delineate—”
“Don’t you just love it when he talks like that?” It was Sela who interrupted this time.
They had no respect, no discipline, none at all. And they were all too blasted clever. How was he supposed to impose order on psychic chaos when—?
“I’ve met this guy who works at the GAO a couple of times,” Grace said. “Very psi-positive, very intelligent. Cute, too. We ought to recruit him.” She held her hands up before her. “Not that I’ve ever mentioned the project to him.”
“And what has this guy got to do—?”
“He’s done a lot of experimenting on his own with projecting consciousness. Been Walking, astral projecting, but without controls or goals or documentation. There is literature out on the Internet about the sort of thing we do.”
Jeremy snorted. “Not that Distance Viewing crap. Those experiments were terminated—”
“Doesn’t mean the theory wasn’t sound,” Sela said.
“From the documents I’ve read—”
“Yes, yes, your clearance is higher than our clearance,” Grace teased Jeremy. He had a tendency to be pompous, and the others loved pricking his self-importance. Grace was a natural born experimenter and risk taker. Falconer generally encouraged her to be innovative. But this time he wasn’t too happy when she proposed, “Let’s concentrate on pinpointing an incident in the past. I think it could be done using a variation of this man’s technique. He’s run some nonlinear experiments that I’ve participated in.”
“What?” Falconer demanded in growing alarm. “You are not supposed to participate in anything outside this building.”
“I have a social life.” She grinned at him. “Never fear, beloved leader. These were past-life regression workshops.”
Sela laughed. “You met this guy at a New Age fair, didn’t you?”
“I met him at a bar . . . which has New Age classes in the back room,” Grace admitted. “But the point is,” she hurried on, “his methods worked for me.”
“You discovered you were Nefertiti in a past life?” Sela asked.
“No. Normal people with normal lives.”
Which is more than can be said about your life now, Donald signed.
“True.” She looked thoughtful. “Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be a good idea to recruit this guy. He’s brilliant and incredibly psychic, but he’s way too into believing he used to be some ancient Greek king.” She looked around the table at her Walking comrades. “Don’t think he has the mental stability that showed up on all our test scores.”
“And I’m still wondering how each of you cheated on those,” Falconer contributed. “Except for you, of course, Jeremy,” he added when a dark look was
turned his way from the one member of the team who would never think of breaking a rule. You’d think someone like Jeremy would be a stabilizing influence on this group, but even Falconer, who was supposed to approve of people who followed orders, thought of Jeremy as something of a pest. Jeremy was very good at Walking, however, and they all respected his psychic talents.
“What we’re supposed to be doing today is more important than trying to Walk into the past.” He doubted it could be done. Besides, he didn’t want to go there. Whatever it was that had happened—he couldn’t think about it. There was blackness when he tried to think about what had really—
Sweat broke out on his forehead, fear gripped him, the room went dark and disappeared—
“You feel that?”
“Brrr . . . temperature must have dropped twenty degrees.”
“Something wrong with the air conditioning?”
“No. Thermostat’s fine.”
“That cold’s not from this world, children. Look.”
The first voice Falconer recognized was Sela’s. The touch of her warm hand on his shoulder was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes. No, when the blackness went away. His eyes had not been shut. His gaze focused on a round, dark-skinned face. The concern in Sela’s coppery eyes was palpable. He smiled, not to reassure her, or the other three Walkers crowded around him. He smiled, because he knew, knew though thinking about it was painful, that someone had been messing with his mind.
Sela returned his smile and stood back as Falconer got to his feet. His emotions were shaky, but he didn’t let it show in how he moved, or in his voice. “Maybe we will give Grace’s nonlinear Walking a try. But,” he added, duty coming first, “not until after we get today’s assignment over with. Study the satellite photos in the files your controllers have prepared for you, do your Walk and report. Then meet me back here afterwards, if you’re feeling up to it.”
Mess with me, and I’ll turn every paranormal resource of the U.S. military on your ass, he thought at the unknown source of his fear and disorientation. As far as he knew that resource included five psychics and a small staff that were facing budget cuts, but any weapon against the dark was better than none.
“We’ll be here,” Grace promised for all of them. Sela gave him a long, worried look, then shepherded the others out of the meeting room.
“What do you think?” Maggie asked anxiously, her voice hardly above a whisper.
Sara exchanged a look with Gerry. He sighed. Sara handed the file back to Maggie and said quietly, “What do I think? I think he’s perfect.”
Maggie Donner smiled. She tucked the file back into her briefcase, then she noticed Sara and Gerry’s tense expressions. “You asked me to find her some new recruits. If this guy’s perfect, what’s wrong with him?”
“He’s not a permanent resident,” Sara said,
“I could introduce him to Olympias,” Maggie suggested. “Let her decide.”
“She’d agree with me,” Sara answered. “He has great potential, but recruiting him would be a waste of our resources.”
“I see your point, Sara, but good help is hard to find. With only a few of us, we’re getting more spread out all the time,” Gerry said to Sara. “I’m bogged down with the census at the moment.”
“Trying to find out the exact number and location of every strigoi in the country is a pretty big job,” Sara agreed with him. “Especially with the trouble the data you came up with is going to cause the locals. I’ve been thinking that it might be wise for you to be out of town when the natives get the news. Don’t want any nest leader taking a dislike to a lowly slave who was only obeying orders. Maybe you could go to Denver to personally check out what happened to the missing nest there. Olympias isn’t happy with the Denver Enforcer not knowing where they went.”
Gerry nodded. “But I can’t be gone too long. Too much to do here.” He crossed his arms and said all too casually, “About Maggie’s potential recruit—”
“He’s a congressman,” Sara cut him off.
“Which would make him useful,” Maggie said.
Sara looked around the cool, shadowy interior of the cathedral. The three of them were standing like a group of tourists beneath one of the lovely stained glass windows. No one was nearby, but she waved them to a row of pews where they’d have a bit more privacy. Once they were seated on the needlepoint cushions in the middle of the long pew, Sara explained. “Congressmen come and go. If Olympias chose to make him a slave, we’d have to work for him as much as he’d work for her. The point is to lighten our workload by recruiting new blood—not to end up adding keeping this guy in office to what we already do. We serve Olympias, not a congressional reelection committee. Right, Gerry?”
He gave a reluctant nod. “I’d love to have a congressman on staff, but I suppose we can’t spare the resources to maintain him in office. I think we should keep him in mind. Let’s stick with career bureaucrats for now. We do need to build up a larger organization before we can promote our agenda within the elected federal government.”
“We don’t have an agenda,” Sara reminded the gung ho slave. “We live to serve Olympias’s agenda.” She thought they’d been through this yesterday and he’d leave it alone for a while.
“She doesn’t have an agenda. All she cares about anymore are the Enforcers. Grant you, that’s plenty of work for one vampire, but her responsibilities entail so much more. She’s ultimately responsible for every strigoi in the country.”
“She’s responsible for keeping the underneath world secret,” Maggie cut in. “Having a congressman on staff could help that. But I do see the problems it would entail as well,” she conceded. She brightened. “Can we bag him if he gets elected to the Senate? Six years are better than two.”
“I could see going with that,” Sara replied.
Gerry nodded at Maggie. “Good idea. We’ll introduce him to Olympias and see what she thinks.”
“I don’t suppose he’s companion material?” Sara asked. She had to fight down a pang of jealousy at the thought of Olympias with a companion—but she did live to serve, and her mistress had been without a psychic lover for a long time.
Maggie shook her head. “Sorry. I haven’t met anyone talented enough to ring our lady’s chimes.”
“Keep looking.”
“I think she needs more people like us than she does a bunny,” Gerry went on. “There is so much more she could accomplish with a larger staff and a more active role in the daylight world.”
Sara gestured for him to calm down. She whispered when she said, “That isn’t the strigoi way.”
“But we could help her see that it should be. She has blinders on and is far too content with the status quo set down hundreds of years ago.”
“Then so are we.” How Sara hated that she and Gerry got into this argument. “Let it go. I mean it. Do what she tells you.”
“But—”
“Can we get back to current business?” Maggie asked. She checked her watch. “I’m due back on the Hill in an hour.” Maggie never missed the chance to act the high-powered Washington career woman. She was an attorney with a large lobbying firm, as well as a vampire’s mortal possession. She was also a slave in charge of other watchdog slaves in various agencies, PACS, and committee staffs.
“Gerry and I have a lunch meeting,” Sara said. “Then I have a great many things to report to Olympias tonight. Anything else?” she asked Maggie.
“There’s a party in a couple of nights that Olympias will want to get to. A lot of needy program heads will be wining and dining and whining to a lot of appropriations people. There’s a few black ops types who’ll be begging there. Might be a good place for her to read some dirty military minds.”
“I’ll mention it to her,” Sara said.
“I know a congresswoman on an appropriations committee. I’ll make sure she gets an invitation to Olympias,” Maggie said.
They all got up and checked their watches. “Time to go,” Maggie said.
Sara and Gerry let Maggie leave the cathedral before them. When she was gone, Sara said, “Let’s go have a talk with this companion from Alexandria.” She wasn’t looking forward to it, but a slave had to do what a slave had to do. Besides, all she and Gerry had to do was deliver the bad news. It was up to Olympias, Enforcer of the City, to enforce it.
Chapter 3
“YOU ARE DEAD.”
“I make it a habit not to stay that way.”
She looked away from the thick-bodied man, with his scarred face and its one mocking eye. She noticed that she wore a dress of dark red wool; heavy gold jewelry hung from her neck and her ears, while gold snake bracelets wrapped her arms. Though the wool of her clothing was finely woven, its texture was rough and barbaric against her skin. The colored tiles of a mosaic floor pressed against her bare feet. The chill of mountain air pricked her skin. She shivered and recognized that she was in her bedchamber, though the walls were made of mist.
“You are a barbarian,” the man, her enemy, said. “Don’t you remember?”
“I’ve never denied it.” She held her head up proudly, graying curls tumbling around the chiseled planes of her face. She never showed him fear, not even when he beat her. Especially when he beat her.
He was drunk, she could smell the sour wine, and saw it in the evil glint in his one good eye. He was always at his worst in his cups. That ran in his blood, the love of drink and the viciousness that came with it. He’d passed that on to their son. That, and a genius for killing. She blessed the gift of war and cursed him for giving any weakness to her strong, beautiful boy.
Laws of the Blood 4: Deceptions: Deceptions Page 3
