License to Ensorcell

by Katharine Kerr

  “Do you realize you talk about Chaos in two different ways? Sometimes it’s a force—like gravity, I suppose—and others, a personality.”

  “It partakes of both is why. Like light being both a wave and a particle—it all depends on how you look at it. In the Middle Ages, they personified the forces as demons with Satan in charge. Today we tend to think of electricity or some universal principle—the opposite of gravity, I’d say. Chaos makes things break up and fly apart. Gravity sticks them together, the universal principle of Order. Harmony goes beyond gravity to make everything work together. Too much gravity, and birds couldn’t fly. Not enough, and the air the birds fly in disperses into outer space.”

  “In a mad sort of way that makes sense.” Nathan glared at me again. “But only in a mad sort of way.”

  The only answer I could give to that was a shrug.

  Thinking of demons made me remember the bad Latin—Vide, daemona adest!—instead of the idiomatic ecce daemona, and, of course, vide was singular, not plural. Perhaps the group I’d contacted had been playing around with some invocation ritual, one that was supposed to call up a female demon. Or had Johnson been asking his Peacock King for a glimpse of the woman who was trying to track him down? Maybe vide referred only to one person after all: him. I turned cold all over. If so, I’d just tipped him off. The flying reptiles had gotten a good look at me even if no one else had.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathan said. “You’ve gone quite pale.”

  “Have I? Just tired, I guess. This stuff isn’t easy to pull off.” I could have kicked myself. I’d slammed a mental door in his face after he’d taken the risk of showing me something of himself.

  “No, I don’t suppose it is. You should get some sleep.”

  “Yeah. I should.” I got up and realized that I ached all over. “The procedure worked, all right. You know what they say, no pain, no gain.”

  Although I considered myself somewhere between a coward and a worm, I gathered up the candles, shoved them back into the suitcase, and started to take the whole mess into my bedroom. I’d just put my hand on the door when Nathan got up from the couch.

  “Nola,” he said, “do you like having these talents?”

  “No.” Here at least I could be honest. “I used to hate them, in fact, but they’re not going to go away, and so I might as well use them. I try to do so in ways that benefit everyone involved, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.”

  “I see. That’s how you stay sane, isn’t it? Not glorying in them, I mean.”

  “Yeah. You hit it in one.”

  His smile caught me, not the boyish grin, not the tiger, but just a smile. I felt myself starting to melt from the inside out.

  “See you in the morning.”

  I nipped into the bedroom before I liquefied right into his arms. Yet I have to admit I regretted my solid state for the first time in years.

  CHAPTER 7

  I WOKE TO A GRAY MORNING and the sound of Nathan’s voice, speaking English in short bursts. I sat up in bed and realized from the pauses that he was talking on the phone. A break in the case, maybe? I rolled out of bed, grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor, and put them on. I’d just finished pulling on a V-necked teal sweater when Nathan pounded on the door.

  “Nola, are you awake?” he said. “I’ve had a call from Sanchez.”

  “I am, yeah.” I opened the door and found him shivering just beyond, dressed in nothing but his jeans and a nice patch of curly brown hair on his chest. “You’re going to catch cold if you’re not careful.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. I thought California was going to be warm.”

  “Not in March. What did Sanchez have to say?”

  “There’s been another silver bullet murder.”

  I felt as sick as if I’d bitten into spoiled fruit.

  “This one’s all wrong, though,” Nathan continued. “Here, let me get dressed.”

  “Please do. I’ll be right out.”

  I put on socks and running shoes, used the bathroom, then trotted out to the living room and the smell of fresh coffee. Nathan, dressed in a gray sweater over jeans and a white shirt, emerged from the kitchen with two full mugs. I took one gratefully.

  “Why is it all wrong?” I said.

  “The victim was an obstetrics nurse at a hospital out on Geary Boulevard. She was coming home from the night shift, her usual shift.”

  “She couldn’t possibly have kept that job if she’d been a werewolf.”

  “Exactly, but of course I couldn’t tell Sanchez that.” Nathan paused for a sip of coffee. “I begin to see the difficulties you must have in your line of work. It must be nearly impossible to link up with the local authorities.”

  “Fortunately we don’t have to do it very often. Do you think this murder is a copycat?”

  “It could be, though casting silver bullets doesn’t strike me as an everyday skill. It could also be Johnson trying to throw your agency off the track.”

  “By making himself look like a common or garden variety serial killer? I can buy that. Does Sanchez want you to go down to the station?”

  “Not yet. I think he’s beginning to feel crowded out of his own territory.”

  “Gosh, I wonder why?”

  “So do I.” Nathan sounded honestly puzzled.

  I made a mental note to stop wasting my time on irony.

  “But at any rate,” Nathan continued, “we’ll hear later.” He rubbed his stubbled chin with one hand. “I need to shower and shave.”

  “You know, I’m still curious. Why do you use witch hazel instead of aftershave? Doesn’t it sting?”

  “They all sting. I’ve never seen any reason to stink of scent.” He made a face at me. “Flowers and all that.”

  “There are some musk and ginger ones.”

  “It’s still scent.”

  I let the subject drop.

  After he cleaned up, Nathan tried to push breakfast upon me. I held him off. It was bad enough watching him eat cold pizza. When he was finished, he paced back and forth in the apartment making various phone calls to mysterious non-English-speaking locations. He also received a lot of calls, which meant I got heartily sick of his phone’s more or less musical ring. It sounded so strange, played in the thin high electronic notes, that it took me a while to recognize the first few bars of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Once I realized what it was meant to be, it sounded even worse. I did my best to ignore it and him and logged onto the TranceWeb open board.

  Three of the four replies I’d gotten about the two William Johnsons stated what I already knew, that the situation I’d described was impossible. The fourth jerk thought I was posting a hoax “just to waste our time.” I left him a vicious reply and turned to e-mail. The code expert had picked up the scans of Johnson’s letters and promised he’d analyze them as soon as possible.

  In our archives I found what seemed at first to be plenty of information about Satanic groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, but most of the reports dated back twenty years or more. The original Church of Satan had pretty much folded its tents and moved out of town once Anton LaVey, the founder, had passed to the other side. Various of our stringers and agents had picked up traces of other covens, although they tended to confuse modern pagan and Wicca groups with Satanists. By the time I finished weeding out all those false leads, I had precious little hard information left, and not one mention of the Peacock Angel. I sent a sharp note to Y about educating our staff on the difference between Satanism and Wicca. I ended the session by posting my report on the previous night’s CDEP run.

  After he finished his phone calls, Nathan flopped onto the couch and grabbed the remote to channel surf. He found a soccer game, flipped on the sound, listened to the Spanish language commentary for a few seconds, then flipped the sound off again. He kept watching, though, utterly absorbed in the back and forth of the little white ball. I began indulging in domestic fantasies, pretending we were normal people, sitting around relaxing on
a foggy Sunday morning.

  Except of course, I had work to do. I decided to concentrate on the coven member I was mentally calling Sneezy, as in one of the seven dwarfs from the Disney movie. Not only had I gotten a definite impression of her mind, but her reaction to the overdose of resinous incense had given her a human touch, a point of empathy. Frankincense and myrrh—I’d always hated those sickly scents when I went to church with my mother, who favored a regressive Tridentine Mass community. The Magi probably brought the resins to the infant Jesus, or so I believed back then, to fumigate that crummy stable and drive out the bugs.

  Be that as it may, I took my pad and crayons into the kitchen to work. Before I did the LDRS, I decided to run a Search Mode: Personnel on Sneezy. I pictured her pale blue eyes looking out from the black hood, then let my mind range out in a light trance. Immediately I registered a cluster of emotions, sexual longing, confusion, fear, all of them floating around the blurred image of a man. When I focused down, I realized that the image existed as a memory in her mind. I broke the contact because I had no way of finding out if the male figure in the memories came from recent experience or from her past.

  Since Sneezy had no mental defenses, I felt some guilt about probing into her life, but not enough to stop me. The LDRS went splendidly. Even with my usual scrawled excuses for drawings I received clear glimpses of an expensive house: a large living room decorated in pink and white, heavy on the rose prints and gold accents, with bay windows that looked out onto a long lawn bordered with flowers. Sunday papers lay scattered on the floor beside her chair.

  The data began to flow faster. I started a new drawing with the scribbled figure of a man in the doorway. He seemed to match the blurry memory image I’d seen early. He also knew I was spying. I felt shoved away, snarled at, turned upon, but this time I ended the session myself before he could send the wave of pain my way.

  Johnson? I found it hard to believe that any woman could long for the man I’d seen in the photos and experienced in Search Mode. The mysterious DD maybe? I’d gotten a vague impression that he was young and had dark hair, just like Jerry had described, but those two details fit at least a million men in the Bay Area. If indeed it was DD, then Sneezy was fooling around with a dangerous toy. I sealed my mind from both of them.

  I took the drawings out into the living room and found Nathan still engrossed in his game. A glance at the screen told me that they were playing in the seventy-eighth minute, almost finished, not counting whatever penalty minutes had accrued. I set the LDRS sketches down by my computer and went into the bedroom to call my little brother.

  I tried to reach Michael’s cell phone—nothing. His phone must have malfunctioned again, I supposed. I checked the time, just past eleven, and tried Aunt Eileen’s landline. She answered on the second ring.

  “You must have gone to the early service Mass,” I said.

  “We did for a change, yes,” Aunt Eileen said. “It’s actually sunny over here, and Jim said he wanted to get church over with so he could work in the yard.”

  “Ah, that’s my uncle! Can I talk to Michael?”

  “He’s not here. He borrowed Jim’s truck and drove over to the park. At least, he said he was going to the park to look at something. That new girlfriend of his lives over on Anza, I think it is, so I’ll bet that’s where he really went.” She paused for a maternal chuckle. “It’s close enough to the park so he wasn’t technically lying.”

  “Hah! That’s probably why he turned off his phone.”

  “Very likely, yes. Anyway, he promised to be back by noon. He and Jim were going to go buy some more annuals for the floral borders.”

  “Okay, I’ll call later, or have him call me.”

  “I will. Have a good day off.”

  I ended the call and wondered why I felt dread like a knife between my shoulders. I remembered what Michael had told me about the “weird energy” in the doorway to nowhere. He’d gone to the park to “look at something.” The dread doubled. I went back to the living room.

  “Nathan?” I said.

  He made a sound like “wha urmph?”—the normal response of a guy interrupted while watching a game on TV.

  “I’ve got to get over to the park. Michael’s in trouble.”

  Unlike a normal guy, Nathan straightened up and switched off the box. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go get the car.”

  The dread kept me company the entire way over to the lake and the portal. I wanted to be wrong, prayed that Michael was hanging out at his girlfriend’s house, but I knew better deep inside. Sure enough, when we drove up to the lake, I saw Uncle Jim’s old red Chevy pickup parked on the side of the road. As Nathan pulled up behind it, I was unbuckling the safety belt and unlocking the door. The second he turned off the engine I got out and ran for the monument.

  “Michael!” I called out. “Mike, it’s me, Nola!”

  No answer, just the quacking of ducks and the rustle of the long streamers of willow leaves in the wind. I pulled out my phone and hit his number on the speed dial. Nothing, not one ring—I gave it up and put the phone away. By then Nathan had caught up with me.

  “He might have left the truck here and walked somewhere,” Nathan said.

  “A teen who’s just gotten his driver’s license? Walk?”

  “Improbable, yes.”

  I trotted up to the portal and gave it a good looking over. Although I felt nothing unusual, it struck me as somehow different than the day before. When I climbed up a step to examine the pillars, I saw a faint scratch running from top to bottom along the inside of the left column, as if a vandal had scraped a car key down it—an eight-foot-tall vandal, maybe. The right pillar bore a similar mark. When I pointed it out, Nathan leaned close to peer at it.

  “It almost looks burnt,” he said. “Just the scratch mark, though, nothing on the rest of the pillar, and there are no smoke stains.”

  I stepped through and back again without experiencing the slightest sensation of an energy field. Either the thing Michael had noticed had disappeared, or I simply wasn’t attuned to it.

  “Your pad and crayons are still in the car,” Nathan said. “Shall I get them?”

  “Please,” I said. “Or wait, I’ll come with you. I can sit in the backseat to draw.”

  As we started back along the path at a normal pace, I noticed the shallow bay, its water calm even though the wind rippled the deeper parts of the lake. I saw a change I’d missed on my frantic run to the doorway.

  “Look at the water right here,” I said. “It’s clear, no green scum. Even if the gardeners spread herbicide, it wouldn’t work that fast.”

  “They wouldn’t be working on the weekend anyway, would they?” Nathan said. “To skim it with nets, for instance.”

  “Not when they’d get double overtime, no.”

  In the trees beside the path a creature scuttled away with the snap of a twig. I caught a glimpse of a skinny blue tail, no fur, just scales. I turned fast and charged after it. One of the reptilian meerkats, all right—it tried to scamper up a tree, but I sketched a ward and flung the energy straight for its ugly little back. It squealed, then vaporized with a puff of yellow smoke.

  Chaos breach. Something had happened here that should never have happened in our part of the multiverse. Nathan was waiting on the path with his hands on his hips and his head cocked to one side, watching me. I ignored him and walked to the edge of the pond. I took a deep breath and opened myself to the vibrations. Ducks came quacking softly toward me, then scattered, flew up in a frenzy of terrified honking and the flapping of wings as a blue crackle of sheet lightning skittered over the bay.

  I shook my head and looked around. Ducks paddled calmly in the burned-clean shallows. The scene that I’d just perceived had occurred some while earlier in response to the Chaotic discharge, which had left a scar on the time stream. No ordinary electricity, whether natural or man-made, would have had that lingering effect. Nathan walked over to join me.

  “Some sort of ene
rgy release happened here,” I said. “I can’t tell you any more than that, except my little brother probably got caught in the middle of it.” I could hear my voice shake. “He looks a lot like me, and there’s a goddamn serial killer out there who might not be able to tell the difference between us, not from a distance, not with Mike’s long hair.”

  Nathan took a step toward me and held out his hand. I was tempted to take the offered comfort, but I turned away instead.

  “You can’t mean an ordinary explosive,” he said. “A pipe bomb or such. It would have destroyed the monument.”

  “Very true.” I breathed deeply and got myself under control. “No, this wasn’t anything ordinary like those—what do they call them? IEDs?”

  “Yes, improvised explosive devices.” He reached inside his jacket and took out his phone. “I’m going to call Sanchez.”

  “Are the police even going to take this seriously? If it weren’t for the circumstances, he could maybe have just wandered away somewhere into the park. Usually they don’t pay much attention to missing teens until it’s too late.”

  “Usually I’m not involved with the case.”

  “That’s true.” I managed to smile. “Let me try an LDRS first, okay? If he did just walk down to the men’s room it could be real embarrassing.”

  The LDRS turned up nothing. I tried for a solid fifteen minutes—nothing at all, just the same cold emptiness I’d felt on occasion when looking for Johnson. I sat half-crouched in the backseat of the car while Nathan paced back and forth on the grass outside and called Sanchez. I only heard snatches of what he said. I didn’t really want to hear more.

  An image rose in my mind, what the Agency calls a PI, a Possibility Image, something that might have happened, might happen, or maybe would never happen but could. Michael lay facedown on a pavement and bled from the mouth and nose. I tried to work with the image, but it refused to show me context. Only blood, a trickle of blood running across a dirty sidewalk—I killed the image before I screamed aloud. A cold rage filled my mind and heart. If these people, Johnson and DD, had harmed my family, I would make them pay. They would never regret anything in their lives the way they were going to regret harming Michael.