“No, sir,” I said as calmly as I could manage. “I’m not, but how can you tell?”
“You don’t smell like her.”
The danger warning disappeared. I tossed the ensorcellment Qi over my shoulder and let it scatter. His statement made me suspect that he was a shape-shifter, a lycanthrope,
most likely, judging by the silver at the temples of his thick black hair. He gestured in the direction of the living room with a wave of his gun.
“Come out, will you?” he said. “It’s only hope that makes me so damn rude.”
“I’m sorry.” I put as much sympathy in my voice as I could muster. “I’m afraid she’s really gone. I’m a psychic. I’ve seen her—well, I guess we can say ghost, though that’s not exactly what I saw.”
He stared at me for another long moment, then nodded. His entire body twitched as if it longed to deny the truth. “Okay,” he said. “I don’t suppose you know how—”
“I do, but please, let’s get out of this moldy bathroom.”
He laughed, a rueful sort of sound, and agreed.
The living room was full of cops: the three TWIXT men and three uniformed SanFran officers, one lieutenant and two sergeants, one of whom, a tall blond, looked oddly familiar. Hafner’s command staff, I figured, and they’d drawn their guns. My father had turned dead pale and retreated to a corner of the room. He’d wrapped the gray fog around him again and pressed himself so tightly against the wall that I doubted if the police had even noticed him. Ari stood by the window, his arms crossed over his chest. When I joined him, he put his arm around my shoulders.
“Very well, gentlemen,” Hafner said. “My apologies for the raid. I received some faulty information.”
I could feel Ari’s surprise at this admission. I was surprised, myself. Hafner was turning out to be very different than the monster of corruption we’d been expecting. Still, when I sampled his SPP, I sensed a heart of iron. He’d killed men to get the job he held, and he saw absolutely nothing wrong with that. He was also still holding his Colt .45.
Spare14 stepped forward. “We have a confession to make, Chief. The three of us are CBI men. Miss O’Grady here is a certified police psychic and a distant relation of your missing woman.”
Hafner laughed with one quick bark. Werewolf—I was growing more sure by the minute. The other officers moved with a peculiar gliding walk to stand behind him. A pack of werewolves, actually—I remembered my glimpse of the
moon from the night before. We had a week before they changed, and I thanked Whomever for it.
“We’re tracking a renegade Maculate,” Spare14 continued, “a professional ape-hunter.” He sighed and softened his voice. “I’m afraid that—”
Hafner froze, staring at him. “No, please God, no, not that.” He caught his breath with sob. “He didn’t—”
“I’m afraid you see what I was getting at. I’m very sorry.”
Hafner tipped his head back as if he were going to howl in grief, then shook himself. As he returned his gaze to Spare14, I sampled the Chief’s Qi—iron heart, iron control, genuine grief. “I do see,” Hafner said. “You’re sure of this?”
“Very sure.” Spare14 glanced my way. “O’Grady?”
“There’s no doubt that she’s passed over,” I said. “As I told the chief, I saw my cousin’s revenant.”
I won’t wholly die.
Nuala’s remark took on a grisly new meaning. “She told me something that fits with the other evidence, the things we know that make the Maculate the most likely suspect.”
Hafner bowed his head and stared at the carpet.
Ari stepped forward. “We have evidence that the Spottie’s joined Storm Blue. We came here, actually, to search for two hostages that the Axeman’s holding. We ran across the Spottie—he calls himself Claw—during the course of our investigation.”
Hafner looked up. “Let me see your IDs.”
All three of the men produced the little leather cases. Hafner checked them carefully, not that I blamed him. I glanced at the spot where I’d last seen my father, but he was gone, maybe into the bedroom, more likely a good bit farther away than that. I figured he’d return when he could be sure the police had left.
“Very well, gentlemen.” Hafner holstered the Colt at last. When his officers did the same, the tension in the room eased.
“We’ve received some interesting information about this gang,” Spare14 said. “Are you aware they’re planning a strike on your position?”
“I’ve heard rumors but no real evidence. Is it true?”
“Very true. If you’d care to sit down, I’ll explain. Oh, by
the way, Agent Nathan has discovered the addresses of their two safe houses.”
Hafner looked at Ari and smiled, an expression that made him look more murderous than ever, thanks to his very white strong teeth. “Good job,” he said. “I think we’ve got some planning to do. Assuming, of course, that the CBI will agree to a joint operation.”
“We’d like nothing better,” Spare14 said. “After all, Chief, this is your territory, not ours, though we would like to have custody of the Maculate.” He paused and gave Hafner a glance loaded with meaning. “Should he survive the raids, that is, which may not be possible.”
“If he survives, of course I’ll remand.” Hafner smiled again. “But I’m afraid these raids are a dangerous business.”
“Understood.” Spare14 nodded and passed a death sentence on Claw with the gesture. “Now then, would you care to sit down?”
The police contingent stayed for a good hour while Hafner and Spare14 planned out a complicated operation. Hafner and his lieutenant would lead coordinated raids on the two safe houses while the TWIXT team—or the CBI men as the Chief thought of them—would control the Playland operation. Hafner would supply extra officers, however, as reinforcements.
“Timing’s everything,” Hafner said. “We also need to plant a leak about the safe house raids in advance. We want to draw as many gunners off the Playland site as possible. I don’t want any dead hostages.”
“Neither do we,” Spare14 said dryly. “I quite agree about the plant.”
They returned to discussing details. While I listened, I continued to feel the sense of dread that had woken me. Yet it never coalesced into an ASTA or SAWM. I could judge, therefore, that I was in no particular danger personally, not at the moment, anyway. By concentrating, I managed to extend the field, as it were, to the men in the room. No, none of them were in danger, either, nor did it apply to my father. Who? I sat very still and let images rise into my consciousness.
Major Grace. I felt a cold chill around my heart when I saw a memory image of her open office door. Anyone could have been in the hallway when she told us about the safe houses.
I pulled myself back to the moment. The men had fallen silent to allow the tall blond sergeant to write notes. He sat at Spare14’s desk, his head bent as he worked in a notebook with a fountain pen. Now that I was no longer terrified that the cops were going to shoot us all, I recognized him, a doppelgänger of Lawrence Grampian. Werewolves, for sure!
“You don’t need a plant,” I said. “Storm Blue already knows about the safe house leak. They’ve got a spy in Mission House.” I turned to Ari. “They’re going to send someone after Major Grace.”
Ari swore in Hebrew. Jan laid an automatic hand on his shoulder holster. Spare14 glanced at his watch.
“Nearly noon,” he said. “They’ll be serving lunch at the mission. The doors will be open to anyone.”
“I’ll go over and warn her,” Ari said. “If that’s acceptable. I don’t want to trust a phone call. The spy could be listening to her end of the conversation.”
“Quite true, and she’s a stubborn woman when it comes to trusting in her God. Very well. The Chief and I will finish up the last few details here. O’Grady, go with Nathan. You’ll be able to persuade her of the danger better than the rest of us can.”
As we walked over to Mission House, I gathered Qi. With every stride closer we took, the sense of danger increased. I began to wrap Qi around itself into a loose skein, ready to be tightened into a sphere once we stopped walking and I could concentrate.
At a side door of the grim gray building a line had already formed for the meal: mostly women and children again, but even the men were all thin, ragged, and oddly quiet. The children leaned against their mothers or sat down on the ground to wait. Few smiled. Neither did any of the adults.
“Can we go straight in?” I said.
“I’d rather not attract attention,” Ari said. “Is she in immediate danger?”
I ran a quick Personnel scan. “No. She’s in some kind of a meeting with other people around her.”
We got in line just behind a handful of young men, all of whom looked ill: scrawny, pale, and exhausted. The sun shone in a flood of the orange light through the perennial dust clouds. In that glare everyone looked as flushed as if we’d been caught in an epidemic of fever. One of the men in front of us started coughing, a rasping deep cough that ended when he spat up into a scrap of cloth.
“That’s blood,” another guy said to him.
“Just a little,” he said.
The other guy shrugged, and neither spoke again.
The side door opened. The line began to file into a long, low-ceilinged room crammed with oblong plank tables, each covered with clean butcher paper. At the far end stood a long cafeteria-style counter, where young men in the black-and-maroon uniform of their army were filling bowls with soup. Each person got a plate with a bowl of soup and a chunk of white bread. Everyone said thank you and looked glad to get it.
Ari and I exchanged a glance and stepped out of line. “Let’s go upstairs,” Ari murmured. “Is that where she is?”
I was about to agree when a door behind the counter opened and Major Grace walked out. The danger warning stabbed at me.
“No,” I said. “She’s right here.”
We took a few steps away from the line and stood up against the cheerfully yellow wall of the dining room. I gathered more Qi, wound and wrapped it tighter and tighter. The young men who’d been in front of us went through the line and brought their trays to a table off to one side. The guy with the cough took a mouthful of warm soup and began to hack stuff up again. His friends ignored him.
The tables filled up with oddly silent diners. Occasionally, a child cried or called out. Even more rarely an adult said something to the person next to them. Major Grace walked through the room, stopping at every table to greet the diners, smiling at the children, conversing briefly with the adults she knew.
Eventually, she reached the guy with the bad cough. He’d finished eating and slumped down in his chair. When Major Grace stopped and spoke to him, he raised his head and tried to smile. The effort brought on the racking cough. He twisted, choked, and fell out of his chair sidewise onto the floor. Someone shouted. The Major called out for help. The diners at the nearby tables turned in their chairs to look. Several people rose to see what was causing the confusion. Behind her, I saw a man with a shaved head stand up and pull a knife from his boot.
I hurled the Qi like a fastball, overhand and straight into his chest. It hit with a flash of silver enveloping light. The knife flew into the air, then clattered on the floor. He screamed, twitched, gibbered, and fell forward onto his face. Women screamed, and children wailed in terror. The friends of the man who’d fainted grabbed him and pulled him out of the way. Ari ran to the Major’s side with the Beretta drawn and ready.
I made my way through a thinning, noisy crowd, but I noticed that even as the diners pulled away from the tables where the incident had taken place, they carried their food with them. Ari lunged forward and grabbed a pale, heavyset man by the collar. He swung him around and whacked him across the face with the Beretta. The guy howled in pain as blood spurted from his nose and lips. A second knife clattered to the floor.
Major Grace knelt by the man I’d rendered harmless and stared into his face. He smiled at her, the usual mindless gape of the ensorcelled. His wide-open eyes displayed less intelligence than your average sheep. His fingers twitched to some unheard rhythm, and he giggled. I knelt down beside her.
“All right,” Major Grace said. “Rose, what are you?”
“A certified police psychic.”
“That’s not what I meant. Are you a human being?”
“Huh? Yes, of course I am.”
“Can you tell me outright that you’re not a demon? They have to answer when you ask them, or so I’ve been told.”
“No problem.” I made the sign of the cross for good
measure. “I am neither demon nor angel, only a human weirdo.”
Major Grace managed a smile at that. “What did you do to this fellow to make him have that fit?”
“Ensorcelled him with extra Qi. You can call it ‘life force,’ if you prefer. Nothing more than that. He’ll be back to normal in a couple of hours.”
“Nothing more, hum?” Major Grace shook her head and laughed under her breath. “All right, if you say so.” She gave me a wry smile. “Thank you. It was obvious what he had in mind.”
“Yeah, he must be from Storm Blue. That’s who we’re tracking. Eric is a CBI agent. Or I should say, his name’s not Eric. It’s Ari Nathan.”
“You two should be on the stage. I was totally taken in.” She sighed and glanced away. “That’s hard to do.”
“I hated lying to you.” Which was true, even though I’d just fudged a few more facts. “Storm Blue really is holding my brother Sean prisoner, if that’s any consolation.”
“It is, yes. Thank you.”
We stood up. Ari had holstered the gun. He’d also bound the accomplice’s hands behind his back with the guy’s own belt and made him lie facedown on the floor. He stood nearby and talked into his TWIXT communicator. Major Grace looked the prisoner over.
“Jason, a new recruit,” she said, “or so we thought.”
With the incident under control, the diners in the room went on eating. No doubt they’d seen worse.
A small group of Army personnel rushed into the dining room. They clustered around Major Grace and all began to talk. One of the women was weeping with a run of silent tears down her face. I felt a trace of ASTA at the door and spun around in time to see a familiar blonde girl slipping out of the room. I’d seen her before, sitting in Mike’s lap and sleeping in his bed.
“Ari,” I said, “A Storm Blue girl just ran. The news is going to get back to the Axeman.”