Once Bitten, Twice Shy (24 page)

"Wait," said Bergman as I reached for the latch. Another couple of seconds passed and then I heard a final click. Bergman nodded, so I turned the knob. As the door swung open Vayl said, "Just remember Bergman, sooner or later you will have to give us a way to get inside without the benefit of your eyeball."

"No problem. As soon as all our stuff is unloaded I'll modify the system."

I stepped into the front hall and a piercing whistle stopped me in my tracks. Knowing Bergman, if I moved any further a cannon would descend from the ceiling and blow my head off.

"What is that?" Vayl asked as Bergman came in to give me a critical look.

I held up my hands. "I didn't do anything."

"But you did. That's a wavelength sensor. You're sending some sort of signal."

"Is it the watch?" I asked, snapping the band to see if that stopped the alarm. Nope.

Bergman had run out to the van. He brought back a box, dug around inside and came out with a hand-held wand that looked like a super-sized cigarette lighter. Starting at my head, he swept it down my body. As soon as it reached my navel it sent out its own warning beep.

I raised my shirt. "It's your belly-ring," Bergman said, adding urgently, "Give it to me."

I took it off and handed it to him. He jumped back into the van, started it up and raced off. In the time it took us to figure out how to turn the alarm off he returned. "I planted it on an ice-cream truck. Whoever's following that signal will hopefully zero in on the truck and forget the signal stopped here for a couple of minutes."

"Pete said I had to break it to activate it. That only then would our backup team get involved."

Bergman grimaced. "Somebody activated it remotely."

"The same somebody who supplied it in the first place?" wondered Vayl.

"Well it's not one of mine," said Bergman.

"That's how they found us," I said. "Those God's Arm fakes on the road. Liliana at the restaurant. Mr. and Mrs. Magoo in the hotel. All they had to do was follow the belly-ring signal." I clenched my jaw, trying not to kick a hole in the wall. "When I get hold of this senator I'm going to rip his ears off and stuff them down his throat."

"What about the Raptor?" Vayl asked.

"I'll leave him to you, as long as you promise to make it vile.
God
, that pisses me off!" The anger wasn't going to help me think clearly though, so I tried to walk it off by exploring the house. Its interior lived up to the exterior's promise. Wooden floors, colorful throw rugs, overstuffed furniture and antique accessories in twisted iron and oak made the house feel like the set for one of the daytime dramas Granny May used to love to watch. She called them her "stories," and never failed to shake her head sadly when last season's true love became this season's big breakup.

I just about had it back under control once we unloaded Bergman's van into the living room, a light, airy place with pale blue beadboard walls and a huge fishing net hanging from the ceiling. A long, mahogany bar separated it from the kitchen/feed-a-party-of-thirty dining room. A hallway, painted pastel green, led to three bedrooms and a bathroom. Stairs just to the right of the doorway led to a large family room, a home office and a master bedroom with a view that made me wish I could sail. I thought there might be some truth to the idea that surroundings influence mood. Maybe I should paint my apartment.

Once everything was in, Cassandra and I started unpacking while Bergman and Vayl set everything up. Several of the boxes held computer components, and before long they'd transformed the dining room table into a communications center. Four PCs sat back to back, connected to each other, the Internet and a central printer through a maze of cords that lay like a big, sloppy coil basket in the middle of them all. Our laptop sat beside them and yet separate, a snooty, secretive step-sister. The table was so long that half of it still remained free for other purposes.

Bergman and Vayl began setting up a mini lab on the bar while Cassandra stored the empty boxes in a downstairs bedroom, so I got to work elsewhere.

"Jaz, why did you rearrange the furniture?" Bergman asked a few minutes later, staring curiously at me over a row of shiny glass beakers.

"What do you mean? I'm just—" I looked around the living room and realized I'd done it again. Without any conscious thought, as though an entire section of my brain had switched to blackout mode, I'd reproduced the same design I'd created at Diamond Suites. "What the hell?" I murmured.

Cassandra came down the hallway, took a look at my little project and sent me a look of trepidation that cut straight to my heart. Vayl's forehead creased and the corners of his lips drooped. For him it was the equivalent of a thunderous frown.

"You deceived me about this, didn't you?" he demanded, waving his hand to indicate the new room arrangement. "This is not how it once looked at your house." I shook my head. "What else have you lied to me about? I cannot abide liars." His tone, straight out of the Knucklecrackers Handbook for Schoolmarms, made me grit my teeth. Before I could defend myself, or launch a vase at his head, or plan a massive spitball campaign with Jimmy and Susie that would probably get us expelled but would be well worth the trouble, Cassandra spoke up.

"I may be able to explain that better than Jasmine."

She brought out the smallest of her four suitcases and set it on the ottoman I'd moved from its spot beside the couch not five minutes earlier. Now it sat center stage. I sank onto the couch beside her. Vayl, still looking irritated, sat opposite us in a wing chair upholstered in blue twill.

Cassandra opened the case, reached into it and brought out a foot-high pyramid made of multicolored glass orbs, each about the size of a large marble. I moved the case out of the way and Cassandra gently set the piece on the ottoman.

"Is this what I think it is?" I asked.

"The Enkyklios," she said, nodding. "My vision of your… my second vision is recorded here." She touched the top marble of the pyramid and the whole thing shivered in response. "You may want to watch this in private."

"No," I said, challenging Vayl with my glare, "let's keep this all wide open. That way nobody can accuse me of more lies, and later we can talk about how
I
can't abide people who leap to judgment!" I let the anger carry me, give me the strength to sit in the living room like a regular person rather than lock myself in a closet like a scared kid. It's hard, it hurts to stop hiding. Riding another, and probably my last, wave of anger, I said, "Let's do this."

She pressed on the top marble, which bent but didn't break, like the Jell-O molds Granny May used to make because she thought we liked the taste of rubbery strawberry letters and two-legged elephants.

"
Enkyklios occsallio vera proma
," Cassandra whispered. Well, that's what it sounded like anyway. She kept going, reeling off a list of words that sounded like Latin but weren't. As she spoke the marbles shivered again, then began to roll in random directions, though they never completely lost touch. It reminded me of clock gears, and yet no one movement seemed to trigger another.

The pyramid undid itself, rolling into a variety of other forms that resembled the prow of a ship, a sailor's hat, a Harley Davidson, a strand of DNA.

"That is so cool," I whispered, despite my pounding heart and a nauseating fear of how Vayl would react to the new discovery. Bergman had left his lab/computer center, a miracle in itself, and sidled over to the empty wing chair. He stood behind it, looking as if he wanted to attack the Enkyklios with a bat.

At last the marbles stood in vertical rows of three, forming a sort of plateau with a single, bluish-gold globe sitting above the rest. "Is that me?" I whispered, feeling a little faint as Cassandra nodded.

"Are you ready?" she asked. I rubbed sweaty palms down my pants.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get it done." My voice sounded fake in my own ears, a recording in definite need of a remix.

She touched the marble and said, "
Dayavatem
!" She pulled her hand away and sat back, making room for the images that rose from it, digital quality holographs in living color and sound.

I saw myself, 14 months younger and light years closer to innocence, sitting in the living room of what looked like an old frat house. The stuffing peeked out of several holes in the couch and love seat, the coffee table had once been a working door that now sat on a double-high pile of cement blocks, and the chairs only rocked because their legs were uneven.

"Look, Jaz," said Bergman, "the furniture in the picture is arranged the same way you did it just now."

"The same way she
always
does it," Vayl said, folding his arms across his chest.

"Since you're so determined to be mad at me, go right ahead," I said, "but the fact is I never knew why I kept moving the furniture around. I wasn't usually even aware I was doing it. Then you said something, and it seemed like such a strange thing to do," I shrugged, "I made up a reason so you wouldn't think I was crazy."

Did I detect a slight softening in Vayl's expression, or was I just fishing? Never mind. The show had gone on. In a room it hurt my heart to see again, my band of Helsingers and I sat around the recycled door playing a card game I knew I'd been good at but could no longer remember the name of.

I could tell we meant to go back out, because we still wore our uniforms. Superman Suits, we called them, feather-lite body armor encased in navy blue leather. We were all high on adrenalin and success, toasting each other like German bobsledders, eating pizza for God's sake. Pizza.

The room tilted and nearly took me with it. But Vayl's hand on my shoulder steadied me. I looked up, grateful he still thought enough of me to leave his chair. He settled on the arm of the couch beside me.

"I only remember bits of this," I said, sensing that explanations might keep me from falling headfirst into the nightmare that, until now, had only played itself out behind my eyelids. "That's Matt on my left. He'd just turned 26 two weeks before. The tan is from the trip we'd taken to Hawaii to celebrate." My throat closed on the words, and for a minute I couldn't speak.

Matt and I sat on the couch, talking softly while the others played out the hand. Brad and Olivia, a married couple from Georgia, sat in the tattered love seat that met our couch at 45 degrees. They took turns throwing red plastic chips into the growing pile and teasing each other about losing the down payment on their house in a single hand.

Dellan, a muscle-bound vamp who'd been turned in the 60s, sat on the floor to my right, cradling his crossbow, eating all the toppings off his pizza. He threw what was left to Thea, also a vamp and sometimes his lover—depending on how much he irritated her—who sat on the floor to Olivia's left. Tomato sauce made her gag, but she couldn't get enough of that stuffed crust.

We'd go back into the field as soon as the pizza and cards had played themselves out, but for now we were just kicking back and enjoying the company. "That's Jessie, sitting in the chair across from us, the one in front of the fireplace. She was my sister-in-law. She was—" I shook my head, not knowing how to capture Jessie's vibrant, infectious humor, her intense loyalty, her deep and abiding passion for my brother in words. "She was my hero."

Jessie had draped her leg across the chair beside her, as if saving it for David. Having made her bet, she was fashioning an airplane from a couple of paper towels. I knew eventually it would come floating my way and I would be required to throw my napkin back at her, but for now I was content to snuggle with my honey.

It felt a little sick to watch my handsome young lover rear his head back and laugh at one of my wiseass comments, as if I was some grief-crazed widow rolling out the home movies for a torturous walk over the coals of memory lane. But, God, it was good to see him, to see all of them, and remember with a sort of shock how happy we'd been together.

I started talking again, fighting the vortex of pain that had robbed me of everything I'd liked about myself. "Nobody ever heard the knock at the front door. No one except Ron. He was Dave's sub, a rookie straight out of the academy. He was still kind of sick from the slaying, not the vampire bit, the human part that comes before you get to the vampires. Anyway, he'd been visiting the upstairs bathroom periodically." We watched him, a young, spiky-haired version of David Spade, with the physique of a marathon runner and the constitution (at least temporarily) of a tubercular alcoholic. He was coming down the stairs, one hand on the rail, the other on his stomach.

In the living room it was my deal, and I'd just begun to shuffle the cards.

Ron came down the steps slow, stepping in eerie time to the rhythm of my shuffling. When he reached the bottom, he heard a knock at the door. Nobody else did. They were all yelling at me.

"Get the lead out and deal the cards already!" Jessie roared, throwing her paper airplane at my head.

I grinned. "Just getting the cards warmed up for you, Jess."

A chorus of "Aw, come on!" and "Deal, dammit!" drowned out Ron, who was saying, "Please tell me you didn't order more pizza," as he opened the door.

A blue-eyed, long-legged blond stood on the threshold, carrying an insulated pizza box container. She smiled coyly at Ron. "Hi. Wow, are you a S.W.A.T. guy? I love your uniform!"

Ron grinned. The poor fool couldn't help it. She resembled every centerfold he'd ever drooled over. "Kinda," he said. "Um, how much do I owe you?"

"Sixteen-fifty," she said, flashing a couple of dimples, this time accompanied by a tempting bit of cleavage. "Do you mind if I come in?" she asked, looking over one shoulder with just the right hint of fear. "It's kind of creepy out here in the dark."

"Sure, come on in. My house is your house," he said, a chivalric knight taking temporary ownership of federal property to save his distressed damsel. It turned out she was just damned. Ron died with both hands in his pockets, fishing for a twenty while a goofy, I've-bagged-a-Playmate smile played across his face Pizza Girl had lunged for his throat and torn out his larynx before he understood his mistake had killed us all.