Authors: A.J. Aalto
Slipped?
Why was he out there, in the forbidden areas, in the first place? I frowned. “I’m sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine how hard that’s been for you.”
“Losing that Bond so suddenly and violently,” she said, “cannot be described. I am fortunate that House Dreppenstedt functions more like family, not like some of the older houses. Without a companion, they might have shunned me, driven me out, back to the world.”
The Blue Sense stirred to report that she was lying, but empathy is rarely as helpful as you’d imagine; sure, Tara was telling me a falsehood, but about which bit? Was she lying about the house shunning her? Was she lying about not wanting to go back to the real world? Was she lying about the accident?
Tara said, “I’m sorry. Telling you about Carole Jeanne wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t kind. Will you forgive me?”
“
Maaaaaaybe
,” I said suspiciously. “Can I call you whoreface?”
“Sure.”
“Can I clobber you?”
“Um, no.” She eyed me warily. “But I promise to never be unkind again.”
“You won’t take offense if I consult my Clairempathy to judge your sincerity, will you?”
Tara hung her head for a second. “That was fair. I accept your terms.”
I summoned the Blue Sense, which responded without struggle here, an easy, springy, effortless summoning I had known nowhere else on the planet. With my Talent summoned, I wrapped Tara in psi like a lasso. She giggled in response and her shoulders twitched upward.
“Tickles,” she said.
Jealousy
, it reported.
Concern for safety, feeling threatened and displaced
. I probed further, and Tara gave a little shudder. I had gone from tickling her to pressing in on her very flesh and I Felt it as though I had a wet sponge in one fist. I gave it an experimental squeeze, and her eyes flew wide. Her lips made a perfect O. There was something else, and I was close to it, but I couldn’t quite pin it down.
“What are you so worried about, Tara?”
“You’re number seven,” she blurted, like it was an insult.
Lucky number seven? I tried to remember anything I knew about revenants and numbers. Declan’s warning:
the four is always a lie
. How many canons were in Marie-Pierrette’s journal: I’d lost count. More than ten. What did seven mean? Notes in a musical scale? Days in the week? In numerology, seven was the seeker of truths. Asmodeus was known to speak the naked truth to mundane humans when asked a direct question. Was that a connection, or was my mortal mind simply puzzling things out the way one does?
Seeing my confusion, Tara got upset. “Your advocate did not tell you that you’re his seventh. How unfair.”
“What does it mean?” I said, not trusting her as far as I could spit a hippo but not wanting to miss what new trick she could be playing on me. “So what if I’m Harry’s seventh?”
“Seven is cataclysmic,” she said emphatically. “Seven always leads to ruin.”
“Oh, come on!” I cried, rolling my eyes and throwing my arms in the air, a miserable mirror image of Kermit the Frog’s happy waving. “I can’t
always
be the worst at stuff.”
She nodded like a doctor giving a terminal patient the bad news. “The old ones, they learned a
looooong
time ago to get rid of the seventh as soon as the Bond set in and it was official. The Seventh DaySitter always leads to calamity and ruin for any immortal, and so he must destroy her. The seventh is a disaster!”
Sounded about right. I dropped my arms. “How do they, uh, get rid of her?”
“Full body impalement in the Wild Valley.”
I blinked. Then I blinked again. Then I fetched the lettuce bowl, chewed a lot, swallowed, and blinked some more. Tara waited patiently.
“Like, when you roast a pig?” I asked finally. “That kind of impalement?”
She nodded rapidly, looking a bit green.
“Well, damn, that's kinky. I’m not here for that, right?” I double-checked. “If so, I’m taking my dollies and going home. I’ll leave through the back door, I don’t care. I’ll
swim
home.”
She shook her head. “They would have done it by now. I guess Lord Dreppenstedt has just… resolved to work through his burden. While you last.”
“He chose me,” I said through my teeth, “because he liked me.”
“They usually choose a seventh that will be completely unsuitable so they don’t feel bad about losing her so quickly,” she let me know, which I thought was helpful of her.
“I am not bad luck for Harry,” I said, struggling not to believe it despite overwhelming proof. If I looked back at our entire relationship, it was fairly obvious that I was, and continued to be, a catastrophe. “You can’t be saying I’m the first… uh, seventh…” I paused to work that out. “Yeah, first seventh to survive.”
“There have been a few sevenths that weren’t destroyed,” she admitted uncertainly, “but they have always caused the tragic and sometimes brutal downfall of their companion and the house is left to mourn both of them. It’s better to cut one’s losses and just—“ She drew her finger across her throat and made a
schhhritch
noise.
“I think you mean—“ I mimicked a pike going down my throat and gurgle-choked with my eyes crossed. “You know, on account of the whole impalement business.”
She acquiesced with a sad head bob. “There are worse ends.”
I couldn’t believe that, and scrunched up my face to show her how I felt.
“There’s something you need to see.”
The back of your head?
I figured that wasn’t good people skills, and said obligingly, “Oh?”
“Come. I’ll show you.”
It felt like a setup. I
knew
it was a setup. And yet, I couldn’t
not
tromp after her. Somewhere in Felstein, Batten was alone, surrounded by revenants; maybe Harry was Kill-Notch-sitting. That was a good thing if it helped him become comfortable. Tara and I went down several halls, her little ballerina flats soft and quiet on the stone floor. The path was twisting and turning. We jogged up a set of stairs, and another, and another, until I was good and lost. On a wave of psi, I felt her anxiety rise as we came to a long, curved window that reminded me of bowed aquarium glass at a dolphin tank. What I saw were not sea creatures, however.
There were meandering paths through the boxed sand areas, and above them were skylights that really didn’t help during the long polar night of winter, here in the Arctic. There was a gas lantern on a pillar nearby, casting flickering shadows around a woman sitting on a flat rock with her legs to one side, using a small hand rake to trace spirals in white sand.
Harry sat on a wrought iron bench with his hands loosely knotted in his lap, silent. I followed the line of his somber gaze to the woman, her short brown hair frosted with a hint of white and done up in springy, permed curls, wearing a navy, floral print dress, carefully tracing lines in the sand. It looked like she had drawn a collection of turtles. I couldn't make out her expression behind what looked to be bifocals, but her mouth was pursed in concentration; it didn't look like she was ignoring Harry, but she wasn't about to interrupt what she was doing for him, either, and he wasn't pressing the issue. It was weird, seeing him so reticent, but then I remembered that he was pretty much relegated to the kiddie table in this crowd.
Harry knew I was there, but he didn’t look up until he picked up my insecurity through the Bond, and then, he did so with a look of sad resignation that cut me deeply. Was this Carole Jeanne? Why was she here? If he had her, why did Harry need me at all?
“Surviving beyond your companion’s needs is not always a good thing, either,” Tara told me. “A discussion for another time. Join me later in the den. We have company, now.”
Batten had found us. I smelled watered-down Brut cologne before I saw him. He must have thrown a bottle in his go-bag, because he sure didn’t have his kill kit with him.
“I should leave you alone.” Tara said.
“I wish you would.”
She shrugged it off. “When you think about it, you’ll see that I’m trying to help. Tonight, while our masters are dining, come to the den. Room 226. Just you.” She perked up when Batten got close, flashed him her biggest smile, and told him, “Have a good one.”
“He’s already got a good one, but the judge told him to stop whipping it out in public.” I gave Batten a sharp, openly possessive butt smack.
Batten spread his hands. When she had toddled away, he asked, “Must you?”
“Yes, I must. She’s all up in my beeswax and I need her to feel the sting,” I said, watching Tara walk down the hall was like watching a spider getting flushed down the toilet; I waited a beat to make sure she didn’t come back. Batten noted Harry and his company and chose not to comment or ask questions. I liked him a lot for that, especially since I didn’t know what to say.
“Could we have a talk?” Batten asked. “In private?”
I watched Harry return to silently staring. His lady friend also remained silent.
“I don’t see why not,” I answered, and followed him to the stairs. He knew which way to go, which was amazing, since I found this place a maze. Or maybe Tara had taken me the least-direct way on purpose, which, at this point, seemed the most likely thing for her to do.
Once in my room, Batten didn’t break stride as he moved to the bed; his was the smooth stalk of the jungle predator at comfort in the dappled shadows, even though I sensed he was hyperaware of his new surroundings. “Tell me what I don’t know.”
“About life? Love? Liberty? Lunch? Lingerie? Liposuction?”
“Revenants.”
“Sweet Dark Lady, where would I even start?” I sighed. “How much time do you have?”
“The rest of my life, if one of them does something I'm not prepared for five minutes from now. I’ve earned a heads-up, here. I know how to kill them. I don’t know how to interact with them on this level.”
“What level is that?”
“I need to know what I’m looking at, for starters. The houses and their Talents, their banners, their alliances.”
“Oh, so just...
everything
.”
“Spill, Snickerdoodle.”
“You ask too many questions.”
Batten laid back on my bed. I wondered if he thought he was manipulating me with the clever positioning, or if it never crossed his mind that his body on my bed would have a distracting effect on me. His face revealed little besides his impatience with me, and ever the mystery to my psychic Talents, he was a blank wall. A yummy, yummy blank wall.
I tested that theory. “Wanna do it?”
His reply was an impatient, “Let’s review. There are nine types of immortal Talent, yes?”
I nodded. “Only eight of which rub off on a DaySitter.”
He started listing on his fingers. “Clairvoyant, clairempathy, psychometry, telepathy…”
“Telekinesis,” I reminded, remembering the crackle of Malas’s power imploding window glass and shattering skulls.
“And precognition.” He tallied. “That’s only six.”
“Astral negation,” I said, a lot less comfortable now that I’d mentioned this. “Which is the second rarest Talent. It’s known to those in the business as Soul Leech or Soul Calling or Spirit Canceling. The removal of a person’s soul from their body. Sometimes, depending on their age, the revenant can swap souls from one body to another, like throwing a pair of socks in another drawer. It’s… a scary thought.”
“Which house has that Talent?”
Since I knew only one— House Sarokhanian was double-Talented with astral negation in addition to its precognition— and he wasn’t going to like hearing it, I hedged. “I’ll get back to you about that.”
“Eighth is the Stormbringers,” Batten added. “Captain Rask.”
“He was the only one who inherited the Talent from the First Turned,” I said, repeating Harry’s lesson. “Tempestakinesis.”
“And the ninth?”
I showed him my biggest shrug. “Harry would never say. I know there is one. The king might be the only one to have it.” I thought about the king’s banner, hoping for clues, but I couldn’t remember it. “Maybe that’s how he’s kept the trolls at bay. Maybe it’s the portal thing? Maybe the portal is more than just a thick fog? Maybe that’s how he puts on a good show, this ninth Talent?”
Batten prodded, “And what about the other vampiric powers that a DaySitter cannot inherit?”
“Immortality, though longer life is assured through regular feeding…”
“V-Telomerase,” he said, showing off what he remembered from our chat in the hospital after Danika Sherlock tried to gut me like a fish. “Gold caps on the blood vials.”
“Very good,” I said. “Shadow-stepping, preternatural speed, reflexes, endurance, and strength — though some increase in physical vigor is assured — and supernormal healing, phantasm bilocation in the older ones, levitation, cryokinetics – the so-called 'Cold Wake,' some degree of control over their lower body temperatures.” I flipped open my Moleskine and studied my notes one last time. “I have a couple questions for you.”
“Shoot.”
“What’s SAMBO?”
“Russian martial arts,” he answered. “Why?”
“Hmmm. Golden overheard someone saying the ‘doctor is a combat SAMBO champion.’ I’m wondering, doctor who?”
We smiled in unison at the Doctor Who thing, and then he said, “Weird for a medical doctor to study effective ways to harm people with his hands.”
“But handy, for clearing obstacles.”
Batten gave a sharp bark of a laugh to agree. “It would be easier to deal with you if certain obstacles were out of our way. Dead guys, for example.”
Deal with you.
What was I, a deck of cards? A Wall Street merger? Deal with me? Was he kidding?
“Harry is not an obstacle
,
” I breathed. The Bond’s leather straps yanked tight in my belly, my gut straining with the need to release sudden fists of fury. “I think you better check yourself, Kill-Notch.”
“Marnie, settle down.” He smiled hard; it was more a tool than a genuine gesture and did nothing to soothe my ruffled feathers.
The Bond roared in my ear, a pulse of its own, drowning out a great deal of my rational thought. “If you think you can talk me down from the bell tower with a smile and that crisis-negotiator tone of voice, you don’t understand metaphysical bonds.” I took a peremptory step forward, not sure what I’d do if I reached him. “Harry’s family is uneasy with you here; that’s bad enough. But now you’ve implied Harry has reason to be uneasy? That dog won’t hunt, son, not in this yard.”