Cloak Games: Rebel Fist (3 page)

I suppose a double bacon cheeseburger was one way to get that energy. But, God, all that grease! 

“Bookstore next?” Russell said, once I dumped our wrappers in the bin. 

“Yup,” I said. “Let’s…”

I froze.

A tall, gaunt man in a dark suit, white shirt, and black silken tie walked across the food court, his eyes fixed on me. A ribbon of icy fear shot through my mind. I had seen men like him before. He was a disguised anthrophage, a creature from the Shadowlands and a servant of the Dark Ones, and the anthrophages wanted me dead. I started to reach into my jacket for the little revolver I had concealed in the interior pocket, clearing my mind to work a spell as I did so…

“Nadia?” said Russell, alarmed.

My brain caught up with my reflexes. 

The man wasn’t a disguised anthrophage. He was just an old man in a suit. He wasn’t staring at me, but at the menu for a taco place behind me. Even as I watched, he stepped around me and approached the counter. I looked at him, trying not to shake. He looked a lot like a disguised anthrophage, and the anthrophages had almost killed me in the Shadowlands. I still remembered the weight and the wiry strength as the anthrophage drove me to the ground, its vile breath washing over my skin as its mouth yawned wide to bite my face off…

“Nadia?” said Russell again, tugging at my sleeve. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I heard myself say. That was a lie. James was right. I was definitely not okay. “Just thought I saw someone I recognized. Let’s go to the bookstore. Get you some books. Get me some coffee. God, I could use some coffee.”

“You seem too jittery for coffee,” said Russell. He still hadn’t let go of my sleeve. He knew me well enough to realize that something was wrong. 

Fortunately, I am a very good liar. 

“Thought it was a guy who gave me some trouble,” I said in a quiet voice. “But I was wrong. I’m fine, really.” 

Russell gave me one more concerned look, but nodded at last, and we set off for the bookstore on the mall’s fourth level. It was a big place, full of rows of shiny paperbacks and a large section of games and toys. Russell made a beeline for the historical fiction section. He loved books about the Crusades. At his urging, I had read a few of them, and had been amused how the books compared a Crusader knight’s loyalty to his lord to the fealty of a modern man-at-arms to his Elven liege. The Department of Education and the Inquisition made sure of that. You couldn’t read a book or watch a video or go on the Internet without seeing a message, sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle, about how the Elves had benefited humanity and how the highest duty in life was to serve the High Queen and her nobles. 

I wondered if people ever realized just how profoundly they had been programmed. Sometimes I felt like I was the only one who saw the truth. Well, the Rebels did, but the Rebels were psychotic assholes. For once the Department of Education’s propaganda did not overstate the truth.

I had seen the dead children left behind from Rebel bombs, which was yet another memory I could have done without. 

I went to the bookstore’s café for some coffee. A coltish-looking teenage girl of about Russell’s age took my order. Of course, she was already taller than I was, with long blond hair and bright blue eyes, and would likely grow into a six-foot swimsuit model. I managed to convince her that I wanted a straight black coffee without any cream, any sugar, any whipped cream or God knows what other nonsense. At last the nervous girl produced my coffee, and I paid for it and took a sip, only to discover that she had in fact added sugar to it. A wave of irritated exasperation went through me. I’m not usually one of those jerks who yells at cashiers, but I was still rattled after my mini panic attack in the food court, and the coffee girl was about to get the brunt of my bad mood. Then my brain caught up with my irritation, announcing that taking out my startled fear on the poor girl wouldn’t accomplish anything, and that a woman who had committed as many illegal acts as I had should not draw attention to herself with a tantrum over a damn cup of coffee.

It took a few seconds for all of this to work its way through my head, and I can only imagine what my expression looked like. 

The girl stared at me as if I was a bomb about to go off. 

“Ma’am?” said the girl. “Is…everything all right?” 

Ha. Now there was a profound question.

I opened my mouth to answer, and Russell bumped into my elbow.

“There you are,” he said. “I was looking all over for you.”

I started to say that I had told him I was getting coffee, but then the girl behind the counter squealed. I kid you not. She actually squealed. 

“Russell!” she said. “Oh my God! What are you doing here?” 

“Hey, Lydia,” said Russell with an easy smile. “I didn’t know you were working today.” 

“I wasn’t going to,” said the girl, “but rifle club got canceled for the weekend, and the manager said I could have the hours if I wanted, so here I am. What are you doing here?” 

“Making trouble and acting disorderly,” said Russell.

The girl laughed. “Is she your girlfriend? You took her out for coffee?”

Russell put his arm around my shoulders and nodded solemnly. “Yes. I like older women now.” 

The girl laughed at that, and I gaped at Russell, two facts taking hold in my brain.

One. My brother had set this all up. He had wanted those books, and he had four paperbacks in his hand…but the entire point of this trip had been so he could hit on the coffee girl. 

The devious little stinker! I wasn’t sure if I should be annoyed or proud.

Two. The girl was into him. Her eyes sparkled when she laughed, and she pushed her hair away from her forehead when she looked at him. 

Russell Moran, my baby brother, was a nascent ladies’ man.

“Don’t be gross,” I told him, taking his arm off my shoulders. “I’m Nadia, Russell’s sister.”

“Oh my God!” said the girl. “I’m Lydia. Russell and I go to the same high school. We’re both in rifle club. He’s a really good shot, did you know that?”

“It’s easy when the targets don’t move,” said Russell.

He was more right than he knew.

“I wish I was that good of a shot,” said Lydia. “I take ten shots, and I’ll be lucky if three of them hit the target. I wish someone would show me a few tricks so I could do it better, you know?”

There was a golden opening if I had ever heard one, and Russell seized it without hesitation. 

“I’d be happy to show you,” said Russell. “The high school range is open tomorrow night. Meet me there at about seven.” 

“It’s a date!” said Lydia, and then she turned red. “I mean, it’s…”

Russell gave her an easy smile. “We’ll just be practicing for rifle club. Nothing to get excited about.” 

Lydia smiled back. “I’ll see you then. Oh! I’d better look busy. Mr. Loman is coming.” I glanced over my shoulder and saw a balding middle-aged man in a tie and a blazer wandering towards the coffee counter, the MANAGER badge prominently displayed upon his lapel.

“I don’t want you to get in trouble,” said Russell. “See you tomorrow, then.”

“See you tomorrow,” said Lydia, and she smiled in my direction. “It was nice meeting you, Natalie.” 

I very carefully did not roll my eyes.  

Russell walked into the bookstore proper, and I followed him, the cardboard cup of coffee in my right hand. 

“What was that about?” I said.

Russell shrugged, but his grin belied the gesture. “What was what? We’re just going shooting, that’s all. If you can get the competency badge in rifle club, it counts for a lot of extra credit points.”

“You asked her out,” I said. “You’re going on a date.”

“Well, yeah,” said Russell. “I figured that was obvious. But I didn’t want to be obvious about it with her, you know? You have to play it cool.” 

“Oh, you do?” I said. 

“Yeah,” said Russell. “After I broke up with Julia, I decided…”

“Wait,” I said. “You had another girlfriend before her?”

“What?” said Russell, gesturing with one of his Crusader books. “No, no. I had two girlfriends before. Well, three, if you include Anna, but we only went out twice so I don’t think that really counts.”

“Three,” I said. “But two if you don’t count Anna.” I took a sip of coffee to collect my thoughts. The coffee might have had sugar, but at least it was hot. “Um. Were you ever going to tell me about this?”

Russell raised his white eyebrows. “Were you going to tell me about your boyfriend?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said.

“And you’ve never had one?”

I opened my mouth, tried to think of an answer, and came up with nothing. I’d had a boyfriend…and he’d almost killed me.

And a whole lot of other people, too. Of course, I turned the tables on him, but after surviving Nicholas Connor I had come to regard romance of any kind as a mistake at best and a fatal weakness at worst. It felt strange to be standing here in a mall bookstore with my teenage brother, discussing his girlfriends as if I was a normal twenty-year-old woman instead of an Elven lord’s trained thief, as if I did not know things that would get me executed in a heartbeat. 

“Okay,” I said at last. “Maybe I’m not the best person to talk to about this.” 

Russell shrugged. “Don’t worry, though. The thing with Lydia won’t last. It never does.”

“What do you mean?” I said. 

“The girls all like me, and their moms and dads do, too, but once they find out about the frostfever…” He ran a hand through his white hair. “I’ll never be a man-at-arms, right? The parents want their daughters to marry an Elven lord’s man-at-arms. So they shut it down before it gets too serious.”

“Oh, Russell,” I said. 

He shrugged. “It is what it is. And I should be dead, right? So I really can’t complain.” 

“Then why do you do it?” I said. “I mean, if you know it’s going to fall apart? Why take the chance with girls?”

He shrugged again. “I dunno. Because I think they’re hot?”

I snorted. “Good answer.”

“And…I should be dead, you know,” said Russell. “If Lord Morvilind didn’t keep casting spells on me, I know I would have died as a baby. So what’s the worst that can happen to me? I mean, I should have died already. So why not take the chance?”

“That’s…a good attitude,” I said.

“Besides,” said Russell, and he grinned. “You know what I found out?”

“What?” 

“Girls like confidence,” he said. “Seriously, they really do.”

“Oh, we do?” I said. 

“They do!” said Russell. “I mean, look at me. I kind of look like a scarecrow with snow on my head. But if you walk up and look girls in the eye and don’t show any fear, they’ll go for it. They’ll try and push back a little, make fun of you, but if you flip the joke on its head, they’ll laugh, and the next thing you know you have a date.”

I laughed. “Russell Moran, ladies’ man. I never would have guessed.” 

He grinned…and then, right then and there, everything went to hell.

I felt a surge of magical power around me. Usually I could only sense the presence of magical force when I used the detection spell, or when I stood near a powerfully enchanted object. I spun in alarm, my hand twitching towards the pocket in my coat that held my gun, expecting to see someone right behind me casting a spell. 

Nothing. 

At the moment, Russell and I were alone the aisle. 

The surge of magical power peaked and then faded from my arcane senses.

“Nadia?” said Russell. “What’s wrong?” 

“I…” I tried to think up a good lie, but came up blank. “I…don’t know.”

“Are you sick?” He gave a suspicious look at the coffee cup still in my other hand. Though if anything was going to make me sick, it was that damned chicken sandwich. 

“No,” I said. “I think we should go home. I think we should go home right now.”

“I haven’t paid for the books yet,” said Russell.

“Fine,” I said. “Go pay for them, and then…”

The lights went out, plunging the bookshop into darkness. The glow from the rest of the mall vanished, and I heard a sudden murmur of surprise from the crowds on the concourse. A click came from the ceiling, and the battery-powered emergency lights by the doors flicked on. 

“Oh,” said Russell. “The power must have gone out. Good thing I brought cash.” 

“Wait,” I said, reaching into my jacket and grabbing my phone. “Check your phone. See if you can call out.” 

“Okay,” said Russell, puzzled. Light flickered next to me as he checked his phone. “Huh. No signal. Maybe the power outage knocked out the cell tower.”

“No,” I said. My phone, too, displayed NO NETWORK AVAILABLE on the screen. However, my phone had a little after-market module, one not available in most consumer phones. A cell phone could lose network access for two reasons – the network was down, or something was blocking the phone’s radio. Most consumer cell phones couldn’t tell the difference.

My phone could. 

Below the NO NETWORK AVAILABLE message appeared another line of red text.

ERROR: BROAD-SPECTRUM JAMMING DETECTED. UNABLE TO CONNECT.

The network wasn’t down. The network was being jammed. Someone was deliberately cutting off cell phone access to the mall. Combined with the surge of magical power I had just felt, that meant…

I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it wasn’t anything good. 

“We need to get out of here right now,” I said, grabbing Russell’s arm. 

“I haven’t paid for the books yet,” said Russell.

“Leave the books,” I said. “We’ll come back for them later. We have to go right now.” 

“It’s just a power outage,” said Russell. “What’s the big deal? We’ll sit down in the café until the lights come back on.” He glanced in that direction, and in the dim glow of the emergency lights I saw him smile. “We could keep Lydia company.” 

“I don’t think this is just a power outage,” I said. “Someone’s jamming the network, which means the power failure was deliberate. Someone shut off the electricity, and I don’t want to be here when…”

“Excuse me, miss?” said a male voice. I turned and saw Mr. Loman coming towards me, his MANAGER pin flashing in the emergency lights. Up close, I saw that he had a graying mustache that looked kind of like dryer lint. “Company policy says all customers must shelter in the café area in the event of a power outage.”