Unbinding (28 page)

“But with plenty of that sound and fury,” Nick said dryly. “I was impressed. The cops were, too.”

“At least,” Kai said, vaguely embarrassed, “they did start listening to me after that. And it mattered that they listen. Not just because I didn’t want to see helpless animals killed, but because I needed to
see
the animals. I’d spent hours studying Dyffaya’s work in the compulsions laid on his followers and in the scraps of intention I salvaged from the hobbit house. I knew I’d recognize the patterns of his intent, and I was sure I could sort out scraps of general intent left behind from the general chaos event from compulsions laid on individual animals. I figured Dyffaya’s blood-hooks would be carried by animals under compulsion, you see. And it worked. I could spot the animals with the tags easily.”

“That’s going to be useful. Had he tagged many of them?”

“Just the bunnies. Not the puppies or the lizards or the toothed birds. None of the scary creatures. The bunnies, because people weren’t scared of them. They’d pet one or pick it up—and get bitten.” Kai sighed. “Two people are missing.”

“Were there a lot of injuries? To people, I mean.”

“Yes, but most were minor. Bites, of course. A broken leg when someone got shoved off the escalator in the panic. The worst injured were the ones who were shot.”

Arjenie’s eyes went big. “Shot?”

“Yeah. A civilian idiot decided to go hunting. He wasn’t the ace shot he liked to think—hit a man by accident, but that didn’t discourage him. He kept shooting at this lizard thing and put a bullet in a woman’s chest. She was still in surgery, last I heard. He was under arrest and screaming about his Second Amendment rights.” Kai sighed again and leaned back against the seat. “Tell me how it went at the zoo.”

“There’s five missing.”

“Five? But that’s more than twice as many as he’s grabbed at other chaos events! And it’s an odd number. I guess we were wrong about him grabbing people in pairs.”

“No, he still grabbed in pairs—he just grabbed more pairs. Originally there were six missing, but one was a little boy and Dyffaya sent him back, just like he did that toddler at Fagioli.”

Kai thought about that. “It sounds like children won’t work for whatever he wants with these people—but he isn’t killing them. He’s returning them. Do you think he’s reluctant to hurt kids?”

“Maybe. It’s possible that the godhead itself kicks them out for some reason, not the god.”

“Thinking about the godhead makes me dizzy. Could there have been more than one chaos event at the zoo, and that’s how he grabbed so many people there?”

“I don’t know how to tell. There were two transformations—the wasps and some of the trees. The trees didn’t do anything, though. They didn’t sprout thorns or poke people with their branches, though they look weird enough to behave that way. Gorgeous, but weird. I’m pretty sure the wasps were the only things delivering hooks. Everyone who vanished had been stung. A few hundred people were stung who didn’t vanish, of course. There were a lot of wasps.”

“How much of a lot do you mean?”

“Thousands, maybe. Your fire charm plus the wind charm worked on the swarms, but then they stopped swarming. I had no idea how to find them all. I was really glad when that Unit agent showed up.”

Arjenie had called Ruben Brooks to say they needed help. Brooks had responded by sending a Unit agent to take charge of the investigation. Kai knew that much from talking to José earlier, but that’s all. “So who is this agent? What do you think of him or her?”

“Her. Special Agent Karin Stockman. She’s over forty and very confident, very experienced. She’s not Wiccan by faith—she told me that right off the bat—but some of her training is Wiccan. That was obvious when I watched her cast. She has an excellent vermin spell, different from any I’ve seen before. It’s designed to repel flying bugs, which isn’t unusual, only it isn’t a ward. I’ve never seen a vermin spell that wasn’t a ward, have you? She modified it on the spot to attract instead of repelling. That kind of inversion can be tricky, but she handled it beautifully. It gathered the wasps so she could deal with them. She’s a Fire Gifted,” Arjenie added, “so once she got them together, she burned them.”

Kai frowned. “They must have been just wasps by then.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think even an excellent vermin spell could collect creatures that were being directed by Dyffaya. Which means that by the time this Karin Stockman showed up, the god wasn’t actively directing the wasps. That doesn’t mean they didn’t need to be disposed of. Aside from saving a lot of people from being stung—they were pretty aggressive, I understand?”

“Very.”

“And just because the god wasn’t directing the wasps doesn’t mean they weren’t delivering hooks. They had to be destroyed. Why don’t you know that vermin spell?”

“Well, it isn’t part of my family’s lore, so—”

“No, I mean, why haven’t Unit people pooled their spells?” Kai sat up again. “Maybe not every spell, but Unit agents should do more sharing than they are. There should be some kind of common pool of spells that all Unit agents can learn.”

Arjenie shrugged. “I don’t see how that could work. Most of the spells I know aren’t mine to give away—they’re the coven’s, so I’d have to ask my aunt’s permission. I’m sure I’m not the only one in that situation. And anyway, I’m not an agent. I’m just a researcher.”

A researcher who could call the head of Unit 12 and get him to send an agent. “Still,” Kai said, “hoarding knowledge is the way the sidhe do things. We probably caught it from them, this idea that spells should all be kept secret instead of sharing the knowledge.” She brooded on that a moment. “And that’s enough about my hobbyhorse for now. You didn’t really tell me what you thought about Karin Stockman.”

“She was a police officer in Connecticut for twenty years before the Unit recruited her.”

Kai’s eyebrows lifted. “You don’t like her.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you’re being so careful with what you do say. Come on, Arjenie. If she’s going to be a problem—”

“She really is good at her job. And she really didn’t pat me on the head and tell me to run along home. It just felt that way.”

“One of those, huh? Is it the law enforcement background?”

“Oh, yes. She and Ackleford seemed to hit it off, by which I mean they were both rude and neither of them minded. It was funny to watch them sneer at each other. I think she discounted me mostly because I’m a civilian—”

“You work for the FBI.”

“I’m an info geek, not an agent, plus I’m too girly. Some of the older female agents are like that. They had to out-guy the guys when they started out in the Bureau to get any respect. I bet Special Agent Stockman learned to cuss and spit early on. Well, not literally, but you know what I mean.”

“I do.” Kai had met women like that, who’d come up in a profession back when they had to claw their way into the boys’ club. Most of them were great people. A few, though, had learned to despise their own sex. “I wonder why she hasn’t called me.”

“She’s only been here a couple hours.”

“And she’s been busy since she arrived,” Kai conceded. “But she flew in, didn’t she? She could have called me from the plane or the airport. Seems like she’d want to talk to the one person who knows something about the god.”

“Give her time. I’m sure she will.”

“Hmm.” Kai had not wanted to be in charge. She had no right to complain if the person who’d been put in charge didn’t do things the way Kai thought she should. But dammit, the woman ought to call her. Maybe it was okay if she didn’t call right away, though. With a sigh Kai leaned back again. This time her eyelids drifted down. “I won’t say this was the longest day ever, but it ranks way up there.”

“Mmm.” Arjenie sounded as beat as Kai felt. “We did learn a few things. Dyffaya doesn’t grab people at every chaos event, and he doesn’t have to grab just two at a time.”

“True. And so far he’s used a living agent, plant or animal, to deliver his hooks.”

“That’s something, I guess. I’m not sure what, but . . . did you learn anything more from studying the god’s followers?”

That made Kai smile grimly. “Two things. First, they’re linked in some weird way. I’ve never seen anything like it. Second, Ackleford was right. They’ve been booby-trapped.”

“What?” Arjenie sat up. “How?”

“There’s a trigger. It’s so subtle, so carefully planted . . . I nearly missed it. If I’d been at full strength I probably would have missed it because I would’ve been trying to fix things instead of studying them. The trigger’s tied to the most obvious place to start lifting the compulsions,” she added. “Not that ‘obvious’ is a good word for it. ‘Only’ fits better, as in, the only place I’ve found so far.”

“What does the trigger do? Could you tell?”

“If it’s tripped, it sets off a cascade that destroys their minds. All their minds, I think, even if I only tripped it in one of them.”

“That’s hideous. Horrible.”

Kai nodded. “All of that. There’s something odd about that trigger.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I feel like I’m still missing something.”

“Maybe you’ll figure out what tomorrow, when you’re rested.”

Kai nodded again without lifting her head. She’d rest her eyes a moment, she decided. Just a moment . . .

She woke when the car stopped, disoriented. Blinked herself into something resembling awareness. “Guess no one tried to kill us on the way here. I didn’t . . . that truck.” A 1979 Ford truck in the original orange and tan, faded and peeling, sat in front of Isen’s house. “I know that truck.”

She threw open the door and bolted out of the Town Car. The front door of the house opened. A short, square-built man with long white braids and skin burned dark from a life spent outdoors stood in the lighted doorway.
“Yázhi Atsa!”
he called in his gravelly voice—Little Eagle. Only one person in all the realms called her that.

Seconds later, Kai was held tight in her grandfather’s arms.

T
HEY
were back in the clearing where they’d first arrived, though it looked different now. The same impossibly tall, black trees surrounded it; the same glowing ground cast an eerie, upward radiance. But the clearing was larger now. And populated.

Eleven humans, a werewolf, and a chameleon sat in a circle some fifty feet in diameter, waiting for a god. No recliners this time. The land itself rose in tidy mounds to form their seating, with the tallest hump reserved for the absent god. The humans and the lupus ate fruit and cake and drank wine as they waited. The chameleon appeared to be napping.

Those mounds had sprouted a profusion of exotic and improbable flowers. Very festive. So were the garments Dyffaya had chosen for his imported audience—short silk tunics in bright colors. Cullen’s was spring green. That was no more his choice than was his seat for this show, but that was how Dyffaya wanted it. At the moment, Cullen was chatting with the dark-haired woman on his right.

Nathan and Benedict’s garb had been chosen for them as well. They wore the
liarda
that were traditional for slaves condemned to fight in the pits of Kakkar, a particularly nasty portion of an unpleasant realm.
Liarda
were basically leather jockstraps, and not particularly comfortable.

Nathan waited, too, but outside that festive circle. As did Benedict . . . but not with Nathan. Opposite him, opposing him in space as he soon would be in fact.

They’d gotten most of what they wanted. Most, not all. The negotiations had cost Nathan and Benedict some pain, but nothing they couldn’t heal. The god hadn’t wanted them too damaged to fight, and Benedict’s healing was slower than Nathan’s. What Nathan did not understand was why Dyffaya hadn’t threatened to burn a school or some more random strangers. Nor had he threatened Cullen’s life. Maybe he didn’t believe the sorcerer was important enough to them to make it worthwhile. Maybe he had some use for Cullen that required him to be uninjured.

Or maybe he’d been in too much of a tearing hurry to bother. The bargaining had taken place at well more than arms-length—Dyffaya continued to be careful about letting Nathan get close—and in a ridiculously short time. Only three hours. When Nathan acquired Kai’s knife it had taken two full days, and that had been a friendly negotiation. He’d expected this negotiation to take several days, and had hoped to draw it out for a week or more.

Dyffaya had accepted the not-killing part of the bargain almost too easily. It was the not-harming part he refused to consider. “Don’t be absurd,” he’d said. “I’ve already bound myself to a situation that may result in your death. I assume your lady would consider your death a grievous harm.” Nathan had suggested they define “harm” in such a way that grief was omitted. Dyffaya had said loftily, “The binding doesn’t work that way. You’ll excuse me if I do not explain precisely how it does work.”

In the end, Dyffaya had agreed not to kill or allow his people to kill Kai or Arjenie except in fulfillment of the terms he’d already bound himself to; not to compel or beguile them; and not to strike at their families. In return, Nathan and Benedict would fight as the god directed. They hadn’t sworn to kill on his order, but that’s what it would come to.

Not right away
, Nathan promised himself as he began his asanas to limber up for the coming trial, while the people inside that circle ate and talked and laughed. He had decided that at the start. He didn’t have to kill Benedict until the last bout.

A collective gasp of awe went up as Dyffaya suddenly appeared, standing in front of his throne-mound. He wore flowers and his mixed-race body for the occasion. It was every bit as well-endowed as his statue-of-David body. He told them to continue eating, sat, and snapped his fingers. A large goblet of wine appeared in his hand. He toasted his puppet people with it, and they cheered.

Grimly, Nathan continued his asanas. There was one problem with his decision to drag this out, hoping quite irrationally that he wouldn’t have to kill Benedict. Benedict couldn’t afford to return the favor. He might not know the true nature of Nathan’s Gift, but he knew some of Nathan’s skills. He knew, too, that Nathan healed much faster than he did.

No, Benedict would try to kill Nathan as quickly as possible, while Nathan would be trying not to kill. That meant he wouldn’t have the full benefit of his Gift. It would be like those bouts they’d fought back at Clanhome . . . and this first combat would be unarmed. Just like the first bout he’d fought with Benedict. The one he’d lost.

Dyffaya set down his empty goblet and called Dell to him. She woke, yawned, and sauntered to his side. He rubbed her behind the ears.

Nathan would have given a great deal to know how deeply beguiled the chameleon was, but Dell was avoiding him. The chameleon’s forced defection hurt more than he’d expected, perhaps because she was a tie to Kai. Or maybe he’d grown accustomed to not being alone anymore. The only unbeguiled person he could speak with was Cullen, and Cullen spent most of his time with Benedict.

Dyffaya had not liked being told he must bind himself to their agreement. He’d agreed, but he’d thrown a hissy fit first. That hissy fit involved taking away their clothes and insisting they wear the
liarda
from that moment on. He’d also insisted that Benedict and Nathan swear to avoid all contact with each other, save for their fights. And he’d broken both of Nathan’s legs.

Fortunately, Nathan’s bones knit quickly. Five days was ample time. Nathan knew it had been five days because Cullen had recast his clock spell.

Those five days corresponded to only half a day on Earth. Nathan knew that because he’d spoken with all the people Dyffaya snatched over that five-day period, and they’d all been taken on the same day. All eleven of them. Eleven people Dyffaya had snatched and beguiled and bedded, and who now sat on those flowery mounds chattering, eager to watch Nathan and Benedict try to kill each other.

Why bed them all? Why beguile them? Why bring them here in the first place? Nathan could think of many possible answers to those questions, none of which were convincing. There was a point to this lavish importation of forced worshipers. He hadn’t a clue what it was, but the god had spent a great deal of power stealing these people. He had a use for them, something more than a simple craving for adoration.

Though he liked that well enough. “My beloved ones,” Dyffaya said in a rich, mellow voice that carried beautifully. Everyone fell silent, even Cullen, though that was likely common sense, not adoration. “I am happy today.” That brought applause. They were so glad their lord was happy. “I am happy to have you all with me, and pleased I can offer you such fine entertainment, something never before seen in any of the realms. Nathan, Benedict—enter the circle!”

Nathan walked forward silently. So did Benedict. The crowd oohed at them. Some were betting—men, mostly. The odds, he noted, were on Benedict.

Benedict met Nathan’s eyes as they came together in the center of the circle. He nodded gravely. Nathan did the same. Together they turned to face the god.

Dyffaya flung up one hand—and a ball of eerie blue fire appeared in the very center of the circle, some twenty feet above the ground. “This,” he announced, “is a fight to the death—but between fighters so superbly honed and skilled, such a trial may require more than one round. Today’s round ends when one of our fighters kills the other, or when the balefire touches the ground. If both combatants are still alive at the end of the round, we will hold another bout tomorrow.”

Nathan did not want to kill Benedict. He liked and respected the man, and Benedict’s death would hurt so many people . . . but Nathan had been a weapon in someone else’s hand before. As had Benedict, he was sure. They’d been willing weapons, their loyalty freely given—his to his Queen, Benedict’s to his Rho. Now they were wholly unwilling, but they understood each other’s choice. Benedict would kill to save Arjenie. Nathan would kill to save Kai.

He hoped hard that he wouldn’t have to. Irrational, yes, but he wasn’t simply hoping for a miracle. A little luck, maybe.

The third element. That was all he lacked. He’d sworn to fight Benedict. He hadn’t sworn that Benedict would be his only target.