Death Magic

SEVEN

RUBEN’S eyes jerked open on darkness. His heart pounded out a sick, runaway rhythm. A heart attack. Another heart attack. He reached for his chest . . .

And realized that he didn’t hurt. His mouth was gummy and sour with fear, his heart raced, but there was no monster crouched on his chest, cutting off air and life and possibilities.

There had been pain, though, huge and monstrous. Overwhelming. He remembered that, and the glimpse he’d had of his own familiar kitchen seen from the floor—the legs of the table, a shiny puddle next to a smashed coffee cup. But already the images and content of the dream were tattering under the focus of his waking mind, like dew evaporates under the regard of the rising sun.

Or like cockroaches scuttle into their cracks and crevices when you turn on the light.

Ruben drew in a shaky breath and listened to Deborah breathing beside him. She lay on her side faced away from him, but her rump crowded his hip. Her deliciously bare rump, he noted with a stir of interest. Her nightgown had ridden up the way it so often did.

The way he often helped it do . . . or used to. Not so much now, not with the doctor’s warnings lying between them, stiff and rigid like an invisible bundling board. One could get around that unwelcome board with effort, but the sheer furtiveness of joining themselves according to the new rules left him sad afterward, and Deborah too often felt guilty.

Yet he was still here. In spite of a clever and determined enemy’s efforts, he was alive this night. Tonight’s death had been a dream.

Ruben glanced at the clock. 4:05. How appropriate. Four A.M. was the traditional dark time of the soul, wasn’t it?

Slowly Ruben eased away from the woman at his side. Deborah slept on. He smiled at his sleeping lover, wife, dearest friend . . . Deb had always slept like a child, sunk so deep in dreams that the alarm seldom penetrated. Nor did other sounds. Touch her feet or her face, though, and she woke instantly. Other physical sensations could shift her up toward consciousness, bringing her close to awakening.

So he shifted carefully. He didn’t want her to stir and ask what was wrong. He didn’t intend to tell her, so there was no point. Deb knew about the other dreams, where he watched destruction and devastation rain down on so many all over the country. She didn’t know about this one.

Ruben rose with nary a twinge of pain. That remained a wonder to him. After years of increasing weakness, of aching in every joint, he could stand so smoothly now, and walk. Even run, if only for a short distance and in a lumbering manner that ought to make any bystanders giggle.

It had been metal poisoning his body all along. Who could have guessed?

Most families had their little myths, stories passed down through generations that held a kernel of truth, if not a fistful. On his mother’s side, the story was that some unknown ancestor had been sidhe—an elven lord gone walkabout, according to the tale, who’d encountered a young Jewish maiden drawing water at the family’s well back in the Old Country.

The nut at the heart of this tale was true. The elven lord might not have been a lord. The maiden may not have been maidenly. And there was no saying if a well had been involved, or even if their meeting had taken place in Europe rather than after his people immigrated. But sometime, somewhere, an elf had dallied with one of Ruben’s ancestors. He had a trace of sidhe blood.

Not enough to gift him with any of the wondrous abilities the sidhe possessed, but enough to have complicated his life tremendously. And saved it. If not for that smidge of elf in his makeup, the potion he’d been given last month would have killed him.

Folktales about the sidhe and cold iron possessed that kernel of truth family stories often do. Not all sidhe were allergic to metal; of those who were, sensitivity varied greatly. And not all metals affected them.

Iron was the most common allergen, however. The tales were right about that, but they never mentioned aluminum . . . the metal used in the wheelchair where he used to spend so much time. And which he turned out to be more sensitive to than iron. The gnomish healer who’d diagnosed his condition had tested him with various metals. They’d learned that, in addition to iron and aluminum, he needed to avoid tin and lead, though they weren’t quite as toxic for him. Silver, gold, copper, nickel, and zinc were fine.

And so he used real silverware these days. They’d replaced doorknobs, switched out the bathroom fixtures to brass—an alloy of copper and zinc—and ate virtually no processed food. The cans weren’t a problem, but he couldn’t eat food cooked in steel or aluminum pots. Deb had doubled the size of her vegetable garden and switched to glass pans. Cars were unavoidable, but Ruben wore gloves when he left the house. Also when he used the computer. And Deborah had become preoccupied with finding out where on his family tree that trace of sidhe blood had flowed into his genetic stream.

Why did it matter? She didn’t seem to know herself, yet matter it did. Perhaps her preoccupation was born of her own heritage. Old money, old bloodlines, an inbred interest in ancestry . . . or perhaps she just wanted to feel in control of something. Anything. The last month had been terribly hard on Deb.

Ruben moved away from the sleeping woman.

Their bedroom was at the back of the house. Ruben stood at one of the two tall windows on the back wall, looking out on their large, rolling lawn studded with flower beds and artfully placed outcroppings of rocks, trees, and shrubs that created subtle paths for the feet and the eyes, bounded at the rear and along the east by the dark sentinels of the woods. On the west side, moonlight glimmered off the long pool they’d put in when Ruben first began experiencing symptoms. He’d swum in that pool faithfully for years, until he grew too weak.

A fat moon peeked out from the branches of the enormous oak that anchored the east side of the yard. Nearly full, he noted. So near he couldn’t pick out the difference by eye, but he knew when the full moon would arrive this month. That particular datum mattered these days.

Deb had poured so much of herself into their land. It was a mistake to see anyone wholly through the prism of their Gift, but there was no denying that Earth-Gifted tended to put down roots. He was not surprised she’d refused to leave her home, to go into hiding as he’d so urgently asked her to do.

And, he admitted in this four-in-the-morning privacy, he’d wanted her to refuse. However sternly he hid that from her, that’s what he’d wanted. More time with Deb. Every moment he could steal.

This wasn’t the first time he’d had that dream.

That trace of sidhe blood was responsible for more than his allergy to some metals. Though he had no proof, Ruben felt confident it was also responsible for his Gift. Not the existence of it, perhaps, but the strength. Precognition was actually very common. Accurate precognition was not. Accuracy such as he possessed was unheard of.

He was very, very good. Better than he’d allowed any tests to show. People were uncomfortable enough around someone who’d shown he could, at times, sense the future with seventy percent accuracy. They simply would not believe he was right ninety-eight percent of the time.

Deb knew, however. Deb knew almost everything there was to know about him.

Almost.

Precognition took many forms. Visual precogs—those who literally saw the future—were the rarest and statistically the most accurate, but they had almost no control over their Gift. Visions either arrived or they didn’t. Dream or trance precogs were less rare, but accuracy varied enormously because so often the dreams, voices, automatic writing, or symbolic images required interpretation.

Ruben’s form of precognition was by far the most common—a simple, quiet knowing that arrived without fanfare and almost always concerned the near future. It was also generally the least accurate. “Hunch” precogs could easily mistake their own thoughts or projections for the working of their Gift. At least half the time, and usually more, that’s what happened.

But not with him. Ruben always knew the difference. He didn’t understand why others didn’t. Sometimes the information his Gift provided was so muddled as to be useless—the specifics of the future were wonderfully malleable when a patterner wasn’t meddling with the present—but he could always tell the difference between knowing and eavesdropping on the noise in his own head.

Two things were common to all precogs, however. They all occasionally experienced a different form of their Gift. A trance precog might have a strong hunch, or a huncher have a true dream. And—for reasons that were often debated, never proven—they were usually blind to their own futures.

Usually. Not always.

Behind him, his lady, the love of his life, rolled onto her back and began to snore softly.

Love and sorrow rose and swirled in him, leaving him giddy and filled with tears. He was alive now. Now was the time that truly mattered . . . an odd concept for a precog, he supposed, but true. He couldn’t act, think, feel in the future or in the past. Only in this moment.

Was it terribly selfish of him to hold tight to this one secret? Probably. He had told one person about his recurring dream—his second-in-command in the Shadow Unit. But not Deb. Not his beautiful, wondrous Deb.

Twenty years ago Deb had asked him if he’d ever seen his own death. They’d just been dating then, but he’d known he would ask her to marry him. That hadn’t been precognition, but the soaring dream of his heart. He’d told her “no” back then, quite truthfully . . . but added that if he ever did, he would tell no one. Not even her. Ruben marveled that his younger self—so often wrong about so much—had been so nearly right about that.

He’d had the practical discussions with her. Given his heart attack, that had been necessary. But those discussions came with a large and lustrous “if.” He couldn’t take that “if” away from her, though he knew it was wrong.

Four times now he’d dreamed of pain, terrible pain, the kind that eats thoughts and strength and life. He never remembered much about the dream, but his body did. When he’d had the heart attack, its kinetic memory had awakened, telling him this was the pain he’d previewed in a dream.

He’d expected to die. He hadn’t.

He hadn’t stopped having the dream, either.

Any dream he had that often, through so many changes of course, meant the events it depicted were not to be stopped by any conceivable branchings in the possibilities. His dream always ended the same way: in cessation. Not darkness or some version of the fabled tunnel, but a blankness his waking mind couldn’t conjure or reconstruct.

Tomorrow or a month from tomorrow, his body would be crushed by pain. It would end. And Ruben would find out what lay on the other side of the small, dark door that everyone passes through alone.

He would miss her so much.