Out of Mind

Chapter 3

This was too much.

Another Embran was in town. He didn’t know where exactly the new specimen had set himself up, or what forms he could change into, but another one of them was in New Orleans and thanks to the last efforts of the creatures from deep in the earth, this one would be better prepared to carry out his plan.

If he succeeded, would his kind pour from below, like battalions of fantastic monsters, to overrun the city? Jude Millet knew the answer, but asking himself the question again gave at least a tiny suggestion that it might be impossible.

They would never succeed. He pushed back the tails of his black coat and planted his fists on his hips. A humming grew within his brain and he gave a grim frown. His force, the power of his gifts, trembled at the prospect of confrontation to the death.

Fuming, Jude paced the attic in the building that housed J. Clive Millet. All he had been granted were a few months of peace since the last giant upheaval, and he didn’t appreciate this fresh intrusion. He wanted, no, needed much more time to consider how to deal with several disparate issues: First, doing what he could to help his family cut off the Embran attempts to destroy them. Second, guiding the Millets and other psi families involved toward finding what he knew as the Harmony, an object purported to contain a treasure they must protect. Also, he longed to help settle the Millet division over who was or was not suitable to be head of the family.

And he must also be sure that New Orleans, and the powerful psychic families who lived there, most in anonymity, continued to thrive. The less talented families, or perhaps the younger ones—in centuries—faced a smaller risk than the prime ones, the Millets, or the Fortunes, or even the Montrachets, but if any of them went down, all would suffer.

He had had his suspicions that the present generation of Millets had not done what was needed to be certain their work with the Embran was finished.

But he had not expected a fresh onslaught so quickly.

This time would be more difficult.

This time there was no willing go-between with that world down there. Or none that he knew of.

With a breathy sigh that filled the attic, he drew himself up to his full height and pointed at the gauzelike web separating him from the “real world.” Even the term made him smile. What did these newcomers know of reality?

The curtain fell away and he walked, albeit unwillingly, to look down from the single gabled window on Royal Street floors below. The last of the sun had mercifully bled away, leaving only wisps of purple amid the murky gray of the encroaching evening.

There were times when his ability to hear whatever he wished to hear could be a damnable nuisance. Today, especially late in the afternoon, he had given in to a premonition that he needed to listen in to his descendants. The games they played! Sykes bringing young Ben Fortune back to New Orleans—not that Jude might not have done the same thing himself. It seemed that the problem child, Willow, had attracted attention from a malevolent force—little doubt about what that force might be—and her brother, Sykes—also Jude’s favorite—was using the occasion to play matchmaker.

Jude wholly approved of a match between Ben Fortune and Willow, as long as that young woman was ready to accept her own talents—and those of her family.

But there would be time enough to deal with that after Ben helped to make sure Willow didn’t manage to stumble into serious or worse trouble. Jude had felt her rushing through the streets, and he had heard her exclamation when she felt something odd. Small, sharp tapping on her neck.

And now some baker was dead, supposedly of a heart attack, but with small puncture wounds on his head.

Ah, yes, signs of Embran were simple to recognize once one knew what to look for.

Sykes had been down in the shop, too. He knew he should not use invisibility to hang around spying on his own family, but couldn’t seem to suppress his natural love of mischief.

Jude sighed. The red-haired issue must be dealt with quickly. Sykes, dark-haired and blue-eyed, should be running J. Clive Millet and looking out for the family since his ineffectual father, Antoine, refused to do so. Pascal didn’t want the job, or said he didn’t, but was too responsible to walk away.

Sykes’s talents were, as he’d heard some young whippersnapper say, “awesome,” and Jude was immensely proud of the one who was, unfortunately, suffering because of Jude’s own mistakes.

His eventual plan was to put all that right. And he hoped it didn’t take another three hundred years, which was the length of time he had been working on the problem so far.

Several centuries ago, after losing the love of his life to a mysterious death, Jude had married a woman Embran, in Bruges, Belgium. Of course he hadn’t known she was Embran or that she intended to use him to further her own evil plans. The Millet family had suffered unspeakably. He had been tricked by the creature’s beauty and charm—her kindness to him in his time of grief—and had no idea of her true nature or form until she managed to have his entire clan chased from Belgium by those she had caused to suspect the Millets of witchcraft.

That had started the entire superstition about dark-haired, blue-eyed males being a curse. All the Millets were born redheaded and with green eyes. Then Jude had come along and when they could no longer try to pass him off as a changeling, he was branded a mutant with hair as black as night and eyes the blue of deep water over a reef.

That was why, since Antoine Millet had shirked his duties in favor of supposedly going in search of a cure for the curse, his brother, Pascal, had taken over as Millet-in-Chief while dark-haired, blue-eyed Sykes was kept on the sidelines.

“They are all so stupid,” Jude said into the silence. “While they fuss about minutiae, enemies threaten their existence and the existence of every psychically empowered family in New Orleans, together with the poor mere humans who get in the way.”

He opened a door in an ancient dresser and slid out a painting he made himself look at occasionally, just to sharpen his determination. It showed him as a man of twenty-nine, his hair long and black as it still was, apart from some gray streaks, with the sweet-faced blonde woman who should have become his wife. On her lap was what they had jokingly called “their first child,” a dog she had adored.

Once more he recalled the pain of losing her, and his unspeakable mistake in turning to someone else so quickly. He sometimes allowed himself a little quarter because his nemesis had, in fact, been red-haired and that had been part of what fooled him into marrying her.

“Never be fooled again,” he told himself. “And make sure none of the ones for whom you care are fooled.”

There must be a way to move actively among his people without them suspecting his presence. This time he could rely on no one but himself to keep the flow of information coming so that he could direct matters as necessary.

They didn’t know it downstairs, but their enemy was already among them and Jude expected this one to make the last one look like a toy for a child to cuddle. Death was in the air, again, and a plan to reduce New Orleans to the earthly stronghold of the Embran.

There was much he didn’t yet know, but he would find out—with some help from an emissary.

He gazed down on the gathering waves of people in the streets and considered how he should choose his collaborator.

But of course! Jude laughed and braced his weight on either side of the window. Of course. He had the perfect solution to his dilemma.