Ritual Magic

TWENTY-NINE

CYNNA could not be talked out of it. Admittedly, Lily didn’t try very hard, not with Drummond cheerleading the idea from his side, but Rule did. He was hampered by having to make his case over the phone, since he had to stay with Andy and José until they could be taken home. Cynna told him he’d have to cope, because she was damn well going to finish what she’d started before it rained down dworg on their heads.

“I don’t think the dworg were sent on my account,” Cynna told Lily as she sat down on a wide strip of grass next to the hospital’s parking lot. She untied one shoe. “She didn’t go to all that trouble just to keep me from Finding your victim’s home or whatever. But maybe that was part of the timing. And even if it wasn’t”—she took that shoe and sock off and started on the other one—“I’m going to do this.”

Lily suspected Cynna was hell-bent on doing her Find because she could. This was what she did, what she was good at, and there’d been little she could do for their wounded. Reason enough to follow through, Lily thought, if Cynna hadn’t been Rhej. She was, though, which raised the stakes considerably. For that reason and a couple of others, Lily would stick with her. No point in dividing up their guards.

Those guards stood in a circle around them now, facing out. Once Cynna had removed her shoes and socks she stood, her stance wide, knees flexed, arms overhead. Her Gift didn’t need anything but her attention to work, but for a tricky Find she sometimes boosted her focus with a sort of barefoot drumming dance. That was what she was doing now.

Slowly she began to stamp the earth with her bare feet. The rhythm picked up as she turned in a slow circle, her hands weaving invisible patterns, her arms gradually descending as her feet punched the ground faster and faster. Her dance paused twice before she stopped, her arms straight out in front of her. She nodded once, satisfied. “Got it.”

“LEFT at the light,” Cynna said. The words came out a little muffled because her mouth was full of mozzarella, crust, and sauce.

They weren’t in the tankmobile, though it hadn’t been damaged by the dworg. The shiny paint had gotten a few scratches—maybe when the RPG went off, maybe from the claws of a scrambling wolf—but the car was operational, unlike several others. But none of the vehicles could be handed back to their users yet. CSI was still vacuuming. That wasn’t as pointless as it seemed. No one expected to find anything pertinent, but, as Karonski had put it, they didn’t want to feed the conspiracy nuts by stinting on the usual procedures.

In the end, Rule had accepted that Cynna was going to do this. So he’d rented them an armored limousine.

That had meant a delay, but a brief one. Just the right amount of time, it turned out, for the pizza Scott had ordered to arrive. That was good, because two of their guards were among those who’d fought dworg that day. They needed the fuel.

Cynna and Lily had the limo’s rear seat. They were sharing a large pizza with pepperoni and extra bell pepper. Mike, Miles, and Jonathan sat across from them. Each of them had his own box, as did Casey and Scott up front. Casey was driving.

Lily wasn’t hungry, but she’d taken a slice knowing that it might be hours before she had time for supper. Then she bit into it and was suddenly ravenous. That first piece was gone now, as was the second, and she was finishing her third. She glanced out her window. They were on Market Street, passing Mount Hope, the cemetery where the first person she’d killed was buried. “We getting close?” she asked Cynna.

“Still a little over ten miles.”

That should be enough time. Lily washed down the last bite with Diet Coke. “I’ve got a question.”

Cynna was eyeing the box, where one last slice remained. “Go ahead. You want the last piece?”

“I’m full. It’s a couple of questions, actually. The first one’s for you as Rhej.”

Cynna’s eyebrows went up. She took the last slice. “Okay.”

“It seems as if all of the Great Bitch’s agents we’ve run across have been psychopaths. We’re known by the company we keep, right? I can’t help wondering if the Big B is literally crazy.”

“Well, sure!”

Lily blinked. “Then she is a psychopath?”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. I think that’s a purely human malfunction, and whatever else she is, she’s a lot more than human. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that exposure to her causes psychopathy, though. Why do you ask?”

“Because what happened today doesn’t make sense. Unless she’s really around-the-bend nuts, not operating logically—”

“That’s not her kind of crazy.”

“What kind of crazy is she, then?”

“Um . . . she’s not human, so I guess I’d say she’s crazy the way her peer group defines insanity.”

Her peer group being other Old Ones? “Can you narrow that down for me?”

Cynna glanced at the three men facing them. “Most of the stories are shared with all the clan, but the thing you want to know is from the primus memorias. First Memories. First Memories are from when lupi were created, and they’re shared only with lupi, and they’re spoken while the Rhej is touching the memory itself, in order to keep the telling as close to the original as possible. Can’t do that perfectly because the language they’re in is hard to translate, but we do our best. But it’s considered safest to touch or enter those memories only at Clanhome.”

“So you can’t—”

Cynna flapped a hand. “Let me think this through.” She did that, frowning. Then nodded. “You’re Lady-touched, so it’s okay for you to know the primus memorias, but I don’t want to tell them without touching them. I’d be paraphrasing, and it’s okay for others to do that, but not me. But the guys can talk about them.” She looked at the three men facing them. “Someone want to tell Lily what the Lady told Aswan about the gods going insane?”

For a long moment, no one did. Miles and Jonathan exchanged an uncomfortable glance. Oddly, it was Mike who finally spoke . . . odd because he was Leidolf, so Cynna wasn’t his Rhej, and Mike was not exactly a shining example of liberated thinking.

“I’m not going to say this right,” he warned, “but here’s what I remember. The Lady was talking about why we aren’t ever to worship her. She said that it’s normal for the new races to worship those like her, who’d stayed on from the last cycle to help with this one. Like when a baby thinks his mother’s breast is the whole world, see? But that time ends. When he becomes a toddler he learns the word ‘no’ and can’t stop using it, and the older he gets, the more he becomes his own person. Only something went wrong this time. I didn’t understand, but somehow the godhead got sticky. It stuck to them when it wasn’t supposed to, and that was wrong. It would keep the younger races from knowing themselves fully, which is how God comes to know Himself—”

“Herself,” Scott put in.

“The universe,” Miles said. “The way I heard it, it’s how the universe comes to know itself. Through everything it creates, but especially the sentient races.”

“You’re all mostly right,” Cynna said. “The word from the memories doesn’t have an English translation, so your Rhejes would have used whatever felt closest. That could be ‘God’ or ‘the universe’ or even just ‘life.’”

Mike nodded, accepting that. “There was a big argument. Some of the Old Ones thought the sticky godhead must be the way God—or the universe, or whatever you call it—wanted to know Himself this time around. They thought it would be terrible and wrong to abandon their power and leave the new races without help and guidance. But most of them didn’t think like that. The new gods didn’t have that stickiness, and—”

“New gods?” Lily asked, then wished she hadn’t interrupted.

Scott answered that from up front. “Gods who weren’t Old Ones.”

“Like the Native American gods?” Nettie had said something about that once.

Jonathan nodded. “They weren’t as powerful as the old gods. Maybe that’s why they remained more like counselors and elders, worshiped but . . . differently. That’s not something the Lady said,” he added quickly. “That’s just me thinking about it.”

Mike picked up his thread again. “So the Lady and most of those like her stepped back from their godheads. It’s not just that they renounced being worshiped, though that’s part of it. They, uh . . . this part I don’t remember very well.”

“I do,” Miles said suddenly. “‘And so we sundered ourselves from the being and power of gods. Reft and bereft, we grew smaller and more vast, and slowly returned to ourselves. In our return, we saw that we had started to slip toward madness, and we looked at those who had not renounced godhead. We watched them, and we saw that they were insane.’”

“Right,” Mike said. “You’ve got a good memory. So that’s why we don’t worship the Lady. It would be the opposite of serving her because it would harm her.”

“You need to go left at the intersection,” Cynna told Scott, then glanced at Lily. “Does that help?”

“Some. Sort of.” There was one hell of a lot of information in those few passages, but most of it didn’t apply to the immediate question, as far as Lily could tell. “It doesn’t tell me what kind of crazy she is.”

“The kind that thinks they have all the answers,” Miles said. “That’s in another one of the First Memories, but it’s still the Lady talking to Aswan. Aswan was the first Rhej,” he added, in case Lily didn’t know that. “The Lady was explaining about submission and how we need to understand it because the crazy gods didn’t. It went something like this: ‘The unsundered gods, in their insanity, forgot surrender; they submit only to what they already know and confuse will with purpose. And so each is certain that her or his aspect encompasses all wisdom, with all others being lesser, or distortions, or lies.’”

Mike frowned. “Did she say wisdom, or truth? Or maybe I’m thinking about what she said about rainbows.”

This time it was Scott who quoted quietly. “‘Which color of the rainbow is the most true? Is red more true than green? Is blue the best path to understanding, and should you therefore outlaw yellow cloth and purple vases and the soft blushing sky awakening to day?’”

“Yeah, that bit. She was talking about how the clans are to respect each other, but it applies to lots of other stuff.” He paused, glancing at Miles sitting beside him. “I guess we haven’t always done a great job at respecting each other.”

Everyone got quiet. Nokolai and Leidolf were prime examples of clans not respecting each other. Lily decided to return to her question. “So you’re saying that the Great Bitch is the kind of crazy that doesn’t tolerate disagreement. My way or the highway.” This wasn’t exactly news.

“Pretty much,” Cynna agreed. “The interesting thing is that the other Old Ones considered that insane.”

Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “It is interesting, isn’t it? In a weird and startling way.” It also didn’t seem to help much. “If the Big B is acting rationally, however screwed up she may be, then she had a purpose for what she did today. Only I don’t see it. Sure, she’d like to wipe out Nokolai, but she didn’t. She didn’t even come close, however tight things seemed at the time. And she used an awful lot of power trying. And how come she can open gates that way all of a sudden? Last year she couldn’t.”

“Slow down, Scott,” Cynna said suddenly. “It’s just ahead on the right.” She frowned at Lily. “What are you saying?”

“Drummond thinks we have a second enemy. At least,” she corrected herself, “he thinks I do. He, uh, saw some kind of spiritual attack directed against me while we were fighting the dworg.”

“Shit. That’s not good.”

“It’s sort of what my other question was about.” More than one question, really, but with the guards here she wasn’t sure how to bring up the second one.

“Ask quick. We’re nearly there.”

“He thought that either the toltoi protected me or the mate bond. So I wondered . . . does the bond have some kind of spiritual component that could do that?”

“Yes.”

“That was a quick answer.”

“I should qualify that. The mate bond is a magical construct similar to an artifact, but it’s, ah . . . how do I put this? It’s fashioned around a spiritual component instead of a material one. I don’t know what kind of spiritual attack he saw—”

“He didn’t tell me, and I haven’t been able to get him to show up again. He’s having trouble manifesting.”

“Hmm. I think—I don’t know, mind—but I think the bond might be able to protect you from direct attack, like if something tried to take you over. I’m not sure it could help with the kind of spiritual interference that doesn’t rob you of choice, the sort the Church calls temptation.”

Lily had wanted to kill Santos. She hadn’t done it, but she’d been tempted, and it hadn’t been moral reasons that held her back. He’d been trying to rescue her at the time, however mistakenly. Did that mean—

“Stop,” Cynna said. But she wasn’t talking to Lily now. “We’re there.”

THE man who’d been staked to the ground and ritually murdered had lived in a brick-veneer ranch-style house in Alta Vista—a nice enough neighborhood, the kind where vacations were more likely to be Motel 6 or camping than anything involving airfare, but most of the time most of the people here could take a vacation. Like much of the city, Alta Vista had been hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, but it was beginning to come around. Not as many For Sale signs dotted the streets, nor were there many walkaways standing empty and forlorn.

This house hadn’t been abandoned. Someone had added a pricey metal roof in the last five years, and the landscaping was well tended, if uninspired. A wide driveway leading to the two-car garage left little room for the yard, which was all grass except for the kind of foundation plantings beloved by builders fifty years ago. The grass had been cut recently and looked like it got watered as often as the city allowed. “Anything?” she asked Mike, whom she’d sent to peer in the high window in the garage door.

“No car, if that’s what you mean.”

She nodded. “Head around back, keep an eye on that door.” There was a fence, but that wouldn’t slow him down.

No toys on the lawn or the drive, Lily noted as she headed for the small front porch. No potted plants or lawn ornaments, either. The porch’s only decoration was a slumped sack of fertilizer topped by a pair of dirty gardening gloves. The welcome mat provided the single note of whimsy. “Hop In!” it said in bold black letters surrounding a cheerful green frog.

She rang the doorbell.

“If anyone was here, wouldn’t they have reported your guy missing?” Cynna asked.

“You’d think so.” Lily rang again, to be sure. It wouldn’t be hard to get a search warrant, but it would take time, and—

“Lily!” Mike came loping from the side of the house. “Something’s wrong. There’s a window cracked open around back. I couldn’t see in because of the blinds, but I could smell it. Piss and shit and sickness. Not death—I didn’t smell decay, and I heard breathing. Someone’s in there, and it’s bad.”

Lily hammered on the door with her fist. “Police! Open up! We have reason to think someone inside is injured or ill, and will break in if you don’t open the door!” She let two heartbeats pass, then said to Scott, “Get me in.”

Scott stepped back two paces, eyed the door—solid core with a dead bolt—and said, “Mike! Get in through that open window and let us in.”

Mike spun and raced back around the house. A moment later she heard glass break. Apparently Mike hadn’t been able to just push the window up. She drew her weapon. Her heart pounded. She waited, waited . . . heard feet running on carpet, coming near. The click of the dead bolt being turned.

The door swung open. “She’s in bad shape,” Mike said. “No sign of anyone else inside.”

Lily decided to trust his senses and holstered her gun. She ran after him, gathering quick impressions—a small, neat living room flooded with light from the picture window, a darker hallway with four doors, where the sewer stench that had alerted Mike grew thick in her nostrils.

Mike turned into the second doorway on the left. She followed.

It looked like a little girl’s room, all pink and white, with stuffed animals on the shelves and a frilly bedspread on the double bed. But the woman lying in that bed, stinking of urine and feces, must have been at least twenty. Her hair was dusty brown and braided in twin plaits. Her eyes were closed. She lay on her back with her mouth open, one arm limply cradling a bedraggled stuffed dog, and she looked more dead than alive. She had the small chin, the broad, flat face, and the flattened nose of Down syndrome.