The Best Defense by Kristine Kathryn Rusch 6 page

But where was Wylde?

The air was getting thick, gathering and bunching on itself, and now I heard the whisk of many voices swirling on eddies and currents that were not breezes but liquid and sullen, with the feel of fingers dragged through tar.

The realization flashed into my mind with all the immediacy of insight.

The clearing was a perfect circle. The perimeter thrilled in the air with a slight tang of ozone, and the hackles of my neck prickled.

An absurd thought, entirely my own: Like a force field.

Stupid. But I reached a hand, felt the jump and shock of electricity as the field reacted, puckering into knives of energy that burned seams into my palm. With a hiss of pain, I pulled back.

At the sound, Dickert‑or whatever he was

Devaputra‑mara

pivoted. He didn’t even seem surprised. His eyes danced flames, and when he laughed, the sound burst inside my head like napalm. Pain hazed my vision, and I staggered, went down on one knee, then grunted when another white salvo exploded in my brain. Maybe Dickert said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the roaring in my head. Gasping, I pressed my palms against my skull to keep it from blowing apart.

The little girl shrieked, something pointed and piercing that was a stake through my heart.

Had to do something. My slack fingers slapped against the butt of my Glock, and I concentrated on wrapping my hand around the grip, heaving it from my holster. There was a shell in the chamber. The gun was very heavy; my hands were shaking, and I thought: Can’t hit the girl, just don’t hit the girl…

Now, in my head: Jason, no!

I pulled the trigger.

Rocketing from the Glock’s barrel, the bullet whammed against the invisible force emanating from the circle. The circle sheeted purple; the air sung electric. In the next instant, a fist of energy hurtled with all the force and fury of a blow. Pain erupted in my face, and I was lifted off my feet and dashed broadside against a very solid, very real oak with a jolt that shuddered through my bones.

Wind knocked clean out. Unable to breathe, I clutched at my chest, writhing in the dirt, struggling to pull in a precious mouthful of air‑and I thought of that poor girl from so long ago.

A mistake. Suddenly, it was as if a giant hand had descended from the sky, clamped around my throat, my mouth, my nose. I couldn’t breathe. Mouth dropping open in a silent scream, gawping, trying to make my lungs work, drink in air. My chest burned; something was squeezing, cinching down around my ribs. My world shrank, my vision nibbled away at the margins, and if that amulet still burned, I no longer felt it.

Darkness before my bulging eyes. I was on my back, staring into a canopy of a blackness darker than night. Couldn’t feel the snow. Pulse thudding in my temples, my mind slowing down, the thoughts like single words sketched in black marker.

Need.

Air.

From the space above my body, the darkness… shifted.

The night peeled away like a wrapping tugged to one side, a curtain lifted, a door opened‑

And then Sarah Wylde was there.

She said something and moved her hands over my body. I don’t know what she said, couldn’t tell above the roar in my ears, but then the ache in my chest eased. My throat opened, and I pulled in a shrieking, burning breath of cold air‑and then another.

A hand taking mine. Sarah’s grip steady and sure, and now it was her voice in my head: Get up. We have to go together. You have the Sight, now use it!

Somehow I was on my feet, and it was as if things began to tumble into place like cogs meshing with new energy. Perhaps no more than a minute had passed since I’d fired my weapon, but I saw that Dickert, blue and terrible, was bestride the girl, and Sarah’s face was a shimmering oval of pure white light in my new eyes.

What Rollins had said about yantra tattoos: Some make the wearer invisible.

She’d been the presence at my side. Needing me?

Yes. I was the Sight. I could lead. I was the light she needed to see.

“Open the door, Jason.” Speaking now, her voice humming with urgency. “We have to cross into the circle, but we can’t do it unless you open the door.”

“I don’t know how,” I said.

I shouldn’t have been able to see the green fire in her eyes, but I did, just as I knew Dickert’s were red coals. “Open your hands, Jason. Open your hands. ”

What? An image shot into my brain‑the rabbi, in the kitchen, his fist bunched against his chest: Open your heart.

My palms itched. They began to heat. I stared, and they were glowing, beginning to crackle, and now the air they held whirled, the strands of two glowing orbs of energy coalescing, one in each palm, pulling together like the arms of a Milky Way galaxy spinning backward.

Without knowing why I did it, yet understanding that this was the only way, I thrust my hands toward the field. The moment of contact was brutal and solid, like twin jackhammers punching through concrete that rattled to my shoulders and down my spine. A tremendous BOOM, and then the field shattered, turning into opaque shards that sprayed indigo rooster tails of eerie light.

And then we were through, Sarah’s hand clamped firmly around my wrist, moving with the speed of avenging angels.

Dickert‑whatever he was‑roared. Wheeling about, he started for us. His body bent, shifted, transmogrified, and now a fan of sinewy dragons sprouted from his torso. They bellowed.

“Get the girl!” Sarah shouted. She let go. “Then get out of here!”

“Not without you!”

“No time!” And then she was sprinting for Dickert, driving hard, running full tilt, hair billowing.

Rearing up, the dragons spouted fire.

“Sarah!” I shouted. Somehow I had reached the girl; she was quaking under my hands, shivering as if with a lethal fever. “It’s okay,” I said, thinking, liar, liar!

With a bugling ululation, the dragons let loose fireballs: huge, all orange‑yellow flame.

Sarah saw them coming. Still running, she lifted both arms in a great fluttering motion as if snapping a sheet. An instant later, the fireballs connected, squashing flat against some invisible mantle, raining flames on either side of an invisible dome.

Her tattoos‑how could I see them? Her tattoos were moving. A spray of arms, muscular and thick with scythe‑like talons, unspooled from her body, like those from a many‑armed goddess. They whip‑snapped the distance between her and Dickert, powerful hands clamping around the dragons’ necks even as the dragons twined round her arms. When they crashed together, the air split with a cannonade of thunder.

And then the most remarkable thing: Sarah’s form blurred, got fuzzy‑and then the girl, the one I’d seen die in silent agony over forty years ago, stepped away from Sarah’s body. The girl was all colors and no colors; her eyes were white light, and when she opened her mouth, brilliant lambent pillars shot forth as if all the heavens had gathered in that one place, in that one time.

Dickert bellowed as the light splashed and broke over him, and he backpedaled, off balance. The dragons’ heads smoked, then sprouted frills of fire. The air thrummed with a high‑pitched squealing that shook the earth beneath my feet. The dragons dissolved, and then Dickert‑just a man, now‑went down.

Sarah reeled, then stumbled backward as the girl tore herself free, spreading upon the air, now white, now black as a mantle of the deepest starless night‑and flung herself over Dickert’s body.

And yet I could see everything, and I knew that what I saw now was tit for tat. Death dealt out in equal measure.

Dickert’s back arched, yet no sound issued from his wide open mouth. He was slowly suffocating, and I knew just what that felt like. His legs flexed and pedaled to nowhere. His hands were at his throat, his fingers clawing his own flesh to bloody ribbons. His face was going plummy purple, eyes bulging now not in rage or triumph but terror.

Still holding the girl, I knelt beside Sarah. Touched her shoulder. She pulled her head around, and with my strange new sight, I saw that her eyes were still green, but for the moment, there was no one else there.

I looked at Dickert. His legs were shivering, his hands fluttering in death tremors.

“It’s over,” Sarah said. “Until next time.”

VII

When Rollins and Arlington ’s finest showed up at Dickert’s rentals, they found a clutch of seven girls in each. The youngest was ten, the eldest seventeen. Each had either been sold by their families or simply kidnapped. Of the twenty‑one girls, thirteen were from South Vietnam, seven from Thailand, seven from Cambodia; all were smuggled in by way of the Canadian border into Minnesota. The houses were overseen by “mothers” hired to run the brothels.

They never found Call‑Me‑Bob. But the girl’s name was Tevy.

Cambodian for “Angel.”

In time, the DA saw the wisdom of not stringing up Lily Hopkins as an example. A smart DA, he got her remanded to a psychiatric facility and from there, probation and home.

I’m told Lily wasn’t in an institution very long. Her father came to be with her. They probably have a long row to hoe before they’re a family again.

But.

We live in hope.

Never did figure out who that poor Vietnamese girl had been. Sarah didn’t get a name, sorry, but she thought the girl might have been a collective Presence. Many villages in Vietnam and Cambodia had spirits attached to them. So perhaps the girl was the village, and the monk was dead. So.

What was past was past.

We couldn’t have taken it further, anyway. When I went back to look at the DVD, the disk was empty. Poof. Like magic.

As if I’d been allowed to see only what was required to act.

All accounts balanced.

And Sarah Wylde:

“A seer?” I asked. This was five days later. We were drinking good coffee‑excellent coffee‑at a little Ethiopian bakery‑café off U in the Shaw District. “I’m no prophet.”

“Not a seer. A See ‑er. You’ve got the gift of Sight, not Future Sight, not clairvoyance, but the ability to see manifestations no one else can‑and probably more abilities you don’t know. It’s what makes you a good detective. Your hunches? Those sudden aha moments when everything clicks into place?” She gave a lopsided smile, but her lip was almost normal. “That’s part of it. You’ve got something special.”

Then she touched her fingertips first to my forehead and then my chest, over my heart.

The place where, a year ago, another woman‑different and yet somehow the same‑placed her hand and told me why she’d waited around until I’d figured things out. Her mission, you might say.

“There and there,” Sarah said. “You’ve been… marked. You’re different.”

“But I’m just a cop.”

Who’s been touched by a woman who might have been an angel.

“If you were just or only a cop, you couldn’t have seen my avatars. Dickert would have been just a man. You’d never have found him. I’d never have found him either. Oh, I was… drawn to a certain point in time just as you were, and Dickert and MacAndrews and Lily Hopkins. But I don’t necessarily know a Malevolent when I see it. That’s why I mantled myself, so I could remain invisible until you’d found him or… you needed me.”

I touched the place where the amulet nestled against my skin. “Do you think the rabbi… that Dietterich…?”

“He sounds pretty intuitive. He must’ve sensed something, then given you the amulet, not really knowing how it was going to help.”

“And how did it? I still don’t get that.”

“Let me see it again.” She took the charm I proffered. Stared at it. Then she made a little aha sound and started digging through her purse. Fished out a compact. “Not gibberish. I just wasn’t looking right.”

“A compact? I didn’t know you were vain.”

“Don’t be mean. Look.” Opening the compact, she held the amulet so I could see its reflection in the compact’s mirror. “It’s a mirror script, like da Vinci’s handwriting. That’s ancient paleo‑Hebrew from before the First Temple Era. Say, five thousand years ago. That one in the center with hooks like a bull’s skull?”

“Yeah. I thought of Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“Close. It represents an ox head, but it’s also an ‘aleph,’ the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In their modern equivalents, the letters spell Elohim no matter if you read them right‑left, diagonally, or up‑down.” She paused expectantly, and when I didn’t jump in, she said, “God, Jason. It’s God, or whatever power you want to call on. And the gems, these are all from the high priest’s breastplate, each letter associated with a specific jewel. The amethyst in the center: Purple is the color of spirituality. Amethyst is the stone of clarity and transformation. Coupled with aleph, it is the power of one, the power of that which is unique and like none other. It’s you, Jason.”

I chewed on that a minute. “What about those things I conjured up in my hands? What were those?” But what she’d said was already triggering associations I’d look up later.

“Dunno. Be interesting if you can conjure them again.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I read a lot. And when you’re in a family as odd as mine…”

“Uh‑huh. Tell me something: Your dad being a demon hunter. Is that all hype? Or are we talking like father, like daughter?”

Her emerald eyes sparkled. “I have a very interesting family. Want to meet him?”

“What are you offering?”

“This.” Then she cupped a hand to my cheek, and I felt something almost unbearably sweet, and yet also like pain, loosen in my chest. As if by losing one thing I had gained something much greater, even if I could put no name to it. Not yet anyway.

“A door, Jason,” she said. “All you need is the courage to open it and step through.”

It was going to be complicated.

Later, in my apartment, I Googled: Ummin. Thummin.

Read and Googled some more.

Thought: Hmmmm.

Two days later, on Saturday night:

I watch as Rabbi Dietterich blesses a cup of wine to begin the ritual of Havdalah, marking the end of Shabbat. The word means separation, and he once explained the ceremony as not only signaling the start of a new week but as a literal separation of one state of being from another. The Orthodox believed that all Jews received a second soul for the duration of Shabbat, and so this ritual marked that separation as well.

What is this second soul? Who? Always the same one, or can any restless soul come calling? I don’t know. I suspect it’s complicated.

Someone passes the spice box, and I sniff the heady aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg, of cloves and allspice. The Kabbalists say that the scent might also entice that second soul to linger just a little while longer.

People don’t like to let go, even when they know they have to.

Chanting the blessing, Dietterich lights the long braided candle with its two wicks. The flames leap heavenward. The light is full and rich and makes Sarah’s hair shimmer with sudden startling flashes of ruby and gold. When she looks at me, I see the light reflected there.

“Just as light illuminates the dark, so we see that there is a clear distinction between darkness and light, between confusion and clarity,” Dietterich says. “To linger in the light is to know wisdom. To know wisdom is to banish loneliness and doubt and fear. So we are sad as we take leave of this Shabbat and of this soul, which has blessed us by its touch, yet we take comfort in what we have shared and what lies ahead knowing that what is now will be again.”

As the rabbi douses the flame in a small dish of leftover wine and for some reason I do not understand, I close my eyes. Maybe it is because, for the first time, I do feel something leaving. Something is letting go. It is not quite loss, but it’s that same feeling when Sarah touched my face.

Is it‑was it‑ Adam? Has he always been there and it’s only that I’ve never rediscovered my old friend, there all along, because I haven’t known how to look? How to see?

How many other souls are worth knowing?

“Jason.” I open my eyes, and it’s the man to my left. Saul, I think his name is. He extends the basin of wine. “Your turn.”

“Thank you, Saul.” I dip my finger in the wine, close my eyes once more, and dab a drop to each.

The command of the Lord is clear, enlightening to the eyes.

Psalm 19:9.

We live in hope.

And when I open my eyes and pass the basin, Sarah is there.

The True Secret of Magic, Only $1.98, Write Box 47, Portland, ORE. by Joe Edwards

It used to be more than a grift. She’d never meant this to be a con. Even now, she could sense her grandfather frowning from the spidered darkness of his grave. “My sweet patoot,” he’d say in that gravelly voice that always brought in a few extra dollars from the middle‑aged women in the audience. “You can’t never lose track of which part is from the world of light and which part is from the world of shadow.”

“Yes, sir, pappy,” she whispered.

Bringing in money through the mails was a risky proposition even at the best of times. Postal inspectors took a dim view of mail fraud. The murmured cant by candlelight in a sideshow tent became a felony when she wrote it down and put a five‑cent stamp on it.

It wasn’t the money that was interesting.

She lived in a little walk‑up on the third floor of a decaying Victorian apartment house on Portland ’s east side. Buses and trucks wheezed in the street by day, railroad cars rumbled down the pavemented sidings by night. It was never silent here, always too damp, nothing like the bright fields of home. There was little to do here except listen to the ache of her bones. If it weren’t for the mail, she’d have cracked like an old chamber pot long before.

The mail was interesting, not the money. It brought questions‑the same kind of sad and quiet whispers people had come into her tent with during the years before and during the Depression.

Dear sir can you pleese find my dog Freeway?

How will I find love?

Where did Aunt Irma hide the silver?

She didn’t even mind the sirs. A whole generation had grown up since the war not knowing that women had done anything besides wear sunglasses and capri pants while lounging outside their husbands’ Levittown homes. The ones who were old enough to recall the Depression, and women working swing shift at the factories after that, they preferred to forget, to pretend. Now America had that nice Catholic boy as president, who’d fought the Japanese armed only with perfect teeth and a Cape Cod tan. He was every woman’s dream and every man’s envy. Not like the wrinkled old men who reminded everybody of the bad times.

She took the money in, a few dollars some weeks, more others, because without it she would have been living on dog food in someone’s cellar. But the money was nothing more than the river on which the questions flowed.

This past week there had been a postcard from Dallas, Texas. A question, of course‑money came in envelopes.

Why must he die? it said on the back. The handwriting was strong, with a thick marker pen, like a man labeling a box. There was no return address, only the postmark.

She turned it over as she had every day since receiving it. Texas Theatre, Oak Cliff, Dallas, the letters on the front proudly proclaimed. The movie house’s marquee advertised Cary Grant in The Grass Is Greener, which made the photo several years old. Somehow she doubted the postcard concerned itself with the passing of an actor.

No clues at all. The question was nonsense, and there was no way to answer it anyway. She tucked the postcard into the frame of her mirror, where she kept the saddest and most puzzling ones. It was past time to fold a few more of the brochures to mail to the people who’d sent actual cash money. The money orders she simply tore up and threw away, though those people also received a brochure for their efforts.

There is magic everywhere in this world. From the voodoo priests and priestesses of New Orleans to the smoldering altars beneath castles and palaces of Nazi‑occupied Europe, misguided persons have always come together to call power. Professor Marvel LaCoeur’s patented magical pathways will show you the true secret of magic, safe and effective. Win over friends! Get the girl! Have more money than you’ll ever need!!!

Her favorite time to walk was twilight. That was the hour when the distinction between light and darkness melted to a quiet silvery glow, and anything was possible. Sometimes her grandfather whispered to her then, or even walked a few paces beside her. It was hard for him to reach back from where he had gone, but she knew he loved her.

The city was that way everywhere‑the day birds were not quite all sleeping, and the night birds were not quite all out. Mercurys and Buicks fled downtown, heading for the nicer homes in Gresham and Milwaukie, even as the first cab loads of drinkers and louche women were already passing west, into the bars that were just awakening. Sun touched the West Hills, but she could see stars over the mountain.

Her time, her day, when answers would come unbidden to questions she had not yet heard. The challenge in her life was matching them up once again.

Blue shall always be unlucky for you.

Trust her tears far more than you trust your smiles.

Take the job, even if it means moving to Mexico City.

It was like having one piece each out of a hundred different jigsaw puzzles. Still, she kept a pencil stub and a pocket memo pad in her purse. When the answers came, she wrote them down. They always mattered again later.

Papa leaned so close she could smell the cloves and hemp on his breath. He whispered: Because otherwise the boatman would be king.

She hadn’t put her memo pad away yet, but she thought long and hard before she wrote that answer down.

The next day she shuffled off to the post office to mail the three brochures she’d received payment for the previous week, as well as the one money order she’d thrown away. Portland at the end of summer was already crisp. The air was like the first bite of an apple even though the sun was still brass‑bright. Nothing like the golden fields of her youth, but little else in life was like her youth either.

There was no one outside the East Portland postal station. She stopped to examine the rhododendrons that struggled in their concrete‑lined beds. The season’s last spiders hung on in their optimism, webs strung to catch the straggling flies.

She looked up through the windowpane by the door to see a man in a cheap gray suit looking back at her. Time to go home, she thought, but even as she turned away he stepped out the door.

“ Box 47.” It wasn’t a question. His voice, though… this one could have worked beside pappy back in the good days. A big man, shoulders that pushed skinny kids around on the playing field not so long ago, with close‑cropped black hair and narrow gray eyes.

She might have fancied him, decades past.

“ Es tut mir bang?” She used the voice she always used for pushy strangers and people who asked questions‑thick, European, confused. “I’m sorry?”

“Ella Sue Redheart.” His smile didn’t try very hard. “You’re no more Yiddish than I am, lady.”

So much for the accent. “That’s ma’am to you, sonny.”

“Ma’am.” You could have sliced the sarcasm in his voice and sold it by the pound. He pulled a sheaf of papers out of his coat pocket. No, letters, she realized, two envelopes and a postcard. “You are the box holder at number 47?”

“Who knows?” She shrugged.

His smile quirked again, with a dose of sincerity this time. “I do.”

“Big government man, shaking down little old ladies. Your mother know you do this?”

“Cut the crap, granny.” He reached in again and pulled out a badge. “We both know I’m a postal inspector, and we both know you’re Miss Redheart of Box 47.” He snorted. “Magic? Really? You got supernatural powers?”

“Oh, I got supernatural powers, boy. They tell me you’re going to buy me a cup of coffee down the street there, and we’re going to talk real nice.”

“How’s that?”

“Because you haven’t yet told me your name. A cop always starts out either with the truncheon, or the I’m Officer Blueshirt of the pig farm routine. You want something. Don’t try to grift a grifter, boy.”

“Coffee it is.” This time he really did smile. He didn’t give her the letters, though.

The source is within you. Every one of us is born with a shard of the Pearl of World deep inside our hearts. Most children have it taken out of them by spankings, by prayer, by the mindless lockstep of school. Free yourself and you can find that Pearl. Once you take it in your hand, you can make the world your oyster! You begin by looking back before your first memories, when even your mother was a stranger to you.

She blew across the coffee cup. It was beige with green striping and could be found in any diner in America. The coffee within was as dark as a Chinaman’s eyes. No cream, no sugar, not her.

The postal inspector stirred his tea. She’d been surprised by that. She’d have thought him a coffee man. All the big ones were. Coffee, and scotch in the afternoons.

Pappy’s first rule was never volunteer anything to the heat. She wasn’t pappy, and besides that she was as small time as they came. Still she held her silence as tightly as she held her cup.

He finally put the letters on the table. “Two days, three letters. That’s what, six simoleons in your pocket?”

“Less advertising, printing and mailing,” she said quietly.

“I’ve seen your little booklet.” He leaned close. “A moron wouldn’t believe that stuff.”

“You’d be amazed what people believe, copper.” She sipped her coffee. “You’d be even more amazed how many of them are right.”

He kicked back and drank some of his tea. “Maybe. I seen a lot. First Korea, then a flatfoot in Seattle, now minding the mails for Uncle Sam.” He examined the letters. “That’s six years right there, three instances of postal fraud. For you, I’m guessing it don’t matter what the fine is, you can’t pay it.”

She hunched down. She wasn’t often ashamed of herself, but this man opened doors in her memory. “I live on ten dollars a week, fourteen in a good week. What do you think?”

“I think, why the hell is someone committing federal offenses for ten dollars a week?”

“It’s a living.”

“Not much of one.”

She put her cup down and took the letters from his hand. “Sonny, I’ll be seventy in a couple years. I ain’t never had no Social Security number, been cash and carry all my life. It’s what I got.”

He tugged the postcard out of his pocket. “No, this is what you got.” He turned it over in his finger like a stage magician with the Queen of Hearts.

She looked, suddenly terrified it might be from Dallas, Texas. But no, this one said, “Greetings from Scenic Lake of the Woods!”

The card stopped flipping. He read aloud, “I can make fifty dollars a week and send my kid to college, but I have to go so far away. What should I do?”

“ Take the job,” she whispered. “ Even if it means moving to Mexico City. ”

“You don’t charge for those,” he said flatly.

She shook her head. Two bits a reading, a long time ago in a tent beside dusty red dirt roads. Not now. Not any more.

He pulled another card out of his coat. A photo, she realized. A head shot of a man of medium build, average looking with short dark hair. He seemed like an earnest fellow. This one could have been her son, if she’d ever had a son. “This tell you anything?”

Someone has a camera, she thought, but bit off the words. “N‑no.”

“Hmm.” He stared. “I’ll buy you coffee again next week. You think of anything, you write it down in that little book.” He left thirty‑five cents tip on the table and stood, taking his hat off the coat hook on the wall.

As the postal inspector left, she realized two things. She hadn’t pulled out the memo book since meeting him, and he’d never told her his name. At least he’d left her the letters.

She palmed the tip as she picked up her mail and shuffled off for home.

That Friday there was another postcard from Dallas in her box. This one showed a city park, with a road running through it to disappear under a railway overpass. There were a few monuments scattered around. She looked at the back, at the almost familiar handwriting.