Chapter Seven
My Scrambler knocked and shuddered for a few moments after I had turned it off. I think that the climb up the interwoven parking garage ramps may have exhausted it.
The ocean wind whipped through the garage, and even though summer was nearly in full swing in Miami, the swirling nighttime air felt unnaturally cold to me. I pinned on my badge and trudged to the elevators in the center of Nawang's oceanfront condominium tower. And when I say "Nawang's condominium," I mean the entire building, which he picked up for pennies during the lowest point of the real estate bust, if what Nace had told me was true. He didn't even actually buy the building. He bought the holding company that owned it.
Emma and Calvin were already waiting by the elevator. Emma was wearing a black, sparkly, and eye-wateringly slinky cocktail dress. It looked very good on her, setting off her pale complexion. Its short skirt blew freely in the wind, and I found myself wishing that it were just slightly windier. Calvin was wearing the same suit he had worn to the interview. He popped some chewing gum into his mouth and pocketed the wrapper.
As for me, I was adorned with grease-stained jeans and a black tee-shirt that said, "BECAUSE I CAN READ IT THIS WAY." Written upside-down. As a concession, my flip-flops were new.
"I've never seen you wear that before," I said to Emma.
She shrugged. "You've never been in my closet," she answered.
"I've never been in your anything, now that I think about it," I waggled my eyebrows.
Emma snorted irritably. "There's a whole list of reasons for that, lover boy. Your eye looks a lot better than last night. Did you get a doctor to look at it today?"
"No," I shook my head. "I have some old-fashioned remedies that my mother passed down to me."
"I wish you would give more credence to modern medical science," she frowned unhappily.
"Hey," I put my hand to my heart. "I'm their number one fan. I just can't afford the modern medical invoice."
The elevator opened. A pair of body guards, dressed in cheap sports jackets, stood at attention in the back. The older one looked us up and down and waved us in.
"The party is on the eighth floor," he said to us in Spanish. "Mister Nawang requests that you stay on that floor unless invited elsewhere by the staff. There's another party on the fifth floor tonight, but that's being hosted by sports agents who don't want their young guests to be seen."
"How many people are at the party?" I turned back to him.
He seemed to chew on something for a minute. "You ever been to one of Mister Nawang's parties before?"
I shook my head.
"When he purchased the building, he remodeled several of the floors for private entertainment. The whole eighth floor is reserved for your party. But, since it's a Tuesday night, the crowd will be relatively light. Mister Nawang loves a good party. He keeps people like me and Julio busy all the time, right?"
Julio, the other guard, nodded and smiled to himself.
"Eighth floor, enjoy the party, Mister Saga," the older one said. "You won't need your badges, now."
We entered a dim, coquelicot-red world of downtemo electronica and Chinese trance background music. In spite of myself, I found myself relaxing, getting my mellow on.
A couple of college-aged girls tottered over to us. I thought I recognized one of them from the telephone pool back at the firm, only now she was heavy on the eyelash gunk, and even heavier on the vodka. She and her friend zeroed right in on Calvin, who had been forced to shift his eyeglasses to the top of his ultra-curly hair.
"Can I take your coat?" she asked, and burst into a fit of giggling and snorting.
"Want to ride my bicycle?" the other girl slurred, and the pair fell into each other with laughter.
"Say, hey loddie-loddie," Eyelash Girl started to sing, badly. She wasn't looking at anyone in particular. "Hey loddie-loddie!"
Calvin looked back at us, apologetically. He held his left hand to his face, giving us the sign of the telephone. "I'm being called," he said.
"Lucky you," Emma observed.
In spite of the gloom, I thought I saw Calvin turn a little red. "Twice lucky, I'm hoping," he put his dark glasses back on. "Hey, ladies, my name's Calvin. How can I entertain you two this evening?" As smooth as silk, he took the two girls in his arms and they wandered off to find a private corner for themselves.
"That kid puts me to shame," I said.
"Figured that out, did you?" Emma shook her head in mock despair. Or, I hoped it was mock despair.
"Hey, whatever happened to Miss Supportive?" I protested, putting my arm through hers as we ambled into the reception area.
"She burned her bra," Emma said.
"Ah," I mused. "And is that bad, or good?"
"Depends on whether you're the bra," she answered.
"Let me know when you're ready to burn your dress," I didn't say.
Not far from the elevator door, we ran across a directory of the floor. It turned out Nawang had partitioned the floor into a collection of venues—two types of dance floors, a sports bar, a smoking room, a beatnik lounge, a small soundstage, and a maze of semi-private nooks, among other cryptic-sounding rooms.
A well-groomed man wearing a lightweight headphone stood to one side. "Have you been here before?" he asked. "Want help selecting a venue?"
"I almost hate to ask," Emma glanced at the directory, "but what's the 'Leather Room'?"
The man laughed. "It's made up like a ski lodge. It has big leather chairs and couches, and lots of fireplaces. Romantic. People go there to relax and get away from the noise of the party.
"Right now, the biggest crowds are in the rave floor and sports bar. If you like classic guitar, there's some aficionados hanging out at the sound stage."
"I'd go to the sound stage, if I were you," a voice carried from behind us. "The guitarist doesn't even use a pick. He's pasted cut-up ping-pong balls onto his fingernails and plays with all five fingers. Never heard anything like it in my life."
"Iverna!" I said, turning. "Thanks for helping us get the job."
"Quote me something, dahling."
"For you? 'I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one.'"
She sighed theatrically. "Word on the street is you all earned your pay, with interest," our agent took a sip from a Long Island iced tea. "They gave you a thirty percent bonus for the day's work, and asked if you want to stay on with them a bit longer for some more 'odd jobs'. I didn't ask them what that means, and they didn't offer to say, anyway. Emma, I really dig your dress."
Didn't I tell Emma I liked her dress? Okay, not exactly, but she knew by the way I was drooling at her, right? That counts, doesn't it?
"Thanks," Emma smiled. "I won't even bother complimenting you, you just always look stylin'."
"Heh," Iverna primped her hair dramatically. "Keep the compliments rolling, honey, I live for 'em."
"Have you seen a guy named Elliot Dyer?" I asked the information dude.
"Yeah, I think. Let me ask." He pressed a finger in his headpiece and whispered with his operator. "Yeah, he's over in the beatnik lounge. He, ah—nothing. You can't miss him."
"Thanks," I said. "Do you two mind if I head out for a couple of minutes? There's a guy I want to talk to."
"An infamous wayward husband," Emma said to Iverna.
"Oh, ah," Iverna pursed her lips. "Want some backup?"
"Better not," I held my hands up. "There's some, uh, personal things about his wife that he needs to know."
"In that case, remember that Big Brother loves a party," Iverna looked upwards toward the black ceiling. "Meet us at the sound stage when you're done. Dahlink."
At the threshold of the beatnik café, a hostess handed me a black beret to wear. I put it on, feeling kind of stupid.
The café consisted of dingy brick walls tagged with graffiti that looked a little too artsy, and some purposefully torn and stressed posters with pictures that were too abstract for my small brain. The tables were Japanese-low, complete with floor pillows instead of chairs. In the far end of the room was a small stage, decorated with a pair of dusty-looking bongos. Shadeless incandescent lights hung from the ceiling by bare wires. And speaking of shades, the ceiling was totally covered with a double-layer of ultra-dark sunglasses. They unsettled me. It was a little like standing right underneath the eye of a giant housefly.
Xavier Díaz—White Court vampire, with Elliot Dyer—selkie, and a conservative-looking girl who I didn't recognize sat cross-legged on the stage, with the girl sitting between the two men.
The girl was blindfolded, and she was smiling hugely.
The two men sat facing her. Xavier was staring at her intently, his eyes eerily unblinking and opened a little too wide. His pupils seemed a little dilated. Elliot sat with his arms crossed but otherwise looked completely at ease. He had the ghost of a smile on his lips.
I instantly hated both of them. I had the sudden irrational urge to run up and rescue the girl. Actually, knowing who both of those guys were, maybe it wasn't such an irrational reaction.
Most everyone else in the room was standing up, enthralled with the threesome.
"What's up?" I asked a person standing near the back of the crowd, a woman wearing a rather tight-fitting tee-shirt and jeans.
"It's a challenge," she whispered in my ear. "Xavier has been wearing the crown of most eligible bachelor next to Isaac since our firm started, but Elliot begs to differ. So Elliot challenged Xavier to a round of the dating game. Whoever gets the date is the undisputed king-expectant of Casanovas. They've been going at it for the last ten minutes."
"Holy scones," I said. "Who's the chick?"
"Don't know. She doesn't work for us. Somebody's friend, I think. She's never met either of them, that's why they picked her."
The bachelorette held up her hand and the room quieted. "Bachelor One," she said, "if you ruled the world, what would your first law be?"
Xavier snorted. "Baby, I already do rule the world. And I'd give it all to you, for just one kiss from your angelic lips." I could have sworn that his unblinking eyes somehow blinked even less. He was leaning closer to her, almost straining, while Elliot looked on without moving a muscle.
The crowd in the room shifted restlessly. It seemed odd to me that Xavier didn't seem more influential to us. But I didn't want to risk opening up my third eye again to see what was really going on.
The bachelorette pursed her lips. "Bachelor Two? Same question."
Elliot stretched, cricked his neck to the right. "If I were made the ruler of the world, I'd make a free dating service for anyone to use who doesn't have someone. I'd make it safe, and I'd make it truthful. Because I strongly believe that no one in the world should be lonely for even one moment. Life is too short and too hard for anyone to live without love."
The bachelorette nodded. She rubbed her hands together, thinking. "Okay, Bachelor One, since you're scoping out my lips, what would you say is the difference between sexuality and sensuality?"
The vampire seemed to squirm. Who would have thought that he would get a vocabulary question? He probably wasn't sure what the difference really was. Come to think of it, I didn't know the difference either, except vaguely. Xavier cleared his throat, as determined as ever to win his girl. "Sexuality is when you and I make passionate, beautiful love all through the night. Sensuality is when you dream about me every night afterwards." He smiled hugely, thinking he had nailed it.
A sullen silence fell over the spectators. Xavier believed what he was saying. It probably was exactly what happened with his victims who lived. His power isn't working, I realized. Something is blocking it. Something more powerful than a vampire, at least when it comes to actual matters of the heart—or someone. My eyes returned to Elliot. He hadn't moved. But his sly smile was just slightly wider. He was enjoying seeing Xavier squirm. And, oh, how he was. His words must have never needed to be more than just window dressing when he had his demon to talk for him. Now everyone realized just how hollow those words were. And Xavier knew that we knew. I hoped he wasn't contemplating killing us.
"Bachelor Two, same question?" the girl asked.
Elliot leaned closer to her. His voice was so quiet that I almost couldn't hear him. "Sensuality," he whispered, "is when I tickle your naked body with my perfect red rose. Sexuality is when you tickle me back with yours."
The spectators who managed to hear him snapped their fingers in appreciation.
Xavier seethed. "Ask him the next question first," he said to the bachelorette.
"No," she simply answered.
Now he did blink. He worked his hands into fists nervously.
"Bachelor One, what is your idea of a perfect marriage proposal?"
"Ma-?" he looked incredulous. Cattle don't discuss marriage with the ranchers, he was obviously thinking. Oh, how he was going to lose now. "Baby," he said in an oily voice, "I'd give you the biggest, baddest, most rock and roll proposal the world has ever seen! I'd rent out a football stadium, and bring you to the fifty yard line in a limousine with a swimming pool in the back, and I'd jump out of a helicopter from above, and on a streamer tied to me, I'd tell you about my undying love. And instead of fireworks, there'd be a hundred thousand bottles of champagne popping all at the same time in your honor. And I'd get down on my knees and worship you as the living goddess that you truly are, for all the world to see."
"Wow," the bachelorette said. Xavier beamed.
"Uh, and Bachelor Number Two? How would you top that?"
Elliot thought it over. "I don't know if I can top that, but the original question was, 'what is a perfect marriage proposal?' And I think I can give you an answer to that. You see, when two people really love each other, and know that they are meant for each other, and want to be with each other for the rest of their days, it doesn't really matter if the guy falls out of the canoe trying to get on one knee, or if the ring falls though a hole in his pocket, or if it rains on them as they look for a romantic place to talk. We're all human, and things don't always go as planned. But it's still okay, because the only thing that it takes to make a proposal perfect is whether it has a happy ending. When two people who have sought each other all their lives, now know for sure that they have found each other, forever."
The bachelorette was very quiet.
"Okay," she said, "I've decided I'll date Bachelor Number Two." She took off her blindfold and looked at the two men who had contested over her. And when she looked at Elliot, she broke into a shy smile. He held out his hand to her, and she took it.
Xavier snorted. He stood up and walked away without a word to anyone.
"Long live the King of Casanovas!" the lady next to me shouted, her arm pumped into the air. Laughter filled the room, and the sound of snapping fingers grew louder. A few people playfully tossed their berets in the air, and I followed suit just so that I could ditch the stupid thing.
The whole contest had left me dumbfounded. I had watched Xavier working the strings. They just weren't connected to anything. It was like someone had cut the throttle wire in his car. He was jamming down on the petal, but the engine wasn't listening. I didn't even know that could happen to a vampire.
I followed the pair of lovebirds out, waiting for the crowd to thin a little before I said anything to him. "Elliot," I said. "Can I have a quick word with you? Uh, in private?"
"Do I know you?" he turned back to me, his brows furrowed.
"No," I glanced at the girl, not wanting to say too much. "It's about your work at the Seaquarium."
He glared at me suspiciously.
"A friend of yours asked me to look you up," I added.
"Can this wait? We're sort of on a date," the girl said.
Elliot touched her arm with his hand reassuringly. She shuddered with pleasure. "It's okay, this will just take a couple of minutes. Right?"
"Right," I said.
"I'll meet you by the elevators," he spoke softly to the girl. "I'll only be gone five minutes, I promise."
The girl glared at me icily. "See you."
"Okay, there's a buffet room right over here. It's usually quiet at this hour." He led me through a short maze of nooks to a room with a serving table along the entire back wall. The table had been laden with appetizers, but most of them had already been picked over. I helped myself to some leftover crackers and smoked gouda.
That's when Elliot tackled me. I lost my footing and we both rolled to the floor. He got on top of me and put his hands around my throat.
"What have you done to her?" he demanded hotly. As if I could answer him. He was a lot stronger than he looked. "Haven't you people already done enough? You can do whatever you want to me, but if you involve her, I'm going to start killing people, you understand? Understand? You tell that to Nawang!"
I gurgled. I think my face might have started to turn color, because he suddenly let go. But he didn't get off of me.
"Ava—" I gasped. "Ava—made me promise to find you."
Elliot hissed. "It would be just like her," he groaned. "She doesn't know when she endangers people. It just doesn't occur to her."
"I hope," I coughed, "it doesn't bother her that you're going out on dates. I thought you were married."
"We—" he started, and then stopped himself. "It's not a proper Christian marriage. It's just our way of saying that we are special to each other. But we're still going to be what we are. You know about us, right?"
I nodded.
"Then you know that we can't get married in the Christian way. The Bible says that people who go through what we do, don't have marriages any more."
He meant, people who die.
"She's worried about you. She sent me to find you. If you want to see her again, go to this place." I handed him a card with the location of my boat.
But he threw the card back at me as if he were burned. "No!" he groaned. "You don't understand! They own me now! I don't want her anywhere near me! You don't know what they've done to—"
The sound of footsteps interrupted us. A man in a white suit casually leaned on the doorframe. Isaac Wright looked at the two of us, still on the floor, wry amusement on his face.
"Did I interrupt your foreplay?" he casually scratched one of his fangs with his fingernail. "Hey, Elliot, that was nice work with the thrall. But you've gone and left her unprotected by the elevator, and Xavier knows where she is. I wonder what he might do about it?"
His head lowered in close-mouthed submission, Elliot helped me up from the floor, and pushed his way past Isaac, who was quietly laughing to himself.
"He tries so hard," Isaac said to me. "Just like you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I wanted to thank you for your team's excellent work on Monday. I doubt that the enemy is stupid enough to bite, but you have to try. It's part of the game. And you never know, sometimes you get lucky."
"What was in the locker that Emma sent Evans after?"
Isaac shrugged. "Fake evidence. That Echemendía was in bed with Chinese slavers. Memos, things like that. But we also made indisputable documents to prove that the stuff in the locker was fake. We weave such tangled webs, don't we? Just like you."
"I'm not weaving any webs, dude," I said. "I'm just here to get some crackers and cheese."
From across the room, the White Court vampire held his hand out towards a full glass of merlot sitting on the serving table. He narrowed his eyes and flexed his fingers, and the full glass lifted up and floated to his waiting hand. He delicately plucked it out of the air, not spilling a drop.
Crap, I thought. On top of being a vampire, he's been studying magic under somebody. And I always spill a little, the show-off bastard.
"Surprised?" he said, his eyes fixed firmly upon me.
"Parlor trick," I shrugged. "You should go on tv."
The vampire frowned. He set the wine down on a nearby side table and walked over to face me directly.
"Is that so?" he hissed in a stage whisper. "And do you call it a parlor trick out of sheer ignorance, or personal experience?"
I could feel him applying pressure to my mind, using a strange and powerful concoction of his vampiric and magical skills, but I wasn't about to cave in to him. "It's just a parlor trick," I repeated.
He forced his will upon my mind harder, an outright attack. If it had been physical, it would have been like getting a golf driver in the kidney. "I hope for your sake that you aren't spying for the White Council. We don't want your kind here, wizard," he blew into my ear. "Who on the WC sent you here?"
If I hadn't been trained for his mental attack, I'd be gurgling drool by this point. But my father had insisted that I learn how to beat mental dominance. As an undercover Warden, it was one of his most important tricks. And to show how serious he was about it, he let my uncle Senge teach me. Every day. For nine months. Uncle Senge made me crawl on the floor and bark like a dog. Each month, I got stronger and more clever at holding him back. But he never let me win.
Isaac was good at this, very good. He hit me with a two-pronged attack, magical and demonic. But he was no two thousand year old vampire. I steeled my mind and lubricated it. My thoughts shot around Isaac's mental grasp like a greased pig.
I looked at him blankly. "White Council? Is that like the KKK, or something? They got wizards, don't they?"
Faster than I could blink, the vampire slugged me in the cheek, driving me down to the ground. I stayed there, meekly looking back at him.
He pointed a bony finger at me. "I'm watching you. Never forget that we're all watching you."
This time, he picked up the wine the old fashioned way before stalking out, while I rubbed my swelling cheek.
"What's with the white suits, anyway?" I raised my voice through the open doorway. "You got dandruff problems, or something?"
And then he stamped back in, angrily. I thought I was dead.
"Come with me," he ordered.
"Where?" I said, warily.
"Penthouse," he answered. "The CEO wants a word with you."
We entered a different, teak-lined elevator on our way to the penthouse. There were no guards in the elevator this time. Isaac inserted a key into the control panel before selecting the top floor.
I wasn't really going to ask where this guy Nawang got all his money. It couldn't have been from just ordinary campaign contributors. Let's face it, Echemendía was a two-bit candidate in the grand scheme of things, no matter how big a name he might be in ten years; he could never draw in the kind of money needed to finance this party, let alone the firm. But then again, Echemendía was probably just one of many candidates that the firm represented. And with helpful folks like Isaac and Elliot on the payroll, I had to wonder how many of our contributors were completely voluntary. I shuddered.
The questions about Nawang swirled about my mind as the elevator dinged and the doors opened onto a short, wide hallway. A bodyguard stood behind one of a pair of giant foo-dog statues that faced me, teeth bared and tongues protruding. Nice doggie, I thought.
Isaac led me through a living room. It was decorated with artwork from China and Tibet, mostly crafted just before the Chinese revolution. Some of the artwork looked like it must have originally been owned by the very wealthy, right before they had their throats slashed by the People. A lot of the décor reminded me of my parents' old living room, except that it was a thousand times more rare and expensive.
We turned westward, and Isaac led me through a hurricane-proofed sliding glass door onto a large balcony that overlooked the sprawling city beneath us. The multicolored lights gleamed like a jeweled spider's web, scintillating in the night wind, which blew more fiercely than ever at this height. A line of yellow ocher and black flags tied to the wall above the balcony door flapped and whipped like sails in a squall.
I noticed another guard standing quietly in the shadows in one corner of the balcony, but Isaac led me in the other direction, to a patio table surrounded with cushioned chairs. In the center of the table had been placed a black-lacquered tray bearing an antique Tibetan tea kettle and two probably priceless cups.
Nawang was sitting in one of the chairs, cast in semi-darkness. He was wearing a smoking jacket. I had never actually seen a smoking jacket before. I guess rich people actually wore them, after all. To distinguish themselves from the smoke-jacketless rabble.
He stood as I approached.
"Thank you, Isaac," he said in Tibetan. "How is the party going?"
Isaac glanced at me. "Fine," he answered in English. "Xavier got owned by Elliot tonight."
"That's why I brought Elliot into the circle. There's much he could teach the three of you, if you were willing to swallow some pride."
Isaac looked away. "I'd better go back. With your permission, Lama."
"As you wish," Nawang indicated that I sit, and then sat himself. He picked up the tea kettle and poured first into my cup, then his own. "You are in my home," he said. "I offer to you the hospitality and safety of my house." In his own way, he was promising that he had not poisoned the tea.
I picked up the other cup and saluted him back. "I thank you and I accept."
"Your hair," he pointed a finger at my thick, jet-black shoulder-length mane. "Is that the style for young Tibetan men, now?"
"I'm American, too," I said.
He took a sip of his tea. "Yes, we all are, after a fashion. But I am not very different from the older Cubans who live here. I was forced from Tibet, but in my mind, I never really left there. The dichotomy has made my present life a little dreamlike."
"That should appeal to the Buddhist side of you," I said.
"Yes," he mused. "If I were still a Buddhist." He looked me up and down for a moment, gauging me. "Isaac believes that you are a wizard. He fears that you were sent to spy upon us by the White Council."
I stopped my tea in mid-sip. "And what do you think?"
"I think," he pointed his index-finger straight upwards, and a lick of flame shot out of it, "that the White Council would not insult me by sending us one so inexperienced as you. Please take no personal offense." He closed his hand, the fire gone.
"Then why tell me at all?" I ventured.
"Because Isaac has finely honed instincts. His paranoia leads him to the wrong ultimate conclusions, but if you listen to the words within his words, you can see the points where he has stumbled upon small truths. Isaac senses that you are a wizard, therefore you must be a tool of his enemies. QED. But I see something different."
He placed an eight by twelve photo on the table. It was a picture of me drinking the potion at Pueblos. "We used the cameras to time your ear-boxing punch during the fight. You moved faster than a Master. If you had wanted, you could have easily dispatched your assailants. It took remarkable courage for you to engineer your loss. It's one of your qualities that seemed salient to me."
"A potion doesn't make me a wizard."
"I could study your genealogy, if I chose. It would not take me long to find the evidence of who you are, and what you can do. Do you wish to make me prove my point? There is no hurry for us."
He had me. He had my real identity, and I couldn't stop him from figuring out the rest. "You're Isaac's master," I finally understood. Isaac wasn't kidding, then, when he called Nawang a Lama. He really was one. A powerful one, if he commanded a trio of vampires. And yet here he was, sitting around as a CEO of an underhanded American public relations firm. I didn't get it. What kind of lama was this guy, anyway?
He smiled indulgently. "Isaac is just a study, something I did to exercise my own teaching skill. But someday I hope to find a more worthy student."
Oh, I thought. So that's what this is all about.
"And I thought you were just offering me some tea," I said, a bit too sarcastically.
He just nodded, as if expecting that from me.
"Humor an old man for a moment. Make the flags above us stop waving."
I frowned. "Look, ah, Mister Nawang, it's nothing personal but—"
He waited me out.
"—but, my idea of a master doesn't normally involve a guy who hangs out with vampires. And politicians. And whatever else you hang out with. No offense."
"None taken," he said. "Is it that you have something personal against vampires, or do you fear that I operate outside of the laws of the White Council?"
"I have this nagging fear that you're going to turn out to be a dangerous megalomaniac."
"It's kind of you to tell me."
"All part of the service."
"You know, the real world doesn't work that way. You realize this, yes? It's true, I break the White Council's laws from time to time. But the Tibetan Lamas were never signatories of the White Council. For centuries, we operated as parallel concerns, with the understanding that we had more common ground than not. But we were never the same, and I have never considered myself answerable to them, any more than I am answerable to Mexico or Canada."
"And the vampires?"
"I have worked to tame them, to some extent. I have made them dependent on me. Now they must answer when I call. In so doing, I have made them less of a danger to the outer world."
"If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with?"
"Now I know you're being flippant. Even if you're right."
"You could have killed them, instead of hiring them."
"Ah. And how many should I kill? Have you ever heard of anyone trying to kill all vampires? Do you think such a thing is even remotely achievable?" He looked at me critically for a moment. "But now I think I understand you. You are thinking about the White Council's war on the Red Court vampires. The White Council has decreed that all Red Court vampires must be exterminated. Do you think they will succeed, where none have before, and with such few numbers on their side?"
I had no answer to that. I looked down at my tea.
"The Spiral of Daggers is broken, so you cannot join their ranks as you would have a century ago. That leaves the White Council as the wizard's last refuge. And that brings us to you, and a single question. Why aren't you with the White Council now, fighting their vampire enemies, side by side with the other wizards? An interesting question, yes?"
I looked really, really hard at my tea.
"And hence my interest in you. Does it not strike you that we might share more than you originally thought? Both of us are estranged from our worlds. Both of us are getting by with the resources that we find."
I looked around the high-priced balcony. "Uh, yeah," I said.
He smiled. "I have more resources because I need more resources. All that you see follows an ultimate purpose."
"And that purpose is?"
"Perhaps I wish to make the world a better place to live in."
"Bullshit."
He shook his head, smiling. "Not at all."
"Better for who, then?"
"You are young. You haven't seen real atrocity. You wouldn't understand."
"Try me."
"Truly? Then I will. Go ahead. Make the flags stop waving."
"Why?"
"I want to see your technique."
I didn't owe this guy anything. It's not like I was out looking for another master. Just the opposite, in fact. But somehow, I wanted to show him what I could do. I had spent the last year running from the White Council. For the last year, I thought that I would never train under a master again. I was drifting, homeless, and I knew it. Maybe he knew it, too. Even the remote possibility that I might be able to finish what I had started out in life doing posed a powerful temptation to me. And what kind of hypocrite was I being, criticizing him for hanging out with vampires, when my honorary uncle was one, too?
Anyway, I hadn't accepted his offer, yet, right? I could back out any time.
I looked up at the beating flags. The wind was very strong. "Tricky," I said.
He pushed his chair back and got up, moving over to the edge of the balcony. "Show me," he challenged. He sat cross-legged on the ground and leaned back on the railing, relaxed. His bald head gleamed in the moonlight, even as the rest of him seemed to disappear into the murk of the night.
I ran through the options that I had. I could try to own the wind with elemental magic. I could try to hold out the wind with a shield, although shields aren't really meant for that.
Elemental magic wasn't my strong suit, even though it seemed like the best fit. But part of my problem is that Tibetans don't have an element of Air. We subscribe to the same elements as the Chinese: Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, and Fire. Air as an element is a more Western concept, and I'm not as adept at employing the Western style of magic.
I spent the next half-minute surveying my immediate domain, taking a quick stock of my assets. There wasn't much for me to work with, but I guess that was the challenge. Magic isn't always just about pointing your finger at something and hollering. My high school football coach did that a lot during games, and I guarantee you nothing magical ever happened with our team. In a lot of ways, practicing elemental magic is not much different from practicing chemistry—you put the right things together and you get an effect. Think physics but with an alternate set of physical laws, combined with a little mental persuasion.
What that means is, for some kinds of magic, you need actual stuff to help you out. The hollering just impresses the yokels, or makes you feel better.
I stopped at a serving table laden with some basic condiments. I lifted up a porcelain container of sugar, which I passed up, and a full jar of mustard with a little brush, which I took. I helped myself to a fistful of wooden coffee stirrers, and a clean cloth napkin.
Returning to the table, I poured myself a fresh cup of tea, cleared off the rest of the table, and jumped onto it, carefully surveying the table-top. It was shaped like a perfect circle. Better and better.
Biting my lip with concentration, I pulled out the mustard brush and began to paint runes along the entire border of the table, running in a circle.
It's hard to explain to a layman what runes really do, because there's no direct analogy in the world of particle physics and Newtonian law.
The universe has no sense of obligation about us. But it does hear us, if we use words that it understands. And runes are one of those things it hears. Why the universe perceives them, I don't know. Maybe writing them is like writing a computer program that is executed by the creaking gears of the cosmos. Maybe by writing a rune, we're really hacking into what is supposed to be a closed system. I genuinely worry about these things. I worry that when I write a rune, I may be breaking something that I really don't want broken. If I knew more about what I was doing, maybe I'd worry less. My previous master never seemed to fret over it. But then again, he's prematurely dead, and I'm not. There's got to be some kind of lesson to learn there.
But in spite of my personal hang-ups and anxieties, I wrote the runes anyway. I hoped the universe wouldn't mind that I was painting them in mustard.
Mentally, I reached out and touched the edge of the circle, closing it. Within the circle, I was now isolated from the natural fields of magical influence weaving around me, in the same way that the firm's headquarters was isolated from cell phone radio waves. Essentially, I had temporarily made for myself a magical Faraday cage. Doing this allowed me to construct my own magical effect inside of a kind of magical clean room—the purer the effect, the more potent it would be when I unleashed it.
Sitting cross-legged in the center of the table, I took up the pile of coffee stirrers and broke them into pieces, arranging them into a tiny campfire. With a quick murmur of magic, I lit them on fire and quickly doused the flames with a few drops of my tea.
A wisp of smoke wafted up from the miniature campfire. Symbolically, the smoke was my access point to the element of air. I mentally tied the little wisp to the circle of runes that surrounded it, applying my program to it.
And then I collapsed the Faraday cage, releasing my program to the world. "Element of air," I intoned in halting Latin, "I command thee. I command thee. I command thee."
The air around me responded. I could feel it starting to synchronize with my thoughts. Mentally, I ordered the wind to stop blowing around the flags. At first, I could feel it working. The wind slowed. The flags began to flap less rapidly, to grow a little limp. But then I felt a presence. I felt the element of air pushing back at me, as if it sensed a foreign object that it rejected. I had never encountered that before. I had never found an intelligence behind an element, even a Western one. It baffled me, but I was determined to win out. I pushed back. I used my own will to bind the air around me. But then the air returned the favor, pushing back even harder. It shoved me.
Slowly, I looked back, behind me. At Nawang.
He was still sitting cross-legged, with his back to the railing of the patio. But a nimbus of white light surrounded him. His eyes were closed in concentration. And he was vaguely smiling.
The little smoking-jacketed bastard was overriding my spell with his own. Without a circle, without runes, without mustard.
He hadn't just wanted to see my form. He intended to destruction-test it. He wanted to find its breaking point.
I kept pushing on the spell I had, trying to coax some life into it, but there was no way I was ever going to out-muscle an actual Tibetan Lama. There had to be another way. I thought about the words of his challenge.
Before I even realized what I was doing, I found the cloth napkin in my hands. I knew what I was going to do now. I was going to do what I should have done in the first place. He had asked me to make the flags stop flapping. He had never said anything about the wind.
Gently, I spread the napkin out on the table, flattening it out with the palm of my hand. At the same time, I mentally kept up at my previous spell, in the hopes of holding Nawang occupied. I began to whisper Tibetan words at the napkin, arranging energies in my mind. With a little coaxing, the napkin stiffened, becoming as hard as a piece of plywood. And then I created an affinity between the napkin and the flags.
It was exhausting work. I was diverting my attention between two spells at the same time, one of which was being sabotaged by someone much stronger than me at magic. It was tough to keep up the discipline to not drop everything and come to the rescue of the spell that was under attack.
I got up from the table and walked over to Nawang, the napkin in my hands. My eyes rolled up into my head momentarily as I completely let go of the first spell. The balcony shook with the sudden burst of wind.
Nawang opened his eyes, looking at me with sudden disappointment. But I merely jabbed my thumb up over my shoulder, pointing at the flags. He pulled a pair of thin-wired glasses out from an inside pocket of his smoking jacket and put them on, looking up above the doorway to his penthouse apartment.
The wind was blowing like a gale, but the flags were as stiff as wood. I held up the napkin for him to see.
He suddenly laughed aloud.
"I have seen enough," he said. "Now I know the manner of your training. It is certainly diverse. I can see that you have already had many teachers in your brief time of study. It is a shame you had to grow up in such times as these, when the world will not appreciate your art. You will have to find satisfaction in other ways. But this is not impossible, lobsang."
Disciple, he had called me.
"I never said I was looking for a new master, Lama," I said.
He frowned. "I never said I would accept you as my student. I think one day you could make a fine wizard, should that be your fate. You have all the skills that you need to progress to the next level. But you have been on your own for too long. You lack the self-discipline to achieve what you desire.
"There was a time when disciples in Tibet would grovel for years to be taught by the guru. They would sacrifice all that they were to prepare themselves for instruction, and to gain his notice. Now, the young people like you would look up teachers like me on the internet to see how many stars my previous students gave me. Everyone seems to be out for himself. The world has become a myopic place, in many ways."
"You would reject me if I groveled," I answered.
"Perhaps, depending on the creativity of your supplication. But you are right. The rules of the world are different, and we must operate accordingly. I only hope that you understand what it means to live in a dog eat dog world. I fear that you do not. I fear that you will find out the hard way, and very soon.
"I am going to retire to my apartment now. Take some time to consider what you have seen tonight. Tomorrow morning I will have need of you. Get a good night's sleep." Seemingly without effort, he stood up and walked back to the penthouse. The guard opened the door for him. As he passed through the doorway, my napkin suddenly went limp, and the flags began to flutter again. I hadn't even seen him waggle a finger.
A gust of wind blew the napkin out of my hand. It whipped out over the railing and spun downwards to the quiet street below, disappearing in the murk.
I studied the urban darkness beneath me, considering his unspoken offer.
