Chapter Ten

In spite of the early summer heat, I wore a heavy plain grey sweatshirt. I was irrationally worried that someone might see through a thinner shirt and notice the black brand on my chest.

I had gone back to my boat to get it and to take a shower on the way to my next assignment. Ava was there. Jeeves was not. Ava told me that Jeeves had simply stood up, packed his little backpack, and jumped off the side of my sailboat. I had never heard of him just running off alone, before. Maybe my Contract freed him from any further obligation to me. Maybe he just didn't want to be a part of what I had gotten into. I didn't know what to say. Losing him was like losing the clapper from my ritual bell. He had been just so indispensable for me, for pretty much my entire life.

I had tried to tell Ava what I could about Elliot, and indirectly, about myself, but only managed a few halting words in the end. I warned her she needed to get clear of Miami that day and hitch a ride back to Scotland any way she could. She just looked at me critically and suggested that I mind my own business. As I got dressed, I tried a couple of times again to persuade her, but she just crossed her arms and glared back at me. "I'll look after Calvin and Emma at the theater," she finally had offered. "There are things that I can do to soothe their hurt. You just do what you have to do." I hadn't told her exactly what had happened to them. I wasn't permitted. But somehow, she sensed the truth. I gave her a kiss on the top of her head, smelling the musky scent of her hair, and left for work, as ordered.

Now I sat in the back of a leased tour bus. The bus' windows had been tinted and mirrored, but the afternoon sun still forced its way inside, overpowering the air conditioner. I drank liberally from a liter bottle of water and leaked sweat out of my face.

Nace walked down the aisle, handing out forged press badges to the passengers. He sat down next to me and tossed mine into my lap.

"I won't ask you how you are," he said quietly.

I turned away to look out the window, not speaking to him.

"For what it's worth, I've been in that room," he said. "It's hard, but you do get over it, eventually. You'll see."

"I don't know if knowing that makes it all better or even worse," I said.

"Tonight, the insiders will take you out and we'll all get blitzed."

I cleared my throat and peered some more out the window. We were parked across from a small beachfront park in Fort Lauderdale. Some local news vans were already in the area, their antennas raised; others were still pulling in and vying for the best remaining parking spots.

"How many are there?" I asked, almost to myself.

"How many what?"

"Of us?"

I could feel him sort of shrug. "Close to twenty, now. But not all of us work together, so there may be some I've never met."

In the middle of the park, a small work crew was laying down a low platform. They placed upon it a narrow podium, facing the street. Behind, the ocean waves rolled and swelled, the low rumble punctuated by the calls of seagulls, gliding and flapping in seemingly random directions overhead. A handful of tourists hung out on the beach, doing what tourists in Miami do, which is basically anything that wouldn't remind them of work or school.

"Our mark is named Martin Suarez," Nace pointed past my cheek out towards the podium. "He isn't here yet, but he will be in a few minutes."

"The baseball player?"

"Retired. One of the chief supporters of the enemy, Hernandez. He's been donating a lot of cash to his campaign and to institutions like Pleiades, but more importantly, he's been doing a lot of personal campaigning behind the scenes—getting his rich friends involved, hosting parties, shaking hands, that kind of thing. He's been a pillar of strength for Hernandez for a long time."

"So, what's your plan?"

"Our strategic goal is that we want to isolate Hernandez away from his support system a little at a time, sort of cut him out of the herd. The best way you do that is by forcing him to personally renounce his own biggest supporters. Not only would he lose his helpers, but he'll ultimately be judged by the questionable friends he keeps. People like Martin. The technique we use is called pretzeling.

"Pretzeling is very hard to execute, because you have to do it absolutely perfectly or else it all falls apart, and because magic is involved with it. But if you don't screw it up, it's almost impossible to defend against. That's because the final stage is carried out by the free press while we're safely gone, and once they get rolling on a big story, there's just no hitting the brakes."

I turned back to Nace. "What story?"

"The one we make up. You'll see. Follow me, we're getting started. Nawang is going to want you to hang around him, watch how he pulls the strings. Your real training starts today."

Nace and I wandered around outside the bus, milling with the gathering crowd of reporters. Or rather, I wandered behind Nace while he worked his personal brand of magic on the people around us.

"Are you guys able to get a signal in?" a frustrated tech approached Nace, looking at his tag to see which outfit he was with.

"No," Nace shook his head. "I heard that the TSA is testing out some kind of new radar feature over at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Only it's leaking into the civilian frequencies. We can't get a live feed in, and our cell phones are spotty, too. Heard a rumor that people called in complaining about their garage doors opening and closing on them."

"Damn," the tech muttered. "Guess we just have to record and courier it back. Sucks for us, because we have a longer drive back than WTVJ does."

"Don't talk to me," Nace laughed. "We're from Tallahassee."

"Wondered who you were. Long ways."

"We cover all the races for state government. Everyone there wants to know whose hand they'll have to pump."

"Got that right," the tech said. "Still, what a pain. Thanks for the info, Kevin'll look into the TSA thing."

"No prob," Nace nodded as we moved on.

We had five or six conversations just like that before Nace stepped away from the crowd, satisfied that he had everything under control.

"Why aren't they able to get a live feed?" I finally asked.

"Because we're jamming them, bonehead," he said, wiggling his thumb over to a pair of nondescript vans parked down the block. "We want them to rely on recordings, because we're going to alter them. The interview they play tonight is going to differ just slightly from the one that actually happens."

"What? All of the tapes?"

"Yup," he said casually.

"That doesn't make sense. Even if you alter their recordings, they're still going to remember what happened in the interview." I frowned in thought.

"That's Nawang's department. And soon it'll be yours, too."

"Oh," I groaned inwardly. Damn. There goes my virginity.

A murmur rippled through the mob. I turned to look around and saw a small caravan of cars pulling into the parking lot. A group of suits opened the doors to a black limousine and made their way purposefully through the crowd to the podium.

I had never been a big baseball fan, but I recognized Suarez from his numerous television commercials. "If this guy is making a big announcement, where's Hernandez?" I whispered to Nace.

Nace smiled. "Hernandez is stuck in Tallahassee for a vote he can't miss, or Echemendía would call him out on it. What a shame, huh?"

"Huh," I returned.

As I stood in the back of the crowd, watching the reporters finish jostling for their positions and setting up their equipment, I quietly questioned all the effort being expended for this race. When it came down to it, we were dealing with two guys fighting it out over a two-bit representative spot in the Florida panhandle that paid less than forty thousand dollars a year and was considered a part-time job by the state. Yet everyone was acting like these guys were running for President of the United States. It all seemed so out of proportion to me. The money. The attention. The crime. I just didn't get it.

Suarez didn't use a microphone. He got behind the podium and launched right into his pitch. I found myself professionally admiring his projection. He had a big smile.

I felt a hand touch my right shoulder. It was Nace. He crooked his finger and beckoned me to follow. "There's nothing to see, here," he said.

We wound our way to the back of the park, towards a big white tent marked: "FIRST AID." The flaps on the tent were closed. One of our firm's bodyguards was standing outside, his arms crossed. He looked at me and Nace and nodded at us deferentially. Nace pointed indifferently at the tent door. "Go in," he said. "I'll see you later."

The tent seemed darker inside than it should have. I had to blink a few times before my eyes adjusted to the twilight gloom. Smoke from incense filled the interior. I turned to look at the tent walls, and found them covered from top to bottom with runes, some of the most intricate that I had ever seen. Some of them I recognized, but most went far beyond anything that I had ever studied either under my parents or my Warden master. A sense of unease passed through me, along with a grisly sense of affinity. As if I were somehow a part of the writing. I quietly wondered if the runes I looked at were related to the forms of magic that constructed my Contract, before my Contract shut that line of thinking down.

Nawang sat on the floor in the center of the tent, his legs crossed and his hands in ritual meditative position. He was intoning a preparatory chant, not exactly a spell, but a kind of self-cleaning ritual to prepare for casting. He had surrounded himself with a ring of parchment bearing a second set of runes, some very tiny. Beyond that, he had encircled himself with a ring of one hundred and eight phurbu daggers, just as I had in the warehouse a lifetime ago, with one odd difference—the daggers were pointed at Nawang, instead of away from him. I had never, ever heard of anyone doing that, and I couldn't imagine why he would do it. It almost struck me as intentionally perverse, like someone wearing an upside-down cross.

He opened his eyes and straightened himself.

"Hello, Cimba," he said.

"Hello," I answered.

"I want you to observe me as I cast this spell. I want you to memorize what I do, the way I do it. Understand?"

Before I could say anything else, my body said, "I understand, Master."

He smiled.

"Do you have any questions before we begin?"

I swallowed, looking around the tent. "It looks like a spell of ensorcellment. But it's so complicated, it goes beyond anything I've ever seen."

"It isn't the complexity that baffles you, Cimba. You don't know what you're looking at because it comes from forbidden knowledge. If you had continued your studies under your previous teachers, I doubt that you would ever have seen what you see now, no matter what degree of power you attained."

"Who forbid this knowledge?" I asked.

His eyes twinkled with pleasure. "In my opinion, that is a most salient question," he answered. "The spell you are looking at is indeed a kind of ensorcellment. But not of one person. Today I am going to enthrall the entire crowd outside by the podium."

I instinctively turned back towards the tent flap, astounded. "But—there must be a hundred people out there! There's no way—" I looked back at him. "You couldn't draw enough power. I couldn't, anyway."

He nodded. "Our way isn't about power, Cimba. It's about subtlety, and will. Walk the tent. Memorize the runes. I will make you reproduce them later."

Of its own accord, my body began to methodically comb the walls of the tent, as I quietly memorized each rune in sequence. While I busied myself with the task, Nawang began to hum his chant. I could feel the energies forming around him, coalescing into patterns that I could sense but did not recognize as anything familiar. Something about the energy flows seemed darker than they should have. Sharper. As if thorns covered them. It wasn't supposed to be that way. But Nawang seemed unperturbed.

When my survey of the tent was complete, I sat in one corner, facing Nawang, watching him at work.

The energies around the tent became harder, more defined, bending and shaping to the hammer and anvil of his mind. I was watching a great artist at work, pulling at the strings of the universe, remaking the form of the world into his own creation. His work should have been a thing of brilliance, a thing of beauty—and on the surface it was. But there was an undercurrent to it, a dark yin to the bright yang that gave me a sense of deep unease, like taking an intercontinental airplane trip on a supersonic Concord, champagne in hand, but the passenger in the seat behind you coughs and hacks the whole way.

I used my training to center my mind, to synchronize myself with the flows, to sense them better without having to resort to fully opening my third eye. For all the power flowing around the tent, very little was being drawn from the ground by Nawang. I didn't know where he was getting the rest. Maybe it all really was just the manifestation of his pure will. I had heard of such things, and had practiced myself with will-power for certain kinds of Eastern magic. But when it came to enthrallment, I was on uncertain ground. I had faced enthrallment many times under the watchful eye of Uncle Senge, but I didn't know if a vampire's methods were reproducible by a mortal. I wondered if Nawang's methods were fully reproducible, either. I doubted it.

I dove deeper into the threads of light and dark, exploring their nature. The deeper I went, the more the universe twisted around and folded in upon itself. My conscience moved faster and faster toward the center, pulled inwards.

And then I was in a dream.

I stood alone in a subway station. The station was cast in a dim and yellowed shadow, and the walls and floor were stained with grime, the buildup of years of use, years of neglect. A wind picked up, and blew upon my face from the left. I heard the rolling rumble of the train approach, the whoosh as it drew near. The train was white and sort of trapezoidal from the front. An electric sign above flashed the words "EMBARCADERO" in yellow. The train drew by, its brakes squealing before it came to a stop.

That's when I saw the people through the train's large glass windows. They were all standing, facing outwards towards the platform, unmoving. They all wore black ear-buds. I noticed for the first time that their earphone wires extended out through the open door of the train, twisted together in a great black cable that snaked across the floor and plugged into an old-fashioned microphone that was raised about two feet above the floor. A large pillow-seat with a black pig sewn into the top had been placed in front of the microphone.

A buzzing sound rose and fell near the microphone. As I got closer, I could hear a low voice, whispering, as if I had tuned into a news broadcast over the radio, but couldn't quite get the frequency.

The people in the train stood as still as statues, listening to the voice.

And then I understood. This wasn't my dream. It was Nawang's. I was looking at his own personal metaphor for the spell he was weaving. I had slipped into his mind, which technically was bad, but I think he meant for me to go there, so maybe I wouldn't get into trouble for it. I wasn't going to ask.

The people in the dream train were real human beings. I recognized some of them from the crowd of journalists outside the tent. They were all plugged into Nawang, hearing his whispering voice, being slowly bent to his will, accepting his programming.

I tried to be horrified. Nawang was breaking the laws of magic not merely once, but a hundred times over in the course of an hour. But my Contract held me in check. I knew intellectually that I was supposed to object, that I was supposed to grab the nearest sword and take a good whack at him, but my heart wasn't in it—my heart had been locked away.

I had seen enough to understand how to start practicing his technique, per his orders. Everything I needed was neatly filed away in my brain for future reference, whether I wanted it there or not. I hadn't seen enough to understand all the myriad details, but those were things I would be expected to work out on my own.

I walked away from the dream, and awoke.

Nawang opened his eyes, turning toward me.

"Go," he rasped. "Guide them to the bus and get them seated. You may need to break them up into groups. The others will know what to do."

Back at the podium, Martin Suarez was busy wrapping up his pitch, so to speak, his gravelly voice cutting through the rolling sea wind. Cameras and microphones pointed at him, perched atop the shoulders of cameramen. Local television reporters stood with them, passively watching him at his work.

Very passively.

When he finished, he looked around at the audience to gauge their reaction to whatever it was he was selling. But the reporters just stared back at him listlessly, empty of any expression at all.

His expression slowly deflated. "Are there any questions?" he shouted out hopefully, but in vain. There were none. No one as much as twitched. They just kept staring at him, like he was a bug. I was standing behind them, and I was unnerved. I didn't know how he could just stand there and absorb all those staring eyes. It must be something you learn to live with when you work in a stadium.

Nothing was said, and the cameras kept rolling.

"¿Que pasa?" he muttered. "Okay, that's it! Remember to vote for Hernandez!"

Suarez pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow before following his team back to his limousine. The crowd didn't disperse as he walked away. He looked back when he got to his car and frowned when he saw that everyone was still facing the podium.

Nace casually ambled forward to the front of the crowd, carrying a rolled-up white poster with him. He waited patiently for the mark's car to pull away and drive off. When they were gone, he unfurled the poster, holding it up in the sunshine.

It was all white, with the black silhouette of a pig in the center.

So faintly that I couldn't be sure I heart it, the crowd of journalists let out a soft moan at the sight of the poster, or at least I thought they did. I felt something shift in the air around me, like someone had hit the carriage return on a manual typewriter just after it dinged.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Nace raised his voice. "Cameramen will line up in single file at the black truck behind you. Everyone else will line up in single file in front of the lady holding the blue sign, over by the bus. You are free to move."

As the crowd lethargically hobbled to their assigned places, I strolled over to Nace, my arms held straight out in front of me. "Brains," I rolled my head and slurred. "Brains!"

He smiled back at me. "Enjoying yourself?"

I shrugged. "It's better than bussing tables," I said. "Where's the work crew?"

"I paid them off to leave."

We walked together toward the bus, Nace flicking his eyes up and down the line of enthralled people. "So, now what?" I asked.

"Now we herd them onto the bus in groups. Once they're seated, we show them a fabricated clip of the mark making racist and generally insulting comments about Miamians, and so on.

"Over at the black trucks, we take the tape from each camera and alter it to include a matching scene.

"When the journalists go back to their studios, they think they have the local story of the century."

"Wow," was all I could say. "Simple."

"Heh. We have to have our computers generate a slightly different video clip, tailored for each camera and its original angle of view of the podium. It takes some pretty sophisticated software to do it. But it's oh-so-worth-it. After this, we just lean back and let the press do our work for us."

"Won't the mark deny it?"

"How? It's on tape, man, many times over, and everyone but his own team remember him saying those things. Hernandez will have to denounce him and sever their ties. Thing of beauty."

I looked back at the journalists, quietly feeling for them. People aren't born sheep. But they can be made into them.

"Anything special you need me to do?"

He shook his head. "Just stay around here and make sure no one wanders off before getting their programming. It happens, sometimes."

"Hmph," I grunted at his back as he disappeared into the listless throng. I shuffled back and forth at the fringes of the crowd, watching the reporters and their crews being herded onto the bus to be reprogrammed, wishing—wishing something—something else. And feeling like a glorified border collie. Maybe not so glorified.

"There is no getting used to it," a voice rasped from behind me. Elliot. Buddha help him, he had tried to warn me away.

"I don't care about that," I answered. "Is there any beating it?"

"No," he said slowly, carefully walking through his words. "There is no point in even thinking about finding the magic's source, because only the DA knows what it is, and he will never ever tell a thrall."

"You're right," I said. "Impossible."

"How is she?" he asked quietly.

"Adamant," I said.

"Damn her. I should have married a narwhal and stayed out at sea."

"The sea's more dangerous. Killer whales, and things."

"Not as dangerous as she turned out to be."

"There's not a man in love who hasn't said something like that, I'd guess."

"She's different. I don't know how, exactly. But it's true. I don't think she realizes it, but she's much more powerful than I am. I have begun to doubt that her creation was a random thing, as it might have been for me."

"My homunculus fell in love with her."

He laughed at that. "Good for him. Did he get lucky?"

"No," I sniggered.

"You've already thought about it, haven't you?"

"About what?"

"You know—it." He touched the center of his chest with his fingertips.

"I was thinking about it while the timer was running. I couldn't stop myself. It's the training. I never really understood all those exercises my father and uncle made me do, until now. I just thought Uncle Senge had talked him into being an asshole."

"So, you thought of something?" He raised his head a little, glanced furtively at me.

"No," I said. "Of course not."

"Yes, of course not."

I pinched my lip in thought. Nawang had thrown me into the deep side of the pool. He was counting on me floundering for a while, needing his help to pull me out. To learn to become dependent on him. What I needed right now was a better rope than Nawang could give me. A strong rope.

It was time for me to go to my Uncle Senge. I would never be able to outright tell him what had happened; the magic of my Contract wouldn't permit me. But I doubted that I would need to. He's old, but he's not stupid. Besides I had royally screwed up, and he was entitled to know. I just wished I could have sent him a text message instead of having to face him in person.

The only thing scarier than a hungry vampire is an indignant one.