Chains and Memory

  I could run. The signal boards were black and dead; it might be half an hour until the next train. If I left the station . . . McPherson Square wasn’t the best area at night, but I’d feel better with people around. Assume for the moment the Unseelie were indeed after me again: would that deter them, or just put innocents in the line of fire?

  The wind picked up. I craned my neck, but there was no train approaching, that might account for it. More and more trash blew through the station, as if all the rubbish of McPherson Square had been gathered for the purpose. I wrapped my hands around the post, bracing my hips against them, concentrating on making a telekinetic shield. Newspapers couldn’t hurt me, but gods only knew what might be concealed behind them. Did the Unseelie want me dead, for having escaped their grasp?

  The sudden blare of the train whistle made me scream. Light flooded the platform, the beams far too bright in the dimness. I flinched away—and that saved me.

  A figure had crept up the stairs on my right, shrouded by the whirling trash. Even as I turned, it raised its hands to shove me into the path of the oncoming train.

  I reacted on pure instinct. It wasn’t a fancy combat trick or anything Julian had taught me; it was just a gout of flame, roaring from my own hands straight toward the sidhe who was trying to kill me.

  Toward him . . . and through.

  The afterimage burned in my retinas, temporarily blinding me. I blinked it away, and found the station quiet.

  No whirlwind of trash. No approaching train. No sidhe.

  Just a smoldering sign where my flame had struck the wall at the head of the stairs—and a man collapsed on the steps, arms wrapped protectively over his head.

  My breath came in quick gasps. Oh, gods. A trick. None of it had been real. A glamour, maybe—several glamours—and I almost hit a stranger . . .

  “Are you okay?” I hurried forward, though not without a swift glance around to make sure nothing else was coming. The man started to get up; I reached out to help. My hand touched the bare skin of his arm, and he threw himself back with a cry.

  Shit. I had forgotten.

  He stared at me in horror. The light was full on my face; there was no way he could miss the golden eyes. Unseelie eyes, and a wilder’s skin-crawling touch—and from his perspective, I had just tried to burn him alive.

  “Please, wait!” I cried, but it was too late. The man flung himself past me at full tilt, just like I’d once run from the Unseelie in Talman. “It was—”

  He leapt up the nearest escalator two steps at a time and vanished into the station above. “An accident,” I whispered, sagging down onto the filthy floor.

  Except it wasn’t an accident. I closed my eyes and sent my senses outward again, bolder this time, sweeping the station for any hint of the Unseelie. I found nothing. They had to have been here, and probably more than one; we didn’t know all of their capabilities yet, but we knew it was hard for them to make large or full-sensory glamours. What I’d just experienced would have taken several working in concert: one for the train, maybe, another for the trash, a third for the attack. I cursed through my teeth. One on the train, to make me get off at the wrong stop, a deserted platform where I could be more easily manipulated.

  I couldn’t even be sure that man had been real.

  No, he was real. Maybe the Unseelie could have faked that — but it would entertain them more to make me endanger an actual person.

  My breath was still coming in quick gasps. I floundered for a calming exercise, but couldn’t think of one. Fuck. My focus was in shreds. I got up and started walking in little circles, burning off the nervous energy. The posts around me were not stalagmites, were not Unseelie sidhe lying in disguised wait. The Metro was not the cave where they’d changed me. Where had that guy gone? I wished I could run after him, try to explain what had happened. If he’d even listen. But the only way to find him would be to chase him down psychically, and I didn’t think that would help matters any.

  The sign at the top the stairs, announcing repairs to the Diamond Line, was still smoldering. I dragged myself together by sheer force of will and snuffed it out.

  Enough of my panic had faded that my body was shaking. I sank down onto one of the benches, wrapping my arms tightly around my middle. I had gone three months without facing any of the sidhe.

  It wasn’t long enough.

  Chapter Two

  Julian’s boots were on the rack outside the apartment door. My knees weakened with relief at the sight. I should have called him or sent a message or contacted him telepathically—anything—but just getting myself home had taken all my capacity for rational thought. If he’d been out for a walk or something, I didn’t know what I would have done.

  But he was home. I took off my own shoes and put them on the rack, very carefully, then unlocked the door and went in.

  Julian was sitting cross-legged in the armchair, reading. Before I could say anything, he looked up in alarm; I must have been leaking empathic traces of distress. Yes, definitely leaking—he just about levitated to his feet, crossing the small living room in three strides. “What happened?”

  “They’re back,” I said, and dropped my bag with a thud.

  I really just wanted to sink down onto the floor, but I made myself stay up until I reached the near end of the couch. Julian knelt by my feet, which both comforted me and made me feel hollow. A different boyfriend would have sat next to me, put his arm around my shoulders — but not Julian. We still didn’t really do casual touch, and probably never would. It no longer had any effect on me; now that my own Krauss rating had been jacked through the roof, Julian felt completely ordinary. But the habits of a lifetime—his even more than mine—didn’t fade that quickly.

  If I asked, he would join me on the couch. But I was doing my best not to push, except when I really needed it. I told myself I didn’t need it now. Wrapping my arms around my stomach, I fixed my gaze on the floor and started talking, Julian listening with no more expression than a stone.

  Telling it helped me pull myself together. By the time I was done, I was more annoyed at myself than anything else. Going through the whole thing step by step had shown me all the places I could have done better. Julian didn’t point that out, but his jaw tightened in the way that said he was biting back a curse. “Are you sure it was the sidhe?”

  My heart thumped hard. “What do you mean? Who else—” Then my thoughts caught up with my mouth. I wasn’t exactly a nobody anymore: the paparazzi had seen to that, blasting my story across every media outlet from the tabloids to the Psychic Sciences Report. There were plenty of people who didn’t like me. “The Iron Shield are all baselines. They wouldn’t have any way to stage something like that. Psychics, though . . .” I ground my teeth. “I suppose they could have done it. But it would have been hard. The illusions were detailed, Julian. And there was nobody else on the platform, nobody with line of sight—not unless they were hiding behind even more illusions. Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor?”

  “Yes. And I agree. But we can’t leap to conclusions.”

  I sighed and slumped against the back of the couch. “No, I’ve done enough of that for one night.”

  Julian rose and paced, thinking it through. He didn’t have much room to move. The apartment my parents had rented for me was modest, and the furniture it came with ate up a lot of space. They hadn’t expected me to be sharing it with anyone else.

  And so far as they knew, I wasn’t. But until Julian’s own situation got sorted out, the only money he had to live on was the stipend meant to support him at Welton, and that would barely pay for a closet in D.C. At this moment, I was selfishly glad: it meant he was here, rather than on the other side of the city. I didn’t have to deal with all this alone.

  “You need to report it,” he said. “Not to the police—they wouldn’t know what to do about it anyway. But to SIF. If the sidhe are out and about, they need to know.”

  He was right, and I should have thought of that sooner. I swore,
beating my head against the couch’s soft edge. Knowing I’d gone into shock didn’t really help; I still felt like an iron idiot, stumbling blindly home the way I had. It was the kind of thing I would have done at Welton, when we had no clue what was going on and no sense of its enormous scope. My therapist had told me, over and over, that the coping strategies that served me well last fall weren’t so useful in daily life. Apparently they weren’t much good in a crisis, either.

  Julian got my port out of my bag for me and went into the kitchen while I made the phone call. Neither of us could cook to save our lives, but he’d put a frozen lasagna in to bake before I got home; the smell gusted out when he opened the oven door. My stomach grumbled a reminder that I had not fed it since lunch, and it had been a long day since then.

  I’d put the number in my list under “SIF.” It had seemed cumbersome and more than a little pretentious to type in “Supernatural Investigative Force,” and when they first gave me the number to call, I hadn’t known who exactly it went to. This was back when nineteen different governmental groups had been busy questioning me; I’d demanded a way to ask them questions in return.

  The agent they’d assigned me to was a guy named Shawn Stutler. When he picked up, I got no video, but a rush of background noise. He was either at a restaurant or still in the office, along with a lot of other people. From what I could tell, SIF only hired workaholics, so I bet it was the latter.

  Stutler made me wait while he went someplace quieter. Then he brought up the video, confirming my guess; I recognized the grey-paneled walls behind him as the SIF offices. Or if not those, some other bureaucratic building. “Kim,” he said. “Is something wrong?”

  If my story surprised him, he was too well-trained to show it. Stutler wasn’t a Guardian; he was just a SIF agent, handling non-emergency affairs involving psychics, magic, and crime. But he knew his job. He got the details from me with efficient speed, and said he would send someone to the station to look for traces.

  It was the kind of thing I wished I knew how to do. Unfortunately, that was one of a million tricks I hadn’t learned yet. I’d always thought there would be time for it later, when I went to graduate school and started training to become a Guardian.

  When I was done, a brief silence fell. “I’m sorry,” I said into the port, knowing it was completely inadequate. “I just—I wasn’t thinking.”

  “They waited until your guard was down,” Stutler said. “After this, it won’t be.”

  Not exactly the most comforting thing he could have said. But maybe Stutler knew me better than I thought, because it actually did help. “Yeah,” I said. “Anything else I should do?”

  “Keep your port with you, in case I need to call. And keep an eye out, just in case.”

  By the time I hung up, Julian had dished out the lasagna. I ate it, even though I didn’t have much of an appetite, and waited for him to speak. He didn’t leak anything to my empathic senses, and his face was its usual mask, but over the years—and especially over the months since we’d started dating—I’d learned to read his body language pretty well. There was something he wanted to say.

  But he didn’t say it before we finished dinner. I took our plates to the kitchen; he followed me and leaned in the doorway. “Do you want to take tonight off?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. The dishwasher door slammed too loudly as I shut it. “I want to learn how to read signatures. If I’d been able to do that an hour ago . . .”

  I expected him to get a particular expression on his face, the one that said he knew how to do what I was asking, but didn’t really know how to teach it to me. I’d seen a lot of that expression since we started living together and began these evening practices. Julian had strong gifts, but he wasn’t a teacher, and we both knew it.

  Instead he nodded thoughtfully. “I might be able to arrange that.”

  Arrange it. Not do it. I cocked my head to one side, curiosity overcoming my bad mood. “What are you thinking?”

  He answered me obliquely. “I met with Grayson tonight. Didn’t get what I was hoping for, but—” He paused, then met my gaze. That, like touch, was a thing he didn’t do very often. “Have I ever told you about Guan?”

  A first name, with no last name attached, meant he was talking about a wilder. I shook my head. The list of people and things Julian hadn’t told me about was longer than the list of things he had. Not for lack of openness on his part, at least not anymore; we just had a lot to catch up on, and getting through it all was going to take a while.

  “One of my teachers,” Julian said. “From the Center. Grayson told me he’s in the city. I got in touch with him tonight, and asked if he’d be interested in meeting you. Informally, that is.”

  The last bit got my attention. I’d met plenty of wilders since the Unseelie changed me. The ones who didn’t go to work as Guardians were usually involved in the training and management of their fellow wilders, and I’d spent the last few months dealing with people from both camps. But those had all been official encounters. I’d never just . . . hung out with them.

  “What did he say?” I asked cautiously.

  “He suggested lunch tomorrow. And I’m hoping he might be willing to train both of us.”

  I used to think Julian knew everything already. Compared to most college students, he was ridiculously skilled. But when the Guardian Corps denied his application for entrance, I found out there were things he hadn’t learned yet. If I was reading him right, he hoped to make an end-run around those obstacles—and maybe I could hitch a ride with him.

  Not all the way to Guardianship; I wasn’t remotely qualified for that yet. But I could learn some of the things I needed to know.

  Lunch tomorrow. I ran through my schedule in my mind and said, “I can’t get away for long. Certainly not long enough to practice anything—assuming he agrees. But I could meet you guys at the food court near work. Is that okay?”

  Julian nodded. I stepped on the impulse to ask the next question, which was, “Do you think he’ll like me?” For starters, it would make me sound pathetic. And I’d find out soon enough.

  ~

  Julian met me in the lobby of FAR’s building and we walked over together. “Anything I should know about Guan before I meet him?” I asked.

  “He’s from China originally,” Julian said. “Emigrated here before I was born.”

  “I didn’t know governments let their wilders emigrate.”

  “Generally they don’t,” Julian admitted. Technically wilders were independent citizens; once they reached the age of majority, they were free to do whatever they liked. In practice, it was rarely that simple. “There was a deal struck over it, some kind of cooperation pact for bridging the differences between Eastern and Western magic. He’s been a teacher here ever since.”

  It was lunch hour in Arlington; there were a lot of people on the street. We had no trouble making our way to the food court, though, because they parted around the two of us like the waters of the Red Sea. Even people with their backs to us eddied unconsciously out of our way. “Personality?” I asked.

  “Laid-back,” Julian said. “He’s very efficient at teaching, but he doesn’t come across that way, which is part of why it works so well. You relax and the next thing you know, something you didn’t have a grip on at all seems easy.”

  I liked the sound of that—especially after grinding my way through Grayson’s classes last fall. Then we were at the food court: a pleasantly landscaped area between a number of restaurants and food stalls, part of it enclosed, part open-air. The weather was cloudy and damp enough that the outdoor tables were only half-filled. The empty ones, I noticed, were all clustered together, and right in the middle of that cluster there was a single table with two people sitting at it. Two wilders.

  One of them was clearly Guan: a forty-something Chinese man, stocky build, hair streaked with grey. He caught sight of us around the same time I spotted him, and rose to his feet. Next to him was someone I didn’t know at all
, and she didn’t so much rise as leap up.

  She was a delicate little thing, hair more honey-toned than Julian’s but nearly as pale. Even if she hadn’t been a wilder, she would have looked otherworldly. I guessed her to be a fair bit younger than us, maybe in high school. When I turned to ask Julian who she was, I found he had stopped a few steps behind me, staring. And he might not show much emotion by most people’s standards, but I could tell he was both surprised and happy.

  He didn’t stay frozen for long. His stride lengthened, and then when we came close, I got my second surprise of the day: the girl ran forward and threw her arms around him.

  “Neeya, m’aithinne!” Julian said, laughing and returning the hug. I tried not to stare. “I didn’t know you were out!”

  “Just a few weeks ago,” she answered. When she stepped back from Julian, I saw she was at least six inches shorter than him, maybe more. It made her look younger than she probably was; I revised my estimate upward to eighteen or so. “Out”—that was probably “out of the Center,” the institution where wilders were raised and trained. Unless she’d been in prison or something.

  Guan nodded a greeting at me, then another one at Julian, whose answering nod looked more like a bow. “Guan, my apologies. This is Kim, who I told you about. Kim, this is Guan, and Neeya.”

  The girl’s manner cooled noticeably as she looked me over, though I couldn’t be sure how much of that was typical wilder reserve reasserting itself. “I know who she is,” Neeya said, with a tone that implied she’d seen me on the news.

  Reflex almost made me offer my hand to shake—a habit trained into me by my mother’s society gatherings. Wrong manners for this crowd. “Thanks for coming out today,” I said. “I don’t know whether you guys have eaten yet, but I need to grab food . . .?”

  We split up to get our lunches, each of us picking a different restaurant in the food court, then re-converging on the table. I tried to hurry, but Guan beat me back, leaving me no chance to talk to Julian alone. According to Julian’s quick advice this morning, one of the top rules of Wilder Etiquette 101, was no private telepathic conversations around other people. It was too hard to hide them completely, even if the other wilders couldn’t hear what you were saying.