Authors: Katharine Kerr
Water to Burn (47 page)
“Get out of there!” I screamed. “You’ll drown.”
Caleb spun around just as another wave broke and came rushing into the cove. This one splashed on his heels. He dropped the shovel and ran the last few feet to the portion of the cliff directly below me, right at the point of the V. He looked up and around with frantic movements of his head. The wave receded. Caleb found some sort of handhold on the cliff face, grabbed it, and pulled himself up.
One hand at a time, one foot at a time, he scrambled up the cliff. Loose dirt and rocks fell away below him. Weighed down as he was by the backpack, he stopped some ten yards up to pant for breath. Distantly, I heard sirens announcing the approach of the police rescue unit. I ran a quick SM:Danger, which made me aware only of the incoming tide. I tried again with an SM:P for Belial and picked up nothing.
“Drop the backpack!” Ari called out. “Don’t be stupid!”
Caleb shook his head no. While I’d been running scans, Ari had uncoiled the rope. He flung one end over the side of the cliff. It dangled, bright yellow against the brown, about thirty feet above Caleb’s head.
“Try to reach it,” Ari called down.
Caleb started his painful climb once again. I looked out to sea and saw Poseidon rising from the waves in his glass-green chariot. In the roar of the tide, I thought I heard him call a command. He vanished, but a wave rushed into the cove and bit into the bottom of the cliff. When it slid out, it took a huge mouthful of dirt with it. I heard Caleb cry out, but in triumph, not in fear.
Caleb stopped climbing, resting again I thought at first. He clung to an outcrop of what appeared to be stable rock with one arm and began to dig into the cliff with the other hand.
“Hang it up, you idiot!” I called out. “The cliff’s falling apart.”
“No!” His voice cracked and screeched. “I won’t leave it.”
“You’re going to fall unless you climb—”
“I won’t let you have it!” He screamed into the wind. “It’s mine!”
A chunk of cliff the size of an economy car broke free and fell with a spray of pebbles and clods. A scatter of dirt dusted his shoulder as it passed him. The chunk crashed onto the beach below and splashed in the rising tide.
“Get up here!” Ari tried again. “Grab the sodding rope!”
Caleb ignored him and the rope. He wedged himself into a crack in the cliff face, clung to a projecting rock with one arm, and kept scrabbling in the dirt with the other. I heard police officers on the cliff top yelling as they ran toward us. So did Caleb. He yelped out a couple of incomprehensible words, shook his head, and kept digging with one hand.
A crumble of dirt broke loose just a few feet from us and plunged to the beach below. Ari grabbed my arm.
“Get back from the edge,” he said. “We could be caught by a landslide any moment now.”
I started to follow orders, but Caleb suddenly shrieked aloud in triumph. He sank his arm into the fissure up to the shoulder and pulled something free, a long dirt-stained shape that looked like an enormous bone. I stopped moving, but Ari grabbed me around the waist from behind. Before I could complain, he dragged me away from the edge.
Just as we staggered back to safety, the section of ground upon which we’d been standing gave way. I heard Caleb scream, heard a rumble like the sound of a wave—but a wave of earth and rock. Caleb screamed again, and the sound followed him down as he fell, twisting, shrieking, to the flooded shore below. Clods of dirt and lumps of—of something—tumbled down after him in a cloud of dust and a vomit of mud.
I caught my breath and my balance just as the first officers reached us. Enough of the cliff had fallen away that we stood near its newly formed brink. I could see all the way down to Caleb’s body, lying flat on its back in a pool of seafoam. It was half-covered with dirt and rocks, as if the cliff had tried to bury its tormentor. Nearby lay the lumps of whatever it was that he’d given his life to find.
“What—”
“Bones of some sort.” Ari shaded his eyes and peered down. “Fossils, I’d say. A treasure, certainly, but not, I suppose, what he had in mind.”
I took a few cautious steps toward the edge for a better look. I could make a half-educated guess as to what I was seeing. The huge skull had fallen on to Caleb’s chest with what must have been a crushing blow.
“Yeah, fossils,” I said. “A mammoth or mastodon, I betcha. They used to be real common around here, y’know, in the Ice Age.”
“Dangerous prey,” Ari said.
“Yeah. Just think. Caleb is the first man killed by a mammoth in ten thousand years. Well, his spirits promised him he’d be famous. I’ll bet he makes the
Guinness Book of World Records
.”
Guinness Book of World Records
.”
The ground under my feet trembled again. Ari and I turned and ran back to solid earth and safety.
Since his heavy backpack weighed Caleb down, the police rescue unit recovered his corpse before the waves swept it out to sea. The backpack turned out to be full of books and maps, some stolen from research libraries back east, pertaining to Drake’s treasure. The rare volumes were soaked through and ruined, of course, another small crime totted up on Caleb’s tab.
Caleb’s death was ruled an accident, another case of an unwary person trusting an ocean that could turn treacherous in a split second. A lot of people have died that way, trapped between a rising tide and the unstable ground of the northern California coast. The police could call it what they wanted, I decided. I knew better.
Karma. The Great Wheel turns slowly, but it never swerves.
Later that day, after we finished all the official procedures and filled out the forms, and I had reported to my real agency and Ari had contacted both of his, I called Caroline Burnside. At the news that one of Bill Evers’ murderers was dead, she laughed aloud.
“I did a tarot reading for myself this morning,” she told me, “and it looked like something good was going to happen. Chalk one up for my cards!”
By the time we got back home that night, the sun had set, and I felt ready to do the same. As I turned the car to pull into the driveway, the Saturn’s headlights swept across the front of the building and illuminated a streak of red paint.
“More sodding graffiti!” Ari said.
“But no interchange symbol this time,” I said, “just the Norteños tag.”
“True. I wonder if that means something.”
“Maybe. Whoever’s been putting it up might have finally figured out that I’m not interested in his message. I hope so.”
Ari said nothing until I finished guiding the car into the garage. We got out, and I waited out in the graveled yard while he pulled down and locked the garage doors. We started walking toward the front of the building to get in, since we’d bolted the back doors from inside.
“About that symbol and the message,” Ari said. “Do you really think someone sent—”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have any idea of who it might be?”
“The only person I can think of is that guy Karo mentioned, the man who speaks to the Peacock Angel.”
“Some kind of Satanist?”
“I doubt it. I don’t much like him anyway. If it’s actually him and not some other new and improved weirdo.”
Ari stopped walking. By the glow of the streetlight in front of our building I could see his reproachful stare.
“Well, I’ve got to consider all the possibilities,” I said. “Sorry.”
He groaned aloud and started up the stairs. I followed and let the subject drop.
CHAPTER 17
I
WOKE UP EARLY AND FOUND HERCULES standing beside our bed, a massive blond guy wearing a tunic with a lion skin draped down his back. He rested a wooden club on one shoulder. Ari stayed asleep even when I sat up and turned toward the IOI.
WOKE UP EARLY AND FOUND HERCULES standing beside our bed, a massive blond guy wearing a tunic with a lion skin draped down his back. He rested a wooden club on one shoulder. Ari stayed asleep even when I sat up and turned toward the IOI.
“Hi,” I said. “Something you want to tell me?”
“Antaeus,” Hercules said. “Remember how I disposed of him?” He winked at me and vanished.
Rather than try to go back to sleep after an apparition, I got up and took a shower. I crept into the bedroom to grab my flannel-lined jeans, warm socks, and the teal sweater. In his sleep, Ari turned over onto his back and began to snore. I dressed out in the hall, then went into the kitchen to make coffee.
While I watched the water dripping through the grounds, I remembered who Antaeus was, a particularly nasty Titan who derived his superhuman strength from his mother, Gaia, a.k.a. the Earth. As long as he touched the ground, he was invincible. Hercules lifted him above his head and held him there until he was weak enough to strangle.
Belial derived his strength from the ocean. If I could lure him inland, the odds would swing in favor of my team. The problem became finding the right bait. I spent half an hour and two cups of coffee trying to come up with an alternative, but in the end I admitted what I knew all along: the best bait was going to be me. If he stayed true to the Chaos master type, Belial would want revenge for his follower’s death.
And once we had him, what then? I discussed the problem with Ari a little while later, once he’d gotten up and had his coffee.
“Belial’s not really here,” I told him. “What we’re experiencing is some kind of weird linkup to his actual self. He’s got some kind of vehicle for his consciousness, kind of like the powers of that casket thing in
AVATAR
. We don’t understand either the link or the vehicle.”
AVATAR
. We don’t understand either the link or the vehicle.”
“True,” Ari said. “We don’t even know what he is when he’s at home.”
“Actually, I have a theory about that. A sapient squid from another planet.”
Ari choked on his mouthful of granola. I tactfully looked away while he corrected the problem.
“Another planet,” Ari said eventually. “A sapient what?”
“Squid.” I returned my gaze to my partner and found him cleaned up and respectable again. “But I mean a cephalopod in general, not exactly a squid, but a similiar line of evolution.”
“Oh. That makes it ever so much better.”
I ignored the sarcasm and continued thinking aloud. “Even if his body were on this planet, how could you arrest him? Do you know how to scuba dive?”
“No. Sorry.”
“And even if I could figure out how to terminate him,” I went on, “it’s against Agency policy unless he’s directly threatening another sapient being’s life. If I use myself as bait, he probably will be threatening my life, of course. He’s already done that once.”
“The more you natter on about this,” Ari said, “the less I like it.”
“I’m not real keen on it myself. But I can’t allow a Chaos master to wander around in my territory causing trouble.”
Ari started to speak, caught himself, and considered what I’d said for a couple of moments. “True.” He spoke quietly without a trace of sarcasm. “You can’t.”
I caught myself before I said something gushy. “Glad you understand,” I said instead. “Thanks.”
It took some time and many phone calls before Annie, Jerry, and I finalized our plan. We needed to meet indoors for our séance to prevent an interruption from some curious bystander. Annie and I both lived too near the ocean. Jerry’s roommate dealt so many different drugs that I refused to let Ari inside their apartment. We finally settled on a hotel room as the only alternative.
“I’m going to get a suite, because we’ll need plenty of room on the floor,” I said. “What about the place where we spent our first night together?”
Ari smiled. “You do have a sentimental streak after all.”
“Actually, I was thinking that it was quiet and not too expensive.”
The smile vanished. “As you’d say: whatever.”
Since the tourist season had yet to start, I had no trouble renting a suite at the Daly City hotel for that night and the next. It came with wireless access, so I took my Agency laptop with me as part of our respectable amount of luggage. I also wore the glen plaid pants suit, a further touch of respectability. I didn’t want the staff wondering what we were doing in that suite. Ari and I checked in late that afternoon. Annie and Jerry would arrive on the morrow.
“I need some time to bait Belial,” I told Ari. “I’ve got to make sure he attacks when I want him to.”
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