Alaskan Fury (35 page)

The wereverine gave her a long,
wary look over the barrel of her gun, seemingly waiting for something.  When
she simply continued to frown at him, however, he seemed to slump in disgust. 
“Never mind,” he muttered.  “This place screws with my senses.”

“
What
,” Imelda snapped,
jabbing the barrel of the gun into his forehead with each emphasis, “Are.  You.
 Trying.  To.  
Say
?”

“What I’m sayin,” the wereverine
growled, “is get that fucking gun outta my face.  I wanna see how the dice fall
‘fore I go decide to do something stupid.”

Imelda scowled at him, once again
feeling that nagging sense of déjà-vu that had been plaguing her since she’d
woken from that too-deep sleep.  “In half my dreams, demon, I think you die
today.  Right now.  Regardless of what you want.”

He gave her a mirthless grin.  “I
got faith in my Fate.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.  “I
don’t.  I think your Fate is malleable, demon.”

He shrugged as best as he could
with his arms bound above his head.  “It is whatever you say it is, considerin’
you’re the one with the gun.”

Imelda felt her finger tightening
on the trigger, feeling that odd split-duality, as if she were experiencing
something that had already happened.  Twice. 
Damn it,
she thought,
realizing she was hesitating for that very fact.  If this was what it was like
to be given messages of God, she would be happy to allow someone else to
shoulder that burden. 

“You know,” the wereverine said
conversationally, “you almost had me fooled.  Don’t smell no different, but I
got that link, when I served my time in Egypt.  Damn thing’s fucking killin
me.  Tellin me I need to protect your ass.  Not sure it was you, but certainly
gets the blood pumping, ya know?  Like ya got a handful of the hairs growin’
off my heart and gave ‘em a damn good tug.”

Imelda peered at him.  “You are
babbling nonsense.”

“Yeah, well,” the wereverine
admitted, “I’m a little woozy.  Seein’ how there’s a fucking needle in my foot,
you can fucking sue me.”  The unnatural emerald gaze on the other side of the
gun, however, was steady. 

Again, Imelda felt a wash of
guilt for the monster’s condition before she forced it back down.  She thought
again of the dreams she had witnessed, of the eye-searing clashes in the sky by
two of God’s chosen.  That one battle had decided the fate of the Order, and
every tiny event, every tiny choice she had made beforehand had affected the
outcome,
all
of which were beginning to dull into a foggy fuzz in her
mind, with simply too many choices to remember the exact repercussions of every
word, every action.  It was like a migraine, but broader, more expansive, more
disorienting, and less acute.  Like walking through life with her consciousness
always experiencing a one-second lag behind her body, yet at the same time
having the memory of the future three.

That was bad enough, but
something had been bothering her from the beginning, ever since she’d woken
from her dance with death.  God’s angels didn’t
fight
.  God’s angels
battled
Lucifer’s
angels.  That meant one of them was
fallen
.

And, with the gut-twisting proof
still bleeding in front of her, Imelda had a very good theory on which one it
was.

Slowly lowering the gun, Imelda
realized she had to
know
.  She considered walking up to Zenaida and
confronting her about it.

“Be sure you pick the right one,
Sister,” the wereverine said softly.  “The other one’s gonna make you
disappear.”

Imelda considered him a moment
longer, then spun on heel, climbing the basement steps two at a time.  She took
an immediate right into the information-command center, where a lone technician
was monitoring their tech-only drones.  “Any developments?” she asked,
startling the young man out of a book he’d been reading.

“Uh,” the young American said,
scrambling to look like he’d been working, “well, not really, but yeah, I mean,
we’ve had a couple oddities.  I was gonna wake you, but Jacquot said to let you
sleep.”

Imelda frowned.  What was Jacquot
doing awake at this hour?  She’d told him to be ready for a mission in the
morning.  Instead of asking, she said, “What kind of oddities?” 

“Uh.”  The young man coughed and
scratched the back of his neck nervously.  “Well, uh.  A flying caribou, for
one.”

Imelda’s heart skipped a beat. 
“They’re there.  I want both my teams mobilized and—”

The young man coughed, looking
acutely uncomfortable.  “Uh, sorry, Inquisitor.  Jacquot already took them off
somewhere.”

Imelda stared at the young man. 
She had specifically told Jacquot not to go hunting dragons until she could
call in backup.  “He went to the Brooks Range?”

The freckled young man winced and
looked as if she were demanding to know the genetic source of his lethargy.  “I
guess.  I don’t really know—”

“Radio him.  Call him back.”

The young man’s face reddened. 
“Uh, yes Ma’am.”  He turned to the communications equipment and began radioing
for the Frenchman.

Jacquot did not answer.

Beginning to state the obvious,
the young man put the headset down and said, “He’s not answeri—”

Scowling, Imelda spun on heel,
yanking her phone from her pocket.  She dialed Jacquot’s private number, but
immediately got sent to voicemail.  Losing her temper, Imelda snarled into the
message-system, “Dammit, Jacquot, I told you not to risk any more lives on this
mission until I figured out what we were dealing with.  Come back to base. 
Immediately.”  She slapped the phone off and dropped it back into her vest and
began pacing the hall, waiting for his reply.

The rash, testosterone-fueled
fool
. 
Two teams against a
dragon
?  She didn’t have
time
for this.  The
wolf was about to make her rendezvous with those she sought, and if she did
that, the fate of the Order was in jeopardy.  Rubbing her forehead, Imelda
began to pace the hallway, thinking.  She wondered if this was how Padre Vega
felt, with his visions.  Already, that strange dual-reality was dizzying her
again, making her feel as if she were in two places at once.

She waited twenty minutes,
leaving two more messages, before Jacquot deigned to call her back.

“I am busy helping Zenaida,
Inquisitrice,” the Frenchman snapped into the phone before Imelda could pepper
him with questions.  “I will call you again later.”  Then, just as Imelda was
regaining enough composure to bark an order at him, the line went dead.  She
stood there in the hall for several minutes, staring at the dead phone in her
hand, before her legs started moving of their own accord.

She found Herr Drescher in his
room, asleep.  She knocked until he opened the door in his underwear, his
silvered hair awry, his blond beard squished sideways from sleep.  “Yes,
Inquisitorin?” he mumbled in a yawn of confusion.

“Be on the pad at four,” Imelda
said.  “You’re taking me north.”

Herr Drescher blinked at her,
“But Zenaida—”

Imelda was so tired of hearing
the woman’s name that she snapped, “I do not
care
about whatever Zenaida
told you to do.  You are on
my
team, and you work for
me
.  Be
prepared to leave in…” she checked her watch, calculating how long it would
take her to prepare.  “Twenty-six minutes.”

Herr Drescher stared at her a
moment, then leaned back into his room to peer at the clock above the door. 
Returning his head through the open jamb, he said, “You want me to grab
Jacquot, Inquisitorin?”

“Jacquot is lost to us,” Imelda
said, before she realized she’d spoken.  Then, once said, her gut refused to
recant her words.  At Herr Drescher’s frown, she growled, “Just get the
helicopter ready.  I am going to go have a chat with the wolf.”

Herr Drescher’s eyes widened, but
he didn’t argue.

Imelda left him to prepare. 
Already, her head was beginning to hurt, the edges of her vision encased in the
sharp white shards of glass that heralded another migraine.  She went to her
room to grab her wallet and her medicine.

Inside, after acquiring her billfold
from her dresser, she went to her bathroom cabinet-mirror, pulled out her
bottle of migraine tablets, and hesitated at the smell of cologne.  Frowning,
she glanced around the room and, seeing no one, opened the bottle and took a
small sniff.

She smelled nothing except that
bitter medicinal tang, which immediately brought with it a pang of desire. 
She’d gone
much
too long without her medicine.  She dumped a palmful
into her hand and was about to pop them into her mouth when that sudden
dual-reality she’d been experiencing since the dream vanished, leaving her
fully immersed in the present.

Imelda froze, her hand inches
from her face, the cluster of little white pills nagging her to swallow them. 
She counted at least sixteen.

…
sixteen?

With the odd feeling of
past-future-present gone, the outlines of the pills were crystal-clear in her
mind.  Never before had her headache vanished so quickly.  Had she become so
dependent upon the medicine that now it was merely the placebo effect?  And
when had the desire been
that
strong, that she was willing to take eight
times her normal dose just to ease the pain?  Had she become addicted to the
thought
of medicine? 

Irritated at her own weakness, Imelda
lowered the pills to the edge of the sink.  Almost immediately, the headache
started again, but now, tight-lipped, she forced herself to ignore it.  , her
eyes settled on the medicine, and she felt another pang of desire. 

Since when had
medicine
helped her, more than to dull the ache?  And when had she wanted it that bad? 
People
died
from doses like that.  She cocked her head at the tiny
pills, then at her medicine cabinet.  She again caught the lingering scent of
cologne.

Very carefully, Imelda opened the
cabinet, retrieved a pair of tweezers, and carefully plucked one of the pills
from the sink. 

She carried it out into the
living-room, where she set it upon a receipt on her dresser and frowned at it. 
The dual-reality was back, a sort of disconcerting past-present-future mix that
left the white static in her head building to a crescendo.  Feeling both stupid
and paranoid, she took the receipt over to her fishtank and let the pill slide
into the water, then watched the fish.

Nothing happened.

For several minutes, she watched
her two koi move back and forth behind the glass, utterly unaffected by the
medicine.

Grunting, Imelda rolled up her
sleeve, deciding to fish it out before the chemical had a chance to seep into
the water, her fingers hovering above the surface, then hesitated when the feel
of multiplicity once again disappeared, leaving her completely centered,
painless, in the moment.  She pulled her hand away and looked at the fish again. 
The static fuzz returned.  The koi continued to swim along the front of the
glass, looking for treats.

I must be losing my mind
,
Imelda thought.  She reached out, opened her bottle of fish-food, and threw a
few pellets in for them, then spent a few minutes watching them swim.  Her
migraine continued to build.  She was about to reach into the water again when
her head stopped hurting.  Again.

Imelda yanked her hand from the
fish tank, frowned at it a long moment, then went back into the bathroom.  Ignoring
the sound of the helicopter spinning up outside, she picked a second pill up
with tweezers and carried it back to her dresser, dropping it on another
receipt.

Then, going to her backpack, she
retrieved the faestone goblet from its case.  As soon as she lifted the
glittering violet goblet from its silken slip, the tiny collection vial she
sought slid out, dropping to the floor at her feet, the river-stone rattling
inside.

Imelda grimaced.  The last thing
they needed, at this point, was the Fury’s blood in their compound.  She
uncapped the vial and dropped the stone into the trash, then replaced it with the
pill, to get testing done by the lab.  If Zenaida had been poisoning her, and
she could get proof, it would be an excellent weapon to use before a tribunal.

Her headache was a massive
throbbing pulse of white, now, and it was all Imelda could do not to pluck the
pill from the vial and pop it into her mouth to relieve the pain.  Placebo or
no, at least it would bring relief.  Yet the way that even
thinking
about picking up the pill and putting it in her mouth was terminating the odd
duality entirely was leaving Imelda discomfited.  Almost as if the futures she
had seen were simply…vanishing.

Which made her wonder…  Why would
futures
vanish
?  In the strange dreams that God had given her slipping
in and out of death, everything had followed the Butterfly Effect.  A single
choice spawned thousands of others.  The only reason a particular path would
end
was if she was no longer there to witn—

With a frown, already halfway
finished returning the faestone goblet to its silken bag, Imelda hesitated. 
Very carefully, she retrieved the artifact and set it on the dresser beside the
pill.  Then she emptied the vial into its glittering purple bowl.

Upon contacting the medicine, the
goblet became streaked with veins of black.

Not poison. 
Magic
. 
Seiðr. 
The cord-magic of the Third Realm.

The bitch was trying to kill her.

For a long moment, Imelda stood
there, looking at the black spiderweb working its way through the beautiful violet
faestone.  Like all faestone, the goblet experienced an allergic reaction when
allowed to contact seiðr, the abominable blood-magics performed in the frigid Third
Realm.  It was why they were so popular as feylords’ drinking utensils.