Chains and Memory (7 page)

I nodded warily, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He didn't make me wait long. “While you were in Georgia, you began seeing a therapist, did you not?”

Lying would hardly make anything better. “Yes, I did. On the advice of both of my parents, as well as the agents who questioned me after I left Welton. I'd been kidnapped by the Unseelie; they rewrote my genetic code, for gods' sakes. I attacked my own boyfriend and tried to murder him. It's enough to give anybody PTSD.”

“Since moving to this city, have you resumed therapy?”

“No,” I said, through my teeth. “I haven't found a therapist I like yet.”

I heard Stutler draw in a deep breath. All my attention had been on Kutty; when I turned my head, I found Stutler's expression had settled into grave lines. “Kim, we found no traces of sidhe presence at the station last night.”

My jaw sagged. “No traces? But that many glamours—they would have left
some
kind of residue behind. Unless the sidhe sat around for half an hour picking every bit of it apart, and they're not going to do that when—
shit
.” I growled in inarticulate frustration. “Iron. The rails are steel, and I'm betting half that station is, too. It's old construction. The traces would have dissolved all on their own, because of the iron.”

“It's possible,” Stutler said, his voice carefully neutral.

He didn't believe me. A steady flow of profanity started up in the back corners of my mind. Would
I
believe me, in his position? Which was more likely: that the Unseelie violated their agreement and came in force to an area filled with iron, where they employed a series of linked glamours to provoke me into dangerous behavior, and that the traces of their handiwork were then erased before the agents could get there . . . or that a young woman with documented PTSD heard someone coming up the stairs, panicked, and lashed out?

I realized, with sudden cold clarity, that I was a fucking idiot for having gotten in the car with Stutler today. For having come here like a trusting little lamb, all by myself.

My voice shaking, I said, “I'd like to call my lawyer.”

I didn't make it back to FAR that afternoon.

My lawyer came, and things got very unpleasant for a while. Kutty dragged out every single mistake I'd made since December—even things I didn't remember—and piled up together, they made me look like a menace to society. I asked at one point whether I was being accused of a crime, and Stutler told me that no, the guy at McPherson Square had declined to press charges. The implication, of course, being that if he'd chosen differently, I'd be in even deeper shit than I was already.

I had thought of Stutler as my friend in SIF. I didn't anymore.

My lawyer was a guy named Thomas Lotze. Unlike half the people I dealt with these days, he wasn't a friend of my mother's; he was the best lawyer she could hire. He gave me a piece of his mind for not having called him before going with Stutler, which I submitted to without protest. He was right, after all.

It dragged on forever, until I was more than half afraid I wouldn't escape. There was no crime, though, and holding me in the short term wouldn't accomplish anything for anybody, so they finally let me go. By the time they did, it was well and truly dark out, and I was going to be late for my first training session with Guan.

At least I'd had the sense not to say anything about that to the SIF guys, or even to Lotze.

When I was alone at last, I dug out my port and called Julian. He answered after one ring, and listened silently as I told him what had happened.

He stayed silent for a while even after I was done. My fingers curled around the edge of my port. Then, when I was on the verge of speaking again, he said, “It makes you wonder how many of the other problems were coincidence.”

My fingers tightened around my port. The woman with the Unseelie contact lenses—it hadn't just been the flash of gold that set me off. I'd been uneasy before then, my psychic senses on edge, because I kept having the feeling that somebody was
following
me. I hadn't said anything about that at the time, or even today. I couldn't tell whether that was a good decision or not. “You think they've been setting me up this whole time. Not just with the thing last night, but before then.”

“Maybe,” Julian said.

I couldn't say this to Stutler. It would sound like a conspiracy theory, the product of an unhinged mind. I didn't even think Lotze could do anything with it. Not without proof, and where was I going to get that?

Every bad or weird thing that had happened to me since I came to D.C. took on a different cast in my mind. How many of them were happenstance, and how many were a plot to get me shielded?

Despite my best efforts, my voice wavered as I spoke again. “I don't know if I should come tonight. What you said after lunch—I don't want them thinking I
need
training.” That I needed help controlling myself.

“You're just visiting the house of some wilders,” Julian said without hesitation. “There's no reason they should find that suspicious.”

“Unless somebody tells them what I'm doing there.”

“Kim.” He said my name quietly but firmly. It steadied me. “No one will tell them. There isn't a single person among the Fiain who wants to see you gutted.”

Not even Neeya. She didn't like me, but it was a long way from not liking to wanting to see me placed under the deep shield. Did they all hate it as much as Julian did? Were they really all rooting for me to go free?

Julian thought so. I had to trust him.

“I'll be there as soon as I can,” I said.

~

I was hyper-alert on the Metro ride out to Eastern Market—even more so than usual. If the Unseelie really had been messing with me all this time, then I couldn't take anything for granted. Was the drunk woman singing off-key at the other end of my car put there to annoy me, setting me up for some kind of confrontation? I didn't know, but I switched cars at the next station to get away from her.

I can't live like this,
I thought as I neared my stop.
It really
will
send me insane.

Maybe that was what the Unseelie wanted.

It was a relief when I got to my destination. The townhouse was a small one in a quiet neighborhood, the sort of place somebody could afford on a federal paycheck as long as they had a roommate. Guan had suggested this as a good practice site; it was the home of two wilders, both of them Guardians. Marcus was at work that evening, but Toby opened the door a half-second after my knock.

Seeing him made me realize how much my perception of wilders had changed. In the past I'd noted their appearances—skin color, eye color, that sort of thing—but their defining feature had always been their numinous quality, brought on by their high Krauss ratings. Now that was invisible to me, and other things came through. Toby looked hapa, like maybe one of his birth parents had been white, the other one Asian. Culturally, of course, he was still Fiain. For the first time, though, I found myself thinking about the fact that they
came
from somewhere. They had human ancestors, not just sidhe ones.

Those thoughts made me slow off the conversational mark. He stepped in to fill the gap. “You're Kim,” he said. “Welcome.” Not
you must be Kim
. No deduction necessary, not with my gold eyes advertising my identity. Contact lenses could only approximate that look.

“Thank you for letting us use your house,” I said, stepping over the threshold. “I'm grateful for the place to practice . . . and I have to admit, I'm glad to meet other wilders.”

He merely nodded. I wondered how he had interpreted “other”—did he think I was counting myself as one? Or that I meant wilders other than Julian? I wasn't sure myself which way I'd meant it.

A
mrrrrp
from the living room drew my attention. A moment later a calico cat put her head around the corner. Seeing me, she headed my way with an odd little galloping gait, and commenced butting her head into my ankles with a piteous air, as if she would die should someone not pick her up and cuddle her.

“Kim, meet Hitomi,” Toby said with a grin. “Don't believe her when she pretends to be helpless. She can jump onto the dining room table without any trouble.”

When I bent to pet her, I saw what he meant. One of Hitomi's hind legs had been amputated; that was why her gait was so odd. “What happened?”

“Dog bite. She's a rescue cat; we took her in when the shelter would have put her down.”

Either Hitomi was entirely acclimated to her owners, or cats didn't mind a wilder's touch. She leaned into my hand, deftly catching her balance when I let up from scritching her cheek. I could see why they'd adopted her; she had the sweetest face I'd ever seen on a cat, and she used it shamelessly.

Pets: another entry on the endless list of Things I Never Associated With Wilders. But of course they had lives beyond their duties. Through the doorway I could see the living room was lined with books, a large screen stuffed in one corner. I wondered if Toby and Marcus were a couple, or just roommates. Julian hadn't said, and I wasn't about to ask—not on a first visit, anyway.

Toby offered me water, which I declined. Then we went down to the basement, where Julian was already at hard at work with Neeya. My eyes popped when I realized what they were doing.

Neeya lounged against the wall on one side of the room, with Julian at the far end. She had a book on the floor between her feet, and I thought at first that she'd been reading while Julian practiced something on his own. Then the book shot across the intervening space and landed in front of Julian, who was sitting cross-legged as if meditating. His face was set in a look of intense concentration, and I couldn't figure out why. Moving a book telekinetically wasn't exactly hard—

Then the book vanished, and reappeared between Neeya's feet once more.

“Don't let me take it,” Neeya said with a taunting smile.

Julian wasn't just moving the book. He was trying to teleport it. Which was fine when you had a summoning circle to make it come to you . . . and
insanely difficult
when you did it with pure telekinesis.

“Neeya's very good at that,” Guan said. “But I suggest we stay on this side of the room, out of Julian's line of fire.”

With my attention on the other two, I hadn't seen him sitting in the corner to my right, in one of a pair of battered armchairs. The basement was clearly outfitted as a practice room for Toby and Marcus; it had very little that could break or light the house on fire, but the open doors of a sturdy metal cabinet over by Julian showed various ritual items like candles, mirrors, and jars of powder.

I went to sit with Guan. “Do you want to start work on something in particular?” he asked.

He posed the question casually, but I heard a test in it. He was a teacher, after all. If he hadn't already cooked up some lesson plans for me, I would catch in my teeth the book currently zipping across the room. He wanted to see what I went for first.

The truth was, I really didn't know where I should start. The list of things I needed to learn was as long as my arm, and figuring out which one ought to go first was impossible.

But there was one thing I
could
tell Guan.

“I think somebody is trying to screw around with me,” I said in a low voice, so Neeya wouldn't hear. Toby had gone back upstairs. “Probably the Unseelie, but I don't know for sure. You know better than I do what I need to learn first, but as far as priorities go . . . I want to protect myself against them.”

“Combat magic?” Guan asked, his voice similarly soft. He was watching me closely.

I shook my head. “As much as I like the idea of taking those bastards' heads off, no. Right now I need to act like a nice, responsible member of psychic society. I've been practicing shielding with Julian, but that's passive; it only protects me from direct attacks. It doesn't make them stop screwing with me in the first place.”

Guan had the full measure of wilder unreadability, but I thought the slight tightening around his eyes signaled satisfaction. I'd passed his test. He said, “Disruption spirals, then.”

A quick press of my lips kept the words
I've seen those in the movies
from leaving my mouth. “Okay.”

Before five minutes were up, I knew Guan was nothing like any teacher I'd had in my life, from my Yan Path tutor in childhood to Grayson last fall. For one thing, I was used to reading theory in textbooks before I moved on to actual practice. Maybe it was because Guan was doing this on the sly, ergo he didn't have books on hand, but I got the impression he was used to teaching through lecture and example, not explanatory texts. I made a mental note to ask Julian later.

He also didn't hold my hand on anything. Julian had called him “laid-back,” and in a way he was; he didn't radiate focused intensity the way Grayson did. But all of my college professors, I realized, had been pitching their classes to the lowest common denominator. Which at Welton was pretty high—after all, it was the top psychic sciences university in the country—but still, the roster for any given class ranged from strong talents to people who were just barely muddling through, like me when I took Effect Limits.

Guan didn't have to worry about that. Every single person he taught was a wilder, with a comprehensive suite of gifts. And he was clearly used to teaching the older kids, the ones who knew basic theory and had gotten to the point where their default state was being unshielded. So he hit the ground running—and so did I.

I expected it to be grueling. In some respects, it was. My background in ceremonial magic was pretty thin, so I had to learn a lot of smaller things on the fly to make a disruption spiral work. They were constructs of pure power, designed to do what it said on the tin: disrupt any other effect within their zone of influence. As defensive measures went, they certainly had their limitations, but Guan had chosen well; I could fling one of these down around myself, or even at a distance, and buy myself time to prep something else.