Charming (18 page)

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” I said.

“That’s what I tell her,” Sig agreed.

“I’m OK,” Molly said. “It was just time to express my faith in a different way.”

“So you became a monster hunter to deal with your fear?” I asked.

“It’s the only kind of therapy that works,” Molly said. “Don’t ask me why.”

“I get it,” I said. And I did. For a certain type of person, running toward the things that scare them is the only thing that gives them any sense of control. Anything else feels like living helplessly in fear. Molly looked and sounded like a soft-voiced meek little thing, but she was her own kind of warrior.

“ ‘Take arms against a sea of troubles,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘and by opposing end them.’ ”

“Exactly!” Molly smiled, pleased. “I like
Hamlet
too.”

“Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s spring, and I’m listening to Gwen Stefani singing ‘Oi to the World,’ ” I noted.

“Hey,” Molly protested mildly, turning up the volume. “This is No Doubt.”

The road became narrow, winding, and dark as we threaded our way up a mountain that probably had a name like Lookout or Hightop. Every now and then I would get a glimpse of Clayburg’s lights through breaks in the trees. Finally we pulled up to a walled gate that looked as out of place in that part of the Blue Ridge as a Bentley at a stock car race. The gates swung open as soon as Molly pulled up to them.

The road we were leaving was gravel and barely large enough for two cars to pass side by side, but the driveway was paved smooth and wide enough for three cars to fit comfortably. Fountains abounded on the estate to either side of us, set off by marble statues and sculpted topiary and bright lights.

“This is the home of a hacker?” I asked uneasily.

“I never said he was a hacker,” Sig said. “Parth is a software mogul.”

“And he lives in the mountains?” I asked. “And handles your tech for free?”

“Money doesn’t mean anything to Parth,” Molly said affectionately, despite the obvious displays of wealth on every side of us.

Sig was more cynical. “Parth helps us because he’s an information addict, and one of the things he’s researching is the supernatural. He learns as much from the questions we bring him as we do from his answers.”

The house itself was as huge as I’d expected based on the front gate—it was a mansion, really—but the drive up had led me to expect something classical in design, something Greek or Gothic or Florentine. This sprawling monstrosity was distinctly modern. It wasn’t so much one building as a compound, and
the sections didn’t blend geometrically. Separate wings might be blocky or towerlike or triangular, all of them connected by sections that were big enough to be residential dwellings in their own right. The only thing the different areas had in common was that all the roofs were covered with solar panels and wind turbines and small satellite dishes. It was god-awful ugly.

“What’s with the dome?” I wondered. “Is that a gym or something?”

“An observatory,” Molly corrected as she pulled up and parked. I shut up and followed.

The front door was opened by a pretty young Indian woman in a white bikini top and a sarong. She was round-faced and round-hipped, with long hair that wasn’t bound in any way. Despite the hour, she seemed alert and friendly.

“Hey, Kimi,” Sig said. “This is John.”

I managed not to wince. I was going to have to remember to tell her not to toss my real name around anymore. At least she hadn’t added “Charming.”

“Parth is eager to meet you,” Kimi told me, smiling without showing any teeth.

I just nodded.

The inside of the house was sweltering, the humid air filled with a thick cloying smell from some kind of incense. Sig and Molly had begun taking off their jackets before they even stepped inside, and they draped them on a rather ornate coat rack whose top looked like an octopus uncurling its tentacles. I left my jean jacket on. The knife sheathed at my side was plainly visible, but I wasn’t comfortable enough to let Kimi see the Ruger Blackhawk holstered at the small of my back.

“Parth likes to keep his house hot,” Molly told me. “He says it reminds him of home.” Divested of her outer layers, she was
short, compact, apple-cheeked, and cute. Her short hair was chestnut-brown.

“He keeps the whole place this warm?” I asked. “His heating bill must be massive in the winter.”

Kimi smiled at me. “Parth doesn’t stay here in the winter.”

We were led down a long, large hallway whose walls were made of thick glass. Behind the walls were massive tanks full of salt water and various species of iridescent fish that I suspected were exotic. Marine biology isn’t my thing.

The hallway led to a pentagonal room that seemed to serve as both large greeting room and hub: a circular area in the middle was full of bamboo furniture with brightly colored silk cushions and covers—couches, chairs, tables—and the room was surrounded by four large arched hallway openings. Small rounded pillows designed for sitting meditations were strewn out over the floor in a rough circle, and there was a gong in the middle of the room. Kimi led us east down a curving hall where several doors on either side were separated by large paintings. Their common theme seemed to be optical illusion.

At irregular intervals we would pass rooms with open doorways. One room was covered with brightly colored stamps. One room was filled with expensive-looking urns, and a crematory furnace was in the far corner. One room was filled with plastic action figures in their original packaging. One room had walls that were covered with paintings from floor to ceiling. One room was filled with busts and sculptures. Another was filled with long white cardboard boxes, and comic books in plastic sleeves covered the walls.

“The stamp room is one of my favorites,” Molly confided.

“Parth likes to collect pretty things, doesn’t he?” I said neutrally.

Despite the size of the house, there didn’t seem to be a second floor; the hallway’s ceiling was at least thirty to forty feet high for no reason that I could see. I was starting to feel like I was in a James Bond movie, except instead of Dr. No the villain was Dr. Seuss.

Spaced at regular intervals were small tables that held incense candles and lava lamps. I stopped to stare at one of the lamps.

“Parth loves lava lamps,” Kimi said, smiling. “He says they’re a metaphor for life.”

“Does Parth take a very large hit off a hookah when he says things like that?” I wondered. My jacket was plastered to my body by sweat, and the incense was irritating my nasal passages. It occurred to me that incense could be used to mask more than the smell of marijuana.

“Shhh,” Kimi admonished. “He’ll hear you.”

I looked around and down the long stretch of hall. I didn’t see or smell or hear anyone except for somebody who was making a lot of splashing sounds about two hundred feet away. Something was definitely not quite right in Whoville. I almost asked if I could go back to the car and get my guitar case out of Molly’s trunk.

Finally we came to the large three-tiered room the swimming sounds were coming from. On the lowest level was a swimming pool, but instead of having your standard boxy edges, the pool was an artificial lagoon sloping gradually into the second layer of the room, which was like a cove except that the stone-paved floor gradually flattened out and had drains in it. There were a lot of lounge chairs and small round tables in this area.

The east end of the cove had a layer of stairs that led up into an area that looked like a war room. There were nine
large-screen televisions on different walls, and at least five large glass-topped tables whose edges looked like some kind of space-age black plastic and whose surfaces glowed and cast light on the ceiling. I looked at those a little more carefully. The plastic-encased legs were sunk into small recessions
in
the floor rather than
on
the floor, and I was pretty sure the glass surfaces of the tables were computer displays. The scattered light revealed small holes and seamed lines in the edges of the plastic table frames, power outlets and places where you could put flash drives and slots that probably slid out so that disks could be inserted. I’d be willing to bet that the tables transmitted to printers somewhere too.

Each table had several chairs around it. Some kind of high-tech conference tables. Or perhaps teleconference tables.

I could smell that the swimming pool on the lowest level, unlike the aquariums, was full of fresh water. A tall, thin, bald man of Indian origin and indeterminate age was swimming in it. He wasn’t doing any kind of stroke that I recognized, but he was gliding through the water effortlessly. When we walked into the cove area, Kimi led us to the edge of the water, where a pile of white towels was stacked next to a cotton bathrobe. Parth disappeared under the water, then reappeared in front of us and began walking up the slope toward us so smoothly that it almost seemed like the water wasn’t holding him back at all.

He was wearing a small tight blue bathing suit, his body lean and sinewy. He moved with fluid precision, watching me with dark eyes. “Molly, Sig,” he said genially, bending down to pick up a towel. “Lovely to see you as always.”

“You too,” Sig said with an exaggerated eyebrow lift as he briskly rubbed himself dry with a towel.

He laughed and turned toward me. His face was narrow and bony, his eyes intense. I was watching carefully while his
mouth moved, but I couldn’t see his tongue. “And you must be the strange and wonderful hybrid Sig has told me about,” he said.

“That’s pretty ironic,” I said. He was close enough now that I had his scent despite the incense, and I chose my words carefully. “Coming from a naga.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, and from the pool behind him a twelve-foot wave gathered up and came crashing toward me.

14

A
word about knightly training might be appropriate here. Being mere humans, knights have slower reflexes than most of the creatures they hunt. Because of this, brief pauses are a luxury that knights simply can’t afford, and a lot of their training focuses on eliminating hesitation. Occasionally this leads to mistakes, but knights believe that it’s better to err on the side of decapitation. When you need them, those unwasted moments are pearls beyond price.

Factor in that my reflexes are actually much faster than those of the knights who trained me to compensate for slower reflexes in the first place, and maybe it will explain why I caught Parth off guard even though he attacked me. I didn’t stand there stunned by the impossibility of the wave that he brought crashing down on me, nor did I instinctively go limp and let it carry me back with its greater weight. I was already leaning forward as soon as the water level rose dramatically. By the time the wave surged to intercept me, I was turning my body into as thin and straight a line as possible and hurling myself like a spear toward Parth’s knees, forced to aim low
so that I could slice through the approaching wave beneath its breaking point.

Parth was as surprised as a cat who finds itself being attacked headlong by a mouse that it thought entrapped. Startled, he tried to step farther back into the wave that wasn’t having any visible effect on him, but I grabbed his ankle as my hands broke through the back of the wave, then hung on and yanked his heel upward hard as the rest of my body was snatched back and dragged away from him again. Parth fell straight back and cracked his head hard on the floor, and the wave abruptly dispersed around me, collapsing in on itself as if a giant water balloon had just been burst.

We both began to scramble. I was still holding on to Parth’s foot, and I yanked him back to the ground at the same time that I pulled myself to my knees. He lashed out at my hand with his other foot, but by that point I was on my feet and dragging him by his ankle as fast as I could while he vainly clawed at the wet stone with his hands, managing to cover twelve feet in this awkward fashion. Sig was walking beside us yelling something, but I was focusing on keeping Parth too disoriented to concentrate while getting him as far away from the water as possible.

Finally he twisted and pulled himself toward me, bending his knees and arching his back. I was bent over slightly, and his hands managed to reach the sides of my jacket and cling on with grim strength as he pulled himself closer to me. I didn’t try to fight or grapple; instead, I let go of his leg and dropped down onto my butt, grabbing his arms while he held on to my jacket. Continuing with the motion, I managed to curl my legs in close to my body and plant my feet in his stomach while I rolled onto my back. Parth released my jacket in an attempt to avoid getting pulled over the top of me, but it was too late. At the apex of my
roll, I went back on to my shoulders and straightened my legs, literally catapulting him through the air with greater-than-human strength and sending him over and off me, bouncing toward the stairs at the other side of the room. When we scrambled to our feet, I was between him and his artificial lagoon.