Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (19 page)

Delacroix clapped his hands, and his magick circle came to life. The wind shifted, tugging us away from the edge, and half of Marielle's face became obscured by her hair. She pushed it back, but I had already turned away, shielding my eyes from her. She'd have to read me a different way.

"It won't last long," Delacroix said. "And it isn't very strong. You'll have to generate your own wind if you want to go far."

"It'll do," Marielle said. "Clearing the next block might be enough."

It might.
The Chorus twisted up my neck. Was she voicing a positive opinion to buoy their confidence or did she know something about the men coming to kill us?

The building shivered, and the tremor in the walls made the balcony sway unnervingly. The Chorus, noting the stress fractures in the masonry of the building, observed that the architecture of this block wasn't very earthquake-proof. The leys were being warped, coerced into a volcanic nexus that was coming up through the foundation and lower floors. Inside the fourth-floor apartment, several of the lights guttered out as the next tremor ran through the structure, and two floors below, the windows in the kitchen where several Watchers lay dying, blew out, raining flowers of glass down on the sidewalk.

Vraillet came out onto the balcony, still carrying the shotgun. "Time to go," he said. "They've breached the apartment below." He thrust the weapon into Delacroix's hand, and stepped into the circle of violet and blue light. He pointed east, toward the white cathedral of Sacré-Cœur, and jumped. Delacroix's magick circle popped beneath him, a magick spring throwing him into the air, and his own magick bloomed like a tiny sun sparking. Then he was gone, a shadow streaking across the roofs of Paris.

One of the two ailing Watchers followed, though his concentration was bad enough that he only managed a long jump, across the street and onto the roof of the building opposite. His landing was rough too. If he was smart, he'd just lie there, below the roof line, and wait for all the dust to settle. Eventually he'd be able to walk out. If the poison didn't kill him first.

The other guy demurred. "I don't care for heights," he stammered. "And . . . and I haven't mastered flight." He was standing inside the apartment, nervously shuffling back and forth. As close as he dared to the open sky.

The building groaned again, shaking more violently, and in the kitchen behind the scared magus, glassware rolled out of a cupboard and shattered on the floor. Somewhere, distantly, someone started screaming, a thin siren of sound like a teakettle boiling in the next apartment over.

Steadying myself against the outer wall, I reached in and caught the reluctant magus' jacket, yanking him onto the balcony. "You're coming with us," I said, wrapping him in long ribbons of the Chorus. Delacroix's circle gave off a huge flash of blue sparks when I hit it with the other man in tow, but it still worked. The ground flexed beneath us, and we were suddenly thrown aloft.

The building growled, and it seemed to lean forward as if it were going to swat us out of the sky. The balcony cracked, part of the railing breaking away and falling. The sliding glass door shattered, glass sliding like water across the angled floor of the balcony. I twisted around, trying to catch sight of Marielle and Delacroix. As if I could carry more weight than I already was.

There were two more flashes of blue light, and then the circle disintegrated along with the rest of the balcony. The whole side of the building started to come apart.

The psychic wings of the Chorus unfurled and we caught an updraft of hot air.

Back in college, I had been an avid outdoorsman. Even worked at REI part-time. I had grown up in the shadow of the Grand Tetons, and getting out into the mountains surrounding Seattle had been a vital part of the weekends. I had started with rock climbing, but had graduated to BASE jumping a year or so before that night in the woods up north, when everything changed.

One of my fellow jumpers said it best: "Jumping off a rock isn't crazy. It's the most controlled expression of freedom you can achieve. It's just you, your gear, and gravity; and gravity never lets go." We jumped off cliffs, bridges, antenna, and the occasional half-completed building in Bellevue, and every time, we were in complete control of our descent. You never
fell,
you always
managed a controlled descent;
we were very particular about the distinction. You climbed to a high spot, found your landing spot on the ground (pre-scouted, of course), gave the wind the middle finger (because the wind, unlike gravity, was a capricious bitch), and jumped. Everything else was just a matter of focus and control.

Much like magick.

Jumping from buildings was tougher, only because the winds were more chaotic, and stronger too. In Seattle, some nights they'd howl in off the Sound, like alienated djinn exiled from the desert, and the buildings would creak and groan under their pressure. Only those eager to die talked about jumping from a structure downtown on those nights. The wind was too strong, and it would grab a jumper like a leaf and shake him until he was nothing but pulp and bone caught in the tattered remnants of his 'chute.

Towing another man was a bit like falling with a torn parachute. Control was sluggish, the drag unnatural, and gravity was an issue. I wasn't so much an owl as a clumsy bat, struggling to stay in the air. The magus and I scraped the side of a building, nearly collided with a black metal railing—invisible in the shadows of the alley into which we were falling—and then bounced off the pavement.

My cargo—who, the Chorus informed me, was the conspiracy theorist Chieradeen—groaned loudly. I sat up, checking for anything worse than a bruised rib and scraped palms. "Any landing you walk away from is a good one," I told Chieradeen, whose only response was a grunting noise. My center of gravity rolled once as I got to my feet, and the Chorus was heavy in the base of my head. They shifted like a pool of mercury and my balance settled.

A pair of shadows eclipsed the ambient light pollution trickling down from the roof line. I glanced up as Marielle and Delacroix glided down and landed with much more grace. Delacroix had left the shotgun behind.

I eased Chieradeen over, and when he opened his eyes and looked at me, I helped him sit up. He was like me, bruised and a little battered but alive, and the realization that he wasn't going to die from falling was starting to sink in. Chorus-sight lit up his skin and revealed the chaotic insanity still in his veins.

I checked Marielle and Delacroix too. We were all still poisoned to varying degrees. No wonder I had flown like a wounded duck. Half my mind was busy fighting a chemical war in my bloodstream. I had been able to ignore it so far because of the heightened energy state of the Chorus, but I was going to have to do something about it soon.

Marielle knelt beside Chieradeen, and in a quick motion, stripped off her sweater. Underneath, she was wearing a tight black tank top. Motioning for the Watcher to lie down on his back, she bunched the sweater under his head as a makeshift pillow. "He's going to need a hospital," she said, looking up at Delacroix. "We need a car."

Delacroix's mouth compressed to a fine line, and he stared at the pair of them for a long moment. The muscles in his jaw worked, chewing on an idea that none of us wanted him to articulate, and then he nodded finally.

"Keep it simple," Marielle admonished to his back as he strode off toward the street.

When he was out of earshot, she bent over Chieradeen. "How can it be that you don't know how to fly?" she asked him, her voice gentle. "It's the quickest way to get out of a bad situation. I figured you'd be good at escape routes."

He tried to smile, and managed a weak grin. "Long story," he croaked. "And stupid too. It's better—" He coughed wetly.

Marielle pressed a hand against his shoulder as he tried to continue. "It can wait," she said. She bent closer to him. "But you have to live to tell me."

He nodded, his hand stealing up to hold on to hers.

"Your fight is not with us," she said. "We can't stay together. You must find your own path."

He looked at me, and the fervor in his gaze made the Chorus churn in my gut. "Is he—" he started.

Marielle shook her head. "Do not allow yourself to be distracted, Traveler. Not with the poison that is eating your heart." She caught his chin and pulled his attention back to her face.
"Vide te animum, frater."

Watch your spirit, brother.

"Ye-yes," he said, and the spinning confusion of his soul lost some of its chaotic motion. "Yes, I can do that." He let go of Marielle's hand.

I helped her up, and we faded into the shadows of the alley, heading for the other end. I glanced back once, when we reached the street, and Chieradeen was just a misshapen heap on the ground, a huddled shape like a solitary rock on a wet beach. One man, trying to hold his own against chaos—within and without.

"We're going to need a hospital too," I pointed out.

"I know," she said. Shivering slightly in the night air, she pointed toward the nearest intersection. A pair of cabs were parked next to an open brasserie. We went to the closer of the two, and she bent over next to the driver's window, making sure the guy inside the warm car got a nice view of her breasts.

The cab window scrolled down a few inches. Sweet-smelling smoke and French hip-hop rolled out of the car. "Pitié-Salpêtrière," she said. "Please."

The cab driver, a huge, bearded man who barely seemed to fit behind the wheel, stared for a second, and then nodded. The back doors unlocked and we got in. Inside, the music and cigarette smoke were even stronger. We were barely seated when the driver put the car into gear and mashed the accelerator. Marielle fell against me, her arm and shoulder across my body. Her skin was hot.

I was feverish too, and the secondhand smoke wasn't helping. Whatever the guy was smoking, it was strong and exotic, and he was using it to hide the smell of a recently smoked joint. The combination made me dizzy, and the stop-start motion of the cab wasn't helping either.

Marielle repositioned herself a little less awkwardly, though she didn't move that far away from me. She rubbed her upper arms, mainly—I thought—as an excuse to do something with her hands. "Moreau," she Whispered instead of trying to make herself heard over the banging hip-hop. "What did he tell you?"

"He didn't know who called Tevvys," I sent back.

She glanced at me sharply. "He was lying to us."

"I know." The cab dashed through a changing light, bouncing hard on the street, and I waited for my stomach to stop complaining before continuing. "But not about that."

She glanced at the driver, who was oblivious to our magi-speak conversation. "What about, then?"

I shrugged. I looked out the window instead of looking at her. Her neck was exposed, as were her shoulders, clavicle, and a bit more. I didn't fault the driver for staring when he had the chance. "He didn't say."

"I told you to find out what he knew."

The Chorus bristled at her tone, but I kept them in check. "And I did."

She didn't say anything, and implicit in that silence was the accusation that I had disobeyed her, that I had failed to follow through with her intent.

But it was her intent. Not mine. I had no reason to kill him, nor any desire to do so. The sight of the Chorus had been enough to reduce Moreau to tears. He had told me everything he thought he knew, and the Chorus had easily read his earnest desire to be believed.

"I am not your instrument." I told Marielle as gently as I could, but I couldn't keep the echo of my voice, the buzzing noise of the Chorus, snarling through a ripple of memory. We had been here before, and the sentiment had been the same then.
I am not your angel of vengeance.

"We don't know anything," she said, vibrating with a quiet fury. She couldn't know what the Chorus was reacting to, but she could read the underlying bite in my words. "We lost more men and learned nothing. What was the point of all that, Michael?"

I shook my head. "What would killing Moreau have gained us? The satisfaction of Old Testament-style retribution? Is that what this has come to already? Besides, killing Moreau would have been a waste of a useful tool. I shouldn't have to tell you that, Marielle. Alive, Moreau can still be twisted to our design. He can still perform a useful service."

"What service is that?"

"We have Tevvys' phone," I Whispered. "I told Moreau that the only way he could redeem himself was make contact with whoever was coordinating the attack and have them call us."

"I don't—" She stopped and shook her head. After taking a few deep breaths, she changed direction. "He'll turn on us the moment he has a chance. Provided he actually lives long enough."

"I guess he has some incentive then."

"Michael—" She sighed, and a bitter laugh got caught in her throat. "You are such a fo—"

"I'm not." I spoke out loud, biting the words off more firmly than I intended, the Chorus sparking behind my anger. "I used him, Marielle, instead of throwing him away."

"What if he doesn't survive? How is that useful to us?"

"It tells us they don't care who they hurt." I reached out for her leg, and she moved away from me. I dropped my hand to the seat. "If they did bring the building down, it'll take them too long to dig out anything useful. They don't have that kind of time. They need to either find us or make a deal. As long as we can stay a few steps ahead of them, they'll have to keep flailing away at us. Wasting resources and energy trying to find us."

I glanced out the window again. Through a break in the buildings, I could see the black shape of the trees along the Seine. Beyond their silhouettes, I could see the lit buttresses of Notre-Dame. My vision swam suddenly, a disorienting pressure inside my brain. The lights around Notre-Dame changed, lengthening into tall shapes. The crown of the church looked like it was swarming with phantom gargoyles, all struggling to take flight. "Meanwhile," I offered. "We've got a head start."

"Yes, but a head start to where?"

"One thing at a time," I said. "Let's take care of this poison first."