* * *
All the little hairs rose on Vallon’s neck and the sick feeling in her stomach disappeared in a tight ball. A slight movement in the air that shouldn’t be there. A taste to it that reminded her of cedar and incense and she knew she didn’t have any of those in her house.
Just leave, a part of her screamed. Leave and call the cops.
But the cops weren’t her friends right now.
She stepped further into the dimly lit room, the grey light outside placing a caul over the rich burgundy and blues of the furniture. The air shifted again and she turned her head toward the kitchen, and the door to the basement.
Oh, God, no. All her stuff was there. She -reached- and a blaze of Gifted presence came from the rear of the house.
“What the hell are you doing?” The fear morphed into fury and in two quick steps she was in the kitchen.
A sudden movement. A flash of power. A glimpse of black as someone shoved her kitchen table hard into her gut. The force sent her reeling back onto her butt, her head slammed against the wall.
She scrambled up, staggered, and tried to see through her daze. Whoever it was had disappeared through the open back door. She ran to it and peered into the back yard. Rain-soaked lawn. The rusting, children’s swing-set the house’s previous owners had left in place, the lone swing gliding in the breeze. The rain on the rhododendron leaves sounded like voices and she shivered, rubbed her head, and stepped back inside.
She grabbed the doorknob and released it in shock as a tingle ran up her arm.
She knew the feel. Gift. Whoever it was had done something to her door to get in, because she knew for sure she’d left it locked after Fi had left the door open.
She knelt to examine the lock. It looked the same, but when she tentatively touched it the tingle made her fingers numb.
Power. A lot of it, like a bit of the earth power she used for change, was still left in the door. And that wasn’t a trick known by any Gifted she knew.
Gritting her teeth, she grabbed hold of the doorknob and held on, opened herself.
The remains of the power flooded through her and the taste of cedar and incense flooded her senses.
Powerful. No one she knew, that was certain.
The briefly seen figure had been tall and swathed in black. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize.
Definitely male. Lean. Black hair, shoulder length. Dark, ankle-length coat, damp from the rain, but drying from being in her house. The face—she hadn’t seen, but she knew it was dangerous even though the guy had hidden it from her as he plunged out the back door.
She released the door and stood. The tingle was less now, would disappear in a few days, which was one of the reasons why she’d gone back to the scene of Simon’s death—to see what she could sense of the maker of the parking garage. The power in her door had a totally different feel than the licorice darkness of the concrete, but it still held a powerful sense of danger. So who was he and what did he want?
She eased the door closed, listened for the click, and turned the lock. Checked that the door was secure. So whatever he’d done hadn’t disabled the mechanism.
Aside from the table shoved across the room and the chairs that had fallen over in the process, everything looked pretty much the same. But that didn’t mean the place hadn’t been searched. What had he been after?
Then Maggie’s trilling meow came from beyond the basement door and it all came clear.
“Dammit.” She crossed the room, opened the door, ready for the tingle because she always kept this door locked, too. Maggie scooted out and began her dramatic parade of feed-me remonstrations.
“You’re going to have to wait, girl.” Vallon flicked the light on and plunged down the stairs into treacle-thick air, slowed as she reached the bottom.
Her private space was lit by a single, bare light bulb. This basement was the reason she’d bought the house.
Swathed in the earth, the old, bare-concrete foundation was actually cracked in places so it allowed in the sweet scent of wet soil. In places pale finger-joints of tree roots had shoved through the walls and widened the cracks. All of which would have made most prospective home owners run away.
More so with the rain. Today the back corner of the single room, near her sandbox, held a slight puddle of water, but across the center of the room at the base of the stairs a single, wider crack showed a silver runnel of moisture, and yet the room was warm.
She inhaled and closed her eyes and -reached-. The golden power that ran in the earth sat close to the surface here as if the power pressed up through the earth’s lithosphere. Environmentalists spoke of geothermal power as the hope for future clean power. The use of the readily available heat in the earth could provide all the heat the world required—if people would only listen. The use of the other power, accessed by the Gift, could provide so much more if they were brave enough to use it.
But the AGS so far had been cautious, limiting the use of the power to what could be found closest to the earth’s surface. So Vallon had bought this house and created this room for her own experiments; here, where beneath the scent of wet earth and mold came an aftertaste of ether and spice so rich it made her think of a fabulous Indian masala.
When she moved, the air friction was enough to make her think she’d spark and catch fire. No change to that. Sometimes the nearness even eased the afterburn, but not today.
Her hands shook as she crossed to the makeshift worktable and cupboards she’d built when she first moved in, and a sinking feeling took her stomach. This was what the intruder had come for. She was sure of it.
She’d left out her latest experiment with controlling her Gift. Along with learning to make her own ink and vellum, she’d been trying to hone her skills to draw more power to make very specific changes. The sheet of vellum she’d left drying had shown a sandcastle of delicate proportions that would be impossible to create in real life. Sky bridges and crenellated towers so fine there was no way sand would have the tensile strength to hold—without the power.
But the sheet of vellum wasn’t there anymore. She turned back to the sandbox—her training ground. Only a heap of white sand, still vaguely showing the perimeter of the castle’s base. She’d wanted to see how long she could hold something in place with just her will and her drawing. It had been a long time….
“Dammit.” She swung back to her table.
Her things moved. Bic pens and ruled notebooks shuffled aside. He’d been searching.
She yanked open the first cupboard. Packets of verdigris and lapis, onyx and the yellow scales of butterfly wings. All painstakingly collected. All carefully preserved. Based on ancient recipes, they were meant to be suspended in the alcohol base that made up her inks. A quick scan showed the raw ingredients were there.
Opened the second cupboard and a cry escaped her. Gone, all gone. She sank down on the old wooden stool she kept for while she worked.
Her father’s old journal—well not so much a journal as a formulary that had contained ink recipes and the clues that had led her to other things. It was nothing short of a miracle she had it at all, given that it being left for her to find was probably an oversight.
And now it was gone. Missing along with all her sheets of carefully prepared vellum and her special fountain pens.
She spun around and crossed the room to the small alcove with the half wall she’d filled with stretching and drying racks. Empty. All of the paper-fine ewe’s belly leather she’d so carefully cured because it was necessary to the Gift, had been stolen away.
“Damn and damn and triple damn.” She wanted to cry.
“Mew.” Maggie stood at the top of the stairs, her querulous demand a reminder that there were other things in life besides the Gift and its equipment.
“I’ll be there in a minute, sweet cheeks.” She felt like all her insides had been scooped clean as an eggshell. It had taken her years to learn the trick of making the vellum and inks, and months to ma
ke the supply that she used—very judiciously—off the job, for the AGS had done worse than fire agents who took it upon themselves to use the power outside their employment. Rumors said they simply disappeared.
She scrubbed her face trying to understand just how much trouble she was in. If the man in black was working for Gleason, then the AGS knew and she’d pay the price. If she quit, Homeland Security couldn’t have loose cannons with the ability to change things running around the country.
And if the intruder wasn’t AGS?
She slumped down on the lowest stair and thought about what Landon had said and the implications. With her paper and pen case held by the police and her supply of vellum gone, she was almost defenseless except for a few scraps of vellum that might be around the house.
For some reason the Vellum was the only thing that worked when writing changes. Some Agents said it was a matter of not believing anything else would work and fulfilling that prophecy, others said it was only a matter of focus and ewe’s belly worked better. Landon, who would probably know better than anyone because he studied this sort of weird arcane learning, said vellum probably worked because it was made from ewe’s bellies and thus was more closely aligned with living things. All that mattered was that Vellum worked and regular pulp paper didn’t.
If she ever had to face off against another Gifted, she was screwed.
Maggie scooted down the stairs, sat facing Vallon, and gave another peevish meow.
“I know girl. I’ll feed you. But why didn’t you stop whoever it was from getting in here and taking my stuff?” Another impatient meow and Vallon stroked the little black head that filled her palm so perfectly. Vallon absently used her Gift and the sandbox stirred, whispered smooth, the air tanging with a whiff of ozone. Maggie went over to sniff it, glanced over her shoulder and chirruped, so Vallon scooped her up, trudged up the stairs.
Her feet were like lead. The heavy air weighed on her, when usually it revived. All she wanted to do was curl up and sleep, but she knew better than to do that. She’d done that when her father had died. She’d felt this kind of abandonment then.
What had saved her was the academy and taking those first baby steps to learn her Gift. And that had brought her here. So what baby steps was she to take now?
She set Maggie down and went through the motions of feeding her. When she was done, she hauled the table back in place, then sank into one of the chairs. What the hell was going on?
Too much, apparently, and as usual all she saw was the evidence of the secrets, never their heart. Dad hadn’t ever shared how he really felt. He was too busy with the AGS, and then he was gone. Or maybe he had shown his heart. Maybe he just didn’t have a heart for Vallon.
At the Academy it had always seemed like the instructors whispered about her behind her back. Only Fi had been her friend. And after Fi abandoned her there were only the men.
She shook her head. The men were nothing, meant nothing. She had used them for release from the afterburn. She needed to find one now and then she needed to protect herself from whatever was happening because this was the most frightening case of afterburn of all. Too many things had happened, all at the time of Simon’s death.
It couldn’t be a coincidence.
She grabbed a tablet of paper out of a drawer, but found a small square of vellum she’d had to doodle on had been removed. That sent her stumbling out of the kitchen. She’d had bits and pieces of it around the house. Had the searcher found them all?
Upstairs to her office in the small back bedroom. Full bookshelves lined the walls, antique bindings looking tattered in the grey light from the lone window. A small desk stood under the window, drawers all closed. The office looked the same, but the scent of incense and cedar still lingered.
Two quick strides to the desk. Lifted the green blotter and swore. All the loose bits of vellum underneath were gone. Yanked open the bottom file drawer to where she’d kept her experimental drawings. Empty hanging file folders yawned up at her.
“Who are you, you bastard?”
She straightened and checked one last place. Her bedroom. Side-table drawer slightly ajar and she knew before she looked that her small supply was gone. She shivered and slumped, hugging herself, down on the edge of the bed.
Whoever it was had made sure she was defenseless. It would take weeks to tan and stretch and dry more vellum. That was if she could get organic ewe bellies to work with. And all the facts suggested whatever was coming down wasn’t going to wait a month for her to re-supply.
The worst was that they’d stolen the safe feeling she’d always had in her house. Nothing was safe anymore.
The light through the sheer lace curtains left the yellow room filled with grey shadows, and the scent of the cedar and saffron was thicker here—as if the intruder had lingered awhile — and that just plain creeped her out.
She stood and went to the window, peered out into the rain-washed pavement and at the slicked rhododendron bush up the street. No figure there now, so why did she feel as if she were still being watched?
When she turned back to the bedroom, the glare through the window silhouetted her against the framed miniature landscape drawings above the bed.
“Oh!” The surge of recognition shot through her. She was up on the bed, taking the drawings down, carefully breaking the brown paper seal on the back of the frames to reverently remove the drawings. One she had done herself. The other two were the last things she had of her mother’s, found among the belongings of her father.
Or at least she had convinced herself they were her mother’s because they had been drawn with a different hand than her father’s and tucked into the bottom of a box of Vallon’s drawings her father had apparently taken to work.
All three were drawn on vellum.
The precious oily feel of the paper filled her with relief. “So you missed some, you bastard. You’re not omnipotent and I’m not disarmed.” Which helped a little.
She carefully folded the three small sheets of paper, changed from her damp sweater and into her favorite black t-shirt and jeans, then slid the paper into her pocket. Now she just needed a pen loaded with the right ink. She’d hate to harm the pictures, but if it meant her life, she would.
Feeling a little bit safer, she returned to the kitchen and her blank writing pad. She’d been a pawn in someone else’s plans too much. Gleason’s, for example.
Now she was going to take control.
Chapter 9 - Subterfuge