License to Ensorcell Read online

  “There’s quite a story in that,” I said, as firmly as I could. “But it’s not one for right now.”

  “Well, of course not!” Eileen reached over and retrieved the album. “Brian, please, turn that awful thing off!”

  Brian had just finished splattering three zombies against a wall with a ray gun. He started to protest the order, then saw the cookies. The game went off. Nathan glanced at the book bag and raised an eyebrow.

  “Some things that belonged to my brother Patrick,” I said and nodded a slight yes. “Michael saved them for me.”

  “Ah,” Nathan said. “Nice of him.” He stood up. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Houlihan, but we’ve really got to leave. There are things I need to do after I drop Nola off at her place.”

  Aunt Eileen fixed him with the gimlet eye. “Drop her off?” she said. “I should hope so!”

  The weapons expert looked briefly terrified. I said good night all around and got us out of there before the lecture began.

  The sky was darkening to twilight as we hurried across the street. He unlocked the passenger side of the car and opened the door for me. I stood my ground and held out a hand.

  “The keys, Nathan,” I said. “If I do the driving, you won’t need to use that insurance policy from the rental agency. If you drive, we will.”

  “I’ve noticed,” he said stiffly, “that California drivers do seem to be timid souls.”

  “We happen to love life, that’s why. Give me the keys.”

  “You know, you remind me of your aunt at the moment.”

  “Good. If you don’t give them to me, I’ll take the bus home, and you can damn well find your own way to either my apartment or a premature death. I put the odds at fifty-fifty.”

  He sighed and handed over the keys. As soon as we’d gotten back into the car, he retrieved his gun in its shoulder holster and strapped it on.

  “By the way,” I said, “I’m sorry about the family photos.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You weren’t bored?”

  “Only a little confused. You certainly come from a large enough clan.”

  “You could say that, yeah. My grandfather—Eileen and Mother’s dad—was the seventh child of a seventh child. Then Grandpa had seven kids, too. Those are the O’Briens. Father Keith is the third O’Brien, Eileen’s the sixth, and my mother hit the jackpot—she’s the seventh of them. She married Flann O’Grady, and they had seven kids. Michael’s the seventh in our batch.”

  “Isn’t there a superstition about that? All those sevenths, I mean.”

  “If you want to call it that, yeah. There sure is.”

  Nathan turned and looked out the windshield. In the cold glare of the streetlight, he looked exhausted. “The vast majority of my grandparents’ families died in the Holocaust—their parents, brothers, sisters—anyone still in Europe when the war started. Well, except for one brother who was an infant at the time—my great-uncle. A Dutch family took him and risked everything by pretending he was theirs.” He shrugged as if tossing the grief away. “But I don’t have much of a family.”

  “Uh, God! I’m so sorry.”

  “So am I.” He began fiddling with the safety harness on his side of the car. “Let’s go, shall we? I want to get back to your place in time for the news.”

  So did I, but when we watched it, him on the couch, me on my computer chair, the news had nothing to add to the murder story. Apparently the police had yet to notify the next of kin.

  “Next broadcast?” Nathan said.

  “Eleven.” I paused to yawn. “Can’t you just hack into something and find out who she was?”

  “I can contact the police, and I suppose I’d better. I’m working for Interpol again.”

  “What? You mean you can just go ask? Why are you sitting around my apartment waiting for the news, then?”

  He gave me a look full of sorrow, as if he couldn’t believe my lack of brain.

  “No,” I said, “and you know what I mean by no. It’s time for you to leave, by the way.”

  “What about those journals? Do you think there’s something in there for our job?”

  “I don’t know yet. I do know I need to read them.”

  “Spying on your brother’s love life?” He grinned at me.

  I realized I’d never told him about Patrick. “No,” I said. “I’m afraid he’s dead.”

  The grin disappeared, and he winced. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize—”

  “I know. It’s okay.” I hesitated, then decided the truth about his murder could wait. “He had a lot of psychic talent. There may be something for our job in these notebooks, something he noticed or wondered about.”

  “I see. I’d like a look at them.”

  “Sure.”

  I’d piled the journals up next to my computer. I scooted the chair around, took the top one from the stack, and handed it to Nathan. He flipped it open and swore.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Can’t you read Latin?”

  “No. I take it you can.”

  “I endured twelve years of Catholic school. Damn right I can.”

  “Why did your brother choose to write these in Latin?”

  “That’s kind of the family code. He went to Catholic school, too. Hey, it could be worse. He also knew classical Greek, and I don’t.”

  Nathan snarled like an angry dog.

  “But don’t worry,” I said. “I’m planning on reading every word. I’ll give you a full report if I find anything of interest.”

  And with that I shooed him out.

  CHAPTER 3

  EVERYONE IN THE FAMILY KNEW that Patrick wanted to become a priest, but until I read his journals, I never realized just how desperately he longed for a refuge within the church. When our dad went missing, Patrick was five years old. He turned to his uncle, Father Keith, who took over the role with his usual understanding. Unlike me and most of my siblings, Patrick kept up his belief in God and the specifically Catholic doctrines at least partly because Keith believed them. Fortunately for Keith, his share of the family talents fit into his priestly vocation: a heightened empathy, psychic insights, warnings of danger, spiritual revelations, all the phenomena that supposedly derive from the God of the Christians. Unfortunately for Patrick, hiding lycanthropy in a seminary would have taken godly powers.

  He started keeping journals when he was living at home and attending classes at the local Catholic university. I found the first volume hard reading. Pat’s grief, loneliness, rage at the talent the family genes had devolved upon him, thoughts of suicide restrained only by his knowledge that Keith would be shattered—I kept thinking, why didn’t he tell me all this? Why didn’t he let it out? I reached the conclusion that he didn’t know why. Through the entire notebook ran the festivals of the church. He recorded each saint’s day, each feast, in different colors of ink to match the appropriate liturgical garments. And every month, around the full moon, for three days he wrote nothing at all.

  When I finished the first journal, I realized it was two in the morning. Going to bed struck me as a great idea. I laid the journal down on the couch beside me, yawned, stretched, and opened my eyes to find the angel standing in the middle of the living room, between me and the TV. He seemed to be studying the pattern on the faded Persian carpet I keep under the coffee table.

  “Uh, is there something you want to tell me?” I said.

  “Coat of many colors.” He pointed at the carpet with an urgent forefinger. “Many many colors.”

  “Uh, yeah, but why is that important?”

  “Read the next book.”

  He vanished before I could test him for Chaos affiliation.

  Still, I picked up the second journal and started leafing through more grief, rage, and loneliness. Just when I was ready to hang it up, angel or no angel, a pattern began to develop. I found only hints at first, references to odd e-mails that Pat was afraid to hope meant what he thought they meant—not that he’d deigned to copy any of them
into the journal, the annoying little brat! Slowly though the hints added up to possibilities. What if there was a place where he could serve God as he was, wolf nights and all?

  At last, with only ten pages to go in that notebook, whoever sent those e-mails contacted him outright. They had smelled Pat running at the full moon, then seen him from a distance right after the wolf-form left him. They had decided to take the chance and approach him. On the second to the last page, Pat sent an e-mail in answer. On the last page, in big letters, he’d printed, “Fr. LG respondit!”

  By then my eyes were watering, my back ached, and I was beginning to think in Latin. I checked the time: five A.M. Going in to my fake job had become impossible. I could phone in using the landline and leave a message for Mr. Morrison, then go to bed—but damn it, I had to find out who this mysterious “they” were. First, coffee! I stood up, creaking in every joint, and staggered into the kitchen.

  I had just poured myself a cup when the landline rang. I drank a couple of mouthfuls and picked up the receiver on the sixth ring.

  “Bona matutina,” I said. “I mean, morning, Nathan.”

  “Morning,” Nathan said. “I’m glad you’re safe. I just drove by your place and saw the light on in the window, and I wondered why you hadn’t turned it off. I’ll be right up. We can go out for breakfast.”

  “No, we can’t!”

  But he’d already hung up on me.

  I put the receiver back and stood fuming beside the phone just long enough for his meaning to soak in. “I’m glad you’re safe.” With the light still burning in my window, I could have been lying on the floor dead, murdered by William Johnson in one of his bad moods. Once again I’d forgotten about him.

  I began to wonder if he was meddling with my mind, making me forget so he could have an easier shot at me. I tried a Search Mode: Individual scan, just a quick cast into nowhere in particular. I picked up nothing, absolutely nothing. Johnson could have been dead or heading to Mars on a spaceship for all I could find.

  Still, I took the warning to heart. When Nathan knocked on my door, I made him repeat our passwords before I opened up. He strode in, freshly shaved, smelling of witch hazel, wearing a blue shirt, and waving a manila folder.

  “The police report on the Presidio murder.” Nathan tossed the folder onto my coffee table. “Where do you want to go for breakfast?”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I never eat a real breakfast, and I’ve been up all night reading.”

  “Ah. That’s why you look like something the cat dragged in.”

  I refrained from throwing my coffee into his face only because I probably did.

  “You go out to breakfast if you want,” I said. “I need to keep reading Pat’s journals.”

  “Find anything in them?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”

  Nathan walked over to the couch and leaned over it to pull the curtains open a few inches. The cold gray light of a foggy dawn sliced into the room. He stood there looking out for a minute or two, then switched off the floor lamp.

  “I’ll go out for breakfast alone,” he said, “if you’ll do your reading somewhere else. Sitting in a window with the light on! Do you want to get your head blown off?”

  “It’s not high on my list of priorities, no.” I began to feel like a fool. “I’ll find a nice safe spot.”

  When he left, I shut the door, locked it, slid on the deadbolt, and put on the safety chain for good measure. I took the third journal into the bedroom. The only window there opened onto a narrow air shaft. I put a Chaos ward on the glass and pulled the curtain shut. Since the ward only worked against dedicated followers of Chaos, and I didn’t know yet if Johnson followed that path, I moved my floor lamp and pulled a chair around so I could sit away from the window rather than sprawling on the bed to read as I usually did. I got myself another cup of coffee and opened the third notebook.

  This mysterious Fr. LG—I assumed the Fr. meant frater, a brother as in some kind of Catholic order, and that LG were his initials—had a lot to say to Patrick over the next few weeks, all of which Pat recorded in the journal. At first LG dropped only hints, a few leading questions, a sliver of information here, a morsel more there. Pat sounded dubious himself, afraid to believe rather than openly skeptical. “The next full moon will prove the test,” he remarked at one point.

  A few days before, he met LG for coffee, as casually as you can get at a doughnut shop near campus. LG brought along a Sr. MR, a sister, which ruled out any kind of official religious order in my mind. I considered the possibility of a magical lodge, a kind of anti-Masons, maybe, since Pat would never have had anything to do with the actual Masons or their offshoots. He liked both the frater and the soror and left the meeting inclined to trust them, though, of course, they’d only chatted about trivial matters in public. He agreed to meet them at Land’s End at the full moon.

  I was reading as fast as I could, scanning pages and leaving the details for later. As usual, he’d made no entries on the three days of the full moon’s influence.

  The fourth day, he wrote in big shaky letters: verum! It’s true. And for the first time I saw the words the Hounds of Heaven. Frater LG, Lupus Gubbionis—his name came from the wolf of Gubbio, the giant wolf who terrorized an entire medieval village until St. Francis tamed it—headed up a small group of lycanthropes dedicated to serving the Good in their own way rather than giving in to the forces of Chaos that always threatened them from within. Soror MR, aka Mater Remi and LG’s fiancée, had taken for her name the wolf mother of the brother who hadn’t founded Rome. An interesting touch, I thought, to identify with the outsider.

  By then I was so tired, and my eyes ached so badly, that tears were running down my face, partly for Pat, too, of course, who at last had found the friends and the place in life he’d always wanted, only to die a year later. Well, all right, mostly for Pat. I got up and grabbed a box of tissues.

  After I got control of myself, I washed my face, then went back out into the living room for a look at the copy of the police report Nathan had brought by. I was beginning to form a theory about why Johnson had come to the Bay Area. I hoped the young woman found dead in the Presidio had nothing to do with the Hounds, but I worried.

  I had just picked up the folder when I heard a sound at the door, a little click, a scrape of metal on metal, another click. The doorknob quivered. I put the folder down on the coffee table and stepped back. Tired though I was, I could still summon plenty of Qi. If Johnson opened that door, he was in for a blast of it.

  The door moved inward, then slammed against the safety chain. Through a crack about an inch wide I could see the pale yellow glow of the light above the stairs. I raised my hands and breathed slowly, regularly, feeling the Qi ascend with every breath. I stripped Qi from the air to match what I was summoning from within. The energies twined themselves into a ball of fire between my hands. I waited, ready to let it go as soon as I had a target.

  “Brilliant!” Nathan called out. “Nola, you can open it now. You’ve got the right kind of chain in place. I’m glad to see it.”

  I was tempted to blast the bastard anyway, but I’d signed a contract restricting ensorcellment to life and death situations. He shut the door again to allow the chain to sag back to normal. I let the Qi spill and dissipate harmlessly as I walked across the room.

  “Where does Jake live?” I said.

  “Sheboygan,” he said. “Which is in Wisconsin, by the way. I looked it up on the Internet last night.”

  I opened the door to find him smiling, a lockpick in one hand, an object wrapped in a paper napkin in the other.

  “I brought you an English muffin,” he said. “With butter.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Come in. I’ve got something to tell you about my brother Pat.”

  I locked and chained the door behind him, then took the muffin. Coffee on an empty stomach after a long night is never a good idea. I ate the muffin fast to keep it company. Nathan stood beside the window, push
ed back one curtain a bare crack, and peered out at the street below.

  “One quick question,” I said. “The murdered consular official?”

  “What about him?”

  “Was he from the Bay Area?”

  “Yes, from San Francisco, in fact.” Nathan let the curtain fall and turned back into the room.

  “Did Greenbaum have a Bay Area connection?”

  “Is Fresno in the Bay Area?” He pronounced it “freez-no.”

  “No, thank God! But it is in California.”

  “She was born there. Her parents didn’t emigrate until she was a teenager.”

  “So I’ll bet they came to San Francisco now and then to see the sights. Huh, everything fits.”

  “Fits what?”

  “The pattern that’s emerging. Look, there’s no subtle way for me to say this. My brother was a werewolf, and I’m beginning to think that Johnson may have murdered him, too.”

  Nathan opened his mouth and shut it again, several times.

  “You’re a nutter, aren’t you?” he said at last. “Beautiful but stark raving, and I’m supposed to work with you.”

  I had expected no less. “No, I’m the sane one in my family.”

  “That I can believe, having met some of them.”

  “Oh, come on, Nathan! There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in whatever that was. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? What happened back in your home territory was so weird that my agency is about the only thing that could help you. Your higher-ups must have known that.” I gave him my version of the gimlet eye. “Either they’re holding out on you, or you’re holding out on me. Why were you given this assignment? A pair of murders by a non-national is a fairly routine Interpol matter. Why bring you and your deep cover connections into it?”

  Nathan considered me for a long moment. “You’re sharper than you let on,” he said eventually. “Johnson’s itinerary sounded suspicious, Syria, Iran, and so on.”

  “Yeah, but is that all? Why were you put in touch with my agency?”

  “I’ve wondered that myself. Your lot apparently have nothing to do with counterterrorism.”