Ring.
     "I found her," Chandler told me. I slowed to a hover.
     "Good. Is she there?"
     "She's... in retreat. She's in a safe place, she's thinking."
     "Could be worse, then. Oh, she stole a bike a while ago...?"
     "Don't worry about it."
     "OK. I was just going to offer to take it back."
     "She said that she already ran into those guys and they have Scott, or at least Scott's 'brother?'"
     "A close copy, with certain modifications, evidently."
     "She had to run away from it, which I don't think did her self esteem any good."
     "Huh. Well, if she's there and safe and behaving herself, this is good," I said as much to myself as to him.
     "Don't do that," he suggested mildly.
     "What?"
     "Treat her like she's six. It's not going to help."
     "She acts like it," I growled.
     "So do you sometimes." Not accusing, but stated simply, factually.
     I'm not sure if he has any idea how close I came to saying something truly childish—I mean, which one of us is turning two in a few weeks? I took a careful breath instead. "OK, admitted."
     "The two of you are feeding off one another in a really nasty way. She doesn't need criticism, she needs a friend. In the same way you don't need to be 'protected.'"
     I closed my eyes for a moment. No way was I going to get into a discussion of what I need, or for that matter anyone else. "Do you have to be so fucking perceptive all the time?" He did have a point; we might not have much in common aside from our reaction to certain forms of stress, but that was plenty to set us off into a retaliatory spiral. Witness earlier today.
     He chuckled. "I guess I'll go back to my day job, then."
     "Point taken. I know it's not the best way to handle her, but—" But why the hell do I have to be mature about everything if she doesn't? Talk about being immature.
     "But she gets under your skin," he finished understandingly.
     "She doesn't seem to realize that she agreed to do this job." I've seen the pattern too many times now, with Fimbulwinter, the Blood Board she killed, Don Vincent—something sets her off, she goes off, and suddenly it's Lucky in her private universe, to hell with the rest of us.
     "She does. She just hates losing."
     "Everyone hates losing."
     "There's hating losing, and then there's hating losing."
     "And Lucky hates to lose. I know, and I know she's getting better. I..."
     "Go get some rest," he suggested gently.
     "I'll try to behave myself," I signed off with a minimum of sarcasm. Spent a long moment just hanging there in midair like a surrealist painting, then turned back to base for a much-needed nap.
     Scott doesn't need to sleep so much; he continued his research, got some results, called Winters to give her the names of the other members of the crew that had beaten us up. I woke up after a few hours and headed down to see what he was up to, turned my own attention to the golem's activities. No recognizable pattern appeared from its reported movements. At the original murder scene, the rabbi Hans had mentioned, the clay was not found on the body, I noted; in all the other cases it had been. Hans said a golem is a creature from Jewish mythology, a clay man animated by some sort of written spell. Hm. In possible connection, I noted down the beatings Winters had mentioned in Brookline, and a number of what appeared to be attacks against the temples. It looked as if Promethean had interrupted a third such attack. The man he had tried to save had died at the hospital.
     "I don't know if this means anything," Scott spoke up suddenly from the other terminal, "but they might try and kill the prosecutor who prosecuted Lucky next."
     "Why do you think that?"
     "Here." He passed me a printout. Ellis, Lesobeck, and Washington—all three showed up in the case of Felix Javlin, a violent psychotic who was, by all accounts, still in jail for his murders, but stranger things have happened.
     "Good work."
     While I was reading it occurred to him to check the phone for messages, something which had completely escaped my mind previously.
     Beep. "Hi, this is Trent, Emily's still talking in Japanese, call me."

| Top |