Wanderers 2 apprentice, p.26
Wanderers 2: Apprentice, page 26
I started to turn and then realized that I wasn’t in any condition to face her at that particular moment.
“Thanks,” I said, and then dove into deeper water. The cool water flowed over me and worked its magic. When I bobbed to the surface, standing waist deep in the current, Tess was staring at me curiously.
“Did I do something wrong?” she asked.
“No, certainly not, I just needed a full dunking to get a clean feeling again.” I waded toward her and then, as the water got shallower, I saw her smile.
“Oh, now I understand. The semi-celibate mentor has to maintain appearances.”
I smiled back, a little sheepishly and shrugged.
“Don’t worry about it, Rafe; I’ve had my itch scratched pretty well. I’m willing to follow your rules—for the nonce.” She smiled slyly and reached for an article of her clothing.
Damn, sometimes I think I’m too noble for my own sake. Then I thought about me being noble and had to laugh. A lot of things have been said about me since I became a Wanderer, but I don’t think noble has been one of them. Tess looked back curiously when I laughed and I shook my head. “Personal joke, you wouldn’t get it.”
“Yes, apparently not,” she said.
She dipped her pale blue panties into the river and rubbed the fabric together. A minute later, she held up the material. It was still red.
“Hmm, looks like this is going to take a lot of work,” she said.
“Wait a minute, I have an idea,” I said.
I walked past her out of the water, taking her panties as I passed. My hygiene spell wouldn’t usually separate me from mine, but it would separate me from something foreign. I reached for the nearest ley line and felt it a few miles away. It would take a little longer to recharge fully, but not too much longer. I started a tap and then focused on Tess’s panties, picturing that which was me and that what wasn’t. When I had all the molecules of my blood in focus, I handed the panties back to her. “Dip them in the water, now.”
Tess did and there was a swirl of red in the water. When she lifted her hands, the panties were spotless.
“Wow. I thought you didn’t have a spell for that,” Tess said. She moved to beside me on the bank and bracing one hand against my hip, slipped first one foot and then the other into her panties. Standing erect, she pulled them up snug. “Ick, still cold and wet.”
“I’ll fix that as soon as you’re fully dressed. Let’s try the rest of your clothes and then mine.”
“Okay,” Tess said picking up her bra, jeans, blouse, and leather pants. I repeated the technique on them and a few minutes later she was dressed and I was working on mine. By the time, I had my boots on; my hunger was getting the best of me. My body hadn’t had the extensive damage as Tess’s crippling wounds, but critical elements and extreme blood loss had required a sacrifice of most of my extra fat. I was looking anorexic; you shouldn’t go into fights with less than five percent body fat content.
“Tess, come here,” I said and held out my hands. She stepped into my arms and I pulled her close. Our gazes met and I smiled. “Thanks for saving my bacon. Now, mesh with me so I can show you how we dry off.”
“Bacon sounds good about now,” she said smiling.
“Doesn’t it? We’ll find food as soon as we’re dry, now concentrate.”
We meshed, faster than any previous time. Either our practice was making us skilled at this or last night’s little emergency had brought us so close that our bodies, minds, and auras automatically meshed anytime we concentrated on it. My money was on the latter. While Walt and I had never achieved the level of meshing that I had with Tess, we had practiced this for years.
Meshed, I activated my fire tat and allowed the heat to flow diffusely over our bodies, careful not to let it go into either of our skins. In a couple of minutes our clothes were steaming, a couple more and we were dry. We hadn’t had to wash the interiors of our boots, or they would have required special attention.
When we broke the meshing, Tess smiled up at me. “I have got to get me one of those tattoos. How long before I can get my first one?”
“With you, I have no idea; you’re progressing so much faster than I did. I would never have thought you could have pulled off that healing spell in so short a time, especially under stress. Tess, it took me a month to acquire my first tat. It’s more than a little painful to burn one of these tats, but it doesn’t have to be done in one setting like when you’re doing a spell from a grimoire. Tonight I’ll start teaching you the technique to make them.”
“Great, now about that bacon.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’m starving. Beast, how far is the highway?”
“Not far, a half mile or so by air. Don’t you want to get your things from the motel?”
“Not until we’ve eaten. Going back there will mean a fight and I need to be ready.”
“Rafe, you haven’t said what happened to you,” Tess said.
“Yeah, well, that’s an embarrassing story,” I replied.
“You’re embarrassed that someone stabbed you and left you for dead?”
“Yeah, I’d rather not say, but you need to know.”
“If you want,” Tess said softly, “you can leave out the part where your pants were around your ankles.”
I glanced at her, figuring she’d be wearing a damn grin, but she surprised me with her solemnity.
“Well, that’s sort of part of it. Laura was the one that stabbed me.”
Tess’s mouth dropped open. “What? Alex’s mom? How can that be? She’s been nothing but nice.”
“That may be and I certainly didn’t expect it of her, but she stabbed me with my own damn knife. You know how embarrassing that is?”
Tess took my left hand in both of hers. “Well, no, but I imagine it’s pretty bad. At least that explains why your pants were around your ankles.”
I stared at her, but again she gave no sign of trying to be funny. “Yes, pretty bad. Do you see now why I said I tell very few people about who we are and what we do? We can’t trust anyone, Tess. I don’t mean it’s absolute, but for most people trust has to be earned. We’re not dealing with ordinary people. I don’t know what you’ve had to deal with growing up, but I’m sure it was nothing like what you’re going to experience on a regular basis in the coming decades. Twenty years ago I thought Laura would be a girl that I could have settled down with, if not for my being a Wanderer.”
“Nineteen,” Tess said.
“What?” I asked.
“Laura said nineteen, she was pretty certain.”
I shook my head. “Well, it doesn’t really matter; anyway I find it more difficult than you that Laura stabbed me. I let my guard down and it almost cost me my life. I’ve traveled forty plus years as a Wanderer and I’ve never been closer to final death. Does that tell you how seriously I screwed up?”
Her face grew concerned. “Yeah, I guess.”
“The Laura I knew would have never done this to me. Something’s going on, somebody’s controlling Laura. I don’t know who or how, but I mean to find out.”
I waved to Beast. He walked near and bent down for us to climb up.
He launched into the air without his usual four gee acceleration. He might think I hadn’t noticed, but his take-offs with Tess on board were considerably more restrained than with me alone.
We reached the highway in a minute or so and I pointed out a small turnout with a picnic table where we could land without drawing too much attention. While we remained hidden by Beast’s hawk glamour, it wasn’t much of a problem, but the road had enough traffic that I didn’t want anyone seeing two people and a motorcycle suddenly appear on the shoulder.
Beast shifted forms as soon as we landed. He dropped the glamour and pulled onto the highway headed south. Since he seemed to know where he was going, I let him steer. It took five minutes to reach the outskirts of New Braunfels and a few minutes after that we found a restaurant.
While we waited for our food to arrive, I continued topping off my energy reserves.
Tess fingered my dad’s watch. “Do you want this back now?”
“No, I prefer you keep it. You’re progressing, but I haven’t shown you near enough to ensure your survival if the proverbial shit hits the fan. I added a ward to trigger the watch’s shield. If anything magical comes at you, it will trigger the shield. It’s not as strong as the one I’ve been teaching you, but it will activate faster. It’ll stop most things, but you may have to keep applying energy to it. Since you’ve been able to focus energy, it should be well within your capabilities. To drop the shield, you just have to concentrate on it and will it away. The ward and shield will reset automatically, but never drop it unless it’s fully charged.”
“How am I supposed to tell if it’s charged or not? Does it have something like a little battery light?”
I almost laughed. “No, but you’ll feel it when you shove power at it. If you push power and it won’t take it, then it’s full.”
“Will it stop a knife?”
“Certainly, it’s a superb shield. It will stop energy, magic, or materials denser than air. As you get better, you’ll find that you can control its shape and placement. Its default is a sphere around you, but it’ll stop at the ground or a really solid wall.”
Tess frowned.
“What is it?” I asked.
“If you’d had this watch on would you have been able to block Laura’s knife?”
I shook my head. “She had the blade in me before I realized she’d taken it from my boot. I can trigger my shield tattoo as fast as the one in the watch, but I need a quarter to a half second to trigger either one. Once she had the knife in my guts, I couldn’t focus well enough to trigger either. If I’d had a little time, I might have been able to stop the second stabbing, but there was a good bit of pain and it slowed down my focus.”
I was underplaying the amount of pain. In reality, it had hurt like a muthafucka, as the saying goes.
Our breakfast arrived and we dug in, eating in silence for several minutes, but I noticed that Tess kept looking at me as though she had another question.
Finally, when I stopped shoveling food into the empty pit that was my stomach, I leaned back and nibbled at my second rasher of bacon. “Okay, Tess, what do you want to know?”
She set her coffee cup down. “When we find Laura, are you going to kill her or what?”
“You don’t think she deserves it?” I asked.
“Sure she deserves whatever she gets, I mean geez, she killed you, but shouldn’t you just have her arrested?”
I would have grinned if Tess hadn’t still been so new at this. “Look, Tess, we’re not in the law and order business. We’re in the fix-it business. Usually, we reserve our fixing for something that Verðandi has assigned to us, but when we’re attacked, we have to make sure that the threat is neutralized. It’s just like the Amazons yesterday. They might have been duped into attacking us, but we can’t take the chance of trying to take everyone alive. Besides, what would I do with them once they were captured? Granted there are ones that I could put back in their own worlds and lock their portals, but others, like the Amazons can open their own portals.
“We don’t always have to kill, especially humans, I have a fondness for most humans, I mean I am one for God’s sake, so I don’t like killing people. But just because I don’t like doing it doesn’t mean that I won’t.”
“But Alex’s mom.”
“He means that much to you?” I wondered.
“No, it’s not that, well not just that. He’s sweet and all and very enthusiastic …”
I didn’t need to know about a seventeen-year-old boy’s enthusiastic. I sipped at my coffee and waited.
Tess continued, “I mean, I do like him, but not enough that I could forgive what Laura did to you.”
“Good, because while I’m going to do my best not to hurt Laura, I am going to sort out whatever is controlling her and put an end to it, be it man or beast. If Alex gets in the way, he could be hurt too. I try to avoid collateral damage, but sometimes—”
Tess was grimacing now.
“What? You don’t want me hurting your lover?”
She starred at me. “Are men really this slow-witted?”
I leaned back in the booth and took a hard look at my apprentice. “If you have something you want to say, say it.”
“You can’t hurt Alex.”
“Why not? I mean I’ll do my best not to, but eggs and omelets–”
She leaned across the table and slapped my forehead lightly with the palm of her hand. “Because he’s your son, doofus.”
Chapter 24
I frowned and put down my coffee cup. “What are you talking about? He’s seventeen and I was here twenty years ago. He couldn’t be mine.”
“Rafe, don’t you ever listen to anyone besides yourself? I told you not half an hour ago that you were here nineteen years ago.”
“Okay, I remember you saying that, but Alex is still seventeen.”
“No, Rafe, he turned eighteen months ago.”
I sat back in the booth. That couldn’t be right. When was I here? No, he couldn’t be my child. Wanderers don’t have children.
“Wait a minute there, Tess. So he’s eighteen that still doesn’t mean he’s my offspring.”
She sighed. “Do I need to hit you upside the head, again? Have you looked at him? He’s the spitting image of you. Only your apparent age keeps people from thinking he’s your son. As it is, I’m sure everyone at the motel thinks you’re his half-brother by another woman.”
“It just can’t be. Wanderers aren’t fertile.”
Tess crossed her arms over her breasts and gave me a wicked stare. “Who says?”
“Well, Walt always told me that we weren’t, at least mostly not. He said he’d never heard of a Wanderer having a kid and Walt had nearly seventy years of experience.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. So your mentor didn’t know anyone who had children. With the life you, I mean we, Wanderers live, how would you ever find out if you’d left something behind when you left town?”
I shut up and stared at the ceiling. This couldn’t be happening. Had I left Laura pregnant? Christ! If I’d known, I could occasionally have visited or at least provided for the two of them. Hell, forty years of traveling the single road and now this. And if I had one, could I have any other offspring? Damn it, this wasn’t right. Walt had assured me that we didn’t have to worry about that. Verðandi would know; I’d have to find some way to reach her.
A child, for Christ’s sake I never … me, a father, that just sounded wrong. Could it be?
Finally, I met Tess’s stare. “That doesn’t change what I must do. I have to stop whatever is controlling Laura. You can take the boy aside while I hunt her down, that’s the only way to make sure he doesn’t get in the way.”
“And then you’ll tell him you killed his mother?”
“Damnit Tess, I’m not trying to kill her, but these things happen.”
“Why?” Tess asked.
“Why what?”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “Why do you have to hunt her down and ‘fix her’? Can’t we just leave? She won’t come after us.”
“You can’t know that. There are only a few things that could control someone that well without me detecting their influence, and those things are the kind that will keep trying until either they or I am dead. Besides, whatever is controlling her will keep controlling her. I can’t let something of evil stay in someone I care about.”
Tess’s eyes darkened. “Damn it, Rafe. I don’t want you to kill Alex’s mom.”
“I said I’d try not to.”
“That’s not the same as saying you won’t.”
“Of course not. Let’s not forget who the apprentice is here. I know what I’m doing.”
She leaned back and crossed her arms over her breasts again. “Yeah? That’s why I found you with a knife in your chest and your pants around your ankles.”
My teeth made an audible noise as they ground together. Walt should have been thankful he’d had me as an apprentice and not this stubborn hellfire.
I pulled a few bills from my pocket and dropped them on the table. Standing, I looked down at Tess. “We’re leaving; you can distract Alex while I take care of business or you can go with me and watch the fight. Maybe you’ll learn something.”
I turned and walked away from the booth without looking behind me.
Damn it, Walt had never gotten around to teaching me how to train an apprentice. Teaching her my talents and abilities was one thing, but teaching her how to be a Wanderer was something else entirely.
Beast was leaning on his kickstand beneath a red and gold leafed maple at the edge of the parking lot. When I reached him, he growled, “Didn’t you forget something?”
“She’ll be along in a minute,” I sounded more confident than I felt. “Beast, tell me something about Alex.”
“What do you want to know?”
I swung a leg over his back and sat down. “You’ve been around him and seen him with Tess for a while now. What can you tell me about him that I might not know?”
His voice grumbled so low in the registers that I felt it in my chest more than my ears.
“You want to repeat that in English?” I asked.
“I guess Tess has told you that he’s your son.”
Damn it! “You knew?”
“It was obvious to anyone who wasn’t you.”
“Then why in hell didn’t you say something?”
“That’s not my place. If you ask, sure I’ll tell, but your knowing he was your son didn’t have anything to do with my role as your familiar.”
“There aren’t any rules to being a familiar.”
“Sure there are. I help you with what you don’t know, provide transportation, occasionally I even help protect you, but there is no requirement for me to identify every one of your offspring for you.”
