Читать книгу Waking The Serpent - Jane Kindred - Страница 13

Chapter 6

Rafe’s heart sped up a little just at the way she moved. This was starting to seem like a worse idea than it had before.

Phoebe stood poised in the open arch between the kitchen and the living room, limbs smooth and supple in a light-blue ribbed tank and a pair of curve-hugging cutoffs, the ponytail clipped high and swooping over backward. “How long have you been lurking out there?”

“Not lurking.” He held up her tablet. “You left this at the jail yesterday and I forgot to give it to you.”

“Oh. Wow.” Phoebe came to the door and opened it to accept the tablet. “I thought I’d never see that again. Thanks. You’ve saved me a lot of time and aggravation.” She held it awkwardly inside her folded arms, as if aware of the effect the skin-hugging fabric was having on him. “Did you want to come in?” It was obviously an invitation he was meant to refuse.

“No, I just came to...” He paused, distracted by what he thought he’d heard. “Were you talking to me just now? I thought you said my name.”

“To you?” Phoebe gave him a look that said he was full of himself. “I was just working with a step-in. Some dead cheerleader or something. She was kind of incoherent.”

“Oh.” Rafe ran a hand over the thick waves of his hair, kept manageable in a short tail at his nape. “Anyway, I wanted to apologize for what happened last night, and to make sure you were all right.”

Phoebe stared him down. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Rafe pocketed his hands. She wasn’t going to make this easy. “I should have stayed to see that you were. You were pretty shaky on your feet. And I think maybe I’m the reason things got so...weird.” Her cheeks flushed pink and he hurried on. “I think it was the invocations I used.”

“The invocations?”

“To the Aztec deities. The Lord and Lady of the Underworld. I think it may have created a double channeling—you channeling the shades and the shades channeling Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecacihuatl. They’re more chaotic, passionate gods than the usual pantheon invoked in the craft. A lot of practitioners stay away from them because of the darker history they became associated with, but I’ve always felt drawn to their primal archetypes. I never thought their history mattered. I assumed the symbolism invoked by the deeper mind was important, and not the specific energy it raised. At any rate, I feel responsible, and I just wanted to say that.” He reached into the back pocket of his khakis for his checkbook. “I still want to pay for your time last night. And don’t worry. I won’t be bothering you for any further help contacting the shades. I’ll figure something out. What’s your hourly rate?”

Phoebe’s eyes darkened from periwinkle to violet and she pushed the screen door wide. “Don’t write me a check standing on my porch.” Her smile seemed forced. “People will talk. Come in and sit down for a minute. I’ll get you a lemonade.”

Rafe hesitated but decided he’d seem like more of a jerk if he said no. He stepped inside, surveying the stained wood of the wax-encrusted coffee table as he sat on the couch while Phoebe went to the kitchen. “I should have put foil under the candles.”

Phoebe grabbed some glasses from her dish rack and took a pitcher out of the fridge. “I should have put them out instead letting them burn down into a soup.”

“You were in the bath. I should have put them out when I left.”

“I—” Phoebe came around the bar with two glasses of lemonade and cocked her head. “Wait, whose turn is it again? Does one of us win a prize if we manage to be the most self-effacing?”

“I wasn’t trying to be self-effacing—”

“Man, I don’t have the energy for ‘who’s more defensive.’ Besides, I think you’d win that one hands down.”

Rafe scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She smirked as if he’d proved her point. “You seem to be taking all of this personally, like your honor’s in question. It was an awkward night, and it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Let’s call it a learning experience and move on.”

This had definitely been a bad idea. Rafe stood, feeling large and awkward in her cozy living room. “You can mail me an invoice.”

“Jesus, Diamante. Just drink the damn lemonade. Fresh squeezed.” Phoebe shoved a glass at him. He was out of his element here. “It’s okay to be freaked out by what happened last night. It freaked me out a little, too. But let’s not make any hasty decisions just because it was uncomfortable. You’re facing a murder charge, and the evidence is stacked against you. If we set some ground rules for the shades next time we summon them, we can avoid any surprises.”

The condensation-damp glass nearly slipped from his hand. “Next time? You’d actually consider doing that again? Knowing the risk?”

“You said they wanted your help. It doesn’t seem like they’d be deliberately contrary if we make the rules clear and tell them they have to abide by them to get what they want.”

Perhaps the shades Phoebe was used to dealing with weren’t contrary, but he had a feeling she hadn’t dealt with any like these before. These shades had a history. That much, at least, Rafe could explain. As long as he could keep his mind off the soft slope of Phoebe’s skin where the moon tattoo nestled above the hip-hugging panties she’d been wearing last night. And everything beneath them.

Rafe took a swallow of lemonade and cleared his throat. “You need to understand where these shades are coming from. There’s been an increase lately in the number of shades who aren’t crossing on their own. That was the source of my falling out with the Covent. They felt they needed to address it and I, of course, disagreed. But they overruled me and decided to convene the Conclave.” He sat on the couch again and Phoebe sat beside him.

“To censure you.”

He gave her a wry smile. “Censuring me was just a convenient bonus. They actually came for the ritual.”

“What ritual?”

“A sort of wide-net snare—to cross every shade in the valley.”

Phoebe made a noise of outrage. “Every shade? Shades they hadn’t even encountered, who hadn’t bothered anyone—they were going to haul them all in?”

Rafe nodded. “Regardless of how recently they’d passed or whether they had any unfinished business.”

“That’s barbaric.”

“I don’t disagree.”

Phoebe’s eyes, darkening again to violet, held the same passionate intensity they’d had last night, though this time it was the passion of anger. She reminded him distinctly of a young Liz Taylor.

He realized he was staring. “They went ahead with the ritual, and I stood in the back of the temple refusing to be part of it.” Gabriel’s pleading had been fresh in his mind, and Rafe had been unwilling to leave, wanting to stop it from happening somehow, to keep his coven from doing to any other shades what he’d done to Gabriel. “You could feel the energy of the shades being drawn into the circle as the ritual began. It was palpable. I couldn’t see or hear any of them like I had with Gabriel, of course. When he came to me, I could see the apparition because we had a blood bond. I’m sure you’ve experienced that with people you’ve known who’ve passed.”

The terse shake of Phoebe’s head surprised him. “I’ve never had that kind of visitation. Just the step-ins.”

“Well, these shades weren’t visible or audible, but the energy was like a pulsing wave. It was heavy and oppressive and I couldn’t just stand there any longer and let it happen. As the rest of the coven began the crossing invocation, I raised my voice in objection.” He hadn’t meant to, but he’d called the shades to him, and he and Matthew had been surrounded. He didn’t feel like describing that peculiar moment when the psychic energy in the temple had nearly overwhelmed him. It had seemed for a moment as if the shades were waiting for him to command them.

“So what happened?”

“I must have disrupted the coven’s focus. The shade energy dispersed before they could cross them and the ritual was in chaos.” Rafe shrugged. “Most shades, new ones, anyway, aren’t aware there’s a self-appointed afterlife policing effort from the Covent. But they’d drawn in so many with this ritual the word is presumed to be out, and they’ve been having trouble raising any shades at all.”

“That must be why.” Phoebe looked thoughtful as she sipped her lemonade. “I drove by the temple yesterday. Something drew me there, the presence of a shade that seemed to want to make contact, except it didn’t step in—maybe couldn’t. And the air around the temple seemed full of shades, but none of them tried stepping in, either. Which, well...you probably can’t appreciate how unusual that is. But I got the feeling they were caught in some halfway state. It was unsettling.”

The idea was worse than unsettling. As much pain as it caused him to think about what he’d done to his brother, he’d hate to think of Gabriel’s spirit being trapped.

Phoebe regarded him. “So that’s when they branded you an oath-breaker.”

He nodded. “The Conclave revoked my active status with the Covent and the right to practice ritual.”

“Which you evidently ignored.”

Rafe met the twinkle in her eye with one of his own. “Evidently.”

“But the Covent’s lawyer is still defending you. How’s that work if you’ve been excommunicated?”

“It’s not quite that severe. It’s more like I’m on a metaphysical ‘time out.’ At any rate, their reputation is at stake if my association with them comes up in a murder trial. And the lawyer is actually my father’s, which he thinks I’m unaware of.”

Phoebe leaned her elbow on her knee with her chin propped in her hand. “Ione didn’t think you knew.”

He shrugged as he took a sip of the lemonade. “We all do a lot of pretending, I guess, so everyone gets what they want.”

“So, after the ritual, you went to the psychic?”

Rafe nodded. “My apprentice left town without a word right after the ritual. I was worried about him and hoped she could help me find him.”

“You have an apprentice?”

“Well, had, anyway. The Covent gave him the boot for not standing against me. Matthew’s a freshman at the University of Metaphysics. He applied to the Covent as an apprentice after a summer internship. But no one there has heard from him since last week.”

She was staring at him with an odd expression. “Matthew?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I just...heard the name Matthew somewhere recently. It’s probably nothing.” The way she said it gave him a feeling of misgiving, but she didn’t elaborate.

Rafe finished his lemonade and set the glass on the coffee table. “When I went to see Barbara Fisher, she couldn’t help me with Matt, but she told me there were three souls attached to me, invoked by what I’d done at the Covent’s ritual. She was able to channel them, and the shades appealed to me for help, claiming someone was compelling them to step into unsuspecting hosts.”

“A necromancer.” It was a label he hadn’t thought to use. The idea was chilling.

“She could only channel them for short intervals. We had two more sessions, but the last was cut short. Barbara didn’t channel shades the way you do.” Rafe reached for his glass to cover the awkwardness conjured by the unspoken implication before remembering it was empty.

Phoebe jumped up. “Would you like another? There’s plenty.”

He accepted, glad of the distraction as she went to refill his glass. “Her method was fairly traditional. Tarot, and similar summoning spells to what I’ve used. So there was no direct communication, just her acting as an interpreter. She said she sensed the shades were being pursued by the man trying to control them. She was trying to get details about who he was, or where he was, but they went silent and she couldn’t raise them again. But we were so close to something. I felt it. The shades had begun to trust me.” Rafe glanced up as Phoebe brought him the lemonade. “I think we would have gotten a name that evening, before whatever spooked them. And I think that’s why someone stopped Barbara from contacting them. Permanently.”

Phoebe looked as if she was about to say something, but a loud clatter from the kitchen startled them both. A striped Siamese cat scrabbled at the window over the sink, eyes fixed on a large owl perched in the mesquite tree framed in the glass.

“Puddleglum!” She ran to the kitchen and pulled the cat away from the window, but it was the bird that caught Rafe’s attention. The yellow eyes rimmed with ivory in the dark-brown face stared in at them boldly.

Puddleglum struggled out of Phoebe’s arms and made a dash for the cat door. A moment later, the owl took off from its perch, the pale breast the only spot of color against the chocolate-brown wings as it flew away.

Phoebe examined her scored arms. “Dammit, Puddleglum.”

“Interesting name.” Rafe tried not to show his concern at the visitation by the bird. “He doesn’t look like a marshwiggle.”

Phoebe glanced up at him with a pleased smile. “You know the books.”

Rafe laughed. “I don’t live in a cave. Who hasn’t read the Chronicles of Narnia?”

“Most men, in my experience. At least, not that they’d admit to. I’m more likely to get a positive response to Bilbo Baggins. My theory is the preponderance of strong females in Narnia. Or females at all.”

Rafe blinked at her. “Wait, how did this happen? I thought we were sharing a nerd moment. Now I feel like I’ve had my feminism card revoked.”

She cocked her head, setting the ponytail bobbing. “You have a feminism card?”

“A man can’t be a feminist?”

“Of course he can.” Phoebe studied him as if she’d just found a new species of his genus. “I just don’t meet a lot of them who look like you.”

Rafe raised an eyebrow. “Like me?”

Phoebe laughed. “I think I’m the one being sexist now. Never mind.”

He couldn’t help wondering what he looked like to her. A Neanderthal? Some kind of machismo-obsessed asshole? But the symbolism of the owl nagged at him, putting his ego on the back burner.

The owl was the nagual of Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Underworld, whom Rafe had invoked only last night to such spectacular and mortifying effect. The nagual could be a spirit animal offering protection or it could be the animal form of a sorcerer. He’d never heard of a single documented case of such a transmogrification happening literally, but such myths abounded. And with everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, he couldn’t afford to dismiss the bird’s appearance as coincidental.

He set down the untouched lemonade and rose. “I should probably get going.”

Phoebe frowned. “I thought we were going to try to work with the shades to get some answers.”

“We?” It was Rafe’s turn to frown. “You said we’d need to set ground rules. I think one of those should be that I don’t participate in the summoning. Whatever happened, whether it was my energy or the gods I invoked for the ritual, it doesn’t seem wise for the two of us to put ourselves in that position again.”

Phoebe’s mouth set in a tight line. “Right. Because that would be horrible.”

He didn’t know what to make of that comment. Was she actually offended that he was trying to protect her from whatever had tried to use them last night? She couldn’t possibly be willing to risk being assaulted just to help him channel a few shades.

“My lawyer is coming over this afternoon, anyway. I need to get back.” Rafe went to the door and paused at the threshold, glancing over his shoulder at her. Bare arms and legs glistened with a light sheen of perspiration in the humidity. Rain was always in the offing this time of year. It made him wonder what she’d taste like with rainwater coursing over her skin.

Rafe cleared his throat. “I suspect the shades might seek you out now that they know you. If they do, let me know what you find out. I appreciate your help.” He tried to smile amiably as he pushed open the screen door. “And the lemonade.”

“Rafe.”

He took a deep breath and turned back, sure she was going to press him on participating in summoning the shades.

“I remember where I heard the name of your apprentice. At the temple yesterday, the presence that drew me there. The name I got from it was Matthew.”