potions, all of which surrounded the Enkyklios.
I sat at the chair beside Bergman’s that Cassandra had obviously just vacated. “Any luck?” I asked.
He nodded as he peered through a magnifying glass at an item he held with tweezers. It was about the size of a watch battery, but it glowed the red of the rubies in my ring. “We think this will do the trick,” he said.
“Okay.” I gulped down another urge to cry. This was so not going to work if I was going to blubber every five minutes. I resolved to have a huge emotional breakdown the second I stepped foot in my apartment. I’d supply myself with chocolate. A gallon of cookie-dough ice cream. Two boxes of Kleenex. And maybe a good tearjerker to get me jump-started.
The Pursuit of Happyness
always did the trick. Yeah, that sounded like a winner.
Having planned ahead, I now felt better. At least, better able to function. “Okay. How does it work?”
Bergman took a while to answer. Finally he admitted, “I’m not completely sure. Cassandra has made it able to follow the path of the ohm.”
When my eyebrows shot up he explained. “That’s what they call the item a necromancer uses to control his, uh, zombie with.” He gave me an apologetic frown. “Cassandra finally got hold of this woman she said you guys tried to talk to before the mission even started. What was her name?” He had to think a second. “Oh yeah. Sister Doshomi. She had a story on her Enkyklios that basically explained Dave to us. He was made the second way, the way Hilda — remember her, the woman whose daughter died — who ended up as the great necromancy professor?” I nodded, feeling a jolt of sympathy for the woman who’d lost everything and still managed to reach across time to help me. “Dave was made the way Hilda suspected. The way she actually discovered before she was murdered.”
He cleared his throat. Looked at me sympathetically, like we were at a funeral, which it kind of felt like we were. “Jaz, Dave’s not just a regular zombie. He’s a zedran. Which is why there’s an ohm in the first place. You know, so the Wizard can communicate with him from a distance.” Maybe sensing that I was having a hard time digesting all his information without falling off my chair, he rushed on. “The good news is, the ohm has to be made from the Wizard’s own flesh. So once we get it out of Dave, actually once the retriever we’ve built gets it out of him, we can use it to find the Wizard.”
“How?”
“Cassandra knows a spell.”
That got my attention. I laid my hand on Bergman’s forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because only three weeks ago if I’d have said the word ‘spell’ to you, you’d have burst a blood vessel.”
He nodded slowly. “It’s why I wanted to come.” He put everything down and sat back. “I didn’t count on meeting Natchez. But I guess I was hoping to find somebody — or something — like him on this trip.” He shook his head in amazement. “The man knows how to
live
, Jaz. He’s not afraid of anything that I can tell. Not of getting sick. Or working something new into his repertoire. Or trying something totally off the wall. Did you know he once saw a woman on the street that he just loved the looks of, so he asked her out? Just like that! I mean, she could’ve been psycho. She could’ve had four different STDs.”
“And?”
“She was fine! They went out a few times. Didn’t have enough in common for a longer relationship and parted friends. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“He’s the same age as me, Jaz, and he’s lived, like, twenty lives compared to mine.”
“Do you really envy him as much as it sounds? I mean, if you’d spent all your time jumping out of airplanes and climbing mountains, you wouldn’t have come up with even half your inventions.”
He clasped his hands between his knees and slouched in his chair, like I was one of his professors reprimanding him for not handing in his paper its usual two weeks in advance. But when he looked at me it was with a new defiance in his eyes. “I hate being a wimp. Feeling this paranoia so extreme it’s burning knots in my chest. Like the world’s going to end if I don’t protect myself well enough, if I take one step in the wrong direction. You can’t imagine how bad it sucks.”
Actually I could. After I lost Matt, Jessie, my crew . . . the Agency kept a sharp eye on my sanity. Rightfully so, since I could feel the shards of it slicing against the inside of my skull every single day. And I’d developed a few bizarre habits that were tough to hide. Among them a tendency for my brain to stick on a word like a bad stutter. Also a habit of blacking out at the worst possible moment. Fortunately I’d been able to toe the line long enough to get my head on fairly straight. I said, “So what’s your next step? Surfing those massive Australian waves? Skiing the Alps? Exploring the wilds of Burma?”
Bergman cleared his throat. “Actually, I thought I’d just explain how the retriever works. And then, you know, after this mission’s over? Maybe take a vacation to Cancun. Buy some funky clothes and tell the girls I’m a musician. You know — see what happens.”
I chuckled. “Sounds like an excellent place to start.” I scooted my chair forward. “So show me.”
He handed me the magnifying glass. “It’s the same principal as the bug card. Only with a magical wallop. You introduce it into Dave’s body. It zeroes in on the ohm. Attaches to it. Disables it. And then reemerges.”
“How does it get in and out?” I pictured it like the killer pill he’d made to zap one of the vamps we’d targeted during our last mission. We’d tried to get him to eat it, so I was seeing Dave wolfing this thing down in a cheeseburger or whatever equivalent we could drum up on short notice. Given our current location it would probably be hidden among some rice-stuffed veggie leaves.
Bergman took off his glasses, cleaned, and reset them on his face. His hands shook slightly as he worked the
