Jennifer Rardin - [Jaz Parks 1] - Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Cassandra didn't realize I was waxing rhetorical.

'You control it with food,' she said. 'Souls, to be specific. Likewise, you might be able to beat it by starving it.'

'Is that how the emperor's Kyron died?'

'Oh, Kyron don't die,' Cassandra said earnestly, 'they simply become weak enough to bind.'

Somehow I didn't think she meant bind as in 'Yo, Henry, go find me some rope.'

'Bind how?' I asked, feeling suddenly exhausted. I eyed one of the couches speculatively. How offended would Cassandra be if a perfect stranger collapsed there for, oh, say three days, more or less?

'According to the legend, a powerful mage bound the Kyron by making her forget her own name.'

'That must have been a major bump on the head.'

'Indeed,' Cassandra agreed. 'It would take more than a mild concussion to forget the name Tor-al- Degan.'

Chapter Sixteen

H—Holy crap! Cole and I exchanged dumbstruck looks while Cassandra puzzled out our shock. Before she could put her questions into words, however, Bergman slunk into the room.

'What?' he asked, immediately suspicious as we stared at him, some of us dazed, some confused, none quite able to muster a common pleasantry.

'We've had a kind of a shock,' I finally managed. Talk about understatement. That was like saying Vesuvius' eruption was a slight blip in Pompeii's weather pattern. If we weren't so damn civilized we'd be on our knees, kissing our asses goodbye.

Bergman looked around the room furtively. If you didn't know him, you'd suspect he'd caused our consternation. He just carried that air of guilt with him wherever he went.

'I'll fill you in later,' I said, pretending this powerful fist of foreboding hadn't just sucker-punched me in the gut. 'We've, uh, that is… we've found out what we needed to know so, now that you're here, we'll get out of Cassandra's hair.'

I stood up, digging in my pocket for a twenty.

'No, please,' said Cassandra, 'there's no charge.'

'My boss blesses you,' I said. I leaned across the table and held out my hand, my Military Brat Politeness Training temporarily overcoming common sense. 'Thanks for your help. You've been a godsend.'

She shook my hand, barely squeezing in response to my firm grip. Then her focus shifted, and I knew I was screwed. I tried to pull my hand back before she could connect with spirits I wasn't ready to face. But her vision had nothing to do with worlds beyond death.

'David is in danger,' she said tightly. 'You must tell him to stay away from the house with the pink door. It is rigged to blow.'

She dropped my hand and sat back in her chair, looking like somebody who's just debarked from an intense roller coaster ride. She murmured something that sounded like, 'Who are you?' But I could barely hear her beyond the roaring in my ears. It was as if the explosion had already happened inside my head. The blackness stormed over me like a level five twister, a miles-wide black-on-black runaway train I could never hope to resist.

But I tried. For David's sake I fought to stand, to simply stay upright and functional while my own wild-eyed psyche tried to bowl me over. This time it worked. The force that had, for so long, squashed my awareness and pushed it down into unconsciousness, now tugged at me, pulled me forward so fast I felt dizzy with the rush. I felt supercharged, as if I could see everywhere all at once, be anywhere I wanted to go, do whatever I wished. The way I figured it, this was no time to kick Tinkerbelle in the teeth. I wished to be with David, wished hard, like when we were kids and Tammy Shobeson had me down in the dirt, demanding that I call myself and my snake eating, son- of-a-bitching dad a dirty, rotten coward.

There was a moment when the blackness seemed to offer up a navigational beacon, my own personal yellow brick road on which to set a new land-speed record. Later I would gain the knowledge I needed to slow that trip down, put it into some kind of perspective. But now it seemed instant, a Jell-O Pudding trek that put me where I needed to be, in the middle of Desert Nowhere in the dark, in the heat, slamming into my brother, through him, screaming, 'David! David! David!,' in a voice so loud and shrill I expected some unseen enemy to lob a grenade my way just to shut me up.

David stood still, a sheen of sweat covering his artificially darkened face. Night vision goggles covered his eyes, but I knew what they looked like. I faced their twins every day in the mirror. He carried an M-16 in one hand and a radio in the other. He looked so fit, so healthy, I just stood there for a second and watched him breathe.

'Jaz?' he whispered.

'You can see me?'

Immediately he shook his head. I could almost read his thoughts. Nope, can't see a thing because this was not covered in Special Forces Booklet 14 A. But he reached out his hand, poked it through my stomach and out my back. The same hand went immediately to his forehead and banged on it hard. 'What a helluva time to start hallucinating.'

He turned his back on me, and over his shoulder I saw the house, a squat little square with dark, dark windows and a pale pink door. His team surrounded it, crouched in the shadows like latter-day ninjas, awaiting his orders.

'David!' I jumped in front of him, holding up my hands, failing to stop his slow advance. 'The door! The pink door! It's booby-trapped!'

'Quit freaking out, D.' That's what he called himself during his damn-I'm-stressed pep talks. 'It's all been scouted. It's all good.' The hand with the radio moved toward his lips.