There was little further conversation as Lynzi showed them around the area and then led them back to Christian’s car, where she asked, “Do you have any thoughts?”
“Not yet,” Christian answered, “but I know how to contact you if I need to.”
Lynzi nodded. “This Haven has been my home for forty years. I have three circles of power around it, and you do not have nearly the control to veil yourself su ciently to cross those circles without my feeling it. Are we clear?”
“Clear,” he answered.
Alysia asked, “Can you feel him because he’s another Triste, or can you sense everyone who comes and goes?”
“I can sense everyone,” Lynzi answered, understanding why Alysia asked, “but I don’t normally pay attention unless I feel another Triste or someone unusually powerful. I didn’t feel anything noteworthy before the attack.”
“Interesting,” Christian commented, then turned to Alysia. “I’ll stay in town today. If there’s another attack, or if you just want to talk without a babysitter around, you’ll be able to nd me.” He looked back at the other Triste. “Lynzi,” he said, and o ered his hand, which she shook. “Happy hunting.”
Alysia waited until Christian’s taillights faded in the distance before saying to Lynzi, “So what now?”
Lynzi gave her a long, measured look, before asking, “Are you still in Bruja?”
“No.” No matter what doubts and questions Christian had put into her head, Alysia found herself thoroughly glad to be able to answer the question honestly. She suspected that Lynzi would know if she were lying.
“Do you know who shot us?”
“No.”
“As long as you’re living here peacefully and honestly, you are welcome to stay,” Lynzi said. “You are also free to leave, if you want. But if you choose to stay here and you bring bloodshed into my home, then I will need to respond. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” Alysia answered around the hitch in her throat.
“Let me know if you and Christian come up with any theories. But you should probably let him sleep a couple hours before you visit him. He’s exhausted.”
“Remind me never to underestimate you,” Alysia said, resisting the urge to step back from the witch.
Lynzi smiled and said, “I think I just did. Now, I’m going to go back to bed until a decent hour of the day. Take care, Alysia.”
“Yeah. Take care.”
Unsure what else to do, Alysia returned to her room. What next? Did she want to track
Christian down? She needed to, if she wanted to solve the riddle of this attack before someone else was hurt, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to face him without her so-called babysitter.
A knock pulled her from her spinning thoughts.
“Yeah?” She approached the door to peer through the peephole, and saw Ben leaning against the far wall.
“Do you have a minute?” he asked. “I’m trying to get this virus cleaned up so I can get the hell out of here, but I could use a second opinion on the code.”
She reached for the doorknob and then hesitated, feeling some old instinct kick her in the shins. “I can probably help you out, but how did you know to come to me?”
Through the peephole, she watched Ben’s face fall. His tone stayed mostly upbeat, but his expression was crestfallen as he said, “We worked together on the Mahoney issue a few months back. Just that once, though, so no big deal you don’t remember me.”
She remembered the job, which had been ten times as di cult as it should have been because SingleEarth seemed to think it would go faster if they assigned as many techs as possible. She had been too busy being angry at everyone else working with her to bother to remember their names or faces.
“Right, of course,” she said as she opened the door. “Come on in. You can set your computer up anywhere,” she added when she realized he was carrying a laptop bag.
As he reached into it, she hesitated again; her body tensed for no obvious reason except that some part of her brain was expecting something more dangerous than a computer to come out of the beat-up black bag.
Ben wasn’t a threat; he was even still limping, as the muscles in his thigh continued to knit themselves together. And Christian had looked right at him without recognition.
“It’ll just take me a minute to load this,” Ben said. “Don’t suppose you have a Coke or something I can steal?”
“I wonder what got in the way,” Ben said, so dryly she wasn’t completely sure he had intended sarcasm. He looked back at the computer screen and opened a le. “Here, come look at this.”
She had put half the room between them, but now she leaned in to check out the code he had brought up in a text file. At first glance, it seemed like a nasty little computer virus.
“Here, sit,” Ben said. “It’s a beast, complicated as hell. Mind if I get myself some water?”
“Go ahead.” Some people could recognize handwriting; Alysia could recognize a programmer by his code, and she was sure she had seen this style before. She scrolled through, trying to get a sense of what the virus had been intended to do, and why the style seemed so familiar.
“I have a couple questions,” Ben said as he stepped into the kitchen.
“Yeah?” she asked, without looking up from the screen.
A jolt made her nearly jump out of her skin at the same time that her chair toppled backward. Her e ort to catch herself was sabotaged by a sneakered foot knocking her arm out of the way, so she landed awkwardly, at the same time that Ben asked, “Question one is, why’d you shoot me?”
Strangely, the rst emotion she felt once her vision cleared and she could focus on Ben standing above her with a punch-dagger in his hand was relief. Her instincts weren’t completely dead.
“I didn’t shoot you,” she said. “What were you doing here that I should have shot you for?”
“I’m willing to believe you, but only because you let me get behind you just now,” Ben said. “But seriously, don’t get up,” he added when she started to shift position to do just that. “Question two is, why is someone o ering a half-million dollars for the delivery of your still-breathing body?”
“News to me,” she answered. She had been debating how it would go if she tried to cut his legs out from under him, but if he was hoping to take her alive, she could take more time considering her strategy. She was out of shape, which meant that any way she fought back had to be fast and dirty. “Are you Crimson?”
Onyx members rarely went undercover, but Christian hadn’t even blinked to see this guy in the hall, which meant he wasn’t from Frost.
“That’s your gig, babe,” Ben answered. He knelt down near her, close enough that he was either very stupid or very certain of his ability to defend himself. “Within the history of the
Bruja guilds, maybe a dozen members have gone multi-class. I can count on one hand the number of members who have reached third rank in all three guilds. I can count on one nger the number of folks who reached third rank and then had the spine to tell the leadership to go to hell.”
She shifted position again, slowly. When he didn’t tell her to stop, she moved inch by inch until she was sitting against the wall. “I can’t tell if you’re irting or trying to kidnap me,” she remarked, noting that he had sidestepped her question in favor of sharing his observations about her.
“I don’t do captures,” Ben answered.
“Did you plant the computer virus?” He seemed to have stopped immediately threatening her, but he hadn’t put down the knife.
“Duh,” he answered. “All I needed to do was intercept the call to tech support and I had an excuse to come look you up. Most of us gured you were rotting in a ditch somewhere, you see, but then you showed up on CNN. Are you by any chance here stalking an Onyx creep with lousy aim? Because if so, I want in.”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t stalking anyone until they attacked me. Was the number against me up before the shooting?” She had been so distracted by Christian that she had never taken a good look at the job board at the Onyx guild hall. Had her name been on it?
