"We're going trolling for gypsies. n.o.ble told me that not all of them were gone and as it happens, I have a hole-card. I did the Lowara Rom a big favor a while back. Big enough that it's an embarra.s.sment to them, and they'd like the scales evened up. I think it's time I called it in."

EIGHT.

It had been an exhausting several days, and mostly fruitless. More than once Mark had thought longingly of visiting Sherry But no. He contented himself with calling Robert timed for an hour when he knew d.a.m.ned well Rob wouldn't be home and gave her a vague sort of rundown on what was going on. And why he wouldn't be dropping by for a while. They'd talked for a lot longer than he'd planned, nearly two hours.

Rob seemed to be burying himself in his work, and Mark frankly couldn't tell her if that was good or bad, or even if it was likely to last much longer. All he could do, really, was be an ear for her. The disappointment in her voice when he told her he wouldn't be by for at least a couple more weeks almost broke his resolve But work came first.

Chasing down the list of neo-pagans this "Athena" had given Di had proved more bewildering than anything else. They were a real odd lot some about as ordinary as a dictionary; people Mark would never have guessed had odd tastes in religions. Certainly not the kind he would have picked as being psychic. Computer people, teachers, clerks real suburban types, complete with station wagon and kids. But some Some were as weird as snake shoes, and as flakey as granola. Mark found himself wondering if this was the "cream of the crop," what were the rest like?

There was the tiny, bespectacled lady with a house full of reptiles, including a twelve-foot python, which she fed while they were there Mark would rather not have had that particular educational experience. He really had not seen the need to know how pythons ate. But that wasn't all she talked to them. She kept a big lizard on her lap, petting it, the way anyone else would pet a cat. She had actively, s.a.d.i.s.tically enjoyed Mark's uneasiness, too.

There was the long-haired guy in the Grateful Dead shirt and hat who was composing music for whales or so he said. Mark wasn't sure if he meant he was composing it for them to hear or that he was composing the music on their behalf, like some kind of cetacean dictation machine. The guy hadn't been real clear his conversation tended to wander down strange little side paths. And even when he wasn't going on about the vibrations from the neighbors, he kept changing the subject back to his music, to the point of insisting on playing them bits of it. Thank G.o.d it had at least been easy to listen to the guy may have been weird, but he was a decent musician. Mark had more than a suspicion that the guy was on something acid maybe, or mushrooms; he sounded like it and looked like it. But what the h.e.l.l, he was Homicide, not Narcotics, and the guy was looney, but he wasn't hurting anybody but himself with that stuff.

There was the couple in purple robes with little pyramids everywhere even suspended over the bathtub. Mark was ready to run for the car after five minutes in their presence. They were as bad as all the crazed maiden aunts in the world rolled up into two bodies. They could not be kept to the subject.

They kept trying to get both of them to drink weird herb tea, stuff that smelled like a moldy meadow.

And they had no interest in discussing the cult-killer. Instead they practically held the both of them down by force, and gave them long, rambling discourses about their own past lives, going all the way back to the caves.

Then there were the ones that looked like they'd just gotten off the set of a sci-fi movie a group of five wearing identical silvery leotards; they looked and acted like clones, finishing each other's sentences who said they were Atlantean amba.s.sadors. Mark didn't have to deal much with them.

They ignored him totally, as if he was invisible. If he wanted questions answered, he had to relay them through Di. It was a rather unnerving experience.The real spooky ones were the ones about a half a dozen altogether, all solitaries who kept talking to their crystal pendants. It was hard to act normally when they were asking the crystals'

opinions, and including the rocks in on the conversations.

But none of the weird ones bothered him down deep the way some of the "normal" ones did. The ones who wouldn't talk with him around at all; who seemed as frightened of him as if he were the representative of the Holy Inquisition. He felt uneasy, and obscurely ashamed, as if he was the one directly responsible for whatever had happened that made them so frightened of real-life authority.

Living in fear like that their fear almost made him nauseous.

And that fear seemed obscurely familiar. It was a while before he remembered where he'd seen a pathological fright equaling theirs in the past. It had been in the eyes of an old Jewish woman who'd survived the Holocaust.

Homicide had been wanting to question her about something she might have seen but a uniform, any uniform, sent her into a state of panicked paralysis. He'd been in plainclothes, so he'd been yanked in to talk to her. She'd looked like that, before he took her away from the uniforms that called up old, bad memories of the SS and the concentration camps, and gotten her out into the open air and a park bench. He certainly had never expected to see that same fear in the eyes of people his age and younger, born and raised in the "land of the free."

That he had that depressed him. And made him angry, though his anger had no target. And he wasn't sure how to deal with the situation, or the emotions it had raised....

But while he wrestled with uncomfortable thoughts, Di questioned all of them, even the fruitcakes, with apparently unlimited patience.

Mark could understand her thoroughgoing care with the "normals," but not with the others. But when he asked her why she was bothering with a bunch of folk who obviously didn't have all of their ducks in a row, she just shrugged.

"You just happened to be d.a.m.ned lucky, Magnum," she'd told him. "Your particular sensitivity didn't show up until you were old enough to handle it. That isn't always the case. Think about what you might have grown up like if you'd gone mediumistic when you hit p.u.b.erty "

Mark gave that some thought. "I think I would have ended up in the school shrink's office," he said finally. "Or else gotten a rep as a real looney."

"And when kids get a rep for being looney frequently they decide subconsciously that it's easier to give in to the rep," she said sadly. "Then, if they're lucky and usually around college age or later some of these so -called 'looneys' find the neo-pagan movement. And they find out they really aren't crazed. Only by now they are, just a little, as a result of living to that stereotype that they were stuck with as kids. But at least they're happier, and they've found somewhere where they're accepted.

So if they live out a few gentle fantasies, where's the harm?"

"None," he admitted. "But "

"No 'buts.' They may be odd they may be living in a world that's half fantasy; that still doesn't make their talents any the less valid," she interrupted firmly. "If there's anyone who has any inkling of who's doing all this, I'm going to find that person. And there's only one way to do it."

He'd sighed. "Legwork; and among the whole lot of them."

"Roger." She smiled. "Just be glad Athena weeded out all the marginals and the ones with no psi at all. We could have been at this for months."

He shuddered.

Then there was search number two.

Mark had been in and out of more weird little stores in the past week and a half than he ever dreamed existed in Dallas. Thai groceries, Pakistani herb stores, Indian sari shops it was fascinating, if tiring, but it hadn't been entirely pleasant. Not unpleasant, though he'd discovered the hard way that there were a number of spices and incenses he was allergic to. He was prepared now, but always a bit dozey from antihistamines.

Search three was getting nowhere; they had yet to find a single sign of the Romany.

He was ready to call this off; Di seemed inexhaustible.* * *

"Not another Indian restaurant," he groaned, when Di gave him the address. He put the car in gear and sent it off down the back streets, the sun glaring off the pavement in front of them.

She sighed with a certain understanding. "Relax, you don't have to eat anything, you don't even have to go in this time. Just pull around through the alley in back. There that'll do."

Mark echoed her sigh and obeyed, yet again grateful that the Ghia was tiny enough to squeeze through alleys lined with dumpsters. They had the windows down; it was still d.a.m.ned hot. The odor of garbage was flavored with weird, spicy overtones. He felt a sneeze coming on, and suppressed it. The racket of the engine bounced off the brick walls and called up vibrations in the metal of the dumpsters.

Di was scrutinizing the graffiti on the walls but the scrutiny seemed almost automatic. Mark got the feeling her mind was elsewhere. So far he hadn't seen anything in any of these alleys that looked like protective signs. It was all the same; spray-painted filth and gang-signs, and the name of an occasional rock group.

"Penny," he said, finally, cutting around two dumpsters jacknifed across his path.

"It's been real quiet," she replied. "Three days of ma.s.sacres now nothing. Fits the pattern we established, but I still don't like it. And it makes me wonder what do they do if they can't find any victims when they need them?"

He eased his foot off the gas for a moment, and took a look over at her; she was broody-eyed, a sign that she was worried and disturbed.

"Maybe they store them up, like mud-dauber wasps store spiders," Mark said jokingly. Then felt a cold chill as he realized that it might not be such a joke. If I were raising power with blood-sacrifice, it's what I would do. You can't always be certain a wino or a punk is gonna be in the right place at the right time. And if they can block us from even knowing what rite they're practicing, surely they could hide a few drugged-out street people from us.

Just then they pulled out of the darkness of the alley into the sunlight. The sun bounced off the hood of the car and into his eyes; Mark reached for the sungla.s.ses on the dashboard with a little haste. G.o.d, it might as well be summer. It was still so d.a.m.ned unseasonably hot with no sign that the weather was ever going to turn. The weathermen had been making vague explanations about the jet stream which meant they didn't know why it was happening either.

I wonder if they have anything to do with the weather being like it is, too?

It was an idle thought; lost as Di turned and resettled herself in her seat.

"I wonder if we had ought to check out missing persons logs," he mused out loud, as he waited for a gap in the traffic pa.s.sing by the Ghia's nose. "I wonder if they are stocking a larder."

"Me too," she replied grimly. "And I think maybe we'd better."

"This one "

Rubbing her temple with her free hand, Di held out one picture just one out of all the hundreds they'd looked at. Mark took it from her. It was a fairly bland color photo, obviously an enlarged copy of someone's driver's license picture. Some guy who looked like any other desk-jockey, except for a certain petulance around the mouth and a shiftiness about the eyes.

I wouldn't buy a used car from him, that's for sure.

"Why this one?" he asked, putting it flat on the table in front of him, propping his chin in both hands, and staring at it as she keyed up the file on the terminal next to her.

"I can't 'find' him. There's a blank where he should be; it isn't a 'dead' blank and it isn't a 'gone to Rio'

feeling either that wouldn't be a blank, it would be a 'not there,'" she replied absently. There was a crease between her eyebrows that told Mark she was on the verge of a headache. "And I can't get inside the blank; there's protections on it I don't want to chance springing. Ah here's two more reasons for you in the files, reasons you can give the Chief. One, he didn't pull any cash out of the bank before he vanished "

"Hm, yeah " Mark agreed. "When a guy is dumping his family or running from trouble at work, he usually cleans out the bank accounts.""Exactly which bears out my feeling that he's not on some beach somewhere. Two, though that's very interesting. The last place he was seen was at RemTech, by an employee who'd just quit. Athena told me that one of the places 'it' hunted was the industrial park where she worked. Guess where RemTech is "

"Begins to add up," Mark replied soberly. "Adds up to a total I don't like. Now how the h.e.l.l do we find him if they've got him? This isn't like an ordinary kidnapping they don't want to contact anyone, they've got what they want. What are we gonna do?"

"Well, I'm pretty sure he's probably drugged it would be the easiest way to keep him quiet and controlled. As I said, there seems to be a kind of blank where he should be, but I can't localize it at all and I'm afraid to trance out and try anything trickier for fear I'll be triggering something. We need a better clairvoyant than I am to do that."

Mark frowned, drumming his fingers on the table. "I have the sinking feeling we're going to go back to one of those fruitloops we've been talking to."

She glared at him and there was some real anger and resentment in that glare. "If you insist on putting it in those terms, yes. But I would like to remind you that they are doing us a favor by even talking to us. And some of them will be putting their safety and maybe their lives on the line if they work with us. You could be a little more open-minded."

He flushed; she was annoyed with him, and was within her rights. None of these folk were under subpoena; none of them had insulted him unless you counted the "Atlanteans'" studied refusal to admit he existed. "Sorry," he mumbled. "I'm spoiled. The Spook Squad was so normal. I mean, we were organized. We may have been a little bozo, but we were real careful about doing reality checks. I keep thinking everybody that's a trained psychic should be that professional."

"Welcome to the real world," she said. "Let's get to it." She stood up, shoving her chair back, and taking the photograph back from him. "We'll need this. I think our best bet might be Marion." She picked up her jacket from the table, slung her purse over her shoulder and was out the door of the Records room before he could react.

"Which one was that?" he asked, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair and running a few steps down the echoingly empty hall to catch up with her.

"One of the ones that was scared to death of you," she answered, lengthening her stride a little so that he actually had to stretch to keep up with her. "The one with the thirteen cats and the boyfriend that wouldn't come out while you were there."

He remembered that one after a little thought, a pale, washed-out thing; no-color eyes and hair, and slightly overweight. A face so round and bland only a cop would be likely to remember it and then only because it was so unlikely to be memorable. "Why her?"

"Because she and her boyfriend are much better clairvoyants than I am and I'm better at defense than anyone in this city," she answered over her shoulder as they slipped out of the cool of the building into the hot, white sunlight. The heat blasted up at them from the baking asphalt of the parking lot and down from the cloudless sky. "We're going to need both."

Di made him go back to Aunt Nita's first; she ran inside and came back out with the carry-on bag he remembered. The one she hadn't unpacked. He got an involuntary chill, seeing it.

She was bringing out the Big Stuff then. Things were about to get very serious.

She left Mark down in the car for a long time when they got to the girl's apartment building an old place; brick, four stories too old for central air, and heated with steam radiators, a structure probably built between the wars. When she came back, she looked deadly serious and asked him in a very quiet, almost toneless voice to follow her lead exactly.

He nodded agreement, and followed her up to the back apartment on the fourth floor.

There he was left in exile with the cats on the sun porch full of plants and candles and catboxes.

They closed off the french doors into the living room and wouldn't let Mark in until the room had been so Di told him consecrated, cleansed, and warded.

He was just as happy. Warding he understood; he was fairly certain that he would not have been comfortable around a neo-pagan ceremony of "consecration and cleansing"; there was just too much Catholic still in him. In the past the few times Di had needed to do something like that she hadn't taken him along. The cats were all friendly enough company; they were overjoyed to find someone who'd drag a string around for them to chase. The windows were open and there was a really nice breeze coming through them. Each of the five catboxes had its own little wooden "house" you hardly knew they were there except when one of the cats decided to use one. So the "exile" wasn't all that bad.

He played with the cats until his arm was tired. He was rather amazed to find how well they all got along together; he knew how Treemonisha would feel about sharing her s.p.a.ce with any other cat! And she'd have taken her pique out on him.

Finally one of the curtained doors opened, and Di beckoned him inside.

He rose and obeyed; she shut the door behind him, the light filtering through the yellow muslin curtains on the doors was dim, but enough to see by. Marion and her nameless boyfriend were seated inside a small circle chalked on the rug. The boyfriend was dark, rather s.h.a.ggy, and wearing just a pair of jeans the girl had on a T -shirt and jeans, but nothing more. But both of them were scrubbed so clean they practically squeaked, and smelled faintly of herbs.

When he turned to Di, he could see that her long hair, usually free and flowing, was bound up into a knot at the nape of her neck and still damp she smelled of the same herbal mixture.

He glanced back at the pair inside the chalked circle; they were holding hands now, and the photograph was on the floor between them.

Di was still armed; gun on the left hip, and the sheath of a knife on the other. She was wearing a heavy silver pendant with a large moonstone in the center; other than that, she looked pretty much as usual, which was a relief. He still kept expecting lurid lighting and bizarre costumes.

Di steered him wordlessly over to a floor pillow and shoved him down onto it. He seated himself obediently, cross-legged. The rest of the room's scant furniture had been shoved against the walls, all but a tiny table that had two knives, an incense burner, a cup, a little dish of what looked like salt, and a lighted candle on it.

Di sketched a circle in the air around him with her knife-blade, muttering under her breath as she did so. He felt something then; he hadn't expected to detect anything, not really but there was something like a faint feeling of an invisible wall around him.

"Don't move," she told him in a fierce whisper. "No matter what happens. If you're tempted to break the circle, just sit tight and concentrate on the idea that you aren't there. If we're attacked, whatever comes after us is going to try to frighten us into bolting from our protections because it won't be able to see us until we do. So don't break cover."

Then she left him, and knelt beside the other two. "All right, Marion give it your best shot. If we can't find this guy I'm dead certain he's going to end up like the others "

The girl just nodded; she and her boyfriend ignored Mark's presence completely. They let go of the hands nearest Mark; each rested the fingers of that hand on the edge of the photograph. They looked deeply into each other's eyes and then closed them, almost as one.

And nothing happened. The dim light and stuffy, incense-scented air kept conspiring to put him to sleep. It was, frankly, boring. Mark kept looking at his watch, trying not to doze off, and trying not to fidget; Di hardly moved at all, and as for the two clairvoyants, Mark could scarcely tell that they were breathing.

Then, without any warning at all, the room was plunged into complete darkness.

Mark stifled a cry of alarm; a cold sweat broke out all over him, and he fought down the urge to jump up and head for the door.

It was a hot, stifling darkness, a darkness redolent with a metallic-sweet smell. It was nothing like the sharpness of the incense; after a moment Mark recognized it in the small part of his mind that wasn't trying to flatten him to the floor in panic as the odor of fresh blood.

He felt the building of a blind, unreasoning fear. It felt as if he was all alone in this endless night.

Alone Not quite. There was something in that darkness, and it was trying to find him; Mark could feel the searching eyes peering blindly in his direction. Hot, hungry eyes. Eyes that wanted to find him; that would find him. And an intelligence behind those eyes that wanted him, wanted him badly.

I'm not here, he thought, his pulse roaring in his ears, the taste of blood in his mouth where he'd bitten his lip. There's no one here. n.o.body at all. No one here....

Anger was there, an ancient anger as sharp as broken gla.s.s. And that hunger kept searching for him.From a thousand years and a million miles away, he could hear Di, singing something. He felt a pressure building a real, physical pressure; he had to pop his ears when it began to get painful. The heat lessened just a little, and the smell; the angry hunger seemed to turn the hunt away from him.

Then it was gone, the heat and the odor with it, and the light came back to the room.

The two in the circle were huddled together; arms around each other and the picture lying forgotten and crushed under their knees. Di was on her feet beside them; with her hair come loose and flying about her, her hands over her head, palms together, the knife between them. She looked like an outraged warrior-princess; angry, and tired, and frustrated all at once.

Mark realized at that moment that he had flattened himself to the carpet still inside the invisible - but-not-unfelt boundaries of his circle. He slowly levered himself to a sitting position, feeling not in the least ashamed of himself. Whatever that thing had been it had not been imagination, and he did not want to meet it again, not until he had some kind of weapon that would work against something like that in his hands.

Di took a deep breath and lowered her hands, slowly. She made a cutting motion beside the two next to her, and walked over to Mark and repeated it.

He felt the invisible "wall" vanish.