"Nothing yet," Charlie said slowly, "But I've gotten warning that this thing you're after may try and haul me in as a draftee. I figured the only thing that was going to stop it was distance, but Mark claims you've got a better solution."

Her eyes widened, but she asked nothing more; Mark suspected her reticence was something along the lines of "professional ethics." "I can see why you'd want shielding but if what I do is going to run counter to your beliefs, the shields won't take," she warned, twisting a bit of hair around one finger.

"Are you really willing to let me work white man's magic on you?"

"I don't think anything you do will conflict," Charlie replied, slowly. "I'd like you to try. The warning's been pretty pointed, and it's from a source I trust."

She nodded gravely. "Mark, why don't you two go dry off; I'll be ready by the time you get back to the living room."

Mark took his friend back into the bedroom and pulled out some dry clothes for the both of them.

Charlie and Mark were pretty much of a size; he managed to squeeze into a pair of Mark's bluejeans without too much problem, and an old T-shirt stretched enough to get across his brawny shoulders, which had always inspired Mark with raw envy. By the time they'd toweled off and changed, Di had, indeed, gotten what little she needed ready.

She'd put her hair up in a knot again she was wearing a plain silver choker and matching rings on each hand. "You sit there on the floor in front of me, with your back to me," she directed, as she seated herself carefully in the chair just under the north window. "Just like I was going to ma.s.sage your shoulders." Charlie obeyed her, sitting cross-legged at her feet with his back, to her. "Mark, turn out the electric lights, would you? I don't want any other fields being generated while I do this."

He obeyed; now she was lit only from behind, by the gray, uncertain light that came through the window.

Huh Mark thought with surprise, Now that's peculiar. Very peculiar. They should look faded out but they don't. He looked closer. If I didn't know better, I'd say she looks like she was sitting in sunshine not in my living room!

She held her hands about five inches away from Charlie's head, and her eyes went unfocused. Mark forgot the peculiar quality of the light around her, and watched all this with curiosity and interest he'd been in Charlie's position the last time she'd done this.

There did seem to be a faint sort of light linking her two ring fingers but when he tried to focus on it, it faded out.

"Okay, Charlie " she said, after a moment. "Before I start, I would like to ask a question, and I promise you that it's relevant. Do you have what they call uh I think it's 'spirit vision'?"

Charlie started, and his eyes looked surprised. "I uh yeah," he admitted.

"There's a reason for my asking; since you do, you're going to see all of what I'm doing and you can actually tailor the shields to suit yourself. They'll 'take' better if you do. Poor Mark had to make do with what I made up for him." She smiled at Mark, and wrinkled her nose.

"Hey, they're okay, I've got no complaints," Mark countered.

"So what do you think of when I say I'm going to put protection on you?" she asked.

Charlie grinned sheepishly. "Promise not to laugh?"

"Promise."

"A force field, like Star Trek."

"Good image," she approved, nodding. "Easy to work with. Okay; relax if you can, you're going to see just that kind of force field forming up around you in a minute. Um it'll probably be blue; that's the primary color in your aura. Once I've got it in place I'm going to shrink it down so it's contiguous with your skin. Leaves less of a target that way. The way it'll work is to make magic slide around you, rather than stopping it or absorbing it. Ready?"

Charlie nodded, and she held her hands out, one just above either shoulder, and again, about five inches away from him.

Mark hadn't really expected to see anything of the shields going up, so he was rather surprised to notice that Charlie seemed to be blurring a bit. He blinked, thinking that it was tired eyes, but Di and the furniture behind him remained in sharp focus Except those sections that were behind that five-inch distance; those were blurry as well. It was a bit like the heat-distortions above hot asphalt. And at the border of the distorted area was a thin line of the faint light, only this time it was bluish.

Mark was fascinated.

Charlie was evidently seeing something a bit more elaborate, as his eyes were wide with the greatest surprise Mark had seen him show in a long time.

Just when Mark thought he might be seeing a bit of a glow running all through the distorted area, Di flexed her fingers slightly, and the distortion seemed to sink into Charlie's body.

Charlie held out his hands in front of himself and stared at his fingers, quite dumbfounded.

"Is that it?" he asked, hesitantly.

"That's all there is," she replied, wriggling her fingers, then standing up and stretching for the ceiling. "End of dog and pony show."

"I didn't mean it that way," he told her, craning his head backward to look at her. "I meant wow, that was pretty impressive from in here!"

"Does it feel any different?" Mark asked. "It sure as h.e.l.l did for me."

"I'll say it does," Charlie exclaimed, getting to his feet. "Like the difference between driving my Bug and Johnnie's four-by-four. Or no, something heftier. A tank."

"Something like," Di grinned. "When I do a job, I don't do it halfway, and I rather like armor- plating."

One more crying baby or pa.s.s from that drunk in first and I think I'd have killed someone, Mary Johnson moaned to herself, loosening the collar on her uniform and pressing her aching head against the gla.s.s of the window of the shuttle van. Bad enough the hour delay on the ground in Frisco. Then we ride a roller coaster all the way here. But then to end up waiting two more hours on the ground because we can't get at a gate!

The Amerine Airways shuttle van was crowded far past its intended capacity often. Mary and everyone else had their luggage on their laps. She was just lucky to have gotten a seat at all, much less a window seat, and knew it.

My G.o.d, it's almost 2:00 a.m. Thank G.o.d I just went illegal, or I'll bet they'd call me in for the 5:00 a.m. New York shuttle. I think I'd rather die.

Thanks to three tornadoes on the ground near DFW this afternoon, virtually every flight in and out had been subject to a delay of at least an hour. DFW Airport was a madhouse; kids crying, babies screaming, weary, angry pa.s.sengers in every terminal and of course all the restaurants and concession stands had closed down at their normal hour of ten and of course the computer-driven terminal environmental controller had turned off the air-conditioning at the same hour and of course no one knew how to turn it back on again.

You could pretty much count on it any craft that had hit the gate after midnight had left about half its pa.s.sengers stranded for the night. The gate agents were equally divided between ready to commit suicide and ready to commit ma.s.s murder.

And there wasn't a hotel room to be had at any price. She and the rest of the crew were so tired they were just about ready to pool their cash to get one of the VIP suites there were enough couches in one of those things to make sure everybody got some kind of bed, and there were the hot tubs and saunas But even those were gone.

So they were catching the shuttle out to the flight academy. Thank G.o.d for that. The rooms were all dorm-style and not exactly high-cla.s.s, nor exactly cheap if you were just bunking down overnight and not there for training but right now all Mary wanted was a shower, a flat s.p.a.ce, and a pillow and blanket.

It was as black as the inside of a hat out there; the darkness had that peculiar quality it sometimes had down here after a rain when the sky was still overcast; it seemed to drink all the available light and give nothing back. Mary was glad she wasn't driving; it would be a b.i.t.c.h to see anything tonight.

"Anybody want off at the gate?" the shuttle driver called out. "You could probably walk to the dorm faster than I'm going to get there. I've got priority stuff for every building on the route."Mary considered the amount of luggage she had not much and concluded that the walk might be just what she needed to settle her nerves.

"Me," she called, "And I'm right on the door."

Her seatmates sighed with grat.i.tude and relief. "Don't use up all the hot water," Captain Forster said, from somewhere behind his carryons.

"Serve you right if I did," she answered. "You should have diverted to Houston at least we could have gotten hotel rooms there."

"b.i.t.c.h, b.i.t.c.h, b.i.t.c.h," the Captain retorted. "I got us a powercart so I could keep the a/c on. You could have been baking back there."

"More like steaming and I was already," she replied, carefully working herself and her gear out of the van door. "If that jerk in First had put his hand up my skirt one more time "

Her fellow attendents groaned in sympathy. "I'm black and blue where he kept pinching me when the beverage cart stuck," Lynn Jeffers seconded.

"Y'all had it easy," drawled someone in the front. "We had us a buncha drunk Shriners from Vegas an' we was so low on fuel the cap'n had to kill the a/c and most of the lights while we was waitin'

on a gate. Talk about your animals!"

The horror stories continued as Mary got herself out of the van and onto the roadway, and as the van rolled away she could still hear them at it.

Why did I ever think that being a flight attendant was glamorous?

She was right under the streetlight, so the first thing, the very first thing she did was to open her suitcase and extract her old, comfortable running shoes, changing them off for her pumps. Her feet stopped hurting for the first time in hours.

It was cool, but not too chilly in fact, as overheated as she was, the cooler air felt wonderful. It smelled pretty nice too, all clean, the dust washed out by the rain. It was too bad that it was overcast; the stars would have been nice tonight.

She shut her pumps into her suitcase and stacked everything back onto her wheelie and strapped it all down, then peered around into the darkness beyond the cone of light from the streetlamp.

There's a jogging path around here somewhere, I know there is hah! One thing you had to say for old Amerine; they'd put some really nice paved paths through the wooded grounds for runners.

Bless their flinty hearts.

She headed off down the path for the dorm, feeling a little more like a human being and not so much like a sardine with sore feet.

One of the shadows beneath the trees on the right side of the asphalted pathway detached itself from the rest and moved off after her.

"Mark " Di said, looking up from her book.

"Hm?" he replied, just as happy to set down his own. After sending Charlie home, they had elected to stay in the living room tonight; actually reading some of the books that seemed relevant, instead of just skimming through them. They'd moved two of the foam flip-couches over below the good reading lamp so they could share it, and Mark had some nice soothing s.p.a.ce-music on the stereo rig. It was a pity the situation was so serious this would have been an enjoyable evening if they weren't having to think about the guy that was going to become a corpse if they couldn't find him soon.

"Do you remember what Ramirez said when he was talking about trying to get that voudoun curse off him?"

He stretched, and shifted position on the couch. "About the girl in Dispatch?"

She shook her head, and chewed on the end of her finger. "No, before then."

"Huh. Give me a minute." He sat in silence for a moment, Treemonisha purring her approval of his choice of position from the pit of his stomach where she'd curled up. She was a lot better pleased that they were lounging in the living room instead of crunched up against the table in the kitchen. She hadn't been able to get into Mark's lap when they'd been using the kitchen.

"He said " Mark replied after running the conversation through his mind, "that he had gone across the border trying to find an old-time brujo to try to take it off " "Yeah! Yeah, that's it! That's what I was trying to remember! That's the one set of practicing magicians we haven't checked out brujos and brujas!"

He scratched the side of Treemonisha's nose, feeling a bit dubious. "Well, I guess it could be nasty enough. Aunt Nita used to tell stories that could curl a kid's toes. Is it native though?"

"According to this book it is " She held up the heavy volume so he could see the t.i.tle Superst.i.tions and Folklore of the Southwest. "Although this lot doesn't know as much about it as I'd like; they've got it mixed in with a lot of other traditions that I know are separate ent.i.ties, like the mescaline ceremonies. At least they admitted they didn't know too much. But that's what was nagging at the back of my mind. Now that you've jogged my memory, I'm remembering that someone in a position to know told me a long time ago that all the aspects of the Virgin that the brujas invoke are really Christianized versions of some of the traditional Amerindian G.o.ddesses."

"So that would qualify as native, all right," he agreed. "But I hate to tell you this I know less about where to find a brujo or bruja than you do."

"You would not likely ever find a bruja," she replied, smiling a little. "They're rather down on men.

And I'll have a hard time convincing one to talk to me they're equally down on Anglos. But I'll have more luck than you will, I bet, especially since I can point out those three kids that were victims. And I bet I know who can get me pointed in the right direction."

"Who?" he asked.

"It's right under your nose, Magnum."

He shook his head, still baffled. She laughed.

"Your own Aunt Nita."

"This is as bad as when I was in high school." Julia pulled away a little and complained, as John fumbled with the b.u.t.tons on her blouse. "h.e.l.l, we don't even have the back seat of a car "

He pushed her back against the bark of the tree they were under. "You know why we can't rent a car what if your husband or my wife found the rental record?" he said with exasperation. "And we couldn't get hotel rooms tonight to save our souls "

Julia squirmed on the blanket she'd filched from the flight academy dorm room, trying to find a position where there weren't as many rocks under her rear. "We could have tried out in the boonies.

n.o.body else was bothering. We could have rented two cars."

"And have somebody turn up the fact that it was only the two of us out there and not the whole crew?" He had her half undressed now; the flight in had been a bad one the plane had been hit twice by lightning on the way down. Bad flights, so Julia had learned, tended to make Captain John Powell h.o.r.n.y as h.e.l.l.

"Why are you so paranoid, O Captain?" she asked a little acidly. "I have just as much to lose as you do."

"Look I'm already paying out alimony to one ex if Angie ever found out about us she'd take me to the cleaners. And I think she's got a PI checking up on me."

Julia would have asked some more specific questions at that point, but about then things were rapidly coming to a boil and she didn't want answers any more. Bad flights frequently had the same effect on her as they had on the captain.

Beneath a stand of bushes was a clot of shadow. Within that shadow, a darker shadow watched them, and waited.

Tommy (his real name was William, but he hadn't gone by that in decades) Thomson was rather proud of himself. He thought he'd been real clever, sneaking on that Amerine shuttle van He, along with several hundred other pa.s.sengers, had been stranded for the night when his flight from Florida missed the connecting flight into Chicago. The Amerine personnel refused to do anything for him, claiming that because the delays and missed connections were due to weather, they were free of obligations.Hah. You can't get away with treating a vice-president of marketing that way. I know all the dodges.

He'd ranted and raved in his finest managerial style but he'd only been one voice among hundreds and nothing he'd tried had produced so much as an apology, much less the hotel room he was demanding.

They kept trying to claim that weather delays were "acts of G.o.d" and that they weren't liable for anything. Turkeys. I'll fix them.

Since trying to penetrate the bulls.h.i.t of the underlings had gotten him nowhere, he'd decided to bypa.s.s the peons, and deal with the bosses directly.

The question was, how to get at them.

Then he'd overheard one of the stews talking about getting a bed at Headquarters, and had followed her. When the shuttle van with its inconspicuous Amerine Airways card in the corner of the windshield had arrived, he'd bullied and pushed his way on board, cutting out one of those uppity stews and leaving her to wait for the next van. He'd figured out a while back that if you acted like you were in a position of authority if, in fact, you started making the demands people tended to a.s.sume you had the right to push them around.

It had worked like a charm. n.o.body had questioned him, challenged him, or even asked to see his employee ID.

He'd figured that in a bad situation like they had over at the airport, there were bound to be some honchos around. But they wouldn't be at the airport, they'd be at Headquarters, where they could monitor the situation, but n.o.body could get at them to confront them. It was easier and a lot more comfortable and convenient to work that way it was the way he used to work.

So old Tommy was too clever for them; he knew all the end runs and the slick moves, and was ready with a counterplay.

He'd b.i.t.c.hed and moaned about the van, the heat, and the driver all the way to the Amerine complex. After all, that's what an exec did. The rest of the van's occupants had gone silent after the first few minutes, and he figured he'd pulled a slick one on them all.

When the van driver had announced "Headquarters," he'd popped out of that van like a horse out of the starting gate. No one else got off, though there had only been someone waiting at the stop for a package that the driver had handed him. By the time Tommy had gotten himself straightened out, that person had already vanished into the bowels of the building.

Tommy had found himself shivering in the cool damp air. He hadn't brought his coat with him; just left it stuffed in the locker where he'd shoved his suitcases. He was in front of a huge gla.s.s-and-chrome building, illuminated against the overcast darkness by floodlights all around it. The Amerine logo was carved into a stone monolith set into the sidewalk about ten yards from the front door.