Seeker (39 page)

“Mostly it would be bad for you,” John said. “Please back away.”

The Dreads did not move.

The Young Dread spoke up now. “An athame is difficult to destroy,” she told him.

“It’s stone, isn’t it?” He looked around, moving nearer to the roof edge overhanging the drop to the river below. “Even stone will break if thrown far enough.”

John now noticed the Big Dread had a wound across his chest that was dripping blood, but the man was ignoring it. The Big Dread’s face, as he stared up at John, looked like a statue carved to illustrate the emotion of hatred.

“Perhaps,” the Old Dread agreed. “Or perhaps not. You would be foolish to try. The object you hold is the only one of its kind.”

John waved the athame above the drop. “Not the only. Quin has another one.”

“No,” the Old Dread said. “Similar, but not the same. The one you hold is special.”

As John looked again at the stone dagger in his hand, he noticed a separate piece, a long, slender blade of stone. Cleverly designed, it was fitted along the athame’s blade so perfectly they seemed at first glance to be one. Yet when he pressed downward on it with his thumb, the slender piece slid free.

The Middle Dread made a jerking motion, and all at once, there was a knife in his hand. Even in his half-woken and injured state, the man, John understood, could kill him quite easily. Yet the Old Dread signaled the Middle to stop.

“Do you value your life?” the Young Dread asked him.

“Do
you
value my life?” he asked her. “First you help me, and then you work against me. Aren’t you allowed to make up your own mind?”

“If you value your life,” she said, ignoring his words, “you will not use the tools in your hands. Without training, they will end you quickly, and when they do, you will lose the athame and lightning rod somewhere under the ocean or in the fiery heart of a mountain. We will never recover them.”

John tapped the athame and the other object—the lightning rod, she’d called it—together gently, still holding them both above the drop to the river. Immediately, a low vibration began. He could feel it running through his lungs and heart, altering his breathing and heartbeat. It was in his ears as well, distorting other sounds. He pulled the athame and rod apart and waited for the vibration to die out. It took nearly a minute to do so, unsettling him the whole while. And this was from a gentle tap. What was it like when you struck them together for real?

The Young Dread was right—even with an athame in his hands, he could do nothing without training.

Quin had refused him. She didn’t want to help, and he didn’t want
to force her. And yet there were only a few people in the world who could show him how to use the tools of a Seeker. Briac Kincaid was one, but he would die before helping John. The Young Dread should help him, but she had just shown that she would not. So, Quin. It always came back to Quin.

Carefully he slid the lightning rod back into its slot on the athame’s blade until he heard it click into place. Then he drew his whipsword and cracked it out into solid form.

“You would fight the Dreads?” the Middle asked him, finally breaking his silence.

“Do I have a choice?” John responded.

The Old Dread made a tiny motion with his hands again, which seemed to say,
Leave this to me
. He brought his eyes back to John. “Return our athame and we will not harm you,” the old man said.

John could almost believe that the Old Dread meant it. He glanced toward the Young Dread. She was impossible to read, but he sensed she would follow the old one. Then he looked again at the Middle. In that man’s face, he saw nothing but his own death. He was quite sure that this Dread, and others like him, were the ones who had all but eradicated his house. John made up his mind.

“Thank you for your kind words,” he said.

With that, he threw the athame as hard as he could over the cliff. The dagger flew end over end through the air, then began a downward arc out of sight.

The Old Dread’s arms whipped up, pointing toward the falling athame in a gesture that ordered the other two to follow it. He needn’t have bothered—the Young and the Middle were already racing toward the edge of the cliff, searching for a path to the river below.

The Old Dread turned his eyes back to John, but he moved no
closer. John didn’t wait to see what else the old man might do. He ran to the edge of the roof farthest from the cliff. From there, he lowered himself and dropped to the ground. It was a long way down, but he landed well. Scrambling to his feet, he sprinted toward the woods without looking back.

PART THREE

W
HERE
A
LL
R
OADS
L
EAD

“I’m not running errands for you,” Shinobu said, elbowing his way through the crowd on the main Bridge thoroughfare. A few people turned to stare at him. “Does it look like I’m speaking to you?” he barked at them. When they turned away, a few frightened, more of them annoyed, he began muttering again. “Still on the Bridge, still running your errands. You promised me I’d be rid of you. Yet here I am.”

He was, in point of fact, speaking to Quin, though some part of him realized she was not actually present. He hadn’t bothered using the air mask that hung at the exit of the opium bar, and he was weaving dangerously between other pedestrians as he made his way toward Quin’s front door.

When he saw her house swimming crookedly across his field of view, looming among many such buildings in the middle section of the Bridge, he made an effort to steady himself. The Bridge authorities didn’t look kindly on intoxicated visitors walking around outside their designated areas.

“You’ve always taken me for granted,” he told Quin. His words
were rather blurry, but since Quin was absent from the conversation, he was fairly sure she wouldn’t mind. “Asking for what you need. ‘Find my mother.’ ‘Save me from being killed.’ ‘Give me a shower.’ What about what I need?”

He lurched to a stop at Quin’s door and rested his head against the wood for a moment, just to help him stay upright. Then he knocked softly.
What do I need?
he wondered. After all, Quin had only asked him to let her mother know that she was all right. He’d done that days ago. But he’d continued staying at Quin’s house.

The door he was leaning against was abruptly pulled open, startling Shinobu, who had forgotten that he’d knocked. He fell through the doorway into Fiona’s arms, ending up down on one knee, with Fiona pulling him up by his shirt. She didn’t look very steady on her feet either.

“What about what I need?” he said to her.

“What do you need, Shinobu?” Fiona asked him. Her red hair was disheveled, hanging loose about her face. “Tell me.”

She got the door closed behind him, pulled Shinobu through the front room, and eased him down into a chair in Quin’s examination room, nearly losing her balance as she did so. The treatment table had been turned into a bed, with sheets and blankets, and Brian Kwon was lying there, much like a baby whale, still recovering from his injuries.

“What do I need?” Shinobu repeated, trying to remember how he had gotten from the front door to the chair. “I need …” He wasn’t sure. It was something to do with Quin. He remembered her body pushed up against his, his arms around her. He could still feel the imprint she had left upon him.

“You don’t need opium, that’s sure,” Fiona commented, her words slurring a bit. “You’ve had more than enough of that.”

He focused his eyes with great effort, looking around the dimly lit
room with its shelves of herbs, and the giant form of Brian studying him from the bed.

“Only two pipes,” Shinobu told her.

“Your body tells a different tale.”

“It might have been twelve. A number with a two in it. Maybe twenty or twenty-two point two. Two hundred twenty-two …”

“Hmm,” Fiona said. She moved into the kitchen, attempting to tie her hair back as she did so. Then she busied herself making tea.

Brian was propping himself up on an elbow. “Be nice to her,” he said. “She’s … not feeling well.”

“She’s drunk.”

It had been three days since the fight on the lower levels, and the nasty cut on Brian’s shoulder was healing. His many broken ribs were wrapped tightly in a fashion that made him look like an enormous Chinese sausage.

“Sorry I didn’t bring you any, Sea Bass,” Shinobu said, assuming his failure to bring home drugs was why Brian was looking at him disapprovingly. “You know they don’t let you take pipes out of the bar. You must be dying for something.”

“I’m invited to Master Tan’s house for dinner,” Brian told him. “He says I can start walking more today.”

“Well, don’t expect any opium from him.”

Brian wasn’t laughing. “I’m not looking for opium. I have my tea.”

“Whatever you say, Sea Bass.”

Brian grimaced and swung his legs off the bed, so he was sitting on the edge. Very carefully he lowered one foot to the floor and then the other. His grimace deepened as he put his full weight onto his feet. But after a few moments in a vertical position he seemed all right.

“Not too bad today,” he muttered.

Shinobu watched him hobble across the room to his clothes,
which were clean and folded on a nearby chair. With what looked like tremendous difficulty, Brian began pulling his shirt over his head. This involved many Chinese swearwords.

“Would you like some help?” Shinobu asked.

“I would not,” Brian responded. “You’d end up breaking more of my ribs.”

“That’s probably true.”

Fiona returned with tea, which she forced into Shinobu’s hands, sloshing some of it over the rim. With her help, Brian finally got all of his clothes on, shoes included, though Fiona seemed to make the process take longer. When he was dressed, Brian placed his feet gingerly one in front of the other and walked out of the room.

“Since you’re up now, I’ll bring you down to the lower levels tonight,” Shinobu called after him. “What do you say? Fiona can’t keep us locked up here forever.”

“What do you mean ‘locked up’?” Brian called back. “She doesn’t even want you here. You just keep showing up.”

“So you’ll come with me?”

“I’m done with opium.”

“Fine—I was thinking Ivan3 tonight anyway.”

Brian ignored him. With a jingle of bells, the front door opened, and before it swung shut, Shinobu heard him breathing heavily and cursing again as he walked off.

“Tea. Now,” Fiona ordered, pushing it toward his face.

Shinobu took a sip and then spit it back into the cup. It was one of those healthy concoctions Master Tan had been making for Brian.

“Where’s your tea?” he asked her.

Fiona looked daggers at him. She had put her hair up, but a large portion was still hanging down along one side of her face. “You will drink that tea or you will leave this house. And hopefully be arrested on your way off the Bridge.”

“Is it only tea for opium addicts? Not alcoholics?” It seemed ridiculous for her to lecture him when she was too drunk to stand up straight.

“You’ve no need to call me that,” she said, making an attempt to speak clearly. “If I have a little something from time to time, whose business is that? You fill your body with all sorts of nasty things.”

“It’s the same,” he protested.

“It is not.”

“Your poison comes in a bottle. Mine comes in a pipe, or sticks, or needles. That’s the only difference.”

“It is
not
the same.” She was busying herself by making Brian’s bed, but the sheets were not cooperating. “You don’t see what I see. You don’t listen to things you’d rather not hear, do you?”

“I listen to things I’d rather not hear all the time,” he retorted. “Come visit my mother with me, and I’ll show you.”

“Your mother?” she asked, confused for a moment. Then she grabbed back on to her train of thought: “Do you have a daughter, Shinobu? A daughter who’s hidden her past but sees things in her dreams? What if when she sees those things, there’s the chance you’ll see them also? That you’ll know exactly the sorts of things she’s done? What sorts of things I’ve let her do?”