Nos Faux Ratu Ch. 05

Ghede smiled. "A little bit."

Jenna figured that she should be objecting, but she really did not want to. She was also pretty sure that she was supposed to be in a lot of pain. And pissed about something.

"Jenna, I'm going to go talk to the troops," Nessa was saying, "so rest up." She leaned in and kissed Jenna on the lips. The girl acted a bit surprised at first, but succumbed to it quickly. "Hmm," Nessa said after licking both their lips, "you must be feeling better. Ghede has that effect on women. Some guys too."

"You are too generous in your praise," he chuckled.

Nessa could not stop smiling as she left the room. Her friend was going to be okay, and she was putty in Ghede's hands.

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That afternoon . . .

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When Jenna awoke, it was still daylight. She felt sore, weak, and all-in-all unpleasant. She was, surprisingly enough, actually wearing clothes, despite being in bed with Nessa. Her vampire friend was sound asleep, looking beautiful without trying, which Jenna thought should be impossible. Nessa was under the covers while Jenna was on top of them, wearing the softest black silk pajamas she had ever imagined.

"Glad to see you're awake, "Ghede whispered. "How are you feeling?"

Jenna looked over at Nessa, then put her finger to her mouth and made a "shh" sound.

"It's going to take more than the sound of my voice to wake her," Ghede said.

"You spend a lot of time around her when she's asleep?"

"In my interactions with her, I have rarely made it to the 'sleeping' part. She shares her bed with many, but allows very few to stay with her through the day."

"She's . . . I guess she feels sorry for me," Jenna muttered, wishing she could check to see if her hair looked okay.

Ghede ran his fingers through Jenna's hair in a way that seemed far too intimate but strangely noninvasive. She knew the touch was meant to convey comfort, and it did. She wondered if she was supposed to be feeling something else. As it was, she would take 'relaxing.'

Nessa snorted ungracefully and then rolled over.

"She is as delicate as a desert flower," the large black man said. "And I doubt that she feels sorry for you. Well, maybe at the moment yes, but she would not trust you so implicitly out of pity."

"What makes you think she trusts me?"

"She is thousands of years old, and right now she is more vulnerable than you can imagine. It would not take much for one with your power to end her long life in an instant. You are new to our world, so you probably do not yet comprehend what allowing such intimacy involves. Now, I need to examine you again." Ghede grabbed a necklace from around Jenna's neck, one that she did not remember putting on.

"What's that?"

"It is a healing charm," he told her. "A powerful one. I am attempting to heal those bones that are cracked or broken first, then we will give your a body a chance to recover before we start on other injuries."

"Can't we just get it over with?"

"Your body can only handle so much magic, just like it can only handle so much medicine. And like medicine, mixing different magics can have unforeseen consequences. We want to get you better, not cause you to grow gills or scales."

For some reason, Jenna thought about how cool it might be to have gills. She had always wanted to try scuba diving as a kid, but had never gotten an opportunity. She shook her head. "Shouldn't you be working on a spell or whatever that will make the Nightwalker program look like a failure?"

"I already know how to cast a disease spell that will work. The question is not finding such magic. It is finding a way to pay the price. Magic can give you a great many things, but it always asks for something in return. Nessa and I must agree on the price to be paid."

Jenna shivered, the words coming out of Ghede's mouth making her uncomfortable. He mistook the reaction for being cold, so he covered her with a blanket except for the spots he was examining.

"You are more jittery than I expected a commando to be," Ghede muttered.

"You're better spoken than I thought a voodoo priest would be."

"How many voodoo priests have you met?"

"How many commandos have you met?"

Ghede smiled. "Well played."

"Nessa may be used to being poked and prodded by strangers, but I'm not." Then Jenna blushed again. "That wasn't what I meant . . . it didn't come out right."

"Yet was oddly appropriate. So tell me about yourself. My talk with Nessa indicated that you have quite a story, but she wanted you to tell it." Ghede could tell instantly that this was not a happy story. His patient stiffened up and her face closed off. "If you want to."

"Can we not?" Jenna asked, her voice cracking slightly.

"We don't have to do anything you don't want."

Jenna tried to smile. "Now you sound like her again."

"Is your story so painful?"

"I just don't want you to look at me like I'm even more broken than I am."

"Would it help you if you knew more about me?" He watched her shrug, almost shyly. 'This is the dangerous Nightwalker I was told about?' he wondered. "Well, I'm from New Orleans. I come from a big family --" He paused when he saw Jenna's expression change, like something was caught in her throat. "-- where I'm the oldest of eight kids. Both my folks were practitioners, so I grew up in the life. Initially, I just wanted to go into holistic medicine, but my folks reminded me that despite some bad press, Western medicine had done so much. So I figured a combination of the two, and a smidgen of magic, would be worthwhile."

"You sound very . . . civilized?" Jenna said, not sure of how to clearly state what she meant.

"Not everyone in voodoo lives in a hut back in the swamp. I don't particularly like the taste of crayfish, though there's a place on bourbon street that makes a mean alligator sausage. I graduated at the top of my class from the University of Washington, moved back home, and have been been working both sides of the magical divide ever since." He turned around, reached into his bag, and grabbed a small human-ish figure.

"A voodoo doll?"

"Not exactly. I know you have a story to tell and are reticent to tell me, but if you do feel like unleashing some anxiety, then talk to this."

"You want me to talk to . . . a doll?"

"Yes. Or think to it. Anything that you're still afraid to admit to me or someone else can just go into the doll. Consider it your own personal stress reliever. I promise it will make you feel better." He looked over when Avery walked into the room and gave him a signal. "Now come along," Ghede told Jenna. "You have something that you need to do."

As her doctor rolled a gurney over ('Where the hell did the gurney come from?' she wondered), Avery came over to help move her into it.

"I can walk," Jenna said, trying to get to her feet. Her abdomen, neck, shoulders, and leg screamed at her to cease and desist. "I can't walk," she mumbled, settling back down. Even being transferred by two fairly strong men was exceedingly painful. "And now my dignity is shredded as well. Where the hell am I going?"

"Heaven."

Heaven was the VIP section of Nessa's club, Devil's Night, and it was about twenty stories down from her current location. The gurney was wheeled into the grav-lift, then Ghede got back off.

"I need to discuss some things with Nessa when she wakes up, and your outing may take a while."

"Okay, what outing?" Jenna said irritably. "What outing?!" came out more loudly as the door closed. She tried to look over at Avery, but her neck was stiff and the agony was quite intense. Avery stood by quietly, almost amused by Jenna's attempts to look threatening.

"This is your stop."

Stop was right. That was what Jenna's heart did when those doors opened and she saw who was waiting there. It was her old friend Death, and he was not alone. Four other members of the Major Arcana sat with him, as well as a number of Minor Arcana.

"What the . . . Death, how . . . why are they --"

All her old cohorts were just staring at her. It was the High Priestess, normally known for her quirky sense of humor, who broke the ice.

"That's the most that I've heard you say in the last seven years." The curvaceous brunette's voice was teasing, but a little uncertain.

"Oh, she's a veritable fountain of conversation," Death assured her. "Most of the time, I can't get a word in edgewise."

Jenna's heart was still pounding, so she did not have much left to donate to light banter. "You shouldn't have . . . I mean this is Nessa's --"

"Who is Nessa?" one of the Minor Arcana asked.

"Why did you bring them here?!" she blurted, looking from Avery to Death to each member of the Nightwalkers present.

"Nessa contacted me shortly before dawn and told me what happened," Death explained. "Then the Fool called a meeting where he informed us that we were all going to undergo yet more bioengineering. Those here were amongst those who questioned this. You don't do bioengineering from a syringe. Then the Hanged Man came out," the assassin whispered, "and showed us his new face."

"I'm quite familiar with what he has become," Jenna said, thinking of the wounds that kept her from striking out at her former boss.

Death's face fell. "I'm sorry for what happened. I had no idea that he was sending anyone after you."

"Could someone explain what's going on?" the King of Coins asked. "I know that the Fool is off his rocker, but who the hell are these people you're staying with?" he asked Jenna directly. "What happened?"

Jenna was concerned about something. She looked towards Avery.

"Nessa said that they should know what's really going on. So it's up to you."

"Death --" she started to say.

"I trust them," he told her. "They defied the Fool and their government because they didn't want to turn into what he wanted them to be."

"I know some perfectly nice werewolves," she told him.

"He didn't want werewolves . . . though that's a comment I never thought I'd hear coming from your lips. He wants monsters. He wants killing machines. The Nightwalkers inspired fear in the corporations. These new Nightwalkers will inspire pure terror, and I don't know where he plans on stopping."

"I mean, are we actually talking 'werewolves'? They're some kind of corporate soldiers, right?" This was one of the Minor Arcana. It took a moment, but Jenna realized that almost all the Coins had defected. They were a tight bunch, so she was not surprised that they would follow the King of Coins.

Jenna took a breath, then exhaled. Then another breath. She was freaked out. She had never seen a single one of these people outside of the command post except Death, and now she was almost completely exposed before them, lying in pajamas on a gurney.

"Is she okay?" Strength asked, the big man's voice rumbling like a diesel engine.

"She looks like she's doing lamaze," Chariot said.

"I'm fine," Jenna said. "Fine. Just fine."

"But are you fine?" the High Priestess asked, smirking a little. To her, the Empress had always been the ice queen, and it was amusing to see her flustered.

Jenna glared at her former comrade, but there was a sort of quirk to her mouth and sparkle in the woman's eyes that made Jenna realized that she was being played with.

"You want to know the truth? Here's the truth," Jenna said, a little angry and a little embarrassed. In as few breaths as possible, she laid it all out for them as it related to the existence of magical beings and the events that had transpired since she had first been discovered by Nessa, leaving out the bits about her own history and her sexual relationship with the vampire.

There was an unsettling silence that hung over her story, starting as a dubious cloud and then morphing into something more dire. The Nightwalkers present slowly came to two realizations. The first was that Jenna was not crazy, and the second was that she was not lying.

"So you're telling us that monsters are real, the Fool is planning on declaring war on the corporations with super werewolf commandos after he kills us, and there's another army of werewolves looking to kill us and your new boss?"

"That just about covers it," she said.

"Well, at least it couldn't get any worse," the Three of Coins muttered. Then he found everyone in the room looking at him. "What?"

No one responded. There were certain things that were never said or done in their line of work, even by the least superstitious amongst them. At the top of that list was the phrase, "At least it can't get any worse."

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The next night . . .

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The Fool had never felt so very much alive in his entire existence. He could see so crisply, hear so acutely, and he could smell the world like never before. A Nightwalker's sense of smell was acute, but there were layers of olfactory stimuli lying beneath the surface of the world that he had never imagined before.

'Idiots,' he thought, his mind drifting back to the mass defection that had occurred earlier. Under other circumstances, he and his new and improved Nightwalkers would have caught the traitors, but somehow they had already had an escape plan. Someone had been thinking far ahead, and the renegades had fled through a tunnel lined with explosives.

The Hanged Man stood nearby, his head bowed in respect as it had been since the Fool had injected himself with werewolf saliva. They had been forced to capture a few more specimens to get enough of the substance for all the remaining Nightwalkers, and they had extra now due to the defections. But he would bring them all back to the fold. Once they understood what they could become . . . what those who had remained loyal HAD become . . . they would come crawling back.

"Have you completed the sensory sweep?" he asked of his second in command.

The Hanged Man nodded. "Unfortunately, the drives had been set up to auto-erase. I don't think it's a mystery who the culprit is."

"Death, oh Death," the Fool whispered. "You will pay for your treachery."

"Sir, do you think he has been working with the Empress this whole time?"

The Fool stared straight forward. "That is a possibility. Why else have we been able to capture the werewolves but none of these vampires that the Empress told us of? Yes, it makes sense."

"So we can trust nothing that he has said."

"True. Get the Empress's file." Once it was in his hands, the Fool started to look over it carefully, screen by screen. Her file had been too well hidden from him for there to be nothing, and the only person besides he and the Hanged Man who had seen it had been Death.

The Fool slowed the screen progression down to a crawl. It was so simple that he almost missed it. "Got it."

"What, sir?"

The leader of the Nightwalkers looked up, a dark gleam playing across his eyes. "If the boy died in childbirth, then why did they fingerprint him?"

"He could have died shortly afterward."

The Fool shook his head. "I want records of every adoption that took place in the Atlanta area within a few months after the birth. Newborns tend to be grabbed up fairly quickly. I suspect that they would have kept his name, so look for boys named William. Find him, and we have leverage over the Empress. And hunt down any relations we can use against Death."

The Hanged Man coughed into his hand. "Sir, the only relation that Death had was with the woman he was dating, and she happens to be the daughter of General Levinson. Using her would be most unwise --"

"And highly improper," the Fool said. Even if Death and the Empress and the rest had forgotten what loyalty meant, the Fool had not. "Fine. The Empress interests me more anyway." He could not explain his exact reasoning to the Hanged Man. He could not vocalize that the thought of the most powerful female member of the Nightwalkers filled him with a sense of urgency, especially now. She would make a great hybrid, and then she would see what the new Nightwalkers were truly capable of. She would come around. She would be one of his greatest soldiers. Then, she would become his mate.

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To be continued . . .