99 Gods: Betrayer Read online

  “Amsterdam,” Ken said, and sighed. “You hungry?”

  He tried to send a thought to her mind, but his attempt bounced. However, she smelled chocolate, in absolutely ginormous quantities. She stood, sniffed and ran. Ken stood up and followed, as did the surprised gaggle of bodyguards. Guess if she could run past them they had let down their guard.

  She found the chocolate in some sort of store. When did they start putting stores in airports? She ignored her own question and hunted through her purse. No money, no credit cards. So life was that way again? Whatever happened to trust! Well, how about all these other tourists, and all their money? They could buy…

  Ken caught up with her, worry lines all over his face. “Whatever you want, buy.” He appeared haggard, as if he hadn’t had much sleep. Dead on his feet from concern or something. Nessa wondered why.

  She pulled her blouse out from the waist of her skirt. Skirt? Who the hell dressed her in a goddamned skirt! A black skirt at that! A poufy Victorian black skirt. How had she gotten so fat? And in such a strange place? She ignored all her worries for a moment and started to chuck the place’s best smelling bars of dark chocolate into the basket she made from her blouse. As she went along, she also felt the urge for more substantial food, so she let Ken pay for the chocolate while she grabbed a couple of chocolate croissants from the pastry shop next door. She stuck one of them into her mouth. Ken caught up and paid for that, too. Nessa flounced off back to her seat, chewing on the pastry no-handed.

  “It’s got to be the pregnancy,” a strange man said. Nessa nodded at the strange man and walked on.

  Twitch.

  Nessa glanced around her. “You again?” Another airplane, another first class section, and Soft Hand Lady again. She had hold of Nessa’s hand and had a quite strange expression on her face.

  “You remember?”

  “Yah.”

  “Okay. I would…”

  Twitch.

  Loser Lady #1 sat beside her. Young, mid-twenties, with a soft doughy face and lifeless black hair with blonde roots. She had goopy brown eyes and half the time looked like she was about to cry.

  “Why are you dressed so strangely?” She wore a frilly revealing black dress as Victorian as Nessa’s absurd skirt.

  “Goth, remember?”

  Nessa didn’t, not right now. “Go away,” Nessa said. “I want Ken.”

  “He’s contemplating suicide. I would, too, given how mean you’ve been to everyone recently. I mean…”

  “Have I been mean to you?” Nessa said.

  “Whadda you think, Nessa?” Loser Lady #1 said. “Saying things like ‘Hey, Loser Lady, go get me something to drink’ is gonna make me smile?”

  “Tell me again,” Nessa said. “Why’d we recruit you?” What possible use could a Goth…

  Nessa didn’t see Loser Lady #1 move, but she stuck a semi-auto handgun on Nessa’s forehead. “Bang.”

  “Safety’s on,” Nessa said, and sniffed. “You just look like someone’s crybaby niece, that’s right, but you’re a stone cold killer. Do I have the right memory?”

  The handgun vanished. Worry covered Loser Lady#1’s face. “You said you recruited me because I’d only killed twice, in self-defense, and because killing broke me up afterwards. The first recruitment, when your group sent me to Portland to learn to be a Supported.”

  “You must have reminded me of me,” Nessa said, although Nessa couldn’t ever recall wearing dagger earrings.

  “Perhaps that’s why you named me Loser Lady #1,” Loser Lady #1 said, with an air of put upon exasperation.

  Nessa smiled. “So you can be nasty, too. Remember, there’s no ‘us’ in ‘anonymous’.”

  “Huh?”

  “If we’re not here, we can’t cause any problems,” Nessa said. She paused and studied her confused seatmate. “We ever mate? I need to mate and you can’t get me preggers because I already am.”

  “That’s why none of the men will sit by you anymore,” Loser Lady #1 said, after a long pause. “You keep propositioning them.”

  “I do?” Nessa said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Perhaps that’s for the…”

  Twitch.

  Nessa used her telekinesis to help her wind the long spaghetti noodle back up her left nostril. Success! She pulled one end of the noodle and played. Up one nostril, down the other. She attached a gold chain to the end of the noodle with a little temporary telekinetic glue, and then carefully pulled on the other end of the noodle until she had the gold chain going up one nostril and down the other. She detached the noodle and clasped the ends of the necklace together, then pulled the clasp in a nostril and down to the back of her throat.

  Small pieces of spaghetti littered the table in front of her.

  “Done!” she said, and flounced over to the hotel bed. She sat and bounced. Ken groaned, hidden somewhere under the covers. She elbowed him until she got an ‘owwh’ reaction. “Time to go.”

  “Nessa?” Ken said, his voice muffled by covers. “Go where?”

  “Dancing.”

  Ken threw off the covers, glanced up at her, and yowled. “I don’t want to go dancing,” he said, backing away.

  She wiggled her hips and crawled toward him. “I’ll bet if we go dancing you’re going to get some.” Wiggle wiggle wiggle.

  “What do you think we’ve been doing for the last day?” Ken said. Nessa eyeballed his nakedness and smiled. He could use some sleep, though. Someone had been abusing him, that’s for sure.

  “Well, then, get some more, better than you’ve ever had before,” Nessa said. Dancing turned her on. “Party Boy found us a euro-style disco.”

  Ken buried his head in the covers. “Oh Gods. EDM.”

  “Of course.”

  Ken groaned. “What’s with the hideous costume?”

  “Hideous?” Sniff. “That’s not a nice thing to say to your wife.” Nessa walked over to the bathroom mirror. All the world’s mental voices started to chatter, but she ignored them today. She didn’t see any hideous in the reflection. Gold chain from one ear to the other under the chin. Two ear studs in each ear. A gold chain running over the top of her head, connected to her upper ear stud holes. Gold lip gloss straight down from the nostrils, across the lips and down the chin. Brilliant red lip gloss on the rest of the lips. Sparkly eye shadow above the eyebrows, under the ears, and on the top of her breasts. Her face wasn’t as thin as it once had been, but the worry lines were still as deep as her hollow eye sockets. She frowned and preened until she found the exact right expression on her face that said “I’m a hard-bitten dangerous knife-wielding bitch”. Perfect.

  “I’m doing Bulletproof Punk,” Nessa said. She patted her naked tummy. No one save those who knew how thin she normally was would notice that she was into her 2nd trimester, with twins. Normally, that area went ‘in’. Not anymore.

  “Another scheme of yours to influence modern fashion?” Ken said. “I didn’t think tank-tops went with floor length skirts.”

  “That way my tats show,” Nessa said. Wasn’t this obvious? She couldn’t let Loser Lady #1 outfashion her. She went over to Ken’s suitcase and picked out what she thought he should wear. “Here.”

  “I need to shower. I must stink.”

  “Uh uh. No shower. I want you to stink. You smell just like I want you to smell.” Ooh, this was going to be fun.

  Ken stopped on the way to the bathroom and turned to her. “We’ve got an appointment to talk to Nairobi tomorrow.”

  Ah, Nessa thought. We must be in Kenya already. Must have been a fast plane flight.

  “Meaning what?”

  “We need to settle you down. We’re not going to talk Nairobi out of Uffie if you don’t get back to acting human, soon.”

  “Trust me,” Nessa said. She wiggled her hips and continued to study herself in the mirror. She furrowed her eyebrows until they shouted about her having the urge to whip some slaves. Yah, this’ll do.

  After Ken dressed, she grabbed him by the hand
s and led him down the elevator, into the oppressively hot and humid street, and mentally called over the nearest taxi. Party Boy and Loser Lady #2 piled into the cab with them. Loser Lady #2 loomed over Ken, significantly taller than he was, and looked like she outweighed Nessa and Ken both.

  “Where’d you come from?” Nessa said.

  “We’re your bodyguards, remember?” Party Boy said. “We’re supposed to be invisible until we climb into cabs with you.” Party Boy was mouthy, Nessa remembered from somewhere.

  “Oh,” Nessa said. “If you’re invisible, no wonder I didn’t notice you before. Neat! Did you have fun watching while Ken and I screwed?”

  Party Boy didn’t respond, though his face did turn some amazing colors.

  The chatter-free cab ride ended at the front door of the disco. Nessa grabbed Ken and led him inside, pushing at any minds who thought to stop them or the rest of the guard detail. Well, almost. She let Loser Lady #2 weasel her own way into the disco.

  Nessa danced. Thoughts fled, replaced by loud throbbing music. She recovered Ken’s spent interest quickly. She was good at dancing. Then she took turns dancing with the rest of the crew, although the only one she really enjoyed dancing with was Soft Hand Lady. Whenever Ken’s interest relaxed, she danced with him again. Over time the rest of the crew fell away to the side of the dance floor, exhausted, until only she and Soft Hand Lady remained.

  “You can’t dance me into the ground,” Soft Hand Lady said. “This place will close long before then.” She and Nessa clung to each other during one of the slower more electronica numbers. “Nor can you seduce me like you did with < >.” Loser Lady #1.

  “Oh, you’re plenty seduced,” Nessa said. Besides, Loser Lady #1 had tried and failed to seduce her. Hmph. The only boinking Nessa wanted to do was with Ken.

  “I share the number one sexual deviance among Telepaths and stronger Mindbound,” Soft Hand Lady said, vainly attempting to be off-putting. “I’m asexual.”

  “You talk to Dr. Blackburn or something? That sounds like one of his observations.”

  “Never met the guy,” Soft Hand Lady said. “But I’ve read the articles, especially those by that Joan D’Ark Telepath.”

  “Oh, her,” Nessa said, and snorted. Soft Hand Lady nodded. “She’s a lot less fun in person than she portrays in her articles. For one thing, she’s in her sixties, which you’d never pick up on based on what she writes. She’s also utterly crazy. Not that crazy’s bad or whatever, but it means you might want to take what she writes with a grain of salt.” Nothing like a Telepath dominatrix with a masturbation fetish to mess up world opinion about what the average Telepath wanted out of life. “She’s in hiding, and has been ever since she outed all of us Telepaths, though none of us can figure out why. She’s one of the world’s top ten Telepaths; I think she’s got more up top than I do. She shouldn’t fear anything, any more than I do.” Joanie wouldn’t join up with Alt’s group, either, no matter how nicely Javier pleaded with her. Javier had even promised to take a shower and wear clean clothes. No dice.

  “Why’d she stick her nose out of the closet at all, then?”

  “I think she always wanted to, but she didn’t have it in her to be a one woman show-the-world-that-telepathy-is-real before some of the Gods declared open season on Telepaths.” Nessa paused. “The attitude is ubiquitous among Telepaths. Only the posers and Psychics get into exhibitionism. Or did, before the 99 Gods showed up.” Nessa paused again. “So I’m turning you on so that the rest of your evening is a success, once you get back to your hotel room.”

  “You’re shameless.”

  “I’m a Telepath.”

  “I thought that was down right now.”

  “Well, telepathy is down, but since I have to be functional tomorrow, I’m dancing,” Nessa said. Soft Hand Lady frowned as if Nessa’s comment hadn’t made any sense to her. Nessa poked into Soft Hand Lady’s head and as she had said, Soft Hand Lady wasn’t the least bit turned on by Nessa, just by the situation.

  “What does dancing have to do with anything, other than making Ken insanely jealous?” Soft Hand Lady said.

  “Dancing opens up my mind and sets all the little radishes in my head back in their proper bungee-holies, so I can do all the big things I need to be doing,” Nessa said. When she had everything together, she could do so much!

  And she had, too. Pffft!

  “My memory’s functional again, I’m not drifting my consciousness from sock to sock, and me and the here-and-now are back on speaking terms. Ken? Well, getting Ken jealous has two purposes. One is to get him good and ready to boink me later. Second, I’m helping him get over the effect of the group change on him. Get him to recognize he has to block his psychometric touch again. That’s how he gets his hunches about where things have been and what they’ve done; his trick needs to be under his control, not going off randomly. He spent too much time on the plane ride huddled in a corner and drama queening.”

  “So you’re not going to get angry with me when I turn down the obvious pass you’re making at me?” Soft Hand Lady said.

  “Not at all,” Nessa said. “Remember me in your thoughts, though.” Nessa left Soft Hand Lady behind on the dance floor and strolled over to Ken. “Remember me?” The situational echo rolled through her, and for an instant she felt psychically connected to the nearest million or so people in the city of Nairobi. Dozens of them would soon have mind-numbing déjà vu events happen to them. “I’m ba-ack.”

  Ken radiated anger. “We’re going to the hotel room, now,” he said. He grabbed her arm with his hand and with his telekinesis, tight and rough.

  Nessa turned to wave at the nonplussed and exhaustion-dripping Party Boy, who had been trying to cheer up Ken. “Goodie!” she said.

  11. (Dave)

  Dave finished wiping the last of the breakfast dishes, still smiling from last night. Maybe someday soon, he might be able to help Elorie past her issues with sex. Helping her love herself again would be a good start. Damn if the scars didn’t mess up her ability to consider herself worth loving. They had fought, made up, made progress, even sort of made love. He had gotten a chance to witness one of Elorie’s coping mechanisms for anger – dunking herself in cold water. Sorta strange, sorta cool. In his experience with women, progress seldom occurred in nice, quiet conversations. He suspected it had something to do with the sort of women he fell for.

  “Hey, P-boy, this here trash can needs a little environmental geology,” Jack said, from the workroom. Jack alternated between calling him pussy-boy and spy-boy. P-boy was a step up. None of Elorie’s team appreciated Dave. They didn’t consider his field of expertise relevant, he was only medium athletic, and mostly, they considered him a spy of Dubuque. In this group of people who had fled the Gods by going underground, he might as well have been an axe murderer. Dave had let the abuse get to him, which triggered last night’s fight with Elorie, and so, before breakfast, Elorie had buttonholed Jack outside of everyone’s earshot. Dave had expected the talk to make the situation worse, but whatever she had said to Jack only partly took. Dave glanced at Elorie, who fought a grin.

  Well, what the hell. Dave saw no reason to back down. He went over, emptied Jack’s trash can as requested, then came back to loom over the ex-Navy Seal. Elorie began another slow pass through the workroom, subtly offering support and advice. She ran the group with a light hand and from what he had seen they would do absolutely anything for her. “What exactly are you working on?”

  “Got me some Arabic writings to look through,” Jack said. Dave eyed the thug bodyguard and didn’t shake his head. “Not that you’d understand, since Dubuque didn’t give us someone fluent in any of the important languages of the Ecumenists.” Jack Caravello was as big an asshole as he was tall. If not bigger.

  Dave shrugged. “Dubuque gave what Dubuque gave.” Georgia Kelly, PhD archeologist and Cal Tech professor until she got paranoid and went into hiding after the 99 Gods showed, had quizzed Dave on languages during his first day on the
team. She gave up on him when he had told her he could only speak English and Spanish. “I also read German, actually, technical German, if you’ve got a use for that.”

  The women’s cabin, the largest of this collection of cabins by a backwoods Cascade Mountains lake, doubled as the team’s workspace. They had been located here because of its safety. Given the current anti-God sentiments, Portland would have had to provide them bodyguards otherwise. They were also here because John Lorenzi currently lived in another cabin on the lake, Lorenzi being the putative sponsor of the Ecumenist quest. The small nameless lake was a glacial lake, not a Midwestern sandy-bottomed kettle lake but a silty lake formed when a mountain glacier’s moraine blocked a stream. Dave didn’t mention that little appetizer of wisdom to this company.

  The crew had a weight machine set up in the room next door. Lisa Nguyen stopped her leg presses and looked at Dave. She was an international private detective and she took frequent breaks from her intense and so far fruitless Ecumenist skip-trace computer work to iron out the kinks, either on the weight machine, the treadmill or the stationary bicycle. He had talked to Lisa enough to know she had something akin to photographic memory or total recall. She, too, always paid attention to everything going on around her.

  The entire cabin reeked of locker room, which didn’t bother any of the others in the crew. Given that they all regularly worked out on the machines and used them as the center of their group socialization, this didn’t surprise Dave.

  Lisa came up to Dave and asked him a question in German.

  Dave shrugged and answered. “Five years, high school through college. I know enough to make out what someone says if they speak slowly, but I can’t speak a word of German without embarrassing myself. Reading science journal papers in German’s more my speed.”