“I want to help.” Cassandra ducked her head. “I just can’t right now.” She shrugged, spoke in a voice so low I think only Dave and I heard her. “Maybe love really is blind.”
Dave stared at her for a couple of beats before his whole countenance lifted, as if a plastic surgeon had slid a computer printout in front of his actual face and said, “See, I can make you look ten years younger!”
Before our newest couple could get with the romance, I turned to Bergman. “We need to figure out how our traitor is contacting the Wizard. Nobody left the farmhouse, but either the Wizard or one of his apprentices knew to raise those zombies. What’s that tell you?”
“The mole was probably carrying a bug. Or, more likely, had planted it on somebody else. So the Wizard knew all about the reavers. But he still had to signal the necromancer to raise the zombies, because he wouldn’t have risked coming close enough for you or Cole to sense him.” Bergman looked at Dave, who couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off Cassandra, who suddenly found the bedspread fascinating. “Yo, Romeo.” Bergman waved his hands, like a flight deck crew member clearing his pilot for takeoff.
“Uh, yeah.” Dave smirked in a way I hadn’t seen him do since he was eighteen. Good grief, what had happened to our badass military man? Had he truly been taken down by the blurry-eyed psychic?
“I’m thinking silent signal,” Bergman went on, eyeing the couple doubtfully. I wasn’t sure they were listening either. “There are a couple of different methods they might have used. We can test for them if you want. Of course we’ll have to fly to Mars for the equipment, but I’m sure we’ll be back in time for supper.”
Bergman raised his eyebrows at me as Dave glanced at Cassandra and nodded. “He’s got it bad,” Miles whispered.
“And vice versa,” I replied.
“What’re we going to do?” Cole muttered. “We need Dave in his right mind. After all, he’s kind of in charge.”
Actually, if you wanted to be anal about it, Vayl was in charge. But I wasn’t in the mood for technicalities at the moment. I took a second to observe my twin as he leaned toward Cassandra, whose hand he had not relinquished, and murmured into her ear. For a second I couldn’t place his expression, it had been that long since I’d seen it.
“He’s also happy,” I told them. And I realized, whether Vayl had been right or wrong about my reaction to it, I had to back off and let this relationship run its course. “Let’s give him that, at least for the next few minutes.” I was pretty sure neither one of them noticed when we left the room.
Chapter Ten
Cole, Bergman, and I reconvened in the girls’ bedroom. After a repeat of the flying card trick, we discovered no bugs. Not surprising. Still, we all huddled on the silver-framed bed and spoke in the hushed voices of those who are about to tell some truly gruesome ghost stories.
“Okay,” I said, “we have three suspects who we need to learn a lot about in a short amount of time without them realizing we’re doing research. Any ideas?”
“Get ’em all drunk and hire some strippers,” Cole said immediately. “You’ll find out everything you need to know in twenty minutes.”
“Nice plan,” I drawled, “in Miami. However I feel there might be a shortage of strippers in Tehran. And I believe you informed us the preferred drink here is tea.”
Cole, having run out of fingernails, began gnawing on the button of his shirt. He spat it out immediately. “Plastic sucks,” he said. “Dammit, I need gum!”
“I’m out,” I replied. “Here, chew on this.” I shoved up the sleeve of my light blue tunic, unbuckled the sheath I kept strapped around my right wrist, laid the syringe of holy water on the bedside table, and handed him the rest. “I imagine it tastes like old shoe, but the leather’s probably good for your teeth. Plus, maybe it’ll help zap your brain back to reality.” I shook my head. “Booze and strippers. Geesh!”
Bergman tapped me on the knee. “I’ve been thinking about the ways the mole might be contacting the Wizard.”
“Go on.”
“He’s carrying a transmitter on him, no doubt about that. But it may even be embedded under the skin, so I wouldn’t recommend searching for it as your first means of digging him out. He’s got to have a way to either power it up or key it to send messages. So we need to watch for odd gestures that don’t seem to fit with what he’s saying or doing at the time.”
“That seems easy enough,” said Cole. He began touching himself in random places. “These are my dad’s old baseball signals,” he told us as he pressed his thumb to the side of his nose, tugged his left earlobe, and slid the side of his hand across his chest. “I’m telling you to bunt, run like hell, and then if they throw you out at first, go to the concession stand and get me a Dr Pepper.”
“I hardly think it’ll be that obvious,” said Bergman.
“You never know,” Cole insisted. “When a guy’s scratching his nuts, they don’t always itch.”
“Okay.” I held up my hands. “No more testicular discussions. No more baseball. Though I can see how you got from one to the other pretty quickly, Cole, I am now certain the heat that built up inside that semi trailer during our ride here has boiled your brain. Bergman, anything else we should look out for?”
He began fiddling with his bootlace. “It seems stupid when I think about saying it now.”
I wasn’t sure how a guy with a genius the size of a small country could still worry about looking foolish in front of his buds, but I was beginning to think his troubles would drastically reduce if he could just find himself a good woman. Somebody to give him a daily dose of feel-good whether he needed it or not. I sure didn’t have the patience for it. “Dude, spit it out. If we laugh, you can punch us both.”
“But not in the arm,” said Cole. “I’m still sore from all those shots they gave us before we flew over here. You can punch me in the stomach, but give me time to get ready. Houdini died because some guy didn’t warn him first, you know.”
I regarded Cole with the thinning patience of a kindergarten teacher who has neglected to take her Zoloft. “What the hell is up with you?”
“I am experiencing a deep-seated need to blow a bubble,” he informed me.
I took his right hand, which held my syringe sheath, and shoved the leather in his mouth. It was like giving E.J. her pacifier. Instant relaxation of the facial muscles. Full-body quiver, as if a wave of stress had just exited his epidermis. And yet, at the back of his eyes lurked a tight black ball of tension that promised to explode the second he stopped chewing. Nope, Cole wasn’t just stressed about the lack of bubble gum. Something much bigger had him twisted like a pretzel. I could probe, but I’d never get anywhere with another guy in the room. It was part of their Code. I didn’t understand it. But I respected it. Like demanding silence while using the urinal. Some things men just wouldn’t say in front of other men.
I turned to Bergman. “Go on.”
“You guys are Sensitive’s, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, it seems to me the mole might be another. He could be communicating with the Wizard through telepathic or other non-traditional means. In which case one of you should be able to sense him.”
“But we haven’t,” I said.
Bergman nodded. “All that could mean is that he’s somehow shielded himself. In which case, you might be able to sense the shield.”
Cole and I looked at each other doubtfully. In the short time we’d known each other we’d learned our Sensitivities differed quite a bit. We could both detect vampires. But only I could tell when reavers were around. Cole was better at picking out witches and weres. And the powers our Sensitivities gave us differed greatly as well. The fact that so far neither of us had noticed anything amiss among David’s crew didn’t do much for Bergman’s second theory. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to give it a spin,” I told Cole.