Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

  Almost dead center of the crowd shot, several people were walking away from the photographer, cutting through the mob. One of them was looking back over her shoulder, looking right into the camera.

  Vasco pointed at her. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  She showed him a weak smile.

  “8 October 1968,” he said. “That’s when I knew for sure you’d told me the truth.”

  “Vasco—”

  They both jumped when the phone rang.

  [ 9 ]

  Deep in the well, the Cobra hit water. Blue lightning bolts, orange sparks lit up the black hole, reaching up with diminishing strength . . . flashing bursts of white light . . . fading . . .

  Antoine slammed the cover down over the well. Leo limped up, Mattieu’s arm around him. He saw what they had done and nodded.

  Jagger turned to run to the apartments when he saw Antoine lay his forearm on the well cover and lean over it. Jagger threw up his hand. “Don’t—”

  Muted, echoing gunfire sounded from the well, and a barrage of bullets ripped through the cover, spraying splinters into the air and turning the wood-board ceiling above it into a colander. Antoine jumped back, stumbled into the wall. Wide-eyed, he examined himself, patting his chest and stomach. He looked at the others. “I’m all right.”

  “We’ve gotta find out what those shots were,” Jagger said. But he wasn’t going to do it without a gun; he’d left his in the tunnel. He rushed back into the main court, glancing up at the front wall’s top edge, the night sky beyond it. He picked up Luca’s pistol and paused. Over the sound of his own heavy breathing and the blood rushing in his head, he heard the whirling of a Cobra’s engine coming at him from the alley that ended at the burning bush. It had come around and was following them. The sound of another Cobra joined the first. He couldn’t see them yet, seconds away.

  He returned to the others. “Two Cobras heading this way.”

  He shifted hid gaze toward his apartment, seeing only the rooftops and spires that blocked it.

  You need to check on them, “Leo said. “Go, I’ll take care of tthe cobras.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  But it was Jagger who did: “Their ejector ports . . . that’s where the spent shells came out. Jam something into them . . .”

  “Got it,” Leo said, pushing him.

  “A pen . . . a . . . a . . .” Jagger said, thinking.

  “Go!”

  Jagger brushed past Antoine and said to him, “Come with me.”

  They ran past the bell tower, heading for the stairs that would take them up to the apartments. They reached the Fatimid mosque: built within the monastery during the thirteenth century to appease Muslim rulers, it had never been used because its qibla wall was not properly oriented toward Mecca; Jagger had wondered how intentional that mistake had been. They were rushing along the side of the mosque, almost to the Garden Gate—Past the mosque, around the storage building, straight to the stairs . . . is this gun loaded? Has to be . . . up the stairs—when a figure darted in front of them, left to right. It was the attacker in the steampunk outfit, his trench coat flapping behind him. He was coming from the direction of the apartments, beelining toward the northwest corner of the monastery.

  Jagger raised his pistol and squeezed off a shot, hitting the wall behind the intruder, who disappeared behind a building.

  Jagger quickly backed away from the side of the mosque to give himself a perspective of the apartments’ top floor. He could see his door—closed—and window, illuminated from the inside. It made him believe all was well up there, that Beth and Tyler were safe. The pressure in his chest eased, just a little.

  Antoine started after Steampunk, but Jagger grabbed his arm, pointed. “Check where he came from, the apartments. I heard gunshots and someone scream.” Then he went after the man himself.

  First he could hear him on the stairs leading to the second-floor monk cells, where he had lain when he observed the assault team exiting the helicopter. He wondered if his being there had alerted the bad guys to an easy place to breach the compound.

  He rounded a corner and got a visual: a dark figure almost to the top. The silhouette of the crossbow rose up from his back, its limbs like a stickman’s umbrella. Jagger hit the stairs just as Steampunk was pulling himself onto the steep porch roof.

  Jagger stopped and aimed—hard to pinpoint his target against the blackness of the porch and roof. “Freeze!”

  The man kept moving, a shifting shadow among deeper shadows.

  Jagger fired. The shadow continued its climb. He pulled the trigger again, but the weapon didn’t fire. He grabbed the slide to yank it back and eject any shell that might be jammed; it wouldn’t move. This was the reason professional shooters avoided using another person’s gun: you never knew if it was functioning properly, how often or recently it had been cleaned. Jagger was willing to bet firearm maintenance wasn’t high on the monks’ priority list. With a growl of frustration, he threw it down.

  He bolted up the remaining steps, swung around a support post, and jumped onto the railing. A loud thump told him Steampunk had slipped and fallen. Jagger pulled himself onto the roof as the guy was reclaiming his feet and stepping onto the flat roof. Jagger got to the same place without slipping and sprang for Steampunk, who had climbed onto the top of the wall, four feet higher than the roof, and was beginning to stand. Jagger grabbed the hem of the trench coat and yanked.

  Steampunk jerked backward. He spun and came down on one knee, facing Jagger—that leather mask, those brass-framed goggles, the gas-mask tube and canister swinging like an elephant’s trunk. His right arm rose high, crossing over his face. Jagger caught the glint of a sword, which Steampunk swung in a diagonal slice that would cleave Jagger’s head like a pineapple.

  Jagger ducked, felt the blade brush over his hair.

  As Steampunk’s sword swooped in a rising arc, his body twisted with it, and his left arm, acting as a counterbalance, swung in front of Jagger’s face. Jagger grabbed at it, seizing his wrist. Without missing a beat, Steampunk’s sword came down again. Jagger raised his prosthetic arm, and the blade struck it hard. Jagger twisted his fake arm around and clamped RoboHand on his opponent’s other wrist. He tried to squeeze it, to break the bones—RoboHand had the power to do it . . . when it was working.

  Steampunk wrenched his wrist out of the malfunctioning hook and raised the sword again. He tugged with his other arm, trying to free it from Jagger’s real hand.

  Jagger pulled at it and heaved his body back. He had to change the dynamic of the fight, and the first thing he thought to do was yank Steampunk off his perch, get him on the roof, maybe throw him off it.

  It didn’t work out that way.

  [ 10 ]

  Balanced on the fortress’s wall four feet above Jagger, Steampunk must have realized Jagger’s intentions to pull him off. He threw his whole body back.

  Jagger’s grip slid to Steampunk’s gloved hand, to something he was holding. About the size of a soda bottle, but rough and rectangular—a shard of stone. As the men fell away from each other, Jagger’s fingers clutched at it, gripped it, ripped it out of Steampunk’s hand.

  Jagger landed on his back, and his head cracked hard against the flat roof. White light popped in his vision like a camera flash. He squeezed his eyes closed, opened them. He was seeing stars, literally: millions of them in the night sky above him, seeming brighter than ever, larger, closer. And they were moving, swirling and zipping. He viewed them through a patina of rippling, translucent colors: green, orange, purple. It was much like the aurora borealis, but more see-through, almost invisible, and instead of a mere ribbon across the sky, this filled the firmament from horizon to horizon.

  All this he grasped in seconds, and while he felt an urge, like the first tugs of a developing appetite, to take it all in, study it for a time, his mind snapped back to the urgency of his situation. He focused on Steampunk, rising to his feet on the wall above him
—and the man wasn’t alone. Another attacker stood at his side, nearly clinging to him.

  The second man’s gruesome minotaur face was too perfect, too animated to be anything but professionally applied makeup and the kind of prosthetic appliances they use in movies. His broad nose wrinkled when he snarled; his mouth opened obscenely wide, revealing lion fangs, dripping thick saliva; his eyes were black orbs. Shaggy black hair flowed over twisted bat ears and hung past his shoulders. His arms were disproportionately long—gorilla arms—and one of them was draped over Steampunk’s shoulders. His pants appeared to be made out of animal pelts. No shirt, muscles that made the other muscular attacker look malnourished. Dust or ashes floated off him, as though he’d rolled in soot.

  It occurred to Jagger that he might be hallucinating; like the stars, this beast’s appearance was a result of cracking his head. Or . . . Steampunk wore a gas mask. The man had sprayed him with a hallucinogen. That had to be it.

  No, there’d been no spray. A slight concussion, then, nothing serious.

  Then a monkey appeared. It was small and emaciated, with mangy fur clinging in spots to greasy gray skin. It skittered up the beast’s body, mounted his head, then leapt to Steampunk’s shoulder. It looked at Jagger with human eyes and showed him a mouth full of needle teeth. It shrieked, a chattering, laugh-like sound.

  The beast glared at Jagger, appearing to smile wickedly, perversely. His head rotated on a tree trunk of a neck, and he whispered in Steampunk’s ear.

  Steampunk reached over his shoulder and brought back the crossbow. He checked the weapon, already loaded with a two-foot arrow, the tip a thick metal stud shaped like the bottom two inches of an ice-cream cone. He raised the stock to his shoulder and aimed it like a rifle.

  This is going to hurt, Jagger thought. For the first time since rediscovering his immortality, he was glad about it. He wasn’t ready to leave Beth and Tyler.

  Steampunk’s hulking, Halloween-happy friend whispered in his ear again, and Steampunk grinned. He lowered the crossbow to look over it at Jagger.

  A voice emanated from the canister at the end of the gas-mask tube, sounding like the scratchy, unreal voices coming out of an old-time radio. “This will pin you down. I’ll use the sword to send you home.”

  He knows, Jagger thought. He knows I’m immortal. He’s going to cut my head off. Panic pulsed through him like atomic bombs, matching the pounding of his heart. And each one carried with it a single thought—

  Beat: Lord, take care of my family.

  Steampunk raised his weapon.

  Beat: I’m sorry I doubted You.

  Steampunk thumbed off the safety.

  Beat: God, forgive me.

  Light blinded him, and his first thought was that the crossbow’s arrow struck without his witnessing its flight, the pain so great his mind turned the sensation into light on his brain’s way to shutting down.

  No, Steampunk hadn’t fired. A helicopter, then. Its spotlight just switched on.

  As suddenly as the light had appeared, it was gone.

  A man was standing over Jagger, a foot on either side of his chest, and he was on fire. Jagger saw no flames, but glowing orange embers fell off of him. Correction: they didn’t really fall as much as they swirled, billowing away from him, then flowing back toward him. Moving, dancing, the sparks from a raging fire caught in a turbulent, chaotic wind.

  The man rushed toward Steampunk, visible to Jagger beyond the man’s right hip.

  Steampunk fired.

  As the arrow left the bow, the man’s hand moved faster than Jagger could track it—not there, then there—and touched the flying arrow. It thunked into the roof beside Jagger’s ear. The man laid a finger to the tip of one of the crossbow’s lathes. The string snapped, whipped up, and fell, dangling from the end of the other lathe.

  Steampunk’s goggles aimed at the broken string, at the arrow protruding from the roof, then at Jagger. “Lucky you,” he said through the canister. To the man who had deflected the arrow and broken the string, he paid no attention at all.

  But his beastly compatriots did. The monkey-thing shrieked at him, turned in a circle on Steampunk’s shoulder, then jumped down and scrambled away.

  The beast roared, drew a battle axe with a head the size of a guillotine blade, and swung it at the man. The sparkling embers swirling around the man sailed forward on their side of him and came together in front, in a blink forming a sort of shield—it looked to Jagger like a force field in a big-budget science fiction movie, shimmering orange translucence. The blade clanged against it, skated off.

  The shield broke apart, once again becoming embers flying around the man. They whipped around him to come together behind him, two columns at his shoulder blades, like dual scuba tanks extending from waist to head. They unraveled outward and upward, appearing to form—Jagger could think of no other word—wings. They fluttered, and the man jumped/flew to the top of the wall, five, six feet to Steampunk’s side.

  The beast—behind Steampunk now—was hoisting his axe over his head, turning to aim it at the man, who thrust out his foot in a linear forward kick to the beast’s stomach. The beast staggered back, out of Jagger’s sight. The man—embers zipping around him, fluttering around him—drew a sword that shone with scarlet light, making Jagger think of rubies. Pursuing the beast, the man dashed forward, disappearing beyond the edge of the wall.

  Steampunk picked up his own sword and jumped down to the roof. His canister said, “We’ll do it the hard way.”

  Jagger started to rise. Steampunk planted a booted foot on his chest and pushed him down. The sword was already over his head, arcing down.

  Jagger raised RoboHand, and in the chaotic muddle of his panicked brain he remembered a term he’d always thought was achingly sad: defensive wounds. He imagined the blade severing his prosthetic midforearm on its way to his neck. He wondered if the coroner would label his sliced fake arm a defensive wound.

  A shot rang out, and a spark sprang from the sword’s handle. The weapon clattered to the roof. Steampunk stumbled back, holding his right hand in his left. He dropped onto all fours at Jagger’s feet and scrambled over Jagger’s legs and torso, a wild animal going for the throat. He stopped when his face was over Jagger’s, Jagger’s twin reflections staring back at him from the black glass of the goggles. The gas canister rested on Jagger’s chest, and Steampunk’s voice came out of it: “Like I said, lucky you.” He sprang up, and as he did he grabbed the thing Jagger had taken from him and yanked it out of his hand. Jagger’s vision blurred and his eyes filled with tears. When he blinked them away, Steampunk was gone.

  “Jagger!”

  Jagger craned his head around. He was closer to the edge of the roof than he’d realized. He could see over it, down the sloping porch roof to Mattieu, whose head, shoulders, and chest rose up from that roof’s far edge, his forearms bracing him there. One hand was tilted up. It held a gun.

  Jagger’s mouth dropped open. Beside Mattieu, a man was perched on the edge the roof, crouching there with both hands over the monk’s, helping him hold the gun. The glowing embers Jagger had seen swirling around the first man also danced in the air over this one. They had formed into huge wings extending from the man’s back, slowly moving in unison, beating the air, like hands treading water.

  “Are you okay?” Mattieu said. “Are you hurt?”

  Jagger blinked. “Who’s that?”

  “Mattieu.”

  “No, the man with you.”

  “What?” Mattieu said. “Are you all right?”

  The man stood, and Jagger realized he was translucent. He could see the domed top of the mosque’s minaret through him.

  “Who are you?” Jagger said.

  “It’s me, Mattieu! Jag, don’t move, okay? I think you’re injured.”

  “No . . .” Jagger rolled over and got on his hands and knees. When he raised his head, the man had disappeared.

  [ 11 ]

  Nevaeh stepped through the opening in the hedge and o
nto the beach before answering.

  “Where are you?” Toby said in a rush.

  “Busy.” She glanced back at Vasco, who was leaning over the magazine, staring at the picture. She turned toward the water, saw a couple walking hand in hand through the surf, the sun showing only a sliver of shimmering light behind them, as though the ocean were on fire out there. “What is it?”

  “You’re not at St. C’s, are you?”

  “You know I’m not. Why would you think—?”

  “Someone’s attacking it.”

  “What? The monastery? When?”

  “Right now! It started about a half hour ago. A helicopter came in, then there was an explosion, smoke coming from the gate. Looked like the copter tried to get inside the walls, but someone shot a missile at it.”

  “At the monastery?”

  “At the helicopter. It came from inside St. C’s.”

  “A missile?”

  “Yes! It missed. It went streaking up into the sky and exploded. Freaked the helicopter pilot out. The copter did loopty-loops and got out of there.”

  “It’s gone? The attackers left?” The sun dropped completely below the horizon. Nevaeh felt colder already.

  “The copter landed. I’m on the roof of the Southwest Range Building, jumped right up the back wall. These boots are sick. But I still can’t see anything.”

  Gunfire sounded in the distance. Sounded like a war.

  The whos and whys of the situation—answers to which Toby was obviously clueless—pushed the blood harder into her brain, making it throb.

  “What about Beth?” she said. “Where’s Jagger’s wife?”

  “I think she’s still in the apartment with the boy.”

  It dawned on her that other Immortals—Tribe defectors—might have heard of Ben’s death and Beth’s part in it and wanted her for themselves. She said, “Are they after her, you think?”