by Vox Day
“I’d be delighted to sink these into those delectable curves of yours, darling Melusine. And, if you give me any reason to believe that you have forsaken Albion, don’t think I shall hesitate to indulge myself.”
Already holding Jehuel’s hand, Puck seized hers with all the speed of an adder striking. Alarmed, she tried to pull away, but it was too late. His razor-tipped smile widened as she felt a rush of demonic power ripping her out of the material world and hurling her right through the lower three shadows into the dark, unyielding cold of the hungry void.
She screamed, but she could not hear the sound of her own voice, nor even feel her spirit. Her sole link to reality was the crushing, vise-like grip on her left hand. She clung to the pain as if it were a lifeline, until at last, despite her fierce struggles, the bitter cold began to anesthetize it. Slowly, relentlessly, the saving agony subsided, until finally all feeling, all sense of self, was gone, and she drowned in the midnight sea of nothingness.
Chapter 17
One, Three, Two, Three
What has Kant got to do with the platypus? Nothing. As we shall see from the dates, he couldn’t have had anything to do with it. And this should suffice to justify the title and its use of an incongruous set that sounds like a tribute to Bogres’s ancient Chinese encyclopedia.
—Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus
Christopher eyed the small wooden building hidden behind the thick copse of trees. Partially protected by a hedge, its forward location still seemed like a risky spot for the German panzershreck he feared, and he was desperate to take out the machine gun hindering his assault on the outskirts of the town. But he knew the German commander well, a gambler who liked nothing better than beating unfavorable odds.
He reached hesitantly for the little tank, his fingers touching lightly on the camouflage paint job he’d applied just last night, then drew his hand away. Don wouldn’t dare, would he? The building was exposed, so even if his men managed to burn the tank, they ran the risk of seeing their main line of retreat cut off by Christopher’s lead platoon.
“Chicken,” Don made clucking sounds. “Man, if you keep taking this long to make up your mind, I’m going to have to insist on chess clocks.”
Christopher glared at his friend and came to a decision. The Jagdpanzer was to the south, which meant that the anti-tank weapon he was concerned about should be somewhere in its vicinity, protecting the tank destroyer’s poorly armored flanks. He picked up the miniature Churchill, more decisively this time. Once he could bring its seventy-five millimeter main armament to bear on the machine gun’s position, Don’s northern flank would crack and it would only be a matter of time before his elite British troops swept the Nazis from the small Italian town.
“Startup, one,” he called out movement points as the tank went into motion. “Rotate vehicle heading, two. Three. Four….”
He paused expectantly. His tank was now adjacent to the wooden building, and if Don’s half-squad was hiding there, this would be the ideal moment to fire. But Don said nothing. Christopher smiled to himself, pleased at calling his friend’s bluff, before moving the tank again.
“Five. Six—”
“Wait,” Don held up a hand. With the other, he plucked a painted pair of kneeling soldiers from one end of the table and placed them in the building. “Hold it right there. These bad boys pop up to send a little HEAT love up the wazoo of that Churchill. They’ve got the ‘shreck, of course.” He picked up a little blue counter and waggled it triumphantly.
“But… I mean… I thought… then why didn’t you fire when I was in T-Nine?” Christopher was shaken by the belated ambush. “Side armor is the same as rear on the Churchills, so it’s not like your To Kill is any different.”
“Oh, I know that,” Don admitted gleefully as he picked up his pair of custom-made precision dice. The pips were tiny death’s heads, white-on-black and black-on-red, which he used only when playing Germans. He had a pair for every nationality, except the Axis Minors. “I just wanted to see the look on your face after you thought you were in the clear!”
Chagrined, Christopher resisted the urge to whine, or at the very least, pound the wooden table on which the intricate miniature battlefield was assembled. He gritted his teeth and hoped desperately for boxcars.
“Are you going to eat the backblast?” he asked, searching for a silver lining.
“Nope,” Don announced fearlessly as he flicked his wrist. “To Hit is a … seven. Bang! That’s a hit. To Kill… twenty-six minus eight… now what is that?”
“Oh, shut up,” Christopher answered sourly. Even on his worst day, he could roll less than eighteen with two six-sided dice.
“To Kill is a… ten. Kaboom! That doesn’t burn it, though, so you can still make your crew survival.”
Christopher sighed and rolled his own dice. A matching pair of sixes stared up at him mockingly. Well, there’s your boxcars, he thought with bitterness. It might as well have been the roll for his personal morale check. His dice were clearly cursed by the dice gods today, and the odds that the good people of Sinagoga were going to be freed from their Teutonic oppressors were looking increasingly remote.
“And they don’t make it! Oh, the humanity!” Don pumped his fist. “That’s the one thing I was worried about. I didn’t want them surviving to tie up my guys in close combat.”
Christopher was trying, and failing, to come up with an appropriately cutting retort when the door at the top of the basement stairs was opened.
“Hello, earth to geekworld!” It was Jami. “Christopher, Rachel’s on the phone. Do you want to talk to her, or should I tell her you’re too busy killing elves or whatever?”
“Rachel?”
Christopher pushed himself away from the table and leaped to his feet. He heard Don burst out in mocking laughter behind him as he ran rapidly up the stairs, taking two at a time. But the call couldn’t have come at a better time. His dice certainly needed the break.
Jami rolled her eyes as her brother bounded up from the basement and into the kitchen, imperiously demanding the phone with an outstretched hand. Annoyed, she refused to relinquish it and continued talking on the cordless, fending him off with her free hand.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m doing good,” she told her friend. “Jason and I are going out after the game tonight. No, I think Holli’s doing something with Angie and Brittany. I don’t know what.”
“She didn’t call to talk to you,” Christopher hissed.
“You don’t know that,” Jami shot back, and she returned her attention to the receiver. Rachel was suggesting something about a future shopping trip. “Sure, let’s do that. Next time we’ll blow off the boys and go to the mall or whatever. Sounds good. He’s right here. Okay, bye.”
She finally relented and handed him the cordless.
“See, that wasn’t so bad, was it,” she commented airily. Christopher ignored her, of course, and immediately began babbling about his ridiculous game. Poor Rachel. Jason had his own weird little boy things, of course, they all did, but Jason’s were at least kind of cute. Well, not totally lame, anyhow. But since her brother insisted on living in the same house with her, she couldn’t entirely escape his occasional monologues on elven dragon tanks or whatever the latest dork thing was.
And while it was within the realm of possibility that there were bigger wastes of time than spending hours pretending to be a general of a painted toy army, she’d never actually encountered one in person. Well, it was possible that listening to someone talk about it was even worse. Fortunately, a sister wasn’t actually expected to pay attention or remember any of it. Girlfriends, on the other hand, weren’t quite so lucky.
Feeling bored, she wandered out into the living room. After two months of summer freedom, she was almost started to dread the early part of the afternoon. They weren’t as bad as those awful wintry school mornings, of course, where you were forced to leave your nice comfy bed in order to freeze your tush off in the pre-dawn dark, but they were tough
, especially on game days like this. It was barely one o’clock, way too early to start getting up for the game, but not too soon for that nervous feeling of dread and anticipation that kept you on edge and would not let you get comfortable. The ham-and-swiss sandwich she’d had for lunch seemed to lie in her stomach like a rock and she almost regretted having eaten it, although bitter experience had taught her that when you didn’t eat anything, you ended up playing in a weird light-headed sort of fog. Which never worked out well.
Sighing heavily, she lowered herself to the floor with tender care and began stretching out her legs. Her left hamstring was tweaking a bit and she still had an ugly purple bruise on her left shin from last week’s game, but that was her own stupid fault for not wearing shin pads. One… two… three…. She counted to ten, relaxed, then reached out again for another five-count.
She was just switching legs for the second time when she heard her sister coming down the stairs.
“Do you always stretch out like this beforehand? I mean, for a date?”
“Shut up, you know I’ve got a game tonight.”
“Actually, I didn’t,” Holli corrected her. “I was just going to ask if you and Jase wanted to go to church with me, but I guess that’s out if you’re playing tonight.”
“You’re not going tomorrow morning? I thought you were going out with Angie tonight.” Jason wasn’t much for church anyway, but that was a subject she preferred to avoid.
“Yeah. Her and Brittany are going to pick me up there after the service gets out. I’m going to see if I can talk Christopher into driving me.”
Jami snorted. “Well, if you want to do your good deed for the day, see if you can get him off the phone and rescue Rachel. He was giving her the play-by-play from today’s geek war.”
“Oh, the poor thing!” Holli made a sympathetic face as she looked out the window towards the driveway. “I forgot Don was coming over. Is that his new car? Hmmm… I guess I would have figured him for more of a pickup guy. So, was it army guys or elves today?”
“Like I care?”
“It doesn’t hurt to show an interest.”
Jami eyed her twin skeptically. Yeah, right.
“Well, not if you’re faking it,” Holli admitted. “Hey, you never know what kind of secret boy stuff might be useful. It’s, like, cracking the guy code. I mean, say you ran into this really cute guy, and then you find out he’s into, I don’t know, Warhammer or whatever. You ask him if he plays Orcs or Skaven, and bang, he’ll dump ten lingerie models to go out with you.”
Jami rolled her eyes and pulled her legs into a butterfly position. She’d rather microwave her soccer boots and eat them for dinner than spend even one more second than she had to thinking about dork world. But she was pleased to see that Holli was starting to think about boys again. She even had a little sparkle in her eyes that had been all too rare of late. It wasn’t that her sister had completely fallen apart after the prom shootings last spring, nor was it all that strange that she still hadn’t started seeing anyone less than four months after losing her boyfriend to the deadly machinations of the Fallen, but the strangely serious expression that was all-too-often on her face sometimes made Jami feel as if a stranger was living in her twin’s body. Holli seldom talked anymore about her two favorite subjects, fashion and boys, and three months of unread Glamours, Cosmos and InStyles were piled in the corner of her room.
“There’s two problems with that,” she declared.
“What’s that?”
“One, you might as well wish for a unicorn, because the geek hotty does not exist. He’s just a figment of imagination dreamed-up by fat-legged smart girls who wear glasses and own the complete Harry Potter, including the DVDs and action figures. You have to either be fat and greasy or skinny and pimply to be a game geek. It’s the law. And second of all, I already have a boyfriend, so even if he did exist, what do I care?”
Holli made a face at her.
“It’s the principle, Jami. Like, for the football players, you have to know which teams are in which divisions, and who’s the quarterback on each team. For the brains, you just need to mention the name of a few books like Siddhartha and the Republic—you don’t actually have to read them, thank goodness—and you tell the guys who are all into money and stuff that you think it’s kind of funny how Intel is on both the Nasdaq and the Dow.”
“What about the stoners?” Jami asked, wondering just how much thought Holli had put into this.
“DARE is the dumbest thing ever, and you can make all kinds of things out of hemp, like sweaters and rope,” Holli responded immediately. Jami laughed and held up a hand, which her sister high-fived with enthusiasm. She had to give Holli full props for that last one, since she knew her sister had no time for the smelly, shaggy crew who hung out on the big rock in the middle of the parking lot.
“Okay, I’m impressed. But don’t they ever catch you out? I mean, you never read anything except your magazines.” Not that she’d even read them much lately.
“Nope,” Holli shook her head, “all you have to do is get them started, then ask questions every now and then. Haven’t you ever notice that once a guy starts talking, you practically have to hit him over the head to get him to stop?”
Actually, that was kind of true, Jami realized. Even when she and Jason were talking about soccer, he was the one who did most of it. And when he ran out of things to say, one little statement on her part was enough to set him off again for another ten minutes.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I never really thought about it. But why are you telling me this? I mean, I’m the one with the boyfriend.”
“Yeah, but you’re not going to be dating him forever, are you? Have you guys even talked yet about what you’re going to do when he goes to Ohio?”
Jami frowned at her sister, suddenly displeased. She didn’t necessarily disagree with what Holli was suggesting, after all, Jason was leaving for college in another six weeks. She even knew, when she made herself think about it, that his departure would probably change the nature of their relationship. College guys always ditched their hometowns, and if they didn’t do it ahead of time, they did it when they came back for Christmas break, which was even worse. It wasn’t a good thing or a bad thing, that was just how it was, and Jami had seen it happen to too many girls at Mounds Park to believe that it would be any different for her and Jason. Even if she didn’t want to. But she knew one thing for sure. She had no intention of getting sucked into that hometown trap, pining away for a boy who wasn’t even thinking about you while he was running around with college girls. If he didn’t get around to breaking up with her before he left, then she’d just have to do it for him.
Still, she didn’t think it was very nice of Holli to rub her nose in it like that. That was another thing that had changed since last spring. Her sister was more insensitive now, her mood was often darker and she dwelled on the negative more than she ever had before. It wasn’t as if she’d completely changed, but sometimes, like now, her normally fine-tuned social skills appeared to disappear.
“So, maybe I’ll just find another soccer player,” Jami answered indifferently.
Her tone must have been sharp, as Holli was quick to apologize. “Look, I’m sorry. That came out wrong, okay? I don’t want you to think I’m jealous or anything, because I’m not. It’s just that I don’t want to see you get too wrapped up in something that might make you, you know, miss out on things next year.”
Jami met her sister’s eyes and made a little back-and-forth motion with both her hands on either side of her hips.
“Summer lovin’ it happened so fast…” she sang sarcastically. “Come on, Hollywood, if Olivia Newton John could survive it, so can I. Now, please tell me you’re not already thinking about who’s going to ask you to Homecoming. It’s, like, four months away and we haven’t even met the new guys yet. There’s always one or two cuties that transfer in.”
“Me?” Holli looked horrified. “Oh, no, I couldn’t… I do
n’t think I’m ready to go out with anyone yet. I was thinking about who you could go with.”
“My boyfriend hasn’t even left yet, Holli! Gee whiz, can you lay off until he’s gone, at least?”
“Sorry, you’re right. I don’t know, I guess it’s just easier for me to think about, you know, what you’re going to do next, not me.” It was more the flicker of pain in her eyes than her words that mollified Jami.
“S’allright. And I suppose it doesn’t do me any good to just try to pretend it isn’t going to happen. I mean, part of me wishes that we could just, I don’t know, be in love and never have to think about him going out with college girls and stuff, but then, it’s not like I even want to get married.”
“To Jason?”
“To anyone!” Jami made a face. “I’m going to be a professional soccer player somewhere, here or maybe over in Europe if they don’t start up a new WUSA—hey, why is it that the TV channels will pay all that money to show stupid golf, which totally no one watches, and here there’s millions of people who want to watch soccer and then they won’t even show it half the time?”
“Maybe because golf stuff costs more than soccer stuff and they make more money that way. Just one of those clubs is something like two hundred bucks! Can you even imagine?”
“That’s probably it,” Jami agreed. “Still, it blows. Especially the way they announced they were killing off the league right before the last World Cup. I was so mad!”
“So, what are you going to do?” Holli wrinkled her nose at the musky smell of Jami’s freshly-oiled boots as she joined her on the carpet. “Are you going to talk to him soon?”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“I just think that it’s important to make the most of your time, that’s all. Because you don’t know when it’s going to end.”
“Except when you do, I know.” She waved away Holli’s denials. “Look, don’t worry about it, okay?”
