"That was a stupid move, too," Louis said, his sunken eyes glittering. As his arm retracted, his hands swelled to twice their previous size, and yellow talons extended from their fingertips. Lunging, he raked at Bellamy's eyes.
The agent sidestepped and blocked. Louis's nails ripped his sleeve and gashed his forearm. Bellamy snapped a punch into his skeletal opponent's side, and felt one of the fleshless ribs break.
As Louis reeled past, Bellamy lifted his foot to kick the other wraith in the knee. He should have had a second to execute the attack before his adversary could wheel back around to face him. But the flesh sculptor's malleable body simply twisted one hundred and eighty degrees at the waist, bringing his hands into position to rake at the FBI agent once again. His talons flashed at Bellamy's torso, Bellamy was caught off guard. The attack ripped open his chest and knocked him onto his back. Another wraith would have had to drop on top of him to continue clawing, but Louis merely lengthened his arms.
Bellamy shook off the shock of his wounds, struggled desperately to keep Louis from rending him again. In response, the Masquer stretched his limbs still further, looping the extra lengths around the downed man, entangling him. Straining, Bellamy fumbled his sword from its scabbard, but Louis knocked it out of his grasp. The weapon spun across the floor.
Bellamy could hear his Shadow in the depths of his mind, cackling over his imminent defeat. Behind the writhing, shifting form of Louis, he glimpsed the mortals. Now unable to sense the presence of the ghosts, evidently daring to believe the haunting was over, Mrs. Villiers had crept to her loved ones and was ineffectually trying to comfort Davy and rouse her husband at the same time. Her ministrations made a bizarre contrast to the desperate battle just a few feet away;
Bellamy felt himself beginning to weaken. If he was going to turn the fight around, it would have to be in the next few seconds, and he could only think of one more trick to try. Turning his head, he sank his teeth into one of Louis's tentacular arms. The thin layer of desiccated flesh tasted rotten and foul. The phony maggots squirmed against his tongue.
The flesh sculptor's limbs jerked, loosening their grip. Bellamy thrashed frantically, freeing one leg from the coils that held it and scooting himself a few inches across the floor. He whipped his foot up at Louis's crotch.
Since Bellamy didn't know what was under the grubby black raincoat, he had no idea how effective the attack would be. If Louis had withered his genitals as he'd shriveled the rest of his flesh, the kick might not hurt him at all. But evidently the Masquer's perverse desire to resemble a rotting corpse had stopped short of a willingness to emasculate himself. He made a choking sound, and, staggering, doubled over. His elongated arms flailed spastically.
Bellamy thrust-kicked at Louis's ankle. Bone cracked, and the Masquer fell. The FBI agent swarmed on top of him and started battering his ghastly skull face. The Invisible tried to fend him off, but his movements were still too feeble and clumsy with pain. Bellamy slammed a punch into the bridge of his opponent's nose. The blow sent a burst of pain through his own hand—evidently he'd broken a knuckle or two—but Louis abruptly stopped struggling and lay inert.
Gasping needlessly but compulsively for air—he wondered how long it would take him to shed the habit—Bellamy scrambled across the floor, picked up his gun, then straddled Louis's chest. Meanwhile, Mrs. Villiers tried the door knob. This time, it worked. Weeping softly, clinging to one another, she and her family stumbled out into the night. Bellamy sent a silent apology winging after them.
He was pretty sure he hadn't hurt Louis severely enough to dump him into the Labyrinth. If the flesh sculptor were going to vanish, he would have done it already. Bellamy just had to be patient, and wait for him to awaken. And after a few minutes, the skeletal ibambo groaned, and his lidless eyes shifted in their bony sockets.
Bellamy aimed the pistol at the other ghost's face. "Welcome back," he said. "I've got darksteel bullets in this thing, so if I were you, I wouldn't try anything too macho."
"Why are you doing this?" Louis croaked.
"I work for the Queen," Bellamy told him. "I have orders to infiltrate Geffard's operation."
"You won't get away with it," Louis said.
"Apparently you're right," said Bellamy. The bloodless cuts in his chest and arm began to close. "I didn't count on your boss sending me on such nasty errands that no decent person could stomach them. So it's time for Plan B. I'm going to interrogate you. If you give me the answers I need, you might survive the experience."
Once again, Bellamy felt the Masquer's perpetually leering countenance sneer. "I'm not going to tell you shit."
"Then send me a postcard from the Void." Bellamy slowly tightened his finger on the trigger.
"Wait!" squawked Louis. "I'm just a peon. I don't know anything!"
"Then that's your tough luck." The gun was almost ready to fire. Bellamy wondered if he should ease the pressure. A few days ago, he would never have contemplated murdering a prisoner. But now that he was buried in the cold, dark realm of the dead, his wounds throbbing, his Shadow still squirming in the back of his head, his mortal life and scruples seemed dim and far away.
"All right!" said Louis. "Maybe I know something. I'll tell you what I can."
"Good," Bellamy said, shifting his weight. Louis's frame was far too bony to make a comfortable seat. "Let's start with the basics. Geffard wants to be King."
"Sure. Everybody knows that. People say that when he was a young houngan in Haiti, he had problems with his mother, who was also his teacher and sponsor in voudoun. She accused him of walking the Left-hand Path, of joining the culte des morts, and wanted to strip him of his magic. He tried to fight her, but he wasn't strong enough. He had to flee to New Orleans to keep his powers.
"He hoped he could be top dog here, like he wasn't on the island. And New Orleans has had a lot of powerful hoodoo men, guys like Doctor Cat and Father Byron. But it's always been the priestesses, the Laveaus and Latours, who really run things. I've heard that eventually one of the mamaloi got tired of his uppity ways, stole one of his suits, and dressed a corpse in it. Geffard looked all over Louisiana for that body, but he couldn't find it. As it rotted, so did he.
"And of course, when he passed over, he found a Queen ruling the dead half of New Orleans, too. Must have made him crazy. But eventually he went down into the Abyss, found the Island Beneath the Sea, made a pact with one of Les Mysteres, and became more powerful than he'd ever been in life. And when he came back to the Mirrorlands, he swore that the third time was the charm, and he was finally going to knock one of the bitches off her throne and take it for himself."
"How does he plan to do that?" Bellamy asked.
"How should I know? Do you think he spills his guts to every guy on the payroll?"
"I think you're the kind of creep who keeps his ear to the ground," the agent said. "I think that even if Geffard hasn't confided his plans to you, you've probably discovered some of them for yourself. And I'm absolutely certain that if you dry up on me, I'm going to put a bullet into your head."
"Okay," Louis growled. "But all I know is what I hear. I can't promise any of it's true."
"Just tell me."
"The word is, Geffard made a deal with a horde of Baka."
Bellamy thought of his shadowself, the foulness festering inside him. And supposedly Baka—Spectres—were all Shadow. He grimaced in disgust. "And that particular piece of information didn't bother you. You kept working for him anyway."
"Fuck you," Louis said. "We Invisibles have a more realistic outlook than you Morts. We wouldn't try to wipe out the dark side of existence, even if we could. It's there for a purpose. We get along fine by keeping the dark and the light in balance."
"Whatever," Bellamy said. "Tell me about the deal."
"The Baka gave Geffard control over some kind of spirit nobody's ever seen before, to attack the Queen's flunkies and desecrate their shrines. That would mess up her gris-giis and make people lose faith in her. And because
the creatures were so weird, the royal guards would have trouble fighting them, and it would be hard for anybody to link them to Les Invisibles."
"What did the Spectres get in return?"
"We Creoles are really good at possessing the Quick. The Baka needed to learn how to do it, and Geffard taught them."
"And now they're making mortals kill for them," Bellamy said. "Preachers. Cops. Fire fighters. Why?"
"Just the usual Baka meanness?" Louis said. "If that's not it, it beats the hell out of me."
"Do you know the motive behind the Atheist murders?"
"No. How would I? Are you trying to blame those on the Baka, too?"
"I'll ask the questions. Tell me about the werewolves."
"What werewolves? Look, I've given you everything I've got."
"Let's hope that isn't true," Bellamy said. "Because it hasn't been enough to save your neck. Geffard must have a hideout. A place where he and his fellow conspirators meet to do the things they can't do openly. Where is it?"
Louis hesitated.
"You have till the count of five," said Bellamy, "and then I'm going to shoot. One, two, three—"
"Stop!" the Masquer cried. "There's supposed to be a big old house on Barracks Street, between Chartres and Decatur. I can't tell you which one it is, because I've never been there."
"All right," said Bellamy. "That's it for now." Glad to ease his aching rump, keeping his pistol trained on his prisoner, he stood up cautiously.
"Look, I really have told you everything," said Louis, clambering to his knees. "Why don't you give me a break and let me go?"
"Sorry," Bellamy said. "I won't kill you, but you can't just walk away either. I'm taking you to the Queen, to tell her what you told me."
"No," said Louis, "you can't do that. Geffard is going to find out I ratted on him. He'll put a curse on me. If I'm going to survive, I have to get out of town right now."
"Maybe in a few hours," Bellamy said. "But for now—"
A tentacle of gray, desiccated flesh and yellow bone, extruded from the substance of Louis's back, whipped over his shoulder and lashed at Bellamy's face. The FBI agent jumped backward, but the unnatural limb still clipped him a glancing blow to the temple. Louis scrambled up and charged him, talons outstretched.
Off balance, Bellamy had no choice but to fire. The shot blasted a hole in Louis's brow and blew out the back of his head. The skeletal wraith collapsed at his captor's feet, waves of black light washing through his body.
"You were no loss to anyone," murmured Bellamy, watching the Masquer melt away, "but I still wish you hadn't done that. There was no need for you to die." He wondered if Louis's Shadow had prompted the suicidal assault. It so, perhaps Les Invisibles weren't as good at managing their inner darkness as they thought. Perhaps it couldn't be placated, only opposed, the same way that good people were obliged to stand up to all the external violence and savagery in the world.
Frowning, Bellamy pushed such philosophizing aside. He had more pressing matters to think about. Like reaching the Queen as soon as possible. Now that Bellamy had answers for her, she'd mobilize her army to arrest Geffard. Wouldn't she?
Maybe not, the agent thought glumly, remembering the darkness which had rippled through Marie's body. Even though he'd rescued Titus, he was still essentially an unproven stranger, and a white one at that, in her eyes. Would she find his fragmentary, secondhand information, extracted under duress from a shifty, unreliable character who'd subsequently evaporated into thin air, sufficiently compelling to shake her out of her fear and indecision? He had an unpleasant suspicion she might still refuse to act.
But Bellamy did have an option. He could scout out the house on Barracks Street himself. Maybe he could find some physical evidence to support his allegations, or
Marilyn removed her blond wig, revealing the dark crewcut beneath, set the hairpiece on its black, vaguely skull-shaped plastic stand, and fussily began to comb it out. To Astarte, the monotonous swishing had grown as wearily familiar as the nondescript decor of the motel room, which miraculously never seemed to change, even though the fugitives never slept in the same place two nights running. "I hope you don't think that thing looks real," she said irritably.
Turning, the occultist arched a plucked eyebrow. "Is that the reason for the magenta stripes in your own coif, and all those piercings? Your devotion to the natural look?"
"That's different," said Astarte, touching her finger to the ring in her lower lip. "This isn't supposed to look like part of my mouth. A wig is supposed to look like your real hair. But it doesn't. It looks like some kind of animal crawled onto your head and died."
Marilyn simply looked at her for a moment, and then, lowering her voice, said, "I know this whole enterprise is difficult. Also painful, frustrating, and frightening."
Astarte's annoyance abruptly gave way to a surge of dismay. Her eyes stung, and she blinked furiously. "I don't want to give up hope. But I keep thinking, if Frank was alive, he would have contacted us by now. He would have thought to leave a message on Grailnet."
The transsexual put down the comb, got up from the vanity, sat down on the bed beside her companion, and took her hand. Up close, she smelled of Obsession and the garlic chicken she'd eaten for supper, and Astarte could see the tracks on her inner arms. "Perhaps he's alive but a prisoner."
"I guess that's the only hope," Astarte said. "But you didn't see the half-eaten dead bodies heaped up in the house. If you had, you'd have trouble believing the werewolves could scrounge up the willpower to leave any human prisoner in one piece, even if they wanted to."
"If you're convinced Agent Bellamy's gone," Marilyn said, "there's still time for you to walk away from this. We're glad to have you, of course, but you're not a member of the Arcanum, you don't have any special expertise, and I suppose that if we have to, we can carry on without you."
Scowling, Astarte twisted her hand out of Marilyn's grip. "Forget it. I'm staying, no matter what. If I can't get Frank back, I'll make the bastards sorry they killed him. I just wish you people would crank up your 'special expertise' and do something."
learn enough about Geffard's resources and strategy to help Marie through her paralyzing dread of making the wrong move. But if he was going to do it at all, it had to be now, before the loa noticed that he and Louis had gone missing. The detective retrieved his gleaming black shortsword, then strode out into the night.
"But we are," Marilyn said. "Joan Crosby is studying some suggestive fluctuations in the local ley lines. Alan Fong is consulting the Tarot and I Ching. Tom Kincaid is meditating, trying to contact a benevolent spiritual entity who, he believes, has counseled him twice before in times of danger. Others prowl the city every night, visiting sites with a history of paranormal—"
"I know all that," Astarte said, "and none of it is getting us anywhere. You keep fiddling around with your experiments and observations, kidding yourself that you're getting closer to the truth, wasting time, when meanwhile, for all we know, the end of the world is coming!"
"And what would you have us do?" Marilyn asked patiently, sounding as if she was certain she already knew the answer to her question.
"I don't know exactly," Astarte said. "But you can work magic, even if you say you're not a wizard. You sure put a spell on Frank and me."
"A parlor trick," the occultist replied. "Jumped-up hypnosis. And even that required days of grueling preparation. It no more resembled true magick than the flame of a single match resembles a forest fire."
"Whatever," Astarte said. "The point is, you can do stuff. So maybe we should come out of hiding. Draw Dunn and his buddies into a trap."
"Confront the devil head on," said Marilyn. "That was R. J.'s way, and it got him killed."
"At least he got to look the supernatural in the face before he died," Astarte replied. "You claim you want to do the same thing. Learn real sorcery and uncover the secrets of the universe. You've spent God knows how many years puttering around with grimoires and Ouija boa
rds. But you're never going to get anywhere if you flinch whenever it's time to take a risk. Hell, to you and your buds, I'm just some kind of ignorant Goth New Age groupie. But since I came to New Orleans, I've seen more paranormal shit than you have in your whole life."
For a moment, Marilyn looked as if she were going to snarl some angry retort, but then she sighed and lowered her eyes instead. "Perhaps you're right," she said in a troubled voice. "Maybe I have been too cautious. Lord knows, eager as I am to experience the occult, it terrifies me, too." Her painted scarlet lips quirked into a crooked smile. "It's what one of my psychiatrists called an approach-avoidance conflict. I wish I did have your single-minded determination to explore the darkness, no matter what horrors are waiting inside it.
"But it doesn't matter whether I'm courageous or a coward. The simple fact of the matter is, we Arcanists are scholars and scientists, not mages, saints, or even soldiers. Our adversaries are the spawn of Hell, or any rate, something comparable. We couldn't possibly confront them and live to tell the tale, not at this stage of the game. Our only hope is to study them from a safe distance, using the best tools at our disposal, and pray we discover data which will allow us to foil their schemes."
Astarte could see she was never going to change her friend's mind. And for all she really knew, Marilyn's perspective was the right one, even if she did find it hard to swallow. "All right," she said. "We'll play it your way. But when time runs out, and the disaster happens, remember I told you so." She picked up the remote control from the night stand. "I suppose we should watch the news. Find out if the Atheist has killed anybody else."
"I suppose," Marilyn said, rising. She returned to the vanity, unscrewed a jar of cold cream, and began to remove her makeup.
Astarte clicked on the television. The screen displayed what appeared to be the climactic scene of a medical drama, a surgical team laboring frantically while monitors bleeped and blinked behind them. Sneering, she muted the sound.
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