Now Bellamy understood why the rebel hadn't concealed himself inside some object in the Haunt. He'd been conserving his mystical energies to merge himselt with the truck, which had already been loaded with many of the voudoun fetishes— quite possibly enough to finish the job of destroying Marie.
Bellamy leaped, and slammed down on the rear of the rental vehicle. Astarte and the soldiers jumped after him, but fell short.
The truck hurtled out onto Barracks Street. Evidently conscious of his unwanted passenger, Chester began to swerve unpredictably back and forth. The motion threatened to tumble Bellamy from the roof. He peered about, looking for something to cling to, but there was nothing. Lying spread-eagle, he held himself in place as best he could.
Until he realized with a twinge of irritation that he was thinking like a mortal. He wasn't trapped on the roof. Willing his body to become completely intangible, he fell into the cargo compartment, landing on an image made of crossed sticks and clothes stuffed with straw, like a scarecrow. He banged his knee, and his left hand plunged on through the floor, giving his shoulder a painful wrench.
Lurching to his feet, he wondered what his next move ought to be. Throw the fetishes out onto the road? He was leery of damaging them, for fear that whatever befell them might also, in some measure, happen to Marie. But he suspected that breaking a few was less risky then allowing Chester to deliver the lot to Geffard. He grabbed the scarecrow doll and carried it toward the rear of the compartment.
The doors clanged shut and latched, plunging Bellamy into darkness. He was sure that Chester had done it on purpose. Groping his way now, the floor shuddering beneath his feet, the FBI agent tried to shove the image through the steel panel. The maneuver seemed like it ought to work. After all, the voudoun doll existed in the Shadowlands, just as he did. He could carry other objects, like his clothing and weapons, through walls without any problem. But the fetish wouldn't penetrate the metal. Maybe Chester was responsible for that, too,.
Bellamy ran his hands over the double doors. Found a lever that should open them. He projected himself into the Skinlands and pulled it, but it didn't move. He tried again, grunting and straining, the metal bar cutting into his hands, with no better result. He kicked the doors, and that didn't budge them, either.
He felt his shadowself stir in the depths of mind, laughing at his impotence. Ignoring the parasite as best he could, he discarded the scarecrow, stumbled to the other end of the compartment, and hurled himself at the front wall.
He smashed int. • the surface, rebounded, and fell. Hauled himself to his feet and tried again. Antoine had told him that in the realm of the dead, belief was power, and he strove tcs believe that, unencumbered with any of the images, he could pass through. That Chester's magick was too feeble to hold him back.
For a split second he thought he felt himself flowing through the steel, and then it thrust him backward. His wrist throbbed as if he might have broken it.
He flung himself forward a third time, and his body penetrated, though not without resistance. The Skinlands matter felt like knife points dragging and snagging along inside him. Then he lurched into the cab.
His flailing, outstretched hands plunged inside the dashboard, the interior of which seemed to clamp down on them like a trap snapping shut. Bellamy barely managed to yank them out in time to keep them from being crushed. He made sure his entire body was inside the cab, then positioned himself in the driver's seat and vaulted across the Shroud.
With a click and a crackle of static, the radio switched itself on. "I'm in control," said Chester's voice. "There's nothing you can do. Jump out now and I'll let you live," The door swung open.
"Forget it," Bellamy said. He stamped on the brake. The pedal wouldn't budge. He kept fighting the resistance, then suddenly floored the accelerator and jerked the steering wheel to the left.
As Bellamy had hoped, Chester didn't: seem able to concentrate his force of will equally in all the controls at once. The wheel felt sticky, but it turned, while the gas pedal didn't, resist at all. The truck hurtled at a parked Hyundai.
The. accelerator bumped Bellamy's foot upward, and the steering wheel spun, as Chester barely managed to avoid a collision. The FBI agent yanked the emergency brake, nearly bringing the vehicle to a lurching halt before the lever snapped off in his fist.
The truck sped forward. Bellamy put his foot on the brake pedal, then instantly shifted it to the accelerator, propelling the van onward even faster. At the same instant he seized the ;gearshift and rammed it from Drive into Reverse.
The transmission made a grinding, crashing sound. Chester's voice screamed from the radio as if the insult to his borrowed mechanical body had wounded him, too. Hoping that it had, Bellamy wrenched the steering wheel.
The truck jumped the curb and slammed into a cornstalk fence. Bellamy jolted forward into the wheel. The steering column collapsed beneath his weight and he hurtled onward, driving his head through the windshield. Writhing, razor-edged shards of glass tightened around his neck like a noose, and then he passed out.
At first Marilyn Sebastian could neither wake up completely nor sink deep enough into unconsciousness to escape every vestige of pain. She didn't know which was more annoying, the gray fog smothering her mind, or the pangs wracking her body. She only knew that she wanted to be rid of both. Exerting her will, she struggled to push them away, or perhaps to propel herself free of their grasp. She heard a sharp click.
An instant later she was standing naked in a bedroom. Judging from the ornate furnishings, the dark, musty chamber might have been considered luxurious a century ago, but now everything was grimy and festooned with filthy cobwebs. An oil lamp shed a wavering greenish light—strangely, the fire seemed to be shedding chill instead of heat—and black cracks seethed in one corner of the ceiling.
On the canopy bed lay a tattered body, reeking of blood. As soon as Marilyn saw it, she began to remember the battle in the police station, and understood that the mangled husk belonged to her. For a moment she felt a twinge of horror, but then the sensation withered into a disinterested curiosity. She calmly surveyed the wreckage. Much of her face shorn away. Both breasts shredded, her cherished implants burst. Three fingers cut short, and it looked as if Dunn might have given her a head start on the final phase of her sex change, too.
She looked down at the luminous shape she was wearing now. Slender but muscular arms. Small breasts. A narrow waist. A penis with no external testicles, and beneath it, a vagina. She'd become a true hermaphrodite, the perfected being the alchemists and cabalists had extolled. Running her hands over her smooth, unblemished flesh, she laughed with delight.
A white light flowered in the corner.
Fearless, curious, her radiant form gliding with the easy grace she'd possessed as a boy of twenty, she moved closer. Images formed in the pearly glow. Each lasted only an instant, but she had no difficult assimilating them.
A baby boy entering the world, bloody and squalling, in Amsterdam. An exuberant childhood spent skating, playing soccer, and frolicking along the canals with a host of friends. And when the friends were absent, learning yoga, meditation, and ultimately how to conjure spirits and rouse dull, dead matter to fluid, obedient life. Because the boy's parents were mages, and he'd inherited their gift. Indeed, he possessed it in far greater measure than they did. Grown to handsome, vigorous manhood, a master of his art, he worked miracles with a snap of his fingers and explored a hundred extra-dimensional worlds. Lesser sorcerers begged him to accept them as disciples.
That's me, Marilyn realized. That's my next life, waiting for me to start it up. She stepped forward.
"Stop," said a woman's voice.
Startled, the Arcanist turned, to see that the wall behind her had disappeared. The room now opened on a benighted stretch of rocky beach. Some distance out to sea, four mounds of rock jutted above the surface, and closer in, breakers hissed as they crumbled into white foam. A chilly breeze carried the scent of the salt water.
A glowing lantern hanging from its ornately carved prow, a small lateener sat beached at the edge of the surf. Beside it stood a tall woman, her dark, multi-layered cloak sodden from the waist down, its cowl shadowing her features.
"Who are you?" Marilyn asked. She was still unafraid, but a hint of disquiet blunted the edge of the bliss she'd been feeling a moment before.
"I'm called Katrina," said the woman in the hood. "A Ferryman, though I doubt that title means anything to you."
"It makes it sound like you help people travel to wherever they're going. Are you here to take me to my new life?" Marilyn didn't actually feel as if she needed an escort. She sensed that another step or two into the light would suffice to unite her with the fetus inside her new mother's womb.
"No," Katrina said, "I wish I were. Ordinarily I'd rejoice to see a soul move on to another reincarnation. Every such transmigration cheats the Void."
"Then what's the problem?"
"The Atheist conspiracy. Your unfinished business."
"Unfinished or not," Marilyn said, "I'm dead. It's somebody else's problem now."
"You're only dead if you choose to be," the Ferryman replied. "You uncoupled your soul from your body voluntarily, to escape your discomfort. Many mages can do it, or so I'm told. You still have time to return before your heart and lungs stop pumping."
Marilyn frowned. "If I go back now, will I still move on to the life in the light whenever I do die?"
"I'm sorry," Katrina said, "but no. The universe never stops changing. Unclaimed opportunities disappear."
"But at least I'm finally a genuine sorcerer in my present life," Marilyn said. "I'll learn to do all the things I saw him do."
"No," said the woman in the hood. "His genotype would be perfect, his parents would be superb mentors, and he'd begin learning in his cradle. In your current incarnation, you possess less native ability, may never find any sort of teacher, and are already middle-aged. At best, you'll acquire a fraction of his abilities. And before you ask, I'll confess it's unlikely that you'll ever be altogether free of disfigurement and pain. The werewolf savaged you too badly."
"Then to hell with it," said Marilyn, "I'm going forward."
"Even though people need your help?"
"You seem to be some sort of angel or Buddha or something," the Arcanist replied. "You help them."
"I swear to you," said Katrina, "I am, to the extent I'm able. I have vows to keep, no matter what the cost, obligations you wouldn't understand."
"How convenient for you."
"I assure you," Katrina said, an undertone of anger in her voice, "it's far from that. I don't want to see millions of souls suffer, or the world blighted."
Marilyn's eyes narrowed. "It's really that bad?"
"Yes," Katrina said. The cold breeze gusted, stirring the topmost layer of her cloak. The surf whispered. "I can't see precisely what's coming, but I can tell it will be disastrous. What's more, it will create an ongoing menace, which, by all the laws of karma, the young warlock in your vision will almost certainly have to confront."
"Better him than the current edition," Marilyn said. "You said it yourself: he'll be more powerful."
"But the agents of Oblivion will have had decades to increase their strength. And what about all the spirits, living and dead, who will perish in the interim? What about your colleagues in the Arcanum, and your other friends?"
Marilyn grimaced. "I care about them, of course. I care about 'the world,' for that matter. But what makes me so important?"
"You may be a fumbling, unschooled mage, but mages of any sort are thin on the ground, and you have an urgent task to perform."
"Damn it, I don't even know you! What if you're a demon, trying to trick me?"
"You can feel that that isn't so," Katrina said, and in fact, Marilyn did. "Do you recall what Astarte told you? That as much as you wanted to embrace the supernatural, you always wound up flinching from the danger it embodied?"
"How could I forget?" Marilyn said sardonically. "She taunted me with my cowardice to shame me into going after Bellamy's notebook. Because I listened, we walked right into Dunn's ambush, and he ripped me to pieces."
"Yet it was that confrontation which unleashed your powers," the Ferryman said. "By defying your fears, you won the prize you've always dreamed of, even if you did pay a heavy price for it. Now be bold again. Don't take the easy, selfish path. Stand by your allies. Do what you know is right."
Marilyn turned and gazed into the light. Something twisted inside her breast, and then she wrenched herself back around. "All right," she said, her voice breaking, "you win. I'll stay and fight." The radiance at her back died, deepening the ambient gloom. "Now what exactly am I supposed to do?"
The far wall popped back into existence, cutting off Marilyn's view of Katrina and the surf. "Hey!" the Arcanist yelped. "Come back!" Nothing happened.
Snarling curses, Marilyn stalked over to her ravaged body, put her strong but delicate hands on its gashed, bandaged shoulders, and willed it to admit her. After a moment a circle of golden light appeared on its forehead, and she spun dizzily into it like water swirling down a drain.
NINE
Geffard glared at Denis, the wounded soldier, in disbelief. "You must be mistaken," the loa said, though the watery feeling in his guts told him otherwise.
"No, Captain," the other wraith said, shaking his head. A ring of shadow oozed outward from the bloodless hole in his forearm. Probably he still had a darksteel bullet or arrowhead stuck inside his flesh. "The Queen made a sneak attack on the house on Barracks Street. We tried to defend the place, but they drove us out. I don't know how many others besides me got away."
Fearful that his face would betray his dismay, Geffard turned away to compose himself. Resting his hands on the railing encircling his steamboat's uppermost deck, he gazed out at the broad expanse of the Mississippi, stinking of silt and pollution, the Color of charcoal in the pre-dawn gloom. Far out in the water, the lights of a small boat, one violet and one green, drifted silently along. His instincts fold him that the craft belonged to one of the dead.
Try as he might, Geffard couldn't comprehend how this debacle had come to pass. All right, this Bellamy person had invaded the Haunt, made it out again, and somehow even survived the Maelstrom that arose immediately thereafter. None of that altered the fact that Marie had been too weak and addled to lead an assault, and her troops wouldn't have marched without her. Geffard would have staked his very existence on that; he'd only decided to move the fetishes on the principle that it was foolish to run even -a tiny risk if it could be avoided. Yet now, inexplicably, it seemed that his meticulously crafted scheme had fallen apart.
Grimacing, he abruptly decided it didn't matter how Marie had escaped the curse. What was important was to turn the situation around. Molding his handsome features into a confident smile, he pivoted. "I know you didn't hive an easy time of it, bringing me this news," he said. "I won't forget. Go tell one. of the officers to spmmon our supporters. Then find yourself a healer to tend your wound."
Denis frowned. "Captain," he said hesitantly,: "we've already lost a lot of men. The rest are scattered through the city, and we don't know how many of them will arrive here in time. You're on a boat. Maybe you should get out .on the river, It will give you time to make new plans."
Geffard quivered with fury. His own mother had driven him out of Haiti after he joined the cwite des morts, The mamaloi of New Orleans had subjected him to a slow, agonizing, humiliating death for challenging their power. And now this fool was advising him to. let a woman humble him againf The loa's power stirred inside him. The force of his will tightened around Denis's neck like a noose, then jerked him into the air. The other Creole kicked and pawed frantically at the insubstantial tether holding him aloft.
"Coward," said Geffard. "You faithless, stinking coward. We lose one battle and you're ready to run away? I should—" The magician's rage deserted him in mid- sentence, or rather, he realized that Denis wasn't
its proper target. The man was neither timid nor disloyal, or he would never have trekked wounded through the streets to warn his commander. Nor would it profit Geffard to alienate any of his followers, particularly at this juncture.
He hastily set Denis down, and then, when the: wounded ghost's knees buckled, grabbed him and held him up. Begrudging the expenditure of spiritual force—he was likely to need every iota of it over the course of the next few hours—the houngan willed a bit of his vitality to tingle from his hands into Denis''? body. With a creak, the soldier's neck straightened, and the raw groove beneath his chin disappeared.
"I'm sorry!" Said Geffard, suffusing his.musical voice with horror and self-loathing. Meanwhile, his mind reached out to Denis's, kneading it like clay. "I don't know what came over me, I'll do anything, anything at all, to make it up to you."
Denis stared back at him with dread and loathing in his chocolate-colored eyes. Then Geffard felt his magick take hold and twist the other wraith's emotions. Denis blinked. "It's...it's all right, Captain," he rasped. "I know you didn't mean it."
"You're as generous as you are brave," said Geffard, his voice breaking, all gratitude and humility. "The gods know, I don't deserve friends like you. But since I'm lucky enough to have them, we are going to beat the Queen. I promise you that. Now, do you feel strong enough to carry my orders to an officer?"
"Yes, Captain."
"Then go, please. Time is of the essence. Tell them I'll be down directly."
Denis hobbled to the companionway and started down the steps. Geffard strode to his cabin, whispered the word which dissolved the seal on the door, and went inside.
On a sidewheeler like the Twisted Mirror, even the captain's quarters were none too large, but Geffard had done to his best to made them luxurious, with an ornately carved featherbed, armoire, and dressing table of gleaming cherry. On the sideboard gleamed crystal decanters of bourbon, cognac, and rum. Like the humidors of fragrant Cuban cigars and marijuana, the liquors were offerings from Les Invisibles' mortal worshippers, translated by magick into the realm of the dead. A stereo system powered by soulfire crystals and a rack of CDs lent an anachronistic touch to a room which otherwise reflected the nineteenth century.
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