by Tanya Huff
Three seconds to drag the door toward her far enough to let her pass.
There’s got to be a light here. You can’t deal with emergencies in the dark. Two further seconds while logic actually answered and groping fingers closed on a familiar plastic switch.
One final second for her to take in Celluci backed against the wall, gun out; Inspector Cantree crawling on his stomach toward him, dragging blood across the parquet from a wounded thigh; a crowd of two dozen terrifyingly blankfaced men and women shuffling forward, fingers curled into claws.
For the first time, she could hear the chanting over the protests of her own body.
And then the water exploding from the nozzle nearly jerked the hose out of her hands. Knuckles white, thrown against the wall and held upright between the irresistible force and the immovable object, Vicki fought to keep the stream spraying across the dance floor, slamming Tawfik’s puppets off their feet.
The chant abruptly shut off and with it the power he pulled from the acolytes. He felt thumbs press harder against his windpipe and his will drawn into the trap of agate eyes. To dissolve the spell of acquisition was no longer an option, in order to win, in order to live, his will must prove stronger and he must absorb the Nightwalker’s ka. All or nothing. He released his personal power into the spell.
On a platform on the far side of the dance floor, Vicki saw Henry locked in combat with a tall, dark-haired man. Tawfik. It had to be. She felt Celluci push up against her side and shoved the hose into his hands, bellowing, “Keep . . . them down.” Then she staggered back out into the hall for the fire ax.
“Vicki? Goddamnit, Vicki, what are you doing?”
She ignored him. It was all she could do to drag herself across the dance floor using the heavy ax as a kind of wedgeheaded cane. Leg muscles had begun to spasm by the time she reached the platform and Tawfik’s hair had gone from black to gray.
Teeth locked down on her lower lip, desperately fighting for enough air through flared nostrils, she stepped up behind the wizard-priest. It took her two tries to lift the ax over her head.
The sun became a burning weight, a thousand, a hundred thousand lives bearing down on him. The smell of his own flesh burning began to bury the blood scent. Ebony depths promised a cooling, an end. Henry pushed past the Hunger to reach them.
The ax went into the center of Tawfik’s back with a meaty thunk and sank haft deep. Vicki’d put everything she had left into the blow. Fingers with no strength in them slid off the handle and the weight of her arms falling drove her back an involuntary step. Her hips slammed into the platform rail, her legs folded, and she dropped straight down to sit, more or less upright, against a padded support.
Tawfik’s head jerked up and his mouth opened, but no sound came out. His hands released their hold on Henry’s throat and groped behind him. He spun around, pulling free of Henry’s grip, staggered, and fell, back arched against the pain, mouth still silently working.
Henry’s shoulders straightened and his lips came up off his teeth. Now, finally, he would feed. . . .
“No, Henry!”
Snarling, he lifted his head toward the voice. Dimly, through the Hunger, he recognized Vicki, and turned to see what she stared at with such terror.
Two red eyes burned in the air at the edge of the platform. A faint crimson haze hinted at a bird’s head, strangely winged, and an antelope’s body.
Tawfik lifted one hand toward his god, trembling fingers spread, silently begging to be saved.
The red eyes burned brighter.
Gray hair turned white, brittle, and then fell to expose a yellowed dome of skull. Cheeks collapsed in upon themselves. Flesh melted away and skin stretched tight, tighter, gone. One by one, the tiny bones dropped from Tawfik’s outstretched hand as tendons rotted and let go.
Finally, there were only clothes and the ax and a fine gray powder that might have been ash.
And the red eyes were gone.
“You guys okay?”
Henry reached across the remains and touched Vicki lightly on the cheek. In four hundred and fifty years, he had never felt the Hunger less. Vicki managed to nod. Together they turned to face Celluci.
“We’re okay.” Henry’s throat closed around the words and they emerged with all the highs and lows scraped off. “What about you?”
Celluci snorted. “Fine. Just fine.” He looked down at the powder, his movements jerky and tightly controlled. “All things considered. Why didn’t . . .” The pause filled with a common memory of glowing red eyes. “. . . it save him? I mean, it made him.”
Henry shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll never know. But I could feel Tawfik’s life right until the last second. He was aware the whole time he was . . . was . . .”
“Dying. Jesus H. Christ.” It was more a prayer than a profanity.
A collective moan that broke down into a babble of near hysteria drew their attention back out onto the dance floor. Most of Tawfik’s ex-acolytes appeared to be in a state of shock. Most but not all.
Shirt wrapped in a makeshift bandage around his leg, supported by one of the two judges and the Deputy Chief of the OPP, Cantree dragged himself out of the crowd and scowled at the three on the platform.
“What the hell,” he demanded, “has been going on here?”
“Go ahead, Mike.” Vicki’s head lolled back against the rail as she tried to decide whether she’d rather puke or cry, and if she had the energy to do either. “He’s your boss. You tell him. . . .”
Celluci showed up at Henry’s condo about an hour before dawn. He’d spent an uncomfortable two hours with Cantree in the emergency ward at St. Michael’s Hospital telling him as much as he seemed willing to hear.
“You realize what this sounds like, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I realize.”
“I’d say you were the biggest liar of my acquaintance if it weren’t for two things. I had no reason to have you arrested, yet I can remember giving the order and, just before you shot me, kind of hovering over your head . . .” He wet his lips. “. . . I saw a pair of red glowing eyes.”
“Apparently, it feeds on despair.”
Cantree shifted position on the gurney and winced. “Nice to hear you weren’t looking forward to pulling the trigger. . . .”
Moving carefully, he crossed the living room, threw himself down on the couch, and rubbed his face with his hands. “Christ, Vicki, you stink of liniment. You should’ve gone to the hospital yourself.” Behind her glasses her eyes narrowed in warning and he let it drop. Again. He had to believe she was too smart to allow machismo to cripple her. “So how did the rest of it go?”
Henry turned away from the city. The night was his again. He’d almost lost it, would have lost it had Vicki not used the ax when she had. For all he had meant nothing by it, Tawfik had been right when he’d said a man shouldn’t travel alone through the years. You were the one traveling alone, old man, he told the memory of ebony eyes. And that’s what killed you in the end. I have companions on the road. I have someone to guard my back. You gave up humanity for your immortality. I only gave up the day. There would be no more dreams of the sun.
He leaned back against the window, arms folded across his chest, his gaze caressing Vicki lightly on its way to Celluci’s face. “Fortunately, the various ex-acolytes remembered enough of what they’d agreed to—including rather explicit hallucinations during the chanting that none of them wanted to talk about—that ‘it’s over, it never happened’ seemed to be explanation enough. Your Inspector Cantree was the only one involved who wanted to know what was really going on. By morning, the rest of them will have convinced themselves that they were at a wild party that got a little out of hand.”
“All except George Zottie,” Vicki added from the armchair. “Tawfik had taken over so much of his mind that when Tawfik died he didn’t have anything left. The doctors say it was a massive stroke and he probably won’t live long.”
“A massive stroke,” Celluci repeated, h
is eyes narrowing suspiciously, and he peered across the room at Henry. “What would make them think that?”
Henry shrugged. “Well, they were hardly likely to think his brain had been magically destroyed by a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian wizard-priest trying to sanctify a temple to his god.”
“Yeah? And what about that god? Tawfik’s dead. Is it?”
“Of course it isn’t,” Vicki snapped before Henry could speak. “Or Tawfik wouldn’t be dead.”
“Look, Vicki,” Celluci sighed, “pretend it’s very late and that I’ve been up for almost forty-eight hours, which it is and I have, and explain that to me.”
“Tawfik’s god allowed Tawfik to die. Therefore Tawfik was no longer necessary for its survival.”
“But Tawfik told me that his god only survived because of him,” Henry objected. “That a god with no one to believe in it is absorbed back into good or evil.”
Vicki rolled her eyes. “Tawfik’s god has people who believe in it,” she said slowly and distinctly. “Us. Worship isn’t necessary. Only belief.”
“No, Tawfik worshiped.”
“Sure he did; he sold his soul for immortality and that was his part of the bargain. But he also spent a few thousand years out cold in a sarcophagus and he sure as shit wasn’t worshiping then. His god seems to have survived just fine.” She slid her glasses back up her nose. “So tonight, Tawfik does something to piss off his god. We don’t know what. Maybe it didn’t approve of the venue for the temple—although any god that feeds off hopelessness and despair should find itself right at home in that meat market—maybe it didn’t like the taste of the acolytes, maybe it didn’t like Tawfik’s attitude. . . .”
“Tawfik wanted to be seen as all powerful,” Henry said thoughtfully, remembering.
“Well, there you have it.” Vicki spread her hands. “Maybe it was afraid of a temple coup. Whatever the reason, it chose to trade Tawfik in. It’d never get a better opportunity because you,” she jabbed an emphatic finger in Henry’s direction, “are as immortal as Tawfik was.”
Celluci frowned. “Then Henry’s in danger.”
Vicki shrugged. “We all are. We know its name. The moment we give in to hopelessness and despair, it’ll be on us like—like politicians at a free bar. It may not need worshipers to survive, but it certainly needs them to get stronger. All it has to do is convince one of us and then we tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on and here we go around the mulberry bush again. It’ll want Henry, he’ll last longer. But it’ll settle for you or me.”
“So basically what you’re saying,” Celluci sighed, “in your own long-winded way, is that it isn’t over. We’ve beaten Tawfik, but we’ve still got Tawfik’s god to fight.”
To his surprise, Vicki smiled. “We’ve been fighting the god of hopelessness and despair all our lives, Mike. Now, we know it has a name. So what? It’s the same fight.”
Then her expression changed and Celluci, who recognized trouble, shot an anxious look at Henry who apparently recognized it, too.
“And now, I have something to say to you both.” Her voice should’ve been registered as a lethal weapon. “If either of you ever again pull the patronizing bullshit you pulled on me tonight at the base of the tower, I’m going to rip your living hearts out and feed them to you. Do I make myself clear?”
The answering silence spoke volumes.
“Good. You can spend the next few months making it up to me.”
Also by
TANYA HUFF
SMOKE AND SHADOWS
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
SMOKE AND ASHES
BLOOD PRICE
BLOOD TRAIL
BLOOD LINES
BLOOD PACT
BLOOD DEBT
THE ENCHANTMENT EMPORIUM
THE QUARTERS NOVELS, VOL 1 omnibus:
SING THE FOUR QUARTERS FIFTH QUARTER
NO QUARTER
THE QUARTERED SEA
The Keeper’s Chronicles:
SUMMON THE KEEPER
THE SECOND SUMMONING
LONG HOT SUMMONING
OF DARKNESS, LIGHT AND FIRE
The Confederation Novels:
A CONFEDERATION OF VALOR omnibus:
VALOR’S CHOICE THE BETTER PART OF VALOR
THE HEART OF VALOR
VALOR’S TRIAL
WIZARD OF THE GROVE omnibus
CHILD OF THE GROVE THE LAST WIZARD
