Robert saw what he needed to do: run, leap onto the back of the nearest couch, jump off, and kick Veronica wherever he could land his sneaker. He moved.
On just his third step, Vanessa Blight slid out of nowhere. Robert didn’t notice until after her foot kicked him in the ear.
He didn’t go all the way down, but he stumbled; his knees buckled. Robert recovered in an eye’s blink and reeled around to size up his enemy, to figure the best spot to hit her and do it without wasting a breath. Contrary to her partner, Vanessa wore a dress showing very little skin. Only her face, arms, and feet were bare. And even at this close range, in the bright light, Vanessa’s eyes were in deep, deep shadow.
Robert squinted and concentrated to fire an infrared pellet at one of those pale arms, but he couldn’t focus on the target. Vanessa had already moved, dashing for the stairs. Not expecting a retreat, Robert hesitated, then he hustled after her when he realized she wasn’t running away. She was running to hide something.
The first thing Vanessa hid was herself. She slid back into invisibility as she placed her foot on the first stair. Robert kept moving, but with much more caution. He couldn’t see her, couldn’t pick up even a hint of her, but the Spryte could pop back into sight at any moment and shove him down the stairs. She wouldn’t get him that easily.
Ava would have to deal with Veronica alone. Robert hoped she was up to it.
NINETEEN
Darryl was lying on top of a bed. He knew that much. It was his first thought, even though so far he’d seen nothing but a white ceiling and the dull-yellow bare bulb hanging from its center. His second thought was a self-directed question: Why did his left hand hurt so much?
He tried to raise his arm. It wouldn’t move. Stiff, like a board. Like his back. He wasn’t tied down or restrained in any way, but he couldn’t move. Some dark spot in his psyche half encouraged him to laugh at the situation. After all, one should wake up from a nap well rested, invigorated, ready to hop up and hurry about one’s business. Darryl wondered just how long he’d been asleep, how long he’d been unconscious, how long he’d been under…
XynKroma. That’s where he’d been. And he was well aware that excursions in the realm, while seeming to last for several hours or even days, actually took place in the duration of a finger-snap according to the manner of time-flow on Reality’s surface, or at least according to the manner of time-flow on the planet Earth. An exit from the realm always put the traveler into a long, deep sleep. Darryl knew a deep sleep for him after leaving the realm averaged about seven hours. Always a risk. He was supposed to take his medication about every three hours. Something in the back of his mind, though, told him not to worry about it this time. All the drugs to which he’d been exposed recently had probably been formulated to take the place of his usual pills; he would’ve been no good to his abductors dead. And however long he’d been lying dead-to-the-world in this brick-hard bed, now that he was awake, Darryl knew there was work to do, affairs he needed to finish.
He tried moving his left arm again. His entire body was sore. He remembered the how and why of it, but—never mind—Darryl knew he had to get up.
He bent both of his arms enough to get them into a position where they could help him sit up. While grunting, wincing, and taking long, halting breaths through clenched teeth, Darryl imagined and moved as if his bones had been transmuted into eggshells and his skin had been remade from their boiled yolks. His bones felt as if they would crack at any moment, and his skin as if it would do nothing to prevent the broken pieces from jutting through, causing even more pain. But with a sustained effort, and without breaking anything (plenty had already been broken by others), Darryl managed to get to his feet.
A quick self-examination showed the Killer Vees had left him completely naked. His boxer shorts had gone the way of his other clothes, and his watches. His attention turned to his throbbing left hand. It took only a second to locate the source of the discomfort. His middle and ring fingers had a tight new metallic decoration. The Vees had given him a replacement for the watches. Darryl smirked at the sight of it, shook his head, and looked away to survey his surroundings.
He’d been placed in a small and tidy room that had only four blank, white walls, one full-sized bed, a bedside nightstand, and, on top of it, a lamp. The lamp was unplugged, its bulb missing. He spent a few moments looking harder, looking closer, but there was nothing of interest in the cramped quarters. He began to move toward the door, cursing and fearing for his brittle joints with each step.
After what seemed like five full minutes, Darryl made his way out of the room and into a dark hall. He made a few failing attempts before successfully managing to adjust his vision, enabling him to see as if the hall’s lights were on and the fixtures had been set with 100-watt bulbs. He took two tentative steps forward, then a more confident one. He stopped on the fourth.
He’d come to another door, closed. Darryl looked at it and concentrated. Nothing. He concentrated harder, then felt a trickle under his right nostril. His nose was bleeding…No matter. He’d had success with seeing through the door. It was another bedroom, of the exact same size and layout of the one he’d just left. And it was still occupied.
Darryl thought about turning the knob. He thought about entering, showing his face, making a new introduction to the person inside. He looked at her, and he thought about revenge.
And that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Revenge, or something like it. He’d been living the fantasy of it, deluding himself he’d been doing good when he’d been doing nothing but contributing to the fallen state of the present world. He’d been no better than an Infinite-Definite terrorist. An Errorist. Taking person-by-person revenge to earn a personal (false) redemption. That was the revelation. That was the lesson of his journey through Heaven&Hell.
The idea caused a few lights to brighten his path to true Salvation. His mind was recovering…Darryl had conceded he’d been going about his life the wrong way, but he hadn’t gone so far off he couldn’t find his way back.
He heard a sound and turned to his right. Another sound. The noise was coming from another part of the house. His ears had recovered. Darryl closed his eyes and listened, trying to decipher the sounds, dissect them and reconnect the pieces.
Voices. Two of them. Both hysterical. One joyous, the other not so much. Darryl opened his eyes and took a step back from the bedroom door, looking through it one last time. Revenge. He’d have it soon enough. The right way.
He followed the sounds to a door that hid a stairway. The stairway led in only one direction. Up. Darryl took the steps slowly, more out of trepidation than in subservience to the pain still wracking his body. He stopped before the door at the top of the stairs. He knew what he’d heard, but he wanted to get a clear picture of what he might be jumping into. Once again, he took a good look at the wood—causing a leak in his other nostril—until he saw through to the other side.
At first, Darryl couldn’t understand what he was seeing. Swirling varicolored lights mimicking liquids and winds engulfed the room. It appeared to him as if a typhoon of light was battling a tornado of random shades and hues. But with a bit more concentration—and no small increase in the intensity of the throbbing at his temples— Darryl saw through the confusion. His eyes cut through the room’s colorful chaos and located two people. Two women. Two strong angels. And one of them…At the sight of her, the intense desire for revenge washed over him, saturating him.
Darryl flung the door open and waded into the room’s magick show.
The torrents of colorful radiation would normally have been a torture, unbearable to Darryl only a short while ago. It was now emboldening. Here was the invigoration one should have felt after a good night’s rest. Here was refreshment. Here his strength rapidly returned. Darryl didn’t feel his brittle joints, his aching muscles, the throbbing in his temples, or the soreness on his hand. He was sensitive only to the experience of his skin, which felt as if it were being massaged, delicately, by
billions of pin-sized therapists. There was no stinging. There was no burning. There was only comfort as he walked in his element, his body enshrouded and draped in unnamable blurs. Darryl walked unnoticed though the colorful commotion.
Stopping to stand behind an oblivious Veronica Blake, he looked over her shoulder at Ava Darden, lying flat on her back, wide-eyed, resting on fear, ensconced in stark panic, grasping the prismatic bow to her chest. Darryl looked into those wide bloodshot eyes of hers and somehow managed to snatch away and view glimpses of what she was seeing, the living phantasms of liquid light overwhelming her, suffocating her, burying her, playing on the concealed terror she’d held and carried for more than fifteen years: the dread of immense bodies of water, the disdainful awe of rushing water, the horror of an unwanted child being drowned—again. A grotesque baptism. He saw all of Ava’s memories of the day she almost died, both her imaginings of a belated attempt at infanticide and the facts of a parental suicide gone wrong.
Darryl’s mind and senses could only take so much. He’d seen all he needed to. There was only one act left to perform. Finish off the kidnapper, the tormentor, the jailor, the wayward artist, the true Errorist. Send her to where she belongs.
Darryl placed his hand on Veronica’s shoulder, squeezed, and spun the startled woman around to face him. The Spryte opened her mouth—to shout in realization, to scream in retaliation, to curse in anger, to laugh in nervous amusement—which or whatever, it didn’t matter. He took the opportunity to pull her close, holding her with all his gathered strength as he kissed her.
Both of their eyes remained open as intangible wings of rust and bleeding scarlet thrust up from Darryl’s shoulder blades, flared out, and flapped against the living room’s colorful currents, beating against them like an eagle’s wings on the currents of the sky. His wings of light, however, had a purpose different than flight. He’d no intention of lifting himself and his enthralled above and beyond. He didn’t want to lift and carry her away. He wanted to push and usher her down deep toward another level of Reality.
He held her tight. He handled her exactly like he’d been wanting to for some time now. Radiation coiled around and strangled the blonde’s bare skin as—by his mouth, through his lips, thanks to his tongue and gums and bloody saliva—Darryl wordlessly told Veronica exactly what he’d been thinking about. The radiation sank into her skin and entangled her blood vessels, scribbled through them, enraging her blood, causing each molecule to shake, shudder, and vibrate more and more rapidly as Darryl caused the torrential currents of light in the room to calm themselves, settle down, and smooth into a uniform blue.
In a flash, the blue engulfed every man, woman, and stone in the room.
TWENTY
It took four times longer than it should have, but Robert’s caution paid off. He reached the top of the stairs without getting blindsided. He was just as careful walking down the upstairs hallway, x-raying each door and searching the rooms behind them. He saw nothing of interest and detected nothing of potential danger until he came to the room of white walls and mirrors.
Robert took a steady breath before entering, leaving the door open behind him as he began to conduct his usual mathematical survey.
Like all the other rooms, the lights in this one were on. Unlike the other rooms, this one had twenty-two bulbs lining the corners where the ceiling met the walls, and no visible light switch. Excessive lighting and mirrors. Never a good combination. The parasites infesting him would go berserk if given the opportunity, and they’d devour him in the process.
Damn his forgetfulness. And damn his decision to leave his windbreaker in the car, thinking he wouldn’t need the extra covering in the predawn hours. Most of all, damn his self-pity—there was no time for it. Robert tried to focus on the task at hand. He was getting a little help.
His senses were sharpening, through no voluntary effort of his own. His body’s invaders were becoming more attuned to their host’s environment. Robert swallowed hard and tried to ignore the inevitable, tried to use the good of a worsening situation. He tried to use his enhanced senses to pick up any sign of his enemy.
The room had a fireplace, but no fire. He could smell there’d been one recently, but there were no ashes. The large clawfoot tub was even more curious; it was empty and clean like the fireplace. Robert wondered about it as he moved closer. He stopped one step before one of his sneakers would’ve landed on the carpet of broken glass.
“The hell happened here?” he said.
“Prelude to a honeymoon,” a scratchy voice behind him responded.
Robert spun around and saw her, but he wasn’t quick enough to move out of the way as Vanessa swiped at him. Her nails caught his T-shirt, piercing the fabric and ripping a large hole in the front. As he tried to pull away, Vanessa’s left hand swung across his face. The fingernails drew streaks of blood on his right cheek.
She remained expressionless, but the sight of the ruddy lines on Robert’s face seemed to excite the porcelain-skinned woman. He saw her body experience a moment of frisson before she swiped with her right hand at his other cheek.
Robert ducked out of the way and threw his body forward, ramming his left shoulder against Vanessa’s right knee.
The Spryte crumpled to the floor with a shriek and slid herself back into invisibility.
On his hands and knees, Robert looked around him and listened. He saw she’d shut the door before she’d attacked him, but now he couldn’t pick up even a hint of her presence in the room. He felt alone, but he knew he wasn’t. No—never alone. His blood was now exposed to the bright environment. The parasites in his blood cells began to drink in the sea of light surrounding him. Robert felt and heard the reaction on his rough, drying cheek—it frizzled and burned.
He clenched his fists, tried to put it all out of his mind, tried to think how to prevent half of his face from burning off. Then he heard the chalky voice speaking to him.
“I’m going to peel off all your skin and knit it into a blanket thick enough to smother all your friends.”
Robert took a deep breath and held it as he tried to figure out where the voice was coming from. He held it as long as he could. Failing, he exhaled, and responded.
“You’re under the weird impression you’re going to leave this house in one piece.”
“Me?” Vanessa said. “I assume nothing…except everything.”
The twenty-two bulbs in the room began to flicker, each one at its own pace. When they settled, each gave off a very different type of light.
Something else had entered the room. Something Robert couldn’t smell, or see, or hear—his enhanced senses weren’t in fact perfect. He only knew it was something. Something dangerous.
Robert squinted, running his vision through every range accessible to him as he spun around, trying to find where the raven-haired Spryte was hiding. He didn’t see her; he didn’t hear her; but out of the silvery blue, out of the reflective glass, he saw them stepping out, stepping forward, grinning, winking, taunting: Anika, Kurtis, Sam, Zel, three people who lived in his apartment building, and several others. Friends, colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances, trusted confidants…
No.
He didn’t trust any of it.
They were all illusions.
Robert grabbed the corresq on his belt, unhooked it and flung it. The silver circle sailed and hit the corner of the room he’d aimed for, at just the angle he’d wanted. The corresq ricocheted off in another direction, at another angle, crashed into a mirror, and ricocheted off into another direction, toward another mirror. The sounds of shattering glass dominated the room while Robert waited, waited for his toy to finish the job he’d assigned it and come whizzing back, close enough to him so he could reach out and grab it without getting cut or stung.
He’d figured it perfectly. After first stepping into the room, out of habit and caution, Robert had counted all of its major objects, measured all distances, and taken account of all angles. His mathematical mind and his geomet
rical instincts had guided him; they’d guided his arm and wrist so he knew exactly how hard to throw and what point to hit so the metallic circle would break and demolish all mirrors after one toss. It was another sort of instinct that allowed him to snatch the device in mid-air without hurting his hand.
The conjured illusions faded away as the mirrors that helped produce them fell apart.
“What else you got, Blight?”
Robert reared back and prepared to fling the corresq at the next target, but a shrilling Vanessa jumped out of nothing and knocked the toy from his hand with a well-placed chop as she ripped off his tattered T-shirt with her other hand.
Before he knew what had happened, Vanessa had tossed the rag to the floor, kicked the corresq across the room, and scratched at Robert’s bare stomach—drawing more blood—before blanking out of sight again.
Robert flinched and grunted, but through it all, he’d kept his footing. He also kept his eye open, searching for his elusive enemy as he inched his way toward the corresq.
Something shifted in his abdominal area, around his stomach, squeezing it. Worse than any cramp he could recall. He couldn’t run, but he could still walk. He made the best of it, ever aware of his surroundings.
Vanessa wasn’t anywhere to be found—until she again slid from behind an unseen veil, scratched, drew blood, and slipped back to a place Robert couldn’t see or sense.
If nothing else, the attack settled the contents of his mid-section. Robert no longer had a cramp. There was only a burning sensation there now, like he’d downed a jarful of sliced jalapenos.
He scrambled for the corresq; the raven-haired Spryte followed her now-familiar pattern twice more before he could get his hand on it. A lack of perfect balance forced him to toss it more than once, but he managed to extinguish all of the light bulbs in the room before Vanessa could strike once more. He and whoever or whatever else was in the room with him were now in complete darkness.
Broken Angels Page 28
