“To protect territory. To be the apex predator.”
Beth felt the castle deck beneath her list like the hallway they’d stumbled through, felt her world twist like the spiraling tunnel. “We have to get out of here. We can’t fight something like that.”
“I know,” Jack said, already turning for the stairs. “This was a mistake.”
The double thud of Beth’s heartbeat throbbed through her—in her throat, in her hands, in her head. But through it, she caught the sound of scuffling below. She went to the edge of the castle roof—swiftly, quietly—and saw flickering lights fanning out across the floor. “Jack, I think we’ve got company.”
She was met with only hollow silence.
“Jack? Did you hear me?” She turned. “I think the Division’s down there. I think they found us.”
Jack simply stared into the darkness, eyes fixed on something beyond the reach of her sight. “We’ve got bigger problems.”
Twenty-Four
Jack didn’t know how she’d gotten there. He didn’t know who she was—what she was—or how long she’d been watching. It was as if she’d simply coalesced on top of the battlements and now stood silently observing.
She was small, lithe, her milky skin waxen. Scarlet tresses fell in soft waves to kiss both shoulders. Although her form was mostly cloaked in shadow, Jack could see that she was naked, the moon gleaming in a bright line along the curve of her petite breasts and slim hips. Her jade eyes pierced the gloom. A slice of moonlight slanted across her right cheek and slid down to her collarbone. Her face was the same one Jack had seen outside that ruined house. And it was the same one whose likeness had been impressed upon the chitin mask.
If Jack had to guess, he would have said she was no more than twenty years old. But those eyes spoke differently. They whispered across the darkness of an ageless intelligence. Whatever she was, it was far beyond human. She didn’t move, but her very being radiated a power as majestic as it was terrifying. It was a power that needed no blustering threats to make itself known. This was her domain. Of this, Jack had no doubt.
She drew him toward her. Her pull was like a beacon calling him home. It was something he hadn’t felt for almost a third of his life and, for all that time, something he’d never dared believe he’d feel again.
The rest of the world fell away, breaking into star stuff. In his mind, Castle Amusements crumbled to ash. Gone were Beth and Blood. Gone was the hunt. Gone were the Division agents who circled below them. Gone was the cancer eating him alive. Gone were the memories that plagued his days and the nightmares that haunted his sleep. All of it gone—sucked into the vortex of those eyes, where he himself was destined to go next.
One foot followed the other as he glided toward her, guided by a gravity that was hers alone. Soon he stood only inches away. Her face betrayed no emotion, as serene as an alabaster icon. But her eyes . . . her eyes . . .
“Jack?” The voice came from a place so distant it might as well have been static left over from the birth of the universe. “Jack? What are you doing?”
He knew that voice belonged to Beth. In some pale and faded way, he knew that, but it didn’t matter. Beth was a ghost now. The whole world was nothing but ghosts, all gone spectral in a blink of those jade eyes.
A hand gripped his arm. Like the voice, he knew it belonged to Beth. And like the voice, it might as well have been a relic of some alien world. The fingers wrapped tightly. The hand tugged at him. So did the words. Jack, get away from her. He could think of no reason to comply. His only desire was to fall into those bottomless eyes that stared at him from across time.
Her beauty was angelic but cold. She placed one slender hand gently on his cheek. Her skin was cool and tingled softly against his, almost electric. And when she clasped his other cheek, the circuit was complete.
Jack’s world went black. Dead black.
• • •
Fractured images and raw emotion streaked past him, hurtling from somewhere in the endless void.
A wet stone wall flickering in oil light. A damp chill squirms across his skin and bores deep. He pulls a scratchy and threadbare wool blanket around him.
Darkness.
Snow falls in fat flakes as he shuffles up a long hill, leaving cold kisses on his skeletal shoulders. An electric streetcar passes, bell clanging in the night as it rumbles down the cobblestone street. A man appeares behind the wheel of a long coupe. His slick hair is parted down the center. He smiles and pats the seat next to him, and when Jack sticks out his hand, he sees that it is a woman’s hand. The same hand that had touched his cheek on the other side of time.
Darkness.
A flash of sharp steel glinting against the black.
Darkness again.
An eye grotesquely large in the brass hoop of a magnifying lens hovers inches from his face. It belongs to the man with the slick black hair. He is wearing a leather apron and long vulcanized gloves.
Darkness.
Lightning cracks.
A pneumatic hiss whispers staccato bursts.
The whine of a saw blade rends the night.
The stench of burning bone.
Long needles pierce him everywhere.
Vertiginous nausea.
Liquid fills both lungs.
Acid courses through every vein.
And then darkness, again the endless darkness.
And cold.
Deep, eternal cold.
• • •
Jack collapsed. His head cracked hard against the floor. He looked up. She stood above him, her hands resting against the ridged V of her pubic bones. She held her palms out in welcome like a statue of the Virgin.
He lifted his hand to her. Their fingers inches apart—
Beth stepped into the edge of his peripheral vision. She clutched double fistfuls of salt, the grains streaming between her thin fingers like hourglass sand. And before Jack could do anything to stop her, Beth hurled both fistfuls straight ahead.
The salt landed in two flat circles on the woman—the thing—who had reached into his mind. Her naked skin, from shoulder to breast, bubbled black like butter left too long on the stove.
Jack recoiled, somehow feeling the burn against his own chest. But she barely seemed to notice. A puzzled look washed across her face as she looked down at the damage. And then her skin began to thicken and grow hazy, like scuffed varnish. The sizzling stopped. The black bubbles flaked off, revealing a layer of chitin beneath.
Almost instantly, every inch of her—her face, her delicate breasts, her trim waist, her slim arms and legs, everything but that lush mane of red hair and those piercing jade eyes—was covered in thin chitin plates like an articulated suit of armor.
He felt Beth’s hand on his shoulder. “Jack, get up.”
He stumbled as he rose to one knee, his legs unsteady like a foal’s. He wanted to speak, to tell Beth what he’d seen, but his brain could not connect to his voice. All that came out was a thin wheeze.
Beth ripped his pistol from its holster and took aim. Again, he wanted to stop her but couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. “I don’t know if you can understand me,” she said, the words dull and waterlogged in Jack’s ears, “but you’d better back the fuck up!”
The thing, whatever she was, only stood there, those eyes swallowing everything they landed on.
“I said, back up!” Beth fired a warning shot. The pellet sizzled against the brick wall. The thing took a small step forward.
“I mean it!”
Another step.
Beth fired directly into the armored torso. The pellet ricocheted off the chitin and bounded into darkness.
The woman—if she could even be called that—closed the distance between them at near light speed. She reached for the gun, now trembling in Beth’s shaking hand. Her fingers danced along its length, testing it with blind, childlike wonder.
Then she gripped the barrel tightly, and the pistol crumpled like gum foil. She plucked the ruined gun from Beth�
��s hand and flicked it aside. Her fingers went for Beth’s cheek, tracing them along the curve before moving calmly down to her throat.
She clamped tightly and lifted Beth off the ground.
There was no malice in the act. She looked, at most, bemused as Beth clawed at her unyielding grip, her eyes bullfrogging, her cheeks blushing cobalt, her legs scissoring the open air.
Jack eked out a croak. He watched helplessly as bubbles of spit leaked from one corner of Beth’s mouth. If he didn’t do something, she’d be dead in minutes. If he couldn’t stop this, then nothing—not the creatures, not the Division, not the cancer, not even what stood before him choking the life from Beth—would matter.
Beth’s eyes rolled to white, and her legs lost momentum as her body started to plank. Jack opened his mouth and managed nothing but a rasp. He tried again, putting the full force of his will behind a single syllable. “No!”
The thing turned to him, eyes brimming with cold green fire. She held Jack with that gaze as firmly as she held Beth with her single outstretched hand.
“No . . .” The word cracked like crystal against his throat, the jagged edges cutting deep. “No . . . Let her go.”
The thing opened her hand. Beth’s body hit the ground in a heap, unmoving. Jack rushed to her. He put two fingers to her throat. The pulse was there, but weak. “Beth.”
She jolted upright, coughing, seeming to try to suck all the air in the place into her lungs in a single terror-stricken breath. Her body trembled. Jack drew her close to him, cradling her like a child.
He looked up to see her still standing there, observing them with seraphic detachment. And as Beth struggled to level her breathing, an undying fear took him. What would she do with them next? Would she reach into his mind again? Was there more for her to show them? Or were they simply destined to go into a pair of empty chambers in that mound, separated by all but death?
Footfalls thudded beneath them. Their observer wrenched herself toward the sound. She twisted all the way around, feet facing them, body facing the head of the staircase, like a doll on a ball pivot.
The footfalls grew louder, closer, more insistent. The thing straightened up and began to rise. Her feet didn’t leave the ground, but she was growing taller, stretching from five feet to six in a matter of seconds and not stopping—hitting seven, then eight, then ten, fourteen. The chitin plates fell from her legs, dropping to the floor around her like flower petals. Her legs melted into each other, fusing into a long segmented tail. And there she stood, towering above them—half woman, half serpent.
She gave Jack one last impenetrable look, then started slithering toward the staircase, the coils sidewinding beneath her as she shifted toward the stairs. The floor beneath them hummed with deafening vibrations. The thing whipped her tail, and the tip struck a statue. It erupted into a cloud of plaster dust, the half that remained clattering to the floor.
When she reached the stairs, she reared back, coiling tightly. Then she dived straight through the floor, her tail hurtling behind her through the splintered planks like the chain of a dropped anchor. And when she screamed, it was the sound of the world being torn in half.
Twenty-Five
Thorne followed close behind Ross as they entered the fun-house castle. They were able to advance two abreast, but it was a tight squeeze in the narrow hallway. The entire place reeked of decades of dust and creeping mold.
There were six of them in this advance wave. Lamb and Diamond, she and Ross, and two other agents, Baker and Cogbill. After they’d navigated the Crystal Palace’s mirror maze, they passed through the remains of an arcade. Husks of dead video games lines both walls, half their CRT screens shattered.
Ross paused at one of the games. Polybius was written across the top and side in chunky Future Shock script. Ross stood enraptured, the mission forgotten for a moment as he caressed the game’s console as if he were greeting an old friend.
“Now, how did you slip the stable? Thought we’d rounded you all up,” Ross said, half to himself. “Lamb, tag this for retrieval once we’ve captured Jackson. Don’t want a repeat of what happened in New York.”
“Copy that,” Lamb replied, and they moved on.
Once inside the main complex, they got a lock on Jackson and Becker using thermal imagery. The creatures may have been immune to detection by photography, but Jackson and his companion were not.
Monitoring agents put them on the roof of the fun-house castle, and according to the reports, they weren’t alone. The scans had picked up another body. But no one had noticed a third party entering through the roof when Jackson and Becker did. This new variable had already put them all on edge.
They’d all just made it past the barrel room when they heard the scream. An unearthly scream, like nothing Thorne had ever known. She froze. Everyone did, ears cocked upward, like a pack of scared mice.
“What the fuck was that?” Diamond said, his gruff voice cracking.
“Silence,” hissed Ross without even turning. Even now, Thorne had to admire Ross’s style of command. He wasn’t the type to lead from behind and let the grunts take the bullets, like so many Thorne had known.
“We’ve got a fix on someone descending from the upper level,” crackled a voice over the common channel.
Ross lifted his wrist mic. “Jackson?”
“Unclear.”
“Stand your ground,” Ross said, quickly turning to face them. “Remember, both Jackson and Becker are to be taken unharmed.” He unholstered his Taser, already fitted with a primed cartridge. “But the instant you spot someone who isn’t either of them or one of us, you assume it’s one of the creatures. Understand? Don’t hesitate. Fire on it with the pellet guns.”
“Fire? On anyone?” asked Lamb. “What if—”
“I don’t care if it’s your own sainted grandmother you see in there. Do not trust your eyes. Shoot, and shoot to kill.”
Thorne spotted movement ahead. Someone was descending the spiral staircase, and doing it so fast it made the entire thing rattle and groan. In the branching flashlight beams, Thorne thought she might have spotted a woman’s face. One she did not recognize.
“It’s not them.” She fumbled for her pellet pistol, just managing to pull it out before whoever—whatever—it was ducked into the shadows. She squeezed off a single round. It sparked futilely against the stairway’s iron rail, sending halos spinning in her eyes.
Ross bolted, making for the end of the hall before Thorne could utter another word. The groan of rusty springs filled the air as the entire chamber listed left, then right, then left. Thorne tumbled, smacking into the far wall so hard her teeth sang.
Plaster heads bobbed from the walls. She fired at one of them. It exploded, choking the hall, and her lungs, with dust. Something squirmed against her shin, something that was not part of the ride. It ground her legs against the wall with the undulating pressure of caterpillar tracks. The hallway erupted in a hail of pellets. They sizzled against the walls, each one a tiny supernova burning white holes in the curtain of her vision. She felt the weight on her legs lift, her shins still burning from the friction.
Thorne tried to calm her rapid breathing as the shouts and gunfire waned. She tried to bring her eyes into focus, but lingering globules of bright blue and red remained there, trailing. She squinted, peering past them, scouring the hallway for some sign of the thing that had ambushed them. Behind Agents Lamb and Diamond, a shadow rose. It looked human but taller and impossibly thin. “Behind you!”
Diamond heard her, pitching forward, rolling on one shoulder before landing in a crouch, pistol held at the ready. Lamb wasn’t as quick. He turned, and the beam from his flashlight lit up the shadow. Thorne got one clean, clear look at her. A young woman, almost delicate-looking, with a shock of brilliant scarlet hair. Her eyes caught the light, twin green flames burning with rage. She was a girl from the waist up, but below her naked torso, where there should have been legs, was a long segmented tail.
A scream caught
hard in Thorne’s throat. Everything around her slowed, miring her in the quicksand stuff of nightmares. She was stuck, stuck and sinking fast.
Lamb, too, was paralyzed. His pistol hung loosely from his hand as he stared, gobsmacked. The thing shot out a hand. It stretched far longer than it should have, fingers melding into a flat squid-like tentacle. She gripped Lamb’s throat and heaved him up with a whiplash shake. His head cratered the ceiling, raining broken tile and splinters on them all. His legs kicked against nothing for a moment. And then stopped.
Thorne clamped her eyelids tight but couldn’t stop the sounds from burrowing into her ears. The tearing of limbs. The snapping of sockets. The crack of a spine. She screamed, unable to take any more, and opened her eyes to see Lamb’s throat collapse and his head pop off. It landed on the floor, splatters of red streaking his salt-and-pepper hair, eyes frozen open and staring straight at her.
The thing unwound its tentacle, letting the limp body go. A wave of hot copper nausea rose in Thorne’s gullet as she watched it hit the floor, blood spurting from the stump of the neck in a pulsing geyser.
Cogbill and Baker opened fire again with the pellet guns. Diamond joined them, adding his 9mm to the mix. All of it just ricocheted harmlessly off the thing’s skin.
Thorne heard a clanging behind her and turned to see that Ross was already bounding up the staircase. “Agent Ross!” she called, still huddled on the floor. “We’re under attack! It’s a bloodbath!”
“Understood, Agent Thorne. Jackson remains priority one.”
At the other end of the hall, the thing—Medusa, whatever the fuck it was—had yanked Cogbill off the ground. One tentacle wrapped like a creeper vine around his arm; the other had his thigh. He jerked between the two like a stuffed doll and screamed a single word over and over. “Mommy!”
She bent both limbs so far behind his back they touched. But just for an instant. Then the screams ceased as Cogbill was torn in half. The thing cast aside his still-twitching legs and held aloft his torso, a ropy tangle of entrails dangling from it in a garland of gore.
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