Vertigo Effect: The Eighth Jonathan Shade Novel

by Gary Jonas

  She kicked him in the chest and he staggered back.

  “Now!” she yelled and grabbed hold of him. She threw him face first at the back of the cage.

  I put the pedal to the metal and the propeller whirled fast and furious. Unfortunately, Terrell caught himself on the cage. Air and water slammed into his face, but he wasn’t going in.

  Kelly saw the problem, too.

  The airboat scraped around the other boat and accelerated. I adjusted the stick to swerve around in a circle, trying to shake Terrell’s grip loose. Kelly leaped into the boat as it turned. She jumped from one bench seat to another, vaulted up to plant a foot an inch from my crotch, and flipped onto the front of the cage. Her hair whipped through the gaps and the propeller chopped some of it off. She crawled up and over the cage, and I guided us away from the shore and the downed boat. We shot down the canal, sawgrass on one side, red mangroves on the other.

  Terrell pulled himself around the cage. He reached for Kelly, but she moved before his hand could close on her. She kicked him in the chest and he flipped around to the back of the cage again, but the air and metal frame kept him safe. Kelly followed him around, and grabbed his hand. She peeled his fingers back, but he expected that. I twisted in the seat, saw him get a good grip on her.

  “Shit!” I jumped up and over, letting the boat drift as it would. It slowed, and the propeller also slowed. I grabbed a support strut on the cage, ignored the pain in my shoulder and moved like an Olympic acrobat to flip over and I kicked Terrell in the back, driving him forward.

  He lost his grip on the cage and his hand went into the propeller. Chop chop chop!

  Blood and bone sprayed backward. He released Kelly to grab the cage with his other hand. His shoulder caught on the rudder as he slid downward. I gripped him around the waist with my legs.

  “Hit the accelerator!” I yelled.

  I pushed him close, then had to move one of my legs to brace my foot against the far side of the cage. With one hand I clutched the steel of the cage, and with the other I pushed Terrell’s face in toward the propeller.

  Kelly jumped to the driver’s seat and stomped on the accelerator.

  Terrell pushed back, hard. His destroyed hand was growing back, but hadn’t fully formed. I tried to push him in, but he was too strong, and I couldn’t get leverage. He grabbed my leg, pulled my foot off the cage. I tried to pull away, but his grip was tight as a vice.

  “Your turn,” he said and moved to drive my foot into the propeller.

  Esther appeared right in front of him and he flinched, instinctively batting at her. To do that, he had to release me. In that split second, I pushed back and brought myself forward with everything I had right into his back. I shoved him through the opening in the cage and drove him into the blades. The big danger from my position was flying bone fragments, so I let go of the cage and dropped into the water.

  I hit the bottom hard and skidded along, tearing my wound open further. But Esther later told me the spray of blood and bone from the back of that airboat was a sight to see.

  And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Terrell back together again, even with magic.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Kelly circled back to get me.

  “You’re hurt, but you’ll live.”

  Until she helped me up, I thought I’d avoided all the bone fragments, but I was wrong. Pieces of Terrell were embedded in my chest and arm. My neck was scratched up from another piece, though that could have been from a branch. No way to know.

  The tour guide met us on shore where Meghan sat next to Bill. Their mouths were bloody and the ground in front of them was littered with shark teeth. Once Terrell, or whatever had taken his place, was destroyed, the spell he’d cast wore off. Their mouths would be sore, but the gums would heal.

  “How are you doing?” I asked as I sat down near them.

  Bill looked over at me. “Better than you.”

  “Question,” I said. “Did you two knowingly team up with him?”

  Meghan looked indignant. “How dare you! I would never!”

  I laughed. “You’re not that good an actress, Meghan. So you were in on it from the start.”

  Bill rubbed his temples. “Terrell told us we could all live forever and never age. We’d always look young.”

  “Wow,” I said. “How old are you, Meghan?”

  “That’s a rude question.”

  “You can’t be thirty.”

  “According to IMDb, she’s twenty-seven,” Bill said. “Roles are going to start going to the younger, prettier actresses.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “Men are allowed to age in Hollywood.”

  “Doesn’t mean we want to age.”

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Meghan asked.

  “You’re looking at jail time for sure. You might not have killed Angela or the clerk, but you were certainly accomplices. And the law won’t buy any of the magic, so you’re going to look mighty stupid to the press.”

  “But what about the picture?” Bill asked. “We still have scenes to film!”

  “CGI has come a long way since they had to put Brandon Lee’s face on someone else’s body for The Crow. They won’t need you.”

  “Soon they won’t need any of us.”

  Thunder rumbled, and it began to rain. The last rays of the sun disappeared and night embraced us. The rain felt good except when it hit my wounds.

  “You need a doctor,” Kelly said.

  I turned to the tour guide. “Think you can get us back to the dock?”

  He nodded. “Thought I was a goner for sure.”

  “You can charge them for the lost airboat,” I said.

  “The studio can pay for it,” Bill said.

  “No way,” I said. “This comes out of your pocket.”

  We all climbed into the airboat, and the driver took us back. We were already soaked from the water fight, but the rain at least washed the mud off.

  “They’re buying me a new sword, too,” Kelly said.

  “True that,” I said. “Get your debit cards ready, folks.”

  ***

  One of my few regrets after that was that we didn’t get to go to L.A. to shoot the big finale for the movie. That would have been a lot of fun, though I have to admit I was tired of fighting in the water.

  Instead, I got patched up, and we ended up back in the Caribbean. Life did not suck.

  Brenda came down to visit, and while that first day she was still mighty sad about the loss of her cousin, by that night, she was able to smile a bit.

  “I’m so sorry about Angela,” I said that night in bed.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Brenda said. She had her arms wrapped around me, her head on my chest.

  “Still,” I said.

  She kissed my sternum. I was the only person in her life who could touch her without being turned to stone.

  “You should have come down to help us against Terrell,” I said. “You could have just touched the son of a bitch.”

  “It’s a handy skill from time to time, though turning people to stone isn’t any fun,” she said, and moved her hands down my belly. She let them keep going. “It’s so nice to be able to feel skin on skin without the other person turning into a rock.”

  “Careful,” I said. “You’re making something hard as a rock.”

  She groaned. But it was true. And soon enough, the groans of a bad joke turned into moans of pleasure as I went to work loving her pain away.

  There are worse ways to spend a week.

  Jonathan Shade will return in CLUB ETERNITY

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gary Jonas grew up in a military family, so he moved a lot as a child. His original plan was to be a comic book artist, but in college things changed. He took a creative writing class for the easy A, and fo
und that when he wrote stories, people were affected emotionally by them in ways they weren’t by his artwork. He switched from art to writing without ever looking back. Well, he might have looked back a few times, but by then it was too late. He sold his first short story to Marion Zimmer Bradley for the anthology Sword and Sorceress VII. Many short story sales followed to various magazines and anthologies including Robert Bloch’s Psychos, It Came from the Drive-In, 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories, Prom Night, and many more.

  His first novel, One-Way Ticket to Midnight, was published in 2002, It made the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Award. While the novel was well-reviewed, it didn’t sell diddly squat, so Gary turned to writing screenplays for a few years. A couple of Hollywood options led to nothing, and the notes from producers, while sometimes spot-on, were also sometimes way out in left field (if they were even in the ballpark). Gary returned to novel writing with Modern Sorcery. You can visit him online, and sign up for his mailing list on his rarely updated blog.

  Books by Gary Jonas

  The Jonathan Shade series:

  Modern Sorcery

  Acheron Highway

  Dragon Gate

  Anubis Nights

  Sunset Specters

  Wizard’s Nocturne

  Razor Dreams

  Vertigo Effect

  Club Eternity (coming soon)

  Timeless Gods (coming soon)

  The Kelly Chan series

  Vampire Midnight

  Werewolf Samurai (coming soon)

  Zombie Rising (coming soon)

  The UFO Conspiracy Files series:

  Guardians of the Sky

  Rogue Alien (coming soon)

  Stand-alone novels:

  One-Way Ticket to Midnight

  Pirates of the Outrigger Rift (w/Bill D. Allen)

  Novella:

  Night Marshal: A Tale of the Undead West

  also available in Night Marshal Box Set (the first three Night Marshal tales in one bundle--includes Night Marshal by Gary Jonas, High Plains Moon by Glenn R. Sixbury, and This Dance, These Bones by Rebecca Hodgkins). The set kicks ass.

  Collection:

  Quick Shots

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