by John Farris
“Are you having any trouble holding her?” Eden said.
“No. My mental body is almost a hundred percent charged. And she’s only a Fetchling. They’re all beauties, thanks to the spectrochrome therapy. Which can charge up to the fifth energy body and is great for removing dents, wrinkles, and old skin. But none of them have superpowers.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Eden, they’re everywhere in Vegas. That was the lure of Mordaunt. The crew Flicka belongs to is typical: six or eight personas, all of which have been around for centuries. I have a few names. Do any of these strike a chord, someone else . . . you may have met lately?”
“Bertie, you’re nearly exhausted.”
“But we need to do this. Nicole was the one you saw on her bike, trying for a new land-speed record.”
“You must have scared her bad.”
“A little slippery, I couldn’t quite get control of her. And there’s Devon, Reese, Honeydew, Harlee—”
“Good grief! Harlee, but not like the motorcycle?”
“Yes.”
“She invited herself to a show at Cody’s gallery the other night and buddied up to all of us. Especially me. Really charming. She’s called me a couple of times since. She wants to do lunch.”
Bertie said, “Like the lunch date I had with Charmaine Goferne?” She smiled ruefully, looking at the IV line taped to her wrist. “That was special.” Bertie paused, and closed her eyes. “I wish Tom were here,” she said in a barely audible voice. Eden, sitting beside her on the bed, squeezed her other hand. In the armchair across the room Flicka stirred and blinked as if she were trying to see through a thick fog. Bertie took a tighter grip on her mind and Flicka settled back with a small sigh.
“Anyway—about Harlee. From what I picked up looking through Flicka’s recent activities, it’s Harlee who runs the crew.” Bertie drew a long, pensive breath. “Guess you know what you have to do.”
“Avoid her at all costs until we can both get far away from Vegas.”
“Uh-uh. You have to dig into Harlee’s mind and find out all you can about her. We can’t just run. There are still matters to be settled, here and now. We can’t allow the Fetchlings to form a bond with Delilah.”
“Get into her mind? I don’t peep, you know that.”
“You’re not a natural-born peeper, but you have latent ability. It’s your sixth energy body, which you’ve never paid much attention to. Time to . . . get on with your education as Avatar.”
“Time for you to rest. And you never did touch your dinner.” Eden looked back at Flicka. “Of course you had this little problem. Our problem now.” She opened the hypodermic kit that Flicka had brought with her.
“Any idea what this stuff is?”
“Something lethal, that’s all I know.”
“We have to turn her over to the cops.”
“Possession doesn’t equal intent, Eden. Any publicity while her lawyers are working on it, the other Fetchlings in Harlee’s crew will make themselves scarce.”
“You could—”
Bertie smiled faintly at Eden’s stern expression.
“Brain-lock? I’m not quite up to it. And it’s the next thing to murder anyway.” Bertie put a hand on her chest as she breathed. Her eyes closed, opened. “Not up to that, either. We just have to let her go. But with a lesson . . . she’ll never forget. Know what I mean?”
“I’m reading you,” Eden said grimly.
“There’s . . . adhesive tape in the bathroom.”
Eden got the tape and a pair of scissors with blunt points, then stood behind Flicka, tearing off several strips of the transparent tape. With those she sealed the Fetchling’s mouth and taped her wrists tightly together. While this was going on, Flicka, unable to offer resistance, looked uncomprehendingly at Eden.
“You said they were a ‘crew.’ How do they live, commune-style?”
“Far from it. They’re all kept. Flicka has a penthouse to herself at the Space Odyssey except when her ‘Vegas Daddy’ is in town. He’s a media billionaire in Seattle. Fishing for marlin . . . off Tasmania right now. All set?”
Eden backed away from Flicka’s chair, eyed her taping job critically.
“All set.”
She reached for the walking stick of stout mopane wood that went everywhere with her. The gold lion’s head made a quarter turn toward her face as she held it lightly and horizontally in one hand. Eden closed her eyes briefly.
“Cut her loose, Bertie.”
Moments later Flicka jerked sharply in the chair, eyes widening, nostrils pinching in as she drew a huge breath. The expression in her eyes went wild as she struggled to free her taped hands. She leaped to her feet, looking from Bertie on the bed to the stick in Eden’s outstretched hand. The muscles in Flicka’s throat stood out. She bolted for the door.
“Simba,” Eden said.
The stick flew from Eden’s hand, turning end over end, and slashed down across Flicka’s upper back as she groped for the doorknob. Flicka jerked backward in pain and was struck smartly across one thigh, which hobbled her. She dropped to her knees.
“Good thrashing is enough,” Bertie cautioned. “Don’t break any bones.”
“I know,” Eden murmured, expertly deploying the stick, dispassionately watching the action with folded arms as Flicka threw herself helplessly around the carpeted floor, trying to avoid the painful fleshy whacks—most of them to her rear end—and an occasional jab to a calf or arm muscle.
At last she lay weeping with her hands covering her face, thoroughly welted beneath her volunteer’s smock. Simba continued to hover over her body at an angle of thirty degrees.
Eden cut the tape away from her mouth with scissors.
“Listen good, Flicka,” she said in a big-sister tone of voice. “You think it hurts now, but oh when you wake up in the morning! Anyway, you’ll live. A courtesy you don’t deserve. Bertie could keep that evil mind of yours in a snakepit for the next two hundred years. Or remember this—either of us can kill you before you’re able to blink.” Eden passed her left hand, palm down, over the talisman that lay on her breast—only a thumbnail-size wad of grayish metal to Flicka’s streaming eyes. “Understand? Nod if you’re connecting with me, cutie.”
Flicka nodded, making strangled sounds that alternated with whimpering. Her face was flushed and wet.
“Good. You don’t have the talent to play in our league. Don’t try it again. Still paying attention?”
Flicka nodded hatefully.
“Get up.”
Flicka rolled over slowly with a cry of distress and raised herself to her knees. Eden helped her up the rest of the way with the gold lion’s head under Flicka’s chin. Flicka’s eyes rolled nervously.
“I’m bleeding internally,” she moaned, wiping a little blood from a corner of her shapely mouth.
“You bit your tongue, that’s all. A couple of guys are going to come in here and take you—somewhere. Have a long whirlpool bath with Epsom salts, then alternate ice and heat every fifteen minutes on the bruises. You should be able to get out of bed by this time tomorrow.”
Eden released her grip on the walking stick, which remained where it was and kept Flicka’s chin angled toward the ceiling.
—How did you get to be such a tough guy? Bertie asked Eden subvocally.
—Four years of Division One basketball. Bertie, let’s see Flicka again, say, around eleven tomorrow morning?
—What? Where are you going with—? Oh, I get it.
—Practice, practice, practice. As long as we have ourselves a Fetchling, I should make good use of her.
—So you’re going to park her in the bungalow at Bahìa for the night, away from bad influences?
Eden smiled.
“For now we’re going to be Flicka’s new best friends.”
Saying it aloud; Flicka rolled stricken eyes in Eden’s direction.
AT VIRGIE LOVECHILD’S •
NOVEMBER 4 • 12:53 A.M.
Delilah ha
d insisted that the red crystal skull accompany her wherever she and Gwen went, so it was sitting on the front seat next to Gwen in the Cadillac Escalade. Dr. Marcus Woolwine rode in the back of the SUV as far as he could get from the skull, fearing complications with his pacemaker. Gwen drove because Woolwine had never learned how. The Escalade had an onboard navigator, so Gwen had no problem getting them down from the Magician’s fortress on Charleston Mountain en route to the short street behind the Strip and the ever-growing eastward sprawl of megaresorts.
The Strip was where she had problems.
Gwen could drive because dpg’s routinely mimicked their homebodies’ mundane skills, but she didn’t have a license. And she’d never tried to handle anything the size of an Escalade. Heavy southbound traffic on the Strip unnerved her. So did Delilah, who expressed a certain childlike awe at what she was seeing.
“O wondrous sight! How the night dost thrive, with combustion fit to breed Apocalypse!”
Her attention divided, Gwen nearly sideswiped a white limousine with running lights, and partygoers sticking up out of the moon-roof opening like bobble-head dolls.
“The moon is red at midnight, as if it supped on blood! So this is Vegas! Methinks it not unlike a hunting ground, wherein herds of game pay for the privilege of their slaught’ring.”
“I don’t gamble myself,” Woolwine said faintly.
A cultured female voice advised Gwen to make a left turn where Spring Mountain Road became Sands, then a right onto Burbank. Delilah quieted down once they passed the Wynn Resort and crossed under the monorail, which momentarily fascinated her.
The gate across Virgie Lovechild’s driveway was closed but not padlocked. The yard was empty. They heard, faintly, rap music coming from the Airstream trailer parked near the concrete-block wall at the back of Virgie’s property. And the low tones of a police/fire radio frequency scanner. There was a party going on in one of the oblong apartment buildings on either side of Virgie’s place.
Marcus Woolwine got stiffly out of the Escalade, which Gwen had left across the driveway entrance. He blinked at her. She had the red crystal skull under one arm. Pointless to suggest she leave it behind, he thought. Better to leave both Gwen and Delilah there in the yard while he tried the house. He had seen that there were lights inside.
And, as he found upon entering (the front door stood carelessly or invitingly open, depending on one’s purpose in being there), a stuffiness made even less bearable by an assortment of odors that offended his keen nose. Stale but still strong marijuana smoke. A tinge of vomit. Miasma of unwashed animals. Sweetish smear of spilled salsa dip on a low table.
“Hello?”
No reply. But even as he held back on the threshold Woolwine sensed that someone was there. He heard a faint, muffled grunt from the back of the bungalow. Then a sudden loud assault of malevolent hip-hop, as if that someone had dialed the volume of a radio too high while idly looking for a station. It gave Woolwine a violent start. Only about three seconds’ worth of the ghetto music, and silence again. But his nerves were slow to settle down.
He took a couple of cautious steps into the living room.
“I’m looking for Virgie Lovechild!” Woolwine called hopefully into the silence.
He heard that small, exasperated-sounding grunt again. As if someone was laboring to accomplish a small task.
Woolwine hunched his shoulders uneasily and proceeded across the front room of the bungalow, crunching corn chips underfoot. He kicked something that gleamed momentarily like a dog’s bone as it rebounded from the concertina of a small radiator. The trashiness further offended him. And if there was a bone, where was the dog?
He paused at the entrance to a tiled hallway. On either side, at the end of the hall with its statuary niches, there were two rooms. Lamplight slash through a partially open door to the left revealed another apparent instance of sloppy housekeeping: three or four pieces of broken pottery on the tiles. His eyes shifted from a jagged remnant of a painted face to an indistinct shadow on a bedroom wall beyond the carved door. Someone seemed to be doing an exercise. Which could explain the grunts of effort he’d heard, if not the refusal to answer him.
But the simple explanation could not hold its shape in his mind. A discordancy, a sense of something terribly skewed, emphasized by that pale piece of a saintly face and a single blue eye on the tiles catching the light from inside the room, made his skin prickle.
His instinct, as the grunting came more fiercely to his ears, was to back off, go away with no further attempt to intrude or interrupt what possibly might be a bout of not-altogether-agreeable lovemaking. He was poised to turn when he heard, almost at his feet, a cell phone ring tone.
Woolwine jerked his foot away as if from something deadly and stared down at the compact phone alight and lying against the line of hand-painted baseboard tiles.
As he stared at the cell phone, feeling a creeping numbness along one edge of his tongue and an artery throbbing in his neck, he realized that the abandoned phone wasn’t just another instance of general untidiness. Something bad had happened, was still happening, in Virgie Lovechild’s house.
The door to the bedroom in front of him opened wide on iron hinges, the hall brightening a little more from the light of the opaquely shaded lamp within. A girl with a spiky ruff of dark hair, grotesquely overpainted eyes, and a sweaty face was standing there, her breast heaving. She had on headphones that were plugged into an iPod that she wore around her neck.
Behind her, Woolwine glimpsed a still form in tangled bloody bedclothes, head and face hidden beneath a flattened pillow. Those effortful grunting noises he’d heard—the girl had not been exercising but engaging in a more lethal pursuit, smothering the life from whoever it was on the bed.
Deb the Goth girl and Dr. Marcus Woolwine stared at each other with nearly identical expressions of dismay. Deborah’s expression changed first, to lip-biting resentment , as if she were anticipating some sort of parental rebuke.
“Who are you? What are you sneaking around here for? What did you see?”
“I—I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—”
Deb pushed the headphones off her ears and waved a temperamental hand as she walked toward him, still trying to get her breathing under control.
Dr. Marcus Woolwine backed up, the only sensible response to the heat and fury he felt emanating from her body. He saw in her darting eyes the trapped wildness of a desperate character, emphasized by the remote heavy beat of hip-hop menace issuing from the headphones. Woolwine knew that few human beings have a taste for cold-blooded murder. He was unable to imagine what had triggered the girl’s assault on a presumably helpless, bedridden person. Following the deed she might simply have lapsed into a fugue state, shutting out the immediate past, settling down into some sort of nerveless rote activity. But his unexpected presence had wrenched her back into that other emotional state, which had seen her through the killing frenzy. Of which, Woolwine realized, he could now be an extension, simply an object to be removed from her flight path as quickly and efficiently as possible.
If she’d had a gun, she might already have shot him. Instead, Deborah had her hands and fingernails.
“Stand away, skithy fool!”
Certainly not Deb’s voice that he heard. The Goth girl only grunted in her heat as she sprang at him, fingers hooked frighteningly to rip away a significant portion of his face.
She missed, but was close enough to swipe the mirror sunglasses from his face, dash them against the wall as he stumbled and fell back. He landed on his shoulders instead of cracking his skull on the tiles, saving him from a concussion at best. Nevertheless, for a few moments he was in such pain that he couldn’t move. Deb kicked his knee and was about to kick him squarely in the groin with a sharp-toed boot when Woolwine saw a thin beam of light like a laser strike her in the forehead. He then was able to scramble out of the Goth girl’s path. But she didn’t continue after him. She was motionless, as if she’d been hung out to dry on a pink clo
thesline that went through her head to the wall behind her.
Woolwine continued to put distance between them on all fours, glancing to the front of the house where Gwen/Delilah stood with the cradled crystal skull. The laser beam issued from a cosmic flurry deep inside, from another universe he was incapable of imagining. He looked again at the aghast but silent Deborah and smelled her cooking. A mingling of odors, most prominent of which was bone being ground away as if by a high-speed drill. Wisps of smoke rose from her distended nostrils. He paused, transfixed, continued to stare at her until Deb’s eyeballs boiled over and flowed down her cheeks. That was all he cared to see. He pushed himself erect and turned away. When the beam from inside the skull abruptly vanished he heard Deborah fall on her face with a mushy sound.
He said to Gwen/Delilah, “I . . . I don’t know what was going on here! It must be Virgie Lovechild in the bedroom! Probably murdered. I think we should leave here as quickly as possible!”
Gwen said, “There’s someone in that trailer outside. He may have seen us.”
“I can’t believe how badly this day has gone!” Woolwine lamented.
“Delilah wants you to wait in the SUV. We’ll only be a minute.”
“You’re not going to—!”
“Yes. We are.”
Woolwine was sweating coldly. Unsteady on his bowed legs. He felt his gorge rising.
“This is not what we came for.”
“Delilah says, ‘In delay there lieth no plenty.’ And for you to shut up. You’d better get going. She can really fly off the handle at people, you know?”
Gwen turned and walked away with the skull in the crook of her arm. Woolwine followed numbly from the bungalow. He didn’t look around as Gwen walked quickly to the Airstream trailer.
He was getting into the back of the Escalade when he thought he saw, in a car parked near the dead end of the block, some movement, a hint of a pale inquiring face behind windshield glass that reflected the tropical neon of a sign advertising an apartment complex.
