by John Farris
Pain had cleared her mind. The closer they came to Bronc’s suite, the more lucid she became. She had a good idea of what she was going to see inside. Whoever was waiting for her could be manipulated, outwitted; just a matter of experience. For now she made do with squeaks of protest, tears.
There were more men like those who had met her in the foyer. She didn’t expend energy trying to impress them with her fear. She let her feet drag, whimpering, as they took her through the bedroom with the round bed the size of a satin-covered helo pad and on into the ornate bath where the ringleaders were presiding over Bronc’s torture amid urns of fresh flowers.
Three of them, all members of the Elite 88, who in Mordaunt’s absence had united to get their hands on the one thing that would ensure their power over other hostile factions: Mordaunt’s gold. They looked at Harlee when she was brought in with poorly concealed impulses of deep greed. She was instantly contemptuous, although she rolled her eyes and favored the situation with a shriek of horror. It was a shock to see how they had broken a tough guy like Bronc Skarbeck.
He was kneeling on the bathroom floor, his head and face in a streaky mess of blood, some old, some new. His hands were wired behind his back. His ankles were wired together. They had inserted a silver rod into his anus. Silver provides excellent conductivity. No elaborate devices: wires from the rod had been joined to an ordinary electrical plug, which, when inserted into the outlet next to Bronc’s shaving mirror, had caused him to smash his head repeatedly against the tiles.
When she shrieked, one of the ringleaders nodded to the man who had control of her. He let Harlee go. She went to Bronc, who was trying to raise his battered head, look around with blood-clogged eyes, utter coherent words. Harlee slipped in his blood, shrieked again, put a hand on his quivering naked back.
“Sorry,” she thought she heard him say.
Harlee stood protectively beside Bronc, aimlessly rubbing bloodied hands on her clothing, urine running down her legs (they’d find that a convincing touch), saying, “Nonono oh please don’t hurt him any more!”
The spokesman for the little group of Malterran claim jumpers, a bled-out crookback scorpion of a fellow, gray as ashes and apparently living on a charge of lethal belligerence, said, “There should be no need. Now that you’ve returned.” He looked at another of the trio of urbane cutthroats—this one had jowls like pouches of coins low-slung from heavy jawbones. The Scorpion said with a galling smirk, “In every man’s life there is at least one day that will haunt him forever. Usually it has to do with a woman.” He looked back at Harlee. “A pretty young thing in this case, eh?”
“She’s soiled herself,” the third man observed. It seemed to excite him. He ejected the remains of a smoked cigarette from an ebony holder and walked over to Harlee, lifted her chin with a thumb. “You are Fetchling? Remarkable. What stories you must have to tell. You should be most entertaining.”
Skarbeck was convulsing. One of the torturers slipped the silver rod out of him and tipped him on his side with a foot.
“He’s dying! Get him a doctor!” Harlee pleaded.
“Give him a shot of morphine,” the Scorpion said to the torturers. “Then cover him. We’re through here, aren’t we, Egon?”
Addressing the one who had been captivated by Harlee, and who held her immobile.
“Are we through here?” the smiling man asked of Harlee, whose chin he held at an acute angle in the air, light pressure on an artery.
“I’ll do whatever you want! Just don’t let Bronc die, please!”
“You have access to the vault? You would not both be lying to us?”
“Yes. Yes! I can get you in. Please. I’m going to faint.”
Egon let her go. Harlee held her throat and made pathetic strangling sounds while assessing her precarious situation. Flight, for now, was out of the question. Too many of them; she wouldn’t get far. But they weren’t going to hurt her, not seriously. Aside from her supposed entertainment value she was uniquely valuable to these renegades.
Harlee looked in dread at her bloodied hands. “I need—I have to—”
“Of course, darling,” the Scorpion said. “Egon will take you to your room to shower and change your clothes. Unless—” He looked around Bronc’s bathroom.
“I have my own suite.”
Egon walked Harlee down the second-floor gallery and into her digs.
While he was looking around for possible escape routes, Harlee glanced at the picnic hamper that she and Devon had taken to Ferdie Younger’s canyon hideaway earlier. Her heart was jumping. The hamper had been returned, probably by messenger, wrapped in pink cellophane with a bow. And there was an envelope inside.
While Egon was out on the balcony judging how far Harlee would have to jump to rocky ground if she was desperate enough (more than twenty feet), Harlee scooped up the hamper and carried it into the bathroom, where she stashed it at the back of her walk-in clothes closet.
She turned on the shower, began pulling off her clothes. Saw Egon in a fogging-up mirror, leaning in the doorway behind her.
“Leave me alone.”
“What harm if I watch you undress?”
“No. Get out.”
Egon shrugged, smiling. “Oh well. Plenty of time for that later, yes?”
Harlee gave him a look over her shoulder, lips tight together. His smile became a laugh, but he went away, closing the door, but not tightly, behind him.
Once she had stripped, Harlee wrapped herself in a bath sheet and retrieved the hamper from the closet. It was lighter than when it had been filled with toothsome treats for Ferdie. And it felt cold.
Her name in script was on the pink envelope. She opened it.
Dear Harlee:
Caution is your watchword, I should remind you. There are ten of my beauties. Be aware of the correct number. A mistake could be deadly for you. For now they are snugly packed in a section of their hive that is surrounded by dry ice sufficient to keep them sluggish and unfit for combat. Quite harmless until warmed to room temperature. Simply attach the nozzle of a portable hair dryer to the case containing their hive. Two minutes, on low heat, will be sufficient to restore them to full potency. Full of vim, vigor, and homicidal inclination. Again, be very cautious. I would miss your stimulating visits.
F.
Very cautious? Well, that was the part that required a lot of thought, while she soaped and loofah’d herself in the steamy shower.
The steam and the attention to her body was making Harlee sleepy, along with the inevitable aftermath of a considerable shock to her system. As soon as she had dried off and put on a terry robe she swallowed a couple of uppers with cognac. She needed a rush to sharpen her perceptions and keep her on her toes, as if for a crucial fencing match.
The pesky Egon looked in on her again without knocking. She was drying her hair. She turned off the dryer and just stared at him until he went away again.
This time Harlee locked the bathroom door. Her pulses had picked up. She felt a keen sense of purpose, a razor’s edge of desire for revenge.
In her dressing room she put on thermal underwear, then a fresh white padded fencing costume. She selected a mask and studied herself in an alcove of bright mirrors. Only her hands, feet, and the back of her head were unprotected. She took off the fencing mask, added a fall to her hair, and made of it a thick bun no hornet could penetrate. Fencing gloves and a pair of lace-up, knee-high white leather boots completed her costume.
Then she woke up the Japanese hornets.
Harlee could only hope she’d done it right. She wasn’t about to open the hamper to have a look. But she sensed a lethal power astir, down there in the fragment of hive.
Egon knocked imperatively on the bathroom door. “Coming,” Harlee said cheerily.
In the bedroom he stared at her costume as she walked briskly past him, fencing mask in one hand, hamper in the other.
“What do you have there? Why are you dressed like that? What’s in the hamper?”
“Two thousand dollars’ worth of bloody clothing I’m throwing out,” Harlee said, not breaking stride. “A few personal things.”
“Just leave it.”
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. “Twenty minutes after the housekeeper gets here at seven, there’ll be cops all over this hacienda.”
He was quick to catch up to Harlee.
“That will not matter to you. Or to Skarbeck.”
But Harlee was already on the gallery, quickening her pace to Bronc’s suite.
“Stop. What are you up to?” Egon said.
Harlee sobbed. “Is he dead? I just want to see him again.”
“Stop!”
“Fuck you,” Harlee said, shrugging off his hand and entering the suite. The other men were slow to react to the hamper, the odd costume, the fencing mask. She slipped past them to the double ebony-and-gold doors of Bronc’s bathroom. Bronc still lying on the floor inside—looking old, tired, freckled, gray, with filmed-over eyes.
Harlee was grabbed again.
“You will show us what you have—”
“Oh yeah?” Harlee screamed. She turned and flung the hamper at Egon. “You sons of bitches! Take it! Take all of them!”
The lid of the hamper fell open as Egon deflected it to the floor. He bent down to turn the hamper right-side up, then jerked his hand away as if he’d touched a live wire. Harlee saw four or five of the giant samurai hornets clustered on the back of his hand and wrist.
Then she turned and ran, fencing mask going to her face. She vaulted over Bronc’s huddled form and ran into the shower enclosure as Egon screamed in shock and terror. Her heart was throbbing up into her throat.
The shower was nearly the size of a horse’s stall. She quickly began to turn on the shower jets, hearing screams from other Malterrans as hornets flew at their eyes, blinding them with streams of venom.
Through the angular full-force sprays of water Harlee saw a looming frantic face as one of the men tried to join her in the shower. He got the door open, but she kicked him in the balls and drove him back as one of the great hornets alighted for a moment on a fleshy cheek. He went down, flailing and shrieking. Harlee had never heard another human being make such a sound, not even Bronc Skarbeck with a lightning bolt up his ass.
Fetchling. And so contemptuous of her. So confident of their own status and power.
Their venom (she heard Ferdie Younger say again, recalling his voice perfectly in her mind while she chewed savagely at her lower lip) consists of eleven different chemicals that, among other things, dissolve human flesh. If one is stung about the face, the face will soon decompose. No matter. By then the victims are usually dead from anaphylactic shock.
Harlee clenched gloved hands and screamed herself, exultantly.
So how do you like me now, guys?
She couldn’t look at her watch, didn’t know how much time had gone by before it was absolutely still in Bronc Skarbeck’s suite. She let the shower jets run and leaned against a wall, shuddering, staring through steam at Bronc’s body. Thinking nostalgically of how he’d obsessed over her, and how he would have approved of this act of vengeance.
But now, with her valuable hornets scattered, their own time short in an alien unforested place, she would have to think of something even more appropriate to avenge the Great One and satisfy her vendetta against Eden Waring. Who also seemed to be taking her too lightly, going by the tone of voice that the Avatar had adopted during their brief phone conversation. Harlee hadn’t missed the mild but unmistakable taunting.
Think you’re good enough? Take your best shot, kid.
No big deal. Harlee felt enlivened by the rough jets of water stimulating her skin through two layers of stinger-proof clothing. Wonderfully focused. And dispersing wholesale death by hornet had been the best upper of them all.
She wanted to stay on top of this high. She wanted another death. She wanted it soon.
CHARLESTON MOUNTAIN • 4:20 A.M.
The coldest hour of the new day.
At seven thousand feet or better the temperature is within a couple of degrees of freezing.
Two of them sitting on the Magician’s terrace outside his six-room suite at the highest level of the cantilevered house. There are clear night views in three directions.
Two spirits, one immortal, the other subservient, within a single body on a chaise lounge, blanket-wrapped. The red filaments of an electric heater mimic in tone the shimmer of the red crystal skull on a table next to the chaise.
She, they, have been lying there for an hour. A storm is building over the cloudless peak of Charleston Mountain. The crystal skull has begun to gorge. Its source of earthly energy (more than suitable to Delilah’s needs and purpose) is contained within a much smaller mountain eighty miles northwest. A hidden, unacknowledged source, but available to the attractive power of that cosmic glow-worm of a skull.
Thus, the sky between Charleston and Yucca mountains, previously untouched by weather, displaying a tapestry of stars in the clarity of the high desert, is alive at this hour in the form of a seething, ruddy whirlpool. There are flickerings within the slowly circulating cloud of energy that resemble heat lightning.
Below the cloud, the desert, largely unpopulated.
And certain secret government installations collectively known as Area 51.
There is almost no traffic, commercial or military, in Las Vegas airspace, but a helicopter has crashed on takeoff at Nellis, all of its electronics compromised. No loss of life, no immediate connection to the appearance of the mystery airborne event, but military meteorologists are among the first to begin a study of the growing phenomenon.
At fifteen thousand feet or so, the cloud is easily visible to anyone on the streets of Vegas. Even at the graveyard hour there are quite a few fun-seekers up and around. Most are spellbound; a few are frightened. Those who try to use their cell phones find that reception is poor to nonexistent.
A Lufthansa 747 freighter from Frankfurt, inbound to McCarran International but still thirty-seven thousand feet above southwest South Dakota and Mount Rushmore, is advised by the FAA’s Denver Center to divert to the Salt Lake City area and hold there as long as fuel permits, due to “unstable conditions” generated by the rogue system near Vegas.
Harlee Nations, red-eyed herself and desperate for sleep, is aware of the violent red glow overhead as she drives up the sometimes-difficult road through Kyle Canyon to the Magician’s house, where she plans to crash for twelve hours or so. She doesn’t make much of the cycloid cloud even when her car’s electronics start acting weird short of the gated entrance to the Magician’s house.
She gets out of her Viper and trudges across the auto courtyard carrying a backpack with items of clothing and other essentials to get her through a few days.
All lights in the house are out, except one, which attracts her eye: an intense beacon of neonlike pink fulminating on the highest terrace. She has seen its like before. But in spite of her muddled emotional and mental state, she knows very well that she put the crystal skull in the Magician’s vault with all the gold that the predacious, now very dead, Malterrans had lusted after.
And only Lincoln Grayle himself could have removed it.
Harlee sobs hopefully on her way up a succession of stairs to the high suite.
CONCORDIA HOSPITAL
Yes, I see it,” Bertie Nkambe says to Eden on the phone. She is looking out a north window of her room at the cloud with its carousel of lightning. “I feel it, too. What do you think?”
“You know how it goes with me. I dream it a couple of times, then it happens.”
“Good-bye, Las Vegas?”
“Good-bye to us as well,” Eden says pensively. “Can you speak up, Bertie? I can barely hear you.”
“Maybe this is the best Gwen can do,” Bertie says. “If that’s it, then the two of us can do better.”
“No. You’re too weak, still. Better leave Gwen to me. She’s my responsibility anyway.”
“But
there’s two of them, Eden! And we don’t know what powers Delilah survived with.” Bertie looks at the cloud again. It seems less formidable than it did a few minutes ago, when she was levitated from sleep by its presence, every nerve in her still-healing body ignited by the attractive force in the depths of the cloud.
“Doesn’t matter,” Eden says grimly. “I buried him, Bertie, and I can damn well bury both of them.”
Bertie says after a few moments, “Might not be a good idea, subverting occult law. She’s your doppelganger.”
“Until I decide otherwise. As for occult law—when she’s not just another energy body, she’s—nothing, really. It wouldn’t be the same as killing myself.”
Eden’s voice fades momentarily, a ghostly withdrawal.
“Or would it?”
“Let me think about it,” Bertie cautions. “There’s time. Eden, I think the cloud is losing some of its force. Powering down.”
“Seems to be,” Eden agrees. “Bertie, I have a hunch what this was about.”
“A demonstration?”
“Yes. Staged for us.”
4:51 A.M.
By the time the cloud had disappeared, more than seven hundred calls had been received by Las Vegas Metro’s emergency lines, an electronic traffic jam that had put the 911 system temporarily out of business.
Bertie was looking at the now benign night sky and yawning, thinking over her conversation with Eden, when there was a knock at her door.
She thought it might be her father or brother. But at this hour—
Bertie’s pulses jumped. She hurried to unlock the door.
Tom Sherard stood there wearing a seaman’s sweater and Levi’s, cuts on his face, fatigue in his gray eyes.
“Tom!” she cried, but even as she reached out to draw him closer, she realized her mistake and backed away, horrified.
She tried to reverse the polarities of his brain but her psychic strength wasn’t equal to what Mordaunt could bring to bear on her.
