Avenging Fury

by John Farris

  Cody gestured, frustrated, helpless.

  “Speakin’ of evils, what am I supposed to do with the Fetchling?”

  “Send her out,” Eden said. “There’ll be room in the copter for Flicka. I made a deal with Harlee. Now go.”

  10:12 A.M.

  An airborne Channel Three news team was getting it all, feeding every astonishing, unexplainable moment of what had been a standoff on Las Vegas Boulevard South to the audience that regularly tuned in to The Today Show locally, and to every NBC afil in the country via the network’s News Service uplinks in Charlotte, North Carolina. Eden Waring was a hot item again, although perhaps not good news. Not that anyone trying to interpret the on-camera events had a clear idea of what was happening, or why.

  Eden, an unknown middle-aged Hispanic male, a beautiful young woman who had Eurasian bloodlines, and a likewise unidentified Las Vegas Metro policeman with what looked like a long gnarled stick attached to the back of his flak vest were seen getting into the police helicopter, which lifted off less than a minute later and hovered momentarily before turning in a northerly direction.

  That’s when both the Channel Ten helicopter and a second helo from a rival station new on the scene appeared simultaneously to develop engine trouble: each had to set down quickly. Unable to follow, the news teams focused on the “borrowed” Metro copter as it dwindled to a speck in the sky above suburban Summerlin. Where the streets below were crowded in three directions with outbound traffic—north, west, south, it didn’t seem to matter. People were getting the raw news coverage and the speculative message that things were weirdly awry in paradise. Feeding off an atavistic communal urgency, they wanted out of town now.

  At the aerie of the late Lincoln Grayle on Charleston Mountain, Dr. Marcus Woolwine, still in the process of packing up to prudently join the exodus, watched TV for a couple of minutes with Gwen the dpg and Harlee Nations. Harlee had easily identified Flicka, and kept that knowledge to herself while she pondered what Eden was up to.

  “Where do you suppose they’re going?” Woolwine said. He was on his third cup of black coffee, and jumpy.

  “They’re coming here,” Harlee said with a flash of inspiration as she looked at the doppelganger and her consort, Delilah. “Because Eden knows you’re here. The question is, how does she know?”

  Gwen looked distressed until Delilah offered a contemptuous response.

  “She quickens to a destiny the planets have decreed; anon she comes in blithe folly, with revengeful appetite and blood-sotted cheek, to sport with a ruder power. Pish!”

  “Does anyone want more coffee?” Woolwine asked.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be so cocky,” Harlee advised Delilah. “Because what I saw her do to the Great One looked pretty damned impressive.”

  “Mark me, Fetchling: I am greater than he who proclaimed himself ‘Great’ whilst I was away.”

  “I believe I’ll just be getting along,” Marcus Woolwine said with a tense smile.

  “Nay. I may’st have need of thee, unhair’d physicker.”

  “But I’m not well! I have a pacemaker. Too much . . . excitement is bad for me.” He looked with loathing at the fulminating red skull in the crook of Gwen’s arm. “And so are the vibrations from that . . . artifact.”

  Delilah gave Woolwine a look that silenced his desire to protest further. He backed out of the room with the translucent dome-capped fireplace in the middle of it and out onto one of the wind-buffeted terraces that were cantilevered over steep wooded slopes of the mountain. He stood with hands clasped behind his back and looked forebodingly at the turbulent superheated sky. The crystal skull was still up to no good, perhaps uncontrollable as it siphoned power from both man-made sources and the magnetic-flux belts that girdled the earth above and within.

  In the house, Harlee said to Delilah, “One of those skulls is for sure a cosmic train wreck: even so, it may not have enough oomph to stop Eden. But there is another one. I’ve been thinking it might be smart to get your hands on it.”

  “Thou hast seen the other?”

  “Yes, and by the way, Eden wants it too. What does that tell you?”

  “Where liest this skull?”

  “In the Magician’s vault, below the ruins of his theatre. I’m the only one around with access. A full-body scan is required.”

  Delilah studied Harlee, then nodded.

  “Go thou hence, Fetchling. Return quickly, that twinn’d skulls may enforce a forkèd plague to wither and oppress the demi-goddess.”

  “Favor for favor, remember? When you’re finished with her, what’s left is mine.”

  10:25 A.M.

  There it is,” Eden said, pointing to the multistory house on the western face of Charleston Mountain. The police helicopter was at seven thousand feet and two miles distant, approaching from the southwest. The pilot’s name was Harry Redmond.

  Through binoculars Hector saw Harlee’s candy-apple-red muscle car pass through the gates of the house and speed away through tight turns.

  “Someone’s leaving,” he said, and handed the glasses to Eden.

  “It might be Harlee. Flicka, what does Harlee drive?”

  “Dodge Viper,” the girl said sullenly. “Red.”

  “It’s Harlee.” To the helicopter pilot Eden said, “Where does that road go?”

  “About another eight miles through all those switchbacks, it connects with the main road up Kyle Canyon at Cathedral Rock.”

  “What’s at Cathedral Rock?”

  “Hiking trails, picnic area, some cabins to rent.”

  “I need to get close enough to the Viper to see if anyone else is with Harlee before she reaches Cathedral Rock.”

  “I can try. Don’t know how close I can get for a look-see through all that ponderosa and bristlecone.”

  Harry Redmond banked the copter right and headed straight for the mountain. The twelve-thousand-foot summit was buried in fulminating cloud. Through the binoculars Eden saw only intermittent flashes of the red car. Harlee was going very fast on a narrow road on which there was little forward visibility through a blanket growth of ancient pines.

  “If she don’t know the road like the back of her hand,” Harry said with a shake of his head. “What I’m saying, there’s turns where the dropoff’s a thousand feet straight down.”

  “Crazy,” Flicka said. “She’s just crazy for speed. I never like to ride with Harlee.”

  Eden’s hands trembled, as if the binoculars she held suddenly weighed like a stack of bricks. She put the glasses down. Her heart shimmied, the beat staggering. She could feel it knocking near her breastbone. Aftereffects, she thought. All in all, she didn’t feel very well.

  She said to the pilot, “Is there a place at Cathedral Rock where you can set the helicopter down?”

  “Parking lot, if it’s not too crowded.”

  “What are you thinking?” Hector asked. He had noted her trembling hands, which were now clasped atop the midpoint of her chest-hugging seat harness.

  “I want to be sure Gwen isn’t in the car with Harlee. We have enough lead time to stop her at Cathedral Rock.”

  “If she wants to stop,” Flicka said.

  Eden smiled slightly.

  Harry Redmond flew to the southeast of Griffith Peak, the helicopter making unexpected and scary moves in wind shear at eight thousand feet as they dropped toward Kyle Canyon. Eden felt dismayed to discover that the recreation area at Cathedral Rock was a busy place in what should have been the off-season. The loop road was lined with cars and RVs. There were hikers all over the slopes, some hurrying for shelter beneath a lowering sky that already blackened the western horizon: there was a huge, slow-moving circulating cloud that sparked ominously and stilled birdlife as it sought to swallow the pale sun above the southeasterly slope of the mountain.

  Harlee in her Viper was still a few minutes away from them on the gated private road to the Magician’s aerie.

  At treetop level Harry Redmond was having trouble holding steady
in a tricky up-canyon wind while he looked for room on the deck. The chopper was attracting a lot of attention from campers and hikers.

  Eden said, “Hector, we need to get those people out of here! Off the mountain and farther down into the canyon where the other campgrounds are.”

  Officer Welling said with a somber face, “What’s gonna happen?” It was the first time he’d spoken since being loaded into the helicopter. He still seemed dazed from the experience of dangling from Simba’s gold jaws, but he had been studying Eden. Something about her anxieties—even though he didn’t know what was causing them—had struck him as valid.

  “To begin with,” Eden said, and she was trembling again, “when I get going, with all these trees, there could be a danger of fire.”

  “Well, me and Harry could probably help move folks out,” Welling said. “Soon as he sets ’er down.”

  Eden smiled, tense as lockjaw.

  “Thanks. Look, I’m sorry if I made a bad impression on you and Las Vegas Metro, but—”

  “Bad impression? My Jesus! I don’t have a clue where you’re coming from, or what you are.”

  “Yes, I get that a lot lately,” Eden said, and looked away.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Not important now, Lew. Hector and I would appreciate all the help we can get.”

  “This other girl,” Lew said, leaning toward Eden’s right ear as much as his harness would allow, “is she like you?”

  “No, there isn’t anyone else like me, Lew. I’m sui generis.”

  Lew looked puzzled, then said guardedly, “Is that treatable?”

  The pilot put his helicopter down where it wouldn’t block the loop road. The gate across the Magician’s road was about fifty yards east of them, following the course of the south-loop trail.

  As soon as Eden opened the door on her side she realized that the temperature was fifteen or twenty degrees cooler this high on the mountain. She was wearing only a cotton sweater, and began to shiver as soon as she stepped out of the helicopter.

  Hector got out next. Eden said, “Harlee’s only about three minutes away. The gate will stop or at least slow her down. If she’s alone then she can keep going after we’ve had a few words. If not—”

  Eden didn’t have a chance to finish the thought. A white limousine had appeared, coming up the canyon road. It looked as out of place in the rustic setting as a wiener wagon at a state funeral.

  The limo turned right onto the gravel apron in front of the gated road. Stopped. Backed down forty feet to the paved road and idled there, as if the unseen driver was waiting for instructions.

  While the stretch limo sat there a tinted window slid down and Eden saw, in a backseat, Tom Sherard talking on a cell phone. As he talked he turned his head slowly to look at her.

  But it wasn’t Tom she saw in those hooded eyes.

  “Oh my God! Hector!”

  “I know.”

  “What do I do now?”

  The gates were opening. Apparently Mordaunt had contacted someone at the house, or else there was a rolling code activated by the phone call.

  As the limo started uphill again and the window rose darkly, Mordaunt raised two fingers to his temple, saluting Eden.

  “Stop this, Eden,” Hector said quietly. “Whatever the consequences, the possessed cannot be allowed to meet.”

  “But it’s Tom! Mordaunt has control of him, and I don’t know what to do!”

  Behind her, Flicka laughed. Eden watched the limo pass through the gates, then whirled to stare at the Fetchling. Both of them realizing the same thing at the same time. The limo took up all of the Magician’s road and Harlee would never see it in time.

  Flicka stifled a scream with her hand.

  10:38 A.M.

  Ignoring the pain in her bad knee, Eden jogged past Flicka and got into the helicopter with Simba.

  “Harry, follow the limo!” she said to the pilot. “Treetop level!”

  “Might be askin’ for trouble, the thermals they get up here! And that cloud’s breedin’ something I don’t care to fly through.”

  “But you’ve got to do this for me!”

  He looked at her for several seconds, chewing gum slowly. Harry was a middle-aged man with a lot of freckles on his square face, and a sanguine disposition.

  “Who’s that in the limo?”

  “All I can tell you is he’s as bad as bad can get, and he has a hostage who is a very dear friend!”

  “Well, all I can do is try,” Harry said. “Seeing as how this here is another hostage situation, and you bein’ one of the most desperate characters I’ve ever met.”

  “Ha ha. Harry, please. We’re wasting time.”

  Harry grinned sorrowfully, then devoted his attention to lifting off. They were already pointed in the right direction.

  “Even if the limo’s full of more-desperate characters, ain’t no way I could hope to stop it on that narrow road.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  “I’d put that down to braggin’ if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes that you got some powerful tricks up your sleeve. You just about made a churchgoer out of me again. Better close our door, honey, it could get rocky real quick.”

  “Need to leave it open, Harry. Is there a safety rig in case I need to step out onto a skid?”

  “Step—? Mercy!” A look convinced him that she was serious. “There under your seat. Line attaches to that eye-bolt on the floor. Don’t suppose you’re wantin’ a gun? We carry the Smith .40. Course, if I give it to you, once this is over with and provided I live to tell the tale, I’ll have to say as how you overpowered me.”

  “Really, Harry. Do you think I need a pistol?”

  “Just makin’ conversation. I am kinda nervous.” Harry applied forward cyclic to hover next to a steep shaggy grove of ponderosa, the rotors grabbing at thin air with a sharp slapping noise. “Here comes that limo, just like a caterpillar clingin’ to a leaf stem.”

  “See it. I’m more interested in the red Viper right now. Keep on top of the road for another mile up.”

  “Fixin’ to do, prevent a head-on crash?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “The easy-to-understand version is, I’m going to pull the Viper over and park it until I’ve attended to my other business.”

  “From up here you’re gonna do that? I hope you don’t mind my curiosity.”

  “You remind me of my foster father,” Eden said as the ship climbed higher. Her nose was leaking from the impact of warm turbine exhaust on her sinuses. “He took everything in stride, even though he and Betts always knew about me and my heritage. I never knew my birth mother. They took me from her as soon as I was born. But I saw her in dreams while I was growing up. Then, funny thing, a few months ago she came to me.” Eden didn’t know why she was rattling on to Harry this way; his attention was rigorously devoted to keeping his helicopter aloft. Probably she was only distracting herself. Thinking now of Gillian Bellaver and their moments together on a windy Montana hilltop, Eden in a psi-active state of her second-energy body. They’d had only a few moments together, little time for Eden to say—She caught sight of the Viper dashing along the road below.

  “There she is, Harry!”

  “She can drive, I’ll give her that. But how lucky does she think she is?”

  “Fetchlings who live a couple of hundred years probably get so stinking arrogant they think nothing can hurt them.”

  “A couple hundred years?”

  “Swing us around and go down as close to the road as you can!”

  “Problem is, we don’t have much density at this altitude, but I’ll try’r.”

  Harry pushed the helo a little too forward and clipped some high branches from a pine. A couple of broken branches whipped in through the doorway. The cold was like teeth in Eden’s bones; part of her face felt numb. As the ship swung abruptly, giving her a cleaner line of sight, she nearly went headlong out the door, thinking as she was dumped, Wel
l shit, Harry, but she didn’t say it: he was doing his best. The safety line yanked Eden back, and she got her feet under her on the deck.

  “Can you give me five seconds of steady while I lasso that sports car?”

  “While you do what?”

  Eden placed a hand over the metal talisman on her breast. Harry looked at her long enough to see the glow through her hand as Eden summoned Dark Energy and aimed it mentally at the red convertible. The transference was just another sight Harry was unlikely to forget for the rest of his life.

  Eden had a glimpse of Harlee’s face as the girl looked at the hovering helicopter. Her hair streamed out behind her in the rotor wash. Eden saw that Harlee was wearing her shoulder harness.

  So Harlee stayed with the Viper when control was abruptly taken from her and the Viper assumed a new trajectory, off the road, threading between a couple of massive trees and into space like an untracked roller-coaster car pulling a couple of Gs at a nearly vertical downward angle.

  “Oh Lord, she has done bought it!” Harry cried over the intercom.

  “No, I’ve got her,” Eden said calmly, as the Viper slowed in its plunge and pulled up, regaining altitude off to the right side of the copter while continuing to lose momentum. There were skeins of bluish light all around the car, resembling a cat’s cradle, as the Viper rocked gently, going nowhere, a hundred feet out from the dark forested slope of the mountain.

  Harlee still had a death grip on the steering wheel. She looked stunned. Eden couldn’t contain a nervous giggle at her expression. Not that she was having all that much fun. There was still far to go, and the effort she had expanded so far had her nauseated.

  “Lord God a’ mercy!” Harry said, staring in fright at the floating car. “Don’t suppose you’d be available for kids’ birthday parties?”

  Eden tapped Harry on the shoulder as he corrected for both high altitude and a buffeting wind from the growing maelstrom on the crest of the mountain.

  “She’ll be okay! Nowhere to go until I come back for her! If I do.”