Loring pointed up. "It doesn't matter what time it is, there is a storm brewing. We must stop the Witch."
Working our way up along the cylinder felt very strange, especially with Bat persisting in what looked like, from my vantage point, his hanging by his feet from the ceiling. We advanced slowly and cautiously, but saw no opposition. Nowhere did the slime break or fail to secure us.
At the far end of the cylinder a smaller passage opened up. It was about half the diameter of the main tube and that the slime grew only on the sides and floor of the tunnel. It spiraled out and down from the main tube, but because of the twist in it, I could only guess at its length. It seemed, as nearly as I could determine, to be a transition point through which the tube's gravity could be aligned with that of the external world.
Loring said he knew nothing about it, but confirmed my suspicions on its purpose. "This is new construction as far as I know, but it should come out in the penthouse."
"I'll go first and signal when it's clear." I put a new clip into the carbine, then started down the tributary tunnel. I started on a side wall but found myself channeled onto a narrow pathway. By the time the slime ran out, the passage had been squared off and opened into the white silk world of Nerys Loring.
I paused in the doorway and looked both ways, but with the shifting walls billowing and snapping, seeing anything was impossible. "Looks clear, I think," I whispered into my radio. "Come up slowly in case I'm wrong."
One step through the doorway, and I found out how very wrong I was. Two feet hit me in the right shoulder as someone jumped me from above the doorway. I rolled beneath the impact, but before I could come up and turn around, a solid kick in the ribs sent me flying even further. My carbine went skittering across the floor and sunk in one of the streamlets off to my left while I came up short against a low wall and smashed into it with my shoulders.
Mr. Leich, dressed head to toe in black, stood in the middle of floor and laughed mildly. He rubbed his hands on his thighs, then balled them into fists. Behind him, like squashed bugs on the pristine white of the walls, I saw twin slime handprints above the door, which explained how he had hung there until I arrived.
"Hope I didn't leave you hanging too long, Mr. Leich."
His dark RayBan sunglasses hid his eyes, but I imagined no mirth in them, nor did I hear any in his voice. "You've been a very bad boy, Mr. Caine. I owe you, and she said I could have you." He licked his lips lasciviously, then smiled and showed me his fangs.
I gathered my feet beneath me and stood. "If you want me, come get me."I dropped a hand to the Wildey Wolf's butt.
He shook his head. "You still don't understand, do you, human? You've shot me four times. You've caused my flesh to be scraped off in a skid. When you hit me with your car you fractured my leg in eight places. The paramedic said I'd never walk again, then I drank his blood and danced away from the accident site. You can no more fight me than cattle can fight against the slaughterhouse."
Leich pointed at my pistol. "Go ahead. Take your best shot. You've learned nothing."
I pulled the Wildey and snapped it off safety. "On the contrary, Mr. Leich, I have learned a great deal."
The first shot I triggered hit him in the right shoulder with enough of a punch that his sunglasses bounced off his face. Leich twisted his torso back toward me to show he could take everything I could dish out. Then his head turned to the right as he suddenly realized that the thing lying on the floor back beyond him was, in fact, his right arm.
"Don't go to pieces over this, Mr. Leich," I chided him, "or should I call you 'Lefty'?"
Pure suprahuman loathing blazed in his eyes as he turned back to me. He started to snarl something, but my second shot pinned the words in his throat and blew his larynx back out through his spine. Blood splashed over the silk sheets snapping like sails in a gale. His body flopped back into the watery grave that took my carbine while his head did a triple somersault in the air, then hit the ground. It bounced once and rolled back off his nose. Lying on his ear, Leich gnawed at the air for the next five seconds, then he lay still in a pool of blood.
Bat and Jytte appeared at the doorway with their carbines at the ready. "Trouble?"
"No, Bat, it's under control." I holstered the pistol. Behind him Natch and Loring caught up and Marit played rear guard. "He's the only one she had waiting. Either she's very stupid or..."
"...or there is nothing you can do to stop me!"
I heard her voice echo throughout the penthouse and a thunder strike punctuated her statement. I spun around to face deeper into her domain, dreading the effort necessary to hunt her down in her silken labyrinth. She is a spider in her web.
The bloody splotches on the sheets to my left slowly began to expand and grow. They spread out until they consumed the whole white cloth, then they infected the next sheet and the next. Those silken curtains filled with blood, and it dripped over marble, staining it, then down into the streams. The streams themselves began to overflow, washing across the floor and whirling Leich's carcass away.
The liquid soaked through my boots and felt warm and sticky just the way blood should.
Then, suddenly, every sheet ignited in a stark burst of magnesium light like they were made of a magician's flash paper. I shielded my eyes as best I could and coughed as the acrid smoke choked me. Heat spiked in the room, and I waited for the nauseating scent of singed hair and boiling flesh, but the sensation passed in an instant.
I opened my eyes to a new world. What had been white before was now black, as if it had absorbed the soot or the heat had seared it. Now that the sheets were gone, I could see countless little alcoves. All their furnishings looked intact except for the change in color from the other evening when I saw them. The lights had dropped from bright to dim, taking the penthouse down into darkness and, by contrast, allowing one thing to attract our attention.
Off to the west, looking over the city, stood a series of three arched windows. The central one rose half again as tall as the two flanking it and together they provided a breathtaking view of the city. Through it I saw City Center and three brilliant lighting strikes off to the northwest. Angry clouds filled the sky and eerie white flashes edged them with silver.
The others followed wordlessly as I moved toward that site. Standing in front of the windows on an altarlike dais, I saw Nerys. She wore a white gown styled on classical Greek lines, yet cut short to reveal her long legs. Golden cords wrapped round the bodice and snaked between her breasts. In her hand she held the cords' tasseled ends, pulling the cords taut around her body as if they alone could contain her exuberance.
I reached an aisle that led directly to her. As I moved down it I had the disturbing sensation of a supplicant approaching a deity to ask for a boon, but I banished it with a snarl. "It's over, Nerys. We know everything."
"You're wrong, Caine, it's just beginning," she laughed throatily. "There is nothing you can do to stop it, and you owe that fact to Nero Loring himself."
She gestured languidly at a display console that slowly rotated into view. At first glance, as it slithered through shadows and was backlit by lighting, I thought it a polished and chromed prototype from the finest neotech laboratories in Japan. When it locked into place and I got a better look at it, I knew no human could have ever have created it.
The black cables running from one edge to another could have been optical fibers sheathed in shiny plastic, but they flared out at either end in pseudopod receptors that clung to the box like leeches. The cables pulsed as power ran through them and light shifted within panels to which the cables had fused. The panels themselves looked, in the beginning, like complex LCD compilations but I quickly saw, in fact, they were scaly flesh that changed colors with a chameleon's ability to camouflage itself.
A lucite post rose from the center of the device while I stared at it, then fanned itself out like a peacock's tail. Narrow at the base and almost a foot wide at the peak, I saw strange shapes imbedded in the lucite. Then, a second
before I realized what medium the artist had used to create the organic designs, I saw they were really thin brain slices trapped between two layers of the clear synthetic.
The Witch looked at the machine with rapture on her face. "Say hello, dear."
A black membrane on the front of the machine quivered like a drumhead to produce a little girl's voice. "I'm sorry, Daddy. I don't want to do it but I can't stop."
"Nerys!" Loring shouted. He pointed at the Witch. "What have you done to her?"
The Witch's eyes narrowed. "Only that which you forced me to do, foolish man. You sought to thwart me and my master. You used her brainwaves, I have used her brain. What has been done is your doing." She turned and glanced at the maglev line and the St. Elmo's fire begining to play along its length. "It cannot be stopped."
"We can blow the line." I pointed back the way we came. "Let's go, Bat."
The Witch laughed at me. "You're going nowhere."
"You're going to stop me?"
"No." She shook her head. "Now, my pet, you may reveal yourself. You have done very well."
Marit stepped back away from the rest of the group, but kept her carbine level. "You all know, at this range, I won't miss and your vests won't help. I don't want to have to kill you. Just put your guns down."
Our collection of long guns and pistols clattered to the floor.
The Witch folded her arms across her chest. "You see, Mr. Caine, Fiddleback is not alone in keeping pets. I would kill you for what you have done, but it is not my place to discipline another's toy. I will leave that for when Fiddleback arrives." A close lightning strike turned her face into a mask of silver. "That, by the look of things, should not be long at all."
I looked at Marit and shook my head. "Marit, how could you?"
"I didn't mean to hurt you, Tycho. I didn't."
I heard her words, but the plea for understanding in her voice died in the black hole at the center of her eyes. "Stop now, Marit. Shoot her. Redeem yourself."
"I can't, Tycho, I can't." Marit winced. "I have come too far to be cheated now."
The Witch chuckled lightly. "Your mistake, Mr. Caine. You can offer her nothing more than a warm body in the night. I, on the other hand, can offer her immortality. I can offer her eternal beauty and wealth. I can give her all the things she hungered for as a child in Eclipse. In return, I asked for her to deliver Coyote to me. She has failed in that task, but you are a prize that is, at the moment, far more valuable to me."
She opened her arms wide like a mother welcoming children. "All of you have been resourceful. I appreciate and respect that more than you know. Come to me. Embrace me. Become my servants and, through the grace of Fiddleback, I will see to it that your every dream is fulfilled beyond imagining.
Bat folded his arms. "You mean I get to kill you more than once?"
The Witch shook her head. "How droll, Mr. Kabat." As Marit circled around to stand beside her patron, the Witch pointed at Bat. "When I give the word, my precious, cap him, so he dies in pain, and slowly."
"As you wish, mistress."
"What of the rest of you? Nero, you have been a thorn, but I will let you live. You, Feral, you can have anything you want. And you, Jytte Ravel, I can make you at home in that body. I can make you whole again. It is your choice."
Outside the sky exploded with jagged slivers of pure energy and static crackled through my radio. The storm rolled in over Squaw Peak, thunder rumbling like a growl in a wolf's throat. Multiple lighting strikes walked their way down the side of the mountain. They struck the numerous lightning rods protecting Frozen Shade from storms and for a brief moment, a sizzling energy rope tethered the clouds to the ground. As each line parted, darkness again flashed over the landscape, but the glowing purple ring of the maglev circuit brightened.
Natch chewed her lower lip, then shook her head. "I wouldn't join you even if you were as smart and powerful as you think you are. No sale, Bitch-witch."
The Witch's eyes sparked. "Ravel?"
"You and your kind steal humanity. The only way you could make me whole is to steal from another." She shook her head once. "Void transaction."
"Idiots! Can you not see what she sees?"
"Nope, we can't." Bat shook his head. "But then, we have our eyes open."
"Marit," I whispered sadly over the radio.
She looked at me. "Tycho?"
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry? For what?"
I tried to remember the person she had been the night before.
I failed. "For this. Salome."
A second after I said the word, the Semitek embedded in the main body of her radio exploded. The lead shot nestled at the point of the shaped charge burst free of the small plastic radio case, shattering the clip she had used to fasten it to her harness up by her right shoulder. Plastic fragments and metal shot shredded the harness and blew through the body armor. Recoil started her spinning back and to the left as the shot tore through her chest, punctured her lung and opened her pulmonary artery. Spinning uncontrollably, she brought the muzzle of the carbine up and whipped it across the Witch's face.
The Witch reeled off the back of the dais and fell from sight. I dove for the floor and came up with the Wildey Wolf. Bat dropped to one knee and recovered his carbine. Natch grabbed Nero Loring and started pulling him away from the dais while Jytte headed straight for the computer. Suddenly something moved over near her, and Jytte came flying back to bowl Natch and Loring over.
The Witch came back up in her true form. She still wore Nerys' face over her own, though the pale flesh had been stretched to the point where green showed through from beneath it like an infection. Likewise the flesh of her hands had become corpse-white cellophane gloves that ended in tattered strips at her wrists. Sharp black claws pierced the skin at the end of the fingers and glistened with venom.
As she slithered forward she slid free of the rest of the flesh she had worn in her time as a changeling. A black tongue, forked like that of a serpent, flickered through Nerys' ruby lips. From her throat, all the way down between very mammalian breasts and along the full 20 feet of her snakelike body, yellow ivory scales covered her. Green scales armored the rest of her and gathered into barbs on the backs of her elbows and the points of her shoulders. She blinked away the membranes covering her eyes, showing the elliptical pupils of her amber eyes.
"I need this deception no more! The coming of my lord is nigh!"
Bat and I opened up at the same time. He burned through his clip before I finished mine. His duplex bullets ripped a line across her torso starting at where her left hip might once have been and ending at her right shoulder. My five shots centered on her head and throat. One nailed her dead center in the forehead, shredding her human mask and helping knock her back off the dais.
She ducked from sight for a second, then rose up again. I could see broken scales where Bat had hit her, but as I watched they repaired themselves. "You cannot kill me! Your weapons are too puny! I am invincible!"
Somewhere behind me Nero Loring started laughing.
Bat, Natch and Jytte all concentrated their fire on her. Bullets ricocheted from her head and chest, shattering the windows behind her. Immediately the storm's howling winds whipped through the room, lashing her face with the hair she had worn as a human. Huge chunks of rain-slicked glass whirled out into the night as I jumped up onto the dais and pried Marit's carbine from her dead fingers. Water washed over the back of the Witch and ran off her scales like the bullets we shot at her.
Loring's laughter cut through the thunder and his ridicule seemed to hurt her more than our bullets. She coiled up at the base of the shattered window and hissed at him. She set herself to strike at him, then twisted her head around and glanced at me with the corner of her eye. Her hands twitched, and she came for me.
As she lunged in my direction, the broken shards of wet glass beneath her coils provided her less than optimal traction. Half her serpentine body shot back out through the window as her torso launched to
ward me. Even in mid-strike she realized what had happened, so her raking claws shifted from me to the dais and sunk in through the formica top and the particle board beneath it.
She looked up me and her snake-tongue flayed the last of the human flesh from her face. Clinging there, with her arms outstretched, she hissed menacingly. "This is not over!" A green coil appeared at the edge of the building, but a burst from Jytte's carbine knocked it back out into the night.
"It is over."
I jumped back off the dais and without my added weight, it slowly slid back toward the broken windows. I leveled Marit's carbine at it and burned the clip. The duplex bullets blasted it into so much kindling and Formica dust. The wind sucked the debris out, taking both the Witch and Mark in the bargain.
I ran to the window and steadied myself against one of the window frames. Falling further and further through sheets of rain, I saw a black whiplike shape undulating through the air. Then, amid a bright flash of light, it hit Frozen Shade. A lightning strike tore into the damaged panel, more sparks shot up and an S-shaped fire begin to burn at the base of the Lorica Citadel.
I turned away from the window and shouted over the howling wind. "Nero, Jytte, what about that computer?" The light around the maglev line continued to build and seven spiral rainbows rose from the local maglev lines to link each citadel with City Center. "Whatever she started, it's continuing."
Jytte looked at the machine and shook her head, "I am unable to assess what I can do. Given time, I could piece together the neural links that make this thing work." She pointed at the two thick cables that touched the base of the brain-fan. "All input and output is going through here, being filtered through Nerys' brain. Deciphering the mind of a 14-year-old girl is not possible."
I turned to Nero. "How did you code the brainwave data?"
"Her patterns in doing one thing would trigger an effect and in doing another would stop it." The storm wind pulled at Loring's vest and whipped the long strands of his hair through the air. "She hated math, so that's what I used as a trigger. It was the pattern from a series of math problems!"
A Gathering Evil Page 27
