“No,” Jode said. The Lucifer hadn’t moved since Sebastian knocked away the Element gun. “Sacrifices are only valuable if they accomplish their goal. Otherwise, they’re just deaths.”
“Rosalind...” Sebastian began.
“You’re in for a surprise.” Dreamsinger laughed again. This time her laughter sounded more genuine. And mean-spirited. “Dear brother Sebastian, do you realize you’ve fulfilled your final purpose?”
The boy glared at her. “What do you mean?”
“You were used to gain access to this station. To shut off the electricity. To cut the cables feeding this room so nothing will happen even when the water finally spills around your dam. On top of that, your lovely wife just tricked you into dispelling every enchantment in this room. My Chameleon glamour wasn’t the only spell you removed; you also erased thirteen charms of protection to prevent this cage from opening.” Dreamsinger made a mock bow toward the Lucifer. “Clever you. But your kind has always been clever.”
“More so recently,” Jode said.
“So you believe.”
“What are you talking about?” Sebastian demanded.
Jode gave a nasty smile. “You’ll never know, boy. You’ve outlived your usefulness.”
The Lucifer made a darting motion with its hand. Something went bang, like thunder.
For a moment I was certain the bang meant Sebastian’s death: some murderous alien surprise that would beat the boy’s psionic defenses. The Lucifer might have planted a booby-trap while consummating the sham marriage—one long deep kiss and a tiny curd of maggoty white could have slid down Sebastian’s throat. That curd might lodge itself in the boy’s stomach, stealing atoms and molecules from nearby tissues to build an explosive chemical...or perhaps the curd could mutate into an explosive all its own. One way or another, Jode must have a trick for blowing people up from the inside: that’s how it got the Mind-Lord, blasting him to pieces above the winter anchorage.
But the explosion we’d heard didn’t come from Sebastian—the bang erupted back near the exit tunnel. Jode’s leer of triumph dissolved to bewilderment...and Dreamsinger laughed at the sight.
“I’m not the only one who’s predictable,” she told Jode. “I knew you’d rig the boy for a fatal finish...so I removed your surprise from Sebastian’s small intestine. Switched it by sorcery to the corpse of one of my Keepers. As I said, they made a valuable sacrifice—without them, I couldn’t save one of the most powerful psychics the world has ever known.”
Jode’s face twisted with fury. The Lucifer’s right hand turned puffy, as if the creature was so enraged it didn’t have enough self-control to retain its Rosalind form...but the moment passed and the hand resumed human shape. Sebastian seemed to have missed the brief transformation—he was too busy staring at the alien’s fierce expression. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Rosalind, what’s this about?”
“She’s not Rosalind,” said the Caryatid. Her voice was wheezy—the bullet through her shoulder must have pierced a lung. But she struggled to her feet, still pressing her wound with a blood-drenched hand. “The real Rosalind is dead. Murdered by this bag of skin filled with pus.” She took a shaky step toward Jode. “We found Rosalind’s body last night. Dead in her dorm room. The thing you married was her killer.”
“No,” Sebastian whispered. “No. The Rosalind I married...she was my Rosalind. She knew things—secrets only we...how could anyone else know?”
“How do you think?” The Caryatid took another step toward Jode. “This thing is called a Lucifer. It’s a shapeshifter; it can look like anyone it wants. If it made itself look like you and visited Rosalind in her room...secrets would naturally spill out. Amongst other things.”
Bile boiled up in my throat. I remembered the position of Rosalind’s corpse: lying naked in the bed, arms and legs splayed wide. If Jode had come to her in Sebastian’s form soon after supper...if Jode had said, “I know we didn’t plan to get together till later, but I just couldn’t wait...”
I could guess what the Lucifer would want. Not just talk. Not just secrets. Jode wanted the perversity of bedding the girl before killing her. Certainly, there were practical reasons for such an atrocity: seeing the girl naked in order to duplicate any moles, birthmarks, etc., hidden by her clothing; learning if there was anything distinctive in how she made love. Fundamentally, though, the Lucifer was just so damnably evil it wanted to be astride Rosalind when it spewed curds into her mouth—filling her with death and horror at the moment the betrayal would be most shattering.
Jode liked to cause pain; it was that simple. The Lucifer reveled in the anguish on a victim’s face just before the face went slack. Even now, though the alien hadn’t managed to kill Sebastian, Jode must have enjoyed the boy’s look of dawning revulsion.
“No,” Sebastian whispered. “No.”
“Oh yes,” Jode said. Then three things happened almost simultaneously.
First: Jode lunged toward Sebastian, slamming a fist toward the boy’s face. The blow didn’t make contact—Sebastian’s nanite friends would never permit that—but the boy reflexively retreated from the attack. Backward. Into the airlock shack that led to the electric cage. At some point when we’d been distracted by other things, Jode must have opened the shack door. Still backing up, Sebastian tripped over the lip of the airlock doorway and fell to the floor inside. He didn’t hit the ground hard—his nanite friends cushioned the fall—but Jode shut the door behind the boy and threw a lever on the shack’s outer wall. The inner door of the airlock, the one to the prison cube’s interior, slid open in response to the button. The mass of dusty black inside the cage, quiescent all this time, lurched instantly toward Sebastian and rolled over him like a midnight avalanche.
Second: the Caryatid cried, “Damn you!” and erupted into flame. Spontaneous human combustion—an age-old legend dismissed by scientists, but if anyone could manage the feat, it was the Steel Caryatid. She lit no match to start the blaze; she simply waved her hands, and suddenly she was burning. Not just on fire...the Caryatid was fire, a woman turned an inferno: advancing on Jode as her legs withered to ash, then continuing forward as flame incarnate, a final conflagration accelerating across the room and roaring into the alien at full speed. Jode was just turning away from shutting Sebastian in the airlock. The fire struck the Lucifer blind-side and ignited its Rosalind clothing. A howl of pain. A wet sizzle. There was nothing left of the Caryatid at all, her flesh and bones incinerated in a flash; but Jode was awash in searing flame.
Third: Dreamsinger turned toward the burning alien. The light of the flames lit her face with orange intensity, but the Spark Lord’s expression was blank. She’d been caught by surprise when Jode and the Caryatid acted. I think Dreamsinger had expected someone to attack her, she wasn’t prepared to be ignored, treated as if she meant nothing compared to more important targets. Now as she approached
Jode-in-flames, I couldn’t tell if she intended to put out the fires incinerating the alien or to stoke them higher. Dreamsinger apparently couldn’t decide either—she moved slowly, distractedly fingering the
Which is how she was standing when the Element gun went off.
She was hit by a volley from all four barrels—bullets, fire, acid, sound. The first three attacks stopped short of their target as the force field around Dreamsinger’s armor blazed into violet life. Bullets turned to molten lead as they hit the energy barrier; fire and acid splashed the violet glow but couldn’t reach the gawky girl inside. Only the hypersonic waves got through...and I assume they would have been stopped as well if Dreamsinger had been wearing her helmet.
Without that helmet, she was vulnerable to simple sound. Amidst the clatter of bullets and the whoosh of flame, she gasped and crumpled to the floor.
A Spark Lord defeated. Unconscious.
Elizabeth Tzekich raced around the corner of the laser cage and ran to what she thought was her daug
hter. Knife-Hand Liz held an Element gun; its barrels were still smoking.
Tzekich was followed by the same two bully-boys we’d seen in Nanticook House. They’d all come around the far side of the prison cube: moving quietly, hidden by the great alien mound in the cage and by the noise the rest of us had been making.
I didn’t know how long Tzekich had been listening, but obviously she hadn’t understood that the girl who looked like Rosalind was actually an alien shapeshifter. Or maybe she had heard and didn’t believe it. We’d told her the previous night that her daughter was dead, replaced by some kind of double...but she hadn’t believed it then, either. And who knows what goes through a mother’s mind when she sees what looks like her daughter enveloped in flame? She only had our word this wasn’t the real Rosalind; and she wasn’t prepared to trust us.
Not when her daughter was burning.
The moment Tzekich reached the fiery Jode, she tossed her gun aside and whipped off her thick winter coat. She used the coat to swat the flames, muffling Jode’s body when the fire had been beaten down enough to be smothered. By then, Jode’s face was black and flaky, scraps falling from the creature’s cheeks like bits of burnt paper; but the Lucifer still retained some semblance of Rosalind, enough to fool a frantic mother. Tzekich was murmuring teary words in a language I didn’t understand—leaning close as if she wanted to kiss the girl but was too afraid of damaging the blistered face.
“You know what’s going to happen,” I whispered to Annah.
“Yes,” she said. “If the Lucifer’s still alive...”
“It is. Bits of it. Remember, each curd is a separate organism. What Opal called cellules.”
“And even if the cellules on the surface got burned, there are plenty alive underneath?”
“Right. So as soon as Knife-Hand Liz gets too close...”
Annah shook her head. “Jode won’t attack her. Jode will say, ‘Oh yes, I’m Rosalind, please save me, Mommy.’ Anything to kill time until the cage runs out of power and the thing inside gets loose.”
“How can we stop it?”
“We can’t. Only Sebastian can. He can start the Falls flowing again. Reconnect the cables he cut.”
I looked into the prison cube. There was no sign of the boy under the mass of black that had deluged him. The giant Lucifer had returned to the main part of the cage, hauling the boy with it—like a crocodile dragging a meal back to its lair. “How do we know he’s still alive?”
“We don’t,” Annah said. “But his psionic powers give him a chance. They might have formed a barrier between him and the monster. An air bubble.”
“If he’s still alive and his powers are working, why hasn’t he escaped on his own?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he needs our help.”
That almost made me laugh. “So we just waltz into the cage and rescue him?”
Annah pointed to the Element gun I was holding. “The flames and acid should drive the monster back. And Sebastian’s powers will protect him from the blasts. I hope.” She shrugged. “It’s the only chance we’ve got to beat Jode. What all the others died for. We have to try.”
I hesitated. “What if the Ring tries to stop us?”
She kissed me, soft and sweet. “Leave the Ring to me. You save Sebastian.” Before I could react, she scrambled to her feet and shouted, “Hey! You! Knife-Hand Liz!”
I don’t know if the Ring-folk had realized we were there—we’d been down on the floor and out of the action, on the opposite side of the cage. Now the two bully-boys whipped up their guns, so jumpy they might have cremated Annah on the spot; but she held her hands high and harmless, her own Element gun slung out of sight behind her back.
“Hello,” she said, walking slowly toward them. The Ringmen tracked her with their gun barrels. “We’ve never met, but I know you. Do you know me?”
The bully-boys stared without answering. Elizabeth Tzekich, cheeks smeared with tears, looked up from what she thought was her daughter. “I’ve watched you from a distance. The don on Rosalind’s floor. What the hell’s going on?”
“My friends told you everything last night. A monster killed your daughter and took her place. That creature is now at your feet.”
Tzekich looked down at the burnt figure wrapped in her coat. A whisper came from Jode’s throat. “Mother...”
“It thinks you’re gullible,” Annah said. “It wants to play on your sympathies. Then, when you’re no longer useful, it’ll kill you as heartlessly as it did Rosalind.”
“So you claim.”
“Talk to it,” Annah said. “In your own language. Ask questions only your daughter could answer.”
Tzekich stared piercingly at Annah. Then she turned to the Lucifer at her feet and said something in her native tongue. Jode only groaned, “Please, Mother, it’s me...”
In English.
I nearly laughed. Annah, clever Annah, must have suspected Jode couldn’t speak whatever Balkan dialect Knife-Hand Liz used with her real daughter. Mother Tzekich didn’t give up immediately—she tried several more sentences with short pauses after each: probably questions Rosalind could answer easily...but not Jode. The shapeshifter only gasped, “Mother!” repeatedly, trying to fill the word with so much anguish, it would touch a stony heart; but the look on the mother’s face had changed to loathing.
She knew the truth: this wasn’t Rosalind, it was Rosalind’s killer. And a woman who’d earned the name Knife-Hand Liz had no pity for such an enemy.
Her bully-boys felt the same way. Whether or not they spoke Tzekich’s language, they could see what was going on; when this “Rosalind” couldn’t answer simple questions, the bodyguards shifted their guns toward Jode. They’d realized the Lucifer was a deadly threat, and they wanted the monster in their sights.
The Ring-men were right about Jode being dangerous. But they shouldn’t have taken their eyes off Annah...who reached behind her back and swung her Element gun to bear on Knife-Hand Liz.
Tzekich either saw Annah’s move or had an inborn sense of when a weapon was aimed at her. She looked up, no fear in her eyes, and said, “What is this about?”
“It’s about you leaving. Your daughter is dead and I’m sorry...but there’s nothing left for you here. Just go.”
Softly Tzekich asked, “Without revenge?”
Annah waved the gun’s muzzle toward Jode. “If you want to incinerate that monster, be my guest.”
“And what about the teachers who were supposed to keep my daughter safe? Or the psychic boy who was the cause of everything? This creature, this Lucifer...it wanted to use the boy, yes? If not for Sebastian, my Rosalind would still be alive.”
“And if not for your own actions, the same!” Annah’s voice was sharp. “Rosalind came to our academy because you’d made so many enemies, the girl wasn’t safe elsewhere. But do you blame yourself? No. You blame the teachers, you blame Sebastian, you want everyone else’s head to roll. But heaven forbid you take any responsibility.”
Annah gestured her gun once more toward Jode. “There’s the real killer. No one will stop you from doing your worst. Snuffing out that monster might be the noblest deed you’ll do in your life—not just revenge, but justice. How many people get such a gift? To vent their grief on a thing of pure evil. To take a vengeance unquestionably right. But you get only the demon; nothing more.”
Tzekich looked into Annah’s eyes, staring past the muzzle of the gun. Softly she said, “My daughter has been murdered. If I could kill the whole world, it wouldn’t be enough. Don’t you understand revenge?”
Annah didn’t answer right away. I don’t know what was going through her mind—what memories of her family, its vendettas, its hatreds. The previous night, she’d talked about people who hungered for revenge, who considered it more important than life itself: “an absolute necessity, a religious imperative.”
I wondered what Annah had seen—what atrocities her family had committed, what horrors had been done to them in return.
“I
understand revenge,” Annah said. “It can’t stop itself. Someone else has to put it out of its misery.”
She fired her gun into Knife-Hand Liz’s face.
An instant after Annah pulled the trigger, she dove forward onto Jode’s body. I thought she must be diving for cover...as if hitting the floor was any protection.
The Ring-men fired on her at point-blank range.
Gushes of flame lit the chamber. The smell of burning gas mixed with the bitterness of acid. Bullets caromed off the rock walls so fiercely, I buried my face against the floor and covered my head with my arms.
Moments later, a gun blew up. I heard the explosion as shattering metal: a pressurized ammunition chamber filled with flammable gas or acid that was breached by a bullet and burst its deadly payload into the world. I didn’t know whose gun it was—Annah’s or one of those held by the Ring—but they were all so close together, it didn’t make a difference.
Total mutual destruction in the first half-second. Burnt, shot, corroded.
As I lay listening to the roar of weapons, I realized Annah must have known what would happen. What she’d be forced to do. Even if Tzekich hadn’t explicitly threatened Sebastian or the school, violent retribution would still have hung in the air. “My daughter has been murdered. If I could kill the whole world, it wouldn’t be enough.” Sooner or later, Tzekich might lash out against the boy...or the academy...or someone Annah loved.
Like me.
So Annah made sure that wouldn’t happen.
She also granted Elizabeth Tzekich’s final wish. The way Knife-Hand Liz looked into Annah’s eyes...had she been pleading for an end? Her daughter was dead; her heart was broken; and though she spoke of revenge, perhaps Mother Tzekich was actually asking for release.
One can be so crushed with grief, one prays for death so the pain will stop.
Believe me, I know.
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