American Quest

by Sienna Skyy

  The Auxilium was back in the driver’s seat, sprinkling sand out the window and over Hedon where he lay beneath the wheel. Incredibly, he seemed to have dozed off. In fact, he was snoring with deep, lusty oinks.

  The Auxilium winked at Bruce. “Stand back, sonny.”

  The monster truck roared to life and, with an anticipant hiccup, lurched forward. The added weight of the van didn’t seem to bother it much. The front wheel rolled forward over Hedon, then the back wheel followed suit. All the while the fat man slept.

  The van lumbered into view. At first, only its hindquarters were visible at the end of the tow cable, like a mouse being carried off by the tail. It gave some resistance as it broke the plane to the surface, at which point the Auxilium put the truck in reverse and then forward again, once more treating Hedon like a speed bump as she did so.

  And then the van was out.

  Hedon groaned and pulled himself up to a sitting position, rubbing his eyes.

  “Sandman trick, I should’ve known. Naughty, naughty!” He blinked, eyeing the van. “Oh, bloody hell.”

  The lady scaled out of the truck and down to the ground. Hedon rolled, but could not get away from her fast enough.

  She grabbed him by the scruff of his collar. “You leave these people alone. And I’ve had just about enough of your foul language.”

  Bruce raced to the van. Jamie and Emily tumbled out first, followed by Bea, Forte, and Shannon. Hands went to shoulders and faces, inspecting, hugging. They shook and cooed to each other.

  Jamie looked around. “I didn’t think we were going to make it. How did you get us out?”

  Bruce turned and pointed to the monster truck, and then stopped, puzzled. It was gone. And the Auxilium was gone. That horrible Hedon guy was gone.

  “Where’s the hole?” Emily said.

  Bruce looked. The fissure was gone, too. And although no other cars had passed during the entire time the van had been a chicken bone stuck in Mother Nature’s throat, the freeway was now flowing with steady traffic in both directions.

  The van itself rested, intact, on the side of the road. Just in front of it gaped a relatively innocent-looking pothole.

  33

  NEW YORK

  “I AIN’T SEEN NOTHING LIKE IT BEFORE, master. They’ve got protection like madness!”

  “Am I to understand there has been not one single casualty?”

  Hedon’s arms spread wide. “It’s rather precise surgery, isn’t it? First, I’ve got to separate the bloke from the others, and only then can I get down to business. I wouldn’t’ve minded a little help on that one, hey!”

  Hedon angled a nasty curl of the lip toward Isolde, who answered with a barely stifled huff. If Hedon was attempting to exhibit any reserve of temper, his efforts proved shoddy.

  Enervata felt acid seep into his blood. These lapses of deference among his lieutenants seemed increasingly overt.

  He stood in human form because he would be joining Gloria soon, but that wouldn’t stop him from exacting discipline first.

  Hedon must have sensed Enervata’s mood, for he returned to a more humble—if not whining—tact.

  “And then there’s the matter of that lady showing up. I can’t be expected to hold me own against one of those.”

  Isolde gave a snide grin. “A wave of the hand, a sprinkle of sand. Our Hedon slips off to slumberland!”

  Enervata shot out his arm and slapped her. “Amusing to you, is it? You find this funny!”

  Her face registered no shock, no mortification. Her head merely swung under the force of his hand and then returned as if nothing had happened. She seemed utterly impervious and it made him want to flay her.

  But he didn’t. He wheeled instead upon Hedon and threw a punch to his jaw, and then another, and another until Hedon was on the floor, coughing and spitting blood and flesh. Enervata kicked him in the stomach then and Hedon heaved a fetid expulsion of breath and began to gag.

  Enervata turned his back. He didn’t care to watch Hedon disgorge. He turned instead to Isolde, craving to sink his black, violent hunger into her. But to his surprise, she was not gawking at Hedon. No smirk rested upon her face. She was looking away, as though her gaze dwelt within another time and place altogether.

  But most curiously, most fascinating, Enervata was certain that within those yellow eyes he saw evidence of tears. Actual tears.

  Could they be from fear? After all these centuries, to see fear again in Isolde’s eyes! Not just anxiety or foreboding, but enough true fear as to cause her to weep. The thought registered with such an immediate endorphin rush that he felt a surge of blood to his groin.

  Was it really fear? Her expression seemed so strange. Wild. Almost foreign. But it had to be fear, because he could imagine nothing else.

  And then she seemed to return to the present and her gaze dropped dully to the floor.

  He left her alone and strode to the silver charger that lay atop the demi-lune commode, pouring himself a glass of Taylor port. “When you’ve finished regurgitating your supper, Hedon, perhaps you’ll see fit to report on our philanthropist, Jonathon Raster.”

  Hedon coughed wetly and then snuffled. “I didn’t—that is, Isolde was just there . . .”

  “I am not asking Isolde. I am asking you!”

  “Of course, master. Everything is as you asked. I was the one who set it up, really. Isolde just ran reconnaissance.”

  “Hedon . . .”

  “He’s resigned! Jonathan Raster’s resigned.” Hedon coughed again, finishing with a long, hoarse grind of air that left him smacking his lips. “Announced his resignation just this morning, he did. Claims his innocence but wants to remove himself so the foundation isn’t tainted by all the scandal.”

  Enervata nodded. “Excellent news.”

  “Course Kolt’s all up in a lather. Didn’t take kindly to the way we publicly yanked his knickers up his bum.”

  Hedon rolled to a sitting position and looked around—no doubt hunting for his honey wine—then thought better of it and folded his hands. “Kolt’s put out the word to all the others that he’ll make just about any deal he has to just to get back at us.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Enervata said. “It’s much too late for that. Tomorrow Gloria will be mine.”

  Enervata saw the excitement in Hedon and Isolde’s eyes. And the doubt. He knew they wondered where they would stand in the new world.

  Yes, let them wonder.

  He waved his hand as if brushing dog hair from a velvet cushion. “Out. Get out, both of you. And when you next report back, you’d better each come with your fingers tangled in the blood-soaked hair of the travelers. One head in each hand for my Hall of Amusements.”

  Hedon and Isolde said nothing and took their leave.

  Enervata revealed Gloria’s door. She could now open or close it if she chose to wander through the penthouse.

  He took his time, sipping his port, thinking of the tantric allure of Isolde’s fear. So many delights awaited him. He would never kill Isolde. Neither would he allow her to taste the power of reign over the wild-lands. But she would indeed taste fear again, that fear he’d glimpsed in her, along with the complementary flavors of despair and pain. Yes, he would indulge himself in her misery repeatedly through the drifts of eternity.

  And perhaps when he’d tired of Gloria, he could rekindle his passion by defiling her in the same manner. Perhaps he would enjoy them both, side by side. This, the purest love.

  The door to Gloria’s room opened and Sileny emerged. She avoided his eyes and skirted past him to the rear chambers. It was pitiful that Gloria had sought the company of this wretch, the mouthless one. Sileny exuded a kind of fear so acrid and constant that he took no pleasure from it at all. Only revulsion.

  Sileny returned, this time bearing a mother-of-pearl box and, head bent, slipped back into Gloria’s room. She left the door open behind her.

  Enervata stepped toward it. Tonight he would take Gloria to a performance of the Pekin
g opera, Forest of the Wild Boars, portrayed in the acrobatic ballet style of Wusheng. Sileny was no doubt helping Gloria to dress.

  He would shower and ready himself. More important, he needed to revise his state of mind to assimilate more to Aaron Vance and less to Enervata. He still felt heady with the lust of releasing violence upon Hedon and still felt the sensual ache from Isolde’s misery.

  But he wanted to see Gloria, perhaps catch a glimpse of her as she prepared herself for him. And he wanted to look upon her, unobserved, while he still bore this mantle; wearing the sweat of violence, Hedon’s blood at his knuckles, Isolde’s despair like an aphrodisiac. He wanted to gaze upon Gloria with the taste of the world to come still in his mouth.

  But the risk was too great. If she saw him, she might see the black echoes within him. He turned for his room. But he paused and looked over his shoulder.

  And then he saw her.

  She stood reflected in the great mirror. A gown of rich, shimmering jade hues clung to her body in angled folds. It draped from one single shoulder down the length of her breasts and tapered waist, past her thighs, and then flared out at the knee to a bell shape, where the colors created a hologram of green, blue, and purple. Sileny had adorned her with a golden scalloped necklace, so delicate the shape only emerged when Gloria moved and the light chanced to glimpse it. One slender shoulder lay bare and, from the other, a sheer cascade of translucent chiffon feathered its way down her back.

  Sileny was tending her hair now, which was pulled into shining folds that echoed those in the dress, a spray of tiny emerald, sapphire, and amethyst jewels winking as if suspended in a halo.

  And beyond Gloria, perfectly, stretching the length of the wall, hung the peacock tapestry.

  Gloria inclined her neck, graceful and long, and she was the human embodiment of that tapestry. A thing of pride, leisure, and astonishing beauty. A thing that should be his. Would be his.

  She turned and saw him. Enervata knew he should move on, pretend he hadn’t seen her and continue to his room to get ready for the opera. But he couldn’t. Could not take his eyes from her. He expected her face to register shock at his accidental voyeurism, or that she might look away in modesty.

  But she did neither of these things. Instead, she gazed back at him, bold.

  In that moment, Enervata realized that he’d been wrong. He’d told Isolde and Hedon that he would have her tomorrow.

  Seeing the willingness in her eyes now, though, he knew he’d have her tonight.

  34

  PENNSYLVANIA

  BRUCE HUGGED THE CELL PHONE to his ear, brows knit, his gaze traveling through two panes of glass and an expanse of pavement to rest on Jamie.

  Jamie held her phone to her ear, brows knit, her gaze traveling through two panes of glass and an expanse of pavement to rest on Bruce.

  He stood inside the convenience store while she sat in the van by the gas pumps. On that expanse of pavement that lay between them was utter bedlam. But neither Bruce nor Jamie said much as they gawked at each other. What was there to say?

  Bruce tried the glass door again. “I still can’t get out.”

  Jamie’s hand made a helpless up-and-down chop. “Why would you want to get out? It’s, um, being handled.”

  She looked like she was about to say something else, but she just sighed and turned to watch a snaking nozzle at the end of a hose arc through the air like a seahorse, rearing over a retired man in a Hawaiian shirt who duly cleaved it in half with a machete.

  Bruce blinked. “Er, yeah.”

  Bruce had been making a drink run when the gas pumps had come to life and begun to attack the van, banging and squeezing like the giant squid that tried to eat the Nautilus. Inside the Quick-Mart, the door had suddenly locked, leaving Bruce standing helpless next to a bewildered attendant and a bleary-eyed truck driver who kept shaking his head and saying, “This is why I usually drive at night.”

  Bruce had thought for sure they were going to lose somebody. The hoses had stretched to impossible lengths, shooting out from all eight pumps and descending with ferocity upon the van.

  But then the tour bus showed up, and the tourists piled out and . . . and . . .

  Well, here they were.

  Bruce watched a curly-haired woman bearing a fanny pack and pink sunglasses as two wild black hoses descended upon her from opposite ends. She wrestled them both to the ground and jammed her feet on top of them, bending them and pretzeling them together. She then yanked, cinching them into a tight knot. The hoses and nozzles flapped and banged until the machete-toting guy with the Hawaiian shirt came up and lopped their nozzles off.

  The entire parking lot roiled with whipping gas hoses, but furious as they were, they were grossly outnumbered by the rabid tourists. Fanny-packers beat, yanked, stretched, and sliced the hoses to shreds. And the wounded hoses oozed a sticky red something that didn’t quite look like blood but didn’t look like gas, either.

  Bruce heard a high-pitched, buzzing shriek and he turned to see a lady in a muumuu with one hand gripping a twisting, writhing nozzle. In the other hand she wielded a scorching red curling iron—at least it looked like one except that the barrel glowed like a hot poker—and she burned through the rubber mesh of the screaming hose.

  Bruce heard a click at the door and reached for it, finding it open.

  “Wait, I don’t think it’s safe yet,” he heard Jamie say, and saw her twisting in her seat to confer with the others in the van. “And . . . did you get the drinks? Bea says we have to make doubly sure to hydrate.”

  “Hydrate? Oh. Oh yeah.” Bruce had actually left all the drinks at the counter, still in the bag where he’d abandoned them just as the pumps had come to life.

  “And Em wants cashews.”

  Bewildered, Bruce fetched the drinks and attempted to pay the attendant for the cashews. The poor man only gaped at the spectacle beyond the window.

  The truck driver approached the register and shook his head. “It’s why I usually never like to drive during the day. Nothing but crazies on the road during the day. Could I get a packet of Marblows?”

  The attendant blinked, seemingly unable to move, an odd gurgle in his throat.

  Bruce laid down a couple of bucks for the cashews and turned back toward the window to watch and wait.

  “What are they?” Bruce said into the cell phone. “Some kind of angels come to protect us?”

  A bent old man jammed an umbrella down the snout of one of the nozzles and began beating it against the concrete.

  Jamie turned back to Bruce with a shrug. “Hard to say.”

  Bruce shook his head. “It’s not exactly how I expected divine creatures to act. They’re kinda, I don’t know, ruthless.”

  After some time, the tourists neutralized all the pumps but one. The sole surviving hose turned and tried to escape them, bolting for the freeway like a sidewinder. The bus itself took off after it, accelerated, overtook it, and then squealed its brakes as it pinned it down. The pack of tourists swarmed over it.

  Jamie’s voice came through the cell phone again. “You know, they’re fighting the bad guys, but something tells me the tourists aren’t necessarily good guys. I don’t know what they are. You’d better make a run for it while you have the chance.”

  Jamie was right. He dove through the door, leaving the truck driver and the shocked cashier behind him.

  NEW YORK

  Clashing cymbals burst through the whine of a Chinese twostringed fiddle. The plush red theater lay dark but for the stage, and Enervata observed the sea of heads below where he and Gloria sat in their box seats. To think, by tomorrow these people would all fall under his rule. If they only knew what awaited them before dawn, would they spend their last moments of freedom sitting idle in a theater?

  Onstage below, the actors’ movements flowed in graceful arcs, even in the subtle turning of the head as the warrior shifted his whiteand-red painted face from side to side. Though he carried a sword and wore a costume of full battle armo
r, he pivoted and leaped in movements that defied gravity.

  Enervata heard a subtle cough from behind and he turned to see a round silhouette darkening the archway.

  “Excuse me,” he whispered to Gloria.

  She nodded, the reflection of stage lights glimmering in the jewels that adorned her hair.

  He joined Hedon at the rear of the box seats and they stepped back into the hall.

  “More problems, master,” Hedon whispered. “We can’t get to the travelers because Kolt’s got every Pravus who’s ever sullied the earth out there turning everyday folk into bloomin’ warriors.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Enervata said slowly and quietly. “Where are they?”

  “They’re coming here. They’re almost to New York. Master, we can’t get near ’em. We’re up against both the light and the—”

  “I will only say this once more. Either you bring me those heads, or I will take yours. Do you understand?”

  Hedon stared at him, notched nose flaring and drawing in curls of his mustache. He nodded. “Yes, master. I understand.”

  35

  NEW YORK

  MANHATTAN GLITTERED IN THE DARKNESS across the river. Jamie’s stomach was in knots. She knew precisely where to go. They’d found the place online after the glimpse they caught of the driveway. Now, as she guided the van over the familiar roads, through the tollbooths, and onto the George Washington Bridge, she realized that over the next several hours they could very well determine the fate of the world.

  “It’s beautiful,” Emily breathed in the backseat. “So big.”

  Jamie checked the rearview mirror and saw Bruce put his arm around the little girl. But he said nothing, his gaze fixed on the city beyond as it winked to life. In fact no one else spoke, not even Bedelia who, like Emily, had never been to New York City before. In fact, it seemed as though Bedelia watched the city emerge with trepidation.

  I can hardly blame her.