Out of Mind

by Stella Cameron

“They don’t have to,” Rock said. “And remember we can wipe their memories clean. If any of them get through, we will deal with them.”

  Only you aren’t so good at getting rid of memories yet. In short bursts, zipping from one gap between plant displays to another, Ben worked his way toward the other three.

  Using his third eye, he could see them completely. Rock, in his thick-soled shoes and black leather pants, stood a little apart from the other two. His head was in its human form again. Vanity wore a sleeveless top and tight jeans. John’s elegant clothes made them an odd set.

  A mark on the back of Vanity’s left shoulder made Ben stop breathing. It was a festering burn, and he had little doubt how it had happened. In the moment of battle with the batlike creature in that empty shop, he had used his defensive gift. Vanity was that creature, and she carried his scar no matter what form she took. He smiled at her arrogance in assuming he would have no opportunity to make the connection.

  He would never forget how that burn had damaged the source of her invisibility and left one side of her bat body fully revealed to his human eyes. Had she repaired herself at all, he wondered, or was she still only able to squirt the fluid, the source of her shield from ordinary sight, on one side, never to be completely invisible again?

  Once more he concentrated his powers solely on searching out Sykes. Still there was no hint of him and Ben ground his teeth together. Without reinforcements, he would have his hands full here.

  Vanity spoke in a soft voice unlike her own. “Rock, I have a better idea for us. I’ll go to Zibock alone and take my little people. You stay here and keep watch on the Millets.”

  “You don’t decide my actions for me,” Rock growled.

  He tore the chain from his pocket and his fingers furled around a black cylinder. Instantly, a blue beam shot across Vanity’s eyes. She stared into the light, unaffected, and ripped the laser from his hand. “You can’t stop me. We know how powerful you are, but there are two of us and only one of you. John, whom I call Servant, not slave, has abilities you know nothing about.”

  John made an angry noise but subsided.

  Ben heard Rock bellow. And Vanity laughed again before the sound changed into a yipping cackle. Ben was certain he knew what was happening.

  With three of them and one of him, to let them discover him before he was ready could be suicidal. Ben switched his attention back to the Embran.

  He wasn’t disappointed. The door to the birdcage stood open and inside, Vanity morphed into the bat that immediately surged to several times the size it had been when he saw it before. Hastily, it wrapped its agile claws around the neck of a bottle, one of a number lined up on shelves of supplies. Ben was sure these must be the containers of orchid food Willow had mentioned. If she was right, there were shrunken people hidden among the bright granules.

  Ben saw another movement and his stomach flipped. Willow crept through the entrance to the conservatory and inched toward the group of Embran.

  “Willow, stop. Right now. They’ll kill you.”

  He waited. If she heard him, she didn’t respond, although he couldn’t feel any shield over her mind.

  A violent crash brought a scream from Willow. Ben leaped from his hiding place and stopped her from rushing forward. She was no match for his speed or strength, and he held her back easily while the Embran were absorbed in each other.

  The bottle Vanity had picked up looked as if it had exploded on the floor. “Catch them,” she screamed to John. “I need something to carry them in now.” She grabbed another and threw it to John, who put it on the nearest bench. More bottles headed for John, and Ben figured either John had dropped the first one, or Rock had intercepted and smashed it. Brilliant turquoise granules had scattered everywhere.

  “Stop it,” Willow moaned softly, her eyes wild and searching the floor.

  The bat continued to pass bottles. Some John caught, some Rock snatched and immediately smashed. With the last bottle, Rock knocked John out of the way and swept the rest from the bench where they’d been placed. They crashed in heaps of myriad colored granules.

  “So much for your plans to impress Zibock,” Rock said to Vanity.

  She swelled even larger, her eyes glittering with fury.

  John’s uncontrolled fluctuations ceased. His face became all but featureless while he stretched longer and longer, growing thinner at the same time.

  John turned into a red, hard-shelled thing, the elegant clothes gone, more twitching appendages appearing rapidly. He was jointed, like a creature wearing armor.

  “Save your time,” Vanity hissed at him. “I must go to Zibock alone. Wait here…Servant.”

  John’s dislike for his nickname was evident. His tentacles slapped the cage bars angrily, slipped through, and Vanity’s bat bared its sharp teeth to bite, snapping off a piece of tentacle while John howled.

  Even more horrifically, Rock’s mouth opened wide, wider than should have been possible, and when it started to close, a massive hooked bird’s beak replaced the lips. Pointed ears rose on top of the head, ears from which loose skin trailed like gray capes. Slimy feathers and hair sprang over his rapidly bulging body. Swaying with every move, a beard of fat hung beneath the beak. And the wings that had made Willow call this a raptor spread with enough force to knock holes in the walls.

  Giving attention to the contents of the smashed jars was out of the question yet. Rock’s raptor form swung about, thrashing plants to shreds.

  He saw Willow and roared as if in pain when he must have realized she could make a lie of the story he had told Vanity.

  “What is she doing here?” The bat made a move to leave the cage, but at that moment, the small, green bird in the cage rose from the end of a perch. It flew at Vanity, stopped as it drew close and whipped its blue-black snakelike tongue around her head. Gasping, she heaved to free herself but the bird’s tongue tightened on her.

  “Call off your bird, Servant,” she gurgled to John, who made a cackling sound and leaped about.

  Rock lunged at Willow, his beak snapping. He snatched her up by the shoulders and shook her like a rag doll.

  Ben had no choice but to give the creature all of his attention and hope John’s malignant bird would keep Vanity busy. John seemed transfixed at the struggle inside the cage.

  Grabbing a potting fork from a box of tools, Ben thrust the sharp tines into the part of Rock’s belly that had yet to finish its transformation. An insane roar sent shock trembling through the atmosphere. Battling powers clashed.

  Sykes appeared beside Ben, taking in the scene quickly. And Pascal was there almost at the same time.

  “What took you so long?” Ben said.

  “If you had made contact with Nat before wading in here, it wouldn’t have taken so long.”

  “Enough, you two,” Pascal ordered, sidling toward the elongated red monster that was John, where he stood before the bat writhing in the birdcage.

  Giant talons had replaced Rock’s hands, and Willow was clutched in one of them. Back and forth she swung with the wounded beast’s stumbling gait. Thick black fluid dribbled out around the fork tines still embedded in its belly.

  Sykes pried Willow from the talons, and Ben, focusing on his own fingers, sank them into slimy feathers and fur. Instantly, smoke rose and the acrid reek of burning tissue. Rock howled and cast about, wild and still too strong to be taken down easily.

  “Willow,” Ben shouted, unable to see where she had landed. “Just answer me.”

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  Growing tiny, the bat slid free of the bird’s tongue and fell as if dead, only to leap up, its size ballooning again and its needle teeth glinting. It cast around, searching for something.

  Before Ben could stop her, Willow threw herself toward the smashed bottles, and he stared, amazed, at figures uncurling to full height—men and women, naked, but obviously too distracted to be concerned with their bodies.

  “Heavenly hedonists,” Pascal exclaimed, although Ben t
hought the apparently appropriate description was accidental.

  “Get out of the way,” Willow ordered the group. “Get back. Chris, Fabio, take them all out of here.”

  Chris, Fabio and a woman who held Chris’s hand, stood their ground, but the rest edged carefully backward.

  Ben heard another scream. Willow’s. Yanked by the rapidly growing bat, she fell inside the cage. Vanity had taken the key and deftly used her claws to close and lock the door on the inside.

  He shot to tear at the bars.

  Shrieking with unearthly laughter, Vanity threw Willow to the ground and spread herself on top of her, completely hiding Willow.

  Ben strained at the bars and one began to bend outward. “Leave her,” he yelled at Vanity. “Get away. Willow?”

  Willow didn’t answer, and Vanity only swelled larger, her whole, ugly body vibrating while she continued to laugh.

  Swaying in front of Pascal and Sykes, John used his tentacles to snap at them, forcing both to engage him. One at either side, they pummeled him, but he kept swinging at them.

  With a last huge shout, Vanity rose up, revealing a rapidly changing gelatinous mass. Inside it, Ben saw Willow fighting to escape. She might as well have fought with superglue.

  What he saw next took his horror to a new level. Starting at one end, the mass formed itself into a hard, yellowish coat—a shell. Willow was disappearing inside one of their eggs.

  “I win,” Vanity cried. “I will take her egg to Zibock as a gift.”

  Rock mumbled from the floor, making no sense.

  Soaring, her bat wings flapping, Vanity said, “I will tell him to eat her and live forever.”

  “You don’t know that works,” Rock said indistinctly between drooling lips.

  “But we must try,” she told him, emitting high-pitched clicking noises.

  The shell grew larger, overtaking Willow, who lay on her side, fighting with the gluey substance that bound her.

  “It will suffocate her,” Vanity trilled gleefully. “She is not like one of us. She cannot live without air as we do when we’re young.”

  Stretching one arm as far as it would go, Ben thrust it behind the bar he had bent. Vanity flew at him, her teeth bared. She came too fast and he caught her low belly, concentrated all his energy there, and smoke rose.

  His smoldering touch impaled her, and she flapped helplessly, thrashing her head, wailing.

  The shell had reached Willow’s shoulders. He could see her punching weakly over her head.

  Leaping against the cage, he rammed the soles of his shoes into the door and strained, dragging at the bar until he felt it yield more.

  “Willow,” he shouted. “Stay with me.”

  Just barely he reached the key and unlocked the cage. Aware of the bat’s mewling and flopping, he had no time to consider another attack from that direction.

  The egg came together at its narrower end.

  “No!” Ben threw himself across the space, hauled the egg toward him and saw a space no bigger than a quarter. “No!”

  With all his might he jammed a forefinger through the hole and tore away a chunk of gummy shell. Hard on the outside, it was still soft and sticky inside.

  Crazed with fear, he stripped away piece after piece of shell. The viscous matter adhered to the inside, forming the actual egg, and toward the other end it had started to turn opaque.

  He dragged at the stuff that still covered her head, scooped it away from her nose and mouth, panting, aware of choking on his own breath.

  Sykes joined him and went to work helping clear Willow’s eyes and rake at her face and hair. The other man’s ragged breathing, his desperation, joined Ben’s.

  Willow’s eyes were closed and she didn’t move.

  Pushing Sykes away, Ben turned her onto her back and brought his mouth down over hers, puffing into her mouth and turning his head to watch her chest.

  “Ben,” she whispered. “I’m not dead.”

  He caught her up in his arms and shook her, kissed her and shook her, not caring what still clung to her skin. It was already drying and falling away.

  Sykes cried out. Vanity found enough energy to land on his back and reach for his ear with one claw.

  “You are dead,” Pascal thundered. Holding a bundle of metal orchid stakes, he cannoned inside the cage, raising a single stake in his right hand. He used it to hook Vanity from Sykes’s back and pin her by one wing to the back wall, like an ugly butterfly on a board.

  Straining, striking out with the still-free wing, Vanity’s bat tried to snare Pascal, but he moved with incredible speed, piercing the second wing with another stake and jamming it to the wall. For good measure he sent several more stakes after the first two.

  “Don’t kill it,” Sykes said. “We need its secrets.”

  Pascal cast a pitying glance at his nephew. “Naturally.”

  John in his lobster incarnation settled his tiny eyes on Willow, and he made sinuous movements in her direction, only to be met by Chris and Fabio, who threw themselves at his body and climbed him as if he were a rope. They made it to the head where they drove their fingers into those nasty little eyes.

  The creature staggered back and forth, its body undulating in outrageous angles before it fell and the entire group of naked humans climbed on top to hold the thing down.

  More footsteps pounded toward the conservatory. As Ben expected, Nat, Bucky Fist and Gray ran in while uniformed cops ground to a halt outside.

  Ben wouldn’t let Willow go. He held her and watched for the moment when he would have no choice but to join the melee. Sykes snagged a stake from Pascal and the two of them fell to stabbing the still-writhing Rock.

  Nat, Bucky and Gray flew into the middle of everything, and Ben almost laughed at the sight of Bucky slamming handcuffs on Rock’s talons, talons that withered before the eye. When the talons disappeared altogether, the handcuffs proved just as helpful since they were securely attached to Rock’s wrists.

  He convulsed, and the horrible creature that was the real Rock rolled on his back and lay still while he was bound. “I need eggs,” he whispered.

  Ben turned to the Vanity-bat attached to the wall inside the birdcage. It heaved and swelled, first in one direction, then another, like some deep-sea jelly creature blobbing along the bottom. Pascal kept watch while Nat stalked closer to the cage.

  “Bolivar didn’t get away until after he was arrested.”

  Ben recognized Gray’s voice, Gray who had been there when Bolivar was arrested, as Ben had not.

  “We can try to do better this time,” Ben told Gray. “Bring that sack now.”

  Snatching up a burlap sack, Sykes entered the cage neck and neck with Gray. Together with Pascal they covered Vanity with the sack and worked her free of the wall while leaving the stakes through her wings. She fell heavily into the bottom of the sack. Lumps and bumps poked at the inside as she struggled to get free. Ben and Pascal slapped lengths of duct tape around the sack until it was completely covered.

  “That’s him,” the woman with Chris cried out. She pointed at John who was transforming back to his elegantly dressed form. Already his blond hair had appeared. “He’s the one who did it to me. He put me in a champagne glass, then in a bottle and left me there.”

  As if struck, John grew completely still. Then, first blurring and melting, he changed shape, growing shorter, stockier and eventually, becoming Val Brandt.

  Ben stared, but it was Willow who confronted the man. “You were with them all along. You helped lure me to your house. Was Chloe one of you, too?”

  Val laughed. “Poor, weak Chloe. She never knew that I took over her Val’s body.”

  37

  Rays of golden sunshine penetrated the Court of Angels.

  The Millets, Marley and Gray Fisher and the Fortunes gathered near the fountain—all but Poppy Fortune, who had left New Orleans the night before, headed for her parents’ retreat house in California.

  Ben kept Willow close to his side. “I wan
t to get out of here,” he murmured to her.

  Her immediate smile was all the response he needed.

  “We’ve got one or two things to get through first,” Sykes said, smirking.

  “We all know about your out-of-this-world hearing,” Willow told him. “But you do have to compete with Ben all the time, don’t you? It’s pointless because…well, it’s pointless is all.”

  “Pointless,” Ben echoed, squeezing her shoulders.

  The smirk on Sykes’s face didn’t waver.

  “That’s enough, children,” Pascal said, but he looked pleased with himself. “This is serious. No horsing around.”

  “How sure are we that Nat has those three in custody?” Gray asked.

  A pause settled in. After taking time only to shower and change, most of them were exhausted, if relieved, but they knew what stretched ahead and it wasn’t pretty.

  “They’re in restraints,” Pascal said finally. “Inside cells.”

  “What if they morph into something else?” Gray said.

  “They don’t pass through walls as far as we know,” Marley put in.

  Liam and Ethan Fortune stood a little apart. They had been brought up to speed by the others, but the fresh concern over what New Orleans and its people faced was obvious. “Couldn’t they be put in tanks?” Liam said. “Where they could be watched all the time? They aren’t invincible and we’re going to know more about them.”

  “They can’t help themselves,” Ben said. “They’ve set a course and it isn’t going away. They are slowly dying out. Slowly by their standards is evidently a long, long time by ours, but they aren’t ready to give up immortality.”

  “Finding out the significance of those keys has to be at the top of our list,” Willow said. “Especially now we know they definitely have something to do with our missing angel.”

  “If the Embran have it right,” Ben pointed out.

  “I think the angel represents a real person,” Willow said, and everyone fell silent.

  The stands of bamboo rustled and flipped. Winnie chomped noisily on her plastic bone—dinosaur bone as Gray called it. Mario stuck close to Willow and Ben and seemed subdued.