“Yes, you will be my instrument. You will be my assassin.”
Her gaze fixed on the pistol, Lauryn said, “I won’t do anything for you. I certainly … I certainly won’t kill for you.” She felt the mist tickling her lungs when she breathed. Her throat was raw with it. When she swallowed, it was like drinking acid.
“Oh, but you will,” said Id, extending her palm. Lauryn’s hand involuntarily reached up to take it.
Then she stopped it. By force of willpower alone, she stopped her rising arm.
“I will not.”
Slowly, Lauryn brought her hand back down.
Id’s eyebrow arched.
“Your will is strong,” said the goddess, impressed. “Stronger than most.”
Lauryn smiled. Because now, at this moment, she knew she possessed the strength to save her daughter. Ignoring the words and the power behind them, she thought of Megan only—her daughter’s smile, her whining on the road, her abandoning all reason where Jasper was concerned, her grouchy demands for the Internet during the hurricane, her need to know about why her family had shattered. Her ability to sleep through anything, the mirth from her father’s eyes, the iron of her mother’s stubbornness. All that made Megan who she was, the sum greater than the parts of Mark and Lauryn Hughes, the tiny new being Mark named “doll” that first day in the hospital … Lauryn wrapped her heart around all those things that made Megan her daughter, her beloved child; the uncuttable cord of connection beyond reason, beyond family that such a wanting word as love could never fully capture.
Now, at last, she understood the depth of Mark’s sacrifice, what she’d only known as the shadow of a truth before. How ultimate and immutable his love for Megan had been, a concrete reality that had never really been a choice. How much she loved him for it, especially now, despite the wrongs he’d done her and their marriage. Knowing that no wrong could offset the infinite good he’d done out of a last, full measure of devotion to his child.
She reached down and grasped the gun.
Id stepped back.
Lauryn raised the pistol.
The Lady swept her hand wide.
Lauryn resisted the pull but her arm followed Id’s command just the same, controlled by the invisible power of a goddess’s will. When her hand stopped moving and she saw her new target, Lauryn barely had the strength to stop her finger from pulling the trigger.
“Much stronger than most,” Id smiled. “Oh, how delicious. You will serve me well.”
Lauryn held the gun, yes. And her finger itched to pull the trigger. But now the mother stared, wide-eyed, down the barrel of the pistol at a new target—her own daughter. Lauryn’s hand shook. With fear. With fatigue. Helpless to fight the fate being imposed upon her. Id’s whim become Megan’s destiny.
“Shall I have your finger touch the trigger?”
“Please…” Her throat tight with terror, Lauryn could hardly speak. Despite her struggle to keep it still, Lauryn’s finger moved. Its tip brushed the trigger. “Please stop!”
“Agree to be my servant, and I will release you. Refuse, and the seer dies.”
Lauryn felt the cold curve of the trigger’s embrace. How much pull would it take before she murdered her own daughter?
“You will be my assassin.” The Lady’s voice caressed her ears. “Whom you kill is up to you.”
Megan stood as if to offer a clearer target to her mother.
“Please stop! I’ll do what you ask! Just stop!”
A power beyond muscle, beyond her own control certainly, swung her arm wide and pulled the trigger. The shot rang out across the control room.
Someone screamed.
Across the room, Iris blinked once. The blood from the hole in her forehead crept into her right eye socket. She leaned back against the wall like she was tired and wanted to rest. As Iris slumped, lifeless, the flow from the bullet wound slowed. She seemed to be crying tears of blood.
Lauryn stared, horrified. She recognized Iris, of course, but it was the distant recognition of shock, of knowing she’d just ended another human being. The sickening reality began to sink in and yet, her joyous relief that Megan had been spared competed with the horror in her heart.
The fact that it was Iris she’d shot began to register. The homewrecker. The slut. The woman who’d spread her legs and lured Mark away.
Ding dong, the bitch is dead. Which old bitch? The thieving bitch!
Lauryn took no pleasure in the thought that sang in her head, but it came just the same, before she could stop it. Her insides were twisting and turning with relief and grief and self-loathing and satisfaction, all together impressing their collective shame on her psyche.
She wanted to vomit.
Frank Baines’s shocked stare found her. He still sat next to Iris, holding her hand. But his eyes bored into Lauryn. Was he crying?
“Put your weapon away,” said Id to Lauryn’s frozen stare. “But keep it close, assassin. You will soon have need of it.”
* * *
Eamon was turned around. He’d followed Lauryn into the tunnel and knew enough to turn right when he hit the main passage. But as the bitter mist thickened, with strange noises turning him this way and that, he’d lost his way.
He thought he heard Jasper once, a yelping bark of surprise, but as soon as he turned to find it, the sound disappeared. Just another echo along the cold stones around him. And one more chance for him to become confused.
“Damn it, Jasper,” he said, caring more for the dog than he wanted to. “If I could just find you, you could help me find her.”
What if another one of those anorexic cannibals found him?
What if a hundred did?
Or Peter.
He wished now he hadn’t given his gun to Lauryn. And he regretted the brash way he’d explained his plan to cut off the maniac’s head, put it in the bowling bag, and return to his lab.
Simple as that, right?
He thought about his recordings. If he’d ever get out alive to experiment with the notions he’d begun to explore in them.
The imp of his unconscious projected the witch doctor’s image on the widescreen of his mind. The old man, hair wild, sat hunched by the fire, his only covering a ratty loincloth. It was gray and fetid like the faded, dirty clothing the Exers wore. The witch doctor smiled at him, then cast large bones into the air, like the Neanderthal at the beginning of 2001. The bones arced high and fell in slow motion, just like in the movie, before landing in the dirt with a thump. One of them, he noticed, was a femur with a noticeable crack in it. Like the one he’d seen on his x-ray twenty years ago.
It was his femur. Broken in a skiing accident shortly after college.
The witch doctor was casting his bones.
Predicting his fate.
Eamon stopped his wandering in the tunnel. He closed his eyes and concentrated hard on the smiling savage squatting at the fire.
“Well?”
The witch doctor chuckled. At first merely amused, the sound expanded to fill Eamon’s skull with the mocking laughter of the insane.
* * *
Lauryn swept a lock of hair from Megan’s forehead, wanting the contact to last as long as possible. Id had allowed her a brief goodbye. Megan stared at her with a smile on her face. A vacant, distant expression of ignorance and enslavement.
As she looked into her daughter’s empty eyes, Megan’s dream came to mind. The one in which Lauryn was supposed to confront and defeat an evil woman. She hadn’t given it much thought before, hadn’t given it much credence, but now she wondered whom Megan had meant. This ethereal creature of awesome power? If so, the dream had proven less than prescient. This moment tasted like anything but victory over the creature holding her daughter hostage.
Maybe Megan had meant Iris. Was shooting her husband’s lover in cold blood what she’d seen? Lauryn didn’t think so. For whatever faults she’d had, for all Lauryn’s calling down curses upon her head, Iris wasn’t evil. And now she was dead by Lauryn’s hand.
There was hardly a victory to be claimed there.
Anywhere, it seemed. Maybe the victory was yet to come? Such hope seemed foolish to Lauryn now. Childish naiveté.
“What must I do?” she asked, holding her daughter’s eyes.
It was the Lady who answered. “There is a road. It is, appropriately enough, called the Hero’s Road. All the spokes in the wheel of the multiverse lead to this road. Every world, every time, every reality. You will find your targets there.”
“And this road?” she asked, touching Megan’s cheek. “Where does it go?”
“To the place where the heroes will meet, of course,” Id said, her tone impatient. “A town in the High Desert of Nowhere.”
“And you want me to—”
“Any person—any being—you meet on this road, you are to kill.”
“But … how will I know—”
“If you refuse to carry out this mission, I will give your daughter to the Maestro. And he can do with her whatever pleases him.”
Maggie woke up at that. Until now, she, like the others, had been mere spectators of the drama unfolding. But that comment got Maggie Mae’s attention. She stole a sidelong glance at Marsten.
He was smiling. Like he knew something no one else did. Like he knew Lauryn would fail.
“I would simply convert you as I have the others, but your mission … it will take subtlety. You will need to think on your feet. So I cannot lay upon you what controls the others. Those you face will be like you—skilled and strong and stubborn. And only with your faculties intact will you defeat them.”
“And if I do this and return…”
“I will restore your daughter to you. And you may both go. For what good it will do you when the Master makes permanent his hold on this world. And that will be soon. Sooner, now that I have you.” Id’s satisfied smile seemed to flush her entire body with warmth.
Lauryn cupped Megan’s face in both hands. “I’m so sorry, baby. I should never have brought you here. Stavros and his … but I’ll come back for you. I promise.” Megan stared at her like a baby in the crib learning facial features for the first time. She had an expression of stale serenity on her face. Lauryn leaned in and whispered something in her ear.
“Enough,” said the Lady. “The road awaits.”
Lauryn kissed her daughter’s lips and touched Megan’s forehead with her own, then released her quickly. It was time to harden up. Time to do what must be done.
Letting Megan go might’ve been the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life.
No, Lauryn thought sadly. I think that’s what I’m about to do.
A door opened at the back of the control room. The fog was thickening there, churning as if stirred by a breeze from beyond.
“Walk through that door and your journey begins,” said the Lady.
“You’ll keep Megan safe. And I mean safe. No wishy-washy bullshit loophole language. No harm of any kind will come to her.”
“This bond I make with you,” Id said. Her face became serious. As if the words she spoke now were necessary. Sacred. “Carry out my will and your daughter will be returned to you whole and unspoiled.”
Lauryn nodded. She checked her weapon. Marsten held something out to her, she saw.
More ammo.
His smile spread across yellow teeth.
“Good luck,” he sneered.
Lauryn took the clips. “If you so much as touch a hair on her—”
“The road awaits.”
Lauryn locked eyes with Marsten. He winked with his right eye, a grotesque expression as his open orb loomed large.
She turned toward the door, now almost fully obscured by the fog. Before it covered her vision, she stared hard at Megan one more time, recording a lasting image with her mind’s eye. Then she stepped through the door.
* * *
“Well, that went well!” said Marsten, clapping his hands together. He picked up his axe. “Now, I’m gonna take Megan here…”
“The bond I made with the assassin is absolute, Maestro. Why is beyond your understanding. The consequences for disobeying my will are not.”
Marsten regarded her coolly. “I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve been doing a little thinking about that. Worming my way through that particular problem, you might say. And I get it, Queenie. I really do. You’re a powerful hoochie-mama. You control doors to whole other shitholes, just like this one. And your tits could stop a Mack truck. I mean, really. Ten plus!”
An icy green flared behind the Lady’s flattened affect. She stood a little straighter, her long hair flicking this way and that.
“But here’s the thing … you ain’t the boss of me. I mean, you’ve made that clear, right? Your Master is really the guy I need to speak to. The management, if you will. So, can we get him on the line?”
Id moved forward. “Maestro, what has come over you? Perhaps a rest—”
“Yeah, I feel those words reaching down the front of my pants. But you just don’t do it for me anymore.”
Id stopped.
“And it’s funny. I don’t even feel the worms digging around anymore either. Now, I just feel like me. Good old-plain-school Peter Marsten. No virus from Herr Professor Stavros rewriting my brain. No tongues licking the insides of my ears whenever you speak. Just me.” He flitted his gaze Maggie’s way. She was staring at him like he’d begun speaking in a foreign language. “I’ve missed me. And as for you.” He regarded the Lady again, scanning her up and down. “I’ve grown tired of looking at you.”
He turned and took Megan roughly by the arm. “We’ll be in the back.”
A half-smile curled Id’s lips. Any other woman—any human woman, that is—might’ve been offended. Her feelings hurt at such a public rejection of her body’s beauty. But the Lady’s face showed only the cold resolve of absolute confidence.
“Maggie,” she breathed.
The Maestro turned to Id, expecting her to say something else.
Maggie moved from the left.
There was the muted sound of a knife being drawn.
Marsten’s instincts kicked in and he swung around, jerking Megan behind him. But his wounded leg slowed him down.
Maggie’s scream began in her gut, clawed its way up her throat, and filled the room with pent-up fury. Marsten raised an arm, but he was off-balance and Maggie slipped in underneath the big man’s bulk. She seemed to climb up his bulky frame like scaling a tree, laughing at Marsten when his right eye saw what his left had missed.
Marsten raised his right fist with the axe clutched in it to ward her off.
But Maggie was faster and inside his defenses. She plunged her knife into his gaping left eye. She pushed with all her maddened might until she felt the hilt thrum in her hand as the blade scraped bone.
“Tired of looking at it!” Maggie screamed. “Tired of seeing it not seeing me!”
The Maestro’s shriek crescendoed from fury to agony. Anyone listening without seeing might have thought his screaming the horrified cry for help of a little girl, perhaps snatched roughly from beneath her bed by a monster bent on murder.
Clawing at the knife embedded in his skull, Marsten fell to his knees. His grunting became a bloody gurgling in the back of his throat. He wrapped a meaty fist around the slender hilt and pulled, roaring as the blade slid loose from his skull with its bloody plunder.
Maggie stood off, her work for the Lady done. Megan, with no reaction at all, made way for the thrashing carnival show that was Marsten’s remaining moments. Thick, dark blood fountained from his slag-eyed socket. He fell onto his side, twisting and tortured, his fury spending itself as the dying moan of the damned.
Maggie stared at the Maestro, at the waning twitch of his fingers. She touched the right side of her face, and it felt cool, even stretched with a smile.
“More my style,” said Maggie. “Appreciate that, lover.” She turned to face Id. “What now?”
The Lady faced the television screens. “Now?” She grinned at the sigh
t of all those people on their way to TranStar.
Coming in waves, willingly.
“Now, mayhem.”
* * *
In the observation room above, a young thief in blue jeans gaped at the horror show below. He watched the behemoth that’d kidnapped Megan finally stop moving. It took a while. He watched the woman who’d stabbed him wander away from the scene, muttering to herself. And he watched the goddess with hair like red snakes turn her attention back to the TV screens. Even from here, he could see, the people were coming. Thousands and thousands of them. Converging on the building.
But he didn’t care about them. He only cared about one.
Reaching down, he petted Jasper. He scratched at the scruff where the dog’s missing collar had flattened his fur.
“Keep your head, keep your life, boy. That’s what we’ve gotta do.”
Lying beside him, Jasper whined quietly.
“But we’ll get her back,” Colt said, gazing down at the dog. “We’ll get her back.”
Jasper looked up from the floor, his deep, brown eyes hopeful.
Epilogue: Beyond Space, Out of Time.
The fog cleared and, for a moment at least, Lauryn felt a sense of relief. But the grief quickly descended around her. The loss of Megan to Marsten’s clutches. The shame for Iris’s death, for the death she must dole out to others now. The anger at Stavros for getting them all into this.
But no, she couldn’t blame him. She’d agreed to come on his mad quest. Had dragged her fourteen-year-old daughter along, inspired by some nonsense dream and the realization that if she didn’t come with her daughter, Megan would come anyway. So Lauryn had made the decision for both of them, to protect Megan.
A fat lot of good that did, she thought. I’m a failure as a mother. I had one job. One.
And now she’d become the unholy instrument of whatever the woman was.
Something supernatural.
Powerful.
Something beyond anything Lauryn had ever known.
Ironheart (The Serenity Strain Book 2) Page 19