Blind God's Bluff: A Billy Fox Novel

by Richard Lee Byers

  The hammerhead swam back and forth for a second, like it was giving us a chance to turn around. Then it started toward us again.

  “What should we do?” asked A’marie.

  “For starters, don’t let it near us.” I pictured the Thunderbird, then made an invisible wall.

  The hammerhead bumped it and sent a jab of headache between my eyes. It circled from my twelve to my three, then swam forward again. I threw up a second wall to bounce it back. I wondered if I could make a bubble instead of walls, one defense to enclose A’marie and me completely. But this seemed like a bad time to start experimenting.

  “So far, so good,” I said.

  “Not really,” said A’marie. “You held it back, but the water’s getting really hot.”

  I realized she was right. I’d just been too busy with my wall building to notice. Those lobsters that just sit in the pot while the cook gradually turns up the heat had nothing on me.

  “Shit,” I said. “Maybe you should go back.”

  “I will if you will.”

  I made a third wall—or maybe, since it was over our heads, it was more of a roof—and the hammerhead veered off just short of running into it. Somehow, it was learning to sense where they were.

  “I’ll cover your retreat,” I said, “and then I’ll get by this thing somehow. Or if I don’t, I won’t show up for poker, and you’ll still get what you wanted.”

  “Great plan,” she said, “but let’s try this first.” She unbuttoned two of the lower buttons of her white shirt, reached inside, and brought out her Zamfir pipes.

  It turned out she could play underwater just like we could talk. Even though I wasn’t the one she was trying to hex, the music put a twitch in my legs. The hammerhead swam in a kind of shimmying figure eight. Dancing a shark dance.

  “Nice,” I said. I took hold of the back of A’marie’s cummerbund, and, finning, hauled her along. She couldn’t use her arms to swim and work the stops of the pipes at the same time.

  We made it several yards. Then the hammerhead shook off the spell and shot at us again. I just got a wall thrown up in time to keep it from tearing a chunk out of me. As it turned off, I saw A’marie and me reflected in one beady little eye.

  She lowered the pipes. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It almost worked.” I struggled to come up with an idea of my own. By now, the water was hot enough that it was hard to think about anything but the burning sting.

  Finally, though, I had something. “Your songs can’t control it,” I said. “It’s just too strong, or stubborn. But do you think you can sort of give it a nudge?”

  She said maybe, I told her my plan, and we more or less agreed it was as half-assed as usual. Then we put it into action.

  I spirit-traveled to just behind the shark. Then I willed solidness back into my hands. When I did, I winced at the heat coming off it. I reached and yanked on its tail for the second that was all that I could take.

  At the same time, my physical body was floating unconscious, and instinct told me the last wall I’d made had disappeared when I moved. All the shark had to do was lunge forward to rip its two original targets to pieces.

  But A’marie was piping for all she was worth. And maybe her music was what convinced Murk’s dog that the new annoyance behind it was more important than the trespassers in front. It wheeled and shot at me. I melted back into a ghost, and it plunged right through me.

  It felt good to be one hundred percent ghost. The heat in the water couldn’t scald me anymore. But I couldn’t stay that way. I had to keep the hammerhead’s attention on spirit-traveler me. So I firmed up my hands and flew—if that’s the right word when you’re underwater—over the shark, thumping it down the length of its body as I went. I finished with a clapping motion that smacked both protruding eyes at once.

  Then I streaked onward, and as I’d hoped, the hammerhead chased me. Every so often, I let it catch up and try to bite me, only to snap its jaws shut on nothing. I figured that would make it even madder.

  And maybe it did, but it was a tricky move to pull off. An ordinary spirit traveler was invisible. Visible-but-still-not-completely-there took concentration, and the throbbing in my hands made it harder. Eventually I slipped, let myself become too real, and the shark’s teeth touched me. Somehow I threw the thickness out of me, hurled it out like vomit, and got away with only cuts and scrapes.

  But it was still time to stop playing tag, before I screwed up worse. I turned and raced back the way I’d come, toward the two figures floating together in the cloudy green water. With its arms just hanging, my physical body looked drowned and dead. A’marie had her legs wrapped around it in an awkward piggyback way. It kept the two of them from drifting apart and still left her hands free to play. To make music to feed the shark’s anger. To urge it to chase me faster than it had ever swum before, and never stop until it ripped me apart.

  I tried to lead it in close. When my spirit body vanished from in front of it, I wanted it to see the physical me just a few yards farther on, and, crazy with rage, not notice any difference between that and what it had just been chasing.

  It worked. I jumped back into my flesh and bones, and damn, the shark was close, and it sure as hell kept coming. I pictured the Thunderbird and threw up a new wall, giving it everything I had.

  When the fire shark crashed into it, it rocked my head back like a sock on the jaw. But it also knocked the creature out, and it drifted toward the bottom. Blood floated up from its jaws. We were deep enough that it looked brown.

  A’marie and I hugged for about a second. Until we each felt how much it hurt.

  Her skin was red and blistered, like from the world’s worst sunburn. Mine was the same, with what looked like third-degree burns on my hands. I also had my own blood floating up from the cuts that had opened in my physical body when the shark bit the ghostly one.

  “Paging Dr. Red,” I said.

  I had to give props to Timon’s teaching. Red filled me up instantly, although the pain of my injuries dulled the feeling of joyful vitality a little. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d already burned through a lot of magic.

  Fortunately, I still had some left. I took A’marie’s hand in both of mine and sent power pulsing into her in time with my heartbeat. In some places, the angry redness simply faded. In others, blisters flaked away and uncovered healthy new skin beneath.

  I gave myself the same treatment. It killed most of the pain and stopped the bleeding. I shrunk Red back down till he blended in with rest of me.

  A’marie looked me over. “Are you all right now?” she asked.

  “Yes, except that this water is still too hot. Let’s move.”

  As we did, she asked, “Do you think we killed the shark?”

  “I hope not. Murk might not like it if we did.”

  She grunted, and then giggled.

  “What?”

  “We were in hot water.”

  I snorted. “Is that the kind of joke that Old People think is funny?”

  “You have no sense of humor. That was hilarious.” And I guessed she thought so, because she kept chortling off and on, right until the moment when the sight of Murk’s den knocked it out of her.

  I was just as amazed as she was. Mel Fisher spent years and tons of investor money looking for wreck sites in the waters off Florida. Would-be Mel Fishers still do it today. Yet here, within spitting distance of the Tampa shore, were several old barnacle-covered ships heaped like firewood or a kid’s blocks. Two were Spanish galleons, and, for all I knew, full of gold doubloons. That would fit with a wannabe lord’s pride and sense of style.

  “Hey, Murk!” I yelled. “Are you in there?”

  He was. He flowed out from under the pile like an ordinary octopus coming out of a hole in the rocks. I caught myself holding my breath, because, even though he was fast, it took a while for all of him to slide into view. I’d imagined him as a dinosaur-sized animal, but I’m not sure even dinosaurs really grew that big. Hi
s tentacles were like rubber telephone poles. His black, glaring eyes were the size of truck tires.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry, but we had to beat up on the hammerhead to get to you. I hope it’ll be okay. This is A’marie, and I’m Billy.”

  “I know who you are,” the kraken said. Before, his laughter had reminded me of a muted trombone. Now his voice was like a foghorn. “Timon’s new champion.”

  “Kinda sorta,” I said. “That’s what we’re here to talk to you about.”

  “You shouldn’t have invaded my privacy.” The giant tentacles reached for A’marie and me. She let out a yelp.

  I felt like yelping, too. But I was also irritated, and that helped me find the mojo to make a wall big and strong enough to bump the lead tentacles back.

  “Screw you, too,” I said. “In the first place, you Old People are way too grabby. In the second, what’s the big deal about your privacy? It’s not like you’re a hermit. You talk to people. Hell, you mentioned talking to the Twin Helens, whoever they are, when I saw you before.”

  “I communicate with whom I choose, in the manner I prefer.”

  “Well, aren’t you special. So how about choosing us, in the manner of here and now? You might like what you hear.”

  “But I know I can solve my problems by eating you.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. Either way, I’ll still be just as tasty in ten or fifteen minutes.”

  “Please,” said A’marie to Murk. “I brought him to you because everyone says you’re wise and honorable.”

  “Talk,” growled Murk, “and, for your own sake, make it good.”

  A’marie and I laid it out for him. And when we finished, I said, “So that’s the plan. We came to you first because we don’t have much time, and, like she said, everybody respects you. If you get onboard, others will, too.”

  Tentacles waving—some still too close to A’marie and me for comfort—Murk floated and thought for a few seconds. Then he said, “You’re either very brave or a very great fool.”

  I shrugged. “Can’t I be both?”

  “Do you know why Timon inspires such fear?”

  “I told you, he gave me a taste of what he can do.”

  “That’s only part of it. Most beings die because of things that happen here in the waking world. We can suffer and find ourselves inconvenienced in a dream, but it can only kill us if magic is involved.”

  “Okay, but so what?”

  “By all accounts, Timon is the opposite. It would take sorcery to kill him in the waking world, and no one knows the spell. Whereas in the dream realm, he holds every advantage.”

  “That’s interesting, but I don’t want to kill him anyway. I just want to… deal with him.”

  “I’m trying to warn you just what a powerful, uncanny creature he really is. I’ve seldom met his like, and I’m old enough to remember when your kind first dared to sail beyond sight of land.”

  “I get it. He’s a badass. But somebody isn’t afraid to mess with him. Whoever sicced the brownwings on him.”

  “A fellow lord, who was able to act anonymously, and who will soon go home to some fortified place beyond Timon’s reach in both the waking and dreaming worlds.”

  “I thought you Old People were supposed to be gamblers. How come you won’t take a chance when there’s something really worth winning?”

  “For one thing, you haven’t convinced me you’re worth betting on.”

  “Even working together,” said A’marie, “Leticia and Gimble couldn’t take him out of the game.”

  “I also escaped from a trap the Pharaoh set for me,” I said. The damn bubbles were still tickling my mouth. “And, like I said, I slapped your watchdog around. Plus, I’m smart enough to know you vassals were tipped off that brownwings were going to attack Timon. It’s just that nobody warned him.”

  Murk hesitated. “How could you know that?”

  “If you didn’t know he was going to get hurt, why would you all make an agreement that nobody would stand in for him?”

  “Perhaps we made it afterward.”

  I shook my head. “I know you guys are all supernatural and everything, but even if somebody saw him get his eyes popped, there just wasn’t time for the word to go around and everybody to palaver before he called you up out of the water. But don’t worry. I didn’t tell him you all let him walk into an ambush, and as far as I know, he hasn’t figured it out. Not yet. Things could get ugly if he does.”

  “Is that a threat?” asked Murk. The ends of his tentacles flexed.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not like that. What it is, is another good reason to deal with him now.”

  Murk made a short bass-fiddle noise that might have been a kraken grunt. “I admit, the horned girl has a point. You evidently have some power, and some intelligence to go with it. Unless you’re simply lucky. But sometimes luck trumps strength and cunning both.”

  “Amen to that,” I said. “So does that mean you’re with us?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Murk. “What’s in it for me personally?”

  I glanced at A’marie. “‘Wise and honorable,’ huh?” I said.

  “Neither wisdom nor honor preclude looking after your own best interests,” said Murk. “If you don’t understand that, you really are a fool, and perhaps I should eat you after all.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “What’s your price?”

  “The bay.”

  “That’s what Timon already offered you.”

  “Yes, Timon, whom I mistrust and despise.”

  I turned back to A’marie. “What kind of a boss would he make?”

  She hesitated. “Everyone respects him. That doesn’t mean they love him. Still, I think they could do worse.”

  I looked at Murk. “No eating the rest of the fish people?”

  He made another short, low-pitched sound. “Fish people… I wouldn’t eat anyone except to administer justice.”

  That could mean anything. But something made me want to trust Murk. Maybe I had a soft spot for gigantic man-eating monsters with nothing even a little bit human about them. Or maybe it was just that I was short on options.

  “To hell with it,” I said. “If the plan works, you get the bay.”

  I was quiet on the swim back to shore, and not just because I was keeping an eye out for the hammerhead. Eventually A’marie asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “When I made up my mind to do this, I wanted to help everybody.”

  “You are. You will. Murk will be all right.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes. He wants the prestige of being a lord, but he’s too much of a loner to bother his subjects very much. You’re doing as well as anybody could.”

  “Thanks.” I hesitated. “You know, I like it better working together.”

  “So do I.” She smiled. “I definitely feel like I’m getting more accomplished. Because it’s hard to stop you from doing what you want to do.”

  ‘I’ve been lucky so far.” Saying it made me wonder when my luck was going to turn.

  When the bay got shallow enough, I pulled my fins off, and we put our feet down. Then we had to cough and retch out the water in our lungs. The breeze that had felt pleasant before chilled my wet skin, and the on-top-of-Everest feeling came back. The magic from the pills hadn’t run out of juice, and so it was still harder to breathe the open air.

  The tape on my ribs was peeling off, but that was okay. Now that I’d juiced with Red’s magic, it didn’t feel like I needed it anymore.

  A’marie pulled off her goggles. I took off my goggles and fins, and we waded toward the little red convertible.

  Something rose up behind it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I had a hard time making out the shape behind the car. It was like it was made of glass, and on top of that, my eyes just wanted to look someplace else. I had a hunch that an ordinary human, with no mojo inside him, wouldn’t be able to see it at all.

  “Do you see that?” I wheezed,
stretching out my arm.

  A’marie looked where I was pointing. “Yes,” she said, sounding surprised. “I think it’s Sylvester.”

  Now that she’d suggested it, I thought she might be right. The figure was big enough, and had a round-shouldered, slouching shape to it, like an orangutan.

  “What’s he doing here?” I asked, just as the giant raised his arm and waved.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Did you tell anybody where we were going?”

  “No.”

  “Then I really don’t like this.”

  Sylvester beckoned for us to come on.

  A’marie frowned. “I know what you mean. But I’ve always gotten along with Sylvester. I don’t know of anybody who doesn’t. He’s… gentle.”

  He hadn’t looked all that gentle fighting for beads in dreamland, but I guessed that hadn’t been his fault. Besides, all our stuff was in the Mazda.

  “Okay,” I said. “But have the pipes ready. They’re our only weapon. And be ready to run back to the water.”

  Panting like we had asthma, we waded up onto the sand. Water trickled down from A’marie’s soaked clothing.

  As we got closer to Sylvester, I could see him more clearly. I had a hunch the charm he was using wasn’t actually supposed to hide him from other Old People. It wasn’t strong enough for that. It was only meant to keep humans from spotting him. He needed something like that to move around in broad daylight.

  He was dressed in a denim shirt, jeans, and a white kerchief with a gold pattern in it knotted around his neck. He needed a cowboy hat to go with the rest of the outfit, but that, he didn’t have. His shaggy brown hair covered his face like a hood, although I could make out the gleam of eyes behind it, and the Bluetooth jammed in his ear.

  He let us get within a few yards. Then he brought up the hand that had still been dangling behind the Miata. The one with the Remington Model 870 in it. The shotgun looked like a toy in his grip, and I noticed someone had cut away the trigger guard. Probably because his thick, crooked finger wouldn’t have fit through.

  “Shit!” I said. “I knew it.”