Avenging Fury

by John Farris

  “It’s all right, Eden,” he said, sympathetic to the rage of emotions in her face.

  “Oh, no, how can it be all right?! I went haywire; betrayed Bertie, my God, insulted us both, not to mention the memory of my—”

  He reached up impatiently with both hands and pulled her down hard on top of him, Eden gasping in surprise. The rough stuff a new slant on the man and the situation. But his hands relaxed immediately while still keeping her close.

  “We were both haywire, as you put it, for a time, and with damn good reason. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. Drove aimlessly, one road after another. How did you manage to get so far so quickly? No, it doesn’t matter. The look on your dirty face when I found you. I had to make love to you as quickly as I could, and nothing short of a bullet in my own heart could have stopped me. Quite the typical aftermath of a successful hunt. That’s one aspect of it. But we made love to bring ourselves back to life. Now we will deal with it. Nothing has happened for us to be ashamed of, or grieve over, or waste time in recriminations.”

  “How can I d-deal with being in love with you?”

  “But you’re not, Eden.”

  He held her face against his chest while she shuddered in protest. Then, to her chagrin and sudden panic, he began to laugh.

  “Nothing’s funny! And how do you know what I—”

  “Affection, gratitude, youthful desire is what you feel. Everything that we hope may define and enrich our long-term friendship.”

  “We haven’t had the chance to—”

  “I have no misgivings about making love to you, Eden. We’ve behaved humanly, not badly. But—”

  Eden thought she saw herself, vaguely, a diminished spirit in the high gloss of the pupils of his eyes. She was very still against his body, afraid of what he must say next. Obeying the wants of the flesh had broken something that might not be repairable—a valuable charm that had bound the three of them in a magical circle.

  “—But I would feel badly should I use this night as an excuse for an affair that would be good for neither of us. Tonight may have been fated; now we must try to get on with what is most important in our lives. Think about what lies ahead of you, Eden. And for Bertie and myself. You’ve grown in your powers, awesomely so, but only half of Mordaunt and what he represents lies buried behind us. You are still missing someone of vital importance to your evolution as the Avatar. Cry now if you must; but let that be an end to it.”

  After half a minute the motionless Eden said, “I won’t cry.”

  “Not yet. But you will.”

  “I think I have to . . . go away for a while. By myself.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to say to Bertie.”

  “Shouldn’t that be up to me?”

  “Damn, damn, damn.”

  “But she will get over it.”

  “So sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Not in these matters.”

  “Will I have to hate you before I get over you?”

  Unhappiness in his eyes. “I said I was out of my depth here.”

  She dug her fingers into his shoulders until he winced, Eden a creature of unrest, kneading away her growing frenzy and her own sense of loss. She tossed her hair out of her eyes. Hollywoodish.

  “Screw her; leave her.”

  “You haven’t been listening worth a damn.”

  “Then say what I want to hear!”

  “I’ve told you the truth. Now take your well-earned holiday and think it over, Eden.”

  “I can bring this room, shit, this crummy goddamn motel down around our heads. I can destroy both of us here!”

  “You can do disastrous things. I bear witness. Go ahead, throw all of your toys out the window and break your crayons. It won’t change the picture of yourself in your coloring book.”

  Eden slumped against him with a low and mournful sound.

  “All right, little beauty. All right, now.”

  He stroked her rigid shoulders and the cold nape of her neck.

  “Just hold me a little while longer, Tom.” Her body quaked but her voice had lost its spiteful grit.

  “For as long as you like.”

  “And tell me that you’re hurting. Even though it’s not much of a hurt.”

  “If I confess to that, you’ll know rather too much, won’t you? Could present an obstacle in the relationship we must work very hard to maintain.”

  “Oh boy, all the answers. The voice of pure reason. Tom Terrific, truth-bringer.”

  “Speaking of hurts, actually it’s your bony knee digging into my bad one, and that does hurt plenty. I may whimper.”

  Eden shifted her weight, briefly thinking about giving him a hard nudge in the groin with her knee. Those little sulfurous bubbles of spite still showing up in the bloodstream. But she was deadly tired and, after strenuous sex, parts of her body felt like leftovers from The Rape of the Sabine Women. Presumably he was already sore enough.

  She kissed him, sensing no reluctance on his part, relaxed and let her mouth linger beside his, lips moving speechlessly. Then she rolled away and raised herself on one elbow, looked at him. Eyes drowsy, refocusing slowly.

  “I do love you. Someday you’ll know how much. Our relationship will just have to live with that. Now let’s get out of this dump. The wind coming in around that window is beginning to depress me. Whether or not Bertie can heal her wounds, how easy can that be, and meanwhile she’ll need us.”

  7:06 A.M.

  Bronc Skarbeck left the walled compound of his house overlooking Lake Las Vegas and picked up 515 north in Henderson, endured heavy traffic until he switched to Charleston Boulevard. He drove his Aston Martin west past golf courses and a desertful of closely packed housing developments that, even in the best light the new day offered, looked to Skarbeck like instant slums.

  Half a dozen miles from Grayle’s Mountain he tensed up, seeing clearly the immense damage that had been done to the theatre. The avalanche pile also was visible, a miniature mountain with a thin horizontal streak of smoke and dust still hovering over it.

  He’d left Harlee slumbering. Didn’t know how long he would be gone, but she was good at amusing herself: hair, nails, exercise classes. And she was computer literate, probably since kindergarten, a devotee in fact. The furious, fantastic, arcane games that made life itself, what used to be real life, seem drained of ardor and promise to an entire generation. Once he had asked her (addressing the back of her head) why she spent so much time on the Internet, and Harlee had answered with religious intensity, “Because it’s there.” The Web. The Net. What meaning did that word have for them? Security. Dive right in. For Harlee there was almost nothing as satisfying as a good chat room on the Net. A cozy cybersite with a dozen good friends using aliases. When she was unplugged for any length of time she became listless, vaguely apprehensive. Hard drives had become the culture’s frontal lobes.

  Two Metro police cars were parked at an angle and nose-to-nose across the entrance to the four-lane Lincoln Grayle Parkway, a wide avenue through more desert, with date palms on either side and tall Italian cypress trees planted along the median. Bronc showed his driver’s license and his business card identifying him as former Marine Corps Commandant D. W. (for Dwight Willis) Skarbeck, U.S. Marine Corps (ret.), now Chairman of the Board of Lincoln Grayle Enterprises. He drove on. Sprinklers were active amid the cypresses. A few hundred yards in toward the mountain he came to the gated entrance to the theatre itself, three stories high with waterfalls in a desert garden on either side of the gates. Beyond them was the rubble perimeter of the ugly landslide.

  More cars there. The pileup, covering at least twenty acres, included blobs of smoking glass, uprooted desert trees, great blocks of concrete with inch-thick lengths of twisted rebar embedded, some boulders the size of ready-mix trucks, and, undoubtedly, a large quantity of mangled rattlesnake colonies.

  Stupendous. Already he was thinking, It had to be an explosion of some kin
d. The melted glass.

  Skarbeck got out of his tiger cat of a car. It was a chilly morning. He wore his black leather bomber jacket over a mock wool turtleneck, and he hadn’t forgotten his hiking boots. Elizabeth Ann Perkins was similarly outfitted. Her cropped, bleached hair looked crisp as honeycomb.

  “Jeez, can you imagine?” Perk said, wide-eyed.

  A helicopter from a local TV station flew low over their heads. A yellow Clark County fire truck was leaving; no blazes in the nearby sagebrush to put out.

  Bo Wilfers, who was Vice President of Operations for the Grayle Theatre, was walking toward them down the middle of a dry streambed. He’d apparently been reconnoitering. Bo had the waddling midsection, the sluggish big-boned grace of an ace athlete turned boozer.

  “How’re you, General?”

  “Bo. Anyone able to get up there yet?”

  “Couple of engineers. Cort McAllister from the night crew.” There was a crackle of talk on Bo’s walkie. He answered, then listened, reported the news to Bronc: “Structurally the theatre’s looking fine. It’s just the terrace and most of the facade that’s gone. The funicular to the terrace was taken out, but a freight elevator on the north side of the carpark is untouched. We’ll be able to get the menagerie out and relocated to Snow Lake Ranch soon as the curators show up.”

  “What about Grayle?”

  “No sign of him,” Bo said with a frown, looking over the landslide behind him. Twenty feet high in places. All of them thinking the same thing, but no one wanted to put the ultimate curse on the situation. Elizabeth Ann had her fingers crossed behind her back. Seeing that gave Bronc a prickly neckline, hint of yet another disaster to cut the ground from beneath his own feet. He ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting a residue of Harlee, her piquant flavor. A black bird soared smoothly down on a current of air from the heights of the mountain range and took up a vigil on a branch of an arrow-shaped conifer stuck at a sharp angle in the morass.

  Bo’s walkie crackled again. “Yeah, on my way,” he said to someone inside the theatre.

  The freight elevator was large enough to lift a ten-ton truck two hundred feet to a warehouse cut into solid rock. Above this storage area were kitchens where meals for sixteen hundred guests were prepared on show nights. From there they walked through a wide passageway to the lobby.

  Emergency power was on. But the lobby, with a weak inflow of light from the rising sun, was a hive of long shadows and shattered decor. Bronc upped the illumination with a million-candlepower floodlight. He sniffed deeply; he had a good nose for the residue of explosives. Because what he saw on the 150-foot curve of travertine floor amazed and perplexed him. Heaps and globs of melted glass below the skeletal bronze remains of eight large chandeliers. But there was no indication that there had been a fire hot enough to do such damage. Not a trace of smoke. Nor for that matter did he detect the fumes of dynamite or Semtex.

  Bo cautioned, “Glass is still hot, so be careful where you walk.”

  “Bo, just what the hell happened here?”

  Bo could only shake his head. Perk said in a voice filled with awe, “Never in my born days.”

  Bronc walked around a coalescing whalelike pile of glass, avoiding little semihardened rivulets extending several feet from the mass. His powerful light revealed something kerneled inside: a dark, vague form. His heart jumped.

  “Oh, my Lord,” Perk said softly. “What is that?”

  “Animal, I’d say.”

  “But could it be—”

  “Human? Don’t think so. Wrong body shape, and the size of the head—”

  The brilliant reflection from the glass hurt Skarbeck’s eyes. He aimed his light away from the curious cryptlike blister on the marble floor.

  “Bo, can you find out if any of the big cats Linc uses in his act are missing from the menagerie?”

  “Check on that right away.”

  “Perk, I don’t remember how to find my way back to Linc’s dressing suite.”

  “I’ll take you. But we already know he’s not—”

  “I want to look around anyway.” He glanced up, wondering why, if there’d been enough heat generated in the lobby to melt glass, the sprinkler system hadn’t functioned. “And, Perk. Get me all the tapes from every security camera, inside the theatre and out.”

  “The insurance investigators will be asking—”

  “Uh-uh. I want to see them first.”

  8:10 A.M.

  Tom Sherard and Eden Waring had breakfast at a Denny’s in North Las Vegas. Eden forced herself to eat a bite, then two bites of omelet, then turned ravenous while looking over the morning papers.

  Alberta (“Bertie”) Nkambe, twenty-year-old superstar model and celebrity vivant from Kenya, had made the front pages of the Las Vegas Sun, USA Today, and the West Coast edition of the New York Times. The stories were all slanted the way Tom had predicted they would be. Bertie had been lunching with a friend after a fashion show at the Bahìa megaresort on the Strip and, struck by stray bullets, was the innocent victim of a love-triangle shooting. The designated victim and her companion at lunch, Charmaine Goferne of Atlanta, Georgia, and the lovelorn assassin, one Cornell Crigler of Las Vegas and an employee of Nevada Gambling Control, were dead. Cornell from a self-inflicted wound moments after the fatal shooting. As was Charmaine’s boyfriend, a detective sergeant with Atlanta PD named Lewis Gruvver. He had been shot once in the temple earlier in the day in his and Charmaine’s bungalow at Bahìa. Same gun. Mr. Crigler had left a wife and several kids. Messy, but with that familiar inevitability that made the case a quick wrap-up for the local cops.

  And all of it was complete fiction, Eden knew; Bertie had been the real target. Mordaunt may have thought he could handle Eden, but not Eden and Bertie together. Another miscalculation. Charmaine was another poor soul captured by the gravity of the irresistible Trickster and put to his purposes. She hoped Crigler and Charmaine, released from thrall, would have a nice extraterrestrial rest somewhere else. While Mordaunt the shape-shifting Trickster remained earthbound, immortal and thus sentient but helpless inside his glass display case until the last tick of Eternity.

  My pleasure, the Avatar thought, with malice that was followed by a dreary shudder.

  Eden ate the last portion of her omelet. A double scotch would’ve tasted wonderful with those somewhat bland eggs. Tasted wonderful anytime. The breakouts on her lower lip hurt. Hives. One minor consequence of all the Dark Energy she had channeled; probably she was lucky that her back teeth hadn’t melted along with those chandeliers. She was using hand sanitizer on the blotches but it would be a couple of days before they dried up and meantime she felt and probably looked like a wreck. Stress was responsible for the early onset of her period. Too bad there were no taut, terrific, maintenance-free superbodies to go with superminds, Eden thought, with a savage cynicism that surprised and then depressed her.

  Sherard was checking e-mails on his computer. He looked up at her.

  “Habari gani?” Eden asked.

  “Joseph is on his way from Nairobi.” Joseph was Bertie’s father. “And her brother is coming from Paris.”

  “Family. They’ll be a great help to her.” Eden smiled weakly at Tom and looked away. Blue morning distance. Sere mountains. And then—ta-da!—there was Las Vegas. You could dress up the landscape with comedy architecture but still it all resembled distressed property in hell. It was Lincoln Grayle’s town, and she wondered how many of the Trickster’s minions were still orbiting his defunct nucleus. She hated the place. Her heart was breaking here.

  Another naked, lingering look at her lover-by-chance, while his attention was elsewhere. Tom Sherard, idealistic to a fault, although his own heart in their hour of intimacy had revealed its flaw, that buried vein of fool’s gold.

  “Let’s go see Bertie,” Eden said. “She’s wondered where we are.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do I know anything?” Eden said with a shrug.

  CITTA DEL VATANICO •
1730 HOURS ZULU

  His Holiness Pope John XXIV has his evening meal served to him on a tray in his papal apartment study, having canceled a formal dinner with visiting prelates from several Eastern European countries. He pled indisposition due to a stubborn ear infection, but his real purpose is to confer with the shade of a young Arab prince who had been a rare and promising moderate with growing diplomatic influence in the venal, superheated atmosphere of Persian Gulf politics. His older brother, jealous of his popularity, had had Rahim assassinated six days ago.

  The Holy Father’s day job, according to a principal tenet of the Catholic religion, is God on earth. He was born Sebastiano Leoncaro in the Italian Piedmont, one of his numerous human personae throughout millennia. As the senior member of a council of twelve Old Souls, he is the supreme voice of the Caretakers, responsible for matters of policy, assignments, and the inevitable fitness reports: none of the ancients, including Leoncaro himself, has achieved the state of cosmic perfection represented by a star in the firmament. They all have struggled, earth-bound, for hundreds of thousands of years to give guidance to the human race, that hodgepodge of fledgling souls incarnating every day to begin the arduous task of defining themselves. A long learning process even for those who have achieved a satisfactory degree of advancement in less-demanding cosmic outposts. Earth has its beauty spots but it also has Malterrans, who are here to harass and hone the human psyches of the Little Souls to a fine edge of homicidal fury.

  Leoncaro, the Light on earth, has an opposite number: Mordaunt, Deus Inversus, darkness that only supernal light may penetrate. The Caretakers, able to influence but not interfere directly in the actions of men, however stupid and harmful to their progress, have had some interesting times with Mordaunt, who can interfere as much as he pleases while treating the human personae of the Caretakers to horrors and bloodbaths.