by John Farris
“What about that limo?”
“Right. Thanks for reminding me, Harry.”
Eden chose a tree, a gnarled, overhanging bristlecone pine that looked as if it had withstood more than its share of lightning strikes. Now it endured another, or something like lightning, that split it nearly in two from a twisted topknot of barren branches to its solid base. Half a ton of riven tree fell hard across the road, blocking it.
“That should slow him down some,” Eden said, thinking only of Mordaunt. Not wanting to think of Tom Sherard as a prisoner in the grip of Deus Inversus. “Can you take me to the house now, Harry? Ought to be a helicopter pad up there.”
“Reckon you’re expected?”
Eden looked at the house of the late Lincoln Grayle, only part of it visible, jutting from the side of the mountain with vistas of high desert in three directions. Over the desert and south of Yucca Mountain a new storm had arisen as if it were being sucked out through a fault in the earth: smothering sky, great balls of pure energy spinning, colliding, glaring lethally like radium, a birthing universe. To Eden’s eyes the chaos greatly resembled Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night.
“Depend on it,” Eden said. As fascinated, and as frightened, as she’d ever been.
Eden, wishing she had a plan.
10:47 A.M.
The household staffers who had kept things humming as usual in Lincoln Grayle’s still-mysterious absence were now on the run, lugging possessions to a waiting van on the stone-paved auto courtyard. The wild pinball display and fulminating blackness swallowing heaven had them panicked. The terraced levels of the house were lit up by displays of electricity like those emanating from a Tesla coil.
Harry Redmond turned on his landing lights as debris pelted the helicopter. He looked grim from strain while locating the landing pad outside another set of tall gates. He turned his ship ninety degrees, crabbed it sideways, and set it down without a bounce. There was a near-vertical wall of forest less than ten feet from the helo disk. Pinpoint landing. Tall trees swayed violently, loosing a barrage of pine cones.
“You’re a genius, Harry!” Eden said over the intercom. “Thanks for the lift!”
“How long you aim to be?” he asked, looking in dismay at the storm. “This is like End of Days! One stout branch comin’ down, we’re marooned up here!”
“You’re not staying, Harry! That van? They can’t make it down the mountain! Can you take those people to Cathedral Rock?”
“Better hurry! And whatever it is you got to do up here—best of luck!”
Eden unbuckled and backed out of the helicopter. Between the rotor wash and the whipping winds she had to stay in a crouch while making her way through the gates to the van. Her hair, short as it was, was trying to stand on end. Her fingertips glowed like Saint Elmo’s fire.
She waited in the lee of the van while Lincoln Grayle’s beleaguered servants scrambled aboard the helicopter. She felt both relief and a sense of abandonment as Harry lifted off. He had offered to come back for her; Eden had refused, knowing how poor his chances would be of making another trip up the mountain.
When she couldn’t see the copter anymore Eden put her face down on one arm and sobbed.
“I know you’re tired,” she heard someone say. A calm voice. Firm but soothing.
Eden’s head jerked up as hands gripped her shoulders lightly. She looked around into the eyes of Gillian Bellaver.
“Mother!”
10:52 A.M.
The limousine that had been making slow time up the mountain road from Cathedral Rock, nearly too long to negotiate the hairpin switchbacks, finally came to a stop at the smoldering hulk of tree blocking the rest of the way.
“Can’t go no further, boss,” the limo driver said to his passenger in the backseat. Then he caught sight of the red Dodge Viper that was just hanging around in thin air a hundred feet off the road, laced up in a netting of pure energy. His jaw sagged. He couldn’t take his eyes off the Viper and its pretty driver, who was standing on the seat waving her arms at them as if she were in a lifeboat signaling a passing freighter.
Mordaunt laughed at Harlee’s predicament, forgetting for the moment who must’ve been responsible.
The driver opened his door and stepped gingerly out into the road. He looked reluctantly at the storm piled high atop the mountain, looked down at his hands. They were glowing. The skin on the back of his neck crawled.
“They Lawwddd!”
He backed away from the white limo, looking again at Harlee. The girl was using some vile language out there. “Reckon as how I’ll just come back for it some other time,” he mumbled, referring to the limo. Then he broke into a run down the road, not wasting another look back.
Mordaunt, still laughing, got out, assessing Harlee Nations’s situation. Of course she didn’t possess a jot of magic and had no powers to extricate herself from the predicament in which the Avatar—who else?—had left her. Not much he could do, either, without shutting off the power that kept the Viper in suspension. But then it would be good-bye Harlee.
Harlee didn’t know him, of course. Mordaunt liked the body he was in, the lean well-traveled hunter’s body. Although nothing else had been available to him in the crisis—the imminent sinking of the Stella Salamis—still he couldn’t have wished for better.
“Where did Eden Waring go?” he called to her, in the voice of Lincoln Grayle.
“Linc? The Great One?” Harlee reverted to her teen persona, babbling “Omigodomigod get me out of this!”
Maybe, Mordaunt thought, instead of trying to recast Eden’s spell he could add to it without terminal consequences.
“Better sit down, Harlee. Fasten your seat belt, too.”
“WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO—”
“I said, sit.”
Harlee slid down in the seat, grabbing for the harness. She felt the Viper rock a little, and let out a wail of fright.
The Viper shot forward toward the road. It would have burned rubber if there had been anything but air beneath the set of performance tires.
The Viper came down hard on the road, two wheels, snarl of electricity around it, and stopped with a jolt against the front bumper of the limo. Harlee’s eyes were shut tight. She had a stranglehold on the steering wheel. Her hair crackled on her head. She made a hissing sound through her teeth as Mordaunt approached and cooled the Viper down.
He leaned toward Harlee, sniffing, as her eyes peeped open and she looked up at him.
“Think you c-could hold yours if you drove headfirst off the—”
“Nice to see you again, Harlee. Better change.”
Her teeth were chattering. “Ch-change into what?” She noted what Mordaunt was wearing, instantly coveting the seaman’s bulky-knit sweater.
“How about letting me have that sweater?”
“Mr. Sherard might catch his death of cold up here.”
“He looks like a hardy dude, and anyway you’re n-not planning on keeping him, are you?” Mordaunt had to smile. Harlee knew him well. “Didn’t think you were. Linc, I’m s-s-suffering. Please?”
“Guess I owe you that much, don’t I?” He smiled indulgently and pulled the sweater off over Tom Sherard’s head, creating a ministorm of static electricity. Harlee got out of the Viper, realizing she had little choice but to strip to the skin. Her knees were knocking. So cold. She snuggled gratefully into the sweater, which covered her to the kneecaps. She pressed her thighs together and crossed her arms, hands inside the sleeves of the sweater, leaned against the abandoned limo, and looked at Mordaunt, seeing him through the fixed pupils of Sherard’s attractively hooded eyes.
“Where were you going?” Mordaunt asked her.
“I was on my way to the vault. Where I stashed your crystal skull after I used it . . . to break you out of that awful crypt of glass.”
“Always so clever and resourceful,” Mordaunt said admiringly. “I never had a moment’s despair knowing you’d find a way.”
Harlee’s blood had warmed enough to allow
for a flush of pleasure.
Mordaunt frowned and stared at the pinwheeling sky. “But if the skull is in the vault, what’s causing that?”
“There’s another skull, Great One. Identical. The bitch Avatar’s doppelganger brought it back with her—along with someone who calls herself Delilah.” She looked to Mordaunt for enlightenment.
All he said was, with a trace of sardonic amusement, “Does she?”
“And she doesn’t respect you at all.”
Mordaunt had another laugh as he looked up the road.
“I think I’d better get up there before they wreck the house.”
“I should get moving myself,” Harlee said quickly.
“No. I want you to wait here, Harlee. We’ll go together—” He cast another glance at the sky. “After I’ve finished off Eden Waring.”
“But, Great One—I wanted to take care of her myself! Make her suffer for all she did to you.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a little too ambitious, Harlee?”
“No, I don’t!” she pouted.
Mordaunt studied Harlee in combat mode for a few moments longer, then nodded. “I do owe you a great debt. All right. Once I’ve . . . denatured Eden, stripped her of her powers, I’ll let you deal with her.”
“You can do that? Take away all her powers?”
“Har-lee. I’m amazed that you even asked me that question.”
11:03 A.M.
As the electrical storm covering the summit of Charleston Mountain gained in intensity, Gillian Bellaver said to her daughter, “This is all the time I can spend with you.”
They were sitting in the sixteen-passenger van, Gillian with an arm around Eden. Who had had a blissful few minutes to be soothed and loved, to recover her strength and courage.
“But I still need you,” she said tearfully.
“It’s time to take back what belongs to you,” Gillian said.
“And you can’t help me?”
“I don’t have that dispensation, Eden. But you won’t need anyone’s help from here on. The power that she’s generating now will be Delilah’s undoing.”
“How?”
“Just put her in her place, darling.”
“Where’s that?” Eden said, with a despairing laugh.
“Once you’ve seen her you’ll know.”
“But when will I see you again, Mother?”
“In quieter circumstances. A more peaceful place.”
Eden was afraid. “Does that mean—”
“That you’re going to die? Not here, not today.”
Gillian calmed her daughter with a kiss. And was gone instantly, as if she’d never been there, a somnambulist’s daydream. Eden shook her head violently, slumped in the seat, and let out a yowl of bereavement.
Something bumped hard into the van. Eden jumped. She turned to see a hand flat against the window and the face of Dr. Marcus Woolwine, mirror glasses askew and reflecting the livid sky. His mouth worked as if he was straining to breathe.
Eden slid back the door and Woolwine tumbled part-way inside, fingers digging into the floor mat.
“Help me . . . get me away from here!”
Eden grasped him by his belt, pulled him all the way inside, turned him over.
“Who are you?”
“Marcus Woolwine. And you—must be—”
“Eden.” She looked unkindly at him. “Doctor Woolwine? I know all about you. You took Gwen away from me once, kept her a prisoner at Plenty Coups. Are you keeping her from me now?”
“Yes!”
“How?”
“A device that I implanted in her neck. A Magnetic Flux Inhibitor Unit. But I’m not in control of Gwen! This—this creature who calls herself Delilah has Gwen now.”
“So I was told. The device is in her neck? Where?”
“Right side. It’s only a little more than skin deep. Can you help me now? My pacemaker—”
“Keys are in the ignition, Dr. Woolwine. You’ll have to drive yourself. I’m going to be damned busy for a while.”
Eden stepped down from the van, no longer interested in Marcus Woolwine, deaf to his pleas and immune to his terror. She looked at the house.
Her doppelganger had appeared on a midlevel terrace in a blitz of electricity that had a baleful tone to it. Gwen held the red crystal skull in the crook of one arm. Eden grimaced at the pulses of energy emanating from the skull, targeting her from a congeries of foul worlds in transit far beyond the skull’s earthly depths. At the same time, she was contemptuous of what was being summoned to test her, even before she and Delilah had been formally introduced.
Simba had risen, erect and protective, deflecting the charged bolts hurled Eden’s way. Behind her the large van was struck repeatedly and rocked, then toppled. It spun and bounced like an empty tin can in a zephyr down the road until it flew away in darkening space with its lone passenger.
Eden began to shimmer, then neatly to divide, separating into five distinct energy bodies as she, and they, passed through the open gates to the courtyard of the Magician’s house. Her other bodies were like teammates in a cosmic game. They literally blocked out for her as she drove for the goal, feeling springy power in her legs and not a twinge from the cartilage-poor knee as she soared from cobbled courtyard to the terrace.
Where Gwen, or the shell of Gwen, was waiting.
So what does one say to her renegade dpg? Eden didn’t feel like saying anything, even though Gwen’s lips began a humble smile of greeting. Quickly suppressed by Delilah. The doppelganger was just a waxworks replica anyway, compared to Eden’s teeming energy bodies.
On the other hand, Eden conceded, not all of this was Gwen’s fault. She’d only been headstrong, competitive, independent-minded, and gullible. Precisely Eden’s own characteristics, except for gullible.
“Sure, here’s the sweet bitch now, cometh in ceremony, appurtenanc’d with Promethean court! Futile justlings; they will avail you not.”
Eden shrugged. “I want Gwen, and I’m taking her.”
The pupils of Gwen’s eyes, mirror images of Eden’s, one eye starting to turn in from fatigue, combusted with the heat of Delilah’s disdain. It was so creepy, staring at herself in mortal thrall. Eden’s shoulders contracted. Her gorge was almost in her throat.
“Disprize me of my chattel? Nay, I think not.”
“And one more thing,” Eden said, taking a calming breath while the dazzling, red-cheeked skull poured its apparently inexhaustible store of complex occultism into the energy bodies surrounding her. “First and last warning: turn that fucking thing off, Delilah.”
Gwen’s lips were shaped for lethal scorn when Eden shifted her gaze to the mote of the Magnetic Flux Inhibitor Unit beneath the skin of the dpg’s neck and zapped it out of there with a bolt of her own energy.
Two things happened instantly.
The corporeal body vanished. Something else appeared in its place: a great writhing tempest, bones and nettles, screeching hellbirds and venomous roil of green-scaled serpents. The tireless orb of red crystal, buoyant in the maelstrom of violence, glared.
But Gwen was saved and Eden knew it; she had felt the familiar homecoming buzz around her navel.
As for Delilah:
Eden heard her mother say it again—
Just put her in her place, darling.
Eden went to work with all the force, passion, and goodness at the disposal of her maturing skills and the Dark Energy of the Universe. First to contain the furious lashings of the Delilah tempest (yet only a part of a larger deadly soul) with its murk and foulness, corruption and evil craft, its primal curse and eternal blasphemy. Unflinching, Eden and her energy bodies denied what the loathsome and now bodiless spirit before her most desired: to take form—as shrike, harpy, banshee, some dark incarnate beast never before seen—and fall upon its tormentor. Sorry, not today. Eden blended her own energies with those around the wicked little skull, desaturating them of evil until the tempest was tamed, yanked inside-out and at odds w
ith its worst intentions. Sensing rank fear in the supercharged air around the terrace and above the mountain, Eden with a final thrust sent Delilah into the skull and the damnation that lay beyond it.
Eden had no desire to know where that might be. All she cared about was packing the skull with so much of her own fury that Delilah, no matter how resourceful, could never find a way out.
The red skull fell to the terrace floor, rolled around lopsidedly with that puckish death’s-head grin she loathed.
Eden retrieved it carefully, the tip of her walking stick through one eye socket. She held it with an outstretched shaky arm. The skull swarmed with bad feeling but not much potency, smarting off at her. She felt its animus like pinpricks to the heart.
The tempest in the sky had not lessened. Dark, highly charged smoke like that from a runaway prairie fire. It continued to move toward what Eden assumed was a city in full panic mode, feeding on what the magnetic earth and that cache of buried radioactivity within Yucca Mountain provided.
As she had witnessed in her dreams. But there was nothing she could do to stop it.
Eden leaned away from gritty blasts of wind circulating around the house and vomited some bile mixed with blood. That scared her. She was seriously drained but there was no stopping now. A mate to Delilah’s prison skull existed, and she had to find it.
Then there was Mordaunt.
With Tom Sherard’s fate to be resolved.
With the taste of blood on her lips, Eden was certain that she wasn’t far from dying. What Delilah had contemptuously referred to as her “Promethean court” only flickered now in Eden’s waning energy field, specters composed of scattering sparks.
Keeping the skull far enough away that its oscillations couldn’t drain her further, Eden turned and was shocked to see, in the glass of a sliding door, that her hair had gone as white as a snowfield.
At the least, Eden reckoned, she could use a good hour to recover somewhat before any more confrontations. The rest of the week, even better. She yearned for just one last look at the face of her new love, whom she had banished from what might remain of her life.