by John Farris
But someone was waiting for her in the courtyard, and it wasn’t Cody Olds.
Eden found stairs and went down slowly, walked outside on the cobbles, and aimed the skewered skull at her nemesis.
“I’d better have that,” Mordaunt said pleasantly.
Eden found that shaking her head was brute labor. Still she managed not to let him see her tremble.
“Have a rough time of it with Delilah? What’s become of her, anyway?”
“You’ll have a chance to talk things over with her. But . . . not here.”
Mordaunt lost his breezy attitude as he looked hard at the skull. Tom Sherard’s wide shoulders drew together slightly. Otherwise there was no reaction by the body she knew so well and that the Magician inhabited. Eden wondered if enough of Tom remained to recognize her given the state she was in. Or to know her voice.
She tapped a depth of anger she’d thought was exhausted.
“Why couldn’t you just have left him alone?”
“Because,” Mordaunt said, “he shot me. Also there was nothing else available when my ship was going down. So Delilah and I are as far apart as ever?”
“Do you want the bad news first? There’s no way . . . you are ever going to get her back.”
He thought it over.
“Then why don’t I just leave that to you?”
“Make a trade, that’s what you’re saying?”
“You’re weak, Eden, weaker than you know. Better take it.”
“Let me talk to Tom.”
“You want to hear him beg for his life? Eden, that’s so penny-dreadful they wouldn’t use it on One Life to Live. Besides, I’m not a sadist. I’m basically a businessman. So let’s get our business done, and he’s all yours.”
Eden said with wild-eyed suspicion, “You’ve destroyed his mind, haven’t you? He can’t talk to me!”
“Destroyed? I’m not a mind-fucker either; I just set him aside for a while. You know how it works. Are you being irrational on purpose? Calm down. I know Delilah must’ve put you through the wringer but for both our sakes stay focused.”
His tone was almost flippant, but she sensed anxiety, and knew very well what made him anxious. Probably he wasn’t lying about Tom; for now he needed his host. “No harm has come to your lover. So give me Delilah. Okay, please.”
“First let go of Tom for a few moments! That’s all I’m asking now. Let him say something to me so I’ll know he’s all right!”
Eden went down on her good knee and set the skull on the cobbles. She looked up at the blazing sky.
“So help me I’ll turn this thing into a bag of marbles!”
Mordaunt, carelessly perhaps, had told her what she needed to know. And now—
“Tom?”
The face of Tom Sherard lost its stoic blandness; the faraway gaze came closer. Looking down at her, he shrugged painfully, as if in response to an immense weight he bore.
“Hi . . . kiddo.”
“Tom!”
He blinked at her, raised his eyes to the hell on the mountain, looked again at Eden. He smiled wryly.
“Okay, that ought to be enough,” Mordaunt said impatiently, and the muscles in Tom’s face began to slacken.
“Tom, what do you want me to do?” Eden cried, mentally grabbing him back from Mordaunt’s attempt at control, digging in mulishly so that Tom grimaced in pain. Then he exerted his own will in concert with Eden’s efforts. In his eyes Eden saw the savvy hunter who has caught a flicker of quarry in deep brush.
“You’ve got the shot,” Tom Sherard said. “Take it, Eden.”
Mordaunt went recklessly into Tom’s brain, now in a destroying mood as Eden sobbed and took over the rest, the corporeal Tom Sherard, destroying too, reducing what was dear and human to her to bright and starry dust that was quickly flying on the wind, scattered skyward.
And there stood Mordaunt where Sherard had been—naked, hunchbacked, wolfen, long in the snout and with tall pricking ears. The thing was instantly in motion, springing at Eden. But the talisman on her breast glowed furiously and repulsed it. The renewed brightness coalesced into a phalanx of Eden’s energy bodies. Five pairs of hands flung Mordaunt to the ground before he could lope away. Her supernatural Furies resisted Mordaunt’s every desperate, cunning effort to shape-shift and elude them as they dragged him howling to the radiant red skull.
“You wanted to be with Delilah? Go to her,” Eden said, then closed her ears and mind to Mordaunt’s shrieks.
Within the fireball of skull a curious glimmer of a face appeared. The were-creature’s screams abated when he saw it. What he saw made him cringe, more whipped dog than wolf now.
It was a high-yellow face inside the skull, the skin lavishly freckled. The left eyelid was sewn into place over an empty socket. And upon that lid was a vivid blue-eyed tattoo.
In spite of the rising wind Eden was certain that she heard high notes from a supernal horn.
The face inside the skull was split by a nearly toothless grin.
“You, Mordaunt,” Eden heard Letty Fresno say. “High time you be gettin’ back to where y’all belong!”
A gleam appeared behind the tattooed eyelid, soon became as bright as the talisman on Eden’s breast. Then the light beamed from the crystal skull and exploded with such force around the shaggy form of Mordaunt that Eden was momentarily blinded. She fell forward on her elbows and curled with a sigh into fetal position, her senses tuned to a last, long held, purifying high note that only the amazing Jonas Fresno had ever reached.
A horn man whom she’d never laid eyes on; but she recognized his genius as well as a sympathetic spirit. Captivated by Jonas’s spell, she felt renewed, forgiven.
Once Eden was able to stand without being knocked sprawling by wind, with no idea of how much time had passed, she found herself alone with the crystal skull. No energy bodies protectively surrounded her. But there was no vestige of Mordaunt either, no residue of his evil. Her navel quivered suggestively, but she didn’t want to hear from Gwen. As far as Eden was concerned her doppelganger was banished until—and maybe she was hoping for too much—Gwen learned to stay out of trouble.
The virulent storm brewed from nuclear waste appeared to have spread considerably while she lay dull-witted and motionless on the driveway. Too bad for Las Vegas, Eden thought without remorse or regrets. If the lights of Glitter Gulch hadn’t gone out already they would before long. Permanently. No big loss to the culture, although inevitably there were good people who would be greatly inconvenienced, forced to resume their lives as refugees.
She refused to blame herself. The overlying storm was only one aspect of the evil that had infiltrated and possessed that gaudy nightmare of a town. She couldn’t have reversed it even if she had been in a more forgiving mood. She was weak, crapped out—according to the lingo of the gamester’s land.
Weak, but alive.
They would probably rebuild Vegas or a cheesy replica somewhere else someday. There was always enough money. And, like her doppelganger, the majority of human beings were slow learners.
Eden looked at the crystal skull that had, in two separate gulps, swallowed the soul of Deus Inversus. In the aftermath the skull seemed almost benign. Eden presumed that the Caretakers would be pleased with her. There was no message, no astral e-mail to consult, but she knew she wasn’t supposed to leave the skull lying around. As long as this one and the other skull—wherever Harlee Nations was keeping it—were available to those remnants of Mordaunt’s followers like the Fetchlings, there was risk that the evil they contained could find another outlet.
So don’t be a slow learner, Eden said to herself. You’re tired, you feel a hundred years old, you don’t have the power left to light a match, but finish it. Get rid of the damned skulls!
With that she picked the skull up in one hand, palming it, index and middle fingers curled in the eye sockets, and began to walk. She was wobbly, aimless, empty-headed, needing to pause frequently to take deep harsh breaths as she made her way w
ith the aid of her walking stick down toward Cathedral Rock.
2:55 P.M.
Eden felt as if she were sleepwalking, her conscious mind detached from her shuddering body and trailing behind like a balloon on a string. She daydreamed of Africa, the spacious veranda of the house at Shungwaya shaded by thatched roofs, the shimmer of the nearby lake, heat haze through which far-off animals moved evanescently to water. Dreaming of lazy days that had served to make her whole once before, a book in her lap or binoculars with which to study birdlife. Or leisurely conversations with Bertie or Tom—Tom, whom she had sacrificed because there was no other way. Whose bravery in retrospect was more than she could bear to dwell on, else she would just quit here and now, petrified with despair, abandoning hope of making it back to the sanctuary of the Kenya homestead. . . .
The red Viper convertible she had left floating in air was back on the narrow road, parked and empty in front of the white limousine. Eden stared at it uneasily, her mind working much too slowly. Only Mordaunt could have rescued his harlot Fetchling, she reasoned, but where—
And she was slow to turn, to recognize that she had trapped herself between one long side of the limo and the precipice that began six feet away at the edge of the road.
The limousine door that Harlee flung open behind Eden knocked her flat. Simba flew end over end from her hand. If her two numbed fingers hadn’t been gripping the skull like a bowling ball she would have lost control of that too. Her bad knee had struck a rock; the pain had the effect of clearing her mind. But as she tried to turn over, Harlee was on top of her, screaming, tearing the talisman from Eden’s breast and flinging it aside.
“Bitch! Where is he? What did you do to the Great One?”
Harlee had a screwdriver from the car’s tool kit in the other hand. Most of her weight was on Eden. A knee dug into Eden’s groin. Eden squalled in pain. Harlee hesitated for a moment to relish her advantage, perhaps hoping also to raise fear in Eden’s eyes.
“Now you see me and now—you don’t!” Harlee cried, striking at Eden’s left eye with the screwdriver.
Born with a lot of quick from birth, reflexes and stamina reinforced by thousands of hours in the gym and on the running track, Eden reacted, in spite of her depleted state, fast enough to deflect the first strike. But Harlee was young and quick herself. The second hard strike drove the eight-inch shaft of the screwdriver through the palm of Eden’s right hand.
As Harlee worked to yank the screwdriver free, Eden smashed her in the side of the head with the crystal skull. Harlee fell back against the limo. Eden pulled her hand free of the impaling screwdriver. But she couldn’t power up fast enough to seize the advantage, cave in the Fetchling’s forehead with another blow from the skull.
Simba was out of sight, out of reach of her acquisitive power—what remained of it was no more than a guttering candle flame about to be extinguished forever.
Eden didn’t hear the gunshot; she couldn’t hear much of anything. But the screwdriver, aimed again at her left eye, disappeared, along with about a third of Harlee’s hand, transformed into a red smudge the size of a blooming rose on the side of the limousine.
Harlee, staring wide-eyed at her crudely semiamputated hand, was trying to scream again. She could only make a drawn-out windy sound of horror.
Eden struggled painfully upright on her good knee and saw Cody Olds come around the front of the Viper sports car, a long-barreled .45 Colt’s Frontier model revolver in his shooting hand. At a bend in the road a little distance beyond the Viper stood his Toyota Prius, driver’s door standing open.
Striding toward them, he paused to pick up Simba from the road, keeping the Colt aimed at Harlee’s head. But the Fetchling had no fight left in her. She was crying hysterically.
“Cody,” Eden said, making an effort to keep her chin up, “what—are you doing here?”
He glanced at her, shocked and concerned about her appearance. The white hair, the deeply hollowed eyes.
“If you thought I was going to go off and leave you on your say-so, there’s plenty you still need to learn about me.”
“So glad—you didn’t listen. So happy to see you.”
“Who is this?” he said with a glance at the Fetchling he’d shot.
“Meet Harlee Nations.”
Harlee screamed at Cody, “My hand! Look what you did to my fucking hand!”
Seeming to forget about Eden, she scrambled awkwardly toward Cody, cradling the wounded hand against her breast. He cocked his six-shooter with his thumb, gave her a warning look.
“She one of those supernaturals?” Cody asked Eden.
“No. Don’t shoot her again, luv. There’s something I need to find out.”
“You’re bleeding all over yourself, Eden.”
“Not serious. Hurts like hell. She stuck me with that screwdriver.”
Eden intercepted Harlee and stopped her yelping, sprawling progress in Cody’s direction. She grabbed a handful of the Fetchling’s hair and yanked her head up and back.
Mad with pain and frustration, Harlee spat at her.
“That’s cute,” Eden said calmly. “Listen, Harlee. I want to know where the other skull is.”
“I’m bleeding to death! I need a doctor!”
“We’ll get you to a doctor. Where’s the goddamn skull?”
Harlee glared at Eden, moaning, then rolled her eyes to Cody when he placed the muzzle of the Colt against the side of her head.
“You can’t have it! You’ll never get your hands on it!”
“Tell me why,” Eden said, tightening her grip on the Fetchling’s hair.
“It’s in his vault. The Great One’s vault! Nobody—can get in there but us!”
“What vault where?”
“His theatre. Below his dressing suite.”
“Take us.”
“Don’t waste your time,” Harlee sneered. “No way inside. Without—all of me.” She raised her wounded hand in dread. “But I’m not perfect anymore! I can’t fix this. I can’t grow another hand!”
Cody looked at Eden. “Reckon she’s talking about a full body scan, or all ten fingerprints for biometric access?”
With a frenzied laugh Harlee lunged off the ground, shoving Eden momentarily off-balance. Eden’s grip on the Fetchling loosened. Some of Harlee’s hair tore off her head along with a patch of scalp as she bolted past Eden and leaped from the side of the road, space-walked momentarily with a scream, and was gone.
Eden recovered quickly enough to get over there and see Harlee crashing down through the green pinnacle of a fat old ponderosa pine. The Fetchling tumbled and plummeted farther until she was abruptly jerked to a stop, a jagged bare branch socketed in Harlee’s soft underjaw, protruding through the top of her head.
Behind Eden, Cody lowered the Colt’s hammer and stuck it inside his belt, whistling regretfully.
“Guess that makes her the winner. The hard way.”
“That’s not a come bet,” Eden said. She turned and took Simba from Cody’s other hand. “Let’s go.”
“Think you can get into that vault?”
“I don’t know. I know I have to try.”
4:35 P.M.
There was no power available at the ruins of Lincoln Grayle’s theatre on Spring Mountain other than what an on-site generator supplied for work lights. The elevator that Eden and Cody located in a back wall of the late Magician’s roomy wardrobe was inoperable. No juice, and also a biometric scan apparently was required.
With an electric torch Cody eventually uncovered a shaft for emergency use while Eden with her throbbing hand remained quietly in the spectrochrome chamber where the Magician and his cohorts regularly restored their vigor through application of colored lights. Eden had no idea how any of it worked. Her energy level seemed to be building slowly as she and the ruby crystal skull she had placed on the chamber’s table faced each other. The skull retained a faint interior starburst glow. It seemed to perk up the chunky talisman Eden had restored to her breast. Now
and then she imagined she heard that eerie, confident trumpet solo.
“Want to come take a look at the vault?” Cody said as he returned to the spectrochrome chamber. “You need to be real careful climbing down there with that hand of yours.”
Eden had bandaged her palm from the first-aid kit Cody kept in the Prius, but the puncture wound was still oozing blood and fluid. A couple of her fingers on that hand didn’t work at all.
“I’ll be okay.” Eden flashed her own light at the bank of colored lights above the table. “I wonder if there’s an instruction manual. I might be able to turn my hair back to its natural color.”
“That’s all you have to worry about?”
“Well—I must look like hell to you, cowboy.”
“You’re not so bad with white hair,” he said diplomatically. “Let’s do this and get out of here. All those costumes and masks and stuff—spooky.”
“He won’t be back, Cody.”
Cody looked at the crystal skull. “Don’t trust that thing. Looks like it’s winking at us.”
Eden didn’t know how much time they had. Or what came next. She bound the skull up in a long scarf and Cody helped her arrange the sling across her body. He went first down the shaft hewn from solid rock, frequently looking up, wary of Eden slipping and taking them both twenty feet to the bottom.
In the illumination from their flashlights Eden had a critical look at herself in the mirrorlike surface of the vault door installed in a grotto. It was chilly down there, probably less than sixty degrees.
“How do you suppose they got a vault that size down here?” Cody said. “Remember when they opened that vault of Al Capone’s on television a few years ago? Nothing in it but an empty beer bottle. Could the Fetchling have been lyin’ to you?”
“No,” Eden said. “The other skull is in there. I feel it. But—” Cody watched her. Eden licked her crusted lips. “I just don’t know what happens when—the two of them get together.”
“Then let’s don’t trouble to find out,” he said uneasily. “Throw that one you got already into Havasu and we’ll go fishin’.”