Fury and the Power

by Farris, John

  "That's genetics," she said of the crossbreeds. "I know a little something about genetics." She leaned against an unpainted concrete wall, eyes simmering in subdued lighting. "Now tell me your real secrets, Magic Man."

  "Like what?"

  "Like how you raise blood lust to the level of insane murder in an otherwise average, well-behaved teenage kid like Jimmy Nixon. And, like, where do shape-shifters come from—f'r instance, that saber-toothed baboon I met in the pasto—the, y'know, 'cause you were there too, don't deny it; the Pope-astolic Palace."

  "Interesting mutation. I never know what I'm going to get. That's the fun part. So it was a saber-toothed baboon you destroyed?"

  "Damn right I did!" Eden said, leering with pride. "'N with little help from my own brand of magic." She held up the bottle to a work light in the tunnel outside the menagerie, sized up with a squint the inch of dark wine remaining, and drank it unsteadily, the rim of the bottle clicking against her front teeth. A few drops dribbled off her chin.

  The magician watched her with the same forbearance, mild amusement—and continued skepticism—that he had shown Eden for more than an hour. "C'mon" she said, lowering the empty bottle and issuing a challenge, "if we're gonna have a true, lasting relationship, gotta level with me. Hey! Speaking of the relationship, have to call you something. What do you suggest? Linc? Or, no, more appropriate, how about Morrie? You get it, don't you? Short for Mordaunt."

  "Linc will do for now, Eden."

  "'Kay. So, Links. How 'bout another bottle wine? I am really starting to get loosed up here, no shit. That's how you want me, right? Purrrrfeckly relaxed." She hiccupped and smothered a giggle with the back of her free hand, stealing a glimpse of the face of her watch as she did so.

  "Maybe later," the magician said indulgently. "Why not take a break from the booze for now? You're sweating. I don't care for that. I don't like having women who sweat around me. Which they tend to do, onstage, when we've got flames going—"

  "Just like in hell? Oops, my bad. Sorry. Listen, about sweating. That's what my glands are used to doing. Pour out the juice. I played basketball since I was in third grade, you know. Sweat's just bodily essence. If a man I happen to like sweats, it turns me on. That's something personal I'm letting you know, Links."

  "There's a great deal about Eden Waring I'm eager to learn. But we have many years ahead of us."

  "Kind of warm in this tunnel. Keep the animals cozy, right? Keep your animal warm too, Links? The one I heard so much about, came sniffing 'round my bed at Shungwaya. Scary son of a bitch. So let me in on it. The big secret. How can you take ordinary human beings, make them into monsters?"

  "If you know how to stimulate the pineal body and the endocrine system by the use of spectrochrome therapy, human evolution can be accelerated to warp speed. The trigger is then implanted in the brain through the time-honored power of suggestion."

  "Human evolution? Devolution, I'd call it," Eden said wisely.

  "Whatever. They serve our purpose, luv."

  She wagged a forefinger at him, face going slack; but her eyes were frightened. "Nuh-uh! Changed my mind. 'Clude me out.'

  "But I need you. It's a most interesting experiment in genetics, Eden. I'm so looking forward to seeing just what it is you give birth to three days from now."

  She jerked away from the wall as if she had been stuck there, lurched toward him.

  "I'm scared! Why can't it just be you and me, Links? You and me."

  "Because what you see as Lincoln Grayle is only an insignificant part of who and what I really am. We want to realize, in the person of a child, what is most powerful in each of us."

  Eden tried to snuggle against him. He resisted the thrust of eroticism with a grimace of displeasure, but couldn't prevent her hand from clamping onto his penis.

  "Isn't this good enough?" she said, whorishly kneading the brute sausage. "It's what I want, Linc. Give it to me, please? Right here. Now. I am so ready!"

  "I'm not. It can't happen when—unless I—and you need to sober—"

  Eden became dead weight on his arm, as if she were having a spaz attack. When he tried to hold her up off the floor she recovered with all of the nimble footwork that had made her a star point guard and, squaring up to him, smashed him full in the face with the butt of the empty wine bottle. His nose shattered and his head was driven into the wall behind him. Blood flew as his lungs emptied.

  She hit him again, backhanded, and the bottle broke against a wedge of cheekbone before he hit the floor rolling, just beginning to feel the awful pain.

  Eden stood astride him momentarily, still holding the jagged neck of the wine bottle, his blood dripping down her face.

  "I believe I could use some fresh air," she said, perfectly lucid. "You'll find me on the terrace—Links, honey."

  She walked away, steady after a first stagger-step, wiping blood off her face and trying to keep her gorge down. She headed along the tunnel toward the freight elevator that would take her to stage level. Wanting to scream but she couldn't get it out of her throat. The adrenaline rush was rapidly burning the alcohol out of her blood. She thought she could make it. Outdoors, the cold night air. But his blood. A little of it had passed her lips. She spat and spat.

  As Eden ran into the large elevator, big enough to lift an elephant, she heard the roaring of the mutant big cats in their menagerie cages. She felt a livid itch on her lower lip and knew she was about to break out in hives.

  Something entirely different from the magician whose face she had just ruined would be rising from the bloody floor of the tunnel, finding her spoor.

  Eden looked at her watch again.

  Showtime was eighty seconds away.

  If she lived that long.

  Chapter 55

  11:59 P.M.

  The strong winds that had afflicted the Las Vegas area and caused some temporary power outages had abated and the clouds were breaking up as the cold front passed through, affording glimpses of a waning moon above the summit of Spring Mountain.

  He wouldn't be needing the moon tonight. At four thousand feet Tom Sherard had settled into his hide overlooking the Lincoln Grayle Theatre, approximately one quarter mile away at two o'clock and seven hundred feet below his rocky perch. He sat cross-legged in spite of the painful stress on his bad knee, the stock of the .470-caliber rifle his father had ordered for him on his first birthday (stocks had been replaced several times from the day he took his first reduced-powder shot at the age of six) against his shoulder as he calibrated the scope.

  Directly east lay a golden field of shimmering lights sown like the wages of sin for miles across the high desert floor. A toy version of King Arthur's castle at one end of the Vegas Strip; the red thread of a roller coaster wound around the needle of the Stratosphere Tower at the other.

  Below Sherard the terrace of the theatre looked like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, with huge concrete planters for trees and three fountains, not operating at this hour. The superstructure of the theatre, five stories of beehive glass cut like a diamond into thousands of facets, filled the front of the cavern that had been blasted out of the mountain to accommodate the theatre and kitchens where assembly-line meals were prepared for sixteen hundred guests on show nights.

  He couldn't see past the facade from where he was, but he knew from the magician's Web site what the semicircular lobby inside looked like: turquoise-veined travertine floor, chandeliers resembling stalactite sculptures in an ice cave, each weighing a quarter of a ton.

  A pair of night watchmen in a golf cart were moving slowly around the terrace. He sighted in on one of them, crosshairs just below a jowly neckline, feeling now the familiar slow-boiling anticipation of a blood stalk at the root of his throat, in the pulses of his temples.

  The watchmen concluded their circuit of the terrace. A door opened in a wall bearing a fifty-foot-high mosaic of Lincoln Grayle. The golf cart disappeared into the lower depths of the theatre complex.

  Sherard moved the stoc
k of the Holland and Holland rifle from the padded shoulder of his hunting jacket. He closed his eyes, clearing his mind of the shot he was going to take, and waited.

  Chapter 56

  MIDNIGHT

  Eden ran through the levels of the darkened theatre and crossed the lobby, emerging into the brilliance of ten floodlights aimed at the theatre's facade. The temperature behind the cold front had dropped to the mid-thirties at this elevation. She was still perspiring from the heat of the menagerie tunnel and began to shudder as she turned and backed away from the entrance doors, circling a fountain, keeping it between her and the were-beast she was certain would be coming after her.

  As she moved she had a look around the empty terrace, glanced at the stars now appearing in the sky. One hand against her breasts, cupped over the talisman that Leoncaro had urged on her. She was bleakly aware that whatever blessings accompanied it would be only of limited value. Bertie had believed—and look what it had gotten her. None of her powers had been adequate to anticipate and deflect an assassin's bullets.

  Now that she was out in the open fear evaporated from her skin. Bertie lay gravely wounded in the ICU but Eden felt satisfaction in remembering what the magician's face had looked like after she'd smashed part of it to pulp. The sharp neck of the wine bottle was still in her left hand. Probably futile as a weapon, given the power coming her way, the retaliation she had provoked.

  She let go of the ugly little talisman and wiped the hollows of her eyes. The drops of Grayle's blood and her perspiration she flung from her fingertips appeared to hover in the floodlit night a few feet from her, taking on some of the fire that seemed also to glow within the crystal chandeliers visible inside the theatre. Light of her Light; a subconscious recognition, a gift of apprehension as, there on the terrace where it seemed to Eden she had been waiting until half past Eternity instead of less than a minute, something was happening.

  The most wonderful something she had known in her life. There was just nothing to compare with the sight of an ordinary golf cart coasting out of a doorway in a wall near the left foot of another huge version of Lincoln Grayle, this one composed of many thousands of black and white tiles. You couldn't look anywhere in or outside of his theatre without encountering the likeness she had done a brutal job of deconstructing in reality.

  Eden wasn't thinking about that right now; she could only smile incredulously at the sight of Bertie Nkambe behind the wheel of the cart as it crossed the terrace on a diagonal, coming straight for her. Bertie looking in the pink instead of unconscious beneath a ventilator mask in the hospital Eden had left a little less than three hours ago. Bertie, giving her a familiar blithe wave along with a big white dimpled smile.

  Incredible to see her, but wonderful: of course she knew about Bertie's considerable healing powers... Eden could not control her tears.

  "Bertie?!"

  "But you—"

  "C'mon, we'll take a ride. Tell you about it."

  "No! Bertie—Grayle—he—we've got to—"

  "Hey, nothing to worry about! I saw him. He's down and out. You clocked him good."

  "Saw—?"

  She braked the golf cart a few feet from Eden and beckoned, still smiling, a hand jauntily on one hip. Didn't appear that a single hair on her head had been disturbed by Mordaunt's assassin. To Eden's weary eyes she looked, matter of fact, as if she'd spent hours getting dolled up for a cover shoot.

  "Time for us to skedaddle outta here, Eden. Saddle up and let's ride, partner."

  Still Eden hung back, light-headed from the confusion, the assaultive conflict of her senses.

  "Bertie, where's Tom?"

  "Tom?" Her smile changed, just a little, as if she'd heard something obscene.

  "Didn't he come with you? He's—" Eden ventured a couple of steps toward the golf cart, shielding her eyes from the hot glare of a nearby floodlight. She failed to notice crimson drops of moisture she'd discarded into the air frantically rearranging to spell out a warning.

  Beware

  "—Supposed to be here," Eden concluded weakly. "I left him a note?"

  Bertie's good humor vanished. Her back hunched like that of a sullen cat. She looked around the terrace swiftly, then in an instant of raw apprehension raised her eyes to the cliffs flanking and rising above the Lincoln Grayle Theatre, pale to the darkness of the sky from the leak light of the powerful floods and the glow of faceted glass.

  Bertie's slanted eyes seemed to elongate as she took in the silent seated form of Tom Sherard, a distant wink of light off the lens of his rifle scope. Her recognition of danger was swift but not as swift as the bullet Tom sent her way. The .470 soft point slug took out two ribs and splashed most of one lung, knocked her flat and hard beside the golf cart.

  A human being and most animals would have died instantly from hydrostatic shock. But this Bertie wasn't human, only a cunning copy. It was the copy Eden saw struck with a meaty wham and knocked down, not Bertie struggling to assume yet another form on the deck even as the big bellowing echo from the Holland and Holland reached her ears, rolling across the face of the mountain. Sure as hell wasn't Bertie stretching out and getting up on all fours, claws grating on stone, blood billows issuing like condensed red breath from a leer of a mouth and coal-black nostrils.

  Eden scuttled backward and recoiled from the scorch of a hot floodlight. The were-beast that was making a screaming effort to achieve its full shape from the abandoned form of Bertie Nkambe—that was to be the Trickster's last great illusion—wasn't having an easy time making the shift. Mindful of the sharpshooter on high, instead of coming at Eden it turned and loped toward the safety of the theatre, still incomplete and lopsided from the drag of a Bertie-leg, knee to foot, that remained unassimilated, a sight that wrenched Eden's violently beating heart. Then Tom fired again, hitting and disabling the striped high shoulder of the tiger.

  The were-beast plunged through a glass door and skidded ten feet on slick travertine, then collapsed in a spill of coughed blood out of gun range.

  There was another message in the air for Eden made of her sweat and tears, a message from the center of her being.

  Destroy

  Eden looked up where she thought Tom must be, but couldn't locate him. She walked deliberately across the terrace as the were-beast crawled along the floor inside the theatre, howling miserably, leaving a blood swath beneath the great blazing chandeliers, white as ice sculpture.

  (Ice, glass—what did it matter? What mattered was to focus properly, channel the Dark Energy she felt as a hot-wire tingle back and forth across her scalp, causing the hair of her head to stand and strain at the roots.)

  A smoke-tinged rosette opened in one of the facets of the hive-like facade. And she hadn't even been trying, just gave it the merest glance, the wild heat converging from both eyes as another blister formed on her lower lip.

  The talisman smoked between her breasts. Her nipples were electric. She was on fire, but a fire she could bend outward and direct according to her will; it meant her no harm. She looked up again, leisurely, past insignificant clouds to a star field that lay close across the heavens. It assumed from a cataclysm of seething light and energy a familiar form: her own. Recognition gave her cheer and a confidence that was beyond godlike.

  Now, if she could make an elephant fly—

  (Best not to leave any part of it standing. Not a single magical door or tunnel through which the Trickster might make his escape.)

  Eden stood ten feet from the facade of the Lincoln Grayle Theatre, perhaps twice that distance from where the deformed magician was making an effort to pull his final act together.

  And dropped a quarter ton of melting chandelier on top of him.

  Because—oh, yes!—she could definitely make an elephant fly!

  The feline shape of Mordaunt was indistinct within the crude drop of glowing glass. Only the grotesque hyena head and strong shoulders of the tiger were still visible. Its screams difficult to bear. Eden added another slow-moving mass of molte
n glass to what was already on the floor, continued to pile it on until all of the chandeliers were melted and down. They composed an ingot like a softly pulsating, liquid star eight feet deep on the travertine floor.

  The glass would, perhaps, take a week to cool and harden completely.

  Eden backed away from the theatre until she was nearly at the outer edge of the terrace. Her celestial simulacrum lay cozily on the brow of the mountain, intensely radiant. Stars in her eyes, stars in her hair. All of them spinning in concert with her earthly mind waves. She looked down and saw that she had risen a couple of feet above the terrace floor. She felt a curious lack of childlike wonder. Still she enjoyed her casual buoyancy, a bodiless sort of freedom, and the enormous light show playing in her brain as she initiated the meltdown of the theatre's facade, more trudging tons of sizzle glass.

  But all of the added weight was too much for the terrace supports and the whole thing collapsed suddenly; Eden thoughtfully watched it go, great smoking globs of glass and slabs of concrete tumbling down the mountain, setting trees aflame, blocking the only road to the theatre. The floodlights were out. The Trickster's show had gone dark.

  Beginning to feel depleted, Eden let herself drift a couple of hundred feet through the dark rising cloud of smoke and dust until there was solid ground beneath her feet again.

  Chapter 57

  1:55 A.M.

  Tom Sherard drove the back roads of the valleys and desert until at last he saw her, a lone slow-moving figure at the edge of a long straight road to nowhere.

  He slowed down to a crawl and kept pace with her in the rented SUV and she never looked his way. She walked with her head up, eyes fixed on the dim mountainous distance.

  He pulled ahead of her, turned the SUV in her direction, all lights blazing. She must have been nearly blinded but she kept walking until he stepped into her path. Then she just stood there, swaying a little, looking intently at his face. Her own face was grimy, her clothing filled with dust. Breakouts on her lower lip from hives. She began to tremble, as if she were just feeling the cold.