2012 (29 page)

It stopped, though, and hung there, its yellow surface gleaming, its black windows revealing nothing of the interior. Then the passenger door went up and a pureblood leaned out. “Hey, you Marshal Samson?”

“I’m General Samson.”

“I’ve got orders to deliver this to a Marshal Samson. You got your number ID?”

Samson produced it.

The salesman thrust the ID card into the slot. Samson heard the car’s confirming bell. The salesman hopped out. “She’s yours, Marshal. Ever driven before?”

He forced himself not to gape. It was stunning: instead of killing him, she’d given him a gift of one of the finest sports vehicles in the world, a wonderful, beautifully made creation that belonged only to the highest of the upper classes. Merely possessing such a thing raised you into the aristocracy.

He entered the car. The fine interior gleamed with exotic metals, greens and silvers and golds. The leather was pale and as supple as cream. Human, without a doubt, and young.

He glanced across the dashboard, a forest of gleaming gold buttons, none of which he understood. Apparently, the car had every option you could imagine. “I have no idea how to run this.”

“You don’t need to know. It’s ensouled.”

He was momentarily too amazed to speak. Shu ensouled perhaps a thousand vehicles a year. Such a car would cost a man like him ten lifetimes of income. Driving it identified him as one of the world’s most powerful, most elite people.

“Is the soul…human?”

The salesman laughed. “Maybe next time, mister. It’s a good one, though. Very smart, very compliant. You need to ride a human ensouled vehicle very carefully, you know. They’re fast and really, really clever, but they can be tricky.”

Indeed, they’d been known to smash themselves to bits in the hope of getting release. It didn’t work, of course. They couldn’t release themselves.

But they ran a vehicle superbly.

Experimentally, tentatively, he asked the car, “Are you there?”

There was a pause, then, “Who are you?”

“The new owner. Take me home.”

It hesitated a moment as it read his ID. “Yes,” it said. He did not ask it why it had been put into a machine. He didn’t really care, as long as it did its work. It was his now, that was all that mattered.

As he soared upward, his engines singing, he called Echidna.

“You’re welcome,” she said into his ear.

“How can I ever thank you?”

“I can think of two ways.”

“Which are?”

“Open both human worlds, and I will grant you an entire city. I will break the law of blood, and let you wear Sky.”

The car swooped low into the dark streets of the back city, the real city. People looked up, some knelt, all bowed, pulled off hats, raised their open hands to sign loyalty to the Corporation, for nobody but an owner could be driving such a vehicle, a car glowing with the violet light of a soul.

The door opened. He got out. Wide, amazed eyes. Smiles everywhere, then cheering as his neighbors came to their windows, looked down, and saw his triumph. Success honored all.

He climbed the narrow stair, thick with the smell of boiling soup, and went into his apartment. There were meat parties everywhere in the street. The day’s executions had favored his neighborhood, and they all thought he was the reason, and he was cheered from every door.

Who knew, maybe Echidna had given such an order.

The gateway was open, waiting. He walked up to it. The stress waves shimmered evenly. It was as clear as he had ever seen. The approaching date was really having an effect now.

Then he realized what he was looking at. Mazle stood in their cramped headquarters space beneath two-moon earth. She was looking down at the autopsy table. On it lay the body of Al North.

He felt sick. That should not be.

He stepped through. “Is the agent dead?”

“You lived!”

“Is the agent dead?”

She gestured toward North. “This needs fixing.”

“I told her-” His mind returned to the sick, vicious boy, waiting for him with his molting hook. He shuddered. “Never mind what I told her.”

“We’re going to try replacing the brain entirely,” she said. “This almost has to get rid of the residual will. Then it’s going to work.”

“It had better work.”

“Yeah, because if it doesn’t Daddy’s gonna take away all your toys. And if you ever lie to my aunt again, I’ll help my unpleasant little cousin take off your skin, and I’ll eat it before your eyes.” She smiled. “You’re nothing, Samson, you and your ugly little car.”

He bowed to her.

EIGHTEEN

DECEMBER 19 

ORIGINS UNKNOWN

NICK SAT READING THE PAGES his father had just finished. Over the past two weeks, Dad had slept maybe six hours, but he was asleep now, sprawled like a corpse across his keyboard. Of course, corpses don’t snore.

It was four in the morning and two weeks ago he wouldn’t have dared to get out of bed and venture into the dark, but things had changed, hadn’t they?

“What’s going on?”

“Hi, Mom.”

“What’re you doing up?”

“Dad’s written about being an intelligence agent.”

“Anything more than what we’ve already remembered?”

“Not really. When I came in here he was sound asleep and snoring, and he was writing.” He gestured toward the laptop. “This. It’s a description of Samson going to the demon earth. It’s horrible, Mom, really horrible.”

“Wylie, wake up.”

“Mom, leave him.”

“I don’t want him like that, he needs a bed.”

“Look, if you disturb him, he’s just gonna start writing again. He’s gonna have a heart attack. Let him sleep.”

She leaned over and read a few pages. “God, what a place. Abaddon.”

“I googled it, it means ‘the abyss.’ At least, it does in our language. In seraph, it probably means ‘Home,’ or ‘Nice Place’ or something. They’re cannibals, and even the children torture and kill. It’s, like, play for them. Like a video game to them, to skin a real person alive. They’re loathsome, Mom, and we do not want them here.”

She looked down at her husband. “I’m gonna get him a blanket at least.” She went to the linen closet and pulled one down. They covered him together, mother and son, and Nick slid the cushion from his chair under his head.

“I’m sober, I swear,” he murmured.

“It’s okay honey, it’s good.”

“Let’s fuck, baby.”

“Sh!”

He gave a long snore and smacked his lips.

“I grew up with him, remember, Mom.”

She tried to laugh, almost succeeded.

“Mom, the thing we have to ask ourselves is, not only who Dad is and who we are, but what we’re supposed to be doing, because I have to tell you, I am starting to realize that I feel this incredible kinship with somebody in his book, and I want to understand what’s going on. Trevor is, like, my soul brother or something. And another thing-this is dangerous. What happened with Al North trying to come in here, and that thing that came after Dad-it’s very, very dangerous.”

At that moment, there came a thin sound, almost like the wail of a smoke alarm, and for a split instant that’s what they all thought it was. Then Nick was running, they were all running. Kelsey stood in the hall outside her bedroom clutching Bearish and making this terrible sound, a noise Wylie had never heard his little girl make before, and which he had not known she could make.

Brooke leaped to her and enclosed her in her arms, and Kelsey sobbed the ragged sob of a child so terrified that not even her mother could comfort her. “There’s hands in my room and they were touching me and touching me, and when I threw Bearish at them, I saw a face and it was awful.”

“Oh, honey, honey, there’s nothing in your room, look, it’s empty in there, the light is on and it’s empty.”

“You saw just hands, Kelsey?”

“Yes, Daddy. They tried to grab me, and when they touched me I saw them. Then they were gone.”

“And the face, you saw it-“

“When Bearish hit it. It was bloody and awful, Daddy, it was horrible.”

He looked at Nick. Nick looked back, his eyes steady with understanding. But he said nothing.

No, and that was right. They had to be careful here, extremely so, because there was a person in the house that they could not see, who had one goal, and that was to kill.

“Let’s go downstairs and make cocoa,” Nick said. “We need some cocoa.”

“Nicholas, it’s late and Kelsey’s tired.”

Kelsey threw her arms around her mother’s waist. “Mommy, yes!”

“Just one cup, then, and we have to make it quick. Because my girl needs her beauty sleep.” She picked Kelsey up, and her little girl snuggled into her arms.

As they trooped downstairs, Nick asked Wylie, “Are we going hunting in the morning?”

“Hunting,” his mother said, “on a school day?”

“Not for middle school,” Nick replied smoothly. “Teacher’s Day.”

Wylie understood exactly what his son was doing. He could not communicate openly, not if somebody was in here and they couldn’t see him and they were listening. “We could go for pheasant,” he said quickly. “Maybe we’ll put a bird on the table. The guns are ready, so we can get an early start.”

“Let’s pull ‘em out, then,” Nick said.

Wylie could feel the presence in the house just as clearly as Nick apparently could. An invisible something, and it was close, it was right on top of them.

He unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled out one of their birders and tossed it to Nick, then got himself a 12-gauge. “Get behind us,” he said to Brooke.

“Excuse me?”

“Mom, get behind us!”

Wylie saw movement, very clear, not ten inches from his face. An eye, part of a face. And he knew something about who was here: it was a man, and he was horribly scarred. Al North was back for a second try.

Then there was a hand around his wrist. He looked down at it, felt the steel of the grip. “It’s on Daddy,” Kelsey screamed, and this time Brooke saw it and she screamed, too, and not just screamed, she howled.

Nick fired into the seemingly empty space where the figure had to be, and there were a series of purple flashes in the general shape of a man, but the buckshot passed through him and smacked the far wall of the family room, shattering the big front window and leaving a trench in the top of the couch.

The hand had gone.

Nick grunted and he was up against the wall, he was being throttled, and where the body of the intruder touched his, you could see edges of a black, tattered uniform. Wylie was not a huge man, not as big as Al North, but he waded in. From behind, he put his arms around North’s neck and pulled his head back, gouging into his face, and as he did that, the face and head appeared, the stretched neck, arteries pulsing hard, and the eyes, surrounded by scar tissue and dripping blood.

Seeing this, Brooke went into the gun cabinet and brought out the big silver magnum she’d fussed and fretted for years about him even having. She waved it, not having any idea how to use it.

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

Amid a showering mass of sparks, the figure flew across the room, slamming against the TV with a huge crash. It lay there, the left half of the head and face visible down to the left shoulder. Both hands and most of the left arm could be seen, also, until the hand moved across where the stomach would be, slipping into an envelope of invisibility, then coming out again with blood on the fingers.

The one visible eye was gray, glaring ferociously out of a blood-ringed socket. The surgery was crude and cruel. Until now Wylie had not realized just how poor their doctor had been.

The hand shot toward him again, like the head of a snake, and there was a knife in it, and the knife sailed at him, spinning, flashing metal, and clanged against the wall. There was a spitting, sparking sound and a burst of blue electric fire, and where it hit, reality seemed to peel back.

Where there had been a blank wall, there was now a door with a blue-shimmering frame, and beyond it a kitchen with a twisted, melted countertop, a toaster that looked like melted wax, a Sub-Zero fridge that had been clawed and melted and was hanging open.

There were people there, and one of them looked in this direction. Wylie knew what he was seeing, and it was even more terrible than he had imagined when he was writing about these humanoid reptiles, because it was so sleek, so beautiful with its shimmering pale skin, and so terrible with its empty, hard eyes, quick eyes that focused fast on this room, then came alive with a glitter that could only reflect eager delight.

Seraph, they called themselves, but we had names for them, from every culture in the world, from every time in history, but all these names amounted to the same thing, the one word that described something so exquisite and yet so ugly: he was looking straight into the eyes of what mankind in both human universes had identified as a demon.

Kelsey ran-toward it. She ran with a child’s blindness and raw, instinctive hunger to find safety. No doubt, she didn’t realize what she was seeing. Maybe she saw a policeman-black uniform, silver buttons, red collar patches-or maybe some other form of deliverance, but she ran to the thing, right through the opening and into the other universe. The dying universe. The place where they tore souls out of bodies and made wanderers of little girls.

Wylie tossed Nick the twelve-gauge. “Blast it,” he yelled, “it’s getting up.”

“KELSEY,” Brooke screamed, running after her, leaping, trying and failing to grab her flying nightgown before she went through the door.

-which made a faint, wet sound, a sort of gulping, as she passed through. She stood shimmering with bright violet light, as if she’d been trapped in some kind of laser show.

The creature waiting for her went down and opened its arms, but the smile revealed rows of teeth like narrow spikes, and the golden eyes were not eyes of joy, they had in them the look of a famished wolf.

Wylie dove in behind his daughter, feeling a hammering electrical pulsation over his whole body, followed by gagging nausea as he landed beside her. She was icy cold, her skin gray, and he had the horrifying thought that her soul was already gone.

The demon had white hair, thin and soft, waving around its head like a halo. “Hi,” it said, “I’m Jennifer Mazle. It’s good to meet you, Wylie.”