Dark to Mortal Eyes (8 page)

“Scoot, don’t mess with that thing. We’re not alone.”

“Oh no, the girl’s goin’ schizo on me.”

“I’m not kidding.” Josee eyed the canister. Earlier, despite warning bells that had jangled in her subconscious, she’d been blindsided by an attack. One whiff had triggered the pain. In this brief span of time, though, something had shifted; now, in vivid color, her pupils registered a hostile entity.

Creeping. Green. Oozing into view.

Across the coals, Scooter was cradling the canister as though enraptured with a newborn. “What’d you smell?” he wanted to know. He put his face near the surface. “I can’t smell a thing. Yeah, yeah, okay, now I can, sorta.”

An aftershock spasmed through Josee’s torso. Scrapbook pages from the past: glaring lights, distant voices, a sharp needle prick … and her red gel capsules.

“Scoot, just do what I ask.”

“Hey, it’s all good.”

“No,” she told him, “it’s not.”

“Things’re cool, Josee. No need to stress. Check this out. My ring starts glowing when it gets close to this thing.” He stretched out his arm, brought it in again, while the moonstone throbbed. “Man, you see that?”

“Please, hon, this is no joke.”

“S’okay. What’s the problemo?”

From the canister’s seam, a neon green vapor emerged. Scooter seemed blind to it as it twined up his arm. Josee, on the other hand, witnessed the movement in lucid detail. Coils, shifting and sliding. Fangs, curved and transparent, gathering substance from the emerald wisps.

“You can run,” he said, “but you can’t hide.”

Alongside Highway 99, Sergeant Vince Turney sat in his police cruiser and tried with thick fingers to fetch peanut M&M’s from the bag between his legs. He nabbed a morsel. Yellow, his favorite.

He didn’t deny he could lose a few pounds around the middle, but he’d wolfed down an early breakfast and was feeling the urge to nibble again. He crunched on the candy, dug for more.

Fuel, he told himself. To keep his body going.

Before her passing, his fiancée had teased him that he’d be hitting thirty before she did. In his memory, her voice had lost its humor. “Two or three years, Vince, and you’ll be on the downward slope, slip-sliding away. As for me? I’ll still be young and perky. Just trying to warn you that you’re gonna need more sleep and exercise, not to mention those longevity supplement drinks.” Milly had winked, and Turney had wisecracked that she couldn’t handle any more man than she was already getting.

Of course, after she’d left for her shift at Key Bank, he’d rushed out to the garage to hide his stack of Sobe beverage elixirs.

Not that it mattered. Milly was gone long before his thirtieth milestone.

A teenage driver fiddling with a CD … A twist of the wheel … A median overrun …

For nearly three years, Milly Svenson’s gravestone had graced a hillside cemetery outside of Junction City. Near her parents. At peace and with God.

Here Turney was, still plugging along the career path of law enforcement. Had he missed a turn? Misread the signs? Chief Braddock’s old-school leadership grated against Turney’s sensibilities, as did the job’s brushes with human depravity.

Best to stick to my duties, that’s the thing—to serve and to protect
.

On the Corvallis outskirts, he adjusted his weight in the driver’s seat, fished for another M&M, and waited for a bike to reemerge over the rail embankment. He’d seen a rider disappear near this spot, and he knew there was nothing over yonder but trees and ferns and poison oak.

Some hobo most likely. Or a harmless bum. He’d seen the type before.

Although riding the rails held a certain appeal for Sergeant Turney, he knew his job suggested that he’d better check this out, for the sake of all law-abiding
citizens. He radioed in his location, then lumbered from the car, tucking in his shirt and swinging at flying insects on his way through tall ryegrass.

That’s when he heard a scream.

Josee could do nothing but watch as the vapor coiled up Scooter’s arm to his neck. It brushed over his beard, fondled his locks in a licentious caress, then rushed down the other arm to his ring. Scooter’s eyes fixed upon the moonstone, and the being struck. Snakelike, the vapor thrust itself forward. Jaws unhinged and rear fangs extended toward him.

“Scooter!”

He whipped his head toward her so that the fangs missed his eyes and clamped instead onto his cheek, where they pumped midnight blue venom into tissue. Within seconds, his face became a mask of repulsive calm. Subservient and accepting of his fate? Or reveling in the experience?

Josee couldn’t tell. Strange. Maybe both.

As the fangs retracted, blood glazed over Scooter’s eyes. He showed no response, zilch, as droplets spilled from his eyelids onto his poncho.

Shame filled Josee. She’d felt the threat, seen the clues, yet she’d let the speed of the attack keep her from responding. As if she could’ve. She, too, had frozen in position while a cloak of leaden incompetence weighed upon her back.

Lead: metallic blue gray, the color of a bullet, of a sinker on a line.

The color of her helplessness.

Old snapshots flipped into focus: the time a kitten was swept down the Long Tom River; the day a stuttering classmate endured insults at the back of the school bus; the night her foster mother absorbed blows from the same drunken jerk who’d locked Josee in the basement …

Josee’s emotion now swelled into outrage. Blue gray turned red.

Can’t just sit here. I have to do something!

“Leave him alone!”

She erupted from her seat, casting off the leaden cloak. She armed herself with a branch and kicked at the leaves. “Get away!” She cranked the limb and
took a swing; bark sizzled through the wispy form. In the serpentine coils, Scooter’s body remained limp, and the complacency on his face incensed her.
Typical
, she thought.

“Fight!” she commanded him. “Do something.”

The vapor turned its gaze her direction.

“Why don’t you leave us alone?”

No more than a foot away, the being’s tongue flapped forward to read her heat fluctuations. Sizing her up. The miasmic mouth wielded fangs, and the eyes turned into flame. Searing. Dancing with aggression. She knew instinctively that she would never find a snake like this in the Portland Zoo’s reptile house.

Josee stepped back. What was she doing? This was insane.

But this creature had no right! A righteous indignation rose within her—from the soil of her childhood vows, from the withered seed of a child’s faith.

Along the coils, a twitter of muscle cocked back the serpent’s head as it prepared to strike, finalizing its coordinates. Only seconds left, milliseconds. Josee’s heart pounded against the spike of pain between her ribs and seemed to drive it deeper with each blow. Deeper.
Clanggg!
Deeper.

Why hadn’t she reacted sooner? Where had she gone wrong?

The clanging spike resurrected a vision of torture. A crucifixion. In one of her foster homes, the scene had been depicted in a wall hanging. She was sickened by it, yet comforted by the Savior’s kind gaze. There, amid that household’s iniquity, it was the only comfort she’d received.

Josee cringed. Another hammer blow.

And the serpent stalled; its fiery stare flickered. Was it teasing her, playing a cruel game? No, it seemed repulsed by something.

By a withered seed …

Josee fought the tightness in her throat. “Get away!” She was vibrating with fury and horror. “Go! Leave us alone!”

In a burst of green, the being darted toward her. Scooter rotated once, remaining upright as the coils unwound. Razor-sharp scimitars arched down toward Josee’s eyes, and orbs of poison that looked the size of billiard balls clung to the fangs.

“God!” she cried out like a terrified child. She awaited impact. “God, no.”

The serpent froze. Venom spilled and burned holes in the forest ground cover.

Josee emitted a thin cry of faith. “Please, Jesus … save us.”

A mustard seed …

The eyes of flame faltered once, twice, and then, in an explosion of color that rent the air with the odor of decay, the being came apart and evaporated into the thicket’s shadows. Without ceremony, Scooter landed on the ground. Lying there, vulnerable, he reminded Josee of a prey numbed, yet alive, heart still beating to provide fresh sustenance on demand.

Stahlherz faced the computer that had become his bane. Here at this machine he had hoped to instill terror in the heart of his opponent, yet two moves into it, Marsh Addison had abandoned their chess match.

Crash-Chess-Dummy—the man’s user name said it all.
Oh, isn’t he witty?

Of course, Stahlherz knew the sting of Addison rejection. From a photograph on the shelf over his desk, a man seemed to smirk at him. The man had one hand hooked into a loop of his Wranglers, the other dangled over the handle of a plow.

Chauncey Addison … Chance … Marsh’s father.

Stahlherz dusted the frame with his thumb. Yes, here was the responsible party, this maggot feeder of a man. He had tossed Stahlherz aside. Left him for dead. Stahlherz’s rage dug its talons into his temples, stirred the acids in his stomach.

Bad blood? Now there, my friends, is an understatement
.

Outfitted in a slate gray corduroy jacket with elbow patches, Stahlherz slipped from his basement lair. His false ID was in his pocket, along with his sheathed dagger. The park was only blocks away, but he stopped to load his Discman with an audio book, John Le Carré’s
The Little Drummer Girl
. Full of artistic types and terrorists, the novel mixed politics and the antiestablishment fringe in a heady dose of mayhem.

A classic. An injection of inspiration. ICV would prevail.

Karl Stahlherz held his chin up, striding in defiance of the aches in his
back, the arthritic tightness in his legs. He entered the park from the east, alert for the Professor’s presence. Within their network, no one knew of his and the Professor’s blood ties. True identities were guarded fiercely. As a safety precaution, ICV operated in small, independent cells.

Stahlherz ran gray eyes over the red-stone path. Envisioning his chess table, he moved fingers in midair as though coordinating troops upon his onyx board. Plans were in motion, the waiting nearly over. Moving into position, the chess pieces were mirroring the actions of his physical troops.

ICV—their network of young men and women. Trained and ready.

Over the years he and the Professor had recruited these members from the soil of disillusionment. Mere kids, really, seedlings of desire that had been watered with a will to survive, to shape their world, to cast off the lies of the preceding generation.

Let the social commentators sneer; the power of a unifying vision was not to be denied. Generation X, Y, or Z? Make no mistake, they would make their mark.

He followed the park path, kicked at a loose rock. Tomorrow he’d have another shot at Mr. Marshall Addison. He’d been using the gaming zone confrontations to evaluate the man’s psychological makeup. Used other means, as well. But chess … Ah yes, chess: informer, inquisitor, impartial judge, and jury.