New York City
December 19, 5:36 P.M. EST
Toys touched his fingers to the glass, feeling the cool caress of the December wind. Behind him, Gault and the American sat on opposite sides of the big man’s desk, heads bent together in a discussion on logistics for the newest phase of the Ten Plagues Initiative. On the wall a silent flat-screen TV showed a shot from an aerial view of the scene of a gunfight in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. The legend across the bottom of the screen read:
Terrorism?
Below the window where Toys stood, New York was sprawled in gaudy splendor beneath a gibbous moon. Millions of lights. Millions of beating hearts. Toys’ own heart felt like a piece of broken crockery in his chest. As cold as the night and as removed from real humanity as he was up here on the fiftieth floor of the building that the American owned. One of the big man’s many holdings. Here, Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta. The man was immeasurably wealthy. Toys smiled thinly as he mused that he, too, was now wealthy. He had millions of dollars of his own money in numbered accounts. A gift from the American.
So you don’t have to keep sucking on Gault’s tit.
That was how the American had phrased it.
I could leave,
Toys thought.
I could walk out the door, get into a cab, and vanish.
How long, he wondered, before Gault would even realize that he was gone? Then how long would it take Gault, using the vast resources of the Kings, to find him? A week at the most. And what would Gault do? Have him brought back in chains? Forgive him? Kill him?
Toys could not pick which option was most likely. He sighed and leaned his forehead against the glass. Gault had become the King of Plagues in every sense. He was fully invested with the Kings. He was one of
them
, heart and soul.
Which left Toys … where?
He had no idea.
The last four months had given him new definitions for both “heartache”
and “hell.” Although Toys managed to fake interest in the Ten Plagues Initiative, he knew that it didn’t fool Gault. Not completely, anyway. The only comfort, and it was a cold and dubious comfort, was that Gault did not grasp the nature of Toys disapproval. He thought it was cowardice.
Cowardice.
Jesus. Toys wanted to take a knife and rip Gault’s guts out every time he thought about that. Twice in the last month he had come into Gault’s room in the middle of the night and stood over his bed, watching Gault sleep, holding a knife in his sweating palm.
Cowardice?
How could Gault have wandered so far from himself that he could not recognize love?
Not for the first time, Toys wondered if Eris really was some kind of sorceress.
He and Gault barely spoke unless it was about incidental things. A second round of martinis, travel plans. Nothing of consequence.
Gault’s time was taken up playing the role of the King of Plagues. He had entered the world of the Kings with a will, and even though bombings were not under his purview, Gault had actively participated in the planning of the London event. He had also selected Fair Isle. Toys was secretly pleased that the Ebola release had fallen flat.
Rivers of blood my ass,
he mused.
And the woman, Amber Taylor, had dodged away as well.
Bloody good for her.
He knew that although the failures could not be laid at Gault’s feet, they were nonetheless failures connected to his overall plan. The failures were embarrassing to the Goddess as well, and that really pleased Toys.
Now they were poised for the next round. More killings. More death. And still they hadn’t reached the real centerpiece of Gault’s plan.
Toys wondered if they would all drown in a river of blood of their own making.
We deserve it.
The phone rang and the American answered, spoke quietly for a moment, and then hung up.
“I need to deal with something,” said the King of Fear as he lumbered toward the door. “You boys make yourself comfortable.”
He closed the door behind him.
Toys stood by the big picture window and looked out at the New York skyline. This was the fifth of the American’s offices he had visited in the last few months, and he marveled at the fact that despite the differences in locale, each office was decorated identically, down to the bottles in the wet bar, the brand of expensive furniture, and even the art on the walls. He knew that this all made some kind of statement about the man, but he wasn’t sure what that statement’s message was. On the surface it seemed to suggest a mind that possessed a single fixed image of the world, but Toys knew that this was not the case. He wondered if it was more misdirection on the American’s part. A statement intended to cement a certain limited view of who he was into people’s minds.
Behind him, Gault sipped a Scotch and soda, the ice cubes tinkling against his lips.
Toys turned. “There’s still time,” he said.
“Don’t start,” muttered Gault quietly. “I’m not in the mood to have this discussion again.”
“We haven’t
had
this discussion yet. Every time I try to bring it up, you growl at me or storm out of the room. I’m supposed to be your Conscience—”
Gault snorted, which shut Toys up as effectively as a slap across the face.
Toys rubbed his eyes. He felt old and used up. “Oh, bloody hell,” he said sharply. “I’m going to say it anyway.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” warned Gault.
Toys crossed the room and stood in front of Gault.
Gault took a sip, sighed, then said, “Okay. Have your say. Get it out of your system. I suppose I owe you that much.”
Ha,
Toys mused sourly.
If you paid what you owed me, Sebastian, we’ d be thousands of miles away from here and running fast.
Aloud he said, “When we escaped the meltdown in Afghanistan you were too badly injured to walk. I carried you out of there, Sebastian. Carried. On my back.”
“You want a sodding medal? Fine, I’ll buy you one.”
“Hush.” Toys said it softly, and something in his tone made Gault close his mouth on another barb. He gestured with his glass for Toys to continue. “When we escaped and we got onto the medical transport, that was the most frightening time of my life. Not because I thought that they would catch us. No … I was afraid that with everything crashing down I would lose you.”
Gault blinked in what looked to Toys like genuine surprise. “You didn’t lose me,” he said softly.
“Yes, I did. Not then, but since then. In bits and pieces. I lost some of you before, to Amirah. I know you loved her, but you have to admit that I did see through her deception all along. If you had listened to me, things would never have gotten out of hand. I know that I’ve said that before and every time I do you and I have a row about it, but it’s true. I was right about her.”
Gault shrugged and his tone grew harder. “Okay, you were right about her. Bully for you.”
“Given that,” Toys persisted, “why can’t you take a moment and step back from all of this? The Kings, the Ten Plagues, the
Goddess
—all of it. Step back and at least consider whether I might be right again.”
“About Eris?”
“Yes. In a lot of ways she’s as mad as Amirah was.”
“So?”
“I think she
believes
that she is a goddess.”
“Again … so?”
“She isn’t,” Toys said viciously. “She’s a woman who knows that despite good genes and some natural longevity, this is the last blast for her as a sexual icon. Once her beauty really starts to fade, the other Kings will lose interest. Remember that ‘glamour’ is another word for an illusion or spell. That’s what she’s cast. Because she acts the part of the Great Beauty of the Ages, she is taken as such. It’s affectation, and she’s charismatic enough to pull it off. She’s also probably scared out of her mind because she has to see, day by day, that she is nearing that line when, once it is crossed, she will become
ordinary
. A woman. Not a goddess. An old woman.”
“You’re jealous of her,” sneered Gault.
“No. Even I’m not that damaged … and don’t think that you can do me any harm by attacking my sexuality. I’m not conflicted about who I am, Sebastian. I know who I am. Just as I know who you are.”
“And what am I, O wise and mighty Conscience?”
“You’re a fool,” Toys said acidly. “If you were merely naïve and oblivious I could forgive it, but you’re the smartest man I’ve ever known. Ever. So, this refusal to see Eris for who she is, and to refuse to see this Ten Plagues madness for what it is, that’s deliberate and stubborn foolishness.”
“You’re treading on thin ice, Toys, and your time is almost up.”
“When you conceived the Seif Al Din project I objected to it, as you may remember. Not because I’m capable of taking the moral high ground—we both know I’m too thoroughly corrupt for that—but because it wasn’t a good balance of reward and risk. A mistake could have led to a global pandemic, and very nearly did. If it wasn’t for Joe Ledger and the DMS, your mistake would have been the very last one in history.”
“Joe Ledger is a dead man,” sneered Gault. “He slipped us in London, but I’m going to have his guts for garters.”
“Will you listen to yourself? You’re obsessed with him as if he’s the cause of your problems.”
“He is.”
“He isn’t. You’re not a supervillain and he’s not your arch nemesis. This isn’t a sodding comic book.”
“Don’t be insulting.”
Toys sighed and flapped his arms. “Now, here we are again, standing at the brink of another needlessly risky venture. What are the rewards? You want to cripple the Inner Circle? Really? Since when did they mean
anything
to you? Four months ago you’d never heard of them. But then Eris fucked the last bits of common sense out of your head and suddenly you are willing to launch a program that will not only cause countless deaths but could very easily spark conflicts that will tear nations apart. Why? What do you think you’ll accomplish with that?”
Gault said nothing. He sipped his drink and watched Toys with hooded eyes.
“Shall I tell you then?” asked Toys.
“Oh, by all means. Show me how smart
you
are.”
“This isn’t about being smart, Sebastian, so don’t try to turn it into a
contest to see whose brain weighs more. I
know
you’re smarter than me. You’re smarter than almost everyone. You’re just not as smart as you think you are.” Toys stepped closer. “You want to rise above your human weaknesses, Sebastian. Just as Eris wants to rise above the truth that she must inevitably age, you want to rise about the truth that you can be hurt. You’re both playacting at being gods because you can’t
stand
the thought that you are human. Flawed, limited humans.”
Gault finished the last of his drink and set the glass down on the American’s desk. “Go to hell,” he said softly, then shook his head. “No …
rot
in hell.”
He turned toward the door and Toys laid his hand gently on Gault’s arm.
“Please, Sebastian … I’m begging you. Don’t
do
this.”
Sebastian Gault hit Toys in the face. A single wickedly fast punch that caught Toys in the mouth, bursting his lips against his teeth. Toys staggered back, clamping his hands to his bleeding mouth, shocked into a horrified and broken silence. Blood welled from between his fingers and dripped onto his shirtfront.
Gault looked down at his own fist as if surprised that it had just done that. “Rot in hell,” he said again. Quietly, without emphasis, his voice as dead as his eyes.
He turned and left the room.
Toys sank slowly to his knees, blood running in lines down his chin and splashing on the floor. He caved in around his pain. Not the pain of torn lips and mashed gums, but the red howling ache in his chest.
He squeezed his eyes shut, and wept.