Avenging Fury Read online

  At eighty-plus years the biogeneticist (among his several areas of legitimate as well as peripheral, witch-doctor-style expertise) was in crackerjack condition. Strict diet, Eastern physical disciplines, periodic injections composed of living animal and human embryos. Mysterious transfusions were rumored. Hyperbaric chambers. All that—and for all Skarbeck knew, the ritual sacrifice of young virgins both male and female—kept Woolwine at the top of his game.

  One of his specialties had been to take natural-born killers and improve their lethality. Through electrical and pharmaceutical interventions he teased, twisted, rearranged brain dendrites or entire masses of lobe. He could hypnotize a timber rattlesnake and wear it around his neck like a lei to pool parties.

  And, most useful to Mordaunt, he had devised an effective means of separating Eden Waring from her doppelganger.

  “Almost finished here?” Skarbeck said to the relaxed Woolwine as a needle thinner than a human hair was withdrawn from below an armpit. “We need to talk.” He was still uneasy, with a prickling premonition of a disaster in motion.

  When they were alone and Woolwine was sitting up on the massage table, having pulled on a loose-fitting buttonless peasant shirt with a rough weave, he shook his head and said, “I have no idea of what happened to the Great One. Although I don’t think we ought to presume that he is, ah, deceased. ‘Death’ as we know and experience it is not a reality that applies to our, ah, employer.”

  “Oh, no?” Skarbeck said dourly. He described what he had seen on the surveillance tapes, and told Woolwine about the predawn heist of the were-beast’s remains, which were slowly hardening in their glass teardrop.

  “Was it him, do you think?” he asked Woolwine.

  “Quite possibly,” Woolwine replied, frowning.

  “So he’s dead, all right.”

  “Of that, as I said, we can’t be certain.”

  “Then we had damn well better get him back. It back. Whatever.”

  “Where were the, ah, remains, taken?”

  “I’m working on that. Nothing so far. But the girl probably knows.”

  “Eden Waring, obviously, is to be approached with the utmost caution.”

  “That’s where you come in, Dr. Woolwine. Although you didn’t handle her so well the last time, up there in Plenty Coups.”

  Skarbeck saw an expression of dismay in Woolwine’s eyes as he slipped on his mirror-finish, titanium-rimmed space cadet sunglasses.

  “I would not care to be in a position of trying to control the power of the Avatar. Her dpg, that’s another matter.”

  “The replica who calls herself Gwen?”

  Woolwine lifted his face toward the clouds. Skarbeck saw, like a circling eyespot, a hawk reflected on one metallic lens of the wraparound sunglasses.

  “She may prove to be more valuable to us than Eden Waring herself.” Woolwine nodded approval of this observation, then paused to pour himself a healthy cocktail the color of pond scum from a thermos. Skarbeck refused an offer to sample the drink with a curt shake of his head. Woolwine sipped, made a savoring sound with his lips and tongue, and got down from the massage table. “But right now I have only the vaguest idea of Gwen’s whereabouts. Come with me, General Skarbeck. There is something you should see.”

  Skarbeck accompanied the resident genius to the next level of Lincoln Grayle’s house, Chuck Berry’s rollicking “Run Rudolph Run” surrounding them on hidden speakers.

  “Where are we going?”

  “There is a slight chance Gwen may have returned by now.”

  “Returned from where?”

  “Jubilation County, Georgia. If indeed she did manage to get there yesterday.”

  “It’s only about a four-hour flight from Atlanta.”

  Woolwine chuckled.

  “I’m speaking of Jubilation County as it was on a particular day in the summer of 1926.”

  Woolwine paused before a locked door at one end of a wide hall, beyond which was another terrace and a pale vista of mountains that appeared as remote as a moonscape.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Skarbeck said. “Time travel?”

  “Well, yes. Doppelgangers are adept at it. But to make matters just a little more difficult for our resourceful Gwen, the Jubilation County she was seeking lies in a parallel universe, one in which a single day is repeating endlessly. A universe, you might say, that developed a bad case of the hiccups.”

  In response to Skarbeck’s stony expression Woolwine placed a finger to his lips and with a card key unlocked the door to Gwen’s suite.

  “Actually the difficulty factor in finding that particular ‘Jubilation County’ was, as you can imagine, increased exponentially.” Woolwine lowered his voice to a near whisper before stepping inside, motioning for the General to follow. “Also, the act of inserting herself into a microregion of such a complex nature, potentially disrupting the symmetry of repetitive time, might create incalculable havoc. The mathematics of complexity theory are, I admit, beyond my ken.”

  To Skarbeck the multilaureled geneticist and accomplished mind-bender might as well have been babbling in tongues. When he followed Woolwine into the spacious Japanese-style suite, his displeasure was transmuted to amazement: Gwen the dpg was seated at a small writing table with folded hands, head tilted forward in contemplation of a red crystal skull. He blinked, then realized that he was seeing only a holographic likeness.

  “What the hell—”

  Woolwine blocked his further progress with a cautioning hand.

  “No, no, don’t disturb it.”

  “It?”

  “Or the zero-point energy field around Gwen’s image, which is her point of reference once she is ready to return to this little corner of the continuum. Provided she is not enmeshed in a sticky paradox. And her return involves, perhaps, the additional burden of a hitchhiker.”

  “What are you talking about? Who or what was she after in Jubilation County?”

  “The feminine half of the soul of Mordaunt.”

  Skarbeck felt a disturbing tingle at the back of his neck. He rubbed slowly, unable to look away from the intimidating red skull with its flashy grin.

  “What is that boogeyboo?”

  “A source of polarized occult power that is, not to quibble, stupendous. Without the crystal skull I doubt Gwen could have made it out of this homely harmonic, let alone to another, plasma-shielded cell of our universe. Assuming she is there now, once again in the flesh, and not somewhere irretrievable in space/time, ricocheting at the Planck energy level as if she were in a cosmic pinball machine.” He shrugged. “A brave girl. But so many ifs.” Woolwine looked unwell. He licked his lips and took deep breaths. “And now you know as much as I,” he said to Skarbeck. “I really must quit the room. I have a pacemaker, and the vortex spiral in here is redlining me.”

  “The feminine half of his soul? What sort of psycho-babble bullshit are you—”

  “We had best hope that it’s all true, inasmuch as we may never set eyes on him, I mean the masculine aspect of Mordaunt, again.”

  “I’m working on it. Too soon to make that judgment.”

  “Nevertheless—” Woolwine, gasping a little, made for the door. Skarbeck followed, closing the door behind him. In the hall, Yuletide sentiments that no one had had the nerve to deprogram caught up with them: Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band rocking out with “Sock It To Me Santa.” Woolwine gave his lungs a lift and smiled thinly. “Nevertheless, Gwen may prove to be our only hope of, ah, continuing employment, with access to Mordaunt’s cornucopia. I admit I have rather enjoyed the rarefied heights of the stinking rich.”

  Skarbeck included himself with a nod.

  “But I’m thinking we don’t need either of them. Not as long as we still have Eden Waring.”

  “The Avatar. Yes. Marvelous powers. Unfortunately, there is no darkness in her.”

  Skarbeck studied cameos of his own face, reflected in metallic lenses below Woolwine’s sweaty brow; there was a vertical groove deep
in Skarbeck’s forehead like a fault line over the epicenter of his disaffection. “There’s darkness in us all, Dr. Woolwine. What the hell, you’re a Freudian—”

  “No, no, I’m not a Follower. I invented my own discipline: psychoneuroendocrinology.”

  “That so? Anyway, it’s the self-destructive urge, the gambler’s secret desire to lose, the ‘bad twin’ syndrome—well, she’s already got one of those. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t tell me Eden Waring is any different from the rest of us. Being the Avatar doesn’t automatically promote her to fucking sainthood. If the worst has happened to our good friend and patron Lincoln Grayle, then it will be up to you to dig into Eden’s psyche and wake up whatever hound of hell is lurking there. On our leash, of course. Whatever you call yourself, you’ve got the know-how.”

  Woolwine said with a nervous wince, “But I’m not so sure that I—”

  “Don’t kid me. I’m a big fan of your work. And I’ll remind you that I have plans of my own, no matter what condition Mordaunt might be in right now. I have no intention of abandoning them because of a little setback. Who knows how much help the Waring girl could be to us.”

  “I only meant to say that attempting to manipulate Eden Waring could result in a phase transition of our own cosmic cell—in other words, a severe case of the hiccups.”

  Skarbeck showed him a flash of an edged smile.

  “But you’ll do it anyway, won’t you? Not just for the money. When it comes to crunch time for hotshots like you and me, it’s all about the size of our balls.”

  ABOARD THE STELLA SALAMIS • 29° 48’ N 117°

  13’ W • 1340 HOURS ZULU

  The rolling seas of Baja California had been a little too rough to make sleep easy or profitable. After three hours or so Tom Sherard gave up the effort and left the small passenger cabin he occupied to prowl the ship with bleary eyes and a brooding mind, winding up on the bridge with the salt wind in his stiffened face. Starkly tired but uninvigorated by the elements. Wondering hopelessly how it could have gone any differently with Eden and himself, always returning to the same conclusion.

  He had taken Eden because she wanted to be taken, and because his emotions were overcharged; every moment with her after he’d found her footloose on a desert road had had a hallucinatory vagueness about it. Her mother’s lovely eyes and her mother’s strange magic invested in the quaking, exhausted girl. Control of himself had always been an absolute in Sherard’s life, a personal bulwark that had stood no chance against the force of his blood at their first intimate touching. Interesting, he thought, how much of what one assumed was inviolable in one’s nature or character could be demolished by a fleeting look in a young woman’s eyes.

  A look he was sure would be there again, the next time he saw her.

  He was willing to be hard on himself now, after some rather fatuous remarks to Eden that hadn’t served either of them too well. But what was the point of going down that twisted road; it was done. Sex with Eden, physically so satisfying, had left him tremulous inside, a kind of moral palsy to give it a name.

  The breadth of the sea, with the Baja peninsula a tan scrawl far to port beneath lowering, green-black clouds, was intimidating to Sherard. He felt a pinch of dread at each impact of tons of water breaking over the bow of the ship, which now seemed insubstantial in such risky seas. Spindrift glazed topside surfaces and tasted bitter on his lips.

  Out of his element here.

  So he’d betrayed himself, not to mention Bertie, but still he wanted Eden. Her scent and bodily warmth, his own sensual greed, was too much with him.

  The slow uplift and plunge of the freighter, bow pointing down toward unimaginable deeps.

  Sherard kept his footing, but there was nausea high in his throat. He wanted, wanted Eden—adrift without her, as lonely as he’d ever felt in his life. The full and only truth. Own up to it and get on. For now his hastily arranged voyage served two purposes. They soon would be well rid of a monster. Meanwhile, in relative solitude, he would have a few days to pull together his scattered resources.

  Regain his own trust.

  But there was the guilt, always the burrowing-in guilt, at not fulfilling his self-appointed role as guardian to two beloved young women. Leoncaro’s express desire had been for Sherard to see a terrifying job through to the end. All right, then: the Magician had left the building—rather, his theatrical haunt—clinging to the side of a mountain. Leaving behind those who had served him. God only knew how many of those there were, what horror they represented.

  Eden was nearly alone back there in Las Vegas. She and Bertie had the Blackwelder people watching over them, to be sure, and Sherard thought that Eden would spend most of her time at hospital. He had left Eden strict instructions—too strict, it seemed to him now, curt perhaps. And it might have been a mistake not to awaken her when he was leaving.

  If he knew Eden—sometimes he thought he did—she just might be resenting that. In light of their new, obsessively smoldering, contentious relationship.

  The horizon looked darker to Sherard. The weather seemed to be worsening as the Stella Salamis steamed south toward the Middle America Trench.

  Bloody hell.

  LAS VEGAS • 5:15 P.M.

  With the General fully occupied and planning to be out of the house for the evening, Harlee had invited her crew over for a swim, some goofing, a gabfest, and catered barbecue.

  Five girls. They stretched and preened and tanned and did their nails. All of them had the patter and midteen exuberance of Harlee herself, and all were wrenchingly gorgeous in their next-to-nothing thongs as they lounged around the blue Chiclet of a swimming pool. On his way out Skarbeck paused to look them over from an upstairs arcade. My house is your house, sweet darlings.

  He was able to put a couple of names with the correct faces and bodies. Devon was the tall one with copper tresses spilling over freckled shoulders like ribbon waterfalls . Her wide-set gray eyes were as cool, as mystical, as Irish fog. Bare-breasted, she was doing Qigong exercises. What an eyeful. Then there was Honeydew, with that shockwave of blond hair, three shades of blond. As fresh, nervy, and playful as a baby tiger. Except for graceful Devon, they were noisy but not unmannered, punctuating fragments of cross-talk with little shrieks of glee or a disparaging groan. Speckling the scene with argot. Ginky. Flam. Sloth. Cryp. Random. Supa-dupa.

  Harlee had deflected most of Skarbeck’s questions about her crew: where they all came from, etc. Just as she politely but firmly deflected questions about herself. For all he knew she might have walked, fully formed, out of the hard glitter of desert sunrise one morning not long ago. Ignorance of her origins made his possession of Harlee feel less secure, but it was an unspoken part of her bargain with him, so he let it go.

  He assumed that most if not all of Harlee’s crew were attached to men like himself, the real pros of the high castles, the fantastical facades of Vegas that lined the Strip, otherwise known as death row for the self-indulgent. Their expensive casual clothes, running heavily to hip-hop, cholo, or tough chic—bandanas, leathers, swagger chains, gaucho pants, designer denim—their jewelry, and the cars they drove said that money was no concern of theirs. All they needed to do was ask for it.

  When Skarbeck lingered a little too long, unabashedly voyeuristic, the sybarites noticed and acknowledged him—all save oblivious Devon in her free-flowing meditative state—Harlee having the last hand wave and greeting, passing on an airborne kiss, subtle dismissal in the gesture.

  As soon as the General had left the premises and Devon concluded her Qigong patterns, frivolous talk ended and Harlee’s crew gathered around her.

  All expressions serious, solemn. No tears, but Flicka, a Finn-Indonesian mix of wonderful genes, was biting her full underlip, which resembled a piece of exotic, peeled fruit. Harlee remained on her feet, moving among her huddled crew like a lioness with cubs to feed.

  Reese was the first to speak, and finished speaking with an apprehensive shudder.

&nb
sp; “Is it, like, for real? What we saw? He’s dead?”

  Nic looked up from a golden nail on the toe she was fondling and said curtly, “Reese, chill. Honey, the Great One can’t die.” She recrossed beanpole legs styled for jaunting. Her dark eyes were rudely painted; in her casual carnality she was as scary as a young tarantula.

  “Can’t D-I-E,” Devon repeated in a near whisper from the stillness of her lotus position.

  “That’s right,” Harlee affirmed. “But no shit, he’s in a tough spot.”

  “Do you think he’s hurt?” Honeydew asked anxiously.

  “What do you think?” Nic said. Her eyes had a splendid radiance in the light off the surface of the pool. “The bitch Avatar dropped half a ton of molten glass all over him.”

  Reese shuddered again and hugged herself. Her eyes were the size of moonflowers in a petite face. She was still beaded from a dip; her dark wet hair curled down her back like swimming snakes. “But w-what will they do with him now?”

  Harlee said, “Some storm troopers moved in early this morning, scooped up the glass mound he’s buried in, and made off with it. Bronc is trying to find out who they were and where they took the Great One.”

  “ ‘Storm troopers’ be kinda out-of-date,” Nic reminded her.

  “Paramilitaries, whatever. Big woo.”

  “Crucis Aurea,” Devon said wisely, her eyes focused on a patch of sky overlaid with the celestial gold of Renaissance art.

  “We won’t bother with them,” Harlee advised her crew. “They’re too hard to find anyway. But I think you all know who we’re going after.”

  “The Avatar?” Flicka ventured, and hunched her shoulders warily.

  “Not gettin’ soft, are you?” Nic said. Very PMS today, for which the others usually forgave her.

  “Oh, fuck you, Nic. It’s just that she’s, you know, volatile.”

  “But human,” Harlee reminded them.

  “Girl, you don’t tell me to fuck myself,” Nic said to Flicka.

  Flicka’s cheeks reddened. “You are so not the Terminator you think you are.”