“Come down, please. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “Afraid,” she echoed, and turned her head toward the far end of the room.
Cal mirrored the movement, sickly green light licking across his face. Out of the gloom an oily bloodied spray arced outward to wrap itself around the bright flare. Cal cried out and leapt back, wrenching his sword from its scabbard, wielding it in both hands. There was nothing he could do. The crimson stain invaded the flare aura and altered it, polluted it. And the poor child, writhing in agony, moaned Cal’s name.
He shrieked rage and launched himself toward the source of the red power, Goldie in his wake.
Something rose up out of the darkness there. Something huge and bright-the titanic golden statue of Nebuchadnez-zar’s dream. I knew this must be Primal, and I suspected I already knew the penalty for failing to offer veneration. It raised gleaming arms and the building rocked. I kept my feet with difficulty, but Cal and Goldie, in frantic motion, tumbled to the floor.
It spoke then, twisting thunder into words. “What an amusing novelty you normals are. Except for you, Mr. Goldman, you’re not quite normal, are you? You have… a delicious strangeness about you. You also have a most receptive mind. I wouldn’t have been able to spring this trap without your help.”
With a wordless cry, Goldie flung out his arms and unleashed an explosion of gold-white light in Primal’s face. It met a wall of crimson but was not repelled. Instead, the scarlet ooze seemed to filter Goldie’s power, to stain it, as it had stained the flare’s aura. Then it spat the stuff out again in a vivid pulse aimed directly at Cal. It caught him in a breaking wave, flinging him backward into the room. He rebounded off the wall and crumpled into a heap nearly beneath the flare.
I scrambled to his side, whispering scraps of prayer. Chaos had entered the chamber, voices shouted, thunder rolled, the very walls seemed to shake. I ignored all. By flare light, I could see that Cal lived. His pulse was strong. Before I could check beneath his eyelids, they fluttered and his eyes opened. They focused, not on me, but behind and above me. They filled with the aqua radiance, grew wide and troubled.
“No,” he said.
I twisted to follow his gaze. Above me, the girl hung, her glow strong but tarnished with red. Her body moved as if in a current, and I thought for a moment that it was her pain that Cal was responding to. But when I gazed into her face, I knew the lie of that. Beneath the fathomless eyes her mouth was curved in an unholy smile.
TWENTY-SEVEN
CAL
Ihurt all over and tingled as if I’d connected with an electric fence. But for the first time in what seemed an eternity my mind was clear. Every perception, every sensation, cut like a shard of glass.
I looked up into that face, a face that should have been Tina’s, and saw something fundamentally and inexpressibly alien. This was not Tina, had never been Tina.
“You all right?” Colleen leaned over me, cutting off my view of the flare, her own face barely recognizable in the ripples of light and dark. Howard peered over her shoulder.
The wave of futile bitterness passed. I took up my sword in one hand, grabbed Colleen’s arm with the other, and hauled myself upright, turning toward the front of the room. Primal stood there in a blaze of his own light, flinging out bright spheres. The flares in the room had congregated above him.
It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes. I could now see what Colleen had commented on before-that the flares were tethered to him by a visible web of power. He was drawing on them, sucking up their life to fuel his own.
Goldie was the target of Primal’s volleys. He was huddled in the middle of the room, tucked into himself, rocking back and forth. The fireballs detonated with a fizzing sound, exploding like trick snakes and writhing about him. His golden halo, so bright in the semidarkness, was tinted crimson.
“He’ll kill him,” I said. “He’ll kill Goldie if we don’t get him out of here.”
“What do we do?” Colleen asked.
“Split up. Try to distract Primal. Confuse him. I’ll get Goldie.”
I sheathed my sword and crab-crawled toward him on my hands and knees, using dangling hanks of cable for cover, flattening myself to the floor when slivers of Primal’s light flew too near. I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I reached him. I’d have to trust my instincts-pray there was some way to separate Primal from his power supply.
Your thought is your reality, Doc had said. Colleen had complained that life’s rules had been suspended, and Mary that they had changed so much she no longer knew them. They were right. There were new rules, new laws of nature; perhaps even nature itself was fundamentally changed. Before, if you wanted to set off an explosion, you had to take the indirect route offered by science. You had to manipulate matter. Now, the connective tissue between thought and reality was exposed. And that exposure presented us with a whole new set of tools, a whole new realm of arts and sciences.
New rules, new ways to set off explosions.
I heard a shout from the shadows somewhere near the front of the room. Colleen. A moment later mundane fire flared and rocketed toward Primal on a crossbow bolt. I didn’t see it connect, but Primal let out a roar that sounded like a train wreck and flashed white-hot. The red missiles stopped falling.
I scrambled to Goldie’s side, grabbed him with both hands and shook him as hard as I dared. “Goldie, come on! Get clear. Now.”
He shook his head, cringing as Primal roared again, firing lightning in every direction. “No good. He’s turned me into a boomerang. I could’ve killed you.”
“You didn’t. Goldie, come on. I need you. Clear your head.”
He raised his hands, tangling his fingers in his rampant hair. “He’s in my head, dammit! I’m a fucking puppet!”
I shook him again, cringing as Howard let out a wild howl somewhere in the dark. “Let it go. I have an idea. Take my hand.” I held it out to him.
He raised his eyes to my face. He looked less like a man and more like a wild thing-a satyr surprised in a forest glade. But he obeyed, lacing his fingers into mine. I could feel the power in him, hot and raw and reckless. Darkness and light colliding; converging and separating. I’d had no idea how strong he’d become.
Looking down into his eyes, I drew my sword. “Feed me power,” I told him. “He may have your number, but he doesn’t have mine. Not yet.”
He gripped my hand tighter. “Be sure of this, Cal. Be fucking sure of it.”
“I’m sure.” I stood, hauling him to his feet, and aimed the point of my sword approximately at Primal’s head. “Fire.”
I can’t even begin to describe it. A wild tide of power leapt the physical connection, welded the two of us together, and roared through me like hot lava, scalding every nerve. The sword erupted with it, spewing gold glory at the target I held in sharp focus. We were a cosmic flamethrower-Agni, Lord of Fire. Rage and exultation, pain and ecstasy, tumbled through me. I think I screamed. Maybe we both did.
Primal couldn’t absorb the attack. All he could do was throw up a shield, and he was too late to save himself completely. The blaze of power caught him, spun him around and flung him against the deeply tinted window behind him. A thousand tiny traceries of brilliance raced out from the point of impact, letting in a ruddy glow from outside. The wash of light caught Colleen in a far corner of the room, frozen in the act of reloading her crossbow.
I lowered my sword. It still burned white-hot and vibrated in my hand as if an electrical current crackled through it. Beside me Goldie hummed under his breath, quaking. Chills rolled between us through our entwined fingers.
“Anything left?” I murmured, my eyes still on Colleen. “Nothing,” he panted. “Nothing left.”