As if to prove her right, Frik rushed toward Arthur, who prepared to block the Afrikaner’s charge. Too late, Peta noticed that Frik had grabbed a vase filled with roses and baby’s breath and flung it ahead of himself. Arthur’s blocking punch shattered the crystal, sending water and flowers and splinters of glass flying everywhere. And blood. Arthur’s blood. Spurting from his knuckles.
That was enough for Peta. She wasn’t about to let Arthur be annihilated. The others could stand by out of respect for his wish to deal with Frik on his own terms; she couldn’t. There was no way that she could endure it—or live with herself—if he died again. This time for real. She dashed forward, ready to attack Frik.
And stopped.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose. She felt as if something had hit her at the base of her neck and a jolting shiver ran down her spine and up again.
Disoriented, she turned around.
The lab was bathed in an eerie glow, the way light looks from twenty feet underwater. She tried to call out to the men. No sound emerged. She faced them and tried again. This time her voice rang out loud and clear, but the fight claimed their full attention.
Pressing his advantage, Frik grabbed Arthur by the shoulders and spun, hurling his former friend over a plush leather chair and into an antique coffee table. He threw the chair out of the way and dove. Arthur was ready. Catching Frik with his feet, he propelled him through the air, to land with a thud by the sliding glass doors to the helipad.
With a handspring, Arthur was back on his feet, running toward his opponent. As Frik struggled to stand, Arthur kicked him in the chest, sending him crashing through the closed half of the glass door.
“That one’s for Simon,” Arthur yelled.
Cheering, Keene and Ray and McKendry moved toward the helipad. Spurred on by their support, Arthur started forward. Through the commotion and the shattered glass, Peta could see Frikkie roll to his knees and come up throwing something. The Grenadian shielded himself from a shower of pebble-sized chunks of glass.
Frik, backing up onto the wide roof, motioned for Arthur to come and get him.
Hoping that the other three men would have the sense to make sure the right man won, Peta started after them. Their attention was focused on Arthur and Frikkie, rolling near the low parapet at the edge of the roof, first one on top, then the other.
She looked back into the lab.
The artifact had transformed into a single brilliant, shapeless white mass. She saw what might be the outline of a face in the glow as the object left the table and began to float, infinitely slowly, toward the tall ceiling. The image of the strange mural in the undersea cave rose in her mind. Was this what the painter had been drawing?
Midway between the table and the ceiling, the device ceased its motion and hovered.
The lights in the suite flickered and went out, leaving only the green glow of emergency fluorescents. In the moment before their screens popped like balloons pricked by a dozen pins, she saw on the security monitors that downstairs in the casino, machines were wildly spewing out money.
Glancing to the side through Ray’s wall of glass, Peta watched the city lights of Las Vegas blink out. A wave of black washed over the neon city, leaving Las Vegas Boulevard in darkness. An instant later, almost as if it had been timed, fountains of sparkling red and orange and yellow shot from the roofs of the other casinos, starting from the southern end of the strip at Mandalay Bay, rushing toward the Daredevil Casino and beyond.
In homage to the midnight hour and the start of 2001—the true millennium—the nine minutes of planned fireworks crackled and flashed and boomed from the Strip’s megahotels.
Firework mines thundered in quick white bursts that deafened her and drowned out the sound of her shouts. Rockets rose into the sky, bursting into sparkling blue and red and gold and white star-flowers.
She looked up at the artifact.
As if it had waited for her attention, the glowing orb started to move again, this time toward her. Like a living thing, it floated inches from her face and, impossibly, passed right through the vast wall of windows. She turned to follow its progress and spotted it, one small, unblinking light against the backdrop of flaming, sparkling fireworks that showered Las Vegas. Traveling southeast, slowly at first but gaining speed, it left a trail like a miniature comet drifting through the desert sky.
Peta stood transfixed until she could no longer differentiate between the orb and the stars. When it was out of sight, she turned toward the door that led to the helipad. The Daredevils, their battle abandoned, stood in awed contemplation of what they had witnessed.
Characteristically, Keene was the first to break the silence. “I wish Selene could have seen that.”
And Simon, Peta thought.
“Maybe she did see it, Josh,” McKendry said. “Anybody want to take a guess at what it was?”
“It was mine, that’s what it was,” Frik said.
“By all means go and get it.” Arthur’s voice held no antagonism. His body language indicated that his desire to fight had left with the vanishing object.
“Do you think, maybe, this proves we aren’t alone in the universe?” Ray asked, a surprising note of longing in his voice.
We had it in our hands—the cure for the ills of the world—and we let go of it, Peta thought as the lights came back on in the suite. She knew without looking that the monitors were back in operation, and that downstairs in the casino and out on the Strip, it was business as usual. “And so the world goes on,” she said.
“Time for our meeting?” Frik was apparently trying to resume command of the situation.
“We’ll meet, all right, but without you.” Arthur took a step toward him. “You’re out of here.”
The others chorused their agreement.
Frik didn’t move. Almost in pantomime, Ray walked over to Arthur’s side. Frik backed up to the exit. “You’ll be sorry, you bastards.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Arthur said. “What do you think, guys?” His glance included Peta.
Reserving judgment on the issue of whether or not she wanted to be one of the boys, she joined the Daredevils as they walked Frikkie out of the penthouse.
Epilogue
GULF OFPARIA, JANUARY1, 2001
At the base of the abandoned oil rig in the Dragon’s Mouth, off the coast of Trinidad, Manny Sheppard cut his engine. In the absolute quiet of the Caribbean night, he watched a strange glow hovering over the water.
Beneath it, a rippling began, like waves from a dropped stone. Once, twice, and again, as if in a three-gun salute to Obeah, and to the dead and finally buried, the glow faded and returned. Then it began a slow ascent into the heavens.
About the Authors
Kevin J. Anderson has written twenty-six national bestsellers and has been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and theScience Fiction Chronicle Readers’ Choice Award. He lives in Monument, Colorado. Janet Berliner, author of many novels, including the Bram Stoker Award–winningChildren of the Dusk (with George Guthridge), lives in Las Vegas. She has also edited many anthologies, includingPeter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn . Matthew J. Costello lives north of New York City. He is the author of numerous novels, includingUnidentified , a recent Literary Guild Selection, and has teamed up with F. Paul Wilson on two previous novels. F. Paul Wilson has written more than twenty novels, including the bestsellerThe Keep and the Repairman Jack novels. Twice winner of the Prometheus Award for best libertarian fiction, he lives in Wall, New Jersey.