‘Hey, you!’ he shouted – he wasn’t sure if he spoke in Ronan or English; he was too furious to care.
The Seron, so intent on reaching Garec, ignored him at first, but as Mark started shouting obscenities at him he finally turned.
‘Come get me, you ugly motherhumper!’ Mark cried, his feet ankle-deep in the fjord. ‘I’m not armed – look!’ He discarded Howard’s Gore-tex coat and peeled his old red sweater over his head, leaving himself bare-chested, with a thin coat of perspiration despite the cold. ‘C’mon, ugly rutter!’ he shouted again, jumping up and down on the balls of his feet. ‘I’m right here waiting, you frigging bastard!’
The Seron remained low the ground, crouched, his eyes fixed on the raving man only a few paces away.
‘Yeah, yeah, you’re so tough,’ Mark growled. ‘Come get me, you pussy. Stop stalking around like my sister’s cat and get down here.’ Mark flexed his arms, not entirely convinced he had made the right decision, but too far down this path to change his mind now. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ he shouted, an instant before the Seron pounced.
For a fraction of a second, Mark considered standing his ground. His rage was so overwhelming that he was certain he could beat the soulless half-human in a straight fight, but something echoed in his mind, that same voice he had imagined speaking to him in the Blackstones when he had nearly frozen to death, the voice that had awakened him when he had fallen asleep at the wheel on the Long Island Expressway. ‘You can’t win,’ it said, and with just a hair’s width separating them, Mark ducked beneath the Seron’s grasp and dived into the black water.
He ignored the cold and kicked hard towards the bottom, thankful the water was deep right up to the shoreline, then, once he was thirty or forty feet out, he surfaced long enough to catch his breath. The Seron was paddling diligently after him.
‘I’m over here,’ he shouted, splashing a handful of dark water in the Seron’s direction. ‘You almost had me there. I was worried, I tell you.’ He let the Seron get within an arm’s length before slipping beneath the surface again. This time, on his way to the bottom, Mark reversed and gripped the warrior’s ankles. He gave a firm tug, not enough to drown the creature, but sufficient to pull the Seron’s head beneath the surface for a moment; it sent a powerful message. Mark knew he would have to surface and tempt the soldier again, or it might make the decision to turn and flee back towards shore.
Bobbing up through the darkness, Mark called again, ‘I’m over here, dummy.’ He had moved further away from their camp, from Gilmour’s fire he judged the distance at about seventy-five feet, not yet enough to get the job done. He listened for sounds of the Seron’s breathing: laboured and quick. ‘Are you getting tired? That’s a lot of armour you have on. I know I’m tired, and I’m just in boots and leggings. So, you must be wearing down.’
The Seron was starting to worry; he could tell. He swam closer to the struggling warrior. ‘I tell you what – why don’t you take off that leather vest and your chain-mail, and we can make a real contest out of this.’
The Seron, though obviously fatigued, lashed out with a fist like a hammer.
Mark took the glancing blow on the temple and saw stars for a moment. He let his rage numb the pain. ‘Good punch, old man. I actually saw the lights of Denver that time.’ He swam a few paces away. ‘Now go ahead. Take your time. It’s all right, I’m not going anywhere.’
The Seron ripped and tore at the heavy leather vest, then slipped out of his chain-mail, allowing it to sink to the bottom of the great inland cleft. The Malakasian killer seemed energised by his new buoyancy and growled a warning at Mark.
Watching him come, Mark gave his own warning, a quiet affirmation of what he was about to do. This was no parking-lot fight, throwing a few punches until someone broke it up or the police came: this was everything he had believed could never happen to him. He had never thought he would hate in this way – yet he was about to kill this thing in cold blood.
‘So be it, rutter. Come get me,’ he said as he slowly backstroked into even deeper water. Gilmour’s bonfire looked like a lighthouse as Mark dived deep and waited. Let the sonofabitch wonder. Once he was confident the Seron had dived after him several times – he wanted him struggling for breath – Mark moved with the fluid grace of an underwater hunter, slowly coming up beneath the creature’s legs. He grabbed one firmly with both hands and pulled hard for the bottom, releasing the creature at about twenty feet.
He surfaced, taking deep breaths, and checked his position against Gilmour’s fire. He could hear the Seron, grunting and wheezing in dismay, begin paddling back towards shore – Mark thought how curious it was that the supposedly reckless killers would cling so ardently to life when they realised they had been beaten.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ he whispered and slipped beneath the surface once more. Three times he pulled the coughing, spitting Seron warrior down, thinking of Brynne. I love you, she had said, mimicking Mark’s own clumsy admission. Now he was about to get some revenge, a sliver, anyway. ‘Three down, and I am keeping score, you bastard,’ he shouted.
Rage at the thought of Brynne, freezing cold and sinking beneath the waves in Orindale Harbour, warmed him. Had she called out to him, treading water as long as she could in hopes he would come paddling over to rescue her? These questions tumbled through Mark’s mind as he inhaled deeply and pounced on the Seron’s back. Down and down they spiralled, the creature fighting furiously, but Mark wrapped his arms around the Seron’s neck and took the blows until he felt the Malakasian stiffen, then go entirely limp.
Mark couldn’t see in the black depths of the fjord, but he felt the body bob towards the surface for a moment, then, trapped by the cold and pressure of nearly fifty feet of water, spiral lazily towards the bottom.
He swam towards the shore and pulled himself onto land, his body trembling with cold as reaction set in. Blood ran from his nose, and one eye was beginning to swell. He didn’t speak as he strode across their camp, past the comforting warmth of Gilmour’s fire to the little catboat he had stolen and rigged for their trip along the Ravenian Sea. He reached beneath his pack and withdrew the double-bladed battle-axe he had found in Orindale. He crossed back to where Garec was binding the Seron’s wrists and ankles, ignoring Garec when he asked, ‘Are you all right, Mark?’
Gilmour whispered, ‘Don’t.’
It was too late.
Mark hacked viciously into the first prisoner’s neck. Blood splashed from the wound, dousing him. He took the second Seron while Gilmour was reaching out at him, but the spell on the old man’s lips was a moment too late. Mark left the axe embedded in the Seron warrior’s skull.
Mark barely heard his friends shouting. As he stumbled towards the fire, he was backlit by flames: a homicidal lunatic on a killing spree. Then Gilmour’s spell wrapped around him and he collapsed into the dirt beside the fire.
‘Do you like snow peas?’
‘What? I’m sorry. What?’ Jennifer jumped, startled. ‘What did you say?’ She turned to find the store manager standing beside her.
‘I asked if you like snow peas.’ He smiled. ‘You seem to be interested in the frozen peas, but I have some nice snow peas, fresh in, over in the produce section.’ He gestured towards the rear of the supermarket. ‘It’s eighty-nine cents for a half pound.’
‘Uh, no, I mean, thank you, but no – I’m just looking for some-’ Jennifer stammered to a halt. She had been replaying her conversation with Steven, and wondering where she could hide, someplace that no one would think of finding her, or even associate with her. A madman – no, a demon, worse than a demon – was looking for her, reading the thoughts and memories of people from her neighbourhood, her friends. They all knew where she went; Silverthorn certainly wasn’t safe, not for long, anyway. Eventually, he would find someone who knew Bryan and Meg had a condominium up here, and then he – it – whatever it was would be on its way.