“Gia, how could you?”
She burst into tears. “How could I not?”
Just then the doorbell rang. Jack looked past Gia, saw Vicky run to the front door and peek through the sidelight.
“It’s Tom!”
She pulled open the door and let him in. He held up a white paper bag.
“Hi, everybody! I come bearing gifts!”
“What?” Vicky cried.
“Donuts!”
As Vicky cheered, Jack muttered, “Oh, shit.”
* * *
-44:46
Well, at least the kid’s glad I’m here, Tom thought as he started down the hall.
And what a hall. What a house. He hadn’t been able to appreciate it that first night—not with all the turmoil. But now… look at the fine wood, the Persian rugs, the antique light fixtures… had to be worth millions. He’d got the impression that Gia was a commercial artist, making ends meet but with little left over. How did she afford this? He’d have to wheedle the story out of her.
Maybe the donuts would help. He’d had an inspiration on the way over: Arrive with goodies in hand. He considered it a truism that the surest way to a mother’s heart was through her kid. Get the kid to like you and you enhance your chances twofold, maybe threefold.
So he’d asked his cabby to find a bakery or donut shop along the way. He’d stopped at a place on the East Side called Muller’s. The donuts looked so good that Tom had scarfed down a cruller on the way over.
Vicky snatched the bag from his fingers and darted into the sitting room. Further on, in the kitchen at the end of the hall, Jack and Gia stood facing each other. Both looked upset.
Jack pointed to him. “Wait right there.”
The words, the tone, the gesture took him aback. Who was Jack to order him about in Gia’s house? But one look at Gia’s puffy face and he knew something was wrong. Still wrong.
What had happened? He hadn’t exactly expected to find a party going on, but this seemed like a wake. Only Vicky was in good spirits.
Jack turned away from him and back to Gia. They seemed to be in a serious, almost heated, discussion.
Tom edged closer.
“I can’t believe you did this without telling me,” Jack was saying.
“I knew you’d try to stop me.”
“Damn right I would have! Now there are two people in jeopardy instead of one!”
Gia sobbed and the sound angered Tom. Jack was being rough on her. What was he so exercised about?
“I know! Don’t you think I know that? But what was I to do? If I had a chance to save her, I had to take it.”
“You should have come to me first!”
“I couldn’t.” She shook her head. “I know I should have. Don’t ask me why… I just couldn’t.”
What was this about? What had she done?
Tom had come even with the sitting room. He glanced in and saw the kid sitting on the edge of a chair, kicking her legs, oblivious to everything but the TV and the sugar-coated donut she was munching.
“All right,” Jack said. “Let’s see it.”
“No, I—”
“Please. This isn’t just about you and me. There’s the baby to think of.”
Gia looked like she was again going to refuse to show him whatever they were talking about, but must have changed her mind. Because, without another word, she turned and raised the back of her T-shirt.
Tom gasped and felt his knees dissolve when he saw the black band spread across her back. He had to prop himself against the door molding.
Sweet Jesus, it was almost halfway around her body!
Jack stared at it, then his head dropped. Gia pulled her shirt back down.
The light dawned for Tom.
No! A horrendous situation had become infinitely worse. He could comprehend a mother’s love for her child, but weren’t there limits? He’d heard of mothers throwing themselves in front of a car to save their child, but that was impulse. This had been premeditated.
Initially her daughter was going to be shunted off into the Great Unknown. Now Gia was going to be sent there instead.
It made no sense. Either way she loses her daughter, but this way she loses Jack too. Not to mention this exquisite townhouse.
“Only one thing to do then,” he heard Jack say.
In one swift, smooth move he stepped to the counter, pressed his hand into a saucepan, and returned with his palm coated in some thick brown fluid. He then lifted the back of Gia’s shirt and slipped his hand under. Gia reacted as if he’d splashed her with acid—her back arched, her eyes widened, and then she began to cry.
What the hell was going on here?
“Now it’s settled,” Jack said.
Gia turned and pounded her fists once against his chest.
“No! I can’t lose you! Not now!”
Jack grabbed her wrists. “You didn’t really think I was going to let this happen to you, did you? You three are more important than anything else I can think of.”
“Turn around! I want to see!”
Jack complied, lifting his shirt and revealing the Stain. Gia threw her arms around him and sobbed.
Stunned, awed, Tom watched the two of them. He couldn’t imagine doing something like that—not even for his kids, let alone a woman. Especially the women he’d married. He could see no upside. And the downside was unthinkable.
He repressed a shudder. To be whisked away to some unknown place, never to be seen again… the idea of risking that—embracing it—for someone else was beyond him…
What planet were these two from?
Again those feelings of longing and envy he’d experienced in B. B. King’s. Their devotion to each other… the way Jack hadn’t hesitated, not for a heartbeat, to place himself between Gia and the Lilitongue. He’d given it no more thought than slapping a mosquito he’d spotted on her arm.
Tom shook his head. Inconceivable…
And then he thought of something else: Who would do that for him?
Vicky had Gia, and Gia had Jack. But Tom could think of no one who’d step up like that for him.
The realization staggered him.
No one… I’ve got no one.
That chill angst washed over him as it had last night. Was there one person in this world who gave a damn if he lived or died?
Surely not his brother. He glanced Jack’s way and saw him glaring over Gia’s quaking shoulder.
He heard Gia moan, “What did we ever do to deserve this?”
Tom knew the terrible answer: I came into your lives.
All his fault. He’d brought the Lilitongue up from the depths. He’d been the one who wanted to escape…
Tom felt himself wilting under Jack’s stare. What did the man want?
He doesn’t expect me to step up and take it from him, does he? Is he crazy?
Never happen. Not in a million years.
Even if Jack weren’t here, even if Gia had no Jack in her life, Tom knew that he couldn’t, simply couldn’t, do what Jack had done.
He was made of different stuff. Wired differently.
He fought the burning shame. No one had the right… it wasn’t fair to expect that.
He shook his head and turned away. No… too frightening… he can’t… he won’t…
He opened the door and let himself out. He stood on the front step and blinked in the wind. He pulled his jacket tightly around him. Cold out here, but warmer than inside.
Safer too. At least here Gia couldn’t turn to him with a pleading look, asking him to save the father of her baby, to do the right thing.
And when he shook his head and backed away, as he most certainly would, her expression would change, and she’d look on him as a coward.
I’m not a coward. I’ve done things, lots of things that require balls the size of cantaloupes.
I just can’t… do… this.
He felt a sadness descend on him. And something more… an odd feeling… an emotion he hadn’t experienced in yea
rs.
Guilt.
But that wasn’t enough, not nearly enough to make him turn and go back in there.
* * *
-44:23
Jack forced himself to look on the bright side: The shmegege was gone. And Vicky hadn’t heard any of this.
On the dark side, his back itched and burned. He didn’t have to look to know why.
Gia tightened her python grip on him.
“Jack, Jack, Jack—what are we going to do?”
His gut roiled with fear… of the unknown, of being taken from everything he knew, everyone he loved.
“Keep looking for a solution.”
But not much time left.
He glanced at the old Regulator clock on the kitchen wall: a couple of minutes to eleven. Less than two days.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Jesus. They’d already been through most of the Compendium. The odds of finding something else in there looked low to nil.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”
“Let’s not write me off just yet. We don’t even know if this thing will live up to its press.”
She lifted her head off his chest and looked him in the eye.
“You’re not serious!”
“Well, it’s who knows how old. Maybe over the centuries it’s had some internal breakdown and won’t be able to, you know, take me away.”
Jack didn’t believe a word of it. And neither, apparently, did Gia. She scowled at him.
“You’re kidding, right? It sits in midair and can’t be moved. It leaves a mark, a Stain, just like the book says. Oh, it’s working all right. It’s working just fine!” She closed her eyes as another sob shook her. “I don’t want to lose you!”
Jack took hold of her upper arms and stared into her eyes.
“You won’t. If we can’t find a way out of this, and it takes me somewhere—I’ll get back. Wherever that thing takes me, I’ll find a way back to you.”
“But what if it takes you somewhere else, someplace too far away… some other place you can’t get back from?”
Jack knew what she meant: What if the Lilitongue transported the escapee to the Otherness? To where his life expectancy would be calibrated in nanoseconds.
Gia had her arms around him again.
“Why’d this have to happen? Why?”
The first words that leaped to his lips were, Because of my goddamn brother. But he bit them back when he realized that the recent string of incidents had not begun with Tom. It had begun with Dad’s death. And a terrorist plot had preceded that.
Massacre… Joey hadn’t returned his call… with all that had been happening, he’d forgotten about Joey.
“Who knows? Maybe Tom will steal the Stain from me.”
She looked at him, shock on her face.
“What?”
“Only kidding.”
“Didn’t you read the coda to the recipe?”
Something in her tone…
“No. What—?”
She turned to the kitchen table. The Compendium was open to the Stain recipe. She ran a finger down the page and stopped.
“Read that.”
Jack leaned over the book.
“‘The Stain may be taken by yet another, but none shall take it from him. The third Stained is the last Stained.’“
Jack closed his eyes. That shut the door.
No. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, buy that. And he couldn’t let Gia think he did.
“So they say,” he said with more bravado than he felt. “This Lilitongue thing was made by a man, it can be unmade by another man. And I intend to be that man.”
“Jack—”
He pressed a finger against her lips.
“Here’s what we do. You finish reading the rest of the Compendium.”
“And you?”
“I’m going to get some tools.”
He went upstairs for another look at the thing and found it gone.
He knew where to find it.
* * *
-42:17
Jack stood in his bedroom before the floating Lilitongue and shoved a magazine into the grip of the Glock.
Why bedrooms? he wondered. Maybe because your scent was strongest there.
He pointed the Glock at the thing.
First he’d tried an ax. N-G. Did no more damage than the baseball bat. Not even a dent.
Next he’d fitted an electric drill with a diamond-tipped bit. Might as well have been trying to puncture steel with a pretzel stick. The drill whined and wailed as the tip slipped and slid all over the surface without leaving so much as a scratch.
How could something that felt like rough skin or old leather be so tough?
Well, he’d see how it stood up to his third and last tool: a bullet. Would have loved to hit it with a monster .454 Casull round from his Super Redhawk, but was afraid of killing someone with a ricochet. Hell, the slug might end up in Queens.
Instead he’d taken his Glock .40 out of storage—the highest caliber he had a suppressor for—and stuck a few hardball rounds in the magazine.
He had to admit he felt calmer knowing that Vicky and Gia and the baby were safe. He was in the stew now, but better he than they—He’d found himself in bad situations before. Not this bad, maybe, but hardly walks in the park. And somehow he’d always managed to find a way out. That was why he was still here.
But for how long?
He could almost feel the black ends of the Stain creeping toward each other, millimeter by millimeter.
He faced the Lilitongue and took a step back. He raised the pistol in a two-handed grip, positioning the muzzle about two feet from the Lilitongue. Worried that a direct, straight-on hit might bounce back at him, he aimed right of center and counted on a ricochet hitting the wall.
What he was really counting on was making a hole in the damn thing.
Although what he’d do with that hole once made was another question.
He took a breath and pulled the trigger. The pistol made a phut! and bucked in his hands. A wisp of powdered plaster puffed from a sudden ricochet hole in the wall on his right.
And the Lilitongue? Nada.
In a blind rage Jack dropped the pistol, picked up the ax, and started hacking at the Lilitongue like some sort of berserker.
Goddamn the thing!
If it were a person, or if it were alive and being controlled by someone, he could find a handle, have a chance. He could track down whoever it was and rearrange the guy’s features and sundry other body parts until he gave it up. A person, no matter how sick or depraved, he could deal with, he could understand.
But this… this implacable, imperturbable, invulnerable, inexorably ticking bomb was indifferent, immune, just… there.
He swung at it until his arms gave out. Then, panting, sweating, he stopped, seething at his impotence.
His cell phone rang. His first impulse was to ignore it, but he answered and recognized Joey’s voice.
“Jack? I got your message but was waiting to see if something panned out.”
“And?”
“I think we got something. You free?”
Jack thought about that. Free? Hardly. Obviously Joey was looking to meet, but Jack was in anything but a meeting mood. Too much going on right here. But this had to do with Dad’s killers. Joey wouldn’t be calling about anything else.
“Depends. What’ve you got?”
“Got a face and a name and an address.”
Jack hesitated and glanced at his watch. So little time left. And yet, if this led to Dad’s killers…
Joey said, “Hey, if you’re not interested…”
No way he could be not interested. If he had a chance to get his hands on the guys who murdered his father and settle that score before zero hour, he had to take it.
“Oh, I’m interested. When do you want to get together?”
“I’ve got my car. Where are you now?”