The older woman shook free. She snapped at Mary, “You’re going too fast.”
“I’m sorry.” Words tumbled out of her. “Two men are chasing me.”
“Chasing you,” said the older woman.
“I beg your pardon?” said the younger woman, who looked around with incredulity. “Here?”
Mary knew how the woman felt. Whoever those men were, they wouldn’t do anything here at the front of the restaurant, not with the family as witnesses and all the cars whizzing by on Grape Road.
It was too public.
Just like Dairy Queen had been yesterday.
Fuck.
She knew when the two men rounded the corner. She felt their presence as a prickle along the back of her neck. She and the others turned to look at them.
“Let’s go back inside, Christine,” the husband said, putting an arm around his wife. “Just until this is sorted out. Right now.”
Mary reached for the nearest door handle. Even as she jolted into movement again, she knew she was moving too slow.
She heard flat, popping noises and turned her head.
Crimson exploded in the middle of the man’s forehead. The young woman Christine opened hazel eyes wide in surprise as she began a slow, graceful, downward pirouette. A spray of ruby stars appeared on the boy’s soccer league T-shirt. The boy looked down and fingered one of the stars as his knees collapsed. The older woman’s jaw shattered, bone and tissue flying.
Liquid warmth splashed over Mary’s face and torso.
She knew that warm wetness well. Red was an important color to her. Four people toppled to the pavement like mown flowers.
“No,” she said. She opened her mouth wide. Someone started to scream. She thought it might be her.
Her invisible presence screamed with her. RUN RUN RUN!
Still smiling, the man in the sports coat lunged at her and clamped a hand around her arm. The other looked around with a sharp gaze while he tucked his gun and silencer back inside his jacket.
She dragged hard against the fingers that dug into her flesh, still screaming.
“Come with us now, Mary,” Sport Coat said. “You don’t want any more people to get shot, do you? We’ll kill everybody in the restaurant if we have to.”
“Not that we’d mind,” Spring Jacket added. “We like to kill.”
But her body couldn’t be reasoned with, or ordered to obey. It had a mind of its own and convulsed into wild struggles. Spring Jacket stepped over the bodies of the family to reach for her other arm.
She was a small, underweight woman. Both men had at least sixty pounds on her. Even as she bucked and heaved against the hard hands that sought to subdue her, her mind was a different engine that ran on its own track.
They didn’t shoot me. They recognized my face. They called me by name. They want me for something.
What do they want from me?
Then she twisted into Spring Jacket’s body and brought one knee up hard between his legs. As he groaned and doubled over, she jerked her arm free to stab at Sport Coat’s eyes with stiffened fingers. He caught her wrist before she hit his face.
Sport Coat spun her around until she faced away from him. He forced both of her arms behind her back. She knew she was in serious trouble even as she tried to kick Spring Jacket in the head. He ducked to the side, and she missed.
With a grunt Spring Jacket stood upright. He backhanded her. Her head snapped from the blow. She bit her tongue so hard blood spurted in her mouth. Then she had to stop screaming because she started to choke.
“I’ll pay you back more when we’ve got time,” he said. She spat a mouthful of blood in his face. He wiped it off with a sleeve. “Keep it up, bitch. I’m running a tab.”
Neither man had lost his empty mannequin smile. The four murders and the fight had taken less than a minute.
A short distance away, cars shot down a busy five-lane highway. She willed them to keep moving so that no one else got shot.
Even if someone noticed the fight and called 911, it wouldn’t do her any good. The men picked her up, one at her torso and the other at her legs. They jogged with her toward a dark unmarked van.
That van was the embodiment of every kidnapping nightmare.
She couldn’t go in there.
She was as good as dead if they got her in that van.
She bucked and kicked as hard as she could, and she barely made them stagger.
Panic enveloped her, a pure bolt that was as sharp and cold as a scalpel of ice slicing open a vein. It was followed by a blinding wave of white heat that filled her mind and body. A roaring madness took over the world.
She was aware, as if from a great distance, that both men had started to curse. They dropped her. She hit the ground hard and tried to roll into a ball. The roar of white noise filled her body and mind then began to recede.
She was being rolled on the ground, wrapped up in something.
Voices:
“Hurry up, goddamn it. Cover her legs with your jacket.”
“I’m going as fast as I can. What the hell did she just do? Somehow she fucking burned my hands.”
“I got burned too, ass-wipe, and I’ve got her shoulders covered. Come ON!”
The sound of a door sliding open. She stirred. Rough hands slid under her shoulders and legs. She opened her eyes. Felt herself being lifted. Looked up into two smiling mannequin faces. Liquid spilled out of her mouth.
A hawk with splayed talons plummeted out of the jewel-toned sky. It raked Spring Jacket’s head from nape to crown, slashing him open to the bone. Wetness sprayed her again. The man rocked forward from the blow. He dropped her legs.
Spring Jacket wobbled and turned toward what hit him. A second hawk dove for Sport Coat’s face. One of his eyes split like a grape under the slash of its talons. He lost his hold on her shoulders. She hit cement hard a second time. She would have whimpered if she’d had any breath. She managed to roll several times before she dared to lift her head.
Both men were bent at the waist, covered with dozens of attacking hawks. They beat at the air and slapped at the birds. Red streaked their flailing figures. One pulled his gun and fired blind. A few birds dropped to the ground. A dozen more took their place.
She struggled to her hands and knees but didn’t dare rise to her feet, for a shrieking cloud of raptors wheeled and dove in the parking lot. Red-tailed hawks, rough-legged hawks, turkey vultures, Cooper’s hawks, falcons, goshawks, harriers.
Calm descended on her for the space of one pulse beat.
She was not on earth. She was somewhere else where things like this could happen.
A breeze whipped around her damp neck, and that small voice said, They die for you. Don’t waste their sacrifice. Run!
She ducked her head to crawl away from the battle. Gravel bit into the heels of her palms and her knees. Her hearing was filled with the sound of her harsh wet breathing.
Car. Keys. Purse. Where’s the damn purse?
She had been carrying her purse by its strap. She had dropped it somewhere when she had been attacked. She crawled toward the front of the restaurant, searching the ground of the parking lot as she went.
She had to go back around the corner of the building. Her purse was lying close to the woman named Christine, near the dead woman’s outflung arm.
She touched Christine’s still-warm fingers and said in a harsh croak, “If your spirit is still here, I’m so sorry. I don’t understand why this happened. I would have done everything I could to avoid your family if I’d known.”
She snatched up her purse, struggled to her feet and ran, bent over, back around the corner and down the line of parked cars until she reached her Toyota.
Scrape, fumble.
Get the damn key in the lock. There.
br /> She yanked at the door and fell into the car. Locked the door. Started the engine.
It stalled. A sob broke out of her. She tried again.
The engine roared. She jerked the stick shift into reverse, misjudged the distance and clipped an SUV as she pulled out.
Thunk!
Something hit her trunk. She screamed and twisted at the waist to look out the rear window. A blood-covered figure pushed off of the trunk of her car and fumbled along the driver’s side toward her door, one arm curled over his head while shrieking birds continued to dive and rip his skin to ribbons. His raw, red flesh was unrecognizable as a face.
She screamed again, yanked her car into first gear and slammed down on the gas pedal. With a squeal of tortured tires, the Toyota shot away.
Chapter Eight
THE IMMACULATE INTERIOR of the back of the limousine was just as it should be, luxurious and contained. The man liked to have his environment comfortable and controlled. It brought him a sense of calm and peace, which allowed him to focus on his work.
The seats were made from butter-soft Italian leather. There was a small but perfectly stocked wet bar that included champagne and several bottles of a 1999 Royal DeMaria Riesling Icewine. The fridge was stocked with petit fours; smoked salmon pâté and organic whole grain crackers; boiled quail’s eggs with a lemon-mayonnaise dip; melon balls made from honeydew, cantaloupe and watermelon; and several different kinds of fresh sushi. There was also a flat-screen HDTV that he kept on mute, perpetually tuned to CNN.
The man divided his attention between watching the ticker tape headlines running along the bottom of the screen and the spring scenery that scrolled past his windows.
His cell phone rang. It was one of his employees, and this was a phone call that he had been waiting for, so he answered and listened. “You’re quite sure that he’s dead? And it can’t be traced back to you? Excellent. Thank the Senator for his help. Tell him that I too am looking forward to a mutually beneficial future.” The man smiled out at the bright spring day. He asked his companion, “Do you play chess?”
“What?”
“Forgive me,” the man said. “I thought I said that quite clearly. Do. You. Play. Chess.”
“No, I do not fucking play fucking chess.”
“Do you know anything about the game?”
“For Christ’s sake, who cares?”
“Manners.” The man kept his voice mild, but his gaze turned into spears of ice. “I do, and you would do well to remember that I am driving this conversation.”
A pause. His companion said, “I only know the basic moves, and nothing at all about the maneuvers or strategies. I know just enough about the game to know that’s like labeling primary colors to a master painter like Renoir.”
The man was somewhat mollified. He relaxed back in his seat and chose, for the time being, to ignore his companion’s truculent attitude. “Nicely put. Chess has been called the game of kings, you know, as it was deemed a worthy occupation for sovereigns.”
“I presume you are driving this conversation to somewhere specific.”
The man said, “Then there is the analogy as well. Politics is like a game of chess. There are the pieces, and then there are the players. Dorothy Dunnett, a well-known Scottish novelist, used the analogy in a series of historical novels filled with political intrigue. Have you read her work?”
“No.” His companion closed his eyes, his expression indifferent.
“You should pay attention,” the man said, his tone flat. “I am telling you the most important thing you have heard in your life.”
His companion took a deep breath then opened his eyes and looked at him. “Fine. Do go on.”
The man said, “There is another game beyond the game of kings. It is a shadow game, and it has been played for millennia behind the panoply of human things. Like politics, the board and the pieces of the shadow game have shifted and changed through time, but in this game, the players have remained the same. I have just removed a piece from the game. We should call him a bishop. Like any chess piece he could only make certain moves, but they were damn good ones. I’ll give him that for his epitaph.”
“You had a man killed because of a game in your head.”
“No, I had a man killed because he could sense changes in spirit as he stood near his king and worked to protect him. With this man out of the way, I now have much more leisure and opportunity to take the king. All it will take is the highest-level security clearance, the right time and place and a handshake, and when I do it, it will strengthen my position in the game tenfold.”
“Oh I see. So basically you had a man killed because of a game in your head. I suppose I could congratulate you,” said his companion. “But I won’t.”
“Indeed,” said the man. The corner of his mouth twitched. “The fact of the victory will have to be congratulations enough.”
The ancient game, so long played, was coming to a head. There had been many peaks and valleys over the years, intense maneuvering and vicious skirmishes followed by periods of quiet and a wintering of conflict. Dared he hope they were at long last heading into the endgame?
The man remembered his first years on earth, that giddy rush of exhilaration he had felt after having been imprisoned for so long. He had been free at last and this whole world lay before him like a virgin with her thighs spread wide.
He had to admit it might have gone to his head a little.
He had not been a happy camper when he had found that a group of his people had followed him to earth. That first conflict . . . A frown marred his handsome brow. He didn’t like to remember it.
It had begun so well, his first life in this place. He had lived in a golden land, and his childhood had been one long ascendant journey to self-discovery. He had been born to rule, not by birth but by ability, and by right, and he had taken that golden land of Babylon and made it his own. He became king and imposed his law, his order, enacting his own manifest destiny.
The group that had followed him had been fresh and at full strength, in the morning of their first birth into this world. They had just recovered their full memories from their earlier lives, and they had acted in concert to take him by surprise. Barely escaping with his life, he had been forced to go into hiding deep underground in the dark, airless catacombs of his city.
One of his enemies at the time had written: How the oppressor has ceased! How his insolence has ceased! . . . How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!
But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit. Those who see you will stare at you, and ponder over you: Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, who would not let his prisoners go home?
The author of that histrionic piece had been a stinking prophet with the burned gaze of the mad. He had come from an aggrieved and superstitious desert people that had been comprised of twelve tribes.
They had been too ignorant to realize the value of what he had brought to his kingdom, or the value of what he could have given to them, the education and learning, the technology and the civilization. They preferred to wallow in the heat and dust, and to plunge into constant petty wars as they worshipped their angry, vengeful God.
It had taken the man a long time to heal from the wounds he had gotten in that first battle on this world. But he had, and he could not forget, and he did not forgive. Among his many other projects and hobbies, he had made it his mission to hunt down the group who pursued him, and to destroy them. In fact, in that endeavor, he had enjoyed some degree of success.
The old bitch, though. He shook his head as he straightened his tie. She was a pistol. She’d gotten mighty dexterous at avoiding him throughout the centuries. But he had one huge advantage ove
r the group that had come after him. He did not have their code of ethics. He had no ethics whatsoever that would hold him back from using his special talents in whatever way he wished.
The folks from home had liked to call him an aberration. He preferred to think of himself as unique. It had a much more positive spin.
As a result he was as strong and fresh today as a man in his prime, with all memories intact and all grudges well-nurtured. From what hints he’d been able to glean from the psychic realm, the old woman had let herself become frail as well as elderly. That wasn’t the brightest of ideas when involved in a long-term war such as theirs.
Over the ages he had accumulated an awful lot of grudges against her.
Triumphing over her was going to be downright orgasmic.
But first things first.
About that chess piece he’d just removed. The bishop. Nicholas Crow had been too educated for a normal human, too much of an adept in things that most people knew nothing about. The old bitch had scattered her teachings like a virus throughout the first nations, so it was actually possible that Crow had been taught what he had known by a native elder.
But he had to wonder. Perhaps the old bitch herself had trained Crow. If so, the man might find a trail of breadcrumbs in Crow’s past that would be advantageous for him to follow.
However, the very next thing the man needed to do was hunt down Dr. Mary Byrne, who had turned out to be a rather surprisingly slippery fish. And loud. Her psychic energy was blazing like a comet. At the rate she was going, she’d be a burned-out husk in a day or two. That was not the preferable option of events.
He had to find Mary fast if he hoped to get anything useful out of her. Just out of curiosity, he also wanted to find out what had happened to his two drones. They had almost gotten her, but then he had lost his connection with them. Now he couldn’t make psychic contact with either one. Neither was answering his cell, so the man had to assume for the moment that they had somehow been destroyed.
Also, the police reports he received about what had happened in Mishawaka were preliminary and confused, but rather interestingly freakish. He needed to get a more accurate account of what had happened, so he could determine what forces had been involved and decide what to do next.