Half a dozen of the things were broken around Ray, screaming like girls with broken arms, but still dragging themselves after the pack, their fangs clattering angrily. He hadn’t spotted Angel in long moments, but he could still hear her fighting at his back as his seemingly irregular movements took him in a curving path to the observer watching the hunting pack, maybe ten feet away. One of the spider-things stood at his back, between them.
Another hunter lunged at him from the front. Ray pulped its head like a bug on the bathroom floor, whirled, and dove to the ground. He slid between the legs of the arachnid behind him, who stood there with a look of almost human astonishment on its caricatured features. He raked the bottom of its gut as he went by, twisting desperately to avoid the deluge of steaming fluid that burst from it like a ruptured bladder, and grunted aloud when some splashed on the back of his hand. He turned a complete somersault and came to his feet face to face with the observer, morningstars raised high.
And he froze.
The thing had no face. Its head was a featureless white cone that tapered to a wet red tentacle that quivered like an eager tongue.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Something clung to its neck, its mouth fastened onto its dead white flesh, its large eyes regarding Ray with unblinking hatred.
“Ti Malice!” Ray blurted aloud.
Not many knew about the obscene Haitian ace who had wreaked unaccountable havoc before vanishing from human ken over a decade and a half ago, but Ray was a compulsive reader of secret government files and there wasn’t much he didn’t know about obscure aces. Especially the bad ones.
The Haitian’s tiny arms encircled the thing’s thick white neck, his slug-like body hung down its back. Malice rose up, his mouth coming free from his mount’s neck with an audible slurping sound. Malice’s mouth was like that of a lamprey: round, ringed with tiny, sharp teeth, and a tube-like tongue that sucked the blood from his host. He hissed at Ray, spitting dark, purplish blood. The thing he rode raised its featureless face to the moon and somehow howled, sending shivers down Ray’s back.
It moved. But Ray moved faster.
He blocked the thing’s lunge with one of the morningstars and swung the other like it was a baseball bat and Ti Malice’s head was the ball.
He hit a home run. Malice’s head splattered at the impact. The feeble grip of his arms around the creature’s neck broke, and Malice shot backward and hit the ground twenty feet away, bounced and rolled, leaving a smeared trail on the thick, gray grass which twitched agitatedly above the tiny body, and finally closed over it like hungry snakes.
The creature slumped to the ground, shuddering all over. Ray stood over it, undecided. It lifted an arm, as if in supplication, and behind him Ray sensed all movement stop. He held his blow as the thing stood. Not quite human-shaped in its long trench coat, it regarded Ray with its featureless face. Ray forced himself to look back. Forced his gorge to stay down. After a moment, without making sound or gesture, it walked backwards among the trees.
What was left of the hunting pack followed it, taking a wide berth around Ray as it did so. As they vanished among the eerily-moving trees, Ray let out a long breath he didn’t realize that he’d been holding. He turned to look at the battlefield, the ground splashed with ichor and littered with smashed and slashed spider bodies and parts.
“Angel!” he called, and realized that she had slumped to her knees, her head down, unmoving.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Peaceable Kingdom: The Angels’ Bower
Jerry started to feel a little uncomfortable under Barnett’s smiling scrutiny. Ray departed to go on this mysterious mission to pick up the kid and Fortunato excused himself as well, leaving only Jerry and Barnett alone in his office. Jerry cleared his throat and spoke, just to break the increasing sense of tension the inscrutable Barnett had been projecting.
“Nice office,” he said. “It looks familiar.”
Barnett nodded. “It’s a copy of the Oval Office in the White House. I felt very comfortable there.”
“Uh-huh,” Jerry said.
There was another long minute of silence until Barnett seemed to feel that he’d softened Jerry up sufficiently, and spoke again.
“I just like to get to know my friends, Mr. Creighton,” Leo Barnett said, “so I can tell them more easily from my enemies. It is Mr. Creighton, isn’t it?”
Jerry’s guilt for ragging on Billy Ray for lying to him returned, redoubled.
“Well,” Jerry said after a moment, “let’s say that’s my name for the purposes of this discussion.”
Barnett nodded after another a long moment of silence stretched between them. “I see that in your own way you’re a careful man. I can understand that. Even admire it. I’m a careful man as well, and I like to know whom I’m dealing with. I had you checked out by some of my connections, and you don’t add up. Your past is shadowy. The history that does exist is rather unusual. By the way—I hope you don’t mind my excluding your man Sascha from this little conversation. Though I’m willing to trust you to a point, I don’t like the idea of exposing myself to a telepath, even a low-grade one, for any length of time.”
“That’s all right,” Jerry said amiably, even though he detested Barnett’s pompous tones. “Why are you leaving Mushroom Daddy out of the discussion?”
Barnett raised his eyebrows. “Because he’s a complete flake? Because besides being an unknown goofball, he’s also apparently a drug dealer? He positively reeks of the marijuana smell.”
“How do you know what marijuana smells like?” Jerry asked him.
Barnett smiled, not prettily. “Enough. We have to lay our cards on the table. I’m afraid that although we’ve gathered John Fortune to our bosom, he’s not entirely safe. The Allumbrados will still come after him, and Cardinal Contarini—who is the head of that detestable organization—has aces working for him. The boy will be in danger when, not if, they discover we’ve got him here at the Peaceable Kingdom. Since it’s your job to protect him, and it is also totally in my interests that he remain safe, I suggest we join forces until we can break the back of the Allumbrados and they no longer pose a threat to the boy’s safety.”
Jerry was loaded with questions. “That’s all well and good,” he said. “I agree in principle, but somebody’s gotta explain some things to my satisfaction.”
“All right,” Barnett said.
“All right,” Jerry repeated. It occurred to him that he had only Nighthawk’s word on the Allumbrados. It would be nice to have another, although clearly not necessarily unbiased, viewpoint. “What exactly is your interest in John Fortune, anyway? And who in the Hell are the Allumbrados and what do they want with the boy?”
“They are tools of Satan and they want him dead,” Barnett said succinctly, “while we want him to stay very much alive.”
“But why, for Christ’s sake?”
“Because,” Barnett explained impatiently, as if this were the dozenth time he had to go over it, “he is Christ.”
“Christ?” Jerry asked, nonplussed. “You mean, like Jesus Christ?”
Barnett sighed. “Yes, of course. Are you a believer, Mr. Creighton?”
“A believer?” Jerry asked. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“There is no guessing, Mr. Creighton, when it comes to matters of faith. You have either accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, or you haven’t.”
“Well,” Jerry said. “I guess I haven’t.”
“Then I’m not going to bother to explain things that you can’t comprehend. No offence, Mr. Creighton.”
Jerry wasn’t feeling particularly gracious, but he didn’t want to argue theology with the ex-President. He grunted.
“I’ve written a tract that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Leo Barnett said, “that John Fortune is Jesus Christ, Our Savior, and that his coming will usher in the Millennium and the Kingdom of God on Earth. If we can keep the Allumbrados from getting their way.”
“Wait a minute,” Jerry said.