“Well, he’s the only human I know who can walk on water and float in the air.”
“He can?” Weezy said with a shocked expression. “You never told—”
“I will. Later. Promise.”
“He may be an extraordinary human,” Veilleur said, “but he’s still human, with all the faults and foibles of any other human. Just because he can measure his years in millennia—”
“As can you,” Jack said.
“Ah, but I look my age, he doesn’t. And never will. As a result, there’s a tendency to think of him and react to him as some sort of demigod. But he has human faults. One of them is, as I said, hubris. Another is a certain pettiness of spirit.”
Jack perked up. That sounded exploitable.
“How so?”
“He is incapable of letting go of a slight. If he has been injured, he must retaliate. Time will not lessen his need. He will bide his time and wait for the right moment to inflict the most pain. Then he will strike, and feast on that pain.”
“How does that help us?”
Veilleur frowned. “I’m not sure yet. The doorman told you he’d changed his appearance?”
“ ‘Latin lover’ was how he described it.”
Veilleur nodded. “We can only guess why he’d do that. Not for anything to do with his mission for the Otherness, I’ll bet. I believe it’s personal. And I believe that is where he might be vulnerable.”
Jack felt a tingle of anticipation. “You mean it may be coming time to make a move against him?”
Veilleur shook his head. “Sorry, Jack, but we can’t risk any head-to-head confrontations. You know that.”
Jack balled his fists under the table. No point in arguing. They’d been over this too many times already.
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to investigate. Perhaps we can use your skills and ingenuity to make something backfire on him. Who is to say?”
Better than nothing, Jack guessed.
“He is also impatient,” Veilleur added. “He was reborn in 1968 and has run into no opposition since. He senses that something is amiss on our side—”
“And he’s right,” Jack said.
Veilleur nodded. “Yes, he is right. But that very lack of opposition causes suspicion. He paid a terrible price for letting his guard down in the fifteenth century. He won’t do that again. But that does not leaven his impatience. And his impatience may trump his caution . . . again, presenting us with an opening.”
An opening for what? Jack wondered. An opportunity to sit on our hands some more?
“That’s all fine and good,” Weezy said, “but where does Dawn fit in?”
Jack wasn’t following. “We’re not going to involve her.”
“She is involved. Ras—I mean R has been hiding her for nearly a year. And as soon as she has the baby, he moves her out.”
“Which means he has plans for the baby and not for her.”
Weezy gave him an arch look. “Oh, really? Let’s think about that. He didn’t just kick her out, he moved her into her own place, and guess where that place is.”
Veilleur said, “I was concerned about that before I knew who Osala was,” Veilleur said. “Now that I know . . .”
“There are no coincidences here,” the Lady said.
That was old news, but the words never failed to send a chill through Jack.
He turned to Weezy. “Okay, maybe he does have plans for her. But where do you fit in? You were a threat to his plans for the Fhinntmanchca, but that’s over and done. So why would he be interested in you now?”
“It somehow involves the baby,” she said. “I’ll bet my life on it.”
Veilleur’s expression was grim. “Not a wager to take lightly where the One is concerned.”
Weezy swallowed and nodded. “Oh, right.”
Veilleur leaned forward. “Did Dawn mention anything to you about the infant’s ‘deformities’?”
Weezy’s hand flew to her mouth. “Ohmygod! In all the clamor about the anagram, I forgot.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Well?”
“She said it had black hair all over its body, little clawed hands, and . . . a tentacle coming out of each armpit.”
Jack would have said simply that it looked like what a q’qr was supposed to look like, but Weezy was obviously letting Veilleur draw his own conclusion. And he did—with a bang.
He slammed his hands on the table and straightened from his seat.
“What?”
Even the Lady seemed shocked. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
Weezy shook her head. “That’s what she told us.”
Veilleur dropped back into his seat. “This shouldn’t be. And yet it makes a strange sort of sense.”
“Does it? Dawn giving birth to a quasi q’qr?” He glanced at Weezy. “We figure there’s still some human in that baby.”
“Correct,” said Veilleur. “It’s not one hundred percent what you call oDNA. But obviously it has enough to take on the appearance of a q’qr.”
“That’s what I thought,” Weezy said. “A hybrid displaying the q’qr phenotype.”
“Whatever,” Jack said. “The big question, as I see it, is why is a baby q’qr so important? I mean, important enough for R himself to keep Dawn as a houseguest all through her pregnancy and for the Order’s doctors to guide her through labor and then whisk the baby away as soon as he’s born?”
“I don’t have the answer to that,” Veilleur said. “Let me tell you what I know about the baby’s genesis. For that we have to go back to the First Age.”
“That’s fifteen thousand years,” Jack said. “The baby’s only two days old.”
“But the Taint that fills him is ancient. You know about the q’qr race.”
Weezy said, “Genetically altered humans created by the Otherness to fight its battles—its own private Mongol horde.”
“Exactly. They multiplied like bacteria and overran everything in their path. A weapon designed to wipe them out misfired and killed only their females. So they mated with human women but human DNA trumped oDNA every time. Their offspring carried the Taint, but no new q’qrs were born. Their line was at a dead end. When the last one was killed, the q’qr race was extinct.”
Weezy said, “I think the last q’qr died in 1983.”
Veilleur gave her a strange look.
“One used to live on your property in the Pines, Mister Foster. Jack and I ran into it—the last one I’m sure—when we were teens. We’re pretty sure it drowned.”
He frowned. “You’re quite sure?”
“Quite.”
“How odd. But not impossible. A q’qr can be killed, but if left alone, it lives on and on.”
“Immortal?” Weezy said.
“In a sense, yes.”
Jack didn’t care much about that q’qr. Dawn’s was the one that mattered.
“Can we get back on topic? Why do the One and the Order want this quasi-q’qr baby?”
“Again, I can’t even hazard a guess. Though I doubt the One is personally changing diapers, he does seem to have taken the child under his wing.”
“Or the Order has. Dawn mentioned that her OB man had the Order’s sigil on his watch.”
Weezy frowned. “You don’t think they’re going to worship him or anything like that, do you?”
Veilleur barked a laugh. “Oh, I doubt that very much. The Septimus Order has its roots in the First Age. Its leaders took orders from the Seven and marshaled the q’qr armies. They had nothing but contempt for their filthy, ignorant, brutal charges. In fact, when the Order executed one of its own for treachery or a high crime, they q’qred them.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning they would cut off his forearms at the elbows and shove them into his armpits as a show of contempt.”
Jack stiffened and glanced at Weezy, only to find her staring at him.
“Mister Boruff!” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
&n
bsp; “Who?” Veilleur said.
Jack turned back to him. “A corpse we stumbled on in the Pine Barrens when we were kids—on your property, in fact—turned out to be a member of the Order, and he’d been killed that way.”
“To mimic the form of a q’qr,” Weezy added. “We never dreamed . . . no one had ever seen the Kicker Man back then.”
“Speaking of which,” Jack said, “if the q’qrs were fashioned by the seven-crazy Otherness, why do they have only six limbs instead of seven?”
Instead of answering, Veilleur turned to Weezy and pointed to the Compendium. “Do you think you could find the Order’s sigil in there and trace it for me?”
“I’ll try.” She opened the book and began flipping through it. “With the way the pages shift around, finding anything in here is a real challenge.” But only a few seconds later she stopped. “Well, I’ll be. Got one.”
She grabbed a pen and began tracing, then handed the sheet to him. Veilleur held it up for Jack to see.
“Now,” Veilleur said to Weezy, “may I have one of your markers?”
Weezy handed him one of her ever-present Sharpies and he went to work on the tracing.
“It’s true that q’qrs do not have seven limbs, but their symbol, the one they left behind wherever they pillaged and slaughtered, the one Hank Thompson has misinterpreted as the Kicker Man, has seven points.”
He held up his handiwork.
“And so, the rule of seven holds.”
Jack shook his head in wonder. “It fits right into the sigil. I never saw it, never guessed.”
“Everything is connected,” Veilleur said. “Everything.”
“But we still don’t know why the One is protecting this baby instead of disposing of it. Because if he wanted it gone, he wouldn’t have waited for its birth; he’d have killed Dawn last year and been done with it. Someone’s got plans for that baby.”
“Then those plans must include me,” Weezy said. “Else why would he install the baby’s mother across the hall?”
Jack had been thinking along those same lines.
Veilleur said, “What puzzles me more is the obviousness of the move. The One is devious. He’s practiced at the art of misdirection. A blind man could see through this.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” Weezy said. “Maybe we’re supposed to see through it. Maybe its real purpose is to cause us to spin our wheels in confusion while the plan to bring down the Internet”—she glanced at the Lady—“and you, goes forward.”
Jack shook his head. “Well, he’s confusing me. Does he want us looking for Dawn’s baby or not?”
“Maybe he doesn’t care,” Weezy said. “Maybe he’s so confident the Internet will fall that he feels we’re irrelevant now, and he’s just playing with our heads.”
Veilleur pushed himself up from the chair. “Weezy is right. If the assault on the Internet succeeds, these questions will be irrelevant. We must find a way to save the Internet.”
If I’d been allowed to find and take out Rasalom, Jack thought, this conversation would never have happened, because it would be irrelevant.
“Yes, please,” the Lady said. “I like it here. I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want you to suffer what will befall you if I am taken away.”
Veilleur stared at her a moment, seemingly appraising her, then turned to Jack.
“May I ask you a couple of favors, Jack?”
“Sure.”
“Would you drive me out to Queens tonight?”
“Sure. When?”
“Around midnight or so?”
Jack frowned. “Where do you want to go at midnight?”
“A graveyard. Would you be so kind as to bring along a two-gallon container of gasoline?”
“Um . . . okay. Can I ask what you need it for?”
“I’m going to help someone start a fire.”
“Well, as I always say, set a fire for a man and he’s warm for a day; set him on fire and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”
Weezy punched his arm. “Jack!”
But Veilleur’s expression was stricken. “How did you know?”
SATURDAY
1
“Bayside?” Jack said as he headed for the Queensboro Bridge. “What’s over there?”
He’d pulled up in front of Veilleur’s building in his big black Crown Vic at about 12:10 and found him waiting at the curb. The old guy had given him the destination as he’d settled into the roomy front seat.
“A cemetery.”
Jack felt his gut clench. “That wouldn’t be Saint Ann’s, would it?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I’m familiar with it. My . . . daughter is buried there.”
“Oh, yes. You mentioned her. Emma, correct?”
Jack nodded, his throat thick. She’d never been born, never officially lived, but she was far enough along in gestation and might have survived if not for the trauma Gia had suffered.
“I’m sorry,” Veilleur said. “Had I known, I would have asked someone else.”
He found his voice. “No, it’s fine. Gia and I go out there every so often and visit her grave.”
Veilleur shook his head. “Terrible thing to have to bury a child.”
“Have you—? Never mind. Of course you have.”
Over the span of the millennia he’d lived, Veilleur must have buried many children. Then Jack realized with a start that he’d lived long enough to bury all his children.
“Too many times. It wasn’t so hard with the old ones—the sons and daughters who had lived a full life and eventually became sickly and decrepit with age. But the children who die as little ones . . . no matter how often you go through it, that ordeal does not get a bit easier.”
They drove in silence for a while, with Jack wondering how many children Veilleur had sired through the ages.
“Do you remember them? All of them?”
A sigh. “All of them. They ran the gamut from the saintly to the downright evil.”
“Evil? You had an evil child?”
He nodded. “A number of them. Some people are simply born bad. They grow up bad. There’s no accounting for it. A couple of them, well, I had to end their lives myself.”
Jack swallowed. “Kill your own child?”
“Twice, yes. They weren’t children, they were grown men, and they were killers. This was in times without much in the way of civilization, no ‘authorities’ who could arrest them, no medications to treat them, no jails to lock them up. But they had to be stopped. They couldn’t be allowed to go on raping and killing whenever they felt an urge in their loins or became angry. So it fell to their father to stop them.”
Jack tried to imagine . . .
“There was no one else?”
“How could I let someone else kill one of my sons? I’d brought him into the world. He was my responsibility.” He rolled his shoulders. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Gladly.
Jack said nothing for a while, too dazed by the thought of having to kill your own child. What kind of world had it been between civilizations? Rule by brute force . . . survival of the fittest . . .
Veilleur—Glaeken—had survived all that. The stories this man could tell . . .
In an effort to break the silence and change the subject, he said, “I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to get in Saint Ann’s at this hour.”
“I won’t need to.”
He remembered the two-gallon can sitting behind his seat.
“I brought the gas.”
“I know. I can smell it. Thank you.”
“Mind telling me what this trip is all about?”
“I’d be glad to if I could, but I’m not sure myself. All I can say is that someone does not rest easy in the soil of Saint Ann’s.”
“ ‘Not easy’ . . . we’re not talking a vampire or anything like that, are we?”
Veilleur made an amused sound, not quite a laugh. “No, nothing s
o prosaic, I’m afraid. The inhabitant of this unmarked grave is human, or was, but somehow, in some way, it has been infused with the Otherness.”
“You mean oDNA?”
“No. It’s something from without. This is the One’s doing.”
Remembering something from one of his trips to St. Ann’s, Jack said, “There’s a patch of ground there where nothing will grow. I got that from a very frustrated groundskeeper. No matter what he does, nothing will germinate or survive on this oblong patch.”
Veilleur was nodding. “That’s the grave. I visit it every so often, trying to decipher its purpose, what it means.”
“And . . . ?”
“I remain baffled. But I have a feeling a few of my questions may be answered tonight.”
“How do these ‘feelings’ work?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. After millennia of being connected to the Ally and fighting the One, I suppose I became sensitized. No doubt I lost some of that sensitivity along with my immortality, but enough remains to sense singularities and incongruities, and sometimes a coalescing and intersecting of forces. That’s what I sense happening at Saint Ann’s.”
“You think the One’s got a plan going?”
“I’m certain he has a number of plans running congruently. That’s been the pattern of our struggle down the millennia: We both adhered to the practice of having a backup plan already in motion in case the current strategy fails. But I have a feeling—and I can’t say why—that this has nothing to do with opening the way for the Otherness. I sense this is somehow personal.”
Jack remembered something Mack had said.
“Guy I talked to yesterday says the One’s been involved in something ‘down south,’ but didn’t know much beyond that.” He glanced at Veilleur. “What’s your plan B?”
“I don’t even have plan A. I’m out of this, Jack. I’m old and I’m tired. I can no longer lead. I can serve only in an advisory capacity.”
Swell. But Jack had known that.
“And what do you advise?”
“Stay away from that baby. Other than that . . .” He shrugged.
Jack pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “What? How do we fight back without going after the One or the Order? It’s like punching smoke.”