Off to the west, looking over the city, stood a series of three arched windows. The central one rose half again as tall as the two flanking it and together they provided a breathtaking view of the city. Through it I saw City Center and three brilliant lighting strikes off to the northwest. Angry clouds filled the sky and eerie white flashes edged them with silver.
The others followed wordlessly as I moved toward that site. Standing in front of the windows on an altar-like dais, I saw Nerys. She wore a white gown styled on classical Greek lines, yet cut short to reveal her long legs. Golden cords wrapped round the bodice and snaked between her breasts. In her hand she held the cords' tasseled ends, pulling the cords taut around her body as if they alone could contain her exuberance.
I reached an aisle that led directly to her. As I moved down it I had the disturbing sensation of a supplicant approaching a deity to ask for a boon, but I banished it with a snarl. "It's over, Nerys. We know everything."
"You're wrong, Caine, it's just beginning," she laughed throatily. "There is nothing you can do to stop it, and you owe that fact to Nero Loring himself."
She gestured languidly at a display console that slowly rotated into view. At first glance, as it slithered through shadows and was backlit by lighting, I thought it a polished and chromed prototype from the finest neotech laboratories in Japan. When it locked into place and I got a better look at it, I knew no human could ever have created it.
The black cables running from one edge to another could have been optical fibers sheathed in shiny plastic, but they flared out at either end in pseudopod receptors that clung to the box like leeches. The cables pulsed as power ran through them and light shifted within panels to which the cables had fused. The panels themselves looked, in the beginning, like complex LCD compilations but I quickly saw, in fact, they were scaly flesh that changed colors with a chameleon's ability to camouflage itself.
A lucite post rose from the center of the device while I stared at it, then fanned itself out like a peacock's tail. Narrow at the base and almost a foot wide at the peak, I saw strange shapes imbedded in the lucite. Then, a second before I realized what medium the artist had used to create the organic designs, I saw they were really thin brain slices trapped between two layers of the clear synthetic.
The Witch looked at the machine with rapture on her face. "Say hello, dear."
A black membrane on the front of the machine quivered like a drumhead to produce a little girl's voice. "I'm sorry, Daddy. I don't want to do it but I can't stop."
"Nerys!" Loring shouted. He pointed at the Witch. "What have you done to her?"
The Witch's eyes narrowed. "Only that which you forced me to do, foolish man. You sought to thwart me and my master. You used her brainwaves, I have used her brain. What has been done is your doing." She turned and glanced at the maglev line and the St. Elmo's fire beginning to play along its length. "It cannot be stopped."
"We can blow the line." I pointed back the way we came. "Let's go, Bat."
The Witch laughed at me. "You're going nowhere."
"You're going to stop me?"
"No." She shook her head. "Now, my pet, you may reveal yourself. You have done very well."
Marit stepped back away from the rest of the group, but kept her carbine level. "You all know, at this range, I won't miss and your vests won't help. I don't want to have to kill you. Just put your guns down."
Our collection of long guns and pistols clattered to the floor.
The Witch folded her arms across her chest. "You see, Mr. Caine, Fiddleback is not alone in keeping pets. I would kill you for what you have done, but it is not my place to discipline another's toy. I will leave that for when Fiddleback arrives." A close lightning strike turned her face into a mask of silver. "That, by the look of things, should not be long at all."
I looked at Marit and shook my head. "Marit, how could you?"
"I didn't mean to hurt you, Tycho. I didn't."
I heard her words, but the plea for understanding in her voice died in the black hole at the center of her eyes. "Stop now, Marit. Shoot her. Redeem yourself."
"I can't, Tycho, I can't." Marit winced. "I have come too far to be cheated now."
The Witch chuckled lightly. "Your mistake, Mr. Caine. You can offer her nothing more than a warm body in the night. I, on the other hand, can offer her immortality. I can offer her eternal beauty and wealth. I can give her all the things she hungered for as a child in Eclipse. In return, I asked for her to deliver Coyote to me. She has failed in that task, but you are a prize that is, at the moment, far more valuable to me."
She opened her arms wide like a mother welcoming children. "All of you have been resourceful. I appreciate and respect that more than you know. Come to me. Embrace me. Become my servants and, through the grace of Fiddleback, I will see to it that your every dream is fulfilled beyond imagining."
Bat folded his arms. "You mean I get to kill you more than once?"
The Witch shook her head. "How droll, Mr. Kabat." As Marit circled around to stand beside her patron, the Witch pointed at Bat. "When I give the word, my precious, cap him, so he dies in pain, and slowly."
"As you wish, mistress."
"What of the rest of you? Nero, you have been a thorn, but I will let you live. You, Feral, you can have anything you want. And you, Jytte Ravel, I can make you at home in that body. I can make you whole again. It is your choice."
Outside the sky exploded with jagged slivers of pure energy and static crackled through my radio. The storm rolled in over Squaw Peak, thunder rumbling like a growl in a wolf's throat. Multiple lighting strikes walked their way down the side of the mountain. They struck the numerous lightning rods protecting Frozen Shade from storms and for a brief moment, a sizzling energy rope tethered the clouds to the ground. As each line parted, darkness again flashed over the landscape, but the glowing purple ring of the maglev circuit brightened.
Natch chewed her lower lip, then shook her head. "I wouldn't join you even if you were as smart and powerful as you think you are. No sale, Bitch-witch."
The Witch's eyes sparked. "Ravel?"
"You and your kind steal humanity. The only way you could make me whole is to steal from another." She shook her head once. "Void transaction."
"Idiots! Can you not see what she sees?"
"Nope, we can't." Bat shook his head. "But then, we have our eyes open."
"Marit," I whispered sadly over the radio.
She looked at me. "Tycho?"
"I'm sorry."
"Sorry? For what?"
I tried to remember the person she had been the night before.
I failed. "For this. Salome."
A second after I said the word, the Semitek embedded in the main body of her radio exploded. The lead shot nestled at the point of the shaped charge burst free of the small plastic radio case, shattering the clip she had used to fasten it to her harness up by her right shoulder. Plastic fragments and metal shot shredded the harness and blew through the body armor. Recoil started her spinning back and to the left as the shot tore through her chest, punctured her lung and opened her pulmonary artery. Spinning uncontrollably, she brought the muzzle of the carbine up and whipped it across the Witch's face.
The Witch reeled off the back of the dais and fell from sight. I dove for the floor and came up with the Wildey Wolf. Bat dropped to one knee and recovered his carbine. Natch grabbed Nero Loring and started pulling him away from the dais while Jytte headed straight for the computer. Suddenly something moved over near her, and Jytte came flying back to bowl Natch and Loring over.
The Witch came back up in her true form. She still wore Nerys' face over her own, though the pale flesh had been stretched to the point where green showed through from beneath it like an infection. Likewise the flesh of her hands had become corpse-white cellophane gloves that ended in tattered strips at her wrists. Sharp black claws pierced the skin at the end of the fingers and glistened with venom.
As she slithered forward
she slid free of the rest of the flesh she had worn in her time as a changeling. A black tongue, forked like that of a serpent, flickered through Nerys' ruby lips. From her throat, all the way down between very mammalian breasts and along the full 20 feet of her snakelike body, yellow ivory scales covered her. Green scales armored the rest of her and gathered into barbs on the backs of her elbows and the points of her shoulders. She blinked away the membranes covering her eyes, showing the elliptical pupils of her amber eyes.
"I need this deception no more! The coming of my lord is nigh!"
Bat and I opened up at the same time. He burned through his clip before I finished mine. His duplex bullets ripped a line across her torso starting at where her left hip might once have been and ending at her right shoulder. My five shots centered on her head and throat. One nailed her dead center in the forehead, shredding her human mask and helping knock her back off the dais.
She ducked from sight for a second, then rose up again. I could see broken scales where Bat had hit her, but as I watched they repaired themselves. "You cannot kill me! Your weapons are too puny! I am invincible!"
Somewhere behind me Nero Loring started laughing.
Bat, Natch and Jytte all concentrated their fire on her. Bullets ricocheted from her head and chest, shattering the windows behind her. Immediately the storm's howling winds whipped through the room, lashing her face with the hair she had worn as a human. Huge chunks of rain-slicked glass whirled out into the night as I jumped up onto the dais and pried Marit's carbine from her dead fingers. Water washed over the back of the Witch and ran off her scales like the bullets we shot at her.
Loring's laughter cut through the thunder and his ridicule seemed to hurt her more than our bullets. She coiled up at the base of the shattered window and hissed at him. She set herself to strike at him, then twisted her head around and glanced at me with the corner of her eye. Her hands twitched, and she came for me.
As she lunged in my direction, the broken shards of wet glass beneath her coils provided her less than optimal traction. Half her serpentine body shot back out through the window as her torso launched toward me. Even in mid-strike she realized what had happened, so her raking claws shifted from me to the dais and sunk in through the Formica top and the particle board beneath it.
She looked up at me and her snake-tongue flayed the last of the human flesh from her face. Clinging there, with her arms outstretched, she hissed menacingly. "This is not over!" A green coil appeared at the edge of the building, but a burst from Jytte's carbine knocked it back out into the night.
"It is over."
I jumped back off the dais and without my added weight, it slowly slid back toward the broken windows. I leveled Marit's carbine at it and burned the clip. The duplex bullets blasted it into so much kindling and Formica dust. The wind sucked the debris out, taking both the Witch and Marit in the bargain.
I ran to the window and steadied myself against one of the window frames. Falling further and further through sheets of rain, I saw a black whip-like shape undulating through the air. Then, amid a bright flash of light, it hit Frozen Shade. A lightning strike tore into the damaged panel, more sparks shot up and an S-shaped fire began to burn at the base of the Lorica Citadel.
I turned away from the window and shouted over the howling wind. "Nero, Jytte, what about that computer?" The light around the maglev line continued to build and seven spiral rainbows rose from the local maglev lines to link each citadel with City Center. "Whatever she started, it's continuing."
Jytte looked at the machine and shook her head, "I am unable to assess what I can do. Given time, I could piece together the neural links that make this thing work." She pointed at the two thick cables that touched the base of the brain-fan. "All input and output is going through here, being filtered through Nerys' brain. Deciphering the mind of a 14-year-old girl is not possible."
I turned to Nero. "How did you code the brainwave data?"
"Her patterns in doing one thing would trigger an effect and in doing another would stop it." The storm wind pulled at Loring's vest and whipped the long strands of his hair through the air. "She hated math, so that's what I used as a trigger. It was the pattern from a series of math problems!"
"And the stopper?"
"Singing a song. Her favorite Christmas hymn, 'Silent Night'!"
A particularly strong and close bolt of lightning silhouetted Bat at the window. "Get her singing, Loring, or we'll all be doing a Requiem! Jesus, Caine, look at this!"
The rainbows broke loose of their citadel moorings and began rotating above City Center like a helicopter blade. As they spun faster and faster they blurred together into a flat disc that slowly began to arc down into a bowl that covered the city. The light show continued to whirl at a frenetic pace and lighting strikes increased, skewering the luminescent dome for a second or two, then being sucked up into its maelstrom.
Then the bowl's edge touched the maglev line. It continued to spin for a moment, then instantly stopped. Pressure built within the dome, and my ears popped. Below us, in the citadel, windows imploded. I heard my heart begin to pound inside me and I found breathing difficult. I tried to step back away from the window but the very air felt thick as wet cement.
Suddenly the center of the bowl blew upward, and the whole funnel-shape began to spin again. I fell backward and lost sight of the sky for a second. When I came back up it had all changed, and I felt like I'd dined on razor blades and ground glass for the last three days.
The whole brilliant funnel had vanished, leaving in its wake a green and red neon latticework that might as well have been the funnel's bones. Around it and through it I could see the storm clouds, and though the center seemed to go up through the clouds, I saw nothing but a void in the heart of the funnel. Lightning strikes from outside it only hit the lattice, making it glow golden-yellow at that point for a second, then it returned to the red or green color it had been.
I shouted over at Jytte and Loring. "You better do something. This is really weird."
Jytte's fists knotted in frustration. "The Witch knew what she was doing. Most of these brain slices are from the left side of the brain. All math and logic, very little language."
Loring knelt next to the machine. "Come on, Nerys, you have to do it. 'Silent night, holy night . . .'"
The machine's membrane answered him with, "I can't, Daddy. I can't."
"Think of something!" I stood and watched the first blue tendril hook itself over the edge of the funnel. "Bat, get the hell out of here, take Natch with you. I don't know how far you'll get but . . ."
Bat shook his head as a second tendril appeared over the event horizon. "I don't run." He slapped a new clip into the carbine and worked the charging lever.
The tendrils solidified as the creature hauled itself up through the hole dug in the sky. The creature's outline hardened into a carapace studded with hooks and bumps and claws. Whereas before it had been smoky gray and insubstantial, it was now a light brown that was his true color. Like the Plutonians he had doubtlessly fashioned in his own image, a leathery flesh covered his body. His head and face were pure arachnid, with compound eyes and sharp mandibles which could have taken the top off one of the Goddard Towers were he inclined to crane his neck toward it.
The creature hung on the lattice with one hand while reaching out with the other. The arm telescoped out to extend from its shoulders, near the center of the city, to the base of the Lorica Citadel. With one of its triform fingers it nudged the burning body that had been the Witch, then brought the finger to its mouth and it tasted of the ashes.
A buzzing, popping voice sounded in my head. "Thiz one never underztood. Inferior, with pretenzionz."
"Jytte! Do something!"
"There is nothing to do, Caine. The parts of the brain we have can't sing!"
The creature's head rotated around to focus on me. "My pet, you oppoze me?"
"I am not your pet!"
"Defianze iz powerful. How to break your rezo
lve and leave your mind intact?"
"Please baby, just sing it for me," Loring begged the black box.
"I can't, Daddy."
The creature reached out for me, but as it did, lightning struck the lattice in two places. The talons grasping at me flashed into their blue outline form and sparked from the metal window frames. They passed through them and left the stink of ozone in their wake as I jumped back, and Bat ducked beneath them.
"He's still vulnerable! Sing the song!" I shouted.
"I can't," the machine wailed.
Not knowing if the machine had visual sensors or not, I pointed at the creature. "You have to. If you don't, Fiddleback will kill your father."