Fury and the Power (20 page)

(Geoff splashed down off the ledge into ankle-deep water and started toward the ravine, aiming the beam of the flashlight at the creatures on the rock.

("Get away from him! Leave him alone!"

(Instead they changed positions, coming closer together with their backs to Geoff, blocking Geoff's view of his father. They kneeled slowly around him. Then the sobbing stopped abruptly.

(Geoff slipped and fell on the slick rocks of the beach, losing his grip on the flashlight, which flickered out as it rolled away down a sloping shelf underwater. Screaming in frustration, he lunged to try to retrieve it, getting a face full of water that stung his sore eyes.

(Groping beneath the surface, he touched a bare foot and an ankle; his hand slid higher, to a slender but sup-pie calf, before he snatched it away and scrambled back, opening his smarting eyes.

(Girl, blond, pretty, early twenties, standing in a slosh of seawater that came nearly to her bare knees. Standing where no one had been moments ago, hands at her sides, looking calmly down at him. She had a very small face that made her eyes seem as large as the plummy eyes of children in a Keene painting.

("Oh,
shit
!"

("Scare you?"

("Where'd you come from? Fall out of the sky?" No idea why he had said that, but it made her laugh.

("Yes. But not like you did," she replied, glancing around at the swamped Conan helicopter. She turned her face back to him. She would have been pretty, but there was something wrong with her mouth; it had an ugly twist to it. And there was a mark of some kind, a round scar on her forehead that gleamed like the moon that was in and out of clouds above their heads.

(As if she knew what he was staring at, she covered her mouth with one hand.

("I know. It's not pretty to look at. Can't seem to get the lips right, but I will. Takes practice. I need a mirror, but I haven't had time to just sit and work at it. Try to imagine what
you'd
look like if you had been shot twice in the face today. Oh-oh. Sorry. That scared you, didn't it?"

(Geoff's lungs felt like sacks of cement in his chest. He made strangled noises trying to breathe.

("Don't worry, bud. I wasn't implying you were going to get hurt. What happens to you from now on is your choice. I'm Chauncey. What's your name?" Behind the hand held loosely to her mouth it looked as if she were chewing.

("Geoff," he said with a winded sigh. He tried to get up. He was only in about two feet of water, but his knees had washed out. He couldn't stand. This frightened him more than her supernatural appearance.

(Chauncey showed him her small mouth again. "This look any better to you?" She smiled. It was a terrible-looking smile, but he nodded. "Okay. Like I said, I'll work on it. That's the thing about suffering trauma when you're in an alter shape. I don't think I'll be able to do anything about my left foot for a while."

(She lifted her leg slowly out of the water. It was as shapely as the right leg down to her ankle. But she had, instead of a petite foot, the paw of a lion, beads of water dripping from the ebony claws.

("Like walking with a bucket on my foot," she complained. Her grimace of a smile shot halfway up one cheek as if her face had suddenly become highly plastic, unmanageable. A shattered front tooth gleamed wetly in the long gap of her mouth. Chauncey felt the anomaly and with her thumb smoothed her mouth back to approximately where it belonged. But now it was too big, grotesquely wide. She softly patted her lower lip, reducing an ugly lump. "Oh, damn," she fretted, licking and patting. "But I don't want to bother you with my little problems; it's all cosmetic. We should be talking about your future. Your father has already made his decision, as you can see."

(Geoff had forgotten about his father and the shadow-creatures surrounding him. But when he looked he saw that his father was alone on the boulder at the mouth of the ravine, sitting up cross-legged. His face, white by moonlight, was turned toward Geoff. Were his eyes open? Geoff was too far away to tell.

("Dad? Are you okay?" He made another attempt to get to his feet.

("Better than okay," Chauncey said. "He's recovered his honor."

(Geoff tried to wade through the water, but it felt thick and heavy, dragging at his legs, holding him back. He paused, trying to catch his breath, and in those few seconds he saw his father raise the Glock automatic, muzzle first, beneath his chin. Holding it in both hands, he pulled the trigger, and the mist flushed red around him as what remained of his head pitched forward.

("Dad… ddddyyy!"

(Chauncey's hand was on his shoulder.

("It's all right. Our honor has been satisfied, and your father has redeemed himself in the most honorable way left to him."

("No! Get away from me! You're a fuckin' freak show, all of you! You
made
him kill himself!"

("Not true. We don't have that kind of power. We can't make anyone act against his will. We may not seek revenge, or kill in cold blood."

("You did a good job of it today!"

("That's where you're wrong. We can defend ourselves on our ground, in our home place, by whatever means we find necessary. That dispensation ends at the boundaries of the home place. You're angry and you're frightened, but I can't hurt you, Geoff. All any of us can do is reason with you. Explain your choices."

("What are you talkin' about! What have you done to Eden?"

("We gave her sanctuary. Which you violated today. I don't know where Eden is. While we were… busy, the others of your force took her away."

("What others? You don't make sense. None of this. Why did he have to die?"

("Don't you know who they were?" Chauncey persisted.

("No!"

("Or where they've gone?"

("Oh, God!"

(There was no sound accompanying the appearance of flames. He noticed them first reflected in Chauncey's large dark eyes. He felt the heat; then the mist of the bay was tinted orange. He looked around and saw the body of his father engulfed, still seated on the boulder like a holy immolator at an Asian protest rally. Standing well away, almost into the trees, were small groups of watchers, dark except for the vivid amber of their slanted eyes. The flames leaped and whirled. The heat was intense. The heat and the burning father, corpse though he was, made Geoff dizzy from nausea and despair.

("So you have nothing to tell me."

(Geoff stared at the pyre, swallowing, weeping.

("Just leave me alone."

("You haven't heard your choices."

("There'll be search teams. They'll find us in the morning. I have to get through the night, that's all."

(She nodded. "That's one choice. To be rescued."

("Yes."

("Geoff, you see the Auditors waiting over there, don't you?"

("The what?"

("If you choose rescue, then we'll go away and leave you here. All of us but one, whom the Auditors will choose from their number to be your companion for the rest of your life. Give yourself a few moments now, look the Auditors over, and try to imagine what that life will be like. You'll be constantly watched, by eyes that never blink. Never close. The Auditor won't speak to you. He'll have nothing to say. He will only watch, and wait."

("Wait for what?"

("For you to go balls-up, dungeon-style paddy crackers. Forty-eight hours to fracture time is about average, I'm told. That's when you'll begin to talk to your Auditor. Talk, talk, talk. Plead, moan, and whimper for him to forgive you. But forgiveness is the Pardoner's game. He's only an Auditor.
Your
Auditor, until the end of your days."

(Geoff ran his tongue over his broken front teeth. His lips twitched into a frozen position, a kind of snarl.

("Or—" Chauncey had been working on her smile. She almost got it right this time. "You can go back to Moby Bay, and live there. A few mortals made that choice, and many of them adjusted nicely in time. You will be… tolerated, and we're not so hard to take, really, in our everyday appearances. You might even marry one of us. It's a simple, undemanding life in Moby Bay, except for occasional disturbances like today's. There are always problems with the Bad Souls, the Fallen of Malterra. Those who have no hope of God's forgiveness. I'm telling you, it makes them
mean
."

(Geoff was trembling. He couldn't look at Chauncey any longer. He looked instead at the flames, at the diminished wisping remains of his father.

("The third choice, of course, is the best one," Chauncey said. "It satisfies—"

("Your honor? What sort of honor do monsters have?"

("There you go, confusing appearance with evil. Not all of the Fallen were evil. The Bad Souls are permanently locked into human form. All except Mordaunt, who is
Deus inversus
, the Darkness of God. All of you mortals can consider yourselves lucky that this is so. Gives you a fighting chance, at least, although evil has had the edge for the last hundred millennia. Maybe because it's never boring. Why
we
are shifters is part of the whole Redemption package. Unlike the Malterrans, eventually we may return to a state of Grace. First we do our lessons. In order to understand the nature of all creatures that swim, fly, walk, or crawl, we assume their identities." Her smile was okay now, somewhat rueful in tone. "But damn it can be tricky! Learning how to shift, I mean. Want to see my paw again? I guess not. I've been working on this damn gryphon for the last year and a half. Mom says I've always been too ambitious. She's probably right. Combining different parts from the avian and animal worlds and getting them to work together, kind of a hoot but it's exhausting. My brother says I should have started with a chicken, the little jerk.

("But anyway, getting back to you. That third choice. If you're buying the total Redemption package. It's really a bargain. Spare yourself in this life, you wrestle a lot of heavy baggage into the next. You go with scabs, murk, and mildew. The soul deserves a clean delivery, Geoff."

(His eyes were smarting. He rubbed his throat, trying to ease the choking tension there. He turned away from Chauncey, seeing the flames on the rock again like radiant branches of a tree nourished by the consumed heart of his father.

("Oh, Geoff?"

(He turned back to her. Chauncey's right hand was out. He saw a compact Glock automatic lying in her palm.

("This is yours, isn't it?"

(He stared at the pistol for a few seconds, then waded three steps toward Chauncey. The surf beyond the misted bay was like the blood rushing through his heart. His fingers closed over the dull black slide of the Glock, fingertips grazing Chauncey's wrist. It was unexpected, that touch, comforting in a way. Imagining himself blind and finding a flower in the dark. A single beat of his heart said
courage
.

(Geoff looked up and into her eyes.

("Thought I'd lost it," he told her. He lifted the Glock from her hand. Held it as he might've held a key poised at the threshold of a lock on a mysterious door. "Thanks."

("What you think is the end is only another place to go to."

("I wanted to see Eden again." There was no strain in his voice, no sorrowing notes. His mind felt clear, open to possibilities, raised remotely above the ruck and misery of self-pity and other merely human perceptions, immaculate as an observatory. The reality was clear as well, like the gleam of new stars; his purpose now etched plainly in firmament but only large enough to accommodate the humble event.

("I know," Chauncey said. "I can promise you this. If she ever needs our help, she'll have it.")

"T
hat's enough," Eden said. "Don't show me any more. I don't want to see him die." Chauncey's small face had a rosy flush; there was a touch of euphoria in her blue eyes from the residual energy of psychic communication.

Eden felt darkened, exhausted. She took a few minutes to regain her composure, staring sightlessly out the window next to her chair as the Gulfstream jet rose through streamers of cloud to the assigned flight level for the Cheyenne to San Francisco flight.

"I do need your help," Eden said finally.

"Ask."

Eden described the dreams and visions she'd been having, of a tiger with the head of a hyena, and the bloody paw prints on the sacred staircase in Rome.

"It couldn't be one of us," Chauncey said.

"My friend Bertie Nkambe, the Kenyan girl you were talking about—"

"Oh, yeah," Chauncey said, with a wry scrunch of her mouth, "the shooter. She plugged me twice when I was in an alter shape, trying to keep them from toting you away. Sorry to interrupt; what about Bertie?"

"She's Gifted, particularly at Peeping and brain-locking. Bertie thinks I may subconsciously be creating this thing. Slowly bringing it to life. But that's horrible. Obscene. I
know
I can't be doing it. I mean, why would I want to?—What are you smiling about?"

"This conversation. What do other girls our age dish about? Hair, clothes, what we saw on TV last night. And guys sex sex guys."

Eden smiled too, painfully. "I love your boots."

"Aren't they awesome? Thirty-seven bucks at this little trading post near the Navaho rez in New Mexico. I like the way you cut your hair. Are you bleaching those streaks in?"