Fury and the Power (33 page)

At the same time Frank, still doubled and hissing like a viper from the Book of Revelation, bobbed against the ceiling above their heads, a grotesque party balloon. Most of the oxygen in the library seemed to have been consumed by the demands of their terror; the heat now was almost scorching.

Leoncaro's secretary, nearly blinded, his face wrecked down to fragments of gleaming bone, threw himself across the Pope's body. The library was emptying; more nosebleeds to fuel pandemonium.

"
You know who I am
," Irene said with a curt aside of her head; she was cutting new teeth that jutted from her upper gums like ivory stakes. She spat in fury at the tall African girl while simultaneously urinating on the floor.

"And you know who
I
am," Bertie Nkambe returned. Then with an agonized glance at her companion she said, "Tom! They're trying to shift on me! I don't know how long I can hold them off!"

"Give me the chunky fellow," Tom Sherard said calmly.

His Holiness stirred, trying to rise with Colbert's body on his back. The secretary had passed out.

"
Totus tuus
," Leoncaro said with a lift of his eyes to Bertie.
I give myself totally to you
. He was bewildered from shock or perhaps serene in the light of a vision of the Holy Virgin.

Three men rushed to get Leoncaro on his feet. They half dragged him to the door while Irene struggled, shrieking impotently. Then with a sound as painful as an arrow to the ear Irene split the carapace of force holding her immobile. She bounded on all fours after the Pontiff, now splitting out of her dress as well, revealing the colorful ass of a baboon.

Frank Tubner fell at the feet of Tom Sherard, who smashed his head sidelong with the cane; there was a double
crack
of split skull bone, first from the impact with the cane, then as Frank's head hit the marble floor, but Pinky didn't hear that hollow-sounding report. Time had just skipped on her once more. Skipped for the rest of the afternoon.

E
den Waring, accompanied by two tall, bearded Swiss Guardsmen in their amusing orange-and-blue striped Renaissance regalia, was hurrying along the corridor that led to the library when the screaming erupted and echoed throughout the Apostolic Palace, followed by invited guests bailing out of the library with bloody noses, followed by the Pope, more blood on white satin, his zucchetto dangling over one ear, gold pectoral cross swinging as he was more or less carried by three men in black suits, and followed by—

The two guards, unable to believe their eyes, tried to hold Eden back as the Pope was pushed inside a room and a stout oak door slammed behind them. The late Irene Hudlow, now transformed into something else entirely, hit the door hard enough after a leap of more than fifteen feet to cause chandeliers up and down the corridor to tremble and blink. Real ugly, but obviously powerful. What remained of Irene was a nice rope of pearls around its hairy neck. Claws gouged splinters a foot long and an inch thick from the elaborately carved door.

Eden recovered her faculties while the Swiss Guards and others, attracted by the fearful screaming that could be heard, probably, in the basilica, were backing up. Eden crept closer with a grimace white as a scar, moving at an angle in the wide corridor, so far unnoticed by the howling-mad creature. She held Tom Sherard's walking stick level and at shoulder height, gripping it a few inches below the gold lion's head. She calmed herself with an athlete's practiced focus.

The four-hundred-pound, ten-foot-high door began to come off its ornate hinges.

Bertie appeared in the library doorway as the creature acknowledged Eden's approach with a baleful over-the-shoulder look. For a few moments the claws were still while it pissed lavishly on the floor, expressing both contempt and a territorial imperative.

What kept you?
Bertie wanted to know. Subvocally she still sounded weakened by the ordeal.

Storm over the Atlantic. That's a gorgeous
shuka
.

Thanks. My guy at Hermes. Eden?

Yeah?

Don't fool around with this beastie. There are people dying in here.

I wasn't thinking of adopting it
, Eden told her, curtly shutting Bertie out of her mind; she needed to retain focus and not allow surging adrenaline to pump her heart through the roof of her mouth.

The creature resumed its frenzy of destruction. The massive door came free with a tortured screech of old nails pulling out of wood and wrenched bronze hinges, and was flung end over end down the wide corridor at Eden.

"
Simba!
"

The lion's-head walking stick streaked end-first from Eden's hand as she dodged away from the tumbling door. The stick was a momentary blur, catching light as it arched toward the open doorway. It pierced the creature in mid-leap like a heavy arrow from a medieval longbow. Flesh, sinew, bone, and heart skewered in a fraction of a second. The creature fell headlong and skidded in a heap almost to the feet of those who had sought refuge inside the large domed chamber. A leathery eyelid closed in shadowless diffused sunlight.

When Eden got there a stink was rising from the hairy body that was curled limply on one side. Some pearls from the broken strand were rolling slowly across the marble floor.

Eden looked into the eyes of John the Twenty-fourth. His Holiness looked appalled and seriously pissed at the same time. He held his gold cross in one hand, away from the blood-soiled front of his cassock.

Well done
, she heard in her mind. Then Leoncaro raised his eyes to something he sensed was lurking above them, on the outside of the small dome with its cupola of stained glass.

Eden had a glimpse of it too—catlike, shadowy, climbing surreptitiously to the highest point of the cupola, looking down into the chamber some thirty feet below. Small brimstone eyes in a blunt monstrous head. She'd last seen it in the video shot by Etan Culver in Amboseli National Park during the fearful display of rage and power by the elephant known as Karloff. Bright splinters of light from the sky above the cupola hurt her eyes. And the part-feline phantom was already losing definition, as if it had been accidental; a burst of dirty smoke from a chimney, vanishing even before she could be certain it was really there.

"I don't suppose I'm going to get my walking stick back" Tom Sherard grumbled. He was gazing at the gold lion's head and the inch of dark wood socketed between the simian shoulder blades of the motionless creature.

"Remember what we talked about? That thing isn't dead," Bertie reminded him. "Only inert. But it will stay that way as long as the stick is there. How long do you think
mopane
wood is good for?"

"I reckon a thousand years, in a dry place."

"I know of just such a place," Leoncaro murmured, kneeling beside the shape-shifter and making the sign of the cross above its head. An eyelid flickered, prompting a shocked reaction from caped ecclesiasticals drawn to the scene. The Pope wasn't bothered but he did seem annoyed that there was no door to close on the chamber as he rose stiffly, waving aside helping hands. "A tomb," he concluded, "where others much like this one are interred." He looked again at Eden with an unexpectedly warm—considering the tumult echoing through the Apostolic Palace—smile of welcome.

"So good to meet you, at last. We'll talk soon. Right now I believe we both have more pressing concerns, Eden Waring. Do you have knowledge of the whereabouts of your alter ego?"

Eden said, with an expression of surprise—how could he know about doppelgangers?—"Not yet, Holiness. I don't think that's good news. She—she must respond if she's able?'

He glanced up at the dome again before giving himself over to a phalanx of Swiss Guards in mufti. The blood of outrage in his face caused the old scar impinging on his upper lip to stand out in ivory relief.

"You must do everything in your power to retrieve her" he said to Eden, "before we meet again."

LAS VEGAS

OCTOBER 23

9:25 P.M. PDT

"L
ewis," Charmaine complained, "I know you explained it all to me a couple times already, but I'm standing here twenty minutes at this table and I still don't know when you win or lose, or why?'

"Mostly I'm winning," Gruvver said, absorbed in the action at the Caesars Palace craps table. He indicated the four-inch stack of red chips, with a growing stack of green beside it. Now that the dice were in the hands of a shooter who had numbers working, Gruvver was making come-bets on every roll, with odds. Working up a sweat, rolling his shoulders, putting his own momentum behind the bouncing dice. "This is when the game gets good."

"What are those green chips worth again?"

"Twenty-five each."

"Oh. And what is the high-roller trying to do?"

"He's not necessarily a high-roller; he's just the shooter. But it's happening for him. What he doesn't want to do now is seven-out." The point was nine. "Yeah!" Gruvver exulted.

"You win again?" Charmaine said, liking this part.

"Four hundred big ones on that roll."

Charmaine helped him stack the chips he pulled in. Behind them the lilt and bingle of slot machine city, a rhythmic patter of payoffs that was part of the mega sell come-on, the hallelujah energy of a rural come-to-Jesus beneath spyglass ceilings that hid most of the casino watchdogs and their hardcore eavesdropping technology.

"Come, don't come, stickman, hard-on, everybody gettin' lathered up," Charmaine said teasingly in Gruvver's ear. "This game's just about havin' sex in public. No wonder most of the women watch while the men play with themselves, rubbin' up and blowin' on those dice."

A woman next to Charmaine, overhearing some of this, said in a middle-European accent, "For a man, everything is about sex. Money? It just buys better sex."

Charmaine offered a polite expression of interest but no encouraging comment. Not liking the way the woman was staring past her at Gruvver. Vegas seemed to be full of people who looked as if they harbored secret manias and were there to be exorcised, not entertained.

"It's hard way, Charmaine," Gruvver corrected her as she pressed closer to him. He was avidly following the tumble of dice off the padded end wall. "But that's a sucker's bet. Yeah! Man made his point again."

Charmaine nipped his earlobe with her teeth. "Are we ever gonna eat supper tonight?"

"Reservation's at ten."

"Think I'll go play roulette then." It seemed safe to leave him alone; the woman had drifted off to another table. "That game is easy to understand. It's red, or it's black. Put your money on a number, little white ball lands on that number, bingo, thirty-five to one. Could I have some money, Lewis?"

"There's a fifty in my wallet."

"I'll play your birthday, like I did yesterday at Mandalay Bay."

Charmaine reached inside his suit coat and extracted his wallet. "Why don't I keep this? That way I know you'll come looking for me when you're flat busted."

That wasn't happening yet. The shooter had made another point and Gruvver was in ecstasy. Charmaine dropped his wallet into her purse and sauntered off. What she really wanted was a kir royale, but if she sat down at the bar by herself two things were inevitable. She'd get carded. Because she was still a few weeks shy of twenty-one, she wasn't supposed to be in the casino.

Or before she could even order her kir royale, someone from casino security would stop by to chat and then ask to see a room key. Charmaine had one, although they weren't staying at Caesars; but it was annoying to think she could be mistaken for a hooker.

Might as well settle for a Coke at the soda fountain with all the kids.

At a table in one corner of the ice cream parlor she took Gruvver's old wearing-out wallet from her purse and idly looked through it. Receipts stuck just about everywhere; she needed to establish a better filing system for him. And there were a couple of articles he had clipped out of the local newspaper today. One was just a squib under World News Briefs that he'd circled. The supreme Patriarch of Thai Buddhists had been flown to Los Angeles for treatment at the UCLA Medical Center. The nature of his illness was undisclosed. Charmaine had no idea why Gruvver would be interested in a Buddhist; he was benignly negligent about attending his own church, even though his mama called him promptly at seven A.M. every Sunday to remind him. Charmaine had come close on a couple of mornings while half asleep next to him to picking up the phone herself, which probably would have jeopardized the marginally good opinion Lewis's mother had of her.

The other article had a one-column head:

VATICAN DISTURBANCE

BLAMED ON CHILDREN

Apparently, Charmaine learned, hundreds of visitors to the Holy See the day before, at about three forty-five in the afternoon Rome time, had been shocked to hear terrified screams emanating from the Apostolic Palace while the Pope was in audience with a group of "prominent American lay people." A dozen security men had rushed to the second floor of the palace, followed shortly by a medical team. Everyone inside the basilica at the time was quickly ushered out and security personnel closed off all access to the palace.