He yawned, and settled deeper into the couch. He was in a corner room on the first floor of the main house at the Junction, one with a lot of windows and a good view of the waterfall. Nova was somewhere upstairs, doing something that had produced a strange smell for a while. Whatever it was, it had made her throw up. Before that, she had been running all over the house, acting like a spy. But there had been no sound out of her for over an hour.

"Too good to sit with her baby brother," he told Adam. The infant regarded him solemnly, and then threw a Titanide egg at him.

Actually, Conal didn't mind. He just got a lot of satisfaction out of feeling put-upon.

The kid was okay. Not a howler. Real smart, and real strong. He could probably start with the weights in another year or so, just as soon as he had his feet solidly under him. He had the bones for it. And in a way, Conal was proud that Robin had trusted him enough to leave the baby with him.

He had set the kid up in the middle of the floor with some toys he'd scrounged, and Adam seemed happy to sit there and throw them around, then crawl after them. His favorite was the rack of old Titanide eggs. They were round, about the size of a golf ball, and came in all colors. They were too big for him to put in his mouth, though that didn't prevent him from trying, and they wouldn't break. About their only drawback was a tendency to roll under furniture, so Conal had rigged a palisade of pillows all around Adam, four meters wide. He didn't manage to chunk too many that far. He stumped around in there, naked, not falling down much, and bouncing right back up when he did.

Conal watched Adam grow still, and start peeing on the floor. Conal laughed, and Adam turned awkwardly and started laughing, too.

"Ma!" Adam squeaked. "Tye-Nye! Ma!"

"Pee-pee," Conal told him, getting up. "Gotta learn that, kid. Say, 'Gotta go pee-pee.'" Adam laughed louder, nodding.

Conal got a towel out of the bathroom and mopped it up. It was a nuisance, but what could you expect? And it was better than diapers.

He sat down again and his thoughts turned, not for the first time, to Nova. Most likely she was sleeping up there. Hell of a problem, Nova. Hell of a problem. What to do about it? Where to start?

He couldn't think of a good place. At first he thought she hated all living beings equally. Lately he had come to believe he held a special place in her heart, just below rattlesnakes, pederasts, and spirochetes. Definitely a tough place to start from, but determination had always been Conal's strong point.

Unhappily, imagination was not. Nor was subtlety. Cirocco had told him he had an admirable directness, but that it took some getting used to.

So when his thoughts turned to Nova, they kept going around in the same unprofitable pattern. He knew it was ridiculous, he knew something radical had to happen before she could ever begin to see him as anything but a repulsive monster, but he kept having the same recurrent fantasy. It started with him getting out of the chair and going up the stairs. He would knock on her door.

"Come in," she would say. He would enter, smile winningly.

"Just wanted to see if you needed anything, Nova," he would say.

Then-he wasn't sure about the details of this part-he would be sitting on the bed beside her, and he would lean over to kiss her, and her lips would part ...

She screamed.

It was a dreadful, terrifying scream, torn from her throat. So deep had been his fantasy that for a confusing moment he tried to form an apology, and then his blood seemed to freeze as he understood this was real.

His feet touched the bottom stair, the ninth stair, and the top stair, and he was barreling down the hallway toward her room.

TEN

Nova came awake slowly, not knowing what had been bothering her. She lay there, waiting for the sound again, wondering why she had thought Cirocco was outside her door waiting to come in.

There it was again. A scratching sound. But they didn't scratch at doors here, they hit them with their fists. And this wasn't the door, it was the window.

She got up, yawning, padded to the window, and stuck her head out. She looked down.

What she saw was frozen in her memory for all time.

There was a thing climbing up the outside of the house. She saw its arms, which were made of bones and snakes, and the top of its head, which was covered with cracked parchment and scraps of long hair. But the true terror was in its hands. She could see the bare finger bones, pieces of rotting flesh, and mouths. Each finger ended in a little bund snake with a wide mouth and needle-teeth, and when the hand grasped the vertical wall the snakes bit into the wood with an audible crunch. The thing was coming up fast, hand over hand. She was fumbling for her gun, realizing belatedly that she had no clothes on, when the thing looked up. It had the face of a skull. Worms swarmed in the eye sockets.

Nova was not easily frightened. Even that horrific face was not enough to make her scream. But then she turned to get her gun and was face to face with the second thing, hanging from the wall beside the window, its face two feet away from her own. Above its eyebrows there was just jagged bone and a boiling mass of worms. It reached for her and she screamed.

It had her by the wrist. She pulled, still screaming, as the tiny snakes bit into her flesh. Then she tore free.

She did not remember how she got across the room. Time went very slowly, or racketed by leaving momentary gaps. She found her gun in her hand. The hand trembled, fumbling with the safety. She brought it around and up. The second thing was in the room coming right at her and she pulled the trigger and heard nothing because the blood had made the gun slip out of her hand, and the thing was still coming at her. She rolled over her bed and down into the gap between it and the wall as she heard the door splintering. The gun had to be down there somewhere. She fought an overpowering urge to take another look, heard something hit something else with a meaty sound, heard something else rattle the house as it hit the floor. She found the gun, steadied it with her good hand, and jerked her arms over the bed with the gun out in front of her.

Conal came within a tenth of a second of dying. The nerve impulse was already on the way to Nova's trigger finger when she realized he was grappling with one of the creatures and managed to jerk her hands up in time to put her first rocket-propelled bullet into the wall a foot below the ceiling.

There was no way she was going to get a safe shot at the one Conal was fighting, but the second monster was framed in the window, on its way in, so she gave it two explosive slugs, one in the head and the second in the chest, and paused one second to see what it thought about that.

The head exploded, pulverized, vanished. The chest wanted to fly apart, but the silvery snakes that threaded the thing's body somehow managed to hold it together.

And it kept coming.

You do that much longer, she thought, and I'm going to get scared.

The one on the floor had thrown Conal off. Nova put three bullets into it, with results not much better than before. The creature was thrown against the wall by the force of the explosions and its left arm was blown off at the shoulder. But it got up, one handed, and started toward Conal.

So did the arm. It pulled itself rapidly along with its fingers.

Nova swallowed the sour taste of vomit, and put her last three slugs into the one just inside the window. The headless one. It staggered back, hitting the sill, and tumbled out, backwards. She heard things scrabbling at the wall, receding, then a splash as it hit the water.