"No!" I screamed, and something within me leapt out like a savage creature. I knew what I wanted, and I shaped it. I'm not sorry for it. I'm really not.

I wanted death. I wanted revenge. I wanted to make widows of these soldiers' wives and orphans of their children. I wanted them to fucking suffer.

The fragments of the Temptation stirred on the floor. A thick greenish fog swirled at ankle level, coiling and rising. Groans and screams echoed, as if coming from some vast subterranean well. The sights and sounds made Sher swing his muzzle away from Kafka. The kid's eyes widened at what was coming from that fog, rising with it as if striding up from the depths.

The kid screamed.

He held the trigger down, a long and noisy burst.

A hand reached from the fog and snatched at the barrel even as Sher was firing. The hand flipped the rifle, reversing it, and then the weapon fired again.

Sher's body danced backward in a ballet of death, moving to the jittery music of the bullets slamming into his body. He screamed wordlessly, but I could hear his thoughts, and I didn't care. It was my hand that had taken the weapon from the kid, even though the hand that had come from the fog had been clawed and green and scaly. It had been my hand-because I'd made it move. I'd ordered its actions, and it had responded.

Sher was dead long before the body stopped twitching and fell to the floor. His squad was staring, momentarily stunned.

It took only that instant of hesitation for them to die as well. A tropical hurricane wind roaring from below shredded the fog, and I took each tendril and made it a thing, a creature of Bosch.

A joker. A demon.

They poured out, shrieking and vengeful: the stag-headed man; a merman in full medieval armor riding a flying, metalscaled fish; a featherless bird with teeth stolen from a Tyrannosaurus; a claw-legged, man-size toad; a cat-demon; a ferocious winged fish bearing a unicorn's horn; flying devils of all descriptions…

Tey tore the guns away from the soldiers and threw them back to us. The soldiers went down under a clot of swarming attackers.

My demons tore the limbs from their living, writhing victims. They died slowly and horribly, and I…

I relished every last instant of their pain. The floor literally ran red with blood.

I laughed. I howled. I chuckled.

My jokers celebrated with me. "Out!" I cried to them, and my fantasy multitude echoed the word with their shrill inhuman voices. "Drive them all away! Kill any of them you can!"

Flowing like a massive black cloud,. my troops were gone. My will went with them. I sent them hurtling against the intruders. With their power, I ripped the choppers from the sky and tore the hulls open on their boats. They killed, they maimed, they destroyed.

More of my cavalry swooped down from the sky. Some were jokers riding armored flying fish and armed with (if I could believe the eyes of the Rox) swordfish lances. At their flanks, hags and beasts and creatures of all descriptions plummeted down from the false dawn glow, ablaze in their own infernal light. The apparitions were incandescent, painful to look upon.

The demons landed and tore the guns from the hands of the nats even as the soldiers fired on them. The joker riders flushed out the hidden troops and drove them into the open. The shining, awful hordes whooped and howled and dove at them; the riders impaled them on their strange lances. The soldiers fled before them. In a very few minutes, the attack was broken. The troops were fleeing the Rox any way they could, and my army-my dream army-pursued them. Briefly, anyway.

I was tiring rapidly. With my exhaustion, the summoned creatures of my mind lost strength as well. Those soldiers who made it to their boats or to their choppers I let go as the images of Bosch turned again to wisps of fog and faded away. That night, I'm told, less than half the troops returned to their bases. The rest the bodies-were thrown into the Rox sewage system to rot. There was no place on the Rox to bury them, even if we'd wanted to.

So in essence, I suppose, I eventually ate them.

You know what? I didn't care. In fact, I rather enjoyed the thought.

It wasn't until hours later that I started shaking.

Lovers

There was a storm over Ellis Island. Strange green-black clouds roiled, and occasionally a sullen flicker of lightning would play in their leprous depths. Suddenly a long funnel cloud dropped from the parent mass and with its end whipping like a snake, groped at the buildings below.

It was almost as if the weather were the deciding factor, for the assault troops began rolling back. Men came flying down to the shore, throwing away weapons as they ran. They usually found the LSTs retreating without them, so the water was bobbing with small dark heads.

Turtle, with Tach wedged on his lap inside the turtle shell, maneuvered at the edges of what had been a battle and had now become a rout. Their ears still rang from artillery shells striking the steel plates of the shell. It was a proof of the warranty of battleship steel-there was neither crack nor dent in the metal.

A pair of helicopters were chattering away from the maelstrom of the island. The funnel cloud hopped like a kid on a pogo stick, and one of the choppers was caught in the whirlwind. The blades clawed, found no support, were torn away. It was going down, the little rear propeller spinning uselessly. Then it stopped, and Tommy grunted with effort as his telekinetic power broke the dive and held the machine motionless in space.

Turtle moved slowly toward the Jersey shore, towing the stricken helicopter. The other chopper whipped past the shell, dangerously close, then banked and came around until it was hovering precisely in front of the flying ace. They both knew the machine guns mounted on the front of the copter couldn't do them any damage, but Tach felt herself tense nonetheless. It's disconcerting staring down gun barrels. Suddenly the helicopter wobbled, then peeled off and headed for Manhattan. Tommy resumed his errand of mercy, dropping off the helicopter and her crew on the shore. They emerged waving and cheering.

"Nothing to stop us now," Tommy said, and he flew back toward Ellis Island. "Look's like the war's over."

"I don't know whether to hope Blaise is alive or dead," Tach said, sighing.

As they drew closer to the island, fear began nibbling at the edges of Tachyon's mind, wrapping tendrils about the ends of her nerves until a subliminal shivering gripped her body. The baby, sensing Tach's agitation, was turning over and over in her womb. Tachyon tried to send soothing thoughts to the infant, but it was hard to concentrate on anything but a desperate need to run.

The Rox drew closer. Turtle was breathing hard like a man in the middle of a long run who begins to doubt his ability to continue.

"It's… it's Bloat… Teddy," Tach forced out past the terror that wrapped like a smothering blanket about her lungs. "Fight it. Ignore it."

"Can't you ward us, or guard us, or do some damn Takisian thing?"

"No, I've trained this body, but its powers are… feeble." She ground her teeth together, holding back the scream that threatened to rip her throat apart. "But I'll try to contact him. He helped me once

… he cares for me… he'll do it again."

Tach sent with her weak telepathic link and felt it recoil back on her, defeated by the terror of Bloat's mind. Tommy started screaming. A thin tearing sound that was terrible to hear. It fed and nurtured Tachyon's terror until she was blind, dumb, and deaf, locked in a world where only fear existed.

The shell flipped nosedown, and they were plummeting for the murky waters of the East River. A few bloated bodies bounced in the chop. Tachyon put her hands over her face and sobbed uncontrollably. With that small part of rationality that remained she remembered that Turtle could control his TK powers only when he felt secure, unafraid. She had conveniently forgotten that inconvenient fact, and the oversight was going to cost them their lives.