Jack was beyond fear. The cloying treacle and liquor of Glaucous’s talent had pinched to sour vinegar, stinging in his nostrils and brain, opening up choked glimpses of branching, looping world-lines—none of them good, all of them in fact awful.
What was happening had never happened before, not in Jack’s experience, nor in the experience of any ancestor who had ever contributed to the sum of the genes ratcheting in his flesh and blood—even as far back as the primordial slime.
CHAPTER 47
Wallingford
Daniel drew up Fred’s gray wool jacket and walked west, shoulders hunched, feeling the storm gather its power.
A sharp jerk of sense had reversed his arrogance and pleasure at his new body. The storm wasn’t after him—but it would work quite well as a distraction. He had been too preoccupied to pay close attention—stupid, stupid!
There was almost certainly another target nearby—another fate-shifter. Maybe more than one. But someone in the employ of the thing that hunted them could still set his sights on Daniel. He would be special. I no longer dream of the city. I don’t know why—I just don’t. A bad shepherd—isn’t that what they call me?
Lightning whited the facades on his right. Just blocks from the turn to his home, as he walked beside the big lamp shop, all the chandeliers, switched on for the morning trade, suddenly went dark. The air hissed.
Daniel had to drag his new body by main force toward the abandoned house. Fear was bringing Fred back, unpleasantly strong, and Fred most certainly did not want to go. Daniel could not jaunt again, even had he the strength, the concentration. The corrosion would be everywhere. Nothing but hideous, gray looped worlds bunched up between this dissolving segment of history and whatever lay at the end: tumbled lengths of fate, frayed out, soaked and sour-smoky with decay. Another voice—not his own, not Fred’s. Fred was already being pushed back like a slug under a stone. Why bother, Mr. Iremonk?
Lightning flew down the street, sizzling, blinding, and struck a fire hydrant. The blast nearly knocked him off his feet and shattered all the glass in the lamp shop windows.
He stumbled on, whining like a kicked dog.
You have an appointment, long delayed.
People on the sidewalks were screaming, running.
He whirled around. An old woman in tight pedal-pushers held an inverted black umbrella in one hand and dragged a terrier along behind her, on its side, legs kicking. Each time the dog got to its feet, she jerked the leash so hard it fell over again. Big splats of rain—drops the size of baseballs, mixed with sharp chips of ice—hurled from the churning sky.
Just a few miles from the center of the storm.
The sweep of her robe, merely that. Nothing compared to the Gape. Remember, Daniel? Poor bastards, all of you. But especiallyyou.
Half a block behind him, Daniel saw a small man with oily, slick black hair. Daniel turned left. Across the street waited another—slender, dressed in old black clothes shiny with water and age—and a block east, a third, clutching a dripping, battered bowler hat in one white hand. All were smiling, enjoying the storm—ignoring the rain and the ice.
Where is the net’s fourth corner, Daniel?
Trying to run backward, he almost fell, so he swiveled, arms wind-milling, and lit out—gave it all he had. He wouldn’t look back.
Had to reach the house.
Had to.
CHAPTER 48
West Seattle
The storm had a dead, hollow voice. It had never known hunger, care, passion, or any growl of hormonal surge; its voice had never vented from flesh or form.
The storm was a thousand spins and drafts of wind and water, filled with restless veins of flash and charge, and all it knew—all it could possibly know—was that it had been set free, liberated from probability, and that it had a power no storm had ever before possessed. It could gather, it could kill— with malice.
One wet black swirl had almost caught up with the white van.
“My dear, it is our quarry, our cargo!” Glaucous shouted over the roar. He jerked his thumb toward the back. “He trails a spoor…”
“Of thread?” Penelope shrilled.
“Spoor, not spool! He exudes, he stinksof the bad places, not hell—though he must have come very close, dipped an ankle or a knee… Violet! Indigo! Blue! Red! Red bolts and orange! All for madam’s delight!”
Jack needed all his strength. He pressed his feet against the doors at the rear of the van, clutched the sack around him, rolled, grunted—
The light from the windshield darkened. Glaucous and Penelope screeched like terrified parrots. Jack peered out of the hole he had pushed through the cinch, between the silhouettes of the massive, cowering woman and the driver—through the van’s windshield. There, he saw something inexplicable. The vision refused to be cataloged or stored away, even in short-term memory. A seam, a gap, a failure.
A face. Extraordinary beauty—and rage.
Jack immediately forgot what he saw.
Glaucous looked to his terrified partner. In one bright flash he saw the intensity of Penelope’s fear and knew that she knew. A fatal mistake had been made. However long their relationship—whatever her strength and talent—she would have to be the one. Not for the first time, Glaucous would sacrifice a valued partner.
The storm could not wait. It struck with all its pent-up force, spending all its power, everything hidden within, at once.
A black wall of cloud plummeted.
The windshield shattered.
Darkness hammered.
The van flipped and skidded along its side, rolling Jack with a bone-bruising thump onto the ribbed panel. Through the sack, the skin of his back burned as friction heated the metal. Jack rolled and kicked and pushed his head and one arm through the cinch.
The van ricocheted off a jersey barrier and flipped again. Suspended in space, Jack drew up his knees, rounded into a ball—all he could do to avoid breaking an arm, a leg, his neck. From the front seats came twin explosions of breath as belts jerked tight. The van slammed down on its roof.
CHAPTER 49
Wallingford
As Daniel ran up the steps of the house, he observed the fourth corner of the net. A small piebald man stood on the porch of the bungalow. Rain fell in such volume, Daniel could barely make out the house, much less the figure waiting for him there—paleness within shadow, shrunken, like a hideous dwarf. Daniel was soaked. The tall grass in the yard lay flat, submissive. Pieces of ice bounced on the sidewalk and the roof, struck his head and shoulders. Blood trickled down his forehead, diluted by rain. Not a good performance for a man used to walking between raindrops. Lightning played to the south, where he supposed the real search was under way—where the main target was being harried. Assume nothing. Perhaps it isyou, after all.
He instinctively reached ahead with his feelers. All paths were distorted, tangled. More alarming, he saw an echo float by—a half-seen rebound of Charles Granger, slouching backward toward the freeway, oblivious—
And then, another—Fred. Himself,bouncing back from just a few minutes in the future. Their broken piece of history was rapidly approaching an impenetrable wall—and he had no idea what would happen then.
The piebald dwarf on the porch advanced—and changed. This was no mere solid figure. Daniel had seen such before, in the bad place—forms and figures that defied dimension. Descending the steps, the dwarf grew as if reflected in a curved mirror. The closer it came, the larger it would be—and the more powerful. By the time the figure reached him it would loom high enough to brush the black, swirling clouds.