Beyond World's End Page 23

  The girl whimpered. Jeanette slapped her, hard.

  "Aerune. His name is Aerune. He's—" Moon broke off, moaning. "It hurts!"

  "Do it, or I'll lock you in Bellevue and give you something to whine about!" Jeanette snarled. Moon cringed away from her anger. "The Lord of Death and Pain," she moaned.

  "You!" Robert strode through the ring of armed men toward the . . . elf. Jeanette watched him in horror. Robert had been so convinced that it was the Feds who were hijacking their project that the stranger's exotic appearance didn't even slow him down. "Who are you, and just what the hell do you think you're doing here?"

  The stranger—Aerune—drew himself up to his full height. His black cloak billowed in the wind.

  "I am the Lord Aerune mac Audelaine of the Dark Court, and this man is mine. Contest with me at your peril, mortal lordling."

  He turned his back on Robert, and reached for Hancock again.

  Jeanette saw the glitter of the .45 in Robert's hand and stifled a cry of warning, though she wasn't completely sure who she wanted to warn. Robert jammed the barrel into Aerune's back, and even from where she was, Jeanette could see a curl of smoke rise up from Aerune's cloak, as if the pistol barrel were red-hot.

  "It burns! It burns!" Moon cried, as Aerune whirled around with a roar, his face twisted in an inhuman mask of fury. He lashed out at Robert with a backhand blow.

  "You will pay dearly for that insult!" he snarled in a voice like broken music. Robert jumped back, motioning his troops forward to deal with the intruder.

  But Aerune wasn't there.

  "Fan out! Find him!" Robert shouted, sounding too furious to be rattled. "I want him alive!"

  You won't find him, Jeanette thought. "Moon," she said gently. "Moon, what happened? Can you tell me who he is? What he wants?"

  The girl looked at her, and now there was something almost serene in her expression. "He's what you think he is, Jeanette. He's a lord of the Unseleighe Court. He wants all the Crowned Ones—us—the ones you call Survivors. He needs us. . . ." She sighed, her head lolling on her shoulders as if exhaustion had suddenly overwhelmed her. "He needs us to kill you all."

  Jeanette led her over to the bench and let her sit down beside Hancock. Moon curled up, instantly asleep. Her face looked haggard, and there were dark bruises of exhaustion beneath her eyes.

  This one isn't going to last long either, Jeanette thought clinically. Something about T-Stroke worked like putting a penny in an old-fashioned fusebox: people could access their hidden potential, but it burned them right out within a matter of minutes. She was glad she'd brought Moon along anyway. This was probably as close to a field trial as they were going to be able to manage with any of the Survivors. Their Gifts made them too unpredictable to let out of their cells.

  She glanced warily at Hancock, but the projective telepath was still in the Land of Nod, happily quiescent under the influence of the euphorics Beirkoff had given him. That was one good thing out of this whole mess. They didn't need any Monsters From The Id cluttering up the place.

  She sighed, running a hand through her hair. An elf. She'd never believed she'd see one. She'd stopped believing in them years ago—forced herself to stop believing, because it just hurt too damned much. But looking into Aerune's fallen-angel eyes, skepticism was impossible. He'd been here. He was real. He burned at the touch of Cold Iron, just like all the books said.

  And boy, was he mad. Madder than Jeanette had ever seen anyone get, in a serious career devoted to shining people on.

  No, she had no problem believing in his reality. She had another problem entirely. Elves were supposed to be magic, and she'd certainly seen Aerune do magic, just now.

  So what did an elf want with her retread junkies?

  She blinked, blinded by the headlights of the big truck that pulled up, driving across the grass of the park. Robert jumped out of the passenger seat.

  "Come on! We've got to get back to the lab—and hire some decent help," Robert added, his voice hoarse with disappointment. "These losers couldn't find a pig in a one-room schoolhouse. The target gave them all the slip." For the first time, he seemed to notice Moon. "What did she get? Did she read his mind?" he demanded eagerly.

  "Yes, she got something," Jeanette answered, busy unlocking Hancock's handcuffs. "And no, you're not going to like it." She glanced up at the sky. It was already turning light. She glared back at Robert. "What do you want me to do, carry them? Get me some help here. And once we get back, you and I have got to talk."

  * * *

  "An elf. Jesus, Campbell, you been sampling your own stuff? Elves! Next you're going to be telling me the Smurfs are after us."

  Robert paced back and forth in front of Jeanette's desk in her office down in Threshold's Black Labs. It was a little after six A.M. Saturday morning. The Talents—the four they'd managed to keep—were all back in their cells sleeping off the last of their T-Stroke, and everything was tidied away before the city was fairly awake. And now Robert was looking for someone to blame for tonight's fiasco.

  "An elf," Jeanette repeated patiently. "That's what Vicky Moon said. That's what Aerune is." Somehow she thought it was very important to convince Robert of that fact. She'd read a lot about elves when she was a kid. They weren't the twee little Disneyfied things that Robert seemed to be thinking of. When mankind was still living in caves, they'd ruled the world, until Cold Iron had driven them Underhill. Even then, they were still formidable enemies.

  "Or thinks he is," Robert said, still unconvinced. "Campbell, there's no such thing as elves, so this guy can't be one. Q.E.D." He smiled at her patronizingly. Jeanette sighed.

  "Well, he thinks he is. You want to argue with him? What else fits the facts? You burned him. With your gun barrel, because it was steel. Didn't you see the smoke?"

  "It was . . . it could be some kind of psychosomatic reaction. Or an allergy of some kind," Robert said, floundering just a little.

  "The only thing with an allergy to iron is an elf," Jeanette repeated in a dull voice. "And besides, he vanished right in front of us. So either we've got ourselves an elf, or David Copperfield is looking for outside work."

  "Yeah, okay, this Aerune's an elf," Robert said hastily, unwilling to bother continuing the argument. "If he's allergic to iron, that's good. It'll give us some way of handling him. The important thing is to get him back. He's obviously found some way to use his psi powers without burning out the way your test subjects keep doing. Do you think there are more of them? There has to be. If we can get our hands on them we could stop wasting our time with these trials and go right to the source."

  Jeanette stared at him blankly. Did Robert actually think Threshold had the faintest chance of controlling someone like Aerune? His voice echoed again through her mind: "I am the Lord Aerune mac Audelaine of the Dark Court—contest with me at your peril."

  The Lord of Death and Pain, Moon had said. Oh, yeah, definitely somebody I want mad at ME.

  "And how are you planning to do that, Robert?" she asked, just to be asking.

  "We'll set another trap for him tonight," Robert said in a crisp managerial style. "If he's after our Talents, you can shoot them up again so they'll attract him, and this time we'll be ready for him. No pointy-eared mutant is going to thumb his nose at me!"

  Great. I'm now living in an X-Files LARP. Mutants are so much more realistic than elves, right? Jeanette thought. She made one more attempt to get through to him.

  "But we've got something he wants, Robert—and he has something we want. We could summon him, yes, but then we could talk to him, strike a bargain. . . ." Elves were always making bargains, Jeanette remembered. It could work. And he could teach them so much. . . .

  "We don't have to bargain. We hold all the high cards, and after tonight, we'll have this Aerune mac Whasis too. This Highlander reject won't be so high and mighty once he's got an iron collar around his neck. In fact, I think he'll tell me everything I want to know," Robert gloated.

  "Uh-huh." Robert'
s refusal to negotiate frustrated her. Aerune was pure power—and Robert was talking like he was some kind of special effect that could be captured between commercial breaks. All Robert could see was what he wanted to see—not what was there.

  This was not going to end well. It was time to cut her losses.

  "Look, I've got to finish up some reports on our lab rats and tweak the T-Stroke mix before I go home and grab some Z's. What time should I meet you back here tonight?" she asked brightly.

  Robert smiled, sure he'd won his point. "Be back here around nine. We'll set things up in the Park this time—after midnight there's nobody there but the muggers. We'll have plenty of elbow room and plenty of peace and quiet. And a few surprises for our mutie friend."

  "Sounds good." Jeanette forced another smile. "See you then."

  * * *

  After Robert left, Jeanette spent a long time staring at her reflection in the black mirror of her office wall, making up her mind for sure. She'd always known that someday it would be time to leave this little party Robert was throwing, and actually, she'd been here longer than she thought she'd be. But she could smell disaster ahead, and with her own survivor instincts, Jeanette decided she didn't want to be here when it hit.

  Aerune haunted her thoughts. Power. Promise. Danger. She felt the temptation to stay just to see him again beckon to her, and quashed it firmly. It's time to go.

  She'd always known that someday it'd be time, and planned accordingly. Jeanette opened her guitar case and felt around in the lining until she found what she was looking for—a red plastic diskette with a smiley-face sticker on it. She loaded its contents to her computer and hesitated for a moment before pressing "Send."

  Has to be done. She pressed the button. The virus began working its way through the system, erasing every hint of her presence—and her work.

  Next she went through her desk, pulling all her paper files and shredding them. She took the bags to the incinerator herself—in her outlaw days, Jeanette had never relied on anyone else to cover her tracks: when you wanted something done right, you did it yourself.

  When that was done, she took a last look around. The office where she'd spent so much of her time was completely sanitized. No trace of her presence remained, except for her guitar and sound system, a rack of CDs, and a few posters on the walls. She wasn't going to take anything but the guitar with her, but she couldn't leave the other stuff down here. This place wasn't supposed to exist.

  Because it was Saturday, most of the day staff wouldn't be coming in at all. She commandeered a cart from the laundry and loaded the rest of her personal gear into it, and took it upstairs where it belonged.

  Her "official" office cubicle looked strangely virginal, since she was almost never there. She took a few minutes to set up the stereo, scatter the personal things she was abandoning around it, and hang her posters on the walls. She took the cart back down to the laundry (details were important when you were planning to vanish) and came back up to the office to turn on her computer.

  She tested her worm by logging in with her Black Projects user code, and was relieved to see the message "No Such User." She reset the time on her computer to a date last week and logged in under her rarely-used official, abovestairs account. Then she spent a few minutes writing memos that would "prove" she'd gone on vacation a week ago, and wouldn't be back for two more.

  Let Robert start a war with Faerie. I hope Lord Aerune makes hash of him. And either way, I'm covered, and he's left holding the bag. Bye-bye, Lintel. I can't say it's been fun, because it hasn't.

  When everything was arranged to her satisfaction, she took her guitar and went home. Her apartment had always been just a place to store her stuff, and Jeanette wasn't the kind of person who accumulated a lot of stuff she really cared about—she'd learned that lesson early and too well. She threw a couple of pairs of jeans and some T-shirts on the bed, and pulled her studded leather jacket and engineer boots out of the back of the closet. She took a moment to strip the vest with the Sinner Saints colors off the jacket—it'd been years since she'd worn her colors, and she didn't want to run into any old friends now—before diving back into the closet for her saddlebags. She packed quickly—clothes, music, and cash, lots of that—before putting on her boots and jacket.

  Time to go. If that idiot wants to commit suicide, he can do it without me—and if he manages to survive, he'll still need me and maybe we'll do the dance. But I'm not taking any falls for him. Survival of the fittest. I'm sure Robert would agree.

  * * *

  Her Harley was waiting for her in the garage below—a cream and maroon touring beauty she'd named Mystery, on which she'd blown most of her first paychecks when she'd come to Threshold. She stripped off the protective cover and slung her saddlebags over Mystery's back, buckling them into place before lashing her guitar down to the pillion seat. It would make an awkward load, and she might have been willing to leave the instrument behind if she'd been sure she was coming back.

  But she wasn't.

  She wheeled slowly out of the underground garage, blinking owlishly at the winter sunlight even through the tinted face-shield of her full-coverage helmet. She debated where to go for a moment, but given her mode of transport, it was pretty much a no-brainer.

  South. Somewhere warm, with no snow and fewer questions.

  * * *

  Campbell didn't show up at the lab at nine o'clock. At nine-thirty Robert checked her downstairs office, found it stripped, and called her house. At nine-forty-five he let himself into her apartment with a passkey he didn't think she knew he had, and looked around. The place looked like a hotel room that had been trashed by gypsies.

  God, how can anyone live like this? You can take the girl off the street, but you can't take the street out of the girl, he thought in disgust.

  She wasn't here either. He looked around. There were signs of hasty packing, and the ice-cream carton in the back of the fridge where Campbell kept her stash of ready cash was empty. He felt a wave of smug disdain. So she's bolted. Da widdle girly got scared and ran. Jesus, isn't that just like a woman?

  But did this really change anything? Robert thought about that for a moment, making up his mind. It wasn't like she'd be going to the police, not with what he had on her. Actually, Campbell's bailout wasn't entirely a bad thing. Ever since the drug trials had started panning out, Campbell had been acting pretty skittish, and that mutant-guy from last night showing up had obviously been more than she could handle. After all, Robert Lintel thought sagely, it's one thing to read about psychic powers in a fiction book and another altogether to see them in front of your face.

  He'd probably scared her into running by talking about setting a trap for the guy tonight. Women just weren't any good in military situations. Oh, she faked it better than most, but Robert had seen the flash of fear in her eyes when the guy in the cloak had showed up. She'd just lost her head and panicked. How typical. Women were all like that.

  But I don't need her anymore. I've got more than enough T-Stroke to turn a sample over to a good research chemist and find out the proportions—and more than enough to finish the trials without her.

  And once he'd done that, he could write his own ticket anywhere in the world and kiss Threshold good-bye.

  In fact, maybe it's better to wait a day or two before trying to trap this Aerune again. He'll be sweating, and I'll have time to rope in a few more pieces of bait.

  Pleased with his conclusions, Robert Lintel left the apartment.

  Everything's going to work out just fine. . . .

  NINE: A GAME OF CHESS

  Though his dreams were only dreams, they were haunted by the Unseleighe taint Eric had felt in Central Park and the nagging sense that there was something he was missing. He woke up late on Sunday morning, rumpled and disgruntled and aware that somehow he'd blown most of the weekend without getting his coursework done. His mind felt fuzzy—the mental equivalent of indigestion—and he badly wanted someone to talk it out with. But Greys
tone wasn't available—when he looked, the gargoyle wasn't even on its perch outside his window—and Toni and Jimmie had both made it pretty clear last night that the Guardians wouldn't welcome his involvement in the situation.

  But the more he thought about it, the more Eric was convinced there was something back there in the Park that they'd all missed. Something important.

  Well, if they won't talk to me about it, I know someone who'll at least listen.

  * * *

  Even the most avaricious capitalists took Sundays off, and Ria Llewellyn knew from long experience that you got better work out of people if you didn't ask them to give 110 percent all the time. She'd been on everybody's back most of the week, getting a feel for her New York companies and finishing up with dinner with Eric last night—which, while fun, could not by any stretch of the imagination be called restful—and today Ria was looking forward to a leisurely day of shopping and sightseeing. Maybe she'd even succumb to the impulse to go down and see the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. She'd forgotten how much she liked New York—it was such a human city, so un-elvish, that she actually found herself preferring it to L.A., where not even the special effects were real, let alone the people. Too many bad associations there: tragedy and betrayal and her long painful climb back to life.

  Besides, Eric will be here for at least another year. . . .

  That was certainly one of the attractions. They'd made a good start last night. He wasn't as indifferent to her as he'd tried to pretend. And he wasn't out to kill her, either on his own behalf or someone else's. In Ria's opinion, both of those things made a good start to a relationship.

  The windows of her sitting room at the top of the Sherry gave her a magnificent view over the Park, an unexpected oasis of green in the steel and concrete forest of the City. The trees were winter-bare, the grass a faded brown-green, but at night the lights shining down into the park gave it an air of mystery—a man-made fairyland, in sharp contrast to the inhuman beauty of Underhill. Ria preferred it.