Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (52 page)

“Now!” Moki said, returning. “Let’s get on with it.” He put his hands on his hips and puffed up his chest. “You strike first.”

“First take off the necklace.”

“Stop stalling. Is this the brave Repairman Jack Bati told me about?”

“Just ‘Jack,’ okay?”

“I think you’re a coward.”

“You won’t take it off?”

“My necklace is not a subject for discussion. It is part of me. It will remain with me until I die. Which shall be never.”

“Okay,” Jack said slowly, “since we’re on the subject of courage, let’s give ourselves a real test: Each of us will pierce his
own
heart.”

Moki stared at him with wide eyes. “You mean … I will plunge my knife into my chest and you will do the same into yours?”

“You got it. Simultaneously. It’s one thing to stab somebody else, but it takes a
god
to stab himself.”

Moki’s grin widened. “I believe you are right. You are a worthy rival, Repairman Jack. I’ll be sorry to see you die.”

Not as sorry as I’ll be if Kolabati has suckered me.

Moki positioned his knife over his chest, the point indenting the scarred area just to the left of the breastbone. Jack did the same. His sweaty palms slipped on the handle. The touch of the point sent a chill straight through to the organ beating barely an inch beneath it. It picked up its tempo in response.

This had to work.

“Ready?” Jack said. “On three. One … two…” He shouted the last number.
“Three!”

Jack watched as Moki rammed the blade deep into his chest, saw his torso hunch, his grin vanish, his features constrict with sudden agony, watched his eyes fill with shock, horror, rage, betrayal as the sick realization of what had just happened to him filtered through the haze of pain.

He looked down at the knife protruding from his chest. Blood welled up against the hilt and ran down his skin. Then he looked at Jack’s blade, still poised over his chest. His lips worked.

“You … didn’t…”

“
You’re
the crazy one, pal. Not me.”

Moki glanced over to where Kolabati stood in the flame-flickered darkness. The hurt in his eyes was unsoundable. Jack almost felt sorry for him, until he remembered the brave Niihauan who hadn’t had a chance against him last night. Jack followed his gaze and saw Kolabati’s dismayed expression.

Sudden pain seared his chest. He staggered back and saw Moki go down on his knees, blood pumping from the slit in his chest, his bloody knife free in his hand. And across Jack’s chest—a deep gash, bisecting the rakoshi scars. Moki had pulled his own knife from his wound and slashed Jack.

Jack pressed his hand against the gash but it had already stopped bleeding. The pain, too, was gone. And as he watched in amazement, the wound edges closed and began to knit.

He looked up and saw Moki watching too. Moki reached a bloody hand up to the metal encircling his neck. Ashen-faced now, he looked at Jack’s unadorned throat, his eyes pleading for an explanation. He couldn’t speak, but he could move his lips.

They said:
How?

Jack pulled up the left cuff of his jeans to show where he’d wound the true necklace around his ankle.

“Just because they call it a necklace doesn’t mean you have to wear it around your neck.”

Moki pitched forward on his face, twitched, shuddered, then lay still.

Jack looked at the blade in his hand and tossed it onto the hardened lava beside Moki. Another victory for Rasalom, another talented human gone mad, and now dead.

Suddenly Jack felt exhausted, empty. Must it have ended like this? Couldn’t he have found another way? Was the mad darkness in the air seeping into him as well? Or had he always carried a piece of it within? Was that what he felt twisting and thrashing against the walls of the cage he’d built for it?

Shouts made him turn. The Niihauans were charging up the slope. Jack backed away, unsure of their intent. But they ignored him, rushing directly to Moki’s body. They prayed by it, then lifted him by his hands and feet and tossed his remains into Haleakala’s fires.

As the others began to pray, the chief turned to Jack.

“Haleakala,” he said, beaming. “The House of the Sun. Now that the false Maui is dead, the sun will return to the path that the true Maui taught it.”

“When?” Jack said.

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow, you will see.”

“I hope so,” Jack said. He turned toward Kolabati. “All we’ve got to do is get back to the house and pick up Ba and—”

Kolabati was gone.

Jack spun this way and that, searching the darkness. Not a sign of her. The Isuzu was still parked down the slope but no trace of her. He searched the area but all he found was his shirt, lying on the lava where she’d been standing. He pulled it on and hopped into the car.

Shit. She must have taken off on foot while he was listening to the old chief. Same old Kolabati. She’d lied to him. Should he have expected any less?

Me, of all people.

He’d spent most of his life lying. He mentally kicked himself for believing she’d changed. But she’d been so convincing. Had she ever had any intention of coming back to New York with him?

That’s what you get for playing by the rules.

Maybe he and Ba simply should have tied up Moki and taken his necklace, then ripped Kolabati’s from her throat and left her to die of old age in a few hours. Not that it hadn’t occurred to him, yet everything within him balked at the plan. But maybe this hadn’t been the time for niceties. Too much at stake.

He picked his way downhill, driving as quickly as he dared, while scanning the road ahead in the headlights and as far to each side as he could see in the dark. Nothing. Nothing moving but the wind. As he wound down from the crest, the wind abated and the fish and seawater began to rain from the sky, narrowing vision even further. An occasional bug began to harass the Isuzu.

Finally he came to the house. The lights were on and the generator was running, just as they’d been an hour ago. Jack leapt out and ran inside, stepping over a thrashing tuna along the way. Not many bugs around at the moment, and those seemed to be ignoring him. The necklace?

Once inside he ran through the halls, shouting Kolabati’s name, and Ba’s too.

Had to find her. Uncertainty gnawed at him. What if she hadn’t returned to the house? What if she was hiding somewhere out on the hillside? He’d never find her.

And where was Ba?

He took the stairs to the upper floor, to the great room, but lurched to a stop when he heard the sound. Ahead, bleeding down the hall from the great room, a buzz, the unmistakable sound of oversize diaphanous wings, hundreds of them, beating madly.

He wanted to turn and run but forced himself to stand fast. Something about the buzzing … not wild and frenzied … calmer, smoother, almost … placid.

He stepped forward. He had to see what was going on. From back here he could see only the front end of the room. The lone lamp that still functioned gave off enough light for him to make out the details. What he saw sent his skin crawling.

Bugs … the great room was full of them,
mobbed
with them. They obscured the walls, perched on the furniture, floated in the air. All kinds of bugs, from hovering chew wasps to drifting men-of-war, and all facing the same direction, away from the smashed windows, toward the interior of the room. Jack’s legs urged him to get the hell out of here, but he had to see what held them so spellbound.

He dropped to his knees and inched forward. The bugs remained oblivious to him. He stretched out on the bare floor and craned his neck around the edge of the entryway to bring the rest of the room into view.

More bugs. So tightly packed he could barely see through the crush. Then a gust of wind sluiced through the windows, undulating the hovering mass enough for Jack to catch a look at the center of the great room.

They all faced the sculpture, Moki’s final work—the only object in the room on which the bugs had not perched. Its long, arching wooden spokes lay bare for their entire length, from where they sprang from the walls to the jagged, unwieldy aggregate of black and red lava fragments at their center. The bugs hovered about it, every one of them faced toward the center like rapt churchgoers in silent benediction.

And the lava center … it pulsed with an unholy yellow light, slowly, as if in time with the beat of a massive, hidden heart.

A single glimpse and then Jack’s view was obscured again. But that glimpse had been enough to break him out in a sweat and send him sliding back along the floor. Something about that sculpture, the way it glowed, the reverence of the bugs, the entire scene disturbed him on a level too deep to comprehend or understand. Something within him, not from his personal experience, but some sort of racial memory, a warning carved on his hindbrain or encoded in his genes, flooded him with circulating fear, leaving him unable to react in any way but flight.

And when he was far enough down the hall, he rose to his feet and ran around a corner where he stopped, panting. He resented the dread crawling under his skin. He prided himself on his ability to govern his fear, channel it, use it. Now it was nearly out of control. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths, willing himself to be calm. Half a minute of that and he was in control again. But his fingers still trembled on their own in the adrenaline aftermath.

He moved toward the stairs—where he found Ba. And a woman struggling in his iron grip.

Jack shook his head. “Bati … some things never change.”

Ba had stayed behind in case something like this happened—or if Jack didn’t make it back.

“I was going back,” she said through clenched teeth. “But
my
way!”

“I don’t think you can get back, unless it’s with us.”

With her free hand she reached behind her neck and unclasped the necklace, then held it out to Jack.

“Take it then.”

Jack blinked. “What?”

“And while you’re at it,” she said, tapping the center of her forehead, “put a bullet right here.”

“Bati—” He didn’t know what to say.

“You’d rather watch me die slowly?”

Damn her. Always manipulating. She knew he wouldn’t shoot her, and knew he couldn’t sit and watch her rot.

To Ba, he said, “Let her go.” To Kolabati: “Put that back on, and get in the car. You can decide after you’ve met Glaeken, but you
are
coming with us.”

“Yes,” Ba said. “We must leave. I fear we might already be too late.”

“Too late for what?”

A tortured look flickered across his features, all the more startling because of their usual waxy impenetrability.

“I do not know. I only know I must return to the Missus.”

“Okay, Big Guy. We’re on our way.”

They escorted Kolabati to the Isuzu and put her in the passenger seat with Jack behind her where he could keep an eye on her. He wasn’t letting her out of his sight.

They weathered the cascade of fish bouncing off the hood and roof as the car swerved through the downhill switchbacks. When Ba finally hit pavement he picked up speed. The wheels skidded on dead fish and clumps of wet seaweed.

“Easy, Ba. If we crack up, we may never get back to the plane, and then this whole trip will be for nothing. If it’s not already.”

“I must get back to the Missus. Quickly. She needs me.”

Jack studied his grim, intent features in the dashboard glow. Ba was scared too. But not of bugs. Scared for his adopted family. Why? Why now? What was happening back there?

WEDNESDAY

In the Still of the Night

WFPW-FM

FREDDY: It’s a minute after midnight. A little over nine hours till the light.

JO: We’re almost halfway home. Hang in there, man.

Monroe, Long Island

Alan felt like a vampire.

Why not? He was living like one. Up all night, sleeping when he could during the light. Reminded him of his days as an intern. Thirty-six hours straight without a wink hadn’t been at all unusual. But he was older now, and the stress of the nights—the insane paradiddles on the storm shutters, the incessant gnawing at the outer walls—carried over into the dwindling daytime, keeping his naps fitful and restless.