Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (48 page)

Which was why Alan was out here now. A couple of the storm shutters had refused to roll up this morning. Even from the inside Alan could see they were deeply dented, more deeply than he’d have thought possible from a bug attack, at least from any of the bugs he’d seen so far.

Which meant there might be something new under the new moon, something bigger than its hellish predecessors and consequently more dangerous to the little fortress Toad Hall had become. He coasted to a halt and stared as he rounded to the front.

The damage to the steel shutters was worse than he’d realized. They’d been scored by something sharp and heavy, with the weight and density of a steel spike.

But the remains of the rhododendrons under the shuttered windows bothered him more.

They’d been trampled flat.

Alan rolled across the grass for a closer look. These were old rhodos, maybe fifty years or better, with heavy trunks and sturdy branches, thick with healthy deep-green leaves through Ba’s magical ministrations. Tough wood. Alan remembered that from the times he’d cut back the rhodos around his old house before it had burned down.

These hadn’t been cut, though. The trunks and branches had been crushed, and their splinters pressed into the ground. Something awfully big and heavy—or a number of big and heavy somethings—had attacked these windows last night, banging and scraping at the shutters.

But they hadn’t gotten in. That was the important thing.

As Alan pushed his left wheel forward and pulled the right backward to turn and roll back to the path, he saw the depression in the lawn. His stomach lurched. He’d been too intent on the shutters and the ruined rhodos to notice before. But from this angle you couldn’t miss it.

The fresh spring grass, overdue now for a trimming, had been crushed in a wide swath that angled in from the front gate, curved around the willows, and led directly to the house. Alan tried to imagine what sort of creature could leave such a trail but all he could come up with was a thirty-foot bowling ball. With teeth, most likely. Lots of them.

He shuddered and rolled back to the path. Each night got a little rougher. Eventually Toad Hall’s defenses would fail. It was inevitable. Alan prayed he’d be able to persuade Sylvia to move out before that happened, or that Glaeken would be able to assemble the pieces he needed to call for help.

Alan could feel it in his bones: They were all going to
need
help. Lots of it. And soon. Otherwise, if the Sapir curve was correct, they had two more daytimes left. Then the light would die for the last time at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon. And the endless night would begin.

Abe’s Place

The bugs had done their dirty work—with a vengeance.

During the night, entombed in all that concrete and locked in behind the triple-hatched entry chimney, Gia hadn’t had a clue. But now, topside …

All the farmhouse windows had been smashed, and everything inside had been torn up. Gia had no emotional connection to the place, but still the devastation got to her.

“We ate breakfast here yesterday,” she said, staring at the mindless wreckage of the kitchen.

Abe stepped in through the ruined door.

“The barn is worse. No eggs, just scattered feathers where the chickens used to be. And still no sign of my poor Parabellum.”

“What about the cat?” Vicky said.

Abe shook his head. “I didn’t see him.” As Vicky’s lower lip trembled and her eyes filled, Abe hurriedly added, “But barn cats are tough. He probably found a good hiding place.”

He glanced at Gia and she knew what he was thinking: Not likely.

He nodded toward the rear of the house. “Let’s take a walk to the ridge. I want to show you something.”

“The hole?”

“Something else.”

The hole was the same, but the valley had changed. The ground was torn up, the trees partially denuded, and …

Gia pointed at the linear mounds radiating from the hole like spokes on a wheel.

“What are those?”

“I don’t know from lawns, but those look like mole hills.”

Gia’s skin crawled as she looked at them.

“But if those are moles, they’re as big as humans.”

“Bigger even. But I don’t think they’re moles. More like worms, I’ll bet. And this I hate to mention, but a lot of them are pointed this way.”

Maui

Even the coffee tasted like fish.

Jack knew the water was pure—he’d watched Kolabati draw it from the cooler—but it still tasted fishy. Maybe because everything
smelled
fishy. The air was so thick with the odor of dead sea life he swore he could taste it when he breathed.

He was standing on the lanai, forcing the coffee down, looking out at the valley below and the great whirlpool spinning off Kahului. It would have been heart-stoppingly beautiful if not for the stench. Behind him, sounds of chopping, chipping, sawing, and hammering drifted through the door from the house’s great room.

He thought about Gia and Vicky, hoping they had a quiet night, wishing he had a way to check up on them.

Kolabati joined him then, coffee cup in hand, and leaned on the railing to his right. She wore a bright flowered muumuu that somehow enhanced her figure instead of hiding it. Jack’s eyes locked on her necklace. He tried to be casual but it wasn’t easy. Half the reason for this hairy trip dangled a couple of feet away. All he had to do was reach out and—

“My silverswords are all dead,” she said, looking down at a wilted garden beneath the deck. “The salt water’s killed them. I’d hoped to see them bloom.”

“I’m sorry.”

She gestured with her cup toward the giant maelstrom.

“There’s no point to it. It sucks water and fish down all day, then shoots it all miles into the air at night.”

“The point,” Jack said, remembering the gist of Glaeken’s explanations, “is not to have a point. Except to mess with our minds, make us feel weak, impotent, useless. Make us crazy with fear and uncertainty, fear of the unknown.”

Jack noticed when he said “crazy” Kolabati stole a quick glance over her shoulder at the house.

“And speaking of points,” he said, “what’s the point of Moki? How’d you get involved with a guy like that? He’s not your type, Bati.”

As far as Jack could see, Moki was nobody’s type. The guy was not only out to lunch, but out to breakfast, dinner, and the midnight snack as well. A homicidal megalomaniac who believed he was a god, or at least possessed by one: Maui, the Polynesian Prometheus who brought fire to humanity and hoisted the Hawaiian Islands from the bottom of the sea with his fishing pole.

After last night’s ceremony the four of them had returned to the house where Ba and Jack spent the night in the garage, the only place in the house secure from the bugs. Moki and Bati were never bothered by the creatures—more proof of Moki’s divinity. He’d kept them up most of the night elaborating on his future plans for “Greater Maui” and the rest of the remaining Hawaiian Islands.

Running under it all Jack sensed a current of hatred and jealousy—aimed at him. Moki seemed to see Jack as a threat, a rival suitor for Kolabati’s affections. Jack hadn’t planned on any of this. He’d spent the morning wondering how he could use that jealousy to get to the kook’s necklace. But so far, short of putting a bullet through his skull, he’d come up blank.

“How do you know my type?” Kolabati said, eyes flashing and nostrils flaring. “What do you know of me?”

Jack studied her face. Kolabati had changed. He wasn’t sure how. Her wide, dark, almond-shaped eyes, her high cheekbones, full lips, and flawless mocha skin were the same as he remembered. Maybe it was her hair. She’d let it grow since he’d last seen her. It trailed long over her near shoulder and rustled in the sour wind like an ebony mane. But it wasn’t the hair. Something else, something inside.

Good question, he thought. What
do
I know about her?

“I know you don’t hang out too long with people who don’t see things your way.”

She turned and stared down at the valley.

“This is not the real Moki—or at least not the Moki who shared my life until a week ago.”

Shared her life? Jack was about to make a crack about the ability of this over 150-year-old woman to share anything when he saw a droplet of moisture form in the corner of her eye, grow, and spill over the lid to run down her cheek.

A tear. A tear from Kolabati.

Jack was speechless. He turned and stared through the doorway where Moki feverishly worked like the madman he was. But on what? And didn’t he ever sleep? He’d harangued them for hours, then he’d rushed to the upper floor where he’d gone to work on the shattered pieces of sculpture littering the great room, recutting them, fashioning a new, single giant work from the remnants. Ba was in there with him now, sitting in a corner, sipping tea and watching him in silent fascination.

“He was wonderful,” Kolabati said.

Jack looked at her again. The tear remained. Others joined it.

“You love him?”

She nodded. “I love who he used to be.” She turned toward Jack, wiping her cheeks. “Oh, Jack, you would have loved him too. I only wish you’d known him then. He was gentle, he was so alive and so much a part of his world, these islands. A genius, a true genius who couldn’t flaunt his brilliance because he took it for granted. He never tried to impress anyone, never tried to be anyone but Moki. And he wanted to be with me.
Me.
Nobody else. I was happy, Jack. I was in love. I thought I’d found an earthly Nirvana and I wanted it to last forever. And it could have, Jack. You know it could have.”

He shook his head. “Nothing lasts forever.” He reached out and touched her necklace. “Even with that.”

“But so soon? We’d just begun.”

He searched her face. Here was the difference. The seemingly impossible had happened. Kolabati, the cool, aloof, self-absorbed, ruthless Kolabati who had sent him out to kill her own brother, who had walked out with her own necklace as well as Kusum’s and left Jack bleeding in a chair because he had refused her offer of near immortality … Kolabati Bahkti had fallen in love and it had changed her. Maybe forever.

Amazingly, she began to sob—deep, wrenching gasps of emotional pain that tore at Jack. He’d come here expecting to find the old, cold, calculating Kolabati and had been fully ready to deal with her. He wasn’t prepared for the new model.

He resisted the impulse to take her in his arms. No telling what Moki-the-Unkillable might do if he saw that. So he settled for touching her hand.

“What can I do? What will fix it?”

“If only I knew.”

“Maybe it’s the necklace. Maybe the necklace is part of the problem—maybe it
is
the problem. Maybe if you take it off him—”

“And replace it with a fake?” Her eyes flashed as she dug into the pocket of her muumuu. She pulled out a necklace exactly like her own. “This one, perhaps?”

Since Kolabati was wearing one of the genuine necklaces, and Moki the other, this had to be Jack’s fake.

He swallowed. “Where’d you get that?”

“From your duffel bag.” Her eyes hardened. “Was that your plan? Steal my brother’s necklace and replace it with a fake? It never occurred to you that I might have given it to someone else, did it?”

Time to bite the bullet, Jack thought. Let her know the whole story.

“Kusum’s necklace isn’t enough,” he said, meeting her gaze. “We need both.”

She gasped and stepped back, her hand clutching at her throat.

“Mine? You’d steal
mine
?”

“It wouldn’t be stealing, exactly. I’d just be returning it to its original owner.”

“Don’t joke with me about this, Jack. The people who carved the necklaces have been dead for ages.”

“I know. I’m not working for them. I’m working for the guy they stole the original metal from. He’s still around. And he wants it back. All of it.”

Kolabati’s eyes widened as she studied him. “You’re not joking, are you.”

“You think I could make up a story like that, even if I tried?”

“All those years will rush back upon me without it, Jack. I’d die. You know that.”