Jokers Wild

Chapter Twenty-two

3:00 a.m.

Spector looked around before darting across the street. Cordelia and Veronica trotted after him.

"Slow down for god's sake," said Veronica. She was holding her lame dress bunched up above her knees. "That old man isn't going to bother us anymore. He looked pretty bad when we left. Might even be dead by now"

Spector shook his head and guided Cordelia toward the darkness between streetlights. "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, lady. He's got power enough to waste all of us. All he has to do is pull someone off the street and finish what he started with your dead friend. What was her name? Caroline?"

Veronica stopped and grabbed Cordelia's shoulder. "That's right. And you killed her." Veronica snifled. Spector couldn't tell if Caroline's death had finally sunk in or if it was just the cold. "Let's dump this guy. He won't give us any trouble." Veronica pulled Cordelia close. "If he does, you let him have it. Same as that Imp guy."

"Fine," he said. "Get the fuck out of here. You're only slowing me down. Go help your pimp. He's going to need it." Cordelia turned slowly and let Veronica escort her away. He thought for a moment about following the women and killing them. It would be easy to blindside Cordelia before she could use her power. The other one was just a skirt. But he really didn't feel like it. All he wanted was to kill the Astronomer, or at least have him dead. What smarts Spector had told him Cordelia and Veronica alive could be trouble for him. They could finger him for Caroline's death. As Button-Man Tony had told him once, "It's not the people you kill you regret; it's the people you don't kill."

"Fuck it. I can't ice everybody." He walked down the street toward the subway stop at Seventy-Seventh. He could take the Number 5 train to Jokertown. From there, he just didn't know.

Fortunato lay with his head on Peregrine's naked stomach. She was spread-eagled in the chaos of sheets and shredded clothes and pinfeathers that had come loose in the heat of the last couple of hours. Just a few minutes before, Fortunato had used three of them to bring her to something like her fourteenth or fifteenth orgasm. He'd lost count long before, forgotten the minutes ticking away, even forgotten where he was.

"What in Cod's name did you do to me?" she moaned. "I feel like I just ran a marathon."

"Sorry," Fortunato said. "It kind of goes with the territory." He'd never had sex with another ace before. The fusion of their powers was beyond anything he'd ever experienced.

His energy body was too large to be contained in his flesh; it overflowed all around him in a bright white aura.

He'd come three times himself, each time blocking the flow and turning it back inside him. He'd lost a couple of drops in the process, enough to give Peregrine her own faint luminescence, though it didn't do much for her energy level.

She stroked his chest. "I've heard of afterglow, but this is ridiculous."

He rolled over and kissed her on the thigh. "I have to go, you know."

"The Astronomer."

"Something's supposed to happen in an hour. He's got some kind of escape set up, something that'll get him away from me for good and all. I can't let that happen."

"Why not? Just let him go. What good is killing him going to do?"

"I'm not out for justice, if that's what you're thinking. Making him pay for his crimes, or any of that shit. It's just that I'm not going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, worrying about him showing up again."

"Bullshit. You want him dead, and you want to be the one to kill him."

"Yeah. Okay. I want the little ratfuck dead. I admit it. I want it enough I can taste it." He got up and into his pants. He rolled up the sleeves on his tux shirt and let it hang open rather than search the apartment for the missing studs.

She came to him and put her arms around his neck. "I'd offer to help, but I'm getting dizzy just standing."

"All I want you to do is come back to Aces High with me, and stay there till this is over. One way or another."

"Wait…"

"I can't wait. Time is running out."

"No, I mean, listen. Do you hear something?"

His senses were overloaded from the glut of power. There seemed to be a low, electrical hum coming from all over his body. But beyond that he could hear something else, a sound like wet plates squeaking in dishwater. He glanced at the digital clock next to the bed. It was vibrating on its pedestal. "Oh shit," Fortunate said, just as the water bed exploded. The force of it knocked them across the room. The water was boiling at first, but cooled as it expanded. Fortunato landed against a gray earthenware pot full of bamboo. It shattered under him. Before, the air even came back into his lungs a dead, broken body hurtled through the wall of windows and he was surrounded by flying glass.

Fortunato reached out to slow time, but time itself resisted him. He strained against it and saw the lines of power in the room in topographic relief. He saw that the body was a woman's, but he didn't let himself see any more, not yet.

He pushed at the lines of power with his mind. Tight cones of force rose up where he and Peregrine lay. The broken glass followed the new contours of the room's spacetime and curved away around them, smashing itself to dust against the walls.

Peregrine crawled across the floor. Fortunato saw where she was heading and shaped his power around her to protect her. She got to where her gloved talons hung on the wall and put them on. There was a costume there too but she didn't bother with it.

The roof groaned and then split all down its length like a broken saltine. Chunks of concrete and rebar rained down on them, but the shields around them were solid. It took hardly any of Fortunato's new power to hold them. Peregrine gave herself a running start and flew out into the darkness.

The floor buckled under Fortunato. Jets of water shot up from broken pipes and the air stank of natural gas. He crawled toward the dead woman and turned her over.

Caroline.

It was Caroline.

Her neck was broken. Her skin was clawed and bitten and torn.

She'd been his favorite for seven years. He could never predict her violent moods and sarcastic humor, could never get enough of the sheer physical intensity of her lovemaking. Between the new girls he'd always come back to her.

For a long time he couldn't feel anything. A huge piece of concrete, studded with broken rebar, missed him by inches while he knelt beside her body.

The anger, when it finally came, transformed him.

It was life and death, that simple. The Astronomer took his power from killing. The Astronomer was Death. Fortunato took his strength from sex, from life. And Life was hiding in its burrow, too shit-scared to come out and look Death in the face. Shouting out empty threats and hoping it would just go away. He opened his eyes wide. All it took was a blink of the eye and everything he'd missed jumped out at him. The shimmering heat lines he'd seen in the dead boy's apartment seventeen years before funneled out into the night.

Fortunato stood up, the power of his anger levitating him a foot off the floor. He reached out to the conical net of power, ready to fly into it, to shoot out into its vortex and tear the source of it to pieces.

He reached out and the lines were gone.

He walked through the shattered glass wall and hovered there, glowing, thirty stories above the streets of Manhattan. High overhead he could see Peregrine, gloriously naked, banking steeply over the park. The lights of the city turned the sky flat and gray behind her, and she seemed two-dimensional herself, like a sexually explicit kite. She circled him once, then settled on the broken edge of her apartment.

"Jesus," she said. "So tired…"

"Did you see him?" he asked her. "No. Nothing. You?"

"For a second. I saw the traces he left behind. For the first time. For the first time I'm stronger than he is. If I could find him, find that goddamned ship, I could…"

"What is it?"

Ship, he thought. Spaceship. Like aliens from space, Black had said. Like Tachyon.

Tachyon. Christ, Tachyon had a ship!

The longer he thought about it, the more convinced he was. The Astronomer was going for Tachyon's ship.

He walked back over to Peregrine and kissed her. The smell of their sexual juices hung around them like perfume and it was hard for Fortunato to stop. She staggered a little when he let her go.

That was when she saw Caroline's body. "Oh my God," she said.

Fortunato took the broken thing in his arms. "This isn't about you," he said. "This is about me. You should forget about it." He made it an order without meaning to. She nodded.

He walked out into space again. "Fortunato…?"

He wanted to look back but there was nothing else to say. He let the power take him on into the darkness.

The streets were still crowded despite the lateness of the hour, and everyone who was still out seemed to be drunk, stoned, belligerent, crazy, or all of the above. Jennifer attracted an unwanted amount of attention, and if it hadn't been for Brennan's glowering presence she couldn't have walked half a block without having to use her power to foil someone's unwelcomed advances.

The long day was taking its toll on her. Her feet hurt, she was dead tired, and her hunger had grown until it felt like a small animal gnawing away at her insides. She'd have to get some food. She couldn't ghost until she did. Turning insubstantial burned a lot of energy, and there weren't many calories stored in her lean frame.

Jennifer noticed a street vendor who looked as tipsy as the revelers around them and told Brennan that she needed something to eat. They stopped and he brought her a couple of the soft pretzels the man was selling.

"Sorry this is the best I can do," Brennan said, munching on one of the doughy pretzels himself. "Tonight most restaurants are closed, reservation only, or already so crowded that we couldn't even get in the door."

"These'll be fine," Jennifer said through a mouthful of dough. She grimaced and took a big swallow of her drink. "This mustard is hot!" she said, trying to speak and roll ice on her tongue at the same time.

"Hmmm?" Brennan stopped, then turned back to the vendor and bought a whole bottle of the condiment. "What's that for?" Jennifer asked as he stashed it away. "For later." He didn't elaborate and Jennifer was too busy tearing into her food to worry about it.

They went on through the streets until Brennan led them down a narrow alley that was, amazingly enough, totally devoid of partiers.

"You'll be safe here until I get back," he said. "Where're you going?"

"To my apartment. I'll be right back."

Jennifer watched him go down the alley, stung that he obviously didn't trust her enough to take her to where he lived. He returned as he had promised, bringing a cloak for Jennifer to wrap herself in and a pair of thonged sandals for her feet.

"They're a little large," Brennan said, "but it'll be better than running around barefoot."

She was still stung by his distrust, but couldn't resist asking about the pack on his back.

"What's in there?"

"Some things we might need before the evening is over."

"Informative as always," she said. "Can you tell me something straight out? Where are we headed now?"

"The place we might be able to get some answers. The Crystal Palace."

For seventeen years Fortunato had kept to the shadows. Not from modesty, but to avoid distractions. He didn't fly to the rescue of trapped miners or break up muggings on the subway. Except for a few months of covert politics back in the sixties he'd stayed in his apartment and read. Studied Aleister Crowley and E D. Ouspensky, learned Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sanskrit and ancient Greek. Nothing had seemed more important than knowledge for its own sake.

He couldn't say when that had started to change. Sometime after a woman named Eileen had died in a Jokertown alley, her brain wiped clean by the Astronomer. Sometime after everything he read, from particle physics to Masonic ritual to the Bhagavad Gita, told him the same thing, over and over: all is one. Nothing mattered. Everything mattered.

Tonight he flew over Manhattan Island in the remains of his evening clothes, glowing like a neon tube, a dead woman in his arms. Drunken tourists and cranked-up jokers and the last of the theater crowd looked up and saw him there and it didn't matter.

He looked at the idea that he might not live through the night and that didn't seem to matter much either. What was one pimp more or less?

He saw Jokertown spread out below him. The barricaded streets were crammed with people in costumes and people who were costumes, all of them carrying candles and flash lights and torches. Every streetlight and every light in every window up and down the Bowery was at full power.

He left Caroline on the steps of the Jokertown clinic. The crowds opened up to let him through and then closed again after him. There wasn't a lot of time for sentimental gestures. Caroline. was dead now and beyond caring.

He levitated straight up into the sky. He floated there and cleared his mind and pictured Tachyon, in his effeminate clown suits and Day-Glo hair. You dead yet, Tachyon? he thought. Yo, Tachyon, do you read me?

Tachyon's thoughts filled his head. Finally! Where have you been? I've been trying to get through to you! There was some kind of wall of power around you!

I'm a little charged up tonight, Fortunato told him.

I have to see you. The image of a warehouse on the East River formed in his mind. Can you meet me here? It's desperately important. It's about the Astronomer.

Fortunato turned the picture of the warehouse inside out. The ship was inside. Shaped like a jewel-studded conch shell and bigger than most houses.

I know, Fortunato thought. I already know.

Tachyon was still weeping. An inexhaustible flow, Roulette thought wearily, followed by an irritated flash: What does he want from me?

"Stop it," she said, and her voice seemed to be coming from a long way off.

The alien caught his breath on a sob, lifted his blotchy, tear-stained face from his hands.

"Nobody cares. You can cry your soul out, but nobody will care."

"I loved you." His voice was a husky rasp in the shadows of the room.

"Always in the past tense." And the remark struck her as being unbearably humorous. She never noticed when the laughter became tears.

His hands gripped her shoulders, shaking her until the teeth chattered in her head and the crystal beads in her hair set a cold ringing. "Why? Why?" he shouted.

"He promised me revenge, and peace."

"The peace of the grave. The Astronomer destroys everything he touches. How many bodies must it take to convince you?" He was screaming into her face. "And now Baby, Baby," he groaned, thrusting her aside.

"And what about you, Doctor?" she cried. "What about a lifetime of bodies?" The demons began their play, and she clutched at her head whimpering. "My baby."

His mind met hers, but this time there was no blending of thoughts. The chaos of her mind rejected the meld.

"It's happening again," Tachyon cried in an anguished whisper. "I can't bear it. Not again. What should I do? Who can help me?"

He pulled her off the bed, and shoved her toward her clothes. "Get dressed. We must hurry, hurry. If I can reach Baby before the Astronomer does. Then, later… later I'll do what I can for you, my poor, poor darling."

Roulette, mechanically pulling on her dress and shoes and gathering up her purse, tried to concentrate, but Tachyon's nervous babblings raked across her nerves, destroying thought. She tried to shut him out.

"Personality deterioration," he mumbled from within the large walk-in closet. "It will be necessary to find the core, rebuild memory compartments." The litany continued like a schoolboy trying to cram for an exam. A hanger screeched across the rod.

Roulette moved swiftly, slid open the dresser drawer, removed the Magnum, secreted it in her purse. An instant later Tachyon, dragging a coat over his unbuttoned shirt, raced into the room, and caught her by the wrist.

She didn't resist. He was taking her to her master. And then she would deal with them both.

Before he could even see the place, Fortunato heard the screaming in his head. It was the noise of a squalling infant, but refined, purified, maddening. He put up a mental block against it just to keep his mind clear.

He flew in over a rundown block and saw the warehouse. It was surrounded by kids in black leather jackets, the last of the gangs that had run wild in the Cloisters. They had M16s and holstered. 357 Magnums, like twenty-first-century cowboys. As Fortunato came down at them from the sky they all leaned their heads back to look.

"Run!" Fortunato ordered them. "Run away!" They dropped their rifles and ran.

Fortunato hit the street by the entrance to the warehouse. Something inside hummed like a monstrous carrier wave. There was a single floodlight over the door, but Fortunato himself glowed like a small sun. In that light he saw Tachyon and Roulette running toward him from the direction of Tachyon's apartment.

The Astronomer was already inside. His energy spoor covered the walls and leaked out into the street. Fortunato was reaching for the door when a thin cylinder of pink light punched through the wall next to him, then winked out. There was a sharp cracking noise as air imploded into the vacuum the laser left behind. Somebody inside the warehouse screamed. A second later the laser cut another hole a few yards away, and another. The noise was like cannon fire. Then the humming and the laser stopped together. At the same time the squalling in his head got even louder.

"I'm going in," Tachyon said. "He's hurting Baby."

"Baby," Fortunato said. "Christ."

"It's the name of his ship," Roulette said.

"I know," Fortunato said. "What's your part in this?"

"She's working for the Astronomer," Tachyon said. "She tried to kill me tonight."

Fortunato nearly laughed. So she wasn't freelance after all. Too bad she hadn't pulled it off. Fortunato jerked open the door and saw the Astronomer crawling into the side of the ship.

There was a body on the floor, a kid with a smoking black hole instead of a chest. In the corner were four others: a woman with a nurse's uniform and an M16, another woman in white, a man with a cat's face and long claws, and a plain Oriental woman who looked somehow familiar. The Cloisters, Fortunato thought. He'd seen her there and in the old Masonic temple in jokertown, just minutes before he'd blown it up. As he watched she became beautiful. Fascinating. He couldn't look away. He could feel the neurons in his brain misfiring.

"Stop it," he ordered. His brain cleared and she became plain and frightened again. The nurse raised the M16 and Fortunato melted it, the plastic stock turning to hot liquid in her hands.

"It's over," the Oriental said, "isn't it? We're not getting out of here."

"Not in that ship," Fortunato said.

"All the way from San Francisco for nothing," she said. "The door is still an option."

She looked hard to make sure he meant it, then ran for it. The others followed more slowly, not willing to turn their backs on Fortunato.

"Gresham?" Tachyon said. His voice warbled with anger and hurt. "Nurse Gresham?"

"What?" the nurse said.

"How could you? How could you betray my trust?"

"Oh, fuck off," Gresham said. "What do I care about your fucking trust?"

Tachyon put both hands to his head. His fingers pulled the flesh into a monster face. Fortunato wondered if he was going to combust. Instead Gresham's eyes rolled up in her head. She spun around once and slammed into the decaying wall next to the door.

"Jesus," Fortunato said. "Did you kill her?"

Tachyon shook his head. "No. She's not dead. Though she deserved it."

"Then you need to get her out of here," Fortunato said. "Both of you. While you still can. I'm going to split that ship like an oyster."

"No!" It was practically a scream. "You can't! I forbid it!"

"Don't get in my way, little man. The Astronomer is one of yours. It's your virus did this to him. I'm going to finish this. If you get in my way I'll kill you."

"Not the ship," Tachyon said. The little bastard really didn't know when to be scared. Fortunato had to give him that much. "She's alive. It's not her fault this is happening to her. You can't punish her for it."

"There's more at stake here than a goddamn piece of machinery."

Tachyon shook his head. "Not for me there isn't. And she's not a machine. If you try to harm her, you'll have to stop to fight me first. You can't afford that. The Astronomer will kill us all."

The little fuck was not going to back down. "All right. Okay. We play it your way. But you get the Astronomer out of that ship. Or I'll get him out any way I have to."

Tachyon paused for a second and then said, "Agreed."

"What about me?" Roulette said.

"You're coming with me," Tachyon said. He took her hand and pulled her into the ship after him.

The Astronomer leaned nonchalantly against a post of the bed. The sleeves of his robe were encrusted with blood, and there was the sour odor of death about his bonv form. But for the first time since meeting him Roulette sensed confusion and hesitation.

He turned his maddened, red-rimmed eyes upon them. "You didn't kill him."

The Takisian stepped forward, boot heels ticking on the polished floor. "I proved tougher than you anticipated." The awful gaze switched to Tachyon. "And only a coward sends a woman to do his killing."

"Is that the best you can do? Toss a few insults in my direction? You're pitiful, little man."

Suddenly the master Mason staggered, groaned, and clutched at his head. Tachyon, hair like a fiery cloud on his shoulders, eyes bright in a pale face, began to tremble with strain, and beads of sweat lined his forehead. Then, with menacing slowness, the Astronomer straightened, shook off the alien's mind control. Tachyon's eyes widened in fear.

"Die, you irritating gnat." The talonlike fingers curled, and Tachyon flung himself to one side as a ball of flame exploded on the spot he had been standing.

The floor tilted wildly as Baby flinched.

"It's no good. This ship can't be your escape." Tachyon scrabbled across the polished floor as another ball of flame exploded a delicate. chair behind which he'd been hiding. "She doesn't navigate herself. How's your astrogation?"

Roulette squeezed herself into an alcove praying to be overlooked, praying to avoid being incinerated by one of her master's errant energy bolts.

"And you better not sleep if you do get off the planet. She's a sentient being, but of course you've figured that out." Tachyon yelped, and the shoulder of his coat blackened. "You drop your coercion, and she'll blow the locks, or fly into a star. One of the drawbacks to a living ship, as other enemies before you have discovered."

The pyrotechnic display died. The Astronomer eyed Tachyon with something approaching pleasure. "You've made some interesting points, Doctor. So I'll take you with me."

"No… I think… not." Gasping breaths punctuated the words. "I've set a deathlock. All that I am, body, soul, and mind, oppose you now. To possess me you will have to destroy me."

"A pleasing image."

"Which still leaves you with your original problem." They were circling the room, Tachyon edging warily away from the Astronomer, the Astronomer pacing him with the patience of a predator. "And there's another small matter, but I thought I ought mention it. Fortunato's outside. Waiting. He'll crack this ship to get at you. I'd prefer that he not. Which is why I'mi here-though I can think of nothing I'd rather do less than face you. "

But the Astronomer had stopped listening. At the mention of Fortunato his face had suffused with blood, and an explosive expletive left his lips flecked with spittle.

"You've plagued me long enough, you useless piece of shit. This time I will finish it."

He plunged out of the ship, and Tachyon, seizing Roulette by the wrist, raced after him. And into hell. Balls of flame screamed through the air, searing the concrete floor and igniting the warehouse walls. There was a backblast of air that sent them tumbling, and Tachyon's hand slipped from her wrist. Masonry and girders rained down as Baby, terrified beyond reasoning, burst through the roof and fled into the night. Choking from the plaster dust, Roulette crawled for the door, ignoring Tachyon's frantic calls, first for Baby, then for her.

Cradling the Magnum she huddled in an alley, and watched the sky.