chapter THREE
It turned out that the poker game ran from midnight to just before sunup. That meant my new partner had about an hour to get me ready, and no comfortable, convenient place to do it in. Nobody would have let him into a bar or restaurant even if the top of his face hadn’t been a scabby, eyeless mess.
So we prepped sitting in the T-bird, right where I’d parked it by the water. I tried not to think about how Timon’s funk was stinking up the interior. It was too late to worry about that anyway.
When it was time, he had me drive downtown. And park in front of the Icarus Hotel.
There are places in downtown Tampa that get dark and lonely at night, after all the office workers have gone home, and this was one of them. The hotel had stood empty for as long as I could remember, and the awnings were faded and sagging. Layers of flyers and posters covered the soaped-up ground-floor windows. An empty crack vial crunched under my foot as Timon and I climbed out of the car.
I shook my head. My new partner claimed that he and his kind were the secret bosses of everything, but so far, I hadn’t seen much—including the venue for the lords’ big tournament—to convince me that they didn’t all live like bums or wild animals. I wondered again if he could possibly come up with a hundred and fifty grand, and then the limo pulled in behind us.
I’m into cars, but I didn’t recognize the make. My best guess was that it was some kind of custom-built Rolls Royce. But instead of the Flying Lady, a gold sphinx crouched at the end of the long white hood. The rest of the trim was gold, too.
The chauffeur matched the car, and I don’t just mean his uniform. His skin was the color of milk, and, even in the feeble glow of the one unbroken streetlight, his side-whiskers glinted like yellow metal. He gave Timon and me the once-over, then helped a passenger out of the back of the car.
The passenger looked like he needed the help. He was a living—well, depending on your definition—mummy, small and shriveled, moving as carefully as you’d move if there was nothing left of you but ratty bandages and dry rot. He had plastic splints strapped to his body to help hold him together, and he was smoking a cheroot.
The sight of him gave me a jolt. I reminded myself that I was going to see a lot of monsters, and I needed to get used to them.
Meanwhile, the mummy said, “Thank you, Davis,” to Gold Whiskers. He sounded like an actor playing an English duke or general in an old movie. Then he looked at the T-bird, and a smile twisted the withered remains of his face.
“Lovely,” he said.
I took a breath. “Thanks. It was my dad’s.”
“I don’t suppose it’s a stick.”
“No,” I said, “those are pretty rare.”
“They most certainly are. That’s why I still need one for my collection.”
“So,” Timon said in a strangled voice, “it’s the car that captured your attention? Then I assume you’re not surprised by my appearance.”
“I’m not, particularly,” the mummy answered, “but not because I’m responsible. Because these things happen in a tournament. The brownwings, was it?”
“I think you know.”
“Well, I may have heard something. Just as I heard that none of your subjects will stand for you. So, unless that nose of yours can sniff out the difference between a heart and a club, or an ace and a deuce, I suppose you’ll have to forfeit.”
“I am not forfeiting,” Timon gritted.
“Really? Good for you. How do you plan on continuing?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“As you prefer.” The mummy’s eyes shifted back to me. Dry and flaking as they were, I was surprised the motion didn’t make them crack or crumble. “A pleasure meeting you, human.”
Davis pulled open one of the hotel doors, looked around, then stepped aside to let the mummy totter in ahead of him.
As the door swung shut, Timon asked, “Why did you mention your father?”
“I don’t know. Why not?”
“Because you never know what they might be able to use against you. Didn’t you listen to anything I told you?”
I had. I just found it hard to keep it all straight in my head when I was talking cars with the living dead.
“I did,” I said. “I just wish you’d warned me I was going to be sitting across the table from something like that.”
“Each of your opponents is unique. We didn’t have time to talk about them all. We still don’t. We need to get inside.”
“Fine.” I pulled open the door, and then I caught my breath.
Dozens of white candles burned in the lobby, some in candelabras, others in a big, glittering wedding cake of a crystal chandelier. Some of the soft yellow light should have leaked out the windows, even through the layers of soap, flyers, and dirt. But for some reason—magic, I guessed—it didn’t.
It did gleam on dark wood and leather furniture and what I thought were Persian rugs. All of it looked old, but in perfect condition and spotlessly clean. As it probably was, because, even standing in range of Timon’s BO, I could smell soap and polish.
The people who’d presumably done the cleaning wore tuxes and waited behind the front and concierge desks. They could refuse to play poker in Timon’s place, but they apparently couldn’t get out of doing other jobs for him. At first glance, they all looked human. Although a couple faces just bothered me for reasons I couldn’t explain.
I shook my head. “Jesus.”
“What?” Timon asked.
“This place is yours. You could live like this all the time, with all these stooges waiting on you. But you’d rather be on the street.”
He made an impatient spitting noise. “I told you, I’m not like you. Now get a move on. We need to be at the table before the clock strikes midnight.”
I glanced at my watch and thought, no problem. We still had twenty minutes. A little clumsily, I held the door for him and steered him inside at the same time.
The concierge started toward us, his shoes clicking on a bare section of gray marble floor. Timon oriented on the sound and snapped, “I’m fine, traitor! Stay away from me!” The flunkies flinched. If they hadn’t realized he was going to find out what they’d all agreed on, they knew it now.
“We’re playing in the Grand Ballroom,” Timon said to me. “It’s the big arched doorway straight ahead.”
“I see it,” I said. It had a carving of a guy with wings falling out of the sky in the stonework above the opening. Now leaning on Davis’s arm, the mummy was hobbling inside. I guided Timon in the same direction.
We made it halfway across the lobby before things got complicated.
I was actually lucky I noticed as soon as I did. It was a big space, and even dozens of candles didn’t light it up like electricity would. And the vassals and thralls and whatever were pretty much just standing at their posts. They weren’t doing a lot of moving around.
But they were doing some, and suddenly, the motion wasn’t smooth anymore. It was jerky and jumpy, like a movie with some of the frames missing.
“Shit!” I said.
“What?” Timon asked. Meanwhile, the flickering got worse, like there were more frames missing between each of the ones I was seeing.
I tried to find the words to explain. “It’s like everything else is moving faster than us.”
“It is,” he said. “Fortunately, a gruntling could break this particular hex. Picture your sigil, and repeat this.” He rattled off words with a lot of consonants and hardly any vowels, in a language I’d never heard before. It sounded like he was puking up a cat, and the cat didn’t like it.
“What?” I asked.
He scowled. “There’s no time! Just visualize your sign and will the curse away.”
During my one whole hour of intensive training, he’d told me to pick a symbol to represent me and my mojo. Maybe just because we were sitting in the car, I chose the Thunderbird emblem. I pictured it now, with its long silver wings sticking straight out to the sides.
Then I brought the power shivering up from my insides. It wasn’t easy, but it had been a while since the brownwings, and I’d recharged my batteries at least to some extent. Since I couldn’t see any particular target, I tried to be a bomb again. To make the magic blast out in all directions and smash whatever had a hold on Timon and me.
Once again, the whole world seemed to lurch, but differently than before. This was like the hitch you feel when you step off the moving walkway back onto the regular floor in the airport.
Everything stopped flickering, and then I registered how the guys and women in the tuxes had gathered around to gawk at Timon and me moving in slow motion. I couldn’t see any sign that anyone had actually been trying to help us. Their eyes widened when we suddenly sped up.
Timon sniffed three times, then sneered like he could smell their unwillingness to get involved. He started to talk, probably to chew them out. Then, inside the ballroom, something bonged.
It had to be a clock striking the hour. We’d been stuck in slow-mo for twenty minutes.
I grabbed Timon and ran, dragging him along. One of the Oriental rugs slid under my foot. I almost went down and pulled the old man with me. But not quite.
The ballroom was fancy and full of candles like the lobby. The poker table with its covering of green felt sat in the pool of light under the chandelier. In the gloom on the far side of it were chairs for the flunkies the lords had brought along. The chiming grandfather clock stood beside the wall.
By the time I threw myself into the one empty seat at the table, there were only two bongs to go. The mummy clapped, too softly for me to hear. I wondered if his hands would explode into puffs of dust if he smacked them together hard enough to make a sound.
Standing beside me, Timon somehow oriented on the mummy, sneered, and said, “Was that you? It was a feckless little ploy.”
“But helpful,” the mummy said, “whoever set the snare. Since he’s occupied your chair, I take this fellow to be your proxy. So it was necessary for him to prove he’s of the blood. And now he has, without a bit of wasted time. In fact, we could start playing immediately, if only you’d be so kind as to find a place among the spectators.”
Timon took a deep breath, then pointed his torn, eyeless face down at me. “Win,” he growled. He snapped his fingers, and a girl in a tux came scurrying. Her legs bent backward, and she didn’t have much in the way of feet. Her black little shoes were round.
Watching her lead Timon away, I suddenly felt like a little kid whose parents have just dropped him off for his first day of school. Or his first night in Dracula’s castle.
The mummy smiled at me around his cheroot. “But it’s only courteous,” he said, “to have a round of introductions before the cards start flying. Most people call me the Pharaoh.”
“Hi,” I answered. “I’m Billy.” Timon had told me not to give my full name.
“Lovely to meet you, Billy,” purred the woman on the Pharaoh’s left. “I’m Leticia.” When I really looked at her, I felt a shock, and for once, it wasn’t a surge of fear.
Leticia had waves of auburn hair, and big, shining green eyes. Smooth creamy skin and a strapless sequined evening dress that showed a lot of it. I could give you all the details, and you’d get the idea that she was beautiful, glamorous and sexy, but you wouldn’t really understand. Think of the girl who made you crazy in junior high, right when puberty kicked in. Or the actress who hypnotized you whenever you watched one of her movies, no matter how awful it was. That was Leticia.
My mouth was dry, and my heart pounded. She might have sunk her hooks into me right then and there, too deep for me ever to pull them out, except that I’d played against other good-looking women who used it to get the guys to go easy on them. So this wasn’t a new experience, just a familiar one amped to a new level. And, after things went bad between us, Victoria told me I’d rather gamble than make love, and maybe she was right about that, too. Put it all together, and it may explain why I suddenly realized I was in trouble.
I did what Timon had told me to do whenever someone was trying to hex me. I visualized the T-bird emblem, concentrating on it really hard. A shudder went through me. Afterward, I was still attracted to Leticia, but I wasn’t drunk with it anymore.
Leticia winked like we’d just shared a joke.
On her left—and my right—was a guy who, like the Pharaoh, shouldn’t even have been alive. He smelled like oil and was made of painted tin, hinges, and springs. With his hooked nose and chin, leering mouth, and head bobbing at the end of his long neck, he reminded me of a jack-in-the-box, and when he twisted in my direction, I half expected him to introduce himself as Jack. But, in a voice that hissed and popped like an old LP, he told me he was Gimble of the Seven Soft Rebukes.
On my other side was a scrawny woman with the round, blank, bulging eyes of a bug. She had four arms, all too skinny, all with too many joints, and all covered in bristles.
An open glass jar sat beside her chip stack. An assortment of insects crawled sluggishly inside, but didn’t fly, jump, or climb out. I guessed the lump of blue jelly gave off fumes that kept them drugged. The bug woman popped a grasshopper into her mouth and crunched it as she introduced herself as Queen.
The guy between Queen and the Pharaoh looked as human as Leticia or me. So you’d think he might not make much of an impression, not sitting at this table. But he did. I didn’t suppose he was really a whole lot bigger than Pablo Martinez. People don’t come a whole lot bigger. But he felt twice as huge, and twenty times as dangerous. He had a long, shaggy black beard, hair to match, and faded blue tattooing on his forehead and hands that I couldn’t quite make out under all the fur. His suit and tie looked expensive—Armani or something—and as natural on him as they would on a grizzly.
“Wotan,” he rumbled. He stood up to offer me his hand.
Since I had a hunch what was coming, I wasn’t eager to take it. But table image matters, and I didn’t want to look scared. I got up again, and we shook.
If you want to call it that. Actually, he did his best to crush my hand. Since I’d been expecting it, I was able to squeeze back, but it still hurt. And creeped me out a little more, if that was possible, when I felt that he even had hair growing on his palm.
He stared into my eyes as we strained to mangle one another. His eyes were a muddy, bloodshot brown.
“I hope you realize,” he said, “a champion can lose as much as his lord. Sometimes he loses more.”
“And sometimes,” I said, just like I actually knew anything about it, “he kicks everybody else’s ass.”
“True enough,” the Pharaoh said. “I saw it happen in Punjab, two hundred years ago. So why not let go of him, Wotan, and we’ll see if he can do as well.”
Wotan couldn’t resist one last bone-grinding squeeze, but after that, he turned me loose. I sat back down and slipped my hand under the table, where I could flex the throbbing ache out of it without being obvious.
We didn’t have a dealer. We players were taking care of that ourselves. Queen was on the button, and her complicated four-handed shuffle was like a juggling act.
I took a breath and checked my stack. Timon wasn’t the chip leader, but he’d finished the previous night in decent shape. I checked everyone else’s. Wotan had the most, and Gimble, the least.
Six is a short-handed game, and so more hands were playable. Still, I decided to be a rock for at least the first hour, while I watched how everyone else was playing.
In other words, I was trying to push everything that was strange or scary out of my mind and make this just another poker game. It seemed like the best way to keep from freaking out.
And there were moments when it almost felt like a normal game. We all shielded our hole cards with one hand as we lifted the corners with the other. Or, in Queen’s case, one of the others. The decks rustled when we shuffled; the Pharaoh managed without any problem, and I wondered just how feeble and fragile he really was. Leticia waved over the girl with the backward legs and ordered an apple martini, and while I had the chance, I asked for a ginger ale. Wotan fired up a pipe the shape and nearly the size of an alto sax and added its stinking smoke to the blue haze of the mummy’s cheroots.
And, off and on, the lords chatted. They talked poker, chess, archery, and horse racing, but also games and sports I’d never heard of. They gossiped about scandals I didn’t understand and told jokes I didn’t get. Still, it was table talk, and the tone and rhythm of it felt familiar, too.
Eventually I started to relax, at least a little. Whatever the tournament involved when the players weren’t at the table—and it would have been an understatement to say that I still didn’t have much of a handle on that—between midnight and dawn, it was cards. And cards, I understood.
I started playing more hands. A couple times, I opened from late position with garbage and managed to steal the blinds. I took a chance with suited connectors, made a flush on the river, and took down a nice pot from Leticia. Who revved up the bedroom eyes and teasing smile to congratulate me.
Fifteen minutes later, I caught pocket jacks and felt pretty good about it until Wotan raised from first position, and the Pharaoh came over the top. Then I mucked, and watched cards come out that would have given me a full house. I tried to swallow my annoyance and remember that folding had still been the right play.
See, just another night at the poker table. Until Wotan jumped up out of his chair.
In a way, that was normal, too. I’d seen gamblers get mad and even violent before. But I’d never seen anybody anywhere move as fast as Wotan circled the table. It was like watching a high-speed train hurtle down the track.
I tried to scramble out of my own seat, but I was too slow. Wotan would have caught me still sitting if he’d been after me. Fortunately, he wasn’t. He lunged past me, grabbed Gimble by the arm, and jerked him to his feet.
The tin man whipped his free hand back and forth, trying to hit Wotan in the face. The hard, fast sweeps made his body clink. Snarling like a mad dog, Wotan ducked, dodged, and yanked and twisted the arm he had in his grip.
I finished getting up and backpedaled away from the fight. The Pharaoh, Queen, and Leticia did the same.
Gimble’s forearm snapped away from his elbow. Wotan stooped and banged it repeatedly on the floor. On the fourth hit, a hatch above the wrist popped open, and half a dozen aces flew out. I guessed there was probably machinery in there, too, to slide a card into Gimble’s hand when he wanted it.
Wotan roared, stood up straight, and lifted the piece of arm to smash Gimble’s head. The metal man scrambled backward. Wotan started after him.
“Wait!” I said. I’m not sure why. Maybe it just wasn’t my night to mind my own business.
Wotan ignored me like a pit bull that’s decided to maul the neighbor kid no matter what its owner thinks about it. I took a step in his direction, and then he spun around.
His eyes had turned red. Not glowing red, like taillights, but completely bloodshot, like he’d had some kind of hemorrhage. Maybe it meant he couldn’t see, but as I got ready to dodge the first swing of the detached arm, I didn’t think I was going to be that lucky.
Then Leticia said, “Please don’t!” I felt her magic even though she wasn’t aiming it at me, like the breeze of a bullet shooting past my head.
“I agree,” said the Pharaoh. If he was using magic, I couldn’t feel it. Maybe he didn’t think he had to. I’d noticed early on that all the others, even Wotan, showed him respect. “Please don’t drag the game down to that level, especially so early in the proceedings. I came to Florida to play Hold ’Em. Didn’t you?”
“Gimble cheated,” Wotan growled.
“And you caught it,” Leticia said. “You spotted it ahead of any of the rest of us, and now he’ll pay the penalty.”
“All right,” the big man said. “He is a lord. But this one.” His eyes locked on me. “A human. Shouting orders at me. Interfering.” He shuddered.
“At least for the time being,” the mummy said, “punish his impudence at the table.”
Wotan turned on his heel and started prowling around the room. Everyone gave him plenty of room. Periodically he kicked a chair, or picked one up one-handed, swung it over his head, and smashed it down. Since it seemed to be the alternative to smashing me, I had no problem with how he was working out his aggression.
Meanwhile, Gimble called for his servants. They looked like ugly cartoon squirrels walking on two legs, or maybe like crosses between squirrels and chimps. After figuring out that his elbow was trashed, they bolted on a whole new arm at the shoulder. The boss stretched it out, bent it, and twisted it around to get the feel of it.
“Is it satisfactory?” the Pharaoh asked.
“It will do,” said Gimble, nodding, or maybe that was just the usual bobbing of his head.
“And it looks like Wotan is calming down. So let’s all resume our seats.”
When we did, Gimble posted an extra big blind six times in a row, and after that, nobody treated him any differently than before. Which was more forgiving than people would have been in the games where I generally played.
The difference was that cheating was considered legitimate play in the lords’ tournament. It was just that you tried at your own risk, because if somebody caught you, he was free to play back at you however he liked. But, except for having to throw in the extra chips, once the moment was over, it was over.
Or I guessed that was the way it worked. I wasn’t sure. If the lords really didn’t think like humans, how could I be?
What I did know was that, instead of holding a grudge against Gimble, Wotan kept giving me the stink eye. Either I really had pissed him off before, or he’d just decided to intimidate me.
I’d had other players try to stare me down. But generally speaking, they’d hadn’t had eyes that were still mostly red where they should have been white, and they hadn’t warmed up for the staring contest by ripping a guy’s arm off. The next time it was my deal, I fumbled the shuffle, and cards squirted out of my hands. Wotan sneered, and Queen and Gimble laughed.
That made me angry, which was good. It pushed out some of the fear. I pictured the Thunderbird, and that helped a little more, although not as much as it had against Leticia’s power. Maybe that was because she’d used actual magic. Wotan was just giving me a good look at what he really was inside.
A few hands later, I raised on the button with ace-ten suited. Queen folded, and Wotan said, “All in.”
He was still the chip leader, which meant he was really putting me all in. I wasn’t going to bet my whole tournament on ace-ten, so I tossed my hand and didn’t think a whole lot more about it.
But he went on putting me all in whenever the play was such that he could be pretty sure it would just be him and me in the pot. Which got to be more and more often. The session was almost over, and the others were more interested in protecting what they had than playing any more big hands. They didn’t mind getting out of the way and letting the two guys who had issues pound on one another.
I prayed for a premium hand. Pocket aces, kings, or even ace-king. I didn’t get one.
I wouldn’t need a great hand if I could figure out when Wotan really had something and when he was raising with trash. But I’d watched him all night and never picked up a tell. I couldn’t spot one now, either. He just threw off a kind of steady hatred.
I considered simply protecting my own stack by folding the rest of the night away. But what reason was there to think that Wotan wouldn’t play me the same way next time? Hell, if I didn’t make a stand, the others were likely to decide they could bully me, too.
It came to me that maybe I should cheat.
I didn’t like the idea, but I needed to remember that at this table, it was all part of the game. Why, for all I knew, every one of my opponents had been doing it all night, jabbing away at one another with magic, and I just hadn’t noticed because they hadn’t bothered to direct much of it at the human.
Besides, I was pissed off.
So I figured it was time to read Wotan’s mind. Or look through the backs of his cards with X-ray vision. And it was really a shame that I had no idea how to do either of those things.
My first lesson in Timon’s brand of mumbo jumbo had only focused on defense. He said there wasn’t time to teach me anything else, and that I shouldn’t try anything else. Just play cards and block any magical punch that anybody threw at me.
It was probably good advice. But I did have one trick I could try, because I’d taught it to myself. I visualized the Thunderbird and brought a quiver of power up out of my center. And the next time the action folded around to me, I bet. Queen threw away her cards.
Like many experienced players, Wotan never looked at his hand until it was his turn to act. As he reached for it now, I jumped out of my physical body and across the table. I landed behind him and looked over his shoulder as he turned up the corners of king-queen off-suit.
Not a great hand overall, but perfect for kicking the crap out of my king-jack. I flew back into my body, and when he went all in, I mucked.
And studied the others. If any of them had noticed me soul traveling—or whatever it was called—I couldn’t tell it.
Okay, good. Now I just had to hope I’d get a chance to make the trick pay off before the end of the night.
It happened five minutes later. I bet ace-nine. Wotan came over the top with queen-seven.
If he paired up and I didn’t, I was still going to the rail. But the odds were in my favor, and that was all I’d been waiting on. Grinning, I sprang back over the table. I meant to plunge back into my body like a hand sticking into a glove.
I landed someplace else instead.
I looked around in confusion. It was dark, but not dark enough to keep me from making out the high stone columns holding up the roof, because the building had no walls to block out the starlight. Or the sight of distant pyramids rising against the night sky.
I just had time to think: Egypt. Then creatures stalked out of the shadows.
They were eight feet tall, with heads that were too big and the wrong shape. The nearest one roared like a lion and chopped down at me with an axe.
I jumped out of the way, and I swear, he missed. Still, a shock went through me, and I split into pieces.
Or into five versions of myself. Number Two looked exactly like me. Number Three glowed red, and Four, a silvery white. Five was murky and almost invisible in the gloom. But I still recognized him as a semblance of me, the way you recognize your shadow on a wall.
The giant with the lion’s head came at me—or at us—again. So did one of his buddies, who had the long toothy jaws of a crocodile.
The five of us scattered. I felt instantly that it was a mistake, but it was also the only thing to do if we were all going to avoid having to fight giants with our bare hands. And I didn’t control the others, anyway. Each of them was making his own decisions.
I ran, dodging through the columns with their carved hieroglyphics, using them for cover. The giants used them, too. A fat one with the head of a hippo jumped out right in front of me, feet planted wide in a sumo stance and hands stretched out to grab me.
I dropped and slid on the hard stone floor like I was sliding into second. I shot between his feet, scrambled up, and ran on.
Not long after that, I found myself at the spot where the temple—if it was a temple—gave way to desert sand. Panting, I wondered if I should keep going. Then what I thought might be the voice of a hippo man gave a grunting, croaking cry.
But not quite the way a real animal would do it. I thought I could make out words in the noise, although I had no idea what they meant.
Echoing through the temple, other animal voices roared, hissed, and bellowed in response. The three or four monsters that had been hot on my trail turned and headed back the way we’d come.
That seemed like it ought to be a good thing. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t.
For the first time since the Army cut me loose, I wished for my M16. And when I did, I felt what was starting to be a familiar shiver inside my chest.
Was it possible I could make a rifle, or call one to me? I figured I might as well try. I pictured the Thunderbird, and then the M16. I remembered the weight and feel of it in my hands, and the kick when I fired it. I wanted the hell out of it, and hoped I wouldn’t fly off to wherever it was instead of drawing it to me.
Then the cramps hit, like my insides were rupturing. Maybe because I was operating on only one fifth of my mojo. I kept concentrating anyway.
Something slithered around and through my fingers, liquid and oily at first, then hardening. I looked down and saw my rifle, just like back in Afghanistan. It even had the long scratch on the stock.
My instincts told me that, hard as the trick was, it would have been a lot harder in the real world. But in this place, I’d had just enough juice to pull it off.
I waited for the cramps to ease, then crept deeper into the temple. As I did, my other selves slipped out of the shadows one by one.
First came the red guy, shining like a hot coal. Next, the one who looked exactly like me. And then, hesitantly, the shadow.
Which left us a man down. “Where’s the other glowing guy?” I whispered.
The shadow pointed toward the heart of the temple. Right on cue, animal voices started chanting.
“Shit,” I said. The giants had called off the chase because they’d caught one of us, and one was apparently all they needed. “Christ only knows what they’re doing, but we need to go get him.” I started forward.
The others stayed put.
I turned back around. “What’s wrong?”
“If I die tonight,” asked the guy who looked exactly like me, “who will remember me?”
“Who gives a rat’s ass?” I answered. I looked at red me and shadow me. “What’s your problem?”
They just stared back, and I decided they couldn’t talk. Not that they really needed to. Their attitude was clear.
“Hey,” I said, “I don’t want to go, either. But do you really think any of us can be all right without him? And at least we’ve got this.” I hefted the M16.
At first, nobody reacted, and I wondered if Red and Shadow had really even understood me. Maybe the five-way split hadn’t left them with their fair share of brains. But then the glowing me gave a nod, and the spooky version turned up his hands in a way that somehow communicated that he still didn’t like it, but he was in.
“Give me the rifle,” said my twin. “I’m a really good shot.”
“To hell with that,” I said, “make your own. Or, if you can’t, wait until I shoot a monster with an axe, and then pick it up.”
Apparently he couldn’t whistle up an M16, because he just gave me a pissy look. Then we all sneaked toward the chanting. Sometimes it sounded like real voices reciting real words, and sometimes, like feeding time at the zoo.
Finally our objective came into view. Sort of. The lion, croc, and hippo men hadn’t been considerate enough to light torches or anything like that. But even in the center of the temple, there was a little light coming in from outside, and that, combined with the GE soft white glow of silver me, was enough to show what was happening.
A round pit opened in the floor. On the far side of it was a giant bronze balance scale. A pale, fluffy feather longer than I was tall lay in one weighing pan. A lion man and a croc man were lifting Silver into the other. He struggled, but feebly, like he needed to recover from a crack over the head.
I couldn’t see any way that Silver wasn’t going to weigh more than a giant feather, but the monsters weren’t leaving anything to chance. They pulled down on the pan in which he lay like drug dealers gypping a customer.
The chanting stumbled to a stop. The lion man and the croc man dragged Silver off the scale and hauled him toward the edge of the pit.
And, just standing there like an idiot, I realized I was running out of time to do anything about it. I shouldered the M16 and shot the croc man in the head. He reeled backward. I shifted my aim and shot the lion man. He dropped, too.
I hoped that at that point, silver me would make a run for it, and he did. But staggering, not sprinting, like he was still dazed.
I lost sight of him when giants rushed my three buddies and me. We’d been lucky until then. Caught up in their ceremony, the monsters hadn’t noticed Red’s glow as we sneaked up on them. But it would have been hard to miss the bang and flash of the rifle.
With their long legs, the creatures came on fast. I switched to three-round bursts and blasted away for all I was worth. It didn’t look like it was going to be enough. One of the giants would charge into striking distance, and that would probably be that.
But then a hippo man fell down clutching his crotch and bellowing. Shadow me whirled away from him and used the axe in his ghostly-looking hands to hack a croc man’s leg in two. The whole thing was one smooth blur of movement.
As I went on shooting, I saw that Red and my twin were fighting, too. Not with the kung-fu-master-goes-berserk speed and fury of Shadow. I couldn’t match that, either. But, mostly taking cheap shots at giants who were busy trying to kill him or me, they were doing all right.
In fact, we were winning. And I was happy about it until I shot a hippo man in the chest. When he went down, I saw what was behind him. A crocodile man had recaptured Silver and wrestled him to the edge of the pit.
I aimed for the giant’s head and pulled the trigger. The M16 was empty. The croc man shoved Silver into the hole, looked across it at me, and made a gesture that’s apparently as old as ancient Egypt. Then he turned around and ran.
Down in the pit, something gave a rasping hiss. It was like the voices of some of the animal men, but louder. Much louder.
I ran to the edge of the hole, looked down, and gasped. The thing at the bottom was huge. Its reptilian head belonged on a dinosaur, though you couldn’t honestly say the same for the lion’s mane at the back of the skull.
The body was mostly hippo, but with a big cat’s forelegs and claws. Long, tapering, and scaly, the tail switched back to crocodile.
Silver had his back against the wall. The creature reared up on its hind legs, ready to smash down on him like an avalanche.
I yelled and threw the M16 at it, and the rifle bounced off its spine. It didn’t even seem to notice.
But when it plunged down—and I flinched—it didn’t plunge all the way to the target. Its paws thumped to a stop in front of Silver’s body, and it snarled like something had hurt it.
It was a little hard to see through the shine, but Silver’s face had a tight, strained expression on it. I realized he’d made an invisible wall, just like I had earlier in the evening.
But my wall hadn’t even held back brownwings for long. Silver wasn’t likely to do much better against Godzilla. Snarling, the monster started slashing away at the barrier with its claws, and the other me jerked with every blow, just like they were ripping into him.
I had to help him, but reinforcing his wall didn’t seem like the answer. Even if I still had enough mojo, the thing in the hole would knock it down eventually.
I needed to haul Silver out of the pit. But it was way too deep for me just to reach down and grab his hand.
Could I make a rope the way I’d made the rifle? Probably not, running on empty like I was. I looked around.
The dead giants were wearing what I supposed were loincloths twisted around their hips in a complicated, almost diaper-ish way. I ran to the nearest body and started pulling at the folds.
About that time, the rest of the squad came trotting up. It was good to see we were all still okay. So far.
“What are you doing?” asked my twin.
“We can knot these together,” I said. “Get more. Fast!”
He and Red hopped to it. Crouching, bloody axe in hand, Shadow stood guard in case there were any giants left that wanted another crack at us. He might not have wanted to fight before, but he was into it now. Even with his face all smudged and dim, he gave off an eager viciousness.
When I judged the makeshift rope was long enough, we rushed it to the pit. Where—thank God—Silver was still holding out, and the Beast That Ate Cairo was still snarling and clawing away. We dropped the line, and I had a bad moment when it stopped partway down. I thought Silver had put a roof on his invisible fort. He hadn’t, though. The rope had just caught on top of the wall, and it flopped on down a second later.
Silver grabbed it, and, exhausted though he was, managed to hold on as we pulled him up. The monster roared even louder, then fell sprawling when it took another swing at the wall, and the obstacle suddenly wasn’t there anymore.
We let Silver sit, slumped and gasping, on the floor. “What now?” asked my twin.
I felt like asking why I had to be the one to think of everything. Instead, still going with my gut, I told him, “We need to put ourselves… our self… whatever back together. Everybody join hands.”
Shadow threw away his axe, which clanked on the stone. I ended up holding hands with him and Red. His fingers were ice cold, and Red’s were toasty warm.
I pictured the Thunderbird and wished us smooshed into one person.
Everything seemed to spin. Suddenly I had five strings of thoughts jabbering in my brain, which I don’t recommend unless you want to go crazy or at least develop a migraine. Fortunately, it only lasted an instant, and then there was only one of me again.
Okay, I thought. If I could pull off one more trick, maybe I’d come out of this all right.
The first time I’d run around in my spirit body, I’d felt a connection between it and the flesh, blood, and bones it had jumped out of. Now that the monsters had stopped messing with me, maybe I could feel the same thing again. I tried, straining like you’d strain to hear something faint and far away.
Off to the left. I hoped. The tug was so soft that I wondered if I was just imagining it. But I tried to think positive and ran at the spot. When my feet came off the ground, and running turned into flying, I knew I was right.
The temple vanished, and the candlelit ballroom appeared. It seemed bright compared to where I’d just been. I was thrilled to be back until I felt the fingers twisted in my hair.
They belonged to Wotan, and they were holding my head up to stretch out my neck. He had his other arm cocked back to punch me.
Sitting down and already grabbed is a piss-poor posture for self-defense. Still, I managed to throw up my arm to block. The punch slammed into it and jammed it into my Adam’s apple. Which hurt, but at least didn’t crush my windpipe or break my spine.
Wotan snarled and pulled back his fist for another try.
“No!” I croaked. “No!” It was all I knew to say. After all the scary, mysterious shit that had happened in the temple, I’d lost track of what was going on this world, and what reason he had to attack me.
My whining worked about as well as you’d expect. But the Pharaoh said, “Hold on.” And that did make Wotan hesitate.
“He’s awake,” Leticia said.
“He was in a trance,” the huge man said. And he still seemed huge, even after I’d just fought actual giants. “Doing something.”
That jogged my memory. I realized I must have been sitting there without talking or moving—for all I knew, maybe drooling—and Wotan had picked up on the fact that I was cheating.
But I had a hunch I’d only been out for a couple seconds. I’d already learned that time could move at different speeds for different people, and Wotan was way too impatient to wait for minutes on end while I sat like a mannequin.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “I was just thinking.”
“Bullshit,” Wotan said.
“It’s not,” I said. “And how would you know, anyway? Can you tell when people are doing, uh, mind magic?”
For all I knew, he could, and if so, I was screwed. But my impression was that he was all about the physical.
He hesitated for maybe half a second. Then he said, “I know what I know.”
“Maybe you should ask the others,” I said. “The people who really could tell.”
Which shows how desperate I really was. Because it was one of those same others—given the Egyptian theme, I figured the Pharaoh—who’d stuck my wandering soul in Fantasyland. But for some reason, he hadn’t said anything about it yet, and maybe he still wouldn’t.
“I didn’t notice anything,” said Queen, munching a dragonfly.
“I didn’t, either,” said Leticia.
Gimble and then the mummy said the same.
“I don’t care what you say!” Wotan said.
“But you know the rules,” the Pharaoh said. “If you resort to bloodshed when the target’s impropriety isn’t manifest to everyone… ” He shrugged.
“Damn you all!” Wotan snarled. “I know what you’re doing!” He shuddered. “But it won’t work.” He gave my hair a yank that felt like it could give me whiplash, then let go. “This little turd isn’t worth it.” He stalked back to his seat.
I took deep breaths and told my heart to slow down. When Wotan reached for the pot, I said, “Hold it. The little turd hasn’t folded. And isn’t going to. I call.”
He goggled at me. Apparently he’d believed that, whatever magical dirty trick I was trying, he’d interrupted me before I could make it work.
“In that case,” said Leticia, with a hint of laughter in her voice, “let’s see what you have.”
I turned up my cards. Wotan picked his up and threw them on the felt. The seven landed facedown. Gimble waited a moment, then flipped it over himself.
Then Queen dealt the common cards. Neither Wotan nor I paired up. My ace was good.
Wotan got up and stalked out. We heard him smashing things in the lobby.
The Pharaoh puffed on his cheroot. “If everyone’s agreeable, I’ll count out Billy’s winnings from Wotan’s stack. I can also post his blinds until he returns.”
But Wotan never came back, not that night. The session ended just a few hands later.
Leticia started to shuffle, then set down the cards again. “Sunrise,” she said, and to my surprise, I felt it, too, as a spot of warmth to the east. It was like her awareness was contagious.
Not that I cared a whole lot about it. What mattered was that, not only had I survived my first night of this craziness, after doubling up through Wotan, I was the chip leader. Which is what you always want to be. But I also knew it hung a target on me.