45
Dev’s cell rang just before they were about to leave and speak with Jay and his friends. Dev answered it and listened a moment before turning on the large screen again. He flicked quickly through the channels but found they were all different angles of the same scene. Omid stared, barely hearing Dev say something about telling Jay and the others, before he hung up.
The camera frame was a far away shot of Villa 6, and Omid could immediately see why the the call had come in. The visualizers for the party were now gone, and in their place the walls of the building displayed the solitary figure of a man. He wore a black cloth mask that covered his mouth and nose, but Ms. Omid had little doubt of just who it was. She saw the similarities between the masked man and Jay, seeing his hair, his brow, his ears, and she even thought she could see something familial in the direct, personal way this man looked into the camera.
The crowds outside had already focused on the image. Omid could see the dancing had stopped with the music. The milling and jostling had ceased as everyone turned curious gazes upward.
The man stepped aside, revealing from behind him another smaller Villa 6 and creating the nested image of a Villa within a Villa within a Villa. The lights blinked impartially in the room around the image. Everything and everyone below was silent, waiting for the man to reappear.
So he did, this time with a red can of spray paint in hand.
The man walked over to the small Villa and rested his left hand on its peak.
With his other hand, he brandished the can of paint, pointed it downward onto the head of the angel-like structure, and began to spray. For a moment the paint coagulated in a vivid red clot before trickles flowed slowly down the sides of the building, obscuring the image within the image. The man in the building said nothing and did not look again to the camera for some time. He only stared with artistic intensity at the slow descent of the paint until finally the last of the can was used up and the last ringlet of color had fallen to pool by his feet. The wings remained unpainted with the blood of the body, a red phoenix in technicolor flight.
Dropping the can to the side the man walked toward the camera, which followed his movements in a strange almost darting way, and extended his hands forward. Ms. Omid was at once surprise and not, when a second pair of feminine, pearly white hands thrust out to join his, grasping together.
Let’s leave, my dear,” said Blake to Rosie.
She nodded to him.
Can they still . . .”
No, it’s just us.”
She pushed herself up on her tip toes and they kissed again.
When, after a long and pleasurable time, their lips parted, a tall figure, dressed in black, was standing in the door’s threshold. Rosie’s hands instinctively tightened around Blake, who felt rather than knew the identity of the other man. Neither of them had seen their pursuer before, the man who had hunted them and manipulated them along their entire journey.
Seeing him finally, they both thought that he was not as they might have expected him to look.
The Colonel had disappeared now, leaving in wake the greying face of Nicolas Hurn. In ravenous procession, wrinkles lined the obsidian implants rooted into his skull and neck. His expression was not, as Blake might have imagined, one of anger, wrath, or revenge—there was something else in it. Something sad perhaps, in the way he stared at them, mouth open a fraction, sallow cheeked and glassy eyed.
What do you want with us?” said Rosie. Her voice wavered in a frightened tremolo.
The man at the door said nothing, but, Blake thought, her words forced him into a more powerful depression, his shoulders slumping under their weight. He seemed to fight for breath, to become more frail the closer he came to them. Finally, when it seemed the sight of the couple had become too much for him to bear, he turned away from them, muttering a few words, under his breath, yet unmistakable in the quiet room.
To see you just once, Flora. To see you safe.” And then turning back to them: “I’ve opened the doors, the crowds are coming in. You should leave now.”