the night, into the storm-lashed city.
Soon, both of the Dawson children would be slaughtered, reduced to
nothing more than bloody mounds of dead meat.
That thought pleased and excited Lavelle. It even gave him an erection.
The rituals had drained him. Not physically or mentally. He felt
alert, fresh, strong. But his Bocor’s power had been depleted, and it
was time to replenish it. At the moment, he was a Bocor in name only;
drained like this, he was really just a man-and he didn’t like being
just a man.
Embraced by the darkness, he reached upward with his mind, up through
the ceiling, through the roof of the house, through the snow-filled air,
up toward the rivers of evil energy that flowed across the great city.
He carefully avoided those currents of benign energy that also surged
through the night, for they were of no use whatsoever to him; indeed,
they posed a danger to him. He tapped into the darkest, foulest of
those ethereal waters and let them pour down into him, until his own
reservoirs were full once more.
In minutes he was reborn. Now he was more than a man. Less than a god,
yes. But much, much more than just a man.
He had one more act of sorcery to perform this night, and he was happily
anticipating it. He was going to humble Jack Dawson. At last he was
going to make Dawson understand how awesome was the power of a masterful
Bocor. Then, when Dawson’s children were exterminated, the detective
would understand how foolish he had been to put them at such risk, to
defy a Bocor. He would see how easily he could have saved them-simply
by swallowing his pride and walking away from the investigation. Then
it would be clear to the detective that he, himself, had signed his own
children’s death warrants, and that terrible realization would shatter
him.
Penny sat straight up in bed and almost shouted for Aunt Faye.
She had heard something. A strange, shrill cry. It wasn’t human.
Faint. Far away. Maybe in another apartment, several floors farther
down in the building.
The cry seemed to have come to her through the heating ducts.
She waited tensely. A minute. Two minutes. Three.
The cry wasn’t repeated. There were no other unnatural sounds, either.
But she knew what she had heard and what it meant.
They were coming for her and Davey. They were on their way now. Soon,
they would be here.
This time, their love-making was slow, lazy, achingly tender, filled
with much nuzzling and wordless murmuring and soft-soft stroking. A
series of dreamy sensations: a feeling of floating, a feeling of being
composed only of sunlight and other energy, an exhilaratingly weightless
tumbling, tumbling. This time, it was not so much an act of sex as it
was an act of emotional bonding, a spiritual pledge made with the flesh.
And when, at last, Jack spurted deep within her velvet recesses, he felt
as if he were fusing with her, melting into her, becoming one with her.,
and he sensed that she felt the same thing.
“That was wonderful.”
“Perfect.”
“Better than a peanut butter and onion sandwich?”
“Almost.”
“You bastard.”
“Hey, peanut butter and onion sandwiches are pretty darned terrific, you
know!”
“I love you,” he said.
“I’m glad,” she said.
That was an improvement.
She still couldn’t bring herself to say she loved him, too. But he
wasn’t particularly bothered by that. He knew she did.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressing.
She was standing on the other side of the bed, slipping into her blue
robe.
Both of them were startled by a sudden violent movement. A framed
poster from a Jasper Johns art exhibition tore loose of its mountings
and flew off the wall. It was a large poster,
three-and-a-half-feet-by-two-and-a half-feet, framed behind glass. It
seemed to hang in the air for a moment, vibrating, and then it struck
the floor at the foot of the bed with a tremendous crash.
“What the hell! ” Jack said.
“What could’ve done that?” Rebecca said.
The sliding closet door flew open with a bang, slammed shut, flew open