guy without delay. I couldn’t scoot backward as fast as he could
troll-walk toward me, and although I was a little hysterical-okay, way
hysterical-I could figure the odds well enough to know that even the
greediest bookie in Vegas wouldn’t cover a bet on my survival. In my
panic, hammered by terror and by a dangerously giddy sense of the
absurd, I thought that the most humane course of action would be to
shoot him in the gonads because he had taken a vow of celibacy,
anyway.
Fortunately, I never had the opportunity to prove myself to be the
expert marksman that such a perfectly placed shot would have
required.
I aimed in the general direction of his crotch, and my finger tightened
on the trigger. No time to use the laser sighting.
Before I could squeeze off a round, something monstrous growled in the
passageway behind the priest, and a great dark snarling predator leaped
on his back, causing him to scream and drop the baseball bat as he was
driven to the attic floor.
For an instant, I was stunned that the Other should be so utterly
unlike a rhesus and that it should attack Father Tom, its nurse and
champion, rather than tear out my throat. But, of course, the great
dark snarling predator was not the Other: It was Orson.
Standing on the priest’s back, the dog bit at the sweat-suit collar.
Fabric tore. He was snarling so viciously that I was afraid he’d
actually maul Father Tom.
I called him off as I scrambled to my feet. The mutt obeyed at once,
without inflicting a wound, not a fraction as bloodthirsty as he’d
pretended to be.
The priest made no effort to get up. He lay with his head turned to
one side, his face half covered with tousled, sweat-soaked hair. He
was breathing hard and sobbing, and after every third or fourth breath,
he said bitterly, “You………
Obviously he knew enough about what was happening at Fort WYvern and in
Moonlight Bay to answer many if not all of my most pressing
questions.
Yet I didn’t want to talk to him. I couldn’t talk to him.
The Other might not have left the rectory, might still be here in the
shadowy cloisters of the attic. Although I didn’t believe that it
posed a serious danger to me and Orson, especially not when I had the
Glock, I had not seen it and, therefore, couldn’t dismiss it as a
threat. I didn’t want to stalk it-or be stalked by it -in this
claustrophobic space.
Of course, the Other was merely an excuse to flee.
Those things that I truly feared were the answers Father Tom might give
to my questions. I thought I was eager to hear them, but was not yet
prepared for certain truths.
“You.
He’d spoken that one word with seething hatred, with uncommonly dark
emotion for a man of God but also for a man who was usually kind and
gentle. He transformed the simple pronoun into a denunciation and a
curse.
You.
Yet I’d done nothing to earn his enmity. I hadn’t given life to the
pitiable creatures that he had committed himself to freeing. I hadn’t
been a part of the program at Wyvern that had infected his sister and
possibly him, as well. Which meant that he hated not me, as a person,
but hated me because of who I was.
And who was I?
Who was I if not my mother’s son?
According to Roosevelt Frost-and even Chief Stevensonthere were,
indeed, those who revered me because I was my mother’s son, though I’d
yet to meet them. For the same lineage, I was hated.
hristopher Nicholas Snow, only child of Wisteria Jane
(Milbury) Snow, whose own mother named her after a flower.
Christopher born of Wisteria, come into this too-bright world near the
beginning of the Disco Decade. Born in a time of tacky fashion trends
and frivolous pursuits, when the country was eagerly windiving down a
war, and when the worst fear was mere nuclear holocaust.
What could my brilliant and loving mother possibly have done that would
make me either revered or reviled?
Sprawled on the attic floor, racked by emotion, Father Tom Eliot knew