purple-gray twilight.
“He was our neighbor,” Frank said.
Gasping for breath, unable to speak, still twisting his hand in an
attempt to escape Frank’s iron grip, Bobby saw the name NORBERT JAMES
KOLREEN in the granite headstone.
“She had him killed,” Frank said,
“had her precious Candy kill him just because she felt he’d been rude to
her. Rude to her! The crazy bitch.”
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
The book-lined study. The old man in the doorway now, looking into the
room at them.
Bobby felt as if he had been on a corkscrewing roller coaster for hours,
turning upside down at high speed, again and again until he couldn’t be
sure any more if he was actually moving or standing still while the rest
of the world spun and loo around him.
“I shouldn’t have come here, Dr. Fogarty,” Frank said unsteadily. Blood
dripped off his injured hand, spotting a pale green section of the
Chinese carpet.
“Candy might’ve seen us at the house, might be trying to follow. Don’t
want to lead him to YOU.”
Fogarty said, “Frank, wait-“,
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
They were in the backyard of the decaying house, thirty or forty feet
from steps and a porch that were as dilapidated as those at the front of
the place. Lights shone in the first-floor windows.
“I want to go, I want to be out of here,” Frank said.
Bobby expected to teleport at once, and steeled himself against it, but
nothing happened.
“I want out of here,” Frank said again.
When they did pop from that place to another, Frank cursed in
frustration. Suddenly the kitchen door opened, and a woman stepped into
sight. She stopped on the threshold and stared at them.
The fading, muddy purple twilight barely exposed her, and the light from
the kitchen silhouetted her but did not reveal any details of her face.
Whether it was a trick of the strange illumination or an accurate
revelation of her form, Bobby couldn’t know, but when starkly outlined,
she presented a powerful erotic picture: sylphlike, gracefully thing yet
clearly and feminine, a smoky phantom that seemed either thinly clad
nude, and that issued a call of desire without making a sound.
There was a powerful lubricity in this mysterious woman which made her
the equal of any siren that had ever induced sail to run their ships
onto hull-gouging rocks.
“My sister Violet,” Frank said with obvious dread and disgust.
Bobby noticed movement, around her feet, a swarming of shadows. They
poured down the steps, onto the lawn, and he saw they were cats. Their
eyes were iridescent in the gloom. He was gripping Frank every bit was
hard as Frank was gripping him, for now he feared release as much as he
had previously feared continued captivity.
“Frank, get us out of here.”
“I can’t. I don’t have control of this, of myself.”
There were a dozen cats, two dozen, still more. As they rushed off the
porch and across the first few yards of unmown grass, they were silent.
Then, simultaneously, they cried out, as if they were a single creature.
Their wail of anger and hunger instantly cured Bobby of his nausea and
made his stomach quiver, instead, with terror.
“Frank!”
He wished he hadn’t taken off his shoulder holster back at the office.
His gun was back there on Julie’s desk, of no use to him, but as he
glimpsed the bared teeth of the oncoming horde, he figured the revolver
wouldn’t stop them anyway, at least not enough of them.
The nearest of the cats leaped.
JULIE WAS standing by her office chair, where it had been moved into the
center of the room for the session of hypnotic therapy. She was unable
to step away from it because she had last seen Bobby when he had been
next to that chair, and it was where she felt closest to him.
“How long now?”
Clint was standing at her side. He looked at his watch.
“Less than six minutes.”
Jackie Jaxx was in the bathroom, splashing his face with cold water.
Still on the sofa with a sheaf of printouts, Lee Chen was not as relaxed
as he had been six and a half minutes ago. His Zen calm had been