“Yeah. Okay. At least I think so.” Michael used his lower hands to push himself up to a sitting position. He grimaced. “Fuck, that hurt.”
“There was only one man, and he wasn’t a very good sniper, luckily for you. A trained sniper would have gone for the head shot.” Bedeau tapped his own forehead and grinned suddenly. He slapped DB’s shoulder. “Now he’s a very dead amateur.”
“Good,” Michael told him.
“The people of the Caliphate, they don’t like you very much because of what you did to the Righteous Djinn.” Bedeau said it with a faint smile. DB was damned if he knew what was so amusing about any of it.
“Yeah,” Michael answered, rubbing his chest through the vest. “So I gather.”
Double Helix
THE WORDS OF A TALEBEARER
ARE AS WOUNDS
Melinda M. Snodgrass
I’VE LEFT THE MOISTURE- LEACHING heat of Baghdad for the steaming heat of Kongoville. The tropical heat makes me wish I could strip off not only clothes but skin as well. What is it about the British that we seek out such dreadful climes in our pursuit of empire?
Exhaustion has left my mind feeling like a gray blank. I wasn’t sure I could effectively picture one of the rooms of the palace so I gave myself more room by picking the garden. The night air is filled with the sounds of insects and frogs. I wonder if one of those deep ribbets is Buford out grazing on bugs. I giggle.
It dies when I hear the distinctive sound of a gun being cocked. Whirling I see one of the Leopards, his eyes glittering in his dark face. The gun is coming up. He recognizes me before his finger tightens on the trigger. The barrel drops, and I can feel my knees trembling with released stress. The wash of adrenaline is ebbing, taking with it the last of my energy. I grope in my pocket, pull out a Black Beauty, and toss it into my mouth. It seems monstrous passing down my throat. I have to cough before I can ask, “Où est John Fortune?”
He takes me.
Fortune is slumped in a large armchair, dressed only in boxers, staring blindly at the insects circling the table lamp. Sweat gleams on his bare chest, and forms drops in his sideburns. Sekhmet humps beneath the skin of his forehead like some grotesque tumor. I wonder how Curveball feels with this voyeur present at every tender fuck.
“Lilith,” he says as if remembering who I am.
There’s an overstuffed ottoman near his feet I sink down onto, and feel the leather stick to the moist skin of my calf.
“We’re getting some blowback from the Caliphate,” I say.
“What does that mean?”
“That annoyed locals are shooting at us.”
That makes him straighten. Suddenly another soul is looking through his dark eyes. It’s old and cold and I recognize a kindred spirit.
“They have brought it upon themselves.”
“Yes, well, that may be the case, but however naughty they are or pure we are, bullets are still lead and they still kill. As DB nearly found out.”
“What?” The decibel range goes high and the young man is back.
“Bullet to the chest. Fortunately his vest sucked most of it. But it was a near thing.” I pause for just the right amount of time. Cast down my eyes, then look back up at him. “Kate seemed very concerned. She was still with him when I left to report to you.” I pause again. “Oh, she said to give you her love.”
There is again that strange snapping shift in the eyes, and Fortune’s voice rasps as he says, “You are an evil thing. Dark and—”
My lips skin back in a smile. “John, dear, do exert a little control over your senile mummy.”
Fortune seems like an inexpertly controlled marionette as Isra tries to propel him out of his chair, and he struggles to stay seated and composed. There’s something so wrong and disturbing about this symbiosis that I find myself taking a step back. Fortune was supposed to have the power of Ra, the power of the sun itself, but it was taken from him when his father cured him of the wild card. Sekhmet was to be the handmaiden of Ra. Two powers wedded to form a whole. But Fortune is just a nat, which makes them only half of what they were meant to be.
Thank God. Fortune’s self-righteousness melded to Isra’s vindictiveness would be a truly terrifying prospect.
Political Science 201
Ian Tregillis & Walton Simons
YVETTE: Fourteen days, nine hours.
YVES: Fifteen days, eighteen hours.
YECTLI: Sixteen days, two hours.
CHRISTIAN WAS OUT THE door on the way to his regular postcoital physical before the first egg appeared.
Don’t trust him, Yvette had said.
Zoë, a petite girl with a pageboy bob of strawberry-blond hair, asked, “Why not?” Not-not-not-not . . . The echoes came from every corner of the room. They made concentration difficult. A strange deuce.
Her brother Zane flashed his chromatophores into ripples of fire-truck red by way of response. He snuffled at Niobe’s palm with his tentacles.
Zoë frowned. “What does that mean?” Mean-mean-mean . . .
“It means shut the hell up,” said Zenobia, the frail and birdlike baby of the clutch.
“Mom! Zen swore at me!” Me!-me! . . . Zane recoiled, covering his earbuds. He retaliated, using a camouflage ability that extended to projecting invisibility. Zoë bumped, loudly, into an invisible nightstand.
“Ouch!” ch!-ch!-ch!-ch!-ch!
Niobe said, “Hey. Be nice, you two.”
But why would she say that about trusting people?
I’ll find out, Mom. Zenobia walked to the door, dispersed into a cloud of mist, and was gone. Niobe considered calling her back. But in the end she wanted to know what Yvette had meant, too.
Zenobia drifted through the entire medical wing and found no sign of Christian. He was nowhere to be found. It appeared he’d left the facility, until Zenobia heard laughter and muffled voices coming from a storage room.
Behind the industrial-sized cans of tomato paste and five-gallon tubs of elbow macaroni, four folding chairs were arranged around a card table. One chair sat empty, but Christian was there, chatting with two men.
Mom, I found him!
Good work, sweetie. I see him.
I don’t think he had a physical.
I know.
A fourth man hurried in. He sat across from Christian.
“What’s the good word, Pham?”
“Girl, boy, girl. Deuce, joker, ace.” The man named Pham summarized Zoë, Zane, and Zenobia for the others.
“Good work, Pham,” said Christian.
“Why can’t you just stick around to see what pops out of those eggs, Chris?”
“Would you stay any longer than you had to?”
Twin pangs of hurt and betrayal passed each other on the way up and down the bond between mother and daughter.
Smitty slapped Christian on the back. “He does the hard work. Who can blame him, wantin’ to get out of there?”
“Yeah, speakin’ of hard, how the hell can you do her, anyway? She’s disgusting.”
“Gentlemen, I just sit back and think about my bank account.” Christian grinned. “Every litter of freaks is another hefty little bonus.”
“Yeah, so’s you can afford all the child support!”
“You get paid extra to screw her?”
“Of course, retard. Would you do it for free?”
Far on the other side of the complex, Niobe cried.
“I would if she looked like Curveball. Shit, I’d pay to screw her. Yeah, I would wreck that girl. I’ll bet half the guys on the Committee are bangin’ her.”