A horsefly was buzzing around Jay's head. He brushed it away and sighed. This afternoon was over. There was nothing he could do about it now. Except live with it. For a long, long time.
They were the last ones left in the waiting room. A few reporters still haunted the steps outside, but only family, friends, and VIPs had been admitted to the hospital itself. There had been quite a few during the first hour of their vigil. jokers by the score had come and gone, some bearing flowers or books or other tokens of their esteem. Hiram Worchester sat with Jay for almost an hour during the dinner recess, pale and silent. "I have to get back to the floor," he said when he finally stood to leave. "Tell him I was here." Jay had promised that he would. Leo Barnett prayed for Tachyon and the TV cameras during his visit. "Lord," the reverend had proclaimed, "Hear me now, and spare this sinner. Grant him his life, that he may come to wisdom at last, and know Your power and mercy, O Lord, and accept You into his heart as his personal savior." Carnifex had swung by briefly, flashed his badge, and grilled one of the doctors. Jay was too far away to overhear what was said, but Ray seemed satisfied. A man in a cheap rubber frog mask had stuck it out longest, pacing restlessly as they waited for word, finally leaving as quietly as he had come. He was the last; now there was only Jay and Blaise.
"You think Tisianne is going to die?" Blaise asked. He didn't sound very upset about the possibility; his tone was more one of idle curiosity than of fear.
"Nah," Jay said. "If he was going to die, he'd have done it already. We been here, what, three hours? They got to have him stabilized by now." He wasn't sure who he was trying to reassure, the boy or himself.
"If he dies, Baby belongs to me," Blaise mused. "Baby?" Jay said, confused. "What baby?"
"That's his spaceship," the boy said, with all of a child's contempt for an adult who didn't know something he assumed everyone ought to know. "It's a stupid name. I'm going to think up a better name for her when she's mine."
"Tachyon's not dead yet," Jay said.
Blaise yawned. He was stretched out across his chair in a boneless sprawl that said he could care less, his legs thrown up carelessly on the coffee table. "Was it really as gross as they say?" he asked. His eyes moved restlessly, tracking the fly as it circled around his head. "The Secret Service guy, the one who drove me, he said there was blood and fingers and everything just flying through the air."
"It was real ugly," Jay said. The conversation was making him distinctly uncomfortable.
"I bet he cried," Blaise said contemptuously. "He should have let me come, I could have grabbed the guy with my mind, just like that!" He shot his hand out suddenly and caught the fly in his fist. Jay could hear it buzzing between the boy's fingers. "I could have made him cut himself up." Blaise closed his fist hard around the fly. "That would have been something," he said casually, opening his fingers and staring at the remains of the insect with a strange little smile on his face.
Jay had a sudden image of the little hunchback killer lopping off his fingers one by one and singing "I'm a Little Teapot" as blood fountained from the stumps. "You know, Blaise," he said, "you are one weird fucking kid." Maybe he was being uncharitable. The boy might be in shock, terrified at the thought of losing his only living relative, hiding fear beneath a pose of indifference and adolescent bravado. Only somehow Jay didn't think so.
The boy looked up at him. Beneath his tousled mass of glittery red hair, his eyes regarded Jay haughtily. They were purple, Jay saw, so dark that they were almost black.
Under the bright fluorescent light of the hospital waiting room, they looked like pools of violet ink. "I'm not a kid," Blaise informed Jay. "On Takis I'd be leaving the women's quarters."
"Figures," Jay said. "Just when you get old enough to want in, they throw you out."
9:00 P.M.
The tunnels were dark, deserted, and very quiet. Brennan had figured they would be. He knew that the police had staked out the Crystal Palace, but he'd hoped they didn't know about the secret underground entrance Chrysalis had built.
And they didn't. At least so far it seemed as if they didn't. Brennan had left Father Squid's rectory with the priest still watching over a sleeping Jennifer and had gone underground two blocks from the Palace. He left the main line at Henry Street and went down the tunnel he'd used to gain access to the Palace the night he'd surprised the Oddity in Chrysalis's bedroom.
There was, he remembered, a short spur off the tunnel that he'd never investigated before. He stopped before it, debating his course of action, the only light a dim beam from the flashlight he held in one hand. In the other was his bow, already assembled.
As he stood there debating with himself he heard a noise coming from the tunnel before him. It was a small, skittering noise, as of many tiny feet trying to be silent. He shone his light into the darkness with little effect.
He didn't want to keep the flashlight illuminating himself as the perfect target in the otherwise dark tunnel, but he couldn't stand the thought of turning it off and standing there in utter blackness.
He put it down at his feet and backed away, taking an arrow out of his quiver and placing it on his bowstring.
As he stepped out of the feeble circle of light cast by his flashlight, he heard a voice. Her voice.
"Daniel, my dear archer. You don't have to be afraid of me."'
It was Chrysalis's voice -or her ghost's. There was no denying it.
The double doors to the waiting room opened with a bang. "Are you the family?" a tired voice asked.
Jay got to his feet. "I'm a friend," he said. He jerked a thumb toward Blaise. "He's the grandson."
"Grandson?" The doctor sounded momentarily nonplussed.
"Oh, that's right," he finally said. " I keep forgetting the patient is older than he looks, isn't that right?"
"The question is not how old he is," Jay said. "The question is, is he going to get any older?"
"He's suffered massive blood loss, not to mention major systemic shock," the doctor told them. "And it appears he was in a terribly weakened condition to begin with. Fortunately, first aid was applied at the scene; that made all the difference. Any more blood loss and he might have been DOA. We started him on plasma as soon as he arrived. The hand… I'm afraid we had to lose it. It wasn't a clean cut, you have to realize, the paramedics brought us two of the fingers, but with the way the flesh was… well, chewed up… ah, there just wasn't a hand to reattach them to. Amputation seemed the only viable op-"
"Okay," Jay snapped impatiently, "so from now on, if he loses one mitten, it's no big deal. Is he going to live?"
The doctor blinked at him, then nodded. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I believe we've pulled him through. We're listing his condition as serious but stable."
" I want to see him," Blaise said, in his most imperious tone.
"I'm afraid we don't allow visitors in the intensive-care unit," the doctor said. "Perhaps tomorrow we can move-"
"Take us to him now," Blaise said. Those dark purpleblack eyes narrowed just a little. He grinned boyishly.
The doctor spun on his heels, straight-armed the double doors, and led them back to the ICU without another word. A bag of plasma hung over one side of the bed, an IV bottle over the other. Tachyon had tubes in his arms and more tubes up his nose, wires attached everywhere. His eyes were closed, but Jay could see his chest rise and fall beneath the thin cotton of his hospital gown.
"He's heavily sedated," the doctor said softly. Blaise must have let him go. "For the pain."