Brennan's heart fell as he realized that it was Pumpkinhead, one of the manikins he'd rescued from the tunnels under the Crystal Palace. There were about thirty of them, children of a strange joker they'd called Mother. They'd been Chrysalis's eyes and ears through the city, but with Chrysalis dead and the Palace destroyed, Brennan had brought them to the country to live with him and Jennifer.
And now they were supplying the diversion Brennan had prayed for. They leapt screaming from the loft window, falling upon the assassins like living rain. They were armed with whatever feeble weapons they could find about the houseforks, kitchen knives, even sharpened pencils. They outnumbered the assassins ten to one, but they were all small and weak. Brennan watched with horror as the killers got over their initial surprise and swatted them down like kittens.
Curly Joe was the first to follow Pumpkinhead out of the loft window, and quickly into oblivion. He'd missed his intended target, who stomped him into the ground with bone-crunching force, quickly silencing his thin reedy cries. Kitty Kat managed to sink a kitchen knife into her target's ankle before she was smashed by his flashlight. Lizardo jabbed his foe in the shoulder with a pencil but was too weak to do much more than break the hit man's skin before the thug broke his scaly neck.
Brennan clamped down on his anger and pity and moved as quickly as he could, ignoring the pain running through his injured leg, ignoring the stones, sticks, and sharp slivers of ice that tore at his bare feet.
He flitted through the snow-shrouded trees like a ghost, circling around the A-frame and the greenhouse beyond. He stopped at the shed behind the greenhouse and cursed. He'd forgotten the key. He drew himself back to try to batter down the door, but a small hissing voice stopped him before he could strike.
"Boss! Boss, the key!"
It was Brutus, a foot-tall manikin with leathery skin that sagged in puffy pouches about his gray, hairless face. Brutus had settled into the role of the tribe's chief. He was more intelligent than most of the homunculi, but even he was no brighter than a smart child. At the moment, however, he seemed to have assessed the situation with remarkable accuracy. He tossed the key to the shed's padlock to Brennan, who caught it with cold clumsy fingers and tried to fit it into the lock.
Brennan fumbled a few times before the key finally clicked into place. He threw open the door and took down the bow that hung in a bracket nearby, quickly stringing it with the line dangling from one of its tips. It was only a hardwood recurve with a sixty-pound pull, but it was powerful enough. He grabbed the quiver that hung from the bracket and stepped back into the night.
Brennan no longer felt naked or cold. His anger spread from his gut outward, warming him as he ran over the snow back to the house, Brutus following on his heels.
The scene in the backyard was worse than Brennan had imagined. Tiny broken bodies violated the calm serenity of his Zen garden. Crushed and pulped, the manikins had fought fiercely and hopelessly against giants who could kill them with a single blow.
Brennan cried out in sorrow and rage, freezing one of the assassins in the act of squashing Bigfoot with the butt of his assault rifle. As the hit man looked around with his rifle lifted, Brennan sank down to one knee, drew shaft to ear, and loosed. The razor-tipped hunting arrow cut silently through the night and struck the assassin high on his chest. He fell backward, slamming against the wall of the A-frame, then crumpled forward and dropped his weapon.
An eerie cry of triumph rose from the living homunculi as Brennan drew a second shaft, shifted aim, and fired before the other hit men could react. He gut-shot his second target, who was swarmed by the remaining manikins. The killer screamed wordlessly and tried desperately, futilely, to crawl away.
The third assassin clicked off the flashlight he'd been using as a club, turned, and ran back into the house. Brennan fired and saw his shaft strike home, but the assassin kept moving.
Brennan nocked another arrow to his string and stood, listening. The assassin being pummeled by the manikins had finally stopped screaming. The first one Brennan had shot was dead.
"See to your people," Brennan told Brutus, then limped over to the back door. He stood listening for a moment but could hear nothing move inside. He couldn't wait long, even if the assassin was lying in ambush. He had to go in.
He scooped up the assault rifle dropped by the first assassin, then went through the doorway low and fast. The house was still dark, still quiet. From the front Brennan could hear the sound of a receding car engine.
He flicked on the bedroom light. The room was a shambles. The window had been shattered, and glass lay all over the floor. Bullets had stitched the walls, smashing the framed Hokusai and Yoshitosi woodblocks hanging over the futon where Jennifer lay quiet and still as death, awash in a sea of blood.
Men liked his new body. It was young, had two functioning hands, and best of all had ace capabilities that he'd quickly gotten use to. He could see how Philip Cunningham had enjoyed being Fadeout. But there was one problem with the body. It was not of his race. Kien wondered if that was the cause of the dreams he'd been having lately.
His father had been visiting him, speaking softly of the good old days back in Vietnam when Kien had worked in the family's small store. He had always been a dutiful son, though the stifling life of a storekeeper in a small village had bored him unmercifully. But he had stayed on until his father had been murdered by the French in the last days of the Vietnamese rebellion against their European masters. Then, and only then, had Kien moved on to the city and joined the army of the fledgling Republic of Vietnam. Of course, he had had to change some things to blend in. There was no way he was going to have a successful military career with an ethnic Chinese name among the extremely prejudiced Vietnamese.
"Once again you have abandoned us," Old Dad told him, waving the cane that he often used to emphasize his arguments. "First you turned your back on your family when you pretended to be Vietnamese and took the name Kien Phuc. And now you go even further. You've become a white man."
It was difficult to argue with a dream, but Kien tried. "No, Father," he explained patiently, "I have abandoned no one. This is all part of my plan, a misdirection to finish off my enemies."
The spectre snorted, unconvinced. "You always were a tricky one, boy, I'll give you that."
"Tonight," Kien said, "Captain Brennan dies. And his bitch who'd taken half my hand." He smiled at his father. "That will be the second woman of his I've killed. Too bad he won't live to realize that."
"And after this Brennan?"
"After Brennan, then Tachyon. He knows too much, and he could easily discover my newest secret, that I still live in the body of Philip Cunningham. Tachyon has to die."
"When?" his father asked.
"Soon. Today. When the Egrets return with the heads of Brennan and his bitch."
Old Dad frowned. "It sounds like you're planning on keeping that body," he said.
Kien shook his new head. "Only until my enemies are dead."
"Have you ever run out of enemies, my son?" Kien smiled.
2.
Brutus climbed up the back of the car seat and dropped down onto the van's passenger side. "Miss Jennifer has stopped bleeding, but she looks funny."
"Funny?" Brennan asked, not daring to stop even for a moment to check on Jennifer's condition.
"She's getting clear, like she's fading," the manikin said. Brennan gritted his teeth, concentrating on his driving, afraid to give full vent to his feelings. Since entering the city limits, he'd kept the van at the speed limit. He couldn't afford to be stopped by a traffic cop, not with Jennifer's life hanging so tenuously that any delay might be fatal.