Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (19 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
A B B YY.c
"Not what
I was thinking. There might be a seasonal change coming in Turquoise that will pick the
wind
up. The
re might be a way to tap the energy of the Toussaud dimension. My father and Will are out looking for more places to get the power we'll need."
Sin felt a shiver run through Rajani and brought his head up. "You okay, kid? Your father will do fine."
"I know, but that's not really what I'm worried about." She traced the knuckles of her right hand down his spine. "You know why I went into stasis, right?"
He nodded. "You spent the time in isolation so you
could attune yourself to Fiddleback and eavesdrop on his thoughts. The fact that he got close to coming
through in Phoenix last July brought you out early, because he was very close and you picked him up.
You're our secret weapon."
"I may not be that much of a weapon, Sin." Rajani's fingers dug into his neck and worked over a stiff muscle. "What I don't like is that I've been picking nothing up from Fiddleback lately. I have to assume that when he's out of my range, he's plotting against us. We all know he cannot be trusted, then I get
thinking about how much he could hurt us, and who he could hurt."
Sin heard the unspoken adjunct to her statement. "And your father is out there with Will in a very
vulnerable position. I wouldn't worry about him, though, because Fiddleback can't get to him there. Your
father will be fine."
"I know, I just..." Her voice trailed off, then stopped in what Sin heard as a suppressed sob. "I can't read Fiddleback, and I can't read him either.
He eased himself over and sat up, hugging her knees to either side of his chest. "Who him?" He reached out and took her chin in his right hand, tipping her face up so he could look her in her teary eyes. "You're going to have to tell me because I can't ferret it out."
Rajani sniffed once, then frowned. "It's just that, well, I'm confused. My father and I, we are different than we were. We used to be much like Tadd and Mickey and Dorothy, but now we are distant." Gold
highlights glittered in her eyes. "How do you deal with your relationship with your father?"
Sin chuckled lightly and flopped back on the couch with a thump. "Well, mostly I ignore my father."
"Why?"
"Keeps me from remembering how much I hate him."
Sin swallowed against a lump rising in his throat. "My father did some things that hurt me a great deal. Like most folks, I wondered what I had done to deserve such treatment at his hands. I mean, he was my father, he had always cared for me, and now he was punishing me. I had to wonder why, and it ate me up inside."
He propped himself up on his elbows, "ft wasn't until I'd been in Japan for a while that I realized he did what he did because it was his way of controlling me. I defied him, he made concessions, and I returned home. He kept me under his thumb, allowing my little rebellions because they kept me close to him and within his
A B B YY.c
contr
ol. Finally, when Coyote brought things to a head with my father, we parted, and I realized there
could
never be any
reconciliation."
Rajani shook her head. "But that is not the problem I have with my father. We have grown apart and cannot find common ground."
Sin sat up again and rested his elbows on Rajani's knees. "That's not true, you've just not
yet
found common ground. Your father is trying, though. You just have to look at what he's doing, not what he says, and you can see that."
"Really?" Rajani frowned. "He has been paying more attention to you than he has to me lately."
"You have to avoid reading that wrong." Sin gave her a half-smile. "Since returning from that first expedition to Turquoise, he's been talkingto me a lot fortwo reasons. The first is that you and I are close, and he can leam about you through me. More importantly, though, because we are close, he wants to get to know me to see if I'm good enough for you."
"Do you think so?"
"I know so." Butterflies beginning to navigate clumsily through his stomach, Sin reached down and took Rajani's hands into his. "1 can't read someone else's emotions. I have a hard enough time understanding my own, but you're very special to me." He half-laughed. "Here I am, sitting in the dark, holding hands with a woman from another planet..."
"I was bom here, in Utah."
"Okay, as
good as
being bom on another planet, and 1 feel more at ease and more, well, complete, than with any other woman I have known." He shook his head. "Her father is the guardian spirit of a Tibetan monastery, and she has incredible powers. Because of her, 1 survived a death trap, and because of her and others
associated with her, I'm looking to help stop a tarantula with pituitary problems from taking over reality."
Rajani gave his hands a squeeze. "I don't like what you're saying, Mr. MacNeal, but I like your actions." She sat forward and kissed him lightly on the lips.
Sin smiled. "I like your actions as well, Ms. Rajani." He kissed her more fully, and she did not pull away. "I'm falling for you, and falling hard, you know."
"I know. I felt attracted to you when Match and 1 broke into your suite in Japan. Just from the impressions you had left in the room, 1 knew you to be strong and kind and wise." She looked down for a second, then glanced up mischievously. "That's why I took your cufflinks. They became a connection to you."
"As you used them to get to me and save me when the Galactic Brotherhood wanted me dead, I'm very glad you took them."
She caressed the left side of his face. "I share your feelings, Sin, and I share your doubts. We both must question if what we feel is genuine or part of the pressure cooker we're living in. With the threat to our lives that exists iri Pygmalion and Fiddleback, it is natural to want to cling together, to want to fight off death together."
"You're right, it is natural. It's also natural that you and I are closer to each other than we are to our parents." Sin leaned forward and kissed the side of her throat. "For me, it's because my father is a jerk who's uniquely suited to use Preparation-H as a body lotion. For you, well, your father has become
something more than mortal. He cannot know the same fears we do, nor can he view them the way we
do."
"I wish I knew of a way to let him know 1 still love him." Rajani looked up at Sin. "Do you think he knows that?"
"I think it's something he carries proudly in his heart." Sin kissed her on the tip of her nose, then looked down as his stomach rumbled mightily. "As for me, I'm running on empty."
"Are you done here? Can you go for food?"
Sin leaned back, freeing Rajani's legs, then looked over at the computer. "Yeah, that monster will be crunching numbers for a couple more hours. We can go for Mexican and you can fill me in on what
PsyOps has put together on Pygmalion."
"Done, but only if you put going to bed on your schedule."
Sin raised an eyebrow at her.
Rajani smiled. "Telepathy is not needed to read that thought, Sinclair." She stood and pulled him up off the couch. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she laid her head on his chest. "I actually meant you needed some rest, but given what we're facing, security, love and happiness are not things 1 would deny
either one of us tonight."
Dark Conspiracy 3-17.jpg
Damon Crowley did not let the two days he needed to heal up in the Titan's dimension go to waste. In
between his periodic checks of Coyote's progress and the occasional scouting missions to the surrounding
proto-dimen-sions, he worked hard. Gsing a small knife, he cut a cross into the nose of each any
every .45 caliber bullet in his Mac-10 clips.
When he finished the last one, he surveyed his work. He saw it was good and he smiled.
He made one last check of Coyote's cave. After the first day, Coyote had ceased needing the oxygen,
which turned out to be fortunate because it ran out soon thereafter. The intravenous drip proved equally
unnecessary within the first day. Coyote's regenerating body sucked it dry, then attacked and expelled the needle as a foreign body.
Squatting down so he could look closely at Coyote's legs, Crowley stripped the blanket away from them.
In the half-light, he saw a number of reddish lumps dotting the man's legs as if he had the measles.
Passing his hand above them, Crowley could feel the heat as the body worked the bits and pieces of
grenade shrapnel out. At the rate with which Coyote seemed to be progressing, Crowley
assumed his body would be free of debris inside a week.
Crowley rose up and looked at the stump protaiding from the left arm of the hospital gown. Already the
stitches that had closed it had been consumed by Coyote's body, and the livid red scars had all but
disappeared. The stump had already grown past the mark on the cave wall that Crowley had made to measure
it, and he thought he could see a bud at the end that looked akin to a fetal hand. Before long, the occultist had no doubt, the arm would again be whole and healthy.
"The coma. That will be the tricky part." Crowley concentrated and tried to pick up Coyote's thoughts, but he got nothing. Coyote's brain still functioned, and had even exerted itself when the bed almost crashed, but since his arrival in the Titan's proto-dimension, Coyote had shut down.
Crowley smiled. "1 understand that, my friend. Recover quickly. We need you." He tugged the gray blanket up to Coyote's neck and headed back out of the cave. At the entrance, he rolled a couple of small rocks over the opening. The irony of blocking a cave in a Mediterranean setting with stones and hoping for the
resurrection of the one inside did not escape him, though Crowley was more than willing to grant Coyote in excess of three days and was willing to have him return as nothing more than a man.
Flexing his left arm and finding it completely healed, Crowley reached out and ripped a gaping hole between the Titan's dimension and the Earth. He stepped through into the Terran dimension in a wooded courtyard in the heart of Eclipse. Looking up through the leaves of the trees, he saw the black steel and plastic panels that sucked energy from the sunlight and fed the vast desert city of Phoenix. Existing in a little box-canyon created by City Center, Crowley's home recalled a time when sunlight freely fell on the city.
Two huge canine beasts came out of the two-story house and stood at the top of the stairs on the back