"What makes him unbeatable?"

"He's an instantaneous teleport. He can vanish quicker than anyone can move and reappear anywhere he wants to. Usually behind his opponent. He's also mean as h.e.l.l. He could be big stuff, but he likes to kill too much. He's content with being one of Kien's lieutenants. Not that he does badly for himself." She toyed with her gla.s.s for a moment, then looked directly at Brennan. "Are you an ace?"

Brennan said nothing. Their eyes locked for a long moment and then Chrysalis sighed.

"You have nothing. You're just a man. A nat. What makes you think you can take Scar?" she repeated.

"As you said, I'm a man. He's kidnapped the daughter of a friend of mine. I'm the only one left to go after her."

"The police?" Chrysalis began reflexively, then laughed at her own suggestion. "No. Scar, through Kien, has enough police protection. I take it you have no solid evidence that Scar has the girl? No. What about one of the other aces? Black Shadow, Fortunato perhaps . . ."

"There's no time. I don't know what he's doing to her. Besides"-he stopped for a moment and looked back ten years, "this is personal."

"So I suspected."

Brennan drew his gaze back into the room. He stared hard at Chrysalis.

"Where can I find Scar?"

"I'm in the business of selling information and I've already given you plenty for free. That tidbit will cost you."

"I have no money."

"I don't need money from you. I do you a favor, you do me one."

Brennan scowled. "I don't like being in anyone's debt."

"Then find your information elsewhere."

The need to be doing something was burning in Brennan. "Very well."

She took a sip of her liqueur and regarded the crystal goblet, held in a hand whose flesh was as clear as the goblet itself.

"He has a big place on Castleton Avenue, Staten Island. It's isolated and fenced in and sits on extensive grounds. He likes to hunt. Men."

"He does?" Brennan asked, his gaze thoughtful, considering.

"Why did Scar kidnap this girl? Is she special in any way?"

"I don't know," Brennan said, shaking his head. "I thought it was to keep her father quiet because he had seen Scar and Kien together, but the sequence of events is all wrong. Minh saw them together when he was following Scar, trying to pick up clues about the kidnapping. He told me that they took her for her 'b.l.o.o.d.y hands.' That mean anything to you?"

Chrysalis shook her head.

"Can't you get him to be less cryptic?"

"He's dead."

She reached out, put one of her hands on his and something pa.s.sed between them. "You probably won't heed my warnings, but I'll give them anyway. Be careful." Brennan nodded. Her hand, invisible on his, was warm and soft. He watched blood pulse rhythmically through it. "Possibly," she continued, "you'd like to discharge some of your debt?"

"How?" Brennan asked, meeting the subtle challenge of her tone and expression.

"If you survive your encounter with Scar, come back to the Palace, tonight. Don't worry about the time. I'll be waiting for you."

There was no mistaking her meaning. She offered entanglements that he had avoided for a long time, relationships that he had wanted no part of for years.

"Or do you find me repulsive?" she asked matter-of-factly in the lengthy silence that stretched between them.

"No," he said more curtly than he had intended. "It's not that, not that at all."

His voice sounded harsh in his own ears. He had isolated himself so long from human contact that the thought of entering into any kind of intimate relationship was frightening.

"Your secrets will be safe from me, Yeoman," Chrysalis said.

He took a deep breath, nodded.

"Good." Her smile returned. "I'll expect you."

He turned without a word, and her smile slipped from her face. "If," she said so softly that only she heard the words, "you can do the impossible. If you can beat Scar."

III.

There were, Brennan thought, two ways to go about this. He could be surrept.i.tious. He could sneak into Scar's mansion, not knowing what security system he might have, and flit from room to room, not knowing what was in each room, not even knowing if Mai was in the building. Or he could just walk in, putting his trust in luck, nerve, and his ability to think on his feet.

He unmasked after he left the Crystal Palace and found a cab. The cabbie was reluctant to take him out to Staten Island, but he flashed a couple of twenties and the hack became all smiles. It was a long ride, by cab and ferry, and Brennan spent it in unhappy reminiscence. Ishida would have disapproved, but then, Brennan knew, he had never been the best of the roshi's students.

He had the cabbie drop him off a block or so from the Castleton address that Chrysalis had given him, paid the fare, and gave the hack a tip that wiped out most of his cash reserves. As the cab pulled away he moved quietly in the shadows until he stood across the street from Scar's place. It was as Chrysalis had described.

The house itself was a hulking stone mansion set a couple hundred yards off the street. A few lights shone through scattered windows on each of the three floors, but there was no illumination on the outside. The wall that encircled the grounds was stone, about seven feet high, surmounted by strands of electrical wire. The small gla.s.s-sided guardbox that stood by the wrought-iron gate held a single sentinel. It didn't look as if the security would be very difficult to breach, but the mansion was definitely too big to search room by room.

It would have to be boldness, nerve, and luck. A lot of luck, Brennan thought as he walked briskly from the shadows.

The man in the guardbooth was watching a small television set, a talk show hosted by a beautiful woman with wings. Brennan, who hadn't watched television since his return to the States, nevertheless recognized her as Peregrine, one of the most visible aces, the hostess of Peregrine's Perch Peregrine's Perch. She was watching an immense bearded man in a chef's hat doing something culinary. They chatted amiably as his large hands moved with surprising grace and Brennan realized that he was Hiram Worchester, alias Fatman, another of the more-public aces.

The guard was engrossed in Peregrine, who wore an undeniably attractive costume that was slit down nearly to her navel. Brennan had to rap on the gla.s.s door of the booth to get his attention, though he had made no effort to conceal his approach.

The guard opened the door.

"Where did you come from?"

"A cab." Brennan gestured vaguely over his shoulder. "I sent it away."

"Oh, oh sure," the guard said. "I heard it. What do you want?"

Brennan was about to say that Kien sent him about the girl, but he bit the words back at the last instant. Chrysalis had told him that only very few people knew that Kien and Scar were connected. This flunky certainly wasn't one of them.

"The boss sent me. About the girl," he said, keeping as vague as possible while making his voice a.s.sured and knowing.

"The boss?"

"Call Scar. He knows."

The guard turned, picked up a phone. He hung up after a few seconds of m.u.f.fled conversation and touched a panel in front of him. The wrought-iron gate swung open silently.

"Go on in," he said, turning back to the television, where Hiram and Peregrine were eating sugar-coated chocolate crepes with delighted looks on their faces. Brennan hesitated briefly.

"One more thing," he said.

The guard sighed, turned slowly, more than half-watching the television set.

Brennan rammed his palm, hard, in an upward motion against the guard's nose. He felt bone buckle and shatter at the force of his blow. The man convulsed once as splinters of bone knifed through his brain, and then went utterly slack. Brennan snapped off the television as Fatman and Peregrine were finishing the crepes, and dragged the body into the yard and dumped it behind some concealing shrubbery. Regretfully, he left his bowcase stashed there as well, but, so as not to go totally unarmed, extracted a spare bowstring and looped it loosely around his hips, under the waistband of his jeans.

He walked briskly up the drive to the mansion.

Scar needed a gardener. The yard had turned feral. The gra.s.s hadn't been cut all summer; the shrubberies had gone crazy. Untended, they had spilled over their original boundaries and provided a fairly dense undergrowth beneath the thick, untrimmed trees. It was more of an acre or two of forest than a front yard and for a moment it made Brennan long for the quiet peacefulness of the Catskills. Then he was at the front door and he remembered what had brought him here. He rang the bell.

The man who answered the front door had the insolence of a city punk and the gun that he carried under his armpit in a shoulder rig looked big enough to bring down an elephant.

"Come on in. Scar's got a client. They're with the girl."

Brennan frowned at the man's back as he led him into the mansion. What was going on? Prost.i.tution? Weird s.e.x? He wanted to question the man who was leading him to the rear of the mansion, but knew that it was best to keep his mouth shut. He'd find answers soon enough.

Scar kept a little better care of the interior of his mansion than he did of the yard, but not much. The marble parquet floor was filthy, and there were stale odors clogging the air that made Brennan sick. He was afraid to breathe too deeply, lest he find himself able to identify some of the odors. A stairway swept upward into the upper stories of the mansion, but they stayed on the first floor, heading toward the rear of the building.

His guide turned to the left, pa.s.sed through a metal detector which beeped once, and looked back at Brennan. Brennan followed him. The detector was silent. The thug nodded and led Brennan into a well-lit room that had four other people in it. One was a tough, identical for all practical purposes to the one who had met Brennan at the door. Another was a woman with long blond hair. She wore a mask that covered her entire face.

Another was Mai. She looked up at him dully as he entered the room and quick stifled the look of recognition that came to her face when she saw him. It had been three years since he had seen her. She had grown into a beautiful young woman, small, delicate, fine-featured, with thick, glossy hair and dark, dark eyes. She looked unharmed, if terribly tired. There were circles under her eyes and Brennan could read the weariness in her every muscle by the way she held herself.

The last was Scar. He was tall and lean, dressed in tee shirt and black chinos. His face was a nightmare. The patterns tattooed on it in black and scarlet turned it into the leering, b.e.s.t.i.a.l face of a demon. His eyes were sunk in black pits, his teeth inset in a scarlet cave. Brennan was surprised to see, when Scar smiled at him, that his teeth weren't filed.

"What's your name, man?" he asked in the thick argot of the inner city. "I ain't never seen you before."

"Archer," Brennan lied automatically. "What's going on here?"

Scar flashed his smile again. It twisted his face into odd contortions that showed nothing of humor.

"You just in time, man. The sister here is going to demonstrate her power, aren't you?"

Everyone looked at Mai, who bowed her head in silent, wearied resignation.

"She can can do it?" the masked woman asked, her voice oddly eager and sibilant. do it?" the masked woman asked, her voice oddly eager and sibilant.

Scar only nodded and gestured at Mai. The two thugs watched with disinterest. Scar kept shifting his gaze back and forth to Brennan, Mai, and the woman.

"Tell the man," he said, watching Brennan closely as Mai approached the woman, "that I was going to tell him all about her. I was just checking things out."

Brennan nodded impatiently, aloof and hard-eyed outside, indecisive inside. Mai walked to the woman without glancing in his direction. Whatever was going to happen, he thought, couldn't be too bad. She seemed to be taking things calmly enough. He decided to wait.

"You have to take the mask off," Mai told the woman quietly. She drew back a little and glanced at the men watching her, but obeyed. Brennan watched impa.s.sively as she unmasked, Scar watched with a slight, sly smile. She was obviously ashamed of her face. Brennan had seen worse, but it was enough to evoke leering whispers from Scar's men. She had no chin and only a slight lower jaw. Her nose consisted of flat nostrils set above her lipless mouth. Her forehead was tiny. Her whole face was thrust forward in a reptilian manner that was enhanced by the colorfully beaded texture of her skin. She looked all the world like a Gila monster with long blond hair.

"I used to be beautiful," she said, looking down.

Scar's men snickered aloud, but Mai took her rough-skinned cheeks between her palms and said quietly, "You will be again."

The woman looked up at her, a world of pain in her eyes. Mai gazed calmly at her, her face blank with the serenity of a madonna. For a moment nothing happened. Brennan glanced from her to Scar, who was watching him carefully, then back again. Then, where her palms touched the leathery skin of the woman's cheeks, blood began to run in little trickles. It seemed to be welling from the woman's cheeks, Mai's palms, or both. Tiny rivulets ran from between Mai's fingers, down the backs of her hands to her wrists. Mai moaned and Brennan stared at her as her face changed. Her chin receded, her jaw shrank. Her forehead narrowed and her skin became thick and pebbly and banded in orange and black and scarlet. It took some minutes. Brennan watched with pursed lips. Scar watched him watch. He smiled malevolently, his tattooed face a demonic mask.

Two lizard-women faced each other, one blond, one dark-haired. The woman looked at Mai wide-eyed, Mai looked back rea.s.suringly. She sighed, longly, like a lover after release, and she began to change. Her skin lost its roughness, its bright color. The bone beneath it shifted back to normal configurations. Her lips twitched slightly, perhaps at the pain of the metamorphosis, but she said nothing. It took a moment longer, but the blond woman, too, began to change. Skin softened, bleached itself. Bone flowed like soft wax. Tears ran down her high, fine cheeks, whether from pain or joy, Brennan couldn't tell. The transformation took some minutes. When the tiny rivulets of blood ceased to flow, Mai took her hands from the woman's face. The woman was right. She had been beautiful, and was again. Weeping silently, she took Mai's hand and pressed a kiss into her palm. Mai smiled at her and swayed tiredly. Brennan could see that willpower alone kept her on her feet. Every line and muscle of her body cried out in weariness.

The woman reached down to a purse on a small table near where she stood and took out a thick envelope. Scar gestured. One of his smirking thugs took it, put it in his back pants pocket, and escorted the woman from the room.

"Well, man, what you think?"

"Fantastic," Brennan said, still looking at Mai. "What is it, genetic manipulation of some sort?"

"I don't know about that s.h.i.t," Scar said. "I just heard that she was healing jokers in the neighborhood, and I figured why should she fix up those poor jokers when she can fix up jokers who'll pay plenty. So I s.n.a.t.c.hed her."

Brennan turned away from Mai and met Scar's eyes.

"She's worth a lot. You should have told Kien about her. I'll have to take her to him."

Scar puckered his tattooed lips in mock consternation.

"You will? You seem to know a lot, man. How come you don't know that I told the man about her when that gook saw us together in the back of the man's limo?" He turned, looked at Mai, and added maliciously, "And then the man had the old gook hit so he wouldn't tell no one about it."

"My father?" Mai asked.

Scar nodded, grinning like a devil. Mai gasped, swayed, and would have fallen if Scar's man hadn't grabbed her roughly by the arm. Brennan moved.

He launched himself across the room, ripped the gun from the man's shoulder rig, jammed the barrel against his chest, and pulled the trigger. There was an immense roar as the blast lifted the man off his feet and threw him against the wall. He left a red smear as he slumped to the floor, his eyes open and unbelieving.

Brennan whirled, but Scar was gone. He saw a flicker at the edge of his vision and felt sharp pain as Scar chopped down on his wrist, knocking the gun from his grasp. Scar ducked Brennan's sweeping arm, kicked the gun across the room, and vanished silently and utterly.

He reappeared between Brennan and the gun, smiling crazily.

"You need a gun to go up against Scar? You some kind of crazy nat," he said. "What name you want on your tombstone?" He reached into the pocket of his chinos and with a practiced flick of his wrist opened a six-inch-long straight razor.

He vanished again and Brennan felt a sudden biting pain in his side. He heard Mai's cry, threw himself away, rolled, and stood. Blood ran down his side where Scar had slashed a long, shallow cut across his ribs. He barely had time to stand before Scar appeared again, slashed his cheek open, and popped away. It was as Chrysalis had said. He was fast and precise in his teleporting. And he did enjoy his work.

"I cut you slowly, man," he said, appearing with killing l.u.s.t in his eyes, "I cut you till you beg me to finish you." He twitched his wrist, flicking Brennan's blood off the edge of his blade. It was bright in the room, bright and closed in. Brennan was trapped, confined, and he knew he didn't have a chance in h.e.l.l. Scar would cut him to ribbons, laughing, as he tried to reach the gun. He breathed deeply, calming his racing mind, drawing, as Ishida had taught him, into a state of serene tranquility, and he knew what he had to do. Scar slashed his back as he turned, ran, and hurled himself through the French windows in the rear of the room. He burst out of the light onto a dark patio.

Scar smiled a genuinely happy smile and stepped out onto the patio after him. He whistled tunelessly and watched Brennan run into the yard and blunder into a thick patch of trees.