His hands played across her, caressing, almost worshiping. She was dimly aware that something had changed. Something had been added. His attention was almost obsessively focused upon her. It would have been disturbing had she been more aware. But he was competing with a Dantesque vision-it's hidden hidden away. away. Wish Wish it it would would die. die. She She keeps keeps going going to to see see it. it. It It tries tries to to nurse nurse. And his murmured endearments could not be heard over the other voices. "You "You are are obviously obviously both both latents. latents. Unfortunately Unfortunately the the virus virus chose chose to to express express in in your your child." child."

"That Thing Thing has has nothing nothing to to do do with with me! me! It It is is apparent apparent that that my my wife wife has has been been less less than than faithful." Reproachful faithful." Reproachful brown brown eyes, eyes, the the face face set set in in lines lines of of heroic heroic betrayal. betrayal. "I "I could could forgive forgive almost almost anything anything else, else, Rou, Rou, but but family family is is everything." everything."

"Josiah, why why are are you you doing doing this this to to me? me? When When I I need need you you so?" so?"

No pity.

Tachyon entered her, and she tensed, closing her moist softness close around him. Cobweb fingers brushing at the shields. Her body seemed to be shrinking in on itself as she gathered her will, summoning death from every cell. For an instant she hesitated, and the indecision was a physical pain.

This man, so . . . good. They had shared music, love, and fear. No other path to freedom from . . . monsters.

A conscious, willful choice, the release of death, it flowed softly, a gentle implacable love.

And her shields fell. They were an artificial construct. And as she released, her mind broke under the stress, and, with it, the shields.

Roulette felt his ecstasy as for one brief flicker of time they were one. Then horror replaced joy. She felt him touch it all. The child, Howler, Josiah, the Astronomer, Baby Baby, DEATH!

He recoiled, falling from the bed in a tangle of bedding, and crawled to the far wall. He huddled, retching for several minutes, then the spasms gave way to sobs, and he rocked back and forth hugging himself as tears ran down his bruised face.

Get out of here. For G.o.d's sake, run run! But she couldn't force strength into her legs, so she curled against the pillows, and watched him cry. It was pointless anyway. They would run her down soon enough. And she wanted it to end. She couldn't go on living with the memories. Perhaps it was because she had failed to kill Tachyon that the nightmare kept replaying. She considered for a moment then rejected the notion. No, it was because the Astronomer had lied lied. And she realized she wasn't quite ready to die. First, there would have to be a reckoning.

CHAPTER 22.

3:00 a.m. a.m.

Spector looked around before darting across the street. Cordelia and Veronica trotted after him.

"Slow down for G.o.d's sake," said Veronica. She was holding her lame dress bunched up above her knees. "That old man isn't going to bother us anymore. He looked pretty bad when we left. Might even be dead by now."

Spector shook his head and guided Cordelia toward the darkness between streetlights. "You don't know what the f.u.c.k you're talking about, lady. He's got power enough to waste all of us. All he has to do is pull someone off the street and finish what he started with your dead friend. What was her name? Caroline?"

Veronica stopped and grabbed Cordelia's shoulder. "That's right. And you killed her." Veronica sniffed. Spector couldn't tell if Caroline's death had finally sunk in or if it was just the cold. "Let's dump this guy. He won't give us any trouble." Veronica pulled Cordelia close. "If he does, you let him have it. Same as that Imp guy."

"Fine," he said. "Get the f.u.c.k out of here. You're only slowing me down. Go help your pimp. He's going to need it."

Cordelia turned slowly and let Veronica escort her away. He thought for a moment about following the women and killing them. It would be easy to blindside Cordelia before she could use her power. The other one was just a skirt. But he really didn't feel like it. All he wanted was to kill the Astronomer, or at least have him dead. What smarts Spector had told him Cordelia and Veronica alive could be trouble for him. They could finger him for Caroline's death. As b.u.t.ton-Man Tony had told him once, "It's not the people you kill you regret; it's the people you don't kill."

"f.u.c.k it. I can't ice everybody." He walked down the street toward the subway stop at Seventy-Seventh. He could take the Number 5 train to Jokertown. From there, he just didn't know.

Fortunato lay with his head on Peregrine's naked stomach. She was spread-eagled in the chaos of sheets and shredded clothes and pinfeathers that had come loose in the heat of the last couple of hours. Just a few minutes before, Fortunato had used three of them to bring her to something like her fourteenth or fifteenth o.r.g.a.s.m. He'd lost count long before, forgotten the minutes ticking away, even forgotten where he was.

"What in G.o.d's name did you do to me?" she moaned. "I feel like I just ran a marathon."

"Sorry," Fortunato said. "It kind of goes with the territory." He'd never had s.e.x with another ace before. The fusion of their powers was beyond anything he'd ever experienced. His energy body was too large to be contained in his flesh; it overflowed all around him in a bright white aura.

He'd come three times himself, each time blocking the flow and turning it back inside him. He'd lost a couple of drops in the process, enough to give Peregrine her own faint luminescence, though it didn't do much for her energy level.

She stroked his chest. "I've heard of afterglow, but this is ridiculous."

He rolled over and kissed her on the thigh. "I have to go, you know."

"The Astronomer."

"Something's supposed to happen in an hour. He's got some kind of escape set up, something that'll get him away from me for good and all. I can't let that happen."

"Why not? Just let him go. What good is killing him going to do?"

"I'm not out for justice, if that's what you're thinking. Making him pay for his crimes, or any of that s.h.i.t. It's just that I'm not going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, worrying about him showing up again."

"Bulls.h.i.t. You want him dead, and you want to be the one to kill him."

"Yeah. Okay. I want the little ratf.u.c.k dead. I admit it. I want it enough I can taste it." He got up and into his pants. He rolled up the sleeves on his tux shirt and let it hang open rather than search the apartment for the missing studs.

She came to him and put her arms around his neck. "I'd offer to help, but I'm getting dizzy just standing."

"All I want you to do is come back to Aces High with me, and stay there till this is over. One way or another."

"Wait . . ."

"I can't wait. Time is running out."

"No, I mean, listen. Do you hear something?"

His senses were overloaded from the glut of power. There seemed to be a low, electrical hum coming from all over his body. But beyond that he could hear something else, a sound like wet plates squeaking in dishwater. He glanced at the digital clock next to the bed. It was vibrating on its pedestal.

"Oh s.h.i.t," Fortunato said, just as the water bed exploded.

The force of it knocked them across the room. The water was boiling at first, but cooled as it expanded. Fortunato landed against a gray earthenware pot full of bamboo. It shattered under him. Before the air even came back into his lungs a dead, broken body hurtled through the wall of windows and he was surrounded by flying gla.s.s.

Fortunato reached out to slow time, but time itself resisted him. He strained against it and saw the lines of power in the room in topographic relief. He saw that the body was a woman's, but he didn't let himself see any more, not yet.

He pushed at the lines of power with his mind. Tight cones of force rose up where he and Peregrine lay. The broken gla.s.s followed the new contours of the room's s.p.a.cetime and curved away around them, smashing itself to dust against the walls.

Peregrine crawled across the floor. Fortunato saw where she was heading and shaped his power around her to protect her. She got to where her gloved talons hung on the wall and put them on. There was a costume there too but she didn't bother with it.

The roof groaned and then split all down its length like a broken saltine. Chunks of concrete and rebar rained down on them, but the shields around them were solid. It took hardly any of Fortunato's new power to hold them. Peregrine gave herself a running start and flew out into the darkness.

The floor buckled under Fortunato. Jets of water shot up from broken pipes and the air stank of natural gas. He crawled toward the dead woman and turned her over.

Caroline.

It was Caroline.

Her neck was broken. Her skin was clawed and bitten and torn.

She'd been his favorite for seven years. He could never predict her violent moods and sarcastic humor, could never get enough of the sheer physical intensity of her lovemaking. Between the new girls he'd always come back to her.

For a long time he couldn't feel anything. A huge piece of concrete, studded with broken rebar, missed him by inches while he knelt beside her body.

The anger, when it finally came, transformed him.

It was life and death, that simple. The Astronomer took his power from killing. The Astronomer was Death. Fortunato took his strength from s.e.x, from life. And Life was hiding in its burrow, too s.h.i.t-scared to come out and look Death in the face. Shouting out empty threats and hoping it would just go away.

He opened his eyes wide. All it took was a blink of the eye and everything he'd missed jumped out at him. The shimmering heat lines he'd seen in the dead boy's apartment seventeen years before funneled out into the night.

Fortunato stood up, the power of his anger levitating him a foot off the floor. He reached out to the conical net of power, ready to fly into it, to shoot out into its vortex and tear the source of it to pieces.

He reached out and the lines were gone.

He walked through the shattered gla.s.s wall and hovered there, glowing, thirty stories above the streets of Manhattan. High overhead he could see Peregrine, gloriously naked, banking steeply over the park. The lights of the city turned the sky flat and gray behind her, and she seemed two-dimensional herself, like a s.e.xually explicit kite. She circled him once, then settled on the broken edge of her apartment.

"Jesus," she said. "So tired . . ."

"Did you see him?" he asked her.

"No. Nothing. You?"

"For a second. I saw the traces he left behind. For the first time. For the first time I'm stronger than he is. If I could find him, find that G.o.dd.a.m.ned ship, I could . . ."

"What is it?"

Ship, he thought. s.p.a.ceship. Like aliens from s.p.a.ce, Black had said. Like Tachyon.

Tachyon. Christ, Tachyon had a ship!

The longer he thought about it, the more convinced he was. The Astronomer was going for Tachyon's ship.

He walked back over to Peregrine and kissed her. The smell of their s.e.xual juices hung around them like perfume and it was hard for Fortunato to stop. She staggered a little when he let her go.

That was when she saw Caroline's body.

"Oh my G.o.d," she said.

Fortunato took the broken thing in his arms. "This isn't about you," he said. "This is about me. You should forget about it." He made it an order without meaning to. She nodded.

He walked out into s.p.a.ce again.

"Fortunato . . .?"

He wanted to look back but there was nothing else to say. He let the power take him on into the darkness.

The streets were still crowded despite the lateness of the hour, and everyone who was still out seemed to be drunk, stoned, belligerent, crazy, or all of the above. Jennifer attracted an unwanted amount of attention, and if it hadn't been for Brennan's glowering presence she couldn't have walked half a block without having to use her power to foil someone's unwelcomed advances.

The long day was taking its toll on her. Her feet hurt, she was dead tired, and her hunger had grown until it felt like a small animal gnawing away at her insides. She'd have to get some food. She couldn't ghost until she did. Turning insubstantial burned a lot of energy, and there weren't many calories stored in her lean frame.

Jennifer noticed a street vendor who looked as tipsy as the revelers around them and told Brennan that she needed something to eat. They stopped and he brought her a couple of the soft pretzels the man was selling.

"Sorry this is the best I can do," Brennan said, munching on one of the doughy pretzels himself. "Tonight most restaurants are closed, reservation only, or already so crowded that we couldn't even get in the door."

"These'll be fine," Jennifer said through a mouthful of dough. She grimaced and took a big swallow of her drink. "This mustard is hot! hot!" she said, trying to speak and roll ice on her tongue at the same time.

"Hmmm?" Brennan stopped, then turned back to the vendor and bought a whole bottle of the condiment.

"What's that for?" Jennifer asked as he stashed it away.

"For later." He didn't elaborate and Jennifer was too busy tearing into her food to worry about it.

They went on through the streets until Brennan led them down a narrow alley that was, amazingly enough, totally devoid of partiers.

"You'll be safe here until I get back," he said.

"Where're you going?"

"To my apartment. I'll be right back."

Jennifer watched him go down the alley, stung that he obviously didn't trust her enough to take her to where he lived. He returned as he had promised, bringing a cloak for Jennifer to wrap herself in and a pair of thonged sandals for her feet.

"They're a little large," Brennan said, "but it'll be better than running around barefoot."

She was still stung by his distrust, but couldn't resist asking about the pack on his back.

"What's in there?"

"Some things we might need before the evening is over."

"Informative as always," she said. "Can you tell me something straight out? Where are we headed now?"

"The place we might be able to get some answers. The Crystal Palace."

For seventeen years Fortunato had kept to the shadows. Not from modesty, but to avoid distractions. He didn't fly to the rescue of trapped miners or break up muggings on the subway. Except for a few months of covert politics back in the sixties he'd stayed in his apartment and read. Studied Aleister Crowley and P. D. Ouspensky, learned Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sanskrit and ancient Greek. Nothing had seemed more important than knowledge for its own sake.

He couldn't say when that had started to change. Sometime after a woman named Eileen had died in a Jokertown alley, her brain wiped clean by the Astronomer. Sometime after everything he read, from particle physics to Masonic ritual to the Bhagavad Bhagavad Gita Gita, told him the same thing, over and over: all is one. Nothing mattered. Everything mattered.

Tonight he flew over Manhattan Island in the remains of his evening clothes, glowing like a neon tube, a dead woman in his arms. Drunken tourists and cranked-up jokers and the last of the theater crowd looked up and saw him there and it didn't matter.