Dark Rain (30 page)

But it seemed to ignore the humans. Its green eyes were duller in the sunlight and the thing looked rather witless, with no real intelligence of its own. Its gaze was fixed on its master’s back, and it stuck closely with him, the same way that it had done in its bulldog form.

“You’re like a fly, a bluebottle, all buzzing and pesky, Mr. Devries!” Saruak shouted. “You just keep showing up in the same annoying manner!”

He seemed to think about that and then grinned unpleasantly, displaying the off-white spikes of his teeth.

“I’ve taken it long enough. I think the time has come to finally swat you.”

FORTY-ONE

His voice was as coarse and dry as ever, ringing with contempt and spite. And he didn’t sound even remotely like he was kidding, this time. I remembered how powerful he’d already become, and felt my body draw away from him.

Which was more than you could say for Cass. She had already stepped over to her bike. She snatched her carbine up. And, between one heartbeat and the next, was aiming it.

I lunged across and caught hold of her elbow.

“Cassie, no!”

She looked around at me, slightly annoyed at first.

“With all these people around? Jesus!”

Her expression told me that she saw my point. Her eyes narrowed frustratedly. But she started moving back with me, as quickly as we could, toward the edges of the crowd.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hobart and his men start to come to life as well, moving in our direction. I held a palm out flat, signaling to them to remain where they were. And thank God, they took the hint, although Saul did it pretty grudgingly.

“Trying to
run
?” Saruak called to me.

His dusty boots thumped on the flagstones. He seemed heavier than he had been. And it wasn’t just a matter of him putting on physical weight.

“You forget, Mr. Devries. There is nowhere
to
run, thanks to this fascinating curse of yours. You’re like a goldfish in a bowl, and you can only go in circles.”

He leaned his head a little to one side.

“Think of me as a big cat, about to dip its claws in.”

He was mixing his metaphors slightly, but no matter. I had gotten well used to these snarling, mocking diatribes of his. And paid what he was saying very little real attention. What I
was
noticing as he advanced, what struck at me most forcibly …

Was the effect that he was having on the crowd around him. All these waiting townsfolk.

Nothing had seemed to impinge on their attention so far. Nothing we had done had made them look around or even stir. They’d simply sat there, peering up at the empty stage, their faces pensive and their eyes like tarnished glass.

But right now …

It wasn’t that they looked directly at him. Their expressions stayed impassive, and their eyes remained locked on the stage. But their faces … they turned slightly to him as he passed. Mouths hardened a little. Thoughtful creases appeared in otherwise placid brows. As though they had just heard a sound, a voice, much too far away to understand what it was saying.

They were noticing him, in other words, but not on any fully conscious level. They were like somnambulists. And he was a figment in the dreamworld they had entered.

The Dralleg was another matter. People didn’t shift their heads toward
that
thing at all. No gazes went in its direction, despite its enormous bulk. It might as well have been invisible, stalking along behind its master, dragging its heavy limbs.

But the sun was halfway up toward its peak. The creature cast an elongated shadow. And as that darkness swept across the crowd, their features became stony. Their shoulders hunched, a little like its. Their gazes became vaguely anxious. And a few small children stood up and looked almost on the verge of crying, except that not a whimper could be heard.

I recalled what the Little Girl had said. ‘An expanding and engulfing nightmare.’ That was how she’d described the spirit as his powers grew. And his monster was a part of that, the venom in the scorpion’s tail.

The Manitou voiced the threat. And his creature provided most of the muscle with which to back it up. They’d been a team so far, I could see, each depending on the other.

I knew that my hopes of doing Saruak any genuine harm were limited. He had already grown far stronger than I could have imagined a couple of days back. But me and Cassie had already hurt the Dralleg several times. And I knew we could repeat the trick. So I began considering the possibility of taking the damned thing down for good. Between us, I was certain we could manage it.

That would put its master’s nose badly out of joint, at least. And I’d pay good money to see that happen.

We were still backing away through all the seated, hunkered figures. We had almost reached the outer edge. Were not having to step so carefully, and were beginning to speed up.

Townsfolk were still coming in and drifting blankly past us, sure. But a few more seconds and we’d be pretty much out in the open. We’d have a chance of fighting back without too many civilians getting caught up in the crossfire.

Cassie realized the same thing. I saw her knuckles stiffen on the dark grips of her carbine.

We fell into step together, taking the final paces back in almost perfect unison.

But where to make our stand?

“Sidewalk,” I muttered. “Up behind us.”

And she nodded briskly, getting what I meant.

“
Now!
”

The word was still dropping from my lips when I just turned around and sprinted. Cassie did the same. From behind us came another bark of laughter. Saruak thought that we were trying to get away from him. I ignored him, kept on going, slipping round a few more inward-coming folk.

My shoes and Cassie’s black boots hit the curb at the exact same time. We both wheeled round again, took one more backward step.

And then, mainly because we had no other place to go, we drew ourselves up and stood our ground.

Saruak, as he had done from the start, looked cruelly amused by our antics. He kept pushing on toward us at the same unbroken rate. The smirk across his lower face was like a big, loosely healed scar.

There had to be
some
way he could be thrown off balance, at the very least.

“Stand or run, Mr. Devries,” he was snarling. “Make your mind up, one way or the other. I’m easy because, either way, it’ll make no difference in the least.”

Way off behind him, I could see, Saul had drawn his weapon and was squinting down the muzzle of it. And his men had followed suit. They hadn’t done anything apart from that, were simply holding themselves at the ready, waiting to see if their help was going to be needed.

Not a single other person was looking in our direction. There was more than half the town here, and there might as well have only been the seven of us.

My attention returned to the Manitou. He drew up to within two yards of me and finally stopped. The Dralleg stayed behind him, the same way it had the last time. It was like a wide, distorted shadow of the man himself. I could hear it growling faintly, underneath its breath. But it made no attempt to get at us.

I
reckoned it would do whatever its master wanted. Would attack us in an instant, if he told it to. So whatever Saruak had planned for us this time, maybe he was planning to do it himself.

That big left pupil of his glinted at me once again. Half in shadow as they were, those narrow, bearded features looked like two sections of different faces, one light and one dark. It served to remind me he was not a man at all. In which case, why’d his body aged? I had not thought of that before.

His nostrils flared. His lips skinned back a little from his sharply pointed teeth. His pale eyes studied me curiously, drinking in the sight of me all over again. You’d think that he’d never even seen me before. What
was
it about me that fascinated him?

His left hand started coming up, the long fingernails curling. But then he seemed to think better of it, let his whole arm swing back down. There were liver spots on the back of the palm, I noticed. How long had he been in human form?

His stare intensified a little. It was almost as if he was searching for something in
my
eyes, on my own face.

I seemed to … what was it, exactly? Seemed to puzzle him. I kept on thinking of the way that he’d come after me. Concentrating on me. Probing at me, when there were far more significant individuals in town.

He was somehow being drawn to me, again and again, like I posed some kind of riddle he could not completely solve. But I was just a simple man, with no mystique, no magic.

His gaze hardened next moment. It grew flinty, rather bored
. If I was a puzzle to him, then he seemed to give up on it.

“How many people would just stand here, nose to nose with me?” he hissed. “Foolishly courageous to the last, Mr. Devries.”

“If you say so.”

“Oh, I do! I
do
!”

His pallid irises flicked slightly to the side.

“You know, I think that when I’ve killed you, I will keep this nasty little girl you drag around behind you for my own amusement. Nice long legs, I see. I like that.”

He was about to add something more, when a triple-thud broke across him. Three tightly grouped holes, smoldering a little at their edges, had appeared in the front of his coat, pretty much where his heart ought to be.

I looked round. Cass had dropped her carbine to her hip and let off a burst at almost point blank range. It was probably the remark about her legs that had pissed her off. She’s no sense of humor about things like that.

The slugs should have lifted Saruak up off his feet. But the Manitou didn’t even rock. Didn’t even wince, in truth. The holes in the fabric were the only damage he’d sustained.

His lean face snapped toward her. Even Cassie froze beneath his gaze. The muzzle of her carbine was still smoking. It was the only movement that I was aware of. Everything seemed frozen in place.

“How spiteful!” he complained.

The muscles in her arms went tense. Her dark eyes didn’t waver, boring into his.

“Look what you’ve done to my coat!”

When he saw she wasn’t going to reply, he returned his baleful gaze to me.

“You’ve done better than you ought so far, with this one by your side,” he told me.

And what was he going to do with her?

“Let’s see how you manage without dear Cassandra.”

Without even thinking about it, I started pushing forward. If I could only get close enough to take a decent swipe at him. I’d fight him to the death before I let him hurt her.

Saruak extended his right palm. I staggered to a halt. Both of my legs had turned rigid at the knees. And I could not go forward anymore, however hard I tried to. It was like being trapped in an invisible cage.

He raised his left arm to Cass. And at first, the hand was balled into a fist, all bony knuckles and thick veins. It didn’t stay like that for very long. He extended a grimy index finger.

Raised it.

Cassie let out a frightened yelp as she followed the motion, lifting off the ground.

In an instant, she was at head height, as if she’d been suspended there by strings. Her boots were kicking a couple of feet in front of my face. She was wriggling wildly like a small fish, hooked.

She tried to bring her carbine back to bear, but lost her grip. It came whirling down, clattering on the sidewalk.

Saul and his people started edging nearer again, but I waved them off a second time. Although I still couldn’t go any further forward, however desperately I tried. I could only stare helplessly at Cassie, shocked by the horrified expression on her face.

“Let her
go
! It’s
me
you’re after!”

“Altruistic to the last,” he grinned.

Cass drifted a little closer to me. I tried to stretch out, grab hold of her ankle. But the fingers of his right hand twitched. And suddenly my arms were pinned down by my sides, I couldn’t even lift them.

When she saw I couldn’t help her, her whole manner changed. Fright gave way to renewed fury. She drifted slightly to the right, till she was staring down at the guy’s battered hat. She spat at it defiantly, then let out a stream of language that she’d
definitely
not learned at any Sunday school.

Saruak peered up at her, mimicking shock, although his eyes were laughing.

“Such a lack of manners. Such a load of hatred, too. But you’re mistaken, dear Cassandra. Try to see things from my point of view.”

He abruptly made a sweeping motion with his arm, a high arc through the clear, bright air. And – she was howling again, and I couldn’t blame her – Cassie’s body followed it. She went sailing off into the heavens, all her long limbs flailing. Ice replaced the blood in my whole body. I was certain he was going to let her fall.

But that didn’t turn out to be what he had planned for her. He was simply showing off his powers again. Cass went hurtling right over the square, the podium, the flapping banners.

She wound up on the high, gray-green roof of the Town Hall, where he’d been yesterday morning.

So he hadn’t killed her. Maybe he was serious about keeping her when I was gone.

I could hear the rattle as her boots hit slate. She only paused a short while, crouching, getting back her breath. It was hard for her to take in what had happened. Then she straightened, and began casting around for the best way down from there.