Out of Mind (29 page)

With her hands rolled into fists, Willow looked up at Ben, and he shook his head.
“Don’t let anger distract you.”

“So you took Willow Millet to the Protector?” Vanity said. “And now you are golden. Has she given the Protector important information?”

“I can’t tell you about it.”

Willow nudged Ben.
“He’s not going to tell her they didn’t get any information from me.”

“We can’t be sure Rock knows you’re back,”
Ben said.

The woman hissed with frustration. “What happens to us now?”

Rock’s voice became silky and completely unlike that of the man Willow had known. “You will be punished, but you will get another chance. You are resourceful and we need you. Let’s go and get our next orders. There has been one change I know of. The Protector has given up on infiltrating mankind with single emissaries. Our numbers on earth will grow faster in future. We will be everywhere among them. First New Orleans, then wherever the Protector decides after that. The humans will be allowed to relax, to grow complacent, but not for long. Our everlasting lives depend on the secrets they are hiding from us.”

“They are already searching for the legend. They are
curious about the keys. If they connect the two it will be very dangerous for us,” Vanity said.

“Yes,” Rock agreed. “But we should return to Safeplace Embran. There are signs we are breaking down, you and I. I have brought us something to help us on our way.”

Cracking noises followed, and cooing, like the cries of large doves.

“What are we going to do?”
Willow asked.

“Stop them. But it may be even trickier than we expect. There was someone else with Vanity before Rock arrived. We heard another voice. But I’m only hearing Rock and Vanity now. Someone must be hiding in there.”

“We can’t take them all on by ourselves,”
Willow said.

“I intend to manage nicely on my own until Sykes and the others get the message.”

“I want you to know something.”
Willow reached for his hand.
“I shouldn’t have sent you away. I should have had the confidence to trust your love.”

He crouched beside her.
“You sound as if you’re saying goodbye. Nothing is going to happen to either of us.”

“I can’t live without you, Ben.”

His hug gave her some courage.
“Tell me one thing,”
he said, and his arms shook with emotion.
“Admit we’re Bonded forever.”

She felt tears on her face.
“Forever,”
she told him.

Ben stood again, and with his back still to the wall, he slipped to the doorway, took a cautious look into the plant-filled spaces of the conservatory and crouched low.
“Please stay here,”
he said.
“Get outside as soon as you can and call Nat. See who else you can reach. Make sure Nat knows to wait for a signal from me before coming in here.”

She didn’t answer, and he didn’t wait before leaving her.

T
he Embran, Ben thought, didn’t know quite as much as they thought they did. For one thing, they didn’t know that with some help from him—and Mario—the Millets already had three keys, not one. The failure to find the right angel frustrated him. He and the others would keep looking, that’s all.

“How will the Millets become
complacent
as you suggest with one of their own missing?” Vanity asked. “They will continue searching for Willow.”

“And they will find her when Zibock sends her back,” Rock said with an unpleasant laugh. “All memory of what she has experienced will be gone by the time she returns to the surface. They will think she has suffered an attack of amnesia and wandered away or some such nonsense, but they will not discover where she has been.”

“And she will accept this?”

“In time. She can’t change it.”

Ben wanted to laugh. He had witnessed Willow’s struggles to remember her experiences, but they were getting clearer rather than so distant they showed any sign of disappearing.

He would warn her not to let anyone outside the Millets and Fortunes know the truth yet.

Hidden by plants, Rock and Vanity were at the far end of the long conservatory. Ben launched himself invisibly in the opposite direction, planning to come on them with no warning. In the nanoinstant he took to reach an open closet and slip inside, his other sight caught what hadn’t been obvious with human eyes. Under a table draped with a long oilcloth, a man with long blond hair. Absolutely still, his arms wrapped around his shins and his head on his knees, his outline shivered as if he were in the process of, but never quite transforming into something else.

“You’re trying to hide something,” Rock said, almost growled at Vanity. “Move out of the way. What do you have there?”

“What do you mean?” Vanity said.

“Save it. Get away from the cage. You’re hiding something.”

“Let’s concentrate on what’s important.” The man beneath the table spoke up suddenly, his voice echoing. He emerged from his hiding place, but Ben didn’t recognize him. A tall, elegant man in a brown silk shirt and black pants, he had disturbingly light blue eyes.

He continued to fade slightly, only to return to sharp image. And he sauntered between the tangle of foliage toward the other end of the room.

“Well, if it isn’t Vanity’s slave.” Rock laughed at the man. “Hello, John. I knew you were listening. The same as you’ve known I’ve been here in New Orleans all along.”

“I thought you were—”

Vanity cut the man off. “Rock, you and I will join forces and do as much as we can now. We can go back to Zibock with enough to make him even more happy than you already have.”

“Sure,” Rock said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Ben winced. The answer had come too quickly.

“When will the Millet girl be returned?” Vanity said.

“When I give the signal, Zibock will send her back,” Rock said promptly.

Ben smiled to himself. Rock didn’t know Willow had been found unsuitable for the Embran’s purpose. He also didn’t know she was already back and in this very house. Ben wondered about this Zibock’s plan. It seemed he was playing Vanity and Rock off against each other.

“Perhaps you should wait until we leave,” Vanity said thoughtfully. “I have collected a number of human specimens. We could take them back to Zibock. They may be useful—or not.

“Until Willow returns, the humans will be obsessed with finding her and we’ll be safe. Then her return will distract them further. The longer we put off having them concentrate on finding us, the better. They’re going to find out something about where we come from eventually.”

“They don’t have to,” Rock said. “And remember we can wipe their memories clean. If any of them get through, we will deal with them.”

Only you aren’t so good at getting rid of memories yet.
In short bursts, zipping from one gap between plant displays to another, Ben worked his way toward the other three.

Using his third eye, he could see them completely.
Rock, in his thick-soled shoes and black leather pants, stood a little apart from the other two. His head was in its human form again. Vanity wore a sleeveless top and tight jeans. John’s elegant clothes made them an odd set.

A mark on the back of Vanity’s left shoulder made Ben stop breathing. It was a festering burn, and he had little doubt how it had happened. In the moment of battle with the batlike creature in that empty shop, he had used his defensive gift. Vanity was that creature, and she carried his scar no matter what form she took. He smiled at her arrogance in assuming he would have no opportunity to make the connection.

He would never forget how that burn had damaged the source of her invisibility and left one side of her bat body fully revealed to his human eyes. Had she repaired herself at all, he wondered, or was she still only able to squirt the fluid, the source of her shield from ordinary sight, on one side, never to be completely invisible again?

Once more he concentrated his powers solely on searching out Sykes. Still there was no hint of him and Ben ground his teeth together. Without reinforcements, he would have his hands full here.

Vanity spoke in a soft voice unlike her own. “Rock, I have a better idea for us. I’ll go to Zibock alone and take my little people. You stay here and keep watch on the Millets.”

“You don’t decide my actions for me,” Rock growled.

He tore the chain from his pocket and his fingers furled around a black cylinder. Instantly, a blue beam shot across Vanity’s eyes. She stared into the light, unaffected, and ripped the laser from his hand. “You can’t stop me. We know how powerful you are, but there are
two of us and only one of you. John, whom I call Servant, not slave, has abilities you know nothing about.”

John made an angry noise but subsided.

Ben heard Rock bellow. And Vanity laughed again before the sound changed into a yipping cackle. Ben was certain he knew what was happening.

With three of them and one of him, to let them discover him before he was ready could be suicidal. Ben switched his attention back to the Embran.

He wasn’t disappointed. The door to the birdcage stood open and inside, Vanity morphed into the bat that immediately surged to several times the size it had been when he saw it before. Hastily, it wrapped its agile claws around the neck of a bottle, one of a number lined up on shelves of supplies. Ben was sure these must be the containers of orchid food Willow had mentioned. If she was right, there were shrunken people hidden among the bright granules.

Ben saw another movement and his stomach flipped. Willow crept through the entrance to the conservatory and inched toward the group of Embran.

“Willow, stop. Right now. They’ll kill you.”

He waited. If she heard him, she didn’t respond, although he couldn’t feel any shield over her mind.

A violent crash brought a scream from Willow. Ben leaped from his hiding place and stopped her from rushing forward. She was no match for his speed or strength, and he held her back easily while the Embran were absorbed in each other.

The bottle Vanity had picked up looked as if it had exploded on the floor. “Catch them,” she screamed to John. “I need something to carry them in now.” She
grabbed another and threw it to John, who put it on the nearest bench. More bottles headed for John, and Ben figured either John had dropped the first one, or Rock had intercepted and smashed it. Brilliant turquoise granules had scattered everywhere.

“Stop it,” Willow moaned softly, her eyes wild and searching the floor.

The bat continued to pass bottles. Some John caught, some Rock snatched and immediately smashed. With the last bottle, Rock knocked John out of the way and swept the rest from the bench where they’d been placed. They crashed in heaps of myriad colored granules.

“So much for your plans to impress Zibock,” Rock said to Vanity.

She swelled even larger, her eyes glittering with fury.

John’s uncontrolled fluctuations ceased. His face became all but featureless while he stretched longer and longer, growing thinner at the same time.

John turned into a red, hard-shelled thing, the elegant clothes gone, more twitching appendages appearing rapidly. He was jointed, like a creature wearing armor.

“Save your time,” Vanity hissed at him. “I must go to Zibock alone. Wait here…Servant.”

John’s dislike for his nickname was evident. His tentacles slapped the cage bars angrily, slipped through, and Vanity’s bat bared its sharp teeth to bite, snapping off a piece of tentacle while John howled.

Even more horrifically, Rock’s mouth opened wide, wider than should have been possible, and when it started to close, a massive hooked bird’s beak replaced the lips. Pointed ears rose on top of the head, ears from which loose skin trailed like gray capes. Slimy feathers and
hair sprang over his rapidly bulging body. Swaying with every move, a beard of fat hung beneath the beak. And the wings that had made Willow call this a raptor spread with enough force to knock holes in the walls.

Giving attention to the contents of the smashed jars was out of the question yet. Rock’s raptor form swung about, thrashing plants to shreds.

He saw Willow and roared as if in pain when he must have realized she could make a lie of the story he had told Vanity.

“What is she doing here?” The bat made a move to leave the cage, but at that moment, the small, green bird in the cage rose from the end of a perch. It flew at Vanity, stopped as it drew close and whipped its blue-black snakelike tongue around her head. Gasping, she heaved to free herself but the bird’s tongue tightened on her.

“Call off your bird, Servant,” she gurgled to John, who made a cackling sound and leaped about.

Rock lunged at Willow, his beak snapping. He snatched her up by the shoulders and shook her like a rag doll.

Ben had no choice but to give the creature all of his attention and hope John’s malignant bird would keep Vanity busy. John seemed transfixed at the struggle inside the cage.

Grabbing a potting fork from a box of tools, Ben thrust the sharp tines into the part of Rock’s belly that had yet to finish its transformation. An insane roar sent shock trembling through the atmosphere. Battling powers clashed.

Sykes appeared beside Ben, taking in the scene quickly. And Pascal was there almost at the same time.

“What took you so long?” Ben said.

“If you had made contact with Nat before wading in here, it wouldn’t have taken so long.”

“Enough, you two,” Pascal ordered, sidling toward the elongated red monster that was John, where he stood before the bat writhing in the birdcage.

Giant talons had replaced Rock’s hands, and Willow was clutched in one of them. Back and forth she swung with the wounded beast’s stumbling gait. Thick black fluid dribbled out around the fork tines still embedded in its belly.

Sykes pried Willow from the talons, and Ben, focusing on his own fingers, sank them into slimy feathers and fur. Instantly, smoke rose and the acrid reek of burning tissue. Rock howled and cast about, wild and still too strong to be taken down easily.

“Willow,” Ben shouted, unable to see where she had landed. “Just answer me.”

“I’m okay,” she said.

Growing tiny, the bat slid free of the bird’s tongue and fell as if dead, only to leap up, its size ballooning again and its needle teeth glinting. It cast around, searching for something.

Before Ben could stop her, Willow threw herself toward the smashed bottles, and he stared, amazed, at figures uncurling to full height—men and women, naked, but obviously too distracted to be concerned with their bodies.

“Heavenly hedonists,” Pascal exclaimed, although Ben thought the apparently appropriate description was accidental.

“Get out of the way,” Willow ordered the group. “Get back. Chris, Fabio, take them all out of here.”

Chris, Fabio and a woman who held Chris’s hand, stood their ground, but the rest edged carefully backward.

Ben heard another scream. Willow’s. Yanked by the rapidly growing bat, she fell inside the cage. Vanity had taken the key and deftly used her claws to close and lock the door on the inside.

He shot to tear at the bars.

Shrieking with unearthly laughter, Vanity threw Willow to the ground and spread herself on top of her, completely hiding Willow.

Ben strained at the bars and one began to bend outward. “Leave her,” he yelled at Vanity. “Get away. Willow?”

Willow didn’t answer, and Vanity only swelled larger, her whole, ugly body vibrating while she continued to laugh.

Swaying in front of Pascal and Sykes, John used his tentacles to snap at them, forcing both to engage him. One at either side, they pummeled him, but he kept swinging at them.

With a last huge shout, Vanity rose up, revealing a rapidly changing gelatinous mass. Inside it, Ben saw Willow fighting to escape. She might as well have fought with superglue.

What he saw next took his horror to a new level. Starting at one end, the mass formed itself into a hard, yellowish coat—a shell. Willow was disappearing inside one of their eggs.

“I win,” Vanity cried. “I will take her egg to Zibock as a gift.”

Rock mumbled from the floor, making no sense.

Soaring, her bat wings flapping, Vanity said, “I will tell him to eat her and live forever.”

“You don’t know that works,” Rock said indistinctly between drooling lips.

“But we must try,” she told him, emitting high-pitched clicking noises.

The shell grew larger, overtaking Willow, who lay on her side, fighting with the gluey substance that bound her.

“It will suffocate her,” Vanity trilled gleefully. “She is not like one of us. She cannot live without air as we do when we’re young.”

Stretching one arm as far as it would go, Ben thrust it behind the bar he had bent. Vanity flew at him, her teeth bared. She came too fast and he caught her low belly, concentrated all his energy there, and smoke rose.

His smoldering touch impaled her, and she flapped helplessly, thrashing her head, wailing.

The shell had reached Willow’s shoulders. He could see her punching weakly over her head.