Aubry and Promise took a security suite in Scavenger Towers, on the outskirts of Mazetown. Together, they watched over Leslie. The child had come out of his torpor, but still moved slowly, spoke with a thick tongue, had a frightening tendency to fall asleep. Doctors laid him on the white rectangle of the scan table, peeled him out of his clothing, inspected his pre-pubescent muscularity, and probed the moist, pinkish-brown folds of his genitals. Eyebrows were arched in surprise and speculation, but their evaluations quieted alarm. They suggested that nature be allowed to take her course.
When the doctors and the well-wishers were gone, silence descended. Aubry stood at a video wall, gazing out over a night city where most of the citizens lived and loved and worked without thinking of imminent death.
Promise appeared behind him and wrapped her arms around his muscular waist. She pressed her mouth against his back. Through his shirt, her breath warmed his skin, but not his heart. “You’re not telling me everything.” Aubry said nothing. He crossed to their bed and slipped out of his clothes, and then under the covers. He stared at the ceiling. A thin, high snoring sound, almost a whistle, pulled his eyes down. Their child was curled on his side, asleep on a cot at the side of the bed. Promise wouldn’t let Leslie out of her sight. The slightest variation in breathing patterns, the slightest shift in position, would rouse her from full sleep.
She knelt beside Aubry, the clinging film of her nightgown cloaked by her robe. It would require far denser camouflage to mute her physical presence: every movement, every inhalation or exhalation seemed to be carefully measured for impact.
Lashes half-lowered, she gazed at him, awaiting an answer. “What happened in All-Faiths, Aubry?”
“I don’t know.” But you do know, a voice inside him whispered. You know too damned well.
Aubry moistened his lips, buying time. “I found three dead police officers. Leslie was unconscious but unharmed. And there was a message. The assassin wants to meet with me.”
A red and orange aurora crackled across Promise’s face, shifted shadows on the wall. “Why?”
“Challenge. An affair of honor, perhaps. I don’t know. But it’s just between us.” He didn’t bother to tell her the rest.
Or we will kill everything that you love.
“You can’t do it,” Promise whispered. “You don’t know who they are, or what they want.”
“Yes, I do. They want me.”
Promise spoke very calmly, very directly. “You can’t do that, Aubry. You have obligations now.”
“They killed Mira.” His fingers gripped the wooden sill. It creaked. “They could have killed you, or Leslie. There must have been a reason. They could have killed me, if that was what they wanted.”
If that bitch wanted to kill you like that, he added silently.
“What are you going to do?” Suddenly, quite abruptly, he was lost to her. There was an aspect of Aubry that remained beyond her reach. A part that she had striven against. With a sudden flash of guilt she realized that she had done her very best to conquer him with softness and love. With fame and money, security and family.
That was the aspect of Aubry which had responded to Leslie’s warning. That part of him which Promise feared, because it seemed not only to detect trouble, but attract it as well. And now …
Mira was dead.
Leslie stirred slightly, still recovering from the effects of the nerve ray. He tossed onto his side and back again, lost in a world of phantoms.
Aubry sat at the edge of Leslie’s bed, pulling the blanket up to the small chin with thick, dark, callused hands.
He studied the magnetic chess set in the corner of the room. Leslie and Promise’s sister Jenna were teaching Aubry the game. Jenna was a master, and Leslie an intuitive genius at chess. Aubry was just beginning to understand some of the basic ploys and gambits.
But he could play well enough to lose gracefully. He studied his position. “Knight to queen’s pawn six,” he murmured.
Leslie stirred in his sleep. He didn’t open his eyes, or take a look at the chessboard. “Queen’s bishop to queen’s knight four. Check.”
Aubry studied his position. “Damn.” He brushed one massive finger along Leslie’s cheek. He took gentle pleasure in the ebb and flow, the steady river of life as its tides swept through the body of his child, the only creature in all the world he could call his blood. In repose, Leslie’s angularity was softened. He seemed a chocolate angel, a picture of innocence and guiltless conscience.
How many people had Leslie killed? How many more would have died, if the Medusae hadn’t been stopped?
Within Leslie burned a terrible engine of destruction. The fact that unknown assassins had managed to neutralize him was sobering.
He remembered Mira, lying in a pool of blood and brains and splintered skull, and made a mental transposition. Suddenly, Mira became Promise. And then Leslie.
And now, for the first time, he slid the emotional shields back so that he could actually feel the horror.
Dead. Shattered. His child. His woman.
Aubry’s hand closed on the little bed’s metal framework. It was a quarter-inch thick along an edge, and bent beneath his hands like foil.
He would meet this assassin, this whore who wanted his life.
And kill her, whatever the cost.