The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(91)
The mercenaries on five were still struggling with Meadow, waiting for their orders. They hadn’t twigged that something was a little off about her. The way she kept making the same movements, over and over again, or how her eyes were expressionless.
“Don’t you remember this trick?” I said. “It’s the one you used on me, when you murdered our buddy Spengler.”
Suddenly it wasn’t Meadow anymore. The puppet’s head lolled back, opening a hinged mouth to expose a painted sigil that glistened with malevolent energy. The mercenaries had only a second to react before white-hot light flashed from the sigil’s heart. The camera went dead.
Meadow—the real Meadow—stepped into view on a totally different screen. She held up her detonator box in one hand, and stuck up her middle finger with the other.
“I reckon that’s her resignation,” Jennifer said.
The marble shook under our feet. One after another, explosions boomed from the floors below, blasting out windows and spewing glass and fire into the night.
“She wasn’t planting the explosives on the fifth floor,” I said. “She was planting them on the third, the seventh, the thirteenth, and the twenty-third.”
Forty-Four
“Just a little C-4 in strategic spots,” I said as the rumbling subsided. “Not enough to bring the building down or cut off the exits, but it should do a pretty good job of disrupting the mystic circuitry. Sorry, Lauren. The Enclave was a massive energy funnel, but now it’s just another slab of overpriced real estate.”
“No sacrifice, and no way to reap the power,” Jennifer said, nodding. “You’re finished. Look on the bright side. Maybe you’ll find a nice greenhouse with cheap rent.”
Caine took a step back and drew his sidearm.
“Move out, lads! We’re leaving. But not before I take care of unfinished business.”
A helicopter’s spotlight dropped into view, hovering outside the penthouse windows. The blinding beam flooded the room with brilliant white light. Then the helicopter swung around, turning its open side door to face us. Not a police helicopter. Nicky Agnelli’s big yellow Bell 407, its tail registry blotted out under a fresh coat of paint.
I had just enough time to grab Jennifer’s arm and yank her to the floor before Juliette opened fire.
She sat at the edge of the open door, cradling a long-barreled monster of a machine gun while her sister flew the helicopter. The windows exploded in a hurricane of glass, and lead sprayed across the room like a swarm of angry hornets. Bullets punched into the Viridithol tank, rupturing holes and sending streams of the toxic venom squirting across the marble floor. Two of the mercenaries dropped, and the others scattered, falling back toward the emergency exit.
Angus threw up a panicked arm and raised his gun with the other hand, but Jennifer was faster on the draw. Her bullet slammed into his shoulder, shredding camo and bursting out the other side. His face contorted as he dropped his gun and ran, leading a stumbling retreat. Nedry just lay flat on the ground with his hands over his head, shrieking like a two-year-old.
The gun’s belt ran dry, and the shooting stopped. If Lauren had even been hit, she didn’t show it. The vines lowered her to the ground, and she bellowed with a fury I’d never heard before. The foliage rustled, and her vengeance slithered forth.
Snakes. A living carpet of them, hundreds, short and long and tiny and fat, and every one of them venomous, every one of them heading straight toward Jennifer and me.
Nedry caught sight of the snakes and jumped to his feet, screaming, “Fuck this job! Lauren, I quit!”
He threw himself at the ruptured tank. His open palm hit the mirror-polished surface and pushed right on through. His body flattened and became an image on the other side, a reflection with no source.
Jennifer ran to the shattered windows while I searched for a way to stop the writhing hordes. The tank caught my eye. Viridithol pooled on the marble floor, catching in the chiseled glyphs and running along them in channels, coloring them bile green.
Have to be careful with my aim, I remembered Bob Payton saying as he walked around his candle-lit circle. This stuff is flammable as hell.
I conjured a spark of raw power to my fingertip and flicked it through the air. It sailed, slow and serene, gliding like a fireplace ember to land in the pooled serum.
It ignited like gasoline.
I wasn’t sure if the snakes were screaming, or if Lauren was, but the air filled with a shrill cacophony as her pets broiled under a wall of fire. Juliette clung to the helicopter door, leaning out, and swung a white vinyl bowling-ball bag through the air. Jennifer caught it and tossed it my way. As the helicopter launched straight up, vanishing from sight, I saw Lauren lift her hand and point at me through the crackling flames.
“You die here, Faust! I’m taking you with me!”
The elevator doors chimed pleasantly and slid open. Meadow Brand stepped out and raised her hands like a showgirl at the front of a chorus line. A pack of animated mannequins charged out around her, storming though the fire, heading straight for Lauren.
“Ta-daa,” Meadow sang.
I unzipped the bowling-ball bag. Bob Payton’s severed head rested inside, the pallid skin of his neck ringed with binding seals and the stump cauterized with a blowtorch. I grabbed the head by the hair and held it aloft, unleashing the spell I’d been fueling under my breath, the trigger for the ritual I’d carried out over Payton’s corpse back in New York.