Quicksilver(55)
“Is it looking for us?” Bridget asked.
“Maybe. But if my perceptions can be trusted, it’s more of a weapon than it is a search engine. Maybe the ISA is so freaked out about your alien genome and your ability to escape their every trap that they’ve decided it’s safer just to kill you when they find you instead of trying to take you into custody.”
“That’s so not right,” I said, as if I were still ten years old. “Okay, yeah, they’re not about what’s right. They’re about control. No surer way to control someone than to kill him.”
To finish dinner, I had taken a cinnamon-pecan roll with a brown icing. Ambrosia. It was so good I almost forgot the ghost drone. “I need this recipe,” I said.
“If you live long enough to make a batch, I’ll give you the recipe,” Panthea said, and that seemed fair enough to me.
Returning to more immediate matters than ghost drones in the sky, Sparky said, “Quinn has never shot a gun. He’ll need training.”
“In fact, he won’t,” Panthea said. “He was born for this. You have no doubt read of prodigies, as young as five, who hear perhaps a Mozart concerto and then sit at a piano for the first time in their lives and play it perfectly. Quinn will be that way with any weapon put in his hands.”
“I needed handgun training,” Bridget said.
“You believed so,” Panthea said, “because your grandfather thought you required it.” She smiled at Sparky. “You must have been surprised at how quickly Bridget was able to put into practice all that you taught her.”
Sparky looked thoughtful, although probably not as thoughtful as I must have appeared when I considered Panthea’s words. Hoping that we might all consider that I had been drafted into this mission in error, I said, “Is it possible that I was maybe meant to be a piano prodigy, but I ended up here by mistake?”
Rising from her chair, our elfin hostess said, “I’ve got a small armory. Let’s get a pistol for you. We need to hit the road soon. We’ve got somewhere we need to be by tomorrow.”
As the rest of us rose to our feet, Winston woke and yawned, and Sparky asked, “Where? Where do we have to be?”
“Beats me,” Panthea said. “I don’t see everything. My gift has limits. I can be surprised, make mistakes. Which is as it should be. Otherwise, I’d be a puppet in a play. I’m not a puppet. You aren’t puppets. But wherever we need to be, that place will find us.”
|?24?|
Panthea gave me a single-action Glock 19 modified with a 3.5-pound connector and New York trigger module, which provided a 5.5-pound trigger pull and eliminated any danger that the manufacturer’s standard trigger spring would break.
I had no idea what any of that meant. However, when I accepted the pistol from her, it felt as natural as if I’d been born with it in my hand. I sheathed it in a sharkskin-and-horsehide vertical belt scabbard, which she also provided. At her insistence, I practiced drawing it half a dozen times; it came out of the holster and into a two-handed grip so slick that I impressed Sparky and scared myself.
After we loaded Panthea’s luggage and her locked ammunition case in the cargo hold of the Explorer, she sat in back with Sparky, Winston between them. Bridget drove, and I sat up front. The moon goddess said, “I’m feeling we should backtrack federal to federal to I-10 eastbound,” and I agreed, and Panthea said, “Then do it.”
“Stay sharp but guard against panic,” Sparky warned. “The ISA might not know for sure we came to Peptoe, might be here on a hunch. Even those bastards aren’t likely to use a ghost drone to incinerate every car that’s out and about.”
The fact that he felt compelled to credit the ISA with a capacity for restraint meant that he wasn’t convinced they had any.
No one spoke for maybe ten miles, silenced by the increasing strangeness of our situation. I had been telling myself that we were forming a kind of family, bonded not by blood but by the shared mystery of our circumstances, by mutual respect and affection and necessity. Now it seemed that before we could be a family, we would be a posse, four spiritual heirs of Professor Van Helsing, chasing down Nihilim as the professor had chased down Dracula. A posse was not a bad thing to be if it was righteous and its quarry was evil. Peril and stress and a sense of purpose could inspire an affinity among the members of a posse. Maybe even an enduring sense of family would grow from that. Of course, a posse in pursuit of murderers was itself a collection of targets; and the dead don’t tend to celebrate Thanksgiving with their kin.
The gravel road was a bit slushy but passable. The old federal highway flooded in the lower swales, the pools shallow enough that we could negotiate them, pale wings of water flaring on both sides of the Explorer. In the flashes of lightning, the lonely landscape appeared to be a ghastly vista of wet soot and ashes, and the windshield wipers thumped like the drums in a funeral cortege.
For Bridget, perhaps the storm and the silence were oppressive. Although she couldn’t put an end to the former, she chose to break the latter. “Quinn having no knowledge of his origins, my background being mysterious in its own way—I thought that might be a pattern. But you, Panthea, have a family.”
“Yes and no. I’m a Ching by adoption. My parents were told my birth mother, born and raised in Tucson, was fifteen when she had me, and she refused to identify the boy who was the father—perhaps because there was no boy.”