Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(45)

Yin did not necessarily see eye to eye with yang. Sometimes the twinned pairs struggled through terrible conflicts.

Then there was nothing pretty about life. It became a fight for survival, a bone-breaking bitch-slap of a brawl.

She should know.

Just look at how sick to death she and the Deceiver were of each other.

Chapter Sixteen

IT TOOK MICHAEL another forty-five minutes before he was confident the stolen boat’s engine would not only start on the first attempt, but also take more punishment on the water. He kept barrels of gas stored in a shed at one side of the small bay, and after he finished tinkering, he topped off the tank.

He wished he had his own boat at hand. His was a sleek cigarette boat, a drug runner’s wet dream. Like a good thoroughbred, it was a little flashy and, at roughly one-point-five mil, worth the price for its speed. Now that boat sat useless, moored at Charlevoix.

This boat was an older model, built in the late seventies with a clunky hull design and lots of dated wood paneling, but its owner had lavished a lot of care on it.

Now hopefully he and the others would reap the benefits of that devotion. After a rough night, it was battered and the worse for wear, but the hull was not taking on water and the engine was still good to go. None of them were as young or as resilient as they used to be, boats included.

Most important, very much most important, the cruiser was here and useable.

Of course if Astra had her way, she would take to the Lake in her little bark canoe and hand-carved paddle. She would never set foot on one of these newfangled, motored contraptions if she had a choice.

He shook his head with a snort. She must have experienced some powerful motivation to step onto the boat’s deck, let alone to pick a fight with him right after she had put Mary to bed.

He closed up the engine, and stretched. His tired joints popped.

He could run five miles in ten minutes, twenty-six miles in under fifty and swim almost a mile underwater with a single breath. By the time he had turned seventeen, he had reached expert levels in half a dozen forms of martial arts and adapted them to his peculiar abilities, among them karate, tae kwon do and the different forms of jujitsu, including judo and the aikido “way of harmony” with its Zen principles.

He had mastery over a variety of weapons, a two-handed broadsword, a katana, a bamboo pole and a rapier. He had yet to find a motor he couldn’t hot-wire, could slip past the most sophisticated electronic firewalls and knew to a fine point the relative merits of a Glock versus a Mauser or a Walther. He could sever the stem of a maple leaf at a hundred yards with a crossbow bolt, and could either construct or dismantle explosive devices within seconds.

It’s what he did.

He didn’t figure out women. He especially didn’t figure out shriveled-up, mischievous, horrible, cranky, old, contrary women. That’s not what he did.

Astra was dangerous as only an entity thousands of years old could be. She was one of the most dangerous entities on Earth. He had known it since he was a child. He had come to understand it more as he had grown older, or at least he had come to understand it as much as he was able.

Creatures that were so old simply thought a different way. They had different priorities that arose from different perspectives. As Astra said, human lifetimes seemed to go by in an eyeblink. It was very easy to look at such fleeting lifetimes as disposable commodities.

Both Astra and the Deceiver had retained something or had aged into something—he wasn’t sure which—that aped humanlike behavior but could commit a shattering act on an instant, for reasons that no other creature could comprehend. He compared it to a family dog that might behave in a loving, predictable manner for years, but then one day without warning, it might savage a baby in its crib.

For example, Astra had charged onto the boat and provoked him into a recreational spat. Then she had lectured him to make peace with the world, kumbaya, yadda yadda yadda. All of that was decent enough advice as far as it went.

Then, like a cloud passing over the sun, her energy underwent a subtle change.

His instinct for danger was one of the few things in the universe that he trusted implicitly. That instinct was honed finer than the most delicate butterfly’s antenna. When Astra’s energy changed, he knew that he was closer to death by her hand than he had been in over twenty-five years.

A few moments later, just as inexplicably, the cloud passed. She reverted back to the harmless, careworn and eccentric old biddy she enjoyed pretending she was.

He and Mary had their shards of ancient memories and subterranean motivations, yet they were entirely different creatures than either Astra or the Deceiver. He and Mary had become far more humanlike. They might do something bewildering, to both themselves and to others, but he didn’t think it would be on such a dramatic scale.

He grunted and rubbed the back of his stiff neck with a callused hand.

Here was some irony:

As he had grown to adulthood, the only person who had felt real to him had held his life in iron jaws poised to snap shut and send him into oblivion.

Astra railed at him for locking himself inside his fortress and holding the world at a distance, but she bore the responsibility for having the most influence on him in recent lifetimes.

She valued his warrior energy as a useful weapon. She squandered a fortune of time and money on his training. Then she became alarmed when that weapon turned razorsharp and dangerous.

Not that he was complaining. Growing up with Astra as an adversary and teacher had brought him to the peak of his abilities. Learning how to survive in the teeth of those iron jaws had heightened his instinct for danger to an exquisite sensitivity.