Falling Light (Game of Shadows #2)(47)

Then there was the car bombing and shoot-out at the Petoskey municipal marina, in which several people, including some members of the local police force, were killed. Survivors described how a small blond woman fitting Mary’s description drew a weapon and fired on two police officers down by the dock.

Mary’s purse, along with her identification, had been found on the scene. The FBI had instigated a nationwide manhunt for her, along with her male companion. Very accurate sketches of both him and Mary had been shared with the public.

He sighed. That damn purse. He had to rub his eyes before he could resume reading.

No official database or news agency carried any information on the battle at Wolf Lake, or the twenty bodies left strewn throughout the clearing and surrounding forest. That carnage might not have been discovered yet. The cabin was, after all, in a remote location.

More likely, Michael thought, the Deceiver had sent in a crew to clean up the mess, not because he was in the habit of cleaning up his own messes but because something might have been left behind at the scene that could inconvenience him later. The Deceiver might also have hoped to discover that Michael had screwed up and left evidence behind of where he and Mary were headed.

Dream on, he thought, picturing the last face he had seen his opponent wear. Dream the f**k on.

At last he leaned back and rocked in his leather chair, his sightless gaze fixed on the wall behind his computer screen. Close to sixty people had been slaughtered in the last few days. Some of their names and their smiling faces, from published photos, lingered in his mind.

Sixty people.

Collateral damage, modern war professionals called it.

Chump change, considering the panoramic glut of WWII, when the Deceiver had run amok with a pack of human-born monsters.

Sixty people were a drop in a bucket, compared with the World Trade Center, the desecration of Afghanistan, Iraq or any of the monstrosities that had mowed down millions of people in Germany, Russia, Cambodia, China, Tibet and Africa.

The last century had been the century of mass murder. It was the Deceiver’s century. This world had become riddled with people who had looked into the Deceiver’s eyes and lost their souls, puppets that sat in powerful places and committed his atrocities while they pretended to their families and the rest of the world that they still lived.

Sixty people didn’t sound like much, stacked up against that kind of past, the entire unimaginable, crushing weight of the Deceiver’s dead.

It might take someone with the sensitivity of a butterfly’s antenna to hear in the stories of those sixty people the soft-building crescendo of six thousand years of hatred.

But he heard it.

He rubbed at his tired eyes. His thoughts switched to Mary.

I don’t ever want to shoot a gun again, she had said, her eyes dark with remembered horror. After craving to find her for such a crushing long time, he had suddenly become wild to get away from her.

Not because he didn’t understand, but because he did.

Each bullet took a life, and each life was a world, and Mary was a healer. She flung everything she had at each world in an attempt to save it. He knew that. He remembered that much.

But the Deceiver sat upon a mountain of bodies so high it reached the sky. If each life was a world, he was the destroyer of a cosmos. Now he was poised to slide onto the modern-day international stage in yet another grab for power. He was an addict who would do anything to get his fix. Unchecked, he would turn the earth into a charnel house.

Once long ago, Michael had been a military general in a society far removed from modern Western thought. That society had understood the essential energy of action and existence, that which flowed behind the physical realm. To bring the understanding of the Tao onto the battlefield had been to raise warfare to an art.

He had written, If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

It was essential to recognize the truth of what lay behind the mask of a face, the truth of the forces that moved behind nature. Know your enemy, he had warned that long-ago people. The one who wages this war will never tire. He will always deceive.

Michael’s reason for being, his entire ageless passion, had forged into a singular purpose, and that was to bring that destroyer down.

So he fought to save innocent worlds from dying, just as Mary did in her own way. But his skill was in violence, which bore its own cost.

He needed to know Mary existed. He hungered for her healing energy, for both the wounds he created and the wounds he sustained.

But he would either win this battle by violence or die by violence. He wouldn’t stop. Not ever. Not even for the horror in her eyes as she looked at what he was, and all because each life was a world.

Irony:

Make peace, Astra said, when she of all people should have remembered.

That’s not what he did.

Chapter Seventeen

FOR A WHILE, Mary floated in a soft darkness without dreaming.

Then she remembered that something slippery had happened, something subtle and lightning quick, and a thin, silver thread formed in front of her. In some deeply recessed part of herself, she knew the silver thread was part of a much larger tapestry than she could comprehend. It was a single shining piece in a measureless web.

Everything is connected, she realized. Everything touches something else.

When she discovered the thread, she also rediscovered curiosity. The thread widened to become a silver path, and she stepped onto it. She walked where it led her. The path was cool, quiet and filled with moonlight.