Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(92)

“Join me in a glass of Giacomo Conterno. Since your last visit, I’ve been doing some rooting around in my collections.”

“There’s no time for wine or chitchat,” Constance said.

“My, my, you do seem a trifle overexcited.”

“You lied to me.”

“I never lied to you.”

Constance cut her off with a gesture. “At the very least, you left out something important. Something Ellerby did.”

Instead of answering, Miss Frost raised her glass. But her hand was trembling so much that she put the glass down without sipping.

“I’ve seen the machine,” Constance continued. “In use. Both at the first setting…and the second. No doubt you saw that yourself when you surprised Ellerby in the basement. But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

Hearing this, Frost remained silent.

In an instant, Constance stood over the proprietress. “No excuses,” she said. “No remonstrances. You’re too old for those to matter, anyway…Miss Rime.”

Hearing herself addressed by her true name, Frost’s pallid eyes widened.

“You robbed an old man of his life’s work. And now you’ve let Ellerby turn his invention into a nightmare. Intentional or not, you still have to answer for it. So you will tell me what you’ve been withholding…beginning with whether Ellerby experimented with any settings past those marked on the dial.”

The world-weary fa?ade dropped from Frost’s face.

“The time for lying is past. Savannah’s on the verge of destruction—we saw it in the machine. Tell me everything you know, everything you suspect, now.”

“It’s the many-worlds hypothesis I mentioned,” Frost said immediately. “Patrick was greedy. He souped up the machine to see an hour ahead. But to do that, the portal has to traverse many more universes—some quite unlike ours. And the chance grows that the portal would not simply cross those worlds, but…intersect with them. Open a door to them.”

When she fell silent, Constance heard, filtering up from below, what sounded like shouts and screams: faint through the closed windows but distinctly audible. “Do you hear that?”

“Sounds like typical Savannah drunkenness,” said Frost.

“It isn’t. We’re out of time. Answer my question: if Ellerby pushed the machine farther than level two, what would happen?”

But even as Frost began to protest, a tremendous crash sounded outside. The eyes of the two women met. They both moved to the French doors overlooking Savannah. Constance flung them open and stepped out onto the balcony, stiletto in hand. A yellow light played over her face as she stared eastward, toward the sound of tumult and chaos. Frost stepped out on the balcony beside Constance. As the two gazed down across the city, Frost instinctively raised a hand to her mouth—but it did little to muffle the cry of horror that came involuntarily to her lips.





65



COMMANDER ALANNA DELAPLANE STOOD at the southern end of Forsyth Park, flanked by two lieutenants, observing the rally. So far it had gone off without a hitch. She could see the senator on his platform, high above the crowd, his voice booming out from the speaker towers. Behind him were two gigantic screens displaying and amplifying his speech as he stabbed the air with his finger and pumped his fist, the crowd roaring its approval and waving placards and flags.

Delaplane privately believed Drayton was a first-class jackass, one of those politicians who gave a lot of lip service to supporting law enforcement but, in fact, was always first to cut funding. But she’d never breathe a word of her personal views to her colleagues. Nobody knew her politics and that was just fine with her.

The protesters the senator had been worried about turned out to be half a dozen dispirited young people waving signs and shouting, unable to make their voices heard over the boom of the speakers and the roars of the crowd. She wondered how a guy like Drayton could generate a turnout this big and enthusiastic. There was something about him a certain type of person loved, it seemed. She just couldn’t see it.

Her radio hissed, then emitted a screech, followed by a torrent of unintelligible shouting.

“Officer,” she said, “take a deep breath and identify yourself.”

“Officer Warner, ten thirty-three! Got a…flying…a crazy thing flying…attacking…What the—?”

There was so much background noise the words disappeared into the roar. “What is the nature of your situation?” Delaplane yelled. The officer had sounded incoherent, panic-stricken.

There was a burst of static, and then the transmission was cut off.

Now the radios of all the cops around her were suddenly abuzz with hysterical chatter. As she tried to get through the jammed emergency frequency, she heard sirens to the east. And something else: a chorus of car alarms and faint screams.

She pressed transmit. “Dispatch, dispatch, Delaplane here. What’s going on?”

“Avondale, east Savannah, multiple reports of assaults. Something, uh, flying, assaulting people.”

“What are you talking about?”

As the dispatcher spoke—and none of it made any sense—Delaplane could hear a sound in the air, a clamor rolling in from the disturbance to the east and rapidly getting louder. She turned and looked over the tops of the oaks lining Drayton Street. Now she could see an orange light in the sky, and a rising column of smoke—a fire.