the twining black electrical cables as handholds. He was nearly to the first panel-like metal plate below him when a distant roar sounded from far off in the bowels of the facility.
Terror seized Rook.
His eyes grew large and his body broke out in a sweat. His heart was thumping in his chest. He started hyperventilating, pulling in huge gulps of the dry air. Instead of climbing further down the metal leg of the cage toward the floor far below him, Rook gripped the cables tighter. His hands clutched the cables so tightly that blood ceased to flow through them. His knuckles turned a pasty white color. He was afraid to stay in place and he was afraid to move.
Suddenly, as quickly as the fear had beset him, Rook felt it begin to fade. His heart rate began to slow and he looked around the cavernous space in shock and wonder. He blinked a few times. Besides the creature on the railing, no one (and nothing) was in sight. He had no idea why he had temporarily been so scared of the distant howling sound. It was almost like a wolf’s howl at the moonlight, but stronger.
Not a wolf.
He felt less and less afraid with each passing moment. The creature remained on the railing above him, unmoving. His breathing under control again, Rook resumed his descent down the curved metal beam. The number of metal plates, protuberances and twisting cables made climbing easy. When he reached the half-way point, he glanced back up at the white creature on the catwalk.
It hadn’t moved.
He continued to climb toward the safety of the floor, seventy feet down. When he was no more than fifty feet off the ground, he glanced up again. What he saw almost made him fall.
“Sweet fuck-a-doodle-doo!” The creature’s face was inches from his own. Somehow the creature had leapt to the strut and descended over a hundred feet in the few seconds since Rook had last looked up at it. And it had come down the strut headfirst and in complete silence!
Rook’s heart jackhammered. He gripped his handhold tighter with his left hand, preparing to release his right. He wasn’t sure how much damage he could do with one bare hand, while hanging fifty feet off the ground, but he was ready to give it a go. He pulled his arm back to fire a punch at the beast’s snout, but a voice held his shoulder in check.
“I wouldn’t do that, Stanislav. The dire wolf will not hurt you unless I tell it to. Or unless you attack it.”
Rook kept his fist cocked back, but craned his neck around to the floor, where Eirek Fossen stood wearing a white lab coat. He was over six feet tall with short dark hair and brown eyes and a wide face. Broad and imposing, the man also held a small black pistol. Rook couldn’t be sure from his height above Fossen, but it might have been a Walther PP, the precursor to the famous pistol used by Ian Fleming’s infamous spy. This was the man Rook had allied himself with to fight the monster Edmund Kiss had become. Fossen raised his arm, aiming the weapon at Rook.
The alliance was most definitely over.
“I should have let Kiss eat your face off.”
“I could say the same, Stanislav. Now come down, and do so slowly.”
THIRTY-ONE
Exxon Building, New York, NY
Jack Sigler, the man known as King in the field, felt fine.
Not fine. Fantastic.
He wondered if he had ever felt better. The light from the portal glowed and beautifully. He breathed in deeply and relished the taste of the air. He knew it would be even better if he took the helmet off.
He unfastened the clasps at his neck and lifted it up off his head. He didn’t carefully place the helmet on the ground-he just let it fall from his fingers. The helmet thumped with a dull sound when it hit the carpeted hallway floor, but King paid it no mind, because now he could hear the portal as well as see it.
And it sang to him.
He smiled broadly. This must be what it’s like for Fiona when she hears the mother tongue. His foster daughter was unique in her ability to see and hear the protolanguage of the world in paintings and sculptures, in music and in nature. She had used that ability to help Chess Team and save mankind on more than one occasion. But such important thoughts couldn’t find a hold on the slippery surface of King’s mind, lost in ecstasy as it was. Instead, he let thoughts of the team and the world fall away, like small bits of paper caught in a breeze.
It’s so beautiful.
King inhaled the air deeply, smelling lush fragrance and clean mountain air all in one breath. That he stood in a sterile air-conditioned corridor in a modern building seemed a faraway notion, and because it ran counter to how good the air smelled and tasted, he let that idea go too. It fluttered away just as his worries had. In Chicago the light had been bright, glaring and full of electric danger. Now it shimmered with a luster he felt soothing and exciting all at the same time. He felt calm and in control for the first time in his life. He felt both purpose and the complete lack for a need of purpose. He just was.
King smiled again at the strange wall of light in front of his face.
He glanced around him and saw three of the dire wolves moving slowly around his body, looking both at him and down the corridor behind him. He didn’t really care what they were looking at. They didn’t frighten him at all, and he felt no animosity toward the creatures. He reached out his hand to touch the skin of one and found he couldn’t feel it because of his glove. He pulled his hand back and removed the glove with the other hand, then reached back out to stroke the dire wolf’s chest with his naked fingers.
They are so soft! The creature had a very fine downy hair on its body, almost invisible to the human eye, like the fuzz on a ripe peach. Like the feeling of a high-end stuffed animal.
King ran his hand over the dire wolf’s chest and the creature simply stood there allowing it. The eye facing King warbled in the orb on the side of its head, regarding him carefully. King wasn’t frightened of the creature at all now. Instead, he felt affection akin to love for the beast.
But somewhere small at the back of his mind was a tiny voice screaming that this whole situation was wrong. King ignored the voice and moved forward, placing his cheek against the dire wolf’s shoulder. He rubbed the soft down against his face.
“You’re nice,” he spoke aloud and the dreamy quality of his voice made him giggle.
The dire wolf moved away from him and another came closer, sniffing at him. He liked this new one even better. Friendly. Fiona would like him.
But this second thought of Fiona gave power to the insistent, niggling voice at the back of his brain.
No. She wouldn’t. No! This is wrong.
“Go away,” he told the voice, and it died a quiet death in his subconscious. The dire wolf didn’t move away from him.
He knows I’m not talking to him. Or is it an it? I didn’t see any naughty bits.
King assessed the beast again, but came away from the glance only feeling better, if that was possible. His thought of determining its gender, if any, was swept away, as if a glorious breeze had just rushed by him, carrying scents of his favorite foods, the sea after a storm and gentle winds from an almost artificially green Alpine valley he had once visited in Switzerland.
This place is so good. I should bring Sara here. He grinned a huge grin.
No. The quiet voice returned. You have to keep them safe.
His grin faltered as images of cities being devoured by globes of devastating lightning-hurling energy filled his mind. But the pretty King tightly squeezed his eyes shut, blocking out the glistening wall of the portal in front of him. No longer looking at the soft, friendly dire wolves. The images were still in his head though. The horror of people killed and cities scooped out of the ground by a cosmic event unlike anything before it.
You have to keep them safe.
Thoughts of his girlfriend, adopted daughter, team members and friends like George Pierce filled his mind. His memories of them made resisting the euphoria that much easier. There was a nuclear weapon in a satchel at his ankles, and he remembered what he was supposed to do with it. But it was hard, so very hard. Fighting against
