Nothing.
He went back on the terrace, checked it quickly, and then returned to the west tower. Both elevators were on the bottom floor. He went up the stairs. His mouth was dry and he was gasping for air when he reached ten. His heart felt as though it was jumping out of his skin. The hallway was empty. He went to 10-A and rang the bell, then pounded on the door. He stepped back and smashed his foot into the door an inch or two from the knob.
The door opened halfway and hit something.
He went in and slammed it shut with his elbow.
The first thing he saw was a scorched pattern of tiny holes near the ceiling. Blood was splattered around the holes. The second pattern had chewed a piece out of the corner of the entrance hall where it led into the living room.
A small marble-topped table lay on its side, a vase of freshly cut flowers spilled out on the floor.
She lay beside the table. Her face was gone. Part of her shoulder was blown away. The right side of her head had been destroyed. She was a soggy, limp bundle, lying partly against the wall in front of the door, blood pumping from her head, her neck, her shoulder. A splash of blood on the wall dripped down to the body. Her hands lay awkwardly in her lap.
Sharky clenched his teeth, felt bile sour in his throat, and swallowed hard and cried out through his clenched tee&
‘No. Goddamnit, no!
‘No.’
‘No!
‘Go-o-od damn it.. . no!’
Chapter Twelve
It was another country, another world, a place ripped from the past and sown with the fantasies of a mastermind.
The gardens, a tiny paradise stitched with walkways and encompassing almost three acres, stunned the eye with colour. Purple, yellow, and fuchsia azaleas were in full bloom, surrounded by hundreds of small pink and red camellia blossoms. Beds of iris, their praying flowers streaked with lavender and pastel blue, lined the pathways and grottoes, and small lotus trees and lush green moss covered the cliffsides and stream-fed alcoves.
Only a chest-high fence which prohibited pedestrians from straying off the path tainted the landscaped beauty. There was good reason for the fence. At the far end of the garden, hidden from the bountiful and lush sprays of colour by a sixty-foot-high cliff, was an arroyo, a tortured place that split the cliff in half. It was foreboding, a stark and shocking sight compared to the beauty of the gardens. There were no flowers here. Steam rose from between the rocks. A chill breeze blew down through its crevices.
Halfway up the cliffside, almost hidden by red clay banks, boulders, and scattered foliage, was a dank and ominous cave.
Within its depths yellow eyes glittered evilly, accompanied by a sibilant warning, an intermittent hissing that sounded like air rushing from a giant punctured tyre. The creature lurking in the cavern was more sensed than seen. But its presence feathered the nerves.
One heard the other creature before seeing it, a half- growl, half-cry that drove icicles through the heart. A moment later it appeared, moving cautiously around the edge of the cliff, a towering myth, at once terrifying and majestic, like some primordial sauropod. It was a dragon, a golden dragon, each scale of its lutescent skin gleaming as it reared back on its hindlegs, stretching a full forty feet from its fiery mouth to the tip of its slashing, spiny tail. Green eyes flashed under hooded lids. Five ebony claws curled out from each padded foot. As it opened its fanged jaws a stream of fire roared from its mouth and rolled upward.
The dragon moved like a cat on the prowl, sensuously, slowly, sensing its prey nearby.
The yellow eyes inside the cave followed the dragon’s every move. It began to hiss again, a dangerous sound that reverberated off the cavern walls.
Then it moved. Slowly ft slithered from its hiding place and emerged, an enormous two-headed snake, its sinuous muscles sheathed in blood-red skin, the nostrils flat and piglike in its ugly snouts, its forked tongues flicking from two moist mouths as it slid up through the rocks seeking a vantage place high in the grim landscape.
It moved with chilling grace towards its adversary, eyeing the dragon through glistening black beads.
It began to coil, its thirty-foot body curling into a tight spiral. Then it struck, the vicious twin heads streaking from between the rocks, swooping down, its mouth yawning malevolently, then snapping shut, the fangs sinking deep into the neck of the dragon.
The dragon screamed in outrage and pain, twisted its head, and spat an inferno that engulfed the hissing serpent. The viper’s body surged forward, wrapping itself around the neck of the dragon while one of its two heads snapped back and struck again. The dragon’s shriek joined the hissing of the serpent. The two unearthly creatures were locked in a nightmare embrace.
High above them, from a soundproof booth overlooking the primeval battle, his face shimmering in the red glow of the flames below, DeLaroza looked like a vision from hell. The eerie reflection sutured his features with fleeting scars. His eyes flashed with joy and he clapped his hands together. He was, in that instant, an incarnation of the devil.
