face. 'STOP IT, YOU LITTLE SHIT!'
The baby cried on. Mary almost choked on a scream of rage. How could she have been so stupid to believe that Lord Jack had written the message? To believe that he wanted her and the baby after all these years? To believe that he cared? No one cared. No one. She had stolen this child and blown her disguise, had put herself in mortal danger from the pigs of the Mindfuck State… and all for Edward Fordyce's traitorous book about the Storm Front.
She would deal with Edward before she left. She would make herself put a bullet between his eyes and dump his body in a garbage can. But right now there was the baby, crying his head off. Drummer, she thought, and she sneered. 'You want to cry?' She shook him. 'You want to cry?' Shook him harder. His crying became a shriek. 'Okay, I'll make you cry!'
She took him into the kitchenette, where the burner glowed fiercely red and its heat rose up in a shimmer. The baby was trembling, still wailing, legs trying to thrash. She didn't need the little bastard. Didn't need Lord Jack. Didn't need anyone. She would make Drummer stop crying, make him obey her, and then she'd leave what remained of him for the pigs and the woman named Laura Clayborne. Then she would go underground again, deep underground, where nothing and no one could touch her, and she would turn her back for the last time on the idiot's dream of love and hope.
'Cry!' she shouted. 'Cry! Cry!'
And she grasped the back of the baby's head and pressed his face toward the red burner.
In the dark, Laura listened. The boom of her heart and the roar of her breathing got in the way. Get out, she told herself. You don't belong here. You're a long way from home, and you've gone too far. If a burglar was ransacking Bedelia Morse's house, that was his business. But she didn't leave, and her fingers groped for a light switch. Her hand hit something that jingled merrily and made her jump a foot in the air. Another damned pottery mobile. She was making more noise than a marching band.
In another moment she found a light switch, and she turned it on.
A warm breath washed against her neck.
She spun around, to the right, and looked into the face of the man who was standing there. She opened her mouth to scream. A black-gloved hand rose up, fast as a cobra's head, and clamped her mouth shut before the scream could get out.
The baby's face was almost on the burner. He was still wailing, stubbornly, and Mary braced for the scream of agony.
A scream came.
'NO!'
Someone grabbed her from behind, shoving her and the baby away from the hot burner. 'No! Jesus, no!' A pair of hands winnowed in, trying to grasp Drummer. Mary slammed an elbow backward and heard a grunt of pain as it connected. A woman with red hair was fighting to take Drummer, and Mary didn't know her face. The woman was saying, 'Mary, don't! Don't, please don't!' Her hands grasped at the baby again, and Mary shoved the red- haired stranger back hard against the wall. This was her baby, to do with as she pleased. She had risked her life to have this child, and no one would take him away from her. The woman was fighting her for Drummer once more, the red-glowing burner behind them and the baby wailing. 'Listen to me! Listen!' the woman was pleading as she grabbed hold of Mary's shoulders and hung on. Mary looked at the woman's white throat, and she saw where she should punch into it to crush her windpipe. 'Don't hurt the baby! Please don't!' the woman said, still hanging on. 'Mary, look at me! It's Didi! It's Didi Morse!'
Didi Morse? Mary lifted her gaze from the vulnerable throat and stared into the woman's heavy-jowled, deeply lined face.
'No,' Mary said over Drummer's crying. 'No. Didi Morse was beautiful.'
'I had surgery. Remember what I told you? I had the plastic surgeon do it. Don't hurt the baby, Mary. Don't hurt Drummer.'
Plastic surgeon. Didi Morse, her face made ugly by a scalpel, silicone implants, and a hammer that had broken her nose. I had it done when I went underground, she'd told Mary and Edward. A surgeon who did work on a lot of people who wanted to disappear. Didi had actually paid to have herself made ugly, and the surgeon – who was part of the militant underground – had done the work in St. Louis. Didi Morse, still with green eyes and red hair but now drastically different. Pleading with her not to hurt Drummer.
'Hurt… Drummer?' Mary whispered. 'Hurt my baby?' Tears came to her eyes. She heard Drummer crying, but the sound didn't razor her brain anymore; it was a cry of innocent need, and Mary pressed Drummer against her and sobbed as she realized what her rage had been guiding her toward. 'Oh God, oh God, oh God,' she moaned as the baby trembled in her arms. 'I'm sick, Didi. I'm so sick.'
Didi switched off the stove's burner. Her collarbone was still throbbing from the collision with Mary's elbow, and Mary had almost broken her back against the wall. She said, 'Come on, let's sit down.' She wanted to get Mary away from the stove. Her sight of the woman about to mash the infant's face down on that burner had been a horror beyond belief. She grasped Mary's arm with a careful touch. 'Come on, sister.'
Mary allowed herself to be steered out of the kitchenette. Tears were streaming down her face, her lungs ratcheted by sobbing. 'I'm sick,' she repeated. 'Something's wrong with me, I get crazy. Oh God, I wouldn't hurt my sweet Drummer!' She hugged him close. His crying was starting to weaken. They were in Mary's room at the Cameo Motor Lodge. Didi and Mary had gone there after leaving Edward's at eight o'clock, and they'd shared a couple of bottles of wine and talked about the old days. Mary had folded down the sofa bed for Didi, and it was there that Didi had been sleeping when she'd heard Mary stalk out of the bedroom and go into the kitchenette. Then Mary had gone back for the crying baby, and the rest of what might have happened had been only narrowly averted.
Mary sat down in a chair and began to rock Drummer, the tears glistening on her face and her eyes red and swollen. Drummer was growing quiet, getting sleepy again. Didi sat on the rumpled sofa bed, her nerves still jangling.
'I love my baby,' Mary said. 'Can't you see I do?'
'Yes,' Didi answered. But what she saw was an insane woman with a stolen infant in her arms.
'Mine,' Mary whispered. She kissed his forehead and nuzzled his soft whorls of dark hair. 'He's mine. All mine.'
Sardonicus.
One side of the man's mouth was frozen open in a hideous rictus that showed teeth ground down to stubs. Like Sardonicus, Laura thought as the gloved hand clamped to her face. His cheek on the grinning side was caved in, his lower jaw crooked and jutting forward like a barracuda's underbite. He had black eyes, the one on the damaged hemisphere of his face sunken and glassy. A battlefield of scars streaked back from the corner of his grin across his collapsed cheek. In his throat there was a flesh-colored plug with a three-holed socket.
The sight was terrifying, but Laura had no time to be terrified. She struck out with the tire iron, the strength of desperation behind it, and hit him a glancing blow across the left shoulder. It was hard enough: the man staggered back, and he opened his ruined mouth and made a hissing sound of pain like a ruptured steam pipe.
At once he was on her again, reaching for her throat. Laura stepped back, giving herself room, and swung the tire iron once more. The man lifted his arm to ward off the blow; their forearms collided with a jolt that knocked numbness into Laura's hand, but it was the man who lost what he was holding. A small flashlight fell to the floor and rolled under the kitchen table.
He caught Laura's wrist, and they fought for the tire iron. The man was tall and sinewy, wearing a black outfit and a black woolen cap. His face was pallid, the color of the moon. He slammed Laura back against a counter, and pottery knickknacks clattered and fell. A knee came up, hitting Laura between the legs; the pain made her cry out, but she clenched her teeth and hung on to the tire iron. They careened across the kitchen, crashing into the table and throwing it over. The man grasped her chin with one hand and shoved her head back, trying to snap her neck. Laura clawed at his throat, digging furrows in his flesh. Her fingers found the plug, and she tore at it.
He retreated, clutching at his throat, the breath shrieking from his predator's grin. Laura advanced on him, her eyes wild. She lifted the tire iron for another blow, her intent to knock his brains out before he could kill her. He made a guttural growling sound that might have been rage, and he darted in before she could swing the tool. He trapped her arm, twisted his body, and lifted her off her feet, flinging her like a flour sack to the other side of the kitchen. She went down on her right shoulder, the air whooshing from her lungs as she slammed to the floor.
