And then, despite the agony, Sigurd chuckled hoarsely when he realised what had happened. All along, the room had been empty; he had been shooting at mere projections, materialised from another place.
‘So Parvati,’ he whispered to the disappearing ghost, ‘after all these years, your once-lost powers are finally starting to return. Well, now I have even more reason to find you, and to snatch you from the Rebels. And once I have you, I will extract what is inside of you, like squeezing juice from a ripe orange. If you are crushed, pulverised to mere pulp in the process … so be it.’
As the last traces of the apparitions vanished, Sigurd heard shouts and frantic footsteps coming up the stairs. With a groan he heaved himself up onto his hands and knees, and on shaking, pain-crippled limbs he crawled over to where he had dropped his Desert Eagle. He picked up the pistol and with burn-blistered fingers he pulled a fresh clip of ammunition from his jacket and slammed it into the firearm. As the footsteps and shouts drew nearer, he dragged himself over to where the elevator door was lying, and this he grabbed with his left hand, pulling it over his body while propping his back up against the wall so that only his head and shoulders were peeking out from behind the improvised shield. Two police officers then ran into the room, their guns drawn and their flashlights cutting like car headlamps through the gloom.
‘Jesus Christ,’ the first, a chubby young East Asian officer with a square chin and a thick goatee, shouted. ‘Smells like a fuckin’ cookout in here!’
The second cop, a stocky middle-aged woman with a shock of bright ginger hair, saw Sigurd hiding behind his door-shield, and immediately she aimed her pistol at him.
‘You! Hands where I can see ‘em! Do it now!’ she shouted harshly.
Sigurd grinned with savage delight, and then rapidly raised his Desert Eagle and fired. The shot took her head clean off her shoulders, and her decapitated body toppled backwards through the doorway, stumbling and jerking before it collapsed into a bloody heap in the corridor. The other cop stared with fear-wide eyes at the gruesome sight, paralysed with shock. Sigurd broadened his smile, and then shot him as well.
The first bullet tore a football-sized hole in the man’s chest and flung him against the wall, as if he had been kicked by a mule. The second shot blasted through his stomach, eviscerating him and doing almost enough damage to almost detach his torso from his legs. Sigurd threw the door off of his body – which was badly blistered and still smoking from the lightning strike – and then stood up. Without even as much as a glance at the two people he had just murdered, he limped out of the room, already running plans and strategies through his head.
He would capture Parvati and extract the knowledge and power that had been hidden in her brain from her. He would do it. He had to.
Whistling an old Viking rowing song, he walked casually down the stairs, descending into the shadows … ever into the shadows.
54
LIGHTNING BIRD
12th October 2020. Albany, USA
Lightning Bird felt himself falling, accelerating with wild speed through an abyss lined with streaks of light and colour, filled with mere abstractions of ideas, of thoughts and of imagined things; a vortex of preconsciousness in which he had no control.
But she did, somehow.
And then, through the giddying swirl of crazed lights and colours there was something solid, something stable: his own body, suspended in space, still and unmoving as a corpse. Now he – his soul, the flame of consciousness that was the purest essence of him, disembodied – was cannoning toward it with the speed of whip-cracking broken barriers of sound.
With a jarring jolt he was back, and air came flooding into his lungs like ocean water surging through a breech in a deep hull. Blood, slow and cool, began to move again through his veins. Painful pins and needles gnawed their agony through every one of his extremities, while a powerful nausea surged from the pit of his stomach up his throat, causing him to involuntarily spew the contents of his stomach all over the floor.
Despite his immense discomfort though, his immediate thoughts were with her: Parvati. Swaying groggily in his chair – a heavily stained, rat-eaten easy chair from a long-lost decade – he spun around to see if she was all right. Jun was sitting next to her, holding one of her claw-like hands, and the diminutive teenager’s usually expressionless face was twisted into a scrunch of consternation.
‘What just happened?’ Jun asked. ‘It looked like … like you two died for a few seconds.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Lightning Bird croaked. There was far too much to explain, and he had neither the time nor the energy to do this now. ‘We’re fine.’
Jun turned his attention back to Parvati, and it was clear that he wasn’t convinced that she was okay. Usually, for anyone but Lightning Bird it would have been impossible to tell just how Parvati was feeling; whether she was caught up in effervescent elation or entombed in the ice of a raging blizzard of depression, to an outsider there would have been no discernible sign of either. Her face was permanently frozen in a half-grimace – the same static half-grimace that she had worn for decades, ever since near-death at the hands of the Huntsmen. Jun, however, seemed to possess a rare intuition; the moment the boy had first laid eyes on Parvati, something deep inside him had clicked, and he had been drawn to her by an irresistible force. Some sort of unspoken link had been forged between the two of them, a bond that
