Out of Mind

yellowish coat—a shell. Willow was disappearing inside one of their eggs.

“I win,” Vanity cried. “I will take her egg to Zibock as a gift.”

Rock mumbled from the floor, making no sense.

Soaring, her bat wings flapping, Vanity said, “I will tell him to eat her and live forever.”

“You don’t know that works,” Rock said indistinctly between drooling lips.

“But we must try,” she told him, emitting high-pitched clicking noises.

The shell grew larger, overtaking Willow, who lay on her side, fighting with the gluey substance that bound her.

“It will suffocate her,” Vanity trilled gleefully. “She is not like one of us. She cannot live without air as we do when we’re young.”

Stretching one arm as far as it would go, Ben thrust it behind the bar he had bent. Vanity flew at him, her teeth bared. She came too fast and he caught her low belly, concentrated all his energy there, and smoke rose.

His smoldering touch impaled her, and she flapped helplessly, thrashing her head, wailing.

The shell had reached Willow’s shoulders. He could see her punching weakly over her head.

Leaping against the cage, he rammed the soles of his shoes into the door and strained, dragging at the bar until he felt it yield more.

“Willow,” he shouted. “Stay with me.”

Just barely he reached the key and unlocked the cage. Aware of the bat’s mewling and flopping, he had no time to consider another attack from that direction.

The egg came together at its narrower end.

“No!” Ben threw himself across the space, hauled the egg toward him and saw a space no bigger than a quarter. “No!”

With all his might he jammed a forefinger through the hole and tore away a chunk of gummy shell. Hard on the outside, it was still soft and sticky inside.

Crazed with fear, he stripped away piece after piece of shell. The viscous matter adhered to the inside, forming the actual egg, and toward the other end it had started to turn opaque.

He dragged at the stuff that still covered her head, scooped it away from her nose and mouth, panting, aware of choking on his own breath.

Sykes joined him and went to work helping clear Willow’s eyes and rake at her face and hair. The other man’s ragged breathing, his desperation, joined Ben’s.

Willow’s eyes were closed and she didn’t move.

Pushing Sykes away, Ben turned her onto her back and brought his mouth down over hers, puffing into her mouth and turning his head to watch her chest.

“Ben,” she whispered. “I’m not dead.”

He caught her up in his arms and shook her, kissed her and shook her, not caring what still clung to her skin. It was already drying and falling away.

Sykes cried out. Vanity found enough energy to land on his back and reach for his ear with one claw.

“You are dead,” Pascal thundered. Holding a bundle of metal orchid stakes, he cannoned inside the cage, raising a single stake in his right hand. He used it to hook Vanity from Sykes’s back and pin her by one wing to the back wall, like an ugly butterfly on a board.

Straining, striking out with the still-free wing, Vanity’s bat tried to snare Pascal, but he moved with incredible speed, piercing the second wing with another stake and jamming it to the wall. For good measure he sent several more stakes after the first two.

“Don’t kill it,” Sykes said. “We need its secrets.”

Pascal cast a pitying glance at his nephew. “Naturally.”

John in his lobster incarnation settled his tiny eyes on Willow, and he made sinuous movements in her direction, only to be met by Chris and Fabio, who threw themselves at his body and climbed him as if he were a rope. They made it to the head where they drove their fingers into those nasty little eyes.

The creature staggered back and forth, its body undulating in outrageous angles before it fell and the entire group of naked humans climbed on top to hold the thing down.

More footsteps pounded toward the conservatory. As Ben expected, Nat, Bucky Fist and Gray ran in while uniformed cops ground to a halt outside.

Ben wouldn’t let Willow go. He held her and watched for the moment when he would have no choice but to join the melee. Sykes snagged a stake from Pascal and the two of them fell to stabbing the still-writhing Rock.

Nat, Bucky and Gray flew into the middle of everything, and Ben almost laughed at the sight of Bucky slamming handcuffs on Rock’s talons, talons that withered before the eye. When the talons disappeared altogether, the handcuffs proved just as helpful since they were securely attached to Rock’s wrists.

He convulsed, and the horrible creature that was the real Rock rolled on his back and lay still while he was bound. “I need eggs,” he whispered.

Ben turned to the Vanity-bat attached to the wall inside the birdcage. It heaved and swelled, first in one direction, then another, like some deep-sea jelly creature blobbing along the bottom. Pascal kept watch while Nat stalked closer to the cage.

“Bolivar didn’t get away until after he was arrested.”

Ben recognized Gray’s voice, Gray who had been there when Bolivar was arrested, as Ben had not.

“We can try to do better this time,” Ben told Gray. “Bring that sack now.”

Snatching up a burlap sack, Sykes entered the cage neck and neck with Gray. Together with Pascal they covered Vanity with the sack and worked her free of the wall while leaving the stakes through her wings. She fell heavily into the bottom of the sack. Lumps and bumps poked at the inside as she struggled to get free. Ben and Pascal slapped lengths of duct tape around the sack until it was completely covered.

“That’s him,” the woman with Chris cried out. She pointed at John who was transforming back to his elegantly dressed form. Already his blond hair had appeared. “He’s the one who did it to me. He put me in a champagne glass, then in a bottle and left me there.”

As if struck, John grew completely still. Then, first blurring and melting, he changed shape, growing shorter, stockier and eventually, becoming Val Brandt.

Ben stared, but it was Willow who confronted the man. “You were with them all along. You helped lure me to your house. Was Chloe one of you, too?”

Val laughed. “Poor, weak Chloe. She never knew that I took over her Val’s body.”

Chapter 37

Rays of golden sunshine penetrated the Court of Angels.

The Millets, Marley and Gray Fisher and the Fortunes gathered near the fountain—all but Poppy Fortune, who had left New Orleans the night before, headed for her parents’ retreat house in California.

Ben kept Willow close to his side. “I want to get out of here,” he murmured to her.

Her immediate smile was all the response he needed.

“We’ve got one or two things to get through first,” Sykes said, smirking.

“We all know about your out-of-this-world hearing,” Willow told him. “But you do have to compete with Ben all the time, don’t you? It’s pointless because…well, it’s pointless is all.”

“Pointless,” Ben echoed, squeezing her shoulders.

The smirk on Sykes’s face didn’t waver.

“That’s enough, children,” Pascal said, but he looked pleased with himself. “This is serious. No horsing around.”

“How sure are we that Nat has those three in custody?” Gray asked.

A pause settled in. After taking time only to shower and change, most of them were exhausted, if relieved, but they knew what stretched ahead and it wasn’t pretty.