had thought, it wasn’t Haeckel. When I told Church this via commlink he ordered me to scan the man’s fingerprints.
They matched Haeckel.
No one had figured that out yet.
Shortly after that the Brits arrived and we headed back to the states with what records we had, with SAM, and with Carteret. The remaining six tiger-hounds were gunned down by soldiers from the
Everyone else at the Hive was dead.
It had been terrible indeed.
“It was bad,” I said.
“There are so many monsters… and we keep hunting them down.” She laid her cheek against mine. “What if we can’t beat them this time?”
“We will.”
“What if we can’t? What if we fail?” Her voice was small in the semi-darkness. “What if we fall?”
“If you fall, I’ll be there to pick you up. If I fall, you’ll be there for me. That’s the way this works.”
“And if we both fall?”
“Then someone else will have to step in and step up.”
She was silent a long time. It was a pointless conversation and we both knew it. The kind of convoluted puzzle that the mind plays with in the dark, when pretenses and defenses are down. There was no one else on earth with whom Grace Courtland could ever have had this conversation. Same with me. There are some things too deep, too personal, to even share with Rudy.
I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her tight.
“One way or another, Grace,” I said, “we’ll get through it. With what we got from Carteret and the files we brought back from the Hive, Bug thinks that he’ll crack this in no time. Maybe even by morning. And then we’ll strap on the tarnished armor, take up our battered old broadswords, give a hearty ‘tallyho’ and head off to slay some dragons.”
“Monsters,” she corrected.
“Monsters,” I agreed.
We lay there on the slanting mattress, the sweat of passion cooling on our naked skin, and listened to the sound of our breathing becoming slower and slower. I reached over and pulled the plug on the lamp and we were instantly cocooned in velvety darkness. We lay like that for a long time. I thought Grace had drifted off to sleep when she whispered to me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I turned my head toward her even though she was invisible in the darkness. “Sorry? For what?”
She didn’t answer at first. Then, “I love you, Joe.”
Before I could answer her hand found my mouth and she pressed a finger to my lips.
“Please,” she said, “please don’t say anything.”
But I did say something.
I said, “I love you, Grace.”
We said nothing else. The meaning and the price of those words were too apparent, and they filled the darkness around us and the darkness in our hearts. The battlefield is no place to fall in love. It makes you vulnerable; it tilts back your head and bares your throat. It didn’t need to be said.
I just hoped-perhaps prayed-that the monsters didn’t hear our whispered words.
Chapter Ninety-Three
The Dragon Factory
Monday, August 30, 5:02 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 58 minutes E.S.T.
Hecate and Paris lay entwined on the bed they had shared for ten years. The young black woman they had enjoyed lay between them, her chocolate skin in luxuriant contrast to the milky whiteness of theirs. The woman lay with her head on Paris’s arm, but she faced Hecate and her dark hand rested on Hecate’s flawless flat stomach.
Paris and the girl were asleep, but Hecate lay awake long into the night. Her blue eyes were open, fixed on the infinity of stars that she could see through the wide glass dome above their bed. The endless rolling of the waves on the beach outside was like the steady breathing of the slumbering world. In this moment Hecate was at peace. Her needs met, her appetites satiated, her furies calmed.
Except for one thing. Except for a small niggling item that was like a splinter in her mind.
Six hours ago she had finally let Paris talk her into inviting Alpha to the Dragon Factory. The conversation had been brief. He had sounded so happy, so flattered that they were inviting him, and he accepted their conditions without reservations because they were small: the windows of the jet would be blacked out. She teased Alpha, saying that he had taught them to always be careful and she was being careful. Alpha agreed to everything.
Too easily.
“He knows,” Hecate said to Paris after the call was ended.
“He doesn’t know,” insisted Paris. “He
“He knows.”
“No way. If he knew, then he’d never agree to come here, never allow himself to be that much in our power.”
“He knows.”
“No, sweetie. Alpha doesn’t know a damn thing. But he will once he gets here. I can promise you that.”
That had been the end of it. Hecate had to accept that Paris was too much of an idiot to recognize the subtle brilliance that made Alpha who and what he was. Not that she knew exactly who and what Alpha was-but she grasped the essence of their father in a way that her brother seemed incapable of managing.
“He knows,” she murmured to the infinite stars.
Yet he was coming all the same.
Chapter Ninety-Four
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Monday, August 30, 5:03 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 57 minutes
Eighty-two sat in the dark and looked out at the black water of the harbor. He’d never been in Baltimore before. Except for the Deck, he’d never been anywhere in the United States before. He felt strange. Lonely and scared, and alien.
Everyone here had treated him well. His nose was tended to, he was clean and dressed in new clothes: jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt with the logo of a baseball team. They even let him keep his rock. He’d been allowed to eat whatever he wanted. He’d had pizza for the first time in his life, but he wasn’t sure if he liked it. They gave him a bedroom that had a TV with cable. He was allowed to watch whatever he wanted.
But he knew that he was a prisoner. No one had used the word, but what other word was there? Before they let him go to his new room they’d taken his fingerprints and samples of hair and blood and swabs from inside his cheek. They asked him to pee in a cup. It wasn’t all that different from what the scientists at the Hive did, though these people smiled more and said “please” and “thank you.” But they weren’t really asking his permission to do their tests.
