Demon

Then an arm went around her neck and she was pulled up, on her back. She struggled for a moment but the arm tightened until she was nearly choking. She coughed up water, and relaxed. Chris pulled her strongly through the water toward the shore.

He got her to a rock in the middle of the stream where she could cling with her torso high and dry and not too much current tugging at her.

"Hang on!" he told her.

"Get him, Chris!" she shouted, hoarsely.

He was already away.

She pulled herself higher and looked over the top of the rock. The kidnapper was maybe a hundred feet ahead of Chris, and the gap was narrowing. But the water ahead was extremely rough.

A kind of frozen lethargy settled over her. She was exhausted, had been near death, and it was all she could do to hang onto the rock and watch events unfold before her eyes. They didn't seem to have much relation to her. She was able to wonder if the thief could make it through the rapids and keep Adam alive, but unable to co

She heard the Titanides crossing the bridge, making a sound like an avalanche. She turned, and saw Serpent pointing toward Chris, saw Rocky leap over the railing and float down, forelegs first, then hit with a splash that sent water fifty feet high. His head came up and he was swimming strongly as Serpent and Valiha went through the front door of Tuxedo Junction, not bothering to open it.

There were sounds of something crashing through the brush, and Robin turned in time to see Cirocco pounding along the edge of the river. She passed Robin's rock, passed Chris, reached a suitable place for take-off and leaped. Her body followed an almost flat trajectory and she was forty feet from shore before she hit the water.

And she didn't sink. She had arched her back and held her arms in a swept-back position, like a jetliner, and held her chin high as she hit, and she skipped twice, like a flat stone, then body-surfed another precious five feet before the water had her. She was thirty feet behind her objective and swimming strongly.

Robin found herself balanced on her knees, her fists tight and her teeth clenched, willing Cirocco onward. Dimly she was aware of the sounds of Valiha and Serpent diving into the water somewhere behind her, but her eyes never left the woman she would always think of as the Wizard. It looked like Cirocco would tear the bastard into tiny pieces when she got to him, and there was nothing in the world Robin wanted to see more than that.

She heard shouts behind her. A wide shadow swooped over her with breathtaking speed, then all she could see was the skimpy rear profile of an angel, twenty-foot wings at full extension, the tips skimming the water.

It folded its wings the tiniest bit, seemed to hesitate in its headlong rush. Then it snatched Adam with the effortless grace of an eagle hitting a steelhead. It soared up, converting forward momentum into altitude. At two hundred feet it began to flap its great wings, and in a little while it had vanished into the east.

ELEVEN

Luther had a Sight on the way to Tuxedo Junction. He knew it wasn't going to work out well for him. He thought Gaea might be goading him with this information. And sure enough, when he reached the high hill overlooking the lake, the tree, and the treehouse, he was just in time to see the ending.

The Sight was still with him. It didn't rely on his single eyeball; trees, walls, and distance were no hindrance to it. He could see Kali's troops in the house, the child playing alone in the room. He watched as the half-Titanide heathen raced up and down the stairs, saw Cirocco Jones come ru

For a moment he dared to hope, when the Demon dived into the water. Much as he hated Jones, he knew none of Kali's band was her match-nor, for that matter, were any of his own disciples. Nothing would please Luther more than to see the Demon rend Kali's slime-spawn into component parts. Then the child might be his...

He watched in disbelief as the angel swooped down.

"Angels!" he shrieked. "Angels! Wy God, wy God, why hast thou forsaken we?"

His disciples shuffled nervously beside him, anxious to go. Having no minds of their own, they were somehow attuned to his emotions. They received his towering frustration, his hatred of the Demon and of Kali ... and his quick and virulent fear at the mortal sin he had just uttered.

Luther carried a special Cross in his belt, made of bronze, razor-sharp along all its edges. He pulled it out and began slashing at his own legs, feeling the arms biting deep, glorying in the mortification of the flesh.

He heard a gobbling sound above him.

When he looked up, there was Kali, climbing down from her perch in a tree. A pair of binoculars clattered against her improbable bosom. Her body-slave, a naked boy in his eighth year, scuttled after her, nimble as a monkey, with a golden collar attached to four feet of golden chain that bound him to Kali.

Kali was all gold and putrefaction. The slave chain was fourteen-carat, but the scores of rings she wore on fingers and toes were pure, soft, and fine. She wore a genuine brass bra, buttressed like a gothic cathedral to support the mammoth ochreus breasts. Her legs and her four arms were encircled by a hundred ornate bands and rings, each too small for the limb it squeezed, so that her flesh oozed around them. Her waist was constricted by a gold girdle ten inches in circumference, then her body swelled to a steatopygous abundance. The phrase "hourglass figure" might have been invented for her alone.

Her fingernails were six inches long, and made of bronze.

Her face... it was not completely accurate to speak of Kali's face, since she had three heads. But the right and left ones were simply tacked on. Each had a strangler' noose drawn tight. When one rotted off she would replace it from the supplies available to Gaea. At the time she dropped from the tree and walked toward Luther-in a grotesque, hip-sprung gait, a whore in a mortuary-one of the heads was pretty ripe, and another was a recent addition. The old one had been female and white. It was now extremely mortified, and purple, with red protruding eyeballs and black protruding tongue. It hung backwards by a scrap of flesh. The other head had belonged to a black man whose color had been changed very little by the act of strangulation. This one lolled drunkenly forward, swaying as Kali walked.

The central head had been-in the same sense that Luther had once been the Reverend Arthur Lundquist-a priestess named Maya Chandraphrabha in her previous life. Of Maya, only the head remained. In life, hers had been a boyish, awkward and sterile body. She who now called herself Kali never suffered a moment's regret, never experienced even the brief torments that sometimes beset he who was now Luther. She gloried in her virulent fecundity. Her womb was prolific as a jellyfish; each kilorev she whelped a new squalling monstrosity for the greater glory of Gaea.

She wore a belt fashioned of human skulls.

Kali's face was dead. Her eyes could move, but she could not blink, smile, frown, or close her mouth. Her jaw hung, and her tongue sagged out of her mouth. The gobbling sound Luther had heard was Kali's laughter.

Kali was the avatar of atrocity.

She gobbled at Luther, and the fingers of two hands traced intricate patterns in the air.

"Shesez where the hell has you been, Luther," the boy droned.

The boy had been the heir to a large fortune. He was about a year older than the War. When he and his family had emerged from their shelter in the mountains of Mexico one of Gaea's mercy missions had picked him up. His mother had been deaf, which had given him a skill now useful to Kali. He had once been a bright, healthy, and alert six-year-old. Now his body was the sort a political cartoonist might draw, purposely exaggerated, and label World Hunger. His eyes never left Kali's hands. He was about eighty years older than he had been two years ago.