Jokers Wild

Fortunato reached out to slow time, but time itself resisted him. He strained against it and saw the lines of power in the room in topographic relief. He saw that the body was a woman's, but he didn't let himself see any more, not yet.

He pushed at the lines of power with his mind. Tight cones of force rose up where he and Peregrine lay. The broken glass followed the new contours of the room's spacetime and curved away around them, smashing itself to dust against the walls.

Peregrine crawled across the floor. Fortunato saw where she was heading and shaped his power around her to protect her. She got to where her gloved talons hung on the wall and put them on. There was a costume there too but she didn't bother with it.

The roof groaned and then split all down its length like a broken saltine. Chunks of concrete and rebar rained down on them, but the shields around them were solid. It took hardly any of Fortunato's new power to hold them. Peregrine gave herself a ru

The floor buckled under Fortunato. Jets of water shot up from broken pipes and the air stank of natural gas. He crawled toward the dead woman and turned her over.

Caroline.

It was Caroline.

Her neck was broken. Her skin was clawed and bitten and torn.

She'd been his favorite for seven years. He could never predict her violent moods and sarcastic humor, could never get enough of the sheer physical intensity of her lovemaking. Between the new girls he'd always come back to her.

For a long time he couldn't feel anything. A huge piece of concrete, studded with broken rebar, missed him by inches while he knelt beside her body.

The anger, when it finally came, transformed him.

It was life and death, that simple. The Astronomer took his power from killing. The Astronomer was Death. Fortunato took his strength from sex, from life. And Life was hiding in its burrow, too shit-scared to come out and look Death in the face. Shouting out empty threats and hoping it would just go away. He opened his eyes wide. All it took was a blink of the eye and everything he'd missed jumped out at him. The shimmering heat lines he'd seen in the dead boy's apartment seventeen years before fu

Fortunato stood up, the power of his anger levitating him a foot off the floor. He reached out to the conical net of power, ready to fly into it, to shoot out into its vortex and tear the source of it to pieces.

He reached out and the lines were gone.

He walked through the shattered glass wall and hovered there, glowing, thirty stories above the streets of Manhattan. High overhead he could see Peregrine, gloriously naked, banking steeply over the park. The lights of the city turned the sky flat and gray behind her, and she seemed two-dimensional herself, like a sexually explicit kite. She circled him once, then settled on the broken edge of her apartment.

"Jesus," she said. "So tired…"

"Did you see him?" he asked her. "No. Nothing. You?"

"For a second. I saw the traces he left behind. For the first time. For the first time I'm stronger than he is. If I could find him, find that goddamned ship, I could…"

"What is it?"

Ship, he thought. Spaceship. Like aliens from space, Black had said. Like Tachyon.

Tachyon. Christ, Tachyon had a ship!

The longer he thought about it, the more convinced he was. The Astronomer was going for Tachyon's ship.

He walked back over to Peregrine and kissed her. The smell of their sexual juices hung around them like perfume and it was hard for Fortunato to stop. She staggered a little when he let her go.

That was when she saw Caroline's body. "Oh my God," she said.

Fortunato took the broken thing in his arms. "This isn't about you," he said. "This is about me. You should forget about it." He made it an order without meaning to. She nodded.

He walked out into space again. "Fortunato…?"

He wanted to look back but there was nothing else to say. He let the power take him on into the darkness.

The streets were still crowded despite the lateness of the hour, and everyone who was still out seemed to be drunk, stoned, belligerent, crazy, or all of the above. Je

The long day was taking its toll on her. Her feet hurt, she was dead tired, and her hunger had grown until it felt like a small animal gnawing away at her insides. She'd have to get some food. She couldn't ghost until she did. Turning insubstantial burned a lot of energy, and there weren't many calories stored in her lean frame.

Je

"Sorry this is the best I can do," Bre

"These'll be fine," Je

"Hmmm?" Bre

They went on through the streets until Bre

"You'll be safe here until I get back," he said. "Where're you going?"

"To my apartment. I'll be right back."

Je

"They're a little large," Bre

She was still stung by his distrust, but couldn't resist asking about the pack on his back.

"What's in there?"

"Some things we might need before the evening is over."

"Informative as always," she said. "Can you tell me something straight out? Where are we headed now?"

"The place we might be able to get some answers. The Crystal Palace."

For seventeen years Fortunato had kept to the shadows. Not from modesty, but to avoid distractions. He didn't fly to the rescue of trapped miners or break up muggings on the subway. Except for a few months of covert politics back in the sixties he'd stayed in his apartment and read. Studied Aleister Crowley and E D. Ouspensky, learned Egyptian hieroglyphics and Sanskrit and ancient Greek. Nothing had seemed more important than knowledge for its own sake.

He couldn't say when that had started to change. Sometime after a woman named Eileen had died in a Jokertown alley, her brain wiped clean by the Astronomer. Sometime after everything he read, from particle physics to Masonic ritual to the Bhagavad Gita, told him the same thing, over and over: all is one. Nothing mattered. Everything mattered.

Tonight he flew over Manhattan Island in the remains of his evening clothes, glowing like a neon tube, a dead woman in his arms. Drunken tourists and cranked-up jokers and the last of the theater crowd looked up and saw him there and it didn't matter.

He looked at the idea that he might not live through the night and that didn't seem to matter much either. What was one pimp more or less?

He saw Jokertown spread out below him. The barricaded streets were crammed with people in costumes and people who were costumes, all of them carrying candles and flash lights and torches. Every streetlight and every light in every window up and down the Bowery was at full power.