Chapter 12
The tingling feeling in my crotch was still there, despite Teva having wiped the oil off.
It wasn’t a problem, though; it was a reminder of what she’d done.
A great massage with a happy ending. Okay, a little cliché, but it was nice.
I’d do it again. I looked around; directly across the street from the yacht club was a stone cliff, and behind it was the bay.
Yachts and other boats still littered the place, with a few dozen beached, some recoverable, with others worth nothing more than scrap or spare parts.
Some of the Ci dyn and women had been talking about getting some of them seaworthy.
It wasn’t a bad idea, as some could be used for fishing and crabbing, which I saw as their greatest potential.
It was clear we had to rely on the sea for most of our food, so bringing in more would benefit everyone.
Though honestly, I could have killed for a steak.
I palmed the rail, feeling every grain, letting my body relax into the nothing of the moment.
The wine from Teva buzzed in my veins, the echo of her massage still loosening the deep muscle bands behind my shoulders.
The light over Avalon Bay was clean, past its golden hour, turning the Casino’s red-tiled dome into a bright, warm disk against the channel.
I licked my lips, the taste of blackberry and sun still fresh, and started down the steps.
Halfway to the road, the air went wrong.
There was no warning. The bugs stopped all at once, as if someone had thrown a breaker on every noise in the world.
The light flattened, the warmth sucked out of it, a half-second before the air pressure crashed.
It was the same feeling as being below decks when a shockwave rolled through, only I wasn’t below decks, and there was no blast, the thump of the sky folding in on itself, and the click of every hair on my arms rising in a wave.
Then the wind hit. It wasn’t the sea wind, nor the usual channel gust, but a lateral punch from nowhere, hard enough to slam the Yacht Club door open behind me and scatter grit and dead leaves up the stairs. My shirt flattened to my chest, and I’d nearly been forced to take a step back.
Above the inland ridge, where the old golf course rose behind the houses, the blue glow started.
It looked like a searchlight through fog, only there was no fog, only hard daylight and the electric whine of all the world’s power lines shorting at once.
The ball of light formed above the ridge in the time it takes to blink, ballooning out into a sphere as big as a hot air balloon, but brighter.
Way brighter. It threw blue shadows all the way down to the shore and rippled off the water in jagged mirror lines.
For an instant, the sphere hung, motionless, its surface licked by coiling threads of pure electricity that licked and danced and doubled back on themselves.
I braced against the rail, gritted my teeth, ready for the pop. It always popped.
It did, but not with sound. The sphere opened from the bottom, dumping out its cargo, and for a second, I thought it had ejected a column of fire.
That’s how bright and how fast it moved.
The object dropped and hit the ground below, out of sight, with a concussive thump that made the Yacht Club shake and sent a plume of dust up above the ridgeline.
The sphere collapsed back on itself, the blue glow twisting into nothing with a hungry, wet hiss.
Silence again.
The Casino area went from dead silent to panicked screaming in a heartbeat. Horns blared three times in fast succession, then again. The message was simple: This was not a drill, and whatever had landed was headed our way.
I ran, boots hitting the concrete of the path, loose stones grinding under the soles.
Every part of me screamed go, but no matter how hard I pushed, it felt like I couldn’t move fast enough.
The wind shifted, this time from the north, and from that direction, I heard the first screams, high and clear.
Women’s voices, more than one. The edge of the blue had gone out, but the after-image still burned in the sky.
I rounded the end of the Yacht Club and caught sight of the thing as it cleared the scrub at the edge of the golf course.
It looked alive. It was a beast, a monster.
The word panther jumped straight into my head and stayed.
It was black as obsidian, forty feet long from nose to tail, with shoulders that topped the highest point of the Yacht Club roof by a good ten feet.
The muscles under the fur flexed in long, slow waves, each movement so smooth it almost looked like slow motion.
It moved low to the ground, back legs coiled, forearms splayed wide, claws splaying and digging as it moved.
The face was all snout and jaw, with deep-set eyes the color of burning coal and whiskers so fine I could see them moving in the wind.
Every footfall was heavy, but the pads kept the sound lower than a beast that size had any right to.
The cat never lost its rhythm. Each step ate ground at a terrifying rate.
It was moving for the Casino. It ignored the humans and Ci Dyn in the open, except when a stray got too close; then it flicked them aside with a leg or tail.
I saw one Ci Dyn girl dive left and land in a clump of grass as the tail whipped through the air above her head. She got lucky.
From the roof of the Casino, the first rifle shot went off.
It was the M1 I’d given to Deanna Mullins for sentry rotation.
The round hit the panther right behind the ear, and the impact bloomed into a spray of black fur and skin, but there was no blood, no mess, only the odd rippling of the surface as the hide closed around the impact.
Deanna fired again, then again, each shot ringing down the channel and echoing back from the hills.
I wanted to shout at her to switch targets, aim for an eye, but there was no way she’d hear me over the noise.
The panther made the road at the bottom of the hill and dug its claws in, slowing its descent as it lined up on the Casino.
Two humans, running flat out, crossed in front of it.
One slipped and fell. The panther blinked, then stepped over her, the claws missing her by a foot, and kept going.
The blue-light residue drifted in a weird shimmer over the grass and road, a remnant of the portal that dropped that thing off like an unwanted gift.
It caught the panther’s fur, making it look like the whole animal was moving through a bath of electric water.
I shouted, as loud as I could: “Clear the area! Get indoors, now!”
The words carried, but not enough. The girl who had tripped scrambled up, bleeding from one knee, and sprinted for the Yacht Club.
To my surprise, the panther didn’t chase her.
It kept moving toward the densest part of the camp, the casino parking lot, where the most people and the most noise were concentrated. I had no idea why.
At the base of the parking lot, the cat slowed and looked up at the Casino’s facade.
The eyes tracked with a cold precision that felt wrong, but I still did not understand what I was looking at.
I reached for it the way I had been practicing with animals, looking for the simple images, the hunger, the next movement, and found nothing.
There was no pulse of thought and no sense of the world through its eyes.
It was like trying to read a car’s mind.
I turned and ran across the parking lot on the southwest side of the Casino, Horizon off to my right. My legs wanted to float, but the blood was all adrenaline now. The massage and wine were burned out, replaced by a heat that started in my chest and climbed up through my arms and head.
Above the Casino, rifle fire never let up.
Two Ci Dyn with the old flintlocks tried to get a shot from the balcony, but the powder smoke blew back in their faces and left them blind.
One dropped the weapon and started yelling, waving her arms and signaling to others to get down, take cover, and to hide.
I watched as a group of human women ducked through the west door, their clothes bright in the sun.
At least they were out of harm’s way, for the moment anyway. That thing was huge, and it absorbed every shot like a goddamned giant, cat-shaped terminator. It was like it didn’t even feel them.
The panther circled the Casino in an almost casual way, like it was enjoying a nice walk on the beach, looking for a place to lie out in the sun.
Apparently, it had seen no concern over our weapons or the people wielding them.
I hoped that was a good sign, thinking that maybe it was simply curious after finding itself in a place it hadn’t been only a few minutes ago.
I watched as it moved so close to the building that the roof’s overhang scraped the fur at its shoulders, sending a shower of dust and tile chips into the parking lot.
Two of the girls on the other side of the glass windows screamed, then ducked out of sight.
The cat flicked its ear, then raised a paw and pressed it to the side of the building, testing the wall.
The claws left furrows in the concrete, four perfect lines a yard long.
The panther pulled its paw back from the concrete and turned its head. A Ci Dyn woman had frozen too close to the edge of the parking lot, half-hidden behind a low wall. The cat’s ears flicked once. Then it moved.
It did not charge. It padded over, almost carefully, and gave her a single light bat with one forepaw, the same motion a house cat uses on a mouse it is not ready to kill yet.
She flew off her feet and slammed into the side of a parked truck several feet away with a sound that was all impact and no scream. She slid down and did not get up.
The panther sat back, head cocked, watching her. Waiting to see if his new toy would twitch.