“She?”
Drake grinned. He tugged at the neckline of his filthy T-shirt and pulled it down to reveal the pale flesh beneath. And there, like some mad 3-D tattoo, was a face, the face of a girl with twisted braces’ wires sticking out from between cracked lips.
“The Brittany Pig,” Drake said, enjoying the look of horror on Peaks’s face. “We were melded long ago, me and Brittany Pig, but our relationship has changed, you know? We used to be two separate people, one replacing the other at times. But eventually she grew on me. Get it?” His laugh was a form of assault, a brutal challenge. “She grew on me.”
Peaks managed to nod but did not trust his voice. The face on Drake’s chest was not an illusion, not a tattoo. It was a living face mouthing silently, staring at him with eyes that were windows into madness.
“Sometimes she says their words,” Drake said. “Sometimes the banshees wail and it comes out here.” He tapped the face and the braces-filled mouth snapped at his finger.
“The banshees?” Peaks whispered.
“Them. The dark ones. The demons. The Dark Watchers.”
“What do they say?” Peaks asked.
Drake made a mirthless chuckle. “Mostly it’s Kill. Yes, they like that, killing. Pain. Terror. It entertains them. They like to be entertained.”
Peaks had seen freaks. He had created freaks, nightmarish creatures like Carl. He had a very high threshold when it came to fear. But the thin, handsome, vicious boy with the living face on his chest and the lightning-quick whip hand? Well, this was a new level of malice. This was a creature in long-term, close contact with the Dark Watchers that Peaks had only glimpsed, or read about in the statements of experimental subjects. There was a force about Drake, a sort of invisible but unmistakable aura of malignancy.
I tried to recruit the stable one, Peaks reminded himself. I tried to do the right thing.
“Time to try the wrong thing,” Peaks muttered under his breath. “Here’s the thing, Drake. I just underwent my own change. I became . . . well, very powerful. Very powerful. I know half your mind is thinking of killing me, but you would not succeed, not with just your whip hand.”
There was a tantalizing suggestion buried in there somewhere, and Drake sensed it.
“What do you want?” Drake asked.
Same question Dekka asked more than once. Well, it’s a fair question, Peaks thought. What do I want? I wanted once to save the world.
That realization was bitter now. Save the world! Save the world from superpowered freaks like . . . well, like Peaks had now become. Like this sick piece of once-human garbage with the whip.
And now? What did Peaks want now? To survive in the world that was coming. To be the greatest of the powers. To dominate. To control. To prove himself and avenge his humiliation.
Yes, he still wanted to save the world. But the world he saved would be his world, a world where he received the recognition he deserved.
But first and foremost, he had to acquire as much of the precious rock as he could, keep it safe and under his control. With the Mother Rock, Peaks could stop the government’s plans and substitute his own. Their army would be his.
“The biggest of the rocks is on its way to the Port of Los Angeles. The Mother Rock,” Peaks said.
“Ah,” Drake said. “I’ve been meaning to head into the city.”
“That one piece, well, you could transform an army with it. I . . . we . . . could control a force like nothing the world has ever seen. We could crush any other mutant force. We could even fight HSTF-Sixty-Six and the US government to a standstill.”
“Then what?”
The question surprised Peaks. He blinked. He hadn’t really thought in detail about what happened next; he’d been focused on fantasies of revenge and self-justification.
“Well, then I suppose you, Drake, if you’ve been a faithful lieutenant, could have whatever you like.”
Drake leaned forward. He unlimbered his whip hand and poked at a stick in the fire, sending up a cloud of sparks amid the smoke. Then with his normal hand he pulled his shredded T-shirt up over his head so that the face, the disgusting wire-filled mouth, could be seen clearly in all its disturbing horror.
“Tell the nice man what we want, Brittany Pig,” Drake said.
The eyes opened, black-on-black eyes that reflected no light but seemed to blaze with a dark fire within. The glittering mouth spoke just one word.
“Fun.”
“Fun?” Peaks could not believe he was talking to a sort of three-dimensional, living tattoo with broken braces. But normal had left the building, and crazy was in charge now.