Lame, thought Witmeyer. All this stupid posturing.
I too used to love posturing, she realized. But the good has gone out of it without Clover by my side with her big serious face on.
Things happened quickly then, but later, when Witmeyer thought about it, she could pluck single frozen moments from that afternoon and study them for hours.
The boy leaped into the air. High, like an animal. A cat, maybe, or a bird, flinging his hands in front of him.
“Alley-oop,” said a soldier, drawing a mocking cheer from his mates, but the cheering turned to howls of shock and pain as light blossomed from the boy’s fingers. Two white fireballs filled the entire chamber, completely overloading the night vision goggles, momentarily blinding the soldiers—but not Witmeyer, whose helmet visor had thirty extra years of technology in it, including a flare-guard coating.
Ha, she thought. Clever child with his magician’s tricks. Not clever enough, boy.
Her finger was on the trigger when the man, Malarkey, rose from his hiding place, seeming to fill her entire field of vision. Up and up he went, until he seemed too large for the space.
Suddenly Witmeyer’s gun felt like deadweight in her hands.
How could her pathetic weapon have any effect on such a magnificent creature?
Magnificent?
Had she just thought that?
But this man was magnificent. There was no other word for him. Those shoulders like bridge bulwarks, a chest like a furnace door, a fan of hair that spread like a halo as he moved, and eyes that made Lunka feel transparent when they looked at her.
“Oh,” said Witmeyer, feeling awe in the face of another human being for the first time in her life.
This is a man, she thought. This is a specimen.
Time seemed to slow down as Malarkey launched himself from a crumbled plinth and sailed over her head into the jumble of blinded men. Down they went like toy soldiers, and Malarkey gleefully laid into them, wreaking havoc with his anvil fists, square teeth, and wide forehead, which broke Farley’s nose with a sickening crunch.
I should shoot him, Witmeyer realized. But the thought hung weightlessly in the maelstrom of her emotions and was swept away.
Malarkey made the most of his momentary advantage, then hightailed it after his young companion around the sweeping tunnel bend.
Witmeyer was instantly dismayed.
He is leaving. My magnificent man.
“After them, you idiots!” she ordered the moaning soldiers, throwing kicks left and right. “And remember your orders: take him alive. Take them both alive. But especially King Otto.”
King Otto.
Now there was a man worthy of the title.
Every culture has a raft of poets and playwrights who will declare in heartfelt and varied terms that everyone has a true love just waiting to be found. Several million verses have been written in many thousand languages to support this thesis. As is often the case, these romantic writers are all wrong. While most people do have many potential true loves, there are those individuals who are so unique that no one could reasonably be expected to love them. Just below that level of super-weirdness, there is a small group of extreme individuals who find it impossible to connect to anyone not on their wavelength. These individuals rarely meet and so generally live their lives alone, but occasionally these alphas do cross paths, and when that happens, the attraction is instant, mutual, and irresistible.
The Chinese have a saying: Love itself is calm; turbulence arrives from extraordinary individuals.
Turbulence is beyond true love.
Italians call this phenomenon catching the thunderbolt.
Almost incredibly, in the reeking depths of a London sewer, during the magnesium light of Riley’s flash bombs, both Witmeyer and Malarkey caught the thunderbolt right between the eyes.
Malarkey sloshed down the tunnel, feeling that he was running away from what he wanted to race toward.
That incredible woman.
Who was she?
Where had she come from?
In the second of magnesium flare, her image had been burned onto his retinas and remained there even now.
Those haughty eyes.
The high slashes of cheekbones.
How she held her weapon with easy comfort.
And her hair. Good God, the hair.
Malarkey was perfectly aware that his own hair was fabulous, due to his many and varied conditioning rituals, including sleeping in an inverted position and weekly snake venom soakings, but this girl’s hair made his seem like damp straw in comparison. Even in the bowels of a sewer, she boasted the dark flowing locks of a princess.
What is happening to me? Should I not be consumed with my desire for revenge? he wondered, even as his hands quested along the tunnel walls and his legs churned the water.
Could he be at last experiencing one of the gentler passions that for so long had been denied him?
She had something. A glimmer. A fire.
“Come on, sir,” Riley panted from half a dozen steps ahead. “We need to get to the ladder.”
The boy was right, the ladder was where they needed to be; but they needed to be there now. Anything post now was too late. That ladder was a thirty-rung hand-over-hand climb, and it would take a monkey ten seconds to scale it.
They didn’t have ten seconds and they were not monkeys, and Riley’s stunt with the flashers had bought them five seconds at most. Already the dreaded crimson beams were jittering on the walls.
“Halt, or I shoot,” came a call from behind.
/> “Damn you, Otto,” came another. Farley’s voice, but strained with pain.
Nothing from the girl. Malarkey had been perversely hoping that she would call his name before shooting.
Then it came, three sweet words from the darkness: “King Otto, please.”
King Otto. Please.
Malarkey smiled even as he labored forward. Strange how this brief phrase could delight him so, even in a time of such crisis.
The boy went under and Otto almost followed, but he righted himself by lurching into the wall and bearing the impact. He searched underwater with one hand until he located Riley’s collar and yanked him from the murky depths. Riley was snorting furiously from his nose as he broke the surface.
“Good lad,” said Malarkey. “Good.”
But the seconds this tumble had cost were seconds that they did not have, and now it was a certainty that they would not reach the ladder, not to mention actually scale the rungs.
“Rats,” said Riley, between snorts.
“You said it, Ramlet,” agreed Malarkey, hauling them both forward.
“Stop!” From behind. “Last warning!”
Malarkey saw red dots dancing a firefly jig on his arm. “Rats and curses and damnation,” he said with feeling, though was it possible that some small part of him wanted to be captured, just to see what would happen?
The same thing what happened to dear old Barnabus, his sensible side interjected.
“No,” said Riley, and he pointed toward the ladder. “Rats.”
Malarkey was a veteran member of the criminal fraternity and so had made a lifelong habit of working in the shadows. In consequence, his night vision was excellent, and he could see both Riley’s point and that which he pointed at.
“Aha,” he said with some satisfaction. Interesting. Time for some new combatants in this dark war.
Farley has his red-eyed demons and so too does Otto Malarkey.
“Come and get me, princess,” he called over his shoulder. “I will not bite you.”
He threw his head back and laughed.
It is all a game, he realized. And I am the master of this game.