said. He began to walk toward Tick-Tock, and as he did, the man on the floor moaned and tried to scrabble backward. “I have also been called Merlin or Maerlyn—and who cares, because I was never that one, although I never denied it, either. I am sometimes called the Magician . . . or the Wizard . . . but I hope we can go forward together on more humble terms, Andrew. More human terms.”
He pushed back the hood, revealing a fair, broad-browed face that was not, for all its pleasant looks, in any way human. Large hectic roses rode the Wizard’s cheekbones; his blue-green eyes sparkled with a gusty joy far too wild to be sane; his blue-black hair stood up in zany clumps like the feathers of a raven; his lips, lushly red, parted to reveal the teeth of a cannibal.
“Call me Fannin,” the grinning apparition said. “Richard Fannin. That’s not exactly right, maybe, but I reckon it’s close enough for government work.” He held out a hand whose palm was utterly devoid of lines. “What do you say, pard? Shake the hand that shook the world.”
The creature who had once been Andrew Quick and who had been known in the halls of the Grays as the Tick-Tock Man shrieked and again tried to wriggle backward. The flap of scalp peeled loose by the low-caliber bullet which had only grooved his skull instead of penetrating it swung back and forth; the long strands of gray-blonde hair continued to tickle against his cheek. Quick, however, no longer felt it. He had even forgotten the ache in his skull and the throb from the socket where his left eye had been. His entire consciousness had fused into one thought: I must get away from this beast that looks like a man.
But when the stranger seized his right hand and shook it, that thought passed like a dream on waking. The scream which had been locked in Quick’s breast escaped his lips in a lover’s sigh. He stared dumbly up at the grinning newcomer. The loose flap of his scalp swung and dangled.
“Is that bothering you? It must be. Here!” Fannin seized the hanging flap and ripped it briskly off Quick’s head, revealing a bleary swatch of skull. There was a noise like heavy cloth tearing. Quick shrieked.
“There, there, it only hurts for a second.” The man was now squatting on his hunkers before Quick and speaking as an indulgent parent might speak to a child with a splinter in his finger. “Isn’t that so?”
“Y-Y-Yes,” Quick muttered. And it was. Already the pain was fading. And when Fannin reached toward him again, caressing the left side of his face, Quick’s jerk backward was only a reflex, quickly mastered. As the lineless hand stroked, he felt strength flowing back into him. He looked up at the newcomer with dumb gratitude, lips quivering.
“Is that better, Andrew? It is, isn’t it?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“If you want to thank me—as I’m sure you do—you must say something an old acquaintance of mine used to say. He ended up betraying me, but he was a good friend for quite some time, anyway, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him. Say, ‘My life for you,’ Andrew— can you say that?”
He could and he did; in fact, it seemed he couldn’t stop saying it. “My life for you! My life for you! My life for you! My life—”
The stranger touched his cheek again, but this time a huge raw bolt of pain blasted across Andrew Quick’s head. He screamed.
“Sorry about that, but time is short and you were starting to sound like a broken record. Andrew, let me put it to you with no bark on it: how would you like to kill the squint who shot you? Not to mention his friends and the hardcase who brought him here—him, most of all. Even the mutt that took your eye, Andrew—would you like that?”
“Yes!” the former Tick-Tock Man gasped. His hands clenched into bloody fists. “Yes!”
“That’s good,” the stranger said, and helped Quick to his feet, “because they have to die—they’re meddling with things they have no business meddling with. I expected Blaine to take care of them, but things have gone much too far to depend on anything . . . after all, who would have thought they could get as far as they have?”
“I don’t know,” Quick said. He did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what the stranger was talking about.