Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,38
to get a good look, I gripped her fin and pulled.
The mask made a sucking sound as it came off. The head underneath was nothing but dozens of eyes glaring in all directions from a round black skull. It shouldn’t have filled out the mask to give it the right shape, but apparently magic had taken care of that.
“Look!” I yelled, still scrambling away from the other finheads and their shivs. “It’s not your wife! They’re not your kids and friends! This isn’t real!”
The thing that had been passing for Mrs. Rufino wrenched herself out of my grip and jammed her knife into my guts. The breath whooshed out of me, and I didn’t seem to be able to suck in any more.
But then a shock jolted everything. I’d never been in an earthquake, but I imagined it was probably like that, except that the jolt was inside my head as well as outside. It was like the world was a mirror, and suddenly, it cracked.
The hostile finheads froze like statues, some of them with their blades just inches from my body. Rufino thrashed, snapped the ropes tying his wrists and ankles to the stocks, and shakily drew himself to his feet. “Lies,” he said. That first one was a whisper, but he got louder with every repetition, until he was screaming at the end: “Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies!”
I felt another shock, and another. Sections of what was in front of me disappeared, leaving white emptiness behind. If this place had been a cracked mirror before, now it was shattering completely, and pieces were falling out of the frame.
After another second, I fell out of it, too. I was back in my physical body with my hands on Rufino’s chest. I brought up another surge of Red’s energy, and this time I used some of it to wash away the scary feeling of wrongness in my stomach. After that, I could tell that Mr. Ka didn’t have any more to give. So I let him go, to sink back down inside me or mix himself back in with the rest of me.
Then, panting like I’d run ten miles, I looked down at Rufino to see if I’d actually accomplished anything.
His fin was still ragged and tilted off center, and scars still covered his skin. But he’d stopped struggling, and there wasn’t any terror, hatred, or craziness in his eyes, just a plea to be let out of the gag and restraints.
So that was what his family did. Then there was a lot of babbling and hugging. Rufino told them he was sorry for making their lives hell, and they told him it wasn’t his fault.
A’marie and I stood back and left them to it. Then she gasped, stepped right in front of me, and stooped to get a better look at the front of my shirt.
I looked down at it, too. It had blotches of wet blood all over it, with the biggest one on the stomach. I figured I had one on the back of my right pant leg, too.
“It’s okay,” I said. I pulled up the shirt to show there weren’t any wounds underneath.
Not anymore. Still, if I needed more proof that what happened while I was outside my body could kill me, well, now I was wearing it. And seeing, feeling, and smelling it made me feel lightheaded and queasy.
“Mr. Billy,” Rufino said.
I turned and saw him and the family looking at me.
“Thank you,” he continued. “It’s so… small just to say you saved me. That you saved our whole family. I wish I had bigger, better words.”
I wished I did, too, but the best I could do was: “You’re welcome. And now I think it’s probably time for the whole family to bug out to Cuba, don’t you? You don’t owe Timon anything anymore, not after what he did to you, and you don’t want him finding out you got better. He might decide to hex you all over again.”
“But if Timon isn’t the lord here anymore,” said A’marie, “then he won’t be able to hurt Rufino. He won’t dare to deprive another lord of the use of one of his servants.”
I sighed. I’d known this was coming. Still, it would have been nice to have another minute or two as everybody’s hero.
“You can’t count on Timon losing the fief,” I said. “Because I’m still not going in the tank.”
A’marie stared at me. “I don’t understand. You saw what Timon did to Rufino. It must