Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,64

impressive. But it’s basically just an illusion.” I didn’t exactly believe that, but I couldn’t very well tell him I’d already made a trip to dreamland and set Rufino free.

Timon scowled. “If that’s what you truly think, then you haven’t learned anything. It’s true, I built this interlude from a single human’s dream. But I’ve pulled a number of people inside it. Look carefully and you can pick them out.”

He was right. The people in the crowd weren’t as identical as the rows of guys in the marching band, but for the most part, several characters repeated over and over. Mixed in with all that sameness, a few unique faces stood out. Most were human, but a couple were Old People. Forked tongue flickering, a huge black snake swayed its head back and forth. Sylvester the weeping willow loomed over everybody else. Or maybe it was just one of his kind. With all the hair hanging over his face, it was hard to tell.

What I could tell—or at least I thought I could—was that none of the real people wanted to be there. They screamed, shoved, and grabbed for Timon’s stupid beads with the same crazy eagerness as everybody else. But, like the bald guy in the fake Monte Carlo, they had something dazed and sick in their eyes.

“I’m still bored,” Timon said. “Let’s kick it up another notch.”

He chucked a string of red beads. The spectators shoved even harder to get within reach of it. Somebody knocked down a little kid—one of the real ones—in a Transformers T-shirt. And then people trampled him, mashing his squirming body against the pavement.

I wanted to jump off the float and run over there, but my gut told me that wasn’t the way to help him. I turned back to Timon just as he lobbed blue beads at the people on the other side of the street.

Another real person, a girl with a pierced nose and sleeve tattoos, grabbed them. And probably expected to keep them, because up until now, when somebody got a string in his hand, it ended the struggle for that particular prize.

Not anymore. Sylvester—if it was him—reached over her shoulder with one of his long weeping-willow branch arms, grabbed a dangling loop, and tried to rip them away.

The pull spun her around to face him. In real life, the sight of him probably would have frozen her in amazement and fear, but not here. Not in a dream, and not with Timon yanking her strings. She hung on to the beads and then it was a tug of war.

That would have snapped a real string of cheap plastic beads, but again, no such luck here. Sylvester clenched his other knobby-knuckled, long-fingered hand into a fist and bashed her across the face with it. She fell down, and in a split second, people were trampling her, too, as they scrambled to try and get the beads away from him.

That wasn’t the only brutal all-out fight. By now, people were throwing punches, wrestling, and gouging eyes up and down both sides of the street. A cop unholstered his M&P. But nobody rushed the float to get beads at the source. With Timon making the rules, it probably never even occurred to anybody.

“Make it stop!” I said.

Timon smirked. “Really, that’s the best part. It doesn’t ever have to stop. If I really want to put the energy into it, I can keep a dreamer trapped in this moment indefinitely, long after you and I have moved on to other things.”

As I’d seen.

“You can but you won’t,” I said, as the cop’s automatic began to bang, and the people near him started screaming. “I’ve already seen what you wanted me to, so what would be the point?”

“Well,” Timon said, “I have been known to do it just because it’s funny. Or to remind the chattels who I am. But since I am still recuperating… ” He waved his hand with its ragged, filthy nails.

And then we were flying, with the lights and roofs of Tampa far below us and bright stars above.

It wasn’t like rocketing across the sky in my spirit body. It was peaceful and joyful at the same time, like getting lost in great music. It was perfect, and despite the nastiness I’d seen just a second ago, I had to struggle to remember that I needed to watch what I said.

“Do you like this better?” Timon asked.

“Much. If you can do this and feel this anytime you want, why even