Blind God's Bluff A Billy Fox Novel - By Richard Lee Byers Page 0,73
were.
“I’ll cover your retreat,” I said, “and then I’ll get by this thing somehow. Or if I don’t, I won’t show up for poker, and you’ll still get what you wanted.”
“Great plan,” she said, “but let’s try this first.” She unbuttoned two of the lower buttons of her white shirt, reached inside, and brought out her Zamfir pipes.
It turned out she could play underwater just like we could talk. Even though I wasn’t the one she was trying to hex, the music put a twitch in my legs. The hammerhead swam in a kind of shimmying figure eight. Dancing a shark dance.
“Nice,” I said. I took hold of the back of A’marie’s cummerbund, and, finning, hauled her along. She couldn’t use her arms to swim and work the stops of the pipes at the same time.
We made it several yards. Then the hammerhead shook off the spell and shot at us again. I just got a wall thrown up in time to keep it from tearing a chunk out of me. As it turned off, I saw A’marie and me reflected in one beady little eye.
She lowered the pipes. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It almost worked.” I struggled to come up with an idea of my own. By now, the water was hot enough that it was hard to think about anything but the burning sting.
Finally, though, I had something. “Your songs can’t control it,” I said. “It’s just too strong, or stubborn. But do you think you can sort of give it a nudge?”
She said maybe, I told her my plan, and we more or less agreed it was as half-assed as usual. Then we put it into action.
I spirit-traveled to just behind the shark. Then I willed solidness back into my hands. When I did, I winced at the heat coming off it. I reached and yanked on its tail for the second that was all that I could take.
At the same time, my physical body was floating unconscious, and instinct told me the last wall I’d made had disappeared when I moved. All the shark had to do was lunge forward to rip its two original targets to pieces.
But A’marie was piping for all she was worth. And maybe her music was what convinced Murk’s dog that the new annoyance behind it was more important than the trespassers in front. It wheeled and shot at me. I melted back into a ghost, and it plunged right through me.
It felt good to be one hundred percent ghost. The heat in the water couldn’t scald me anymore. But I couldn’t stay that way. I had to keep the hammerhead’s attention on spirit-traveler me. So I firmed up my hands and flew—if that’s the right word when you’re underwater—over the shark, thumping it down the length of its body as I went. I finished with a clapping motion that smacked both protruding eyes at once.
Then I streaked onward, and as I’d hoped, the hammerhead chased me. Every so often, I let it catch up and try to bite me, only to snap its jaws shut on nothing. I figured that would make it even madder.
And maybe it did, but it was a tricky move to pull off. An ordinary spirit traveler was invisible. Visible-but-still-not-completely-there took concentration, and the throbbing in my hands made it harder. Eventually I slipped, let myself become too real, and the shark’s teeth touched me. Somehow I threw the thickness out of me, hurled it out like vomit, and got away with only cuts and scrapes.
But it was still time to stop playing tag, before I screwed up worse. I turned and raced back the way I’d come, toward the two figures floating together in the cloudy green water. With its arms just hanging, my physical body looked drowned and dead. A’marie had her legs wrapped around it in an awkward piggyback way. It kept the two of them from drifting apart and still left her hands free to play. To make music to feed the shark’s anger. To urge it to chase me faster than it had ever swum before, and never stop until it ripped me apart.
I tried to lead it in close. When my spirit body vanished from in front of it, I wanted it to see the physical me just a few yards farther on, and, crazy with rage, not notice any difference between that and what it had just been chasing.
It worked. I jumped back into my flesh and bones, and damn,