like Gruber's had earlier.
The Astronomer let go with one hand and grabbed the top of his head. "Look at me when I speak to you, Demise." Spector felt his head being spun around. There was a stab of unbearable pain, a snap, and his mouth filled with blood. The Astronomer grinned at him. "It's Judgment Day."
Noise ran through the crowd behind them. The Astronomer turned away, distracted by something, dropping Spector like a sack of garbage.
His body was paralyzed; he couldn't break the fall. Spector landed face first on the sidewalk, smashing his mouth and nose. He watched the pool of blood widen around his open mouth. It was time to die, again. At least he wouldn't have to see or feel what was going to happen to him.
Side by side and bumper to bumper, the floats took up a block and a half of Center Street south of Canal. Fortunato could see Des, the elephant-faced joker, done up in chickenwire and flowers. There was Dr. Tod's blimp and Jetboy's plane behind it, complete with floral speed lines. A clear plastic balloon of Chrysalis floated overhead.
This was deep Jokertown and there weren't so many tourists here. The tourists that came this far down didn't bring their kids. Drivers in coveralls stood by the floats, smoking and talking to each other. The worst of the crowd seemed to all be moving the same way as Fortunato, toward something that was happening up ahead.
Half a block away he could see the lines of power in the air. Like heat waves, shimmering, distorting everything around them. It was a signature that wasn't really a signature, a set of psychic eraser marks. He'd seen them for the first time seventeen years ago, in a dead boy's room not far from here, where women had been brutally cut to pieces as part of a conspiracy that ended with the great, devouring monstrosity of TIAMAT orbiting the sun.
He was lightheaded and his pulse was going crazy. He realized that he was scared, really, honest-to-Christ terrified, for the first time in seventeen years.
He sent a wedge of power out in front of him and ran toward the place where the lines came together. People spun away on both sides of him, shouting at him but unable to touch him.
Demise screamed. Even over the noise of the crowd Fortunato could hear the crunch of mangled bone and cartilage and the thud of a body hitting the sidewalk.
As he broke through the wall of people, they were already turning, trying to get away. Somebody dragged away a wounded cop, his right hand burned black, his face pocked with blood. There was a ten-foot circle of sidewalk, empty except for Demise.
Demise lay on his back, the lapels of his gray suit and the open collar of his scruffy shirt exposed. His head was turned completely around, his face flat against the pavement. Blood ran out of his mouth and nose.
A man in the crowd was screaming. "There! He's right over there! He's getting away! Stop him, for God's sake!" He was pointing at nothing at all. All Fortunato could see was a blur of faces, like he was trying to look too far to one side, even though he was staring straight ahead.
Jamming me, he thought. He focused his power and slowed time, until the man's voice and the moans of shock and disgust around him dropped to a subsonic rumble. A tornado of psychic energy hungin the frozen chaos around him, Demise's power, Fortunato's own, the viral energy of the jokers. It was hopeless.
He let go and time came up to speed. There was nothing he could do. Demise was dead. It was not much of a loss.
Most of what he knew about Demise was second- or thirdhand, picked up from cops and bystanders after the riot at the Cloisters. He was a loser a middle-class failure who'd caught the wild card and died of it in Tachyon's clinic. Tachyon brought him back and Demise never forgave him for it. He'd come back a projecting telepath, so they said, and what he could project was the memory of his own death, strongly enough to kill with it. For a while he'd sat at the Astronomer's right hand, until Fortunato and the others had destroyed their base at the Cloisters and Fortunato had blasted their Shakti device into atoms.
He'd have done the same for Demise and the Astronomer if he'd been able. But now Demise seemed inconsequential. From a sense