Eventually, the reason dawns on him.
Excitement flares his light, so that Terian makes himself briefly visible. He barely feels the ensuing blows, barely hears the cracking in several branches of his aleimi. They can’t touch him...not anymore. A smile lights up his being.
He occupies the successor’s chair.
He. Terian alone.
As the realization hits, he is already giving the signal.
Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure, Magic
31
PYRAMID
President Daniel Caine blinked to clear his vision.
Frowning, he stared around at the mostly older faces. Something was wrong. He could feel it, with every particle of his living light. He needed someone else at the table who felt it, too. Someone besides Ethan, who was, for obvious reasons, in absentia.
Caine barely noticed the silence as he surveyed the room.
That is, until the Secretary of State broke it.
“Sir?” As usual, the man sounded as if he were about to go into cardiac arrest. “Sir,” he repeated, as Caine knew he would until he turned and met the man’s gaze directly.
Once he had, the Secretary resumed in the same, caught-breath voice.
“The terrorists have been isolated, sir,” he said, flushing a darker red. “They no longer appear to be fighting back. The Prime Minister is asking whether you still recommend an air attack, sir. They now estimate twenty to fifty-five possible civilian casualties from that approach, sir, even with the evacuations...and they no longer feel it’s necessary. Their Home Office Security is now recommending gassing the top floors, prior to any gunplay. I really think you should consider this approach, sir. I really do...”
Caine rose to his feet. Normally he would smile here, even tell a joke, but his ability to play that role evaporated about thirty minutes earlier, when the Pyramid network reported that his friend, Doctor Xarethe––meaning the real one––could not be located. He was now forced to assume that Terian, in one form or another, had killed her, too.
The thought more than displeased him.
To call Xarethe irreplaceable was an understatement in the extreme.
Other complications remained as well. Alyson managed to evade him somehow within his own network. That left the outstanding issue of what to do with Dehgoies if Caine found himself backed into a corner, forced to kill yet another of Revik’s mates.
Further, as much as he hated to admit it, Terian was right.
The entire cycle would be disrupted if he killed the Bridge now.
Making up his mind, Caine walked to a telephone sitting on an antique wooden cabinet to the right of the conference table. Without thinking, he picked up the old-fashioned receiver, held it to his ear and waited. Feeling eyes focused on the back of his head from the direction of the oval table, Caine realized only then that he could have used his earpiece to make the call. Or, more efficiently still, his newly implanted impulse-activated network receiver chip, or IAN.
He ignored their collective stares anyway. At least, until it struck him that the old land line might be purely decorative.
It was one problem with long life. Old habits had a tendency to return under stress.
Caine lowered the handset to hang it up, when a voice rose, sounding tinny and far away. He returned the receiver promptly to his ear.
“You needed something, sir?” the voice repeated.
“James?” Caine felt his shoulders unclench. “Where’s Ethan?”
“Sir?” His security chief’s puzzlement wafted through the line.
“Ethan. Our Vice President. Where is he?”
“The Vice President is still housed at his residence, sir,” James said. “You said not to wake him.”
“Yes, well, I’ve changed my mind. I want him brought here. At once. To the bunker.”
The bunker. It was what his wife nicknamed the Cabinet’s main conference room when she first saw it, and the moniker stuck. She also called it the War Room, after that Peter Sellers movie mocking the 1950s paranoia about the Russians hoarding telekinetic seers.
Like a faraway strain of music, Caine felt something crack. He knew it was another piece of the Pyramid fissuring off. He realized James remained on the line.
“Wake him, will you?” Caine said. “As soon as possible. Tell him it’s an emergency.”
He was in the process of hanging up the old plastic handle, when the door to the bunker slammed open.
Caine’s eyes swiveled with all the rest. He found himself staring at the leaning, gasping figure in the door’s opening. For a long moment, nothing else broke the tense silence of the room. Everyone watched him clutch his chest, but like Caine, they didn’t move.