City of Night

as lethal as anyone could have imagined. Such agility. Such exotic mandibles and pincers. Such machinelike persistence.
    Being one of the New Race, the priest was programmed to fight, and he was terribly strong, and resilient. As a consequence of that strength and resilience, his death was not an easy one, but slow and cruel, although eventually he did receive the grace that he had requested.
     
     
     

Chapter 57
     
    Staring at Pastor Laffite’s eyelids as his eyes moved nervously beneath them, Deucalion said, “Many theologians believe that dogs and some other animals have simple souls, yes, though whether immortal or not, no one can say.”
    “If dogs have souls,” Laffite suggested, “then perhaps we, too, might be more than machines of meat.”
    After some consideration, Deucalion said, “I won’t give you false hope… but I can offer you a third chocolate.”
    “Have one with me, will you? This is such a lonely communion.”
    “All right.”
    The pastor had developed a mild palsy of the head and hands, different from his previous nervous tremors.
    Deucalion selected two pieces of candy from the box. He put the first to Laffite’s lips, and the minister took it.
    His own piece proved to have a coconut center. In two hundred years, nothing he had eaten had tasted as sweet as this, perhaps because the circumstances were, by contrast, so bitter.
    “Eyes closed or open,” Pastor Laffite said, “I’m having terrible hallucinations, vivid images, such horrors that I have no words to describe them.”
    “Then no more delay,” Deucalion said, pushing his chair back from the table and getting to his feet.
    “And pain,” the pastor said. “Severe pain that I can’t repress.”
    “I won’t add to that,” Deucalion promised. “My strength is much greater than yours. It will be quick.”
    As Deucalion moved behind Laffite’s chair, the pastor groped blindly, caught his hand. Then he did something that would never have been expected of any of the New Race, something that Deucalion knew no number of centuries could erase from his memory.
    Although his program was dropping out of him, though his mind was going—or perhaps because of that—Pastor Laffite drew the back of Deucalion’s hand to his lips, tenderly kissed it, and whispered, “Brother.”
    A moment later, Deucalion broke the preacher’s neck, shattered his spine with such force that instant brain death followed, assuring that the quasi-immortal body could not repair the injury
    Nevertheless, for a while he remained in the kitchen. To be certain. To sit a sort of shiva.
    Night pressed at the windows. Outside lay a city, teeming. Yet Deucalion could see nothing beyond the glass, only darkness deep, a blackness unrelenting.
     
     
     

Chapter 58
     
    After the unknown thing in the glass case spoke her name and made its ominous claim to her, Erika did not linger in the secret Victorian drawing room.
    She did not like the roughness of the voice. Or its confidence.
    At the threshold of the room, she almost hurried boldly into the passageway before she realized that the rods bristling from the walls were humming again. A headlong exit would result in a contest between her brilliantly engineered body and perhaps several thousand volts of electricity.
    As extraordinarily tough and resilient as she might be, Erika Helios was not Scarlett O’Hara.
    Gone with the Wind had been set in an age before electrical service had been available to the home; consequently, Erika was not certain that this literary allusion was apt, but it occurred to her anyway. Of course she had not read the novel; but maybe it contained a scene in which Scarlett O’Hara had been struck by lightning in a storm and had survived unscathed.
    Erika stepped cautiously across the threshold and paused, as she had done when entering the farther end of this passageway. As before, a blue laser speared from the ceiling and scanned her. Either the ID system knew who she was or, more likely, recognized what she was not: She was not the thing in the glass case.
    The rods stopped humming, allowing her safe passage.
    She quickly closed the massive steel portal and engaged the five lock bolts. In less than a minute, she had retreated beyond the next steel barrier and had secured it as well.
    Her synchronized hearts nevertheless continued to beat fast. She marveled that she could have been so unsettled by such a small thing as a disembodied voice and a veiled threat.
    This sudden,