Prodigal Son

points," he explained. “All over my body. But something was strange about the lightning… such power."
        He didn't mention the ragged white keloid scars that joined his wrist to his forearm.
        If he was living out a Frankenstein-monster fantasy, he had gone to extremes to conform his physical appearance to the tale. This was a bit more impressive than a Star Trek fan wearing a jumpsuit and Spock ears.
        Against her better judgment, even if she couldn't believe him, Carson felt herself wanting to believe in him.
        This desire to believe surprised her, disturbed her. She didn't understand it. So not Carson O'Connor.
        "The storm gave me life," he continued, "but it also gave me something just short of immortality."
        Deucalion picked up the newspaper clipping, stared for a moment at the photo of Victor Helios, then crushed it in his fist.
        "I thought my maker was long dead. But from the beginning, he's been after his own immortality-of one kind or another."
        "Quite a story," she said. "Does abduction by extraterrestrials come into it at any point?"
        In Carson's experience, kooks could not tolerate mockery They reacted with anger or they accused her of being part of whatever conspiracy they believed had targeted them.
        Deucalion merely threw aside the wadded clipping, withdrew a Hershey's bar from the display case, and put the candy on the counter in front of her.
        Unwrapping the chocolate, she said, "You expect me to believe two hundred years? So the lightning that night, it-what?-altered his genetics?"
        "No. The lightning didn't touch him. Only me. He got this far… some other way."
        "Lots of fiber, fresh fruit, no red meat."
        She couldn't tweak him.
        No more of the eerie luminosity passed through his eyes, but she saw in them something else that she had never glimpsed in the eyes of another. An electrifying directness. She felt so exposed that a chill closed like a fist around her heart.
        Loneliness in that gaze, and wisdom, and humility. And… more that was enigmatic. His eyes were a singularity, and though there was much to be read in them, she hadn't the language to understand what she read, for the soul that looked out at her through those lenses suddenly seemed as alien as that of any creature born on another world.
        Chocolate cloyed in her mouth, her throat. The candy tasted oddly like blood, as if she had bitten her tongue.
        She put down the Hershey's bar.
        "What has Victor been doing all this time?" Deucalion wondered. "What has he been… making?"
        She remembered Bobby Allwine's cadaver, naked and dissected on the autopsy table-and Jack Rogers's insistence that its freakish innards were the consequence not of mutation but of design.
        Deucalion appeared to pluck a shiny quarter from the ether. He flipped it off his thumb, caught it in midair, held it for a moment in his fist. When he opened his hand, the quarter wasn't there.
        Here was the trick that Arnie had been trying to imitate.
        Turning over the candy bar that Carson had just put down on the glass counter, Deucalion revealed the quarter.
        She sensed that this peculiar impromptu performance was meant to be more than entertainment. It was meant to convince her that the truth of him was as magical as he had presented it.
        He picked up the quarter-his hands so dexterous for their great size-and flipped it high and past her head.
        When she turned to follow its arc, she lost sight of the quarter high in the air.
        She waited for the ping and clatter of the coin bouncing off the marble floor of the lobby Silence.
        When the silence endured beyond all reasonable expectation of the quarter's return, Carson looked at Deucalion.
        He had another quarter. He snapped it off his thumb.
        More intently than before, she tracked it-but lost it as it reached the apex of its arc.
        She held her breath, waiting for the falling coin to ring off the floor, but the sound didn't come, didn't come-and then she needed to breathe.
        “Am I still not in your life?" he asked. "Or do you want to hear more?"

CHAPTER 52
        
        SCONCES SPREAD radiant amber fans on the walls, but at this hour the lights are dim and shadows dominate.
        Randal Six has only now realized that the blocks of vinyl-tile flooring in the hallway are