The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [78]
Fascinated, he watched. Two tiny eyes glinted like rubies. Then the gold spider crawled over the cuff of his coat sleeve and onto the back of his hand. He could actually see its gold pincers extend forth, could observe them sink easily into his flesh, piercing skin, reaching for moving blood.
The pain was instant and agonizing, like fire. With a cry, Chandra flung his hand aside. There was a gold flash, and a skittering sound against the polished floor. Chandra turned and moved toward the door, but already his muscles were stiffening to cold clay as the poison moved through his body, carried rapidly by the increased blood flow and heart rate that accompanied fear and the rush of adrenaline.
He tried to cry out for help, but his vocal cords were already paralyzed, and the sound was a hoarse croak. A neurotoxin then, like that of the pit vipers that had haunted the edges of his childhood village in India. He had once seen a playmate of his struck by a snake not twenty feet away, and the boy had been dead by the time Chandra had run to him.
The floor rushed up to meet his left cheek, striking it with a curiously dull and muffled sound. A convulsion turned his face upward. The pain was fading. Chandra’s last vision was of the face of the clock on the wall, as distorted as a timepiece in a painting by Dalí. Even then, his mind was able to achieve a clarity apart from his physical being, to crystallize itself in thought.
Time of death: 7:09 P.M. Cause: heart failure from a rapidly acting neurotoxin of unknown origin.
A weak muscle spasm passed through him, then came one final meditation.
Kiss Mahesh for me, dearest.
And for the first time since his birth, Dr. Rohan Chandra’s thoughts were silent.
25.
Somehow, Grace expected Travis to be angry when he stepped into their musty motel room, pale and tired from his night’s work at the hospital, and she told him she had telephoned the Seekers. Instead, a haggard grin crossed his face. “So what took you so long?”
She crossed her arms inside her preposterously baggy thrift-store sweater. “Do you mean to say that all this time I’ve been agonizing over whether or not I should contact the Seekers and how quickly you were going to eviscerate me if I did, you’ve been expecting me to call them?”
He sat on the corner of the opposite bed, mattress springs mewling like a nest of baby mice. “Pretty much.”
Grace let out a groan. Nothing like torturing oneself for days on end for absolutely no reason whatsoever. She glared at the cardboard box and pair of Styrofoam cups strategically positioned on the nightstand. “If I had known you were going to be this easy, I wouldn’t have bothered getting coffee and King Donut to soften you up.”
“On the contrary, Grace, you chose wisely.” He flipped up the lid, grabbed a powdered jelly, and took a big, squishy bite. “If the Seekers are coming to town, we’re going to need all the energy we can get.”
She popped the lid on her coffee and took a deep swig. A reflexive grimace crossed her face.
He cocked his head. “What is it?”
Grace laughed, gazing down at the oily surface of the brown liquid in the cup. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just that on Eldh I always found myself wishing for real coffee. And now that I’m here …”
“You wish it were maddok.”
Her smile faded, but she concealed it by raising the cup and taking another sip of the coffee. It was hot and bitter, and it burned her tongue.
“You miss Eldh, don’t you, Grace?”
His voice was soft, his gray eyes concerned. Sometimes this new seriousness of his startled her. Since she first met him, Travis had been funny and complaining and charming in a fumbling way. And, when both worlds had needed it most, impossibly brave. But since Castle Spardis, where he confronted the Necromancer Dakarreth in the fires of the Great Stone Krondisar, he had changed.
It was subtle. Had they