Broken Crescent Read Free Page B

sense of presence around him, as if he might reach out a hand and feel slick skin and undulating flesh. He felt as if any moment something heavy and damp might wrap around his throat, strangling him.
    “Which road?” The words were heavy, cloying, and came from organs that were not meant for human speech.
    They’re coming for Azrael. Take the road when it is offered.
    The darkness resolved into something. Two some-things. Nate started to have a sense of direction again, of up and down, left and right. Behind him, he could dimly see a corridor in the classroom building. In front of him was what might have been a hill or a lawn, backed with blue sky. Both views seemed incredibly distant. At the same time they felt intense enough that he need only reach out to one or the other to touch it.
    “Choose.”
    The sense of alien presence was overwhelming on all sides, as if cascades of rippling flesh were about to engulf him.
    A searing anger gripped Nate. This thing, this invisible alien meat, it had to be @. This thing whether it was real, or some brain-damage induced distortion of what was really out there, was the source of the e-mails. Take the road when it is offered. . . .
    It was blackmail.
    The corridor swelled in his peripheral vision, and when he looked directly at it, it seemed to grow, as if he was falling toward it. Don’t buy into it. It’s pushing you. Go back. Take the evil you know.
    “Choose.”
    The presence was upon him with a sense of imminent suffocation. Nate’s pulse was racing again, thoughts firing a mile a minute. He had to take some concrete action now or this thing around him would envelop him, absorb him, take him apart from the mind outward.
    “Choose.”
    All he had to do was reach out and touch. He knew his hand would touch cold linoleum. He would be back where things made sense . . .
    . . . and where cops waited to put him away for ten or twenty years.
    “CHOOSE!”
    Nate reached out, but in the impulsive way he acted when panicked, he put his hand backward, away from the corridor—
    It touched grass.
    Sunlight blinded him as a sense of normalcy returned to the space around him. There was ground beneath him, and sky above him. He lay on his back, his arm thrown backward above his head.
    He sank his fingers into the dirt, and stared up at the clouds above him.
    “Some sort of stressed-out nightmare,” he whispered to himself. He thought of several possible scenarios. Making his escape outside, and being so strung out that he fainted. The blackness, and the alien presence, just some paranoid dream—one intense enough that it wiped out the memory of him collapsing here in the grass.
    Maybe the e-mail, and the cop outside his classroom, were part of that same dream. That would be a relief, though Nate thought that might be too good to be true. . . .
    Of course, that left open the question, where was he?
    He sucked in deep breaths, calming himself, staring at the clouds sliding over the intense blue above him. There were no sounds of traffic or people, just the wind rustling the grass around him, and the sound of water nearby. His peripheral vision was blocked on his left by the slope of the ground, and on his right by an old black stump covered in shelf fungus.
    Somewhere a bird let out a piercing call.
    This wasn’t anywhere on the Case campus by University Circle.
    Did I drive myself somewhere in the Metroparks and forget about it? Did I get mugged in the Cultural Gardens?
    The initial relief of finding himself in this quiet spot, not surrounded by Feds, gave way to unease. The idea that he traveled here with no memory was almost as disturbing as the thought that the alien presence in the darkness was real.
    He stood up and felt a cold, salty wind bite into him. When he looked down at his feet, he froze.
    Less than three feet away from him, the ground fell away. If he bent over, he found himself looking down a cliff of black rock that descended a hundred feet, maybe more. At the foot of