Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) Read Free

Carol’s flight to parts unknown; he’d recovered from that.
    Then, years later, his parents’ death in a fire, Danny Gordon’s mutilation and all the horrors that followed, capped by his own flight and years of hiding.
    He’d dragged himself from that well of despair and was just settling into a different sort of life when he’d had to face Renny Augustino’s brutal murder, Lisl’s suicide, and the exhumation of Danny Gordon’s living corpse.
    Bill wasn’t bouncing back this time. He wasn’t sure he had any bounce left. He’d dragged himself back to New York but it was no longer home. No place was home. In this entire teeming city, Nick Quinn and Carol Treece were the only people left alive from his past that he dared approach.
    “You’ve got to call him Rasalom and stop calling him Jimmy. Got to stop thinking of him as your son. He’s not. There’s nothing of you and Jim in him. He’s someone else.”
    “I know that,” she said, holding him tighter. “In my mind I know that. But in my heart is this feeling that if I’d loved him more, if I’d been a better mother, he’d have turned out differently. It’s crazy, but I can’t get away from it.”
    “Nothing anyone could have done in his childhood would have made the slightest bit of difference. Except maybe strangling him as an infant.”
    He felt Carol stiffen against him and was sorry he’d said it. But it was true.
    “Don’t.”
    “Okay. But stop calling him Jimmy. He’s not Jimmy. Never was. His name is Rasalom and he was already who he was long before he took over the baby in your womb. Long before you were born. He didn’t develop under your care. He was already there. You are not responsible.”
    He stood there in the middle of her tiny living room, holding Carol’s thin body against him, breathing the scent of her hair, spying the streaks of gray nestling in the ash blond waves. Trickles of desire ran down his chest and over his abdomen. With a start, he felt himself hardening. He became aroused so easily these days. Sex had been no problem when he’d still considered himself a priest. But now that his lifelong beliefs had been reduced to ashes, buried with the charred remains of Danny Gordon, everything seemed to be slipping out of control. Here he was, his arms wrapped around Carol Treece, formerly Carol Stevens, née Carol Nevins. His high school sweetheart, his best friend’s widow, now another man’s wife. Priest or ex-priest, this wasn’t right.
    Gently, Bill put some space between them. Room for the Holy Ghost, as the nuns used to say when he was a kid.
    “Are we straight on that?” He gazed into her blue eyes. “You’re not responsible.”
    She nodded. “Right. But how can I stop feeling like his mother, Bill? Tell me how I can do that?”
    He saw the pain in her eyes and resisted the urge to pull her into his arms again.
    “I don’t know, Carol. But you’ve got to learn. You’ll go crazy if you don’t.” They looked at each other for a moment, then Bill changed the subject. “How’s Nelson? Does he know yet?”
    She shook her head and turned away.
    “No. I haven’t been able to tell him.”
    “Don’t you think—?”
    “You’ve met Nels. You know what he’s like.”
    Bill nodded silently. He’d met Nelson Treece a number of times—he’d even been invited over here for dinner twice—but always as a priest and an old friend of the family. Nelson was a straight arrow, a comptroller in a computer software firm. A man who dotted all his i ’s, crossed all his t ’s, and whose numbers always added up. A good man, a decent man, an organized man. The antithesis of spontaneity. Bill doubted whether Nelson had ever done anything on impulse in his entire life.
    So unlike Jim, Carol’s first husband. Bill couldn’t see Nelson Treece and Carol as a loving couple, but maybe that was because he didn’t want to. Maybe Nelson was just what she needed. After the way chaos had intruded repeatedly on Carol’s