Mich.e.l.le grinned. "I wanted it to be a surprise. Besides, you"ve missed too much school this week. Now you"re going to go with her, and I"ll come to get you later this afternoon."
"I don"t have my school bag," Adesina fretted.
"That won"t be a problem," Miss c.u.mmings said. "Everything today is on the computer."
Adesina jumped up and down excitedly. Miss c.u.mmings laughed, then turned and started down the steps. Adesina followed her.
"Don"t I get a kiss?" Mich.e.l.le asked, her voice mock sad.
Adesina spun around, and then flew up into Mich.e.l.le"s arms. "Sorry, Momma," she said, planting a big kiss on Mich.e.l.le"s cheek.
Mich.e.l.le kissed Adesina"s forehead. "I"ll see you soon," she said, and then she put Adesina down.
Adesina ran back to Miss c.u.mmings and began chattering excitedly about lessons.
Joey shook her head. "I don"t f.u.c.king get it," she said. "I hated school."
"Well, Adesina loves it," Mich.e.l.le said. "And I needed someplace safe for her today. Before we came back to the States, I talked to Juliette about how to approach Adesina"s education. I didn"t want to send her to regular school, and it would have been dumb for me to homeschool her. I even thought about moving to Joker Town and having her go to school there, but I was worried everything there would be about being a Joker. And I wanted her to have as normal an education as possible."
Joey laughed. "You mean as normal as possible for a Joker who can go into other wild cards" minds? With a mother who"s one of the most powerful Aces on earth?" She turned and went inside. "You coming?"
"I guess," Mich.e.l.le replied. She followed Joey inside and then shut the front door. "Anyway, Juliette found out about this program for kids with wild cards. They monitor their development, they get cla.s.ses, and they give them a place where they"re not the only wild card. And it"s a mix of Deuces, Aces, and Jokers. They also allow a really flexible schedule. Adesina started there when we got back from Africa."
Mich.e.l.le and Joey went down the hall into the kitchen. Joey pulled out her coffeepot and Mich.e.l.le got the coffee from the cupboard. She toyed with the edge of the bag.
"There"s one more thing," Mich.e.l.le began. "Miss c.u.mmings knows that Juliette gets Adesina if anything happens to me."
"But nothing is going to happen to you," Joey said. "I mean, what can they do to you?"
Mich.e.l.le shrugged. "Who knows?"
But they both knew. If Mich.e.l.le"s power could be stolen, she could be killed.
Mich.e.l.le hadn"t been back to Jackson Square since she"d absorbed Little Fat Boy"s nuclear blast. There was a shrine to her in one corner of the park. Flowers and handmade signs decorated a small official placard.
She knew Mr. Jones had chosen Jackson Square to screw with her. Absorbing that blast had done something terrible to Mich.e.l.le. It had driven her half-mad and had caused her to fall into a coma where she"d wandered alone for over a year. That is, until Adesina had found her and pulled her out of that dark, insane place.
The Square and surrounding area were oddly vacant, and Mich.e.l.le didn"t like that at all. She and Joey were the only people there. Even Cafe Du Monde was bizarrely vacant. And there were usually a least a couple of homeless people camped out on the benches. But not this morning. No doubt part of Mr. Jones"s preparations.
She scanned the area. Mr. Jones hadn"t arrived yet, but she and Joey were a little early. Joey was keeping watch on the whole square using zombie birds and insects. They"d agreed that Joey wouldn"t make a big display of zombie power. Not only because they wanted Mr. Jones to see they were cooperating, but in case Joey"s power got taken again, there would be fewer dead things for the other wild card to use.
"How the h.e.l.l did they clear everyone out of here?" Joey asked. She jammed her hands into her jeans pockets and rocked back on her heels.
Mich.e.l.le shrugged. "I have no idea," she replied. "But they must have clout to clear it during Mardi Gras."
"You"re early," Mr. Jones said.
Mich.e.l.le jumped, and then turned. Dorothy and a young man in a hooded sweatshirt were standing next to him. A bubble formed in her hand. She made it heavy. When it released, it would be fast as h.e.l.l. When it hit, there would be carnage. They might nab her power, but she was going to get one last bubble off. And make it count.
"h.e.l.lo, Mich.e.l.le," Dorothy called out brightly. Today she was wearing a pale blue dress with a striped ap.r.o.n, and her hair was done up in pigtails.
"You"re running with a bad crowd," Mich.e.l.le replied. The bubble quavered in her hand. "But cute outfit."
Dorothy grinned and smoothed her skirt. "Thanks! My mother always said I"d end up in trouble."
It was an odd group: the girl, the boy in the hoodie, and the man who was so obviously a kill-first-ask-questions-later type. Mich.e.l.le knew Dorothy"s power was teleportation, so she wasn"t the power thief. That just left Mr. Jones and the kid with the unfortunate complexion.
"I"m just here for a little conversation," Mr. Jones said with a toothy smile. Despite the mugginess and rapidly rising heat, he looked cool. Mich.e.l.le wondered how that was possible. Even his suit was crisp and impeccable.
"Dorothy you already know. This is Dan. He"s the one who"s been lifting Miss Hebert"s power."
"f.u.c.ker!" Joey yelled.
"Oh, most likely not," Mr. Jones said. "If you were downwind of him, you"d know why."
"Hey!" Hoodie Boy said.
"Why are you telling us this?" Mich.e.l.le asked. "I mean, can you not see this bubble? Can your boy yank both our powers before I get this bubble off?"
Mr. Jones smiled, and Mich.e.l.le really wished she hadn"t seen it. She"d battled crazy people before. She"d even fought people she was convinced were evil. But Mr. Jones was worse. His eyes were cold and dead. And the suit and all of his smiles couldn"t disguise that he was devoid of humanity.
"I thought I was clear, Miss Pond," he said. "Killing me-or even all three of us-won"t stop my organization. Consider me an errand boy. I make deliveries, send messages, take out the trash. In the great scheme of things, I am unimportant."
He smiled again. It didn"t improve upon repet.i.tion.
"For instance," he said. "I could kill young Dan here." Then, in one swift motion, he reached into his jacket, pulled out a Glock, and held it to Hoodie Boy"s head.
"f.u.c.k!" Joey said.
"s.h.i.t!" Hoodie Boy said.
Mich.e.l.le let her bubble fly-but Dorothy touched Mr. Jones and Hoodie Boy, and they teleported ten feet to the left. The bubble hit the wrought-iron fence surrounding the park and blew an enormous hole in it.
"Settle down, Miss Pond," Mr. Jones said. "I"m just trying to explain that even useful people reach an end to their usefulness. Dan"s been handy, but his power, unlike yours, now appears to be unpredictable. But we adapt."
"Jesus, dude," Hoodie Boy said his voice quavering. "I"ll do whatever you want, just don"t shoot me."
"Miss Hebert has a very nice power, but her psychological profile is ... subpar," Mr. Jones continued with a slight smile, ignoring Dan. "She"s too unstable to be of any real use to us other than to manipulate you."
Mich.e.l.le wanted to blow a hole in him but knew that Dorothy would just teleport them again.
That"s when Mich.e.l.le heard it. A faint rustling noise above her.
She looked up and there-spiraling down towards them-were hundreds of zombie birds. Dan, Mr. Jones, and Dorothy followed her gaze.
"How irritating," Mr. Jones said. "Dorothy ..."
The girl grabbed the back of Dan"s hoodie, and they ported. They reappeared next to Joey, and Dan grabbed her hand. Joey shrieked.
The zombie birds suddenly started flying erratically, crashing into one another.
Then Dan screamed, and his face turned red. Veins bulged out from his neck.
"Dan," Mr. Jones said calmly. "You"re such a disappointment." He grimaced and leveled his Glock at Dan again. One moldy pigeon flew into Mr. Jones"s face, and then Dan and Joey gasped at the same time.
The flock of zombie birds coalesced again and began to lower onto Mr. Jones and Dan.
"You played with my pain, f.u.c.ker," Joey said. "That wasn"t nice."
Dan scrambled to his knees and lunged at Mich.e.l.le. He touched her bare arm, and there was a terrible wrenching inside her. The world tilted and went grey for a moment. Then the contact was broken, and Mich.e.l.le staggered backwards. She was empty inside, as if someone had scooped out part of her. It was awful.
Dan made a whimpering noise and fell to his knees as bubbles filled his hands and rose into the zombie birds coming for him. But instead of exploding, the bubbles just kept floating upward as if made from soapy water.
Then Mich.e.l.le"s power flowed back into her like a tidal wave. It filled her up and made her whole. Relief surged into her. She was Bubbles again.
Dan was still on the ground. It was clear to Mich.e.l.le that his power-s.n.a.t.c.hing ability was spent. So that just left Dorothy and her teleportation, and Mr. Jones and his Glock.
"Little girl," Joey said, her voice cold, "Dorothy"s your name? I suggest you bounce back to the f.u.c.kers who sent you and you tell them that we"re off-limits. Or there will be more of this."
And then, in an eyeblink, the zombie flock descended on Mr. Jones and Dan.
Dan just lay there, twitching and crying, as the birds blanketed him. Mich.e.l.le had a momentary twinge of guilt at seeing him buried under the birds, but then she remembered how she felt when he lifted her power and a cold anger filled her.
Mr. Jones pulled his Glock and began firing, but his bullets were useless against the zombie flock. Then he lowered his gun and aimed at Joey, but it was too late.
The birds engulfed him, and he shrieked as they ripped his flesh. He dropped his gun and began yanking the birds away from his face, tearing them to pieces as he did. But there were too many. And still they rained down on him.
"I"m Hoodoo Mama, f.u.c.kers," Joey said. Her tone was icy and imperious. "And this is my parish."
Dorothy squeaked, then vanished.
It grew dark, and Mich.e.l.le looked up again. The sky was filled now with thousands of dead birds blotting out the sun. Crows, pigeons, waterfowl, sparrows, and more that she didn"t recognize. She"d never seen Joey resurrect so many dead things at once before.
And when Mich.e.l.le looked back at Joey, she was filled with awe. The scared and nervous girl Mich.e.l.le had been trying to protect was gone. Joey"s eyes had turned solid black, and her face was filled with rage. It seemed as if she were growing larger and larger. As if she had become a force of nature.
No. She had become a force beyond nature.
A force stronger than death.
She had become Hoodoo Mama.
And G.o.d help anyone who messed with her.
In the next instant Mr. Jones vanished, enveloped by the zombie flock. He screamed and screamed and screamed. Blood pooled under the ma.s.s of birds.
"Oh Jesus!" he shrieked. "Help me! Jesus, help me!"
"Jesus can"t save you, f.u.c.ker," Joey said in a cold voice. "No one can."
Then the ma.s.s of birds collapsed as Mr. Jones crumpled to the ground. Even then he kept kicking and screaming.
"Mommy," he cried. "Mommy!" His voice rose up into a high-pitched keen.
Then he fell silent. For almost a minute, one of his feet would pop out of the ma.s.s of birds as he kicked and flailed.
But after a while, Mr. Jones stopped doing even that.
And Dan was already still and silent.
Joey turned then and looked at Mich.e.l.le with a beatific smile on her face.
"I think you were right, Bubbles," she said. "I think I am going to be okay."
With that, Joey threw her arms wide open and spun around. Ten thousand zombie birds swirled around her and rose back up to the sky.
George R. R. Martin Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awardwinner George R. R. Martin, New York Times bestselling author of the landmark A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, has been called "the American Tolkien."
Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, George R. R. Martin made his first sale in 1971, and soon established himself as one of the most popular SF writers of the seventies. He quickly became a mainstay of the Ben Bova a.n.a.log with stories such as "With Morning Comes Mistfall," "And Seven Times Never Kill Man," "The Second Kind of Loneliness," "The Storms of Windhaven" (in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle, and later expanded by them into the novel Windhaven), "Override," and others, although he also sold to Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, Orbit, and other markets. One of his a.n.a.log stories, the striking novella "A Song for Lya," won him his first Hugo Award, in 1974.
By the end of the seventies he had reached the height of his influence as a science fiction writer, and was producing his best work in that category with stories such as the famous "Sandkings," his best-known story, which won both the Nebula and the Hugo in 1980 (he"d later win another Nebula in 1985 for his story "Portraits of His Children"); "The Way of Cross and Dragon," which won a Hugo Award in the same year (making Martin the first author ever to receive two Hugo Awards for fiction in the same year): "Bitterblooms"; "The Stone City"; "Starlady"; and others. These stories would be collected in Sandkings, one of the strongest collections of the period. By now he had mostly moved away from a.n.a.log, although he would have a long sequence of stories about the droll interstellar adventures of Haviland Tuf (later collected in Tuf Voyaging) running throughout the eighties in the Stanley Schmidt a.n.a.log, as well as a few strong individual pieces such as the novella "Nightflyers." Most of his major work of the late seventies and early eighties, though, would appear in Omni. The late seventies and eighties also saw the publication of his memorable novel Dying of the Light, his only solo SF novel, while his stories were collected in A Song for Lya, Sandkings, Songs of Stars and Shadows, Songs the Dead Men Sing, Nightflyers, and Portraits of His Children. By the beginning of the eighties he"d moved away from SF and into the horror genre, publishing the big horror novel Fevre Dream, and winning the Bram Stoker Award for his horror story "The Pear-Shaped Man" and the World Fantasy Award for his werewolf novella "The Skin Trade." By the end of that decade, though, the crash of the horror market and the commercial failure of his ambitious horror novel The Armageddon Rag had driven him out of the print world and to a successful career in television instead, where for more than a decade he worked as story editor or producer on such shows as the new Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast.
After years away, Martin made a triumphant return to the print world in 1996 with the publication of the immensely successful fantasy novel A Game of Thrones, the start of his Song of Ice and Fire sequence. A freestanding novella taken from that work, "Blood of the Dragon," won Martin another Hugo Award in 1997. Further books in the Song of Ice and Fire series-A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons, have made it one of the most popular, acclaimed, and bestselling series in all of modern fantasy. Recently, the books were made into an HBO TV series, Game of Thrones, which has become one of the most popular and acclaimed shows on television, and made Martin a recognizable figure well outside of the usual genre boundaries, even inspiring a satirical version of him on Sat.u.r.day Night Live. Martin"s most recent books are the latest book in the Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons; a ma.s.sive retrospective collection spanning the entire spectrum of his career, GRRM: A RRetrospective; a novella collection, Starlady and Fast-Friend; a novel written in collaboration with Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham, Hunter"s Run; and, as editor, several anthologies edited in collaboration with Gardner Dozois, including Warriors, Songs of the Dying Earth, Songs of Love and Death, and Down These Strange Streets, and several new volumes in his long-running Wild Cards anthology series, including Suicide Kings and Fort Freak. In 2012, Martin was given the Life Achievement Award by the World Fantasy Convention.
Here he takes us to the turbulent land of Westeros, home to his Ice and Fire series, for the b.l.o.o.d.y story of a clash between two very dangerous women whose bitter rivalry and ambition plunges all of Westeros disastrously into war.
THE PRINCESS AND THE QUEEN,.
OR,.
THE BLACKS AND THE GREENS.
Being A History of the Causes, Origins, Battles, and Betrayals of that Most Tragic Bloodletting Known as the Dance of the Dragons, as set down by Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel of Oldtown