“Ruined Snakefish,” Blue corrected automatically. The whole baronial ville had been wrecked by an earthquake recently and rumor had it there was barely anything of the old structure left. Yet another of the nine baronies fallen with the disappearance of the Annunaki.
“Think this might be something that your buyer be after?” Hurbon asked.
“For the right price,” Blue said nonchalantly. There was no art collector in Snakefishville; that was simply a lure to disguise the true significance of the item. Ohio turned to Brigid, looking for any indication that the redhead might give as to the item’s value to Cerberus, that she might begin negotiations.
Beneath the wide brim of her hat, Brigid offered a barely perceptible nod of her head, her long hair brushing at her shoulders. Right now, the strange chair was an eyesore that happened to have fallen into the lap of a drugged-up cultist. However, there was value here, and certainly Cerberus would be interested in testing the genetic makeup of the object to find out as much as they could about the Annunaki. If it possessed star charts that could locate the Annunaki’s home planet, for instance, such knowledge would be of inestimable value.
“Vision chair like that,” Hurbon continued, “visions as big as the sky, that’s got to be real valuable to your client. Art collector sees visions like that and he won’t need to buy any more art.”
Hurbon laughed at his own observation as Brigid began to rise from the strange rootlike seat. As she did so, her hand brushed against the water-stained armrest and something clicked within. Brigid stared in shock as a series of thornlike spikes appeared along the arms of the chair, and several of them pierced the heel of her hand where it still rested against the chair itself.
“Oh, you gone done it now, haven’t you, girl?” Hurbon muttered, and a rich laugh came from deep in his chest.
As the four of them watched, the thorns were turning into tendrils, reaching out from the surface of the chair’s arms like a plant’s shoots emerging from the soil. In a second, the waving tendrils latched on to Brigid as she struggled to get up out of the chair, wrapping around her arms before she could pull away.
“What’s it doing?” Brigid asked, an edge of panic in her tone as she found she could no longer rise from the alien seat.
The tendrils continued to pull Brigid’s struggling form back down into the seat, wrapping around her wrists and bonding them to the armrests like manacles.
“I can’t move,” Brigid said as she struggled against the squirming tendrils.
Kane fixed his steely stare on the voodoo priest. “You have to switch this thing off right now,” he insisted.
Hurbon shrugged. “Ah, the chair chooses her own lovers,” he said, a mellow laugh peppering his words. “I only find them for her.”
As Hurbon continued to chuckle, the shoots rushed upward, grasping the underside of Brigid’s right arm as her bare skin brushed against them. In a split second, the tendrils wrapped around her arm, more and more of them branching from the first few that snapped around her, spreading to form a network of veins across her flesh. Brigid gritted her teeth as her arms were yanked down toward the armrest, the budding tendrils wrapping over them to lock her in place. Despite her physical fitness, the chair seemed to have no trouble pulling Brigid down, drawing her closer with the viselike grip of those thin, plantlike tendrils.
“What’s happening?” Brigid asked fearfully.
“You triggered it,” Hurbon stated, laughing once again.
“I just touched it,” Brigid said. “You tricked me.”
Despite her struggles, Brigid was pulled back down into the seat once more, and she squirmed at an angle as she tried to right herself and get away from the alien chair.
Calmly, Kane bent down and pulled a combat knife from the sheath he wore at his ankle. “Quit struggling, Baptiste,” he told her. “You’re just making it worse.”
Brigid’s eyes went wide with shock when she saw Kane move toward her with the lethal-looking blade. “Kane, don’t do anything crazy, okay?” she said through gritted teeth, letting out a yelp as the thorns pressed against her supple flesh.
Kane eyed the tendrils as more and more appeared, growing from the arms and back of the chair and then wrapping themselves tightly around his beautiful companion’s struggling form. The strange tendrils were already cinched over both of Brigid’s arms and had reached around to encompass her pale, slender neck, pulling her so that she sat upright despite her squirming. “Stay still,” Kane instructed. “I’ll cut you free.”
Hurbon laughed louder when he heard that, as though the whole thing was nothing more than a joke.
Ohio Blue fixed the voodoo priest with a fierce look. “Is this your idea of a game?” she challenged. “I had a collector lined up for this piece, but I don’t think it’s money you’re after.”
“You’re astute for a nonbeliever,” Hurbon growled. As if to punctuate his response, Papa Hurbon swung one of his meaty arms at the blue-clad trader, moving fast despite his size and disability. In a second he had knocked her to the floor with a loud, open-palmed slap.
Ohio cried out in pain as she slid across the wooden floorboards, a loose nail tearing the thin cotton of her pant leg.
In the Annunaki chair, Brigid was straining back and forth, shaking her head left and right as the thorny appendages began to burble around her face, covering her eyes. “It hurts,” she yelped, and Kane saw the tiny runnels of blood begin to snake across her flesh amid a glistening sheen of sweat.
“Stay still,” Kane repeated, pressing his left hand against Brigid’s for a moment. Then he swept the knife rapidly through the tendrils, cutting through the first dozen strands that had laced up her arm.
But before Kane could get any further with his task, the vast form of Papa Hurbon reached for him from behind, pulling the ex-Mag away from the chair in a mighty bear hug before flinging him to the floor. Kane slid across the worn floorboards before thudding into the far wall next to Ohio Blue with a bone-shaking crash.
“The chair’s chosen,” Hurbon barked. “You leave her be now, boy.”
Head reeling, Kane struck out from where he lay, sweeping his legs out and catching Hurbon’s own wooden leg as the massive figure loomed over him. With a howl, Hurbon’s bulbous form fell sideways and he lost his balance, arms reaching out as he slammed against the wall.
“You chose the wrong victim for your little scheme,” Kane snarled, pulling himself up off the floor.
“Ain’t you been listening, boy?” Hurbon snapped as he struggled on the floor like a beached whale. “I don’t choose—Ezili Coeur Noir’s chair does that.”
Writhing in the chair, Brigid yelped as the weird tendrils squirmed around her face, wrapping around her, covering her eyes. Then she felt the tendrils worming up into her nostrils, pushing between her lips, and she felt as if panic might consume her at that moment.
But something even stranger than that was happening. Within her mind, hovering in her field of vision, a star chart appeared with crystal clarity. Planets rotated in their orbits, and as Brigid’s eyes were drawn to them, tags appeared to identify each, written in a script that even she could not decipher despite her incredible base of knowledge.
It was terrifying, that feeling of being trapped in the all-encompassing embrace of the nightmare chair, and a part of Brigid felt the rising panic of claustrophobia as the tendrils snaked over her face. But another part of her, her rational mind, marveled at that star chart playing across her eyes, shifting with the movements of her irises, shifting with her very thoughts themselves.
Across from Brigid in the wooden-floored room, Kane spat a curse at Hurbon as the corpulent priest lay flailing on the floor, unable to right himself without help thanks to the wooden leg he wore.
Papa