Jeremy Case (laser Books 36)

Jeremy Case Gene DeWeese Laser Books, New York ISBN: 9780373720361 It existed. It did not live. Without a host, it had no life of its own, no way to grow or change. It did not die, even though its last host had been destroyed—just as all previous hosts had, in the end, been destroyed. It was not able to die. It remembered nothing, although it contained the memories of all its hosts. Without a host, it had no thoughts of its own, no means of thinking or remembering. It had kept those hosts alive, one after the other, through countless battles and accidents on countless hostile and unknown worlds, but in the end it was always the same. The destruction of that last host had been little different from the others. In that last, fiery, uncontrolled descent, it had been powerless as its host literally disintegrated from around it, flaming away in a shower of incandescence. It had been powerless to do anything but withdraw, as it had done so often before, retreating within itself, into a tiny, self-contained universe, invisible and indestructible, a timeless bubble tucked away from the mainstream of existence, isolated from the real universe except for the tendrils of perception that were the only senses it possessed in its own right, the only links to reality that did not depend totally upon a host. It was powerless to do anything but exist—and wait. Wait—far longer than those who had been its hosts and who had sometimes imagined themselves to be its creators, would have believed possible. It existed and waited, neither alive nor dead, while on the planet around it, new life grew and evolved. New and different life… The First Death CHAPTER 1 To Jeremy Case, airplanes had always been the best magic in the world. There had been an aura of time and distance about them all, from the tiny single seaters that had buzzed overhead on their way to the local airport to the huge jets that left their ghostly vapor trails billowing through the stratosphere. To one day ride in one had been a dream of Jeremy's for at least fifteen of his twenty years. Now the dream had come true but the magic was not there. He was barely aware of the three dozen other passengers. He hardly felt the vague discomfort caused by wedging his hundred and eighty pounds into the narrow seat and jamming his knees against the back of the seat ahead. All he could see was the face that would be waiting for him at the end of the journey. All he could feel was the pain he knew would soon be with him. And all he could remember were the times he had been with her. For more than five years, until his father, now remarried, had come to collect him, she had been both his mother and his father—and, he realized, his friend. Now she was dying. There was something inside her, something wrong and evil, something that should not be there! Something that Jeremy hated with all his being. But hating would do no good. He knew that. Hating the thing that lived within Aunt Jessica's body would do no more good than loving Aunt Jessica herself. She would still be destroyed. Nothing would do any good. Jeremy could only hurt and ache and try to hold back the tears. And come a thousand miles when she called. Something touched Jeremy's shoulder lightly. He blinked, his eyes slowly focusing on his own reflection in the tiny window. For a moment he stared at it as if the face that floated before him belonged to a stranger: Reddish, sandy hair cut short; soft oval face; full lips with an inch-long horizontal scar almost hidden beneath the slightly protruding lower lip; the nose, bent at a slight angle in the same accident that had produced the scar. He blinked again, forcing his eyes to look beyond the reflect