Darker Than You Think (49 page)

"I
wish—" he whispered hoarsely, "I wish I had known."

"Don't
upset yourself," she advised him. "The woman died, you
remember, trying to warn Sam Quain."

Barbee
blinked uneasily, breathing: "What was it she wanted to tell
Sam?"

"The
name of the Child of Night." The she-wolf sat leering at him
redly. "But we stopped her—and you played your own role
very cleverly, Barbee, pretending to be his friend and begging for a
chance to help him and trying to comfort his crying wife."

"Huh?"
Barbee rose from the bed. He felt suddenly cold, and he stood swaying
with a gray illness. "You don't—" he whispered
breathlessly. "You can't mean— that I—"

"I
do, Barbee!" The she-wolf pricked up her triangular ears, her
greenish eyes dancing with a malicious pleasure in his deep
perturbation. "You're one of us—the powerful one we've
bred to be our leader. You're the one we call the Child of Night"

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

Into
the Shadows

Barbee
shook his head dazedly.

"No!"
He stood shuddering, clinging to the bedpost. A sudden sweat filmed
his cold skin. He tried to breathe, and gasped a faint protest: "I
don't believe it."

"You
will," she purred, "as soon as you grasp your powers. Our
ancestral gifts are always slow to awaken —the slowest usually
the greatest. They tend to lie unused and even unsuspected, hidden by
the dominant human heritage, until they waken of themselves—or
are awakened by such an expert as Archer Glenn. Your father blundered
by telling Rowena too abruptly, and her human part rebelled."

Trembling
weakly, Barbee sat back on the bed.

"I'll
not be—your Black Messiah!" he whispered faintly.
"That—that's insanity. Anyhow, I don't believe you! I
don't even believe you're here. Just something out of a whisky
bottle!" He shook a threatening fist. "Get the devil out of
here—before I scream."

"Go
ahead and scream." She laughed at him silently, fine ears
pricked up. "My mind web isn't nearly so powerful as yours—Nurse
Hellar can't see me."

Barbee
didn't scream. For two minutes he sat on the edge of the bed,
watching the bright-eyed, expectant wolf. If she were just
hallucination, born of delerium tremens, she was still a remarkably
vivid and graceful and malicious illusion.

"You
followed me away from Preston Troy's tonight," he accused her
suddenly. "I know you were there—in another shape,
probably. I saw your white coat with that little jade running wolf
pinned to it, on a chair in his den."

"So
what?" Her greenish eyes smiled mockingly. "I was only
waiting for you, Barbee."

"I
saw your picture in his bedroom." Barbee's voice was shaking.
"And I saw him let himself into your apartment with his own key.
What is he to you, April?"

Laughing
again, the white wolf trotted to him and put her slender white paws
on his trembling knees. Her long greenish eyes looked more than ever
human— April Bell's. They looked eager and glad and yet faintly
mocking, and they shone with tears.

"So
that's why you've been trying to run away from me tonight, Barbee?"

Hoarsely
he muttered, "Maybe it is."

"So
that's all it is!" Her cold muzzle lifted as if impulsively to
kiss him. "You silly, jealous devil! I told you that we're
special beings, you and I, Barbee. We were born for a special
purpose. It would be too bad if you didn't like me."

He
rubbed angrily at the tingle of her icy kiss, demanding bleakly: "Who
is Preston Troy?"

"Just
my father." She tittered at his shocked unbelief. "All I
told you about my childhood and the brutalities of that ignorant
dairyman is true—I told you he wasn't my father and knew he
wasn't."

The
white bitch leered at him gleefully.

"You
see, Mother had been a secretary of Preston's before she married the
dairyman, and she still saw him whenever she could. The dairyman
suspected—that's why he was so ready to believe that I was a
witch and so cruel in his punishments. He never liked my red hair."

She
chuckled reminiscently.

"But
Preston was always generous," she said. "Of course he
couldn't marry Mother—he'd had too many other secretaries. But
he used to send us money and gifts in California—Mother would
tell me they came from a mythical Aunt Agatha, before I knew about
Preston. He has done a lot for me since she died— he even paid
for my analysis at Glennhaven." Her greenish gaze mocked him.
"So you were jealous, Barbee?"

He
touched her silky fur with uncertain sweaty fingers.

"I
guess I was," he muttered hoarsely. "Anyhow, I can't help
being glad—"

He
paused as light struck him. The door was swinging open. Nurse Hellar
peered into the room with an expression of mild reproof on her broad
face.

"Really,
Mr. Barbee!" she admonished him softly. "You'll catch cold
if you sit up all night talking to yourself. Let me tuck you in bed."
She started resolutely toward him, and the white bitch nipped at her
muscular ankle. "Gracious, what was that?" She peered at
the redly grinning wolf without seeming to see anything, and
threatened Barbee in a somewhat shaken voice: "If you aren't in
bed when I get back with the hypo—"

"You
won't be," the she-wolf told him, as Nurse Hellar retreated
apprehensively. "Because it's time for us to go."

"Where?"
he whispered uneasily.

"To
take care of your friend Sam Quain," purred the voice of April
Bell. "He's about to get away from the sheriff's men. The high
water has stopped them, and he's climbing a trail they don't know
about. He's carrying that box. He has the only weapon that can ever
harm you, Barbee, and we must stop him before he learns to use it.
I've found a linkage of probability that we can grasp, when the
moment comes."

Stubbornly,
Barbee clenched his fists.

"I
won't hurt Sam," he muttered grimly. "Not even if I am
bewitched!"

"But
you aren't, Barbee." Gently, the white bitch rubbed her silken
shoulder against his knees. "Can't you realize that you're one
of us?—completely, now, because your last human ties were
broken on Sardis Hill tonight."

"Huh?"
He sat blinking at her. "What do you mean?"

"So
you still don't feel your wonderful gifts, Barbee?" She smiled
up at him with a kindly mockery. "I'll show you what I mean when
we come to Sardis Hill." Her tapered head nodded urgently. "Now
it's time to go."

He
sat back resolutely.

"I
still don't believe I could be this Child of Night," he said
flatly. "And I won't harm Sam!"

"Come,"
she whispered. "You'll believe when I show you."

"No!"
Shivering in cold rigidity, Barbee clung with clammy hands to the
iron bed. "I can't be any such monstrous—thing!"

"You'll
be our leader, Will," she told him softly. "Our new
chieftain in the long fight for our lost dominion—until a
stronger one takes your place. You and I are the most powerful in
generations, but a child with both our genes will have still less of
the human taint."

She
dropped to all fours again and nipped playfully at his knee. "Let's
go."

He
tried to resist, but his clinging fingers slipped from the bedpost.
His wistful longing for the winged might of the oil company's
pterosaur came back; it turned swiftly to a ruthless, burning
eagerness. His body flowed and grew. The change was easy now, for all
that awkwardness and pain was gone; and it brought him a fresh,
savage strength.

The
white bitch beside him was changing too. She reared to her hind feet
and grew swiftly taller. The flowing curves of her white body filled,
and the fur was gone, and she flung the burnished red hair back of
her bare shoulders. Fiercely eager, Barbee gathered the slim woman in
his leathery wings, and he kissed her cool, tender lips with the
giant saurian's snout. Laughing, she gave his hard scaled head a
ringing slap.

"We've
another appointment first." She slipped out of his folded wings
and sprang astride his armored back. "With probability and your
old friend Quain."

Barbee
looked at the reinforced window, and it melted out of its frame. He
slithered through the opening, with the girl crouching low upon him,
and perched for a moment with his mighty talons gripping the sill. He
looked back, with a tiny shudder of disgust, for the ugly human husk
behind him. To his faint surprise, the white hospital bed was empty.
That minor puzzle didn't trouble him, however. It was good to be
strong and free again, and he liked the feel of the girl astride him.

"Why,
Mr. Barbee!" He heard Nurse Hellar's breathless voice and felt
the unpleasant glow of light as she opened the door. He didn't let
her see him, and a comical consternation twisted her face as she
looked under the bed and into the corners of the empty room, carrying
her hypodermic needle. "Wherever are you?"

Barbee
felt a demoniac impulse to manifest himself and show her, but April
Bell's flat hand slapped his scaly flank reprovingly. Leaving Nurse
Hellar to solve her own problem, he spread his black wings and
launched himself awkwardly from the window.

The
night was still cloudy and the brisk south wind laden with icy
drizzle. The shape of things was clear to his new senses, however;
the damp chill was merely stimulating now, and all his trembling
fatigue was gone. He beat the rain-washed air with long easy strokes,
soaring westward.

A
frightened dog barked suddenly in the yard of a dark farmhouse
beneath them, and Barbee dived to terrify it into whimpering silence
with his own hissing scream. A joyous strength lifted his wings. This
was life. All his old uncertainties and conflicts and frustrations
were left behind. At last he was free.

They
lifted into the west. Lights of cars moved over the flanks of the
night-mantled hills below, lanterns swung, and flashlights made
furtive gleams. But the manhunt, he saw with the saurian's eyes, was
making slow progress. Flood waters had come tumbling down from the
higher canyons since he left Sam Quain at the cave; Bear Creek and
Laurel Canyon were impassable now with white water and grinding
boulders. The sheriff's men were halted at the ford.