In the Blood (36 page)

Mrs. Seward, her face no longer mutilated, leaned forward and brushed her
translucent lips against Sonja's cheek.

Sonja found herself lifted into the air, hurtling through room after room as if shot
from a cannon, the rumble of walls crashing and floors collapsing echoing in her
ears. She saw the window a split second before she was catapulted through it into
the tangled, thorny embrace of an overgrown rosebush.

Sonja dragged herself a few yards before collapsing. She dimly registered the sound
of yet another of one of Ghost Trap's chimneys tumbling down in a thunderclap of
bricks and mortar. She knew she was in extreme danger of the exterior wall
collapsing on her, but somehow it didn't seem to matter.

Morgan had escaped. After all those years spent tracking him through the cities of
the civilized world, she'd had him, felt his blood, felt his pain... only to have him
escape. She'd been so close -

"Sonja! Thank God I found you!"

She squinted up at the figure kneeling over her. "Palmer?"

He looked like he'd been whacked with a golf club. His face was smeared with soot,
he reeked of smoke, and he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

"It ain't the Easter Bunny, baby!" He kissed her blood-smeared brow and helped
her to her feet. After they were safely away from the house, they turned to watch its
death throes. Ghost Trap glowed like the rising sun.

"Look," whispered Palmer, pointing at the smoke and sparks drifting heavenward.

Sonja watched as the pellucid outlines of the Seward family ascended the currents,
accompanied by an equally pale and familiar figure with long, flowing hair and the
shade of a moon-faced man in a flapping white coat, a deformed infant cradled in
his arms. Within seconds of her sighting them, they were gone, lost among the
smoke and soot and lightening sky.

"I'm not going to ask why you're not on a plane to the Yucatan. I'm glad you're
here, Palmer." She leaned her forehead on his shoulder. "You up to driving? I've

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got the keys - "

"It doesn't matter, Sonja. The rental's buried under a couple tons of fireplace. It
looks like we're going to have to hoof it into town and catch the bus into San
Francisco."

She groaned and took his hand. "I guess we better start walkin', huh?"

As they made their way to the county road, Palmer heard the crunch of tires behind
them. He turned in time to see a vintage Rolls with heavily tinted windows bearing
down on them, an Asian man-his head swaddled in sooty bandages-behind the
wheel. Without thinking, Palmer grabbed Sonja and dove into a nearby ditch. The
Rolls rocketed by, spewing gravel in its wake.

Palmer and Sonja clambered back onto the shoulder and watched the limousine's
taillights disappear in the early morning mist.

Morgan lay on the floor of the Rolls, wrapped in blankets and curled in a fetal
position. His chest still burned, but he was certain he'd removed every trace of the
silver-tainted tissue before the toxin had reached his central nervous system. His
chest would heal. It might not even scar. The same could not be said of his face,
however.

Morgan touched his left cheek and moaned. Wounds dealt by silver weapons never
truly healed, and they always left ugly scars. But that was not the worst part.

Broken bones would mend, damaged organs regenerate, and even severed limbs
regrow, in time. But there would be no healing for the wounds she'd inflicted on his
psyche, only a gradual spread of infection.

Lord Morgan, late of the Inquisition and the Gestapo, lay on the floor of his car and
contemplated the dreadful sickness that humans called love.

Epilogue:

Mérida, Yucatan

A man's mind, stretched by new ideas, can
never go back to its original dimensions.

-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Palmer was hammering together a wooden crate on the porch of his hacienda when
the mailman blew his whistle. "Tweet, Daddy! Tweet!" squealed Lethe, rounding
the corner of the house as fast as her baggy diapers would allow. Her Babar the
Elephant shirt was smeared with mud, and, judging from the dirty tablespoon she
was waving, she'd been digging up the back patio again.

"Whoa, droopy drawers!" Palmer laughed, catching the toddler in his outstretched
arms, flipping her upside down. Lethe giggled and wriggled in his grip like a puppy.

Not bad for a nine-month-old. "You know you're not supposed to go near the
road!"

Palmer deposited the child in the macramé hammock he kept strung on the porch

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and trotted down to the mailbox at the foot of the hill. He made a mental note to
take the Land Rover into the city and buy some fencing material. Lethe was
advanced for her age, but he still had problems with her wanting to run out onto the
road every time the mailman made his rounds. Lethe loved getting mail.

A dark, ragged form emerged from the hacienda and joined Lethe in the hammock.

The little girl's giggles were soon joined by peals of crystal chimes and the
yammering of dolphins.

Palmer sorted through the letters as he walked back up the path to the house . Two
were from boutiques in California and New York, ordering three more crates apiece
of Day of the Dead tableaux, stuffed toad Mariachi bands and hand painted papier-mache carnival masks. There was also a package addressed to Lethe with a fistful of
Asian stamps plastered across it and a postcard from Sonja.

"Look, honey! Aunt Boo sent you a present!" Palmer handed the package to Lethe,
still curled in the seraph's lap. Within seconds, the porch was littered with tatters of
brown paper and Lethe was playing with a rag doll dressed in a tiny blue cotton
kimono, its dyed corn-silk hair pulled into an elaborate geisha's coiffure.

Palmer glanced at the front of the picture postcard- a panoramic view of downtown
Tokyo at night- then flipped it over to read the message. There was no salutation or
signature. There never were.

Still no sign of M. But I'm getting closer. The chimera is very excited. It smells its
old master. The scar makes it harder for M to change identities. There are rumors of
atrocities on the mainland - M? Hope to be home for Xmas. Miss you.

Palmer looked up from the card to find the seraph staring at him with its pupil-less
golden eyes.

"No news, Fido. Same old things." The seraph nodded, although Palmer had his
doubts as to how much the creature understood. "Lethe, sweetie, why don't you go
play with Fido on the patio? I've got work to do."

Lethe nodded her tiny dark head, her golden eyes flashing in the afternoon light,
and hopped out of the hammock, leading the grizzled seraph by the hand. Palmer
smiled as the unlikely twosome, nut-brown nature-child and bedraggled street-person, disappeared around the corner of the house, Fido shambling after Lethe like
a trained bear.

Even after all these months, Palmer still had a hard time accepting it all. A year ago
he'd been looking a twenty-to-life sentence in the face. Now he was living the life of
an expatriate
yanqui,
making a decent living selling Mexican and Central American
folk art to painfully chic boutiques and galleries north of the border. He'd also
discovered, to his surprise, he was a damn good father.
Yeah, a lot of things can

change in the space of a year,
he mused, fingering his jade earring.

Lethe had reappeared a couple of weeks after he and Sonja had set up housekeeping
in the Yucatan. One minute the patio had been empty, the next Lethe and the
seraph were there. Although the baby was not yet a month old, she was already
crawling and babbling.

When it became evident the seraph was not going to leave, Sonja decided it was
time for her to continue on her hunt. Palmer knew the seraph made her nervous. It
had taken him a few weeks to get used to the creature's presence himself. But after

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he started calling it Fido, he began to relax. Somehow "Fido" seemed an
appropriate moniker.

Every so often Sonja would appear on the doorstep, unannounced but always
welcome, loaded down with exotic toys for her "niece." Although she adored Lethe,
Sonja could not tolerate being around Fido for more than a few days.

During her brief visits, she and Palmer lay curled together in the hammock and
listened to the night birds call. In its own strange way, their relationship was idyllic.

The last time Sonja had come home she'd been amused to discover the ritual tattoo
on Palmer's chest.

"What's this? Have you decided to go modern primitive on me?" She giggled,
running her hands over the raised markings covering his pectorals.

"I-I decided to get a tattoo to hide the scar from my surgery."

"Really?"

"Kind of. Besides, it matches the scars you leave on my back."

She was silent for a few minutes. "Do you still have the dreams?"

"Sometimes. They've gotten stronger since the hand came back."

'The hand?"

"Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but a couple weeks ago something tapping at the
window screen woke me up. At first I thought it might have been a bird. Then I saw
it, squatting on the ledge outside the window. It was the hand Li Lijing gave you,
scratching to be let in!"

"What'd you do?"

"I let it in."

"Weren't you scared?"

Palmer shrugged. "I've heard stories about dogs traveling cross-country to rejoin
their families, so why not a six-fingered hand? Besides, it doesn't do anything except
hide under the couch. My mom used to have a Chihuahua like that. And if I had to
make a choice, I'd rather have an animated, amputated hand than a Chihuahua."

"Can't argue with you there. So what is this tattoo supposed to represent?"

"The old Mayan guy who did it says it used to be the seal of the
Chan Balam,
the
Jaguar Lords."

However, he hadn't bothered to tell her that while his Spanish remained hopelessly
retarded, he could now speak fluent Lancondoan, the tongue of the children of
Quetzalcoatl, and that he'd stopped smoking his precious Shermans in favor of the
burrito-sized hallucinogenic cigars favored by the Mayans. That had been three
months ago. He wondered what she'd have to say about his earrings.

Palmer resumed his work on the packing crate, pausing every now and again to sip
from a pitcher of lemonade. He noticed a
campesino
trudging his way along the
unpaved road that ran past the house, headed in the direction of the paved highway
three miles away where a rattle-trap bus carried locals into the city.

Palmer stiffened at the sight of the stooped, unwashed man dressed in the
traditional loose-fitting white cotton pants and tunic, a machete hanging from his
belt. He scanned the
campesino,
briefly sampling his thoughts and measuring his
aura for traces of Pretender taint.

Luckily for the
campesino,
he was exactly what he looked like-a peasant on his way

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to town. He would live to ride the bus to Mérida. Palmer allowed himself a sigh of
relief. He disliked killing, even Pretenders. But he knew he could not allow his
vigilance to slacken, even for a moment. For as every good parent knows, the jungle
is full of jaguars hungry for the blood of children.

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