Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (24 page)

Mulkerrin pulled from inside his collar a silver cross, holding it before him as he rounded the counter. He started to walk toward the door, confident that Peter would not take up the gauntlet, that he was in too much pain or was simply too frightened to attack. He was wrong.

Peter sprang the eight feet to where Mulkerrin walked, forgetting the pain in his ears and the power he knew the sorcerer must control. The cross was nothing, much easier to ignore than the sun, while the silver was a bit more of a nuisance, a poison to him, but only if it penetrated his flesh.

He began to shape-shift as he moved, the metamorphosis faster than the eye could follow. In moments he had become a huge wolflike creature, standing on his hind legs. His claws reached the murderous priest, tearing furrows down his cheek. Mulkerrin screamed in rage and surprise, but did not drop the book. Peter attempted to tear it from his hands, and they struggled. Mulkerrin was far stronger than the average human, and Peter knew this must be some magical augmentation, though he’d never encountered such strength in any being other than his own kind. Still, he himself was by far the more powerful physically, and Mulkerrin had not been prepared to lose his imagined advantages.

The two creatures slammed each other into walls and shelving, Peter using his claws to tear at the sorcerer to no avail. Mulkerrin began yelling something that Peter did not understand, though he could certainly hear it. When he looked up, though, he saw that an aura of black light surrounded Mulkerrin’s closed left fist, a light pulsing with sickness and death. He knew then that he was in trouble, that they were all dead.

Then he saw his opportunity.

Amid the shrieking and the wind and the flying books, the two banshees had not moved, and the first one was still standing by the shattered window, screaming. Peter and his enemy had moved within feet of that banshee, of that window. Peter shoved the priest back, holding the left arm aloft. Mulkerrin stepped back, still clutching the book in his right hand, and screamed in agony as the left passed through the body of the spirit. In seconds, ice had formed on it and the aura had dissipated in a light blue mist.

Mulkerrin kept screaming and lunged at Peter, who side-stepped and grappled with him as he went past, increasing his momentum until it carried both of them out the window, into the cloud-diffused sunlight.

And they fell, immortal detective, sorcerer priest, and the book, toward the glass-strewn pavement of Harvard Square, where afternoon shoppers were just making way for the cops. Never one around when you need ’em, Peter thought as he plummeted, and the only good one was dead back in that room. Peter held on tight, digging his claws into Mulkerrin’s back, the book in the priest’s hands pressed between them.

He looked down, and waited. Milliseconds ticked by, and then Peter dissipated from his man-wolf form into ethereal mist. It frightened him somewhat to metamorphose in the daylight, but there had been no alternative, and having done it, he felt more confident than ever about his abilities. Now, as mist, he watched Mulkerrin hurtle toward the pavement, satisfied that he could grab the book and make good his escape before the cops caught on, hoping that nobody really got a good look at the “man who disappeared.”

Something was wrong.

Mulkerrin wasn’t screaming. His face was not a rictus of fear, of a new knowledge of his own mortality.

Rather, though his face held more than a trace of annoyance, he was smiling.

In mist, Peter saw two streaks, barely visible, emerge from the window of the Book Store accompanied by a horrible noise. The banshees moved to their master’s aid at a speed no human eye could have observed. In only slightly more time, Mulkerrin had been swept away amid a shrieking that shattered windows for a block, hailing broken glass that sliced into tourists and students observing the scene.

The next day, most everyone would have a different version of what they had seen, and some would even deny having been there in order to avoid discussing what was clearly a mass hallucination. Falling people do not simply disappear.

Ah, but they do, Peter thought as he drifted back through the window in time to lie down among the rubble before the cops arrived. Meaghan was bent over Ted’s corpse, her eyes hard but not crying, trying to dig him out of the books. At first glance Peter thought that Guiscard, also, was tending a dead man, but then the pile of books shifted, and Peter could see that the younger man was indeed alive. Even so, when the cardinal looked up, Peter could see only fear in his eyes.

“A cairn of books,” he said softly, almost to himself. “That’s what this almost was. I don’t know what I’d have told his mother.”

“I didn’t get the book back,” Peter informed him.

“I ought to have a cairn myself. The book is gone? Well, for me the damage is done. For you, though—whatever it is you creatures are calling yourselves—for you, with that book back with its owner . . . well, your troubles are just beginning.”

“MY, YOU ARE GOOD, AREN’T YOU?”

Cody looked up at the red-haired woman with the British accent and was pleased. Pleased not simply because he’d managed to avoid anything resembling hard alcohol, not because he was handily defeating the casino dealer at blackjack, and not just because the woman happened to be very pretty and extraordinarily well made. No, his pleasure came from the look in her eye, an unconscious look that Cody had come to recognize well over his century and a half.

She’d made up her mind.

It was a male trail, mostly. The moment a man looked at a woman, he’d decided whether or not he’d like to put it to her, given the chance. Anyone who knew what to look for, and had half a mind to look, could see it plain as day. A male trait. Mostly. Some women, like the British redhead, also got that look.

And it wasn’t just the look, it was the voice, too. Not the way she said “you are good” or the rest. But the emphasis on that “my,” almost as if he had just dropped his pants for her viewing pleasure.

One look made up his mind. He was getting tired of winning at cards.

“Actually, it’s not much of a challenge,” he said, smiling at her and moving down one chair so she could sit at his right, then looking at the dealer. “Hit me.”

The dealer dropped a six of diamonds down on his eight of spades.

“Not much of a challenge?” She laughed with false yet instructive amusement. “This is Monte Carlo, sir.”

“Yes, ma’am. But blackjack is a boy’s game. Poker’s the game for a man. Unfortunately, in your Monte Carlo, it’s nearly impossible to beat the house in poker.” He turned to the dealer again.

“Hit me.”

“It’s not
my
Monte Carlo.”

The dealer dropped a three of hearts, and his total was seventeen.

“I’m sorry, you seemed so fond of it. No, of course you’re English, aren’t you Miss . . .”

“Thomas. Vanessa Thomas. You’re not going to play off that seventeen, I hope.”

“Hit me,” he told the dealer, and got a three of clubs for his trouble. The dealer went over twenty-one, and Cody cleaned up again.

“Nicely done. Now, I’ve told my name. You are?”

“Tired of playing blackjack. Could I buy you a drink and lose my winnings on your favorite number in roulette?”

“Well,” she said, and there was the face again, the voice, “the drink for certain, but I tend toward other types of gambling than roulette.”

And so they avoided roulette. As they talked Vanessa sipped white wine and Cody nothing but seltzer. They wandered from table to table, observing mostly losers who could have won if they’d quit while ahead. Vanessa was charmed by the man’s unaffected-looking, long brown hair and the beard he wore, both in complete contrast to his white tuxedo dinner jacket and the rose in his lapel, as if a cowboy had been hired to play James Bond. He had . . .

“ . . . the nicest eyes.”

“Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you very much. That’s quite a compliment coming from a woman of your caliber.”

She blushed, now, at the compliment so deftly turned in her direction. “You know, you haven’t told me your name,” she said, and the fingers of her left hand slowly stroked the stem of her wineglass.

“Cody. Cody October, but please just call me Cody.”

“Ooh. That’s a wonderful name. So American. It’s like something from a John—”

“A John Wayne movie, I know. So I’ve been told.”

“Actually, Mr. October, I was going to say a John
Ford
movie.”

“Well, thank the Lord, a woman who knows her Westerns! Things have surely changed since I was a boy.”

“Come now, Cody, your boyhood can’t have been that long ago. You don’t look more than, oh, thirty-five or so.”

“You’re being generous, Vanessa. I think you’d be surprised at my age even if you weren’t erring on the side of courtesy with your guessing.”

And she certainly would be surprised. Actually, even Cody was surprised. Not simply because he hadn’t aged since he died in 1917, but because of another, more radical fact. He had gotten younger. Even Von Reinman had never been able to explain that one. His death had come a month before his seventy-first birthday, and here he looked like he was just approaching his forty-first. Which reminded him—he did have a birthday coming up in a couple of weeks.

But hell, he wasn’t going to complain.

“You’re exaggerating,” she told him.

“You’ll find I have a tendency to do that.”

She looked at him queerly for a moment. “And how will I find that out?” she asked, serious now, with an eyebrow arched and a bit of an Irish brogue slipping out from what had been a good hiding place.

“Well, darlin’,” he said, and now Cody let his accent slip out, to make her feel a little better, and waved his arms like a bad actor. “There’s a coupla ways you might find out more about me. First off, I reckon I’m sick to death of this casino and these clothes and drinking seltzer and the people, present company excluded, who frequent these establishments of ill repute, dens of iniquity, etcetera, etcetera. So what that means is, I’ve got to go, and soon, before I decide to start an old-fashioned bar fight just to spark some excitement for the folks here.

“The question, if I may put it so bluntly, all my cards on the table, so to speak, is whether or not I’m leaving here alone. Now, please don’t think I assume too much, or anything, for that matter. However, I know one thing for sure and that’s that I’d enjoy a walk by the water under the moon right about now and it would be far more enjoyable if I wasn’t walking alone. Whether we’re walking back to my ship or back to your rooms or just walking isn’t the important thing. What’s important is the company and the quiet.”

All the while Cody was speaking, Vanessa’s smile had been getting bigger and wider, and now she was shaking her head and kind of chuckling, down deep. She looked up at him when he finally took a breath.

“Well, Mr. Cody October, like most Americans you sure do talk a lot. A lot of words when a few would do. If I’m to understand you correctly, you’d like to take a walk with me. In reply to that, I can only say that I am a bit nackered myself and should be making my way back to my hotel. If you would like to safeguard my passage there, I’m sure I can’t think of a more pleasant way to end an evening.”

“Oh,” Cody muttered as he held out his arm for her to take, “and Americans talk a lot.”

“Well, you do!” She laughed as they walked toward the exit. “Where are you from originally, Cody?”

“Originally? I was born in Iowa, but I’ve lived all over. You might say my soul was born in the American West. The Old West.”

“Oh. A cowboy, huh?”

“Well, no. A million other things but never exactly a cowboy. Really, I suppose I’m an entertainer, a storyteller.”

“Oh, well. That’s more like it. I love stories. Would you tell me a story, Cody?” Vanessa asked just as they left the casino for the moonlit Riviera night and turned toward the water. “If you’re especially good, perhaps we’ll make it a bedtime story.”

“Careful, Vanessa. This kind of story could keep you up all night.”

“I’d bet on it,” she purred, and snuggled close to him.

Well, this was one for the books, Vanessa thought. Winning a bundle, he is, and she walks over, smiles at him, and quicker than you can say “Bob’s your uncle,” she’s walking him back to his yacht. Sure, of course the first thing she thought was he was probably some pervert. But no, the look in his eyes was a healthy lust, not one that told you he was a right bastard and a lying one at that.