The Shape Stealer (10 page)

“At gold’s peak, we will of course short it and help bring it tumbling down, and then we will use our massive short
and
long profits to finance a global political party that will offer hope to billions of citizens—say, one citizen for every dollar or euro made—impoverished by this second, global, gold-centered crash, which will make 2008 look like a mere wrinkle in a riptide. We will offer a truly radical hope—no, not the tired clichés of communism”—his visitors joined him in shaking their heads—“but fair and equal treatment before the law for all, regardless of means, a first in the history of capitalism. The Fairness Party, we will call it.”

Dee burst into applause. After a pause, Will Hughes joined him. Renoir beamed at them. “And if you imagine that I might consider becoming the head of the Fairness Party,” Renoir concluded, “you imagine accurately!”

Dee got up out of his chair to grasp Renoir’s right hand in both of his and congratulated him on his concept with enthusiasm. After yet another glance at Renoir’s necktie, Hughes joined him.

12

Skin that Shines

The very same Will Hughes whom Garet James had met in New York City in the late autumn of 2008, whom she had gone to the Summer Country with in France the next summer and mistakenly left behind in Paris in 1602, sat at the Café du Pain only two blocks from the Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre. He enjoyed his splendid view of the city on the same morning and at the same time that Garet was trudging out of the catacombs with the other refugees from Dee and Marduk, far across the city from him and south of the Seine. A breakfast of café au lait and bread with cheese was before him on the red and white checkered tablecloth, drowning in a pool of sunlight the awning allowed, sunlight that was the greatest and most unexpected treat of all for him.

Late yesterday, in the furnished room near Gare de l’Est he’d rented upon his return to the city, he’d discovered, quite by accident, a tolerance for sunlight. A breeze had lifted the fringe of a carelessly closed curtain, allowing a patch of light to illumine his forearm. Even as he reflexively snatched his arm away, cringing at the sizzling pain he knew from experience was coming, hoping he hadn’t burned himself too badly, he registered that he felt nothing.

Ever so cautiously, Will had moved his arm back into the light. The absence of pain was beyond a relief to him; it was soothing, as if the air were bathing his arm in medicinal bubbles. In a fit of daring, he reached out and flung the curtain aside and stepped into the crisp blaze of late-day light. Will tensed into a giant coil as he stood there, but, remarkably, he felt no different than he would have before he became a vampire—or was made one—on a terrible night in 1602. He waited, counting patiently from one to ten.

Nothing!

It was unscientific, of course, but Will had felt yesterday that he could have stayed in that room the rest of the day, watching the sun descend redly beyond the Seine, and not felt a scintilla of pain. Was he no longer, by some miracle, a vampire? He ran into the bathroom to try to check on the status of another “symptom.”

No, he had seen with disappointment, he was still a vampire, if fangs were the test. Though they did seem to have diminished in size a little. But they were still there. On the other hand, he was able to see his reflection in the mirror, an experience he hadn’t had since before he became a vampire. He was somewhere in between now. All in all, he’d need to be cautious with this newfound tolerance of sunlight. If he were brazen enough to go out in the sunlight tomorrow, he needed to assure himself of deep shadows or a shady interior nearby at all times.

Next, he had wondered if his appetite for humans as food had changed. This was hard to gauge, as he was at the time still hours away from the first meal of his nocturnal “day,” but he had given it a try (even taking into account that he had been attempting to suppress his normal appetite lately for moral reasons, with encouraging though not always certain results). And yes, he did think a rich, juicy, rare, blood-veined steak, steer and not human in origin, was a more alluring and fulfilling prospect for him now than it had been on the previous day. Compared to his fondness for the more brutal food he had been consuming for centuries, this attraction to new forms of meat gave a sense of progress, which Will hoped was real. Eventually … he might progress enough even to eat more vegetables instead of meat!

Finally his thoughts had turned to how his alteration, modest or profound as it might be, could have happened. The quantitative streak in his thinking, the same quality that had led him to metrical poetry and stock trading, told him that, odds were, it had something to do with the young Will Hughes, whom he’d tracked down in a 1602 Paris alleyway and encouraged to have a rendezvous with Garet. That rendezvous, if it had happened, could have included young Will becoming a mortal by drinking Marduk’s blood. He and young Will were two different people, of course, separated by four centuries of experience as identical twins might be separated by living in different countries, but that didn’t mean young Will’s departure from being a vampire couldn’t have affected him in some way.

Apparently, it had. On the very first day on which, according to his calculations, Garet and his younger self would have traveled back to the present. His transformation must have something to do with his younger—and now mortal—self’s reappearance in the present.

Obsessively, he had rechecked his fangs in the mirror.

No change: but only five minutes had passed.

He had then felt inspired to write a few lines of verse about the moment, about how an event happening to another could ripple so fortuitously along the rivers of time:

My Other Self

I don’t know how, or why, or even if,

But Will, my youthful twin, you’ve lifted me

Halfway toward a restored humanity;

And for this I salute you, though the proof

Of such a transformation must await

Events, good fortune, further twists of time.

For now, my skin drinks light like a fine wine,

Affirming some benevolence in fate,

Though my harsh world sometimes succumbs to hate.

I welcome sun, as if my youth’s restored

And sense my triumph—all these years, I’ve warred

Against my own foul nature—not too late,

Now a full day of freedom. Glory, light,

And skin that shines with sun. Farewell to night!

But the optimism of the poem had made Will nervous. He knew it took too much for granted: his new tolerance for sunlight could easily depart. He didn’t know what had happened after he left young Will in Paris, and even if his younger self had met up with Garet and been transformed, he did not yet know for sure if he and Garet had made the journey in time to the present successfully. He and his younger self could be like twins, but maybe time had reduced them to distant cousins instead. Still, he felt he could hope. But he had put the folded piece of paper on which he’d written the poem back in his pocket. Time alone would reveal what this sunny moment was. He had told himself yesterday that for now, he needed to try to enjoy it.

And then, as if out of nowhere, he had been startled by a sudden resurgence of the old hunger, an ancient fire that he’d doused with the worst of all blood-soaked waters over the centuries, too many times. The pangs had awakened him to the reality that he was still a vampire, even if possibly a hybrid one.

But even in that bad moment yesterday, he’d been hopeful that, this morning, he might enjoy his first real breakfast in four hundred years. And now, for the twenty minutes he’d been sitting so near the sun at the Café du Pain (not far from the shelter of the awning, of course), so far so good: he hadn’t felt even a twinge of burning.

Will savored every morsel of his bread and cheese and sipped every drop of his café au lait, like a man without a care in the world. True, he needed to exercise discretion regarding a possible encounter with Garet and/or young Will, who would be in Paris now, assuming that their time transport had gone well. Such an encounter was … to be avoided. But Paris was a large city, and he had an excellent view of the entrance to the café.

Will lost himself momentarily in his surroundings, immersed his vision in the beautiful city sprawling out from Montmartre’s hill, the white, gray, and pastel colors of its buildings, the spires of churches and occasional gold dome of a temple or mosque, the bustle of so many citizens even in the vacation time of late August. These were daylight scenes he could only have imagined for the past four hundred years, and he viewed every last detail of them passionately.

His fangs did not appear to have diminished any further in the mirror that morning, and he ran his tongue across them now, perhaps to prevent his mood from becoming too ebullient. His tongue did not detect any improvement. And then he returned to reveling in the view. Will swiveled in his chair and bent his head back, to take in the deepest of blue skies beyond the magnificent façade of the famed church behind him. The air itself seemed radiant. Will breathed deep to let the Paris sky fill his lungs, tickle his bloodstream, wash his flesh; entertaining the fantasy that if he filled his lungs enough he’d be able to take off and soar like little Lol could.

He was a long way from religion, but then he entertained another fantasy: that sitting in such pure blond air was cleansing for his soul, a new kind of baptism for him.

13

Antidote

When they left the building after meeting with Jean Renoir, John Dee, who had been on the whole quite satisfied with Marduk’s performance during the meeting, observed his colleague to hesitate as they entered sunshine. Marduk quickly drew lavender felt gloves from his pocket and put them on. Then he doubled over as if with pain, shading first his eyes, then his entire face. He held his hands, fingers splayed wide, over his face so as to cover as much exposed skin as possible. He retreated back into the shadow of the building’s awning and dropped his hands with a gesture of exasperation.

Dee was displeased, but not shocked. The vampire’s antidote, an alchemist’s potion that he had been working on for centuries, was being improved upon all the time, but it wasn’t quite the finished product yet.

“What’s wrong, my good man?” Dee asked Marduk, despite his being neither good nor a man. His colleague had resumed standing but still seemed to be gasping a little.

“Your remedy appears to be expiring, Dee. Not quite as it was advertised to me.” Marduk turned a cold glare on the alchemist, one that made Dee shudder. Dee had seen plenty in his four centuries of dabbling with spirits, but there was no doubt that Marduk had a supreme sort of monstrous entity inside him. Babylonian (as in the evil described in the Book of Revelation), it had been long rumored. Dee was afraid of him.

Dee stood very still.

“I could use some water and another glass of the potion! What are you standing here like a grinning monkey for?”

Dee ushered Marduk back into the lobby, where a water fountain caught his eye. Dee pressed a pair of large square pills into Marduk’s right hand and guided him toward the fountain. “It’s best to take it in this form, in public as we are,” Dee told him. “Dash them down with water. They will certainly take you to this evening’s sunset, probably well beyond.”

Marduk placed the pills eagerly into his mouth, gulped them down with long swallows of water. His expression brightened. “What a relief,” he told Dee, apparently referring to the lessening of some burning sensation.

Dee nodded approval, though he hated to use these precious pills, the product of endless hours in his alchemist’s lab back in Ireland. But if these circumstances didn’t justify their use, what ever would? Marduk might have been a monster even to Dee, but he was also the key to a plot aiming at nothing short of world domination, his four-hundred-year-old dream.

They went back outside, Marduk showing no untoward reaction to sunlight, and made their way to the nearest Metro stop. Dee quieted any worries he was feeling over potion efficacy by reflecting that it was probably just a question of refining the dose. A sunlight suppressant was uncharted water even for an alchemical genius like himself, and perfection would not come easily. Vampires had been under the curse of sunlight peril for eons. That might stem naturally enough from their being creatures of the dark, but it created obstacles for the plot he had hatched, Marduk’s very private impersonation of Will Hughes being its centerpiece. As to how the plot had gone this morning: so far, so good.

Then, before they got on the Metro, Marduk expressed to him in no uncertain terms his desire not to return to the catacombs as planned but to have a leisurely breakfast at a sidewalk café.

These liberated vampires, Dee sighed to himself—there might be no limit to their self-centeredness. But this wasn’t the right fight to pick with Marduk; no doubt there would be other, more crucial ones. Aloud, he agreed to Marduk’s plan.

So they veered away from the Metro entrance at Place Jussieu and lulled away the next couple of hours at Café du Dragon, a sidewalk café on the Rue Linné. On one hand, Dee did take pleasure in Marduk’s ability to be out in the daytime, the culmination of so many years of research. It was an endeavor that had begun in the reign of Oliver Cromwell, when Puritan officials (whose values and religious fervor Dee despised) tended to be difficult targets for vampire assassination because they were out so much more in the daytime than at night. Marduk’s wincing leaving the building had been a setback, as it indicated that the antidote’s effects were disappointingly short, but the pills had so far worked like a wonder.

On the other hand, Dee was miffed at Marduk’s lack of gratitude for the financial breakthrough with Renoir, irritated by his sullen personality—indeed, appalled by his lack of enthusiasm for the plan. Dee himself was most ebullient with the energy of his audacity. Enlisting a prestigious organization like the Global Financial Fund—or at least, one of its top executives—as an ally was a major achievement. He knew Marduk not to be the warmest of … creatures, but Dee wished that Marduk respected his accomplishment.