The Shape Stealer (12 page)

And the night got worse from there.

15

Consolation of the Traditional Kind

“Black pools” didn’t even begin to describe the trading he had just attempted, Marduk was thinking as he shut down Will Hughes’s computer and, penniless for the moment, left the room. “Black quicksand” was more like it. Or a black river running so treacherously that the world’s most expert swimmer would drown in it.

He had been tempted more than once to smash the computer screen with his fist or stand on the flimsy rolling chair and kick the screen in with his boot. But he was mindful of the need to stay in Will Hughes’s character and not upset Dee too outrageously, at least until he was ready to serve up justice to Dee as well, for all the slights Dee had inflicted on him during the time they’d known each other. Yes, he restrained himself. Perhaps he could find some other, more anonymous outlet for his fury. Dee’s time would come, surely and soon enough.

Marduk hadn’t failed, though. Anything Will Hughes could do, he could do better. And Will Hughes had made billions as a stock trader. At least, by reputation. (For all Marduk knew, he’d stolen it, or lied about his results, given Marduk’s inability to, at least immediately, duplicate them.) But assuming that Will Hughes was authentic, all Marduk had done here was gotten off to a poor start. He would catch up. Because he was more than Will Hughes’s equal. Much more.

His exit was simpler than his entry—no long tunnel, no security checkpoint—and he wasn’t sure how that was possible, but he simply went down two interior flights of shabby stairs and emerged on the same dilapidated front steps as earlier. When he had arrived, the sky had been pale violet; now it was pitch black.

As he descended the steps, Marduk detected, out of the corner of his eye, a flash of color down the otherwise deserted street. One moving slowly toward him. He smiled a smile of satisfaction. An entirely deserted street wouldn’t have been good, but nearly deserted was excellent. With the stealth characteristic of even the most run-of-the-mill vampire, he turned away from the bottom of the stairs and pressed his back against the brick façade of the building, so that he became nearly invisible amidst coagulating shadows, especially to the casual passerby. Then he waited, each pulse pounding in his chest with greater and greater anticipation, as a blond young woman wearing a short silver dress and black high-heeled shoes came closer. Marduk wondered what she was doing dressed like that on a dangerous street like this, but hey, people had lives to live. Including her. He wasn’t a judgmental sort or a prude. Maybe she was a black pool trader or had a party to go to. Either way, no problem. He had stationed himself so that he could grab her just before she reached the stairs. There was a convenient storage space underneath them, right now half occupied by black garbage bags that would be easily thrust aside. He licked his lips, and his pulse flared an extra pitch of intensity faster. The only remaining risk seemed to be that she might suddenly cross the street away from him—he wasn’t sure he was willing to risk scrutiny from a car or person at a window in pursuing her—but that became less likely with each passing instant. Yes, life was good tonight.

Death would be even better.

*   *   *

A half hour later Marduk headed west down the completely deserted block, in the same direction from which the young woman, whose name was Jill Lautrec (though he wouldn’t learn that until reading about her in
Le Cirque
the next morning), had approached him. He had a look of quiet satisfaction on his features, even as he wiped a filament of pale flesh off his too-red lips. As it happened, it was a remnant of the smooth underside of Jill Lautrec’s breast. Marduk didn’t generally care if his victims were male or female or follow gender-related procedures with them, but he’d been in an erotic mood tonight, perhaps brought on by the frustration of losing so much money.

He reached the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and Rue de Babylone, and turned in the direction of a Metro sign for the station at Serres Babylone, reflecting further. He had no doubt he would soon, with a little practice, get the hang of stock trading and begin to exceed Will Hughes’s achievements. Such a confident perspective was in fact enhanced by the revelation he’d had at the computer screen, that money did not mean the same thing in the stock market as it did everywhere else, and also by confidence that Dee would replace the missing funds. If Dee balked, or even hesitated, Marduk’s hands around his pale and effete neck would encourage a better attitude. In the meantime, he’d satisfied the savage anger he felt over his “losses” with a consolation of the traditional kind. Now he could slip off anonymously into the black loveliness of the Paris night.

Marduk would be in no rush about another meal, either. Dee’s antidote was thrumming potently in his veins; he could feel it. He would head back by Metro to the small apartment Dee had arranged for him in the Latin Quarter, near the Jardin des Plantes, where he could take refuge. Who could guess what fine repasts might await him now, even in the sharp sunlight of tomorrow?

16

We Have Maps

We all emerged from the entrance to the catacombs blinking back robust morning sunshine, as sweet and light-rich as the air in the tomb had been fetid and cadaverous. This would have been one of the first opportunities for my lover Will and I to be together in the daytime had not the wrong Will accompanied me back to the present. I lamented the error again, even as I glanced over at young Will and saw that he seemed to be having trouble navigating. He had stumbled off the curb into the street and back at least three times, as if his vision were dazzled. And now he seemed to be searching for shadows to walk in, hugging the three- and four-story buildings lining the Avenue Denfert Rochereau, which intermittently blocked the low trajectory of morning rays. It was as if he had taken a step toward being a vampire. From what I understood, if he were a full-blooded vampire, even his brief experiences of sunlight as he crossed the narrow alleys between buildings would have broiled his skin to a crisp. But he was making his way through them unharmed, even if wincing.

Then it was my turn to wince, as I recalled Marduk’s fangs biting the soft flesh of Will’s neck in the tomb; and with that image I also recalled something Will had said to me in 1602 Paris, about Marduk’s ability to create vampires with a bite. After all, wasn’t that how Will had originally become one? Then why wasn’t he a full-fledged one again now?

We were walking four abreast, with me on the outside and Will on the inside, Jules and Kepler between us, Jules obsessively checking his phone for a text from Annick. I hung back a step or two, sidled over to the right, and engaged Will in conversation from slightly behind him.

“Do you feel OK?”

He slowed and walked next to me. “I am uncomfortable, my lady, now that you mention it. Perhaps a mild fever. I seem to be more at ease when I’m away from the sun. Perhaps something’s gotten to me from breathing foul air in the dungeon.”

I couldn’t tell if he was dissembling for my benefit, not wanting to be suspected of the taint—however involuntary—of vampirism, or if he genuinely did not realize he could be suffering a side effect from Marduk’s bite. “How’s your neck?” I asked. As far as I could see, all traces of the monster’s fangs had vanished.

I observed Will’s hand quivering as he felt his neck, but it didn’t linger there. “Can’t feel a thing, my lady.”

“Perhaps a sound sleep back at the hotel might be useful.” I suspected he had been up all night in the catacombs. Perhaps he did have a fever, from exhaustion.

“
Pardon,
Mademoiselle James,” Jules said in an officious voice, half turning his head toward me. I had been speaking almost at a whisper, but he’d still been able to listen. “I have told Annick to meet us at the institute and you must come too. There are reports to be filled out and plans to be made.”

“Can’t all of that wait…”

But Jules insisted that it couldn’t.

*   *   *

I kept a careful eye on Will’s demeanor all the way to the institute. He managed to stay with us, but he wasn’t quite right. He gravitated toward shadows wherever he could find them. When he was forced by their absence into bright sunlight, he would sometimes cringe, or pant, or even moan audibly, which, however, no one but me seemed to notice. But he did manage to straggle along, and eventually we reached the block on which the alley leading to the institute was located.

I thought of taking Will by the arm and guiding him toward shadows he sometimes seemed to miss, but I didn’t want to embarrass him. I did sympathize with his problem, no fault of his own but rather the apparent result of imbalances in whatever supernatural realm vampires lived in. Or were dead in. I strongly suspected Dee’s and Marduk’s machinations had triggered this imbalance. So I observed him closely, this nearly identical twin of “my” Will, or, as I sometimes thought of my Will now, “real” Will. I sensed that on occasion, in addition to sympathy, a sliver of passion for real Will—not this one, I reminded myself—confused my perspective. Needless to say, I suppressed that sliver with the same shudder anyone might stifle an inappropriate impulse with. Or tried to.

As we approached the alley from the south we saw Annick hurrying down the rue Saint-Jacques from the north. I heard Jules let out a sigh of relief, immediately followed by an exasperated exclamation.

“There you are! Do you realize that you broke at least three rules of mission protocol? You abandoned your post, you conducted a reconnaissance mission without permission, and you failed to report directly back to the institute in the event of losing communication.”

Annick stamped her foot. “Would you have had me stand by like an idiot while our enemies sauntered by me? How could I ask permission while you were out of cell phone range? And here I am, reporting back to the institute with more valuable information than you have found, I wager…” Her voice faltered as her eyes ranged over the group, counting heads.

“Where is Jean-Luc?” she asked, her anger replaced by fear.

“Jean-Luc was killed by those fiends. You see how dangerous they are? They could have killed you too!”

A flicker of anger passed over Annick’s face, quickly quelled by sympathy. She placed her hand on Jules’s arm. “No wonder you are so upset,
mon ami,
to lose another agent so soon after—”

Jules flinched away from Annick’s touch. “I am concerned, Agent Durant, that we are losing valuable time while murderers roam free on the streets of Paris or in its catacombs! What is this intelligence that you risked your life for?”

“Dee and Marduk went to Global Financial Fund headquarters after leaving the catacombs,” Annick explained. “I was able to observe from tracking their elevator’s destination, and referring to the building directory, that they met with a Vice Chairman Renoir.” Then Annick bristled and drew herself up to her full height—all of five feet in heels. “Furthermore, there was no need to yell at me, Jules Henri Maupassant!”

Maupassant?

“You know as well as I do that sometimes an agent in the field has to use initiative and,” she added, her voice softening, “that we all know the risks. Poor Jean-Luc knew them too. I’m sure you did everything you could to protect him. No one will blame you for his death. Come, let us tell my grandfather what has happened. He and Claudine will know what to do…”

Once again Annick attempted to put a comforting hand on Jules’s arm, but once again he shook her off and, squaring his slim shoulders, preceded us down the narrow alley, determined, I guessed, to be the first to report the casualty of our mission. Annick glanced at me over her shoulder.

“At least you recovered your Will,” she said with a wistful look at him.

“He’s not—” I began, but a gasp from Jules cut short my protest.

We hurried to the end of the alley where Jules was holding back the ivy that, only yesterday, had covered the door to the institute. Only now there was nothing but a brick wall.

“The Malefactors,” Jules finally said. “They’ve removed the institute from the time stream. It is as if the institute never existed.”

“Hellhounds,” Annick said.

“What?” I asked.

“Who are the Malefactors?” Kepler asked. That worried me. He knew about the farthest reaches of the solar system, so if he didn’t know, they must be pretty inaccessible. I should have followed up more thoroughly when I’d heard the term used once before.

“Malefactors are rebellious
chronologistes
,” Annick explained. “As a practical matter,
chronologistes
gone bad.”

“If you’re familiar with thinking about time as a two-edged sword,” Jules said, “good in what it gives us, bad in what it takes away—as the Bard phrased it in sonnet 19, “Devouring time” with its “lion’s paws”—Malefactors are
chronologistes
who have come to view time darkly. They’re a gang of outlaws who try to ambush eternity instead of working with the beauty and malleability of time as we do. Shakespeare, however well intentioned, could be called their spiritual godfather, while Einstein and his softness on time through relativity is ours.”

Annick interjected, “Or to put it more simply, while we Knights Temporal are sworn to maintain the time line, the Malefactors shape time to their own selfish ends. There are many rumors about how they came to so hate time—some theories quite sinister and horrible. They are our sworn enemies. They try to disrupt us. Still, in recent months they have been quiescent, as our current leader has adopted a vigilant stand against them. So what’s worrisome here is the timing. It seems possible that Dee and Marduk may have made some arrangement with them. I just hope everyone got out alive when the institute was attacked.”

“Possible,” Jules said. “They’re evil as a practical matter, but they don’t hate living beings as much as time itself. And, somewhat contradictorily, the reason for that hatred is that they view time as a killer. They are big proponents of the ends justifying the means.”