The Shape Stealer (24 page)

“I wanted to spend a little time in my old and hopefully future friend’s home before it became a museum. Tell me why you are here, Garet James.”

“As I said, I need your help. You’ve been watching me, so you know that Dee and Marduk are out and about in this time, killing again, and no doubt up to even deeper evil we haven’t learned the details of yet.”

“Yes, Lol told me of your little mishap in the catacombs. But meanwhile, I believe your friend Mr. Hughes intends to pursue the fiends. I have every confidence that Hughes will put an end to their machinations. Your vampire-lover is quite … ruthless in his way.”

“I hope you’re right. But that’s not our only problem. The Malefactors are trying to destroy time.”

“Yes, that
is
a problem. But one I think I can help you with.”

He got up and walked over to a patch of wall that had been stripped of its plaster and reached into a dark hole, pulling out a burlap sack. He laid the sack on the table between the two chairs and sat back down.

“Open it,” he commanded in a voice so compelling I would have obeyed even if the sack had contained live snakes, which, for all I knew, it might have. I reached my hands into the sack and felt something square, hard, and very cold. Like a block of ice. When I drew the object out, it glowed with an arctic blue light.

“The silver box!” I gasped, staring at the object. A nest of snakes would have surprised me less. This was the object that had started everything. I had found the box at John Dee’s antiques shop last winter. It had been sealed then—it wasn’t now—and John Dee had offered to pay me to open it, supposedly because of my welding skills, but really because it could only be opened by the Watchtower. After I had opened it, John Dee had sent thieves to the town house to steal it. He had then used it to summon the demons of Despair and Discord to New York City, just as he had once used the box to summon the demon Marduk to turn Will Hughes into a vampire. Will and I had tracked him down to the High Bridge Tower and closed the box. Then Will had taken the box and used it to gain access to the Summer Country …

“I don’t understand,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the glowing box. “How do you have this? Will brought it back with him into the past, where it vanished. Morgane said it was a constant, that there could only be one box in any time line. And the box that young Will brought to Dee that Dee used to summon Marduk was still in Dee’s possession in 1602. It must have eventually been sealed, or how else would I have found it in 2008…” The blue spirals etched into the silver began to spin in circles—an endless Escheresque loop that my eyes followed unwillingly. I smelled the brackish tide of the ocean and was suddenly seized by an overwhelming sensation of vertigo.

“Quick, close your eyes and put your head between your knees.”

Again, Oberon’s voice was so compelling I instantly obeyed—although I’d never understood what good this maneuver did. After a minute, though, I felt a little better. I lifted my head gingerly and cautiously peeked at the box. The blue lines had ceased their endless loop.

“It’s a time-loop enigma,” Oberon said with uncharacteristic gentleness. “If you contemplate it, you’ll go insane. Let’s just say that Will Hughes took the box to the Val sans Retour and used it to travel back to 1602, but the box didn’t go with him. I found it in the Val sans Retour and brought it here.”

“You went to the Val sans Retour?” I asked. “But…?”

“But only faithful lovers can travel safely through the Valley of No Return? That’s true. You are wondering, perhaps, whom I love. I would have thought you would have guessed that by now.”

I looked up from the box into Oberon’s eyes. For a moment I felt, staring into their unearthly green depths, the same vertigo I had felt looking at the box. They were just as old and had seen as much. I saw what they had seen now in flashes that sped before me from the misty beginnings of time when the fey first roamed the earth freely with humans—and even before that, with hominids. Oberon had loved the humans more than any of his kind. I saw him sitting cross-legged in front of a fire in a cave, handing a shell filled with red ochre paint to a caveman, and saw him watch as the man painted animals and a creature who was half man, half antlered beast—and resembled Oberon—on the wall. I saw him standing on an African plain as tribesmen stitched his visage on leather and bone masks. I saw him standing on a Greek mountaintop as a sculptor chipped away at a marble block to sculpt his portrait.

But he wasn’t alone. A woman stood beside him, a woman who looked like me. Marguerite. Together they walked among mankind, sometimes in human shapes, sometimes as animals—the great cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, lions,… and swans.

Then one day Marguerite fell in love with a human man, and she left Oberon for him. When the man saw her change into a swan, though, he shot her down with an arrow to keep her from leaving him. I saw Oberon standing at the edge of the pond, watching her die, but then he saved her by making her a guardian of the humans she loved. Still an immortal, but no longer able to come and go between the worlds.

“You loved her,” I said aloud, breaking out of the stream of memory. “You loved Marguerite.”

“Yes, I loved her, even when she chose to live among humans and become the Watchtower. I didn’t mind her infatuations…”

I saw Oberon dressed as a Moroccan prince in a Tudor house, watching a bearded man writing wildly with a quill pen, Marguerite laughing as she looked over the playwright’s shoulder.

“… but when she chose to become mortal for one…”

I saw young Will at a party, eyes fixed on Marguerite, and then Will at the door later on, begging admittance and Oberon pushing him down the steps.

“That’s why you hate Will so much.” Another memory scrolled before my eyes. A street in Paris at dawn. Will Hughes set upon by a gang of rough-looking men, Oberon watching from the shadows.

“You tried to kill him.”

“Yes, but she would not let me.”

A woman came rushing down the street. She wore a yellow silk dress, elaborately styled wig, and dainty high-heeled shoes. I recognized her as Madame DuFay: one of my ancestors and a Watchtower. I’d watched her memories once, through an enchanted Lover’s Eye brooch, but now I was seeing the events through Oberon’s eyes as she rushed to save her beloved Will Hughes and was struck down instead by one of the assassins Oberon had hired.

“You tried to kill Will because you loved Marguerite,” I said.

“Yes, many times, but the Watchtower always stopped me, even at the cost of her own life.”

“How do I know you’re not planning to kill him now?” I asked.

“Watch,” he replied.

I looked into his eyes and saw him watching me from the shadows in Paris: in the Luxembourg Gardens, outside the Arènes de Lutèce, on the platform at the train station in Poitiers …

“You! You were the man in the black coat and hat I saw in Paris!”

“Yes. I knew you would lead me to Will and to the box.”

I saw him, outfitted in olive green cargo pants, anorak, wide-brimmed hat, and wraparound gogglelike sunglasses, following Octavia and me into the Val sans Retour, and then following me into the reeds after I had left Octavia by the rock … but then he lost his way. The reeds were whispering to him.
How can your love be true when she loves another?
Then the reeds sang.
Only when you destroy what she loves will she be yours.

“That’s a lie,” I said, tearing myself out of the vision. I recalled the seductive power of the reeds. They had tried to convince me that Will didn’t love me. They were a trap set by Morgane to lead lovers into betraying their beloveds.

“Of course it was a lie. If I had listened to them I’d still be there. Instead, I heard another voice.”

He compelled me back into the vision, and I saw a crazed and frantic Oberon wandering through the reeds until he came to a clearing where nine stones stood. I remembered the place. It was the tomb of the Watchtowers. I’d found my way there, too, and had discovered Will in the cave, half dead and raving. But Oberon had seen someone else standing in the entrance to the cave—Marguerite. The original Marguerite. She held her arms out to him, her eyes filled with tears.

“My dear Oberon,” she said, “if you truly love me, why do you kill what I love?” And then she had shown him all the pain he had caused her over the centuries as he had tried to destroy Will, and she showed him how, in his spite, he had hurt humans by inspiring them to greatness and then abandoning them so that they always longed for that lost spark. He fell to his knees at her feet and wept. When he swore he would never hurt Will or another human again, she lifted him to his feet and handed him the silver box.

“Then take this back to Garet and let her use it so that she can finally be with Will. When you have done that, I will know you love me and you can return here and we will always be together.”

Then she kissed him.

I felt the tingle of her lips on mine, and for a moment I was both people in the vision: Oberon, whose memories I was living, and Marguerite, my ancestor. When I opened my eyes I saw Oberon’s face in front of me, his face wet with tears, his green eyes burning into mine.

“So you see,” he said, “I have no reason to lie to you or wish you or Will harm. Take the box to San Francisco and use it to open the portal. You will defeat Dee, Marduk, and the Malefactors, save humanity,
and
save Will Hughes. Spend the rest of your lives together. I will return to the Val sans Retour and spend eternity with my Marguerite.”

“But how…”

“You’ll know how, Garet James. This is what you were always fated to do.”

I nodded and took the box, which he’d wrapped back in its burlap sack, from him. He rose and saw me to the door. When I stepped onto the porch I saw that the sun was rising over all of New York City to the east and south. I turned to ask another question, but Oberon was gone. I tucked the box under my arm and headed to the subway station thinking of the question I hadn’t gotten to ask. He had said I would save Will Hughes and spend the rest of my life with him. But which Will Hughes would I save?

30

Romance at the Edgemont

Marduk had been delighted to learn, on a Fox TV News monitor at JFK Airport in New York City while waiting for his connecting flight to San Francisco, of the arrest in France of Jean Renoir on suspicion of fraud and financial manipulation. French police had uncovered evidence of a “massive plot to undermine the world’s gold trading” and were searching for another suspect in the case, the Irish banker John Dee, and also for the vanished source of information, an unnamed proprietor of an orphanage in Brittany. Yes, Marduk thought with great satisfaction, Renoir had his assortment of enemies, and it hadn’t taken much. He suppressed laughter as an image flashed of Renoir being walked up the steps of a courthouse with a gendarme to either side of him. This reminded him of another French official’s recent arrest in some sex scandal. Ah, the French. They had believed the likes of him, Marduk. Too bad they hadn’t found Dee yet. But that might make it considerably easier for Marduk to kill him.

And now, several hours later, Marduk was really liking the San Francisco hotel John Dee had recommended to him, the Edgemont. One of the city’s most legendary and finest, the Edgemont had famously been scheduled to open on the eve of the great earthquake in 1906. Hundreds of dignitaries had gathered back then in the grand ballroom for an opening gala, and supposedly some who had lingered until the wee hours of the morning had felt an early, cautionary tremor not experienced anywhere else. Crystal chandeliers had swung about wildly, and a huge wall-height mirror at the ballroom entrance had cracked in half. The damaged but not destroyed hotel had finally opened about two years later. Reading about this history on the hotel Web site on the flight from Paris to New York—what a creature of the Internet he was becoming—Marduk had felt his blood-rich saliva surge in his throat and mouth. He looked up the earthquake on Wikipedia; the details of the carnage were a feast for his thoughts.

He sat on the ninth-floor open-air terrace of the hotel, which was located at the intersection of Mason and California Streets. The terrace was part of a cocktail lounge called the Evening Room. Marduk luxuriated in the view, sitting with his cell phone at the ready on the white linen–covered table before him. He sipped a Bloody Mary—he liked the name and the color of the drink—and had the phone out because John Dee, who had managed to flee France, was supposed to call upon his arrival at the San Francisco airport. Dee’s first flight had been delayed by weather in Paris, and then he had missed his connecting flight in New York.

Yes, Dee was furious at Marduk for tipping off the French authorities regarding the Renoir plot but, apparently insatiable in his greed and Machiavellian lust for power, Dee seemed compelled to rejoin him in San Francisco and try to jumpstart a US version of the plot in the midst of the small but growing financial industry there. Marduk chuckled to himself at Dee’s ambition, taking another sip of his drink and pretending it was blood.

He took in the sparkling city view, sunlight gleaming on the Bay and off the windows of the skyscrapers in the Financial District to the south. A small white cruise ship moved at an elegant pace toward the Bay Bridge, bisecting the water perfectly as if it carried a convention of geometers. The ship’s image of hospitality reminded Marduk of his own obligations in that arena. He would have to make a dinner appointment for Dee and himself in the Edgemont’s fine restaurant, the Century (named after the approximate age of the hotel) as soon as he learned what time Dee was arriving. If it was booked, he’d consult with the front desk to find a comparable locale nearby. As to what might come afterward, why reflect on that now? For the moment, he thought he should prepare himself to be an excellent host. He spit on the floor sarcastically at this thought.

Just as a small red private plane, flying low, suddenly appeared in the sky to his left, the phone rang. He answered on the fourth ring. The great Marduk should never appear too eager.