The Thirteen Hallows (4 page)

No police,” Judith Walker said firmly as they rounded the corner, distancing themselves from the assailants. Her fingers tightened on the young woman’s arm, squeezing painfully. “Please, no police.”

“But…”

Taking a deep breath, attempting to calm her thundering heart, Judith continued evenly, “It was just a bag snatch…or a mugging.”

“
Just
a mugging!”

“I’m Judith Walker,” the woman said suddenly, stopping and extending her hand, which forced the young woman to turn back, breaking her train of thought. “What’s your name?”

The young woman extended her hand. The moment it was enveloped in the older woman’s leathery grasp, she became disoriented, a surge of confusing thoughts and odd emotions washing over her. “I…I’m Sarah Miller.”

“It is very nice to meet you, Sarah Miller. And thanks to you, there’s no harm done,” Judith continued forcefully, allowing a little authority to seep into her voice. She continued to hold Sarah’s hand, using the physical contact to strengthen the link between them. She calmed the edgy young woman’s nerves with her gentle touch, while subtly using her skills to envelop her consciousness. It was a talent she hadn’t used in more than a decade, but she knew she needed to take control of the situation or the girl would go to the police, and she couldn’t afford that. Locking her eyes on the girl’s face, she smiled. “Now, I don’t know about you, Sarah, but I’d love a cup of coffee.”

“Coffee.” The young woman nodded absently. “Coffee. Yes, of course.”

Judith maneuvered Sarah toward a small Italian café. Three couples deep in conversation occupied all of the tables outside the restaurant. As they approached, Judith concentrated on an American couple in matching J. Crew madras jackets and madras sneakers, who were sitting a little apart from the others, their table partially hidden by a striped umbrella. Drawing strength from the lump of iron in her bag, feeling it heavy and warm in her arms, she willed them to leave. Moments later, the preppy couple stood up, packed up their maps and cameras, dropped a few bills on the table, and walked away without glancing back.

When Judith and Sarah sat down, the older woman immediately ordered two double espressos and some almond cannoli.

Sarah was still too dazed to notice. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she felt as if she had lost something or had missed something. It was as if she were watching a badly edited movie, with frames or sequences missing. She tried to piece together the puzzling events of the last ten minutes. She had just left the bank and was heading to lunch in the café on the first floor of the library when she spotted the skinhead. He was wearing those mirrored shades she detested. Trailing the stink of unwashed flesh, the skinhead had brushed past her, eyes fixed on someone directly ahead of him. Sarah turned and immediately spotted the silver-haired old woman who was his intended target. Even before the skinhead grabbed for her and the woman screamed and swung her bag, Sarah had been moving toward them, drawn by a sudden, uncontrollable, and completely inexplicable urge to help the woman.

The bitter tang of espresso brought her back to the present. Sarah blinked, blue eyes watering, wondering what she was doing here…wondering where here was.

“That was a very brave thing you did.” Judith wrapped both hands around the thick cup to keep them from trembling and breathed in the rich aroma before sipping delicately. Although her head was bent, she could feel Sarah’s eyes on her. “Why did you do it?”

“I just…just…” The young woman shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve never done anything like this before,” she admitted. “But I couldn’t just walk away and allow them to assault you, could I?”

“Others walked by or looked away,” the old woman said quietly. “I guess that makes you my personal savior,” she added with a smile.

Sarah blushed, a tinge of color touching her cheeks, and in that instant she reminded Judith of her brother Peter, standing proud and tall in his green uniform, his cheeks flushed with pride. Although she’d been only a child when she’d last seen her older brother, on the night before he went off to fight in the war, the vivid image of the blushing eighteen-year-old had remained with her. She had never seen him again; Peter had been among the first British casualties of World War II.

“Are you sure you won’t let me make a report to the police?” Sarah asked.

“Positive,” Judith replied firmly. “It would waste a lot of time—yours, mine, and the police’s. I assure you such assaults are not unusual. This is London, these people often target the elderly, considering us easy marks.”

“They picked on the wrong woman this time.” Sarah grinned.

Judith lifted her bulging bag. “I think this is what they were after. And I’m afraid they would have been sadly disappointed. I’m not hiding the crown jewels in here. Just some books and notes.”

“Are you a teacher?” Sarah asked curiously, biting into her cannoli. “You look like a teacher. At least the kind of teacher I would have liked to have,” she added shyly.

“I’m a writer.”

“What sort of books?”

“Children’s books. What were once called fantasies, but are now categorized as urban fantasies. No vampires, though,” she added with a quick grin. “I don’t do vampires.” Judith finished her coffee in one quick swallow, grimacing as she tasted bitter dregs. “Now, I really must go.” She stood up quickly, then groaned aloud as a slender needle of agony lanced through her hip and she sank back onto the metal café chair.

“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” Sarah came around the table to kneel by her side. “Did they hurt you?”

Blinking away tears of pain, Judith Walker shook her head. “It’s nothing. Honestly. My replacement hip is acting up, nothing more than that. I’ve been sitting for too long, that’s all.”

Sarah spotted a black taxi that turned onto the street and automatically raised her arm. “Come on, let me get you to a cab.” She hooked an arm beneath the old woman’s shoulders and eased her to her feet.

“I’ll be fine,” Judith hissed.

“I can see that.”

Judith wanted to be left alone, wanted nothing more than to go home, climb into a scalding bath, and wash away the skinhead’s touch. She could still feel his blunt fingers in her hair, gripping her shoulder, hurting her arm. She dabbed absently at her cheek, where his spittle had stung her flesh. She knew why they’d come for her. She knew what they wanted. She also knew that they would be back. She looked at Sarah again, and for the briefest instant, the bag on the ground beside her leg pulsed a beat of heat.

The young woman’s dramatic appearance was an interesting coincidence…but Judith Walker didn’t believe in coincidence. For her, everything was wrapped up in fate. This woman had rescued her for a reason. She reached out and rested her fingers lightly on the back of Sarah’s hand, startling her. “We’ll take a taxi to the station. I know there’s a train to Bath soon. Then it’s only a short walk from the Bath Spa station to my house. You’ll come with me, won’t you.”

The blue-eyed woman nodded.

SARAH MILLER
was confused. The events of the last two hours were already sliding and fading in her consciousness, the details blurring like an old dream.

She wasn’t entirely sure how she had ended up sitting in the back of a train beside a virtual stranger. Sarah glanced sidelong at the woman. She was…sixty? Seventy? It was hard to tell. With her silver hair brushed straight back off her forehead, tied in a tight bun, wisps of stray hairs curling around her delicate ears and onto her high-boned cheeks, she enjoyed an ageless beauty reserved for those people who never worked a day of hard labor.

Sarah wondered why she had come to this stranger’s assistance.

Even though she had been taking classes in self-defense—one of her friends told her it was a good place to meet sober men—she’d never actually used any of her training. Weeks earlier, she’d crossed the street to avoid having to walk past five shaven-headed teenagers kicking an Indian boy outside a fish-and-chips shop. Sarah was someone who purposely avoided conflicts.

“Are you okay?” the elderly woman asked suddenly.

Sarah blinked. “Sorry?”

“You were staring at me, but you seemed to be miles away.”

“I’m sorry. I was just wondering…”

The woman continued to look at her, saying nothing.

“I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“You’re a very brave young woman.”

Sarah shrugged. “It was nothing.”

“Don’t denigrate what you did. Few would have had the courage to come to a stranger’s assistance. You’re an extremely brave woman.”

Sarah smiled at the compliment. And they remained content with their own silent thoughts for the rest of the ride.

When the train stopped in Bath Spa station, Judith linked her hand in Sarah’s as they walked up Dorchester Street and turned right across the bridge on the river Avon.

“I’ve never been to Bath before.”

“I’ve lived here most of my life,” Judith said.

At the bottom of Lyncombe Hill, she turned right onto St. Mark’s Road. “I’m just up here on the left,” she said. Pushing open the squealing wrought-iron gate, she immediately noticed that her front door was open. Judith felt the coffee sour in her stomach, knowing instinctively what she was going to find inside. She clenched Sarah’s hand, establishing contact once again, meeting and holding her bright eyes. She knew people found it very difficult to refuse something when there was actual physical contact. “You will come in?”

Sarah started to shake her head. “Really, I can’t. I must be getting back to the office. My boss is a bit of a prick. Don’t want to get fired for taking a four-hour lunch,” she said with a smile, but even as she was speaking, she was walking up the path toward the house.

“You must give me your boss’s phone number,” Judith said softly. “I will call him and commend your actions. People win awards for doing less than you’ve done.”

“That really won’t be necessary….”

“I insist,” the old woman said firmly.

Sarah found herself nodding. A word of recommendation to old man Hinkle would not do her any harm.

Judith smiled. “Good, then that’s settled. Now, let’s have some nice tea, and then I promise I’ll send you back to work.” She had her key in her hand as she approached the door but purposely fumbled with her purse to give the young woman an opportunity to see the open door before her.

“Do you live alone?” Sarah asked suddenly.

“No, I have a cat.” Judith had forgotten about Franklin. He had already exhausted six of his nine lives, and she prayed he was all right. As if on cue, the infuriated tabby meowed from behind the bushes where he was hiding. Judith collected him in her arms and calmed him, thrilled that her beloved pet was safe.

“Your front door is open,” Sarah said. “Did you lock it this morning?”

“I always lock it,” Judith whispered, then added, “Oh no.”

“Wait here.” Sarah placed Judith’s bag of books on the ground and approached the open door carefully. Using her elbow, she pushed it inward. She could not suppress her loud gasp. “I think it’s time to call the police.”

Robert Elliot had always wanted to be an interior designer.

An artistic youth, he would spend hours inside the house coloring at the kitchen table until his father would smack him on the side of the head and yell at him to play football with the other boys. However, Elliot preferred drawing to athletics: sick, dark pictures often involving people being guillotined or animals brutally cut open for dissection. He had a vivid imagination, which was best served confined within the pages of his notebooks. It was safer that way. Yet Elliot’s father continued to push him throughout his youth, and the teenager finally snapped on his eighteenth birthday when he made the first of many pictures come alive, bludgeoning his father to death with a cricket bat.

A gifted public prosecutor had managed to commute Elliot’s sentence to fifteen years, during which time Elliot continued to draw as well as read voraciously, using the prison library to educate himself. Hardened by his time in prison, Elliot found that jobs for which he was best suited required only two things: an enormous financial incentive and a great deal of violence.

He picked a piece of lint off his chocolate brown Dolce & Gabbana sports jacket as he watched the elderly woman hobbling up the street. Elliot smiled and made a quick call. “She just arrived, sir.”

Static crackled on the cell. It was the latest BlackBerry on the market, yet the reception was always fuzzy and when he spoke he could hear his voice echoing back at him. He had no idea where he was phoning. The number was in the United States, but Elliot guessed it was bounced around a dozen satellites before it reached its final destination.

“I’m sorry, sir. What?…Oh. No. There’s someone with her. A redhead. Early twenties, I’d venture to guess. She wasn’t in any of the lady’s pictures.”

Robert Elliot listened carefully to the baritone voice on the other end of the phone, abruptly glad of the distance separating him from his employer.

“Presently, I think that would be unwise, sir,” he advised cautiously. “The girl’s a variable. I don’t know how long she’s likely to be there. She could be police for all we know.”

Static howled and then the line went dead.

Elliot gratefully hit end. He dropped the phone back into his pocket, turned on the engine of his black BMW, and pulled away from the curb. As he cruised slowly past the Walker house, he was unable to resist a smile, imagining the look on the old woman’s face when she saw the way he had redesigned her beloved home.

Robert Elliot had always wanted to be an interior designer, and his new employer had finally given him his opportunity.

The house had been completely trashed.

Judith clutched Franklin tightly in her arms as she stepped into the hall. There were gaping holes in the floor where the floorboards had been torn up. Anger welled up inside her, burning in the pit of her stomach, flooding her throat, and stinging her soft gray eyes. Holes had been punched in the walls, and all the framed covers of her children’s books that had once lined the walls lay crushed and crumpled on the floor.

Judith put the cat down and walked to the end of the hall, stumbling over the shredded Oriental rugs as she tried the door to the sitting room. It would open only halfway. Peering around the corner of the door, she realized that the hideous horse hair sofa she’d always detested was jamming the door. It had been completely gutted, the back slashed open in a big X, wiry hair spilling across the floor, mingling with the feathers from the eight ornate cushions she had embroidered herself. The ebony Edwardian wood cabinet was lying at an angle against the upturned easy chair, drawers and doors hanging open, the dark wood scarred as if it had been cut with a knife.

Hundreds of delicate china teacups she’d spent a lifetime collecting were scattered on the floor, broken into a thousand fragments. All of the photographs had been pulled off the wall, a lifetime of memories torn and stamped to shreds.

“The police are on the way.” Sarah reached out to the older woman, but Judith reflexively pulled away. “Is there anything I can do?” she asked lamely.

“Nothing,” Judith said as the realization gradually sank in that her life, as she knew it, was now over. “Nothing anyone can do.” She put her hand on the banister to steady herself. “I need to look upstairs.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No. Thank you. Please just wait for the police.”

The worst destruction had been wrought in the bedroom. The bed itself had been slashed to ribbons by a razor-sharp blade. The canary yellow down comforter, in which her late husband used to wrap himself when he watched television, lay in shreds on the floor. She held a sliver of the torn material, trying to smell a fragment of the memory of the man with whom she had shared a lifetime.

And Judith knew that she would be seeing him soon.

Surveying the rest of the room, she noted that nothing had been spared. Every item of clothing had been pulled out of the closet and systematically slashed and torn. The remains of a pair of expensive silk heels she had long ago worn at her nephew’s communion were shoved in the overflowing toilet. The smell of acrid urine was almost unbearable. Judith closed the door and leaned her forehead against the cool wood, while tears burned at the backs of her eyes. But she was determined not to cry.

The bedroom she had converted to an office was similarly ruined. The floor was awash with paper, decades of carefully collected and collated notes once neatly filed and cataloged in her cabinet were unceremoniously dumped out, scattered everywhere. Not one of her beloved books remained on the shelf. Paperbacks had been torn in half, every hardback cover was ripped, and some of the older volumes were lacking their leather spines and covers. The original artwork to her children’s books was all on the floor, the glass shattered, wooden frames broken, filthy footprints on the delicate watercolors. The twenty-five-year-old Smith Corona typewriter on which she’d written her first book lay crushed, as if someone had jumped on it. Her iMac was completely destroyed, a huge hole in the center of the screen. Stooping, she lifted a random page from the floor at her feet. Page twenty-two of the manuscript of her latest children’s book: It was smeared with excrement. Judith allowed the page to flutter to the floor, and the bitter tears finally came. Even if she had the time, it would take her years to sort out the mess. But it didn’t matter: Whoever had done this hadn’t gotten what they were looking for.

They would be back.

After placing her shoulder bag on the scarred wooden desk, she removed the books and papers she’d been carrying around with her all day. Nestled at the bottom of the bag, still wrapped in its newspapers, was the treasure her assailants had been after.

Dyrnwyn, Sword of Rhydderch.

The old woman smiled bitterly. If only they knew how close they’d been to getting it. Her gnarled fingers closed around the rusted hilt, and she felt a ghost of its power tremble through her arms. She had never harmed anyone in her life, but if she could get her hands on the savages who had done this, who had destroyed a lifetime of work and memories…

The metal grew warm and she quickly jerked her hand back; she had forgotten how dangerous such thoughts were in the presence of the artifact.