Word & Void 02 - A Knight of the Word (38 page)

“Wait for me here, Nest,” he told her. “Keep watch. If I don’t come out, at least one other person will know the truth.”

He didn’t wait for her response but wheeled away quickly and went down the sidewalk to the corner, turned left along Second, and walked to the apartment entrance. Feeders reappeared in droves, creeping over the walls of Waterfall Park, coming up from the gutters and out of the alleyways between the buildings. They materialized in such numbers that he experienced an unexpected chill. Their yellow eyes were fixed on him, empty of everything but their hunger. So many, he mused. He could feel the weight of their expectations in the way they pressed forward to be close to him, and he knew they understood with primal instinct what was at stake.

He entered the foyer, using his key, walked to the elevator, and took it up to the sixth floor. The feeders did not follow. He imagined them scaling the outside wall, climbing steadily, relentlessly closer to the windows of his apartment. He envisioned an enormous tidal wave washing toward a sleeping town.

He exited the elevator and moved to his apartment door, used his key again, and entered.

The apartment was shadowy and silent, with only a single lamp burning at one end of the old couch. Stefanie sat reading in the halo of its light, her exquisite face lifting to greet him, her strange, smoky eyes filling with shock as he closed the door and came into the light.

“John, what happened?” she whispered, rising quickly.

He put out his hand, a defensive gesture, and shook his head. “Don’t get up, Stef. Just stay where you are, please.” He leaned heavily on his staff, studying her perplexed face, the way she brushed back her dark hair, cool and reserved, watchful. “Simon Lawrence isn’t dead,” he said quietly.

He saw a flicker of something dark in her eyes, but her face never changed. “What do you mean? Why
would
he be dead? What are you talking about, John?”

He shrugged. “It’s simple. I went to the museum to speak with him. He was waiting for me. He admitted everything—firing me without giving me a hearing, stealing the money himself, working to destroy Fresh Start, all of it. Then he attacked me. He overpowered me, threw me down, and walked away. When he left, I went after him. I wanted to kill him I would have, too, except for Nest Freemark. She came back from the airport to warn me. It wasn’t Simon Lawrence I was looking for at all, she said.” He paused, watching her carefully. “It was you.”

She shook her head slowly, a strange little smile playing over her lips. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

He nodded indulgently. She was so beautiful, but everything about her was a lie. “The fact of the matter is, I was ready to believe everything you wanted me to believe. That Simon Lawrence was the demon. That he was responsible for all the bad things happening. That he was intent on ruining my life, on using me, on breaking me down. I had convinced myself. Then, when you tricked me into coming upstairs at the museum, when you disguised yourself as Simon and attacked me, humiliated me, taunted me, and cast me aside as if I were worthless, I was primed and ready to kill him the moment I found him again. And I would have killed him, too, if not for Nest.”

“John—”

“She told me it was you, Stef, and after I got past the initial shock that such a thing could possibly
be
, that I could have been fooled so
completely
, that I could have been so
stupid
, I began to realize what had happened. You were so clever, Stef. You used me right from the beginning. You let me approach you in Boston, played me like a fish on a line, and then reeled me in. I was hooked. I loved you. You made yourself so desirable and so accessible I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to believe you were the beginning, the cornerstone, of a new life. I was through being a Knight of the Word; I wanted something else. You understood what that something was better than I did, and you gave it to me. You gave me the promise of a life with you.

“But you know, what really made it all work was that I couldn’t imagine it wasn’t real. Why would it be anything else? Why wouldn’t you be exactly who you said you were? When Nest first suggested you might be the demon, I dismissed the idea out of hand. It made no sense. If you were the demon, why wouldn’t you just kill me and be done with it? Of what possible use was I alive? A former Knight of the Word, an exile, a wanderer—I was just further proof you had made the right choice a long time ago when you embraced the Void.”

She wasn’t saying anything. She was just sitting there, listening attentively, waiting to see if he had really worked it out. He could tell it just by looking at her, by the way she was studying him. It infuriated him; it made him feel ashamed for the way he had allowed himself to be used.

“Nest figured it out, though,” he continued. “She explained it to me. She said you saw me in the same way her father had seen her grandmother, when her grandmother was a young girl. Her father was drawn to her grandmother’s magic, and you were drawn to mine. But demons need to possess humans, to take control of them in order to make the magic their own, and sometimes they mistake this need to possess for love. Their desire for the magic confuses them. I think maybe that’s what happened to you.”

“John—”

“No. Don’t say a word to me. Just listen.” His fingers knotted about his staff more tightly. “The fact remains, I was no good to you dead. Because if I were dead you couldn’t make use of the magic trapped inside the staff. And you wanted that magic badly, didn’t you? But to get it, you had to do two things. You had to find a way to persuade me to recover it from the dark place to which I had consigned it and then to use it in a way that would make me dependent on you. If I could be tricked into killing Simon Lawrence, if I could be made to use the magic in such a terribly wrong way, then I would share something in common with you, wouldn’t I? I would have taken the first step down the path you had chosen for me. I was halfway there, wasn’t I? I was already very nearly what you wanted me to be. You’d worked long and hard to break me down, to give me the identity you wanted. Only this one last thing remained.”

He shook his head in amazement. “You killed that demon in Lincoln Park to protect your investment. Because it wanted me dead, so it could claim victory over a Knight of the Word. But you wanted me alive for something much grander. You wanted me for the magic I might place at your command.”

She stared at him, her perfect features composed, still not moving. “I love you, John. Nothing you’ve said changes that.”

“You love me, Stef? Enough that you might teach me to feed on homeless children, like you’ve been feeding on them?” He spit out the words as if they were tinged with poison. “Enough that you might let me help you hunt them down in the tunnels beneath the city and kill them?”

Her temper flared. “The homeless are of no use. No one cares what happens to them. They serve no real purpose. You know that.”

“Do I?” He fought down his disgust. “Is that why you killed Ariel and Boot and Audrey? Because they didn’t serve any real purpose either? Is that why you tried to kill Nest? That didn’t work out so well, did it? But you were quick to cover up, I’ll give you that. Burning down Fresh Start, that was a nice touch. I assumed at first that you burned it down just to undermine its programs But you did it to hide the truth about what happened in Lincoln Park. You marked yourself up pretty good going after Nest, smashing down doors and hurtling through windows. You couldn’t hide that kind of damage. So you killed two birds with one stone. You’d drugged me earlier so I wouldn’t be able to meet Nest. When you woke me, after you’d set fire to Fresh Start, you did so in the dark so I couldn’t see your face, and while I was still barely coherent, you ran on ahead on the pretext of waking the women and children sleeping on the upper floors on the building, thereby providing yourself with a perfect excuse for the cuts and bruises on your face and hands.”

His laugh was brittle. “It’s funny, but Nest figured that out, too. When she came looking for me, she stopped by Pass/Go, and Della told her she looked just like you. Nest got the connection immediately. She knew what it meant.”

She leaned forward. “John, will you listen …?”

But he was all done listening, and he pushed relentlessly on. “So you set me up with this story about Simon firing me, and you quitting, and how strangely he’s been acting, and how every time something bad happens, he’s among the missing, and I’m just like a loaded gun ready to go off. I take the bus down to the museum, which you know I’ll do, and it takes me a while because I don’t walk very well with my bad leg, and you catch a cab, and there you are, waiting, disguised as Simon, ready to point me in the right direction.”

He was so angry now he could barely contain himself, but his voice stayed cool and detached. “I really hate you, Stef. I hate you so much I can’t find the words to express it!”

She studied him a moment, her perfect features composed in thoughtful consideration, and then she shook her head at him. “You don’t hate me, John. You love me. You always will.”

His shock at hearing her say it left him momentarily speechless. He had not expected her to be so perceptive. She was right, of course. He loved her desperately, even now, even knowing what she was.

“You aren’t as honest with yourself as you think,” she continued calmly, her dark eyes locking on his own. “You don’t want any of this to be so, but even knowing it is, you can’t get around how you feel. Is that so bad? If you want me, I’m still yours. I still want you, John. I still love you. Think about what you’re doing. If you give me up, you become the thing you fought so hard to escape being. You become a Knight of the Word again. You give up everything you’ve found this past year with me. You go back to being solitary and lonely and rootless. You become like the homeless you’ve spent so much time trying to help.”

She rose, a smooth, lazy motion, and he tensed in response, remembering how strong she was, what she was capable of doing. But she didn’t try to approach him. “With me, you have everything that’s made you happy these past twelve months. I can be all the things I’ve been to you from the beginning. Are you worried you might see me another way? Don’t be. You never will. I’ll be for you just what you want. I’ve made you happy. You can’t pretend I haven’t.”

He smiled at her, suddenly sad beyond anything he had ever known. “You’re right,” he acknowledged softly, and all the rage seemed to dissipate. “You have made me happy. But none of it was real, was it, Stef? It was all a sham. I don’t think I want to go back to that.”

“Do you think other people live any differently than we do?” she pressed. She took a step away from the couch, then another, moving out of the circle of lamplight, edging into the shadows beyond. Ross watched, saying nothing. “Everyone keeps secrets. No one reveals everything. Even to a lover.” He winced at the words, but she didn’t seem to notice. She brushed back her hair, seemingly distracted by something behind him. He kept his eyes on her. “We can do the same,” she said. “You won’t ever find anyone else who feels about you the way I do.”

The irony of that last statement must have escaped her entirely, he thought. “How you feel about me is rooted mostly in the ways you hope to use me, Stef.”

He was moving with her now, a step and then two, a slow circling dance, a positioning for advantage.

“You can make your own choices about everything, John,” she said. “I won’t interfere. Just let me do the same. That’s all I require.”

His laugh was brittle. “Is that all it would take to make you happy, Stef? For me to ignore what you are? For me to let you go on feeding on humans? For me to pretend I don’t care that you won’t ever stop trying to turn the Word’s magic to uses it was never intended for?” She was shaking her head violently in denial. “Just forget about the past? Forget about Boot and Audrey and Ariel and Ray Hapgood and several dozen homeless people? Forget about everything that’s gone before? Would that do the trick?”

He saw a glimmer of something dark and wicked come into her eyes. He took a step toward her. “You crossed the line a long time ago, and it’s way too late for you to come back. More to the point, I don’t intend to let you try.”

She was silhouetted against the bay window that looked down on Waterfall Park, her slender body gone suddenly still. Outside, feeders were pressed against the glass, yellow eyes gleaming.

There was a subtle shift in her features. “Maybe you can’t stop me, John.”

He straightened, clasping the staff in both hands, the magic racing up and down its length in slender silver threads.

Her smile was faint and tinged with regret. “Maybe you never could.”

In a single, fluid motion she dropped into a crouch, wheeled away, and catapulted herself through the plate glass of the window behind her. Before he could even think to try to stop her, she had dropped from sight and was gone.

Nest Freemark was standing on the sidewalk outside Waterfall Park when the apartment window exploded as if struck by a sledgehammer, raining shards of glass into the night and sending feeders scattering into the shadows like rats. She turned toward the sound, her first thoughts of John Ross, but the dark thing that plummeted through the gloom was screaming in another voice entirely. Nest stood frozen in place, watching as it began to twist and reform in midair, as if its flesh and bones were malleable. It had been human at first, but now it was something else entirely. It struck the jumble of rocks midpoint on the waterfall, bounced away, and tumbled into the catchment.

Nest raced for the narrow park entrance, her heartbeat quick and hurried and anxious. She burst through the un-gated opening as the dark thing climbed free of the trough, a two-legged horror that was already losing what remained of its human identity, dropping down on all fours and shape-shifting into something more primal. Its legs thinned and lengthened and turned crooked, its torso thickened from haunches to chest, and its head grew elongated and broad-muzzled.

Stefanie Winslow, she thought in horror. The demon.

Re-formed into something that most closely resembled a monstrous hyena, the demon shook itself as if to be rid of the last of the disguise that had confined it and lifted its blunt snout toward the heights from which it had fallen. Feeders leaped and scrambled about it in a frenzy, like shadows flowing over one another, eyes bright against the dark. The demon snarled at them, snapped at the air through which they passed, and started to turn away.