Immortal Muse (61 page)

The rusted fire escape she dismissed immediately—even if it would hold her weight, it would creak and groan and alert Nicolas exactly how she was approaching. There was a crude plywood door a little farther down; she went to that. The wood was tagged with swirls of blue-and-orange spray paint, and the cheap hinges bled rust down the side. The hinges looked less than functional in any case; the door was nailed shut, the nail heads also rusted and pitted. It had been a long time since someone had come in this way.

Camille rummaged among the test tubes in her purse, pulling one out. She poured the thick, pale liquid inside over the door hinges and onto each of the nail heads before capping the vial again. Tendrils of smoke curled away from the metal, and she could smell an iron tang in the air. She stepped back.

She heard the sound of footsteps as she did so, someone coming at heavy run. She turned and drew her katana from its sheath in a single fluid motion: a testament to the years she'd studied martial arts. The draw of the sword was also the attack. The blade slid hard across the oncoming attacker's abdomen, cutting deep into the muscles and flesh there: she saw the man's intent as he held the tire iron high over his head to strike her. Then he doubled over as she continued to turn her hips, the blade ripping out of his body with a shower of blood droplets. The tire iron clanged against the pavement, dropped from his hands. She heard her attacker gasp as he sank to his knees, doubled over.

She didn't hesitate: this would be another of Nicolas' dupes, thinking they were immortal. If she left him here, he might just rise again like a zombie and follow her. She stared down at the man's back as he groaned and blood pooled on the blacktop.
Let the blade do the work . . .
Her teacher's words. The katana hissed through the air as she sobbed, a downward-angled cut. Despite having practiced at cutting reed bundles in her study of the art, she was surprised at how easily the head separated from the body and rolled away, at how the body remained upright on its knees for a few seconds before toppling.

She glanced at the head which had come to rest a few feet away, its face toward her . . . and she recoiled in horror, cursing. She knew that face, those features: it was Kevin from the
Bent Calliope
Group. He was younger in appearance, his long hair ash-brown rather than touched with gray, but it was him. The mouth was open in a soundless wail, the open eyes staring at nothing. Blood drooled from his neck. “Oh, Kevin,” she said. “Why?”

But there would be no answer for that. Not now or ever.

God, please don't let me find Morris with him, too, or any more of the others . . .
Her vision shimmered with tears, and she blinked them away.
You can't break down now,
she scolded herself.
You can't think about this at all. David needs you. Go help David.

She brought the blade around in a quick
chiburi
motion to fling the blood from the blade, then sheathed it. She tried not to look at the body or Kevin's head as she moved back to the door. The acid had already done its work; the nail heads had vanished and the hinges no longer held the door to the frame. The plywood moved easily as she tugged at it, falling away from the doorframe. She caught it and lowered it to the ground; beyond was a corridor moving away into blackness. From her purse, she took a small LED flashlight and turned it on.

She entered the building.

 * * * 

She had to forget Kevin. She could deal with that guilt and grief later. She put David in her mind, and Nicolas.

Camille slid the Ladysmith from its holster; somehow the weight and bulk of the gun felt more reassuring than the spells coiled in her mind, the test tube vials still in her purse, or the newly blooded katana at her side. At the end of the dark hall, where it turned toward the front of the building, a lone, naked light bulb dangled from a cracked socket on the ceiling, illuminating stairs leading up to the second floor. There was no door at the top, only the yawning cavity of the frame with darkness beyond it, though she thought she detected the wavering, orange-yellow light of a flame flickering dimly beyond. She could smell Nicolas' presence now: the scent of chemicals, mixed and bubbling in their glass retorts. Her own laboratories had always had the same characteristic stench.

He was here; this was his lair. She was certain of it. She listened, thinking she could hear rustlings and burblings above. “Nicolas?” she called out in French. “You know I'm here. I'm alone, the way you said it had to be.”

Faint laughter answered her and a light went on in the room beyond. She could see shadows moving on the walls, but no figures. “I knew you were here before you killed our little friend in the alley,” Nicolas answered. “That was delicious, my dear. Thank you. A nice appetizer for the feast to come, eh? You're just in time. I was nearly ready to start the main course without you.”

She swallowed the bile that threatened to overspill her stomach. “I want to see David.”

“Oh, I very much want you to see him as well,” the voice answered her. “Just come on up.”

“Not until I know that's he's still alive.”

In response, a harsh, white light kicked on, throwing a tight, dusty beam toward the top of the stairs. In the haze, she could see the outline of a man seated in a chair, and another man moving alongside. The shadows stirred, and she heard a gasp of breath. “Camille?” David's hoarse, desperate voice called out. “Get out of here. He's . . .” The voice cut off abruptly, the remaining words muffled and indistinct. She heard Nicolas' laughter once more. Shadows slid in the glare above her.

“He's so noble and self-sacrificing,” Nicolas said. “And he has such love for you. Why, it nearly makes me want to weep.” He laughed again.

“Nicolas, this is between me and you. Let David go, and we can finish things.”

“You tried that argument with me half a century ago, Perenelle. It wasn't true then, and it's not true now. You know I'm not going to let him go. So come up if you intend to try to stop me, or just stay where you are and listen to him die. It's your choice—but you need to make it now.”

She knew that as soon as she was visible at the top of the stairs, Nicolas would attack her, if only because he knew she would do the same. She closed her eyes, letting the spells in her mind rise to the forefront. She put the Ladysmith in her left hand, using her right to slide another test tube from the purse, this one full of a dark powder.

She tossed the vial in her hand up past the top of the stairs, shouting a word in Arabic as she heard the tinkling of breaking glass, closing her eyes and putting her right hand over an ear. White light and smoke erupted with a shattering, sharp explosion of thunder. She ran up the steps, two at a time.

By the time Camille reached the top, staying close to one side of the stairwell, the smoke was clearing but still acrid. Her left ear rang with the explosion's echo, deafened, and her eyes whirled with bright afterimages fading slowly through the hues from bright yellow to purple. Through the aural and visual fog, she saw David off to one side, trussed to a chair, and Nicolas standing before a workbench littered with test tubes and retorts, the shelves behind stocked with glass canisters of chemicals and alchemical ingredients, and what appeared to be her old journal propped up on a reading stand, along with several parchment scrolls. Nicolas was standing still, as if stunned, his hands—strangely—at his hips to either side. He didn't move, didn't speak, but she heard him cough.

She didn't give him the time to utter his spells or to counter her attack. She quickly brought up the Ladysmith in both hands. With a cry, she fired the weapon: once, then again. She saw at least one of the bullets strike him, his body turning violently with the impact, bending him backward over the table so that he crashed hard into the racks of test tubes behind him, smashing them underneath his weight. Camille tossed the Ladysmith aside when she saw him fall, drawing the katana and rushing toward him as she raised the blade.

She imagined his head rolling across the table like an ugly, misshapen ball. Like Kevin's head.

Nicolas lolled on the table, his face a rictus of pain as blood spread on the white shirt he wore; she had struck him in the side of the abdomen, though the other shot seemed to have gone wide. She saw this in the three steps it took to reach him, and in those three steps, she also found her mind wondering at the fact that he wasn't responding, that his hands were still splayed out at his sides, at the fact that his body seemed taller . . .

She remembered a statue in King's Square, remembered Robespierre's head tumbling into the basket below the guillotine's blade . . .

She brought the blade down hard, but at the last moment, she turned her hands. The blade sliced deep into the workbench, shearing through the wild brown locks just above the man's skull—whose features now flowed as if they were melting wax.

Flowed into David's features, and settled. It was David staring at her, his hands working against the ropes that bound him to the workbench, his eyes terrified, his mouth working as he spoke her name. “Camille . . .” Blood flecked his lips.

She released the katana with horror. The weapon quivered in the wood. Behind her, she heard sardonic, mocking applause through the ringing in her ears. “Bravo,” she heard Nicolas say. “And here I thought I'd set it up perfectly for you to kill David yourself—though you probably have anyway. Guns are such ugly but effective weapons . . .”

Nicolas was standing in front of the chair that she had assumed held David, the ropes uncoiled at his feet, his features no longer David's but his own. His hands still applauded her softly. “You
have
killed him, you know,” Nicolas said. “I didn't give him the flawed elixir for just that reason, though it was tempting. He'll bleed out, very soon. Look, he's already going into shock.”

Camille glanced down. Nicolas was right. In the mess of broken glass and spilled chemicals, David's face had gone white and pale. His eyes were staring somewhere beyond her; his hands clenched and unclenched against their bonds. She shouted denial: “No!”

“We could save him still, you know,” Nicolas said. “If I gave him
my
elixir, why, his body would heal itself. Or you could give him yours—but I see by your face that you didn't bring that. Were you too afraid that I'd take it from you? A shame. Still . . . Tell me how to make the true formula, and I'll give David mine in the meantime. That's all you have to do, and he lives. A fair bargain, I should think.”

Camille looked at David. His eyes had closed; he didn't appear to be conscious. “Nicolas . . .”

He held out his hand; a crystalline vial glistened there. “I've given you my terms, wife. The rest is up to you.”

She took a step toward Nicolas, and his fingers closed around the vial as he pulled his arm back. She stopped. “I'll tell you. Let me have that,” she said.

“Tell me first.”

She took a long breath that held back a wail. Defeat tasted like acid, smelled like rotting meat. Defeat was the brush of a corpse's hand against her face. “It's blood,” she said. She couldn't look at him; she stared instead at David. “Human blood. That's what was missing. When you hit me that day, you made my lips and mouth bleed. My blood mixed with the potion when I drank it.”

His dark, scornful gaze searched her face. “You're telling me the truth?”

“It's the truth,” she told him, and he laughed.

“Really? So it was an accident all along?
I
caused the elixir to work for you? Oh, that's precious.”

“Nicolas, please . . . The vial . . . David . . .”

Nicolas' hand opened like a slow, pale flower. The crystal gleamed in the light, the elixir a sapphire inside. “I suppose I don't need this anymore,” he said. He flung the container at the near wall. It shattered there, spilling blue down the plasterboard.

Camille screamed in blind fury. She plunged her hand into a pocket and pulled out the last of her test tubes, an explosive, but she saw Nicolas react, his hands moving too quickly for her to have any hope. She dropped the vial and instead uttered a warding word, her hand chopping through the air. Nicolas' voice barked out his own quick phrase. Black fire erupted along her right side; the ward took most of the heat, but the force of the spell still rammed its way through the psychic shield of the ward, throwing Camille hard against the bench alongside David's body. Glassware rattled and shattered; she heard items falling from the shelving behind her. Something hissed and she smelled gas; yellow flame bloomed, reflected along the walls as smoke slid past her head. She tried to rise. Nicolas barked another word in Arabic and a giant's fist hit her: a fist of air that swept aside the smoke and smashed her down to the floor at David's feet. Fire was beginning to crawl up the wall behind her, licking at the bench that held Nicolas' alchemical experiments.

She heard Nicolas' laughter as she rose up on her knees, trying to clear the confusion in her mind and the pain from her scorched body. She felt more than saw Nicolas walking past her and wrenching the katana from where it had been embedded in the bench. “Very nice,” he said. “You may have been the better alchemist, Perenelle,” he said, “but you were never the better wizard. Such a shame. We could have been the perfect duo, you and I. Can you imagine what we might have accomplished, together? The power we could have held . . . But it's too late for that. With the fire, we don't have much time.” He lifted the sword, let it hiss through the air. She raised her head to see him facing the helpless David. “You get to watch him die, Perenelle, just as I promised. Will you scream, I wonder? Will you cry out when his blood spatters over you and his head rolls at your feet? Let's find out, shall we? Then, since you've given me the secret of the elixir and I can make someone else to take your place, it'll be your turn.”