Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (5 page)

His eyes began to wander as Meaghan chatted happily about a couple of the guys Janet
had
brought home at some time or another. He glanced around the room and something caught his eye. A slim black woman’s briefcase.

Remembering the missing briefcase at the murder scene earlier that night, he spoke on impulse. “What kind of work does Janet do at the firm?”

“Huh?” Meaghan was confused. “At the firm? She works in corporate, same as me. We used to work for the same firm, but I couldn’t deal with the politics. Anyway, she works on organizing and dissolving corporations, on bankruptcies and stuff. Why?”

“No reason, really. A hunch with no backup. There’s so little to go on that I’m wondering whether her disappearance has something to do with work rather than her personal life
.
It’s worth looking into. You say you used to work with these people?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Could you do something for me? I need to know exactly what Janet was working on before she disappeared. Maybe three or four days’ worth of stuff. Can you get me that information?”

“Well, they’re not supposed to do that, but I think I can get what you need.”

“Great.”

The conversation had come to a natural conclusion, and he got up to go. He was pulling his coat on and she followed him to the door. Once there, she handed him the diary.

“You don’t want to read it first?” he asked, quite surprised.

“Nah. I checked the date of the first entry. There’s probably nothing juicy about me in there anyway. Well, maybe a little nostalgia, but nothing more than what I’ve already told you.”

They looked at each other, and Peter chuckled. She had told him the whole story because it might be important, maybe because she needed to tell someone. He had feared she had told him because she didn’t want him to read it in the diary, but it wasn’t in there and she’d known it. He was glad.

“So, if I’m going to help out, does this make me a deputy or something?” She smiled again.

“Or something.”

She kissed him, quickly, on the cheek. “Thanks for being one of the good guys.”

He apologized for keeping her up so late and told her he would be by the following night at about eight. He took her hand as they said good-bye.

“You don’t get too many friends,” he said. “We’ll find her.”

“Thank you,” she said, but he was already halfway down the steps.

Outside, the night was brisk and silent and comfortable to him. The smell of coming snow was even stronger in the air, along with a taste of salt from the ocean a few miles distant. Winter was his favorite season.

As he opened the car door he heard the loud fall of feet on the pavement. Looking up, he saw a short man walking toward him, all in black with a white spot at his throat. An elderly Roman Catholic priest, bundled up in his overcoat, trudged past him.

“Late night tonight, eh, Father?” Peter said pleasantly.

“God’s work is never done,” the priest said without smiling, and continued down the street, away from him.

Peter got in the car and started it up. An omen, he thought, though whether good or bad he couldn’t say. His kind had not had a good history with the church.

A few moments later his mind was back on Meaghan Gallagher. He had a feeling it would keep returning to that fascinating young woman.

Peter had gotten home fairly early, about 3:00
A.M.
, and had stayed up reading for quite some time. He wasn’t very tired, but it was wisest to be in bed on time. His clothing came off piece by piece, and each item was put away neatly in its place.

In his underwear, he went quickly to the door and slid the dead bolt home, then checked to see that the rubber lining under the door was in place. It wouldn’t do to have a space under the door.

He went to the opposite wall and tested the apartment’s two windows. They were locked, but now he closed and bolted the solid wooden shutters he himself had installed on the inside. These lit perfectly into the window frames and had the same lining as the door.

The apartment was sealed.

The hunger had been creeping up on him all night, as it did most nights, and now it sang to him from his belly a wild song, an animal song. As he had become engrossed in the book the hunger and its song had receded. But the moment he put down that book, it returned, more powerful than before, the song virtually a hymn.

He stood in front of the open refrigerator like a child who can’t decide what to eat, but for Peter there were no parents scolding him for wasting the electricity, and after all, he didn’t have much of a choice in meals. He was surprised to find only four bottles left in the fridge. He would have sworn there’d been at least eight before he’d gone out of town. Not that it would have been the first time he’d fed without remembering.

Well, he’d have to call George when he woke up that night. He’d known George Marcopoulos, his best friend, since he first came to Boston. Many years earlier Peter had become a thief in order to end his career as a killer. This new career forced him to move from city to city fairly frequently. No matter how good you were at burglary, if you kept it up, eventually you got caught. Peter wouldn’t be caught, but he might be discovered, and so he’d moved.

To Boston. That night he’d been truly starving and he’d actually paused to drink a pint before making good his escape. Had he left right away, he might have missed the other burglar in Boston City Hospital that night. But he didn’t. He saw the tall white guy, all in black, slip quietly through the door to the morgue.

Against his better judgment, Peter had slid up to the door and opened it a crack, watching as the thief opened drawers and checked toe tags on bodies. Maybe he wanted to say a last good-bye to a loved one, but Peter doubted it. Before he could do anything, an older, white-haired doctor had come around the corner only to knock over the thief, falling on top of him.

George Marcopoulos, the medical examiner at Boston City Hospital, was on his back with a rather large, serrated edge knife at his throat before he had a chance to call out.

“Look at it this way,” the thief growled as Peter looked on, “you’re probably not the first guy to die from working late.”

As the knife bit into George’s throat Peter moved, dropping the bottled blood he carried. Before the bottles shattered on the floor, Peter had the would-be body snatcher on his back. But the guy was quick, for a human. The point of the blade came out of Peter’s back, had passed dangerously close to his spinal cord, and the guy was pulling up with both hands.

With a howl, Peter had transformed.

The rest hadn’t taken long, but when Peter took human form again, he was in rough shape, terribly weak. George might have killed him then, had he really tried. But he didn’t. The old Greek knew without asking what Peter was, though he’d never believed in his life that such creatures might exist. In moments he was back in the morgue with blood to replace the bottles Peter had dropped.

“Okay, what do I do?” he asked as he approached cautiously.

“Feed me,” was all Peter could say at first, and George did. Afterward, to speed the recovery process, Octavian poured a pint of blood directly on his wound. George stared as it closed of its own accord.

Once Peter was feeling better, the two had cleaned up the morgue. They talked while they did so, George almost in awe. Peter was quite impressed as well. The thief was in a condition that would have been hard to explain to police, and Peter was surprised how easy it was to hide a corpse when one was the coroner at a major city hospital. Of course, it didn’t hurt that it was four in the morning.

On that night nearly a decade ago, he’d told George of the bloodsong.

“Ah,” said George, smiling, “the children of the night, what music they make.”

They had no choice but to be friends.

And now he stood in the open refrigerator door, feeling the cold but not really
feeling
it, making a mental note to call his friend, who would come to the rescue as he always had, making certain Peter would not be driven back an immortal evolutionary step. Making certain that the bloodsong could be sung without death, without destruction, without the hunt. Sometimes he missed the hunt, but sometimes he missed life, and he certainly didn’t want to go back to that.

No, tonight the first pint went down fast and smooth. As it rushed into him he bit his lip and arched his back; a shiver ran through him as the music within him grew into a symphony, its rhythm speeding up.

He took his time with the second pint, savoring each drop, and the song built into a crescendo. When the second bottle joined the first in the trash, he was slowly coming down. His brain and his stomach nestled in a warm, too familiar place.

The song had subsided, but it was always there, a sexual throbbing rhythm that demanded one thing only: satisfaction.

The bloodsong’s ecstasy had screamed within him, loudly proclaiming his power to any creature brave enough to approach.

“This is the King of the Jungle here,” he whispered to himself, his eyes shut tight.

My God, he thought, as he did every time, the real thing gives ten times the pleasure, ten times the power. Then the bloodsong carries you on its melody to the next night, and the next.

Yes, he reminded himself. If you keep feeding it.

He pushed the thoughts away, the feelings away, at the same time struggling with the knowledge that Karl would be disgusted with him.

Or, more likely, that Karl is disgusted. Surely, he thought, his old teacher knew what Peter had been up to since they last parted company. And just as surely, he was repulsed by the philosophy that had lowered his warrior prince to a shadow thief and a servant of humans. Karl was most certainly ashamed to know that his old pupil and friend stole by deceit what he no longer felt comfortable about taking by force.

But that was Karl, Peter thought. He misunderstood completely. Peter could not follow the old German’s belief that power allowed them the privilege to do what they wished. Rather, he felt certain that true power lent itself only to real responsibility: responsibility to seek knowledge, to experiment and experience, and to share . . . especially that.

His hunger satiated, he lay down on his bed and drifted into sleep as lazily as a feather falling to the ground. The growing certainty that student would soon have to become teacher weighed heavily on his mind.

Outside, the sun was coming up, the darkness was burning off, and all the things of the night were hiding away. Inside, Peter was fast asleep, sealed off from the day. His alarm was set for sundown: shadowtime.

HENRI GUISCARD TURNED UP THE COLLAR on his overeoat. It was a chilly day, and the cardinal wasn’t getting any younger. He pushed through the revolving door of the Park Plaza Hotel and turned toward Beacon Hill, walking briskly. He was feeling his age again, but doing okay in spite of it. He looked over his shoulder from time to time, but it didn’t appear as though he was being followed. Of course, he thought, an elephant could be hot on his tail, and he probably wouldn’t notice.

Ah, he sighed, it’s probably nothing. But after what happened in Rome, he wasn’t willing to take the chance.

He glanced over his shoulder again.

Throughout his life and his career serving the church, Henri had been an outspoken and well-respected man of God. Now, he hid in silence from the very establishment he had served, paranoid, angry, and confused.

Guiscard could feel a storm rising to the north. As he walked he let his guard down slightly and his mind began to drift back past the events that had led to this moment, to this time and place, past his days as a parish priest. He thought about his childhood in Sicily.

“You’re a Guiscard!” his father said, as he often did. “You’ve got to fight back.”

He had been beaten up once again by a group of older boys, and his father was angry with him. Within him roared the blood of one of history’s greatest warriors, his father said. The Norman Robert Guiscard and his sons had been the bane of the Byzantine empire for a century. Guiscards would still be attacking the Byzantines, his father insisted, were it not that the family had outlasted the empire itself.

All of this was fine in theory, but when it came down to it, Henri did not feel much like a warrior. On the contrary, he felt like one big bruise. He was a frail boy, and though he tried to be proud of his heritage, he often wished he could tell his father that he was afraid. But that was out of the question.