Romani Armada (50 page)

Justin grinned. “And saved my life.”

Adán glanced at Deonne and she recalled his confession that meeting Justin had saved his own life. She smiled at him.

The walking tour of the town went on; the music hall, the theatre, the major’s house and the police station. Justin had a story or knew something about each of them, from when he was a child, while Adán added his own knowledge of the town from his perspective as an outsider.

Deonne could have happily toured Beechworth for days, listening to Justin and Adán talk. Justin’s accent had become stronger and far more distinctively Australian, just from being among the sights and sounds of his childhood. Adán’s speech became normalized and almost accent free – he didn’t mix the order of his nouns and pronouns as he often did when he was relaxed and there were no strangers to hear him.

Eventually, though, the built-up center of town fell behind them. Justin turned off the main road and led them through narrow streets and lanes. Both men stopped speaking, for there were only houses and cabins and lean-to’s to see.

The afternoon was waning when they reached what looked like the far southern edge of town, which butted up against the steeper hills. The horse started to breathe more heavily as he tackled the sharply sloping road.

“I should walk,” Deonne said, concerned.

Justin shook his head. “You would look strange, walking. It would draw attention to us and people would remember us.”

Adán didn’t comment, but he looked thoughtful as he gazed at the poor housing around them.

Justin eventually stepped out onto a narrow road and turned right. There were no houses on the other side of the road he stood upon, and very few dotted along the northern side. He looked down the road, shading his eyes against the sun that was hovering over the tops of the hills. Twilight was gathering along the streets, pulling a dark blanket over everything. There were no street lights, but some homes were showing a flickering golden light from their windows. Of course, there would be no electricity now, either. There was candlelight and firelight. The richer families might own lanterns that used kerosene or gas, but none of the windows they passed was showing the steady light such lanterns would produce.

Adán stepped up to Justin’s side. “Which one?” he asked quietly.

Justin nodded toward a cabin sitting off by itself. It had a picket fence around it and there was a warm glow of light from all the windows. The garden was more substantial than any nearby, and included roses along the fence.

“We can’t go in,” Adán murmured.

“I know,” Justin replied.

There was a movement of darker shadow, further up the street, emerging from the man-high shrubs and bushes that carpeted the hills. The man moved quietly and quickly toward Justin’s home.

Justin turned abruptly, facing away from the house and toward the horse. He hurried over to Deonne’s side and put his hands around her waist. “Let’s get you down,” he said quietly.

“What’s wrong? Who is that?”

“I’m not sure,” Justin said, very quietly, putting her on her feet. “But I think…”

The door of the cabin opened and light spilled out onto the road, illuminating the man standing there. Under his hat, his skin was fair. He wore a full, bushy beard that was pitch black and fierce.

His face in profile was familiar to Deonne.

Justin turned his head away from the light, hiding it.

A woman stepped out of the cabin and pulled the door almost closed behind her. Deonne saw that she was heavily pregnant. “Ned,” she whispered, although the sound carried clearly in the still night air. “You shouldn’t have risked it. They’ve put out more patrols to find you.”

“I ought not to visit my sons?” He laid a hand on her belly, soft and gentle.

“Justin is already asleep. And this might well be a girl,” she chided him.

“I’ve ridden hard and far this day, just to see the face of my only love sitting at t’other end’o my table. Let me in, Maggie. I’ll leave before sunrise. You won’t suffer for my presence.”

“Oh, Ned….” she said softly. “Where will it end? With you at the end of a rope?”

“Shhh….” He kissed her with heart-breaking gentleness and pushed the door open behind her. They stepped inside the cabin and the door shut.

Justin dropped his head onto Deonne’s shoulder. He was trembling. After a moment, he lifted his head with a deep indrawn breath. “I didn’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t remember him at all. My mother never said that he…” He licked his lips.

“Loved her?” Deonne asked.

Adán rested his hand on Justin’s shoulder. “I think you might have to revise some of your family history, Justin Edward Kelly.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Hammerside, Detroit-Rocktown Supercity, 2264 A.D.:
Marley’s conditions were all the cash up front and that Gawain go everywhere she did, plus she wanted to know exactly where she was being taken at all times. No blindfolds, or silly stuff like that.

Her conditions meant that the seating arrangements in Rhydder’s car didn’t suit her in the slightest. She was placed in the passenger seat next to Rhydder in the driver’s seat, in order that she not miss a single turn of their journey, while Gawain perched on the inadequate back bench with Demyan. The four stacks of cash had already been squirrelled away somewhere in the apartment. Gawain had bolt holes and stash spots all over the apartment for illicit and hidden wealth, in case the apartment was ever turned over by looters.

Gawain was nervous. Which meant Gawain was chatty. He clutched his old, battered reading boards to his chest and kept up a continuous stream of comments, questions and an intellectual version of verbal fidgeting that quickly drove Demyan mad, but merely seemed to amuse Rhydder as he steered the Stingray through the fringes of DRC, to the landing strip where he planned to take off from.

The semi-ballistic leap from DRC to somewhere in Europe silenced even Gawain, who watched the sky darken to indigo, then back to the blue of a late afternoon. Marley, sitting up front, was able to pick out the continental shapes as they descended and looked at Rhydder sharply. “Rome?” she asked.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be returned home safe and sound.”

“I hate Rome,” Gawain muttered from the back seat. “Especially in September.”

The landing strip Rhydder used was somewhere in the north of the city, but Marley didn’t know Rome at all. This was her first time to the fabled city, and she was completely out of water. She studied the chipped and faded stone of the buildings they passed as Rhydder drove them through the streets, and couldn’t begin to estimate if this was a good neighborhood or not.

“We’re nearly there,” Demyan said. “Or we would be if Rhydder took the direct route.”

“Time is an issue for you, isn’t it?” Gawain asked. “That’s why, even though you clearly have some empathetic ability, you mishandled things in the first place. You screwed up because you’re anxious.”

“Gawain,” Marley said softly, in warning. Gawain was keeping himself from boredom by following unanswered questions. It was another way he fidgeted, but it often led him into awkward social situations before he realized what he was doing. When he wasn’t chasing down unanswered questions he was as smoothly charming in a social setting as she was...which was to say just not much, but enough to navigate through without making a fool of himself.

“Anxious?” Demyan sounded affronted.

Marley bit her lip, wincing. Gawain
had
offended him. She glanced at Rhydder and was startled to see a small smile lifting the corners of his mouth as he glanced at the rear view mirror. Apparently, he didn’t mind watching Demyan getting skewered a little bit, either.

“You have some ability to understand how people feel. Their emotions,” Gawain replied. “Either you’re very, very good at reading body language, minutia and have a highly evolved understanding of psychology so that what you do
seems
like mind reading, or you actually mind read, or you’re an empath. I didn’t think vampires could do the same tricks as psi, until now. I’m still trying to decide which one it is, but I don’t have much empirical evidence and no offense, I’m not going to ask you directly, because you have a vested interest in lying to me.”

Rhydder made a small choking sound. Marley glanced at him. It looked like he was fighting not to laugh.

“Now you’re calling me a liar?” Demyan asked. He sounded bewildered and winded at the same time. Marley felt a little sorry for him. Gawain at full gallop often had that effect until you got used to him.

“Well, you have to be, don’t you?” Gawain asked reasonably. “You’re vampire.”

This time, Rhydder really did laugh. He gave a gusty, short bellow, then sighed. He turned the car into a steep, narrow street lined with tall, multi-storied homes that all featured arches and columns and privacy walls, marble and tiles and lots of green plants in containers.

Marley had no trouble guessing that this was not a slum area.

“Why do I have to be a liar?” Demyan demanded.

“If you’re just good at reading people, then I imagine it gets you into a lot of trouble and you have to lie to get yourself out of it all the time. If you’re a mind reader or an empath, then you’re already lying about that. You didn’t tell us before poking around in our minds when you first met us. That’s pretty rude, if you ask me. And it’s lying. If you’re for real, you’ve probably been lying about mind reading for years. If you’re not for real, then you’re lying about what you say you can do. You let people
think
you can read minds.”

Marley didn’t need a rear view mirror to know that Gawain had shrugged.

Rhydder cleared his throat as he parked the car very close against one of the walls of a house. “Everyone out on the other side,” he announced.

Marley glanced over her shoulder to look at Demyan. The man was staring at the back of Rhydder’ head. “I don’t imagine you have many friends,” he said at last. “If this is how you treat strangers when you first meet them.”

“No,” Gawain said happily. “It’s the ones that come back that end up my friends. They’re the ones that know and can stand truth when it smacks ‘em in the face.”

Rhydder looked at Marley. “You would be one of those friends, then. Good. We’ll need that.”

He got out of the car before she could begin to formulate a question and headed for a set of stairs that climbed up between two houses.

* * * * *

The Pritti she was supposed to treat had an apartment in a small block high up on the hill, apparently reachable only by climbing the long set of stairs from the road. The apartment building had security that Demyan accessed with a retinal scan and palm print. It gave Marley a measure of the affluence of the area.

It didn’t surprise her the apartment was in such a moneyed suburb. She had heard rumors about vampires – that they were all beyond rich and took paying jobs only to look human and blend in. Demyan and Rhydder seemed to be loaded with discreet money — if you could call a replica antique Stingray discreet. Demyan walked about the city with a satchel stuffed full of money to bribe ex-doctors to treat a single patient who lived in a penthouse in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Gawain had probably been asking the question silently for the entire journey, but for the first time Marley seriously wondered who Rhydder and Demyan really were, beyond being rich, vampire and willing to pay a fortune for her illegal services.

The penthouse floor was silent. Marley sniffed. It smelled deliciously, shockingly
clean
. How long was it since she had really smelled clean? The scent of perfectly clean flooring, fresh flowers in big Chinese ginger jars and not a speck of dust anywhere.

An original oil painting hung on the wall between two apartment doors. It wasn’t screwed down. One door was marked “A” and the other door “B”.

Demyan used his thumb to unlock the door marked “B” and stepped inside.

Rhydder looked at Marley. “After you,” he said flatly.

Gawain grinned. “Me, too,” he said and stepped past him, making Marley’s eyes roll.

“Marley!” Demyan called from the sofa in the center of the main room opening up off the foyer. He was leaning over it, but the sofa was facing the stunning views visible through the panoramic windows wrapping the room and she couldn’t see what he could.

She hurried around to the front of the sofa. A twenty-something petite woman with masses of black, long hair, lay asleep on the sofa, curled into a tight ball, her head on her hand.

Demyan looked at Marley. “I can’t wake her.”

“This is Pritti?” She tugged off her coat.

“She seemed fine when I left her this morning.”

Marley dropped a hand to the girl’s wrist pulse and felt it. It was abnormally slow. She shot out her hand. “A watch,” she said. A watch was placed in it and she glanced at it and thrust it back. “Analogue, with a second hand,” she said.

“I’ll count the ten seconds for you,” Rhydder told her.

Marley glanced at him, startled.

“Vampires have a perfect sense of time,” Gawain whispered to her. “It’s what lets them jump through time.”

“Our memories do that,” Rhydder told Gawain. “But we do have a non-subjective sense of time passing. Ready?” he asked Marley.

Marley concentrated on detecting the almost-not-there beat in Pritti’s wrist. She nodded.

“Now,” Rhydder said.

Silence held the room for ten long seconds as Marley counted beats.

“Stop,” Rhydder told her.

“Far too slow,” Marley murmured and dropped her hand to Pritti’s forehead. “And she’s far too cool. She’s...moribund.” She shook the girl, trying to rouse Pritti herself. “Pritti, wake up. Come on, now. Open your eyes. Say hello to the strangers in your home.”