The Lazarus Heart (28 page)

I have all the time I need,
he thinks.
And the world, when I am done, will be as simple and solid as those panes, as perfectly, rationally opaque.

But then the shadow of something immense and winged stretches itself across the row of windows, the shadow of something a hundred times darker than any shade of paint, darker than the eye of man can even see.
The color of absence,

Jordan thinks as the windows explode and the ebony shards rain down over him.

Even as he falls toward the floor and the cowering man caught in the single pool of light, Jared knows he's too late, that the storm and his injuries have slowed him down enough that some crucial chance has been missed, that something has gone horribly and completely wrong. And then he sees her face, Lucrece's pale face staring up at him through the razor torrent of falling glass, and her eyes are as dead as any eyes that ever looked out blindly from the head of a corpse. In the instant it takes him to reach the ground he sees the rest of it, exactly what has been done to her and the body of the dead detective and the words printed neatly across the floor.

He lands as smoothly as a cat, dropping to all fours as the last of the broken windows smashes to powder against the concrete around him. The skinny, frightened man has fallen, cut and bleeding from a hundred different wounds, and is scrambling frantically away from Jared across the factory floor. The crow flaps past Jared, a living missile of sleek black feathers, and dives for the fleeing killer.

"No!"
the man screams as Jared stands. "No, I stopped you!" The crow has reached the man and is pecking viciously at arms and hands raised protectively over his head.

Jared looks back once at Lucrece and he knows that if anything but sour rage remained in him, even a faint speck of light, that the sight of her hanging there has burned it from him forever.

"I can't kill you slowly enough," he says, turning toward the man who murdered Benny, the man who killed Lucrece, the man he still has no name for. "Not to pay for half of what you've done to me and the people I loved."

The man swats wildly at the crow and scrambles another foot toward the open door.

"But I'm making you a promise, motherfucker. You can be sure that I'm going to try."

And then Jared sees the stainless-steel semiautomatic pistol clutched in the man's scratched and bleeding hands, sees the man's finger wrapped around the trigger.

Before he can even shout a warning, the gun goes off and the crow falls in a heap of broken bones and blood-soaked feathers. She shudders once and the gun fires again, blowing off her head.

It is as if whatever life-substitute has animated Jared's cells, whatever dragged him from the grave and kept him moving for two days, is abruptly taken away, the strings on the marionette severed in one clean snip. Jared falls, breathless, to his knees.

"No,
I said!" and now the man is screaming at the top of his lungs and there are flecks of spittle flying from his thin lips. "I
beat
you! I
beat
you," and then the pistol goes off a third time, splattering what's left of the crow in two or three different directions.

Jared's vision blurs and begins to fade out around the edges. He struggles desperately with the zipper on the back of the leather hood but it sticks. Finally the fabric rips, tears free along a weak seam, and he pulls the mask off and collapses, curls himself into a fetal ball on the glass-littered concrete, a pathetic, hurting thing made of dead flesh unable to die.

The man with the gun is laughing, an awful, hysterical laugh that says everything there is to be said about insanity without using a single word. He turns away from the crow, apparently satisfied that she's truly, irretrievably dead, and he points the gun at Jared.

"What am I going to have to
do
before you start to take me seriously?" he yells. "Before you figure out that you can't win? That I'm never going to fucking stop?" Then he gets a look at Jared's ruined face and recognition washes slowly across his deranged features.

"Oh," he says, all the laughter draining out of his voice, and he takes a step away from Jared. "No. You're not him. He's dead."

Jared opens his mouth to tell the man to fuck off, to ram the gun up his ass, but all he manages is a dry, strangling sound.

"There are
rules,"
the man says incredulously, unbelieving. "There are rules that even They cannot violate, rules that bind even Their hands. Jared Poe is dead and the dead stay that way.

"I have no idea what kind of trick this is, my friend. But it isn't going to work. I know better," and he pulls the trigger and puts a bullet in Jared's chest. Ribs disintegrate, become shrapnel, puncturing his heart and lungs. Jared rolls over onto his back, coughing up gouts of arterial blood.

"I
know
the rules."

The next shot tears into Jared's belly and the bullet shatters his spine.

"No matter
how
much They twist and bend them, no matter how They try to cheat the natural order . . . I am pure of mind and body and I know the goddamn rules!"

Jared vomits another mouthful of blood and stares helplessly up at the thin and raving man. He opens his mouth and the words come slowly, slogging their way out of him in a sticky red trickle.

"Then kill me," he croaks. "If you . . . if you know the rules . . . then kill me."

The man chews uncertainly at his lower lip. Jared can see his Adam's apple bob up and down as he swallows. He leans over and puts the gun to Jared's forehead, presses its barrel an inch above the hole Harrod's pistol has already made in Jared's face.

"No," he says a moment later. That's not why you're here. You're here to kill me, but you couldn't." The gun moves away as he stands up straight again.

"Whatever you really are, I need to know the things you know. I need to know about the bird and the visions They've made me see."

The man's eyes almost seem to glimmer, like a child gazing deep into a bag filled with Halloween candy or someone poised on the brink of an abyss who has just grasped the concept of bottomless-ness. He thumbs the safety switch on the gun and stuffs it into the band of his trousers.

And then there's the taut, staccato sound of ropes snapping and the man looks up, past Jared, and begins to scream.

Lucrece has no way of knowing how long she's been drifting in the gray places, minutes or weeks, floating weightless through mists the color of papier-mache, cold mists that smell faintly of brine and pressed flowers. There is no up or down here, and only the vaguest sense of her body. Occasionally she remembers herself, or recalls the memory of herself, and hesitantly touches fingertips to her face to be sure that she's still there.

There's a faint tugging sensation at her feet, and that's all that might pass for direction. When she stares off that way, squints hard to try to see something through the insubstantial tendrils of the mist, she thinks that maybe there's a light there, far away. It seems warm, a soft, faintly pulsating point in a place where all other points are the same. And it would be so easy, she knows, to go to it, to fall through millennia and distances past perceiving, to let it swallow her the way it's meant to swallow everything in the end. To give up the pain and the weight of being in exchange for a brilliant, flickering moment of peace before oblivion.

Lucrece folds her arms about her chest, pulls her knees up close to her body, and looks away from it.

"This is a bunch of hippie bullshit," she says, and her voice seems to fill the entire universe, all the empty space eager to be filled, the sulking mist jealous of the light and its hoarding appetite.

For an instant or an hour the light flares, bathes her in a wash of its comfort, a gentle cascade of heat filled with promises. Lucrece closes her eyes, or only remembers what it's like to close her eyes, remembering Benny and Jared, remembering the man and his sharp and cutting tools, and she shakes her head.

"No," she says. "You can keep it. I don't want it now."

The warmth is taken away and there's a sudden rustling, like a rain of autumn leaves. Something rubs itself brusquely across her face, something musty and dry that tickles and makes her flinch, and when Lucrece opens her eyes again she's standing in a grove of dead and withered trees.

The mist presses in close on every side, roils like alien storm clouds, as if this is only the most tenuous oasis and might be reclaimed at any moment. But at least there's solid ground beneath her feet, even if it's only cracked and barren earth that's never known rain. A breeze blows through the limbs and sets them to rattling, sweeps up an ashy dust that settles around Lucrece like a shroud.

And the trees are filled with crows.

A hundred or a thousand pairs of golden eyes, eyes like amber beads, watching her, patient as time.

"Send me back," she says, not asking, demanding, not caring if they can hear the anger in her voice, the acid contempt. "Send me back to help Jared."

They turn as one, releasing her from their glare, and look together into the highest branches of the tallest of the trees. Lucrece looks with them and sees the one they've turned to face, perched above them all: a crow so black, so impossibly enormous that he might have been the very first, the incarnation of age clothed in ragged black feathers. His eyes burn with a hundred million years of collected sunlight and starlight. And he knows her name.

"I have the right to ask," she says.

The great bird spreads his wings and a raucous cry rises up from the others, a cry that Lucrece understands is laughter, bitter, wicked laughter at her temerity, that she would dare to demand what is theirs alone to give. She looks away, unable to bear the sound or the glare of those ancient, piercing eyes. She glances down at her bare, dusty feet. Now there is something on the ground just in front of her, a barely recognizable smear of drying blood and feathers, and she knows that it's the corpse of Jared's crow.

The great bird folds his wings again, quieting the others, and she can hear him speaking inside her head.

One of us has already died for your brother,
he says.
A single sacrifice is sufficient for his soul.

She doesn't reply, can only stare at the dead crow at her feet, trying to recall what Aaron Marsh read from the old German manuscript, afraid to even wonder what has happened to Jared if his crow has been killed.

We will not give another.

"For those who have the symbol," Lucrece says, "the passage is easy." She forces herself to look up, to face those judging eyes and again the court of crows caws and croaks its scorn for her.

"For those who have the symbol, the passage is easy," she repeats, and turns to show them the scar across her back.

They're screaming now, furious, insulted bird voices raised in confusion and outrage, anger to match even her own. Lucrece knows better than to turn toward them again. She imagines them descending on her, their stabbing beaks and battering wings punishing her impudence. But she's been torn apart before and there are things she's more afraid of.

Then I'll take you myself, woman, and we'll be done with this. But if you fail. . .

"I
won't
fail," she says.

Without warning, this small wasted patch of ground is split silently apart. Lucrece is plunging, ferried on strong black wings that have made this trip too many times to count. They pass through fire and chilling cold places that have never known light, soar above nameless starving atrocities that snatch at them with claws of iron and ivory. And in the end Lucrece has no time to regret or be afraid for herself, only enough time to prepare for whatever's waiting at the end of the journey.

Lucrece raises her head and opens her eyes, and the man who calls himself by the names of rivers fills his lungs and screams again and again. The knots he tied so carefully are unraveling and the ropes are ripping loose, snapping like sewing thread. In another moment her hands and ankles are free and she drops to the floor.

Jared has managed to roll over and he too can see her and the crow, as big as a raven, bigger, big as a fucking vulture, perched on her shoulder. He tries to move but his legs are paralyzed and useless and all he can do is watch as the organs heaped at her feet begin to twitch and slide toward Lucrece. The blood itself flows backward, pours over the rims of the buckets and flows like a retreating red tide across the floor. It all rises as if suspended on invisible wires, a puppet show for ghouls. Everything the man has taken from her, every bit of flesh and every drop of spilled blood, becomes a swirling, living

cloud, rushing to refill the empty cavity of Lucrece's body.

She throws back her head and the sound that pours from her mouth makes the killer's screams seem as insignificant as a whisper. When the air is clean of her, when Lucrece is once again whole, the slash that his scalpels and bone saws have made closes itself up, knits itself shut with flesh that has become as fluid and impervious as water. She sinks to her knees, gasping, and the killer draws the Beretta and flips off the safety.

"Lucrece!" Jared shouts, but the gun goes off before she can move, blowing a hole in her left shoulder. The huge crow leaps into the air and flaps safely away into the shadows, and Jared watches as the bullet hole heals before his eyes.

Lucrece stands up then, and her lips are curled back from her white teeth in a terrible inhuman snarl, an animal smile for the man still pointing his useless gun at her.

"You're going to have to do better than that, Jordan," she says. "You're going to have to do a whole hell of a lot better than that."

He pulls the trigger again and the right side of her face dissolves in a spray of blood and splintered bone, a gaping wound that vanishes almost as quickly as it appeared.

Lucrece shakes her head and takes a deep breath; the smile never leaves her lips. "That's a pretty goddamn cool trick, isn't it, Jordan?" She takes a step toward the

man.

"Stop!"
he screams. "Stop right this fucking minute." Now he is pointing the gun at Jared.