The Peregrine Omnibus, Volume Two (12 page)

CHAPTER VI

Summer of Love

August, 1967—San Francisco

William Davies twirled his mask on one finger as he sat on the floor, knees drawn up. He was surrounded by a half dozen of his closest friends, who lived in the same house as him. Two of them were girls and both were giggling madly as they passed a joint back and forth between them. The sounds of the Beatles’ new album,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, drifted through the room and William felt himself soaring to new heights, his mind seeming to expand and contract with every beat of Ringo’s drums.

William wore a suit and tie, but somehow it didn’t look square on him. His peace sign button on the lapel of his coat and his shaggy hair made it clear that he was with the people.

“Peregrine,” a female voice whispered in his ear. William turned to look at her, a smile on his face. None of his friends called him by his “real” name, which was just how he liked it. William Davies was a draft dodger, but the Peregrine was an American hero.

William stared into Blossom’s green eyes and full lips, leaning in to kiss her hungrily. She smelled of jasmine and marijuana, all mixed up in a sexy hedonistic fragrance. “You want to go find a room?” he asked her, hoping she’d say yes. Technically, she was dating Cougar, another housemate, but she spent as much time in the Peregrine’s bed as in Cougar’s.

“Maybe later,” Blossom answered, pulling free of his embrace. “Your dad is here to see you.”

Those words were like a bucket of cold water to William’s libido. He stood up quickly, coming down from his drug-induced high. “He’s in the living room?”

“Yeah. He looks younger than I expected.”

“He aged well.” The Peregrine stepped over some of his friends’ prone bodies and walked down the hall. His father was standing with his back to him, looking at a collection of poems some of the gang had scribbled on the wall. Most of them didn’t make much sense, but they were brilliant in a way, William thought. Acid made almost anything seem brilliant.

“Dad?”

Max Davies turned to face his son. Despite the fact that Max was sixty-seven years old, he could easily pass for a man in his early forties. There had reached a point around 1944 or so when Max’s appearance seemed to fix itself and he hadn’t changed much since, other than a few sprinkles of gray amidst his wavy hair. “You need a haircut,” Max muttered. He moved towards his son, shaking his head. “They didn’t even know who William Davies was when I asked for you. They only know you by your secret identity, though I guess you’ve dispensed with the secret part.”

“It’s just reversed now, that’s all,” William replied. “You used to keep the Peregrine a secret because it would have hurt you as Max Davies. But I keep William Davies a secret because it would hurt the Peregrine.”

“You smell like dope.” Max ran a hand through his hair, trying to keep from losing his temper. “I wish you wouldn’t do drugs, son. And I wish you wouldn’t drag the Peregrine legacy through the mud.”

William looked as if he’d just been slapped. Despite his rebellion against the current actions of the world’s leaders, he did take being the Peregrine very seriously. “What do you mean by that?”

“Last week you shot three cops at that rally downtown.”

“They were beating up defenseless kids! They’re just a bunch of goons who think that because they wear a badge they have some sort of power! Well, we’re gonna change the world… make it a better place!”

“How? By smoking grass and screwing around?”

William stared at his father, seething with anger. “Did you come out here just to yell at me? Because you could have done that on the phone.” The Peregrine jabbed a finger into his father’s chest. “And don’t even think about trying to take back the Peregrine identity from me. It’s mine. I’ve been doing this for years and doing a damned fine job of it!”

“That’s mostly true,” Max agreed. He shoved his hands in his pockets and sighed, looking suddenly much older. “Your mom’s dead, William. She passed away two days ago. I wanted to tell you in person.”

William blinked in surprise. “What happened…?”

“She went to sleep and she didn’t wake up. The doctors say she had a congenital heart defect and nobody ever knew it. Not until it was too late.” Max put his arms around his son and pulled him close. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” William whispered, hugging back with all his might.

* * *

William crept through the streets of the city, his heart heavy with sorrow. His dad had stayed around for a few hours before finally returning to his hotel. Things had seemed a little less awkward between them towards the end, though the Peregrine knew how much he was disappointing his father with his lifestyle. If only his dad could understand that they weren’t just wasting their lives… they were trying to stand up for something bigger than themselves: they were trying to literally change the world.

William climbed a fire escape until he stood on top of a grocery store’s roof. Across the street, standing in the illumination of a streetlight, were three men. Two of them were of Oriental descent with short black hair and thin bodies. They wore buttoned shirts and tight slacks. But it was the third man who held William’s interest: he was tall and slender, dressed in an Oriental-style robe. He leaned on a walking stick topped by a large diamond and his face was the epitome of evil: feline features and a long Fu Manchu moustache. If the rumors were true, this man was the mastermind behind the recent growth of the Chinatown gangs.

William had been looking into the gangs’ activities for a few months now but it had been on the backburner until recently. Some of William’s friends had nearly died from tainted acid that they’d bought from this man, and that had infuriated the Peregrine. Now with his own mother’s passing, he was anxious to hit something.

For a moment, he wondered how Emma would take the news.
Probably better than I did. She’s always been stronger than me,
he mused.

The Peregrine drew his pistols and jumped from the rooftop. The fall was a significant one but he’d learned gymnastics at an early age. He landed in a rolling crouch to cushion the impact and came up firing. The bullets ripped through the shoulders of the two smaller men. They went down, whimpering in pain. A powerful narcotic drug had been smeared on the bullets and the men quickly fell into a deep slumber.

The remaining figure watched the Peregrine with dark amusement in his eyes. He reached up with one hand and lovingly stroked the Fu Manchu moustache he possessed. “What a surprise. All these months of waiting to draw you out, and now you finally appear.”

The Peregrine moved towards the man, guns pointed directly at him. “I’m taking you to the police.”

“Really? I’m surprised, given how little you seem to respect them. How do you reconcile your obvious hatred of your government with your unceasing desire to enforce their laws?”

William frowned. “Put your hands up. Now.”

“You’re not him, are you? I suspected you weren’t… not from the descriptions I’d heard of you and the way you were acting these days. So, you must be the boy. William.” The man gracefully took a bow. William was able to study him at length now and he found that his age was difficult to determine. “I tried to raise you as my own, you know. I kidnapped you from your mother and father, but they stole you back.”

William blinked in surprise, suddenly recognizing the figure before him. He’d heard the stories so many times but he—along with everyone else—had assumed that the infamous Warlike Manchu had finally succumbed to time and age. “I can’t believe you’ve been reduced to running drugs in Chinatown,” the Peregrine stated. He kept his voice and hands from shaking, but only just barely.

The Warlike Manchu was perhaps the deadliest foe ever faced by the original Peregrine. A near immortal who had mastered every known fighting style as well as virtually every science and mystic art known to man, the Warlike Manchu had actually served as one of the original Peregrine’s trainers during Max’s early days. When the Manchu had tried to force Max to turn to crime and serve as his heir, Max had refused, inciting a feud that had spanned the late twenties all the way into the mid-1950s. Several times the Peregrine thought the Manchu dead and buried, but the villain always rose from the ashes like a phoenix.

“I thought I had made myself clear,” the Warlike Manchu said with a diabolical grin. “I have been debasing myself in this squalid location because I wanted to draw the Peregrine out of his hiding place.”

“And why would you want to do that?”

“Because,” the Manchu said with forceful conviction, “I want him to help me recreate the world.”

CHAPTER VII

An Alliance with the Devil

Two women lay naked on a bed nearby, their minds drifting on an ever-rising cloud of opium. William watched them move about languidly, their long legs and firm bodies calling to him.

“They are lovely. Would you like to own one of them?”

The Peregrine remembered where he was and looked away. He was in the Warlike Manchu’s Chinatown lair, a plush Oriental-style apartment that was home to the crime lord, his closest agents in the Ten Fingers gang, and a slew of prostitutes. “I don’t believe in owning human beings.”

“A pity,” the Manchu replied, settling down on a throne-like chair. He gestured for the Peregrine to take a seat near him and the vigilante reluctantly did so. “I am pleased that you chose to listen to my offer. I am not certain that your father would have done so.”

William placed his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, clutching the Knife of Elohim in his right glove. If it looked like the Manchu was about to strike, he wanted to be ready. “I’m not sure why I’m here, to be honest,” he admitted.

“I think it’s because my vision of recreating the world appeals to you. That’s why you live here in San Francisco, isn’t it? Because the revolutionary spirit that has so captivated the youth of America appeals to you. I have lived through revolutions and I can see that one is coming… but unless something changes very soon, the legacy of this Peace Movement will be one of lost opportunity.”

“I could see that, unfortunately.” William crossed his legs and relaxed a bit. The Warlike Manchu was studying him closely but William didn’t sense any immediate threat. From what his father had told him about the master criminal, the Manchu was a deadly and calculating enemy, and his boasts of having the means to recreate the world chilled the Peregrine to his core. If he was speaking the truth, then William needed to find out how the Manchu planned to do this, hence his playing along with the villain’s scheme to this point. “I think the kids have the best interests of the world at heart but the people with the real power just want to shut them up, and their guns give them an awful lot of power.”

“Weapons do make the man,” the Warlike Manchu said with a cold smile. “I suppose you would like to see the tablet that I mentioned to you on the way over?”

“I do. And I have to ask you again: why you’d think that my dad—or I—would trust you to use it?”

“I have always been about evolution, about improving the lot of this world. I believe that it suffers in chaos and that a strong hand—my hand or one that I have selected—can bring peace to it by instilling a harsh sense of order.” The Warlike Manchu snapped his fingers and a member of the Ten Fingers approached with a circular piece of stone engraved with Mayan writing. “This stone dates back to the end of the Mayan Empire. On December 21, 2012, the Mayan Calendar ends… and when it does, the world begins anew. We are in a loop, you see—how many times this has already happened, I do not know—but it is possible to break the loop, I believe, if the user of this tablet wishes it to be so. The tablet allows the wielder to dictate the terms of the next cycle. You are God.”

William felt intrigued but sickened by the notion at the same time. “What makes you think the cycle could be broken? Maybe all you’d be doing is kicking off another repeat go-round.”

“That is possible, but I believe my will is strong enough to remake the world in such a way that it would not occur. Even if it did, I would still have millions of years in which I had shaped things to my liking.” The Warlike Manchu leaned forward, his eyes glittering. William could feel the power of the criminal’s intelligence, for it seemed to stretch across the gulf between them. “But I do not want you to stand idly by and watch as I use this tablet when the time comes. I have always wanted to unite our families. First, I offered your father the chance to become my heir, and then I tried to steal you as an infant to do the same. When I look into the eyes of the Davies men, I see my own soul reflected back at me: We are men of vision and determination, willing to sacrifice so much for the greater good.”

The Peregrine hesitated before responding. The Warlike Manchu’s words actually appealed to him. He liked to picture himself as a man who was fighting for a greater good, even if others didn’t see it, but he tried to temper his growing enthusiasm with the stories he’d been told by his father. “Let’s say,” he finally said, “that I’m willing to consider helping you. That’s still over forty years away. I’ll be an old man by then.”

“Not necessarily,” the Warlike Manchu answered. “I have prolonged my life considerably through the use of a special elixir that I discovered. It has helped me survive many things—murder, being turned to stone, being burned alive. All of those things failed to stop me. And I am willing to share this elixir with you, if you swear to join me.”

“And if I refuse?”

The Warlike Manchu laughed softly. “Then I allow you to leave. And you have forty years to plot some way of stopping me from becoming a god. I am immortal… forty years of patience is not difficult for me.”

The Peregrine stared at the Mayan tablet, thinking about the possibilities. Not only to become immortal for himself, but to use the tablet for all the
right
reasons… Couldn’t he just agree to the bargain, take the elixir, and then betray the Manchu? Surely his father would agree that he’d done the right thing if he did that. He could be the Peregrine forever, making sure that the world was safe until 2012, when he could
make sure
on a whole new level.