Werewolf Cop (38 page)

It was Imogen, pleading desperately for mercy. Her words were muffled. She was almost surely gagged. But her sobs were plainly audible, and so was her anguish. Once Zach understood what he was hearing, the straining, strangled rise and fall of it seemed to him all but unbearable. And yet the other men simply ignored it. It was ambient noise to them. They went on talking, and their voices remained—not calm, exactly—Zach could hear the tension in them—but wholly disinterested in what was going on in their victim's heart and mind. As far as they were concerned, she was nothing but a vessel of blood, a carrier of their magic elixir. Goulart, who had been inside her not twenty-four hours ago, chuckled at something Abend told him even as Imogen, in crazed frustration, screamed to him for help through her gag.

This—the woman's cries, the men's indifference—lit something fresh and hot in Zach, a fresh, hot anger. It strengthened him despite his fear. He moved toward the sound through the darkness until he could hear what the men were saying.

“Aren't there some kind of, like, words or something?” he heard Goulart ask. His tone was taut but also dispassionate, curious, as if they were engaged in some sort of experiment.

“Words?” said Abend.

Imogen wept and pleaded.

“Yeah, like, some kind of ceremony. Don't we have to say or do something besides, you know, use the knife?”

“No, no, no. Don't be foolish. That is for stories. There is nothing else to say, nothing else to do. There are no words. There is no ceremony. Only the dagger. And the blood, of course. And the moon.”

Imogen babbled at them and sobbed.

“Oh, right, right,” said Goulart, “the moon. Should be any minute now, right?”

“Soon. Yes.”

“Doesn't matter about the cloud cover?”

“No, no, not at all. We'll feel it, believe me.”

Imogen tried to cry out to them for mercy.

“All right,” said Goulart. “Well, I'm ready, I can tell you that. As far as I'm concerned. . . .”

Thunder growling like a waking beast came through the broken windows and obscured both the voices and the ceaseless counterpoint of the woman's pleading. Zach was thinking clearly enough, quickly enough, to move faster under cover of the noise, his free hand feeling its way lightly along the wall to his left, his other hand gripping the gun.

The thunder faded away. Zach came to the end of the hall. He stepped into the room beyond and saw the others.

He saw them first by candlelight—by the glow of a single candle burning in a pewter holder on a small table. He saw the shadow-shapes of the two men standing by a doorway on the far wall, and the shadow-shape of the woman dangling slumped between them, her hands above her, cuffed to a bar in the doorway just as Zach had been cuffed to the bar in the beach house. She wasn't struggling or shaking or rattling her bonds. Hopelessness had drained the strength out of her. Even her pleading and her tears sounded weak and empty now. She knew the men weren't listening to her. She was certain that no one was coming to her aid.

The room around the three figures was vast—broad and high—a plain of debris and ruin stretching from the little pool of candlelight into shadow and darkness. Tall windows empty of glass rose on the left wall, showing the tempest-tossed blackness of the night. The rain washed through the openings and spattered the floor. The wind blew in and made the candle's flame gutter.

Goulart's shadow turned to Abend's. “What do we do when we—?”

But before he could finish, a tremendous riving jagged lightning bolt shot across one high window, on the diagonal, corner to corner. The enormous room went silver-white. The shadows turned human. For one strobic second, Zach glimpsed them all. There was Imogen with her hands chained above her, her head fallen forward, her sweater casually ripped halfway open, exposing the small breasts beneath and giving the killers an easy shot at her heart. There was Goulart in an Extraordinary Crimes raincoat just like Zach's, the zipper undone so that his damp suit was visible. His hands were thrust casually in his pockets. His slickly handsome face was likewise casual and relaxed. He glanced at the half-naked girl without any real interest, as if she were a decoration or a piece of furniture.

And there, finally, was Abend.

The gangster's life force was fading. Even the shock of darkness that came off him was weaker now, much weaker. Zach hadn't realized it until this moment, when he felt it—but barely felt it—as he approached. As for Abend's physical form, it was a horror show—worse than it had been when he'd been slicing into Zach at the beach house. His face was alive with decay, the flesh visibly rotting and shriveling around the skull. Squirming bits of something—maggots, maybe?—dropped off him and slithered at his feet. He wore his sword, the longsword of the
Brüderlichkeit
in a belt inside his flowing black coat. In his hand, though, he held the baselard, a thin dark iron dagger.

Zach saw all this in the flickering instant of the lightning bolt.

Then just before the bolt and its light snapped out, he saw Goulart turn and spot him there in the entryway.

The sky went black and, at the same instant, a fresh blast of wind hurled rain through the window—so much rain that it splattered on the floor as if it had been thrown from a bucket—and the candle on the table went out. The room was drenched in darkness—blindness following the flash.

Knowing he was discovered, Zach pointed the gun at Goulart—but he couldn't see him now, and he wouldn't fire without knowing for certain that Goulart had drawn on him as well. The man was his partner, after all. Even now he felt pity for him, for the fear of death that had led him down this road. In that black split second after the lightning strike, when he could see nothing, he wouldn't pull the trigger.

He wouldn't pull the trigger—but he was quick enough to take a leaping sidestep. And good thing too, because Goulart had sunk way beyond any sort of compunction. He had, in fact, drawn his own weapon the moment he spotted Zach and now he fired blindly into the place where he had seen his partner standing.

Zach saw the gout of flame from the gun barrel and felt the whisper of the bullet by his cheek.

In the next instant, both men's vision returned. Zach saw Goulart's dim silhouette and Goulart saw Zach's. Goulart shifted his gun toward the shape of his partner, but Zach's gun was already trained on Goulart's chest. Lightning flashed and the two men saw each other's faces. Goulart's teeth were bared and his eyes narrowed with effort and terror. Zach's expression was calm and certain. It was the face of “the Cowboy,” Goulart thought, and he knew he was a dead man.

Goulart's finger began to tighten on the trigger. Zach fired and killed him.

All this took only a second—less. The blast of Goulart's weapon had hardly faded before Zach's weapon blasted back. Goulart's arms flew out at his sides and he stumbled backwards toward the wall. The gun dropped from his slack fingers as he went down, dead.

Zach turned his gun on Abend, on the dim shadow of Abend, which was turned tensely toward him, one hand rising, the hand with the knife.

“Drop it!” Zach shouted, but the thunder crashed and drowned him out.

Zach and Abend faced each other in the darkness, and for another endless moment neither moved. Only the woman in the doorway strained and struggled now as fresh hope—unlooked-for and amazing to her—filled her with electric energy, made her fight against her chains and cry out through her gag with a new fervor.

“Put the dagger down, Abend,” Zach said, trying to keep his voice even. “The sword too. Do it now.”

Abend shifted, completing his turn until he faced Zach head on, as if presenting himself as a target. Even through the obscurity, Zach saw the gangster smile.

“You will kill me otherwise?” Abend said.

“I'll kill you,” said Zach. “I came here to kill you.”

“I wonder if you will,” said Abend. His left hand came up and flame rose from it, as if by magic. But he had only snapped a cigarette lighter—probably Imogen's, Zach thought. The rising fire sent an orange glow over the shriveling, rotting skin on Abend's skull and the heat made more maggots drop off him to the floor. Abend moved to the small table, only a step away, and held the lighter to the candle and re-lit the wick.

“Put those blades down,” said Zach. “I will not ask again.”

Abend did not respond. His decaying features still twisting into a smile, he took hold of the pewter candle holder and lifted the candle into the air between them. The flame-light threw a wider circle of glow around the room, deeper shadows wavering.

And Zach slowly became aware of the small firelit eyes staring at him from all around, from every wall and every corner.

“You are the wolf now, I take it,” Abend said.

Zach couldn't help but glance to left and right. Rats—rats and spiders—huge, huge spiders big as cats—surrounded him at the edges of the candle-glow. They surrounded him and stared at him and some, one or two, slowly began to creep toward him, step by hesitant step. The sight of them made Zach's heart beat so fast, it left him breathless.

“It is not me you're after, you know that, yes?” said Abend. “I am only the vessel of the thing, the human will of it. Because I have the dagger. The dagger is the doorway. Whoever has the dagger over time becomes the will. There were others before me. The wolves have come for them, even killed them sometimes, but the dagger remains, so the thing itself remains. Why do you think that is, Agent? Why do you think the wolves did not close the door?”

Zach licked his dry lips as the rats and spiders edged his way. He knew the answer and murmured it aloud without thinking. “Because the wolves didn't use the dagger. They didn't end the curse.”

“Because they didn't want to die!” said Abend simply, with a small, Germanic shrug. “Even when they could no longer bear what they were, no longer abide the blood they lived by, they didn't want to die, not truly. They passed the curse on, on to you now, yes? And they continued as phantoms. You have seen them, have you not?”

“I have,” said Zach.

“So have I. It is a kind of damnation itself, I think.”

“It is.”

“And yet . . . and yet it is not death.” Still holding the candle up in his left hand, he gestured with the dagger in his right. “It is not death.”

Zach kept his gun barrel trained on Abend's center. He saw no reason to shout another order, another warning. He either had to pull the trigger now or surrender to the man's logic, which was, in truth, the logic of his own fear.

“What is the point of it then?” Abend asked him. “Coming here? Killing me? What is the purpose? None. Why should you alone destroy yourself when the others haven't? Do you think they want you to? They do not, you know. They do not wish you well in this affair at all. If you do what they could not, you shame them. You shame them and then they die. And not that half-death that they know now, not the death of phantoms, but. . . .”

Abend stopped there, mid-sentence. The expression on his monstrous and shifting countenance changed. His over-round eyes brightened and he cocked his head, as if listening to distant music. Lightning flashed at the window and Zach saw him listening like that and he saw Imogen straining forward in her handcuffs, imploring him with her entire body and all her sobs.

Thunder crashed and ceased suddenly—and in the after-quiet, Zach heard what Abend had heard.

That noise. That voice. That muttering. It was here—that presence—that thing. That beast he had sensed in the forest, that he had seen in the rain, that he had heard murmuring senselessly to him out among the trees—

I AM NOT I AM THAT I AM NOT I AM NOT I

It was here and it was murmuring to him now again, the same incomprehensible susurration rising steadily out of the shadows, out of all the shadows in all the corners of the room, coming through the window and out of the night and out of the fall of the rain and the howl of the wind and out of the deep, mysterious intelligence of the very web and woof of darkness. All, all of it, was muttering and shifting and moving toward him like a closing circle, and the circle of rats and spiders was slowly closing too, empowered by the presence that filled and animated them and was their communal mind and gave them their communal purpose.

“The moon is rising,” said Abend with a gentle smile. “The hour has come.”

The dagger began to glow in his hand. It turned the color of death—a color Zach had never seen before—a black red light that was indescribable—that seemed to be as dark as it was bright and to grow brighter and darker at the same time. With a grand, sweeping gesture of disdain, Abend hurled the candle away. It turned, burning, through the air one quarter-circle, then the flame went out, and it twirled darkly across the room, landing with a plastic clatter against a far wall. Nearby, an unimaginably enormous tarantula jumped, startled.

Abend didn't need the candle anymore. The dagger glowed and lit the room with that weird red-black bright-dark light. From Abend's right hand, the strange illumination spread in a broadening dome, over the body of Goulart where he lay on his back staring up into the high rafters, over the figure of Imogen where she strained in her bonds, over the rats and giant spiders where they seemed to pause, to hover tensely as if awaiting a command, and finally over the deepest shadows themselves, joining with the shadows until what was in the shadows was also in the light, and what was muttering in the silence was muttering louder and louder throughout the atmosphere.

“Let me go about my business,” Abend said, speaking into that terrible music, gesturing toward Imogen and starting to turn to her with the dagger raised. “Let me live and you will live. It's so simple, my boy. All you need to do is nothing.”

Zach shot him.

The bullet tore a huge—an unnaturally huge—hole through the center of the man, a hole the size of a fist. Blood exploded backward and forward out of the wound in an enormous red blast. And even so, even so, even with the black-bright air glowing through the middle of him, Abend did not go down. His rotting features contorted with agony, but he still had the strength to keep turning toward Imogen, to keep lifting the knife and to step once in her direction, ready to plunge the glowing blade into the heart of her and drink the healing draught of her existence.