Between (5 page)

“I have another bargain,” he said. “It, too, comes with a
cost. I’m going to buy you a store. A bookstore, maybe. You like books, yes? There will be money in the bank for you and lots of time to learn the business. In your free time you will paint.” He held up his hand to silence questions. “You will, of course, stay out of jail. And if this woman”—he pointed to one of many paintings of a gray-eyed girl with a thick mane of auburn hair—“walks into your store, you will befriend her and give her a book that I will leave with you. Agreed?”

Zee nodded, not trusting his brain or his voice to produce anything short of gibberish.

“One more thing.” The old man produced a package, addressed to Miss Vivian Maylor in a spiky black hand. “There may come a time when you will need to give her this.”

“How will I know?”

“You will give it to her on the day that you hear of my death.” Intense blue eyes held his, and he remembered the chill that shook him in that moment.

In the years that followed, Zee tried to become a better man. He channeled his impulse for aggression into martial arts for a few years, and then tried to subdue it with yoga and meditation. He studied the religions of many cultures. He painted. Bit by bit the bookstore filled up with titles of interest: an eclectic mix of classic literature, genre novels, old and rare texts, things mystical and weird. His art extended from the canvas to hanging sculptures. Some things he sold in the store. But he had developed the habit of painting from dream, and some of these he kept in his apartment upstairs, off-limits to customers and friends alike.

The old man had begun, in the last few years, to seem unreal, despite the regularity of bank deposits showing up in Zee’s account. The woman continued to make regular dream appearances, but he had begun to doubt she would ever materialize, and now, at last, here she was.

Climbing the stairs to his apartment, Zee paced the length of the wall where his dream paintings hung. So many
years, so many dreams. Vivian figured in most of them. There were also dragons.

The doorbell rang.

Not the dinger that went off when someone entered the store, but the doorbell to the back door of his apartment, the one accessed by climbing the narrow fire escape stairs. In the entire time Zee had lived here, nobody had ever rung that doorbell because nobody ever climbed those stairs. He’d always considered the buzzer as a practical joke from a builder with too much time on his hands.

It rang again, and he felt a hiss and slither of time, a sense that this was not the first time he had stood at this juncture, with an abyss of darkness opening in front of his feet.

The feeling passed. Only a doorbell, not a call to arms, but still his body felt changed when he crossed the studio into the living area and opened the door—subtly charged, all of his senses expanded.

A strange woman balanced easily on the narrow steps. She was tall, with striking hazel eyes under delicate brows. Trying to categorize her, he ran up against the word
alien
. The eyes a little too widely spaced, the nose too perfect, something vaguely wrong about the mouth. No makeup or jewelry, and the long black gown she wore was out of place in Krebston.

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end; he felt the once-familiar rush of adrenaline.

She looked up at him through thick lashes, hesitant, insecure. “Hello—you would be a friend of Vivian, yes?” Her voice was lightly accented, and he ran the gamut of known languages through his brain and failed to find a match.

His own hand was already in motion before she struck with the knife. He blocked the thrust, grabbed her wrist, twisted the knife away from her. Before she had time to scream, he had wrenched her into the room and slammed the door behind both of them. He pinned her against the wall with her own blade at her throat. It was carved from stone, slightly curved, and stained with blood.

The sight of it moved him.

He leaned his weight into her, pressing the flat of the blade against her white throat so that the skin puckered along the sharp edge but didn’t quite break. “If you scream, I’ll kill you,” he said.

It was intended as a threat, but he realized with a shock that he meant it.

The knife felt alive in his hand. An infinitesimal amount of pressure and beads of crimson appeared on the pale skin. He swallowed, tasting desire.

“Warlord,” she said, almost purring. “We meet at last. Step back. You’re not going to kill me.”

His hand withdrew of its own volition. His right foot stepped back and the left followed, even though his intent was to stand and fight.

Delicate as a cat, she stepped past him and he followed her down the hall, into the studio. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Looking back over her shoulder she smiled. A lover’s smile, intimate, pupils dilated black. “You want to cut me, Warlord? Kill me? You would like that, I know.”

All the nights of his life he had dreamed of violence. Swords, knives, the dull thud of flesh beneath his fists. Bones cracking, lips splitting. Always it was there, an undercurrent that would not be quelled, but never before had he thought about harming a woman.

The impulse appalled him, but his body persisted in sending messages to his brain. How much pressure it would take to clamp the windpipe below that white skin, how wide the spray of blood if he drew the edge of the blade across her throat. He knew exactly where to thrust between the ribs to pierce her heart or her lungs, how to make a slower death with a gut wound.

And he stood, hands at his side, watching as she moved among his pictures, reading his dreams.

“Would you really rather paint than kill?” she asked him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The lie felt rough on a tongue taught a rigorous discipline of truth.

“Come—I know what you are.”

He managed a step toward her, but it took everything he had. His knuckles whitened on the hilt of the knife, and he raised his arm to throw. She held up a hand and shook her head. “No, no, Warlord. Me you cannot kill.”

A wall of resistance held him back. Invisible. Impassable. Mustering all the strength of his body and his will, he forced himself against it, gained another six inches of ground, and could go no farther. He stood there, breathing hard, sweat soaking his body. What manner of woman was this? All the old mythologies and fairy tales converged on a single word.

Witch.

“What exactly do you want?” he asked.

“You, Warlord. I require your service.”

He laughed, a harsh sound that grated on his own ears. “No.”

“Do not be so hasty. You have not yet heard what I offer to you.” His vision hazed as she moved toward him, rounded hips swaying, lips parted. She wore no bra beneath the bodice of her gown, and he jerked his eyes away from her breasts with a physical jolt, not that it did him any good. She pressed her body against his, smiled up into his face.

When he took a step back, she murmured, “Stand still,” and he felt that same resistance in the air around him, holding him trapped and quivering.

The woman ran a long-fingered hand along his cheek, down his neck, and over his chest. “You waste yourself. This is not the body of an artist; it is the body of a warrior, and a lover. I offer you both of these things—the opportunity to kill, the luxury of my bed. What say you?”

Desire shook him to the marrow of his bones. His body responded to her. Images played unbidden through his brain—perfect breasts beneath his hands, his lips. The flat expanse of her belly, the smoothness of her hips.

He wrenched his gaze away. Over her head hung a portrait of Vivian, gray eyes staring into his.

“No,” he said. His lips felt stiff and numb; the word was an effort.

“Your body says otherwise.” She grabbed his hips, pulled them hard against hers. He closed his eyes so as not to look at her, knowing she felt his arousal.

“My body doesn’t rule me,” he managed to say over the thundering of his heart. “Tell me what it is that you want.”

She kissed him, a long, lingering kiss, and when he did not respond, she stepped back. “She will not be able to satisfy you; a warrior needs a woman of power. A pity.”

“What do you want?”

“So direct. All right, I will tell you. I know all about you, Ezekiel. And I know about the Old One, and the promises he has made. You think he has the woman’s best interest in mind. You think you are going to help her. But if you give to her what he left with you, it will lead her into grave danger.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“I applaud your caution. You should trust no one. Him least of all.” She moved to stand before one of the portraits of Vivian. “Do you love her so much, then? No, don’t answer. I see it in the way you paint her. I hope you realize that even should she come to you from Dreamworld she will certainly be changed…” She stopped, her eyes narrowing.

“You’ve seen her in Wakeworld. Where is she, Warlord? Tell me.”

He didn’t answer.

She took the knife from a hand unable to resist her, held it so the tip pressed just into his bottom lip. A warm thread of blood ran down his chin. He did not flinch.

“Tell me where she is.”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

“What about the Key? Did the Old One give you that for safekeeping?”

He felt a pressure on his mind, a compulsion to answer, and was grateful suddenly for all that he didn’t know. “He never gave me a key.”

“I see that you will answer only as you are compelled. Time-consuming, to think of all the right questions. It is for her own good, Warlord, that you should tell me all you know. You will be saving her life.”

“I find it difficult to trust a woman who holds me at knifepoint.”

“How else should I persuade a Warlord to hear me? Violence speaks to violence, does it not?”

The truth of that was more than he wanted to admit. He repeated, “I don’t know anything about a key. I don’t know where she is.” His thoughts churned. What if the witch was right about the old man? If his intentions were dark, then following his instructions further was the last thing Zee wanted to do.

The woman leaned forward, licked the blood from his chin, kissed his lips; her eyes were deep pools of hunger and promise. “I will find her without your help. But I ask you this—if you love her as you say, then help her. If she should find the key, you must bring it to me.”

“If I were to do this, how would I find you?”

“Ah, details.” She held the blade to her wrist and cut. Blood welled against the pale skin. Wetting her fingers, she lifted them, dripping, to his lips, his tongue. The salty tang of blood flooded his mouth with saliva. Reflex took over and he swallowed.

“Blood calls to blood. If you want me, bleed yourself and call my name. Jehenna. Here—keep this as a gesture of good faith.” She wrapped his fingers around the hilt of the knife. “Stand still, now. Don’t move.”

And he stood, bound by her voice, as she walked out of his field of vision. Heard her footsteps cross the room, heard the door slam. The sound freed him from immobility. Impossible, what had just happened here. Except that blood flowed from a cut in his lip. In his hand he held a knife with a curved stone blade.

Shaking himself out of a stupor, he crossed to the door and locked it, then went into his bedroom. Shoving aside a stack of boxes in the closet, he exposed a locked metal gun safe bolted to the wall and opened it with the key he kept hidden under a loose corner of the carpet. Inside lay his M1911 handgun and his throwing knives.

He picked up the gun, slammed a magazine into it,
imagined firing a shot. Once a week, on Sunday mornings, he did target practice at Benny’s Range. Sunday afternoons he cleaned the gun, polished it, then tucked it back into the box. Also on Sundays, he practiced with the knives. He was good with a gun, but the blades had always felt like an extension of his own fists. Now he fastened the sheaths around waist and ankle, made sure everything was concealed beneath his clothing.

Two other items remained in the box: a spherical object in a velvet bag, another obligation left him by George Maylor. What it was, he had no idea. The instructions were clear:
Open only at the end.
What this meant, Zee had no idea. The other thing was a manila envelope, business sized. Written on it in a distinctive, bold black hand were the words
Vivian Maylor, c/o Ezekiel Arbogast
. Zee lifted it, hefted it in his hand, probed it with his fingers. Only paper, no hint of an object, large or small. No key.

Time enough to decide what to do; it need not be now. He laid the envelope back in the box. Then he wrapped the stone knife in a T-shirt and laid it on top, before turning the key in the lock and piling boxes in front of it once more.

He stared at the closet from the middle of his room, wondering how it was possible that everything should look the same when everything that mattered had changed.

V
ivian scrubbed her hands at the sink, lingering, extending the ritual longer than necessary to buy herself a moment of time. Although she’d managed to catch a few hours of sleep after her walk to the bookstore, she’d wakened feeling like someone had pounded every inch of her body with a baseball bat. Questions to which there were no answers swirled in her head.