Death of an Immortal (25 page)

Sylvie stood over him and tried to think of what to say. Then she turned and walked to the kitchen, and selected the sharpest-looking knife there. She walked back to the couch.

“Hey, what are you doing with that knife?” Perry exclaimed.

She gritted her teeth.
Don’t think, just do it!
she told herself. She brought the knife down onto her forearm and sliced.

Blood immediately began welling up along the four-inch cut. Sylvie leaned down and slapped Terrill across the face.

He rose up faster than she’d seen anyone move, and his eyes, when they opened, had an inhuman gleam. Sylvie stuck her bleeding arm in front of Terrill’s face.

He tried to turn his head, but she commanded, “Look at it!” and he obeyed.

His face began to distend a little, then receded, then distended, and finally settled back into a human appearance. He stared up at Sylvie, looking hurt and surprised at the same time.

“I had to test you,” she said.

“You could’ve died,” he said. “Once a vampire sinks his fangs into you, he can’t stop until you’re dead.”

“I wanted to know if you could be trusted––if you have truly changed.”

“And you think this is an answer?” he asked sadly. “You need a better test. I am dangerous when I wake up. I’m dangerous when I am hungry.”

“Didn’t I just wake you?” she asked. “Aren’t you hungry?”

Terrill looked amazed as he realized she was right.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

“I know,” Sylvie said. “She told me…”

“I killed your sister,” he continued, before he could change his mind about confessing. Then her last words seemed to sink in. “Wait, what? She told you? What are you talking about? I killed your sister.”

“No, you did something much worse,” Sylvie said in a harsh voice. “You took her soul, turned her into something evil.”

Terrill stared at her. It was obvious he hadn’t known. “She Turned? I never even considered that possibility!”

“I have to know,” Sylvie said. “I have to know if my sister can be saved.”

“I don’t know,” he said, dropping his head.

“You created her! You made her a monster!”

“You’re right. I have no excuses. It is my nature, no matter how much I try to change it.”

Until that moment, Sylvie hadn’t been sure if she could or would forgive Terrill. But as she looked down at this defeated man, she realized that was what he was: a man. Not a vampire. She’d seen vampires, and they weren’t anything like this.

“I don’t agree,” Sylvie said. “I think you have changed. Look at you! You’ve had every reason to strike out, to protect yourself, yet you’ve turned the other cheek. You’ve sacrificed your well-being for the sake of others. You’ve been pushed and tempted, and yet you’ve resisted feeding as a vampire.”

Perry and Grime had been standing nearby, watching their interaction. Now Perry said, “She’s right. Show her the cross.”

Terrill turned away, shaking his head, but Grime joined in. “Do it.”

Resignedly, Terrill opened his shirt. There was Jamie’s crucifix, which she had worn every day since Sylvie had given it to her, though Jamie hadn’t been a believer. Sylvie couldn’t help but contrast this miracle with the other vampires’ reaction to the cross.

“You have been in a church and survived,” she said. “That should be impossible.”

“He’s not eating raw meat anymore, either,” Perry said. “In fact, he’s turning downright vegetarian.”

“I wish it were so,” Terrill said, not sounding convinced.

“I will help you,” Sylvie said. “If you seek redemption, I will help you in every way that I can.”

He stood up. He was tall, and he loomed over her, but she didn’t feel threatened.
It’s going to turn out all right
, she thought.

She’d no sooner thought this than the door to the apartment burst open.

Something exploded, and a bright flash blinded her. Through the smoke and the chaos, she glimpsed police officers in helmets and bulletproof vests, assault rifles at their shoulders, streaming into the apartment.

“Everyone down! Down! Down!” they screamed. One of them reached Sylvie and nearly threw her onto the floor.

“Got him!” she heard someone shouting nearby. She recognized Richard Carlan’s voice.

Chapter 41

Even now, Terrill could have escaped. There was live flesh and blood all around him. While the officer who stood above him detached the handcuffs from his belt, Terrill had more than enough time to bring him down.

Swipe at his legs, cutting into them; the man’s neck would hit the ground just so, and Terrill would lean over and bite. The blood would course through his veins, and his supernatural strength and speed would return.

Even now, Terrill was tempted.

As the handcuffs were put on him, he looked over a few feet to see Sylvie also on the ground, and, seeing the shocked look in her face, he suddenly realized the implications of his situation. It was broad daylight. When the cops dragged him outside, Terrill would have no cover.

It would be his end. At last. As it should be.

Even now, he could have leaped upon the police officers; with their necks exposed, it would be a simple thing to bring them down. Then all the bullets and blows they could inflict on him would come to nothing. He’d kill and kill, and feed, and stay in the basement until nightfall.

But he let the cops lift him to his feet and push him toward the door.

Perry and Grime were on the floor also. He heard Grime clearly. “NO!” the man was shouting. “You’ll kill him! He’s a vampire!”

Even if the cops had understood his mangled words, they wouldn’t have believed him. They would have laughed.

Perry was the least shocked. He’d already understood the implications––and he’d already understood Terrill’s decision to do nothing. He nodded to Terrill, as if wishing him well and saying goodbye.

One cop seemed particularly happy to see him. “I got you, you bastard. Me… Richard Carlan. You hear that, Jamie?” he shouted. He was looking toward the sky. “I got him for you!”

The cops hauled Terrill to the stairs. They stood in the shadow of the stairwell while a police car was brought around, and it gave Terrill a few more moments of existence. A few moments seemed so important, after an almost eternal life. Years had passed that he valued less than those moments.

But this was good. He should have given up years ago. He’d reveled in the vampire life for centuries, but after Mary, it had all seemed pointless. Perhaps his change in attitude had come with age. Michael the Maker had seemed equally conflicted, though Terrill hadn’t understood it at the time.

Perhaps the day had come when Michael, too, had decided he wouldn’t kill to save himself. Perhaps somewhere in a distant, unnoticed, superstitious hamlet in Europe, he had met his end. Unnoticed. Unmourned. Just like Terrill would be.

“I forgive you, Terrill,” he heard Sylvie call out, and it was as if a benediction had been bestowed. He turned his eyes to the light, and he wasn’t afraid.

They walked him up the steps, and the first tingling of sunlight landed on his head, pushing down into his hair.
Get it over with!
he thought. He turned his face to the sun.

It was painful, as if his skin was being stripped away. He was blinded. His hearing narrowed to the sound of his labored breathing.

But a minute passed, and then another. He didn’t burst into flame, and the pain was starting to recede.

“Jesus, look at this guy!” one of the cops said. “That’s the worst sunburn I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh, yes. The bum’s life,” one of the others said, laughing. “All sunshine and roses.”

Terrill stopped thinking about them. He was breathing the daytime air, and it smelled different; he was looking at his surroundings in daylight, feeling the sun on his skin, for the first time since he’d been Turned. It was all different. There was a kind of dull glow, a softening and suffusing of everything around him. The hardened cops seemed like friends, the bright sky like Heaven.

Terrill felt the pain of the handcuffs, the hard metal biting into his flesh. It didn’t heal; it wouldn’t heal except with time.

And then it hit him. If one of the cops pulled out a gun and shot him in the heart, he’d die.

He was human. Mortal. God had forgiven him.

His eyes filled with tears, and his human blood and human flesh were flooded with joy.

It was a fair trade: God’s grace for mortality.

He laughed.

The two cops on either side of him looked at each other in disbelief. Then one of them punched Terrill in the stomach.

“It ain’t funny, you murdering creep.”

#

It was everything Carlan had envisioned. His fellow cops lined the hallway and filled the squad room, clapping and cheering. The only scowling face was that of Brosterhouse, the big hulk in the corner. Even that felt good.

The prisoner was strangely passive. He looked blissed-out or something. Maybe he was on drugs. He was a coward, that was for certain. He hadn’t put up the slightest resistance.

The only thing missing from his triumph was Sylvie.

The two bums had been arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting a fugitive, but he’d convinced the other cops to let Sylvie go. “She was here on a mission of mercy,” he’d said. “She’s got nothing to do with it.”

Not that Sylvie had seemed very grateful. She wouldn’t look at him. Instead, her eyes had followed the prisoner. The man who had murdered her sister.

Carlan shook his head. It was some religious impulse, he supposed. He couldn’t understand it. He was having second and third thoughts about Sylvie. She was a little too strange. Jamie had seemed grounded in comparison.

Hey, with this triumph, he’d be set for dates for the next year or two. There were some good-looking lady cops who were looking at him pretty admiringly right now.

He booked the prisoner. The man was a basket case: quiet, malleable, probably totally psychotic. He’d seen a look in Terrill’s eyes as they were taking him down that had alarmed him. And then it was gone, replaced by this zombie. As he pushed the guy into his cell, he gave him one last kick in the ass.

Then he returned to the break room and the hosannas of his fellow cops.

#

Father Harry didn’t sleep, and he barely ate, but he’d never had so much energy.

God was in his Heaven.

Even the logical side of his brain was on board. How could it not be? He’d seen real evidence of real evil. He’d seen how his prayer, which he had pulled out of some deep recess of his brain, had hit the vampire like a physical object. He’d seen the sacred earth of the church remain inviolate. He’d seen how the crucifix had burned the flesh of the vampire.

If there was evil, there was holiness.

He dove into the liturgy, looking for prayers to cast out demons, and he memorized them. These chants had always seemed like vestigial remnants of the medieval church, ridiculous and superstitious and irrational, with no more weight than a modern fantasy book.

Now they seemed like battle plans.

The fight wasn’t over, he sensed. The vampires would return. And even if they didn’t, he now saw that he needed to be prepared. He needed to defend his flock.

He regretted turning Terrill in to the police. The vampire had come to him for help, to confess, and to change. Father Harry had turned him away. Worse, he had betrayed him to the civil authorities.

Father Harry was in full vestments. He’d searched the church for the biggest crucifix he could find. There was one on the wall, a big thing that he’d always been a little embarrassed by. Now he took it down, removed it from the frame that encased it, and put it on a chain around his neck. The weight felt comforting.

He’d be ready for the nighttime.

In the meantime, after he was sure that all the homeless in his care had been taken care of, the wounded taken to the hospital, the others coddled and fed, he decided that he’d go visit Terrill in jail and ask for his forgiveness.

He’d give the man an opportunity to confess, to shed his evil past. Father Harry would be the first priest in a thousand years to turn a vampire from evil. So what if he hadn’t even believed in vampires until the night before?

Father Harry looked around the kitchen. There was a clear, empty water bottle on the counter. He rinsed it out, then went to the vestibule, filled it with holy water, and slipped it into his pocket. He’d never be unprepared for evil again.

He bustled off to the jail, singing a hymn to himself.

Chapter 42

Brosterhouse rolled his eyes at the small-town triumphalism of it all. It was like a football player doing a victory dance after a three-yard gain. Solving murders should be treated like it was just part of the job. Apparently, that was not the case in Bend.

He made his way through the cheering crowd to Captain Anderson’s office. The older cop wasn’t joining in the celebration, he noticed. He closed the door and sat down.

“What are you going to do about it?” Brosterhouse asked.

“Do about what?” Anderson didn’t look like he’d slept. He was a couple of years away from retirement, Brosterhouse realized with sudden insight; he didn’t want to rock the boat.

“About this phony arrest!” Brosterhouse raised his voice, and Anderson frowned.

“Phony? The guy ran; he was hiding. He was guilty of something.”

“Except we now know that the evidence that was used to make the original arrest was planted.”

“Do we know that?” Anderson swung his chair around and faced Brosterhouse squarely. “Look, detective. I understand your concern. But for some reason I’ll never understand, Carlan is popular around here.”

“So he’s allowed to make a false arrest?”

“No, of course not. I’m just saying, we’ll let a day or two pass, and then quietly release this Terrill fellow. Let them have their little party.”

“For God’s sake, the real murderer is out there being cheered while an innocent man sits in jail!”

Anderson sat back with a sigh. “Look, in a day or two, I can do something about Terrill. Meanwhile, the DA still wants another piece of evidence before he’s willing to do anything about Carlan.”