Emerald City Blues (8 page)

So that was how I missed the
Lenin
earlier.

It was a masterful display.
No matter how much I tried not to be, I was impressed at the skill and power of whoever had spoken the runes for these workings. Almost as impressed as I was at just how easily my mouth recalled how to pronounce the
Götterreden
. I realized I was panting, suddenly feeling as if I had just sprinted four blocks in hot pursuit of a suspect. Then a fragment of memory came back to me, and I could have kicked myself. Growing winded was the most common side-effect of any working, I remembered belatedly. Especially if one were out of practice. Like me. No doubt Gerd would have tutted in Teutonic perfectionism at how easily winded I was - not to mention my atrocious accent - but the runes of Seeing had breathed true just the same. I shook my head again as I studied the workings set about the
Lenin
. Whoever did this work was all but Gerd's equal in mastery of the Art, and likely in sheer power. Perhaps more.

I thought on the taste of cognac then, and of Gerd. Whoever set those workings came from the same tradition that he had. There, on the lonely docks of the port, I missed him with a pang like a sudden kick to the sternum. What would he have done, were my old Master here?

Something wiser than I would  at my very wisest, no doubt. And that wasn't very. With that thought heavy in my chest, I let the Sight go, adjusted the brim of my father’s fedora, and peered into the very real, very mundane, and very thick fog. Where was Malloy? I heard a sound off around the port side of the dock and went cautiously toward it. I rounded the bow just in time to catch sight of Malloy slow-stepping up the gangway and onto the deck. His service revolver was drawn, the point low. What was he doing? My breath caught at the idea of what those banes on the bridge deck might do to him. Stop his heart? Burst a blood vessel in his brain?
Was that what had happened to Tommy?

I felt cold. The last thing I wanted to do was to board that ship. What I really wanted was to turn and run as fast as I could and not stop running until I found a nice, safe bottle to crawl inside of until the world forgot Maddie Sheehan was ever born. But Malloy was here because of me. In danger be
cause of me. I had to stop him from ending up like Tommy: killed by something he could never understand, let alone protect himself from.

I don't remember walking up the gangway. I remember thinking what I was doing was the worst idea in the history of bad ideas. The ship moved gently on the tide beneath me. It was as if it were alive, breathing, inhaling the cold Seattle fog and exhaling pure malice. That malice entered my lungs like choking fumes, a black hand wrapped tight around my windpipe
. Bad idea? Oh yeah. In spades.

The deck of the
Lenin
was coated with a few generations' worth of grey naval paint, yet still managed to feel gritty and pitted with Pacific saltwater. I cast my eyes about, trying to pierce the gloom. No luck. I saw nothing moving on the deck near me. I took a few steps, trying to move silently while looking in every direction at once. More nothing. Then I saw it: a dark opening where a hatch had been left open on the port side of the bridge deck’s first story.

Let me see. Dark doorway. Below deck. On a ship concealed by
a master of the Art. Nope. No way I was going in there. No way in hell. Sorry Malloy. Your bad judgment doesn’t require me to follow suit. Not without backup. It was time to-

Blat. Blat
.
I felt more than heard the sharp, muffled impacts. It sounded just like a gunshot somewhere below. As in a service revolver.
Dammit, Malloy.

I was running. That was a bad idea. I was going through the dark hatch and down the steep grated ladder beyond. That was a really bad idea. I was pausing just long enough to fish my Beretta out of my pocket and pull back the hammer.

That was a better idea, but only when set beside its fellow ideas in the police line-up of usual suspects.

I plunged on into
the dim recess. A single naked bulb burned a sulfurous yellow at the far end of the narrow passage. Doors lined both sides of the hall but none were open. I ignored them and ran past. A hard right turn at the end of the hall. Another set of stairs. Why was Malloy going below? Who was he shooting at? I sincerely hoped it was him doing the shooting.

Faster. A memory of my father telling me about how to chase a suspect. Don't outrun your field of view. Keep your barrel pointed straight ahead, gun hand steady even when running. Watch your blind spots. My shoes clattered on the grated ladder. No time to go quietly. Another turn, more stairs, light at their foot. The ceiling opened up as I went down, and I found myself in the belly of the beast. Here in the hold of the ship, crates were stacked three high in row after dark row as far as the light could reach. Blind spots everywhere.

I recognized the crates immediately. I'd seen them up close and personal at the warehouse where the Russian Tiger had knocked my block off before burning the place down. Gun hand steady. Stay pointed. Stay sharp.
I’m trying, Dad.

Malloy was on the floor, slumped against a stack of crates, eyes shut. His right hand was under his left arm, clutching tight to his side.

I knelt down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Malloy.” I was shaking. I tried not to shake him. “Malloy! What happened?”

His eyes flickered ope
n, shuttered, opened again. “Promised your father I’d look out for you, lass. Keep you safe. I’m sorry, Maddie-girl.”

“Sorry? For what? Are you hurt, or –” A shadow flickered in my peripheral vision and I flung myself to the left. Something long and dark carved a path through the space where my head had been a moment earlier. At this distance I could feel the power
of the Art radiating from it like heat from a blast furnace. I ended up on my side, shoulder hard against the crates, half-turned toward Malloy. A tall, thin silhouette stood backlit above me - not by the weak lights of the cargo hold, but ringed with a visible nimbus of sheer power. He held something long and dark in his hand. His hair was a blond halo around his head.

“For this.” Malloy twisted toward me, his right hand leaving its place under his left side and rushing towards me. The butt of the pistol he clutched in it struck me in the right temple. I saw bright white light, then none at all.

I was wrong. There was a worse hangover cure than waking up in jail. It involved having one's wrists cuffed together and then
being hung from a pipe by a rusty chain for a few hours. Give or take.

You've never had the pleasure
? Oh, you really must try it some time. There’s a funny thing about being held captive. Everyone is someone’s captive. The trick is knowing whose.

I would have liked very much to know whose captive I was right now
. A bag of ice would have gone over nicely too, while I was making wishes. Someone had played a lullaby on my head with brass knuckles. Scratch that - on my entire body. I hurt all over. I must have made a sound because even before my eyes opened I heard an amused voice not far from me. "She wakes. So you've decided to rejoin us. How lovely." Her voice was low and dark, like good cigarettes drenched with honey, and it rang with power. I remembered that voice. The last time I'd heard it, someone had used my head for batting practice. With a crowbar.

I opened my eyes and regretted it. I was in a small room, about twenty feet on a side. One wall was
of curved metal, likely the hull of the
Lenin.
There were some crates in the room, and a chair, and a dark-haired, dark-eyed, dazzlingly beautiful Russian woman who stared at me as if I were an unexpectedly puzzling side of beef. Which I was. My wrists were bound together with handcuffs and a chain was looped between them, holding me suspended from a thick metal pipe in the ceiling.

I've had better nights.

"Now that you are here at last, perhaps you wouldn't mind answering a few questions."

If I wasn't tied up I might have stalled, just to listen to her talk a while longer. As it was, I wanted little more than to have feeling in my wrists again. "Shoot."
She didn't smile. "Ha ha. Ask."

"Where is the package you received from Gerhardt Mueller after his death?"

I thought about it. There
was
no package, obviously, so no harm in talking about it. For all I knew it was with Gerd's next of kin, or buried under Harbor Island, or on the moon. A little honesty might trick her into giving something away, something to help me make a little sense out of this strange case. "I just learned today that he left something for me in his will. But I never received anything from him after he went away to the war. I don't even know what it's supposed to be. I certainly don't know where it is."

Her expression didn't change. "Who did you study with after Gerhardt Mueller?"

I choked on a bitter laugh. "No one. I haven’t worked with the Art for years."

Her depthless eyes narrowed, doing intriguing things to her thin, arching eyebrows. "Lying to me will get you nowhere y
ou wish to be," she said softly. Somehow she was more threatening when she let her voice drop. "I will ask again. Who trained you after Gerhardt Mueller?"

I didn't laugh this time. It wasn't funny now. "No one trained me. I haven't studied the Art since he died. I've barely used it in the last decade, and I've forgotten most of what I knew
then. I can recognize it if I’m looking for it, but that’s about all."

That was sort of a lie.
And by sort of, I mean mostly. There’s a funny thing about lying. If you did it just right, you could sneak a truth by unnoticed in the same breath. I might be horribly out of practice, but I hadn't forgotten. Gerd was a good master, and in a rare moment of praise he had once told me I was one of the most apt apprentices he’d ever trained. But that was all right, since she didn't seem to believe me anyway. And her expression had darkened. Why was she asking me about the Art?

"You will tell me how you resisted the Knowing. You will tell me
now.
"

A Knowing. The inverse
of the Unknowing that hid the
Lenin
from casual eyes. A Knowing revealed things - hidden things, yes, but also things that normally couldn't be seen. Things like emotions and thoughts. Even memories, or fragments of someone’s past. Had they tried to find this package from Gerd in my memory? And if so, how could they have possibly failed? A Knowing was much more complex than an Unknowing. Only masters could do it. And I'd been unconscious, unable to resist. Not that it mattered. Even conscious I was no match for a master of the Art. Not even close.

I'd waited too long, thinking. She rose from the chair and swayed a few slow steps toward me. My mind struggled to focus while my eyes were filled with the slenderness of her wr
ists and the way her hips swept back and forth under her as she walked. She reached out a hand and let her fingertips graze my cheek. "You will tell me," she said softly. She was more dangerous now than she had been when threatening me if I lied to her. Why couldn't I look away from those dark eyes?

"What is your name?" I didn't realize I'd spoken aloud until her eyebrows rose at the question.

A pause. Then, a throaty murmur. "Dasha."

Dasha. Da-sha.
I wanted her to say it again, or anything else for that matter. I also didn't want to interrupt her. Too bad on both counts. "Dasha, why is Gerd doing this to me?"

It was her turn for an abrupt
laugh. "Gerhardt Mueller is dead. Unless you wish to join him, you had best tell me where the package he sent you is. We know it was delivered to someone in this city. And I think you know who."

"Is that why you killed Tommy?" I wished I had the words back even as I uttered them. What good would it do to anger my captors?

But Dasha simply gave an elegant shrug in reply. "Mister Cooke also had a package. I trust you saw it? Or did Mister Malloy's vigor drive it from your memory?"

"I'll show him some vigor if I ever get my hands on him." I tasted bile and ground my teeth. Just like I was going to grind Malloy’s bones as soon as I figured a way out of here.

She laughed at my bravado. "He was most helpful to us. But you should not judge him too harshly. He just happened to be the first police officer to come by the pier after we arrived, and was following orders to bring you here to us. My orders. The Art can make me
very
persuasive when I wish to be." Dasha gave me that razor grin again. I swallowed what I felt like saying and came up with something different.

"Okay. I'll bite. Just before Malloy hit me, a blond guy swung something at me. I dodged it, but nev
er got a good look. Am I warm?"

She nodded approvingly. "
Da.
Very good. Your friend Tommy had in his possession Master Mueller's
primstav,
his rune-stave. It is a thing of considerable power. And though it is a very good thing to have, it is not why we came here." Her dark eyes locked with mine. “We came for what Gerhardt left you. And we will have it, whether you wish to give it to us or not."

I would have bet
good, hard American cash Gerd would never have left an item of power like his stave behind when he went to war. There’s a funny thing about betting, though. Sometimes when you bet, you lose. "So that’s why you sent Tommy that calling card. With the Latin on it." She tilted her head slightly to the side as if curious how I would know that, but something else was tugging at my brain. The handwriting on the calling card Tommy showed me was familiar. I'd knew seen it somewhere before. The tall, blond silhouette from earlier that night swam into focus and suddenly the pieces fell into place. And just like before, I couldn't keep my stupid mouth shut.
"Nikolai."