Immortal (21 page)

“So, we goin’ now?” he asked.

“Not just yet,” I said. Okay where were all the bounty hunters now? You’d think at least one would have a bazooka. But no, it was just the demon and me. Perhaps they all realized five million wasn’t worth dismemberment. I could have told them that.

“You killed a couple of friends of mine,” I commented.

“Did I?” He looked down at the body at his feet.

“Not them. In Boston.”

“Oh.” He still looked puzzled, like maybe he’d killed a whole bunch of people in Boston and wasn’t sure which ones I was talking about.

“College kids. In an apartment. They had a futon in the living room?”

“Ohhh, yeah. Okay. Futon. Yeah.”

“Okay? What, no remorse?”

“What do you care? You’re supposed to be real old, right? You’ve seen lotsa people die.”

Demon logic. “Yes, but these were friends of mine, as I said.”

“And how ’bout that girl, huh? What a handful.”

“Brenda?” I asked, taken a bit aback. “Did you . . .”

“I’ll go back for her later. I owe her. I was about to look for her, but then I got tipped you was here. Strong. What the hell is she?”

“A vampire,” I said.

He laughed. Never heard a demon laugh and I don’t want to ever again. “C’mon,” he said. “There’s no such thing as vampires.”

The irony was totally lost on him.

He asked again, “So, are we going now?”

“Almost,” I said. I was stalling. I’d even take a patrolman on horseback at this point. “Let me ask you the same thing I asked the last demon I came across.”

“What’s that?”

“How come there are so few of you? Your kind are so hard to kill, I don’t know why you haven’t overrun the planet by now.”

“It’s a secret.” Same damn thing the last one said. They hadn’t gotten any cleverer with time. “Now enough fucking around. Move.”

“Okay,” I said. Quickly—and expertly, if you don’t mind my bragging—I drew Stan’s gun from my pocket and fired directly at the spot between the demon’s eyes.

His head rocked and he fell over backward, landing with a sick squish onto the remnants of Falcon One. And for a second there I was ready to join the Smith & Wesson fan club.

“Fuck!” he shouted. “That fucking hurt!”

Uh-oh.

He leapt to his feet. I made an effort to flee but that effort only took me about three paces before he had his hand on my collar. He spun me around and shook the bag and the gun from my hands and with one powerful mitt lifted me up by my own neck.

“I gotta bring you in
alive
, but he didn’t say anything about
one piece
, pal! See you try some shit like that with two broken arms, huh?”

Cop? Bounty hunter? Anyone? Clara?

I was in some major trouble. I thought for sure a gunshot at close range would do the trick. Instead, I’d just pissed off a very strong creature with serious anger-management issues.

“Then I’ll do the legs!” he shouted, his eyes positively aglow with the possibilities. “Yeah, and maybe the spine!”

I would have offered a clever retort or even an apology, but I couldn’t actually breathe. My mind was racing through the possibilities again, drifting back to the old question. Why
weren’t
there more demons? What was their weakness?

It’s been said that in times of extreme stress the mind goes in unusual directions. Mine drifted, for reasons I’ll never know, to
War of the Worlds
. (Not the movie. The book. And not because I read it but because I remembered chatting with H.G. Wells about it. He stole the ending from me. Honest.)

The demon pulled me close until we were face-to-face, and I got to find out what a genuine treat demon breath is. “How’s a wheelchair for eternity sound to you?”

It was worth a try. I sneezed right into his face.

The demon’s reaction was immediate and surprising. He dropped me and staggered backward, rubbing at his face and eyes like he’d been scalded with acid.

Fighting for breath, I climbed to my feet at around the same time he ceased his personal ministrations. “Hey!” he said. “You can’t get sick. I read that!”

“True,” I said. “But you can, can’t you?”

“I’m gonna rip your whole arm off for that,” he said.

Having precious little time to act, I bit into my right wrist. Blood seeped into my mouth, helped along by the same puncture wounds Brenda had made a few days earlier. I sucked hard until my mouth was half full.

The demon picked me up by the neck again. He was done talking. Glee spread across his face as he pondered the options regarding non-lethal tortures available to him. He was so excited he was panting.

I spit into his mouth.

“Aww, what the . . .” he spat my blood back out and was about to offer a new debilitating injury for me when his eyes widened. He dropped me.

“Shitty immune system, huh?” I said. “That’s a shame.”

I’m kind of disappointed that it took me so long to figure out a demon’s weakness. In my defense, the germ theory of disease wasn’t well known in Carthage.

He staggered backward as the toxin in my blood attacked him from the inside. It had been diluted by having been in my system for the last few minutes and probably wouldn’t have been lethal to a human in that state, but apparently all it took to kill the demon was a few particles of the stuff.

He clutched his throat, barely capable of breath. I could see his tongue swelling and hanging out like a sick dog’s. He collapsed onto his back, digging at his own throat, drawing blood.

I kneeled down to look him in the panicked eyes. “It’s why there are so few of you, isn’t it? I bet most of you die before puberty.”

His breathing had stopped completely, but he wasn’t quite dead yet.

“Just so we’re clear, this is what happens when you kill friends of mine,” I added.

He might have grunted some kind of response, but it was difficult to tell with him unable to breathe and all. I hovered over him long enough to watch his pupils stop moving. Long enough to be absolutely sure he was dead. It was oddly satisfying. I mean, I’ve killed a lot of things in my lifetime, but this was my first demon.

“Oh, clever,” said a man with an accent I figured for Southern England. He was behind me, and I pretty much assumed he had a gun pointed at my back. Sure,
now
another bounty hunter shows up.

“You think so?” I stood, but didn’t bother to turn.

“Very much so,” he said. “I’m rather impressed.”

“Impressed enough to let me go?”

“No. Not that impressed. So sorry.”

There was a loud bonk and the sound of someone falling over. I turned around.

The Englishman was lying on his side, no longer conscious and no longer holding his gun. Standing over him was Clara. She was holding a large piece of deadwood and looking jumpy.

“Did I kill him?” she asked, hopping from foot to foot the way one might if one desperately needed to pee. I leaned over him and checked. He was still breathing, but there was a nasty wound at the base of his skull. The way his hand was twitching, there might have been some nerve damage.

“No,” I said, “but he may have trouble walking for a while.”

“Okay.” She dropped the driftwood. “Okay. Okay, let’s—”

“How far away is home for you?” I asked.

“Not far.”

“If we try and run there, can you keep up?”

“I . . . um . . .”

“Focus, Clara. I need first aid for my wrist, and I need to get out of the park as soon as possible, and the only friendly place I know of is too far. There are more bounty hunters out tonight, and they’re probably all headed here. Not to mention the police, who are probably interested in the gunshots. Can you help me?”

She snapped out of the stunned reverie she’d been caught up in. “Yes. And . . . and I jog. I’ll be all right.”

“Good,” I said, shedding the red parka and picking up my bag. “Lead on.”

We went through the science again this morning. Viktor wants me to understand how it works—how I work—for some reason. I keep explaining to him that if he wants to really get me to understand medicine, he’s going to have to start with leeches and work up from there. I exaggerate, but only slightly. I mean, I understand what disease is and what causes it, and I have a vague comprehension of how the human body fights disease, but his tedious lectures approach a complexity I just don’t care to absorb. Although he did have a few interesting thoughts on my metabolism and why it seems like I can’t get any fatter or stronger. But I’m never going to get the thing about telomeres. He should just stop trying.

*
 
*
 
*

For our mad dash through the northern portion of Central Park, we stayed away from well-lit paths as much as possible and basically waded through every bush, shrub, and bramble we could. It wasn’t just a matter of evading whatever remaining bounty hunter types who might surface. New York’s Finest had finally gotten their act together. Seems the sound of automatic gunfire in the middle of Central Park causes them to mobilize in fairly large numbers.

The street surrounding the north entrance to the park was, perhaps not surprisingly, lined with cop cars, fire trucks, and ambulances. And bystanders, fortunately for us. We were able to merge effectively with the steadily increasing mass of onlookers, and once we’d pushed through them, we were basically home free.

We walked the remaining three blocks to Clara’s apartment. She lived in a nondescript building on a street full of nondescript buildings. I honestly didn’t know how she told them apart.

“It’s on the top floor,” she said as we climbed into an elevator that didn’t look like it was up for a trip all the way to the top. “It’s not much, but I have roof access, which is cool.”

“Not much” turned out to be only a little bit bigger than Brenda’s hole in Chinatown. The kitchen, living room, and bedroom were basically all the same room. And Clara’s bachelor-like tendencies made it seem even smaller than it was. To wit, there was a stack of pizza boxes in the corner, and that was the only spot on the floor not covered in unwashed clothing. At least she had her own bathroom, small though it was. (Sink, toilet, shower, but no tub. Again, only a small step up from Brenda’s, but a step nonetheless. Plus, this bathroom was clean.)

I helped myself to the bathroom sink, rinsing my wrist carefully. I’d taken a good bite out of myself, but it looked like it was already starting to heal.

“I don’t have any bandages,” Clara called from the kitchen area.

“How about some ice and a hand towel?”

“That I have.”

She appeared momentarily with ice bundled in a towel, offered with a slightly trembling hand. I’d have worried that the towel wasn’t clean, but infection is another one of those things that I don’t have to worry about.

“Let me see,” she said, pointing at my wrist. I held it up. “Ugh. Didn’t that hurt?”

“Not as much as getting peeled by a demon would have.”

She reached out to touch it.

“Don’t.” She jumped back. “My blood might still be toxic.” I pressed the ice up against the wound and stepped past her and out of the bathroom.

“Are you okay?” I asked, stopping beside her as she used the doorjamb to support herself. Her cheeks were flushed with blood and her hands were still shaking.

“Yeah, I . . . just . . .”

“Take some deep breaths,” I said. “You look ready to faint.”

“It’s the adrenaline,” she said. “I’m still a little buzzed.”

“Near-death experiences will do that,” I said. “Even to me.”

She nodded. “Was that thing . . . that was a demon?”

“Yeah. Aren’t they fun?”

“I didn’t think . . . I mean, we talk about them on the MUD, but I never . . .”

“I know. It’s like discovering Santa’s real, isn’t it?” I was looking for a place to sit. My options were the bed or an uncomfortable-looking bar stool in front of the kitchen counter.

“Yeah,” she smiled, relieved to have it put into context. “Um, but Santa isn’t real, right?”

“Not so far as I know.”

“Oh, good. Because I’ve been sorta naughty. Here.” She swept a pile of clothes off the bed. “It’s laundry day.”

I wanted to say it looked like laundry day had passed her by a month ago, but I was a guest. Instead, I sat, which felt uncommonly good. I was fighting a little dizziness myself.

We went through an awkward silence, with her back by the bathroom door and me trying to hold onto my equilibrium.

“Oh, hey,” she said, breaking the moment. She fell to her knees, put one hand on my thigh, and reached between my legs and under the bed. She emerged with a laptop. “We should check the MUD.”

She sat down beside me. It was not the firmest mattress ever built so we ended up sagging together until our thighs and shoulders touched. At around that moment a certain part of my anatomy reminded me that she was an exceptionally attractive young woman.

She flipped open the laptop and started typing away.

“I don’t know a lot about computers,” I said, “but shouldn’t that be hooked up to something?”

“It’s WiFi,” she explained.

“Okay.” No clue.

“Wireless,” she elaborated. “Pirated, actually. The guy two floors down has wireless network access. I’m kinda stealing it.”