The Shape Stealer (16 page)

“You think that’s why Young Will is becoming sensitive to the sun and maybe growing weaker?” I asked.

“That may well be the reason,” he answered. “I would like to consult a
chronologiste
about the matter, but unfortunately, because of the strict regulations about traveling within one’s own time line, the
chronologistes
have very little experience with such matters and are prohibited from even talking about the possibilities.”

“Hm—, personality-wise, I can well believe that Jules would refuse to discuss the problem, but Annick might feel differently. You can come back to the hotel and ask her…”

Will shook his head and looked away. “I can’t go back to the hotel with you, Garet, as much as I’d like to.” He looked at me and I saw that his gray eyes were filled with pain. “I can’t risk being near my younger self. I know from the little I’ve learned from observing the Malefactors over the years that being in close to proximity to one’s self can be extremely dangerous—for both selves. I shouldn’t even be here in the same city as my younger self.”

“Then let me go somewhere else with you,” I said, squeezing his hand. “Back to New York City. Or anywhere.”

Will furrowed his brow and gave me a puzzled look. “You’d abandon him to this strange world? Strange to him?”

I blushed at the censure in his voice. “I’d hardly call it abandoning him. He’ll have Annick, Jules, and Kepler.”

“But he doesn’t love
them
, Garet, he loves
you.
If I know him at all”—a wry smile twisted his mouth—“and I think I can fairly say I know him like myself, his only reassurance in this strange world is you. And if he really is growing weak from my proximity—and perhaps becoming a vampire again from Marduk’s bite—then he needs you even more. Don’t you … like him?”

“He’s not you,” I snapped.

“But he is me, Garet. To tell you the truth, I’m a little surprised and disappointed you have so little patience and liking for my younger self.”

I was stung by the coldness in Will’s voice. “I’m sorry,” I said, “perhaps I haven’t given him a fair chance. I’ll try to be more patient with him … but you can’t expect me to love him the way I love you. It’s you I want to be with.”

“And I want to be with you,” he said, warmth returning to his voice. “But I’m afraid that the only way that will be possible is if my younger self goes back to his original time. And now, with the Institut Chronologique gone, I’m not sure how we can accomplish that.”

“We’ll have to find a way. I’ll talk to Annick about it. In the meantime, what are your plans?”

“I will endeavor to stop Dee and Marduk from whatever mayhem they may be bent on committing in Paris—and elsewhere—and to finally destroy them. You and the
chronologistes
must try to find out what the Malefactors are up to. I promise that I will keep an eye on you … and I have a feeling that our goals will bring us together again. After all, it appears to be our fate to be together, no matter what distances in space and time we travel.”

It was the first thing he’d said in several minutes that I agreed with wholeheartedly. I thought that was the best note to part on. But first I needed to give him a hug, and he responded so intensely that I could feel the full weight of his sorrow over me, over the centuries. And, at the same time, I experienced his joy at our reunion: he pressed into me so tightly that he might have been trying a sort of will power transmigration of atoms, a merging of our bodies that corresponded to what might have been going on with our hearts and spirits. It was so hard to let go …

But then, reluctantly, I moved away and said good-bye, left him on the bench and walked off. When I’d gone a few feet, though, I felt another unbearable wrench at being parted from him. I turned to see him one last time, but the bench where we’d sat together was empty save for the shadows cast by the trees—hieroglyphs that now seemed to spell out a message of rejuvenated time.

21

Insolence

Horatio Barnes, the man Will Hughes was going to meet in San Francisco, was a “niche nabob.” This was the term Dow Jones columnist Ron Boyd had coined for him, in the first article Marduk Googled about him back at his apartment. Marduk had made himself comfortable in a large armchair, with his notebook on his lap, sipping a Belgian beer and munching on French crackers. He still felt soreness but the beer seemed to lubricate it, facilitating its passage out of his body. And he didn’t have to worry about getting drunk. Something about his blood.

Boyd compared Barnes to the man who’d received hundreds of millions of dollars for inventing intermittent windshield wipers. Barnes had developed a lucrative fantasy football consulting business by introducing the baseball concept of “errors” into quarterback ratings regarding intercepted passes. Marduk had no idea what football was, let alone what interceptions were, but he read that Barnes’s system attributed some interceptions to an “error” on the part of a receiver, others to an “error” on the part of a quarterback, and thus made better predictions regarding the future performance of both quarterbacks and receivers. If a quarterback was suffering in the ratings due to poor receivers, the fantasy football coach could improve his team sharply by matching him up with better ones. There was a gambling fever in America regarding football, and Barnes had profited immensely as both consultant and pioneer of his own set of fantasy football leagues. Shrewd investments in commodities like gold, silver, and copper had done the rest.

Good for him, Marduk thought sardonically. Let him enjoy his bizarre nabob wealth for a couple more days. Marduk wondered, almost idly, if his blood would taste sweeter because he was richer. Or luckier. Hughes’s terminated future, and that of this lackey Barnes, clearly decided in his own mind (he would ambush them both and somehow acquire their assets), Marduk’s attention returned to the oncoming evening. Hunting time. Maybe the physiological imperative for it had been reduced by Dee’s antidote, but the primal history, in his veins, in the fibres of his being, was still around. He needed to hunt that night, first for the seven million euros he had lost and seven million new ones in profit to establish his supremacy. Anything Hughes could do, he could do better. And then he might treat himself to hunting down a flesh feast again, afterward. The first gal had been tasty. The next might be even tastier. He called Dee on his cell phone.

Admittedly, he had not been anxious to make the call. Dee would be irritated by the lost euros, which he might not know about yet, and if he said the wrong thing Marduk could be motivated to kill him sooner than was prudent, harming the project and perhaps hurting his cover in San Francisco. Plus Marduk had no way to resupply himself with antidote. But homicidal impulses were a chance he would have to take, Marduk told himself, swiveling his chair for a better view out the window. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have such impulses toward Dee anyway.

He gazed fondly at the gargoyles under the eaves of the 1885 building opposite—winged demons with teeth like daggers, splashed in sunlight that seemed unnatural given their menace—and dialed. He felt less alone contemplating the gargoyles—not that he was a social sort of guy—and thought their prominence on such a typical Paris street gave the dark side of the universe a respect it deserved. Perhaps in San Francisco—though he knew nothing of the city—the “public demonic” might be harder to find.

“Hello.”

“Dee?”

“Is this the Duke?”

Dee’s nicknamed familiarity with him annoyed him. He acknowledged no nicknames; his tone immediately became belligerent. “I lost all the money you gave me last night. All seven million euros. I need a similar amount to play with tonight. Don’t even think of saying no or I’m calling a press conference to denounce you and Renoir. What a pair of bastards you are, by the way.” Marduk laughed.

Dee, perhaps stunned, didn’t say anything.

“And I need real credentials this time, you sloppy worm. I barely got in last night. I’ll bet you were hoping I didn’t. Also, I need a week’s supply of the antidote, so I can have more flexibility with my schedule.” He laughed again. “I’m going to count to ten, and I’d better hear, ‘Yes, sir, Lord Marduk, the money, credentials, and antidote are on the way to your apartment right now.’ One, two, three…” Marduk chuckled; how Dee’s jaw muscles must be clenching with tension. Could a dead soul like Dee still have a stroke? He wasn’t sure, but he hoped so. But if Dee did, Marduk also hoped it was after his necessities were sent to him.

“I’ll go along to keep you happy, my good fellow,” Dee said on “six.” “But at three thirty tomorrow afternoon—the stock market open in New York—we will be starting the full-scale gold-buying blitz. If Renoir knows what he’s talking about, headlines will scream, markets will gyrate, and the black pools may well have to shut down for a few days. So tomorrow night there will be no opportunity for your amateur hour. Make what you can tonight, good wolf. The party is ending.”

“I’ll make my own decision on that. And meanwhile, you have screwed me royally in another way as well.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We should have killed the Hughes boy in the catacombs. Because his elder twin has surfaced in Paris and is somehow able to walk around in bright sunshine. You haven’t been popping him antidote pills behind my back, have you?”

“Of course not, you idiot…” Dee fell silent, as if realizing his poor choice of words and hoping he hadn’t pushed the wrong Marduk button.

For a moment Marduk’s urge to kill blinded him with a kind of red film before his eyes; then he suppressed it. Lucky for Dee they weren’t having this conversation in person. Then again, he doubted Dee would have called him an “idiot” in person!

“… How do you know he’s about in the daytime? Have you seen him?”

“I ran into him at his office while I was there starting a trade on his computer. I thought I’d pick up a few of his tricks. But all I really learned is that it’s going to be easy to kill him in a couple of days.”

“Have you lost your mind? Do you realize how dangerous your behavior is? And no, I have no idea how he could go out in the daytime.”

Silence ensued, during which Marduk could
hear
Dee thinking, so great was Dee’s distress. No matter. Marduk was in charge now. He had no idea what the worm was making of this mess of circumstances, nor did he care. “Just send over my necessities. And watch your tongue, alchemist. Lord Marduk does not tolerate insolence forever.” He hung up, exulting in the anxiety he was confident Dee was feeling. He’d so enjoy the end of him when it came. Soon.

22

A Change in Fortune

Marduk had trouble frittering away the six hours until the black pools opened. He thought of going out to devour someone or something just to idle away time. The Metro and the sewers had workers, for example, not hard to surprise down a dark corridor somewhere. Many other categories of food supply came to mind. But he restrained himself. He wanted to reserve every ounce of energy for the trading room and the promised feast afterward.

The gargoyles provided a repast for his eyes in the meantime. They grew more ominous as the shadows lengthened. He delighted in their malice.

His more detailed credentials from Dee came around six p.m., along with a wire copy showing he had access to seven million euros in an account at Crédit Lyonnais, and a dozen glass bottles of the antidote in a padded box. Just after eight p.m., he was crossing the street toward the decrepit-looking building, licking his lips with anticipation. But he suddenly stopped, blinking rapidly. He wondered if his new exposure to sunlight was affecting his vision, even now, in early twilight. As he gazed on, he was more certain of what he was seeing, and he beat a hasty retreat back across the street, down the block, around the corner, and into a smoke-filled dive called the Black Lily, where the recent health consciousness of Parisians had not penetrated even a sliver. Marduk sat at a tiny, splintery table in the back, ordered a drink, and listened to the sultry jazz singer on a round wooden stage accompanied by piano, illumined in a weak gold spotlight. He wrapped himself in tobacco smoke. Dee, he thought, shaking his head to himself. A worm. An imbecile!

Those strange, black pencil line drawings in the air in front of the black pools building—about seven feet off the ground—that had caused him to beat such a hasty retreat had been surfacing Malefactors. Two of them, standing sentinel on either side of the crumbling front steps. Initially they were both in and out of time at the same time, so that a fully fleshed being like himself could only see their edges. But he was sure of what he was seeing. It was possible that Dee had been trying to collaborate with them, despite Marduk’s warnings on the subject. Either Dee had double-crossed him, perhaps with the vulgar goal of preventing him from losing any more money, or there had been some sort of security breach. But Marduk had no doubt they were there to block his entry or ambush him. Even as he’d stood there for those few shocked seconds, more than their edges began to show. And so he’d fled.

Marduk feared little, but he did fear them. Their capacity to move in and out of time almost at will made them elusive and treacherous. They unpredictably performed acts of mass destruction in pursuit of their mysterious and irrational agenda: both the 1900 Galveston, Texas, hurricane and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake were examples of “natural disasters” rumored to have been instigated by them. Both catastrophes had supposedly been designed to open blocked time portals, regardless of loss of life. At other times they seemed to value life: they had twice intervened on behalf of one of Marduk’s prospective victims (in 1309 and 1727), denying him a meal and the pleasure accompanying it.

Even if they hadn’t intended to thwart his stock trading tonight, they would not have allowed him to partake of a meal in that same locale. Bastards. Even without knowing what they were doing there, he’d been right to flee. His hand-to-hand combat with one in 1309 had been like battling a whirling dervish, and when he’d started to get the best of that dung heap, the creature had traveled back to an hour earlier, ambushed him, and practically killed him. Something similar had happened in 1727. He had no desire for a repeat engagement; he’d wait out the entire evening if necessary in this den of smoke and song, checking up on them occasionally. If they didn’t leave, there was always tomorrow. And if not then, San Francisco.