The Shape Stealer (28 page)

“I know, I know, I never should have fled.”

He wrapped his arms tighter around me to keep me from sinking into the water, found my lips and pressed his mouth to mine. I kissed him back, hungry for his warmth, pressing my self against his warm solid flesh to keep myself from sinking into that bottomless cold.

He lifted his mouth from mine and drew back, his silver eyes locked on mine.

“Garet?”

We were no longer in the water but on a bed in San Francisco. The man above me was not the archer, but Will Hughes, young Will Hughes … and yet he looked at me with the same love that his ancestor had felt for my ancestor Marguerite, and with the same pain.

“Do you know me, Garet? It’s Will … young Will, not—”

I laid my finger on his lips to silence him, feeling my hand moving through water, parting the ripples of time to reach him.

“Yes, I know you,” I said. “I’ve always known you.” And then I drew his head back down to mine.

*   *   *

Still on New York time—or perhaps Paris time or, for all I knew, 1602 time—I awoke before dawn, alone in the bed. Will was standing at the window, staring out at the dark city. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and joined him, leaning against him. He put his arm around me and adjusted the blanket to keep me warm.

“What are you looking at?” I asked, peering into the deep blue beyond the window. The fog obscured even the scattered lights of the city. We might have been floating through a midnight blue ocean.

“Eternity,” he replied. “Can’t you feel it? All of time is pouring through the city. We’ll find our portal today and I’ll go back…”

“Will—” I began.

He touched a finger to my lips, much as I had to his last night—was it already
last
night?—when he asked if I knew him. “It’s all right, my darling, beautiful Garet, I’m not afraid any longer. Don’t you see? All of time is happening
all the time
and so”—he smoothed a lock of hair back from my face and smiled, his eyes gleaming silver against the indigo sky—“the moments we spent together last night will always be there. As long as I have that, there’s nothing in this world—or any other—to fear.”

34

Piece of Driftwood

Horatio Barnes was a short, slender man of about forty, clad in an orange turtleneck sweater and white cotton pants against the stiff westerly breeze off the bay. He had on Converse All Star dark blue sneakers with thick white sweat socks. Like many tycoons of the Internet era, his unassuming features—mild blue eyes, soft cheeks and chin, thinning brown hair swept back from a high forehead—would not stand out in a crowd. Barnes was as physically removed from the Cornelius Vanderbilts and J. P. Morgans of a bygone era as today’s movie usher was from Brad Pitt. But as he eagerly brought up two new ideas to Will Hughes, from whom he hoped to obtain a two-billion-dollar investment that could generate profits of at least two billion more, he showed a greed comparable to that which moved Vanderbilt or Morgan, or the even more rapacious Jay Gould and “Diamond Jim” Fisk (even if the “trillions” of which he’d written in his first query to Hughes were revealed at this meeting to have been a rhetorical flourish).

“Mr. Hughes, I feel so honored that you are willing to meet with me in my most favorite setting in all the world,” Barnes said, as soon as they’d found a bench. They were on the Golden Gate Promenade, Crissy Field behind them, the beach and Bay in front of them, the Gulf of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary to their left. At six-thirty in the evening, the beach was mostly deserted except for the occasional dog walker, but the promenade had its share of strollers. Several varieties of shore bird soared, coasted, and tiptoed about. It was an eccentric locale for a business conference, but Will was happy to indulge. He liked it there, and he liked Barnes. So far.

“Anyone strolling along is going to think we’re just a pair of friends chatting,” Will commented. “We’re more secure here than in a conference room, because someone’s always going to be tempted to spy on a conference room.”

Barnes responded by holding out his hand so they could shake firmly on the point of confidentiality, which they did.

*   *   *

On a rocky ledge at the western edge of Alcatraz Island, so densely shrouded in fog at this hour that no one along the shore saw him or his boat, Marduk laid aside the binoculars with which he was scrutinizing the Hughes-Barnes meeting and nodded approvingly to his lone deckhand. The conferees looked like they were settling in for a talk of some length, and six or seven minutes was all Marduk was going to need. Especially since there was no sign now of his mother, the monster Tiamat. They both clambered down a rope ladder to the boat, deckhand first (Marduk was always one to keep his own back secure). The boat was tied up along the rocks forty feet below, awash in the salt surge and foam of the incoming tide.

It was a gleaming, jet-powered hydrofoil, twenty feet long, equipped with miniature missiles that had been fitted with both wooden- and silver-stake warheads for this occasion. Dee had made the arrangements; Marduk had simply had to pick up the keys at a kiosk selling souvenirs on Fishermen’s Wharf and rent a skiff to take him out to the island. As they got in the gently rocking boat and the deckhand made things ready for him—Marduk didn’t have much experience with boats, but he knew he could steer one—he looked approvingly at the short distance to the Presidio shore. Three or four minutes at most, to bring the boat to high speed and … he licked his lips with anticipation. The appointed minute was at hand.

*   *   *

“I’ll give you two examples of ideas that have been brought to me,” Barnes was telling Will Hughes, “that, if not for the lack of ready capital, would be sweeping the nation.”

Will nodded amiably, absorbed for the moment in the view, thirty feet of white sand down to the shore, against which gentle waves lapped rhythmically. Past it the western bay, dark water with an occasional white stutter of foam spoken by the wind, and then the red-orange towers of the bridge, rising out of grayish white fog like inscrutable copper shrines reaching for the clouds. Here and there, red rays of the setting sun broke through.

Barnes paused for a moment before going into more detail. The hesitancy was fine with Will. He might be disappointed when Will told him he wasn’t doing any new investing now unless it involved compassion for animals.

“The first idea,” Barnes finally said, excitement coming into his voice, “is similar to my fantasy football breakthrough of assigning errors with forward passes. It’s to list all players’ forty-yard-dash speeds alongside their heights and weights. It’s a similarly intentioned strategy: the more available information, the better the gambling decisions. A modest-sounding plan, perhaps, but when you sit down and look at all the details, the capital needs can be quite intense. The teams would have to be paid handsomely for their proprietary information, and there’s already the beginnings of competition in this space from players like Bloomberg and Reuters. So extensive advertising is a necessity. And we’d need expert consultants…” His voice trailed off, as if Hughes’s lack of immediate enthusiasm had dampened his.

“Not much of a sports fan, my man,” Hughes told him, “and the little I follow is cricket or European soccer. Can’t you just turn on your telly, watch a game, and see how fast a player runs?”

Barnes gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “Just the point. By then, it’s too late! You might have already lost your bet.”

After another pause, Barnes went doggedly on. “In a different field, I recently sat in on a focus group of cardiac rehab patients. The modern theory is an aggressive one—challenge patients to work up to new exercise levels so they can rebuild heart muscle—and though it’s statistically valid, such rehab can be frightening. The patients have a strong temptation to cheat when reporting the levels they’re working at, due to fear, or fatigue, or even laziness. In most places a technician monitors their heart rates but not the actual program of exercise. So I propose new software and connections that will allow the technician to monitor the exercise, diminishing cheating. Better outcomes will attract more patients to the programs that do it this way!”

Cardiac rehab cheaters
, Will summarized Barnes’s second idea to himself. How large a group of people could that be, even in a country as big as the United States? It didn’t seem that there could be a fortune in profits, and no animal protection angle came to mind. Still, he didn’t want to be too critical or hurt this entrepreneur’s feelings. He looked away for a moment, toward the fog-encased bulk of Alcatraz, looming out of the dusk to the east.

It happened so quickly that, even when he had the luxury of armchair reflection afterward, Will couldn’t quite reconstruct the exact details of how it went. With Marduk at the throttle, the deckhand cowering near the stern, a hydrofoil was coming fast across the water at them, riding a foot above the waves and sending a cascade of foam and spray in all directions. Marduk looked like he might be intent on crashing the boat onto the beach, a plan that evidently was a surprise to the deckhand, who was kneeling and praying. Will noted a sharply pointed piece of driftwood at his feet an instant before the metallic arrow of the boat’s prow struck the sand and began lurching up toward them at a still enormous rate of speed. From the prow of the boat some sort of missile came at them, a moving bolt of flame like a firework. Will noted the silver stake protruding from it. He swept up the driftwood with his right hand, then grasped Barnes around the torso with his left arm and launched them both away from the missile’s trajectory at astonishing speed, so they skidded along the sand fifteen feet away from the path of the oncoming missile and boat. Then, while prone on the sand, Will hurled the impromptu stake with a violent flick of his wrist and unerring accuracy, directly at Marduk, who had a leering, self-satisfied grin on his face.

The stake struck Marduk in the chest. It combined the force with which it had been thrown with the momentum of the boat traveling at eighty miles an hour, shattering Marduk’s chest, flying clear out his back, and clattering onto the aluminum deck drenched in the blackest, foulest-looking blood Will had ever seen. Marduk grimaced in great pain, and the furious gaze he directed at Will blazed orange-red, like the fire of the Babylonian hell he was descending toward.

The beach had been deserted at the moment of impact, but shrieks and shouts of “Look out!” and “Get out of the way!” could be heard from the nearby promenade as the hydrofoil lost its elevation and with a loud scraping noise struck a cement embankment. The impact broke the boat in half, wrenched its fuel tank loose, and sent the deckhand somersaulting through the air onto the sand. Remarkably, the man was able to stagger to his feet and start running. Will hustled the dazed Horatio Barnes to his feet as well and began fleeing with him to the east, toward Fort Mason. Whether from the force of impact or a stray spark from the hell Marduk descended to, the boat blew up in a tremendous explosion. Charred fragments from the fireball fell no more than a few feet from the fleeing Hughes and Barnes, but they were unscathed.

Once they were able to stop and look behind them, Will dusted the sand and ashes off his clothes and took a few tentative steps back toward the twisted, smoldering wreckage. Initially, he saw no trace of Marduk’s corpse nor, fortunately, of any other victim on the beach or promenade. Hopefully he’d have a chance to scrutinize the scene more closely later. Alone.

“What the hell was that?” the dazed Horatio Barnes asked him. “What kind of a fool drives a boat onto the shore?”

“You had the right key word in your first question,” Will replied.

“What?”

But Will preferred not to elaborate.

Then Barnes put a grateful hand on his shoulder. “You saved my life, man. I’m forever in your debt.”

Will patted him on his back in acknowledgment.

The first approaching siren could be heard, not far off.

35

Amulet

“Let’s find a restaurant and grab a bite to eat,” Will told his prospective partner as they walked away from the crash. “Finish our discussion. I don’t think we’ll be in the way of any seaborne mishaps on Chestnut Street.”

Barnes gave a subdued laugh, and they strolled calmly back in the direction of the city streets. Neither one of them had any desire to remain at the marina as a witness and wind up with his name in the paper, especially in association with the other. But the facts would look reasonably clear to the authorities, Will reflected. Let the wreckage be examined for whatever mechanical failure had caused the pilot to lose control. He doubted that the murderous impulses of a supernatural being would be suspected.

From the man’s lack of comment, Will also doubted Barnes had observed Will’s fortuitous javelin throw, let alone the hellfire issuing from Marduk’s eyes or the corrupt blood pouring from his chest. Good. Will would return later, maybe in the middle of that night, when the wreckage was attended to only by a line of yellow police tape affixed to metal rods in the sand. Then he could satisfy his curiosity as to whether any remnant of Marduk’s existence persisted. If it did, he’d dispose of it properly. The world wouldn’t be safe otherwise.

They went to Santiago’s New York Coffee Shop on Chestnut near Fillmore and lingered over vegetarian omelettes and coffee. Will was reassured to see Barnes had researched him enough to follow the point of vegetarian etiquette. After about two hours they reached a partnership agreement, one that Will scaled back considerably from Barnes’s hopes. He liked the man’s passion and personality but was underwhelmed by his ideas, though he did appreciate the willingness Barnes finally expressed to consider investments that promoted the humane treatment of animals. (It was important to bring as much of the financial world as possible on board with the concept of cruelty-free investing, because nothing other than an economic force was going to change farm animals’ world of suffering.) A second factor in his conservatism was Garet. She made him financially cautious. The future, and all that.