The Thirteen Hallows (13 page)

Robert Elliot struck Skinner sharply across the face, the sound echoing in the underground garage. The signet ring on his index finger caught the skinhead on the cheekbone, opening the skin in a wide, deep cut. For an instant, rage sparked behind the skinhead’s muddy eyes and his fists clenched. Elliot laughed at the reaction. “Touch me and I’ll kill you.” Then he deliberately turned his back on the skinhead, leaving him to dab at the wound on his cheek with his sleeve as he walked back to his car. “It wasn’t my fault,” Skinner said plaintively. “I wasn’t even on the train. Larry was probably out of his head on something….”

Elliot pulled out his car keys and pointed the remote control at the black BMW. The lights flashed and the door locks thumped. “I told
you
to find the girl. I told
you
to bring her back…I told
you…you…you
.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Elliot, I’ll find her.”

The small man opened the car and climbed in. “I know you will, because if you don’t, then our association will be at an end,” Elliot snapped, and pulled the door closed. “And trust me, you don’t want me to lose interest in you, do you?” Without waiting for an answer, Elliot slid the window up and the BMW pulled away with hardly a sound.

Skinner waited until the car had vanished before he whispered, “Fuck you.” Then he dug his hand into the back pockets of his jeans and went to look for Sarah Miller. “How am I going to find her? I don’t even know where to begin.” He needed to stay sharp. He was on borrowed time now with Elliot. He’d seen what the older man had done to people he’d lost interest in. And it hadn’t been pretty.

THE GIRL
led a charmed life.

Not only had she eluded him again, she had killed one of his people.

Robert Elliot cruised London’s streets in the BMW, trying to work out how he was going to tell his mysterious employer that he had failed—yet again—to bring him Sarah Miller.

Elliot knew exactly how McFeely had died. He hadn’t slipped and fallen, cutting his throat on broken glass, as Skinner reported. Elliot had used a police connection to get an up-to-date report on McFeely’s death. According to eyewitness reports, Miller had decapitated the boy with what had variously been described as an iron bar, a metal bar, or a hammer.

Elliot knew it had been the sword. And he knew that his boss was not going to be happy about that.

He finally made the call from a phone box in New Cavendish Street—one of the few still remaining in London. He’d driven around for thirty minutes, trying to think of a good excuse, finally deciding that honesty was the safest policy.

This time the call was picked up on the first ring. As usual, no one on the other end responded.

“It’s me,” he said shortly.

“The girl?” demanded the harsh, arrogant voice on the other end of the phone.

“We haven’t found her yet—she evaded us on the train. One of my men was with her, but there was some sort of accident; it looks as if Miller killed him.”

“Killed him?” The question was left hanging.

Elliot took a deep breath. “I believe she used the sword.”

The phone was slammed down so hard, it hurt his ear.

Bad news?” Vyvienne asked. She slithered up on the bed and knelt behind the naked man, wrapping her arms around his chest, pressing her breasts against his shoulders.

“The sword has tasted blood,” Ahriman shouted with a mixture of rage and fear. “Tasted blood…but not the blood of its Keeper.” Pushing her away, he surged to his feet. He strode across the room, then swung back to face the woman. “Do you know what this means?”

“Another of the Hallows has become active?” she suggested. “But you’ve been firing the artifacts with the blood and pain of the Keepers….”

“Of the Keepers, yes. But Miller killed with the sword, she allowed it to taste unhallowed blood.” Ahriman’s voice was thick with emotion, his cultured accent slipping momentarily. He realized he was trembling. “Have you any idea of the implications?”

She shook her head, long dark hair trailing across her eyes.

“The power within the Hallow has been dormant for centuries. The blood of the Hallowed Keepers fires the artifact and simultaneously calms it, leaving it replete with power. But Miller has given it a soul to drink. Now that it is awakened, it will begin to renew itself…not only in this world, but in the Otherworld as well. Even now, its energy is probably rippling through the Astral.” He stopped suddenly, then leaned forward to cup the young woman’s chin, tilting her face up to his. “Could you find it? Could you follow a disturbance in the Astral?”

“Probably…,” she said, sounding doubtful.

“Then do it. Do it now!” Fleshy lips curled in a smile. “If you can find it, then we can trace it back to the girl.”

The woman smiled lasciviously. “I will need your strength if I’m to go adventuring….”

ELLIOT HAD
been driving aimlessly for an hour, the sleek black car moving silently through London’s never-sleeping streets. He was frightened: The situation was getting out of control, and maybe it was time for him to get out of the city.

The phone buzzed against his chest. Startled, Elliot tapped the brakes and there was the blare of a car horn behind him. No one had his personal number. It was a cheap pay-as-you-go phone that he used only for outgoing calls. The small rectangular screen showed unlisted. It buzzed a dozen times before he finally pressed answer. He recognized the husky voice immediately and felt a trickle of fear. How had this man gotten the number?

“Judith Walker has a nephew, an Owen Walker. The boy lives alone in a flat in Scarsdale Villas. Miller has been there already, she’s given him the sword.”

Elliot blurted, “But how do you—”

“I know.” There was a dry, rasping chuckle. “I know everything, Mr. Elliot. Everything. Remember that.”

It would seem like an open-and-shut case,” Victoria Heath said tiredly, heels clicking as she walked along the tiled morgue floor. It was just after ten and she’d been on her feet for nearly sixteen hours.

“There’s a
but
in your voice…,” Tony Fowler said.

“I don’t believe she had the time. It’s almost impossible.”

“I agree.”

“You do?”

“Sure.” Tony Fowler fished in his pockets and produced the coffee-impregnated handkerchief he kept for visits to the morgue. “I think Miller had help. A friend or friends who started the proceedings, as it were.”

“And you think this corpse was one of those friends?”

“I’ll lay money on it. The witnesses on the train said they knew each other. Maybe this friend was trying to blackmail Miller…and Miller killed him.”

“But why? None of this makes any sense.”

Tony Fowler grinned sourly. “After a while you’ll realize that there’s a lot of police work that will make very little sense: the killings, the muggings, the rapes, the robberies. Sometimes there’s a pattern; however, usually it’s just a mess.”

Victoria Heath shook her head. “I don’t want to believe that.”

“When you’ve been on the force as long as I have,” Fowler said, pushing open the heavy swinging doors, “you will.”

“THE SUBJECT
is a white male, early twenties, twenty-two, twenty-three, six feet in height, a hundred and forty pounds…which is underweight for this height,” the pathologist added, glancing across at the two police officers. Fowler was staring at the pathologist, deliberately avoiding the naked body on the metal tray; Heath stared fixedly at the headless corpse.

“The subject shows extensive puncture marks along both arms, indicating systematic drug usage—”

“Mac,” Fowler said suddenly, “we’ve both had an incredibly long day. Do we have to stand here while you do the full routine? Just give us the highlights, eh? In layman’s terms.”

“Sure.” Gavin Mackintosh grinned. He reached up and turned off the dangling microphone. The enormous Scotsman proceeded more informally. “What you have here is a wasted junkie. He’s been shooting up for two, maybe three years.”

He turned the arms, showing the track marks, some healed to black spots, others still scabbed and crusted. “When he ran out of veins on one arm, he moved over to the other. And if you check between his toes, you’ll see he tried shooting up there too. He’s underweight, as I noted, jaundiced, hepatitis, maybe even HIV positive.”

“I don’t want his medical history. I want to know how he died.”

The Scotsman grinned again. “Someone cut his head off—that’s how he died.”

“That was the glass in the train window…,” Sergeant Heath said tightly.

Mackintosh shook his head. He lifted the young man’s broken head off a metal tray on a side table and held it aloft. Victoria Heath felt her stomach flip.

“He was struck three times, here…here on the face, and”—Mackintosh turned the head easily, almost like a basketball—“here at the back of the neck. These two blows were struck by a flat, blunt object, the third blow was from an edged weapon. This blow severed his head and drove him forward and into the window. Falling glass severed flesh and tendons on the body, but the youth was already dead by that time. We excavated the wound and discovered slivers and flakes of oxidized metal. Rust to you and me. In my opinion, this young man was killed by a sword. A rusty sword.”

“A sword!” Fowler snapped. “None of the witnesses reported seeing a sword.”

“They said it was an iron bar,” Victoria added.

“A sword
is
an iron bar…with an edge,” Mackintosh said. “The two blows here were caused by the flat of the sword. The killing stroke was with the edge of the sword. I’ll bet my pension that your murder weapon is a rusting sword.”

“This is getting too weird,” Victoria whispered.

“We haven’t even come close to the weird part.” Mackintosh moved his hands down the corpse’s torso. “Look at our young friend. Can you tell me what’s missing? Besides his head, I mean,” he added with a grin.

Tony Fowler looked at the body and shook his head.

Victoria Heath swallowed hard and forced herself to look at the body. “Blood,” she said finally. “I would have thought there’d be more blood.”

“Bravo. There are eight pints of blood in the human body. In a traumatic wound such as this, you would expect to lose quite a lot, until the heart stopped beating and circulation ceased. But there would still be some blood left in the corpse.”

“The train carriage looked like an abattoir,” Tony observed.

“A little blood goes a long way.” Mackintosh jabbed a finger at the corpse on the table. “We estimated he lost about two pints in the carriage. However, our friend here has no blood in his body. None,” he mused. “It’s as if he’s been sucked dry.”

This time Elliot was taking no chances.

Although his employer hadn’t threatened him explicitly, Elliot had
heard
the implicit threat in his voice, understood it, and known that this time he couldn’t afford to fail. He still didn’t know how the man had gotten his number or how he knew that Miller had given the sword to Judith Walker’s nephew. He had the feeling that it was time he started thinking about a holiday, a nice long holiday, far away. Australia was nice at this time of year.

He had driven to Scarsdale Villas in Skinner’s van; Elliot wasn’t going to risk having someone see his car in the vicinity of what could turn out to be a murder site. He was dressed in army surplus fatigues and cheap sneakers, and he’d pulled on a pair of surgical gloves before he had climbed into the van. Even if anything should go wrong and he was spotted, he had a cast-iron alibi: He was playing Texas hold ’em with his buddies in Chelsea; three solid citizens would vouch for the fact that he won the pot that evening and sprang for a bottle of seventeen-year-old bourbon to celebrate.

Robert Elliot was a man who did not believe in taking chances.

The only people who’d know he was there were his two companions, Skinner and a blank-eyed mulatto youth named Karl, whom Elliot suspected was Skinner’s slave or lover or possibly both. If necessary, Elliot would dispose of them both without hesitation: a lover’s suicide pact. The police wouldn’t even investigate.

“You’re in good form, Mr. Elliot,” Skinner said, watching the small man’s thin lips curl in a smile.

“This should be an amusing evening,” he murmured as he glanced along the row of houses, checking the numbers.

This was a quiet street; they would not be able to let the boy scream. “Get in quick, and get him under control,” he ordered as they strolled down the street, taking their time, drawing no attention to themselves. “We want the bag Miller gave him and the sword. And then let’s see what other information we can get out of him.”

“How do you know Miller was here, Mr. Elliot?” Skinner asked quietly.

Robert Elliot grinned. “I have my sources.”