Of Saints and Shadows (1994) Read online

  Then the shadows began their work in earnest, and the pain rocketed to every part of his body. He could feel it inside him, growing, expanding; the pressure in his head was intense, and he covered his eyes to hold back the agony that was building there. His scream was short, cut off by pain such as he had never dreamed possible, a pain that did not allow for screaming. His stomach ruptured as the darkness continued to expand.

  Blood and shadows shot from his ears and nostrils, from his anus and the head of his penis. Flesh began to bulge and bubble all over his body, bones cracked, and he cried out to whatever gods would listen to end his pain.

  He barely heard Liam Mulkerrin’s laughter. The priest approached him, barely visible to Dan on a conscious level.

  “The Lord may not hear you, Daniel,” Mulkerrin said, “but his servant will be your salvation.”

  He lifted his hand and the silver pin glinted in the moonlight as he barely touched it to the lawyer’s taut, bulging belly.

  The darkness exploded from within him.

  As Daniel Benedict’s corpse fell to the ground his eyes burst, sending plumes of black smoke shooting from their empty sockets. As the shadows finally expanded to their full size, the lawyer’s body was scattered about the room, mixing with the ravaged remains of his dog.

  In the kitchen doorway, Father Liam Mulkerrin watched this spectacle with amusement in his bright eyes. A simple spell had shielded him for the most part from flying gore, though he needed to wash his right hand, which held the pin. The mist-wraiths he had called upon to assist him were gone in moments.

  Liam knew that he ought to have stayed with simple, inconspicuous forms of murder, gunshot wounds and the like. But as each day went by he became more and more frustrated with this mission, and his only relief came from spectacular cruelty, unending pain, and extraordinary murder.

  Some men played the piano, some painted. Liam Mulkerrin’s art was death. His was a masterful talent, whose calling would not be denied. Simply shooting someone with a gun was like asking Chopin to play “Chopsticks.”

  6

  A LETTER FROM FATHER LIAM MULKERRlN, Representative of the Vatican Historical Council, to His Eminence Cardinal Giancarlo Garbarino, Special Attendant to His Holiness and Chairman of the Vatican Historical Council.

  Your Eminence:

  Though there have been one or two unforeseen difficulties, I believe that the object we discussed should be in my hands within the week. Should any further complications arise, I will notify you at once.

  Yours in Christ,

  Liam

  7

  WINGS FLUTTERED, THE BAT SLOWED, hovering five feet from the ground. Across the street, Phil lay slumped in a doorway as a chill ran through him. He had passed out hours ago, and usually slept the night through.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight a shiver raced from his toes on up, and when it reached his eyes, they opened. He shuddered as he pulled himself into a sitting position, hugging his knees. Felt like the devil dancing on his grave, he thought, and began to dry-heave on the street. Phil, who hadn’t been able to remember his last name since—well, since he could remember—shook his head to clear his mind and eyesight. He dry-heaved again and a surprised look crossed his face. He’d long since become immune to the bottle, so what the hell was this?

  He turned over, trying to go back to sleep. And that was when he saw the bird. Big fucking bird, Phil thought. No, a bat.

  Big fucking hat.

  And then it changed. The bat’s flesh started to pulsate as it flapped its wings—wings that began to stretch. But really the whole thing was stretching, wasn’t it? Phil watched in terror and fascination as the transformation took place. The creature’s eyes were scanning the area, and though he hadn’t quite decided whether this whole thing was a hallucination or not, he knew for goddamn sure he didn’t want the thing spotting him.

  A moment after it had begun, it was over, and the bat was now a man. A hard-looking man, who moved strangely, fluidly, as if he were flowing along rather than walking. And the man looked right at him.

  “Oh, my Lord Jesus,” Phil hissed, for he’d once been a religious man. “It’s a . . . it’s a vam—”

  The old drunk stopped midsentence, unsure of what to do, of what to expect. He half expected to die, almost wished it would happen, though he’d never admit it to himself.

  And then the thin, dark creature lifted its right hand—or talon or whatever—put a linger to its lips, and said . . .

  “Shhhhh.”

  And then it walked away, around the front of the building in front of him. Phil lay there, staring after the thing for a moment, and then reached for his bottle, muttering something half curse and half prayer under his breath. He would tell no one. Not just because he knew that nobody would believe him, but also because he was disappointed. He had witnessed something that he had always been told was only in stories, something that had terrified him as a child. And now that he’d seen it, knew it was real, in a way he felt let down because he was still alive.

  To his credit, it never occurred to Phil to follow the thing.

  Peter sighed aloud as he approached the entrance to the secretary of state’s building. Allowing the old homeless man to see him had been careless. If Peter could slip once, he could do so again.

  Must have Meaghan Gallagher on the brain, he thought.

  Long ago, he would simply have killed the old man. Sucked him dry and laughed about it the next night. But times had changed, humanity had changed, and Peter Octavian had changed as well. Conflict was foolishness, he knew, and it disturbed him deeply that more of his kind did not realize this, and certainly did not share his fondness for humans.

  The Defiant Ones.

  His people.

  The barbarism and inhumanity that had made them truly human had seemingly become immortal along with their flesh. They had learned nothing in their centuries of unlife, as if their ability to reason had died along with their humanity. It shamed him to know that not long ago, he, too, had been a barbarian. But already his warrior’s soul was giving way to enlightenment, and finally to peace. He no longer took life if it could be avoided, unless, of course, revenge were involved. Vengeance was one primitive emotion he could not overcome, nor did he want to.

  No. The old man had not deserved to die.

  Peter shook the clouds of philosophy from his head and set his mind to the problem at hand. He examined the glass doors to the building, with their alarm system hooked into the main lobby, and his course of action was plain: he could not open the doors without setting off the alarm, so he must go under them. At his mental command, his molecules drifted apart and a hot, wet cloud of mist slipped under the door. He had often wondered why this transformation was so painless and the others so excruciating. Not that he minded.

  Frustrated, Peter leaned back in the late Roger Martin’s chair, drumming his fingers on the dead man’s desk, and began to wonder whether someone had beaten him to it. He’d been through every inch of Martin’s desk, every file in the man’s filing cabinet, and come up empty—not a single reference to the case that Janet had been working on. In the Rolodex he found Janet’s and the lawyer Benedict’s telephone numbers, but that was nothing he hadn’t expected to find.

  He was tired, suddenly, and cold. Hungry! He snickered quietly to himself, amused by his own stupidity. He had meant to go see Marcopoulos. His supply of “groceries” was low, and he hadn’t banked on having to go out in the sun. He’d have to be at peak strength, and that was going to take more blood than he had on ice.

  He picked up the phone from Martin’s desk and dialed the number for City Hospital. The phone rang once.

  “Dr. Marcopoulos’ office,” an unfamiliar voice said.

  “Is he in?”

  “No, I’m sorry, the doctor went home early tonight.” That unfamiliar voice had an attitude problem, Peter thought.

  “Could I leave him a message?”

  “I suppose” she said with a huff.
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  “Please tell him that Peter called. That I’m having a barbecue tomorrow and I want him to bring the drinks.”

  “The drinks.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll leave it on his desk.” Her sign-off was barely a grunt.

  And that’s when it hit him.

  Where do you put something when you’re done working on it? On the boss’s desk of course! Ted had said that Martin stayed late to finish something up. He could only hope that the government’s slack working habits would hold up and that no one had worked on it yet.

  He moved quickly around the room. Too quickly, in fact. Papers blew off desks as he slid by, though not before he had scanned each one. On the other side of the room was a desk with an engraved silver nameplate on it—SHEILA TIMULTY—SUPERVISOR. He picked up a pile of papers from the “in” box on the desk, and about halfway down, he found what he’d come for.

  Nonprofit church organization. Cardinal Henri Guiscard. The name he had seen in Janet’s files. Exact same case. Janet was missing and probably dead. Roger Martin was as dead as you can get. Put two and two together and you still have some gaping holes and one big fucking question . . . Why?

  What the hell was there about a nonprofit church organization that was worth killing for? Not that he thought the church was innocent. Far from it; his kind had been through too much with those slavers. But what could these people possibly have done or known to get them killed? And who else was on that list? This Guiscard, most certainly, unless he were the killer. But he wouldn’t be able to find the cardinal until morning at least.

  Benedict, the lawyer Meaghan had mentioned?

  He was back at Martin’s desk before the thought was completed, the Rolodex was open, and his hand was on the phone.

  Only the work number, so he called information. He figured these yuppie lawyer types all wanted to live in the city, keep up appearances don’t you know, so he tried that out. The operator was kind enough to give him the address as well: 14 Brighton Street. Three miles away and practically the damned suburbs. He went to the window and pulled it open. The government must have realized how dismal an employer it really is, because on the seventeenth floor, the windows only opened about an inch. His flesh steamed until only steam was left, drifted out into the cold night air, and re-formed into an entirely new shape on the other side. As he flew away, his thoughts were scattered, searching for a focus beyond two corpses and a mystery he felt he hadn’t even scratched the surface of. Sure, he knew who was behind the murders, but he had no clue yet as to why.

  “Shit,” Ted grumbled as his unmarked car rolled onto Brighton Street. He was off duty, but he’d been on a blind date with his sister’s girlfriend Irlene. She was surprisingly pretty, but didn’t have too much upstairs as far as Ted could tell. It certainly wasn’t anything out of “Love Connection.” He’d been right down the street when the call had come over the radio, but he damn well wasn’t the first one there.

  Ted rolled to a stop in front of number fourteen Brighton, where a yellow plastic police barrier already blocked the front door. Two uniformed officers were keeping at bay the few neighbors who had bothered to come outside when they saw the blue lights flashing down the street.

  “Hey, Donny,” Ted called out to one of the men.

  “Hey, Ted.” A pause. “How was the date?”

  “How the hell—” Ted began, but stopped. He didn’t want to give Wallace the satisfaction. “It was just fucking grrreeaat.”

  “That so, Tony the Tiger? Then how come you’re here.”

  “Your wife sent me to ask what you wanted for breakfast, dickhead.”

  And then he’d passed Don Wallace, who couldn’t think of a snappy comeback and probably would stay awake all night attempting to come up with one.

  Ted heard an engine behind him and turned to see an ambulance pulling in quietly. They were in no rush, that was for sure. There was a rank smell coming from the doorway, and it puzzled him. Unless the guy had been dead awhile, he shouldn’t be able to smell the poor bastard all the way out here. Especially with the cold.

  “Save yourself the nightmare,” said an old voice.

  George Marcopoulos emerged from the doorway, his breath pluming as Ted’s was into a light mist around his head. It could have been a halo.

  “What?” asked Ted. He knew the man, but not well.

  “I wouldn’t recommend you go in there unless you absolutely have to. It’s a real mess.”

  The ME looked ill, and Ted read that as a sure sign that his advice was best heeded. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing I’ve ever seen before, or hope to ever see again,” Marcopoulos whispered softly enough that Ted wasn’t certain he was supposed to have heard. “Hello, Peter,” the old man said.

  Ted jumped. He hadn’t heard Peter come up behind him. His curiosity was piqued. What the hell was going on around here?

  “Peter. How’d you get here?”

  “I rode in with George,” the detective said, smiling at the old Greek. “Shall we go in?”

  “No!” George nearly shouted, which Ted thought was pretty weird. “I don’t think you need to see what’s inside. Either of you.”

  “I’ll just go in and see what the boys’ve got, but I’ll try to avert my eyes. Okay, Doc?”

  Ted went inside.

  Peter had been about to argue when he smelled it. The stench of the blood hit him full force and almost brought him to his knees. The carnage inside must be extreme for George to insist that he stay out, but even out here the smell was overpowering. If he went inside, he might lose control. Better not to be tempted.

  “Thanks for the cover,” he told George. “I didn’t bring my car tonight. And thanks for the warning—from the whiff I got of what’s in there, I wouldn’t want to see it even if I were human.”

  Peter smiled at his friend before he continued. He was happy to have a confidant, someone who knew his secrets, someone to share the truth with. He remembered the night that George first discovered his secret, and how afraid he had been of his reaction.

  “He’s been ripped apart, Peter. From the inside. It looks as though someone planted a bomb inside him and he simply exploded. The dog, too. But even if that were possible, we haven’t found a single trace of any explosive.”

  There was no humor in the old Greek’s eyes. “Whatever happened here, it’s evident that your experience will be of far more use than mine in finding the answers. I was home when they called me.”

  “I figured. I called your office.”

  “They called me because they had never seen anything like it.”

  “Who found it?” Peter wanted to know.

  “That’s the clincher,” George said, looking Peter in the eye.

  “Fellow across the street. Williams, his name is. He’s sitting on the John and has a clear view of Benedict’s house from the window. He glances out at the house just as the lights go. He kept looking to make sure the whole block wasn’t going to go, but it’s Just Benedict’s house.”

  “Did he see anyone?” Peter interrupted.

  “Patience, my friend. Yes, Mr. Williams saw someone leaving the house just a few minutes later. And this is what makes this whole thing even more bizarre. The suspect was dressed like a priest. Williams watched him walk to a car that was parked a short way down the block—too far for him to get any details, so don’t bother asking—and drive away.”

  “So after a while,” Peter continued for him, “the guy’s curiosity is piqued and he comes over here.”

  “Calls first actually, and getting no answer, comes over to find this mess. There is another set of footprints besides Williams’s, but the snow piled up so quick there was no way to get a good look at them.”

  What the hell was going on? Peter wanted to know. That branch of the Vatican, which was pretty obviously involved here, had not been so active in a century. And Karl Von Reinman’s killing, though surely unrelated to these murders, must be Vatican work as well. What the hell were
they up to?

  “Why do you say ‘dressed like a priest’?” Octavian asked Marcopoulos. “Perhaps he was a priest.”

  Janet Harris. Roger Martin. Dan Benedict. Did the killer know that Peter had been asking the right questions? Most probably, he thought. And so he might be next on the list. He was sure he could take care of himself.

  Asking the right questions.

  Meaghan had been the one asking the questions.

  Ted drove. It had started snowing again.

  Meaghan was wide-awake.

  “Wide-fucking-awake,” she mumbled angrily to herself.

  She stared at the ceiling in a vain attempt to overcome her insomnia and shake the cobwebs from her head, cobwebs that held an image of Peter Octavian that, try as she might, she could not put into focus. In the madness of the last couple of days, the more often she had tried to thrust him from her mind, the more often she had been surprised by his intrusion into her thoughts.

  He disturbed her. Not only tonight, when he had left so abruptly, but from the moment they first met. There was something about him that made Meaghan profoundly uncomfortable, as if for some reason, she did not belong. Or perhaps it was Octavian who didn’t belong.

  “So what’s the biggie?” she asked herself quietly, a bad habit Janet had often chided her about. “You think he’s a creep, right?”

  Ah, there’s the rub, she thought.

  She didn’t think Peter Octavian was a creep at all. Sure he made her nervous. But he also created a longing in her that did not originate between her legs. Not to say—she chuckled—that he wasn’t sexy as hell (if you liked the type), but that wasn’t the cause for this longing or for the fascination she felt for him. There was an empty feeling in her stomach when she thought of him.

  “Christ’s sake!” she said aloud, and rolled over, sighing heavily, to face the wall. “He’s just a guy,” she told herself. “No matter how peculiar he is, he’s just a man.”