Darkyn - Private Demon Part 7

Dr. Daniel Bradford walked into the dining room, where he stopped and looked at both women. "I hate walking in late on a conversation like this," he joked. "Especially when it involves me dismembering someone."

Jema smiled at Daniel, whose round, st.u.r.dy form, pleasant features, and silvered hair and beard made him look more like an off-duty Santa than a physician. "Mother was just giving me her opinion on tattoos."

"Disgusting, filthy things." Meryl gave him a cutting glance. "Sit down, Daniel."

"We were just talking about why I didn't get home on time last night. For which I am sorry, Mother," Jema tagged on quickly. She quickly drank some water from her refilled gla.s.s. "It was inconsiderate of me and it won't happen again."

"You didn't answer my question," Meryl snapped. "Where were you?"

Now she would have to lie again. "I went for a drive down by the lake after work. I left late, and I thought you would be in bed by the time I got home." Jema stared into her eyes and kept her expression guileless. "I'm sorry." She drained the rest of her water.

"There, Meryl," Daniel said as he took his place across from Jema. "It won't happen again."

"Of course it will. This is the third time this month. Did the two of you think I wouldn't notice?" Her mother picked up her teacup and then placed it back on the saucer, hard enough to make the china clink. "It's a man, isn't it?

Why are you hiding him from me? Is he someone unsuitable? Someone you met at the museum?"

"No, Mother."

They all fell silent as the maid came in to serve Daniel and refill Jema's water gla.s.s a second time. We can bicker all we like in private, Jema thought, but G.o.d forbid we say anything in front of the servants. Sometimes she hated her life so much she could cheerfully run away from home.

Where would you go? The snide voice of her reason demanded. What would you do? Live in a trailer park? Work at McDonald's? How would you even pay for your insulin?

"I've never stopped you from inviting anyone to the house," Meryl said, picking up the conversation as soon as the maid retreated back into the kitchen. "I'd like to meet him. I can arrange a quiet dinner for us-"

"There is no man in my life, Mother."

"You two need to eat before it gets cold," Daniel said, picking up his own fork. "This French toast looks marvelous.

It's always better with powdered sugar and strawberries, isn't it?" He made a face at Jema. "I'd share, but it would knock your blood sugar through the roof."

"I'm not a fool," Meryl said, completely ignoring the doctor's attempt to redirect the conversation. "My marriage to your father may have been brief, but I remember what it's like to be in love." She pursed her lips and at last dropped her gaze to fuss with her napkin. "I don't understand why you'd waste your time, but that's your affair, of course."

Jema closed her eyes for a moment. "I'm not seeing anyone."

"Would either of you like some juice?" Daniel broke in with forced heartiness. "I think you could manage a small gla.s.s, Jem." He eyed her water gla.s.s, which she had emptied a third time. "Unless you'd like to keep doing your excellent imitation of a camel about to cross the desert"

"No, thanks, Dr. Bradford. I don't know why I'm so thirsty." She tried to smile at him, but her mother's basilisk gaze had fixed on her again, and this time it was impossible to escape.

It was time for another of Meryl's lectures. Jema guessed it would be yet another version of "They only want you for your money."

"These men pay attention to you for only one reason," Meryl said, not disappointing her. "Your money. When I'm gone, you'll be one of the richest young women in the country." Meryl's expression didn't soften, but her voice did.

"Have you told him about your condition? Mentioned anything about how it's deteriorating?"

Daniel's smile faded. "Meryl, I hardly think this is the time or place to-"

"Be quiet, Daniel. Jema, don't you see how that is the only thing they find attractive about you?" Meryl's voice became strained. "The fact that you'll be dead before you're forty-"

"There is no man." Jema couldn't stand another moment of this, and pushed out of her chair. "I was late getting out of work. I went for a drive. I came home from there. That's all it was. That's all it ever is."

Daniel got to his feet, his expression filled with something more immediate than sympathy. "Did you already take your morning injection?"

Jema was sick of being questioned. On the other hand, too much insulin could cause an adverse reaction, and Daniel was simply doing his job by asking.

"Yes." She picked up the bran m.u.f.fin to tuck it in her pocket. "I'll eat this on the way to work, to be safe." She faced her mother. "I apologize for being late last night. You're right: It will probably happen again. Maybe it's time I made arrangements to get my own place."

"That isn't necessary, as you know." Meryl Shaw pushed away from the table as well. She could not rise, because an accident at a dig in Greece thirty years ago had left her paralyzed from the waist down. She used the switch on her battery-powered wheelchair to come closer. She lifted her chin. "I understand your need for... privacy." She said it the same way she would prost.i.tution. "I know I can be demanding at times, but it is only out of concern for your welfare."

That was the only way her mother ever expressed her affection for Jema, and it preserved the distance between them like nothing else. Jema had tried to change that, but Meryl's emotions were too well guarded. She lost her heart with my father, she reminded herself. Once it had been enough to make Jema feel a helpless love for Meryl, but love had to be returned or it dwindled into misery.

All she had left was pity for her mother, and a sense of obligation that was becoming as weighty as her loneliness. It didn't help that most of what Meryl said was true.

No man would ever love her for who she was. All she could offer was her inheritance, and a disease that would ensure he could spend it with another woman while he was still young.

Dream of me.

There was no one for her to dream of. No one who would dream of her.

"I have to go to work." She left quickly, before Daniel or her mother could see her face, or guess how much she hated herself in that moment.

Chapter 6.

JEMA'S BENZ. Jema. Thierry tried to explain it away. Many women in Chicago could be named Jema. A dozen? A hundred? A thousand?

He knew only one.

Jema was the name of the woman he sought. A name had been listed in the list of people interviewed in Cyprien's file. Jema Shaw, an anthropologist who worked at the Shaw Museum, the same place the girl had been employed at night. This Jema Shaw was also the only daughter of James Shaw, the founder of the museum. She might know someone or something that could help him find the men responsible.

He could not tell if his little cat was the same Jema. There were no photographs of her. The only other information in the file about her had been an odd notation, written in a dark, heavy script: Jema Shaw has acute diabetes and her health is presently in decline. Any contact with the Kyn must be first approved by Suzerain Jaus.

Perhaps the warning had been made because of Jema Shaw's position in society, or to safeguard her from being casually used as nourishment. And he had used her, fed upon her, taken her without a second thought.

Had he harmed her? Was she even now being rushed to a hospital, where she would die from blood loss? He was sure he had stopped in time-but she was ill. Ill and he had fed on her.

The only woman who might be able to help him, and he had used her as if she were no one, nothing.

Thierry's thoughts curled like snakes in his head, alternately hissing and striking, from dawn until sunset. As soon as the sunlight had disappeared, Thierry left the alley and searched until he found a car with an ignition system he knew how to cross-wire. He did not like stealing vehicles, and he hated driving on the wrong side of the road, but a car would provide a faster means of escape if he encountered trouble in the city. Also, he could not go to the Shaw Museum too late; if Jema Shaw worked there, she might leave after the museum closed.

If his Jema from the night was Jema of the museum, and he had not harmed her, she would know him the moment he came near her. Through l'attrait, her body would recognize his.

Then, too, there was the matter of his appearance. He was not in any state to walk openly among humans, not with his stained, tattered garments and unkempt hair. They would think him one of the unfortunates who haunted their roadways and parks, and hurry away or summon their police.

He could not risk being challenged. Not when his shame over what he had done to Jema might send him into another bout of thoughtless, uncontrollable rage.

Thierry knew where the museum was, thanks to a folded paper he had found in one of the tourist kiosks located around the city. Even in France, he hadn't approved of the modern "information age." In his view, it was too much.

One did not build a castle only to hand out plans of how to breach its walls. Yet the paper offered many details, including a simple street map, which guided him from Michigan Avenue through the side streets up to the very steps of the place itself. He parked in an alley a block away and walked down to it.

With each step, he looked for his little cat of a woman, praying she would not be Jema Shaw.

If one did not have the paper or know that the Shaw Museum housed Greek and Roman antiquities, one only had to look at the outside of the place. It was miniature replica of the Parthenon in Athens.

While he had been waiting in the alley, Thierry had taken time to read the entire pamphlet, grateful that he had been taught to speak, read, and write English during his years in the Temple. From the information offered, it appeared that the Shaw Museum had been created to house the artifacts recovered by James Shaw during his many archaeological digs in the Mediterranean.

Jema's father had done almost exactly as Lord Elgin, who had brought back statuary that eventually became known as his "marbles" from Greece. Indeed, Shaw had made more than two hundred forty trips to Greece and the surrounding Mediterranean to explore obscure sites and retrieve what the paper named "time-lost treasures." After shipping the artifacts back to America, he had commissioned a team of experts to restore and preserve what he had recovered. The museum had been built to display the fruit of the combined efforts.

Thierry, who had spent centuries admiring the vast collections in his native Louvre, found Shaw's efforts rather odd. Americans were endlessly fascinated with themselves, and took far more interest in their own rebellious, pithy history than that of the rest of the world. Why had Shaw gone to Greece and Italy to dig through theirs?

The museum offered three collections of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art, whose ages spanned six thousand years of the respective civilizations' histories. Much of the artifacts apparently were unusual statuary, temple and ritual pottery, and other religious and iconic objects. The paper a.s.sured him that all of James Shaw's findings had been a.n.a.lyzed with more care than any that had ever been recovered in the history of his field, and that the museum was now regarded as one of the finest privately owned collections of Mediterranean antiquities in the Western world.

Perhaps the man had been seeking some proof of G.o.d, Thierry thought as he reconnoitered the building. Whatever James Shaw had been pursuing, he had left no ancient stone unturned in looking for it.

His sharp eyes caught the sight of a pet.i.te, dark-haired woman walking to the front of the museum. It was her, the little cat from last night. She went past two men in uniforms standing by an open door. Neither man glanced at her.

Jema Shaw.

Thierry paralleled her movements as she went from one side of the lobby to the other, retrieving papers from different offices. She pa.s.sed directly in front of a woman vacuuming the carpets, and stepped around a young man emptying the trash cans. Like the guards, they gave her no notice.

Thierry frowned. These people were not ignoring her. They were behaving as if they didn't see her at all. Yet it was natural, even for humans, to look at anyone who came within a certain proximity. Jema was Shaw's daughter; she owned this property, and employed all these people. Where was their deference?

He could not enter the museum to speak to her; according to the paper it had closed twenty minutes before his arrival. There were phone numbers printed for museum admission and administration, and although Jema's name was not listed beside them, he decided to try calling the one for administration. The phone would enable him to make contact with her without inflicting l'attrait on her again.

Seeing the grandeur of the Shaw Museum also helped Thierry understand the notation in the file a little better. Jema Shaw was a woman of wealth and consequence. The Kyn were always careful to avoid such people. Fame and fortune drew too much attention to those who possessed them, and by extension, anyone around them.

The Darkyn could not afford to stand in the spotlight.

In America a pay phone waited on virtually every corner, and Thierry found one in a shadowy spot across from the museum. He was not familiar with American coins, so he fed a handful of them into the slot provided for payment before he dialed the main administration number. It rang four times, and then a male voice answered, "Shaw Museum security."

"I would speak with Jema Shaw," Thierry said quickly. "This is Henri Dubeck from France." The Dubecks had been in service to the Durands; Henri had been the cousin of the Durand family's tresora. He had first introduced Thierry to the Louvre, where he had worked as an a.s.sistant curator.

It had been four hundred years ago, so Thierry felt safe using Henri's name.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Dubeck, but Miss Shaw has just left for the evening," the man told him at the exact moment Thierry saw Jema exit the building through a side door. "May I take a message?"

He had to speak with her.

"Non, merci." Thierry hung up the phone and trotted down the block after Jema Shaw. He would have caught up, but an odd feeling made his steps slow. Watching her from behind gave him a strange, uncomfortable sense that he had done so in the past.

It was not possible. He knew he had never seen her before last night.

The fenced parking lot behind the museum had a gated entrance and exit with an EMPLOYEES ONLY sign posted between them. Jema walked into the lot and took one of the three vehicles left in it, an all-too-familiar Mercedes convertible. His final doubts vanished as she drove up to the gate and he saw the vanity plate on the front b.u.mper.

JEMA'S BENZ.

Thierry went around the corner to retrieve his stolen vehicle, and used it to catch up with the Mercedes as it turned toward the immense lake just to the east of the city. Naturally that was where Jema would live; where there was water, there were the wealthy, with their large private houses and secured estates. Her father was dead, but there was no mention of her mother. Perhaps Jema lived with her. His little cat might even have a husband.

A husband who should be whipped for permitting her to wander through the city alone at night. Perhaps before he spoke to Jema, Thierry would speak to her husband.

Thierry was not surprised when the Mercedes drove up to one of the largest and most affluent-looking homes, or that high brick walls and electronic gates prevented him from following her onto the property. He drove past and took a short tour of Jema Shaw's neighbors. Nearly all of the homes showed signs of occupancy except the one bordering the north side of the Shaws' property. That house, a smaller but opulent contemporary mansion, had all of its windows shuttered. The wealthy often possessed more than one home; even during his human lifetime Thierry's parents had rarely spent more than a few months at Chateau Durand before retreating to their estate in Ma.r.s.eilles or the great house in Paris. There was a very good chance that no one presently resided in this one, and would not for some time.

Mansions had many rooms and furnishings; a thousand places where Thierry could conceal himself and no one would be the wiser. As shelter, it would serve him far better than an alley or a Dumpster.

The other bonus was that this house had not been gated or fenced in. The only thing that divided the two properties was the six-foot brick wall surrounding Jema Shaw's home. He could jump the wall with little effort, and find his way into Jema Shaw's bedchamber.

Once there, Thierry could find out everything Jema Shaw remembered about Luisa Lopez and him. She would never be the wiser, because he would do it all in her dreams.

August Hightower did not like surprises, but when Cardinal Stoss's replacement showed up at the diocese, he had no choice but to welcome him. One did not refuse to see the Lightkeeper, a man who held absolute power over Hightower and four thousand other Guardians of the Faith.

Cardinal Francis D'Orio had left the Vatican after the recent death of the pope. Like all Brethren, he was not a member of the Catholic Church or the priesthood, but like August Hightower, he pretended to be both in order to collect information and influence Rome to better serve the order. D'Orio had been so adept at his role-playing that he had quickly risen through the ranks of the church. Had Stoss not died in New Orleans, he and D'Orio might have given the new pope more compet.i.tion during the selection for his office.

No Brethren had ever yet been elected pope, but there were many men like D'Orio and Hightower. Then, too, the Catholic Church had been plunged into its darkest era since World War II, and the new pope was a very old man.

Sometimes August liked to imagine himself on the throne in Vatican City. He felt sure that he would make an impressive Vicar of Christ. D'Orio, on the other hand, had taken over active leadership of the Brethren as their Lightkeeper and was now out of the running.

"Your Grace," Cabreri called him from the reception office the morning after he had seen John Keller. "Cardinal D'Orio is here."

Hightower almost choked on the raspberry bear claw he was nibbling. Quickly he brushed at the crumbs that had fallen on his chest. "I'll see him in five minutes."

"He cannot wait, Your Grace," Cabreri said. "I am escorting him back to your office now."

The Lightkeeper arrived with an entourage of priests, monks, and bodyguards in discreet businessmen's attire.

D'Orio entered Hightower's office with the silent confidence of one to whom doors were never closed, and after his men scouted the room, came out of the cl.u.s.ter of ca.s.socks. He did not wear the traditional red of a cardinal, but affected plain Benedictine black. Only his black skullcap and his weathered, swarthy features, the latter of which Hightower had seen in photographs, identified him as the most important man in the room.

With them came Hightower's a.s.sistant, Father Carlo Cabreri, who smoothly performed the formal introductions.

"Your Eminence, may I present Archbishop August Hightower. Bishop Hightower, Cardinal D'Orio, Lightkeeper of the Brethren."

August came forward and bent over D'Orio's proffered hand, pressing his lips with reverence to the older man's ring of office, a diamond cut into the shape of an hourgla.s.s. "Your Eminence, we are blessed by your presence." "Such optimism. You've got crumbs on your mouth." D'Orio turned to the entourage, "Go count some candles."

He glanced at Cabreri. "You too, Carlitto, and no listening over the intercom." As soon the bishop and the cardinal were alone, D'Orio sat down. "You're fatter than I thought you'd be. Have you tried the Atkins diet?" Before Hightower could answer, he gestured toward the nearest chair. "Sit, August. I have a lot to do on this trip, so we need to make the most of the next seven minutes."

Hightower didn't know whether to feel cheered or dismayed as he sat down. "You're an American."

"Born and raised in Brooklyn. My first parish was in Chinatown." D'Orio smiled, showing excellent dentures. "I'm older than you think, too. I was a priest when you were in diapers. Men in my family usually live past ninety with all their brains and most of their parts still working."

"I'm glad to hear it," Hightower said cautiously.

"I'm glad one of us is getting good news." D'Orio settled back in his chair and folded his hands over his sunken belly. "I'm told you met with Father John Keller yesterday. What I want to know is, why didn't you deliver him to us?"