Darkyn - Private Demon Part 9

"A masque." She sounded puzzled. "Is that like a Mardi Gras thing?"

"A little, perhaps." He inclined his head. "One wears a costume and dances to music. It is to be held on the night of October thirty-first."

"Oh, a Halloween party." She laughed, delighted. "I forgot it was so close." Her happiness abruptly ebbed. "Is it just for couples? I'm not seeing anyone, so I'd have to come alone."

He would have to go carefully now. "I, too, am presently unattached. Perhaps you would consent to having me serve as your escort as well as your host?"

"I guess." She sounded puzzled. "Are you sure? I mean, I've seen some of your girlfriends. They're all so beautiful."

Girlfriends? She was speaking of the women Sacher procured for his nourishment and occasional entertainment. What excuse could he make?

"None of them are available."

"Okay. I might as well celebrate my last night in my twenties; I'll be thirty the next day." She gave him a wry look. "But you already know that."

Each year on November first, Jema's birthday, Jaus sent a bouquet of camellias he had raised himself to Shaw House. It was a long-standing tradition.

"Yes." He smiled. "I have been saving a special birthday gift for you. Perhaps you will like it better than the flowers."

"Oh, but I love the ones you send," she a.s.sured him. "It wouldn't feel like my birthday without them." She gave him a mischievous glance. "What could be better than your beautiful camellias?"

"Something that will always make you think of them," he a.s.sured her.

"I can see her; she's down by the lake," Daniel Bradford said, looking through the window facing the dark lake. "I think your neighbor is talking to her. The short, blond fellow, the one whose name I can never remember."

"Valentin Jaus. Of course it would be him. He trots after her like a dog whenever she goes down there." Meryl sipped a dainty measure of bourbon from her gla.s.s. "He's walking her to the steps, isn't he?"

"He's not chasing her around them." Daniel chuckled. "I've seen the man from a distance, mostly in his car when it comes and goes, but I never realized how short he is. He's the exact same size as Jema." His voice grew thoughtful. "Is he interested in her?"

"He's nosy and pushy," Meryl told him. "That's all."

He might have been more, but Meryl had taken steps long ago to a.s.sure he never would be. She despised Valentin Jaus as much she had as his pompous a.s.s of a father. Valentin Sr. had hara.s.sed her for years, calling to check on Jema when she was younger, offering his help where it wasn't wanted, and sending his ridiculous flowers to the house every year on Jema's birthday. It was as if the older Valentin had been trying to taunt Meryl: Happy birthday to your daughter, Jema. If not for me, she'd be dead.

Meryl had been overjoyed when the old man had died during a trip to Europe. Then his son came to take possession of the estate, and picked up right where his father had left off.

"You're brooding again," Daniel told her, coming over to take the gla.s.s of liquor out of her hand. "You're also drinking too much."

"You're right. What do I have to worry about? She'll probably live forever. You two can bury me." Meryl heard the soft buzz of the zone alarm as a door opened and closed at the back of the house. The sound had a Pavlovian effect; she instantly relaxed.

"There, you see?" Daniel patted her hand. "She's home, safe and sound."

"Don't patronize me." Keeping Jema safe and whole had been one of the two greatest torments in Meryl's life. Every day was precious; she held on to them and Jema with tight, unyielding determination.

Jema's job at the museum was an unnecessary risk. However, the situation had been unavoidable. It had been the result of the professional indiscretions of a renowned anthropologist in Germany, who had been forced to retire after allegations that included botching and falsifying the carbon dating of historically important specimens; every reputable museum in the world was reexamining their inventories.

Meryl Shaw had resisted the idea of having her husband's artifacts subjected to reexamination, but in the end was forced to concede to the board of directors. That they had offered the job to Jema only added insult to injury.

"Your father sacrificed his life for the museum," Meryl had told her. "A man doesn't do that to perpetuate fraud.

Refuse the position."

Jema, who had followed the international uproar over the counterfeiting of antiquities, had defied Meryl. She felt there were too many sites around the world "salted" with artifacts of dubious origin in order to attract archeological teams, and she saw the job as a way to keep her father's name and reputation from ever being questioned.

The irony was that Jema had no idea that her father had committed one very large professional indiscretion. One that, if it became public knowledge, would ruin his name forever.

At least now I can get some work done. Meryl flicked the switch on her wheelchair and maneuvered it over to her desk.

"Leave me alone, Daniel." He replaced the stopper on the crystal liquor decanter. "No more bourbon, Meryl. Your ulcer has taken enough abuse this week." He bent as if to kiss her cheek, and then thought better of it and straightened. "I'll see you in the morning."

Meryl waited until Bradford had left before unlocking her desk drawer and removing the inventory files. In them were detailed lists of every artifact that James Shaw had brought back from his digs.

"It has to be in the last lot from Athos." She shuffled the lists and studied the one marked lot A-G240. "But where?"

The Athos dig had been the last she and James had worked together before his death. When he had first proposed the site, she had thought it a complete waste of their time.

"We won't find a village; it's in the middle of nowhere," she protested when her husband had shown her the position of the find. "Maybe some exile set up a goat farm, but there was nothing else even built there."

James insisted they go to Athos anyway. He had found a mention of the village charged with a sacred duty in a prayer scroll taken from another, more prestigious dig. The scroll hinted that the villagers bargained each year with the G.o.ds to win the gift of immortality. James also became convinced that there was an object involved, and after many comparisons to other ancient texts, he began to regard it as a Greek version of the Holy Grail.

"They were told to make this tremendous climb up a mountain every year, just after the harvest. Once they reached the mountain's summit, they presented the homage to the G.o.ds. If the G.o.ds were pleased, they would transform the homage into a powerful icon that granted one of the villagers immortal life." He laughed at her expression. "Yes, I know to you it's nothing but a myth. But the homage was real, material. Even Hesiod wrote of it, describing it when transformed by the G.o.ds as a source of great power and beauty."

"It sounds like an early version of the Prometheus legend," Meryl said, trying to hold on to her temper, "with immortality instead of fire. What happened to this homage? Why did the ritual stop?"

"The usual: greedy G.o.ds versus greedy mankind. Too many immortals were made," James said. "The king of the G.o.ds became angry at the power they wielded over other humans. So he made the homage turn immortals' blood into poison, and cause their touch to be deadly to ordinary men."

"I suppose their hair became snakes, and their faces so ugly that to look upon them would turn you into stone?"

Meryl demanded. "For G.o.d's sake, darling, listen to yourself. You're a scientist. You can't seriously start believing in fairy tales now."

"You'll see," was all James would tell her after that.

From the beginning, the Athos dig had a series of disasters. They had difficulty finding men willing to work the deserted mountainside site, as it was regarded by the locals as a combination of holy ground and the gates to h.e.l.l itself.

The men they could hire worked at a snail's pace, walking off the site at twilight and never returning. Then there was James's insistence on searching every cave they found no matter how small or insignificant; the mountain was riddled with them.

Meryl had refused to go back to the States when she discovered she was pregnant. Her family had disowned her the moment she'd announced her engagement to James, so they would have nothing to do with her. James was an orphan, so there was no one on his side to help her with the birth. Going back to Chicago would mean sitting in an empty house for the next seven months.

No, James had put this baby inside her, and Meryl was determined to stay with him until it was born.

"Women all over the world work up until the minute they give birth," she told her husband when he argued with her about remaining at the site. "Besides, this is going to be our life. Our child will go where we go."

It was toward the end of her pregnancy that Meryl noticed her husband was slipping away several nights during the week, waiting until he thought she'd fallen asleep before sneaking out of camp. She had tried to follow him more than once, but James always seemed to sense it and would circle around to come back to camp, acting as if he'd gone for nothing more than a pleasant evening stroll.

James had a new woman on the side, of course. Meryl had never enjoyed s.e.x, so she didn't resent the other women.

She had ignored them; she could ignore this one. And she had, until the day James found the Phaenon Cave.

Meryl stared down at the inventory list in her hands, her eyes wide and unseeing. Everything that had gone wrong in her life had started the moment James broke through the seal of the cave. She should have never stayed with him. If she had listened and come back to Chicago, she wouldn't be in this wheelchair, or this mess. "This is it, this is the one," James had said as soon as the men had cleared the brush back from the rough slabs of slate rock that had been stacked and crudely mortared together to seal the entrance. "I knew it."

Meryl had been in a terrible mood. Her back had been killing her ever since she'd dragged herself out of her tent at dawn to accompany James to the dig. Because she had never had a child, she hadn't recognized the constant ache as labor pain.

"It will be just like the fifty other caves we've unsealed on this G.o.dforsaken rock," she warned him. "I'm beginning to think someone in nine thousand B.C. had a very twisted sense of humor."

Unlike the other caves they had explored, this one presented a unique set of problems. When the top half of the sealing stones were removed, so was the support for the soft soil above them, which immediately began to crumble. A support beam and struts had to be hastily fashioned and wedged into place before the entrance could be completely cleared.

Then there was the smell. Meryl was used to subterranean gases, but this one was particularly vile, as if the interior were filled with sulfur and something that had drowned and rotted in it. Every man who tried to enter the cave grew sicker with every step; after a few feet their eyes began streaming and they began to choke. Even James couldn't bear the stench.

"At last," Meryl said as she sourly observed the workers rushing into the brush to vomit, as she had every morning for the first three months of her pregnancy, "there is some justice in the world."

James refused to leave the site unexplored, and fashioned a mask for himself out of a cloth soaked in water and a pair of protective goggles.

"I'll send for a set of scuba gear if I must," he told Meryl just before walking in the cave, "but this should get me in far enough to see what's back there."

Unable to recall another moment of the worst day in her life, Meryl picked up the phone and called the museum.

"Yes, Dr. Shaw?"

"Roy, I need lot two-forty taken out of storage and brought over to the house tomorrow," she said. "I'm having a small get-together for some museum board members and I'd like to set up a temporary display. Pack it the usual way and have it here by seven."

"I'd like to help you out, Dr. Shaw, but the head curator told us nothing was to be removed from storage until the inventory and cataloging was finished," the security guard said.

Meryl forced a laugh. "Roy, I own the museum and its contents. I'll take whatever I like out of it."

"That's something I've been meaning to talk about with you." Roy's tone changed. "The curator and I've been talking about things, and I asked him some questions. Lately I've been taking a lot of things out of here for you, so I wanted to cover myself. Just in case I was doing something that might get me in trouble."

Meryl's hand tightened on the receiver. "That's really none of your business."

"The curator set me straight about a bunch of things," Roy continued smoothly. "Things n.o.body around here seems to know. Like who really owns this place. You understand what I'm saying, Dr. Shaw?"

She understood that she'd been an idiot to trust a security guard with a ninth-grade education. "What do you want?"

"A little appreciation would be nice," the guard told her. "You could start showing it when I bring this lot over."

Meryl opened the second drawer to her desk. Inside was a strongbox with the cash she kept for household use.

Next to the box was a .22, small enough to tuck under the fold of her lap blanket. "I'll have it waiting for you."

Chapter 8.

The owners of the property bordering Jema Shaw's home had installed a very sophisticated alarm system on their mansion, one that prevented anyone from breaking into the house. They also had many conveniently located decorative trees among their artful landscaping. Once Thierry discovered how extensive the security system was, he selected a tree, climbed it, and broke off a suitable branch. When he allowed the branch to fall, it struck one of the windows on the side of the house; not enough to break the gla.s.s but with adequate force to set off the motion sensor attached to it.

Modern humans regarded drawbridges, guardhouses, and moats as archaic, but Thierry could not think of any that had ever been defeated by a mere stick.

Predictably, the police came two minutes after the branch struck the gla.s.s, followed by a truck from the security monitoring company. A technician in pristine overalls stayed at the gate while the police checked the house. Once they had determined the house had not been entered, the technician discovered the cause and reset the system.

"I'll call the Nelsons from the office; they're over in Australia until January," the tech told the two uniformed officers. "This kind of thing happens all the time."

Thierry, perched in another tree that concealed his presence and gave him an un.o.bstructed view of the exterior alarm system control pad, waited until everyone had left before dropping down to the ground and entering the pa.s.s code to disarm the system.

That left entering the house. He was tempted to break the window, but shattered gla.s.s or a missing pane might be noticed by the groundskeepers or neighbors. Also, it would allow anyone else access to the mansion. Instead he climbed to the top of the house, where he found an attic vent large enough for him to squeeze through. Once inside, he replaced the grille, worked his way downstairs, and reset the alarm system.

The Nelsons had filled their home with modern, rather ugly furnishings, but they had thoughtfully kept the water as well as the electricity on. Thierry went first to the largest bath and spent an hour in the enormous shower, scrubbing himself clean.

The layers of dirt and dried blood on his body turned the water black, then brown, until it finally ran clear. The stab wounds on his torso had closed, but the areas were still tender to the touch. Also, the brief amount of effort breaking into the mansion had exhausted him.

He would have to hunt tonight.

Thierry dried off with one of the thick, salmon-colored towels left hanging in the bath chamber and walked naked into the next room. It apparently belonged to the lady of the house, who possessed an incredible amount of cosmetics, perfumes, and toiletries. Among them Thierry found a pair of sharp scissors and used them to trim the hair that had grown over his eyes. He didn't have the skill to give himself a proper haircut, so he trimmed the rest to what he considered a reasonable length and bound it back with an elastic band. Unless it grew suddenly, which it sometimes did without warning during the daylight hours, he would pa.s.s as a normal American male.

He was like most Darkyn and did not grow facial hair, so shaving was unnecessary. He was glad, because using the electric beard cutter the man of the house had left behind was beyond him.

Clothes presented the next problem. Thierry was not a small man, and Mr. Nelson, while almost the same height, obviously weighed fifty pounds less. After trying on several garments, Thierry found a pair of trousers with a pleated front that were not skintight on him, and a dress shirt that he could b.u.t.ton up to the center of his chest. He covered these with one of Nelson's knee-length Armani coats. It was too tight across his shoulders, but with the colder temperatures no one would question it.

Half the day had pa.s.sed by the time Thierry turned out the lights and stretched out on the too-soft bed in the Nelsons' master bedroom. He nearly jumped out of it when he saw his reflection staring down at him from the mirror fixed to the ceiling. Why the devil did they have that up there? Did they dress on their backs?

So they can watch themselves, my love, Angelica's ghost purred in his mind. Remember how much I wanted one? Seeing yourself while you're having s.e.x is erotic.

Thierry rolled out of the bed and dragged the thick coverlet from it, laying it out on the floor well out of sight of the mirror. He needed to rest, not think of her. He had to plan how to get into Jema Shaw's house. There was no time to indulge his madness.

What will you do after you find the girl's attackers? Where will you go? Who would welcome a madman into their society?

Michael should have killed him while he was his captive. It would have put a proper end to this miserable life of his.

Thierry closed his eyes, curled his hand around his dagger, and thought of Jema Shaw. He knew nothing of her except what he had shared with her in the alley. She was wealthy, ill, and had befriended Luisa. That indicated she probably had a kind nature. The fact that he had already fed on her underscored the need to be very careful with her.

He could not take her blood again, under any circ.u.mstances.

At dusk he left the Nelsons' and walked to where he had hidden his stolen car, and drove back to the city in time to enter the museum. It had begun snowing outside, so Thierry did not remove his coat once inside. A young man sitting at a desk in the lobby was the only one to speak to him, and he simply asked for five dollars.

"You do not have your own money?" Thierry asked him, perplexed.

The clerk frowned. "It's the price of admission, sir."

One had to pay, of course. Thierry forgot this was one way in which humans made their living. Fortunately he had sorted out what money he had left back at the Nelsons', so he handed over one bill marked with a five.

"Thank you." He offered a folded paper, much like the one Thierry had found in the tourist kiosk. "We're closing in an hour, sir."

He examined the paper with interest. This one showed the layout of the interior. From the lobby he was evidently free to wander the open areas and special exhibit rooms.

"Is Miss Jema Shaw here?" he asked the clerk.