Clan Novel Setite: Book 4 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Kathleen Ryan

  Elizabeth had drifted to the security station. The cameras were on—all of them—and the monitors up and working. She took a seat in one of the chairs. She looked at every screen in turn, coldly, and without comment. The front hall. The kitchen. An outdoor scene. The staircase. The front drive. A wall…part of the garage, she remembered. Views of the guest rooms; of Thompson’s austere bed, of the Asp’s den. A shot of the stairs to the basement. Every possible angle of the museum. Blank corridors. A room she didn’t recognize, very messy. Another, rather cleaner. Hesha’s study, and the two chairs empty there. Hesha’s rooms from another angle, the back of the screen showing behind a large bed, a sliver of neatly kept dressing room to one side. More pictures of the woods, waving gently in night winds. Her own room, she saw without surprise. The bunker—a miniature Asp standing gaping over her shoulder, her own tiny figure motionless in the chair, Hesha looking up at her…into the camera, regretfully. Thompson lying in a chair in a room she didn’t know. Stone hallways. Stone walls— carved walls.

  Elizabeth leaned closer, staring at the reliefs. The picture was dim and the perspective was wrong, but there was a memory….

  “Asp.” Hesha’s voice rang out. “Introduce yourself to Miss Dimitros.”

  Liz swiveled the chair. If the cook’s face had been stunned before—which she doubted, realizing that anyone in this room would have known precisely who was coming—it was a grotesquely genuine mask of stupefaction now. The small, dark eyes narrowed with anger.

  He said nothing, and Hesha filled in the silence. “Elizabeth, this is Raphael Mercurio.”

  “Not Angelo,” she murmured tonelessly.

  “There is no Angelo,” said the Asp, in a voice clotted with resentment. “Raphael. Gabriel. My brother, my twin, he was here when you arrived. Angelo is…our creation. Our masterwork. The great alibi,” he finished, throwing back his head and raising one glossy, defiant eyebrow.

  “For what?”

  “For everything,” said the Asp, menacingly. He glanced at Hesha’s face, and backed away. With an air of pride and hatred, he swept out of sight.

  Hesha touched Elizabeth lightly on the shoulder. She left the chair, and he steered her through the bunker to a plain, wooden door. Hesha knocked once, but opened it immediately.

  “Thompson.”

  “Sir.” Thompson grimaced apologetically. “Hey, Liz.” He straightened the recliner, but remained seated. “Sorry about all this.”

  Hesha allowed no time for pleasantries. “Take off your shirt, Thompson.”

  Thompson and Elizabeth exchanged glances. He grimaced again. “Yes, sir. I’ll need a hand, though. The cuts are closed, but the swelling’s gone up….”

  “Your right shoulder still?” Hesha frowned. “Help him,” he ordered.

  Liz bent over the chair and took the loose shirt up and away—gingerly, after she caught sight of the first gauze padding. Beneath the pullover, Thompson was a patchwork of cotton bandages and fresh scars.

  “Unwrap his right shoulder. Look at it.”

  Elizabeth removed the gauze and a cold pack. The flesh of Thompson’s arm was puffy and discolored. The fluids trapped within stretched tight two shiny, pink dimples of new skin at the center of the wound. She replaced the dressing with skill and without comment.

  Sitting on the edge of the armchair, Elizabeth gazed searchingly into the old cop’s eyes.

  Thompson returned the stare unhappily. She loved the boss—or had, at least. And she’d trusted her “friend” Ron. For the first time in—decades—he was ashamed of something he’d done. And there she went, the gaze broken; finished with him, following Hesha out, walking in his footsteps through the maze. Thompson reached for the mixing bowl, feeling slightly ill.

  Elizabeth stood nervously at the door. Light came from the corridor behind her, faint, but enough to throw her shadow far from her feet. Here, on the raised step of the threshold, she could hear Hesha ahead of her in the blackness, making soft noises…hissing, and a fragile rasp like a broom. The sounds stopped, there was a long pause, and then his voice said quietly: “Light.”

  And Hesha’s sanctuary was revealed.

  The far wall—all the walls—were covered in painted reliefs. In ochre, dun, black., brick red, and blue as dark as night, three tiers high, each section longer than her own body…there would be twelve sections, she realized. It was the Am Duat—the Book of the Dead for royalty—twelve hours of Ra’s journey though the Underworld, each hour divided into three parts, each part depicting an event on the god’s trip from dusk to dawn, from death to life. She stepped into the room, and turned to look at the whole:

  A bare floor, blue-black walls to waist height, then banded colors: red, black, ochre, black, a strip of dun- colored hieroglyphs, and then drawings done on the bare stone in black. The Ninth Hour covered the wall beside her, and she stared in fascination at the precision of the work. She looked up. Above the highest tier, the artist had reproduced exactly—so far as she could remember from photographs—the decorations that belonged there. For the ceiling, the sky by night; five-pointed, spindly stars covered it in elegant regularity.

  The room was enormous. She had felt that from the door. Now she saw that it was nearly empty. Scattered at intervals along the wall lay small chests, low tables and benches made for them, and narrow boxes. Some were golden, some were dusty and worm-eaten. The walls curved with strange irrelevance, as though the masons had chosen to take a walk and the chisel had happened to lead the way. Only the floor and ceiling were parallel to each other. Where the room snaked away, she could see other things, half-hidden behind the living rock.

  The largest, most obvious thing to see lay directly before her. Hesha watched in fascination as her gaze fluttered first to everything else in the room.

  She was unwilling to notice it.

  It was a plain box, simply made. The lid fitted tightly and squarely. It rose from the floor to a height of forty inches. It was forty inches wide, and a little over eight feet long. Elizabeth stared at the thing for a long moment, and at last she walked over to the sarcophagus.

  “I was here, in my dream. In this room.”

  Hesha stayed where he was, and waited.

  “But the floor was beaten bronze and there was no ceiling and no sky. The sun shone in, straight down like noon, and there were no shadows.”

  Her left hand strayed out and brushed the gray surface of the stone coffin with the edge of her palm.

  “You were here, lying down. The light was on your face, and the rock and your clothes were brilliant white. I thought that you were asleep. I reached out to…to…” She stared at her hand, as if she didn’t recognize it.

  “I reached out to tell you something. To show you the sun, I think…but you wouldn’t wake up.” Her voice, trance-like until now, became a little desperate. “You wouldn’t wake up. And I started to feel frost. The metal floor was cold; that was wrong, in the sunshine, and the bed…the mastaba?…was cold, and you were as cold and motionless as the stone.

  “And suddenly I knew that you were dead.” She choked back a sob. “You were dead, and I looked down at myself, and I wasn’t Elizabeth anymore….”

  Visibly, the spell broke. Her hands traced a line over her collarbone, where the Eldest had rested that morning, and her eyes cleared of the memories. Her skin reddened with anger.

  “I don’t have to tell you, Hesha.” Her face was fire; her voice was ice. “You have your cameras and your spies. You can damn well watch my dreams from the outside.” Elizabeth sprinted for the door.

  Hesha was three times farther away from the exit; he reached it before she took her third step.

  She didn’t see him get there; her eyes were open but her mind was too slow to catch the movement. Simply, suddenly, he was in the way, blocking the passage. The message came to her feet too late to stop the headlong rush. Elizabeth dashed into his arms, and the momentum carried her into the space between the monster and the wall. He caught her by the arm and spun her, gathe
red her in to face him, held her against his body. She didn’t scream, and wondered, later, why not.

  He said nothing. His vision was tainted red; his fangs slid down from their sheaths and forced his jaw apart; the only sound worth hearing was her heartbeat, her quick, wet breathing, the faint start of a cry in her throat…and his hands, taloned, reached for that throat. His hands buried themselves in her long, dark hair and tilted her face toward him. His head bent to her neck—he lunged for her, she twisted in his grasp at the last possible moment, and his open jaw met her lips, not her jugular. Blood filled his mouth—living blood—and he let it go on; the Beast took Hesha and the woman with him; his last thought was filled with the taste of her…. It is a deceit; it is an illusion; she is nothing different….

  Elizabeth, shaking and unable to stand under the flames of the kiss, dropped away, and Hesha fell with her, following the blood to the ground. She sprawled on the third step of the tomb; he knelt above her. His hands, supporting her, scraped stone, and the tiny pain brought him—barely—to himself again. He tore his mouth away, wiped her lips clean with his tongue, and sat back. For long seconds he watched her body…at last she breathed…and again…and she opened her eyes and turned her head away from him, struggling to get up.

  Hesha rubbed his scraped knuckles and knew in that instant that the Beast had nearly taken her life; that the taking of it would have given him more pleasure than the slaughter of any other living thing; that her murder would have caused him sorrow for the first time in centuries. And part of him wished that it had won.

  Elizabeth, her feet not yet obeying her, had still managed to sit up. She pushed herself up to the fourth step with all four limbs, and she did not look toward him.

  “Elizabeth. Wait.” Hesha swarmed after her and hunted for her hands. He placed her struggling fingers over his wrist. “Take my pulse,” he demanded.

  She stared up at him in fear. Dark, dark irises in the centers of wide-open white eyes…Hesha heard the roar of the Beast rising again, and he snatched her hands to his neck.

  “Feel. Where is my heartbeat, Elizabeth? You won’t find it.”

  She stopped fighting him. Her fingertips searched his jawline, the hollow beneath his ear, the curve of the neck into windpipe. “The first night we met,” said Hesha, in a nearly normal voice, “when I fell, you were going to take my pulse. And I stopped you.” Comprehension and denial rose in the dark eyes below him. She was trembling now.

  “How many nightmares have you had since you met me?” She blinked, and the fighting flush drained from her face. “I think, Elizabeth, that I wasn’t fast enough, keeping your fingers from my wrist that night. Without knowing, you knew…just as you knew that one Asp was frightening and the other friendly…as you knew how to reach the ring in the stone…you knew what I was.”

  “What are you?” she whispered.

  Hesha paused. He licked his lips, and his hands tightened, involuntarily, over hers.

  “Deathless.”

  Sunday, 11 July 1999, 4:13 AM

  Laurel Ridge Farm

  Columbia, Maryland

  Ronald Thompson waited angrily. He was sick; he watched the scene in Vegel’s apartment through narrowed, puffed-up slits of eyes. He was irritable. Inaction suited him badly; convalescence still worse. Patience he had, and he could have endured the night creditably well—if Hesha hadn’t switched tactics in midstream. Thompson was puzzled, and so, instead of lying down and resting (as Janet had pleaded with him by phone to do) he sat at the center of his net and waited.

  Hesha came out of Elizabeth’s room backwards, bidding the girl good night and better dreams. Thompson nearly choked. As his master turned toward the door of his study, his room, and his sepulcher, Thompson flicked a switch with one swollen finger. Hesha looked up, waited, and then crossed the museum to the bookcase door.

  Thompson straightened his abused body in the chair. He shot Hesha an expectant, a challenging glare.

  Hesha regarded his servant impassively. “Yes, Thompson?”

  “Sir,” Thompson began. He ground rapidly to a halt. How to go on? “Sir, may I ask you a personal question?”

  “You can ask me anything,” said Hesha. The Setite’s eyes clearly promised no answers.

  “What happened,” barked Thompson, “to the plan, sir?”

  “Which plan?”

  “The family plan,” said the mortal harshly. Thompson bit his lip, and fought for the right opening—for words civil enough to keep peace with his employer, but strong enough to vent his wrath—and all that would come to him was the blasted, vitriolic curse that had begun the day.

  Hesha watched as his prospective heir stumbled over his own ire. The man’s eyes hunted the air, and he radiated disapproval. Hesha drew up a chair, sank sinuously into the seat, and said, “Put your thoughts in order, detective. Start again. You object to my handling of the Dimitros situation? Naturally, you have been listening ever since I brought her back to her own room…if you had not caught my performance live, I would have insisted on your review of the recorded version.”

  Thompson nearly exploded. A shout choked up his chest; his mouth opened—and he saw Hesha’s lids twitch, lightly, in amusement. The old cop imploded, instead. So the boss was playing him. A test, he realized. Another test. I wonder if I’m passing it or not.

  “I took her to the place where she felt most comfortable, Thompson. I told her what had really happened to her this morning. I gave you and the Asp hero’s laurels, just as you deserve. In a few nights’ time, she will recover from the shock of the—” his arcing arm indicated the bank of closed-circuit screens—”security arrangements, and I have no doubt that you and she will be fast friends again in a month or so. In fact, by Tuesday I expect that she will have thanked you for saving her life.”

  “I’m not talking about that.”

  “You don’t care that she hated you tonight?”

  “I do. And you say you’ve fixed that. And I believe you, because you’re always right about people, and my gut tells me the same thing. But you said last week that we were going to be family to her—that you ‘intended her to look on you as a father figure.’” He slammed his fist on the wide arm of the chair. “If you think those were paternal moves you put on her tonight—!”

  “I think you have thrown yourself too deeply into the role of ‘older brother,’” Hesha interrupted.

  “Vampires are all very well, sir, but I wouldn’t want my sister to marry one.”

  “A very Victorian older brother,” commented Hesha, in a dangerous voice he had never used on Thompson before. “I am not a vampire, and you’ve had time enough to learn that. I expect you never to use the word again unless you are referring to Stoker or Hollywood’s creations. Do you understand me?”

  Thompson nodded warily.

  “Furthermore. Elizabeth is not your sister, and you’ll do well to remember that. Fall too deeply into any role, and you put yourself in danger; fall too deeply into this one and you may get Miss Dimitros killed. She’s a target to be guarded, Thompson. Don’t let your emotions sway you. Just do your job. As for marriage…” Hesha indulged in near-silent laughter.

  “Now. We were discussing my conversation with our guest. I told her she would have many questions. I promised to answer them. There will be answers Thompson; convincing ones. I told her that she was confused, vulnerable. I told her that I cared about her. I told her that I didn’t want to say too much tonight, that I didn’t want her to leave. I told her that there was more between us than I had realized. I told her that I had never met anyone else like her. I apologized, I confessed, I fell over my feet promising to make it all up to her.”

  “And did you mean any of that, sir?”

  “What would you do if I didn’t?” Hesha waited. “Did you believe it when you heard me say it?”

  Thompson uttered “Yes,” without tone or emotion.

  “Good.” Hesha paused and looked at Elizabeth on the monitor. She was getting ready for bed; conscious o
f the camera, she had decided to change clothes under the covers. “Then I trust that she believed it, too. You know me better. You have doubts. You should.”

  Drawing breath to speak with, he went out on a tangent. “How many times have you been in Vegel’s chamber, Thompson? And in mine?”

  “Sir?”

  “In Vegel’s room there are farmers and hunters and artisans, Thompson. Pharaoh’s guards, lords and ladies, scribes, masons. They work at their stations in life, and the river flows past them, and the green fields support them, and the waters cool their thirst, and the fruits of their labor slake their hunger, and the sun beats down on them all, scribe and farmer, master and servant. And that is life.

  “In my room, the king is dead, the souls of every man, woman and child are stripped apart and sent to judgment in pieces. They are defenseless as they wander without direction from their tomb to the Place of Ma’at. The world is forever dark, and cold, and once they leave the necropolis there is nothing. The desert is cold and full of monsters. The river cannot give them drink, the fields cannot feed them. Only what the living leave for them can sustain them. And that is death.

  “Love can live in the sun. And it is said to flourish in the afterlife. But in the desert between them, Thompson… Neither my kind, nor the Cainites, nor any of the brood of Apep know the meaning of the word after their rebirth. Two of my souls may be here, but my heart lies in the dark underworld, between the jaws of Ammit, the Devourer of the Dead. Understand that. Accept it. And tell me again whether you want to join Set’s children.”

  “Damn you, Hesha,” whispered Thompson.

  “As you say.” The creature’s voice held nothing.

  They sat together in silence for a good five minutes. The main lights went out in Vegel’s apartment. Elizabeth lay on her side, reading by the lamp on the bedside table.