Dark Heart

by Margaret Weis;David Baldwin

  Justin clenched his fist, clenched his teeth. He closed his eyes and tried to think of something else. No emotion, he thought. Keep it bottled up, stare at the wall, go another place mentally. Be anywhere but here.

  Tendons stood out starkly in Justin’s neck and arms as he fought for control. His stomach muscles tensed. His eyes flashed open and he turned away from the mirror. The freshly discarded skin caught his eye. He grimaced in repulsion. Evidence of what he truly was, evidence he couldn’t bear to see. Usually, he got rid of the skin as soon as possible. The Dumpster in the alley behind the club had always served, but no longer. He glanced at the other, older skin. He’d thought it safely disposed. But its discovery in the Dumpster had led to yet another bloody, screaming death.

  No, he couldn’t use the Dumpster any longer. Have to come up with something else…but he couldn’t cope with that now. He could hardly cope with anything. Anything except…

  He wrenched his gaze from the skin toward a more pleasant view. Drawings of all sizes covered the wall. Some were rendered in charcoal, some were done in pencil. A few watercolors glowed like gems among the mostly black-and-white collection. There were scenes from all over the city, views of the Chicago skyline, sketches of nearby country landscapes as well as busy city crowd scenes, finished portraits, quick sketches, simple line drawings. Some of the art work had been pinned up in careful order, arranged in lines like well-laid bricks. Other pieces flowed in chaotic streams across the wall, corners overlapping, images turned at odd angles.

  The wall was filled with Justin’s own work. He rarely left it looking the same from day to day. He’d take drawings down and replace them with new ones often. His favorites stayed. His failed attempts rarely lasted more than a few hours. Sometimes his muse would send Justin out into the city for weeks at a time, and he would roam Chicago and its environs looking for suitable subject matter, sketching and painting everything that took his fancy.

  Currently, Tina had center stage. Images of her dominated the collection of drawings. Tina laughing. Tina smiling coyly. Tina watching herself in the mirror, holding a blouse up against her chest. Tina diving for a volleyball, going for the save. Tina looking pensive. Tina the woman. Tina the girl-child.

  Concentrate on the drawings, he told himself. His eyes fell on a landscape where the bare branches of winter trees were bending before a gale wind. Think of that day when it blew so hard you could scarcely keep the pages from ripping off of your pad as you sketched. Think of that plastic bag that flew through the air and smacked you in the face because you were too busy drawing to notice it was coming…

  …just like Madrone smacked into the wall where you threw him before you killed him.

  The death of the detective refused to stay safely buried in that part of Justin’s subconscious that he never visited willingly. The joy he’d felt in killing the man thrummed through his bones. He looked down at his hand, now human and covered with slime. The warm moisture felt like the blood that had dripped from his fingers as Madrone’s heart slid from them to the floor.

  Justin choked and spun away, stumbled down the steps away from the mirror and the abandoned skin of his transformation.

  And it goes to show you, doesn’t it, Justin? If you try to resist the master, he lets you feast on the horror of your deeds after they’re done.

  He hadn’t wanted to kill Madrone. No more than he’d wanted to kill the security guard Baxter a fortnight ago. But the Dragon would not be denied, and Justin now bore the weight of the Dragon’s disapproval in addition to the weight of his own self-loathing.

  Both men had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was all. But that didn’t change or justify what had happened to them at his hands. Justin knew that as surely as he knew he’d had little or no choice but to kill them.

  Baxter’s death had been one of those unforeseen things, totally unplanned. Justin had been at the university to retrieve an artifact at the Dragon’s request, nothing more. He’d been in the main building at midnight, pulling an ancient chalice from its dusty display case. Baxter had startled Justin, startled him for several reasons.

  Justin had been in the Wyrm shape that night, completely under the Dragon’s compulsion, more passenger than free-willed entity. His mission nearly accomplished, he’d relaxed his watchfulness for a split second as the power of the artifact had pulsed through him. His senses were so acute in the Wyrm state that he was rarely surprised by his surroundings, but Baxter had run into the room at just the wrong instant. A second earlier or later, and Justin would have faded into the shadows before the guard saw him. In Justin’s confusion, he’d reacted before conscious thought could kick in. The security guard hadn’t even had time to draw a breath before his heart was on the floor.

  And Carlton Wheeler, the lawyer. Justin’s self-loathing turned to rage for a moment as he thought of that death. Omar had killed him. Omar, Kalzar’s apprentice, sent to Justin to study the arts of the disciples. Sent to Justin to make his life a living hell, more likely.

  Killing Wheeler was supposed to be a quiet task. A textbook assassination, a case the cops would open and close faster than a bad book. Justin had listened and taught Omar as he’d planned it, watched attentively as Omar set it up, practically held his hand as he pulled the trigger.

  Wheeler’s death was supposed to be airtight, a closed room murder mystery. No detective on earth could’ve tracked it to the killer…

  …until that feckless idiot Omar had started babbling in bars about the murder to anybody who’d listen!

  And then there was the cop…

  Justin threw himself against the wall, pounding it with his fists. He knocked a hole in the plaster, ripping open the skin on his knuckles. Justin paused, staring down at the blood welling up from the uneven cuts on his fingers. The crimson flow slowed and stopped as he watched. The wounds mended and his pale skin gleamed pearl-like, smooth and perfect in the soft light.

  “I didn’t want to…” Justin whispered. The pain in his soul threatened to burst it. He whirled around, perhaps hoping he could escape the torment hounding him if he just moved quickly enough, but he knew from long experience it was no use. He’d made his choice centuries ago, when he accepted the Dragon’s offer of eternal life in exchange for eternal servitude. If he’d known then what he knew now, would he have still made the same choices? Who knew? Certainly not Justin.

  The fight went out of him and memories overwhelmed him. His back thumped up against the wall as he let the pain take him. Slowly, so slowly he could feel the texture of the plaster surface in all its detail against the skin of his back, he slid to the floor, trusting in the wall’s support, until he felt his buttocks touch the carpet.

  “I was wrong…” Each word he spoke was a sliver of fear, a regret that stabbed him like a shard of glass in his heart. And each word could bring down upon him the wrath of the Dragon. The pain would be endless, unbearable, the damage physical as well as mental. And the injuries inflicted by the Dragon would not heal until the Dragon wished them to. The cuts would not close. The bruises would not heal. The pain would not cease, perhaps ever. Justin couldn’t be killed, but if the Dragon wished it, Justin could spend his eternity in endless torment.

  “I could have intimidated him,” Justin murmured. “Taken the skin, rendered him unconscious. Who would have believed him when he described what he saw? He’d never tell a soul, because people would think he’d had too much to drink or had sampled the fruits of a drug bust or lost his mind. He’d probably wonder if that wasn’t the truth himself.”

  But the dragon-like body that was the Wyrm was not fully under Justin’s control. As an underling, a dragonling, in fact, the Wyrm was an extension of the Dragon, and it had its own drive, its own agenda, its own missions. When the Wyrm wanted blood, Justin was merely a passenger in his own flesh, a watcher from within. Even the transformation was most often a matter of the Dragon’s bidding, out of his control. When he resisted the Dragon in the slightest way, he earned the kind of pa
in that would quickly kill a mere mortal, pain he endured until the Dragon felt he’d learned his lesson.

  His options were always the same. Do as he was bid or feel the lash of his master’s anger. He still resisted when he could, but he knew always that resistance was futile. The demons of guilt for the things he had done ate away at his soul, but he could no more change his actions than he could stop the world from spinning. Even as the accumulated pain of centuries of killing weighed upon him, he knew he could never inflict the amount of pain upon himself that the Dragon could.

  And all his killings weren’t futile. Sometimes he and the Dragon were in agreement. There were days when Justin understood that he must kill; there were people who deserved to die. Certainly he understood that! Had he not killed when he was still mortal? He’d certainly indulged in dealing death—in warfare and in what they would call justifiable homicide in today’s vernacular. But this night’s murder was neither of those things…

  “To have your foresight, master…” Justin whispered. “To assuage my conscience by knowing how each of these steps ultimately serves mankind…it would be a balm to my soul.”

  He ran through the events of this evening, trying to find another way out, something he could have done to stop them.

  He’d been in the alley, after returning from Tina’s to the club to await instructions. He’d been standing in the shadows, wondering why his master had sent him here, when the alarm had gone off, indicating somebody was about to open the kitchen door into the alley.

  Then he’d seen the cop find the skin, seen the fight with the Dropka disciple. From the moment the Dropka had appeared, he’d lost the option of dealing with the cop alone. And even then he’d known what the Dragon would demand. From the moment the cop touched the scales of the dragonling cocoon, his fate was sealed, no matter how much Justin fought it. Not killing him then and there had simply been a precautionary tactic—a mysterious, monstrously murdered corpse was the last thing he needed in an alley behind his home.

  Justin rose, shivered. He often hated what he’d become, but he saw no way to change it.

  Perhaps a shower would pull him out of the depression that always followed a kill.

  The shower didn’t help. Afterward, he crossed to the closet. Throwing the door open wide, he pulled out a robe and put it on. The warm cotton settled over his wet skin.

  You are my scalpel, Lord of Sterling.

  The Dragon’s words echoed in his mind from long ago, from the day when Justin had first voiced his doubts about his mission.

  Scalpels must cut deep to save the whole.

  That was undoubtedly the truth. But why did those words never give him comfort?

  He understood intellectually that his immortal master had a plan for the world, one which resulted in actions that seemed on the surface to be deadly, brutal, and hideous, but which served the greater good of the whole of mankind; but as the tool who carried out those terrible acts, his soul lived in torment. He could neither take comfort in the larger goals his master pursued, for his master rarely shared his plans with underlings, nor could he shake the guilt for his dreadful deeds.

  His mind understood. But his soul shrieked in unbearable pain.

  Justin looked about the room and saw an accusing gallery of ghostly figures whose deaths he had arranged over the centuries. They weren’t truly there, merely figments of his overwrought imagination, but they were still as real to him as they’d been on the day they died. They lived on in his memory as surely as they ever had in real life, forever trapped in that moment when they took their last breath while he watched. On the nights he killed, the images were most vivid, but the gallery of the dead never entirely vanished from his mind. Seeing them now, he knew there was no help for it. Sometimes he could hold them at bay, but not tonight.

  Ghostly faces stared at him like death masks, each one contorted in fear and pain. Justin tried to ignore them. He wished desperately that he could sleep. He could escape them if only he could reach that oblivion. Justin’s nightmares were always waking ones, for he slept the sleep of the dead.

  Mortals dreamed, but not Justin. He tried to remember what dreaming was like, but since the day he’d made his choice, he’d never again felt the soaring joy of a good dream, the terror of a nightmare. No warm summer days. No grave-cold horrors. His ghosts found him when he was awake. Tired, defenseless against them, but awake nonetheless.

  When he did sleep, it was as though he ceased to exist. Justin wondered sometimes if his lack of dreams meant his soul had left his body forever on the day he became immortal.

  If so, there was little he could about it now.

  Except regret the loss.

  And he supposed the Dragon had provided a substitute for dreaming—of a sort.

  The master’s appearances in the mirror were strangely spaced. Those glowing red eyes would look out at Justin three times in the same day, every day for months at a time; then Justin would go decades without ever seeing the long, spike-toothed face of his Dragon lord in a reflection.

  But the master often overwhelmed Justin’s sleeping mind. The Dragon had settled there long ago and the weight of its demands were crushing. Although Justin never dreamed as mortals did, he did have Dragon-sent visions. He would see the death of his next victim, and he would see himself as the slayer. He would see where, he would know when it would happen, and he would feel their blood on his claws.

  And then he would awaken and execute the Dragon’s command.

  Most of his victims had knowledge the Dragon could not permit to become public. The master didn’t allow anyone who was a threat to his security to walk the world for long, and it was part of Justin’s allegiance to ensure these people died.

  When the Dragon or one of its disciples saw a problem, Justin was required to eliminate it, just as he had killed Jack Madrone. He had not waited for a dream to do it. The Wyrm had known what was required of him and had carried out the mission, no matter how Justin had felt about it.

  It was only when Justin was unaware of the possible threat that the Dragon would cue him through the mirror or through a vision. If someone in a small town in Montana had somehow stumbled across evidence that might lead him to discover the master’s secret, Justin had a vision. And when he awoke, he would travel through the mirror and deal with the problem.

  Madrone’s image now joined the throng of the dead surrounding Justin—his victims. The security guard, Baxter, stood beside him. Both stared at him, accusing, causing a pain in his heart that threatened to devour him.

  The deaths were necessary. Justin knew that. He told himself that over and over again. But he never ceased to regret his part in them. From the Dragon’s very first order to kill that first hapless priest, a part of him had rebelled at what he was asked to do.

  But the Dragon required blood and death as the payment for the boon of endless life.

  And the price of his service was rapidly rising.

  The cost might soon be out of his reach.

  Justin opened a small drawer in his black lacquer night stand. He pulled out a tiny crystal vial of white powder. He tapped a bit of the powder into a sterling silver cup above an ebony lamp inlaid with ivory. From a jade decanter, he poured a few drops of water into the cup with the powder. With a twist of his fingers, the lamp sparked to life.

  Loathing himself even more than usual, Justin withdrew a syringe and rubber tubing from the drawer. Sitting in the soft chair beside the cabinet, he looped the rubber around his upper arm and pulled it tight with his teeth. He looked at the powder. Slowly, it began to melt and dissolve. When it was liquid, he sucked the heroin up with the syringe.

  It was a vice that he knew better than to indulge. His immortality and healing abilities spared him from the degradation and death that awaited virtually all junkies among normal humans. He wouldn’t even feel the terrible side effects of addiction—the wrenching pain, the chills, and the grinding need of withdrawal. But what was left of his self-respect died a little more
every time he resorted to the needle to banish his ghosts.

  Their images hovered before him. All of them, ancient ones and recent ones. Detective Madrone’s incredulous gaze watched him, as did Baxter’s. Then there was Becky Johnson, and the Italian priest who had fought so hard to live almost seven hundred years ago. A young bride, still in her wedding dress. Blackie Rogers, the cowboy. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and each one stared at him with burning questions in their eyes. Why? And why them?

  Justin closed his eyes. His hand cradled the needle with its promise of a few moments of blessed peace, of relief from his haunted past. He was strong enough to resist the need, he knew it. He just had to find that strength where it was buried in him, somewhere deep down under the centuries of regrets.

  The ghosts were stronger this time.

  He plunged the needle into his arm.

  Then something in the darkness moved. The other ghosts parted for it. It was the form of a woman, young and beautiful, looking away from him at something only she could see.

  “Gwendolyne…”

  Her ghostly image turned as if she had heard him, the train of her heavy velvet dress trailing across the floor. Ghost for the better part of a millennium, she still looked impossibly young to him. She pushed a strand of her long hair out of her face. He saw her upturned nose, her brown eyes, the long graceful neck he had kissed so carefully on their wedding night as an assurance to his child bride that there was nothing to fear.

  Her ghost stood before him now, searching for his face, but she could not see him cramped and slouched in the chair.

  “No.” That single word was a cry from his heart.

  Again the sound of his voice called to her, and again she searched in vain for him in the crowd of victims haunting the room.

  Justin? She mouthed the word. Her lovely, delicate hands reached out, as if blindly feeling her way through the impenetrable darkness of wrongful death.