She nodded. George looked at Peter, who didn’t appear to object.
“Well, as long as the cadaver hasn’t been dead too long, I can always take a little. If the poor soul lost a lot of blood, it’s even less likely to be noticed. I keep it refrigerated, and when my assistants ask, I say it’s for comparative analysis. Also, Peter is unaffected by tainted blood. Alcohol and drugs in the blood are disagreeable, but disease-contaminated blood is okay. He doesn’t even notice. When donors test positive for HIV, the blood is supposed to be disposed of. I get my hands on it.”
Now Meaghan seemed really confused, and Peter was starting to look a little uncomfortable.
“But I thought it had to be, um, y’know, fresh?”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Peter said quickly, “It’s much better that way, and the (bloodsong) . . . let’s say the high is better. But it is sufficient.
“Don’t be fooled, Meaghan. In many ways I am the monster of legend. I was born a warrior, and died a warrior. For the first four hundred and fifty years of my immortal life, I look my sustenance the way the majority of my kind do. From humans. Some of them offered it and some of them did not. For a time it seemed much like hunting wild animals. I enjoyed it.”
“Why did you stop?”
Again, George was surprised. Meaghan was not stunned by Peter’s revelations, or the tone of them, only more curious.
“For several decades I had thought more and more about the hunt, and it began to hurt me inside. It was an ache of the spirit, and then I thought, perhaps the ache was in my soul. I didn’t know, even as a boy in a land which had been a center of Christian faith for a millennium, even there I did not know if the soul truly existed. And now I found myself wondering again. Did such a thing exist, and if so, could such a creature as myself retain it through this dark metamorphosis?”
The three were silent for a moment, Peter gazing out the window, Meaghan at Peter and George at his shoes.
“But that’s all another part of the story. I don’t really want to talk about this anymore.” He looked back at Meaghan. “I want you to trust me; in all honesty, I want you to like me. But I really don’t want to talk about this anymore right now.”
George continued to look at his shoes, but from the corner of his eye, he saw Meaghan take Peter’s hand. The moment lasted until it became more than a moment, and then it was broken by the ringing of the phone.
George looked at his watch to see that it was 6:30 in the morning, and Peter picked up the phone on the second ring. He had to step over Janet’s body to get to it, and that drew Meaghan’s attention to the black bag. She curled up a little then, drawing her knees up under her. As Peter listened and grunted in reply to what he heard, George slid over next to Meaghan on the couch and held her hand in his, the same hand that had reached for Peter’s.
“I’m sorry for all of this. We’ll have her out of here soon,” was all he could say, and she looked at him then, grateful.
“Thank you. If you hadn’t been here, I would have thought I’d gone crazy for sure, and I probably could’ve convinced myself of it.”
“Peter called. How could I say no? He knew I was the only one you could talk to, and besides, he was . . .”
George left the word unsaid, but he could see in Meaghan’s eyes that she heard it anyway.
Starving.
Peter hung up the phone. The news was bad, but it confirmed everything in his head.
“Meaghan, you look like you’re doing much better than George or I could have expected with all this. I’m glad. But this thing is far from over. The man who killed Janet is still out there, and he used her to try to kill both of us tonight. It’s obvious he didn’t know of my nature, but surprise only works once. He killed Roger Martin and Dan Benedict, and that was Ted on the phone telling me that the janitor from Martin’s building is dead and a nurse at the hospital also. Ted said it wasn’t pretty.
“We don’t have time to waste. If you hadn’t noticed, the sun’s going to be up very soon, and we’ve got to find this man before he has a chance to come back for us. All three of us need sleep and we’re going to get it between now and eleven, when the hunt begins.
“The man we’re looking for is a priest. Not dressed like a priest—he is a priest. The circumstances of Benedict and the janitor’s deaths confirm for me that what we’re dealing with is a representative of an arm of the Vatican which hasn’t been known to be active in years. This man is a sorcerer.”
He could see both of their mouths begin to open, to question.
“Yes, magic is real, demons are real, and we’ll talk about them later. This man is very powerful and very dangerous, and no, I have no idea if the pope knows about him or not.” He knew Meaghan’s head was spinning, but it would do no good to let up.
“What it comes down to now is not revenge, not solving the crime or the mystery. Those things often involve patience. It comes down to getting him before he gets us. You follow?”
“Yes.”
And he could see that she did. Couldn’t understand it, but could see it.
“Any questions?”
“Plenty, but they’ll wait until morning—until eleven. Even with all this, I don’t think I’ll have any trouble falling asleep. This is as close to an all-nighter as I’ve pulled in years, and certainly the longest night of my life.”
“They can be very long,” Peter agreed.
“What about . . .” Meaghan began, glancing at Janet’s covered corpse before turning away and falling silent.
“You go to bed now,” Peter said. “George will fill you in on the arrangements later today.”
Meaghan stood and walked to the bag. She did not bend to touch it and her eyes did not linger on it. Instead, she looked back at the two men, one old and one infinitely older.
“I loved her,” she said.
And the two men could not help but avert their eyes until she turned again and walked to her bedroom. When the door was closed, they went about their business, though they could hear her sobbing, finally.
After a few minutes the place was quiet.
12
A LETTER FROM FATHER LIAM MULKERRIN, 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:
Things do not go well at all. For each loose string I eliminate, two more seem to appear in its place. Last night I discovered that one such string is a Defiant One. I know not how he came to be involved with the renegade cardinal, but he most absurdly poses as a detective. He has apparently lived under this guise for the better part of a decade.
Obviously, he and the woman he protects must be eliminated. However, at this juncture, knowing that the Blessed Event we have been working toward and which the German Defiant One and the renegade unwittingly conspired to postpone, knowing that the date of that wonderful exercise is imminent, I must take drastic measures.
I know Your Holiness would prefer that I wait for your instructions, but I cannot. I pray to our Lord and all those at his command that you understand. I must act.
Today, while the Defiant One must sleep, I go to the hotel where the renegade hides. I will force from him the location of the book and kill him once I have obtained that most sacred of tomes. I will then leave Boston behind, along with two, the “detective” among them, who have some knowledge of these events which have transpired. After the Blessed Event, I will return here to Boston and dispatch these two, as well as any who might have been made to believe without the book as proof.
I realize that all of these actions are in direct conflict with your orders, but whatever punishment may come from my insubordination, I will gladly accept so that the Blessed Event may come to pass as we have planned.
Yours in Christ,
Liam
13
JOE BOUDREAU HAD BEEN COLLECTING books since he was a teenager. He’d started with Ian Fleming, and now, at thirt
y-two, had become completely enamored with Andrew Vachss’s Burke and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, a hell of a long way from Bond. He’d always wanted to be a writer, had even sold a short story in college, but he didn’t have the patience.
So he sold books instead. Sure, he had a college degree. He’d graduated from Boston University with honors, an English major, of course. And then he’d done what he thought he’d always wanted to do (ever since he gave up the notion of being a writer). He taught literature to high-school kids.
He quit that, too.
Yep. Joe Boudreau had earned himself quite a reputation as a quitter. Had taken guitar lessons as a kid. Quit. Played Pop Warner football. Quit that, too. Took a job in high school scooping cones at Baskin-Robbins. You guessed it. Then there was the writing, of course. No questions in his folks’ mind where that would end up, and truth be told, it was sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy for him. His grandparents, his aunts and uncles, his parents, even his second cousins—they all figured Joe for a quitter.
Which of course he was.
So when he started teaching high school, everybody expected him to quit. The first year was great. He had a couple of troublesome kids, but for the most part, they were okay. He had confidence, he had passion, and he had a girlfriend, Martha. On their first date Martha had told him that she’d always said when she was a little girl that she would grow up and become a teacher, and that she would marry a teacher. They were made for each other. She shared his interest in modern writers, not just the classics like so many other bookworms.
But the kids only got worse, or Joe got tired of their disinterest, or of them, or all of the above. Martha was going for her master’s at BC; she wanted to teach college.
Joe quit teaching, and Martha quit Joe. Their moonlit talks about Philip Roth and Robert B. Parker, Michael Herr and William Gibson, their love of Harvard Square, their favorite TV shows, the dog they never got around to buying (his name was Rusty), the favorite ice cream they shared when they couldn’t resist it anymore, none of it mattered. It seemed Martha had put it all behind her like a drunken one-night stand, and all because he’d quit.
Not to mention the fact that she’d fallen for Paul Wilson, a tenured English professor at BC.
From that moment on, though Joe remained slavishly faithful to the family that had always made a big joke out of his lack of motivation, his only real loyalty, his only real passion, his only real friends, were the books. So there, in Harvard Square, where he and “the ex” had enjoyed so many bottles of Italian wine and viewed wonderful films in French that would later be made into terrible American films, there he opened up his own place . . . the Book Store.
And that’s what it was. New and old, used or not, hard or soft, romance, horror, science fiction, mystery, and even those works of fiction with the dubious distinction of being called “mainstream”—he carried them all. But only fiction. What interested him were stories, and if he wasn’t interested in something, he couldn’t sell it to someone else. So no Madonna bios or nudie books, no art books, no how-to books, none of that. Just stories in the Book Store.
He did a booming business. In less than two years, it was the most popular bookstore in Harvard Square, where the only type of retail shop more popular than bookstores were ice-cream shops. (Funny, Joe didn’t cat ice cream anymore.) Now, a full five years after he’d opened the store, he was a legend in the area. He’d never been happier and it had never, but never, occurred to him to quit.
Until today.
He hadn’t even opened the book that lay in the locked drawer behind the cash register, but he’d seen the cover and the look on his cousin’s face, and he didn’t want to look inside. He’d always said he didn’t want anything that wasn’t fiction in the store, and he had hated to make an exception. But the guy was his nana’s nephew, his mother’s cousin, so what was he to say? No, he didn’t want to open that book. But for the first time he’d thought about quitting.
Thank God for the children, then. For that’s what saved him. Nothing gave him more pleasure, especially in light of the guilt he felt for abandoning his former students, than selling books to kids. Teenagers especially, were terribly hard to reach, and Joe took a special pleasure in recommending books to them, or helping them to locate or special-order something.
Today it was a boy he’d never seen, only about twelve years old, sandy blond hair and blue eyes. He might have been the all-American boy of yesteryear, that bizarre myth, but he was not. He was the urban-American boy of today, with torn blue jeans, high-top sneakers, a black concert T-shirt, a ring through his nose, and a skateboard under his arm.
But what he wore wasn’t important.
It was what he said.
“Got any James Bond books?”
Ever the cynic, Joe gave the kid the once-over. No “excuse me,” not even a “hey, mister.” Just the question.
“Sure,” said Joe. “The latest John Gardner is over on the espionage shelf.”
The kid’s eyebrows knitted then, like Joe was an idiot or something.
“No way, man. I want the old stuff. The ones they made the Connery movies from. All the other Bonds are lame. D’you got Goldfinger?”
Now Joe was smiling. He chided himself for ever having thought about quitting.
Eleven o’clock and all is well! At least that’s what Meaghan wanted to bellow as she rolled out of bed. She had lived through the longest night of her life. Out her window she could see that it was another chill, overcast winter day. She wondered if that would make it a little easier on Peter.
Poor Peter.
She knew how crazy her thoughts were, but she couldn’t help them. She’d been through it enough times since she’d woken up and lain there thinking. He was not human. Some kind of creature of legend but he was here, real . . . sleeping on her couch.
And she loved it.
She still hurt, no question about that. It would be a long while before she got over Janet’s death, and not just her death but the manner of it. Something truly unnatural was happening around her, really happening. And yet, with reality as seemingly fragile as it was, Meaghan felt freer than she ever had to let the truth break loose from its moorings.
The truth. The truth was she had loved Janet more than she had ever loved anyone, and she no longer cared who knew that. They’d been lovers, but so much more, and it was Peter who helped her to see that. The truth was that she’d been waiting all her life for something to happen to her, something violent, something to which she could react with the passion and energy she had been saving like a virgin for the wedding bed, ever since she could remember. Since she’d been a little girl. Now that chance was here, that excitement was real.
And Peter was responsible for that, too.
The truth was that she and Peter and other new friends like that cop Ted and Dr. Marcopoulos were all in danger of losing their lives. They were the target of a lunatic unleashed by the Roman Catholic Church, the faith in which she’d been raised. Obviously, some of their secrets were about to be released from their moorings. Some truths about to be told. Only they weren’t going to enjoy it as much as Meaghan was enjoying her own release.
The truth was that in one form or another, every horror story she’d ever read had a grain of truth, and everything she’d ever known about the church was a lie. Oh, ever since high school she’d thought of it as a hotbed of hypocrisy, ever since she’d walked in on her ultra-uptight religious mother ramming a vibrator between her legs only a year before both her parents were killed. But this was different. Peter didn’t say there was no God.
“As a matter of fact,” he’d said before she’d gone to her bedroom last night, “I can almost guarantee his existence.”
She wondered about that. Wherever He was, He wasn’t in church. Sure, Peter had said it was only a small sect of the church, but he’d also said it had been there since the foundation of Christianity. So maybe the pope and all the rest of the clergy who weren’t involved were somewhat faithful�
�that didn’t mean that these other guys didn’t have influence when it came to matters of dogma. That would certainly explain a lot. Like why the church was still in the Dark Ages.
But of course, all of the little hypocrisies, labeling music and rerating films, all of it added up to nothing when you factored in evil. True evil. Capital E. And for all the centuries they’d been warning you against it, teaching how to avoid it in a tone that said they were all too familiar with it, with true Evil. And, well, they were.
Eleven o’clock and all was not well. There was a lot happening that she didn’t have a handle on. Though she knew it would be unrealistic to think she ought to. A lot of people were dead.
She shivered. It still had not really sunk in what had happened with Janet. She’d seen it, pretty close up, too. But her mind was still trying to convince her it was a nightmare. It wasn’t working. She couldn’t help but wonder how George was going to “take care” of Janet’s corpse, while also guaranteeing that she get a proper burial. Then again, he was the medical examiner.
Now as Meaghan pulled out clothes to wear—Levi’s, a man’s shirt, and a cotton sweater—she looked at the clock and realized she’d been wrong about both things.
It was also not eleven o’clock.
She carried her clothes with her as she tiptoed past a sleeping Peter to the shower. When she was done in the bathroom, she pulled on the shirt and pants and walked softly back into the living room. Peter was still sleeping, but she figured it was time to wake him up.
She stood over him for a moment, looking at his face.
Peaceful. So peaceful it was hard to imagine the savage power that lay within his sleeping form. And yet she believed every word he’d said, and still felt a powerful attraction between them. It was ridiculous. She kept telling herself she ought to be scared or disgusted, but she wasn’t. Just fascinated.
Meaghan looked at the clock and saw that it was indeed time, then bent over to shake Peter awake. Before she could touch him, he was sitting up on the couch so fast they almost bumped heads.
Of Saints and Shadows (1994) Page 14
