CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Into the Shadows
Barbee shook his head dazedly.
"No!" He stood shuddering, clinging to the bedpost. A sudden sweat filmed his cold skin. He tried to breathe, and gasped a faint protest: "I don't believe it."
"You will," she purred, "as soon as you grasp your powers. Our ancestral gifts are always slow to awaken —the slowest usually the greatest. They tend to lie unused and even unsuspected, hidden by the dominant human heritage, until they waken of themselves—or are awakened by such an expert as Archer Glenn. Your father blundered by telling Rowena too abruptly, and her human part rebelled."
Trembling weakly, Barbee sat back on the bed.
"I'll not be—your Black Messiah!" he whispered faintly. "That—that's insanity. Anyhow, I don't believe you! I don't even believe you're here. Just something out of a whisky bottle!" He shook a threatening fist. "Get the devil out of here—before I scream."
"Go ahead and scream." She laughed at him silently, fine ears pricked up. "My mind web isn't nearly so powerful as yours—Nurse Hellar can't see me."
Barbee didn't scream. For two minutes he sat on the edge of the bed, watching the bright-eyed, expectant wolf. If she were just hallucination, born of delerium tremens, she was still a remarkably vivid and graceful and malicious illusion.
"You followed me away from Preston Troy's tonight," he accused her suddenly. "I know you were there—in another shape, probably. I saw your white coat with that little jade running wolf pinned to it, on a chair in his den."
"So what?" Her greenish eyes smiled mockingly. "I was only waiting for you, Barbee."
"I saw your picture in his bedroom." Barbee's voice was shaking. "And I saw him let himself into your apartment with his own key. What is he to you, April?"
Laughing again, the white wolf trotted to him and put her slender white paws on his trembling knees. Her long greenish eyes looked more than ever human— April Bell's. They looked eager and glad and yet faintly mocking, and they shone with tears.
"So that's why you've been trying to run away from me tonight, Barbee?"
Hoarsely he muttered, "Maybe it is."
"So that's all it is!" Her cold muzzle lifted as if impulsively to kiss him. "You silly, jealous devil! I told you that we're special beings, you and I, Barbee. We were born for a special purpose. It would be too bad if you didn't like me."
He rubbed angrily at the tingle of her icy kiss, demanding bleakly: "Who is Preston Troy?"
"Just my father." She tittered at his shocked unbelief. "All I told you about my childhood and the brutalities of that ignorant dairyman is true—I told you he wasn't my father and knew he wasn't."
The white bitch leered at him gleefully.
"You see, Mother had been a secretary of Preston's before she married the dairyman, and she still saw him whenever she could. The dairyman suspected—that's why he was so ready to believe that I was a witch and so cruel in his punishments. He never liked my red hair."
She chuckled reminiscently.
"But Preston was always generous," she said. "Of course he couldn't marry Mother—he'd had too many other secretaries. But he used to send us money and gifts in California—Mother would tell me they came from a mythical Aunt Agatha, before I knew about Preston. He has done a lot for me since she died— he even paid for my analysis at Glennhaven." Her greenish gaze mocked him. "So you were jealous, Barbee?"
He touched her silky fur with uncertain sweaty fingers.
"I guess I was," he muttered hoarsely. "Anyhow, I can't help being glad—"
He paused as light struck him. The door was swinging open. Nurse Hellar peered into the room with an expression of mild reproof on her broad face.
"Really, Mr. Barbee!" she admonished him softly. "You'll catch cold if you sit up all night talking to yourself. Let me tuck you in bed." She started resolutely toward him, and the white bitch nipped at her muscular ankle. "Gracious, what was that?" She peered at the redly grinning wolf without seeming to see anything, and threatened Barbee in a somewhat shaken voice: "If you aren't in bed when I get back with the hypo—"
"You won't be," the she-wolf told him, as Nurse Hellar retreated apprehensively. "Because it's time for us to go."
"Where?" he whispered uneasily.
"To take care of your friend Sam Quain," purred the voice of April Bell. "He's about to get away from the sheriff's men. The high water has stopped them, and he's climbing a trail they don't know about. He's carrying that box. He has the only weapon that can ever harm you, Barbee, and we must stop him before he learns to use it. I've found a linkage of probability that we can grasp, when the moment comes."
Stubbornly, Barbee clenched his fists.
"I won't hurt Sam," he muttered grimly. "Not even if I am bewitched!"
"But you aren't, Barbee." Gently, the white bitch rubbed her silken shoulder against his knees. "Can't you realize that you're one of us?—completely, now, because your last human ties were broken on Sardis Hill tonight."
"Huh?" He sat blinking at her. "What do you mean?"
"So you still don't feel your wonderful gifts, Barbee?" She smiled up at him with a kindly mockery. "I'll show you what I mean when we come to Sardis Hill." Her tapered head nodded urgently. "Now it's time to go."
He sat back resolutely.
"I still don't believe I could be this Child of Night," he said flatly. "And I won't harm Sam!"
"Come," she whispered. "You'll believe when I show you."
"No!" Shivering in cold rigidity, Barbee clung with clammy hands to the iron bed. "I can't be any such monstrous—thing!"
"You'll be our leader, Will," she told him softly. "Our new chieftain in the long fight for our lost dominion—until a stronger one takes your place. You and I are the most powerful in generations, but a child with both our genes will have still less of the human taint."
She dropped to all fours again and nipped playfully at his knee. "Let's go."
He tried to resist, but his clinging fingers slipped from the bedpost. His wistful longing for the winged might of the oil company's pterosaur came back; it turned swiftly to a ruthless, burning eagerness. His body flowed and grew. The change was easy now, for all that awkwardness and pain was gone; and it brought him a fresh, savage strength.
The white bitch beside him was changing too. She reared to her hind feet and grew swiftly taller. The flowing curves of her white body filled, and the fur was gone, and she flung the burnished red hair back of her bare shoulders. Fiercely eager, Barbee gathered the slim woman in his leathery wings, and he kissed her cool, tender lips with the giant saurian's snout. Laughing, she gave his hard scaled head a ringing slap.
"We've another appointment first." She slipped out of his folded wings and sprang astride his armored back. "With probability and your old friend Quain."
Barbee looked at the reinforced window, and it melted out of its frame. He slithered through the opening, with the girl crouching low upon him, and perched for a moment with his mighty talons gripping the sill. He looked back, with a tiny shudder of disgust, for the ugly human husk behind him. To his faint surprise, the white hospital bed was empty. That minor puzzle didn't trouble him, however. It was good to be strong and free again, and he liked the feel of the girl astride him.
"Why, Mr. Barbee!" He heard Nurse Hellar's breathless voice and felt the unpleasant glow of light as she opened the door. He didn't let her see him, and a comical consternation twisted her face as she looked under the bed and into the corners of the empty room, carrying her hypodermic needle. "Wherever are you?"
Barbee felt a demoniac impulse to manifest himself and show her, but April Bell's flat hand slapped his scaly flank reprovingly. Leaving Nurse Hellar to solve her own problem, he spread his black wings and launched himself awkwardly from the window.
The night was still cloudy and the brisk south wind laden with icy drizzle. The shape of things was clear to his new senses, however; the damp chill was merely stimulating now, and all his tremb
ling fatigue was gone. He beat the rain-washed air with long easy strokes, soaring westward.
A frightened dog barked suddenly in the yard of a dark farmhouse beneath them, and Barbee dived to terrify it into whimpering silence with his own hissing scream. A joyous strength lifted his wings. This was life. All his old uncertainties and conflicts and frustrations were left behind. At last he was free.
They lifted into the west. Lights of cars moved over the flanks of the night-mantled hills below, lanterns swung, and flashlights made furtive gleams. But the manhunt, he saw with the saurian's eyes, was making slow progress. Flood waters had come tumbling down from the higher canyons since he left Sam Quain at the cave; Bear Creek and Laurel Canyon were impassable now with white water and grinding boulders. The sheriff's men were halted at the ford.
"They'll never catch him," murmured April Bell. "We'll have to use that linkage, to help him slip on the rocks and kill himself."
"No," Barbee muttered reluctantly. "I won't do that—"
"I think you will," the white witch told him, "when you see what happened on Sardis Hill."
A queer dread burdened his pinions as he flapped reluctantly westward again, following the black thread of the highway twisting up over the folds of the higher hills. He soared over the narrow saddle of the pass and wheeled low above the steep, sharp curve beyond, his strange eyes searching.
Three cars were stopped beside the pavement above the hairpin, and a black ambulance. A little knot of curious late motorists stood on the edge of the road, peering down the slope at the flattened ruin of the Foundation sedan. Two men in white beside it were expertly lifting something to a stretcher.
Barbee saw what they lifted and shuddered in the air.
"Your body," the white girl told him softly. "Your powers were grown, and you didn't need it any longer. I caught the linkage of probability, while you were driving down the hill, to help set you free."
The men were spreading a blanket over the unpleasant object on the stretcher.
"Free?" Barbee whispered hoarsely. "You mean— dead?"
"No," purred April Bell. "Now you'll never die— not if we kill Sam Quain before he learns how to use his weapon. You're the first of us in modern times to be strong enough to survive, but even so your human taint still made you weak and unhappy. It was time for you to be separated."
He staggered dazedly, on stiffened wings.
"Sorry, darling." He heard the throb of a sudden tenderness beneath the friendly mischief in her voice. "I suppose it's hard to lose your body, even though you don't need it now. But you really should be happy."
"Happy?" he rasped bitterly. "To be dead?"
"No—free!" Eagerness trembled in her husky whisper. "You'll soon feel differently, Will. For all your great ancestral powers will be awakening, now that the human barriers are gone. And now you own all the heirlooms and the precious secrets our clans and covens have kept through those dark ages when men thought they had won."
His long wings faltered, shuddering in the air.
"Darling—you mustn't be afraid!" Warmly, her fingers stroked his scales. "I guess you do feel strange and lonely—the way I felt when they first told me. But you won't be alone very long." A quiet elation lifted her voice. "You see, Archer Glenn says I am also strong enough to survive."
He wheeled slowly, on weary wings.
"Of course I must wait until our heir is born—a son pure enough to father our race again." He felt her body tighten to that indomitable purpose. "But then I can be separated, too," she added softly. "To be with you forever!"
"Huh!" He snorted dully. "Fellow revenants!"
"Don't feel too sorry for yourself, Will Barbee!" She laughed at him lightly, tossing her burnished hair back and digging her bare heels into his scaly hide. "You're a vampire now, and you might as well learn to like it. Your old friend Quain is the one in need of sympathy."
"No!" he gasped, unconvinced. "I won't believe you."
He drifted lower on leaden wings, wheeling slowly above the two men carrying the human part of him up from that smashed car to the waiting ambulance. One of them slipped on the wet rocks, and they almost spilled the thing under the blanket. He knew that didn't matter now.
"It used to give me the creepiest feeling, when Archer was first teaching me the old arts," April Bell was murmuring joyously. "To think of hiding in the dark, maybe even in your own grave, and going out at night to feed! That used to seem so gruesome, but now I think it's going to be fun."
Silently, shivering in the air, Barbee watched the two men slide their burden into the ambulance. He was wondering dully about the separate energy complexes of the mind, and he wished Sam Quain had told him a little more about what the Mondrick expedition found under those old burial mounds in the Ala-shan.
"That's the way our people used to live," the white witch chattered cheerfully, "before men learned how to fight us. It's the natural way, because our free mind webs have such wonderful powers. They can survive almost forever, unless they're destroyed by light or silver or those horrible stones men used to bury with us."
She seemed to listen, peering northeastward.
"It's time to find Quain," she said. "I can feel the linkage forming."
Heavily he flew northeast. He flapped low above the sheriff's men, waiting above the white water at the Bear Creek ford.
"Don't mind them," April Bell called scornfully. "They don't have silver bullets and they don't know how to see us. Men have forgotten how to fight us since the terrible times of the Inquisition—they don't even understand their dogs. Sam Quain is our only danger now."
He flew over the ford and up the foaming torrent that came down Laurel Canyon. April Bell's slim arm pointed, and he saw Sam Quain. Staggering to the weight of the green-painted box on his shoulder, Quain was high on that narrow, unguessed trail which twisted breathtakingly above the mad white water.
"Wait!" cooed April Bell. "Wait until we can seize the chance that he will slip and fall—that's the linkage I feel."
Barbee wheeled deliberately above the ragged ledges. Even now he couldn't help admiring Sam Quain as a brave and dangerous enemy. Defying desperate odds and long exhaustion, the man was making a splendid effort. Against any lesser antagonist, he might have had a chance.
For at last, climbing half-obliterated steps the Indians must have cut, he pushed the precious box ahead of him and dragged himself to the top of the cliff. He rested for only a moment, panting, calmly watching the lights of the sheriff's men beyond the ford. Then, with a stubborn weary strength, he lifted the heavy wooden box to his shoulder again. "Now!" cried April Bell.
With silent black wings half folded, Barbee dived.
Sam Quain seemed suddenly aware of the danger. He tried to get back from the precipice, and swayed as he began to lose his balance. His haggard face stared up, slowly twisting into a grim, red-stubbled grin of horror. He must have known how to see free mind webs, for his mouth opened and Barbee thought he heard his own name shouted in a tone of utmost anguish: "So it's you—Will Barbee—"
The talons of the pterosaur caught the iron-bound box. The seeping reek of that ancient, deadly thing in it filled Barbee's nostrils with a lethal sweetness. The very touch of the box numbed him with a strange chill. His wings were paralyzed, but he clung desperately to the box.
Torn out of Sam Quain's clutching fingers, the box fell over the cliffs. Barbee dropped with it, lifeless with that seeping emanation, until the box slipped out of his frozen talons. He spread stiffly painful wings to check his fall, great eyes fixed on the plunging box.
It struck a ledge far below and shattered into wooden splinters and twisted scraps of white sheet silver. Barbee saw blackened silver weapons, and dissolving bits of yellow bone, and a disk-shaped object that glowed with a terrible dull violet luminescence, to the eyes of the saurian, radiation more damaging than daylight.
That dreadful glow reminded him of the descriptions of an atomic accident, in which an experimenter was killed at Los
Alamos. Was radioactive uranium, he wondered, the metal more deadly than silver? If it were, the witches in charge of atomic security would see to it that none was available to such men as Quain for use in killing other witches.
That glowing disk shattered on the ledge and went down with the specimen skeleton of lycanthropus and the old silver weapons and all the rest into the grinding chaos of foam and mud and rocks and wild water in the swollen creek.
Life returned to Barbee's wings. He flapped heavily away from the spreading cloud of evil malodor that came up from the broken disk. Still weak and shaken, he alighted clumsily on the rocks above the roaring stream. April Bell slipped off his back.
"You were splendid, Barbee!" Her voice was a velvet caress. "That Stone was our only real danger— you are the only one of the clan strong enough to grasp that box; the deadly emanations of the Stone would paralyze any of the rest of us before we could get near enough to touch it." He shivered with pleasure as her electric fingers scratched his heaving, scaly flank. "Now let's finish the job, and kill Sam Quain."
Clinging with trembling talons to the wet boulder where he perched, Barbee shook his long armored head.
"What harm can Sam do?" he hissed reluctantly. "That box held his only weapon, and all the proof he could use to get any support. Now he's just an ordinary fugitive from the law, suspected of three murders. Without that box, his story is pure insanity—such witches as Dr. Glenn can take care of him."
He reached for the red-haired girl with a long leather wing.
"Suppose he does get away from the sheriff's men? Suppose he's fool enough to try to tell somebody his story? Or, more likely, write it? Suppose some unwary publisher should dare to print it—disguised, perhaps, to look like fiction?
"Would the witches worry?
"I think not. The witches who review books would doubtless dismiss it as a trivial bit of escapist fantasy. Suppose it came into the hands of such a distinguished psychiatrist as Dr. Glenn? I can see his sleepy smile. An interesting case history, he might say—and I can see his lazy shrug.
Darker Than You Think Page 28
