Knight's Fall

by Angela Henry

  “I’m so sorry to bother you, Dr. Grace. But you wanted to be informed if anyone called asking for Victor Buchard.”

  “And?” He sat up abruptly, fixing the thin nervous woman with his intense piercing blue gaze. She noticeably flinched, and he smiled. He intimidated the staff, and it amused him to no end.

  “Reception just called and said they got a call a few minutes ago from a man asking to speak to Victor Buchard.”

  “Did this man give his name?”

  “No, doctor.”

  “And what did they tell him?”

  “That no one by that name has ever worked here, just as you instructed.”

  “Thank you, Jan, and can you get Zander Ptolemy on the line for me, please?”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  He watched as the woman scurried from his office and then checked his watch. It was after two o’clock, meaning Ptolemy had missed his noon deadline, making him officially a day late in delivering his latest batch of reanimated brain tissue. Grace wondered if the delay had anything to do with someone calling looking for his brother. His phone buzzed, and he picked it up, assuming it was Jan putting his call through. It wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Grace, but Zander Ptolemy’s not answering his phone. Would you like me to keep trying?”

  “That won’t be necessary.” He slammed the phone down in the receiver.

  He realized he’d been too lax in his dealings with Ptolemy, and it was high time he paid him another little visit to discourage any further delays in the delivery of his product and to make sure he’d disposed of Vic as he’d been instructed. For all Grace knew, his former research assistant had gotten loose and had devoured not only his brother, but also the latest batch of reanimated brain tissue.

  On his way to his car, Grace marveled at the genius of his drug. The effects couldn’t be transmitted by bite because it wasn’t a virus. Ingesting the pills only affected the user, who over time would develop a taste for living human flesh. Unlike a typical zombie outbreak, which can snowball very quickly and be quelled just as fast, NeCro acted slowly over time. Even the name made him laugh until his sides hurt. It was his own private joke that the masses would be taking an antidepressant manufactured by and named after a company whose meaning meant ancient cemetery. And he knew most of them wouldn’t give a damn even if they did know what the name meant, as long as it made them feel good. By the time the powers that be realized there was a problem, it would be too late. NeCro use would have already spread across the nation and around the world, slowly wiping out the human population along the way. It would probably take a few years, but Grace had all the time in the world to wait.

  The sight of all four of his tires as flat as pancakes greeted him when he reached the parking garage. He kicked the side of the car in a rage, leaving behind an ugly dent. But when he reached for his cell phone in his jacket pocket to call security, the unmistakable feel of a gun muzzle in his back stopped him cold.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said the female voice behind him. “I’ll take that.” A leprous hand reached around and snatched the phone from his hand. Grace heard the sound of breaking plastic as his phone was dropped on the ground and stomped on.

  “Crystal?” he ventured, though he knew it was her. He should have never trusted Duquesne to get rid of her. He should have done it himself.

  “Don’t you say my name, you asshole,” she whispered.

  “Crystal, honey, you’re sick. Let me help you.”

  “Turn around, slowly,” she commanded, and he complied and held up his hands to show her he meant her no harm.

  “What are you planning to do with that thing? Don’t be foolish. We can talk about this, can’t we?” Once he’d turned around to face her completely, he was a bit stunned by her appearance but not surprised. She didn’t have much longer, possibly a week, maybe two. He knew that by now the hunger had gotten hold of her, and soon she wouldn’t be able to control her urges. And once the hunger reached a fever pitch, the brain matter would have cannibalized all her healthy cells and she’d die. Not that it mattered one way or another to Grace because he had no intention of letting her get out of that garage alive.

  “It’s no fun, is it?” asked Crystal, pressing the barrel of the gun against his temple and smiling.

  “I beg your pardon?” Grace winced a bit at the sight of her smile. She looked like a desiccated Jack o’ lantern and smelled worse than a slaughterhouse.

  “Not being in control,” she continued. “It’s no fun having someone else calling the shots, is it?”

  “Of course, it isn’t, and I can certainly understand why you’re—”

  “You understand?” she shouted. “You understand what? Rotting from the inside out? Hair falling out by the handful, skin peeling off in strips, and being sick to your stomach at your own reflection? And what about the cravings for the very drug that’s slowly killing you, and then the cravings for the drug stop and are replaced by cravings for . . . for . . .” Her voice broke, and she began to sob.

  Grace tried to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but she jumped back and fired the gun. The bullet whizzed over his head, and he fell to the floor, holding up his hands in an attempt to shield himself.

  “Don’t you dare touch me!” she raged. “Why did you do this to me? What did I ever do to you?”

  “Crystal, I can help you. I swear. You need to let me take you to my lab, where we can wean you off the drug in a controlled environment. I won’t lie to you. It won’t be easy and you may never regain your health 100 percent, but my research team and I will do everything we can to ensure that you live a full normal life again. I promise.” Grace slowly got back to his feet, his eyes never leaving the gun.

  “How dare you say that when you’re the cause of what’s happened to me? You and Alastair used me as a damned guinea pig for your drug!”

  “I’ll admit there were problems with that first batch of NeCro. We were naïve. We thought it was safe. And it is safe for most people. But a small percentage of people, such as you, developed devastating side effects. But they can be reversed. You have my word.”

  The lies rolled off of Grace’s tongue with ease. And he could tell that, despite her rage, what he’d said was getting to her. She still had the gun trained on him, but she searched his face for any trace of insincerity. He was careful to keep his eyes soft and his voice low and soothing. It was like trying to catch a mangy stray cat with a can of tuna so he could drown it in a barrel. But in Crystal’s case, he was using hope. The stupid woman truly wanted to believe she could get her life back, even as the reanimated brain tissue running through her body was wreaking havoc on her few remaining healthy cells. And even if what he was telling her were true and they could stop what the NeCro was doing to her, the effects were irreversible. She’d still look like a monster. She’d have to live as a recluse for the rest of her life. Grace wasn’t kind. But he knew that killing her was probably the kindest thing he could do. Besides, he could use her body as a research tool to refine the drug and make it work even better.

  “Will you trust me, Crystal? Will you put that gun away and let me help you?”

  He reached out his hand for her to take as the sound of a car horn from outside made her jump and glance away from him for just a second. Grace lunged at Crystal, and she startled and shot him point-blank in the chest. The force of the bullet sent him staggering back, but he didn’t fall down. Crystal stared in shock as Grace looked down at the wound and the blood pooling under his shirt, first in annoyance, then in anger. His patience had officially run out. His eyes narrowed, and he threw back his head and roared.

  The veins in his neck bulged, and Crystal couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing when something started growing out of Grace’s back, tearing right through his shirt and suit jacket. They were wings. What had come out of Grace’s back were a pair of black wings tipped in silver. The gun slipped from Crystal’s limp trembling fingers as she stumbled backward and fell. Grace’s
chest expanded, and a wisp of smoke drifted out of the bullet hole, closely followed by the bullet itself, which made a metallic pinging noise as it hit the concrete garage floor. Then the wound closed, not even leaving behind the slightest trace that it had been there. Grace pulled his shredded clothes off like they were dead skin as he walked toward Crystal.

  “What . . . what are you?” Her voice came out in barely a whisper, and she couldn’t move. He loomed over her, with his wings blocking out the already dim florescent lighting until he filled her entire field of vision and there was nowhere else to look but at him.

  “You should have trusted me, Crystal,” he said in a much deeper voice than his usual one. “I would have made sure your death was quick. But now it’s just going to hurt . . . a lot.” He plucked her effortlessly from the floor by her throat with one hand and shook her so violently she thought her neck, as well as every other bone in her body, would snap.

  And her neck surely would have snapped had a car not come around the corner. Over Grace’s shoulder Crystal could see the driver’s mouth fall open in shock at the sight of the winged man, and his foot must have hit the accelerator instead of the brake because the car not only kept on coming but sped up. Grace’s wings began to flap, and he flew several feet in the air just in time before the car could hit him. But in the process he lost his grip on Crystal and dropped her. She hit the ground and managed to scramble behind one of the parked cars.

  The terrified driver hit a concrete beam and fell out of his car, screaming in terror as Grace hovered over him, wings flapping and eyes glowing blue. His screaming caused other people to come running and forced Grace to fly off into the dark recesses of the garage, where he couldn’t be seen. Crystal managed to get to her stolen car, shaking so badly it took her three tries to get the key in the ignition before she started the engine and tore out of the garage. But she’d be back. And next time she’d be bringing what she’d found in the trunk.

  ****

  Desi had been staring at her computer screen so long and hard that her eyes were dry and her head ached. Damn that Louis Charles and his cryptic information, though it was more than she had before. She’d gone straight back to EA headquarters and logged onto EOIS, which stood for Equinox Online Information System. She could have handed the query over to one of the EA’s librarians to research for her, but Kale apparently had them busy searching for anything they could find on astral projection. That was her new theory on how David Granger had vanished before her eyes. She thought he’d never been in the room with her to begin with and had projected his astral self into the interrogation room while his physical body escaped. And once he’d left the building, his astral self vanished. But as far as Desi was concerned, Rena Kale screwed up.

  Images of Cleopatra filled Desi’s screen. How the hell could the person she needed to find be related to Cleopatra? Desi had learned that at least one of Cleo’s kids, a daughter named after her, had married and had two children. But she couldn’t find any info about her two surviving sons. But even if they all had children, how in the world could she find out if she had any living descendants? She didn’t have the time or the skill to make a family tree of a long-dead Egyptian queen. But maybe she didn’t need one. The EA’s vault held treasures and antiquities from ancient times. Maybe they had something of Cleopatra’s daughter, letters perhaps. Since the library staff was busy on their fool’s errand for Kale, she might be able to get one of the archivists to extract some info for her that could help her track down some descendants.

  The EA’s archivists were extractors, meaning they were highly intuitive and could read between the lines of any document more than a hundred years old and extract information that had been left out by whoever had written it. For example, it had been an EA archivist who had read the letters that Jack the Ripper had sent taunting Scotland Yard during his reign of terror. And from feelings and impressions left behind on the paper and absorbed by the ink, the archivist was able to deduce that Jack the Ripper had been a demon-possessed art student who’d flown so low under the Yard’s suspect radar that he’d been commissioned to paint the portrait of the chief inspector’s wife. There were actually paintings of all the prostitutes he’d butchered floating around on the supernatural black market, but the EA had yet to track them down.

  Desi pulled up the archival database and typed in ancient Egypt. She found a record for the actual curse put on King Tut’s tomb. She found the recipe for Ramesses the Great’s magic elixir for virility, which must have worked since he fathered more than a hundred children. She even found out that the EA owned the original Egyptian Book of the Dead. But the EA owned nothing of Cleopatra’s or her daughter’s.

  “This is useless!” She smacked her palms on the desk in frustration. Desi could shoot a rampaging werewolf between the eyes from fifty feet away, withstand the stench of a troll for hours during an interrogation, and chase a centaur for blocks on foot. But doing research called for powers of patience and perseverance that she just didn’t have.

  “What’s useless?” Miriam de Jesus, one of the library staff, was standing next to her staring at her with her one good eye.

  Miriam had short, bobbed, flaming-red hair and an eye patch that she color coordinated with her outfits. Today’s patch was purple. Rumor had it that she’d gotten her eye poked out when she’d tried to pet a unicorn. But according to Morel, Miriam frequented the supernatural gambling casinos and lost her eye when she lost a poker game. Desi filled Miriam in on what she was looking for, and Miriam laughed.

  “Step aside, West, and I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  “With pleasure.” Desi got up from the terminal so Miriam could sit down. “But are you sure about this? I heard you guys were tied up with that project for Kale.”

  Miriam snorted with laughter. “I’m not Agent Kale’s personal librarian. And if my coworkers want to continue helping with her mission of futility, more power to ’em. I’ve got real work to do.”

  “I think I love you,” said Desi, watching Miriam’s fingers fly across the keyboard. “What are you doing?”

  “Well, the problem is that you’re focusing too much on what you don’t know, that is, who Cleopatra’s descendants are, instead of focusing on what you do know: a male of unknown race, living in New Orleans, suspected of torturing and killing animals at least twenty years ago. And as you know, torturing and killing animals is an early sign of demonic possession. We keep a database of offenders charged with crimes against animals so we can monitor them. So if we cross-reference that information with the animal offender database, we get . . .”

  “Over two thousand hits?” groaned Desi.

  “Now, don’t panic,” said Miriam. “This is where the Cleopatra angle comes in handy.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to narrow the results list I just compiled by inputting every name associated with Cleopatra.”

  Desi and Miriam watched the computer screen as it scanned all two-thousand-plus names. It took less than five minutes to condense the list down to a single name: Zander Jermaine Ptolemy, age forty-two; his last-known address was a ten-minute drive from the EA’s headquarters. His photo, pulled from the New Orleans DMV, showed a man with a thin, angular face and limp, straight brown hair that fell from a center part to just below his ears. His features were pretty nondescript, and she couldn’t tell from the photo if he had any piercings, tattoos, or scars. He looked so ordinary.

  “And if I know my history, and I do,” bragged Miriam, “Ptolemy the Twelfth was Cleopatra’s father. Booyah!” Miriam slapped Desi’s back so hard she almost fell out of her chair.

  “Miriam, you are a lifesaver! I owe you big-time.”

  “Just doing my job, West. Now go do yours.” She handed Desi the printout of Zander Ptolemy’s last-known address and watched as she practically ran to the door. “Hey, West,” she called out before she could actually get out the door.

  “Yeah?” Desi paused, clearly impatient to be gone.

 
“Is it true that you got caught playing with yourself in your car? Because I hear Roberts in Gnome Control is single again. I’d be happy to hook you two up if you’re interested.” She gave Desi a grin.

  Desi’s face turned bright-red, and she stalked out of the room without answering. “I’m gonna kill Morel,” she mumbled under her breath.

  Half an hour later, Desi found herself not at the home of Zander Ptolemy, but at the Tranquility Gardens nursing home in Algiers. When Desi had arrived at the last-known address for Mr. Ptolemy on General Pershing Street, an elderly neighbor had told her that the family was long gone. Zander’s mother, Ruthie, had been in a nursing home for ten years, and she had no idea what had become of her sons. Tranquility Gardens sounded like a cemetery to Desi, and that opinion was only reinforced once she walked through the door. The nursing home looked clean and smelled like disinfectant and tomato soup. But it was as quiet as a tomb. Several of the elderly residents were in the TV room, clustered around a big-screen television watching reruns of the Golden Girls, while others sat knitting or playing checkers. Though they certainly looked tranquil, no one spoke or laughed or even coughed or sighed, and Desi wondered if they were drugged or just waiting to die.

  “Excuse me?” she asked of the pretty nurse on duty. She was filing a stack of folders behind a long counter across from the living room.

  “Yes, ma’am.” The nurse gave her such a friendly smile that Desi felt a little guilty about having such unkind thoughts.

  “I’m here to see Ruthie Ptolemy.”

  The nurse laughed.

  “You mean Ruthie Buchard. Ptolemy was her first husband’s last name, and she’ll bite your head off if you forget it.”

  Desi tried hard to hide her incredulity. Buchard? Could she be related to Vic Buchard, the NeCro addict who sold his identity to David Granger and lost his finger in that alley in the Quarter? And was Vic also related to Zander Ptolemy? She couldn’t believe her luck.