a terrible beauty

by Unknown Author

  “A priest?” he said.

  He sounded disappointed as well as hurt.

  Sara made a sound of annoyance. “God, it’s nothing like that.”

  Jake and Kilby looked at each other and nodded.

  “Sure,” Jake said.

  “Is that all you guys think about? Yes, there are some questions I’d like to ask him-questions about the case.”

  Jake and Kilby exchanged looks again.

  “Of course,” Kilby said. “Whatever you say.”

  Men, Sara thought, as she stormed out of the morgue. Outside, it was warm and sunny.'Inside, she was cold and shivering. The voices chuckled quietly in the back of her mind.

  , CHAPTER

  SIX

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIX

  V -

  St. Casimir’s rectory was located behind the church, nestled in a small pocket-like depression. It was cottagesized, from the outside appearing to be no more than a couple of small rooms, and of the same general age and dilapidation as the church.

  A looping gravel path ran from the front of the church to the rectory. As Sara went along the walkway she passed a figure going the opposite way, as if from the rectory itself, which Sara could just see around the bulk of the old church. She kept walking after only the barest glance at the pedestrian who in turn looked at her disinterestedly and kept going in his own direction.

  Sara took a few further steps around a loop in the path and stopped. She’d recognized the figure. Or thought she had. It was the woman she’d seen first in the potions shop and later at Club Carrefour. The same facial features, the same lean build, the same slicked-down hair. Except this person was a man. Or at least he’d had a distinct pencil-thin mustache on his upper lip. Maybe she was mistaken. When their eyes had met briefly there’d been no recognition in his, as if he’d never seen Sara before. And she’d gotten only a glimpse of his face as they passed on the path. But she was a trained observer with a quick mind and she was pretty sure of what she’d seen. Indecision usually wasn’t one of her problems.

  She stood; in the curve of the pathway for a moment, hidden from his view in case he happened to glance back. Her cop instincts were vibrating like a struck gong. His look-alike was connected somehow to Guillaume Sam. He probably was as well. He’d had a furtive air about him, an aura difficult for a civilian to pick up, but quite readable for a cop who dealt with dissembling on a daily basis. He was possibly, if not probably, up to no good.

  As Sara saw it, she had two choices. Check where he’d been. Follow him to where he was going. She hesitated, tom. If Father Baltazar was involved in a struggle against Guillaume Sam, he could be lying hurt-or worse-in his rectoiy even as she stood there, desperately thinking. On the other hand, the blond guy hadn’t been carrying a blood-soaked machete, and had looked perfectly cool and composed as they’d passed on the path. There were people in the world capable of whacking somebody’s head off and then sitting down next to you a couple minutes later at McDonalds and calmly eating a double cheeseburger. But the Machete Murderer seemed to be more of a maniac gore-splattering and blood-sucking type. You’d expect him to be at least a little disheveled after lopping somebody’s head off. Besides, he hadn’t looked anything like Bakula-baka. Of course, the creature might not have same physical manifestation on Earth as he had on Guinee.

  Damn, Sara thought. There were too many ifs to eon-sider in this case. There were too many things out of the realm of ordinary experience. Give trie a plain old murder for hire any day.

  Sara made up her mind, but realized she didn’t have to leave Father Baltazar hanging, either. She got out her cell phone and punched Jake’s number on the speed-dial. He answered immediately with his laconic, “ ’Elio.” “Jake-Sara.” f

  “Sara, hey, wait until you hear what I found about this Jackson guy—”

  ”No time,” she said tersely when she could break into his excited exclamation. “I’m on to something-but I need you to check on something else for me.”

  “Sure.” Jake could be terse if he had to.

  “Come on down to St. Casimir’s. Immediately. Make sure Father Baltazar’s okay.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Someone’s been lurking around the rectory. Looks like a double of that blonde chick with the slicked-back hair we saw at Carrefour’s. You remember?”

  “Sure. She went off with those Stem dudes. Man, what—”

  ’’Yeah, well, never mind. This one looks like her brother. I suppose. Just hustle on down and check on the Father.”

  “Okay.” Jake was silent for a moment. “You be careful.” “I will.” Sara peeked around the comer. Her quarry had reached Fulton Street. He was, in fact, crossing the street and heading deeper into the residential part of Cypress Hills. “The suspect is crossing Fulton Street, heading north. I’m after him.”

  “Check in early and often.”

  “Will do.” ,

  Sara pocketed her phone and started off down the path at a brisk walk.

  Tailing a quariy in the city is fairly easy as long as you’re observant and there’re plenty of pedestrians between you and the target. Sara was and there were. He moved at a good clip himself, as if he had places to go and things to do, but wasn’t a fanatic about it. Sara' stayed within forty feet of him, slipping between the knots of pedestrians like an angelfish in a school of mullet. It helped that he didn’t look around, didn’t window shop, didn’t glance at birds, or flowers, or pretty girls as he went down the street.

  For the first couple of blocks north of Fulton the pedestrian traffic was fairly thick, but it began to thin out as they got away from the commercial thoroughfare and deeper into the residential part of the community.

  Even among the rows of town homes, though, there were plenty of people hanging out on the sidewalks. The neighborhood seemed to be predominantly Lithuanian. It had the look of an old settlement, not rich but moderately comfortable, relatively well taken care of. Kids played on the streets, old people hung out on the stoops or ambled up and down the sidewalks, gossiping with friends and long-time neighbors. Sara sauntered on, tiying to look as much as possible as if she belonged there. It wasn’t too difficult.

  She followed her target for a good twenty minutes as he made his way north on the meandering streets. This was an old part of the city, constructed when growth had been more organic and followed the natural patterns of local geography. The streets twisted like cowpaths. Trees that were more than a century old grew in sidewalk cutouts. As they went further nofth, the aspect of the community changed from urban to village-like. The houses were set on bigger plots of land, with wooden, single-family dwellings predominating.

  The landscape changed again, taking on a relatively rural aspect as Sara’s quarry made a sharp turn into what seemed to be a fenced-in park, going through an open arched metal gateway.

  Sara followed him at a distance, even more carefully, as there were no other pedestrians around the park entrance.

  Only it wasn't a park, she quickly discovered. It was a cemetery.

  A bronze historical plaque on the wrought-iron barred gate provided the snippet of information that the Cypress Hills National Cemetery was the only national cemetery located in New York City. Sara wasn’t sure of what exactly a national cemetery was, but apparently it had something to do with (as the plaque said) the burial of Union soldiers from a nearby military hospital. The cemetery had been opened in 1848 and was used extensively during the Civil War, but there hadn’t been any burials there for almost fifty years. From Sara’s observation, it was clear that the abandoned grounds had gone wild.

  Though it was peaceful and quiet, Sara’s cop mind couldn’t help but notice that the cemetery’s overgrown state offered numerous places of concealment and almost unlimited opportunities for ambush. She watched as her quarry slipped between two wildly overgrown rhododendrons that towered fifteen feet in the sky, choking what apparently was a path that had once gon
e between them.

  She hesitated.

  This isn’t too smart, she told herself.

  “What are you afraid of?” a voice asked.

  “You bear the Witchblade-”

  “-you carry the mystic weapon-”

  “-you should fear no puny mortal-”

  “Maybe,” Sara said to- herself. “But I’m not stupid, either.”

  She went cautiously into the park, taking her cell phone from its belt pouch. “Jake.”

  “Right here,” he answered after the first tone.

  “Father Baltazar-”

  ”He’s fine.”

  “Then I was just being paranoid about the blond guy?” There was a slight pause. “Maybe not. Seems that he delivered a message to Father Baltazar.”

  _ “A message? What kind of message? From who?”

  “It was an ouanga.”

  “What?”

  “Ouanga. A, a kind of talisman, an evil charm. Father Baltazar says it’s a warning from the bokor to back off. He says be careful. It seems you’re following one of the bokor's right-hand men. His name is Gene. The Father doesn’t know his last name, or even if he has one. The sorcerer’s other right hand man is Gene’s twin sister. Her name is Jean—J - E - A - N—if you can believe it.”

  Why not? Sara thought. I’ve come to believe a lot stranger things.

  “Where are you?” Jake broke into her reverie.

  “I’ve followed him to Cypress Hills National Cemetery. That’s why I’m calling. It’s a hell of a place for an ambush.”

  “Wait,” Jake said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Sara was approaching the bank of humongous rhododendrons, so she spoke quietly. “Can’t,” she said. “I’m going to lose him.”

  So what—”

  Sara didn’t have time to articulate an answer, and wasn’t even sure herself why she was following him into such a dangerous place. She couldn’t tell if it was her cop intuition that something important was about to happen, or if it was the voices whispering insidiously in her head, promising her that such risky activity was worth pursuing. Unfortunately, it’d been her experience that sometimes the voices’ promises were lies.

  “Come quick,” she told her partner. “Be careful.”

  And she flipped her phone shut and put it back in its holster.

  She stood before the rhododendrons, listening, and hearing nothing.

  Here’s the first test, she thought, as to how good a job I did shadowing this Gene guy.

  If he knew she was on her trail, this was the perfect ambush point. She took a depth breath, and pushed into the leafy, enfolding arms of the feral bushes. Thin, pointy branches grabbed and poked her as she tried to slither by them without making a sound. She didn’t quite succeed, but she was fairly quiet. She made her way through about six feet of rhododendron jungle before bursting out into the open, blinking at the sudden sun and the figure looming right in front of her.

  The Witchblade surged to life, but before it could encase her in its sharp metallic shell she pushed it back to wherever it went when she wasn’t wearing it, as she realized suddenly that she was confronting a stone angel.

  It was an old angel. Its marble body was pitted with age and acid rain, eaten into b-y almost one hundred and forty years of corrosive city air. It was also crippled. One marble hand, reaching upwards to heaven, had broken away from its arm, one marble wing had cracked off its shoulder. Oddly, the angel’s face was relatively untouched and still smiled a tender stone smile at all passersby.

  It stood on a stone pedestal. The words once chiseled into the face of the pedestal had been obliterated by age. What few marks that still remained were hidden by a tangle of wild rose growing from the grave over which the angel stood guard, twining around the pedestal and up the angel’s legs to its waist. The rose was thorny, its buds small but numerous, and fiery as a sunset in various shades of orange and red.

  For a moment Sara stood contemplating the aged monument and felt oddly at peace. It seemed a gentle, somehow appropriate guardian for the apparently forgotten old soldier buried beneath its upraised arms and beatific smile.

  Then a sound came from further inside the cemetery turned to jungle, the sound of a pick or shovel striking stone, and Sara’s head snapped up. The noise came from behind another screen of greenery. She crept closer, sunk low, and got down behind an unidentified bush with lots of foliage, and, feeling like a character out of The Last of the Mohicans, slowly and carefully parted the branches in front of her.

  Her sensibilities lurched from Mohicans to a Boris Karloff flick about bodysnatching, because that was happening twenty feet in front of her. Three men were taking turns digging up a grave while Gene supervised, leaning back casually upon the canted tombstone and smoking a cigarette.

  “I don’t have all day,” Gene said in a slightly irritated drawl.

  The man leaning on his shovel looked at him respectfully. From her vantage point behind the wall of greenery, Sara could see fear,ip the man’s eyes. Gene, she thought, must be a lot tougher than he looked. The resemblance to his sister, now that Sara could study his face at leisure, was indeed remarkable. They had the same high, delicate cheekbones, the sharp chin, the lofty, unlined brow. In fact, the only discernible difference between the two was the pencil-thin mustache that Gene affected. Even their physical build was quite similar. They were the same height, had the same breadth of shoulder, and slim hips. Sara had never seen male-female twins that so resembled each other.

  Could it all be, Sara wondered, some kind of elaborate charade? Were they really only one person, pretending to be two? But... to what purpose?

  Whatever the reality of their supposed identities, it was clear that the graverobbers were wary of Gene.

  “But you don’t have to be-” the voice insinuated softly in Sara’s brain.

  “You have the Witchblade-’’

  ”Use it-”

  ’’Use it-”

  "Use it-”

  Sara snarled to herself, to the voices murmuring in her brain. She shook her head as if to clear it and rattled a nearby branch.

  “What was that?”

  The man leaning on his shovel looked up, in Sara’s direction. Gene flicked his cigarette aside. Down deep in the grave, one of the digger’s shovels grated on wood.

  “We hit it,” he announced.

  Gene looked back down at him as the idle digger shouldered his shovel like a rifle and started to meander in Sara’s direction. >

  “The coffin?” Gene asked.

  The man in the grave who had spoken grunted. “Must be.”

  There were more scraping sounds as the other stopped digging, and watched his colleague drop down to hands and knees and scrabble among the well-rotted boards.

  “Yep,” he said with satisfaction. “Here we go.”

  He reached down into the partially uncovered and broken coffin, and stood up holding a round, brownish ball. Only it wasn’t a ball. It was a skull.

  Gene grunted. “Good. We need two more for the ceremony,” he said, to the apparent disappointment of the diggers. They complained but not for too long, or too audibly.

  Meanwhile, the man with the shovel over his shoulder wandered casually, perhaps a bit too casually, Sara thought, in her general direction. He whistled, looking everywhere but at her. When he pounced, she was ready.

  He came right at her with a shout, holding his shovel near the end of its handle, ready to swing it like a club. But Sara was partially shielded by the bushes she was hiding behind, so his swing was ineffectual. She stood and drew her .45 from the holster snugged down against the small of her back.

  Sara was furious, and ready to take it out on her assailant. She didn’t know if she angrier at herself for her carelessness, or at the voices that again seemed to have goaded her into an unthinking" action that had given away her hiding place.

  To hell with them, she thought as she sprang to her feet. I’ll handle this on my own.

  The man krreamed ag
ain as he swung the shovel clumsily. Sara slipped through the shrubs that separated them and floated inside his striking range. She could have shot him half a dozen times, but instead slapped him against the side of his head with the barrel of her automatic. He went down like a pig in the slaughterhouse. As he fell Sara noticed the cross tattooed on his forehead.

  “Hold it!” she shouted, gripping her gun with both hands and taking a wide-legged shooter’s stance.

  , One of the bodysnatchers had jumped out of the excavated grave and was advancing towards her in a crouch, shovel gripped low and high as if it were a fighting staff. The other looked on stupidly, mouth agape. Gene, meanwhile, had also taken a few steps forward, casually, silently, his eyes narrow slits.

  Sara shifted her pistol back and forth between the two who seemed the most dangerous. “I said freeze! I’m a—”

  Something glittering spun through the air, hooked, and caught around the barrel of her gun. Astonished, she realized that Gene had trapped her weapon with one end of a weighted chain. He yanked and the gun’s muzzle snapped upward. Her finger tightened on the trigger and it fired once, harmlessly, in the air. Gene shifted his grip on the chain, twisting so that Sara lost her hold on the automatic. He jerked the chain and it went flying back to him, taking her gun along. It fell to the ground halfway between them. She tried to keep an eye on it to see exactly where it landed, but the graverobber rushed her, demanding her attention. '

  “Use the Witchblade,” the voices screamed shrilly, but Sara had closed her mind to their urges.

  “No!” she screamed aloud, and leapt forward to meet her assailant. ' -

  This man was smarter than the first. He wielded his shovel like a fighting Staff, hands far apart on the handle, ready to strike with either the wooden handle or pointed metal blade. Small crosses were tattooed on the first joint of all his fingers. He was another Saturday Night Special.

  The Special took a short, vicious swing with the shovel’s blade end, aiming at Sara’s midriff. She twisted in mid-stride and the gleaming blade missed her stomach by a fraction of an inch. His follow-up with the other end .struck her across the ribcage. She rolled with the blow, tiying to absorb as much of its force as she could. It hurt like hell. Pain flashed across the left side of her body. She was relieved when it slackened and she discovered that she could still breathe easily.