Williams’s bulk spilled over both sides of his hospital bed, with an oxygen tube tucked into his nostrils and an EKG tracking his heartbeat. He was asleep as Sam came in, but some subconscious instinct must have been active because his eyes opened to see Sam standing next to the bed.
“Eresikin Marvin Divine Williams iginudug Ruax. Answer truthfully all the questions I ask you. Segah. How often did Elizabeth Dorn come to the Waifs’ Home?”
Williams could only whisper his replies, with pauses to inhale between words. “Every Sunday, eleven at night.”
Sam nodded at that. Sunday night was part of Monday, an auspicious day for healing magic. At midnight any countervailing Solar influence would be minimized.
“What did she do?”
“Took baths in blood every week. Six or eight times a year were special days. Never saw what she did but the fridge was empty after.”
The weekly blood bath sounded like a ritual to feed whatever spirits were keeping her young, and the “special days” were probably renewals of the bindings. Some details of his plan of action clicked into place in Sam’s mind.
“Who took out the organs?”
“Dr. Gola.”
“Tell me all about him.” When Williams didn’t answer, Sam sighed and asked, “What do you know about him?”
“Little guy. Smells bad. Office on 182nd. Comes at night. Takes some parts home.”
“Anything else?”
“Don’t like him.”
“Good for you. One more question, Marvin. Did you help kill any kids at the Waifs’ Home?”
“Yeah.”
Sam looked at the medical monitors and the oxygen tube. It wouldn’t be hard to disable the blood-oxygen sensor, disconnect the tube, and let Marvin asphyxiate. But then his gaze fell again on the helpless man in the bed—hugely obese, his legs already swollen with edema, a grayish tone to his skin, breathing little sips of air, his heart laboring. Was there any worse punishment he could mete out?
“Eresikin Marvin Divine Williams iginudug Ruax. Forget everything you ever saw or heard at the Waifs’ Home. Forget any magic you have seen. Forget all you know about Miss Elizabeth Dorn. Forget I was ever here. Segah.”
He nodded politely to the ladies at the nurses’ station on his way out.
It was already Friday. If Miss Elizabeth really needed to bathe in the blood of innocents every Monday, she’d be scrambling for a replacement right now. And the mysterious Dr. Gola sounded like an obvious candidate to help her. Sam decided that Dr. Gola was a potential loose end, and in his capacity as Junior Agaus Trainee, he needed to check up on the not-so-good Doctor.
So, after a couple of hours’ rest in his crummy apartment, and a couple more hours looking stuff up in his references, Sam set out for 182nd Street. This time he did bring along the pistol.
The address listed in the phone book for Dr. Gola was a low graffiti-covered building with bricked-up windows and a rusted steel rolling shutter locked down over the front door. Judging by the vines growing up the shutter, it had not been opened in years. The building stood flush against the structures on either side, and Sam’s Inner Eye revealed no hidden alleys.
A circumnavigation of the block revealed a gap between buildings on the west side of the block, opening into a narrow alley paved with asphalt so old and crumbled it might as well have been a dirt road. The whole area reeked of urine and spilled beer. An even more rusty and neglected-looking rolling shutter sealed the back door of the windowless building. Was the address a sham? Sam was ready to believe it, but then his eye fell on a steel basement walkout door set in the crumbling pavement next to the back entrance. It had a lock set in the handle, which gave up at a touch of Sam’s brass key.
The handle turned easily, and when Sam opened the bulkhead he was surprised. He had expected the hinges to be stiff and rusty, but the door opened with silky smoothness, utterly silent. Beyond the doorway the brick steps led down into darkness.
He decided to play it straight. “Dr. Gola?” he called out as he started down the steps. “Hello? Anybody here?”
The basement was dark except for the glaring trapezoid of sunlight on the floor at the bottom of the steps, and that light just made the blackness beyond absolutely impenetrable. Sam took out his flashlight and shone it around, looking for a switch or a pull cord. He spotted one old porcelain light fixture bolted to a ceiling joist a few yards away, but there was no bulb.
“Hello?” he called out again. “My name’s Ace. I work for Moreno. Anybody here?”
He thought he heard a faint rustling sound in the darkness, but when he played his flashlight beam around the basement he only saw cobwebs, a hot-water heater, an old coal-fired boiler, some brick support pillars, a couple of filthy couches, and some random trash in the corners. Maybe the address was false after all?
“Close the door,” said a whispery voice from somewhere in the dark.
Sam pulled the bulkhead door shut, leaving the circle of his flashlight beam as the only light in the basement. He heard the rustling again, closer this time, and when he swung the beam around he caught something which darted out of view behind a pillar.
“Dr. Gola?” he asked again.
“Turn it off,” said the voice, sounding as if it was just behind him.
Sam switched off the flashlight. “I’m here to help you. The Waifs’ Home burned down and you may be in danger.”
“Here to help? Or here to tidy up?”
“I work for Moreno,” he repeated. “Do you know who that is?”
“I serve her. Only her.”
“Look, someone’s going after Miss Elizabeth. You could be next on the list. I’m here to protect you. Get in touch with her if you want—she can vouch for me.”
“Wait.”
From somewhere in the blackness Sam heard the squeak of hinges and a metallic thunk, then silence.
While he waited, Sam exhaled and opened his Inner Eye to see any spirits in the basement. Nothing. Apparently Miss Elizabeth didn’t worry much about the safety of her minion. Which suggested she might have others.
He clicked on the flashlight again and explored the room. Beyond the boiler he found a round steel hatch set in the floor. Sam smiled to himself and found a rickety old folding chair with some slats missing from the seat. He unfolded it and sat a few feet away from the floor hatch, with the flashlight off.
Ten minutes later the darkness was broken by an arc of pale blue light which became a circle as the hatch swung open. A dark human shape emerged, and Sam clicked on his flashlight.
Dr. Gola was lean, hunched, and had a long narrow head with close-set eyes. He squinted and grimaced in the light, so Sam clicked it off again.
“What did she say?” asked Sam, holding the light ready in his left hand and reaching inside his jacket to rest his right on the handle of the Glock.
“She doesn’t fear you,” Gola replied. “What do you want?”
Sam took his hand off the gun. “Like I said, I want to help you. Whoever torched the Waifs’ Home might be coming here next.”
“I can stay down for days. She will protect me.”
“Look, I walked right in here. Miss Elizabeth’s enemies can do the same. You think a hatch will protect you? I can think of half a dozen ways to bust it open. Hell, I could probably do it with mundane tools.”
Gola regarded Sam with distaste, but finally gave an irritated sigh. “You say you wish to help. Will you stay on guard here?”
“If I have to. I’d like to look the whole place over, see if I can spot any flaws in your protection. Maybe summon a couple of guardian spirits.”
Gola shrugged. “Look, then.” He turned back to the hatch.
“I’d like to check out your lower level, too.”
Gola turned, and this time his expression was almost gleeful. “You want to come down? You may not like what you see.”
“I can handle it. I’ve seen plenty.”
With a very faint and nasty-sounding chuckle, Gola turned and clim
bed down, leaving the hatch open behind him. Sam followed.
He had expected to just go down a floor, but he counted at least forty rungs of the ladder to the bottom. He found himself in the center of a circular space thirty feet across with a six-foot ceiling, so he had to stoop. The place was dark, lit only by a couple of glowing computer screens and a purple grow light over a glass terrarium. The room was cluttered with cabinets and small refrigerators. The furniture was mostly handmade from unfinished wood and hardware-store bolts.
A woman lay strapped to a wood frame, angled so that her head was lower than her feet. Tubes led from her neck to a bucket on the floor. Sam knew she was dead as soon as he saw her. Sleeping people didn’t sag that way. She was very young, no more than twenty. If that.
Gola took a half-full plastic blood bag out of the bucket and disconnected the tube. “Not much in this one. Only seven pints. Lucky for her I have some extra stored.”
He shifted the frame back to horizontal, and rummaged in a cigar box for a scalpel. Ignoring Sam completely, he began to cut out the dead woman’s liver.
Sam fought the urge to vomit and instead turned to survey the room. The walls were steel under a flaking coat of haze gray paint. Was this a bomb shelter? A storage tank? A circular patch surrounded by rivets in one wall suggested something to do with water or sewage. With a century or more of influence in the city, Miss Elizabeth could have arranged all sorts of hidden places for herself and her servants, erasing them from any records.
Gola bagged the heart, liver, kidneys, and eyes, labeling them with a grease pencil and stowing them in one of the refrigerators.
“What do you do with the bodies when you’re done?” Sam asked, trying to sound casual.
“I waste nothing,” said Gola. “What she does not want, I keep. Some I sell—need anything?”
“Not today, thanks,” said Sam. “Does Miss Elizabeth come here, or do you make house calls?”
“I will take the blood to her and make all ready. She will bathe herself at midnight, and I will return before dawn.”
“Okay, I’ll escort you,” said Sam. “I’ll be here after sunset on Sunday. I’ll get a car.”
* * *
Two days later Sam backed the rented minivan into the alley behind Dr. Gola’s building while the sky was still pale with twilight. Just to mess with the creepy doctor, he used his magic key to get into the basement, and banged on the hatch in the floor with a chunk of brick. “Doctor? You ready?”
Gola came up with a styrofoam cooler under one arm. “Take this. There is more.”
Sam took the cooler and carried it out to the minivan. He set it in the back seat, took a quick look around to make sure Gola wasn’t watching, and then popped the lid open. It held eight blood bags surrounded by gas-station ice cubes. Sam added a ninth, labeled in grease pencil with his best imitation of Gola’s scrawl.
The doctor emerged from the basement a couple of seconds later, still hunched over. He cast a hateful look at the fading twilight overhead, and scuttled to add a second cooler to the back seat of the van and climb in after it.
Sam got behind the wheel and cranked up the fan to MAX with the exterior vent open. Being stuck in a confined space with Dr. Gola was stomach-churning. The faint odor of putrescine clung to Gola like cologne.
They reached the south end of St. Nicholas Avenue twenty minutes later, and spent another ten minutes looking for a parking space. Sam didn’t have Moreno’s “this car belongs here” enchantment for the rental, so he actually had to find a legal spot for it.
The alley wasn’t invisible this time, and its guardians let Sam and Gola enter without interference—although Sam’s Inner Eye showed him that they were still there.
MoonCat opened the door of the yellow cottage when Sam knocked. Her presence worried him. She’d been through too much already, he thought. But she just gave both men a look of disgust before leading them upstairs. Miss Elizabeth’s magical workroom was a sunny finished attic, with a much-repainted floor and the usual cabinets of ingredients and notebooks. Under MoonCat’s direction, Sam and Gola laid down plastic sheeting on the floor, then wrestled an ancient collapsible bathtub made of wood and rubberized canvas out of the closet.
Dr. Gola, for all his facility at removing organs and skinning cadavers, proved to be hopeless with tools, so Sam wound up assembling the bathtub by himself. MoonCat took over after that was done, following instructions on a laser-printed sheet. She conducted a standard banishing ritual to purify the room, then set up twenty-eight silver candlesticks around the tub, each holding a jasmine-scented tallow candle.
Gola brought up bowls of tepid water from the kitchen and began warming the blood up to room temperature. Sam crushed poppy blossoms and ambergris powder in a mortar, and emptied it into a silver brazier, ready to light at the appropriate time.
Miss Elizabeth made her own appearance at quarter of midnight, wearing a silver robe and smelling of lavender. She handed printed pages to Sam and Dr. Gola, MoonCat lit the twenty-eight candles, and the four of them began a chant to Ningal, Heka, and Shaliah, Lady of Material Happiness. After seven repetitions Miss Elizabeth dropped her robe and stepped into the tub while Sam lit the brazier. They began a different chant, this one in Sumerian, calling upon particular spirits to keep Elizabeth young and free of disease.
She lay down in the tub, and continued the chant as her three helpers poured the contents of all seventeen blood bags over her. Sam saw a flicker of confusion cross Dr. Gola’s face as he handed the last bag to Sam and MoonCat.
As the last bag emptied over her, Miss Elizabeth closed her eyes, wincing a little as the cool sticky blood coated her face. MoonCat slit the throat of a snake and dropped the twitching carcass into the tub. Through his Inner Eye Sam saw three spirits circling the tub, then dipping down to taste the blood.
Then all hell broke loose. Sam’s extra bag contained corn syrup and food coloring, spiked with holy water, powdered gold—the Solar metal, repellent to spirits called by the power of the Moon—salt, and aconite, which he chose for its toxicity rather than any magical significance. As soon as they tasted it, the spirits changed. From simplified human shapes with wings for arms they became angry, burning, claw-footed monsters, and attacked Miss Elizabeth and anyone else they could reach.
One of them slashed at Miss Elizabeth’s sticky blood-covered skin with a taloned foot, screeching something in Sumerian about “poisoned gift.” The second went for MoonCat and the third for Sam himself. He was able to ward it off in the name of Mahashiah, the Lord of Power, with a fistful of crumbled tobacco for good measure. MoonCat drove hers away with one of the charms on her charm bracelet.
But Miss Elizabeth was caught off-guard, without any magical materials on her except useless clotting blood. She had enough presence of mind to snap out a couple of words of power to cause the angry spirit intense pain, but as it fled Sam could see it reach back with one foot and grab something clinging to Miss Elizabeth, visible only with Sam’s Inner Eye. It dragged off what looked like a translucent empty human skin and flew off through the skylight.
MoonCat and Sam looked at each other, both shocked. In Sam’s case he was genuinely unsure of what had happened, and whether it had worked. Dr. Gola rushed to help Miss Elizabeth out of the tub. Putting aside the drying blood and the triple line of deep scratches on her chest, she looked bad. Sam could see her weakening from moment to moment in real time. By the time Gola got her out of the tub she leaned heavily on him for support. By the time he got her to a chair she was panting with exertion.
And by the time MoonCat started grabbing magical ingredients from the cabinets and looking for spells of healing in the notebooks, it was too late.
Sam could see her dying. How many of her cells were only kept alive by magic? How much of the woman slumped in the chair while Gola sponged her off was already dead?
MoonCat saw it too. “Help me!” she yelled at Sam. “Find a working we can do!”
“I think it’s too late,” he
said. Miss Elizabeth’s face had the slack look of a stroke victim, and when she looked around the room he could tell she had no idea where she was.
“Segitsen,” she croaked. “Mama…” And then she went limp.
Gola tried to hold her up, and suddenly flinched back in revulsion. “She is dead,” he said, and then his expression turned to anger. “You bitch!” As her body slid from the chair to the floor Gola kicked her.
“Stop it! We’ve got to help her!” MoonCat knelt beside Miss Elizabeth, trying to lift her back into the chair.
When Gola wound up for another kick Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s enough. You’d better get out of here.” He half urged, half shoved Gola toward the stairs, then knelt beside the corpse with MoonCat. “We’re too late. Something must have gone wrong with the working. Maybe that idiot got the wrong blood. Whatever happened, it’s done. I’ll call Moreno. Do you know what she’s got guarding the place? We’re going to have to dismiss all of them.”
MoonCat raised a tear-streaked face, and Sam saw the precise instant at which she changed from a frightened girl to a ruthless opportunist. “I can command the guardians,” she said. “She showed me how. I don’t need any help here. You can go.”
Sam allowed himself to be politely ejected from the cottage, and waited until he was behind the wheel of his legally parked rental car before calling Moreno.
“Miss Elizabeth’s dead,” he said without preamble. “Her flunkey Gola screwed up getting blood for her, and the working went wrong. She died of sudden old age.”
“Crap. Have you secured him? Gola? We’ve got to talk to him.”
“He ran off as soon as she died,” said Sam. “Her control over him ended and he looked kind of pissed off. I’ll try to track him down.” He started the motor and pulled out into traffic. According to the dashboard clock it was nearly three a.m. Moreno would need at least an hour to get up to St. Nicholas Avenue, and it would take him another couple of hours to dispose of Miss Elizabeth’s body—there would be doctors and cops to mind control, funeral arrangements to make. She might have relatives.
The Initiate Page 25
