Dark Time: Mortal Path (4 page)

The gifts had been beyond her understanding at first, in the limited life she’d led in Massachusetts when it was an English colony. After that first time in the flames, she wasn’t impervious to fire. That was something Rabishu had conferred for a single purpose: recruiting her. But there were other things, like being able to move so fast that she appeared as a blur to the human eye. Her body healed from wounds that would be fatal to others. The irony wasn’t lost on her: Susannah the healer now healed only herself.

She treasured her ability to see auras, reading emotional states by the colors in the radiance that 12 z 138

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surrounded people. She’d been taught martial arts by a Chinese master, at Rabishu’s insistence, and over the years had picked up strikes, defenses, and weapons from various countries around the world. Her fighting had lost its original eloquence in favor of street techniques that served her well.

She sized up the farmhouse where Ledger was held, guarded by F.B.I. agents. For the federal case against Tenaglia, it was important to keep Ledger alive to testify. She was here to make sure he didn’t testify. Rabishu favored keeping Tenaglia and his crime syndicate in business.

Ledger was probably on the second floor, as far from the front door as possible. She settled a throwing star into the wood frame above a second-floor window and tossed a loop of slim rope over it.

After tugging on the rope to make sure it would hold her weight, she scampered up it easily.

A typical burglar would use a glass cutter at this point, for a silent entrance. For Susannah, that wasn’t necessary. This was going to be a quick assault, lacking in elegance but leaving the agents in the home disabled, and Ledger dead.

She wanted to get her assignment finished. When Rabishu had given her the task, she’d toyed with the idea of turning it down. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she flatly refused to do Rabishu’s work, but she didn’t see him as the forgiving type. At the least, she’d no longer be one of the Ageless.

What would it be like to be mortal again? Would I live out my life from now on, or would all my
years catch up to me and I’d age in a flash? Here’s Susannah Layhem, a pile of bones—no, dust—on the
floor. At least I would be dust that no longer had to kill.

She pushed away from the wall of the house and came swinging in, her body bent, feet leading the way to break the window. Glass tumbled inward.

The noise of her entrance drew an immediate response. Shots zinged past, and she hit the floor and rolled, pain tracing a fiery line on her shoulder. She arched her back, sprang up, and took out her first assailant with a roundhouse kick to the jaw that sent him spinning across the floor, sliding through the debris.

A bullet struck her left arm as she did a handspring toward the other two men in the room. They overturned a table in her direction. Coins, cards, dollars, and drinks went flying. They’d been passing the time playing poker. She sidestepped the rolling table, and saw a flash of recognition in one of the men’s eyes that maybe they should have kept the table for cover. Exposed, they scuttled away in opposite directions, knocking over a couple of lamps.

A kick to the stomach and the edge of her hand to the back of his neck turned one of the agents into dead weight, and he slumped against her. The last agent fired at her from across the room. The limp but still living body of the man she’d just disabled took the bullet squarely in the forehead as she ducked to the side. She somersaulted to reach the last agent as he pondered—a second too long—the fact that he’d just shot his buddy. A kick sent his gun spinning across the floor, and another kick sent him flying in the same direction, unconscious before he landed. She retrieved three guns from the room and flung them out of the broken window.

She paused for a moment, looking at the man who’d taken a bullet for her. He was in his mid-thirties and in good physical shape, blue eyes staring, a strong chin, a lock of hair curling onto his forehead. In the prime of his life, most people would think. He wore a wedding band. Previously, she wouldn’t have given the dead man a glance, but lately the consequences of her actions lingered in her mind.

He had a wife, maybe kids. Parents, friends. A widening circle of mourners, ripples in a pond. Most
likely, the agent who shot him will blame it on me. And why not? If not for me, the man would be in his
wife’s arms after this dull job, watching some accountant, was over.

She flexed her left arm. The bullet had lodged in the muscle above the elbow and was going to hurt like hell when she dug it out with a knife later. The other spots where she’d been injured vied for her attention with various levels of pain, but none of them was serious. Although Susannah wasn’t immune to pain, wounds that might kill a human, like a shot to the heart, weren’t a threat to her. The only thing she had to fear was losing her head, literally.

Susannah wiped her bloodied gloves on her pants and reclaimed her knife, sheathing it at her waist.

She eased out into the brightly lit hall and tried the knob of the first door. It wasn’t locked, and opened with a small creak. She pushed the door fully open, rolled and came to her feet smoothly, a throwing knife poised in each hand.

Ledger’s eyes followed her in the dim light of a lamp. He’d retreated to the furthest corner. An aura of dull brownish yellow surrounded him, shot with smudges of gray. The dark mustard color was 13 z 138

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apprehension of pain and the gray represented dark thoughts, thoughts of a bad outcome.

A man anticipating a painful death. No surprises.

“You’re the Black Ghost.”

Susannah blinked and paused in her approach. As she blinked, she saw his aura on the inside of her eyelids, but it faded immediately.

“My wife wasn’t sure whether to believe her, but Emily was right. You were there, in Emily’s room, a week ago. To a seven-year-old, that’s what you were. A black ghost.”

Susannah nodded. So she’d been seen.

“The Feds denied it. They said nobody’d been in the house. Just covering their asses, as usual. Fuck.

You were in my house with my family. Could’ve killed them all, right under the Feds’ noses.” Ledger sighed. “And here you are again. Goddamned Feds. You work for Tenaglia? He’s using a woman for his dirty work. That’s a low one, even for him.”

She shook her head. She never bothered to explain whom she was working for, or anything else about herself. No one would believe it.

“You’re probably lying. What do you care? I’m going to be dead in a minute. But you tell Tenaglia that Kate and the girls are untouchable. You hear that? He so much as breathes in their direction and lightning is gonna strike his family, especially that rat’s ass son of his. Old man Amoretti’s taking care of my family. You tell him that.”

Do it and get out.

Her hands played out the motions of knife throwing in muscle memory while the blades remained perfectly still in her palms.

“Why did you turn yourself in?” She wanted to hear it from him, hear him say that he loved his family more than his life.

Ledger frowned. “What does that matter to you? Get it over with, Ghost.”

Susannah retreated enough to check the hallway, then walked over to him, moving as quietly as a hunting cat, the throwing knives her claws. Although he hunkered down a little, he knew he had nowhere to go and didn’t stand a chance against her. Placing a sharp tip over his heart, she leaned in close to the man’s ear and said, “I’m curious. Indulge me.”

Ledger, who’d been holding his breath waiting for the knife to plunge into his chest, exhaled warmly into her face. He smelled unmistakably of chicken soup.

“I turned forty. My predecessor retired at forty-two. Bullet in the back of the head. Accountants know way too much. They get so they’re holding too many secrets and somebody gets antsy. So I figured I’d get out early and make the best deal I could for my family.”

A tear slid down Ledger’s cheek. “Lately that’s all that matters to me,” he whispered. “You know.

You were in the house.”

Years ago, Susannah would have killed him and slipped away. His story of family love would have bounced off her heart. But she’d seen what he had at stake.

Pajamas with sheep…dancing ballerina jewelry box…black hair on a pillow…a baby girl in a crib.

A family that could have been mine.

The knife eased away from Ledger’s chest.

She thought about Rabishu’s order:
The man Lorenzo DiNina must not be allowed to testify against
Adamo Tenaglia.
Susannah slipped the knives back into their sheaths. When Ledger saw her unarmed, he tried a last, desperate attempt to save his life. He came at her, fists ineffectually flying. She pinned his arms behind his back.

“Cut it out. I’m helping you.”

What the hell? I’m helping?

No time to mull things over. “You’re going to have to do what I say to get out of here alive,” she said.

“Alive? I thought you were sent to kill me.”

Susannah spun him around and firmly gripped him by the shoulders, alert for any muscle tell that would indicate he was going to lash out at her.

“I need to stop you from testifying. You don’t have to be dead to do that. You made a deal with the Feds: your testimony for safe passage for your family. I’m offering you another deal. Keep your mouth shut and I’ll take you to your family.”

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They’ll get Tenaglia some other way. They got Capone on tax evasion.

Ledger blinked several times, an ocular Morse code, as he processed this. Then narrowed eyes betrayed suspicion. “What’s in it for you? I’m not wealthy, you know. I can’t pay much.”

Not wealthy, my ass. Only an accountant would haggle at this point.

Susannah shook her head. “I haven’t figured out what’s in it for me. Listen, we’re out of time here.

Yes or no?”

“I’d be a fool not to take the chance. Even if it’s just a joke you’re playing on me. Yes. I say yes.”

His chin jutted out in an attempt to shore up his courage.

Echoes of her first conversation with Rabishu so many years ago flitted through her mind. She’d chosen life; so had Ledger, even with the hope of it surely seeming small to him.

The smell of smoke, of burning flesh, impossibly slipped into her awareness.

Something was chipping away at centuries of indifference to the fate of her targets, bringing back scenes from her past.

She went back to her village at night a few years after becoming Ageless. She didn’t go to see if
Nathan had taken up with another woman, or to see Patience and George enjoying their married life
and sweet child. She went to the cemetery. As powerful as she’d become, the sight of the small
gravestone felled her and she crawled on her knees and kissed it. Constanta, it said. If Nathan had done
nothing for Susannah in her time of greatest need, at least he’d claimed his daughter’s corpse, given the
baby the name they’d agreed on, and insisted that Constanta have a rightful burial.

Susannah sagged a little. The memory was as visceral as a punch to the stomach.

“I’m ready,” Ledger said.

His words jarred her into the present.

There was an old pickup truck parked behind the farmhouse. A few minutes later, the two of them were on the road.

Susannah felt almost giddy. She’d found a loophole in Rabishu’s orders and used it to save a life—and it felt good. The demon’s next assignment would be locked down tight with no wiggle room, but for now, it was plus one for the Black Ghost.

S
usannah strolled through the summertime exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work at the Musée du Louvre.

The multilingual crowd chattered, some offering their interpretations of the paintings, some gossiping about Picasso’s mistress, who appeared as
Madame Z
among the paintings. Children brought “for the culture” swarmed in a second layer below the adults’ heads, like lizards scampering through the understory of a rain forest.

Susannah listened in on conversations in a dozen languages and studied the great man’s paintings.

She loved the museum, beginning with her first experience of it in 1810, at the marriage of Napoléon and Marie-Edwarde, his second wife.

Susannah had come to the Louvre every year to study and keep up on cultural trends. Since the Smithsonian Institution had come into existence, in the mid 1800s, she went there for intensive study, too, alternating years with the Louvre. It was an odd feeling to see objects that had been part of her daily life show up in the Smithsonian’s American History Museum, including a table that bore her name carved into the top by her husband’s hand. She added other museums to her travels, in London, Cairo, Madrid, St.

Petersburg, wherever the great collections settled.

A visit to Paris usually lifted her spirits. By day she visited familiar attractions; at night she walked the streets of Paris, taking the pulse of the city. Frenchmen came up to her, boldly asking for her company, and if she declined, they tipped their hats to her and left to try their luck elsewhere.

Leaving the Picasso exhibit, Susanna found an unoccupied bench in a niche at the end of a hall.

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Here, in a building where the elusive peace she craved seemed closer than elsewhere, she wanted time to think.

On the surface, her life was ideal. Wealthy, beautiful, intelligent, sensuous, secure from physical harm, she could and did travel the world, living high, leaving a trail of lovers who never touched her heart.

Except that someone else died so I could cheat death. Many someones. I’m living the way I do by
dancing on their graves.