Standing in the Shadows (5 page)

She laid her hand against his broad chest, and yanked it right back, shocked by her own boldness. His body was so hard and warm.

"I know it wasn't your fault," she said. "What happened to Dad. He did it to himself. I knew he was in trouble, but he wouldn't let anyone help him. And none of us knew how bad it was."

"Miss!" the driver bellowed. "You on or off?"

"It wasn't your fault," she repeated. She scrambled into the bus, and clutched the pole as it pulled away, watching Connor's tall form recede into the dusk. Wind whipped his shaggy hair around his stern, sculpted face. The canvas coat flapped. His penetrating eyes held hers, tugging at her, until the bus turned the corner and he was lost to sight.

She collapsed into a seat. Her eyes darted from passenger to passenger, as if Georg would suddenly pop out of nowhere and flash her that seductive smile that had so perplexed her at Crystal Mountain six months ago. She'd been surprised and gratified to be pursued by a guy like that. Almost tempted to give him a whirl just to break the spell of her self-imposed celibacy—but something had held her back.

Her friends had been so impatient with her.
What the hell
do you want in a guy, Erin? He's smart, he's built, he's charming, he's got a sexy accent, he looks like a
GQ
cover model, and he's warm for your form! Stop acting like a friggin 'nun! Go get you some, girlfriend
!

She'd tried to explain that the easy warmth that Georg exuded didn't warm her. It was sort of like the way her taste buds could not be fooled by saccharine or Nutrasweet. The sweetness didn't follow through, it didn't satisfy. Her girlfriends had shrugged
that off as unconvincing. They told her she was too fussy. Or just plain chicken.

The fact that she hadn't gone to bed with that awful man had been her one small, private satisfaction and comfort afterwards, when her world lay around her in ruins.

Nobody in the bus was the right size or build to be Georg. Every time the bus lumbered to a stop, she held her breath until she saw who boarded. A teenage Goth girl with black lips and a pierced face. A portly Latina lady. A young urban professional woman in a suit, coming home from working Saturday at some high-powered job, like she herself so often had, back in the dear old days of steady employment. No Georg. Not
that she would necessarily recognize his face, after what Connor had done to it. The memory of that bloody duel made her queasy again.

She was being stupid, really. If Novak really was bothering to think of her, it wouldn't be Georg that he would send.

It could be anybody.

Novak read the e-mail on the screen of the laptop and typed a response. His hands were deft on the keyboard even with the use of only his right hand plus the thumb and middle finger of his left. He stared at the text as he rubbed the stumps of his maimed hand.

A constant, throbbing reminder of the debt he was owed. The wind on the terrace made his eyes tear up. They burned and stung, unused to the colored lenses, and he pulled the case out of his pocket and removed them. The glues and the custom-made prosthetics that changed the shape of his features were uncomfortable, but temporary. Just until he could organize a final bout of cosmetic surgery.

He gazed out over the city. Such a pleasure, after months of staring at the walls of a prison cell, to cast his gaze out toward ranges of ragged mountains that hemmed in the jewel-toned greens and blues and silver grays of Seattle. He hit send, and took a sip of cabernet out of a splendid reproduction of a second-century B.C.E. Celtic drinking cup. It was fashioned from a real human skull, decorated with hammered gold. A fanciful indulgence, but after his prison experience, he was entitled.

He had Erin to thank for this expensive new caprice. Odd, that he had not developed a taste for blood-drenched Celtic artifacts until now. Their penchant for ritual murder resonated in his own soul.

The sacrifice that he had planned was blessed by the gods. He knew this was so because Celia had come to him in a vision. He was always moved when one of his angels visited him. They had come to him in the hospital where he lay near death, and they had comforted him in prison. Souls he had liberated, forever young and beautiful. Their shades had fluttered around him, distressed to see him suffering. Belinda had come, and Paola, and Brigitte, and all the rest, but when Celia came, it was special. Celia had been the first.

He savored his wine, his pulse leaping at the memory of the night that had marked his life. He had taken Celia's lovely body, and as he spent himself inside her, the impulse rose up like a genie from a bottle, huge and powerful. The urge to place his thumbs against the throbbing pulse in her throat, and press.

She had thrashed beneath him, her face turning color, protruding eyes full of growing awareness. Celia could not speak, she could only gasp, but he had sensed her passionate assent. They had been linked, a single mind. She was an angel, offering herself to him.

The fanged gods had claimed him as their own that night. And he had understood what tribute the gods demanded to confer power and divinity. They had marked him, and he would prove himself worthy.

Celia had been a virgin, too. He had found that out afterwards, when he washed himself. How poignant. It was a curse to be so sensitive. Doomed to grasp for the spontaneous perfection of Celia's sacrifice, over and over. Never quite reaching it.

The door to the terrace opened. He felt the red, throbbing glow of Georg's energy without turning. "Have a glass of wine, Georg. Enjoy the pleasures of freedom. You refuse to relax. This puts us at risk."

"I don't want wine."

Novak looked at him. The thick, shiny pink scar that marred Georg's cheek was flushed scarlet over his prison pallor. His beautiful yellow hair had been shorn to stubble on his scalp, and his eyes were like glowing coals. "Are you sulking, Georg? I hate sulking."

"Why won't you let me just kill them?" Georg hissed. "I will be a fugitive for the rest of my life anyway. I don't care if—"

"I want better than that for you, my friend. You cannot risk being taken again."

"I have already made arrangements," Georg said. "I will die before I go back to prison."

"Of course you have. I thank you for your dedication," Novak replied. "But you will see, when you are calmer, that my plan is better."

Georg's face was a mask of agony. "I cannot bear it. I am dying." The words burst out in the obscure Hungarian dialect they shared.

Novak rose from his chaise and put down his wine. He placed the scarred stumps of his maimed hand against Georg's ruined face. His cosmetic surgeons would improve matters, but the young man's youthful perfection was gone forever. Another score to settle.

"Do you know why the butterfly must struggle to escape its chrysalis?" he asked, sliding into dialect himself.

Georg jerked his face away. "I am not in the mood for your fables."

"Silence." The nails of his left thumb and middle finger dug into Georg's face. "It is the act of struggling that forces out the fluid from the butterfly's body and completes the development of its wings. If the butterfly is released prematurely, it will lurch around, swollen and clumsy, and soon die. Never having flown."

Georg's lips drew back from his gaping, missing teeth with a soundless hiss of pain. "And what is this supposed to mean to me?"

"I think you know." He let go. Blood welled out of the red marks that his nails had left. "Struggle is necessary. Punishment exalts."

"Easy for you to talk of punishment. You did not suffer as I did, with your father's money to protect you."

Novak went very still. Georg cringed away, sensing that he had gone too far.

Georg was wrong. His father had taught him about punishment. That lesson was frozen in his mind, dead center. A tableau in a globe of imperishable crystal. He turned away from the memory and held up his left hand. "Does this look as if I know nothing of punishment?"

Georg's eyes dropped in shame, as well they ought.

A gull shrieked in the darkening sky. Novak looked up, and exulted in the wild creature's freedom. Soon he would be reborn, with no father, no mother. He would be spotless, surrounded by gods and angels. He would be free at last, and he would never look back.

He jolted himself back to the present. "Be grateful that you have been chosen as my instrument to make this sacrifice, Georg. My gods are not for cowards, or weaklings."

Georg hesitated. "I am not weak," he said sourly.

"No, you are not." He patted Georg's shoulder. The younger man flinched at the contact. "You know my tastes just as I know yours. I would rip their throats out with my teeth and drink their blood, if I had that luxury. But I cannot compromise this new identity before I have even established it. You know exactly what it will cost me to step aside and let you play… while I watch."

Georg nodded reluctantly.

"I have chosen you to tear them to pieces for me, Georg," Novak said gently. "And still, you cannot wait. You whine. You complain."

Georg's eyes narrowed. "Do you plan to give it up, then?"

"Give up what? Drinking the blood of innocents?" Novak toasted Georg with the skull goblet and smiled. "You know me too well to ask such a stupid question."

Streaks of purplish red appeared on Georg's cheeks. The flush faded almost instantly to ghostly pallor. "I will help you," he said.

"I know you will, my friend," Novak said. "And you will be rewarded for your loyalty. You must be patient, and trust me."

The terrace door opened, and Tamara and Nigel stepped out. Nigel looked uncomfortable, but that was his natural state of being.

Tamara smiled, stunning in her brief, ice-green dress. She'd changed her chestnut hair to red and her golden eyes to green since he had sent her to monitor the household of Victor Lazar, his old friend and nemesis. He suspected that she had done her duty there with a fraction too much zeal. Perhaps he was being unfair.

In any case, red suited her, and after six months of enforced celibacy, it suited him, too. She was astonishingly beautiful. He would settle for nothing less in his bed. And her ability to hack into computer databases and change the nature of reality to suit his whims was nothing short of magic. She was immensely talented.

Nigel cleared his throat "The courier has just delivered the blood samples from Switzerland," he announced.

Novak nodded his approval. Plans were proceeding with orderly smoothness. "Excellent. You know what needs to be done. See to it."

"The switch is arranged," Nigel said. "I have identified a technician at the DNA laboratory named Chuck Whitehead who is perfect for our purposes. I will arrange for him to do the switch late Sunday night According to my statistical analysis, that's the period when the laboratory is most deserted. I will dispose of him afterwards myself."

"I have some good news, as well," Tamara said. "We won't need to bait the trap after all. The transponder on McCloud's car shows him parked outside Erin Riggs's apartment for thirty-five minutes this afternoon. He then followed her to her mother's house."

His eyes wandered over her body, appreciating how the sheath set off her long, perfect legs. "Wonderful. Stalking the poor girl already."

Tamara's smile widened. What a remarkable creature. Wanted all over the world for computer crimes and fraud, and her sexual skills were just as prodigious. She would do absolutely anything.

In fact, now that he thought about it, her lack of squeamishness was almost inhibiting. A touch of disgust or fear was like a pinch of salt that brought out the flavor of a dish. After so long without sex, he had been less discerning than usual, but his natural high standards were quickly reasserting themselves.

He was irritated. He wondered if she were doing it deliberately. Unacceptable, that one of his servants should presume to manipulate him. How
dare
she.

Georg stirred restlessly, his fists clenching. "So the police must have told McCloud that we are free," he said.

Tamara turned her brilliant smile upon him. "It would seem so."

"Then Erin knows that I am coming for her."

Tamara's smile faltered at the concentrated malevolence in Georg's voice. Then the smile quickly reappeared… and gave him an idea.

"No, Georg," he said. "Don't be obtuse. Erin knows nothing of the sort. I have spent a great deal of money to arrange for reports of our sighting in France."

"I am dying," Georg moaned, in dialect. "I suffer."

Novak sighed. Georg could be so tedious. The poor man was a volcano of festering anger from his traumatic prison experience.

Perhaps he should offer Tamara to Georg, and observe the results. He could gauge her loyalty and commitment, and at the same time, siphon off some of Georg's restless, dangerous energy.

"Stay and help us celebrate, my dear," he said. "Georg, would you care to indulge? Let Tamara ease your torment."

Georg's ruined mouth twisted in a feral smile.

Novak studied Tamara's reaction. Her expression did not waver, but he sensed the tightening in her jaw as the smile froze into place.

His loins stirred.
Yes
. This was what had been missing. Delicious.

He smiled at Nigel. "Nigel, you may stay. Tamara likes to be watched, no? Did you learn to love it during your time with Victor?"

Her smile was like a neon sign, bright and empty. "Of course, boss," she said, without missing a beat.

Nigel's face paled, but he knew better than to decline. Poor, sexless Nigel. This would be good for him. He was less manually skilled as an assassin man Georg, but the mask he presented to the world was impeccable. He was a dried-up, forgettable, middle-aged gray man, whereas Georg had lost his ability to blend. Georg was now no more than a deadly weapon to be kept hidden until violence was called for.

Georg wrenched Tamara's fragile dress down. The shoulder straps broke, and she stood naked on the terrace, the chilly evening breeze making her dark nipples tighten. She waited, unsure of what was expected of her. It was rare, to see her at a loss. Arousing.

Nigel grimaced, afraid to look away. Georg unbuttoned his pants.