Soul Meaning (Seventeen)

by AD Starrling

  The alley behind the tower was blessedly empty. The low growl of the Hayabusa whined into silence as I braked to a stop and switched the engine off. I parked the bike behind the dumpsters and studied the fire escape several feet above my head. I crouched, leapt upwards and caught the lowest rung of the ladder with my right hand. It slid down smoothly to the ground. I started to climb.

  At the top of the flight of steps, I hunkered against the side of the building, slid the guns from the holsters on my legs and carefully strained my ears. Other than the harsh patter of the rain, the clamor of traffic from the avenue behind me, the roar of distant thunder and the dull thrum of blood in my skull, I could hear no other noise. I raised my head cautiously above the concrete parapet.

  ‘Welcome, half-breed,’ said Haus from somewhere in the darkness.

  A gasp left my lips as I was abruptly lifted from the stairwell by a pair of unseen hands and hurled through the air. By the time I landed on my back and skidded halfway across the water slicked rooftop, I had fired half the rounds in both guns.

  They all hit their target.

  ‘Hey, Cain, you never told me he was this puny,’ said the giant in front of me in a heavy European accent. He looked down and fingered the holes in his fine wool, roll neck sweater. I caught a glimpse of a bulletproof vest beneath it. Of more immediate importance, however, was the weapon he held in his right hand. It was an impressive single-edged Chinese sword, a dao. A flash of lightning illuminated the sky and caused the curved blade to gleam ominously in the rain. The canted hilt looked small in the grip of the man who held it.

  The giant was a much taller and wider version of Haus. Muscles bulged across his shoulders and rippled under his tailored trousers. His small, red-rimmed eyes displayed the dull glimmer of an arrogant bully pumped up on steroids. He was also very fast: in all my years as an immortal, I had only come across a handful of Hunters who had surprised me as swiftly as he had.

  Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Haus sneer. ‘What did you expect? After all, he is a half-breed.’ The Hunter paused, his expression hardening beneath his pale skin. ‘Finish him, Abel,’ he said coldly.

  I glanced behind Haus. Reid sat leaning against an emergency door at the far end of the rooftop: there was a bandage around his thigh and a fresh bruise next to his mouth. His right hand was cuffed to a bolt in the door frame. ‘Cain and Abel?’ I muttered wryly as I rose to my feet.

  Reid shrugged. ‘And they’re brothers as well,’ he said, grinning weakly. ‘Go figure.’

  The words had barely left his lips when the giant bellowed and charged. My eyes narrowed. I drew the daisho from my waist, my feet gliding across the concrete rooftop as I twisted my body and shifted to my right. The wakizashi blocked my attacker’s sword. I moved the katana once and stepped back smoothly.

  Blood gushed out of the Hunter’s chest in a crimson flow from the wound I had inflicted with my blade: as I suspected, the vest had not been stab proof. A puzzled frown crossed the large man’s face, as if he was debating a difficult conundrum. He fell backwards slowly and hit the ground hard. He did not rise again.

  ‘How—’ Haus mumbled, eyes widening in an ashen face.

  I watched impassively while the immortal’s last breath left his lips and his face sagged into the waxen expression of the dead.

  It had taken two centuries for me to understand the real reason why the immortals hated me so. It was not, as I had originally presumed, because of racial prejudice, bigotry, or even repugnance at the bloodlines getting tainted in some way.

  The principle reason they loathed me, and their single-minded motivation for wishing me dead, came down to one thing and one thing only. Fear.

  As far as I knew of our extensive history, I was the only immortal who had the ability to truly kill another immortal.

  It did not matter whether it was their first or their sixteenth death. If the weapon I wielded bore a direct physical connection between my body and their heart, they would lose their immortality instantly and be unable to regenerate and live again.

  It was as if I could shatter their entire soul in one strike, like Azrael, the Angel of Death.

  Haus raised the blade in his right hand, screamed something unintelligible and came at me across the rooftop. I blinked water from my eyes, gripped the daisho tightly and shifted into the fighting stance taught to me by my Edo master. Our swords clashed under the pounding rain just as a bolt of lightning streaked across the dark heavens.

  It took only seconds for me to realise that Haus was the better fighter of the two brothers: I narrowly missed decapitation twice. In the end, however, the daisho proved stronger than his blade. A roll of thunder tore the skies when the katana finally slipped past his guard moments later. Haus froze, his body stiffening. His eyes widened while he stared uncomprehendingly at the sword protruding from his chest.

  I never looked at his left hand.

  Reid’s shout reached my ears at the same time the bullet punched through my rib cage, trailing a river of fire into my body.

  ‘Olsson was right. You’re weak, half-breed!’ hissed the Hunter with a distorted grimace. The gun and the sword clattered out of his grip. He slid to the ground, his unblinking gaze turned towards the heavens and his features fixed in a rictus of rage.

  I felt my heart slow down. My vision dimmed. My knees gave way beneath me. My last thought before darkness claimed me was the name Haus had spoken with his final breath.

  ~ * * * ~

  I gasped and opened my eyes. It was still raining. A few crows spiralled out of the night sky and landed on the rooftop.

  ‘Yo,’ said Reid.

  Chapter Three

  The downpour continued into the next day.

  ‘I can’t believe you died twice in the space of forty-eight hours,’ said Reid.

  I remained silent and took a sip from the mug of liquor-laced coffee in my hand. It was difficult to tell whether my partner’s voice held disgust or admiration. Somehow, I suspected it was the former.

  We were in our office in Mission Hill.

  After my fourteenth death at the hands of Burt Suarez, Reid had spent an entire month stalking and, for want of a better word, hounding me until I finally capitulated and grudgingly accepted his offer to become my business partner. It was that, or shoot him. Since I had never killed anyone in cold blood, I had been left with little choice but to agree to his proposition. I asked him once why he had been so determined to work with me. To this he replied, ‘I had a feeling things would always be lively around you. Besides, the homicide unit was starting to wear me down.’ I decided to take this as a compliment. We changed the name of the detective agency I had originally formed with my best friend and moved to smaller premises across town; the previous place held too many painful memories for me.

  The previous night, a young ER doctor had enthusiastically expounded on how the steel rod that had pierced through Reid’s thigh had missed his bone and artery by a mere inch. After patching Reid up, he had gone on to ask excitedly about the bullet wound in my chest; he had faltered somewhat in the face of our stares and, Adam’s apple bobbing wildly in his skinny throat, left quickly to go save lives elsewhere in the emergency department. Reid had refused the pair of crutches offered to him by a nurse and made a half muttered promise that he would return for a follow-up check. The woman’s face had filled with doubt at his words. She perked up considerably when I told her that I would bring him back for the appointment, dead or alive. We had ridden to the docks earlier that morning to retrieve the Chevy. Bar some bird droppings, the car had remained miraculously untouched. Reid never asked about the Hayabusa.

  I sat down on our second-hand leather sofa, closed my eyes and leaned against the backrest. I heard Reid press the button on the answer phone. There followed the subtle scratch of pencil across paper as he dutifully wrote down the messages from the previous day.

  Our landlady had called about our overdue rent, her tone somewhat cool. A hesitant Mr Novak wanted to know how much
it would cost to provide photographic evidence of his wife’s infidelity. A soft spoken and elderly sounding Miss Kaplinsky had phoned about a missing cat. A salesman from Ink R Us was promising a fifteen percent discount if we ordered thirty ink cartridges by the end of the day. A Mr Price from Maine Investment Corp wished to talk to us about investigating one of his employees.

  The last message was from several days ago. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling as the words of a dead man rolled out of the speaker.

  ‘Good morning. My name is Cain Haus. A friend recommended your agency to me. I would be grateful if you could ring me back so I can make an appointment to see you.’ There was a slight pause. ‘I particularly want to meet with Mr Soul. The matter I wish to discuss is a rather delicate one, and I believe he’s in the best position to assist me.’

  The beep of the machine was loud in the silence that followed.

  ‘There’s a voice we won’t be hearing anytime soon,’ murmured Reid. There was more silence. ‘Wanna talk about it?’ he said finally.

  I rose and walked to the filing cabinet that served as our drinks tray. I reached for the bottle of bourbon and poured another measure into my mug.

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Reid muttered.

  ‘Mikael Olsson.’

  He looked at me blankly.

  ‘That’s the name Haus mentioned last night,’ I said dully. ‘It’s also the name of a friend who died ten years ago.’

  Rain drummed against the window. On the street below, people milled along the sidewalks, umbrellas bowing under the force of the heavy autumnal shower.

  ‘Was he the one you were mourning when Suarez shot you?’ said Reid after a while.

  I nodded mutely.

  A frown marred Reid’s brow. ‘Any chance Haus knew him from way back then?’ he said finally, his gaze steady on my face.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied, shaking my head. ‘Mikael disliked the Hunters as much as I do.’

  A door slammed in the corridor outside. We shared the second floor of the building with several other offices. In the distance, the elevator doors opened with a faint ‘ping’. Voices rose and faded in the background.

  ‘So, what are you saying?’ my partner said carefully.

  I turned from the window and stared blindly at the wall. ‘I think he might still be alive.’ I paused as the words slowly sunk into my consciousness: now that I had actually voiced them, they felt more real. ‘And I think he faked his own death, somehow.’ It was the only logical conclusion I could reach. I could not, however, fathom the why.

  I first met Olsson in England, in the late nineteenth century; at the time, I was living in London and working as a reporter for The Times. In those days, the broadsheets were full of frenzied news about The Whitechapel Murders and the puzzling identity of the serial killer who would eventually come to be known as Jack the Ripper. Olsson wrote for the Morning Post. London’s East End was our beat and we found ourselves regularly sharing pints of ale and gruesome stories in the local pubs. It was not long before we became firm friends. We drifted apart ten years later, as friends sometimes do. It was not until I met him again in New York in the 1960s that I realised that he was an immortal. Olsson was similarly shocked. After that, we kept in touch and went on to form a detective agency together in 1990. As immortals who had not yet met their soul mates, having another immortal companion to pass the years with was a great solace.

  Then, one night ten years ago, everything changed. I received a frantic call from Olsson and reached his house to find the front door forced open and a trail of blood that led all the way to the backyard. Though I searched for weeks, I never found his body.

  ‘There was nothing in the house to suggest the identity of his killer?’ said Reid skeptically.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the cops never found out who did it?’

  I shook my head.

  Reid was frowning. ‘Did he have any enemies?’

  I sighed. ‘If he did, he never told me of them.’

  Silence followed. ‘You suspected the Hunters?’ Reid added.

  I shrugged. The immortals were the only ones who could have executed such a smooth assassination. Although I had no proof of this, I had been pretty certain that either Bastian or Crovir Hunters had been behind Mikael’s disappearance.

  ‘Was it to get to you?’ said Reid.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied carefully. ‘If they knew about Mikael, then they must have known where I was. But they never came after me.’

  Reid studied me for a while longer before rising from his seat. ‘Well, the rent isn’t going to pay itself if we just sit here playing twenty questions.’ He shrugged into his coat and headed for the door. ‘I’ll call Novak and Price. You take Kaplinsky.’

  I stared at him. ‘You’re giving me the cat?’

  Reid paused and gestured at his wounded leg. ‘Do I look like I’m fit to chase felines up trees? Besides, we need the money.’

  We didn’t, really, but that was a subject I had yet to broach with Reid: I was pretty certain he would adamantly refuse any financial help I offered. I also sensed I would jeopardise our friendship if I did so. I pursed my lips thoughtfully. ‘You just don’t like cats, do you?’

  Reid scowled. ‘No, I don’t. They’re smug and they always look like they’re up to something.’

  Miss Kaplinsky was a retired school teacher who lived in a quiet neighbourhood in East Boston. Her cat, a silver tabby, had gone missing two weeks previously. Despite actively canvassing the streets and advertising for a reward in the local paper, she still had not heard any news about the absent feline.

  Reid dropped me at her address before driving off to meet with Price.

  Golden Leaf was a retirement complex built in the early 1970s. It consisted of four red-brick, garden style buildings arranged around a large central courtyard lined with sycamore trees and rhododendrons. Sunlight streamed through the swaying branches and cast dancing shadows on the walkway as I made my way across the grounds.

  Apartment 12B was a first-floor corner unit with views over the park opposite the complex. Miss Kaplinsky greeted me in a respectable tweed skirt and a long-sleeved cream blouse. The apartment was small and neat, and smelled faintly of vanilla.

  ‘He never usually strays, you know,’ she said while showing me to a seat. ‘He’s a good cat.’ A soft sigh escaped her lips. ‘I do hope nothing bad has happened to him.’

  I glanced at the shelves and sideboards in the front room. They were crowded with metal frames depicting dozens of smiling children in uniform, standing and sitting in orderly rows. The colour had faded in most of them.

  ‘Would you like something to drink?’ she murmured, hovering by a chair. I shook my head. She crossed the floor to a writing desk and removed something from a drawer. ‘This is a recent picture of him.’ She took the seat opposite mine and leaned across the narrow coffee table. Hands covered in paper-thin skin and fine spidery veins touched the photograph.

  The shot had been taken in the courtyard below. The cat was sitting in the shade of a tree and appeared half-asleep. It looked like it was grinning.

  ‘We’ll do our best to find him,’ I said quietly. ‘Can I have this?’ I indicated the picture. She smiled and nodded.

  I left the apartment a moment later. Predictably, a careful search of the buildings and the courtyard yielded no results. After talking to several of the neighbours and investigating the streets adjacent to the retirement complex, I studied the park across the road. Miss Kaplinsky had already visited it several times and had found no signs of the missing tabby.

  I called Reid. ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Price thinks one of his employees has been playing with the numbers. He wants to hire us.’ His voice was almost drowned by the city traffic in the background.

  ‘That’s great. I’m going to the park to look for the cat.’

  ‘Ah-huh,’ said Reid.

  I frowned faintly; I suspected that my partner was grinning. �
��Come get me when you’re done.’

  I crossed the street and entered the shadows beneath the trees.

  The park was divided into four sections. There was a play area for children, an artificial lake with ducks and other water fowls, an extensive expanse of lawn and several wooded areas. I explored the open spaces first before heading for the woods.

  I personally did not mind cats. They used to be worshipped as gods in the olden days, they were fastidiously clean and territorial, they preferred their own company, and could generally take or leave humans. They were said to be a lot smarter than dogs, although probably not as loyal.

  I pulled a packet of catnip out of my pocket: I was hoping this particular feline had the intelligence of the average Labrador.

  Half an hour later, I had completed my search of the park. Several squirrels and strays had shown interest in the bag in my hands. I had, however, found no trace of the silver tabby. I was about to call it a day when a block of buildings across the road from the north entrance caught my eyes. Between four and six storeys tall, they looked mostly abandoned and were separated by a series of narrow, parallel alleys that faded into deepening gloom. I stared thoughtfully at the dim passages before crossing the road to the nearest one.

  I heard the first inquisitive meow after several minutes. The alley had given birth to a network of backstreets crowded with fire escapes, heating vents, industrial-sized dumpsters, and the occasional tent made of cardboard boxes and lined with dirty cloths and a sleeping bag.

  A ginger tom peered at me curiously from under a metal skip and meowed again. By the time I reached the end of the passage, other cats had emerged from the shadows. I paused at an intersection and glanced over my shoulder. The cats stopped in their tracks and watched me with large, solemn eyes. There was not one silver tabby among them.