Divine Fire

by Melanie Jackson

  I am in terror. I have seen my man in black! The man with the red tablets bearing my name and the dozen bottles of elixir—the one who appeared before me seventy years ago. And I heard him say he has a son who will be called St. Germain and the world shall know him and be filled with awe and dread.

  —From the letters of Ninon de Lenclos

  Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

  —Byron

  The reading or non-reading of a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

  —Byron, letter to Richard Hoppner, October 29, 1918

  Brice dreamed as she never had before, her weird, night-marish visions played out before a sewn-together backdrop of strange emotions, memories and wild imaginings, where frightening things both real and unreal happened over and over again. The only difference in each performance of the nightmare was that the stage grew progressively dimmer and the mood more ominous.

  She came awake in a rush, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” she whispered, her voice raspy. She wasn’t her usual bushy-tailed self after only a couple of hours of sleep and the lingering terror of the dreams made things worse.

  “The power’s out,” Damien answered, his voice also hushed.

  Brice glanced at the clock on her nightstand. It was dark in the room but not completely so. She looked quickly toward her door. Out in the hall, there was a small red light up near the ceiling. It blinked periodically.

  “The smoke detectors have battery backup,” Damien said, guessing her next question. “Just sit still and listen for a moment. There should be light soon—if this is just an accident. The security man at the desk knows how to turn on the backup generators.”

  They waited for what seemed an eternity, staring at the small red dot—danger, warning, spilled blood, it said—then Damien threw back the covers.

  “If, you said. You think this isn’t an accident?” Brice’s voice was barely louder than the wind outside. The storm had worsened while they slept.

  As though hearing her thought, Damien went to her window and pried it open. The wind rushed inside, hurling snow at them. The bitter confetti latched onto the drapes and carpet and clung with icy claws.

  Brice thought of the story Damien had told her about the unnatural storm that brought him to Dippel’s castle. She shuddered, pushing the memory away.

  “It’s dark over the entire block. But only this block. Damn,” Damien said. “Get dressed, Brice. I have a bad feeling.”

  Brice scrambled after Damien, her skin crawling with more than cold. She had a bad feeling too. She rushed to the window and looked down before he could close it, half expecting to see something evil waiting there in the fierce night.

  The streetlights were out as well, but she could see that there were tracks in the snow leading up to the building’s main entrance. It was difficult to tell, since more than one person could have walked the same path, but she counted at least three distinct trails. And there was something ominous about them.

  “Who would cut the power? Could it be street gangs?” she asked, allowing Damien to pull her back and slam the window shut. The question should have surprised her, because it came out of her subconscious, bypassing reason. It didn’t, though. She felt very in tune with Damien and knew what he was thinking.

  Brice shivered. The magic bubble of new love—or at least new lust—that surrounded them had burst. The dark that had been romantic only hours before was now sinister. And she was standing naked with a man who was, if not a virtual stranger, then at least still very strange to her. However, the death of romance did not mean her mental connection with Damien had ended. If anything, it was stronger than before.

  “Trust me, it’s no one you want to know,” Damien said grimly, dusting her off with his crumpled clothing and then pulling on his dampened shirt. “You recall when I said that there was one other thing I needed to tell you? One other danger connected with my prolonged life?”

  “Vaguely.” She remembered more clearly his passionate description of her body by moonlight.

  She reached for her boots, then decided she had better put on her pants first. She turned to the dresser and pulled open the top drawer, grabbing clothes by feel alone. She hated that she was always a little slow upon waking, that part of her mind seemed tethered in the dreamlands and she had to reel it back in before being fully functional.

  “Well, there are actually three things you need to know,” Damien said. “One, Dippel probably isn’t dead. For the longest time I thought he was, since the peasants in his village did a real torch-and-pitchfork number on his castle and supposedly killed everyone in it. But I have recently begun to suspect that it is otherwise. Two, I know of two others of his former patients who have come to a bad end. I wasn’t close with them, you understand, but we knew of each other. One lived in France, one in Florida. Both died early last year in suspicious fires. I didn’t find out about it until this fall, though. The will of my acquaintance in France took a long time to probate, and the small instruction of informing me of Jean’s death was overlooked for months. And Paul had no will.”

  “And three?” she asked, keeping her voice level. It required an extreme effort, because she was beginning to shake violently. The snow was off of her body, but not the chill.

  “I hired a firm of private investigators to find the man I suspect to be Dippel, and to determine if he had anything to do with the deaths of Jean Perregaux or Paul Holmes.”

  “And?” Brice pulled on a sweater, hoping she had it the right way around.

  “There was no proof one way or another. But the man who sounds a lot like Dippel has vanished from his bunker in Nevada—which also conveniently burned—and one of the investigators turned up dead, again burned in a car crash when his vehicle ran off the road.”

  “Was it an accident?”

  “The police report says so.” Damien moved toward the door. “But I don’t believe it. Not now.”

  Brice grabbed her coat and moved behind him. As always, he didn’t seem to feel the chill.

  “I think I’m frightened.”

  “Come on. We need to get to the library. Just stay close and be quiet and everything will be fine.” His voice was brisk and reassuring.

  They ghosted down the hall, their way lit by the distant city lights bleeding through the iced-over windows and by the intermittent red light of the smoke detectors. Damien stopped by a small table and lifted the receiver of the antique telephone.

  “It’s dead. It could be the storm.” He didn’t bother to put any conviction in his voice.

  “Uh-huh, and pigs may fly. Do you have a cell phone somewhere?”

  “No, I told you. I can’t get a signal off the bloody things. In fact, I wreak havoc on lots of machines. Do you have one?”

  “No. Remember? I told you I can’t stand constantly being interrupted.”

  “So…” Damien turned and continued down the hall.

  “I think we have to assume that we’re really in trouble,” Brice said as she followed.

  “Yes, I believe the expression is ‘in deep shit.’ ”

  Brice almost laughed. The phrase sounded ridiculous on his lips.

  “Yes—but how deep?” she asked. “I’m not sure I understand, or even have the scales on which to measure our difficulties. What does Dippel want? To kill you? And if so, why?”

  They walked quickly, being careful to avoid the desk Brice had been using. There was still a faint glow of embers in the fireplace.

  “That remains to be seen, though I suspect you have the right of it. He wants me dead—if not, why not just send a Christmas card or phone for an appointment?” He asked abruptly, “Can you use a gun?”

  “Yes,” Brice answered without hesitation. She didn’t ask if he could. Lord Byron had been a noted marksman. It wasn’t likely that he allowed his skills to deteriorate.

  “Good.” Damien opened a side panel in his desk and extracted two pistols. She didn’t recognize the make of
either gun in the dark, but they were heavy, and hers was warm—almost hot. She began to be aware of how warm Damien really was. His body temperature had been normal while resting, but standing beside her, he radiated heat like a fully stoked iron stove. His elevated body temperature had heated the metal in the few seconds he held the gun.

  “It’s loaded,” he said. “Just point and shoot.”

  Brice turned toward the window and sighted down the barrel. She checked to see where the safety catch was and then opened the gun and looked inside. It held eight bullets. She hoped that would be enough.

  “Aim for the face,” Damien said, tucking his weapon into the band of his pants. “It may not kill them, but it’s hard to chase someone with your eyes shot out.”

  Them? Dippel’s monsters, his undying soldiers. All the horrors she’d read about in that leather-bound journal. So she hadn’t been wrong about the ominous prints in the snow and what Damien was thinking.

  Brice swallowed and nodded, trying not to feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. It was difficult, because in spite of what Damien had told her, the proof she had seen with her own eyes, and what she had read in Dippel’s own journal, she hadn’t really believed most of it. She still didn’t. It was easier to think that any invaders were conventional thieves or drug dealers.

  Brice dropped the pistol into her coat pocket. She thrust her hands in as well. She didn’t want to see if they were shaking.

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” Damien said. His face was harsh in the dim red light. “We are going to climb down the ladder in the elevator shaft to the floor below. After that, there are stairs we can use. We are making for the fifth floor. That’s where the security office is.”

  “There’s more than the guard in the lobby?”

  “There should be at least one other on duty even at night. Hopefully, he hasn’t been incapacitated yet.”

  “And if he has?” Brice asked, even though she was sure she wouldn’t like the answer.

  “Then we take any weapons we can find in the office. And we come back up here and I lock you in the vault while I take care of this mess.”

  “No,” Brice said immediately. She didn’t like the sound of the vault or of Damien “taking care of this mess.” Both sounded potentially fatal.

  “It has an inside latch. You’ll be able to get out if you need to,” Damien said, understanding that she was objecting to being shut up in the vault. He started for the foyer where the elevator was.

  Brice thought of all those not-so-accidental fires that Damien had mentioned and shuddered. If the building went up, escaping from the vault wouldn’t help her.

  “No. We don’t split up. Not for any reason. They always split up in the movies and it’s always a bad idea.”

  “Yes, we do split up—if the guard has been gotten at,” he argued. He looked back at her. “Unless you’ve done a lot of mountain climbing in the snow?”

  “No.” Their footsteps echoed in the hall. She asked, “Why would that matter? You said the elevator had a ladder. And there are stairs.” She could do stairs, even in the dark. The elevator…well, she would manage somehow. A shaft wasn’t like a car, and she rode in elevators all the time. Well, a lot of the time. When she had no other choice.

  “If Dippel’s gotten to the security room, then they are in the building—using the stairwell probably. If I’m to get down to the generator and see about reconnecting the phones, I’ll have to go down the outside of the building. In good weather, it would be a hard climb. In this hell broth? No, I couldn’t let you risk it.”

  “No.” Brice repeated. Again, she didn’t ask about who “they” were. It made some sense that Dippel wouldn’t come alone. And there were those tracks—so at least three people were here. “No, absolutely not. Look, I have a better idea. If they’ve gotten to the security guard, we burn a match under the smoke detectors and set it off. That’ll bring the fire department. They can call the police if we need them.”

  She didn’t think about the fact that Dippel might have a similar plan, only one that involved actually burning down the building. That was too horrible to think about.

  “Good plan, but it won’t work.” Damien stopped in front of the elevator doors and began working his fingers into the crack. He shouldn’t have been able to force the car open, but he managed it quickly. “The smoke detectors only alert the security room. If there really is a fire, the guards call the fire department. I had to do this because I kept setting the damned things off every time it stormed or I had a nightmare. And you can bet the phone lines have been cut for the whole building, not just on this floor.”

  Damien finished opening the metal door with one hand. Brice could only stare at him and wonder how strong he actually was. Had Dippel’s treatment done more than extend his life and turn him into a human furnace?

  “Let’s try it now,” she urged as he swung into the dark shaft. She could smell grease from the gears and cables and began to feel a little dizzy at the thought of stepping into the black hole. She didn’t like confined spaces. She never had, and it had gotten worse since the car accident. The petroleum smell rolling out of the dark didn’t help, either. “If the guard is there, then he’ll call the fire department and help will be here in no time.”

  “The ladder is to the left,” Damien said. “It’s stable, so don’t worry about falling.”

  “Damien, damn it! You aren’t listening.”

  “Look, we can’t do that. If Dippel has taken over the security room, then this will just alert him to the fact that we’re up and know he’s here. We might as well lay out the welcome mat and shout ‘yoohoo, over here!’ Anyway, I’m not sure we want the police and fire departments. This would be awfully hard to explain, and I don’t much fancy becoming anyone’s medical marvel—which is bound to happen if anyone with an ounce of medical training gets a look at me.” His voice was getting fainter. “Brice, just wait for me up there. It’s safe for now, and I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  “Damn it.” Brice reached into the dark, feeling for the ladder. The smell choked her, but she forced herself to ignore it. “I’m coming. Slow down.”

  “Wait there. And be quiet a moment. I need to listen for them,” Damien said, and there was the fading sound of another set of doors being forced open.

  Brice waited, breath held, listening with Damien for any reverberations that suggested he had walked into an ambush on the floor below. But there was nothing. And after another moment, she realized that there wasn’t any Damien either. He had gone on without her.

  “Damn it!”

  Though she was not in the shaft yet, a sort of claustrophobia set in. Suddenly she became aware that the building, though comparatively huge, was actually finite. And therefore not big enough. Not while a killer might be on the loose, not while death stalked. And try as she might, she couldn’t shake off the idea that there could be something there in the dark, something dead, creeping toward her up the ladder she still couldn’t find with her groping hand.

  The walls of panic started closing in. She pushed back with all her might, shoving, sweating and swearing in her brain, using all her willpower to hold the claustrophobia and fear at bay. It was no use, though. Brice finally pulled her arm back, shuddering violently. She couldn’t do it. Not alone.

  It was such a small thing, but she couldn’t look into the dark pit and not sense monsters waiting there.

  “Damien, damn you.”

  The Ninety-first Psalm suddenly popped into her head:

  You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor pestilence that walks in darkness, nor destructors that lay waste at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hands, but it shall not come near you…

  “Yeah, sure.” She forced her voice not to quaver, but fear was creeping over her, bringing a chill to her skin. “Santa, if you’re listening, cancel that order for a new laptop. All I want for Christmas this year is for us to make it out alive.”r />
  Damien knew from experience that there were two kinds of time. One was the stuff that made up days and nights. You marked it with minutes and hours on a watch, or by weeks on a calendar.

  Then there was the other kind, the type that went too swiftly for the consulting of timepieces. It was the type that rushed at you in moments of danger. That was where he was now. His body was recalibrating to this faster internal clock, sending adrenaline to his muscles, speeding up his heart so he was prepared for the shift into battle.

  Another minute and he was ready. He had discovered long ago that he was willing to lose his life in combat, but not his nerve. Not his honor.

  Gun ready, Damien stepped out of the elevator shaft and sprinted through the dark for the security office.

  It was too much to hope that he’d find the security guard rocking back in his swivel chair, hands folded across his lap as he napped, unaware of the power outage. Or that perhaps the backup system had kicked in and the guard was now watching over several screens filled with universally peaceful scenes. Or, if there was something fishy on the screen, that he would be able to whip out some exotic weapon that could be used remotely, and only on the lower floors—perhaps something like a knockout gas, which could be sprayed through the ventilation system.

  Actually, he’d better hope there wasn’t any knockout gas around. There was no guarantee that it would work on Dippel, and Damien didn’t fancy being caught napping by his old friend.

  Damien jogged right and then got up close to the wall as he inched toward his goal.

  Under other circumstances, Damien might not have known where the security offices were located. Having no mania for law enforcement, he did not habitually seek out knowledge of this sort. But he had designed and overseen construction of Ruthven Tower, and had made a point of knowing about his tenants and any changes they made to the architecture.

  The new security suite was down the hall from the elevators on the west side of the building. It took up the coveted northwest corner of the tower and was the only suite on this floor not leased by Birken, Birken & Thomas, Attorneys at Law.