Damien reviewed the building’s new layout as he ran. Birken, Birken & Thomas’s offices ran the gamut in sizes. There were ridiculously large suites for the senior partners, cubbies and lavatories for the legal researchers and assistants, and one palatial bathroom, heavily insulated, lined in marble and without any windows. It could only be accessed with an executive’s key—which Damien happened to have. It would be a good place to stash Brice if she flatly refused the vault. It also had a fire escape right across the hall. This would please her, though he had no intention of using it or letting her set foot on it either. Dippel wasn’t stupid, and he would likely have guards watching the fire escape and the stairs. She’d be an easy target out there in all that white.
Normally, the security office was locked with a cardreader that could read badges and also accepted codes punched into the key pad. But with the power off, the door unlocked automatically, enabling firefighters or paramedics to get inside in the case of an emergency.
Damien stopped outside the offices, breathing quickly, sickness in his heart.
It had been a long time since he was in a combat situation—not since World War I. That “war to end all wars” had killed his last remaining appetite for foreign crusades and bloodshed. Europe, at the end of his stay, had seemed to him a wasteland of barbed wire, starvation and shattered corpses, all caused by the endless and ultimately senseless shelling done by both sides. But the skills he had learned there and on every other battlefield where he’d shed blood had not deserted him. Damien had spent a lot of his time doing what they now called guerilla-style fighting behind enemy lines. In this place of other time, it was as though he had been in battle only yesterday. Damien didn’t like it, but he knew what to do.
The door! Damien thought as his eyes focused, the thin strip of paler darkness arresting his unpleasant memories of past conflict.
The door unlocked in a power outage, but it didn’t open itself. That took some outside agent. And guards were trained to always close the door after themselves if they left the office. It was possible that under these circumstances, the guard had simply forgotten. But it was quiet. Too quiet. Dead quiet.
Damien stopped breathing for a moment to listen for sounds from the office, creeping up silently on the crack in the doorway.
He began breathing again. Nothing. Except a certain unpleasant smell—also all too familiar.
Damien walked into the room, gun in hand, but no longer pointed it straight in front of him.
The guard was dead. Two deadly blossoms of crimson were unfurled on his chest, the handiwork of a highpowered rifle discharged at close range. His eyes were open, his mouth too. There was nothing subtle about this assault; Dippel wasn’t making an attempt at stealth. He wasn’t trying to make anything look accidental. And he wasn’t sparing innocents. They were simply bait, things to goad Byron with.
Maybe he saw this poor man as a gauntlet that he could hurl in Byron’s face.
“Bloody hell.”
Damien noticed on the desk a small white box in a nest of red wrapping paper.
There was a fish tank on the desk as well, quiet now that the bubbles were stilled along with the other electrical appliances. The neon tetras still moved about, but cautiously, as though frightened into an unnatural stillness by what they had witnessed.
Knowing it was pointless, Damien still knelt down and felt for a pulse in the guard’s neck. He noted more details about the uniformed man as he touched the chilled skin. The guard’s face was colorless now, but it had normally known a more healthy tint, the man being of Hispanic descent. He wasn’t a young man, but not old either. He should have lived another thirty years.
He’d also presumably been someone with dreams, someone who could laugh, who probably occasionally drank too much at parties, played basketball, maybe cheated on his taxes. He was someone’s son, maybe someone’s lover, maybe a father.
And now he was nothing.
Well-known bitterness filled Damien’s throat, and he had to choke back a cry.
At least the man had gotten to open his present before he died. A watch. Gold gleamed on the man’s thin wrist, the hands moving in the lighted face. It was a good watch, then, shock resistant, and it went on telling the time of normal life though it was now meaningless to its dead owner.
The watch had an alarm, too, and it began to chirp as the hands reached the hour mark. It sounded a strident alarm, but too late to save the man who wore it. Damien quickly shut it off.
Familiar anger, the rage of the battlefield, though an emotion not felt for more than ninety years, began to fill him. The berserkers, the dark, dangerous parts of his personality, dormant for almost a century, awoke and prepared themselves for war. Wasteful death—and a death meant for him—had been visited on this innocent man. It didn’t matter that Damien hadn’t known this guard. Donne was right: Every man’s death diminished him, when the loss was not meant for the person who suffered or died. The one responsible for this would pay—and pay horribly. Pay eternally. It would be Damien’s pleasure to see to it.
A small snarl rose from his throat and rumbled in the dark. The sound was shocking. Inhuman.
“No,” Damien said into the cold room, denying the beast. “Don’t go there. It won’t help.”
A part of him wanted the rage, though. It felt wrong to stay calm, and it was disrespectful to the man who had died in his place. Still, Damien killed the anger immediately. He knew what the rage could do, and it was one of the few things he feared.
He’d felt it the first time as a boy, when he’d found that stupid workman flogging a lamed horse. Trapped between the toppled wagon’s traces by the long wood poles and his own broken leg, the beast had been entirely at the man’s mercy. By the time the young and limping Lord Byron arrived, the creature was streaming with sweat and blood and screaming in pain and fear. He’d nearly killed that man, had actually taken pleasure in wresting the whip away from him and turning it on the sadist, beating him as the man had beaten the poor animal, stripping away cloth and then skin and then muscle.
Damien shuddered at the memory of his own savagery. He hadn’t cared that others looked on, hadn’t heeded the man’s screams for mercy. If others hadn’t eventually intervened, he might have beaten the man to death. As it was, he had still nearly turned his pistol upon the man after he put the horse out of its misery.
The guard deserved to be avenged as much as that horse, to have someone rage against the wrong done him. But hot anger made all men careless. Worse, Byron’s rages had always blinded him, made him impulsive and foolish. He couldn’t afford that now. Dippel wasn’t some ignorant, brutish farmer who couldn’t defend himself. He was clever, and he was expecting that Damien would be as impulsive as he had always been.
Sometimes revenge was indeed a dish best served cold.
“Dippel, why have you come here?” Damien asked the night. “Why aren’t you dead, you whoreson? Didn’t the pitchforks and torches do a good enough job? What will it take to send you to hell and keep you there?”
There was no answer.
He stood. Damien didn’t allow himself to feel—not anger, not fear nor even alarm. There wasn’t time for that. Dippel was probably busy trying to find some stairway up to Damien’s suite, but the murderous doctor would soon give up on that and think about using the elevator shaft. Damien had to get back to the apartment and get Brice to safety before Dippel found a way up there. She would hate the vault and hate him for putting her there, but it didn’t matter now. No one else was going to die for him tonight. Especially not Brice. He would not let her be martyred. He’d kill to stop it. He’d even die to save her.
Damien had a quick look around the ruined offices. The security cameras were as dead as the guard, and by the same weapon, it seemed. The lights and the telephone were lost as well, and there were no weapons. There may have been some in the desk, which had been broken open with some sort of pry bar, but if so, the guard’s killer had taken them when he departed.
“Bloody hell.”
A noise came. And then another—it was faint, unidentifiable, but out of place in the silence of the abandoned floor, and therefore ominous. He had no proof, but everything inside him said it was Dippel and that he was not alone.
Damien turned toward the door and sprinted for the elevators. His flesh was now hot enough to leave a vapor trail behind him. The rational part of his mind had rejected his rage, but his body still embraced it. Anything that got in his way tonight was going to be hit with several lifetimes of stored-up fury at the injustices perpetrated by the monsters of the world.
Chapter Eleven
A woman who is through with a man will give him up for anything—except another woman.
—Lesson in Love by Ninon de Lenclos
If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing…I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.
—Byron
Is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world and tooled in a post-chaise? In a hackney coach? In a gondola? Against a wall? In a court carriage? In a vis-à-vis? On a table? And under it?
—Byron of Don Juan in a letter to Douglas Kinnaird, October 16, 1819
“Have you ever noticed that the best affairs are accidental ones? They are meetings not sought out but delivered up randomly like a message in a bottle washed up on a beach.” Brice thought she had asked Damien that just before falling asleep, but if he had answered her, she didn’t hear.
But she was hearing something now, a noise in the elevator shaft. Relieved and annoyed, Brice opened her mouth to call down to Damien, but then paused.
Probably it was Damien coming back up to her. Probably. But what if it wasn’t?
Brice tried to still her breathing, so she could listen to the small, stealthy sounds that came out of the fearful darkness.
Something was definitely coming up to her. Something that wheezed. Something that smelled oddly chemical and could be scented above the sickening smell of the gear grease.
Her first impulse was to flee. Or maybe to shove a potted plant down on top of it, to kill the monster before it could get her.
But could it be Damien? Perhaps hurt?
But if it was he, why didn’t he call out to her? If he didn’t want to yell, he could whisper, or yodel, or hiss. Why hadn’t they thought of a secret knock they could use? Like “Knock three times if you’re human—and twice if you’re not.”
Maybe he was silent because something was chasing him? Or maybe he knew that something was already up there with her and didn’t want to warn anyone he was coming?
“Oh, damn.”
Now truly frightened, Brice retreated to a corner of the room and squatted down behind the screen of weeping fig, her eyes alternately fixed on the darker opening of the elevator shaft and the door into the library office. The hall to the kitchen opened up behind her and was blessedly silent. She was certain that nothing was hiding there, since it was the direction from which she and Damien had come. Thank heavens! It was her retreat. From there she could get to the kitchen, dining room, and then back around to the library and the staircase. She had avenues of escape.
As long as it was just one person coming up the shaft. As long as she was swift and silent.
“Please let it be Damien,” Brice whispered to herself. “Please let it be Damien, and let him be unharmed.”
Damien stood outside the elevator and listened. There were sounds in the shaft. A person, or persons, was climbing up from about the fourth floor. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell how many.
“Damn.” The vertical tunnel wasn’t a viable means of travel anymore.
He thought for a moment about shoving one of the sofas in the waiting room down on the climber and then scrambling for the upper floors before they could get off a shot. But what if it was Brice down there? That didn’t seem likely, but maybe she had come after him and had miscounted floors. Had he even told her what floor the security office was on?
“Bloody hell.”
Brice. She was probably still waiting upstairs, maybe even thinking it was her lover returning to her with the security guards. She could get caught waiting right by the doors. Could he count on her to use the gun he’d given her if she saw a stranger? She had accepted the firearm easily enough, but maybe she wouldn’t use it. And she could get hurt if she tried to fight off Dippel and missed with that first shot.
She could even die.
He had to get there before anyone else! That meant being creative.
Damien ran silently back to the security offices. There was only one thing to do if he was to get back up to Brice before anyone else.
The door was still open, showing him the windows that looked out toward the river. They were the only ones on that floor that actually opened to the outside. The insurance company had insisted that functioning windows were a liability in a high-rise.
There was no way to gauge the wind outside the fifthstory windows, but the news couldn’t be good. The cold wouldn’t affect him right away, but it did affect everything he’d be using. Ice and wind weren’t any sort of a plus when climbing freehand. Still, this seemed the only way to make on his own terms, without being surprised by any of Dippel’s creatures.
Damien slowed his breathing and cleared his mind of all fears and memories of disaster. He began a small, internal pep talk as he stripped off his sweater. It was made of loosely woven wool and would be likely to catch on things and perhaps upset his balance. He’d miss the warmth, but it seemed a crucial trade.
Mountaineering without equipment—whether on actual mountains or buildings—required two things: strength of body and strength of mind. And of the two, the fortitude of will was probably more important—as long as one was in generally good condition.
There weren’t a lot of rules to the sport. Just one, really: Don’t look down if you want to keep yourself happy. He knew from previous experience that the sight of a long, steep slope of glass and stone could instantly diminish one’s belief in his ability to be a human spider.
Looking up was another matter. The building had some obstacles that had to be negotiated, including a variety of ledges and inconveniently placed gargoyles that vomited gutter water. He’d have to avoid them. Fortunately, looking up did not cause vertigo.
This whole affair wasn’t a happy proposition, but at least he knew that the drainpipe on the corner was secure. He had them checked all the time, knowing they were his tertiary means of escape in case of a fire. They could take his weight and then some.
If they didn’t shatter in the cold.
And he wouldn’t be seen because there were no windows close by.
The only danger in this venture, he assured himself, was losing focus during the climb.
Or a really powerful wind gust could lift him off the wall and take him for a short and fatal ride. Okay, and patches of ice might form when his abnormally hot body melted the snow and it refroze into ice slicks, which would be dangerous if he had to come back down again.
His impulse was to hurl himself into the night. But there was no need to rush, Damien told himself as he popped the latch on the window. He stepped out onto the snow-clogged ledge, which looked like a miniature polar wasteland, complete with crumbling ice cliffs and crevasses. Brice was probably safe. She had a gun. And even if she had been taken hostage, Dippel wouldn’t hurt her. Not right away. The bastard would want her as bait.
Look at that ledge! Are you insane?
No. He was perfectly rational. All he needed to do was inch along the ledge for about twenty feet until he got to the drainpipe—and there was plenty of room on the ledge, a full seven inches. A climb of seven or eight stories was nothing. He could do it blindfolded and with one arm tied—well, perhaps not blindfolded and with one arm tied behind his back. But it was a short, easy climb up to the roof. He’d m
anaged much more difficult feats in Venice—while drunk even.
Something hurtled out of the night and nearly struck Damien. Weirdly, unexplainably, a small brown bat flew by the window and then flew by again almost immediately. Which was impossible. That meant there were two bats out here in the storm, since no animal could circle around so quickly.
“I don’t know what you want,” he said to the retreating bats as they tumbled around the corner of the building, though he could guess what had drawn them. The gargoyles took on both an electrical charge and also an eerie resonance that probably wrought havoc with the bats’ sonar every time it stormed. “Trust me, you won’t find anything flying in circles. Anyway, can’t you see it’s snowing? Go home before you freeze or fry.”
In reply, a gust of wind struck Damien like a hammer, driving his words back into his mouth. He turned his face from the onslaught and huddled against the wall, fingers locked around the window frame.
Seven inches of ledge. That was plenty. Really.
In the distance, lightning began to flicker—special lightning that brought out something like the aurora borealis and lingered like napalm on the buildings it struck.
Damien counted as he moved: One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four-one-thousand, five-one-thousand, six—
The storm had circled back and was moving his way, and quickly. He wasn’t afraid of the lightning, as long as he wasn’t hit directly, but it could be inconvenient since contact with it left him higher than a kite and sometimes gave him an erection. That wouldn’t be so good on a seven-inch ledge.
Perhaps there was a need to hurry a bit after all.
“Bloody hell and back again.” His frustrated words were barely audible over the crunching of the ice beneath his feet.
Damien scooted another three steps, kicking the snow away with angry feet, and finally reached for the drainpipe. Looking straight ahead, he started to climb the iron rope that was all that linked him to the roof.
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