Of Saints and Shadows (1994)

by Christopher Golden

  So he’d give her a poke. Maybe even drink her blood. But he wouldn’t kill her. She seemed like a pretty nice girl, after all.

  “We’re here,” he said, and gestured at a beautiful ship. Not a huge yacht like many of the ostentatious vessels berthed here, and yet certainly of a size and condition that communicated stature, like its owner.

  They turned onto the walkway. Vanessa could see the name painted on the side, and it was Wounded Knee, a strange name for a boat, to be sure. But Cody was a strange man.

  For the first time, Vanessa noticed that she and Cody were holding hands. They’d done it instinctively, naturally. She looked at him and smiled. His smile was both warm and sad; a man who’d done things he shouldn’t, and couldn’t forget, yet who lived life with a rare energy. Every day, every conversation, every moment was a game to be won. Like blackjack.

  In contrast, it usually seemed as if every thought that entered her own mind contained a but. Not this time. Cody may have been a little strange, a bit larger than life, but he definitely had style. Definitely one for the books. She squeezed the hand she held tightly and led him toward his boat.

  “Cody!” The voice rang out from the deck of the boat, deep and full of the promise of violence. It was a tone Vanessa’s first husband, Ian, had taught her well. She hated it.

  But then another sound replaced it, one with which she was unfamiliar but quick to recognize. She hated this new sound most of all.

  It was her companion, her new friend, screaming.

  Damnation, it hurls!

  Cody can’t control his voice at first, the scream sliding out like far too much whiskey from an empty stomach. A slow breath, like wiping that whiskey vomit from his mouth, he regains control.

  “Cody!” the voice booms again, and it’s all moving too slowly. “I don’t want to have to tell you this more than once. Move away from the woman and she won’t be hurt.”

  She won’t be hurt? Hell, he’s the one with a silver dagger sticking out of his back and they’re telling him she won’t be hurt? What kind of shit is that?

  He moves quickly.

  Cody can’t sec the man who’d been yelling to him, but as he turns there’s no mistaking the trio coming down the pier, or the one only a dozen steps away, who must have backed off when he realized his silver dagger had missed Cody’s heart.

  “Pull it out,” he says to a still-startled Vanessa.

  “What? But I—”

  “Do it!” and he’s glad she’s as tough as he thought she was, because she does do it, puts one hand on his back, covering part of his spine, and with the other, yanks the knife from the wound. Cody sinks fangs into his lip but does not cry out. The lip will heal almost instantly. The wound in his back bleeds freely and will take much longer, poisoned as it is.

  “Now get in the boat,” he growls as he sees all four men begin to move forward.

  “But . . .” she says again, and he looks at her now, sees her fear just as surely as she must be able to see his anger, his pain, his intentions.

  “Get in the boat, damn you. They’re going to kill me and you’re going to be a witness. You think they’ll let you live?” He wants to save the girl, but he hopes she’ll be smart and help him do it.

  He knows who they are, immediately. He’s surprised, actually, that it’s taken this long for them to get to him. Von Reinman’s death was a blow, and at first he’d wanted to go after his mentor’s killers, but then, when reports of other assassinations began to trickle in, he’d realized what they were doing and decided simply to wait for them. Karl’s death was just the latest in a series of tragedies that had proven to Cody that his friendship with other men was a curse for them. First his father, Isaac Cody, and then his brother, Sam, and then men who were like brothers to him; Dave Harrington, James Butler Hickok, Sitting Bull. Karl Von Reinman’s death still rankles within him, but it is the cumulative effect of all of these untimely deaths, deaths he could not prevent, that drives his rage now, lends an old storyteller even more courage and strength than Von Reinman’s blood had given him nearly eighty years before.

  He is on his first attacker, the man who stabbed him, before the others can even lift their weapons. They’d been insane to attack him at night in the first place, so he knows they’ll be packing whatever weapons it might take. That means silver bullets, and though the wound in his back is healing, silver hurts like hell and might kill him. He isn’t about to let that happen.

  He can hear Vanessa gasp at how fast he moves, a man who’s just had a foot-long blade plunged into and then removed from his back. His would-be assassin is yelling in fear, though he’s been trained all his life not to do so. Cody turns him to face his church brothers as they squeeze off their first shots, wasting silver as it thanks into his boat, the pier, and their no-longer-screaming associate. Still, Cody effortlessly holds the dying body up as a shield and pulls out his own weapon.

  “My God!” he hears one of them shout. “He’s armed.”

  And he is armed. Well armed. A nine-millimeter Beretta, semiautomatic loaded with hollow points, fifteen in the clip and one in the chamber. They aren’t silver. They don’t need to be. He was always a much better shot with a rifle, but it’s hard to carry one under a tux jacket. But the pistol is enough. The last thing these guys expect is a gun.

  “Shit.” He takes a slug in the abdomen. It travels through his human shield before it reaches him, so its entry is slow and painful. It will have to come out.

  Though the slug in his belly made them difficult, two huge steps and a massive leap take Cody onto the deck of his boat, corpse still held lightly to him with his free left arm.

  “Get below!” he yells to Vanessa, who doesn’t listen too good.

  Crouched behind the cabin of the yacht, he sees the men rushing down the pier. They must think the gun’s just for show. Who the hell sent these guys? Obviously, nobody was doing his homework. Cody squeezes off one round, which punches a light black hole through the forehead of the one in the lead and completely obliterates the back of his head in a chunky spray.

  Ah, hollow points!

  The two remaining men jump over their fallen comrade as they make for the momentary shelter of the boat itself, huddling against the yacht out of the line of fire. He can hear them scrabbling against the wood. Of course, they’d be trying to get aboard. Suicidal fanatical assholes.

  “Cody!” the voice comes again, and this time he sees its owner, standing on the ship in the next slip, a huge cross held up in his left hand, reflecting the weak illumination from the pier, a pistol in his right.

  “Resistance is useless. Your death is the will of God himself.”

  It hurts Cody to look at the cross, but he does so anyway. To aim. The man takes two slugs in the chest while a third ricochets off the cross. He gets off a couple of shots himself, but they go wide. Nonetheless, Cody chides himself for getting slow in his old age.

  Three seconds is all the time it takes for him to turn the ignition key, starting the motor, and slip into reverse. He is moving backward, out of the slip, even as he hears the sirens of the police responding to the sweet song of gunshots. Monte Carlo, New York, Kansas all those years ago, that gun song remains the same as the sound that killed over four thousand buffalo for him, the sound of death.

  One of the two remaining men is running down the pier after the boat, totally ignoring the fact that Cody’s got this gun and is obviously a damn good shot. When the idiot realizes that Cody isn’t slowing down, he plants his feet and starts shooting. Cody ducks and ignores him. It isn’t these guys who killed Karl, but he knows where he might be able to find the men who gave them their orders.

  And it’s not just for Karl. It’s for him, too. Not because they tried to kill him, but because he’s insulted. They didn’t even make a good attempt. They didn’t do their homework, didn’t bother to try to find out who he was before he died, whether he’d be a challenge even for so young an immortal. It was almost embarrassing.

  Oh, and
here’s the last one, climbing up over the prow of the ship. He’d left one of his assailants alive on the dock, but Cody needs to have a word with this one. Curiosity is killing him. Looking over his shoulder to be sure the yacht won’t hit anything as it backs up, he leaves it in reverse and hurries to where the monk is just pulling his legs up. The assassin doesn’t have time to aim his gun before Cody slaps it from his hand and hauls him to his feet. He can see his own mad eyes reflected in the religious fanatic’s frightened ones.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asks in a clipped, unamused tone.

  “The undead, evil Defiant One. The scourge of—”

  “No! You fool. Who I was, who I was, who I was. Do you know who I was before I became the ‘scourge’?”

  The man stares at him in horror and with a complete lack of understanding. “No,” he says.

  “Idiot!” Cody says as he slaps the man hard enough to shatter his jaw. “Asshole!” And he slaps the monk’s other cheek. “This is ridiculous. You come to kill me and you’re completely unprepared. Doesn’t the name mean anything to you? Cody, Cody, Cody! William F. Cody. Buffalo Bill, for chrissakes! I’m an American legend, you moron. You’ve never heard of me?”

  “No,” the man says truthfully.

  Disgusted, Cody throws him overboard.

  Only when he is back on deck, with the yacht finally moving from Monte Carlo toward Italy only a few miles distant, only then does he wonder what happened to the girl. Only then does he look around to see her dead and still bleeding on the deck from a wound to the throat. Only then does he curse himself for his pride. As long as he has been alive, pride and alcohol have been his downfall, not to mention a freeness with money that he couldn’t control, a blind generosity that helped everyone but himself.

  But tonight it is pride that concerns him. He goes to the woman’s side and checks her pulse, certain she is dead before he touches her. He has ever been, directly or indirectly, the cause of death for those around him. Cody shivers at his shallow thoughts of pride. Certainly, he was still insulted and he could not help such foolishness any more than he could the pain of the silver bullet in his stomach. Yet he tries to push it back, away from him, tries to focus on the woman.

  He’d meant to save her, but ego fed his anger and anger made him blind.

  He would go to Rome. There was more to all of this than met the eye and he knew now that he had to investigate. It was the last thing he wanted. He’d grown accustomed to being the rebel, the troublemaker, the solo act, rather than the scout he’d always been at heart, the friend and boss and father figure.

  But this woman’s death hurt his soul, made it ache the way a broken heart does. What did it matter? She was just another girl. But she wasn’t, because he failed to save her. And no matter what he’d become, what he’d done, in his heart of hearts Cody still thinks of himself as a hero.

  He wants, no needs to drink, to feed, but he can’t bring himself to feed from her. A few miles out he drops her body, wrapped in a blanket from the cabin, into the ocean. She is gone then, and he wonders about her, whether she would have given herself to him willingly. What secrets she hid, as so many humans do, as so many creatures do.

  They drift with her on the open sea.

  16

  CODY COULD THINK OF A MILLION PLACES he’d rather be than Rome. A billion he’d rather be than a rooftop overlooking the walls of the Vatican at going on three in the morning. But he was angry and more than a little curious.

  Karl’s death had been just the latest in a series of assassinations in the immortal community. It was all anyone was talking about, and they all knew who was doing the killing. The question wasn’t even what they would do to exact retribution from the Vatican, but if they would do anything. After all, they were afraid. All but the oldest, and for the most part, they were the ones being hunted.

  Or at least, that was the general pattern until Karl’s murder. Certainly, Karl was old. As a matter of fact, Cody didn’t know how old. But surely not much more than a thousand years. The Defiant Ones being murdered were older than that; the younger victims of these Vatican hunters were only bystanders, generally members of the covens of the oldest of the old. So what made Karl a target?

  The book.

  Cody didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. All Karl had talked about the past couple of years was getting his hands on some book the Vatican had squirreled away since Christ was in diapers, and rumor had it that he had succeeded in stealing it.

  No wonder they killed him.

  But what was in the book, and more important, where was it now? And if that was their reason for going after Karl—well, what was their reason for going after him? Certainly he’d pissed them off almost as much as he’d pissed off his own kind with his complete disregard for secrecy and his flagrant affairs with some of the world’s most celebrated women, allowing himself to be photographed with them. Still, he didn’t fit the bill at all in light of recent events.

  But such concerns would have to wait.

  Now he was crouched in the darkness, a gargoyle, keeping watch over the nocturnal activities at the home base of his greatest enemy. He had to be out of his mind! But somehow he wasn’t afraid. Perhaps it was insanity finally plunging its talons into his brain, but he couldn’t be scared. Hell, most priests and nuns wouldn’t know a vampire if one walked up and bit them on the nose. The pope himself wouldn’t know what a Defiant One was if he sat on one.

  But the others.

  They were the ones to be worried about. The ones that scurried now, in and out of doorways, up stairs and across courtyards. Lights were on in windows that Cody guessed were not usually burning this late. Cars pulled up and priests and nuns and monks got out, and the cars pulled away empty. Where the hell they were all going was a good question, but the most important was, of course, why?

  Why all the activity, all the arrivals in the wee hours of the morning? It looked like a bunch of clergymen getting ready to pitch a religious version of his old Wild West show. Hell, he wouldn’t have been half-surprised to see Annie Oakley walking about if she hadn’t been dead for decades. Of course, he wasn’t one to talk.

  But the activity was out of place; he didn’t hang around the Vatican every night, but he didn’t have to in order to recognize that this wasn’t the norm. Cody began to feel afraid. He didn’t have the answers to his own questions, but of the answers that were possible, none was pleasant in light of recent events. And with each moment that passed, more questions filled his head. He decided to move closer and investigate further—after all, he had come here for answers—but he was held back by one all-important piece of logic.

  None of his kind could enter the sanctuary of the church.

  So what now? He couldn’t very well sit on the roof till the sun came up and hope somebody would shout out the answers. Nope. The answer was obvious. As soon as he saw somebody who looked like they might know what was going on here, he’d have to make a grab for that person before they could get inside the walls.

  And no sooner had this decision been made than a black limousine pulled slowly up to the gate on the north side of the Vatican, away from the square but where Cody might have landed on them had he simply fallen from his rooftop perch. There was nothing on this limo to mark it out as different from any other. But at three in the morning, with this flurry of activity, Cody would have bet on it carrying somebody with answers. He was a gambler by nature, and he knew an easy bet when he saw one.

  The door to the limo opened and the chauffeur stepped out—a large man in a long raincoat, red tie, and driving gloves. Six steps later one gloved hand pulled open the rear door, and Cody moved closer to the edge, preparing to descend and ready to move on both men if the driver wailed for the passenger to go inside. He didn’t. The passenger, a priest with an obviously heavy brown leather briefcase, stepped from the car and the driver shut the door and turned, without acknowledging his passenger, to get back into the limousine.

  Cody was tensed and read
y to spring, planning to change even as he plummeted from the roof, when he saw the man.

  Another figure, a man with a ponytail wearing a long black coat—a classic duster, Cody thought—ran in a crouch from the doorway six stories below until he was stooped down behind the limo, waiting for the driver to pull away. Cody didn’t know who this new player was, but he figured he’d better sit back and find out. Maybe somebody was going to shout out their plans before the sun came up. As the limo pulled away, Ponytail jogged after it, still stooped low and slightly to one side. As the priest unlocked the gate, entered, and shut it behind him, obviously locking it in place, Ponytail rushed to the wall only feet from the gale.

  What now, partner? Cody thought. You fucked up, he’s inside and you’re not.

  One minute Cody was watching ol’ Ponytail, and the next minute he wasn’t. Because the guy was gone. He turned into a cloud of mist with a speed even Cody wasn’t used to and then floated right through the gate into the Vatican.

  INTO THE FUCKING VATICAN!

  Cody’s jaw was agape in complete astonishment at what he had just witnessed. Over and over, he told himself it was impossible. But he had to know, and so he had no choice. Looking like a gargoyle himself, one with its mouth wide open, he stayed there, sitting atop a building in Vatican Square, waiting for answers to far too many questions.

  “Giancarlo, brother, it is wonderful to see you,” Liam Mulkerrin said as he entered the office of his superior Cardinal Garbarino. They despised each other as all men who ache for the same power must, yet they bit back bitter words with steel-trap grins in a rare show of wisdom for such lustful beings.

  “Liam, please sit. I have been awaiting the pleasure of your company, though I had hoped it would be sooner and with better news.” Giancarlo was displeased that Mulkerrin had left some loose ends in Boston.

  “Don’t worry a bit, Eminence.” Mulkerrin’s grin turned to a tight-lipped smirk. “I have things in Boston well in hand and shall return there the moment the Blessed Event is complete. Of course, I have returned with the object of my journey.”