He was elated at the opportunity to strike down his mortal enemy, Waldhart de Rochefort. He was terrified that his cousin might strike first. And he was alarmed that Georg might provide assistance to de Rochefort. All of these emotional responses in turn triggered in Fritz the decision to shoot Georg first. What it came down to was this: in the past, de Rochefort had shown reluctance to harm Fritz. Georg was more of an unknown. So Fritz shot Georg first.
In the instant Georg crumpled, Fritz saw a flicker of movement: de Rochefort vanishing and then reappearing at his side. De Rochefort swiped at Fritz’s dart gun, grasping it with a violence Fritz wouldn’t have thought likely. De Rochefort looked so … old.
Without a second’s hesitation, Fritz let the dart gun go and reached inside a pocket, pulling out the plastic bottle with the squirt top. He squeezed the bottle, releasing a thick white cream onto the exposed skin of de Rochefort’s face. Then, taking a gloved hand, Fritz smeared the lotion across his cousin’s face, down his neck. It clung, greasy, to de Rochefort’s tiny goatee. This amused Fritz immensely.
Less amusing was the hold Waldhart had gained on Fritz’s throat. Fritz prepared to vanish to safety, but first he made one last play for the dart gun. He couldn’t allow Waldhart to possess it—not even a disabled Waldhart was safe with such a weapon. Fritz vanished and had the satisfaction of seeing Waldhart’s look of shock. The old Frenchman took several steps, as if trying to ascertain in which direction safety lay.
There is no more safety for you, cousin, thought Fritz as he came solid again beside Waldhart. Fritz tried to seize the dart gun back from Waldhart, but he’d lost the element of surprise. As the two wrestled for possession of the gun, Fritz was vaguely aware that in a few more steps, he would be close to the building’s edge.
And then he noticed something odd: someone was with the pilot in the helicopter, grappling with him and then knocking him out with a swift uppercut to the jaw. Horrified, Fritz recognized Waldhart’s son, Chrétien. Katrin! Chrétien would find her! Fritz prepared to vanish, but just prior to accomplishing this, he felt the wasp-like sting of a dart.
“How dare you?” Fritz roared at his cousin. Of course he had the antidote—the injection pen from the security guard’s pocket—but the idea that someone would use his own weapon against him was beyond repugnant. “How dare you?” he screamed again, finally freeing himself form de Rochefort’s grasp.
“It’s over, cousin,” replied Waldhart de Rochefort, his voice as steady and low as that of a priest pronouncing a benediction.
How Fritz hated that voice.
“It’s not over for me, dear cousin,” retorted Fritz. “The lotion contains Immutin!”
Fritz enjoyed the look of shock and then outrage on his cousin’s face. “I’ve tested it successfully—the subject was unable to regain the ability to turn invisible. Even after a month!”
At this point, Waldhart was reaching into a pocket and removing an antidote that would fail him—fail him! Fritz reveled in the thought before taking his own injection pen and raising it. But in that instant, Fritz saw that there was something wrong with his antidote: it had already been used. A panel that should have been clear was filled in with red. Frantically, Fritz searched his other pockets, but he already knew he wouldn’t find what he needed—in his vanity, he’d chosen to leave the antidotes behind when he packed for his trip to Rome.
From across the roof, Georg called out. “Looking for this, Uncle?”
The boy held aloft another of the precious antidotes.
“Georg!” called Fritz.
“First, tell me where Katrin is,” shouted Georg. “I find her, and then you can have the pen.”
“Give me the antidote!” screamed Fritz, his face contorting with rage.
“Where is she?” demanded Georg, racing toward the helicopter.
From a few feet away, his own empty antidote in hand, de Rochefort was shouting, “What have you done to me, my cousin?”
“You’re no longer a caméleon, Waldhart!” snarled Fritz. He hadn’t found an antidote pen in his pocket, but he had found something else. He raised his revolver, aimed for Waldhart’s knees, and fired.
Waldhart ducked and rolled to one side. Curse the old man’s agility! Fritz took aim again and struck Waldhart in the thigh. Enough to slow him, not to kill him. Fritz looked forward to keeping Waldhart alive for a very long, very amusing time.
At that moment, a few drops of rain landed on Fritz’s face. Well, he’d be able to fly to Rome in time, at least.
From the helicopter, Georg shouted, “Is she in here?”
Cursing the boy for guessing correctly, Fritz shouted, “The pen, boy! At once!”
Another person materialized beside the helicopter—Chrétien! Fritz was not letting Chrétien steal Katrin. As de Rochefort rose to his feet, Fritz fired his revolver again. The distance was not great, and he was a very good shot. Chrétien de Rochefort took a bullet to the chest and crumpled to the ground. At Chrétien’s side, Georg jumped, screaming as though he thought he’d been the target.
But that was nothing to Waldhart’s reaction.
The old man’s cry of No-oooh! echoed off the next building over. Fritz watched as his cousin turned to charge. He realized again that he was much closer to the edge of the building than was strictly advisable.
“What have you done?” de Rochefort cried with an intensity that shook Fritz to the core.
Gone were the smooth priest-like utterances. The old fool raged like a madman, putting Fritz in mind of an experimental opera-version of Lear he’d seen once in Milano. Fritz tried to raise his gun again, but Waldhart was on him and he found himself wrestling for his life.
~ ~ ~
From the roof’s edge, Skandor watched, horrified, as the young man by the helicopter crumpled, taking a bullet to the chest. Then Skandor saw Georg plunge into the helicopter. Katrin must be inside!
Still invisible, Skandor shot toward the helicopter, dancing through raindrops. He had to stop Georg from finding Katrin. But the pair of elderly cousins, Waldhart and Fritz, danced perilously close to the edge of the roof. There was a two foot wall—hardly enough to prevent what was about to happen. Skandor was torn—his heart told him to race to the helicopter, to save Katrin. But someone—no, a pair of someones—were about to fall ten stories. And if Skandor understood things correctly, neither of them was in a position to vanish to safety.
Sir Walter stumbled on the rain-slicked roof, and Fritz grabbed the old man by the beard and shoulder, intending to hurtle him over the edge, but then Sir Walter gained a hold of one edge of Fritz’s long traveling coat. The two teetered beside the wall; Skandor flew to meet them. He was solidifying; he was reaching, reaching, and then the floor was gone and the sky was in the wrong position and Skandor realized the three were falling, falling together.
It was not the gentle fall of a cloaked leap. This was a mad and deadly race to the ground. Skandor reached for Sir Walter, and time seemed to move very slowly. Skandor saw the raw fear in Sir Walter’s eyes and felt the wind and rain as each struck his face, his hands. His lungs, still aching, burned as he struggled to breathe the rushing air. But he had a task—he had to save Sir Walter. In one motion, Skandor kicked free of Fritz’s grasping hand and somehow managed to hook a leg and an arm around Sir Walter. In a desperate effort, Skandor tried to pull himself and Sir Walter to invisible safety.
The wind was gone. The rain, falling hard, was no longer cold. Sir Walter was as invisible as Skandor was himself. They were safe. Both safe.
It had been maybe two seconds since the three had tumbled from the roof. After the passage of a third second, Fritz Gottlieb met his death, sullying the sidewalk just outside the front entrance to Geneses Corp, International’s San Francisco Headquarters as a heavy rain began to fall over the city.
~ ~ ~
Georg didn’t bother rushing to the building’s edge to see what befell the three who’d just tumbled over. He didn’t have time, and frankly, he didn’t care a
bout any of them. Especially not Skandor, to whom Katrin seemed to have some sort of attachment. If Skandor lay splattered upon the sidewalk, so much the better. Whether it was true or not, it was certainly what Georg would tell Katrin.
With Fritz gone, Georg could use the injection pen on himself, which he did without delay. His ability to vanish restored, he searched the cramped cabin invisibly. In front the pilot was coming to, groaning softly. Or maybe it was the younger de Rochefort who was groaning. Georg cast a glance over his shoulder and thought he saw movement on the ground outside the helicopter. But then all curiosity as to the origins of the groans became irrelevant: he’d located Katrin. Placing his arms around her, gently, gently, he lifted her slumbering form from where Fritz had hidden it behind the passenger seats. Georg was about to bring Katrin and himself solid so that he could awaken her, but then he paused.
Did he want her awake right now? She would ask questions. She would want to know the fates of those who had battled on the rooftop. Georg made his decision. A Katrin who was awake and asking questions was going to present too many problems.
He remained invisible and carried her away, heading for the San Francisco International Airport and his uncle’s private jet. He noticed, as he fled, that it had started to rain.
~ ~ ~
“My son, my son!” cried Sir Walter as soon as Skandor brought them both solid on the roof.
Stumbling toward the helicopter where Chrétien had fallen, Sir Walter’s eyes blurred with tears. How could he bear it if Chrétien lay dead? And how could he be anything other….
A cry escaped his throat, raw, guttural.
Sir Walter slowed as he approached the body. There was his son, his beloved boy. Chrétien’s tangled golden hair drifted over his face, his arms spread to either side. He was beautiful, so beautiful, even in death.
“My son….”
Sir Walter bent to the ground and as he did so, Chrétien coughed, hard.
“Chrétien?”
The boy coughed again and clutched at his chest, inhaling as if it were painful to do so.
“You’re alive? He lives! He’s alive,” cried the old man, throwing a glance to Skandor.
Skandor nodded, gave a quick squeeze to Sir Walter’s shoulder, and then crawled inside the helicopter.
Sir Walter knew he, too, should be concerned for Katrin’s safety and whereabouts, but he couldn’t tear his gaze from his son.
“How?” he murmured, barely audible.
Chrétien smiled lazily, brushing his hair from his face. “An armor which Mademoiselle Gwyn insisted I purchase. It is formidable.”
“Armor?” demanded Sir Walter.
“It goes by the denomination, ‘Kevlar,’ mon père,” said Chrétien. “And I should advise that in the future, we all acquire these gambesons of Kevlar. I was ashamed to speak of it earlier, but it would seem Mademoiselle Gwyn’s insistence I don the vest was well-advised.”
Sir Walter threw back his head and laughed aloud.
33
BROKEN IN TWO HALVES
Skandor searched the helicopter for Katrin, raising no small amount of consternation in the pilot, who had recovered and wanted to know where Fritz Gottlieb was and who had punched him, anyway?
Skandor let the others deal with the pilot.
While Dr. Pfeffer tended to Sir Walter’s wound outside, Skandor searched the helicopter from nose to tail, from top to bottom, his heart pounding in his aching chest. He searched the roof top, foot by foot. He could no longer distinguish between the tears rolling down his face and the rain striking it from above. His lungs burned but the pain of losing Katrin was infinitely greater.
She is gone, whispered his rational mind. He knew this, but he would have searched the entire Geneses building rather than face the loss.
Limping, Sir Walter approached Skandor, thanking him for the rescue.
“It was nothing,” said Skandor, without pausing in his search. Would he be more likely to notice her invisible form if he, too, were invisible?
“My dear boy,” said Sir Walter, “it is no use. Katrin is gone.” With a heavy sigh, the old man explained. “Chrétien tells me he heard Georg’s cry of delight as he discovered Katrin. She is lost to us, I fear.”
Skandor nodded and turned away. He could no longer pretend hope remained. He crossed his arms over his chest, fearful that his heart would explode right out of his body if he didn’t hold it tight, keep it close. And then he collapsed onto the ground, splashing in half an inch of cold rainwater. He felt himself starting to shake, from the cold, from his loss—he couldn’t tell which.
He had saved Sir Walter.
He had lost the love of his life.
He looked overhead. The rain was already passing, on its way to the central valley and perhaps on to Camp Midgard after that. A few stars peered through the thin clouds moving swiftly overhead.
“Skandor,” said Pfeffer, who had now joined the others on the roof, “I am so sorry to say it, but we should leave. I’d like to examine you and make certain you don’t have a secondary response to your earlier trauma.”
Trauma? Ah, yes. The attempted death-by-peanuts.
“Okay,” said Skandor.
But the true trauma wasn’t caused by eating chocolate candies. The true trauma was in his heart. It was beating, but it had broken in two halves and one of them was far, far away by now.
He looked at the stars again, found the brightest one to wish upon, and then spoke softly. “I’ll find you.”
~ ~ ~
“This is the turn off,” said Skandor, speaking to Sir Walter from inside an SUV the old man had rented so Martina could drive the group home from San Francisco.
Skandor stared at the sign he’d passed thousands of times: MIDGARD ADVENTURE! CAMP—7 MILES.
Beside him, Pfeffer was checking his pulse, his breathing, and so on. It seemed likely Skandor would escape a secondary reaction from his toxic encounter. Pfeffer had insisted Skandor stay solid to allow his body to recover under observation; invisibility would have delayed either healing or further reaction.
As the vehicle wound up the hill, climbing almost fifteen hundred feet in elevation, Skandor saw the beginnings of snow—small dustings at first, then larger patches. By the time they reached the MIDGARD ADVENTURE! CAMP—1 MILE sign, the ground, brush, and pines were covered with an inch of snow.
“I have a story to tell you,” said Sir Walter.
At first, Skandor wasn’t sure whom Sir Walter was addressing, but gradually, it became clear Sir Walter was telling a tale that involved Skandor’s Oma, of all people.
“At the end of the Second World War, Dr. Helmann departed Germany with young Franz, Fritz, Hans, and Helga, bound for South America. He cared nothing for the remaining children and left them to starve in his abandoned facility,” said Sir Walter. “They were imprisoned, although Pfeffer had fooled Helmann regarding his ability to ree-pill and was able to disappear and steal small amounts of food for himself and the girls.”
Sir Walter sighed heavily as the vehicle rounded the last curve before Camp Midgard. “Pfeffer, I rescued and raised myself, so far as I was able. The two girls, I thought, needed a mother as well as a father, so I placed them with a kind German family. The girls, along with their new parents, immigrated to America not long after.”
“With Sir Walter’s generous assistance,” said Pfeffer, interrupting. “And one of the girls told me she would give Waldhart’s name to her child in gratitude for what he did.”
“Indeed,” said Sir Walter.
“Waldhart is my middle name,” said Skandor. “Well, one of them. I was named for my father.”
“Yes,” replied Sir Walter. “I have not seen Elke since she was a very small girl.”
Skandor sat up. “You mean my grandmother, Elke Dusselhoff?”
“I believe I have met your Oma before, my friend,” said Sir Walter. “And further, I believe Pfeffer was raised with her.”
“That’s … impossible,” said Skand
or. “Pfeffer’s got to be thirty years younger than my grandmother.”
Sir Walter chuckled. “There are, perhaps, a few things you should know about being a ree-pill-er—a caméleon, that is.”
But there was no more time for conversation; Skandor’s mom and dad were outside, waving, his dad trying to show Martina where to park in a space that had been cleared of snow.
Home.
Skandor was home again.
34
A STUBBORN OLD GUY
“I have no alternative explanation,” said Dr. Pfeffer, throwing his hands up.
Skandor nodded, pretending to understand what he was staring at on the screen of Pfeffer’s computer in his Las Abuelitas laboratory.
“I should have lost my ability to cloak myself. Permanently,” said Skandor.
“Yes,” said Pfeffer. “I have confirmed the presence of the drug Immutin in your system, and Immutin is supposed to act as a permanent suppressant of the rippling gene.”
“Well, technically, he did lose the ability to ripple,” said Mickie. “For a limited time.”
“But I got it back because I was scared to death Fritz Gottlieb was going to shoot me?” asked Skandor, still trying to make sense of the events of the previous night.
“Yes,” said Mickie.
Stepping back from the computer, Skandor peeled off the Band-Aid Pfeffer had placed over his last injection site. Skandor didn’t think he’d given this much blood at the county blood drive last summer.
“That is our conclusion,” said Pfeffer. “Although I think it didn’t hurt that your body went into anaphylactic shock.”
“Hmmph,” grunted Skandor. He looked around for a place to toss the used Band-Aid.
“We know severe trauma causes the body to respond by flooding the system with adrenaline, leading to….”
Skandor didn’t interrupt Pfeffer, but he didn’t continue listening, either. He hadn’t had a proper night’s rest in two days and as long as he could cloak himself again, he didn’t really need to know the technicalities.
Knavery: A Ripple Novel (Ripple Series Book 6) Page 21