A woman’s voice said, “Miss Duane fainted, Mr. Duane. She’s very ill.”
“She’s going to make it, isn’t she?”
“Doctor wishes to speak to you, sir. I’ll transfer your call.”
Clicks and canned music and then a voice.
“Mr. Duane? This is Vic Rankin, attending physician for your daughter.”
“Is she all right?”
“A medical team is with her. I’ll go to her momentarily.”
“What happened?”
“She fainted because of low blood pressure. We’ve done more tests and have more information about her condition we can give you now, if you have time?”
“Yes. Tell me.”
“You know some of this. Her internal organs—liver and kidneys, her heart—have been damaged by starvation. When the body doesn’t get enough protein, it essentially eats its own muscle, including the heart.
“The drugs didn’t damage her very much physically. Heroin actually doesn’t cause that much bodily damage, unless you overdose. But the sexual abuse she’s been subjected to has all but destroyed her reproductive system. That and VD. We’re treating her, but she’s massively infected and has been for a long time.”
Will sat silently, clutching the phone. “Are you saying she still could die?”
A huge sigh. “Yes. I am. But I think she’ll pull through. She won’t be able to have children, however, except through transplanting her eggs to a surrogate. She can’t maintain a pregnancy physically.
“She arrived here on death’s door. The fact that she’s alive is a miracle, and I don’t use that word lightly.” The doctor paused. He was stalling, hiding something more important.
“What else?”
“The latest tests have revealed that she’s brain-damaged. She apparently died during her journey here, maybe several times. The scans show it. She was resuscitated, or came back, but not fast enough. She suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen.”
“Will she be able to …” Look normal? Act normal? Will choked back a sob.
“We don’t know the extent of it or how it will affect her daily functioning and personality. She could have rages. She could be childlike. She could forget everything that she’s said or done fifteen minutes after doing it. Or, she might heal enough that you don’t notice anything at all. Though she will be low functioning.”
“What do you mean? She was top of her class when she got her MBA at Stanford. She’s brilliant!”
“Not anymore, Mr. Duane. When she leaves here, if she leaves here—she’s not out of the woods at all—she’ll be a different person than you knew. You’ll have to get to know each other again.”
Will barked, a sound between a choke and a sob.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you that. We’ll update you daily or more often as we have information. We’re on red alert. I need to go now.”
Leroy’s face flashed before him. That stinking son of a bitch! He brings her back to life but doesn’t keep her back. He let her die several times. Stinking bastard left her brain-damaged.
Will jumped up and began pacing in his office, then up and down the hall in his suite of rooms. Excluding the basement gym, Will’s house was fifteen thousand square feet. Three guesthouses, the pool house, and the horse trainer’s residence in the barn completed the estate. A village could live in style on his property.
His rooms were four thousand square feet, the size of a large normal house. They were complete with his colossal bedroom, an office, gym, kitchen, media room, and closets the size of most people’s living rooms. He wanted to go to the basement and work out. His gym down there was as big as the footprint of the whole house. He had an indoor track. He could work this off. Figure out what to do.
But he couldn’t go to the basement because he’d brought a dozen Indians back from the retreat with him. Staff, ostensibly, but a substitute family in fact. Or they were until he found out how much room Indians took up. They had their own quarters—the three guesthouses, the studio apartment in the pool house, and the apartment in the stables. But they came into his house to eat; Carl was a chef and cooked for all of them. They ate in the kitchen/family room.
Then they wandered around the house, looking at his art collection. He couldn’t blame them for that. It was educational. They watched movies in the theater in the basement. Worked out in the underground gym all the time. They’d be there now, he knew. They played Frisbee on the lawn. And tennis. They swam. They laughed and talked. Carl cooked. He was as good a cook as Jon Walker had been, but he was huge and noisy and had tattoos all over and didn’t look like his predecessor, the classy and stylish Jon.
Will was trapped in his suite of rooms in his own house. He didn’t want to kick the Indians out, and he didn’t want them there. All the camaraderie and love that had bound them at the Meeting seemed to have vanished. Between fighting for his life at work all day and Cass close to death, all he could do was draw a breath, and then the next, and figure out what he should say to whatever asshole was standing in front him.
Will sent Leroy Watches to save her. The bastard had saved her halfway. He’d left her brain-damaged. “You will never marry my daughter. If I have to kill you, you will never marry her.” He shouldn’t have sent Leroy. But he saved her. Leaving her brain-damaged.
Will stopped dead, clenching his hands. How did his life go so wrong? He was golden once, the man who couldn’t be beaten, the hero of his age, the new age, the electronic age. Now, everything was dust.
Oh, Cass. I destroyed you. I should have seen. The silhouette of his ex-wife, the most beautiful woman he’d met, slim and graceful, standing with their tall, elegant little girl swam before him. He ruined them. It was all his fault. Everything was his fault.
He went into his bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. The universe did not contain enough cold water to hide the bags under his eyes or his anguish. Was life with Cass ever anything but a flood of pain? Would it ever be different?
Cassandra. Why had he named his daughter Cassandra, even as a middle name? The Greek prophetess that no one believed. She’d predicted the fall of Will Duane and his house since birth.
Will opened the door to his kingdom, dragging himself to work. He squared his shoulders.
Carl Redstone was there, in tattooed and gigantic majesty. He carried a breakfast tray.
“I don’t have time to eat, Carl.”
“Yes, you do. We need to talk. You need to know that Leroy always does the best he can. He don’t leave nothin’ undone. If he can’t do it, it can’t be done. You need to be healed, Will.”
11
Another Demon Heard From
“See, you bastard puta! See! You are supposed to see and show me everything. You stinking fica! You …” Enzo Donatore stood above his magical see-stone, screaming in frustration. When he was very upset, he cursed in Italian, his family’s native tongue. He slammed his massive fists and forearms on the granite slab supporting the crystal. The table broke on each side of the triangular mass.
“Pezzo di merda! Piece of shit!” He tore the cracked end of the slab off and spun, slamming it against one of the stone pillars of his lair. The underground warren shuddered, and the hunk of granite broke into shards.
“Diego! Get in here!” Enzo screamed into the microphone. He continued to swear until his brother arrived. “Took you long enough.” Diego arrived wild-eyed.
“It wasn’t my fault …”
“Look!” He indicated the fragmented desk. “The stinking piece of crap you got me two days ago broke, just like the last piece. Get me some real granite! Something strong.” His eyes narrowed. “What do you know about this, Diego?”
“About what, Enzo?”
“The Duane bitch. She escaped from one of my business ventures in New York City. Except she was so weak, she couldn’t escape. Have you seen these,” he turned to the see-stone and commanded it. “Show him.” He pulled back, trying not to threaten the stone. If it was afraid, the crystal di
dn’t work. It was working: they watched Hannah Herhman, Doug, and some others break into the bordello and waft Cass away. He couldn’t see who was carrying her, just a blur. And then she became a blur.
“Look! A sorcerer has taken her. He has disguised himself and the bitch so that the stone can’t see them.” Enzo threw his head back and howled; a screech of agony and frustration.
The next images thrown up by the all-seeing crystal were more disturbing: Hannah Hehrman taking apart the whorehouse and everyone in it. Enzo watched in disgust and admiration.
“She is so good, this Hehrman woman. Look at her work with a knife. And so neat. And listen to them, talk, stinking cowards, spilling my secrets. Cowards! Putas!” The crystal showed the empty apartment after Hannah’s team left. No blood, no gore. Not a single living soul. “She is so good. Not even fingerprints. She will be charged with nothing. That woman should work for me!”
Enzo contemplated the image of the empty condo, and then abruptly recalled the problem “The Duane bitch has escaped me. You let him do it!”
Diego backed up, holding his hands out to his brother, trying to keep him away. “I didn’t know anything about it, Enzo. I was assigned to …”
“I don’t care what I told you to do. Cass Duane and her sow of a mother are my top priority. You should always be watching. You failed me, Diego, when I was injured and sick.”
The Indian’s “spiritual” retreat had left him not just chastened, but beaten to a shadow of himself. All those false deities the old man had called flapping around. That gigantic supernova that the old Indian called “the Great One” illuminating everything, eliminating darkness. It was nothing but an astronomic phenomenon, but a powerful one.
Being near it had almost killed him, though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone in the castle. “I was wounded, and what do you do, quit on me. Lazy lay-about …”
“Enzo, I was in North Korea, taking care of our interests there. You told me to go there. I don’t have a see-stone. I don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the world. And you didn’t call me.”
“Shut up! Look what you did!” Enzo turned his attention to the stone. The lovely crystal pyramid spun lights toward the cave’s ceiling. They saw Cass’s rescue again. This time, they couldn’t see anything of her at all: a blur. Then the shadow of a blur, then a memory.
“Where did she go?” The man, he assumed it would have to be a man to carry her, didn’t show up at all. “Play it again.” Nothing. The event was gone from the stone’s memory.
“Look at this. Play the following hours,” he ordered the stone. Fuzzy images of a dark van traveling through the Manhattan streets. Turning in somewhere. All street signs were blank. None of the businesses had signage. The images became fuzzier. Finally, all the stone broadcast was shadow.
Enzo pulled himself up, holding his mouth shut. He couldn’t rage at the stone. It wouldn’t work. “Show me more. Show me everything. Where is she now?”
A map of Manhattan appeared, and then the state of New York, and finally surrounding states materialized as a hologram above the stone. The vision hovered, and dissolved, becoming a film with indistinguishable hallmarks and boundaries.
“Where is she?” Enzo bounced from foot to foot in front the fractured table that held the stone. “I don’t want to see the fucking eastern seaboard. I want to see her.” He grasped the edges of the slab with his fingers. It crumbled.
The vision disintegrated. He couldn’t see the quarter of the country where she was. Nothing. Sure as the fact that he was the most powerful thing that existed, he couldn’t search every stinking clinic and hospital in that area to find her.
“Something’s blocking her,” Diego said, peering at the mist above the stone. “Only something very powerful could do that. More powerful than …”
“Nothing is more powerful than me! Nothing! That stupid old man, that shaman and his hocus-pocus is not more powerful than I. This is your fault, Diego. You were asleep at the wheel.”
He covered the step or two between him and his brother, his claws coming out unbidden. His human flesh, so fine and blond, lightly tanned with silver/gold hair dusting it, withdrew, revealing his shining black scales.
His teeth ripped through the flesh of Diego’s throat before his brother’s reptilian armor could protect him. Blood vessels ruptured and spurting, trachea standing out rigid-white, flesh torn open: Diego had no defense. Even if his demon form had emerged, he would have had no defense: Enzo was the king of demons, the essence of demonic nature personified. None of his kind could beat him.
“Clean up this place, you stinking stronzas,” He roared as a knock on the door announced the housekeepers. “Turds like you don’t deserve easy work like cleaning my office. You should be scrubbing the torture chambers.”
The maids came in, long aprons over their shining snake-like skins. They carried buckets and mops and kept their heads averted.
“Clean it! All of it! And no licksies of the scraps or blood! He’s mine. Not a bite for you. If you find something to eat, bring it to me.” Enzo stalked from the main part of his quarters, a stone lair set under the castle. Its rock was warm buff color and should have given off a cheery feeling, but nothing in the castle or his chambers gave off anything but cold and dread.
Carrying one of Diego’s legs and his torso, Enzo retreated to an upper level of the dungeon. What he had done to Diego was really too messy for his workspace. The see-stone had been very upset by it. He’d had to calm the stone down before covering it. He’d finish his snack here, and think about what was going on.
Sitting in a massive wooden chair upholstered with interwoven strips of leather, he daintily polished off Diego’s thigh. Little prick had it coming. Always thought he was next-in-line. The Donatore dynasty had no next-in-line; Enzo would live forever, unless he met with terrible misfortune of the kind that only he could mete out. Usually.
He’d been at the receiving end because of that dreadful old man, that Indian charlatan. But the old man was right, even as he was driving away Enzo and his hordes; he had said that Enzo existed at the pleasure of the Great One. His superstition, known as God by idiots and sycophants far and wide, did keep Enzo alive because it pleased him.
Pleasure! Pleased! Nothing was pleased for very long in Enzo’s world. But it was true; the old man had shown him. He was allowed to exist by a power larger than he because that power wanted it that way.
He ripped into the upper part of Diego’s torso, lower jaw stuffed in the cavity of his ribs and upper jaw crunching down on his chest. Ripping and tearing his brother’s flesh gave him some peace.
He’d been haunted by the defeat at the Indian’s retreat. It could have been a great victory, but it wasn’t. Only a few hundred of the thousands there had died, and none of those had joined his followers after death. Killed by a demon, they were supposed to become demons, his immortal servants. The shaman had stopped that.
What was going on with the see-stone? Delicately spreading Diego’s ribs and stripping the meat from them, Enzo contemplated. Something—someone—had blocked the stone. Only a creature as strong as that shaman could do that. Was it the old shaman? It could have been. Enzo didn’t know where he’d gone.
He tossed a stripped rib to the rats hiding in the shadows. Could the shaman have died and left someone as powerful in his place? The thought took Enzo’s breath away. What if that person, atrocious though he or she might be, had picked the Duane bitch out of her filthy closet and taken her somewhere? What if that was what the fogginess of the stone meant? That person could block out the entire quarter of a country?
Enzo froze. What if that person had done something to the bitch that rendered her invisible to him? Changed her brain waves or identity to his sensors? How could he find something that couldn’t be seen?
Easy! He ran his bloody hands through his hair. He’d turned back to his human form. He had to get to work. How to find what couldn’t be seen? Look for what wasn’t there. Look for people ac
ting like they were doing/helping/healing someone–her, the bitch—that he couldn’t see. How was he to find the new shaman, this very dangerous survivor/usurper? Follow the blur. Use his assets to cover the globe. The bitch would be in a hospital. No one could heal her. He hadn’t left the life force of a slug in her. Which hospital?
“Dr. Lanzing, I need to ask that favor that you promised so long ago. Yes, it has been a long time, but a promise is forever.” He spoke into the telephone in his lair. In his human form, Enzo was as handsome a man as ever lived. Close to a giant, but beautifully formed in face and figure. Blond, blue eyed. Every inch a businessman. His voice was melodious and irresistible. “I need you to make some staff changes. I’ll take care of all the details.”
He smiled. Finding out what happened was too simple, really. That fake, Grandfather could evade the see-stone, as could the man he’d left in his place. But Will Duane couldn’t, nor could his people. Enzo found out what had happened, directly from her father’s mind. Cass Duane had been rescued by Grandfather’s grandson, Leroy something. He had taken her to a hospital to gain weight and recover. After that, her loving father would transfer her to a very reputable mental hospital for treatment of her multitude of mental ills. Enzo thought that was smart. The bitch was a fruitcake, a very dangerous one.
As a reward, Will Duane was treating Leroy to a lavish vacation/makeover, to render him suitable as a spouse for the fair Cass. Talk about a match made in hell! Enzo belched, hitting himself in the chest with his fist. Diego didn’t agree with him.
Leroy would be hobnobbing with royalty all over Europe. Riding to the hounds, making quite a splash. How to deflect that splash and destroy Will Duane’s plan? And Leroy? And Cass?
He picked up the phone, “Ferguson, my man. I need you to deliver some horses. To your friends, the Ballentynes. Yes, those horses. I want them there.”
In Love by Christmas: A Paranormal Romance Page 9