Immortal Muse

by Stephen Leigh

  He was here; this was his lair. She was certain of it. She listened, thinking she could hear rustlings and burblings above. “Nicolas?” she called out in French. “You know I’m here. I’m alone, the way you said it had to be.”

  Faint laughter answered her and a light went on in the room beyond. She could see shadows moving on the walls, but no figures. “I knew you were here before you killed our little friend in the alley,” Nicolas answered. “That was delicious, my dear. Thank you. A nice appetizer for the feast to come, eh? You’re just in time. I was nearly ready to start the main course without you.”

  She swallowed the bile that threatened to overspill her stomach. “I want to see David.”

  “Oh, I very much want you to see him as well,” the voice answered her. “Just come on up.”

  “Not until I know that’s he’s still alive.”

  In response, a harsh, white light kicked on, throwing a tight, dusty beam toward the top of the stairs. In the haze, she could see the outline of a man seated in a chair, and another man moving alongside. The shadows stirred, and she heard a gasp of breath. “Camille?” David’s hoarse, desperate voice called out. “Get out of here. He’s …” The voice cut off abruptly, the remaining words muffled and indistinct. She heard Nicolas’ laughter once more. Shadows slid in the glare above her.

  “He’s so noble and self-sacrificing,” Nicolas said. “And he has such love for you. Why, it nearly makes me want to weep.” He laughed again.

  “Nicolas, this is between me and you. Let David go, and we can finish things.”

  “You tried that argument with me half a century ago, Perenelle. It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. You know I’m not going to let him go. So come up if you intend to try to stop me, or just stay where you are and listen to him die. It’s your choice—but you need to make it now.”

  She knew that as soon as she was visible at the top of the stairs, Nicolas would attack her, if only because he knew she would do the same. She closed her eyes, letting the spells in her mind rise to the forefront. She put the Ladysmith in her left hand, using her right to slide another test tube from the purse, this one full of a dark powder.

  She tossed the vial in her hand up past the top of the stairs, shouting a word in Arabic as she heard the tinkling of breaking glass, closing her eyes and putting her right hand over an ear. White light and smoke erupted with a shattering, sharp explosion of thunder. She ran up the steps, two at a time.

  By the time Camille reached the top, staying close to one side of the stairwell, the smoke was clearing but still acrid. Her left ear rang with the explosion’s echo, deafened, and her eyes whirled with bright afterimages fading slowly through the hues from bright yellow to purple. Through the aural and visual fog, she saw David off to one side, trussed to a chair, and Nicolas standing before a workbench littered with test tubes and retorts, the shelves behind stocked with glass canisters of chemicals and alchemical ingredients, and what appeared to be her old journal propped up on a reading stand, along with several parchment scrolls. Nicolas was standing still, as if stunned, his hands—strangely—at his hips to either side. He didn’t move, didn’t speak, but she heard him cough.

  She didn’t give him the time to utter his spells or to counter her attack. She quickly brought up the Ladysmith in both hands. With a cry, she fired the weapon: once, then again. She saw at least one of the bullets strike him, his body turning violently with the impact, bending him backward over the table so that he crashed hard into the racks of test tubes behind him, smashing them underneath his weight. Camille tossed the Ladysmith aside when she saw him fall, drawing the katana and rushing toward him as she raised the blade.

  She imagined his head rolling across the table like an ugly, misshapen ball. Like Kevin’s head.

  Nicolas lolled on the table, his face a rictus of pain as blood spread on the white shirt he wore; she had struck him in the side of the abdomen, though the other shot seemed to have gone wide. She saw this in the three steps it took to reach him, and in those three steps, she also found her mind wondering at the fact that he wasn’t responding, that his hands were still splayed out at his sides, at the fact that his body seemed taller …

  She remembered a statue in King’s Square, remembered Robespierre’s head tumbling into the basket below the guillotine’s blade …

  She brought the blade down hard, but at the last moment, she turned her hands. The blade sliced deep into the workbench, shearing through the wild brown locks just above the man’s skull—whose features now flowed as if they were melting wax.

  Flowed into David’s features, and settled. It was David staring at her, his hands working against the ropes that bound him to the workbench, his eyes terrified, his mouth working as he spoke her name. “Camille …” Blood flecked his lips.

  She released the katana with horror. The weapon quivered in the wood. Behind her, she heard sardonic, mocking applause through the ringing in her ears. “Bravo,” she heard Nicolas say. “And here I thought I’d set it up perfectly for you to kill David yourself—though you probably have anyway. Guns are such ugly but effective weapons …”

  Nicolas was standing in front of the chair that she had assumed held David, the ropes uncoiled at his feet, his features no longer David’s but his own. His hands still applauded her softly. “You have killed him, you know,” Nicolas said. “I didn’t give him the flawed elixir for just that reason, though it was tempting. He’ll bleed out, very soon. Look, he’s already going into shock.”

  Camille glanced down. Nicolas was right. In the mess of broken glass and spilled chemicals, David’s face had gone white and pale. His eyes were staring somewhere beyond her; his hands clenched and unclenched against their bonds. She shouted denial: “No!”

  “We could save him still, you know,” Nicolas said. “If I gave him my elixir, why, his body would heal itself. Or you could give him yours—but I see by your face that you didn’t bring that. Were you too afraid that I’d take it from you? A shame. Still … Tell me how to make the true formula, and I’ll give David mine in the meantime. That’s all you have to do, and he lives. A fair bargain, I should think.”

  Camille looked at David. His eyes had closed; he didn’t appear to be conscious. “Nicolas …”

  He held out his hand; a crystalline vial glistened there. “I’ve given you my terms, wife. The rest is up to you.”

  She took a step toward Nicolas, and his fingers closed around the vial as he pulled his arm back. She stopped. “I’ll tell you. Let me have that,” she said.

  “Tell me first.”

  She took a long breath that held back a wail. Defeat tasted like acid, smelled like rotting meat. Defeat was the brush of a corpse’s hand against her face. “It’s blood,” she said. She couldn’t look at him; she stared instead at David. “Human blood. That’s what was missing. When you hit me that day, you made my lips and mouth bleed. My blood mixed with the potion when I drank it.”

  His dark, scornful gaze searched her face. “You’re telling me the truth?”

  “It’s the truth,” she told him, and he laughed.

  “Really? So it was an accident all along? I caused the elixir to work for you? Oh, that’s precious.”

  “Nicolas, please … The vial … David …”

  Nicolas’ hand opened like a slow, pale flower. The crystal gleamed in the light, the elixir a sapphire inside. “I suppose I don’t need this anymore,” he said. He flung the container at the near wall. It shattered there, spilling blue down the plasterboard.

  Camille screamed in blind fury. She plunged her hand into a pocket and pulled out the last of her test tubes, an explosive, but she saw Nicolas react, his hands moving too quickly for her to have any hope. She dropped the vial and instead uttered a warding word, her hand chopping through the air. Nicolas’ voice barked out his own quick phrase. Black fire erupted along her right side; the ward took most of the heat, but the force of the spell still rammed its way through the psychic shield of the ward, thro
wing Camille hard against the bench alongside David’s body. Glassware rattled and shattered; she heard items falling from the shelving behind her. Something hissed and she smelled gas; yellow flame bloomed, reflected along the walls as smoke slid past her head. She tried to rise. Nicolas barked another word in Arabic and a giant’s fist hit her: a fist of air that swept aside the smoke and smashed her down to the floor at David’s feet. Fire was beginning to crawl up the wall behind her, licking at the bench that held Nicolas’ alchemical experiments.

  She heard Nicolas’ laughter as she rose up on her knees, trying to clear the confusion in her mind and the pain from her scorched body. She felt more than saw Nicolas walking past her and wrenching the katana from where it had been embedded in the bench. “Very nice,” he said. “You may have been the better alchemist, Perenelle,” he said, “but you were never the better wizard. Such a shame. We could have been the perfect duo, you and I. Can you imagine what we might have accomplished, together? The power we could have held … But it’s too late for that. With the fire, we don’t have much time.” He lifted the sword, let it hiss through the air. She raised her head to see him facing the helpless David. “You get to watch him die, Perenelle, just as I promised. Will you scream, I wonder? Will you cry out when his blood spatters over you and his head rolls at your feet? Let’s find out, shall we? Then, since you’ve given me the secret of the elixir and I can make someone else to take your place, it’ll be your turn.”

  He lifted the sword again, and Perenelle did scream: a hoarse, wordless, throat-tearing denial. She forced her legs to push her up as the sword—clumsy in Nicolas’ untrained hands—rushed down, interposing herself between Nicolas and David as the sword threatened. She felt the blade slice into her side under her upraised arms, felt the steel catch on her ribs and turn, heard the crack of bone and the ring of iron. The intense pain followed an instant later, a searing blue tsunami that took her breath so that she couldn’t shout or cry out. Nicolas yanked the blade from her body, and she mewled with the agony, hot blood pouring down her side.

  “You were always the one for useless gestures, Perenelle,” Nicolas said. “Now what did that gain you but more pain? It certainly won’t save him, will it?” He brought the sword up again—she could see her blood bright on the steel, heavy droplets flying away in seeming slow motion. She tried to rise once more but her body wouldn’t cooperate. As she tried to hold herself upright, she saw the blade begin its descent.

  Shadows moved in the smoky room. She heard the pop of gunfire: three quick shots, and she saw Nicolas’ body jerk with the impacts. That was followed by the bright sound of breaking glass at Nicolas’ feet, and a voice calling two words—“Alnar aldhahabia!”—as Nicolas started to respond, too slowly. Camille threw herself over David’s prone body: as heat exploded at Nicolas’ feet and along her own side, flames as bright as molten gold climbing over his body.

  Nicolas screamed. It was an ugly sound, a demon’s shriek. Perenelle screamed with him, the golden fire touching her as well, the heat of it spilling over her as her body shielded David. Nicolas dropped the sword; his hands waving as if he were trying to conjure up a new spell to extinguish the fire, but the flames choked him. He breathed them in and exhaled them again as his clothing fell from him in shreds of sparks, as his skin blackened under the relentless, pitiless chemical fire.

  Nicolas collapsed to his knees, his mouth open and working soundlessly. He slid sideways to the floor as the golden flames guttered and went out.

  Camille picked up the sword in hands that shook, her skin blackened and blistered. “No,” she heard someone say—Palento’s voice. “Drop the sword, Ms. Kenny.”

  She paid no attention. “You goddamn son of bitch,” she said, standing over Nicolas. She brought the blade up, and sliced downward as hard as she could.

  Then, finally, she let herself fall.

  *

  There was a voice in the darkness, speaking words that slid through the filter of pain like shards of broken glass.

  “We need a couple buses and the fire department to East 10th and D. The place is about to go up. Make it quick.”

  Her first breath was a gasping horror, and the rattling, terrible cough that followed was worse. “Madre de Dios, she’s alive,” she heard Mercedes exclaim, and fingers moved through her hair and brushed her cheek.

  “David …” she managed to say.

  “I have ambulances coming for both of you,” Palento replied, “but we gotta get out of here—the building’s on fire.”

  Camille shook her head. She blinked, trying to will the room into focus. The walls were lurching around her, the light was erratic and the room too hot, and she couldn’t decide if her vision was blurred or if it was the smoke. She could see Mercedes kneeling next to her, and Detective Palento standing nearby. She was untying David from the workbench, which was alive with flames that engulfed the back wall. Camille’s body felt like it had been pounded, sliced, then broiled. She forced herself to sit up, and Mercedes hissed at the movement. “You shouldn’t …”

  “I’ll be fine,” she told her. “Just help me stand, then take care of David. I can make it …” She felt Mercedes’ arm underneath her, and she nearly screamed with the pain as the sword’s wound ripped open again as Mercedes pulled her to her feet. The room threatened to go away, and she forced herself to remain standing, to breathe, to let the world settle again. She fought not to cough with the smoke, afraid of what would happen if she did. “Help with David,” she repeated to Mercedes, and she started toward the stairs, glancing first to where Nicolas lay. His head was a hand’s breadth from the blackened, charred body, the katana snagged in the floorboards between them. He seemed to stare at her in eternal surprise.

  Grunting with the pain of the movement, she kicked the head even farther away.

  She thought she should be feeling triumph, but instead felt nothing but blinding pain. She took a limping step, then another, then yet another, willing her body to move, holding the edges of the terrible wound together with a hand. Behind her, she heard Palento and Mercedes taking David between them.

  She would not remember the descent, only the bite of the night air outside and the blessed purity of the breath she took then. She leaned against the wall of the building opposite. Kevin’s body was still there in the alley, another accusation. She saw Palento and Mercedes exit the building with David, smoke billowing out from the top of the open doorway. Through the boarded windows above, yellow-and-orange flames were visible. She could hear the crackle of the fire now, almost as loud as the sound of approaching sirens. Palento and Mercedes laid David down on the alley’s pavement near Kevin’s body. Camille looked at Palento in mute question.

  “He’s still breathing,” she said, and coughed. “I don’t know about the gunshot or how much blood he’s lost. He needs that ambulance, fast. And so do you.”

  Camille shook her head. The blood from the long, deep cut had already stopped, and the cool air soothed her burns. “No,” she said. “I’ll be fine on my own. It’ll just take time.”

  Palento was shaking her head, but Mercedes put her hand on the detective’s shoulder. “She’s right,” Mercedes said. “She’ll heal on her own. The hospital’s not the place for her.”

  Palento stared at both of them, at Kevin’s body, at the flames beginning to appear between the boards of the windows. The sirens grew louder, echoing from the street’s buildings. “Can you get her home?” she asked Mercedes, who nodded. Palento shook her head, as if arguing with herself. “I shouldn’t, but no one’s going to believe much of this anyway. Okay, get her out of here—now, while I get the ambulance crew and talk to my people. And neither of you two were ever here. Do you understand?”

  They both nodded this time. Mercedes put her arm around Camille. Together, they limped away as Palento pressed the button of her radio. “Around the back,” she said into the mic. “In the alley. Make it fast—I’ve a GSV who’s bleeding out bad …”

  *

 
; Camille tried to smile at Mercedes. They were in David’s apartment. Verdette was curled up on Camille’s lap as she sat on the couch. Mercedes sat near her, wearing a set of Camille’s pajamas and sipping coffee—Mercedes had cleaned up the worst of the blood, bandaged her wounds, and gently draped a soft nightgown over Camille’s burnt skin, sighing in distress the entire time and wiping back tears at the sight of Camille’s injuries. “I’ll be fine,” Camille kept telling her. “I need to know what’s happening with David …”

  Palento knocked on the door several hours after they’d left the scene, arriving as the sun was starting to rise. “David?” Camille asked her immediately, and Palento shrugged.

  “He’s alive, and out of surgery. Seems he was shot with a .38, same caliber as your Ladysmith, but whoever shot him had either really lousy or really good aim. He lost some of his liver and his spleen, his intestines were perforated, but they’ve patched him up, removed the bullet fragments they could find, and given him a transfusion. They think he’ll probably make it.”

  Camille closed her eyes. The tears were hot on her cheeks. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Don’t thank me; thank the docs.” Palento sat on the chair across from the two women. She looked at Mercedes. “Would you mind giving us some time alone?” she said, and stared hard at Camille as Mercedes gathered herself and left the room. They heard her begin to wash dishes in the kitchen. “You were dead,” Palento said at last. “I felt for your pulse, and there wasn’t one. You weren’t breathing. You were halfway sliced open with a fatal wound, and there was more blood than I’ve ever seen anyone lose before and live—and I’ve seen dozens and dozens of dead people. You were one of them … but you’re not now. How is that possible?”