“Well, I don’t,” Cosette said.
Before they could stop her, she’d popped open her door and stepped out into the night. Rolanda and Davis watched her scurry into hiding behind the abandoned bus. She studied the tenement for a few moments, crouching in the same spot where Bitterweed and Scara had captured her and the others earlier. When she darted across the street, Rolanda opened her own door.
“Now, hold it,” Davis said, grabbing her arm. “We can’t all just go off half-cocked like a bunch of –”
Rolanda pulled free of his grip. “Do what you like,” she told him, “but don’t try to tell me how to live my life, okay?”
Stepping out of the car, she hurried after Cosette. Davis slammed the ball of his palm against the dashboard.
“Shit!” he muttered.
He reached under his seat and pulled out a shotgun. Once he was outside, he stood listening, but the night air didn’t bring the welcome sound of approaching sirens. Davis sighed. He gave it another minute; then, against his better judgment, he followed Rolanda and Cosette into the derelict building across the street.
XVIII
Isabelle stared at Rushkin’s numena, this creature he’d made the mistake of calling across from the before with a self-portrait, and tried to make sense of what she was seeing. She had to ask herself, had she ever met the real Rushkin? Would she even know the difference? The Rushkin who stood here threatening them with his revolver was the man she remembered, the man she knew. He had the same features, the same voice and the same eyes. He carried himself with that familiar arrogance, and she soon discovered that, just like the Rushkin she’d known, he loved to hear himself talk. So how could she think of him as anything but Rushkin?
Rushkin, for his part, seemed particularly intrigued by John’s presence. That puzzled Isabelle until she realized that, insofar as Rushkin knew, he’d already killed John.
“I have to admit that I am curious,” Rushkin said. “How did you survive?”
John shot Isabelle a quick warning glance before replying. Isabelle understood. Rushkin knew nothing of Barbara’s abilities and that was the way it should stay or Rushkin would turn to her next.
“It’s no real mystery,” John said. “We foresaw it coming to something like this, so we had Isabelle make a copy of her original painting, one that opened the gate only a crack – enough to give you a taste of the before, but no more.”
Rushkin regarded them with an admiration that made Isabelle want to crawl under a carpet, out of his sight.
“Now that was clever,” Rushkin said.
John acknowledged the comment with a nod, then lifted his hand to indicate the corpse hanging on the wall behind them. Rushkin’s index finger tightened slightly on the trigger of his revolver, relaxing when he realized the innocence of the gesture.
“When did you kill him?” John asked in a quiet voice.
“We disagreed on my existence – he had a conscience, you see.” The smile that touched his lips was as feral as Scara’s had been. “But it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it? It was too long ago to make any difference to us now.”
Isabelle shook her head. “How can you say it doesn’t make any diff–”
“To all intents and purposes,” Rushkin broke in, “I am the only Rushkin now. The only one you have ever met.”
“I don’t believe you,” Isabelle said. “We know that numena can’t harm makers.”
“They can here,” Rushkin told her. “In dreamtime.”
That gave Isabelle pause. Of course. Why else had she and John come here to the coach house studio?
“So you lured him here and then you just killed him,” she said.
She found it hard to put much conviction behind the accusation, since she herself was guilty of attempting to do the same. The only difference was that the Rushkin she’d come to kill wasn’t an innocent.
Rushkin shook his head. “No, I followed him here. A small point, I realize, considering that the end result was the same.”
“But all those paintings. I saw them being done right in front of me.” Anger flashed in Rushkin’s eyes.
“The talent belonged to me more than it ever did to him. I, at least, had the courage to use it.”
But not to show it, Isabelle thought. She’d give the creature this much: he did have talent. The work he had produced was stunning, but he hadn’t had the confidence to put it under the scrutiny of the academic art world where someone might have been able to debunk it. The only ones he had shared his work with were the hapless students such as herself who were too overawed by his presence to ever think of questioning him. And then there was the whole question of bringing across numena.
That gave her pause. A numena couldn’t bring others across, so who had painted Bitterweed’s gateway?
“You’re lying to us,” she said. “You couldn’t have brought Bitterweed across because numena can’t be makers.”
Rushkin laughed. “How would you know?”
“Because …” Isabelle turned to John for help, but he was too intent on Rushkin to notice.
“You know only what I’ve chosen to tell you,” Rushkin said. “No more.”
“Then answer this for me,” John said. “Our kind doesn’t change. We live forever as our makers brought us across unless our painting is destroyed or we are physically harmed.”
“What of it?”
“Why do you feed on us? Why does your appearance change?”
Rushkin smiled. “I could tell you it’s only because I enjoy doing so.”
Isabelle could feel the tension building in John. Don’t let him get to you, she wanted to tell him, but all she did was step closer to John.
“But the truth is,” Rushkin went on, “when I took my maker’s place, I lost my connection to the before. I have no choice now but to feed on what Isabelle here so quaintly calls numena.”
Isabelle bristled at the condescension in his voice. Remembering the advice she’d wanted to give to John, she made an effort to remain calm. Keep him talking, she told herself. Learn everything you can.
Doubtful as it seemed, something might prove useful.
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“But you do, don’t you?” Rushkin said, addressing John.
“I’m not sure …”
“Numena don’t need to eat or dream,” Rushkin explained to Isabelle, “because their needs are fulfilled through their connection to the before. By taking my maker’s life for my own, I was cut off from my source painting and forced to seek such sustenance through surrogates.”
“But not ones you bring across yourself,” Isabelle said, understanding finally. “Because they require a piece of you to be brought across and you can’t feed on yourself.”
“Exactly.”
“Where is your source painting?” Isabelle asked.
Rushkin smiled. “It would do you no good, even if it still existed. The connection between us is severed and I am no longer bound to it for my survival.”
“No,” Isabelle said bitterly. “Instead you have to feed on others.”
“Everything has its price,” Rushkin told her. “When I am unable to feed for a time, I grow progressively weaker. It begins with my losing my ability to maintain my natural appearance.”
“And how does it end?” John asked.
Rushkin shrugged. “Happily it has never gone so far.”
“Until now,” Isabelle put in.
“Until now,” he agreed. “But I believe we will still be able to come to an understanding. My promises remain, Isabelle. See me through this difficult time and I will ask no more of you. I will even bring your friend back for you.”
When Isabelle shook her head, Rushkin sighed.
“My threats remain as well,” he said. “Would you have John die for you? All the cleverness in your world or outside of it can’t help him now.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Isabelle said. “You can’t use John as a threat to make me do what you want. He won�
�t let me.”
Beside her, John merely nodded in agreement.
“And your other friends?” Rushkin asked. “Those of flesh and blood who are completely innocent except for the crime of knowing you?”
“You’re too late for any of this to work on me,” Isabelle told him.
“I am completely serious,” Rushkin said. “The first to die will be your friend Alan.”
“I’m serious, too,” Isabelle said.
Rushkin shook his head. “You would make a poor card player, Isabelle. I see the fear written all over your face.”
“Of course I’m scared, but it’s got nothing to do with you. I’m afraid of the unknown. Of what comes next. You think I’m sleeping in that tenement studio, dreaming this, don’t you? But I’m not. I took the utility knife you were so thoughtful to leave on the worktable with the rest of those art supplies and used it to cut my throat.”
Not even conscious of the action, she lifted a hand up under her chin as she spoke and loosely held her throat as though, for all that she was separated by who knew how much time and space, she might somehow be able to stem the blood, close the wound that was killing her in the world she’d left behind.
“This dreamtime’s going to last about as long as it takes me to die,” she finished.
Rushkin stared at her aghast. “You couldn’t have …”
“Couldn’t have what?” Isabelle countered. “Have had the courage? You can only push people so far, Rushkin. Back there, when I thought you’d killed John, I hit my limit.”
“But he’s not dead.”
“Doesn’t make a whole lot of difference now, does it? I still pulled the blade across my throat.”
That familiar anger woke in Rushkin’s eyes. “You’ve killed us both!” he cried.
“Christ,” Isabelle said, feeling not nearly as brave as she was trying to sound. “I sure hope so.”
The muzzle of his revolver swung away from where it had been pointing at John to center its aim on her. Looking into Rushkin’s enraged features, Isabelle realized that she wasn’t going to have the chance to bleed to death back in the tenement studio.
“No,” Rushkin said in a dark, cold voice that Isabelle knew all too well. “I won’t let you win. I will find those few numena you have hidden from me and I will feed on them. I will find another young artist and teach her to make me more. I will survive. But you won’t live to see me prosper.”
If she had to die now, Isabelle decided, she’d at least make her death worthwhile and try to take him with her.
She gave John a shove to the right and dove for Rushkin. The monster’s gun went off, the thunder of its discharge so loud in the confined space that she went partially deaf. She didn’t hear the bullet fly by her ear, but she swore she could feel the wind of its passage on her cheek.
Because of the ringing in her ears, the second gunshot wasn’t nearly as loud as the first had been, but that made little difference, for the bullet hit its target.
XIX
After almost knocking the key out of the lock in his hurry to get it to turn, Alan finally managed to get the door unlocked. He stepped back and tugged it open with such force that it banged with a loud thump against the wall, its knob knocking a hole in the cracked plaster. Marisa looked up, momentarily startled from her ministrations.
“It’s too late to worry about making noise,” Alan told her.
She nodded. “See if you can find something we can use as a stretcher.”
There was the table he’d used to break through the door, Alan thought, but it was too heavy. Then he remembered the pallet that Rushkin had been lying on. Under all those blankets, it hadn’t looked like it weighed much.
He picked up one of the unused canvases that were scattered across the floor of the room. Wedging a corner under his foot, he tugged up on it sharply until the frame broke. He repeated the action on another corner, then tore the canvas away from the length of wood he was left with. The makeshift club didn’t have a lot of heft to it, but it was better than nothing.
“Hurry!” Marisa called to him.
Alan gave a quick glance to the corner of the room where Marisa was bent over Isabelle’s still form.
Blood seemed to be everywhere. He darted out into the hallway, almost hoping he’d run into Bitterweed or Scara. He wouldn’t hesitate to strike out at them now. Because of them he was seeing the world through a red veil. Wherever he looked, superimposed over whatever his gaze settled upon was an image of the blood that had spilled from Isabelle’s throat and then welled over his own hands and forearms.
Isabelle had cut herself, but it might as well have been Rushkin or his numena that had slashed her throat, since they’d driven her to it. For what they had done to Isabelle, for the threat they presented to Marisa and himself, he found himself responding with a savagery he hadn’t known he possessed.
So he was prepared for anything as he moved down the hallway, his club swinging back and forth alongside his thigh – anything, except for what he found in Rushkin’s room. The pallet was empty and neither Rushkin nor his creatures were anywhere to be found.
He felt a certain sense of disappointment as he walked slowly around the room, checking behind the door, under the narrow bed. He wanted a confrontation. He needed to have someone pay for what had happened to Isabelle.
Crouching beside the pallet, he pulled out the paintings he found there. The top one was of John. He might have thought that this was the real version of Isabelle’s The Spirit Is Strong until he realized that the background was different. No, this one belonged to Bitterweed. And under it he found the monochromic painting of Scara.
He stood the two paintings up so that they leaned against the side of the bed and stared at them through the red veil of Isabelle’s blood that he carried inside his eyes. He hesitated briefly, then lashed out with his foot and put it through Bitterweed’s painting. A sound of rushing air filled his ears. He turned to see Scara snarling at him, not from her painting, but in the flesh. She was slashing out at him with a switchblade, but before she could cut him, he put his foot through her painting as well, falling to the floor as the second abrupt movement threw him off balance.
She screamed, a long, wailing sound that tore all the way through his anger to touch his heart.
No, he wanted to say. I didn’t mean to do this.
But it was too late. She vanished right there before his eyes in a whuft of displaced air, leaving behind only the echoes of her cry.
“Alan!” he heard Marisa shouting at him from down the hall. “Alan! Are you all right?”
He shook his head, trying to clear it.
“I’m okay!” he called back.
But he wasn’t. He felt sick all over again. This time for what he’d done – no matter if the pair had deserved it – as opposed to the wound that Isabelle had inflicted upon herself.
He disentangled the paintings from his feet and stood up. Under the heap of blankets, he discovered that the base of the pallet was an army cot. Grabbing one end, he dragged it down the hall to where he’d left Marisa with Isabelle.
“What happened?” Marisa asked as he pulled it into the room.
Alan briefly explained. He found sympathy in her eyes, but it was for him, for what he’d had to do, not for the two numena he’d so summarily dispatched. Five minutes ago, he realized, he would have felt the same.
“And Rushkin?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Gone.”
Marisa nodded. She looked down at Isabelle.
“Even with that cot to carry her on,” she said, “I don’t know how we’re going to get her out of this place.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Alan said. “If we don’t –”
Before he could finish, Marisa laid her free hand on his arm. “What’s that?” she asked, her voice dropping to a hoarse whisper.
Alan heard it, too. Footsteps coming up the stairs and now moving down the hall toward them. His mouth went desert dry, fear sucking all the moisture f
rom his throat as he tried to swallow.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He grabbed his makeshift club from where he’d laid it on the cot and turned to the door to face the new threat.
XX
Davis caught up to Rolanda and Cosette in the doorway of the tenement. Rolanda smiled with relief until he stepped around in front of them to block their way into the building. Both women visibly bristled when he insisted they wait outside.
“Look, you got me here – okay?” he said. “You did good. Now back off and let me do my job.”
Rolanda glared at him. “Your idea of doing your job is waiting for help. By the time anyone else gets here, they could be dead.”
“I hear you. That’s why I’m going in. Now. Without backup. But I can’t be effective if I have to worry about a couple of citizens at the same time. Is this getting through to you?”
Rolanda looked as though she was going to continue the argument, but finally she gave him a brusque nod. “Fine. Do your job.”
“Thank you,” Davis said, not quite able to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
He turned to try the door. The knob turned readily under his hand, and when he gave the door a gentle push it swung open. The air inside was stale with an undercurrent of bad odors that he didn’t care to try to identify. The walls and floor were in rough shape, holes punched in the plaster, refuse underfoot, graffiti everywhere. Your typical Tombs squat. It could be home to a bunch of harmless runaways and old winos; or it could be the clubhouse of a bunch of bikers, or some gang of street toughs with better armament than the NPD could ever hope to afford. In this kind of a situation, you just never knew.
Once inside, he stopped to listen, but there was nothing to hear, only the sound of his own breathing.
It was coming a little quicker than he’d have liked, nerves all on edge, skin stretched tight at the nape of his neck, shirt getting damp and clinging to his back. He knew he was being foolhardy, going in like this without any backup, but he’d made the commitment and he knew if he didn’t follow it through, Rolanda and the kid would do it on their own.
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