“Yeah, Steve was looking for her. I said she wasn’t feeling well and had gone out to get a cab home.”
“Did he believe you?” She saw his lips tighten around a sharp retort, then Rozokov intervened.
“Yes, he did. Now take us someplace where we can discuss this problem with some privacy.”
Mickey led them out of the club by the alley entrance and down the quiet backstreets. As they walked, Ardeth was aware of the weight of his occasional glances. Finally, waiting on a street corner, he said suddenly, “So, what did you do to Rick, anyway?”
“Rick?” she repeated in confusion. The name was familiar, as Mickey’s face had been, but the memory could not surface through her worry about Sara.
“You know, the street musician you picked up a few weeks ago. The one who stepped in front of a cab and died. What did you give him?”
“I didn’t give him anything,” she protested, then remembered. “You were the other guitarist, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, the one you didn’t pick up. Not like lucky Rick. Only he wasn’t so lucky, was he? So,” Mickey continued, turning to watch her as they crossed the street, Rozokov a silent presence behind her, “what did you do to him?”
“I fucked him in the alley,” she flared back. “Are you suggesting that I killed him? I’m sorry about his death—but I wasn’t responsible.” She said the words vehemently, remembering the sight of the body flung across the street, the terrible thud as it hit the curb. It had not been her fault. She had killed the boy in the alley, and the others, but not Rick. Not Rick.
“Yeah, right. Just like you’re not responsible for Sara either. She was better off thinking you were dead.” His cynical voice cut her, twisted her heart, and suddenly revealed the weapon she could wield back at him.
“And how did she know I wasn’t? The only way she could have known was if someone who’d seen me told her. Do you suppose that’s what happened?” she asked casually. “That must have started her looking for me. And if she hadn’t started looking for me, none of this would have happened. So it would seem to me that whoever told her is the one who is really responsible for what’s happened to her.”
He rounded on her suddenly, and might have struck her except for the hand that caught his arm. Rozokov moved between them. “Stop it, children,” he said sharply, still holding Mickey’s arm. “Let it be. You will not save her by blaming each other for her danger.”
Mickey jerked his arm, trying to free it, and his eyes widened when he found he could not move. Rozokov let him go and he stood, rubbing his arm and wincing. “All right,” he muttered at last and turned to lead them down the street. Ardeth stood still, watching him go, then looked at Rozokov.
“I didn’t kill his friend,” she said slowly.
“That is between you and your conscience, Ardeth. Not between us.”
“I thought we didn’t have consciences.”
“Things would be much simpler that way, I admit. But all that died in the asylum was your body. Anything else that seems missing now, you yourself have buried.” His voice was gentle, but the words seemed to set fire to the guilt and remorse she had struggled to reduce to ashes in her heart. “But this is not the time, nor the place, for this. Whatever has given you the strength to survive these last months, hold on to it now. We will have need of it.”
In the silence, a voice called to them and Ardeth turned away gratefully. It was easier to face the head of Mickey’s hatred than the cold, implacable intimations of morality in Rozokov’s words.
Chapter 28
The freight elevator clanged and clattered, echoing in the post-midnight silence of the old warehouse. Mickey watched the ancient pointer creep in its slow semi-circle towards the Roman numeral that signaled his floor. Anything was better than looking at the two silent figures who shared the dimly lit elevator with him.
All this time, he had wondered what he would say if Ardeth really did reappear. He knew the questions had to be asked, even if he never mentioned them again to Sara. But somehow he had always imagined that the confrontation would come after the sisters had made peace, as Ardeth was conveniently exiting the scene again, so that whatever truth he discovered would leave with her and not hang around to mess up his relationship with Sara.
Your relationship with Sara, his mind mocked him. What relationship? One kiss, one moment when you thought she might have wanted you to stay. Probably the only reason she let you hang around at all was the lure of her missing sister that you dangled in front of her. But he didn’t believe that, not in his heart.
And now she was gone. Dragged into God knows what horror and all because of her sister. He dared one flickering glance at Ardeth. She was watching the floor pointer as well, face uptilted so that the faint light illuminated her features. The strangeness he had sensed on the street was still there, though more elusive, as if she had gotten better at hiding it. But he remembered seeing her eyes spark red in the alley and something in his gut tightened. He couldn’t reconcile that memory with Sara’s story of the sister who had scheduled her whole life, who had lived in that neat, book-lined apartment, who had made a clumsy papier mâché necklace. The images remained separate, refusing to overlap into a coherent picture. He tried to imagine what might have happened in the last few months to shatter the personality Sara had thought was carved in stone and create this new, utterly alien woman.
Remind Alexander that we have uses for her sister, the cold voice had said. Mickey took a sharp breath and tried not to think about what that could have meant. Or what might happen to Sara’s soul under the pressure of those mysterious threats. The elevator shuddered to a halt, and, grateful for the chance to move again, he pulled open the metal mesh door.
The lights in his apartment were too bright, banks of overheads that suited the office this had once been. In the harsh light, the large single room and its contents looked stark and shabby. Mickey had a moment of dislocation, seeing the room through a stranger’s eyes: tangle of tape recorders and guitars, faded sheet on the unmade futon, neon-graffiti scrawl of a former tenant covering one wall and the ancient, noisy refrigerator. He tried not to look at the far corner, where Rick’s paraphernalia had once been.
“Well, this is it. Home Sweet Home,” he said, hoping the sharp edge of sarcasm in his voice hid his sudden disorientation. “Have a seat, have a beer, make yourselves at home.” He sat down on the unmade bed and instantly wished he hadn’t, as it forced him to look up at them.
After a moment, Ardeth sat down on the armchair in the corner. Rozokov settled onto the stool Mickey normally sat on to record. There was a long silence. “All right, what are we going to do?” he asked, when he could stand it no longer.
“Ardeth will go to the meeting and you and I will follow her,” the grey-haired man said.
“They said they wanted both of you,” Mickey reminded him. “What if they kill Sara because only one of you shows up?”
“Sara is the weapon they will hold over Ardeth to ensure her co-operation. Ardeth is the weapon they will seek to use against me. They cannot afford to jeopardize either of them.”
“Even if they believe me,” Ardeth interrupted, “they’ll be waiting for you to try something. They’ll have guards, maybe more of those machines.”
“Of course. But they will not be expecting Mr. Edmunds here. They are counting on the fact that they are taking you near dawn and that I will be helpless to move about during the day. With you,” he bowed slightly in Mickey’s direction, “as my navigator, my eyes and ears, there is no reason we cannot follow them during the daylight. I will not be able to attack until night, it is true, but we will have had time to observe them and formulate a viable plan by then. We must assume they will not be expecting us to enlist any aid.”
“So I just let them take me.” Her voice was so strained that Mickey looked at her sharply, surprised out of the questions swirling in his mind by the pain and fear he could hear for
the first time. Maybe her strangeness, the sleek confidence suggested by the dark clothes, was an illusion after all. Maybe the sunglasses were to hide more than the red fire in her eyes.
“You must. And, unless your survival depends on it, you must not let them know our true strength. They are still guessing about that, they still have only the old myths to guide them.” That brought the question back. There was some subtext here he couldn’t grasp, something that their conversations hinted at that slipped with eel-like ease from his fingers every time he thought he understood. Ardeth was nodding slowly, but her hands held her elbows against her body, and her knuckles were white.
“This is all sounding very good so far, but I have a bit of bad news. I don’t have a car so I’m not sure how you expect to follow these guys. I don’t think they’ll be taking public transit,” Mickey pointed out, relieved to find some realistic objection to lend some solidity to this strange, slippery conversation. Rozokov looked at him again, the odd, pale eyes meeting his. In the bright light, he realized how shabby the older man’s clothes were, worn castoffs not even acceptable to the Salvation Army any more. The contrast between the clothes and the man’s quiet confidence, the angular aristocratic lines of his face, was suddenly clear and bewildering. “The monster,” the kidnapper had called him. Mickey remembered the hard, unbreakable grip on his arm and the lulling persuasive voice. “I don’t care who or what you are,” he had declared. What you are . . . He shivered but would not let his gaze drop.
“Have you no friends who could be persuaded to lend theirs? Can we rent one at this hour?” Mickey checked his watch. It was 3:30. Mitchell was probably home, might be convinced to part with his old van if they made it worth his while.
“You have any money?”
“Some. How much will it take?”
“Give me fifty bucks and I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Rozokov hunted in the interior pockets of his battered coat for a few moments then handed Mickey three twenties.
Mitchell was just awake enough to be angry when he finally staggered to the door of his apartment two floors below. Mollified somewhat by the sixty dollars and the promise of no more disturbances, he gave Mickey the key and said, “Have it back by tomorrow night.”
“Sure, no problem,” Mickey promised, knowing it might be a lie. He’d have to get another fifty off Rozokov to placate Mitchell later. Later, he thought in sudden giddy humour. After you’ve rescued Sara, disposed of the mysterious bad guys and figured out who and what the hell Ardeth and the old man are. If you manage to do all of that without ending up dead or in jail. Yeah, later.
They were still back in his apartment, waiting, when he returned. “All right, I’ve got a van. But before I drive it anywhere, you’d better tell me what is really going on.”
“Did I not say no questions?” Rozokov said and the quiet voice did not conceal the ominous undertone there.
“That’s right, you did. But I didn’t agree to it. And now you need me.”
“What difference does it make to you?” Ardeth demanded, rising from the chair. “You say you just want Sara back. If that’s true, then what difference does it make if we tell you or not?”
“You say you want her back too—after three months of letting her mourn for you. Maybe I’d be more inclined to believe you if I knew what happened to you, what’s happening right now.”
“I will tell you what you need to know,” Rozokov said. “After we have gone to meet the kidnappers.” Mickey opened his mouth to argue then met the cold gaze and decided against it.
“Good enough. What do we need besides the car?” The list seemed strange, but he found it all—two blankets, an old fedora he no longer wore and a pair of his sunglasses. “Shouldn’t we have some guns or something?” Mickey asked, watching Rozokov tuck the sunglasses and fedora into the capacious inner pockets of his coat.
“Can you obtain some for us?” Rozokov inquired curiously and Mickey was forced to shake his head.
“No. Not at this hour in the morning.” What I really wanted to hear was that we wouldn’t need them, he thought with regret. “Well, come on. If we want to get there before they do, we’d better go.”
The instructions had been explicit. Ardeth and Rozokov were to be waiting outside an abandoned one-storey building that sat alone in the middle of the railway lands. The lands themselves lay in a strip of rusting steel and stubby grass between the raised highways and office towers of the city core, awaiting redevelopment. In the daylight they’d be visible to a thousand passersby, but in the pre-dawn darkness only a trucker or two might notice movement in the empty yards.
The nearest place to hide the van was half a mile away, in the shadow of an overpass. Mickey had to drive without lights through an empty field to reach its sheltering darkness. He surprised himself by praying under his breath the whole way. Whichever god he was praying to didn’t seem to mind the blasphemies he threw in for good measure; they made it to the overpass without losing a tire.
“We’re here,” he said, turning to look at the two figures crouched in the back of the van. “It’s almost 5:00.”
“I’d better go,” Ardeth said, voice tight. Rozokov reached out to touch her hair and Mickey turned away, trying not to listen to their voices or watch them in the rear-view mirror.
“Remember the asylum,” the man whispered, grey head bending close to hers. “We survived. We will survive this.” Mickey heard her draw a slow, ragged breath.
“They’ll burn. And we’ll be free.”
“Yes, my beloved, my salvation, we’ll be free.” In the mirror he saw them kiss, a slow, lingering caress that made something in his heart catch as he dropped his eyes. Then the panel door slid open and she was gone, walking across the rusting tracks towards the building.
“She’ll be OK. They’ll both be OK,” Mickey said awkwardly into the silence. There was a rustle of movement as Rozokov moved into the front seat beside him. He sat still for a moment, watching the dark figure moving away from them.
“You wanted to know what is happening,” he said at last and Mickey nodded, then said “yes” when the man did not take his eyes from the retreating figure. “I know only part of the explanation and much of that I have only guessed. But here is what you need to know. She and I are . . . afflicted . . . with a condition that makes it difficult for us to move about in daylight. This same condition can also mean a longer lifespan. It appears that someone has discovered our existence and sees some profit in exploiting it. They have been pursuing me for a long time now.”
Mickey sat still for a moment, absorbed the words. The man sounded sincere but . . . he remembered the persuasive power of that voice. “Wait a minute. Ardeth didn’t always have this . . . this condition or whatever you call it. Sara would have mentioned it.”
“That is true. She was afflicted because of me.”
“Are you saying it’s communicable?”
“Only under very specific circumstances. You certainly cannot be infected by sitting here with me.” Rozokov’s voice held a hint of humour. Mickey looked hard at him for a moment, at the grey hair and the faint lines around his eyes and mouth.
“If this condition means you live longer, you could make a fortune on it yourself. Lots of people would consider staying out of the sun a small price to pay.”
“It has other prices.” Rozokov stiffened suddenly and gestured towards the dark bulk of the rendezvous point. Mickey heard the faint grumble of an engine and saw a dark van jolting its way towards the building. The white banner of her scarf was all that was visible at this distance. The van rolled to a stop, between their vantage point and the waiting woman. It paused for a moment, then they heard the engine being gunned and it turned and moved, more quickly this time, back the way it had come. Ardeth was gone.
Mickey reached for the keys to start the van but Rozokov stopped him. “No. Not yet.”
“We’ll lose them.”
“No.
We do not need to see them to follow and we will be too conspicuous on the streets at this hour.”
“Don’t need to see them? Then how will we find them?”
“An advantage of my condition. I can find her wherever she goes.” Mickey saw the sideway gleam of the man’s smile. “Blood calls to blood, as they say.”
“Has this ‘condition’ of yours got a name?”
“Back in the old days, they called those who suffered from it vampires,” Rozokov replied, taking out the fedora and setting it over his pale hair. “You may start the van now.”
“And what do they call them now?” Mickey asked, as he began backing out from under the overpass.
“The same thing, I would imagine.”
Mickey glanced over, expecting to see the man smiling at his own joke. But Rozokov’s mouth was still and straight, and if there was any amusement in his eyes, it was safely hidden behind the blind, black stare of the sunglasses.
Chapter 29
“They’re bringing the woman in now,” Elder reported. Lisa Takara nodded and took another sip of her coffee. They were all drinking it, even Parkinson, who normally disdained anything but decaffeinated. They had been dragged out of their beds at her summons; she’d been dragged out of hers by Rooke’s voice on the telephone: “Get up and get ready. We’re bringing them in one hour.”
They didn’t need an hour’s notice, of course. The laboratory had been functioning for close to two months. Two months in which they had had nothing to do but test and retest equipment, read old books full of superstition, and try not to learn too much about each other. Even the move from the first anonymous location to this equally anonymous one was only a minor diversion. They had no more freedom here, in this place that was obviously a house, than they had had in the converted warehouse.
Conversations during the long, dull days were restricted to who had studied what with whom and the latest theories in their related fields. No one mentioned families or life outside the confines of the laboratory they were not allowed to have. No one discussed the “terms” of their contracts or what combination of money, blackmail and coercion had brought them there.
The Night Inside Page 24