Shadowlands (4 page)

The world seemed to slow down. A disembodied voice yelled, “Don’t!” and my brain sent the signal “pull back,” but it was a long time getting to my hand. The dog’s head, with its liver-colored markings [what big teeth, what big eyes] stretched out as if it knew I was going to back away, and its teeth seemed to grow larger as they reached for me. A hand came out of nowhere, clamped down on my still outstretched arm, yanked me to my feet, and then we were running down the sidewalk.

The images I got from him made me run even faster. I didn’t look behind us to see if the dog was still a dog. I just ran.

I knew who my rescuer was long before he had us sitting in one of the booths of the Second Cup at York and Front Streets—I’d known the minute he’d touched me. What I still couldn’t be sure of [strong emotion combined with that odd fragmentation I’d picked up earlier] was how Nikos Polihronidis had managed to be where he was, when he was.

Other than by following me.

I’d managed to get a couple of other things from him along the way [
much
older than he looked; bitten/touched by a Hound once] but what had made me run as fast as I could was the image of bottomless, ravenous hunger in his psyche, and the echoing emptiness that hunger left behind.

And I knew what that hunger was, though I’d never encountered it myself.
The Hunt.

“You were being followed,” he said now. He wanted something from me, and that’s why he’d been on the spot to save me. The calm exterior hid hard images of anger, fear.

“By something besides you, Mr. Polihronidis?” I thought that would provoke him, and I was right.

His face tightened even as he waved his hand in a pretty good imitation of a casual gesture. “Better make it Nik.” He picked up his espresso and put it down again. “You could have knocked me over when I saw you come into the office,” he said. “You’re the girl with the Rider, aren’t you?”

I blinked. I hadn’t seen
that
when he was touching me.

“We’ve seen you together.” He jerked his head toward the bulk of Union Station, just visible at the end of the street. Where the crossroads
was. And the Portal. “I can see his
dra’aj
, and yours for that matter, so don’t try to say you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

I straightened up so fast my spine cracked. Reading people’s
dra’aj
, seeing what their talents were, that’s how the Collector found people like me. But I wasn’t in any danger from Nik. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

“That was a Hound following you,” he said, clearly expecting me to know what he meant. I nodded. Once.

That was why we’d run several blocks down University, past a fire truck which was trying to close a hydrant that people Nik knew had managed to open. Moving water, apparently, would throw the Hound off the scent. My scent. I’d picked up that much in jolts and fits and starts, as we were running.

Just the idea of the Hunt was enough to set anybody running, but something was making no sense.

“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “The Hunt doesn’t prey on humans.” Okay, so he’d been bitten, but he was still alive.

His smile gave me a hitch in the back of my throat, as if I was about to cry. “Maybe they didn’t, maybe that’s the way it was, once. But
doesn’t,
isn’t,
can’t,
and
once
isn’t
now
.” He reached across the table, but I moved my hands to my lap before he could touch me. He’d read so oddly that I wasn’t sure I wanted to read any more. I was still seeing jigsaw puzzles and rag rugs—as though the fragmentation wasn’t in my images, but in him.

“They can prey on humans, all right,” he said, drawing his hand back. “They’re doing it all the time now.” He licked his lips. “More every day.”

“They’re killing people?” Why hadn’t I heard something about this? Had it been on the news?

Nik shook his head, but he wasn’t saying no. “It’s not that simple. People
are
dying, yes, but—if it was only a few…” He shook his head again. “We need to talk to a Rider, about the Hounds. Can you set that up for us?”

“Why?”

A flicker of anger hardened his face. “Because you’re human, like us.”

“No, I meant, why do you want to talk to a Rider?”

“Because they did this. They brought the Hunt here. It’s their responsibility. We can’t,” he swallowed. “We can’t fight them off ourselves.” His voice shook a little, the assured lawyer of the Christie Institute almost gone.

“If people aren’t actually
dying
…” My voice dried up, and Nik squeezed his eyes shut.

“The Hunt takes our
dra’aj
,” he said. “It’s worse than dying. It makes us empty. We don’t live, we can’t even want to die.”

I got it then. I got what it meant. Nik had been bitten. That’s why he felt all fragmented.

“But you’re okay,” I said.

He shook his head, impatience getting in the way of what he was trying to tell me. “There’s a fix, but it has to be renewed, and now, with so many new ones, we can’t keep up with the demand.”

New ones?
“Those people in High Park,” I said. “Wandering around without a clue why they were there? Half starved?”

He nodded.

“Not vampires.”
I knew it.
“Not some kind of flu. The Hunt.”

He winced, looked as though he was going to say something, and then shrugged before nodding again.

Part of me wanted to take him home right then and there, even though I wasn’t sure what Alejandro could do to help him.

But another part of me wasn’t thrilled by the idea that here was yet another person thinking of me as someone he could make use of. Even his saving me had more to do with getting me to help him than it had with me personally—or impersonally, for that matter.

And speaking of personal, I admit I was disappointed that all that stuff about my caramel eyes hadn’t meant anything after all.

Most of my life I hadn’t been allowed to make my own decisions. Since my rescue, I’d been learning how—but this wasn’t about me. It was about Alejandro. I couldn’t make decisions for him.

I stood up. “Okay, I’ll ask my friend, but I can’t promise anything. I’ve got your card.”

“I’ll go with you—at least let me walk you to the subway,” he added when I shook my head. Before I could say no again, his mobile rang. I paused when he answered it, holding up one finger. Somehow I couldn’t just walk away.

I watched the color drain out of his face. “It has to be me,” he said.
“I’ll have to take her.” He glanced up at me. “Wait until I get there.” He snapped the mobile shut and stuck it back in the breast pocket of his jacket.

“Would you come with me?” he said. His voice trembled, as if he was keeping a tight rein on himself. “You need to—” he broke off and took a deep breath. “I need you to show you someone, for a profile. Please?”

“What, now?”

It was fear I was reading from him. Fear and anger and grief. “Please.”

I think it was the please that did it. Not very many people had ever bothered to say “please” to me.

Next thing I knew we were in a cab, and heading to an address on Spadina north of Bloor. Nik spent the ride on the phone, but traffic was with us, and in practically no time we were running up the steps of an old, double-fronted Victorian house, and in through the heavy glass-inlaid doors, past ground-floor offices, all the way up to the second floor. Two women were waiting at the spacious landing at the top of the stairs. One was wearing slacks and a short, military style jacket; the other had a flowery print dress. Both were clearly secretaries.

“Is she in her office?” Nik asked the one in slacks. “How long since you first noticed it?”

“She seemed a bit odd yesterday morning—”

“And you waited until now to call me?” As if he realized that losing his temper wasn’t going to get him anywhere, Nik took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Sorry,” he said. “Just tell me what happened.”

“She kept saying she was okay,” Print Dress said. “Maybe just a bit run-down. But then yesterday she had no dictation, and today she canceled all her appointments.”

“You have to speak to her a couple of times to get her to respond,” Slacks added. “Then, instead of jumping as though she was startled, she just turns and looks at you, as if she knew all along you were there, but just didn’t care. We thought—” she broke off and looked at the other woman, who nodded at her. “We thought it sounded like the High Park flu.”

“You know,” Print Dress chimed in. “What the people caught
down in High Park. Those people the police found there after dark. And when you didn’t call in after your meeting at the Christie—”

Because he’d been following me.
I began to feel a little sick. Not vampires in the park, no. But maybe the Hunt.

By this point both of the ladies were staring at me a little wildly, and only relaxed when Nik finally said, “This is Dr. Martin.” Neither of them raised an eyebrow when I followed Nik into another office.

“Elaine?” I hadn’t known his voice could get so soft.

The woman was smiling, but it was just lip movement.

“Hey, where’d you get this bruise?” There was a purple-blue mark like a stain on her lower arm.

She pulled her hand away, but you could see it was just a reflex. “I don’t know. On the weekend, maybe. I went out with Sue and Vicki.”

That would fit the coloring,
I thought. The bruise had only just begun to fade. Nik turned and looked at me, and I found myself stepping closer.

“Dr. Martin, this is my friend and law partner, Elaine Serber.”

Elaine was doing an excellent job of pretending to be well. But there were signs that would have told any good observer that there was something wrong. The left sleeve of her blouse wasn’t ironed; her face had been completely made up except for blush and mascara; her hair was not artfully tousled, it actually had not been brushed that morning.

She stood up and put out her hand to shake mine, but she was just going through the motions. It was like shaking an empty glove. [Tables with glasses; beer; a dark-haired man with long, pointed nose and sharp teeth (?); jigsaw, the pieces loose, shifting and shuffling like cards; there were pieces missing, important pieces; she was related to Nik, very distantly.]

Oh. The images suddenly clarified. Elaine was like Nik, fragmented, but also
not
like him. Where Nik was a puzzle in a frame, glued together and whole, Elaine was like a puzzle that had been poured out of the box onto the floor, pieces flung and tossed everywhere, some facedown, others piled two or three deep, and—like I said—some pieces missing entirely.

And I knew how it had happened. I saw her with her girlfriends in the bar, the look of the man who had taken her by the forearm as
she’d passed him on the way to the bathroom. And I knew that he wasn’t a man, but a Hound.

“What do you see?”

For a second I was so startled by Nik’s voice that I almost thought he knew that I was reading Elaine. Then I realized that he just meant could I, the psychological profiler, see what the problem was.

“She’s almost completely affectless,” I said, dredging up what jargon I could remember. “There are no micro-expressions in her face. None at all. As though she’s been wiped clean. You sometimes see this in the severely depressed. Sometimes rape victims. Look.” I nodded toward her. “She’s not even reacting to what I’m saying.”

“That’s what the Hunt does to us. This is what they’re calling the High Park flu.”

“You said you could help her?” I still had her by the hand. I was afraid that if I let go, she might fade away completely. [Pieces; rage; cold; static; a couple of hitches like catching breath, a refocusing of attention; Nik would help her.] I didn’t know whose hand was trembling, hers or mine. “I think you’d better hurry.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, his upper lip in his teeth. I couldn’t think what the holdup was. Finally, he nodded. “Come on, I asked the taxi to wait.”

It was easy to get Elaine downstairs and into the taxi, she held my hand and didn’t resist or protest in any way. Nik gave the driver another address, and I was a little surprised when we pulled up in front of what was obviously a hospital. We took a side entrance, an elevator up two floors, and exited into a sunny lounge. There were three people sitting in comfortable padded arm chairs. A man holding the hand of a woman who had fallen asleep nodded at us as we passed, and smiled. Another man, still wearing a straw fedora, was sitting forward in his chair, staring at his clasped hands.

The nurses’ station turned out to be a young woman in paisley scrubs with a laptop on the low table in front of her.

“Eva,” Nik called softly as they approached her.

“Hey, Nikki, whatcha got?”

“Couple of visitors for Harry.”

“Oh, that’s great.” A frown ghosted over her face. “They do realize…?”

“Oh, yeah, they’re not family, legal stuff.”

“Okay.” She went back to her computer.

Nik led us down the hall into a double room, where only one bed was occupied by what I greatly feared was a corpse.

“Harry?”

My breath caught in my throat as the man’s eyes opened. They were the only thing about him that showed any life at all—more life, I realized with a jolt, than Elaine’s did. Harry’s lips moved and, concentrating, I could just make out what he was saying, more by reading his lips than because there was any real sound.

Is it time
? was what he’d said.

“Only if you’re ready,” Nik said. “If you’re sure. Here she is.” He moved Elaine closer to the bed. “Her name’s Elaine.”

Not you?
And the lips moved as if they would smile, but the muscles had forgotten how.
Prettier.

“She sure is.”

Ready.

“Two blinks if you’re sure.” The papery eyelids fell, and rose, fell and rose again. “Elaine, take Harry’s hand. Go on. Hold Harry’s hand.” Nik put his own left hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“Hold on,” Elaine said. Her voice was the thinnest thread.

“That’s right, babe, hold on.”

Thank you.

Still holding Nik’s forearm, Elaine took hold of the old man’s hand with her free hand. At first, I thought nothing was happening. The papery eyelids had fallen shut, and the man’s shallow breathing slowed and slowed until finally the chest fell and did not rise again.