The Ruby Tear (15 page)

Advice

T
hat was not wise
, the Dark One murmured.
You are careless, to take your meal again so close to your enemy’s business and his woman. What if the little gnome-woman remembers more than she should about your time with her?

You are mistaken
, Ivo thought. He stood on the street corner and watched the plate glass window of the Two White Cats, where Jessamyn Croft could be seen having coffee with two of the other actors, the older “lead" and a younger one. She did draw men to her, but that wasn’t surprising.

The Lady wouldn’t let it lie.
How, “mistaken”?

Jessamyn Croft is not my quarry. Nicolas Griffin is, and Nicolas Griffin has shut up his house and gone abroad.

How strange, Baron. You seem to spend all your time with her, and none looking for him. Naturally, I conclude that the one you seem to be stalking is your quarry.

Nicolas Griffin loves her
, he replied, digging his fists deeper into his coat pockets.
He will not go far away from her for very long. Why can you not understand this? Old as you are, do you know nothing of love? If I stay near her, eventually he will come back to her—and to me.

Do you still want him to?

Of course,
he thought.
But perhaps not too quickly. I am in no hurry, Lady. And I cannot believe that after all this time, you are.

One of the young leather-clads he had dealt with on his first visit to the coffeehouse clumped past with a different companion this time, an older man in a lumpy down jacket and cargo pants. They didn’t seem to notice him where he stood under the awning of an all-night Korean grocery.

Now, that is where I should be feeding
, he thought, following their progress down the windy street with narrowed eyes.

True,
came the soundless words in his mind.
They are full of drugs and sickness, exactly what you like best, or so you tell me.

He shrugged off her sarcasm.
Not always. I drank from the little theater woman, and she was clean; not even the taint of tobacco.

He went silent, his attention trained on the actors at the window table, although they were blurred by the vapor on the inside of the glass.

If you liked it, you could go back and finish. This person would welcome your complete attentions, Baron, do you not think so? She has a poor life, in the corners of a world of appearances that despises and pities her for her stunted stature.

No,
he answered.
Lily Anderson likes her life, despite moments of self-doubt and regret and envy of others. But who doesn’t have these? She also has a child she loves and she is respected and well paid for her talent. Also because she functions well as part of a team, I think. Her life is strong and centered. Why should I kill such a person? There are too few of them in the world in any century.

Like this Jessamyn Croft? Is she one of them too? Is that why you spend your time looking at her, even at this moment when you seek to entrap the one who follows her?

Who is it, Lady? The same one who created these “accidents” at the theater?

Why do you care?

He smiled angrily, baring his teeth—not fangs, not without the hunting lust to draw them down. In his quiescent state he smiles as freely as other men.

I like to know who the enemies are, before I choose my tactics,
he answered finally.
You can tell me, you can surely see from where you are: who is it that harries her at her work with such cowardly slyness, and tracks her in her own city’s streets?

I might see,
came the dreamy reply,
but I have no wish to. These petty intrigues are so dull, Baron. You indulge yourself, but I am not indulgent by nature. I await the full flower of your revenge, which was the purpose of your extended life, remember.

I remember,
he replied. He thought of commenting on the mindless devotion to revenge that provided the Dark Lady a recent feast of blood in his homeland, but at that moment he realized that the older man in cargo pants had entered the cafe, alone, and taken a corner table from which he could easily observe Jessamyn Croft and her two companions.

The big kid in the leather jacket had vanished, but Ivo recalled with relish warning him and his friends off with a physical gesture, the other night in the Two White Cats. He would have enjoyed demolishing the two boys, but for what? Discourtesy, and unwanted attention; but their crude arrogance had left lodged him with an inclination to teach them a hot, fast lesson.

The focus of his vengeance was becoming a bit more diffused than was healthy, now that he closed in, however slowly, on his real quarry, his final kill.

Revenge on the last head of the Griffin line was certainly his purpose in pursuing first Lily Anderson and now Jessamyn Croft; wasn’t it? Vengeance offered such a full, rich flavor to the palate of the imagination! No wonder most people—even an unnatural being like himself, with a long, long memory—never lost a taste for it.

Certainly not with the Dark One attentively hovering to remind him of the sweetness that he sought: Griffin blood, Griffin screams, Griffin spasms of terror and agony. A parade of men in various stages of extremity passed before the eye of his memory. These were Griffin men he had driven to reckless desperation, to outright madness, to suicide, or whom he had dispatched personally and with pleasure.

Why shouldn’t he enjoy it? They were wicked men, stubborn men, greedily withholding from him what he knew and they knew was rightfully his. If anything, he felt himself to be superior to the Dark One, having specific motivation for his own vengeful appetite, where she seemed to lust after bloodshed for its own sake.

Through the front window of the cafe Ivo watched Jessamyn laughing at something one of her companions said. She was a very handsome woman, and she had a particularly delightful, bubbling laugh that made other people smile.

But in her eyes the shadow of sadness still lurked, if you looked deeply enough. It was something worth noting. This shadow was powerful, and it spoke to him with unexpected authority.

He thought it was a forced awareness of her own mortality and that of those she loved. He respected her for that. Denial in its many forms was so much more common.

He had felt the crookedness and the scars on her hand when he’d taken it to kiss it. The subtle, imposed asymmetry of her face had been evident to him the first time he had seen her.

This person wasn’t just a pawn, and she wasn’t an enemy’s cast-off leavings to be played with and then spurned. He had to admit to himself that he admired her—for looking into death’s face willing herself to survive, and climbing back into a real, living life with all its risks. Exposure on the stage to failure, even ridicule, was something she had sought out, after time away and damage to her instrument, which was her body and her mind. She’d fought her way back into her work, like a warrior charging again into battle despite her own barely healed wounds from before.

In his own way, of course, he’d led many different lives, but successively, moving through centuries of time, and his performances were designed to be convincing, not enlightening. Also he had a single, driving purpose throughout, a purpose old and deep and not linked to anyone’s entertainment—except, perhaps, his own, and the Dark One’s.

Jessamyn’s performances were true, although they were fictions. His were all lies, as even now his courtship of her for hidden purposes might end in her unintentional destruction—what they called these days “collateral damage.”

If you do use her,
came the distant murmur,
as you say you will.

I mean to
, he replied.
But I try to avoid inflicting my vengeance on the innocent, as you well know. That is not the Craggen way.

After a moment, in which a number of revelers bustled past wrapped to the ears and making a great deal of tipsy and irritating noise, the answer came:
There was your uncle Georg, after the siege of that walled town in Hungary, remember—certain extreme things were done to punish the people for their resistance. Yet those people were guilty only of wishing to survive with their families and goods intact.

Ivo uttered a snort of dismissal.
Well, then, it is not
my
way, and as I am Craggen now—there are no others left, you tell me—it is entirely up to me to define our rules. If I do not do it, then it is not the Craggen way. What I do, is.

Then you may fail, Baron; for a whim.

He shut his eyes tightly and stood there, his shoulders bowed, his right hand clenched around one of the cold metal rods that supported the outer corners of the grocer’s canopy.

A man whose history has passed away and left him behind has little left to him but whims,
he answered.
Apart, of course, from the thirst that sustains me. But my whims are trivial compared to yours, Lady, as you well know. The history of my homeland is made up entirely of your devouring whims, I sometimes think. It seems to me a strong personal victory that, given your example, I manage to hold to my purpose despite the lure of my whims, or the command of yours.

Well, you are young yet, Baron, and full of fancies. But I tell you, this woman is the cause of your restlessness. She puts you in more danger than you know. Do not imagine that this last Griffin man is a flimsy opponent, to be lightly cast down. You cannot overcome him without effective tools. This actress is the best tool you have, and your attentions to her will bring him to you in the end. But it may be as you yourself suggested: that she needs to be in obvious danger for him to come out of hiding and face you in the open.

Leave me, Lady
, he demanded.
Leave me to my own needs. Griffin is lawfully mine, like all his line, and I do not give him up for anything.

But the woman has held to her own life against heavy odds, she has won it back from death’s hand with her own strength. It is true, she is more than just a weapon against my enemy, and in any case I am not careless with fine weapons. She is not mine to do with as I please. Not even for your amusement.

But there came no reply, and when he let go of the pole and opened his eyes, Jessamyn and her two friends had gone. The older man in the parka and cargo pants was still there, drinking coffee.

That one was with the lout from the other night,
he thought.
There’s something, some threat  . . . He was watching her. I may have to do some killing here besides the killing of Nicolas Griffin.
And when all the killing is done—what then? When the ruby is mine, and my enemy has paid, and—and what?

One of the Asian store clerks had been eyeing Ivo, and now came purposefully toward him from inside the store.

He walked away before the grocer’s man could challenge him, but his thoughts walked with him. He was angry with himself:
What then
didn’t matter; it was a good thing that the Lady had slipped away. He would be embarrassed for her to see his thoughts now.

His future, if he had one beyond the fulfillment of his vow, had never been a concern to him. Now, with the end in sight, he couldn’t help but wonder uneasily—would the Lady at last withdraw his unnatural life and leave him to crumble quietly into a drift of dusty corruption, like a vampire in a film? Or take him to some place of her own, for some other service to her? Would he step into an eternity in which his slaughtered family would meet him, soul to soul, with thanks for his faithfulness?

But if so, what would he say to them—shades of so long ago, barely conceivable now as real people to a man who had lived so many centuries into this amazing future? Strangers. They would be strangers; or perhaps he would forget the long pursuit, remember only the satisfying end, and return to what he had been before, unchanged and familiar . .  .

No. If they existed anywhere, his father and mother and Magda and the others, he’d have felt them with him all this time, or now and then, encouraging, exhorting him to complete his task.

So, then—just death? Again, back to how it had been that first time, or something else—devils, even, flames of the hell he no longer believed in? He was so close—a surge of victory at long last, and then
what
?

No, this wasn’t for him to think about. A warrior knew that every new day was a gift no one could count on, and carried on without concern for such things. Completion was coming, and after that—whatever fortune and the Lady brought.

Meanwhile, he had a thirst to feed.

He strode uptown, a sturdy young man with his hands in his pockets and his gaze avidly probing the night world around him.