6

“MASTER NICHOLAS?”

Leander’s anxious query roused Nicholas from his concentration on Malik/Alexius’ stabilizing heartbeat.  New bandages had stopped the bleeding once again, but the man had swooned, giving the physician brief cause for concern.

“Master Nicholas, please...”

He looked up, aware of the agitation in the youngster’s voice. “What is it, Leander?”

“Do you really think it wise to allow an enemy – a Janissary – to escape into the city? Should we not call the guard to go after him?”

Still mourning his failure to reunite father and son, Nicholas now had to admit to yet another error in judgment. Though he was only one man, Gaspar could indeed pose a danger, and would have to be stopped. What to do with him afterward would be another matter.  One Nicholas didn’t care to contemplate.

Stay here,” he told the boy. “Watch over him, and let no one else into the room. I will find the other one.”

For the vampire, tracking Gaspar was child’s play. The blood scent still clung to him from his own bandaged wound, leading Nicholas straight to his hiding place at the Blachernae Wall.  He was crouched near the tower, no doubt preparing to climb the steps and attack the guards above. He might only have to kill two or three before he reached the outer gate. And though he would quite probably die in the effort, he could then easily open the outer gate. Once the wall was breached, the emperor’s city would be lost.

Nicholas descended on him without warning. The vampire plucked him from the tower stairs and carried him aloft so rapidly that the startled mortal hadn’t even had time to cry out. They hurtled skyward, flew over the walls and shortly came to earth again within view of Mehmet’s tents. There Nicholas convinced Gaspar to forget his brief flight, replacing the memory with one of an embattled escape through the kerkoporta, the small spy gate that lay hidden near the tower. In reality, Gaspar had probably never even noticed it.

Once the Janissary had set off at a run for the encampment, Nicholas, at the behest of a need he must fill before going back to the city, walked in another direction.

When he returned to the infirmary and the room where he had left Leander in charge of his patient, he found only an empty cot.

“I think you had best come with us, physician.”

Nicholas wheeled to face four mortals: the silversmith Kostas, two soldiers of the Venetian Guard, and the man who had spoken. Nicholas recognized him, though they had  never met.  A hero both here and in Venice, the Genoese commander Geovanni Giustiniani lead the holy city’s Christian forces. The Venetian Guard were his elite and most efficient fighting force, recruited by tried and true methods of recompense and political necessity to defend the besieged city.

“This man is a traitor,” Kostas accused, and shook a plump finger in the air to point at Nicholas. “A traitor who harbors Turkish spies!”

The military commander silenced him with a gesture, but turned the fury of his own gaze on Nicholas. “Where is the second spy, physician?”

“Dead,” Nicholas lied, and met the man’s eyes with a demand of his own. “Where have you taken my patient and my aide?”

Giustiniani’s will gave no ground to the vampire’s persuasion. “The child is sent home to his father, the better to make shoes for a living,” he said. “The spy is on his way to prison, as the physician who conspired with him will shortly be. Did you really think to hide two enemies beneath our very noses?”

“They are Greeks. I hoped to...”

“They are Janissaries! Their masters wait not a stone’s throw outside our walls. Would you hand them keys to all our gates as well?!”

“I did not m...” Nicholas’ protest died in mid-word when the soldiers were abruptly ordered forward to arrest him. Under the disbelieving stares of aides and patients alike, he was marched through the main ward and out into the street. His humiliation was made complete by the assault of vibrations from LaCroix’s unseen presence, lurking somewhere nearby.

“Tomorrow, Nicholas,” the softly teasing voice had whispered in his mind. “Tomorrow will tell all.”

*    *    *

“Tomorrow night,” LeFebre had said, “after Friday’s healing service has ended. Meet me here in the sanctuary.”

Nick had flown from the church in a quandary, both confused and conflicted by the faith healer’s potentially suicidal offer of help. Desperation had driven Nick to accept that offer, but somehow he would have to take measures to protect LeFebre from the vampire, should this healing attempt go terribly, lethally wrong.

He had retrieved the Caddy from its precinct parking space and was en route to the college dorm address in Schanke’s notes when the cell phone in his coat pocket shrilled. When he answered, Schanke’s worried voice said, “Nick, we’ve got a problem here.”

“Yeah, Schanke. Where are you?”

“Adelle Dienstat’s parents’ place, 327 Kanamet. How fast can you get over here?”

“Five minutes, if I stop for red lights.”

“Run ’em. Traffic division owes me at least three ticket fixes.”

Schanke rang off abruptly, and Nick took the next left to head the Caddy toward Kanamet. He made it to the modest tract house in four minutes flat – without running the lights. Inside, he found two inconsolable parents and one frustrated homicide detective doing his diplomatic best to calm them down.

Diplomacy wasn’t Schanke’s strong suit.

“All right, all right,” the portly detective was saying when Nick approached and displayed his badge. No one looked at it. “Just try to think, Mr. Dienstat.  Anywhere else she might have gone?”

“I don’t know where else...” Dienstat ran one hand through his thinning brown hair while his wife sobbed  loudly on the couch behind him. “She just kept saying  ‘It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault.’ Then she tore out of here, got into her car and took off. Please, you’ve got to find her before... Well, in that state of mind I’m afraid to think what she might do!”

“Try to stay calm, Mr. Dienstat.” Nick traded the badge for a pen and notebook. “If you can give us a description and plate number on the car, we’ll get out an APB.”

“Uh...” The man took a deep breath, trying to concentrate. “It’s a blue Nissan Sentra, ‘91. I’ve got the plate number here somewhere.” He sat down and rummaged through a pile of mail on the coffee table, finally handing Nick an auto registration form. “It’s on there somewhere,” he muttered.

Nick thanked him and dutifully copied down the number.

“You’re sure she said ‘I killed him’?” Schanke asked. There was simply no way to put a question like that gently, but Nick could tell he’d tried.  “Those were her exact words?”

“She couldn’t,” Mrs. Dienstat said emphatically from the couch. “She can’t mean it. Not my baby!”

“That’s exactly what she said,” Adelle’s distraught father admitted. “But I don’t believe it either. There’s got to be some mistake. There’s got to be!”

Nick exchanged glances with Schanke before he said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Dienstat. Whatever she meant by it, we’ll get it all straightened out just as soon as we locate her.”

“Both of you just stay here and keep the phone line open,” Schanke added. “We’ll be in touch as soon as we know anything.”

They made a hasty exit out to the street, where Nick’s Cadillac sat nose-to-tail with his partner’s dented mid-80s Chevy.  Schanke smacked the sedan’s roof with both fists in consternation. “Can you believe this?! I could’ve sworn this one wasn’t a homicide. I would’ve laid odds on it, ten to one.”

“I still don’t think it is.” Nick slid into the Caddy, unhooked the police radio mike and called in the APB.

Schanke leaned in the passenger side window, waiting until he’d finished. “You think she just had an attack of guilt?  Blames herself for slipping him the stuff in the first place and figures she’s a murderer for it?”

“More likely than not,” Nick said. “I gather Dienstat gave you some ideas where to look?”

“Before you got here, yeah. Starting with the hallowed halls of Scarborough Toronto U. Bertie and Phil live on campus. There are also several girlfriends around town she might have run to.”

“Okay.” Nick started the Caddy’s engine. “You take the girlfriends. I’ll take the campus.”

“You got it.” Handing his partner a notebook page with the dorm addresses scribbled on it, Schanke started away, then suddenly turned and stuck his head back in the Caddy’s open window. “And Nick?”

“Yeah?”

“I hope you’re right, buddy.  I really hope you’re right.”

Nick hoped so too. Like Schanke, he had a feeling that Adelle’s tearful confession had been driven by guilt over the unintentionally lethal prank. And if there was one thing Nick Knight knew even better than the killer’s instinct, it was the unrelenting ravages of guilt.

There was little activity on the university campus this late on a Thursday night. After circling through several of the outlying lots without spotting Adelle’s car, Nick left the Caddy parked well off campus on Old Military Road and decided to continue his search using a more advantageous perspective – from the air.

Within minutes, he’d spotted a blue Nissan parked in a lot near the university’s Bladen Library. He landed for a closer look and noted at once that the plate number matched. The engine was still warm, but Adelle’s car was unoccupied, the only one in the otherwise deserted lot. He could hear no mortal heartbeats nearby.

But she had to be here, somewhere. Nick knew the extremes to which guilt, warranted or not, could drive mortal and vampire alike. At her tender age, Adelle Dienstat might be so ill-prepared to deal with her perceived guilt that she would choose drastic methods to punish herself for Con Lewis’ “murder.”

Closing his eyes for a moment, Nick carefully cast the vampire’s senses outward, and listened until the night’s sounds were amplified tenfold.

There.

Carried on the wind, a young woman’s plaintive sobbing reached his preternatural ears. In another moment he was airborne, following the sound.

She stood on the roof of a four-story classroom building, poised so near the edge that a heavy gust of wind might have sent her plummeting to the concrete below. His worst fears realized, Nick floated to a noiseless landing as close behind her as he dared. It wasn’t quite near enough for him to grab and pull her back. He would have to risk inching forward, closing the gap...

The girl sensed something, turned her head. “Get away!” she shouted in a voice hoarse from crying. “Get out of here and leave me alone!”

“So you can jump?” Nick kept his own voice level, striving for calm. “Trust me, Adelle. That’s not the answer to your problems.”

She glanced over her shoulder at him, tears flowing from swollen eyes. “How would you know?!”

Her anguish touched a chord in Nick, one that nearly eight centuries of darkness – and LaCroix’s cruelest efforts – had never been able to suppress.

“I killed him,” she sobbed. “Don’t you understand? Con is dead because of me!”

“But you never meant for him to die.” Nick took a cautious step toward her. “That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?”

She shook her head and took a shuddering breath. “They got switched somehow. The bottles... I don’t know how.”

Another step. “Con wasn’t supposed to get the drugged beer?”

“No! We were gonna pull a joke on Bertie. Me and Phil...” She stared down at shoe tips that were already extended a few inches over the roof’s edge, and moved one further forward. “We wanted to put the roofies in Bertie’s drink and then let him wake up naked, up here on the roof, and not be able to remember how he’d got here or what he’d done. Just a totally lame, stupid joke. So lame it got Con killed.”

“You didn’t know that would happen. Nobody did.” Slowly, Nick extended one hand toward her, trying to catch her gaze when she turned her head to look back at him. “Come with me and we’ll get it all sorted out. I promise.”

She started trembling, thrusting the knuckles of one hand into her mouth in an unsuccessful bid to dam the flood of tears.

“I’m a murderer,” she whimpered around the obstacle of her clenched fist. “I murdered Con.”

“No.” Nick kept his hand out, trying to will her to accept it. “No, you didn’t. It was a stupid prank gone wrong, but that’s a long way from murder. I won’t lie to you and tell you there might not be some juvenile court charges, but not for homicide. I know murderers, Adelle. I see them all the time.” Every time I pass a mirror. “And I know you’re not one of them.”

Adelle’s shivering grew into convulsive sobs, and her shoulders shook so violently that Nick feared she would lose her balance and go over the side. A moment later, she nearly did exactly that when her knees buckled and she began toppling forward.

He flew.

Moving at speeds faster than any mortal eyes could have followed, he snatched her from the air at the brink and fell back to the rooftop with her cradled in his arms. She screamed, but it was a cry of anguish rather than fear. She hadn’t been facing him, and couldn’t have seen the blur he’d become in order to catch her, literally, in mid-air.

Nick held her frail, shuddering form and stroked her hair while she cried into the folds of his coat. “It’s all right,” he soothed, and the cold night wind washed over them as if to deny the promise. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

He gave her the reassurance in full hope that it would come true for this very young mortal.

But he prayed at the same time, to a God he had long ago forsaken, that the vow might also come true for a lost soul named Nicholas Knight.

*    *    *

“Your God,” Malik had said from a dark corner of Giustiniani’s prison cell, “would appear to have deserted you.”

Nicholas made no immediate reply. He stood against the barred wooden door, listening to the Venetian guards’ footsteps retreating on the other side. There were no other sounds, no lingering human heartbeats. Confident that their prisoners were secure, Giustiniani’s men had left no watch behind. That, at least, would render their escape from this place a bit less complicated.

“I don’t presume to know what God might choose to do,” he said in answer to the Janissary’s taunt. “Do you really wish to die for yours? Or would you rather leave here and go back to your encampment and your sultan, tonight?”

Almost no light penetrated through the single, slotted window high in the wall, but Nicholas could see the amusement on Malik’s face without difficulty.  “Have you the key?” the man queried, mocking him. “And has the good physician added flying to his bag of tricks as well?”

Thankful that the mortal could not see his startled reaction to that, Nicholas leaned back against the door and patiently folded his arms. It would be better to wait for a short time, until the Venetians were well clear and occupied elsewhere. He wanted only one human witness to this escape. “What this particular physician can do,” he said calmly, “might surprise you. Why do you discount an offer of help out of hand? Tell me, where is all that faith you spoke of?”

Malik looked suddenly small and very vulnerable, but he set his jaw with a renewed determination just the same. “My faith,” he said resolutely, “is in Allah. Not in men.”

“I’m... sorry,” Nicholas told him, and meant it, though he’d had trouble getting the word out. “A poor jest. It was not meant to give offense.” He crossed silently to Malik’s corner and knelt beside him in the shadows. “I will see to your wound, if you will permit me.”

“See?” Malik coughed and drew in a labored breath. “How can you see anything in this gloom?”

“Well enough.”

When his overture was not rebuffed, Nicholas proceeded to open the man’s tunic and examine the red-stained bandaging. His Beast stirred hungrily at the heightened blood scent, but the physician prevailed, taking satisfaction in the fact that his earlier ministrations had held the wound closed and prevented all but a minor renewed blood flow.

“It’s begun to heal,” he said, closing and re-tying the tunic’s cross-folds. “Try not to move too much, and keep the bandage tight.”

He sat back against the rough stone wall and tried to ignore the odor of moldy straw rising from the floor. Idly, he slipped a hand inside the collar of his own tunic, and his fingers met something small, round and metal.

“Malik,” he said. “I nearly forgot. I have something that belongs to you.”

Feeling the tingle induced by the precious metal and its woven silver cord, Nicholas lifted the medallion from around his neck. It was not a sacred object, but its silver had the little-known power to diminish a vampire’s strength. LaCroix would have called him a fool for wearing it, but as Giustiniani’s men had taken his pouch from him, he was glad of the decision. Just as he was glad that he’d retrieved it from the infirmary floor after Kostas had ground it underfoot.

“You must have kept this all these years for a reason,” he said, and pressed the little disc into the mortal’s palm, noting that the Janissary’s fingers closed over it at once in apparent recognition.

“I...” With familiarity, Malik caressed the craftsman’s mark centered on the medallion’s back. “I kept it, at first, because I remembered this sign,” he said, lost in some long ago childhood memory. “And there was a woman. A beautiful woman.”

“Your mother,” Nicholas ventured, but the wistful look on Malik’s face had quickly turned to one of anger.

“But now I keep it,” he said, “to remind me that one can be born an infidel and yet be saved by the grace of Allah.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicholas said again.  “I should never have tried...” He left the sentence hanging, unfinished, between them. He’d been so certain that reuniting father and son would be the right thing to do. And not for the first time, he had been proven disastrously wrong.

Just as LaCroix had predicted.

Sometimes, Nicholas reflected,  his master’s seeming prescience could be thoroughly galling.

Though Malik did not acknowledge the abortive apology, his next soft-spoken question took Nicholas unawares. “Will you tell me something, healer? Why did you help us? Gaspar and I are no longer Greeks. We are rather the bloody Hellenists’ sworn enemies. Your enemies. Yet you have imperiled your own life to aid us. Why?”

Nicholas was silent for so long that the Janissary had probably decided he would not answer. “One who was of your faith, and a sworn enemy as well,” he finally responded, “showed me a kindness once. Let us say that I have now returned the favor twofold.” He rose slowly to his feet. “Or perhaps more aptly, that I am about to.”

Thankful for the darkness that would hide at least the beginning of his deed from mortal eyes, Nicholas returned to the cell door and listened again for any life signs in the corridor without. Except for the sputtering of a wall torch, all was silence.

He placed his hands on either side of the door’s rough-hewn shape, where wood ill-fittingly met stone, and concentrated on tightening his grip by calling forth the vampire’s strength. When the jointed planks in front of him appeared to change hues from brown to gold to flaming red, he unleashed the Beast’s wrath completely, grasped both edges of the door, and pulled.

Wood creaked, then splintered. Metal fasts wrenched free of the door outside, spilling the heavy iron bolt that had barred it onto the stone floor with a resounding clang. Torch light flooded into the cell and illuminated a terrified Malik, on his feet now, stammering an incredulous “How?!”

Nicholas, eyes faded to gold, was beside him in a heartbeat. “You did not see this,” the vampire’s commanding voice told him. “You have been asleep, healing from your wound. In fact, you are still asleep.”

The Janissary’s eyes rolled back at once, and he fell forward into his rescuer’s arms. Nicholas lifted him, and carried him like a slumbering child from the cell, down the corridor and out into the makeshift prison’s empty courtyard.

By the time the Venetian guard came running to investigate the noise, their prisoners had both vanished into the inky darkness of a cold night sky.