David Robbins - Chicago Run

Isabel balked at answering.

“I’m in no mood to go easy on you,” Blade warned.

“They fled,” Isabel blurted out. “I’m the last one left.”

“And you expect me to believe that?”

“It’s the truth, mister. Honest. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Why did you stay if all the rest ran away?”

“I wouldn’t leave without my mate, Roth.”

Geronimo cleared his throat. “This isn’t exactly the best place in the world to interrogate her.”

“I know,” Blade said, acutely aware that they could well be trapped if the woman was lying and there were more bowmen outside. “You’re coming with us,” he declared, and seized her by the upper arm. Before she could react he headed down the stairs, and was extra vigilant as he neared the bottom. Thankfully the living room was empty, and he pulled her onto the porch.

The woman saw the corpse, and suddenly dug in her heels and tried to jerk free. “No!” she cried. “You’ve killed him! You’ve killed Roth!”

A twinge of guilt assailed Blade, a twinge he promptly dissolved by reminding himself it had been either Roth or one of the Warriors. He tightened his grip and kept going, hauling her after him.

Isabel tried to touch the body of her mate and stumbled, on the verge of falling, but the momentum of her captor swept her along, and she regained her balance in four or five ungainly strides.

Bringing up the rear, Geronimo constantly swiveled this way and that, knowing that slacking off for an instant might well result in making his lovely wife a widow.

Since employing stealth was impractical with the woman along, and since the bowmen had seemed to possess extraordinary night vision and would see them in any event, Blade took the direct route back to their camp. He counted on the presence of his captive to dissuade any of her fellows from attacking.

By the time they reached the fire the flames were nearly out.

“You can do the honors,” Blade told Geronimo.

“Think it’s safe?”

“I doubt they’ll attack when we have one of their women,” Blade noted, surveying the woods. “And besides, if Nathan is still out there, he’ll need something to home in on.”

Nodding, Geronimo knelt and swiftly rekindled the fire.

At the first bright flare of the hungry flames, Isabel Kauler recoiled and covered her eyes. She tried frantically to escape, twisting and tugging futilely, her strength compared to the giant’s the same as that of a timid sparrow to a mighty eagle.

“What’s wrong?” Blade asked her.

“The bright light hurts my eyes.”

Perplexed and curious, Blade turned her away from the fire and stared at her face as she lowered her hands. He hadn’t paid much attention to her eyes before; now he found they were pale, almost white in color, although her hair and eyebrows were a dark brown. Her filthy skin was exceptionally pale, as if she seldom if ever was abroad during the day.

“Have you always been this sensitive to light?” he inquired.

Isabel nodded.

A disturbing insight prompted Blade to probe further. “And all of your people are the same way?”

“Yes.”

“They only come out at night?”

“Yes.”

“For how long has your clan be nocturnal?”

“Nok-what?”

“For how many years has your clan gone outside only after sunset?”

Blade amplified his question.

“Since as far back as anyone knows.”

Geronimo stood and glared at her. “What happened to our friend?”

“Who?” Isabel responded timidly.

“Hickok is his name. He wears buckskins and always packs a pair of Colts. Don’t pretend you don’t know who he is,” Geronimo said.

“But I’ve never seen anyone like you describe.”

“Bull, lady.”

The venom in the Blackfoot’s voice made Isabel take a step backwards.

“Really. I don’t know him.”

“Maybe the men of your clan jumped him,” Blade interjected. “They attacked us without provocation.”

Isabel shook her head. “I’m sure they didn’t.”

“How can you be certain?” Blade asked doubtfully.

“Because they would have brought his body home for us to gut and hang from a tree.”

The innocent simplicity with which she made the disclosure stunned Blade. He exchanged bewildered expressions with Geronimo, then inquired, “Why would you want to hang it from a tree?”

“How else can we drain the blood?” Isabel answered, her tone implying he must possess the intelligence of a rock.

Geronimo spoke, his voice gravelly. “Why would you want to drain the blood?”

“Blood can carry sickness. We’re taught never to drink it or we might die. Then too, it’s easier and a lot less messy to carve a body up after all the veins and such are dry.”

Horrifying insight flooded through Blade. “Your clan eats other people?”

“Sure? Doesn’t everybody?”

Before the Warrior could reply to her naive query, to the north arose the patter of someone running accompanied by the crackling of leaves underfoot, and Blade pivoted to see a figure charging directly toward them.

Was he dead again?

He hoped so.

Yama seemed to be floating in a Stygian void. Total blackness engulfed him. He tried to blink to determine if his eyes were open or closed, but he couldn’t feel his eyelids move. When he went to flex his arms and legs nothing happened. It was as if his consciousness, his very soul, no longer inhabited his organic body and now hung suspended at the core of an empty infinity.

It shouldn’t be like this, he noted.

It hadn’t been this way the last time.

The last time.

Vivid memories of Seattle washed over him with the force of a tidal wave. He recalled being shot with an arrow and taking shelter in an abandoned building. How bizarre it had been when he’d seemed to float out of himself dnd gazed down at his bloody form. Then there had been a flying sensation as he’d sailed through a long, dark tunnel into a realm of Utopian splendor. Some might have called it Heaven, others Paradise, still others Nirvana. To him it had been the sublime place where he’d encountered her again.

Lieuteant Alicia Farrow.

Once she had been a loyal Technic soldier sent to assist in destroying the Home and eliminating the Family. But then she’d committed the ultimate taboo and fallen in love with an outsider. With Yama.

He’d reciprocated, and savored every moment in her company. For the first time in his life he’d known genuine, profound happiness. The mere fact that a woman could love him, given his peculiar temperament, had astonished him. He’d felt their affection had been too good to be true; even so, he’d dared to envision a future with her constantly at his side.

Fate had decreed otherwise.

Alicia had died saving his life. Of all possible emotional burdens, the selfless, fatal sacrifice of a loved one had to be one of the hardest to bear.

He’d rather have died than to have lost her.

But lost her he had.

Then came the trip to Seattle and the “Near-Death Experience,” as one of the Elders later described it. His soul had joined her on whatever level of existence she now inhabited, and he’d enjoyed a fleeting taste of communion with her again. He would have stayed there forever, but such wasn’t to be. A beautiful bright light had materialized to inform him it wasn’t his time.

Of all the rotten luck.

So he’d reluctantly glided back through the tunnel and into his body, to awaken in a rejuvenated but melancholy frame of mind.

The baffling experience had changed him, transformed him somehow.

Where before he’d done his utmost to avoid dying, and probably had secretly dreaded the event, he’d grown to expect death as merely the means of passing on from Earth to the next higher level. Death became a portal, a technique of translation from one plane to another. With the unshakable certainly that those who possessed but the faintest flicker of faith would survive came a newfound fearlessness, an almost fanatical belief in his own invincibility. He’d reasoned that even if his body was destroyed, he would survive.