The Cornerstone (10 page)

He’d discovered a number of things during his tenure as owner of the
buachloch.
The most critical was the fact that like the stone, Dee’s ensorcelled blade had a thirst. Not just for sacrificial blood, but for the soul as well, which meant merely draining a little from someone and leaving them to recover did not work. The blade had to take a life for the libation to be accepted by the
bain-sídhe.
Whether the witch Radha Ó Braonáin had any say in the blood sacrifice as well he
didn’t know—he supposed they’d worked out a coexistence of sorts over the centuries.

He’d also discovered that substitutions didn’t work. A blood bag purloined from a local Red Cross office had no effect when he’d bathed the stone in its contents. It was as if he’d tried to flip on a light switch where there was no electricity. Once he’d even offered animal blood from a slain deer instead of a human, and the resulting sparks had burned the hair off the backs of his hands. Being an elemental, the banshee clearly had issues with him shedding the blood of wild creatures for his hell-spawned ritual. So he’d come to accept that only the intentional blood sacrifice of a human from Dee’s blade could preserve his hold over the stone. When he let that task go too long, untoward things happened, like that fiasco with Danny. Getting rid of his body after the libation had been tedious and time-consuming, secret access to the landfill near Buckhead notwithstanding.

A low growl off to his left pulled him up short. He cast about and then saw it, there in the tangled underbrush of kudzu and poison ivy—a large stray dog with its teeth bared and its short rough coat bristled along its back. It crouched in indecision, drilling him with its eyes. Bayard looked into its animal brain and saw the territorial aggression, but more than anything else naked fear. It poured off the dog's body in waves that Bayard tasted on the air rather than saw with his non-human eyes. He supposed the beast saw him as a zombie of sorts, something alive, but somehow not. A suspended life, if one wanted a precise definition. But dogs knew nothing of defining. Its trembling haunch bunched to spring as its growl went deeper.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Bayard said, touching the feral brain with his mind.

Immediately the cur dropped its coiled charge and galloped off into the trees as if the hounds of Hell were at its heels.

Bayard sighed and turned around, heading back the way he’d come. Hunting here was a waste of time. There were other places he could try.

An hour later he found what he was seeking at the southbound entrance of the graffiti-riddled Krog Street Tunnel. A trio of painters, two boys and a girl, busied themselves with spray cans, covering someone’s message and adding their own. From their explosive laughter and slurred voices he assumed they were drunk or high, which worked to his advantage. A shadow against darker shadows near the entrance, he watched and waited. The girl, probably a runaway if he was any judge, turned and puked painfully over the rail of the tunnel walkway onto the cracked pavement. Bayard inhaled the smell of vomit along with the familiar pungent stink of urine. He actually liked the old tunnel for its ugly industrial style—built in 1912 according to the date incised into its foundation stone, it ran for several hundred feet under a railroad with rows of squat, squared-off pillars, every inch of its dank cavelike walls covered in urban art. It drew the curious, the appreciative, and the unwary. It wasn’t the first time he’d found prey here.

Their task done, the unsteady trio exited the tunnel and wove their way across the highway and down a narrow sidewalk canopied by a steep bank of overarching trees and underbrush. Bayard followed discreetly. It didn’t take long for one of them to drop out, collapsed against the low retaining wall while the other two left their companion lying there. He waited long enough for the girl and still-vertical boy to get well out of sight around the next corner before pulling the comatose figure into a narrow footpath between an abandoned building and the wooded part of the block.

The teenaged boy mumbled and struggled fitfully as Bayard turned him onto his back and pulled his dirty sweatshirt away from his neck. Before he could properly come to his senses and scream out, Dee’s knife had done its work and his red life’s blood was pumping into the thermos. Bayard’s knee planted firmly on the boy’s sternum kept him from trying to sit up, and within moments the thin body went limp. Capping the thermos and clipping it to his belt, Bayard pulled the body into the tangle of brush and vines. Eventually it would be found, maybe even identified, but no trace of its silent attacker would ever be discovered. Her ladyship would see to that, concealment being part of her job description. If Bayard were somehow prevented from tending the stone, she would go unfed, so it behooved her to ensure he was able to carry out his part of the bargain. He often wondered what would become of her if indeed for some reason he ceased to attend to his duties. Would she stay trapped, powerless and shriveled, into eternity?

Once he’d dreamed that Death had come to her rescue, cracking open the stone, freeing his minion, and claiming the witch’s soul. He’d startled awake in a sweat and lain as still as if the Janus were his tomb, listening and straining his heightened senses. It had only been a dream, but sleep had not returned that night nor for several afterward.

Bayard unlocked the back entrance to the theater, crossed the basement quickly, entered the lobby, and climbed the staircase to his private quarters. Once inside with the door locked and bolted, he removed several books from a shelf against the wall beside the tiled bathroom and pressed a hidden spot. The bookcase rolled inward a foot and then slid sideways behind the wall, revealing a tiny kitchenette. Bayard put the thermos on the shallow counter beside a stainless steel sink. He took an apple from a basket and consumed it in a few ravenous bites, then pulled a chunk of Stilton from the tiny efficiency fridge and wolfed that as well. Hunting made him hungry, but oddly, he’d gone vegetarian over the years. No red meat or poultry, very little fish. Dairy he could still stomach, but eggs he could not. He’d once eaten an entire basket of Comice pears after a foray into the night. Bayard took up the thermos and unscrewed the cap. The sickly sweet aroma rose from the lip of the container, but Bayard paid it little attention. Reaching into the cabinet over the sink, he brought out a different cap with a metal spout like a built-in drinking straw and screwed it onto the thermos. It had proved to have the perfect angle necessary for reaching the cornerstone in its present location.

He went to his desk in the main room of his quarters, retrieved his pipe, filled it, and set it alight. Then he sank into the high-backed chair and smoked the entire bowl in the mostly dark apartment, just listening to the building and its immediate surroundings. All was quiet, but tense, waiting. Bayard drew on the pipe. The bowl glowed red momentarily, and he blew the smoke out. It perfumed the close quarters with a smell that reminded him of another room, high-ceilinged, heavy-timbered, and chill, where he’d first been introduced to the pleasures of the pipe. Bayard enjoyed another languorous pull from the pipe, savored the taste and scent of the cherry-flavored tobacco. She knew he was coming down, but she could wait in Hell until he was good and ready.

He watched the bowl glow red and dark again. And then he remembered. What in the name of all unholy had he seen onstage in that scene between Faustus and Lucifer? Ruben swore it was nothing he’d done, although he liked the idea and asked if he could try to recreate the illusion for the show. Bayard demurred—that had been no illusion. Had Tom been aware of anything
outré
during that moment when he’d uttered Faustus’s lines and exited with Morris? His sharpened senses now scanned the stage area of the theater downstairs, but it was cold and empty.

He sat and smoked and when his pipe was done, he knocked out the ashes and fetched the thermos. It was time. He headed downstairs in the dark, unlocked the door to the basement, and snapped on the staircase light in case any lurking rats might want to be warned beforehand. His footfalls clumped down the narrow steps till he reached the black and white tiled floor. Bayard gathered his focus and sat down facing the alcove under the stairs.

Friday, same night
—
1:30 A.M.

“I’m gonna go tally up the receipts and reconcile the register, can you lock up out front?” Nanette, owner of The Rookery and purveyor of all things used and esoteric in the book buying world, tossed Tom the keys, which he caught one-handed.

“No prob—I’m on it.”

“Thanks. Sorry to keep you so late, what with your accident and all. But we have to stay open later during the holidays and you’re the one I trust the most…”

Tom sorted through the keys on the master ring, looking for the one he recognized as the front door key. “I don’t mind. Nowhere else I need to be.” At nearly 1:30 in the A.M., that was true enough.

Nanette winked one kohl-ringed eye at him. “You’re a love.” Her flirtation with him was harmless—she was longtime married to the bookstore’s co-owner, a man her age who also ran a successful personal business as a practicing stage magician, which might explain the store’s extensive tarot card section. He wondered idly if Adelaide’s deck had come from here. The cultivation of a sultry mystique was part of Nanette’s persona and added to the bookstore’s atmosphere. He watched her straight bottle-black hair sway across the butt of her skin-tight leather pants as she made her way with the money pouch through the crowded stacks to the back room. She wasn’t his type, being too brassy and painted-woman extrovertish, so any flirtations returned on his part were mere courtesy and of no consequence.

Since coming to Atlanta, he’d not allowed himself any entanglements, emotional or otherwise, except for his involvement with the Mummers. Instinct, again, had led him there and he did not question the rightness of his being accepted into their little congregation, as he thought of them. Bayard played Pope to his acolytes, who hung on his words and worshipped his brilliance, or so it seemed to Tom. But that assessment of Kit Bayard was for himself and no one else.

Tom went to the front door, pulling the doorknob tight. He was fitting the key to the lock when a tremor went through his hands as if it were coming from the door frame or the floorboards under his feet. His body tensed and muscle memory telegraphed the sensation to his brain—earthquake. Which was ridiculous because as far as he knew, the great state of Georgia was not an earthquake zone. That being said, he’d lived in Greece where quakes large and small occurred too often, and his body remembered. He held the doorknob and felt the tremor subside. What. The. Fuck. Tom locked the door and turned off the lights in the store front.

He stuck his head in Nanette’s office. “Did you feel that?”

“Hm?” She pulled her attention out of numbers and sales figures. “Like…what?”

“Like a rumble, in the building.”

“Oh, sort of…I thought it was a big truck going by or something.”

Tom stood for a moment, unsure, replaying the sensation and not coming up with answers.

“Everything all right?” Nanette was looking at him funny.

“No, I mean, yeah. No problem, everything’s fine. Front is secure.” He came in and handed her the keys.

She took them and regarded him from under iridescent-shadowed lids. “I know you have a lot on your mind, nearly getting killed in traffic and having to put your baby in the shop. Go home and go to bed.”

Good advice. He’d heard it from someone else recently, too.

“Thanks, I will.” He slipped out the back door and into the employee parking lot behind the bookstore. It was dark as pitch. No moon, faint stars. Letting his eyes adjust before walking across the lot, he allowed himself a moment of dismay at the sight of the tin can rental car squatting in his parking place. The only thing it had going for it over his Harley was it was warmer. But not by much.

He was about to get in when he felt the tremor again, a faint shaking under his feet as if the solid earth had suddenly gone fluid. Automatically he started counting the seconds…one-one hundred, two-one hundred, three-one hundred…the tremor stopped. Definitely not his imagination. He got in the car and sat in the dark for a few minutes, waiting to see if it would happen again. When it didn’t, he started the engine and eased out of the parking lot.

He drove slowly most of the way home, and passed few cars on the highway. Everything seemed normal. Tom’s mouth settled into a tight, thin line. Normal his ass. A cast member inexplicably injured in rehearsal, the new back tire of his bike blowing out for no reason he could find, red mist onstage that the lighting guy hadn’t programmed, that stupid tarot card reading forecasting destruction and exploding towers, and now earthquakes where to his knowledge there had never been any. No, things were not the hell normal.

The street where he’d rented a one-room studio apartment over a garage was completely dark this early in the morning, even though its neighborhood edged up against the Georgia Tech campus. Normally you could hear the typical background noise that afflicted most student housing blocks—loud music, parties, groups of people standing around on sidewalks, and continual sounds of cars coming and going. But tonight, all was dark and quiet. The garage was a freestanding wooden car barn set somewhat behind the main two-storey house to which it belonged. He parked the rental car in one of the bays under the apartment and climbed the outside wooden stairs up to his room.

Although billed in the real estate ad as “spacious studio housing near campus,” it was in reality one largish sparsely furnished room with an adjoining smaller room the size of a closet containing a tiny shower stall, sink, and toilet that could have fit comfortably into a mobile home. There was a clothes rack against one wall for hanging things like suits and coats (which he didn’t own) and an old, scarred chest of drawers for everything else. Built-in cabinets above a six-foot kitchen counter on the eastern-facing wall were designed for glassware he also didn’t own. The counter contained a sink and a small apartment fridge under it, but no stove. He’d bought a second-hand microwave at a yard sale, which so far served his needs adequately. He ate a lot of ramen-in-a-cup.