An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3), Fred Saberhagen [best large ereader .txt] 📗

complicate things anyway. You’d think we had loaded it with blanks, or something. Just watch this.”

    And saying that, Carol disappeared, green dress and red hair and pink skin just swirling away to nothing. Not from a position where there was anything at all to hide behind: from right in the middle of his bedroom floor.

    PCP, Walworth thought at once. He’d seen the elephant tranquilizer hit like this before, with heavy hallucinations. Not on himself, of course. He’d never used it on himself. But now Carol or someone had sneaked it into his food or drink. Intending to get rid of him…no, not in his food, an injection, that was it. A mainliner right into the jugular, managed somehow by Carol when she was supposed to be drinking his blood. No wonder she hadn’t wanted mirrors around the bed…

    A spring-loaded panel in the wall near the head of his bed, a movieish gadget that no one would expect to come across in real life, delivered his .38 into his hand as he reached out an pressed the wood. He was reasonably sure that neither Carol nor Winter nor the maids nor anyone else who had been in the apartment recently knew that it was there; it had been installed a year ago, and he hadn’t spoken of it to any of them—not even of the gun until just now. Nevertheless he suspiciously broke the revolver’s action open, slid the faintly oily cartridges one by one out of the cylinder and weighed them in his fingers, looked at them and tamped them gently back. Firing pin was in place too. He snapped the weapon shut, ready for business. The thing looked and felt awfully functional.

    From behind him, from the direction of the huge bedroom window, there sounded a brisk, light tapping, as of something very hard striking on glass. Even as Walworth turned it seemed to him that he knew already, in some nightmare-hatching inner corner of his mind, just what it was that he was going to see.

    Carol’s face hovered close outside the almost unbreakable glass, twenty stories in the air. Her feet were extended toward the lake. With lightly moving arms she swam, a great smiling fish in an immense aquarium…then she was gone again.

    “How was that?” her voice asked, once more from behind him, this time from in the room. Before turning again, he noticed that the night-backed glass showed him a half-reflection of the lighted bedroom—but not of Carol.

    He spun around again then, to face her across the wide, round bed. “Bitch.” His voice was low and murderous. “You stuck me with a good one, didn’t you?”

    “Stuck you?” She pretended not to understand. “I see you found your pistol. If you think it will protect you against Winter, or the old man, then fire it at me. Right now.”

    She sounded too eager. Whatever her game was, he wasn’t going to play it. He shook his head. But in his anger he moved toward her. He was expecting that when he got close enough she would try to kick him where it would hurt the most. He was expecting that and ready for it. But only when he swung his arm to club her with the pistol barrel did she move, and then only to lift her arm. Her little palm caught his forearm, and it felt like he had swung at a cast-iron statue.

    And almost before the pain of the impact had had time to register, Carol had grabbed him by both elbows, picked him up, and spun him in mid-air like some casually victimized infant. She spun him once more, in reverse, and ended the mad ballet by throwing him contemptuously into a chair, which nearly tipped over as he landed. He sat there blinking at her stupidly, for the moment unable to do anything more.

    “You utter goddamned fool,” she said, and added something in the same withering tone, but in a language he did not know. She finished up in English: “I wash my hands of you.”

    His rage had reached the point where his body acted of itself. His arm came up and fired the gun point-blank. The sound reverberated, the smell of burnt explosive stung his nose, the fruitwood table behind Carol leaped up against the wall and came down on its side. She stood there, icily contemptuous.

    At his elbow the phone was ringing.

    He debated whether to fire at her again. She waited, perhaps also debating something in her own mind.

    Five rings, six.

    He reached out his left hand and picked it up.

    Winter’s voice, rough, excited, incoherent.

    Carol came near him and snatched the phone away. Walworth spun away out of his chair, not wanting her to touch him now, and afraid of what she might do if she did touch him.

    “Are you sure?” she said into the phone. What she heard from it then transformed her into a goddess of victory, standing tall with head flung back. “Are—you—sure—that—it—was—him?” Her lips looked rigid, driving the words like nails into the phone.

    The answer this time brought from Carol an outcry that sounded as if she had been hurt. But Walworth could see in her face that it was triumph. He backed away a little farther, sat down on the bed.

    “No!” she was saying into the phone now. He had never seen anyone so beautiful. “In that case he should be kept alive—yes, yes, yes, alive, until later, when I can get to him. Later tonight. No, the gathering is at my place, within the hour. Leave him where he is, and come to my place. Yes, right away.”

    Very carefully she replaced the receiver in its cradle on the little table, near the bed. Walworth sat very still. A Carol he had never seen before looked