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

you rest a while…then I’ll help you get away. Can I lift you now, and hold you?”

    He nodded, feebly. Judy shifted her position, sitting on the hard wood floor. His head weighed almost nothing when she laid it in her lap. Gray hair and paper skin on bone. She stroked his forehead, too fleshless to have wrinkles. She told herself his face did actually look a little fuller now than when she had first found him. Though she had to admit that the improvement was pitifully small.

    The deep sparks in his eyes burned up at her. “You will not leave,” he said, stating a fact.

    “No, I will not.”

    “Then you will be here when he comes.”

    “If he is coming. But yes, I’ll be here till someone comes.” With infinite tenderness she smoothed his hair.

    His mouth emitted a ghost of its old hiss. “Then there is only one thing we can do. For your own sake as well as mine.”

    “What? Tell me.”

    “You know that I am not as other men.”

    “I know.”

    “Even wounded—so—it is possible for me to regain my full strength, or very nearly so in no more than hours, or perhaps only minutes.”

    “Love, tell me how.”

    “The sun has set now and that helps me—of course it will help them also. Pulling out the spear and stanching the wound have helped me greatly. Yet one thing more is needed.”

    Judy raised her head. Had she heard a footstep, somewhere in the house? No, she thought, only the storm. Just inside the broken window, the narrow wraith of snowflakes danced and melted. “What is it, my love? Anything.”

    “My darling Judy, have I not told you again and again to go, to leave me here?”

    “Stop wasting time and tell me—oh.”

    Her lover’s hand had risen to the back of her neck, caressingly. First feebly now, then with strength surprising in a limb so thin, his arm urged her to bend lower over him.

    Judy rearranged her own limbs, her body, to bend down in the way he seemed to want.

    “Oh,” she said again. His lips, that had appeared so dry and wasted, felt soft and warm upon her throat.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

   Before the immobilizing drug wore off, Carol bound Joe’s arms and legs with strong cord and tape. She worked so cunningly that the bonds were almost comfortable, and yet when he was able to try to move again he soon discovered that he could barely twitch a muscle.

    A preoccupied expert, Carol smiled at him absently as she worked. “Joe, my little dear, are you awake? Yes. Too bad, in a way. You might just have slept from here on. Don’t worry, though. It really does work that way. Now, all nicely packaged.” She gave him a pat, then picked him up, dandling a baby effortlessly. “You must be packaged safely, because Mommy is going out for a while. I have to go and play with little Craig once more—to try to salvage him. Because at the moment he’s the only breather I have left who’ll work with me. And you breathers are so useful for some things. Yes, you are.”

    Carol carried Joe into an unfinished side-room, about eight feet by ten, hardly more than a large storage closet. Barrels and crates and boxes almost filled the place. A second door, the upper half of it glass-paneled, led to another, much larger, darkened room or area, where streetlights entering by distant windows showed bare concrete walls and floor, sawhorses, scraps of lumber, a can of paint or two.

    He got only one glance out through the glass panel, for Carol promptly lowered him to the floor, left him sitting there leaning against something solid at his back.

    Before she straightened up, she kissed his forehead briskly, as people who kissed their dogs might do. “I’d like to give you a real kiss, Joey, of a kind you’ve never had. But there just isn’t time. Not right now.”

    Her feet in high heels tapped back into the finished rooms of the apartment. The door closed solidly behind her, so only the street lighting, very distant and indirect, reached him now. He could hear vague sounds of movement from the apartment for a little while, then there was silence.

    They hadn’t bothered to gag him, so it seemed he was free to yell for help as much as he liked—Johnny hadn’t been gagged either. Well, maybe later he would try.

    They hadn’t even bothered to take away his gun.

* * *

   The viewer built into Craig Walworth’s back door showed him that Kate Southerland was standing just outside. She looked just about as she had when he had seen her last, blue jacket and all. Without consciously intending to do so, he spoke her name aloud.

    His voice was low, but Kate evidently heard him through the door, for at once she rattled its handle.

    “Craig?” Her voice coming through the thick wood sounded dazed and empty, “Craig? Let me in, please.” Her image in the viewer appeared dazed too, staring glassily forward as if she could see him through the door.

    Taking his eye from the viewer, Walworth turned himself around in a full circle, looking at his brightly lighted kitchen. He did not really see anything of the cheerful colors. His mind was devoid of plans, and he felt that he was waiting for something to be explained to him. When he had turned to face the door once more he tried looking through the viewer again. She was still there, and once more the handle of the door rattled.

    “Hell, why not?” he said aloud. “Come in. If you’re a phantom I won’t be able to keep you out anyway, will I?”