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

with the distraction from Kate he had missed hearing the sounds of the elevator stopping and opening.

    “Who?” he called out sharply. His hands, center-aiming at the door, were very steady.

    “Winter,” the deep voice answered.

    “No,” Kate whispered, somewhere behind him. “It isn’t. Be careful, don’t shoot.”

    “Come in,” Walworth called, his trigger finger very slowly taking up slack. “It’s unlocked.”

    The knob turned and the door swung in. Not Winter at all. Almost as tall, but lean. Under an open black topcoat, what looked like a new suit of expensive black. A somehow Christmasy red tie, a fine white shirt. Smiling, jaunty, vigorous, but obviously old.

    The old man.

    I see now that you would only laugh like an idiot if I tried to tell you his real name.

    Walworth fired. Even though he knew, before the gun went off, exactly how much good the bullet was going to do him.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

   Kate saw the old man step in the front door, and in the same instant she heard the pistol fire. Only with that shock did her mind grow fully clear. If the old man had really needed help, she would have been too late to help him. As it was, she sprang forward with a speed and strength that she had not known she possessed, reaching past Craig’s shoulder to knock down his joined hands with the weapon still clasped in them. The fore of the movement knocked Craig to his knees.

    The old man smiling reassuringly at Kate. Then, calmly bending with his own fluid and unhurried speed, he caught Craig by the shirt front and lifted him erect again, letting the gun stay somewhere on the floor. Reaching back with his free hand, Corday pushed the door shut behind him. Then he gently questioned both of the people with him: “Where is Joe?”

    “He’s been here,” said Kate. “He’s not here now.”

    Craig said: “I’m not gonna take any heat to protect her. Go over to Enchantress Cosmetics. Ask for Carol.”

    “And what does Carol look like?” The question was in a tone of mild interest. Walworth’s strong, young body was swaying, and he seemed to be trying without success to avoid the old man’s eyes. The old man seemed to be keeping the young one propped up with one finger.

    “Real good shape,” Walworth muttered. “Sharp dresser. Young. Red hair—”

    “Ah? And where is the place you mentioned?”

   Walworth named an intersection. “About eight blocks from here, west and south. I gotta warn you about her. She’s really got it in for you.”

    “Indeed.”

    “And for me too,” Walworth added hastily. “She wants me dead. Just today she drugged me—bad, man, bad. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen. I thought you were a friend of hers just now, coming to finish me off. That’s why I…”

    “Kate has told me,” the old man softly interrupted, “how and where she came to meet them. Johnny has spoken to me of a bearded man driving a car, who asked him for directions.”

    Walworth’s hands that had aimed the gun so steadily were shaking now. He couldn’t seem to find anything to say.

    Kate could only think of one thing clearly. “Please,” she broke in, talking to the old man. “I can help you now. I’m all right. Let’s go find Joe. He’s in real trouble.”

    Still holding Walworth almost tenderly with one thin hand, the old man turned thoughtful eyes to Kate. “Go to the location this man has just given us,” he ordered. “I shall follow presently.” When Kate hesitated, he repeated firmly: “Go.”

    Kate nodded, turned, and fled toward the kitchen. There was no sound of the back door being opened, but Walworth knew that she was gone.

    He asked: “You gonna call in the cops on me?”

    “No,” the old man assured him gently.

    “You’re not really here anyway, are you?” Walworth asked him, shivering. “I could almost wish you were.”

* * * * * * *

   At the mausoleum the old man had shown Kate something of how to use her recently acquired powers. How the night change in her body would enable her to pass like smoke through locked and bolted doors. The kitchen door went past her like some vague and insubstantial curtain, but this time she had hardly thought about the process. As she started down the back stairs of the apartment building, all her mental energies were concentrated on the job of finding Joe.

    The back stairs were concrete and steel, designed as an interior fire escape as well as a service passage. Not until Kate had descended past two landing did she come to a small window. At once she used her marvelous new agility to leap up upon its narrow inside sill. Once she had located the knife-edge crevice where reinforced glass met metal frame, the closed window was no obstacle to her passage.

    In the passing she willed an alteration in the cells of her body, the fabric of her clothes, the very air that filled her lungs and all the spaces in her bones. Outside, her altered body was at one with the wind. Her altered senses blurred. A creature of the air now, and no more solid than the air, she sank through clouds of falling snowflakes. Like blowing snow she skimmed above rooftops, down and up and down again.

    Propelling herself by her will, she moved south, and west.

    Joe was near.

    His danger was terrible, but at least the threat did not seem to be immediate. And fortunately he had not yet been greatly hurt. Kate’s inner senses were keener now than before, but at the same time sight and hearing had grown blurred and dull and indirect with her physical body dispersed to hardly