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

more than mist. She felt rather than saw the glowing streetlights and the bulking buildings of the city below, and anything dimmer or smaller could hardly be perceived at all. In order to reach Joe she was going to have to take on solid form again.

    In theory, she knew, the forms of animals were available now for her to put on. But she had as yet tried nothing like that, and at the moment she had no mental energy or time to spare for experimentation. So when she came down with a crunch in rooftop snow, her shape was her own, as human as before. And as her senses grew keen again Kate was at once aware not only of the details of the buildings and the storm around her, but of two other forms that were passing as she had just passed in the air. They were the diffuse bodies of a man and a woman that Kate was almost sure she had never seen before.

    Joe was very near now, but not in the building where Kate had come down. She moved to crouch motionless beside a chimney, while the couple she had just detected materialized in a slow descent out of the beflaked air to another roof only half a block away. The building they came down on was no more than two or three stories high, of concrete gray.

* * * * * * *

   In the little storeroom there were a couple of fifty-five-gallon steel drums, with clamped-on lids. There were wooden crates and cardboard boxes. It was too dark to see how any of them were labeled. Joe thought that if he could get to his feet he could make an effort to spill one or more of these containers on the chance that they might hold something helpful. A box of knives would seem to be unlikely. Maybe glass to break, to try to get an edge with which to cut his bonds—if he could move his hands enough to pick up anything. Something to start a fire with, to attract help? He hadn’t yet reached the stage where burning himself to death looked like a desirable option.

    But it didn’t take long to convince himself that trying to work free of the ropes without some kind of tool was going to be futile. Maybe if they left him here two days unwatched he’d manage it. But by then he would have died of hypothermia, or whatever they called it now. The storeroom wasn’t as cold as the outdoors tonight, but even with his jacket still on he was no longer warm.

    The ropes were fixed so he couldn’t stand. He might be able to spill boxes, though. If one of them contained glass, and if the glass broke, that might help—more likely, though they would just be irritated by his noises and come in and twist one of his fingers off.

    There was one box on the floor, about as high as a piano bench and as long as a piano, whose lid was slightly askew, so that it ought to be possible to see or maybe reach inside. A place to start, something to try. Crabbing his way along the cold concrete as best he could, almost silently, Joe got beside the large crate. Here his face was in reflected streetlight, while the interior of the box remained in heavy shadow; looking in, he could distinguish only vaguely mounded white, about halfway down.

    He had to find something to cut his ropes with, the way people were always doing it in the stories. Anything.

    At one end, the whitish surface inside the box was marked with a dark ring a couple of inches across. Just above that were two glassy spots…

    He froze, even the cold-trembling in his limbs suspended for the moment, and in that moment he was afraid that he was going to faint. A dead woman lay there, her staring eyes hardly a foot beneath his own. A young woman dressed in white.

    Jesus. Jesus. His back against another crate, Joe slid away from his discovery, trying to keep from blacking out. His arms and legs were throbbing, and at the same time trying to go numb. If he fainted now…they hadn’t even taken away his gun…

    …there were two voices again, somewhere out in the apartment. Joe understood that he was coming out of some kind of blackout. Probably a brief one, for he hadn’t frozen yet, or wet his pants either. Something else to think about…

    A Chicago cop shouldn’t pass out at the sight of one more dead woman. It made his enemies no worse than before, he’d known what they were like ever since Kate’s body had been found…

    Oh, God.

    But it wasn’t Kate. Blondish hair, perhaps, but—

    In a moment Joe had pushed himself back in position to peer again into the crate, or coffin. Of course it wasn’t her, he would have known at first glance if it had been. He forced himself to gaze into the box, trying to make out details that he had earlier avoided. It wasn’t Kate, even allowing for death’s changes. This woman was smaller, sharper featured. And something was wrong about her mouth.

    Out in the apartment, the two people talking had moved closer to the storeroom door. “You simply left him there,” Carol was saying now. Whoever had been left where, she wasn’t sure whether she liked the idea of it or not.

    “He woulda died,” answered the rough voice of Leroy Poach, who had been hanged in Oklahoma in 1934. “No way he would’ve lasted if I’d tried to bring him here. As it is he’s probably finished by now. I think I got him right through one lung. You shoulda seen the blood.”

    “Oh, I’d love to fly out there now…if I