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

to recognize the tilt-topped mass of a concrete breakwater, draped as it was with smooth curves of ice. A few hours ago, great roaring breakers must have beaten on it. Deep water was nearby, then, underneath the ice-jam.

    There was a small sound like a sigh, and from the top of an almost level lintel of ice at Joe’s right the enormous form of Poach came leaping down at him from ambush. Joe got the spear around barely in time. The needle point of it made wooden contact, hooking Poach’s dinner jacket and perhaps his ribs beneath. At the same moment, a woman screamed nearby and Corday shouted something.

    The butt of the spear was jammed down against ice by Poach’s weight on top. It rotated then, deflecting him in his leap to land with what ought to have been a deadly impact, on concrete sheathed in ice. A sound like a drumbeat was driven from his open mouth. The barbs of the spearpoint tore free. Poach slid from the breakwater into black open water just beneath.

    For a moment he was gone. Then he surfaced at Joe’s feet, mouth roaring water and air mixed, his eyes fixed on Joe. His huge hands scrabbled for a grip on ice or spear or enemy.

    Groaning as if with his own death, Joe forced the barbed spear home once more. This time it went straight into the giant’s throat. But Poach’s long right arm shot forward. His hand locked on Joe’s arm farthest forward on the spear shaft. They were going to go down together. Joe’s feet were slipping on the ice.

    Someone seized him from behind, just as he was being dragged to watery death. A thin arm round his waist supported him. He could not turn his head. A wave washed at Poach, and suddenly most of the exposed flesh of Poach’s hands and face were gone. The next wave seemed to knock apart the bones of skull and fingers—Joe could hear them hissing, see them dissolving, as if the water were purest acid.

    It was over. Even the clothing had gone down. The spear was bobbing in the water. Joe found his footing and shakily stood up straight. Turning he met Kate’s eyes. He started to ask: “Where’s—”

    Kate uttered a horrible little cry and struck at something on his arm. Poach’s skeletal right hand dropped off, bones shattering when it hit the ice. The first direct rays of the sun were still on the still-moving bones now. Joe watched them crumble into dust, and then nothingness.

    “Where’s Corday, Kate?”

    “This way. He sent me to help you.”

    Scrambling after Kate around a monolith of ice, he came upon the old man and Morgan in its shadow. The two of them looked almost like lovers seeking privacy. But Corday had the long wooden knife in one hand now, and his other held both of Morgan’s wrists tightly behind her.

    She was looking into the distant sky. Her eyes and face might have been carved from the slab she leaned against. Corday turned to the two breathing people. “It’s over. You may leave us now.” When they did not go he added: “What would you have me do? Do you want to sentence her to one of your prisons for her crimes? Leave us.”

    But when they had turned away he called: “Wait. Tell—tell those who know me, that I shall be all right. That I am going home.”

    Joe took Kate’s arm. Suddenly she was leaning against him weakly. It would be a struggle to get back to where they could call for help, but they would make it.

    Behind them a woman screamed loudly, once. That name, again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

   After the first preliminary session with Charley Snider and Franzen of the Glenlake force, Joe’s head was spinning with exhaustion. But he still held to his determination not to collapse, and not to let Kate out of his sight, until she was ready to collapse too. As for Kate, she swore that she was holding out until she’d seen her little sister.

    Snider obligingly drove them from Glenlake to the hospital, over freshly plowed thoroughfares. On the way he told them about Walworth’s plunge through a broken window. Nobody knew yet whether it was suicide or not. But this time, the Homicide man made it plain, the authorities mean to get to the bottom of the whole business, once and for all—

    Judy had been found at home, unconscious, amid the ruins of the pottery collection. A pillow had been tucked neatly beneath her head and there were two blankets wrapped around her. Someone had called police about her and fortunately they had been able to get a four-wheel-drive vehicle to get her to the hospital. On regaining her senses, in a room near her brother’s, Judy had been unable to give any coherent account of how she had come to be where she was found. Examination disclosed that she had suffered a moderately serious loss of blood. Internal bleeding of some kind was diagnosed, because no wounds were visible that might account for the loss. When the news came that her older sister was after all alive, Judy accepted the happy shock with no apparent surprise at all.

    “Tell me once more now,” Charley Snider asked, going up on the short hospital elevator ride with Joe and Kate. “Try to think. Where did you two first run into each other last night?”

    “I told you, I’ve been drugged.” Kate looked happily giddy. There was a Band-Aid on her arm where blood samples had already been taken for the police. “Somewhere on the Near North, I think it was.”

    “I can’t remember,” Joe chimed in. “I can’t think very straight just now.” He felt horrible, out on his feet, and knew he must look the same, quite