Page 90 of The Undead

William had written down where he was going, of course. Adam had seen it earlier, before he’d found Michael with Sylvia. He read it, ignoring the nervous tremors in his stomach and the knowledge that it was written in Sylvia’s last blood. He didn’t have any Windex under the cabinet, so he made do with soapy hot water until not a trace of the message remained. That done, he stood for some while smelling Sylvia’s lingering powder-and-perfume scent. His eyes wept, but the rest of him was calm and quiet.

Maggie was still waiting when he came out. He walked right by her and down the stairs, through the blood-spattered kitchen, and into the garage. He found the bottles he was looking for and the gas can and began transferring.

“What are you making?” she asked. Adam kept pouring. Where the gasoline touched him, it raised pale blisters. “My God. Molotov cocktails.”

Adam took a sheet out of the dryer and tore it into strips. They were the sheets he’d liked best, pale turquoise that made Sylvia’s coppery skin look richer in contrast. He took great care to stuff the rags down into the bottles and put them in his pockets.

“I need your car,” he said. She backed up a step, which would have been funny if he could have imagined the concept at that moment.

“I’m driving,” she insisted doubtfully. There wasn’t any point in debating it, so he didn’t. He opened the garage door and walked out; Maggie’s Volvo was parked on the street where he and Mike had left it. As Adam headed for it, he smelled Sylvia’s blood again, and stopped.

At his feet lay a gray glistening lump of flesh. He stopped thinking, for a moment, as pain froze him, then picked it up and held it in his hand. He felt remarkably steady, even when William’s joke finally dawned on him.

“What is it?” Maggie asked uncertainly. When Adam breathed in to answer, the smell of what he held almost overwhelmed him, or maybe it was the horror; he was too weary to tell.

“William’s idea of humor,” he answered, and felt another sharp pain, a bullet through the chest, a bayonet following like a thick steel sound wave. “I met her on Valentine’s Day.”

He found a plastic bag in the trunk of the car and put the heart inside. Maggie didn’t say a word until they were strapped in the car and easing out into the street; Adam heard the wail of approaching sirens, but they weren’t close enough to worry about. Maggie turned down a side street, natively cautious, and worked her way around to the east.

“Stop,” Adam suddenly said, and pointed to the gas station on the corner. She gave him a quick, disbelieving look, but pulled in. He went to the pay phone and made a long-distance collect call to New York while Maggie filled up the car and paid the attendant.

“Hello?” a voice on the other end of the phone asked, fuzzed with distance. Adam closed his eyes.

“Celeste?”

There was a long pause. He didn’t wait for her to break it.

“This is Adam, Celestine. I’m in Dallas. William’s here. By the time you get here, I’ll be dead or his, or I’ll have won and you’ll have wasted a trip.” He smiled slightly to himself. It hurt. Everything hurt. “Think of it as a sudden vacation.”

“Why now?” she asked coldly. He traced his fingers over the cold casing of the phone and poked them idly in the coin-return slot. There was a quarter there. He left it.

“Why the hell not,” he said, and hung up while she was talking. Adam cast no reflection in the phone’s metal, of course, until he concentrated. Over a budding headache he noticed that his eyes were too red, his face too pallid.

He smiled.

“Gotcha,” he murmured.

Now, to play.

Chapter Sixteen

Relatives

“Father.”

Simple and to the point, and rich with all the flavors of contempt. I turned my head weakly and looked toward the doorway. Adam stood there, hands in his jacket pockets, surveying us with wide dark eyes. His hair was neatly tied back, his face clean and unmarked by grief. He looked as if he’d just happened to be walking by, not coming at William’s call. If he was distressed at seeing me staked out like Christ on the mildewing wall, he hid it well.

William slowly turned and looked at him, a convulsive smile on his pasty face. I tried to move, but every time I tensed my muscles, the wood ate further into my body, tearing me apart, burning and destroying. The stake in my chest seemed to be tunneling forward on its own, seeking my unbeating heart.

“Well, hello, boy,” William said. “You’re not gonna give me what I want, now, are you? I know you better than that, Adam.”

I hadn’t heard him move, but already Adam was halfway across the room. He took another step in—two—three. He stopped and held something up; it took me a moment to identify it.

Sylvia’s heart. His eyes, hidden behind a new pair of unbroken glasses, glinted in the rising light. He raised the heart to his lips, hesitated, and then slowly rasped his tongue over it.

William deliberately breathed in, then out, an expression of surprise and admiration. Adam slowly lowered himself to one knee. He placed Sylvia’s heart on the carpet in front of him.

“Nowthat,”William murmured, “is somethin’, all right. But what does it mean?”

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