Dark Time: Mortal Path (9 page)

When she reached the first alley, Maliha stood surrounded by the trash bins, with her feet, as nearly as she could tell from the crime photos, squarely on the bit of pavement where Nando kneeled before the fatal shots. Few windows overlooked the space, meaning few opportunities for witnesses. Narrow windows high up on one wall were covered with cardboard or paper on the inside. If there was to be a witness to what happened here besides the killer, it would have to be her. She was going to reenact Nando’s death, based on what she’d learned from the autopsy report.

Kneeling down, she put herself in the position a doomed man would be forced to assume. She held her hands behind her as though her wrists were tied and kept her shoulders hunched, trying to keep her head from becoming such a perfect target.

It was a posture common through the ages. In this time and place, guns were used for executions in the criminal world. In earlier times, different parts of the world, the about-to-be-executed rounded their shoulders in a last, vain effort to protect their necks from the sword.

She adjusted her position until the input to her senses suddenly lessened. She’d found the right spot.

Her eyes were open, but she relaxed her vision and let the scene go into soft focus.

When a violent death occurred, it left a psychic imprint, or scar, on its exact location. Some people 29 z 138

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called the phenomenon a ghostly recording. Maliha thought of it as a remnant of the victim’s spirit that didn’t have the chance to pass into its next destination, as it would in a natural death. While others would walk through the scarred location and feel nothing, Maliha could detect the imprint. Experiencing the imprints was an unexpected side effect of her ability to see the auras, or psychic energy, that surrounded people.

The fragment of Nando’s spirit still clinging to the place he died was drawn to her. It coalesced around her and she was into the imprint. Eyes open, she saw nothing, but felt the pressure of a tight blindfold over her eyes, and heard a voice—no, two voices—having an argument. The wind blurred the words, and then the tone changed, as one person gave an order to the other.

Then there were no words at all. Her time, or rather Nando’s, was drawing to an end.

She felt her hands tied, even though no bond existed for her, and struggled against it. She tried to stagger to her feet, but a heavy hand on her shoulder pushed her back into the kneeling position. A piercing scream tore through her mind, a shriek of desperation that drowned out the sound of the shots, and then pain lit up the right side of her head, two bright streaks like lightning bolts her head could never contain. She felt pieces of her skull go flying. The blindfold slipped down over her ruined face, and her intact left eye registered for a fraction of a second someone visible in the night, a blocky shape with a gun still pointed in her direction. She thought she heard a sigh of satisfaction.

Maliha crumpled as Nando had done. Her left eye now shut, there was internal darkness, the rush of her last breath leaving her lungs, the stilling of her heartbeat, and then the swooshing of her blood settling in its vessels.

After Nando’s death, Maliha remained prone and watched through her now-closed eyelids as the spirit fragment brightened into a glow around her body, and then faded. She got shakily to her feet. The imprint in the alleyway had been released. Wherever it was, the spirit belonging to Nando was whole.

Heading for the spot where the murder of Hairy Borringer occurred, she knew she would find a dark, bleak place where humanity had turned its back on one of its own. But it was her duty to go through it one more time.

To let Harry’s spirit use her as a launching pad into the next world.

T
he flight back to Chicago was uneventful. She brought with her the melancholy atmosphere of the alleyways and the lingering effect of the brutal reenactments of the coders’ deaths. She’d pried herself from her apartment building to get her sluggish body and thoughts revved up.

“Ms. Winters,” the doorman said, as he tipped his hat to Maliha. “Beautiful evening. I hope you enjoyed your walk.”

He made no mention of the fact that her hair was dripping wet and that the T-shirt she wore was plastered to her skin.

“Mr. Henshaw,” Maliha said, nodding. “It was an invigorating walk.”

She’d swum about fifteen miles in Lake Michigan in about five hours, no record for her but more than enough to serve as the day’s exercise. Deeply chilled from the fifty-degree water of the lake, she was looking forward to some pleasant interaction with warm water in her apartment.

“You have a letter. Came by private courier. Hold on a second.”

He went inside and rummaged around in his voluminous desk in the lobby. He handed her an envelope. She recognized it as the type Chicago businesses used to “packet” items from one building to another during the day. It was slim, and she wondered if the contents had accidentally been left out.

“Good night, Ms. Winters.”

“Good night, Mr. Henshaw.”

She’d lived at Harbor Point Towers for fifteen years, and known Arnie Henshaw for every one of them, and that was a typical conversation. There was an understanding between them, though. He didn’t say anything about the way she sometimes dressed, the dual knife sheaths that shouted “armed with a 30 z 138

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dangerous weapon,” the scent of blood that trailed her as she breezed past him through the door, or the fact that she didn’t look like the forty-year-old woman she should be by now.

In return, she tipped him thirty thousand dollars a month, plus a hundred thousand at Christmas. The humble doorman was a multi-millionaire—she’d given him a few investing tips over the years—and when he retired, he planned to travel far away from women who didn’t age.

It was a great understanding.

The lobby was deserted. Once past the doorman, she hurried to the elevator bank in the central core of the building. All three elevators were awaiting her command. Her residence, a custom combination of two condos, was on the forty-eighth floor. The tower was shaped like a
Y
, with the corners sinuously rounded. Inside, she pressed the button for her floor and leaned against the wall, hoping there would be no intermediate stops.

The elevator spit her out with a melodic tone on her floor. Her unit was at the end of a bright hallway. She loved the place, even though it wasn’t the grandest spot by far that she’d lived in. That honor belonged to a sheik’s desert compound, a place of sere landscapes, great luxury, silks, spices, and horses that ran as though their hooves touched not sand but the heat shimmering above it. The sheik wasn’t half bad, either.

One thing she loved about her current home was simply that it was in Chicago. The city overflowed with raw energy and sophisticated culture. Although she lived near the shore of Lake Michigan, she’d been all over the city on foot and by bus, and under and above it, too, on the pedway and the El.

Sometimes she rode the El in the middle of the night, watching the goings-on with hooded eyes, alert but appearing asleep. The passengers never knew that with her slumped form in the last seat in the car, they were utterly safe from harm.

At her door, she entered numbers into a keypad and stood still while her retina was scanned. The neighbors all thought her biometric security was over the top, because the building had an excellent security staff, but they had no idea what was behind her door. In any case, they thought her kinky with all the costumes and props she wore, and Maliha didn’t discourage the notion.

When her retina passed inspection, the electromagnetic lock clicked open, and the bomb-hardened, steel-plated door slid aside.

No one knew what was behind her door because no one had ever been inside since she’d fortified the place ten years ago. She had another unit in the building where she took visitors, including lovers who thought they were seeing the intimate side of Maliha when they looked at the spare, modern furnishings and décor in her condo on the thirty-ninth floor.

They were wrong. True intimacy was reserved for the forty-eighth floor, where Maliha had combined two units into a spacious safe room, reinforced, including the ceiling and floor, to be bullet, blast, and fire resistant. The windows overlooking Lake Michigan were coated with a film that strengthened them and prevented flying shards of glass in case of explosion.

Inside the sliding door, an entrance foyer dead-ended after a few feet, with a hallway leading off at a right angle. A couple of spotlights in the foyer came on, one pointing down for general illumination, and one pointing into the eyes of the person at the door. Maliha expected it, so she covered her eyes tightly as the door slid open.

Light bathed her face as if a lightning bolt had struck in her foyer, amplified by a metal floor and ceiling. She lunged across the space and pressed a switch on the opposite wall. The switch turned off the deadly surprise—a cascade of darts controlled by a motion sensor, shot from the ceiling at high speed, filling the air wall to wall. If the darts were triggered, the hall door instantly closed behind the intruder and another one slid into place in front, trapping the person in an airtight, bomb-hardened steel box. A small pump sucked out the air in the box, making for a truly unpleasant experience for any living thing caught inside.

Anywhere the safe room shared a wall with the building’s hallway or someone else’s living quarters, there was a similar arrangement—a buffer zone, steel-plated on all sides, divided into compartments. Her rooms had added so much extra weight that structural enhancements were needed to spread out and carry the load. She’d had to buy out the tenants on the floor below her for that purpose.

Since Maliha was capable of short bursts of inhuman speed, she’d made sure no human could reach the switch on the wall in time to prevent being skewered in the skull. If an Ageless slave tried it, he could survive the darts, but even the Ageless needed to breathe.

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If she opened the door from the inside to greet someone, the darts would automatically be disabled, but the person at the door would be blinded, giving her a few seconds’ advantage—an eternity for her.

After the blindness wore off, and assuming the person was still alive, he would see a wall the color of eggshells, hung with a soothing, pastel painting of flowers of the type that might appear on the wall of a psychiatrist’s office. Except for the exterior door and the floor and ceiling of the foyer, no hint of the surrounding metal showed in her haven.

Cell-phone reception would be nonexistent except for the three-watt amplifiers embedded in the walls that solved the problem.

As the door slid shut behind her and locked with an authoritative sound, she kicked off her shoes in the foyer, took a few steps on the cool metal, and then buried her toes in the thick carpet of the room beyond.

“Soft lights.”

Rounding the corner, she moved past one of her weapons caches: all manner of swords, knives, and other implements, like throwing stars, crossbows, spears, and sturdy fighting sticks in a variety of lengths.

A shillelagh leaned against the wall, a three-section staff nestled at her feet, and a vicious-looking, double-bladed sword gleamed in the spotlights. A trained eye could see the influence of martial-arts study in China, Japan, Korea, Brazil, Israel, and the Philippines. Maliha could have traveled around the world winning competitions. She’d taken the lesson of humility seriously, though, and had no trophies.

There were automatic rifles, semi-automatic pistols, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, laser sights, and thermal vision and night vision equipment. Guns had their place, but Maliha had been trained with edged weapons and they were still her first choice. She affectionately brushed the hilt of her favorite sword as she walked past.

Beyond the weapons cache was a spacious area, over three thousand square feet, with a wall of windows arcing across into a half circle. Blackout cellular shades that matched the eggshell walls covered the windows from top to bottom. She rarely opened the shades to see the view of Lake Michigan. With the deep carpeting dyed to match, the covered windows, and the black ceiling hung with many low-voltage lights, it was a perfect cocoon.

A place to heal, in body and mind. Her haven.

Scattered around the room were display cases containing pieces that would widen the eyes and quicken the pulses of museum curators and private collectors. She walked past the case containing the Great Mogul diamond, named after the builder of the Taj Mahal. It vanished in India in the midst of a bloodbath as Indian shahs fought for succession. For three hundred years, Maliha’s hands had been the only ones to cup the diamond, shaped like half an egg, and tilt it to the light to see its small but distinctive flaw.

Ordinarily she would pause to admire it or another of the unique treasures in the room, but tonight her thoughts were elsewhere. At times she focused on what she’d lost and what she now faced, and even the physical pleasure of a night swim didn’t drive away the thoughts.

She dropped the envelope the doorman had given her on the kitchen counter and headed for the bathroom, which was divided from the rest of the space by an opaque screen hanging from the ceiling. A quick check in the mirror showed no outward change in her appearance. But there had been those two alarming gray hairs that she’d plucked out last week. It wasn’t vanity that caused her to check the mirror every day. It was concern about finishing her task before she lost her youthful strength.

Maliha feared that she was aging internally faster than her appearance showed, and that appearance-wise, she would take large jumps as age accumulated. She couldn’t bring herself to think the worst, that she might start aging ten times as fast as she had been, or more. There was no reason to think that her aging would remain in any way predictable. Rabishu had admitted that she wouldn’t age as humans did.