From the front row of seats, a pale-faced man stood and gestured toward his vacated chair. Leland nodded her thanks. The chief shook the man’s hand and patted him lightly on the cheek, as though he were Italian.
“Bless you,” Biggs said.
Leland settled into the chair.
Biggs ducked down to her and whispered, “I’ll be back.” The big man moved and was gone beyond the priest.
“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us-”
The thin man near the foot of the grave swooned. A gasp came from the watchers. A young woman caught the man. “He’s fainted. Somebody help,” the woman said.
Others turned in, lightly slapping his leathery face and nudging him, their voices hushed and urgent. “You all right, mister? You all right?”
The chief was in the midst of the situation. “Let’s get him out of the way, get him some room to breathe.”
The others took the suggestion with alacrity. They grabbed arms and knees and hoisted the man from the ground. The crowd gave way. “Sorry, Father,” the chief said over his shoulder. “You may continue.”
The priest nodded, stooping down to take a handful of grave earth from a pile beside his white robes. Sprinkling it down into the grave, over the lowered casket, he intoned the final verse of the psalm: “Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy infants against the stones.”
The baby within Leland leapt.
She knew. She’d recognized the priest not from her days in parochial school, but from that newspaper photo, the photo of the latest victim of the Son of Samael.
She stood and drew her gun.
He pivoted, lowering the closed Bible to a stand beside him, and glimpsed her movement. Or, perhaps more.
She grabbed the front of his white robe and wrenched him around, gun ramming up beneath his throat. “Freeze!”
I would have been captured even then if fate had not intervened. I tried to hold still, but the robes were heavy and she had whirled me viciously around and off balance. I fell backward into the grave. It was lucky for me she held so tight to my robes. She was pulled in after me. We landed side by side, her head hitting the ringing casket.
It sounded hollow. I was glad for the first time since I had learned of Donna’s second death. Of course, I had doubted it, but a nagging voice told me it was true this time. The voice was wrong. More joy: Donna herself lay, unconscious, beside me.
There was one small disappointment. She had gotten off a shot while we fell, and my right ear had been torn off. Blood poured evenly from the spot. Above, there was a lot of scrambling and shouting. Many more guns were aimed down into the grave. None of it mattered. I’d rolled Donna onto my shoulder and held her there with my right stump. My left hand held her revolver, cocked and ready, positioned just above the bulge of my child. I stood atop the coffin, carrying my beloved on one shoulder, and smiled at the circle of policemen around us.
“Put her down, Samael,” snarled a red-faced man who bolted up the hill into the crowd of guns. “You are surrounded.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am surrounded by this poor pregnant woman. The barrel of her gun is also surrounded by her, and by her baby. If you don’t move back twenty paces before I count to five – one, two, three-” I began rapidly, providing no time for them to think, but no one had moved at three, “ – four, five.” I shot, and they all saw the grazing bullet punch out of her side. “Again!”
I shouted. “One, two, three-” They trampled each other to get out of the way. I was grieved to have shot her.
“How many people do I have to kill before you realize I am serious?”
I yanked the mask off my face, and the camera flashes were popping in a crazy kaleidoscope. The spirit gum still hung on my Shaytan tattoo, but I figured it made me look only more ghastly.
“Now, I am going to climb out of this grave, keeping the lady on me at all times. I don’t want any of you crackpots in the woods thinking you can get a clean shot, because I’ll be shifting constantly. She won’t die unless you shoot her or you try something that makes me shoot her.”
I lunged up from the grave, my white robes soiled with mud and blood. It occurred to me only then what a service the robes would do, hiding my true form beneath shifting cloth and shadows. They couldn’t target my legs or feet if they wanted to. I walked. A small patch of woods ahead of us bristled with National Guardsmen, but I shouted them out. “Get clear, or the woman dies!” Another bullet, grazing Donna’s other side, convinced them to scramble out of my way.
“We’re going to catch you,” Chief Biggs shouted behind us. “God damn you to hell!”
I liked the woods. They were pleasant. The birds sang their morning songs, oblivious to the commotion. The WTMJ 4 chopper waited in the field beyond. The pilot was there, just where I had taped him. It took a whole roll of duct tape to hold him. He was wrapped like a mummy in the stuff. I left his eyes exposed, of course, so he could see the video man slumping in his own blood in the passenger seat. Good motivation.
I opened the passenger door, dragged the dead man out, and climbed in. Donna fit all right behind the front seats. I cut the pilot’s arms loose and held the gun to his head and told him to fly. He did.
As we lifted off, National Guardsmen running out in a circle around us and shouting and aiming impotently, I thought what a bright sweet sky it was, and how wonderful it was to have Donna alive again, after all.
“Head toward Chicago,” I told the mummy pilot. He did.
I’d gotten to know the city by the lake, and some of its better hidey-holes. Sure, they would try to follow me, but I’d ditch the ’copter before then and get us into a few more cars. Once we were in the city, it was perfectly possible to park under a building on Wacker Drive and emerge ten blocks away, on the other side of the river. I’m personally indebted to whoever decided to dig rail tunnels a hundred feet below the streets of Chicago. Donna awoke, lying in a dark room. Her costume had been stripped away, but she wasn’t naked. She wore thin clothes of some kind, and over those, tightly cinched restraints, and over those, fleecy blankets. It was a gurney. She lay on a gurney. There was a thick bandage around her midsection, with compresses on both sides. There were also smooth, cool tubes running down beside her shoulder and arm.
But this was no hospital. The room itself felt deep – a windowless, lightless, airless place. It smelled of must and mold. She heard water dripping sullenly. Beyond the burning wounds in her sides and the thick blankets, the air was frigid.
And he was here. It was as certain as that. She couldn’t hear his breathing or the shift of his feet. She couldn’t see anything in the pitch darkness, but she felt the piercing presence of his gaze.
“You’re awake,” Samael said in the utter blackness. Despite herself, Donna started. “How’d you know?”
“Your breathing. It changed. And I sensed your thoughts.”
She didn’t want to encourage that idea. “Where are we?”
“Deep. One of my homes.”
“Very homey.”
“Oh, it is. No one around is trying to kill me. That’s homier than anyplace else.”
“What about our home, Azra?” she ventured. “What about our place of bliss? What’s happened to it?” Her voice had more edge in it than she had expected. He rose. The whisper of his clothes echoed from walls of cement. He came to her side, stooped down, and kissed her lightly on one cheek. “We can’t go back there. You know that.”
A blazing light flashed into being in his hand. It glared gleefully above Samael’s silvery eyes, limned his nostrils, and painted his chin in fire. The madman’s shadow hovered above him on the cement ceiling. Donna glimpsed all of that – and the now-infamous mask of Shaytan – in the instant before she clamped her eyes closed.
“I’m sorry,” Samael said, sounding genuinely grieved.