Shadows of the Midnight Sun Read online

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, sensing his logic. “That’s another reason I want to see the rest of this letter.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” he said. “No other record of it exists.”

  Ida heard crackling and clicks on the line. She guessed the call was being recorded. Her sense of paranoia ticked up, but aside from excommunicating people, the church didn’t have much power to intimidate these days. And considering she was a Southern Baptist who hadn’t even been to her own church for years, that didn’t concern her.

  “Well, I’m not done looking yet,” she told him. “So I guess we’ll see about that.”

  “Certainly,” he replied. “Should you happen upon anything of note, we would enjoy making it part of our collection.”

  “I’m sure you would,” she replied. “Good day, Father Masiangleo.”

  “Good day, Ms. Washington.”

  A click on the line told her he’d hung up. She did the same, turning off her computer and grabbing her coat, wondering the whole time how she might locate Father Hershel.

  By the time she’d rolled her wheelchair out of the office, she was smiling. Father Masiangelo had given her something without realizing it. His offhand comment about making such a note part of their collection told her two things: one, they kept such documents (not a big secret, really), and two, even the church believed that other fragments or better-preserved copies might still exist somewhere.

  She rolled through the main corridor and reached the exit of the large building. As she put her key in the security door, she had the strangest feeling of being watched.

  She looked around. No one was there at this hour.

  “Come on, Ida,” she said to herself. “Wait till you really find something before you start getting paranoid.”

  She turned the key, hit the silver button with the wheelchair logo on it, and waited while the door opened. As she rolled down the ramp, she thought about getting a cab, but she was only seven blocks from home. At this time of night, it might take thirty minutes for a handicap-accessible cab to arrive. And even then, it was awkward with the chair. By that time, she could have been home drinking chamomile tea and getting ready for bed.

  She rolled across the campus like she’d done a thousand times before. The familiar sights and places should have comforted her, even in the dark. But they didn’t, and the odd feeling of being watched returned. She stopped to look around again.

  She saw nothing. No one. But the hair on the back of her neck rose up, and Ida decided to get herself home ASAP.

  She began moving again, heading out onto Amsterdam Avenue and heading down to 107th Street. Halfway down the block, she heard footsteps on the pavement behind her. Or at least she thought she did.

  She rolled faster and faster. Her heart was pounding. She saw no one, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to get home.

  Her arms were strong from years of pushing the chair, and once it got going, she could move pretty quickly. Heading down the sidewalk with a slight descending grade, she was traveling so rapidly that she felt a little out of control.

  As she reached a gap between the buildings, a group of students came around a corner. She crashed into them, sending one of them sprawling. She heard a bottle smash and a muffled curse.

  Hands grabbed her chair and stopped it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the young man on the ground.

  He looked up at her, dazed. His friend held her wheelchair tight, gripping one wheel and one armrest. She noticed his hands were tattooed. The words hate and fear were spelled out on his knuckles.

  The man she’d knocked down was lying in a stain of liquid and shattered glass. She recognized the charcoal scent of whiskey.

  He stood up and threw the neck of the shattered bottle away. “What’s your problem, bitch?”

  His face was harder and older than she’d expected. So was the man who still held her chair. It took only a second for Ida to realize these weren’t students at Columbia and only a second more to realize she was in a great deal of trouble.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE KIND of terror only felt by the powerless gripped Ida Washington.

  “You think you own the street,” one of them said to her.

  “Just let me go,” she said. “It was an accident.”

  “You cause an accident, you got to pay,” the guy holding her chair said.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’ll buy you a new bottle of liquor, if you want.”

  “You gonna buy more than that,” the punk insisted.

  In a blink, he grabbed her and yanked her out of the chair. She went to scream, but he clamped his hand down over her mouth. Her carried her like a rag doll and slammed her to the ground behind a dumpster that smelled of urine, sour milk, and trash.

  She reached up and scratched his face, clawing for his eyes.

  He pulled back, cursed, and slugged her in retaliation. The blow knocked her woozy.

  Through a haze, she saw her chair being flung into the wall across from her and one of the thugs pulling her purse from the ground. He rifled through it, throwing stuff out.

  “What’s she donating to the cause?” the man on top of her called out.

  “Man, this old hag ain’t got more than five dollars in here.” He pointed to a trio of small rings on Ida’s fingers. “She’s got some jewelry, Shakes. Cut it off her.”

  The man holding her down, the one who had been called “Shakes,” pulled out a knife, but Ida was already slipping the rings off her hand.

  She threw them at the thugs.

  “Easy with the goods, Grandma.”

  Ida squirmed, but the man kept his weight on her. “She got any plastic?”

  “Oh yeah,” the man with her purse said.

  “What’s your pin?”

  Ida was trembling. She knew they would probably kill her once they had what they wanted. She’d seen their faces. Their tattoos. They’d be easy too easy to identify.

  “Make her talk,” one of them yelled.

  The man on top of her slapped her and then grabbed her face violently. “Tell me your damn pin!”

  He released his hand enough to let her talk. “Nineteen fifty-two,” she whispered almost inaudibly.

  “What?”

  “One…nine…five…Help!” she screamed. “Somebody please—”

  Another blow knocked her groggy.

  “Hey, man,” one of the guys said. “She’s seen our faces. She can ID us to the cops.”

  “Not if she’s dead,” Shakes said.

  He pulled out a snub-nosed .38 revolver and cocked the hammer, then stopped and looked back down the alleyway as if something had distracted him.

  Ida turned her eyes and tried to focus. She saw a man standing there. He was a silhouette, lit up by the streetlights on Amsterdam Avenue.

  “Move along, jack-off,” one of the guys said. He pulled out a knife and made sure it was visible.

  The man under the streetlight didn’t react one way or another. He just stood there. To Ida, his image seemed blurred. He looked like an angel, she thought, a dark angel. Somehow, the vision gave her strength.

  With Shakes distracted, she jammed her hand into his neck. He rocked backward, and his hand came off her mouth.

  She screamed for half a second before Shakes clamped his hand back onto her face. She saw the gun swinging her way as if to pistol whip her across the temple. But before he struck, his weight came off her, and he was flung away into the far wall.

  The sound of shooting boomed through the alleyway. She saw a knife slash forward, followed by more flashes from the barrel of the .38. A long blade caught the light as it slashed through the air.

  One of the thugs crumbled to the ground, doubling over and clutching at his stomach. The second man screamed and fell back, his neck slashed and gushing blood.

  Shakes grabbed for a knife, having emptied the revolver. But the man in the dark coat caught his arm and stopped it cold. He held it for a second
and then brought the katana-like weapon down hard and fast. It hit Shakes in front of his elbow and took off half of his arm.

  Shakes screamed and fell to his knees, clutching at the bloody stump.

  Ida saw the curved blade rise up in the stranger’s hands.

  “No!” she shouted.

  The stranger hesitated. He held the sword high as if to decapitate Shakes right there in the alley.

  Shakes began to move. Somehow, he made it to his feet and stumbled off, cradling what was left of his arm, headed down the alley to God knows where.

  As he left, Ida tried to focus on the figure dressed in black who’d just saved her. He lowered the sword and wiped it clean. As he turned toward her, his short blond hair caught the light, and his eyes seemed almost iridescent in the dark.

  He was speaking to himself, but Ida could not make out what he was saying, it sounded like Latin. He sheathed his sword. It hid perfectly under his long charcoal-colored coat. Then he bent down beside her.

  “It was you,” she said. “You were following me?”

  She stared at his face. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, but there were miles of pain in that face. And his eyes…They seemed so bright in the darkness, like a cat’s eyes reflecting the moonlight.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “You know who I am,” he replied in a cold voice. “I’m one of the Fallen.”

  CHAPTER 8

  IDA WASHINGTON woke up in her office. She was lying fully clothed on a couch where she often napped. Her mind reeled with bizarre thoughts. Men with swords, thugs attacking her. As she studied the familiar surroundings, the images began to fade.

  “Thank God it was a dream,” she said to herself.

  She pulled herself up to a sitting position and felt another dizzy spell. She put a hand to her head and then pulled it back instantly. He face was bruised and tender. A welt on her cheekbone was raised where she’d been struck.

  It wasn’t a dream.

  The handle on the front door moved and the door opened. In came the man who’d rescued her. The man with the sword who’d slashed and hacked the thugs who’d attacked her. She should have felt thankful, but she mostly felt afraid.

  “Who are you?” she demanded before he’d fully entered the room.

  He closed the door. “We’ve been over that.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Bringing you ice,” he said, holding up a wet towel with ice cubes wrapped inside. “For your face.”

  He handed it to her, and she placed it gently against her cheek, thankful for the cooling sensation.

  “Thank you,” she said. “And thank you for saving me. But why didn’t you bring me to a hospital or a police station?”

  He leaned against the wall. “Those places are problematic for me.”

  She guessed a sword-wielding maniac would not be welcome in either spot. “I have to call the police,” she said, heaving herself off the couch and onto her chair.

  “No.”

  “You killed two men in an alley.”

  “Their bodies are gone,” he said. “No one will ever miss them.”

  “What about the guy who lost an arm?”

  “He won’t live long with an arm like that. And if he does, he won’t remember anything,” the man assured her. “I erased it from his mind.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “You erased it from his mind?” she repeated. “I don’t know what your deal is, but you’re obviously crazy. If you think—”

  He glared at her. “You know exactly what my deal is, Ida Washington. I’m one of the Fallen. The very group whose identity you’re searching for.”

  The words shocked her, but she was well aware that he could have searched her office while she was unconscious. “So you’re a demon?” she said incredulously.

  “The church would tell you that,” he insisted.

  “I see. And what do you call yourself?”

  “My name is Christian,” he said. “But I’ve had many names over the years.”

  “Over the years?” she said. “You can’t be more than thirty-five.”

  He looked her in the eye. “I’m a lot older than that. I was a Roman soldier—a captain of the legion—when I was attacked and fell from grace. My throat was slit wide open by a man who called himself Drakos. As I lay dying, I heard an offer of life extended to me and I took it. In that moment, I became one of the Fallen, what others call demons, or creatures of the night, or the Nosferatu.”

  She began to shake her head. “Unless I missed it, you don’t have a scar.”

  “It healed.”

  “Oh, I see. And yet, you have marks on your hands and arms?”

  “The transformation heals all existing wounds,” he explained. “All sickness ends when one crosses into the void. But once the metamorphosis is complete, the process stops. Injuries after that remain forever. This burn on my arm came at the hands of the Inquisition four hundred years ago.”

  “The Inquisition?” Ida pursed her lips and tilted her head. She knew better than to argue with a delusional person, but she couldn’t help herself. “I suppose this means you’re all immortal.”

  “Not immortal. We die by the thousands. Most by our own hand. But we don’t age.”

  “You really expect me to believe all this?”

  “Mythology tells you we exist,” he said. “There are stories and legends of us in every culture on earth—demons, spirits of the dead that still walk among men, stealers of life. There’s a reason for that.”

  “Yeah, there’s a very good reason,” she said. “It’s because people are crazy.”

  He didn’t react, didn’t smile or laugh or scowl like she might have expected him to.

  She sighed and shook her head softly. “Look, I thank you once again for saving my life. But I can’t help you, sonny. You’re not the first person I’ve met living a delusion. This city’s full of ’em. I guess you’re doing better than most, because you don’t have tinfoil on your head, but that doesn’t make any of this real. I’m afraid you’re in the wrong building. You don’t need a history professor; you need psychiatric care.”

  He stared at her.

  “Listen to yourself,” she continued. “You twist the story to make it fit the circumstances and the questions that come your way. You change it up or add a wrinkle every time I ask you something. I honestly don’t know how you people keep it all straight.”

  His black eyes focused on her, and she began to feel dizzy once again.

  “You’re looking for the truth,” he said coldly. “For an explanation of what you saw as a child. A blaze of blue-white flame that left nothing but ash.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. “What did you say?”

  “I can see it in your mind,” he said. “You climbed from your bed because you heard a commotion, and you looked out your window. You saw a man in chains being dragged into the woods by three other men in long coats. But it wasn’t a lynching. The man in the chains was white, as pale as bone. The men who took him wore black, the long coats of the Ignis Purgata. You followed them. You watched as they chained him to a tree. You screamed as they drove a spike through his heart, and you cried as the tree burst into flames—blue-white flames that haunt your dreams even today. The next morning, you went back there and stirred the ashes with a long stick. Everyone insisted that lightning had hit the tree, but you knew better.”

  She was shocked. Stunned into silence. A feeling of vertigo swept over her. He was telling her things she had never shared with another living soul. Describing images she’d fought to bury for years, memories she’d tried all her life to deny.

  “You can’t know that,” she said. “Nobody knows that.”

  “You know it.”

  In desperate need for something to restore her sense of balance, she gazed at the photo on her desk with the familiar image of her and her mother on a flat wooden porch. The color had slowly faded from the print. After all these years, it looked more like a black-and-w
hite photo that had been touched up than a vibrant color print. Just like her memories.

  She thought back to the burning tree and the pale man chained to it. She remembered his eyes, flashing in the night before they stabbed him. She could still hear his scream. She recalled her mother telling her the tree had been hit by lightning. But she also remembered following the men with the black coats and trying to stay out of the moonlight. The skies had been clear all night.

  She looked up to the man who’d saved her. His eyes had been so bright in the darkness of the alley, but they were black in the sparsely lit office.

  “I don’t want to believe this,” she said.

  “But you do,” he insisted.

  Yes, she did. A new wave of fear swept over her. “It’s said your kind steal souls from the living.”

  “Mostly, they just kill and murder for pleasure,” he replied.

  “Just so you know,” she said, “this whole building is under video surveillance. Anything happens to me, they’re going to come looking for you.”

  “I’m not going to harm you,” he said. “I spilled enough innocent blood while I was human to make me sick of it all. I just need your help.”

  Despite the conflict and fear in her heart, an overwhelming sense of pity began to fill her. Whether the man was deranged or somehow telling the truth, whether her own mind was playing tricks on her or not, she figured the only way to get him out of that office was to tell him whatever he wanted to know.

  “What is it you want from me?”

  “You’ve found traces of my history,” he said. “I want to know what they are. The truth about my past. The origin of this curse. I could take it from you by force, but that’s not my way.”

  She thought for a moment and then nodded. She’d give him what he asked for and pray that he left once he had it. Settling into her wheelchair, she moved herself to the desk and reached for a thick book on the top of a stack on the right-hand side.

  “This,” she said, pulling the book from the stack and dropping it on the desk with a heavy thud, “is all I’ve been able to find.”