Lost Souls

chapter 40

Riding shotgun, Michael phoned Erika Swedenborg to tell her that they were en route and would be at her door in a few minutes. Because they had been in San Francisco when she called them less than an hour earlier, their arrival surprised her.

Michael said, “Our elderly friend knew a shortcut. We took a right turn at nevermore and then a hard left at everafter.”

No sooner had Michael terminated the call than the female voice of the navigational system said, “Turn right in two hundred yards.”

The oil-and-gravel road flanked by enormous pines and the steel-pipe gate were as Erika had described them. Carson stopped at the bell post, put down her window, pushed the call button, and stared directly at the embedded camera lens. The gate swung open.

On the front porch, at the top of the steps, the woman waited.

Carson had met Erika Four in Louisiana, and this fifth edition appeared to be identical to the fourth. Victor might hate humankind, but his appreciation of human beauty couldn’t have been more refined. This might have been how ancient Romans thought of Diana, the goddess of the moon and the hunt: this flawless beauty, this exquisite grace, this physical vitality with which she seemed to glow.

Introductions took place on the porch, and to Deucalion, Erika said, “That we should meet astonishes me.”

“And that we should be alive,” he said.

“In those days so long ago… was he then as he became?”

“The pride was there, a tendency to corruption,” Deucalion said. “Pride can become arrogance. Arrogance is the father of cruelty. But in the beginning, there was also an idealism, a hope that he could change the human condition.”

“Utopian ideas. They always lead to destruction… blood, death, and horror. And you-two centuries alone. How have you… endured?”

“Rage and revenge at first. Murder and brutality. But gradually I realized I’d been given one gift greater than all others, the gift of possibility. I could become what I chose, better than my origins. Rage can be a kind of pride. I turned away from it before I became an eternal monster, in his image.”

Carson saw unshed tears in Erika’s eyes. She doubted that Victor would be pleased that one of his New Orleans-bred New Race possessed enough empathy to recognize and to be moved by another’s anguish. In Victor’s view, empathy was evidence of weakness, an emotion suitable only for the timid and the foolish.

Erika led them into the house, to the kitchen, where the aroma of brewing coffee enriched the air. On the table was a large tray of cookies.

Coffee and cookies with the Frankenstein monster and the bride of Frankenstein.

Carson wasn’t surprised to see Michael smiling, and the self-control revealed by his silence impressed her.

With coffee served and the four of them at the table, the crisis of the moment was not their first concern. How Erika had gotten here was of more immediate interest.

After her call to them in San Francisco, she knew for certain that Victor had been killed on the night that she had fled from him. She assumed he must be dead, for only his death would have released her from the absolute obedience to him that was part of her program. But now for the first time she knew.

That rainy night two years previously, as Victor’s empire began to disintegrate, she entered a secret vault in his Garden District mansion and, operating on his telephoned instructions, packed one suitcase with bricks of hundred-dollar bills, euros, bearer bonds, and gray velvet bags full of precious gems, mostly diamonds: on-the-run money in case he needed it. As ordered by her husband, her maker, she had brought that fortune to a secret facility of his, northeast of Lake Pontchartrain.

Before she could get out of the car and deliver the suitcase, a singular and strange display of lightning turned night to noon. Great barrages of thunderbolts struck the pavement all around her vehicle, so many in number and so completely encircling her that from every window she could see nothing of the surrounding landscape, only a screen of light-a shield-so bright that she closed her eyes and bowed her head, expecting death.

“Thanks to our phone call earlier,” Erika said to those around her kitchen table, “I now know the lightning occurred at the moment Victor died. The signal his dying body transmitted to his creations, the signal that killed them, couldn’t reach me behind that shield of lightning.”

“He harnessed the lightning of a terrible storm to bring me to life,” Deucalion said, “but it was lightning of unprecedented power, and it brought me more than life. It brought me the gifts I would eventually need to destroy him. And lightning spared you because we need to work together to find and stop him in his new, mysterious incarnation.”

“What brought you here to Montana,” Michael wondered, “instead of anywhere else?”

“I don’t know. I had the fortune in the suitcase, enough to start a new life anywhere. I just drove and drove, guided by whim, until I found a place that seemed right.”

Deucalion shook his head. “No. You were guided by more than a whim.”

They were silenced by this suggestion of a destiny. Of a hard obligation. Of a responsibility that was grave, if not even sacred.

“If we were brought here by some kind of Providence,” Erika suggested, “then surely we can’t lose this war.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” Deucalion warned. “We have the free will to do the right thing or the wrong. One curse that our kind and humankind share-even when our minds are clear, our hearts can too easily deceive us.”

“Besides,” Carson said, “there at the end in New Orleans, we had more allies than we do this time. Here in Rainbow Falls, there are only four of us.”

“There is a fifth,” Erika said. “Both he and I thought you needed time to hear my story before meeting him. His looks can be… distracting.”

Hinges creaked, drawing their attention to a pantry door that had stood one inch ajar.

Into the kitchen stepped a trollish thing in children’s clothes, Rumpelstiltskin cubed, a cacodemon, a hobgoblin, a thing for which no word existed, a thing wearing a floppy hat decorated with tiny bells. Its eerie yellow eyes were bright with some terrible hunger, and its hideous face twisted into a mask of hatred so raw that Carson and Michael-and even Deucalion-skidded their chairs back from the table and shot to their feet in alarm.

“Sweetie,” Erika said, “I warned you not to grin. A slight smile is disturbing enough for people who don’t know you.”