Standing in the Shadows (McClouds & Friends #2)(10)

The door to the terrace opened. He felt the red, throbbing glow of Georg's energy without turning. "Have a glass of wine, Georg. Enjoy the pleasures of freedom. You refuse to relax. This puts us at risk."

"I don't want wine."

Novak looked at him. The thick, shiny pink scar that marred Georg's cheek was flushed scarlet over his prison pallor. His beautiful yellow hair had been shorn to stubble on his scalp, and his eyes were like glowing coals. "Are you sulking, Georg? I hate sulking."

"Why won't you let me just kill them?" Georg hissed. "I will be a fugitive for the rest of my life anyway. I don't care if—"

"I want better than that for you, my friend. You cannot risk being taken again."

"I have already made arrangements," Georg said. "I will die before I go back to prison."

"Of course you have. I thank you for your dedication," Novak replied. "But you will see, when you are calmer, that my plan is better."

Georg's face was a mask of agony. "I cannot bear it. I am dying." The words burst out in the obscure Hungarian dialect they shared.

Novak rose from his chaise and put down his wine. He placed the scarred stumps of his maimed hand against Georg's ruined face. His cosmetic surgeons would improve matters, but the young man's youthful perfection was gone forever. Another score to settle.

"Do you know why the butterfly must struggle to escape its chrysalis?" he asked, sliding into dialect himself.

Georg jerked his face away. "I am not in the mood for your fables."

"Silence." The nails of his left thumb and middle finger dug into Georg's face. "It is the act of struggling that forces out the fluid from the butterfly's body and completes the development of its wings. If the butterfly is released prematurely, it will lurch around, swollen and clumsy, and soon die. Never having flown."

Georg's lips drew back from his gaping, missing teeth with a soundless hiss of pain. "And what is this supposed to mean to me?"

"I think you know." He let go. Blood welled out of the red marks that his nails had left. "Struggle is necessary. Punishment exalts."

"Easy for you to talk of punishment. You did not suffer as I did, with your father's money to protect you."

Novak went very still. Georg cringed away, sensing that he had gone too far.

Georg was wrong. His father had taught him about punishment. That lesson was frozen in his mind, dead center. A tableau in a globe of imperishable crystal. He turned away from the memory and held up his left hand. "Does this look as if I know nothing of punishment?"

Georg's eyes dropped in shame, as well they ought.

A gull shrieked in the darkening sky. Novak looked up, and exulted in the wild creature's freedom. Soon he would be reborn, with no father, no mother. He would be spotless, surrounded by gods and angels. He would be free at last, and he would never look back.

He jolted himself back to the present. "Be grateful that you have been chosen as my instrument to make this sacrifice, Georg. My gods are not for cowards, or weaklings."

Georg hesitated. "I am not weak," he said sourly.

"No, you are not." He patted Georg's shoulder. The younger man flinched at the contact. "You know my tastes just as I know yours. I would rip their throats out with my teeth and drink their blood, if I had that luxury. But I cannot compromise this new identity before I have even established it. You know exactly what it will cost me to step aside and let you play… while I watch."

Georg nodded reluctantly.

"I have chosen you to tear them to pieces for me, Georg," Novak said gently. "And still, you cannot wait. You whine. You complain."

Georg's eyes narrowed. "Do you plan to give it up, then?"

"Give up what? Drinking the blood of innocents?" Novak toasted Georg with the skull goblet and smiled. "You know me too well to ask such a stupid question."

Streaks of purplish red appeared on Georg's cheeks. The flush faded almost instantly to ghostly pallor. "I will help you," he said.

"I know you will, my friend," Novak said. "And you will be rewarded for your loyalty. You must be patient, and trust me."

The terrace door opened, and Tamara and Nigel stepped out. Nigel looked uncomfortable, but that was his natural state of being.

Tamara smiled, stunning in her brief, ice-green dress. She'd changed her chestnut hair to red and her golden eyes to green since he had sent her to monitor the household of Victor Lazar, his old friend and nemesis. He suspected that she had done her duty there with a fraction too much zeal. Perhaps he was being unfair.

In any case, red suited her, and after six months of enforced celibacy, it suited him, too. She was astonishingly beautiful. He would settle for nothing less in his bed. And her ability to hack into computer databases and change the nature of reality to suit his whims was nothing short of magic. She was immensely talented.

Nigel cleared his throat "The courier has just delivered the blood samples from Switzerland," he announced.

Novak nodded his approval. Plans were proceeding with orderly smoothness. "Excellent. You know what needs to be done. See to it."

"The switch is arranged," Nigel said. "I have identified a technician at the DNA laboratory named Chuck Whitehead who is perfect for our purposes. I will arrange for him to do the switch late Sunday night According to my statistical analysis, that's the period when the laboratory is most deserted. I will dispose of him afterwards myself."