The Adventures of Lazarus Gray (11 page)

Goodwill realized that he
was in a very bad situation. If Gray or his aides caught him now,
all his plans would fall apart. He’d planned to use Sazar to extort
money from many of the most powerful men in the city. It had seemed
like a good plan but all it had taken was one two-bit hood growing
a conscience to upset everything.

"I’m hurting,
Malcolm."

Goodwill spun about, eyes
wide. It was Sazar. Her gorgeous body looked almost as bad as her
face: she had bullet wounds all over her flesh and she was leaking
buckets of blood. "What the hell happened to you? Gray did
this?"

"Yes. I’m so weak." Sazar
reached out for him, using his shoulders to steady herself. "I
could barely find you, I’m so dizzy."

"Can you get us out of
here? Take us back to my home?"

Sazar looked at him with
blood-rimmed eyes. "I’m not sure. Traveling is hard for me. With
you along, too…."

"Take me there and I’ll get
you as many people to feed upon as you desire."

"I might need to feed
before then."

Goodwill caught her
meaning, noting the way her eyes lingered over the pulsing vein in
his neck. He raised his voice commandingly, hoping she wouldn’t
push the issue. If she did, he was done for. He didn’t remember the
proper words to control her. "Sazar! I am ordering you to do this.
Take us both home. Now."

Sazar mumbled ancient words
under her breath. He didn’t understand them but their meaning was
clear enough. She was growing tired of following his orders. She
gripped him tightly against her naked bloody flesh. "I will do what
I can," she hissed. "But in return, I want six strong men and three
healthy women. Do you understand?"

Goodwill blinked. She’d
always been sated after only one or two kills. Either she was as
weak as she claimed or she was simply trying to see what she could
get away with. "I’ll do it," he promised. "Just get me out of
here."

Sazar closed her eyes and
Goodwill immediately wished he had as well. They vanished from the
Assistance Unlimited headquarters and momentarily entered Sazar’s
home realm. Everything was made of dripping, shifting blood. There
were mountains of the stuff, fountains of red running down rocky
passages until they mingled in a flowing river of gore. There were
things swimming in that stream, horrible things that made Sazar’s
terrifying visage look beautiful in comparison. Goodwill tried to
look away but found that he couldn’t. He could only stare and hope
that his sanity wouldn’t give way.

As suddenly as it had
begun, it was over. Sazar loosed her grip on him and fell to the
carpeted floor of Goodwill’s study. Malcolm leaned heavily against
the edge of his desk, trying to keep from vomiting. He kept
attempting to banish the things he’d seen from his mind.

"I need to feed," Sazar
whispered.

Goodwill thought about
letting her starve but he quickly realized how foolish a thought
that was. She’d rip him to shreds before that happened. "Martin! I
need you!"

Goodwill’s butler rushed
into the room, shock on his portly features. "Sir? How did you get
inside?"

"No time for that now. She
needs to feed. Six men and three women. Round them up, however you
have to."

"So many?"

"Yes, damn it!"

Martin nodded and backed
away from Sazar, who was looking at him with altogether too much
interest. "Sir, a man came by, seeking the papers. He offered to
pay for them but said he’d kill you if you refused. And one of our
guards was attacked by an Oriental man and a blonde
woman."

Goodwill guessed those two
were agents of Gray. But the other… "Who was the man who wanted to
buy the papers?"

"He said his name was
Walther Lunt."

Goodwill shrugged, not
recognizing the name. "If he comes back, we’ll let Sazar deal with
him. Now go and get her something to eat."

Martin hurried from the
room, leaving Goodwill to sit down heavily in his desk chair. He
had no idea who this Lunt was – did he work with Gray? Or was he
someone new? If it was the latter, how did he know about the
papers?

"Pemberley," he hissed. The
doctor must have told this Lunt about the papers. Probably they
didn’t even belong to Pemberley in the first place. He might have
stolen them from this German. "If I see you again, Pemberley, I’m
going to cut your heart out."

Chapter IV

A Ticket to Hell!

Lazarus and Morgan were the
first to return to their headquarters and it only took a cursory
look at the front entrance to know that something was very wrong.
The building was in full lockdown mode and could only be opened by
a series of verbal commands known only to Gray and his
aides.

The two men entered
cautiously, expecting to find someone in near hysterics. That was
the typical way they found people who used the life-or-death
request to open the doors. When they found no one at all, Morgan
stood in the middle of the foyer and scratched his head.

"What the heck? Where could
they be?"

Gray knelt down and picked
up a small bullet from the floor. From the way the tip was mangled,
it was obvious that it had bounced off the semi-invisible walls
several times. "Remember that we are dealing with the
supernatural."

"You think they just walked
through the walls?"

"The blood demon vanished
right in front of our eyes, remember? It’s conceivable our guest
may have done the same. We should check the camera
footage."

Morgan followed his
employer behind the old clerk’s desk. The room behind had a large
television screen mounted on a table with several cables and tubes
projecting out from the device. Gray had modified this particular
television technology so that it could record the features of
anyone who came to the front door. This footage was then archived,
allowing Assistance Unlimited to build a detailed record of all
their cases.

Gray was looking through
the recorded data when Samantha and Eun burst into the room, both
looking slightly out of breath. Morgan, who had been nursing a
small glass of bourbon, stood up quickly.

"You two okay?"

Samantha looked at Gray,
who remained intent on the screen. "Chief, we saw Walther Lunt.
He’s alive. He was at Goodwill’s place and he said he was going to
kill Goodwill unless he sold him those papers."

Gray nodded but said
nothing.

"Didn’t you hear me?"
Samantha asked, her voice raising an octave. "He’s supposed to be
dead!"

Gray turned his mismatched
eyes on her and sighed. "His body vanished from the morgue less
than 48 hours after we left it there. I had assumed that members of
his cult had taken it for their own purposes. They may have revived
him."

"You’re talking about
resurrecting the dead," Eun whispered.

Samantha crossed her arms
over her chest, anger flashing in her eyes. "I’ve had enough of
this."

Morgan raised his eyebrows,
amazed that Samantha would speak to the Chief like that. Nobody was
brave enough to use that tone with him. Nobody aside from a pretty
young blonde who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds,
it seemed.

Gray’s entire body was
oriented toward her now. "Please explain."

"That German tried to kill
me. He
threw
a
lion
at me!" She emphasized those
words to such an extent that they seemed like a verbal slap in the
small room. "You’re telling me that you knew he might still be
alive, or resurrected, or whatever. And you never mentioned it to
us? Did I ever tell you how much it hurt to find out that you’d
been keeping it from us that you were an amnesiac? I thought we
were more than just your employees – I thought we were friends and
maybe even some kind of family. But that’s obviously not the case
if you’re going to continue keeping secrets from us. Well, I’m not
putting up with it anymore. You either start treating us with some
actual respect or I’m leaving."

The silence that descended
upon the room after that pronouncement was shocking in its
totality. No one was even breathing, it seemed.

Gray’s face remained
impassive but there was a flicker of emotion in his eyes that
weakened Samantha’s anger somewhat. Though he often came across as
a stoic and somewhat robotic individual, Samantha had always sensed
a well of sadness within her employer. Now she felt regret for her
harsh tone. "You’re right, Samantha. I apologize."

Morgan blinked in surprise.
"You do?"

"Of course. She’s
absolutely correct. I trust all of you with my life; I should trust
you with all my information as well. I don’t keep secrets from you
out of maliciousness. It’s second nature to me, I’m afraid.
Whatever life I led before arriving here in Sovereign, it was one
in which duplicity was quite common. I find myself lying all too
easily and keeping information close to the vest is a part of
that."

Samantha relaxed her body.
"I’m sorry, Chief. I didn’t mean to--"

"No, you don’t have to
apologize. Like I said, I’m the one at fault. I’ll try to do better
in the future but I ask that all of you be understanding that being
open and sharing doesn’t come naturally to me."

"We’ve all got trust
issues," Morgan said. "Heck, for most of my life, I could have been
killed for spilling the beans when I wasn’t supposed to so I
understand where you’re coming from. It’s hard to get away from
that."

Gray nodded, considering
Morgan’s words. To Samantha, he asked, "So you’re going to
stay?"

"Of course. I wouldn’t
really have left."

"Good." Gray turned and
pointed at the screen. A crisp black-and-white image showed the man
who had entered the building. He was well dressed and very tall.
"That, my friends, is Mr. Malcolm Goodwill."

Eun grunted in annoyance.
"There goes any lingering doubt about his involvement in all
this."

"I guess you were right,
Chief," Morgan muttered. "He must have had that demon come and
rescue him."

Gray nodded, staring at the
image on the screen. "He came here to get those papers back, which
meant he was taking an incredible risk. I think it’s safe to say
that a man so desperate to have something wouldn’t be able to turn
down an invitation to get them back."

"What are you thinking?"
Eun asked.

Gray said nothing, instead
choosing to walk over to a nearby phone. He picked it up and
quickly dialed Goodwill’s number. Behind his back, his three aides
exchanged smirks. Despite his best intentions, Gray simply couldn’t
keep from milking the dramatics from any moment.

"Mr. Goodwill, please. Tell
him it’s Lazarus Gray holding for him." Gray faced his aides and
placed a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. "If he wants the
papers so badly, we’ll simply give them to him." Samantha let out a
little gasp but all three of his aides fell silent as Gray resumed
speaking into the phone. "I’m impressed that you were able to
escape the Assistance Unlimited Headquarters. It definitely shows
that you’re a man of great power. So great that we would like to
bring about a truce of sorts. We have the papers that once belonged
to your man but we have no interest in retaining them. We’re
willing to pass them on to you in return for a small fee
reimbursing us for our trouble. Whatever you think they’re worth.
We can meet at the old Trembley Coal Plant on Skiver Way. Within
the hour, yes." Gray hung up the phone and nodded smartly to his
aides. "Everyone get ready. I’d anticipate Mr. Goodwill being quite
treacherous so we should respond in kind."

***

Walther Lunt sat in front
of the fireplace, stirring the embers with a poker. The ruined side
of his face ached today, as it always did when rain was on the way.
It was an odd affliction. He’d heard of men and women whose
arthritis worsened when storms were looming but ravaged acid burns?
It had to be a first. "We should leave soon. We’re supposed to be
on the other side of town in half an hour."

The woman seated near him
crossed her stocking-encased legs, knowing that the movement would
catch his interest. Lunt was a lecherous sort and Miya Shimada was
attractive enough to keep him in perpetual arousal. A
Japanese-American, Miya had shoulder-length black hair that
shimmered in the sunlight. Her body was the perfect mixture of the
two races that made up her ethnic background: the slim features of
the Japanese melded with the hips and breasts of a Western woman.
"We can leave when you’ve finished your drink. I have to say,
you’re looking much better than you did when I first saw you," Miya
said teasingly.

Walther grunted in
acceptance of that. "I owe you my life. Or, rather, my second
life."

"Our masters aren’t done
with you," Miya pointed out. "That’s why they dispatched me to
resurrect you. In the end, all of us are but pieces on their grand
chess board."

Walther picked up a glass
of cognac from the table in front of him and he sipped it in
silence. When he finally spoke again, his words were so low that
Miya had to strain to hear them. "Have you found out anything
useful?"