He swung the chair with all his strength. It cut through empty air as Morgan’s figure disappeared.
The chair landed on the floor, as Kate almost fell into his arms. Both of them were swaying with exhaustion. The darkened apartment was quiet now. They were alone.
Joe gripped Kate, looked hard at her while she looked back. He started twice to try to speak.
“We’ll talk later,” Kate said at last.
He nodded. “Let’s get out of here.”
Now, with a moment in which to look for it clear-headedly, he found the spear without difficulty. Kate, thinking along with him, had already picked up Morgan’s wooden knife from where it lay on the floor.
They went out the front door of the apartment, at the bottom of a carpeted stair going down beside the elevator. Joe led the way, spear ready. It was a simple door that opened to the sidewalk—
Or to where the sidewalk was supposed to be. Joe had to push the door hard to make it open, and at first the knee-deep snow that had blocked it from outside seemed to him only one more artifact of the evil nightmare from which he and Kate were trying to fight free.
The night air was clear, the snowfall stopped at last. A keen wind was busy drifting whiteness over buried streets, impassable to cars. The old man, standing where the curb should be with his hands in his topcoat pockets, was gazing over a half-buried auto toward the other end of the street. There, almost directly under a bright streetlamp, a pair of figures waited, looking back at him. Morgan in her torn party suit, her cloud of red hair blowing free, looked tiny beside the giant man in evening dress, with the half-ruined face.
The old man did not turn to look at Joe or Kate when they came out of the building behind him. But he said to them calmly: “They will not fly now, or change their form. My hand is on them.” He raised his voice. “Morgan, you see that my allies have not deserted me. Where are yours?”
Whether in answer to him or not, the woman across the street tilted back her beautiful face to the invisible sky above the electric lights. Then from her throat there burst a long, keen, eerie cry. It echoed away among the dark and lifeless buildings, above the brilliant snow, and was followed by deep silence. Joe, listening, could not recall such quiet in the city at any time of day or night. Far away somewhere, diesels were laboring, doubtless either plowing snow or dragging emergency loads through it. Poach was listening too, turning his raised face this way and that. Already his fresh wound was healing. Both of Poach’s eyes were open again, and the blood that covered one side of his forehead was congealed in the frigid air.
At last Morgan lowered her gaze again to the old man. She shrugged. “If you can gather them in, from the four winds, they will doubtless be your allies now—for as long as you seem to be winning. Much good may they do you. Cowards, one and all. Gods, is it long life itself that makes so many of us cowards?”
Corday said: “The one who stands beside you has not yet lived a century. Yet he was cowardly enough to attack me in my earth.”
“Oh, now we are to have considerations of honor.” Morgan shook her windblown hair. “But then with you it is always honor, is it not?” She waited a moment, then added quietly: “We are going to walk away now, Vlad. You have won.”
The old man made no reply. Morgan looked at him a few seconds longer, then turned away and began to walk. Poach, after a last wary glance, followed. Trudging through the deep snow to the nearest street corner, Morgan looked weary as some laboring woman struggling to get home. She turned there, with difficulty heading east into the wind. Poach lurched along beside her.
The old man took his hands out of his pockets and with each hand motioned one of his companions forward. He still had not taken his eyes off his foe. He walked ahead of Joe and Kate, keeping the distance between himself and his enemies nearly constant. The deep snow made hard walking. Joe wondered how long he and Kate were going to be able to keep up. The going was a little easier when they got to where Morgan and Poach had broken trail.
After leading them east through untrodden drifts for half a block, Morgan stopped and turned under another streetlight. “Drive us into a corner,” she called back, “and it will be at your own peril.”
Corday had stopped also, and once more waited with hands in topcoat pockets. “Alas,” he called back cheerfully, “to our greater peril if we do not.”
“Yours, perhaps,” Morgan answered. “I speak now to the others. Joe? Kate? He is as cunning as the Evil One himself. Don’t you understand that if he is the survivor, he must kill you at the end? You know too much about him now, for him to let you live. Kate, he has already killed your grandmother tonight.”
“And you?” Kate called back. “Liar. What will you do with us—refresh yourselves?”
“You do not matter to us, fools. We only meant to frighten you—you will be left in peace forever, but only if you turn around and go home now.”
“This is the way I’m going,” Joe told her. He took a step forward, his grip tightening on the spear.
Morgan looked at them all again, one after another, then once more turned and walked away. Poach kept at her side, walking unsteadily. At once the old man followed them, and Joe and Kate kept pace. Presently, under a blaze of neon from the windows of an otherwise lifeless tavern, Joe noticed occasional red-brown drops spattering the snow.
At the next cross street, Joe could see other people struggling along on foot a block and a half away— perhaps trying to get home, or to get away from home, or to find a doctor or an open liquor store. With sunrise the city, still crippled but aroused, would begin to live again and painfully try to move. Then how would the chase go?
Morgan turned north. Holy Name Cathedral appeared ahead, slowly fell behind as they walked past it. Would there be an early Mass this morning? Involuntarily Joe glanced at Corday’s profile, then up at the stone cross. The old man’s attention was not distracted from his enemies. He did not even appear to blink.
Suddenly the going was easy. They had come to a long stretch of sidewalk blown almost clean of snow. Joe and Kate moved up to walk closer at the old man’s sides.
Joe said: “It goes back a long way, doesn’t it? Between you and her.”
“It does, Joe. But all things must end.”
“I heard Poach saying something tonight . . . that he killed Granny Clare.”
“He did.” The old man paced on for several yards before he added: “Judy was at the house also. But she is going to be all right—if we win. Now we must concentrate on the hunt. Our enemies are still deadly dangerous. But dawn is not far off, and it will weaken them.”
“And you too,” said Kate.
“But not my brave allies.” Corday turned a sudden grin to left and right, including both of them. Joe wished to himself that the old man’s face hadn’t looked something like a skull when he did that. Still it had more life in it by far than many faces that were fat with flesh.
Corday went on: “If I should be destroyed in sunlight, and they survive, still they will be weakened. And forced to remain in human form until night falls again. So if I fall, you must kill both of them today at any cost. But I have survived many such wintry northern mornings, and afternoons as well—ah, they turn east again.”
The distant diesels, or another squadron of them, could be heard again, a trifle louder now. Among tall buildings Joe could not be sure from which direction the sound came. Nearer at hand another noise was growing rapidly; a helicopter’s rotors beat the invisible sky. Only a set of red and green running lights were visible as the machine darted past almost directly overhead.
The streets through which Morgan led them were still empty of other people; superb lighting shone on untracked snow. Another block east, thought Joe, and they’d be on Michigan Boulevard. Joe wondered if Morgan had a goal in mind or was simply fleeing. “They’re sticking close together,” he commented.
“As long as they do,” said the old man, “I have no wish to encounter them without your stout support. Though they are perhaps gaining a little on us now, I think they will run out of gas, as I believe the saying goes, before we do.”
Joe tried to speed it up a little. Police officer needs assistance. It would be a busy day in Communications. All furloughs canceled. Sorry, captain, I just couldn’t make it in, there were these vampires I had to hunt . . .
Kate appeared to be doing fine. She walked with the long wood knife swinging in her hand.
“Corday, I said some things about you before. I’m sorry. What do your friends call you, if it’s any of my business?”
The old man shot him a glance. “Your apology is thankfully accepted. I am comfortable with the name you know me by.”
