"No, Richard," Vollman said. His voice sounded as full of sorrow as his son's was full of hate. "It must stop here. It must stop tonight."
Vollman walked briskly forward, spreading his arms like wings. Sligo withdrew the knife from Christine's breast and began to walk toward his father.
I realized he'd just given me a clean shot, and I wanted to end this fucker's life more than I wanted my next breath, and I brought the gun up to kill him, but Sligo, even while moving toward his father, made a complex gesture in the air – and this tme Vollman was too preoccupied to block the spell.
What I can only describe as a blast of pure magical energy blasted me off my feet and sent me careening backward, like somebody in a wind tunnel – until I was stopped by my impact with the pump house wall.
Karl was hit by the same force, but his luck was even worse. Instead of slamming flat into the rear wall as I was, his body slammed into one of the broad stone pillars that held up the roof, and I thought I saw his spine bend backward with the impact just before the wall of the pump house hit me like a train.
I'd had enough sense to try to break my impact the same way you break a fall in judo: arms spread, palms flat and a little behind me. Maybe it helped a little, I don't know. But that stone wall hit me harder than I've ever been hit in my life and the shock and sorrow I felt for Karl was lost in the wave of unconsciousness that grabbed me and squeezed me and bore me down into the blackness.
I don't know how long I was down there in the dark. I opened my eyes and tried to get them to focus. I was sitting on the stone floor, my back against the wall that had so abruptly stopped my little journey through the air. I hurt in places I hadn't even known I had.
My vision came back into focus slowly. The first thing I saw were my hands. One was in my lap, and the other was limp on the floor next to me. Both palms were scraped and oozing blood. I remembered something about trying to break my fall, except I hadn't been falling, exactly. Something about judo. Whatever my bright idea had been, it didn't seem to have worked real well.
I tried to raise my head, and my vision blurred again. A word floated out of the part of my brain that was still functioning: concussion.
Every street cop gets knocked around some while on the job, and I'd been concussed before, according to a couple of ER doctors. But this concussion, if that's what it was, compared to the earlier ones the way a car crash is like falling off your tricycle.
I tried to keep my head from flopping back down, and succeeded, more or less. When I could see again, I found that I was looking at Karl. He was lying on his side, maybe fifty feet to my left, one arm outstretched, fingers hooked into a claw. The middle of his body was blocked from my vision by the pillar that he'd slammed into. Karl didn't move at all, and I was too far away to tell if he was breathing.
I turned my head, which not only caused another loss of focus but brought on a wave of vertigo that was more like a tsunami. I'd have puked, if there'd been any food in my stomach. When had I last eaten – breakfast? Was that today, or yesterday?
After a while I thought I could see again, but maybe I was just hallucinating. At the far side of the room, in front of that three-sided altar, two figures were struggling. They should have been Vollman and Sligo – I mean, who else could they be?
But what I was seeing, or imagining, didn't look like the two vampire/wizards – not as I remembered them. My brain must have been scrambled but good, because it seemed like I was looking a couple of Roman-style gladiators, shuffling around on the blood-soaked dirt of some arena, hacking at each other with big, heavy swords and defending with manhole-size shields. Roman fucking gladiators – but their faces were those of Vollman and Sligo.
I closed my eyes, not wanting to take in any more evidence that I'd gone totally fucking insane. But then I opened them again, and found that I was still seeing things that weren't there – that couldn't be there.
How else to explain that dusty Western street, with Sligo and Vollman dressed in outfits that belonged in some particularly gritty Spaghetti Western? They stood maybe thirty feet apart, eyes narrowed, tense hands hovering over the handles of their holstered guns, while the wind blew a single, forlorn tumbleweed between them.
I went away again for a while, and when I returned, it looked like the Western theme was still clinging to my subconscious. That would explain why I could see Sligo, in breechcloth and war paint, razor-edged tomahawk in one hand, locked in combat with a saber-wielding U.S. Cavalry trooper who looked an awful lot like his old man.
I closed my eyes once more, and started to wonder if maybe I'd died from hitting the wall, and Hell was a series of bad TV reruns. When I looked again, at least the channel had changed, because a U.S. Marine resembling Sligo was desperately trying to drive the bayonet on his M-1 through the body of Vollman, who was dressed as a soldier of the Rising Sun, a samurai sword held high in both hands.
This series of fantasy visions seemed to go on forever, lending further support to my I'm-deadand-in-Hell theory. I remember Vollman and Sligo, in gray and blue, respectively, going at each other on a Civil War battlefield, then it was on to a bloody no man's land of World War I, followed by a vicious gang fight in some urban jungle, and I'm pretty sure we all ended up at the Alamo, with Mexican soldier Vollman contending viciously with Sligo, who was wearing a coonskin cap and swinging a Kentucky rifle like a club. Then, mercifully, I passed out again.
I was brought back to reality, if that's what it was, by the scream. I forced my eyes open and saw Sligo, dressed as he'd been when we first broke in, standing over the still form of Vollman. There wasn't a mark on either one of them that I could see.
The scream was coming from Sligo. Fists clenched, head thrown back, face gleaming with sweat, he stood over the body of the father he'd hated for so long. It went on for what seemed like long time, the scream did; it combined elation with rage and, if I'm not mistaken, a pretty fair dose of grief, too. All in one great bellow.
Then he was done. Panting, he wiped his face with his sleeve, then looked at his watch. At once, he turned back to the altar.
I tried to concentrate on what he was doing. At the moment, I didn't give a shit if he became a super-vampire or the world tiddlywinks champ, as long as he didn't do anything more to hurt Christine. But I kept remembering that the other four vampires who'd been material for this ritual all had to die. First he'd carved his magical symbols on them, as specified by the Opus Mago, then he'd killed them. I assume the book said to do that, too.
Sligo stood behind the altar and went through the ritual. He read aloud from the Opus Mago sometimes, he rang bells, mixed powders and liquid in bowls, burned incense, and generally looked like he was having a great old time. Big fucking deal.
Then he picked up the silver-bladed knife.
That finally galvanized me into action. Or as much action as I was capable of, which turned out to be not much. I looked for the shotgun, but couldn't see where I'd dropped it, even in the glaringly bright light Sligo had brought to the pump house. I remembered the Beretta on my belt and fumbled for it, only to find the holster empty. Must have been knocked loose when I'd smashed into the wall. The pistol had to be on the floor close by, but every time I moved my head in search of it, the vertigo returned and my vision started acting funky again.
Sligo was holding the dagger reverently in both hands now, reading an incantation from the book in that incomprehensible language. Even in my fucked-up mental state, I figured it was only a matter of time before he'd stop chanting and start cutting – the cutting was going to be on my little girl.
I fumbled my hands into my jacket pockets, an operation that seemed to take an hour. I was searching for my phone, with the vague notion of calling 911. I couldn't find the damn thing, and part me knew it didn't matter, really. There was nobody I could call who would possibly get here in The fingers of my right hand brushed metal. Not the phone – something smaller, and much thinner. Round and curved on one side, jagged on the other. It felt like… part of a coin.