Chapter Three

1951

T

he government agents would have to explain how an intruder had gotten past them so easily, and how they ended up with their hands and feet tied and their service revolvers boiling merrily away in the stockpot on the stove.

The house was in Springfield, Illinois, one of a few dozen like it on a street carved out of a farmer’s field. The kitchen was cramped, but judging by the items on the counter, the lady of the house took cooking seriously. Susannah tested the air. Tomatoes, garlic, onion, herbs, more garlic. As she glided across the linoleum, the light of a full moon poured in dining-room windows open to the night air in the vain hope of a cool breeze. The moonlight rippled across her body and glinted from the hilt of a knife at her waist, one of several weapons she carried. There was no one awake to see her move through the house like a shadow cast by Death.

The living room next. A sterile place, a place to sit on facing sofas and utter social banalities. With her toe, she touched something that hinted at the true life within the house: a doll, no doubt dropped on the way through. That’s what people did most in this room: walk through it. The comparison to her life was inescapable, a life where friendships were frequently left behind and love was never more than a fling.

Like a doll left behind on the floor.

She shook the feeling, picked her way carefully through a playroom littered with toys and books, and made her way down the hall. The first room on the right, she knew, was Patty’s. Easing the door open, she slipped inside.

The curtains were open and a square of moonlight fell on the bed. A young girl was there, blanket thrown off on a sticky summer night, her nightgown twisted around her legs. Patty had turned fourteen a month ago. The faint odor of nail polish hung in the room. The top of her dresser was crowded with hairbrushes, bottles of cream, makeup, and a jewelry box a much younger girl would have, the kind with the dancing ballerina. Next to the jewelry box, in a prominent position, was a framed photo of the family, mother and father beaming as their daughter blew out the candles on her birthday cake. Susannah peered at the photo and counted the candles. Fourteen, plus one for good luck.

Susannah had never had a birthday cake.

Emily’s room was on the left side of the hall, the moon-dark side. Susannah let her eyes adjust to the relative darkness, and then stood just inside the room. The sleeping girl wore pajamas covered with sheep. Emily was seven, and the owner of seven times seven dolls. They were all over the room, propped on a dresser, piled on a chair, mounded at the foot of her bed. Sharing the dresser with half a dozen dolls was a photo of Emily with her father, dressed for Halloween as matching clowns, clowns with laughing eyes. The picture had a frame made of Popsicle sticks, glued on neatly except for one that sagged on the bottom. Susannah put her face up close to the framed picture, looking at the latticework of sticks. A few still had traces of orange on them, her favorite as well as the child’s.

Emily stirred in her bed, and Susannah backed out into the hall.

Mary’s room was next on the left, closest to the master bedroom that was across the hall. The room was dark, like Emily’s, and the door was pulled mostly closed. Susannah put her hand on the door, but was suddenly reluctant to open it and enter. Instead she peeked in to see the dark-haired girl baby sleeping peacefully in the crib.

As Constanta should have been.

She pulled her hand away.

A smell drifted from the room. Mary needed a diaper change and might wake soon, crying because of that or hunger or the pure cussedness of being eight months old.

In the master bedroom, Katherine DiNina wore a delicate nightgown that the moonlight turned the color of old blood. She had a few extra pounds on her, no doubt a result of cooking to please a family, and a sweet face that wasn’t quite beautiful. Black hair spread over the pillow. Pictures of her family crowded the top of her dresser, but the side of the bed where her husband slept was empty. Her arm rested across the space where he should be. Susannah’s gaze fastened on a Moonbeam alarm clock on a stand next to the bed. The lighted clock face said 2:45. Susannah had a clock exactly like it. She closed her eyes and breathed in the fresh scents of soap and shampoo. This woman went to bed clean, ready to embrace her husband.

Thoughts tickled the back of Susannah’s brain. From the infant girl to the mother’s black hair, this family could have been hers and Nathan’s, in a different time. The pain of remembrance coursed through her in a way that it hadn’t in centuries.

My job is to destroy this family, so like mine could have been. These people are like piers of a bridge. Yank one out and the bridge is unstable. That’s what I’ve been doing since I became Ageless, I just never thought of it that way. One strike, one kill—but a cascade of ruined lives.

It was time to leave.

As Susannah retraced her path, she understood why the man of the house, Lorenzo “Ledger” DiNina, had made a deal with the Feds to turn on Adamo Tenaglia, a ruthless crime boss. He did it for the four dark-haired females in this house, who meant more to Ledger than his life did.

 

A

week later, she ran on a dusty road, breathing evenly, enjoying the feelings of her muscles moving and blood pumping.

It was half an hour past sunset on a late August evening in Iowa, the darkness beginning to gather, yet the temperature was ninety degrees and so was the humidity. Cornfields ran on either side of the road for miles, interrupted only by the occasional driveway marked by a mailbox. The air was saturated with the intense smell of ripening corn.

In an hour, she’d be invisible under a thin slice of moon. Her clothing was black from head to toe, the silk fabric snug against her skin and as supple as she was. Her long, black hair was braided atop her head and her pale face concealed by black silk wound around it from the neck up, leaving a narrow gap for eyes as green as the fields around her. She wore skintight black leather gloves with padded palms, and a leather pack snuggled against the small of her back. It was her killing outfit.

Running with her mind elsewhere, she retraced her path through Ledger’s home to the moment she’d frozen in front of the baby’s door. Her memories of Constanta were so strong that Susannah hadn’t been able to enter the baby’s room.

Not in my killing outfit. Not with a knife at hand.

A doe ventured out into the road ahead, followed by her spring-born fawn. Susannah maintained her speed, judged the moment, and launched herself into the air, arcing over the two deer. The larger one startled as Susannah’s foot lightly grazed the fur on her back.

It was an exhilarating moment, one of the many Rabishu’s gifts afforded her.

The gifts had been beyond her understanding at first, in the limited life she’d led in Massachusetts when it was an English colony. After that first time in the flames, she wasn’t impervious to fire. That was something Rabishu had conferred for a single purpose: recruiting her. But there were other things, like being able to move so fast that she appeared as a blur to the human eye. Her body healed from wounds that would be fatal to others. The irony wasn’t lost on her: Susannah the healer now healed only herself. She treasured her ability to see auras, reading emotional states by the colors in the radiance that surrounded people. She’d been taught martial arts by a Chinese master, at Rabishu’s insistence, and over the years had picked up strikes, defenses, and weapons from various countries around the world. Her fighting had lost its original eloquence in favor of street techniques that served her well.

She sized up the farmhouse where Ledger was held, guarded by F.B.I. agents. For the federal case against Tenaglia, it was important to keep Ledger alive to testify. She was here to make sure he didn’t testify. Rabishu favored keeping Tenaglia and his crime syndicate in business.

Ledger was probably on the second floor, as far from the front door as possible. She settled a throwing star into the wood frame above a second-floor window and tossed a loop of slim rope over it. After tugging on the rope to make sure it would hold her weight, she scampered up it easily.

A typical burglar would use a glass cutter at this point, for a silent entrance. For Susannah, that wasn’t necessary. This was going to be a quick assault, lacking in elegance but leaving the agents in the home disabled, and Ledger dead.

She wanted to get her assignment finished. When Rabishu had given her the task, she’d toyed with the idea of turning it down. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she flatly refused to do Rabishu’s work, but she didn’t see him as the forgiving type. At the least, she’d no longer be one of the Ageless.

What would it be like to be mortal again? Would I live out my life from now on, or would all my years catch up to me and I’d age in a flash? Here’s Susannah Layhem, a pile of bones—no, dust—on the floor. At least I would be dust that no longer had to kill.

She pushed away from the wall of the house and came swinging in, her body bent, feet leading the way to break the window. Glass tumbled inward.

The noise of her entrance drew an immediate response. Shots zinged past, and she hit the floor and rolled, pain tracing a fiery line on her shoulder. She arched her back, sprang up, and took out her first assailant with a roundhouse kick to the jaw that sent him spinning across the floor, sliding through the debris.

A bullet struck her left arm as she did a handspring toward the other two men in the room. They overturned a table in her direction. Coins, cards, dollars, and drinks went flying. They’d been passing the time playing poker. She sidestepped the rolling table, and saw a flash of recognition in one of the men’s eyes that maybe they should have kept the table for cover. Exposed, they scuttled away in opposite directions, knocking over a couple of lamps.

A kick to the stomach and the edge of her hand to the back of his neck turned one of the agents into dead weight, and he slumped against her. The last agent fired at her from across the room. The limp but still living body of the man she’d just disabled took the bullet squarely in the forehead as she ducked to the side. She somersaulted to reach the last agent as he pondered—a second too long—the fact that he’d just shot his buddy. A kick sent his gun spinning across the floor, and another kick sent him flying in the same direction, unconscious before he landed. She retrieved three guns from the room and flung them out of the broken window.

She paused for a moment, looking at the man who’d taken a bullet for her. He was in his mid-thirties and in good physical shape, blue eyes staring, a strong chin, a lock of hair curling onto his forehead. In the prime of his life, most people would think. He wore a wedding band. Previously, she wouldn’t have given the dead man a glance, but lately the consequences of her actions lingered in her mind.

He had a wife, maybe kids. Parents, friends. A widening circle of mourners, ripples in a pond. Most likely, the agent who shot him will blame it on me. And why not? If not for me, the man would be in his wife’s arms after this dull job, watching some accountant, was over.

She flexed her left arm. The bullet had lodged in the muscle above the elbow and was going to hurt like hell when she dug it out with a knife later. The other spots where she’d been injured vied for her attention with various levels of pain, but none of them was serious. Although Susannah wasn’t immune to pain, wounds that might kill a human, like a shot to the heart, weren’t a threat to her. The only thing she had to fear was losing her head, literally.

Susannah wiped her bloodied gloves on her pants and reclaimed her knife, sheathing it at her waist. She eased out into the brightly lit hall and tried the knob of the first door. It wasn’t locked, and opened with a small creak. She pushed the door fully open, rolled and came to her feet smoothly, a throwing knife poised in each hand.

Ledger’s eyes followed her in the dim light of a lamp. He’d retreated to the furthest corner. An aura of dull brownish yellow surrounded him, shot with smudges of gray. The dark mustard color was apprehension of pain and the gray represented dark thoughts, thoughts of a bad outcome.

A man anticipating a painful death. No surprises.

“You’re the Black Ghost.”

Susannah blinked and paused in her approach. As she blinked, she saw his aura on the inside of her eyelids, but it faded immediately.

“My wife wasn’t sure whether to believe her, but Emily was right. You were there, in Emily’s room, a week ago. To a seven-year-old, that’s what you were. A black ghost.”

Susannah nodded. So she’d been seen.

“The Feds denied it. They said nobody’d been in the house. Just covering their asses, as usual. Fuck. You were in my house with my family. Could’ve killed them all, right under the Feds’ noses.” Ledger sighed. “And here you are again. Goddamned Feds. You work for Tenaglia? He’s using a woman for his dirty work. That’s a low one, even for him.”

She shook her head. She never bothered to explain whom she was working for, or anything else about herself. No one would believe it.

“You’re probably lying. What do you care? I’m going to be dead in a minute. But you tell Tenaglia that Kate and the girls are untouchable. You hear that? He so much as breathes in their direction and lightning is gonna strike his family, especially that rat’s ass son of his. Old man Amoretti’s taking care of my family. You tell him that.”

Do it and get out.

Her hands played out the motions of knife throwing in muscle memory while the blades remained perfectly still in her palms.

“Why did you turn yourself in?” She wanted to hear it from him, hear him say that he loved his family more than his life.

Ledger frowned. “What does that matter to you? Get it over with, Ghost.”

Susannah retreated enough to check the hallway, then walked over to him, moving as quietly as a hunting cat, the throwing knives her claws. Although he hunkered down a little, he knew he had nowhere to go and didn’t stand a chance against her. Placing a sharp tip over his heart, she leaned in close to the man’s ear and said, “I’m curious. Indulge me.”

Ledger, who’d been holding his breath waiting for the knife to plunge into his chest, exhaled warmly into her face. He smelled unmistakably of chicken soup.

“I turned forty. My predecessor retired at forty-two. Bullet in the back of the head. Accountants know way too much. They get so they’re holding too many secrets and somebody gets antsy. So I figured I’d get out early and make the best deal I could for my family.”

A tear slid down Ledger’s cheek. “Lately that’s all that matters to me,” he whispered. “You know. You were in the house.”

Years ago, Susannah would have killed him and slipped away. His story of family love would have bounced off her heart. But she’d seen what he had at stake.

Pajamas with sheep…dancing ballerina jewelry box…black hair on a pillow…a baby girl in a crib. A family that could have been mine.

The knife eased away from Ledger’s chest.

She thought about Rabishu’s order: The man Lorenzo DiNina must not be allowed to testify against Adamo Tenaglia. Susannah slipped the knives back into their sheaths. When Ledger saw her unarmed, he tried a last, desperate attempt to save his life. He came at her, fists ineffectually flying. She pinned his arms behind his back.

“Cut it out. I’m helping you.”

What the hell? I’m helping?

No time to mull things over. “You’re going to have to do what I say to get out of here alive,” she said.

“Alive? I thought you were sent to kill me.”

Susannah spun him around and firmly gripped him by the shoulders, alert for any muscle tell that would indicate he was going to lash out at her.

“I need to stop you from testifying. You don’t have to be dead to do that. You made a deal with the Feds: your testimony for safe passage for your family. I’m offering you another deal. Keep your mouth shut and I’ll take you to your family.”

They’ll get Tenaglia some other way. They got Capone on tax evasion.

Ledger blinked several times, an ocular Morse code, as he processed this. Then narrowed eyes betrayed suspicion. “What’s in it for you? I’m not wealthy, you know. I can’t pay much.”

Not wealthy, my ass. Only an accountant would haggle at this point.

Susannah shook her head. “I haven’t figured out what’s in it for me. Listen, we’re out of time here. Yes or no?”

“I’d be a fool not to take the chance. Even if it’s just a joke you’re playing on me. Yes. I say yes.” His chin jutted out in an attempt to shore up his courage.

Echoes of her first conversation with Rabishu so many years ago flitted through her mind. She’d chosen life; so had Ledger, even with the hope of it surely seeming small to him.

The smell of smoke, of burning flesh, impossibly slipped into her awareness.

Something was chipping away at centuries of indifference to the fate of her targets, bringing back scenes from her past.

She went back to her village at night a few years after becoming Ageless. She didn’t go to see if Nathan had taken up with another woman, or to see Patience and George enjoying their married life and sweet child. She went to the cemetery. As powerful as she’d become, the sight of the small gravestone felled her and she crawled on her knees and kissed it. Constanta, it said. If Nathan had done nothing for Susannah in her time of greatest need, at least he’d claimed his daughter’s corpse, given the baby the name they’d agreed on, and insisted that Constanta have a rightful burial.

Susannah sagged a little. The memory was as visceral as a punch to the stomach.

“I’m ready,” Ledger said.

His words jarred her into the present.

There was an old pickup truck parked behind the farmhouse. A few minutes later, the two of them were on the road.

Susannah felt almost giddy. She’d found a loophole in Rabishu’s orders and used it to save a life—and it felt good. The demon’s next assignment would be locked down tight with no wiggle room, but for now, it was plus one for the Black Ghost.