Lasher (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 2)

The dead lie beyond, Father said. He had been with the dead, and he did not want to be with them again, until his time came. It would come but by that time he and Emaleth would have multiplied and subdued the Earth. The Earth would be for their children.

"We have come again at the perfect moment. Never has the world been so prepared. In the distant past survival was too difficult for us. But not so now; we are the meek; we shall inherit the Earth."

Emaleth prayed Father would come back. Father would free Mother from the bed; and Mother would not cry anymore. Father loved Mother. He had said, "Remember I love her. We need her. She has the milk, and without the milk you cannot grow to full height."

Emaleth waited to rise out of this dark place and stretch her limbs and grow and walk and smile and be in Father's arms. Poor Mother. Mother was in pain. More and more Mother slept.

It was lonely and still in the room when Mother slept. Deeper and deeper Mother slept. Emaleth was frightened Mother would not wake. She rolled over and reached out to touch the edges of the world. She saw the light dying all around her. Ah, but it was only twilight again, and the buildings came on, full of light. Soon Emaleth would see light for what it really was, see it distinctly, Father had said. And it was glorious.

The dead don't know light, Father had said. The dead know confusion.

Emaleth opened her mouth and tried to make words. She pressed on the roof of the world. She pushed and turned inside Mother. But Mother slept, tired and hungry and all alone. Maybe it was for the best that she dreamed now and knew no fear. Poor Mother.

Six

YURI HAD TO go to Aaron Lightner, it was as simple as that. He had to leave the Talamasca now, no matter what orders he had been given, and he had to seek out Aaron in the city of New Orleans and find out what had happened in recent months to so distress his beloved mentor and friend.

As the car pulled away from the gates of the Motherhouse, Yuri knew he might never be inside those walls again. The Talamasca was unforgiving to those who disobeyed orders. And Yuri could not plead ignorance of the Talamasca's rules.

Yet it was so simple, this departure--driving away in the muffled gray solitude of the cold morning, leaving behind this blessed place outside London where Yuri had spent so much of his life.

Yuri pondered this and he pondered his remarkable lack of conflict or doubt. Indeed he tried to assume a responsible man's uncertainty, and to review his actions from a moral and logical standpoint as a good man should do.

But Yuri had made his decision. Or rather the Elders had made it for him, when they had ordered him to cease all contact with Aaron, when they had told him that the File on the Mayfair Witches was now closed.

Something bad had happened with the Mayfair Witches, something bad that had hurt and discouraged Aaron. And Yuri was going to Aaron. In a way, it was the simplest thing Yuri had ever done.

Yuri was a Serbian gypsy, tall, dark-skinned, with very dark eyelashes and large jet-black eyes. His hair was slightly wavy, but cut too short for one to notice. Slender and spry in appearance, he presented a rather narrow figure in his usual careless wool jacket, soft-collared knit shirt and wrinkled khaki pants.

His eyes had a slight upward tilt to them at the outside edges, and his face was squarish with a pleasant, often smiling mouth. In many a country from India to Mexico, he passed for a native. Even in Cambodia and in Thailand, he went unnoticed. There was that bit of Asia in his features and his smooth golden complexion, and perhaps even in his quiet manner. His bosses in the Talamasca called him "The Invisible Man."

Yuri was the premier investigator for the Talamasca. He had belonged to this secret order of "psychic detectives" since he was a child. Though he himself possessed no unusual mental powers, he worked unfailingly well with the Talamasca's exorcists, mediums, seers, and sorcerers on their various cases worldwide. He was a most effective tracer of missing persons, a tireless and accurate gatherer of information, a spy in the normal world, a natural and infallible private eye. He loved the Talamasca. There was nothing he would not do for the Order, no risk that he would not take.

Seldom if ever did he ask questions about his assignments. He did not seek to understand the full scope of what he did. He worked only for Aaron Lightner, or David Talbot, very high placed in the Order, and it pleased him that they sometimes quarreled over Yuri, so well did he do his work.

In a smooth, unhurried voice Yuri spoke a score of languages with scarcely a trace of an accent. He'd learnt English, Russian and Italian with his mother--and her men--before he was eight years old.

When a child learns that much language very early he has a great advantage, not only in the realm of linguistics but in the realm of logic and imagistic thought. Yuri's mind was inherently agile, and not secretive by nature, though much of his life he had repressed his natural talkativeness and only now and then let it come forth.

Yuri had many other advantages from the time of his mother--that she'd been clever, effortlessly beautiful, and a bit devil-may-care. She had always earned plenty from her male companions, yet was a social being, chatting with the employees in the hotels where she entertained her men, and having other women friends with whom to spend an afternoon at a cafe talking rapidly over coffee or English tea.

Her men had never been mean to Yuri. Many never saw Yuri at all. And those who were longtime companions were always nice to him, otherwise Yuri's mother would never have had them around. He had flourished in this atmosphere of kindness and general indulgent disorganization, learning to read early almost entirely from magazines and newspapers, and loving to roam the streets.

When the gypsies got Yuri, that was when his bitterness and his silence began. And he never forgot that they had been his own kinsmen, his cousins, this band of thieves who bought children and dragged them to Paris and to Rome to steal. They had got their hands on Yuri after his mother's death in her native village in Serbia, a miserable place to which she had retreated as soon as she realized she was going to die.

Years later Yuri tried to find the little village and what was left of that family; but he could not retrace that journey, northward through Italy and into Serbia. His memory of those traveling days had been maimed by suffering--the knowledge that his mother was in great pain, and laboring for every breath, that he was in a strange land, and that he might soon be alone.

Why had he stayed with the gypsies for so long? Why had he been such a good little pickpocket, dancing and clambering around the tourists, and snatching the wallets from them, as he'd been taught to do? What was wrong in his head that he did that?

The question would probably torment him till the day he died. Of course they had beaten him, starved him, taunted and threatened him, caught him twice when he'd tried to run away, and finally convinced him they would kill him if he tried again. They had also been tender at times, and persuasive, full of promises--all that was true too.

But at nine years old, Yuri should have known better. That's what he figured. His mother, even in childhood, would not have been such a fool. No pimp had ever enslaved Yuri's mother. No man had ever intimidated her, though she had fallen in love now and then...at least for a little while.

As for Yur

i's father, Yuri never knew that man, but he knew of him--an American from Los Angeles, and rich. Before Yuri and his mother had left Rome on that last journey together, she had hidden in a safe-deposit box the passport of Yuri's father, along with some money, some photographs and a fine Japanese watch. That was all they had left of Yuri's father, who had died when Yuri was only two.

Yuri was ten before he managed to reclaim those old treasures.

The gypsies had had him stealing in Paris for months, and then in Venice, and in Florence, and only as winter came on had they gone to Rome.

When he beheld the Eternal City, the city he had known with his mother, Yuri seized his opportunity. He knew where to go. In the middle of a Sunday morning, while the gypsy thieves worked the crowds of Vatican Square, he made his bid for freedom, diving right into a taxi with a wallet of newly stolen money, and soon was making his way through the crowded tourist cafes of the Via Veneto, looking for rich company as his mother had always so gracefully done.

It was no mystery to Yuri that there were men who preferred little boys to women. And he had learnt much from example, having watched his mother often through the keyhole or the crack in the door. It was quite obvious to him that to be an initiator can be easier than to be passive; and that if intimacy with strangers occurs in an atmosphere of graciousness, it is not so hard to bear.

Another advantage perhaps was that he was by nature as affectionate as his mother, and now he would call upon that, for he needed it, and it had always worked so well for her.

He was lean from the miserable diet allowed him by his captors, but his teeth were very straight and he had managed to keep them very white. That his voice was beautiful he had no doubt. Practicing his smile before the mirror of a public lavatory, he then struck out to try it upon the companions of his choice.