The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,47

breasts, and gave him a mocking smile, daring him to lay a hand on her with the men within call.

“I’m talking about three o’clock in the morning the day before yesterday,” Rhion said quietly. “At Schloss Torweg, after you got done helping Poincelles raise his—ah—ritual energies. As the closest thing this country has to a professional wizard, when someone tries to kill me I can usually figure out who it is.” He pulled the knife from his pocket and slid it across the table toward her.

She laughed again, shaking back her hair. “Christ Jesus, a wizard! What’d you do, cut the cards and get a number that added up to the Gematria of my name? Going to turn in your Ouija board notes as evidence to the local Gauleiter? You’d better find your keeper and head on back to the Schjoss, or you will get a lesson in manners.” With a cocky flip of her skirt she turned to go.

“Wait a minute! Don’t call the Etiquette Squad!”

She turned back, irresolute, and he talked fast.

“If I’m Gestapo all I have to do is pull an i.d. and it’s you they’ll be taking out of here, not me. If I’m not...” She came back like a feral cat, ready to scratch or flee. He lowered his voice again. “If I’m not you don’t have anything to lose listening to me, do you? What have you been looking for up at the Schloss?”

Her dark eyes shifted. The soft mouth flexed a little, and she brushed aside a sticky tendril of hair from her cheek. “Drugs,” she said quietly. “Cocaine—Baldur keeps a stash of it under a floorboard in the corner of the workroom upstairs.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Why risk being shot for spying over something you can get out of Poincelles in trade for a couple of trips up to his temple? And you know as well as I do that in this country they make arrests on a lot thinner evidence than party tricks and numerology.”

Slowly, still tense and unwilling, she pulled out a chair and sat across from him, dropping her cigarette and crushing it out beneath one high red heel.

“Are you working for the old man? You’ve been searching the place—what are you looking for?” He leaned across to her. “I have to know.” And when she didn’t answer, only studied him with those wary black eyes, he added, “I haven’t told von Rath. I can’t—I couldn’t let him know I’d been out of the compound that night. I’m more or less a prisoner there myself. The old man is a wizard, isn’t he?”

She picked up the knife where he had left it on the table, turning its blunt brownish length over in her hands. The red paint on her nails was chipped and chewed, the nails themselves bitten off short. “Yes,” she said, after a long time. “He’s my father.”

“Can you take me to him?”

Her voice was vicious. “It’s word of him I’m looking for.” She fumbled another cigarette from her dress pocket and flicked the wheel on a brass lighter made from a rifle bullet, but her fingers were trembling. Rhion, though he hated cigarette smoke, reached to steady the flame for her, but she jerked her hands away with a vitriol glare that made him remember how the knife had reeked with her loathing of men.

The mild narcotic of the nicotine seemed to steady her. “I’ve seen people do psychometry,” she said after a moment. “One of the girls in my dorm at college used to do it at parties, but she had to be two drinks drunk...”

“College?”

Under the sweaty points of her red hair her glance was scornful. “You think I could get into every SS barracks between here and the Swiss border by waving my degree in chemistry, pal?”

“Ahh—no.”

She smoked in silence, her lipstick leaving lurid stains on the white paper of the cigarette, her eyes avoiding his. As she smoked she swallowed back her rage, a little at a time, like a bile of nausea. “I heard the SS had an Occult Bureau that was holding people like him in special custody. Then I found out about your place...” She raised her eyes to his, and in them he saw how she hated him for having the power to tell her what he knew. “You say those came from Kegenwald. Could you tell me if he... if he’s still alive?”

In spite of his black eye and the wound on his arm that smarted every time