Path of the Tiger, стр. 24
Through his mind’s eye raced images of thousands of bodies he had known intimately over the years; mortal, fragile bodies. Bodies like the one in his shower: blooming with the fleeting glow of youth and fresh but ephemeral vitality. Bodies covered with temporarily taut skin, alive for a briefly glorious spurt of time with the fiery blood of vivacity, only on the cusp of and not yet caught in the inwardly spiralling gyre that would take them to the ruin of decrepitude and eventual death.
Lost in a cine-reel of fading and time-bleached mental images, some recalled as clear as day, others as blurred smudges of colour and shadow, William glanced down at his own hands. Thanks to the near-immortal blood circulating through his veins, his own skin remained smooth and firm after countless decades of life, while all the bodies of those he had loved and lusted after had long since passed into dust. Sadness plunged a jagged lance through his throat, and despair rose with all the majesty of a dust storm billowing across the Sahara. William fought back tears and bit hard on his knuckles, trying to force himself back into the present.
The rusty prison cell present.
Loneliness.
Fear.
Regret.
Hopelessness.
Falling back into the comforting plushness of an easy chair, he gripped his head in his hands, trying to squeeze the negative thoughts out, as if his skull were a lemon ripe with these sour, bitter juices. He had still not managed to make sense of it all, had still not found the source of this wondrous and terrible magic that both allowed him to assume the form of a wild animal and simultaneously granted him exemption from the Reaper’s dual scythes of time and disease. He had come close to finding out once, during that brief golden age in which he had been a student under the greatest teachers his kind had known, and indeed all of humankind would have known … until this, like all the good things he had ever had, had been ripped away from him.
While William was lost in his thoughts and musings, the young woman stepped out of the shower, dried herself off, and emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel. Her eyes widened with fright as she caught sight of the revolver resting on his lap, glinting its deathly promise in the golden blades of morning sunlight that stabbed through the gaps in the heavy curtains.
‘Jesus!’ she exclaimed. ‘Like, what the hell are you doing with that thing!?’
‘Calm down lass,’ William said as he placed the gun on a nearby desk. ‘I just had a bad dream, that’s all.’
‘And what’s with all those cuts all over you?’ she gasped. ‘Shit, I didn’t see those last night! Dude, like, what did you say your job was?’
William chuckled.
‘The cuts are from a recent motorcycle spill. And I’m just a travelling professor, a historian.’
‘A bike wreck? Holy shit, shouldn’t you like, be in hospital or something? And you’re like, a professor? So that’s why you’ve got all this really old stuff in here … You kinda, uh, look a bit young to, like, you know, be a professor though.’
William analysed the young woman’s expression as she ran her eyes over the massive collection of antiques that hung on the walls and adorned his shelves. Some part of her was vaguely awestruck, but for the most part it was obvious that she could not comprehend either the monetary value or the artistic merit of the vast assemblage of ornaments, relics and artworks.
‘I’m a little older than I look,’ he remarked wryly.
The woman grinned and swept her artificially straightened, coffee-brown hair from her face.
‘Well anyway, Mr Mystery Professor, I have to, like, get going. Last night was fun … maybe I’ll see you again sometime.’
‘Maybe,’ William murmured. He got up, pulled on his jeans and wandered off to the kitchen to brew some coffee, and to give her some privacy so that she could get dressed. When he returned to the large loft area with two steaming mugs of coffee, though, the girl had already left.
Just as he set the mugs down, an unfamiliar phone started to ring. It had to be Hernández’s phone, so he hurried over to the bookshelf where he had hidden it behind an antique, gold-tinted History of the Ancient World, and waited for the ringing to stop. He perused the device and found that all the call and message records, as well as all the contacts, had been erased the previous night; Hernández must have known that there had been a chance that he might not survive his assassination mission. The fact, though, that someone had tried to call him meant that his superiors were still unaware of the fate that had befallen him the night before … and now William had a lead.
For decades the Ice Bear and his associates had evaded him, moving around the globe and staying behind Huntsman cover as the war effort against the Rebels had been intensified. Their last encounter, decades past, had been an almost mutually fatal affair, but that had not deterred William in his quest for vengeance. This phone call was the closest he had come to picking up a solid lead in quite some time, and he had a strong suspicion that this very caller may well have been Sigurd, the Ice Bear himself. Little mattered to William anymore; not The War, not the plight of the rest of the world, not even his own fate,