City of Night

with him.”
    “Who would have thought a psycho killer like the Surgeon would turn out to be a cop,” Winona marveled. “What’s the world coming to?”
    “When will Jack do a prelim autopsy?” Carson asked.
    “It’s done.” Winona tapped the file of handwritten notes beside her computer. “I’m typing it now.”
    This stunned Carson. Like her and Michael, Jack Rogers knew that something extraordinary was happening in New Orleans and that some of its citizens were something more than human.
    He had done an autopsy on a guy who had two hearts, and several other “improvements.”
    Carson and Michael had asked him to embargo his report until they could grasp the situation they faced—and within hours, much to Jack’s dismay, the cadaver and all records of the autopsy had vanished.
    Now he was supposed to be taking great security measures with the body of Jonathan Harker, who was another of Victor’s New Race. Carson could not comprehend why he would reveal Harker’s inhuman nature to Winona.
    Less comprehensible still was Winona’s current calm, her easy smile. If she was typing a report of an autopsy on a monster, she seemed oblivious of it.
    His bewilderment matching Carson’s Michael asked, “Have you just started?”
    “No,” Winona said, “I’m almost finished.”
    “And?”
    “And what?”
    Carson and Michael exchanged a glance. She said, “We need to see Jack.”
    “He’s in Autopsy Room Number Two,” Winona said. “They’re getting ready to open up a retiree whose wife seems to have fed him some bad crawfish gumbo.”
    Carson said, “She must be devastated.”
    Winona shook her head. “She’s under arrest. At the hospital, when they told her that he died, she couldn’t stop laughing.”
     
     
     

Chapter 6
     
    Deucalion rarely needed sleep. Although he had spent periods of his long life in monasteries and in meditation, though he knew the value of stillness, his most natural state seemed to be the restless circling-seeking of a shark.
    He had been in all but constant motion since rescuing the girl from the alley in Algiers. His rage had passed, but his restlessness had not.
    Into the vacuum left by the dissipation of anger came a new wariness. This was not to any degree fearful in nature, more of a disquietude arising from a sense of having overlooked something of great significance.
    Intuition whispered urgently, but for the moment its voice was a wordless susurration, which raised his hackles but failed to enlighten him.
    With dawn, he had returned to the Luxe Theater. The movie house recently had been willed to him by an old friend from his years in a carnival freakshow.
    This inheritance—and the discovery that Victor, his maker, was not two hundred years dead, but alive—had brought him from Tibet to Louisiana.
    He had often felt that destiny was working in his life. These events in New Orleans seemed to be hard proof.
    An Art Deco palace erected in the 19 2 0s, now a revival house, the Luxe was in decline. It opened its doors only three nights a week.
    His apartment in the theater was humble. Anything larger than a monk’s cell, however, seemed extravagant to him, in spite of his size.
    As he roamed the deserted corridors of the old building, the auditorium, the mezzanine, the balcony, the lobby, his thoughts did not just race but ricocheted like pinballs.
    In his restlessness, he struggled to imagine a way to reach Victor Helios, alias Frankenstein. And destroy him.
    Like the members of the New Race that Victor had brought forth in this city, Deucalion had been created with a built-in proscription against deicide. He could not kill his maker.
    Two centuries ago, he had raised a hand against Victor—and had nearly perished when he had found himself unable to deliver the blow. Half of his face, the half disguised by a tattoo, had been broken by his master.
    Deucalion’s other wounds always healed in minutes, perhaps not because Victor had in those days been capable of designing such resilience into him, perhaps instead because this immortality had come to him on the lightning, along with other gifts. The one wound that had not healed with perfect restoration of flesh and bone had been the one that his maker had inflicted.
    Victor thought his first-made was long dead, as Deucalion had assumed that his maker had died in the eighteenth century. If he revealed himself to Victor, Deucalion would be at once struck down again—and this time, he might not