"Lee Killough - Blood Walk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Killough Lee)

BloodWalk

Original story titles:
Blood Hunt
&
Bloodlinks


by
Lee Killough

1

Where do they begin, the roads that lead a man to hell?

. . . With a ritual . . .

Lien Takananda sits at the kitchen table wearing her bathrobe, her short
helmet of gray-touched black hair still rumpled from sleep. She holds three
Chinese coins in her hand and concentrates, only subconsciously aware of her
husband, Harry, in the bathroom, singing a lascivious parody of a saccharine
popular song as he shaves. Almond eyes on the copy of I Ching before her, she
asks the same question of the sage that she has asked every morning for over
fifteen years, since Harry joined the San Francisco police: "Will my husband
be safe today?" And she throws the coins.
The hexagram produced by the six throws is number 10, Treading. Treading
upon the tail of the tiger the text reads. It does not bite the man. Success.
She sighs in relief, then smiles, listening to Harry sing. After a minute,
she gathers the coins again, and as she has done for most of the past year,
asks on behalf of Harry's partner, "Will Garreth Mikaelian be safe today?"
This time the coins produce hexagram number 36, Darkening of the Light,
with two moving lines. She bites her lip. The text of both the hexagram and
the individual lines is cautionary. However, the moving lines produce a second
hexagram, 46, Pushing Upward, which reads: Pushing upward has supreme success.
One must see the great man. Fear not.
She reads the interpretation of the text just to be certain of its meaning.
Reassured, Lien Takananda rewraps the coins and book in black silk and returns
them to their shelf, then begins preparing Harry's breakfast.

. . . with nagging grief. . .

Garreth Mikaelian still feels the void in his life and in the apartment
around him. Through the open bathroom door he can see the most visible
evidence: the bed, empty, slightly depressed on one side but otherwise neat.
Marti's sprawling, twisting sleep used to turn their nights into a wrestle for
blankets that left the bed in a tangled knot every morning.
He looks away quickly and concentrates on his reflection in the mirror. A
square face with sandy hair and smoky gray eyes looks back at him. Burly, he
fills the mirror . . . a bit more so than he would like, admittedly, but the
width does give the illusion of a big man, larger than his actual five foot