The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [111]
If he thought about it, nearly all of Mason’s significant relationships had been with other men. He’d taken lives and he’d saved them, too. More of the latter, he hoped, than the former. He had hated his enemies and he had sincerely loved his comrades. And he had shared his own life most intensely when its very survival had depended on their loyalty and their courage, and their coolness under fire, with his brothers in arms.
Except for his sister. She was the exception to his soldierly rule. He loved his sister very much. He loved her more than he loved anyone. He loved her innocence and possibilities and the incandescent brightness of her nature. She was a one-off, was Sarah. When they made her, they broke the mould. He knew that a big part of his love for her was selfish, because the thought of facing the world without a blood relative left living was a terrifying one. It meant familial destruction, stark isolation. It gave that dark word, loneliness, the depth of an abyss. His mates loved him, if they loved him, through his deeds and wisecracks. Sarah just loved him. And he loved her. And it wasn’t entirely a selfish love. It couldn’t be. Because Nick Mason knew that he would give his life protecting hers.
Sell, he thought, rather than give. Sell was by far the more accurate term. And not cheaply, either. It had started to snow again and he looked upward and blinked against the heavy flakes drifting down against vaunting walls. Nick Mason would never have given his life. That was alien to his nature. But he would sell it for his sister’s sake. And he knew that whoever tried to take it would be obliged to pay a painfully heavy price.
He sighed. It was a nice thought to go back in on, that, after the satisfaction of his fictional cigarette. It sounded just the right note of defiant machismo Paul Seaton would have expected from him. He suspected that Seaton didn’t rate him, thought him little better than a boorish stereotype. But that was okay. He didn’t really rate Seaton, not in a fight, he didn’t. Seaton’s bottle had gone a long time ago. It wasn’t his fault, but it was a fact, nevertheless. Seaton was shot. They were going to have to go to the Fischer house and confront the thing that held the three surviving girls in thrall. Theirs was a desperate enterprise, compelled by need but with scant chance of success. Mason could feel in the reluctant recesses of his soul that this was going to be much more dangerous than his encounter in Africa had been. And he knew in his soul that he had only been the victor then by a breath.
What worried him more than the frailty of his ally, though, was the Havana-loving enigma, Malcolm Covey. Covey possessed an oily omnipresence. He was slippery and clever. And the vague unexplained ambiguity of him was disconcerting. Mason had started to feel a faint menace at the mention of his name. He would have to ask the priest about Covey. Seaton could be appallingly stupid, for someone reasonably bright. But there were no flies on Monsignor Lascalles. Not yet, there weren’t. He turned a circle on the balls of his feet, taking in the heights of gloomy stone and the pale void of falling crystals above them. He pulled in a breath that stiffened his lungs with cold, and followed his own fading footprints back inside.
He met with silence on his return. But it was a companionable silence, there in the library. He knew that Seaton and the priest knew that he had not escaped its enclosure for a cigarette. But he knew equally that in the scheme of things, his small deception mattered to neither of them.
‘Something else happened, didn