As we began our slip-and-slide descent of the mud-slick mountain, legs beating back storm-bowed shrubs and flattened wildflowers, I glanced over my shoulder. Paused a moment, struck by the tableau on the slope behind us.
He had called himself a bene ha’elohi, the first of the celestial Sons of God. His eyes, as he looked back at me, were no longer brilliant, but dim in the rain beneath lashless lids. He didn’t move. Just stood there, alone, in all his ruined flesh.
Yet for some reason I could not explain, it wasn’t Shemyazaz I saw beneath the lowering sky, but Blade Runner’s dying replicant:
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It stopped raining as we reached the halfway point between the high mountain slope and the RV park, but the sun remained no more than a faint watery smear behind still-dark clouds. Trees and vegetation still dropped residual rain. My clothes and Remi’s were sopping, though at least my socked feet were dry within my biker boots; Mary Jane Kelly, other than her shirt beneath an unzipped rain jacket, was dry.
At the motorhome we found Lily waiting for us. She had put down a folded rug and sat atop it within the doorway, green shawl wrapped around her shoulders. The woven fabric hid bare arms and all their embellishment of Celtic silver and brilliant inks.
A few children called through the trees, but the excited conversations on the heels of the earthquake had died away. I heard quiet music playing and a recognizable twang in the vocals; did no one in this state listen to anything other than country music?
Lily examined us benignly as we approached. First me, quickly dismissed; then Remi, on whom she lingered, looking at the ripped sleeve. And lastly Mary Jane Kelly, who returned the cool gaze with one of her own, weighing Lily as she herself was weighed. Away from Shemyazaz, with a gun on board again, her shock had dissipated, replaced by professionalism.
A brief smile twitched a corner of Lily’s mouth and then she rose, resettling the shawl. “Whiskey,” she announced, then disappeared into the RV.
Remi stepped aside, made a gentlemanly gesture for the ranger to go up before either of us. He was a rather courtly man when it came to women, I’d discovered. He gave her room to climb the steps, waited for me to go up next. I did, with Remi right behind.
Lily had poured whiskey into short tumblers and handed them out to us. It was a little early to drink—no longer dawn, but neither was it five in the evening. Remi hesitated. Mary Jane Kelly apparently did not wish to be thought rude and accepted the glass, but did not drink. She just held it.
Lily smiled at me, green eyes bright. “Medicinal purposes. Or perhaps you might call it antifreeze, to warm up the bones. You’re all of you looking like drowned rabbits. And rats.”
She waited, one brow lifted. I wasn’t entirely certain of ancient Irish customs, but in all the folklore I’d read it was a grave insult to decline food and drink when offered.
Lily’s smile broadened. “I’m not Hades, now, am I, tricking you into eating pomegranate seeds and keeping you for four months out of the year?”
“Or the serpent in the Garden of Eden?” Remi put in. “Some believe it wasn’t an apple at all, but more likely pomegranate—or even grapes. No one knows for certain. Forbidden fruit regardless.”
Mary Jane Kelly was taken aback. “You’re saying that’s what the serpent offered Adam and Eve? Not an apple?”
“He’s the right of it, our cowboy,” Lily said. “I wasn’t there to know for a certainty, but there are differing texts.” She raised her own tumbler. “A swallow, no more. Do me honor. Sláinte.”
I found it odd, cognitive dissonance in a way, for an ancient pagan Irish goddess to speak of the Christian Garden of Eden. Kelly just seemed perplexed by the entire topic. I drank. Remi also, even as Lily did. The ranger shrugged surrender after a moment, but barely tasted the whiskey.
“There, now. That’s something. ’Twill do.” Lily set down her tumbler, retrieved Kelly’s and placed it into the sink; apparently the one sip was enough for the Morrigan. “Shed your rain suit . . . and that wet shirt. I have dry tops that will fit you.”
“Oh, I can go on to the station, change there,” Kelly said. “I’m a park ranger—I’ve got fresh clothes there. But thank you for the offer.”
“And in the meantime you are dripping all over my RV,” Lily pointed out. “Go on, then. There are clothes in the bedroom. Take what you like. You’ll be here a while.”
“Actually—”
Lily didn’t let her finish. “They’ve things to tell you, these boyos. And I’m telling you to listen.”
Kelly stared right back at Lily for a long moment, then looked at Remi, at me. I thought she was on the verge of telling us all off. “And you can explain what that thing was, up there on the mountain?”
“We can,” I said.
Remi said, “We will.”
“You’ll be far more comfortable in dry clothing,” Lily said. “I’d offer the boyos clothing as well, but I’ve none that will fit. They’ll have to make do with towels. Go on, then. The bedroom’s through there.” She gestured to a closed door leading into one of the RV slide-out rooms. “You can return the shirt tomorrow. And when you’re dressed, come on through the kitchen to the garage. That’s where we’ll be. I have a man’s arm to see to.”
Mary Jane Kelly seemed on the verge of protesting more pointedly, as she evaluated each of us, but instead she disappeared into the bedroom, and Lily gestured for us to follow her into the garage at the back of the RV, then tossed us two thick bath towels each. We rubbed down clothing, scrubbed at hair. Still wet, but damp, now rather than dripping.
Lily stood with hands on hips. “Will you tell her all of it, then?”
“I think we’d better,” I replied. “She’s in the mix, now.”
The Morrigan nodded, then pulled down the wall-mounted bed. She had Remi sit on it, then set up a stainless steel table on casters, rolled it over in front of him. She opened a package of blue towels marked STERILE, spread one on the steel tabletop and pointed at it.
Remi took the hint. As Lily poked around in a different cabinet and slapped a notebook and a pen on the countertop, Remi unsnapped his sleeve, rolled it back. The long laceration in his forearm came into view. I couldn’t help my grimace and the hiss of indrawn breath, empathizing with the pain.
“Not so deep,” Remi remarked. “You should see the puncture scar I have from one of the steers on the ranch, back when I was full of myself and actin’ foolish. Right in my butt.”
“Pass,” I said dryly.
The cowboy flashed the quick grin that set creases into the tanned flesh beside his eyes. “That’s what everyone else said, too.”
“It’s wanting stitches,” Lily announced, and began setting out supplies appropriate to the task.
Blood doesn’t make me squeamish and neither do stitches—or, well, such things didn’t used to. And I’d had sutures sewn into an eyebrow not so long before that hadn’t bothered me at all. But I was having a visceral response to Remi’s wound, now that it was bared. Part of me, apparently recalling the whole alpha thing of birth order, wanted to take the pain for myself. This primogenitura was beginning to annoy the hell out of me. I hoped it would settle some as Remi and I grew accustomed to working together.
I turned my back on the first aid procedure and started hunting through cabinets and drawers, looking not for medical supplies but for supplies for the task of cleaning a gun. Found what I needed, pulled over a stool, and onto the spread chamois I unloaded the cylinder, rolled the bullets apart, removed the grips and went to work with the CLP spray and swabs, soft cloth.
Into the midst of stitches and gun-cleaning our park ranger came, wearing her own dry jeans and a dark red borrowed t-shirt that bore in white, Celtic-style font: ACTING THE MAGGOT. She’d undone her wet braid and loose hair hung to her hips, medium
brown with that interesting tawny-gold stripe through the midst of it, starting at the hairline over her right eyebrow. Maybe dyed; people were doing all sorts of crazy things with hair dye these days.
Without the rain suit disguising her figure, it was easy to note she was sturdy through the shoulders and thighs, with defined muscles in her forearms. Athlete, not model. She carried wet shirt and rain suit folded up, and her daypack was hooked over one shoulder.
On the threshold she paused, blinked blue eyes slow as her brows shot up. I guess it’s not every day that you walk into what is a cross between armory and field hospital when the RV park is otherwise full of retirees and a few restless grandkids.
“Chair over there,” Lily said absently, mind on suturing.
The ranger glanced around, found the folded camp chair, set aside rain suit and shirt and daypack, sat down expectantly. The huge Irish wolfhound came in as well, collapsed and sprawled with a whuff of sound just inside the door between garage and hallway.
“Have you heard of these?” Lily’s tone was light. She didn’t so much as glance at the ranger. “Black dog. Banshee. Basilisk. Bogle. Cockatrice.” Lily raised bright eyes and looked at me. “Your turn, Gabe.”
Apparently we were going down the alphabet, though Lily had left some names out. I’d cleaned, reassembled the .357, polished the steel, the rounds, set it aside. I had an idea where we were going with this. “Elf. Gnome. Gorgon. Golem—” I turned my head, gazed at Mary Jane Kelly, “—and no, I don’t mean Tolkien’s Gollum.”
Kelly’s expectance had slowly transformed into doubt verging on irritation. She looked from Lily to me, wry hook in the line of her mouth. “Let me guess. I’m a park ranger, so I’m supposed to tell ghost stories around the campfire.”
“Reminds me.” Remi shot a glance at me across the garage. “La Llorona.” He gave it a Spanish accent with the double L pronounced as a Y.
“Hobgoblin,” Lily added. “Minotaur. And as I’m Irish, I’ll not leave out leprechauns, dullahans, or pookas.”
“Ghosts and goblins,” I said.
Mary Jane Kelly was clearly torn between utter disbelief, and the memory of what—of whom—she’d seen on the mountain.
“Suspend your disbelief.” I’d said it once on the mountain. This time I put more emphasis into it. “You saw what you saw, up there. The broken, burned, nightmare of a man. Well—he’s not actually a man.”
Remi’s tone was quiet. “He’s an angel, Ms. Kelly.”
She drew back in the chair, a visible, visceral denial.
I caught Lily’s eye. She was unabashedly amused. Then I looked back at Mary Jane Kelly. “Whiskey?” I asked. “Trust me, it goes down better with alcohol.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Kelly didn’t want whiskey. She didn’t want anything but the truth. And when we gave it to her, she didn’t believe any of it.
I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t blame her even when I dug into the drawers and cabinets and started pulling items out that a matter of days before I’d believed to be utterly mundane. Guns, knives, bullets, silver shot, powdered iron rounds, stakes, old stained ritual bowls crafted of various woods and metals, sachets of herbs and powders, charms, candles, strung beads, crystals, feathers, small bones, stones, tiny bottles, and an additional infinite array of things I had absolutely no clue how to identify.
Then the sorcerer’s wand, sort of: a twisted, carved, polished length of wood as long as my forearm, bisected by silver through the middle with a cross carved into the butt. I picked up and spun it through my fingers as I leaned one hip and shoulder against the cabinetry.
“This?” I said. “This is for vampires.”
Mary Jane Kelly, who had moved out of disbelief and denial into annoyance, scowled at me.
“I know,” I told her. The stake felt oddly at home in my hand as I flipped it through my fingers. “I do know. A few days ago Remi and I felt as you do: that we were being sold a crock of shit. It’s impossible; it’s not real; it’s all just figments of imagination; it makes no sense; it’s just stories, folklore, made up pantheons of differing deities.”
Remi’s voice was quiet. “All of it’s true.”
“All of what is true?”
“Do you know your Irish mythology?” Lily asked.
To that apparent non sequitur, she said, “Not particularly.” Definitely not a happy camper, by tone or expression.
Lily clucked her tongue in mock disappointment. “And you with the surname of Kelly!”
The ranger rolled her eyes. “Listen, my dad hauled us off to Dublin one year for St. Patrick’s Day, just so we could stand along a street and watch a parade where the pipe bands were mostly from the United States, not Ireland! But what do they say?—everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day?” She shrugged. “Kowalski, Kelly—it doesn’t matter. So no, I don’t really know the ins and outs of Irish mythology.”
From more distant parts of the big RV I heard the crow. There was no way of describing the noise it made as anything other than an outraged protest. And the wolfhound rose, took a few steps, sat down immediately in front of the ranger and fixed her with a very hard stare.
“That’s Macha,” Lily said. “You’ve insulted her. The racket you’re hearing is from Nemain, the crow. But you don’t know my sisters, do you? Or who the Morrigan is.”
“It took an angel,” I said, “to convince us.” My back-and-forth gesture with the stake encompassed Remi and I. “Hard to deny a pair of wings growing out of a man’s back. Plus we took a trip to the aftermath of the battle between Boudicca and the Romans in . . . AD 60 or 61. That, courtesy of the Morrigan herself.” I tipped my head toward Lily. “It’s real. It is real. Ragnarok, Armageddon, End of Days, Judgment Day, Apocalypse. Hell, even R.E.M. nailed it with their song, ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It.’”
She shook her head. Shook it harder in abject denial. “I’m not a religious person. What in the world does any of this have to do with me?”
“Murder,” Remi said. “That’s what it has to do with you. Gabe and I just want to keep you alive, is all.”
“I’m a target?” Oh, she was frustrated. And angry. And fear was creeping back. “Why the hell would I be a target for anything, let alone murder?”
“Because of your name,” I told her.
“My name?”
Abruptly the wolfhound stood, stared hard at the side of the RV. Even amidst the wiry hair I could see hackles rising. The crow screeched even as the wolfhound growled, and then we heard a knock at the RV’s exterior door by the kitchen. Lily got up swiftly, followed the dog out of the garage, back through the kitchen.
Remi and I exchanged a glance. He still sat on the bed Lily had pulled down from the wall, and he leaned back against it, injured arm in its bright blue wrapping cradled in one hand.
“Well?” Kelly said. “What about my name?”
Lily came back and broke up the discussion. “It was but a child,” she said, “doing a grownup’s bidding.” In her hand was a manilla envelope. “Gabriel Jeremiah Harlan and Remiel Isaiah McCue.” She flashed the envelope. The writing was in black felt marker.
I dropped the F-bomb even as I tossed the stake onto the counter. Remi thumped his head against the garage sidewall and muttered under his breath.
“Here.” Lily held the envelope out to Kelly. “A little proof, perhaps.”
“Wait.” I moved to reach for the envelope. “I don’t think she needs to see that.”
Lily’s red brows rose. “After all those women with the same names were murdered, and she may well be next? What are you protecting her against?”
Kelly ignored us and tore open the envelope, pulled out a photograph. I screwed up my face, waiting for a reaction to human butchery. Remi didn’t look any happier.
She read the writing on the back first, frowned in perplexity, then turned it over. Col
or ran out of her face, leaving even her lips pale.
I shook my head at Lily, letting my expression tell her I was pissed. The Goddess of Battles was not impressed.
Kelly’s hand shook as she held out the photograph to me. I took it, saw not the eviscerated body I’d feared, but the image of Mary Jane Kelly in her Park Service uniform wearing the iconic hat synonymous with Smokey the Bear. She stood laughing amidst a group of kids, expression wide open and thoroughly engaged.
Three words, no more than that, written on the back:
We got next.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
From Kelly, it was less a voice than a breath. “So, I have a stalker.”
I took the few steps necessary to hand Remi the photo. He examined it, then set it on the steel surgical table and looked at Kelly. “‘What’s in a name?’” he quoted. “And that’s it. The name. Nothing more. Mary Ann Nichols. Annie Chapman. Elizabeth Stride. Catherine Eddowes.”
Kelly’s face was blank. “I don’t know those people.”
“In the 1880s, in London, there was a series of grisly murders,” Remi explained. “Five victims. All women. They think probably there were more than five, but Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes are official. The fifth was Mary Jane Kelly.”
Her eyes were fixed on something I couldn’t see. Then she dropped an F-bomb.
I returned to the stool I’d perched myself on while cleaning the gun. I decided to leave out the bit concerning the kidney in our freezer. “Remi and I have been sent photographs of four murdered women with names on the back. All of them match the names of the Ripper’s victims. So, we started looking for a Mary Jane Kelly to see if we could get to her before he did.”
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