6 Under The Final Moon

by Hannah Jayne

  I thought of the time Nina dressed me in a black evening gown and cashmere gloves when I asked her for burglar wear and decided to stay quiet. I brushed a lavender streak across my thumbnail. “So you had a previous incarnation as a paranormal investigator.”

  “Do you want to hear this story or not?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. Does it have a point?”

  Nina’s nostrils flared and her voice went tight. “Six lovely girls, throats torn clean out, left all over town. In the city’s best date spots as a matter of fact. It was tragic and the crime scene was horrific. Scattered remains, very little blood . . .”

  Despite my stomach threatening escape, my interest was piqued. “Vampire?”

  “Indeed. A very young one. An attractive, sweet-faced boy.”

  “I really don’t see what this has to do with anything. Oliver is clearly not a vampire.”

  “And you wouldn’t think that Vlad was the type of boy to rip out the throats of six teenage girls.”

  “What?” My stomach was truly starting to revolt, and I swigged a tiny sip of my half-flat Fresca, hoping what remained of the carbonation would settle it. “Vlad did that?”

  “Yeah. I did what?”

  Vlad stepped out of Nina’s room looking red-eyed and disheveled as though he had just woken up. Which was weird because vampires never slept.

  Nina wrinkled her nose. “What were you doing in my closet? If you say something disgusting I’m going rip your head off.”

  Vlad let out a sound like a rapidly deflating balloon and held out his cell phone. “I was texting Kale. Don’t be so gross. Why were you talking about me?”

  “I was telling Sophie that you don’t look like a rabid killer, but, well, you kind of are.”

  Vlad’s eyes went wide and there was—shame?—in them. “That was a long time ago, Sophie. And God, Nina, you said you wouldn’t tell! I was just a kid!”

  “Sophie’s family, Vlad. And I was just using your criminally bad behavior to illustrate a point.”

  “Which is?” I asked, still caught.

  “That even someone who looks as soft and dough-like like our little Vladykins here, can make a few seriously bad decisions.”

  “I didn’t know my own strength yet.”

  “He is an eight-year-old boy, Nina!”

  “I was sixteen.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Not you, Vlad. Oliver. This kid. This case tonight. This kid killed his parents.”

  “Meh.” Vlad shrugged.

  “I’m so glad you two can be so cavalier about human life, but the rest of us can’t. I have one life. And I consider it pretty precious. As do most of the other breathers I know. That’s why murder is a serious crime and it’s not something routinely committed by little boys who still sleep with teddy bears under sailboat sheets!”

  “Okay, okay.” Nina patted the air and pulled me to sit next to her. “I can see this is obviously bothering you a lot. What can we do?”

  I looked from Nina to Vlad, pausing on the sweet-faced little death machine who was currently kicking off his shoes, unceremoniously dropping them—and a limp pair of socks—in a pile in the center of the living room. He looked so harmless, so unassuming—so annoyingly regular, leaving messes and being completely oblivious to the fact there was a hamper thirty feet away.

  “Did you really do what Nina said, Vlad?”

  Vlad suddenly focused very hard on balling up his socks and using them to swish an arc across the toes of his black boots. Just when I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, his head bobbed slightly, almost imperceptibly, and his broad shoulders seemed to sag.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  Nina leaned close to me, resting her head on the pillow between us. “It’s not always easy . . . when we start. That was before UDA was established. Part of why it was established.”

  The pitiful look on Vlad’s face was fleeting, and in a half second, his expression was back to vast indifference.

  “But Oliver is just a child,” I said softly. “He’s not—he’s just a kid. A little kid.”

  “‘The lion shall lay with the lamb and a little child shall lead them,’” Vlad said.

  “What?”

  “Apocalypse. Armageddon. End of times. ‘The lion shall lay with the lamb and a little child shall lead them.’ Isn’t that in the Bible?”

  A leaden rock sat in my gut and fear pricked the back of my neck. I recognized the phrase—vaguely—but hearing it come out of Vlad’s mouth made it all the more chilling. My lip started to tremble. “Wh-what are you saying?”

  “This kid set fire to his parents. And there have been other signs, everywhere.”

  “Like what?” Nina spat.

  “Earthquake?”

  Nina snorted. “If it were Armageddon every time an earthquake hit the Bay Area, we would have been Satan’s minions years ago.”

  I glanced at Nina. Vlad glanced at Nina.

  “You know what I mean!”

  I gulped. “Yesterday? The earthquake?”

  “But it’s not like we’re living in Iowa. We’re living in San Francisco. We’re filthy with quakes. So the earth shook a little. Any reports of brimstone vapors of the fires of Hell coming up through the Union Square? No. You’ve got nothing”

  “We’ve got the three-headed dog,” Vlad said. “You said it yourself: he’s the guardian of the gates of Hell.”

  I surreptitiously pulled the collar of my shirt over my bandage. “Who I may or may not have seen. And there are supposed to be horsemen.” I wracked my brain for every other Apocalypse-type reference I had ever heard in my brief stint in Bible school. “And fish boiled in blood and—and—stones falling from the sky.”

  Nina grimaced. “And we’re supposed to be the evil ones?”

  Vlad remained uncharacteristically silent, and goose bumps shot up along my spine, then radiated outward until they were covering every inch of me. I shivered and pulled my hands into my sweatshirt. “Nothing to say to that?”

  Vlad ignored me and went back to typing on his computer. I was about to tell him that it was rude, even for him, to go tech in the middle of a conversation, but he turned the screen to face me and sat back in his chair, not even attempting to hide the enormously smug smile splitting across his face.

  I leaned in, examining the four aging men on the screen. They were standing in a line, one under the other on descending steps, their traffic-cone orange shirts pressed, black rope detailing on their chest pockets and cufflinks.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Vlad scrolled down a little further and a newspaper heading popped up.

  “Four horsemen to be parade grand marshals,” I read.

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest and eyed Vlad. “Really, Vlad? This is a team of geriatric horse wranglers from Bend, Oregon.”

  “The four horsemen are mentioned in the Bible. Did you expect them to be a bunch of teenagers? And they’re coming. It says it right here.” Vlad jabbed an index finger toward the screen. “They’re coming from Bend to grand marshal the parade after the Slow Foods conference.”

  “They’re coming from Bend, Oregon, Vlad. Not Hell. And they’re coming to lead a parade. Not the world into a fire and brimstony war of the ultimate good and evil.”

  Vlad rolled his eyes. “Well, they’re not going to say they’re coming to bring on Armageddon, now are they?”

  I gave Nina my “Do you believe this guy?” stare, but she shot me back her own and it leaned more toward “He does have a point.” I felt myself shiver, ridiculously.

  “Coincidence,” I said. And then, correcting myself, “Stupid coincidence.”

  “Okay, how about this.” Vlad pulled a Metro newspaper off the counter and thrust it at me.

  “Great, the Rolling Stones are in town. Another farewell tour?”

  “No,” Vlad clarified, handing Nina the paper. “Would you do the honors, Auntie Nina?”

  She raised her eyebrows but took the paper anyway. “
Uh, ‘the Rolling Stones enter concert at AT&T Park with an eye catcher.’” She murmured a few more unremarkable lines about the fourth annual farewell tour and then paused. “They skydived into the concert,” she said slowly.

  “So?”

  Nina looked at me, her eyes huge and dark. “Stones. Falling from the sky.”

  There was a beat of tense silence as we all stared at each other, eyes wide. The silence was only broken when Vlad started howling, his laughter popping in the quiet room.

  “You should have seen your stupid faces,” he said between breath-stealing giggles. “You were like, you were like—” He went on to imitate Nina and me with a glazed-eyed, slack jawed look before he doubled over again, snorting this time. “You guys are so lame!”

  “You were making this all up?” Nina said sharply.

  “You’re such an ass, Vlad!”

  He paused long enough to gauge how serious—and how pissed—we were. Then he went back to chortling like a goddamned hyena, and I felt the heat, the adrenaline, those pinpricks of body-alerting fear whoosh out of me. Vlad stopped laughing long enough to point at me. “Armageddon! It’s Armageddon!” he screamed while I wondered how far I could ram a wooden soup spoon into his heart.

  I don’t know how long I laid there that night, staring at the ceiling, but I remembered the shadows changing from a faint pale blue to dark outlines of angry black and soothing back again once the sun started rising.

  My mind was a constant churn of the sweet, innocent face of Oliver Culverson, the resolute terror in the eyes of Effron Salazar, and Sampson, eyes focused hard on me when he mentioned my father—maybe he really meant that I should find him. The thought of that terrified me, and I padded to the bathroom and spent post-daybreak hours waiting for it to be an acceptable time to call someone and popping Tums by the handful.

  At a quarter to seven I was burping up orange-flavored chalk and in desperate need of a Valium. I dialed Alex, ready to fire back when he complained about the early hour.

  “I’m surprised it took you this long,” he said, his voice raspy—and sexy—with sleep. “The boy started talking.”

  I swallowed hard, the action suddenly taking all my concentration. “And he said he didn’t do it.”

  It was silent for a beat, and then I heard Alex suck in a breath. “No. No, he took full responsibility, again.”

  “No.” I shook my head, knowing that Alex couldn’t see me. “I don’t buy it.”

  “He had details, Lawson.”

  “Because he was there, Alex.”

  “No. He had details that even an onlooker couldn’t know. He was the murderer, Lawson. He murdered his parents and set fire to their bodies.”

  I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I worked in an industry and lived in a city where crime, albeit unfortunate, was commonplace. Horrible stories came up in the papers, and I had waded through my own horrible crime scenes—broken, decimated bodies laid out at angles no healthy human would ever be able to mimic. Rooms where the walls seemed to be bleeding. Flesh torn and puckered by knives, by teeth, by whatever could be considered a weapon enough to cause pain and destruction. I was getting used to them—at least as used to as anyone could expect. But I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to “get used to” any crime that involved children—whether they were the victims or the perpetrators.

  “But he’s only eight years old,” I heard myself whisper.

  “I know.”

  “Did he say anything else? Did he say why?”

  I could hear Alex suck in a shallow breath. “He said, ‘The devil made me do it.’”

  As it was probably the most inappropriate thing possible to do after an admission like this, I giggled.

  “Lawson!”

  “I’m sorry!” And I truly was. But I had one of those bizarre conditions that made me do emotionally inappropriate things at exceptionally bad times. Seriously. Ask me about my libido at the next murder scene.

  “I know it’s not funny. I know it’s horrible, but I just get this mental picture of the little guy dressed up like the Penguin saying, ‘The devil made me do it.’”

  Alex didn’t respond, and I was finally able to control my egregious laughter. “So, the devil made him do it?”

  “The kid was serious. He said he was supposed to send a message from his new friend who turned out to be the devil.”

  “Turned out to be the devil?” I asked. “He didn’t know that before?”

  Alex went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “He said he met the man—an adult male—in front of his house when he was out with his nanny. Apparently, the kid spent twenty minutes talking to this guy. He said the man was there waiting for him, outside, every day last week. He gave him candy, ice cream . . .”

  I shuddered. “This man is some kind of predator. No wonder why he thinks it was the devil. Outside his own home, a guy approaches him and forced him to do evil. Was the kid able to describe the man?”

  Alex cleared his throat. “Actually he had a name. Lucas Szabo.”

  I opened my mouth and tried to speak, but all my breath was gone. “He actually said Lucas?”

  “Lucas Szabo. Out of the mouths of babes.”

  “Murderous, arsonist babes,” I said, the tears rolling down my face.

  My whole body started to tremble, and I rooted the soles of my feet onto the floor, fisted my hands, working against the involuntary current. “So my father—Lucas—befriends this kid and forces him to do this?” I could feel all the color draining from my face, could feel the wobbly, uneasy feeling in my head. I pressed my palm to my forehead, pushing as hard as I could. “Oh my God.”

  “The kid didn’t say he was forced.”

  “He said the devil made him do it.”

  “Let’s just say he didn’t seem too upset about the order.”

  I swallowed, a myriad of emotions coursing through me. What was my father doing? I worked to swallow the growing lump in my throat as I thought of little Oliver Culverson, alone somewhere in the seventy-two-hour psych hold, waiting for my father to rescue him, to reward him. But I knew that Oliver would sit there. People would wonder what his parents did wrong, and my father would abandon him just like he had abandoned me.

  “I want to talk to him.”

  ELEVEN

  I dumped half a can of Alpo into ChaCha’s rhinestone dish and she danced around it like it was caviar or donuts, then I grabbed my keys and was out the door in record time—in time enough to ram chest to chest into Will.

  He shrank back, folding at the waist, pressing his palm against his wound.

  “Oh, Will, oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

  He batted at the air and attempted a deep breath, his voice strained. “Hey, no problem. Doc said the best way to get better was to have people slam into me repeatedly. Where you off to in such a mad hurry?”

  I bit my bottom lip, unsure of what to say.

  “Look, love, I appreciate the secret, but the sky is falling and this is no time for you to be all ‘I am woman, hear me growl.’”

  “Roar.”

  “What?”

  “Roar,” I said again. “It’s, ‘I am woman, hear me roar.’”

  He shrugged. “You can make whatever sound you want, love, but I’m partial to a growl.” He waggled his brows.

  “So you are feeling better.”

  “Well enough to come with you.”

  “You don’t even know where I’m going.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Will said, pulling his keys from his jeans pocket. “I’m your Guardian.”

  “What if I’m going to buy tampons?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said again. “I’m protecting, not carrying.”

  “Come on,” I groaned.

  I filled Will in on my and Alex’s conversation on the drive over. We were at the station, staring through the observation window, when Alex approached, his eyes clear and sharp but narrowing when he noticed Will by my side.

  “What are you doing here
?” Alex asked.

  “And thank you for having me.” Will gave a shallow bow. “There was a fire,” he said dryly, making sure that his SFFD department badge was visible. “So technically, the welfare of a fire survivor is within my jurisdiction.”

  Alex’s eye cut to mine. “You sure you want to do this?”

  I nodded, not sure at all.

  “I know what he said about—about Lucas, but before that: was he—were there signs?” I asked.

  I know that both Alex and Will knew what I meant: the MacDonald triad. Sometimes called the Evil Three or the rule of three, the MacDonald triad were the three most common traits of sociopaths—chronic bedwetting in late childhood, animal abuse, and arson. In cases where children have perpetrated such atrocities, often the triad was in their past, a misread—or ignored—early warning sign of the extreme danger to come.

  But Alex swung his head. “By all accounts Oliver was a great kid. Honor roll, soccer team, Sunday school. He was a happy, popular kid who showed no signs of anger or violence. Everyone who knows him agrees this is something completely out of character for him.”

  “I want to go in now.”

  Alex and Will exchanged a glance, a rare, joint acknowledgment of silent agreement. If I hadn’t thought Armageddon was on its way before, I was pretty sure of it now, since those two were vinegar and water.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  They spoke in unison and I blinked, stunned. “No. I’m going in alone. Alex, you’ve got stuff to do and so do you, Will. I can handle this.”

  Frankly, I had no idea whether or not I could handle dealing with this angel-faced child who, according to two men I mostly respected, could be a tiny nugget of evil incarnate. But I was going to try. I didn’t wait for Will or Alex to answer me. I shoved past them both, steeled myself, and opened the door to the observation room.

  Oliver looked up when I stepped in, and smiled. A great, big, friendly kid smile. It wasn’t creepy at all.

  He was dressed in a Social Services-issued gray sweat suit with a zip-up hoodie that was at least three sizes too big, a plain white T-shirt, and a pair of sweatpants that were rolled around the waist, and rolled again at the ankles, making fat donuts of fabric around his socks. I was happy to see that he was wearing plain kid sneakers, the kind of shoe that fit kid feet, not cloven hoofs.