Jade Sky

by Patrick Freivald

  "It's not likely. No ID, stolen car, wrong state. With how much damage there was, they'll need DNA to ID him, if it's even on file." He looked back at the guestroom, then at Janet. "Don't answer your phone, and they can't call you in."

  Her smirk held no mirth. "This job don't work that way."

  He didn't have enough in him to argue. "Just look after my wife."

  "And you bring my brother home safe."

  * * *

  The address Janet had given them matched an abandoned warehouse near Anacostia Park, across the river from the US Naval Yard. She couldn't provide them with headsets, but current security codes and building schematics made an excellent consolation prize. The facility depended on ignorance for safety, the busted-out windows and gangland graffiti the perfect camouflage for an underground detention facility.

  Six rooms: three large cells, a bathroom, and an office, arranged around a pentagonal common room accessible from the street via secret elevator. Matt didn't consider himself much of a conspiracy theorist, but "secret underground detention facility" fit the bill. A building of that size couldn't house more than a half-dozen guards, but given the nature of their prisoners, he'd bet they were augged.

  Five security cameras lay hidden throughout the street level. There was no approach that wouldn't be seen, but Blossom moved so fast he doubted a person would notice her on camera. Matt's infrared overlay showed no obvious guards, but two homeless men lay on opposite ends of the building, and their bulky torsos were muffled in his IR vision. Kevlar. He hadn't known Garrett well, but already missed his tactical prowess—their simple plan should be foolproof, but doubts plagued him.

  Blossom, dressed in a ratty hoodie and torn blue jeans, pushed a shopping cart past the first man. His infrared signature spread underneath him, and by the time she'd hobbled to the other side of the building, he'd cooled by more than a degree Celsius. The same happened to the second man, and then Blossom vanished inside.

  Six seconds later, she appeared next to Matt. "Charges are set. Eighteen." He set his internal clock for eighteen seconds as she disappeared again. At eleven he ran, and at two he crouched behind the cinder-block outer wall.

  A sharp bang shook his bones, then he rounded the corner. Akash ran from the opposite direction, and they hit the elevator shaft a bare moment after the secondary charges blew the lower doors. Blossom had emptied half her magazine by the time his feet hit the lower level. He choked up his assault rifle and scanned for targets.

  What the hell? Streams of dusty sunlight illuminated the five-sided room and the enormous chalk pentagram that dominated the floor. An altar of black basalt sat dead-center, the emaciated body on it surrounded by fat, sagging candles flecked with green specks. Everything stank of burning fat and sweat and feces and blood and Jade, tinged with gunpowder. Whatever he'd expected, it wasn't this.

  A hooded man stumbled back from a giant leather-bound tome, spurts of blood gushing from his chest. Another screamed and choked up a sword—a freaking claymore of all things—and dropped it when his head shattered in a spray of gunfire from Akash. Matt fired two tight bursts, turned and fired one more. Three bodies dropped to the floor, and silence reigned.

  The cells held dozens of filthy, half-naked people, jammed in to standing room only. Their haggard, dead-eyed stares held no sense of hope or even interest at the unfolding events. Except for one.

  Dawkins smiled at Matt from across the pentagram. "Hurry. But don't—"

  Matt stepped forward, then stumbled to the side as whispers screeched through his mind. Streams of thought swirled around the pentagram, a maelstrom of hate and vicious cruelty his psyche couldn't hope to survive. He gasped, braced himself on the wall, and circled around to the first cell.

  "—cross the chalk," Dawkins finished.

  Matt punched in the code Janet had given them. Nothing happened, so he grabbed the iron bar and pulled. "Hurry up," Akash muttered from across the room. The lock bent, then popped, and the door sprang open. Blank stares in empty faces, not one of the prisoners moved to escape. He popped the next, and then approached Dawkins.

  They stared at each other through the bars. Shirtless and too lean, the drug dealer had lost weight, and dark circles ringed his glassy eyes. Weeping sores dotted his cracked, bloody lips. Tattoos criss-crossed his body, each one a copy of Conor's gruesome body art, but defiled by a crucifix over the top.

  Matt hesitated. "You're as strong as I am. Break out."

  Dawkins reached up without averting his gaze, and grabbed the bars. He hissed in pain as his hands sizzled and smoked. He dropped to his knees to wretch between the staring, vacant men that crowded him, then let go and held his hands to his chest. He gagged, spat, then spoke. "I can no more open those bars than you can cross that pentagram. Now hurry."

  Matt had too many questions to ask, so he wrenched the bars apart instead. Behind him, Akash shrieked. He whirled around, weapon raised, and gaped in horror.

  The headless man drove a clawed hand up through Akash's abdomen, lifting his twitching body from the floor. Blossom fired on full auto, emptying a clip into the dead man. As blood seeped from his wounds, it congealed, hardened.

  Akash coughed blood as Matt fired, riddling the corpse with bullets. Each wound sprouted a long black thorn, glistening with blood, and the air filled with the scent of burnt matches. He paused to reload, and the corpse tore Akash in half.

  Blood and viscera splattered on the floor. Akash's upper body landed on the altar, his mouth gaping. The light in his eyes died, and his body went slack. From it, shadows rose. Jade eyes opened in blood-soaked nothing, and wings of smoke unfolded to banish the sun. The emaciated body under Akash crumbled and remolded, forming naked, skinless muscle for the being that rose from the carnage.

  The whispers filled Matt with praise. Brother.

  Dawkins shouldered past Matt, snapping him from his adulation. He stopped at the edge of the pentagram and sneered.

  The angel—it couldn't be anything else—barked something in a language Matt didn't recognize, and Dawkins responded in what sounded like Hebrew. It roared, and the earth shuddered. Dawkins knelt and clasped his hands together, head bowed.

  "Stop her," he said.

  Matt scrambled around to where Blossom knelt, busy carving into her forearm with a combat knife, eyes rolled back to expose only whites, drizzling blood into a pool on the floor. He shook her, and when she didn't respond, he brought his knee up into her temple. She collapsed sideways, but her arm flashed and he stumbled back, abdomen bleeding from three deep cuts. Prone, she dipped two fingers into her blood and traced a symbol onto the floor. The blood hissed and bubbled, and the angel laughed as millions of motes of chalk rose into the air, mingled with Blossom's blood. More of it flowed from her self-inflicted wound, streaming upward into the air to join the maelstrom around the pentagram.

  Matt could lose himself in that laugh, surrender to it, and die in its glory. The whispers begged him to. He needed it, more than anything. More than . . . Monica? Their unborn boy? He shook off the perverse thought and dove at Blossom.

  Her knife glanced off his rib and missed his heart by inches. Ignoring the pain, he wrapped her in a bear hug. He couldn't hope to compete with her speed—she'd head-butted him twice before his arms had closed—but he outmatched her strength two-to-one and healed much faster.

  She snarled in feral hatred and struggled, a writhing bag of snakes, and, while blood gushed from his shattered nose, he held on and fell atop her. He gritted his teeth as the knife ground between his ribs, and wheezed as his lung tried to reknit around the steel.

  A strong arm gripped him in a headlock. Cruel black thorns pierced his neck, his back, his legs. He maintained his grip on Blossom as the thorned corpse lifted him and sank its jagged, barbed teeth into his shoulder. He jerked his head back, then forward, and each movement rewarded him with the crunch of shattered cartilage. Blossom went slack in his arms, so he let go and reached behind him.

  His hands came away slick wit
h blood and sweat. The teeth ground into his collar bone and shifted upward, toward his carotid artery. He coughed blood when the thing’s clawed hand punched through his abdomen below his ribs, and struggled upward. He put his feet under him, found purchase on the floor, and heaved with his legs.

  They flew backward and smashed into the wall, but it wouldn't let go. Hot blood splattered his face, and he tried to block out that it came from his own neck. He slammed back again, to no effect. Pulling the knife from his chest, he flipped the grip and thrust just above the teeth. He spun as it let go, and a roundhouse kick sent it stumbling into the pentagram. The thing shrieked as it staggered across the chalk line, and collapsed.

  Next to him, Blossom struggled to her hands and knees, eyes cloudy. The headless corpse lay just inside the pentagram, steaming but with no thorns in sight—and no teeth. Matt put his hand to his neck and held the pumping artery until it closed, and pulled them away as the muscle healed over it. He sank to his knees.

  The angel stood at the edge of the pentagram in a chaotic swirl of jade thought. The bodies had crumbled, dissipated, become one with it, and the tome next to the altar blazed with green light. Dawkins knelt just outside its reach, flanked by dozens of blank-eyed, slack-jawed men. Their emaciated bodies swayed with his, and their lips moved in a parody of his chant.

  The pentagram contracted as the chalk lines slithered toward the altar, and the angel stepped back in a roar of fury. The spell broken, Matt stumbled forward, toes brushing the edge without crossing it, and joined the chant. He didn't know the words, but they filled him, spilled from him, and he felt their power. The whispers cowered in his mind.

  Inside the circle, the swirling energies collapsed in on themselves, streaming into the angelic form. The angel's shriek filled not only Matt's ears but his mind, drowning out the whispers and dominating them, its will forging them into a barb that punctured his soul. Choking on blood he pushed forward, and the dark power coalesced as it stumbled back. Wings of smoke became stringy skin, its body fading from brilliant, metallic light into pallid flesh as it inched away from the collapsing chalk toward the basalt table.

  The candles blazed, melting to reveal ten-inch blades upon which the fat had been impaled. Matt recognized the almost sweet, bacony smell from a HMMVW accident in the Big Sand, and his stomach churned at the delicious aroma of long pork. He reached forward as the pentagram shattered, his hands sizzling on the white-hot metal of the candle holders.

  "NOW!" Dawkins shouted, and Matt struck.

  The candles impaled the angel's temples, stabbing out the other side to slice Matt's fingers. Its hot blood mingled with his, and the whispers entangled with its shriek of unholy rage. The body crumpled, sizzled, then crumbled to dust.

  Matt collapsed, and dreamed.

  The sky burned a deep green. Matt sucked Jade-tinged air into his lungs, and they shuddered in protest. The plain before him crackled with energy, and a thousand million desperate souls staggered over a field of skeletons. Their emaciated bodies shuffled forward, the green tinge of bruised skin a telltale sign of advanced Jade addiction. They stumbled into an unending pit, deep and eternal, not the smallest shred of sunlight reaching its walls, and they shrieked praise to Tartarus as they fell.

  A smoke-winged angel rose from the unending darkness, a shard of God's will corrupted by lust and greed. He couldn't bear to look at it; he couldn't bear to look away. It bellowed in triumph. Another followed it, and another and another, their voices joined in a majestic choir of unending dread. They streamed into the sky, and where their shadows touched men knew only despair. And still the bodies marched, falling into blackness so that the damned might rise.

  His head rang, and the vision faded. It rang again, and he opened his eyes. He put out his hand, and instead of slapping him again, Dawkins hauled him to his feet. "We got to go, man."

  "What the hell was that?"

  Dawkins dragged Matt forward without responding, the giant tome tucked under his arm. Blossom took point as they clambered out of the ruined elevator and disappeared into the suburban landscape. They hugged the river and hiked north, keeping to the shadows as much as possible.

  "Tartarus," Matt said.

  Dawkins led them through an alley, ducked behind a dumpster, and only then met his gaze. "What about it?"

  "I saw it. I was there, and I saw it."

  "Matt," Blossom said, her voice disgusted. "You cannot believe this stuff about Nephilim."

  Dawkins stopped, put one hand over the book, and closed his eyes. "I've seen enough in the past months to believe in the devil on Earth."

  "Is that what we saw?"

  "No," Blossom said.

  "I don't think so, either," Dawkins said. He hefted the book and walked again. "But I intend to find out." It occurred to Matt that he knew where they were going, knew their plan without being told.

  "So those crazy men, they're ICAP?" Blossom asked.

  "Yes," Dawkins said. "As far as I can tell, ICAP is not and never has been an international government organization. It's a cult, dedicated to spreading Jade use around the whole world, to bring about some kind of apocalypse and rule the ruins."

  Matt snarled. "And you helped."

  Dawkins held the book to his chest and shrugged. "I didn't know."

  "So you became a drug dealer just for the money?" Blossom said.

  Dawkins sneered. "I don't think they knew how effective their first precognitive treatments were going to be with me. After the treatment, I saw . . . so many things. I was angry that they had condemned me to inevitable insanity, and they knew it, and I wanted to hurt them. Over the past ten years I've stolen most of their illegal cash flow, leaving them only government corruption to line their pockets. And I've worked to destroy them.

  "I . . . I didn't know what Jade was, how it all tied together. Gerstner used me as a puppet, and I danced on her strings. By the time I'd teased out what I thought was the truth, Pandora's Box had blown right open, and I only saw one way out. I can't change what I've done, but maybe I can stop them and that thing they serve. That's something."

  "I don't think forgiveness comes that easy."

  He shrugged. "Life doesn't have a rewind button. If I'm going to hell, so be it. I don't have to take the rest of humanity with me."

  Blossom rolled her eyes. "So what now?"

  They arrived at the small dock, where the four-man, deep-V aluminum fishing boat sat tied to the last post with yellow nylon rope. Dawkins got in and fired up the motor. "I want to see my sister."

  Chapter 16

  They trolled up the Potomac at a maddening crawl, the boat winning out against the current by the barest of margins. It didn't take a half-hour for Dawkins to regain his color and musculature—something about their cells had inhibited his regenerates and, if he'd told the truth, the rest of his augs as well. If he could be believed, hundreds had died on the altar in the short time he'd been imprisoned, but today's events comprised the first and only time anything else had happened.

  Matt brooded, trying to tease facts out of what he'd experienced and what Dawkins had said. Dawkins had lied to him before and now claimed that Matt never would have believed the truth if he'd told it. At least that much rang true; Matt wasn't sure he believed it now that he'd seen it. A corpse had killed Akash, and Dawkins subdued an angel with prayer. Or his mind. Or something. He looked down at his hands, red and raw from the candlesticks, even after all this time. And they hurt, long after they should have healed.

  Angels. Matt had always considered himself kind of religious, but now that the existence of angels had slapped him across the face, he didn't know what to believe. It wasn't an aug; it had coalesced, appeared out of nothing, and subsumed dead bodies into itself. He hadn't hallucinated, or Blossom and Dawkins wouldn’t have seen the same things. Blossom remained adamant that an inevitable scientific explanation would come to light, even for her own bizarre actions, which she remembered and apologized for but couldn't explain.

  Proof of God
filled him with doubt.

  They beached at Ruppert Island and swam to shore at the Clara Barton Parkway, where Janet waited for them. Matt stood with Blossom while the siblings hugged. They piled into Janet's four-door Nissan and cruised at just over the speed limit back to Fulton. Matt allowed himself a brief doze in the back seat and woke as Janet pulled into her driveway. He flexed his hands; they hurt less, and he'd regained full mobility. Still, far too slow for a simple burn.

  Matt tiptoed upstairs, where Monica slept. Still pale, she now had some color to her lips and cheeks, and her slow, steady breathing encouraged him. She didn't move when he kissed her, so he closed the door and went back downstairs.

  Dawkins set the giant book on the kitchen table, and, for the first time, Matt noticed the tiny, wandering script that weaved a sinuous pattern around the cover. Dawkins ran his finger along the curving path, muttering guttural words as he went.

  Blossom grunted. "You can read it?"

  Dawkins didn't stop until he finished, at which point he looked up at her. "I've heard it read aloud many times, before each sacrifice. I could recite it without reading it."

  "What does it say?" Matt asked at the same time Blossom said, "What language?"

  He nodded to Blossom first. "It's early Aramaic, what you see on artifacts from the Achaemenid Empire."

  "Fluent, are we?" Matt asked.

  Dawkins's bland look said all it needed to. "You've got eidetic enhancers, too. It's not my fault if you haven't used them to their full potential."

  He ignored the barb. "So what does it say?"

  "It's a prayer"—he smiled as Janet set a cup of coffee in front of him and hugged him yet again—"to 'the sister' for success against the unutterable one's injustice." He underlined the last phrase with his finger as he said it.

  "The unutterable one," Janet said. "So they're fighting Voldemort?"