“Halley’s in one of those ambulances, headed to University Hospital. They insisted on taking her in for observation,” he said. “I’ve got to go and be with her—there’s no doctor who will know what to do if this thing gets its claws in her again.”
He settled his plain black cleric’s shirt upon his shoulders and began buttoning it from the bottom up. He focused on the simple task, his long fingers working with a dexterity that defied his years.
“I barely avoided an ambulance ride myself,” he mused. “They wanted me in for X-rays, but I know the difference between bruised ribs and broken ribs—I’ve broken enough bones over the years.”
I chuckled at this. “Anyone tell you you’re a stubborn old coot?”
He grinned, the expression unearthing the remains of a much younger man. “All the time, but I learned from the best—and look who’s callin’ me old.” His smile faltered. “Look, Sanjeet will be down with the car keys any minute now to drive me to the hospital, so we don’t have long. You planning to tell me what’s wrong with you?”
I hesitated, wondering where I could even start. Amnesia was the official story—memory loss due to oxygen privation. It was plausible, considering I’d all but drowned in Lake Erie’s chill waters—not once, but twice.
The truth was uglier than that. My memory hadn’t failed me—it had been assaulted in a willful excision of information. That made it sound surgical, but my attacker had used something more akin to a chainsaw than a scalpel to cut the pieces of me out. Dorimiel’s assault had left me with a head so full of holes it made a sieve look seaworthy.
I sighed through my nose, then stepped more fully into the room, pulling closed what was left of the door. I leaned my shoulders against the wall, ignoring the way my wings ghosted through the physical structures of the house. Father Frank watched me the whole while, his keen, expressive eyes fixed upon my face.
“Come on, Zack,” he urged. “I haven’t seen you look this rough since they burned Xuan’s village on the Mekong.”
Memories—tenuous as shadows—stirred at his words. They carried echoes of emotions. Fury. Loss. A wrenching sense of guilt. And that name—Xuan. I knew it belonged to a woman. Probably not a lover, but someone I’d sworn to protect.
That was where the recollections stopped. If I tried to grasp any of it head-on, the whole thing would be lost. I could remember around the holes—usually stuff that wasn’t essential, like the sound of fish leaping in the water. The way the air hung hot and damp and reeking of green. I knew where the Mekong could be found—a detached kind of textbook knowledge about Vietnam ran like ticker-tape beneath the kinesthetic memories of the place—but whatever meaningful kernel these recollections were wrapped around remained hollow at the core, devoured by the hungry worm I knew as Dorimiel.
All the most important ones I carried were like that. Lifetimes’ worth of experience—all gone. My past prior to the moment I dragged myself out of the lake was a jigsaw with the middle punched out, and no reference picture left on the box.
“Zack?” Father Frank urged.
“There was… an incident,” I began. “It jacked up my memory.”
“Jacked up?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Gone,” I said. “It’s all gone. I might as well have met you for the first time tonight.” I turned away as I said it, but not before I caught the stricken look that crushed the dignity from his face. “For what it’s worth, you make a damned impressive first impression,” I offered.
He didn’t seem to hear. Wobbling on legs suddenly bereft of their strength, the priest dropped heavily onto the edge of Halley’s bed. All the air whooshed from his lungs, making him grab at his taped-up ribs.
“How do you forget?” he muttered in a gravelly voice. “You don’t forget. You remember. That’s what you are.”
“I wish,” I answered. Restlessly, I rubbed at the scar on my hand.
“You were attacked.” It wasn’t a question.
I nodded.
Something fiercely protective chased the pain from his face. When he spoke, his voice was all gunpowder and steel.
“Who do we need to hunt down?”
“We?” I replied. “There’s no we. It’s over and done. Nothing you can do.”
From the way he flinched at those words, I couldn’t have wounded him more if I’d knifed him in the gut. He made a fist and stared at it, lying there uselessly in his lap. A muscle ticked in his jaw.
“Don’t tell me that.”
I wondered again what kind of priest the padre was—and if his parish knew anything about his extracurricular activities with the likes of me.
“You lied that night at the church,” he said through gritted teeth. “I knew something was up the minute you left your weapons. I asked, and you said it was nothing. Nothing!” All the fight leapt back to his eyes, only now I bore the full brunt of it. I fumbled for some meaningful response, staggered by his revelation.
“Did you think you couldn’t trust me?” he said. “After everything we’ve been through?”
My thoughts roiled with questions—when did this happen? What weapons was he talking about? Was it a normal thing for me to leave stuff at his church? I was desperate for any answers, but his stricken look of betrayal stoppered my throat.
Before I could collect myself, the door behind me creaked and Sanjeet poked her head into the room. She wore her puffy pink coat and held that silly pompom hat of hers in one hand. A bruise the color of eggplant covered one side of her jaw. Like I had before her, she rapped belatedly on the frame.
“You’re not interrupting,” Father Frank said. I stood with my mouth open, still struggling to marshal my words. Sanjeet looked skeptically between us but didn’t contradict.
“You ready?” She held her keys up.
It took all I had not to chase her from the room and press Father Frank for answers. Now was not the time, though—Halley took priority. I busied myself by gathering the various samples of writing that had been scattered all over the floor during the fight. The police had left them alone—probably had no idea what to make of them.
“Yeah. He’s ready,” I said, neatening the stack, then turning back to Father Frank. “You go look after Halley. She needs you.”
Righteous fire still kindled in his eyes, but at the mention of Halley he settled somewhat. He slid from the side of the heavy metal-framed bed and joined Sanjeet at the door.
“I’ll call you from the hospital,” he said. “Keep me in the loop this time.”
I couldn’t meet the accusation in his eyes, so I focused my attention on the papers.
“And Zack,” he added, a quirk of his lips softening the sting of his words. “Answer your damned phone for once.”
They headed down the hall while I puzzled over the three recurring symbols. The answers to Whisper Man were right in front of me, scribbled in fingerpaint and crayon—I just had to figure out how to read them.
I got so fixated on the problem, I forgot to even mention—they were calling the wrong cell.
9
As I finished jotting down some notes on Halley’s papers, I realized the other thing that had slipped my mind while I’d pondered the issue of unreadable words.
Sanjeet had the car.
I stepped quietly from Halley’s room, listening to the unexpected stillness of the Davis household. After all the fighting and chaos, the silence hung like a weight upon the air. The living room was empty, more toys than I remembered scattered across the floor. A mop and pail leaned in one corner where Tammy had apparently tried to clean up all the slush and dirt tracked into the house by the emergency workers. From the look of it, she’d given up.
Tammy and Tyson were upstairs, probably asleep. I closed my eyes, unfurled my senses, and could just barely feel them over the residual echoes of the fight.
A nagging thought wormed its way into my head. I couldn’t shake a guilty suspicion that the situation with Whisper Man had escalated because I’d come into their lives. Trou
ble seemed to follow behind me as surely as my wings.
Folding Halley’s papers, I tucked them into the front of my leather jacket. Then I tightened the buckle at the bottom and quietly slipped out the front door, pausing on the porch to make sure the door latched behind me. Not that locks made much difference when the bad guys just knocked out the windows when they wanted to get in.
I hesitated, wondering whether or not it was safe for Tammy and little Tyson to be left alone in the home. I might be good at attracting danger, but I also did a bang-up job of kicking its teeth in when it threatened people in my care. The Davises were on that list now—at least until this business got resolved.
The sound of a car door drew my attention to the street. A tall, slender black man in a knee-length coat of heavy gray wool slipped into a sedan parked across from the home. He gripped two steaming cups of diner coffee in his hands, and made a point of not looking in my direction. The door shut quietly behind him. He and his companion were barely visible through the glare of the streetlight on the windshield.
The guy passed a cup of coffee over to the woman behind the wheel. She took it gratefully, wrapping gloved fingers around it for warmth. It didn’t take a psychic to see they were cops.
The police were taking the break-in seriously, and I wondered what they knew that I didn’t. This kind of response wasn’t typical for a first-time home invasion. Maybe the officers expected the remaining vagrants to return to the house. Personally, I figured they were long gone.
Whatever the case, as I stepped off the front porch and cut across the yard, I didn’t envy the officers their chilly vigil. The temperature had dropped in the middle of the night, falling somewhere between arctic and the cold of deep space. The snow on the ground was frozen so thoroughly that it squeaked under my boots. As I walked, bitter gusts picked up wicked shards from the surrounding drifts, flinging them against my face. Only the whiskers saved me from the brunt of it.
The night had stilled to that point where the streets were so empty, the city felt abandoned. No one was out in this sub-arctic chill. The windows of all the houses along the street were dark, their residents dreaming safe until morning.
I stuffed my fists into the pockets of my leather jacket and headed toward Mayfield Road. The white-and-red sign for Mama Santa’s spilled plastic light across the pavement behind me as I turned east, heading up and out of Cleveland’s Little Italy. To my left, the first few sections of wall marked the southernmost boundary of Lake View Cemetery. I hugged the weathered concrete, keeping an eye out for patches of black ice.
The eight-foot barrier of concrete gave way to staggered sections of overgrown masonry. Runnels of ice glittered amidst the patterned segments of quarried stone that dated back to the origins of the massive boneyard. The wall rose higher and higher the further I went on the steepening sidewalk, until it towered fifteen feet or more above my head. Clinging runners of ivy and denuded branches of trees dangled from on high, seeming to spill from a wild garden hidden behind the stone barrier.
A single car climbed the hill toward Coventry, engine purring. It caught me in its headlights and slowed momentarily. I kept my head down, though it was unlikely the driver had any real interest in me. Whoever they were, they were probably just startled to see a scarecrow figure all in black wandering the streets at this hour.
The vehicle ghosted past and I continued the chilly mile-and-a-half trek back to my apartment. My breath plumed against the night and I fell into the rhythm of walking, my thoughts clamoring with all the things I’d witnessed since Sanjeet had brought me to the Davis household. Whisper Man. Halley’s uncomfortably keen perceptions. Whatever the hell kind of history I had with Father Frank. The language scrawled on page after page, all of it unreadable.
The quandary of the channeled symbols gnawed at me, because it was something I thought I should be able to solve. Even with my amnesia, I’d yet to encounter a language that didn’t strike some echo of comprehension deep within my mind. Halley’s sigils held a certain passing familiarity, but it was one I frustratingly couldn’t place. They reminded me a little of Hittite, enough for me to be certain they were a language—but if I’d encountered anything like these symbols before, it was never to read them. That was a new experience for me.
More unsettling than the language was the enigma of Whisper Man.
I’d watched cacodaimons riding around in both the living and the dead, so possession was nothing new to me, but cacodaimons were a one-person deal. It took them a lot of effort to go joyriding around in someone else’s skin, and you could see them doing it. Or at least I could. I could also reach across to their side of things and smack them for the audacity.
Whisper Man was an entirely new quantity. From everything I’d seen with Halley and the hobo army, whatever he was, he could control multiple people while remaining all but invisible, even to my psychic perceptions. Just that one little tendril, and as soon as I’d noticed it, it had disappeared.
I had no idea what I was dealing with, and that didn’t sit well.
* * *
The lofty wall of the cemetery on my left began shrinking to meet the sidewalk again. About thirty feet ahead, it gave way once more to an eight-foot fence of lichened concrete. In the distance, the traffic light across from the Mayfield entrance blinked lazily in the frigid night.
I didn’t notice the people until they were right on top of me—literally. There was scrabbling from high above, and then a tattered figure jumped down from the cemetery wall. She hit the sidewalk and rolled to her feet directly in my path. She was followed by a man who dropped with his full weight onto my back. He draped himself over my shoulders, wrapping his arms around my throat. I stumbled beneath the sudden burden, but managed not to fall.
“What the fuck?” I gasped. Power leapt to my fingers and I reached up to twist the guy off of me. The angle was wrong, and he clung with a strength that nearly matched my own—a strength that wasn’t properly human.
“Choke him, kill him, make him bleed!” the woman sang in a ragged voice. She circled warily and the amber glow of the blinking traffic light caught the glint of a blade in her hand. Long, slender, and serrated on one side, it looked like a fishing knife—meant for scales, but it would cut flesh just as well.
“Get off me!” I snarled.
Straining to keep the man from locking his arms round my throat, I seized both of his wrists. With a sharp pivot, I smashed him into the wall. His shoulder hit the stones with bone-jarring force. It did nothing to slacken his grip.
“Hands to take. Eyes to see!” He spat the words wetly against my ear.
More of Whisper Man’s crazed vagrants. Great. These were probably the ones who’d gotten away. I wondered if they’d doubled back, and how long they had been following me. Stupid of me not to check.
“Hold him! Hold him!” she cried. “He can’t know. He can’t see. Not this one. Master says he sings the names!”
While I struggled with her companion, the woman darted forward. She held the blade low, and if I didn’t get out of its way I was going to be singing soprano for a very long time. I could move fast when I wanted—a brief, inhuman burst of speed. It wasn’t something I could sustain for long, but it was damned useful in fights like this.
With a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight hanging from my neck, however, even my speed couldn’t save me from her knife. I sidestepped, nearly losing my footing as I hit a patch of ice. It kept the knife-wielding woman from making a castrato out of me, but her blade still nicked me high up in the hollow of one thigh. It was such a swift cut that I only processed it as a brief flash of stinging heat. I teetered under the lumbering burden of the male attacker, controlling the motion in the next instant so his own ballast carried him thuddingly into the wall.
His head smacked into stone. The fingers of his left hand spasmed, and I used the opening to slip my own hand between his arm and my throat. He was skinny as a refugee, tendons and muscles cording over the knobby ends of his bones. B
lue-white power leapt between us as I closed my hand round his wrist and jerked hard on his forearm. All the strength fled his fingers, and I tore his hand away.
Following through, I ducked forward, dragging him by that arm till I flipped him from my back. He landed on the sidewalk at the Fish-Knife Lady’s feet, the back of his skull hitting the concrete with an ugly crack.
I staggered backward, my left leg buckling suddenly beneath me.
Something wasn’t right. I didn’t feel pain, exactly, just a rushing sense of heat. It felt like water gushing down my skin.
Except it wasn’t water.
It was blood. Lots and lots of blood. My heart thudded in my head, and answering spurts of crimson gouted from my thigh—a little spray at first, but thicker with each pulse.
Fuck.
She’d nicked the artery. The pressure tore it further with each heave of my racing heart. In a panic I clamped my hand over it, pressing down as hard as I could. The femoral artery—that was a big one. That was bad. That was really bad.
I was going to bleed out.
The street was empty. The nearest house was more than a hundred yards away. I could scream, but no one would hear me. At this hour, no one was awake. Running wasn’t an option. I’d never make it.
With every course considered, then rejected, more life flooded through my hand.
I was immortal, but this body could die. Untethered, my soul would drift on the Shadowside. With my memory loss, I had no idea if I could navigate the process of rebirth that allowed me to survive. So much had been torn from me—maybe I would dwindle to a scrap, and lose myself entirely.
The thought left me terrified.
Fish-Knife Lady lunged again. Desperate to survive, I lashed out with my left hand faster than even I could track. I bellowed the syllables of my Name, even as black spots started chewing the edges of my vision.
Harsh Gods Page 6