by Rob Thurman
The next church called for a taxi. I had to gate back home to come out and catch it. I couldn’t flag it down at the church. From inside I could hear the people gathering on the sidewalk, the disbelieving voices. If I didn’t come out of the church, it was a little better. Not a lot better, but a little. They wouldn’t see more proof that someone. . something had been there to begin with.
I needed the taxi for the second church as if I’d passed that address, I didn’t remember it. And if I couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t gate there. As the cab pulled up at the second address, I told the driver to keep going and gave him a new one. This one was already half converted into condos and workers were moving inside and out. If Jack was there anywhere, there would be a good deal more screaming and slaughter or a pile of cooling dead bodies hidden somewhere inside.
The next was the same, as was the next. Nothing stayed undeveloped for long in this city. The longer I searched, the more Niko’s chances declined. Unless. . unless Jack didn’t kill during the day no matter how safe his lair. Junior had his attic, his skylight. . for Jack to watch maybe, or maybe for another reason. Jack didn’t belong to Heaven anymore. At night under the stars and the moon might be the closest he could come to being home. I couldn’t see the stars in the New York night sky with so much light pollution, but Jack’s eyes weren’t mine. Neither was Jack’s mind. Jack’s mind wasn’t the mind he’d always had either. Maybe Jack was crazy enough to think the stars were the eyes of his fellow angels watching his work with approval.
If I wanted to lie to myself and grasp at straws, I would. In my life I’d learned one thing: the truth will kill you as often as it sets you free.
The next church was Jack’s. Not his one true church, but it belonged to him. The first floor was empty, but the basement was home to fourteen fucking hoodie-wearing acolytes. If I never saw another hoodie or whoever had spread the fashion gospel on those goddamn things, I’d be happy as hell. The men had been sleeping when I came down the stairs. It was a small area, meant for storage, not a dormitory, but that’s the purpose it served now. They sat up on old sleeping bags, not one of them with a knife in hand. From the direction they were reaching they slept with them under flattened, ancient pillows. It was a good place if you were smart enough to sleep with your hand under there grasping the handle. They weren’t that smart. They did know me. I saw it in the set of their jaw, the disgust in their eyes. One stood up-the leader, ready to face me unarmed. That’s what a brave if stupid leader would do. The rest were all still reaching for those knives when I sent Jack a message.
It was a messy one.
But sometimes you have to make a mess to get the point across.
I did think about it, Nik, before I did it, as you’d told me to. I decided if the consequences of being Auphe over human in this instance meant getting you back, it was more than worth it.
The basement was covered in gore, charred flesh, far-flung limbs when I finished walking down the stairs to jump the last stair to the concrete and moved across to the one remaining-the one I hadn’t opened a gate within to turn inside out, upside down, round and round. He was still standing, the one who would know of any of them, where Jack might be. That hoodie had been white; it was Carrie-crimson now, but he was covered in a little worse than pig’s blood.
I grinned at him with teeth that couldn’t be as sharp and wicked in reality as they felt in my mind. “Careful. The floor’s slick. I wouldn’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.”
That disgust in his eyes was gone. It’s easy to hate an idea-that of a Godless creature-to want to destroy what was behind it. . when it’s only an idea. It’s harder when that idea is a reality right in your face. Dripping down your face in this case. That’s when there’s only room for fear. This guy might think he was going to Heaven when he died, but God oh God, he didn’t want to die like that, now did he?
I circled him. “It’s funny really. When I was a kid. . and I was once a kid, hard to believe, I know. But when I was little, one of the scariest things I came across was a jack-in-the-box. I practically pissed my pants at the sight of one.” I tugged on his hood as I’d tugged on Nik’s braid hours ago. “Yet now that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for Jack in his godforsaken fucking box and you’re going to tell me where that box is.”
He did.
I didn’t doubt that he would. He could barely get the words out fast enough; they tumbled over each other, a run of stones racing down the side of a mountain. That was usually a warning sign of something bigger and worse to come
This wasn’t any different from that.
There may have been an assumption on his part that I’d let him live if he talked. I wasn’t an idiot and I wasn’t naive. I’d dealt with the Auphe race. Jack was a poison, a disease that could spread even if he was gone. The Auphe had taught me to be a fan of the scorched earth policy. Burn it, salt it, let nothing ever grow here again.
That’s what I did, and then I went to find Jack.
Jack’s church was one of those I thought of as real churches. Not real in a sense of what one worshipped in an ugly church was inferior to what one worshipped in this type of church. It was just what I’d grown up seeing in movies and on TV as the epitome of the House of God. It was stone with a steeple that pierced a sky now purple and pale orange with dusk. There was a stained glass window in front that was two stories tall. There was no scene, no grazing sheep, or sunlight streaming from the sky. It was a complex mixture of rectangular and square shades of glass-a thousand windows, each leading to a better place. The doors were a dark wood and arched at least four feet over the tallest person to walk through them.
I saw all of this once I’d gotten through a fence much more secure than had been at the first church. I gated through it. I had no time for a fence this difficult. This one even came with the kind of razor wire you saw on prison fences. It was ugly and evil, an odd choice to surround a building even I thought of as beautiful. Jack was inside there though, a cancer that made all that beauty an empty shell that didn’t yet know it was terminal. Didn’t know there was no cure strong enough to save it.
Until me. I could save it. I could be the scalpel that cut Jack away. It wouldn’t be clean but clean was overrated as long as you got to live.
The double doors weren’t locked. Why would they be? Jack loved all the company he could get. As Robin had said, who among the city would Jack consider truly innocent? Not many and trespassing would be equal to thou shall not kill in his warped mind. Jack had his own commandments and ten didn’t come close to numbering them.
Inside with the doors shut behind me I could still see well enough though the light was gray and dim. There was some clutter, but not as much as the other empty churches had. Jack had cleaned up. Why not? Who wanted to skin people in an untidy work area? Nik would applaud his work ethic. I swallowed with difficulty. Surprised something that automatic would be that hard to do. I swallowed again and although there was no blood in my mouth I thought I could taste it. . because I could smell it.
The air was saturated with the scent of blood. Old, recent, fresh. I’d thought Junior’s house had smelled-I’d had no idea what bad truly was. I’d fought enough over the years that the coppery tang of fresh blood had long stopped bothering me, but this wasn’t the same. Old blood was a horror I couldn’t explain to someone who couldn’t experience it. It was something I wouldn’t be rid of for at least a week. And here. . there was an ocean of rotting blood. Jack had more victims than the police had ever found. I couldn’t smell anything over what they had spilled here. I couldn’t smell Nik.
“Nik!” I shouted as I limped forward. The ribs were beyond codeine now. “Niko!” I shouted again. I wasn’t trying to be subtle. I wasn’t looking to hide. I wanted Jack to find me. I couldn’t lead him away if he didn’t know I was there. I also couldn’t forget how fast he was. I wasn’t that fast, but for Jack I’d have to be. Whipping my head back and forth, I scanned the church and saw nothing. The bas
ement then. I’d go. . wait. Up. There was a paler glimmer. . blond hair, Nik’s hair in the balcony above. Through the ornate carved wood rail I could see him, a shadowed fall crowned with that rare recessive blond Leandros hair.
Above, like Junior’s attic. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Junior had said his master liked to watch from the sky. That could be true or it might be that Jack wanted to be either closer to what he remembered of Heaven or just free of Earth when he did his work. Angels must have wings for a reason.
Niko’s form didn’t move and I instantly ran to the back where the stairs would lead up because he was not dead. I could smell nothing but what soaked this place inside and out, not even Nik’s normal scent, but my brother’s freshly spilt blood, that I would know. . over anything at all. Jack hadn’t shown up, but he had to be here and I’d be ready for him. I reached for the handle of the door that should lead to the stairs when the blot of gloom under the balcony became something else. Knit out of the shadows, the reaped souls, and the desertion of faith that now filled this place, Jack became.
The killing gate I had planned for him took only a thought. I didn’t have time for even that. A grip of ice sank into both of my temples, through flesh and bone, and I was the storm. I was the lightning that passed through my brain. The floor disappeared beneath me as I hung in midair, arms and legs splayed as I convulsed. Jack’s incandescent glow of white-blue eyes gazed into mine. “We both come and we both go, you said.” Thick with clots of flesh and blood, the phantom of them if not the actual things themselves, the words fought through. “Now I think you, Wolf-in-the-Flock, Auphe-in-the-Flock, you will go nowhere.” He must have dropped me as I was now looking up at the ceiling, unable to move, unable to understand what he said next although I could hear it.
“Pray for deliverance. Pray for mercy. But they will be prayers unheard for I will not let them pass, half a soul or not.”
He hovered over me, but I couldn’t distinguish between the lightning-shot blackness and the electricity misfiring in the darkness of my brain. Was there a difference? I couldn’t. . think. There was the smell of freshly mown grass, the taste of metal and butterscotch, the warm sensation of Delilah’s skin under my hands. I floated on it all. It seemed strange. It seemed right. It seemed. .
I was tired.
A wolf among the sheep. Half wolf, half sheep.
There was something I needed. . It was on the tip of my. . what? What was. . now there was the smell of Oreos. Mrs. Spoonmaker’s Oreos. I smiled and closed my eyes. I was so tired.
With the taste of burned butterscotch in my mouth, I slept.
DIY electroshock therapy is not an Auphe’s best friend.
It was a while before I could link enough words and images in my head to come to that conclusion.
Before that I drifted. It could’ve been minutes. It could’ve been days. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. There was darkness around me and dancing lights, few and distant as the stars of a post-apocalyptic sky. That was all right, came the muzzy feeling. The world had to die sometime. It wasn’t anything as complicated as a thought-it was a feeling, warm and reassuring in the futility of it all. Best to go along. Ride the light to a world better than this. Let it all go. .
Including Niko.
That was a thought, fully formed and capable of dissipating the fog in my brain with the force of a high noon, summertime Death Valley sun. Nik. Where was Nik? I sat up, pushing against the floor beneath me. It felt like polished wood, smooth and perfect. My muscles didn’t mirror that feeling. Every single one in my body ached as if I’d run for my life for several hours, was hit by a bus, another bus, and then hit by a train before deciding to top it off with the New York City Marathon for kicks. Tiny shivers and spasms twitched. . Jesus. . everywhere as I curled into a ball, resting my forehead on my knees until it passed.
I remembered in the fuzziest of ways cold hands, one on each side of my head, and then a lightning storm inside of it. Jack, friend and pal that he was, had given me a free shock treatment. He’d zapped my brain, and the rest of me incidentally, quickly but thoroughly. The seizures that would cause were what had my muscles tied in what felt like unbreakable knots.
After a minute, all I had time to spare, I looked up and around me. My muscles continued to howl, but I told them to talk to my broken rib and get back to me. I was in a basement from the looks of it, a fancy one. The floor was wood, stained and polished to a high gloss that reflected the flickering lights of the four candles Jack had left me.
I thought it was to see the chains. Feeling them around my wrists wasn’t enough. He wanted me to see how helpless I was as well. That was the kind of dick he was. My hands were in front of me, the wrists wrapped in several tight loops of thick chain that in turn was chained around a wooden column that would be theoretically holding up the ceiling. The chain wasn’t padlocked. That would be too easy and not Jack’s style. The ends were melted into one tangled whole. Lightning, good for so much more than scrambling a brain.
The basement.
The imprisonment.
The symmetry of the chains.
I get it, Jack. Funny fucking ha-ha. Just like the good old days twelve years ago.
I hadn’t seen what Junior had done to Niko while I was in the attic and Niko hadn’t told me. He’d only said that he’d killed Junior and we were safe. I was safe. But he didn’t have to tell me he’d been chained and he didn’t have to tell me where. He’d had the smell on him as we sat in our own bathroom and he washed the blood from my chest and from around his wrists. He’d been with the dead. . in the basement. I didn’t know how Jack knew about that. He hadn’t been there for that particular show or had and found a reason not to interfere. It could’ve been Junior’s routine. Chain his victims in the basement, kill them later in the attic. Jack would definitely know that about his apprentice. He’d obviously known about two neighbor kids next door who’d disappeared after Junior’s death. Had guessed why we’d vanished.
Jack knew more than he should.
I tried flipping that switch in my brain, starting small, a tiny gate to eat away at the chains and set me free. Nothing. There was only the creeping return of the muzzy sensation around the edge of my thoughts. If I couldn’t do something so small, gating myself was impossible. Jack had seen me moving like him, if not as quickly. Jack had taken a leap of faith. . wasn’t that hilarious. . that frying my brain would put a stop to that, temporarily. Permanently. Either one suited Jack.
Yeah, Jack knew way more than he should, but Jack didn’t know me.
Gating didn’t make me who I was. It was a part of me, but with or without gates, I’d always be half of something that could take him out if I had to use my last breath to do it. I remember the torn flesh weeping blood that had circled Nik’s wrists from his stay in Junior’s basement. I’d seen him pop a dislocated thumb back into place, with a towel clamped in his mouth to keep from screaming. If my brother had the balls to do that for me when he’d been a kid, there wasn’t anything that would stop me from doing the same for him as an adult.
Junior must have used handcuffs on Nik. Dislocating a thumb wouldn’t help with chains. A willingness to give Jack his pound of flesh would. Or half a pound. Nik had been right. Thinking you’re invulnerable makes you sloppy.
Jack had gotten sloppy.
He’d seen human weapons were nothing compared to him. They couldn’t hurt him, and he hadn’t bothered to take mine. He’d also left me that slack, not too bright of him either. I loved the arrogant ones. I was thinking all that when I maneuvered my hands and pulled the Mossberg Tactical shotgun out of Nik’s coat. I thought on it harder than I had to. If I hadn’t, I’d think about what Jack was doing to my brother right now.
I couldn’t think about that. God, I. . no. Just no.
This had happened to him when he was fifteen. When he was unarmed and had no experience with the evil in the world, other than the kind that then he had only watched. Trapped in a basement filled with the dead
while Junior had been offering me to his master upstairs, he’d thought it was his fault for not believing me. The wonder wasn’t that he’d had a time bomb in him. The wonder was that he hadn’t given up on life then and there. The wonder was Nik himself who did not give up on me, no matter the odds, who saved my ass every last time.
I wasn’t going to be any different. I was getting him out of this. Somehow. And I was going to make him goddamn proud as I did it.
If that meant that I had to take on Jack with no gating ability and no weapon that could touch him, I’d fucking come up with something. Step one: the chains. If I’d known Jack was going to turn this into a psycho high school reunion of sorts I’d have brought bolt cutters. Now, I tucked the shotgun under my arm, pressed the muzzle against the chain and fired. I then switched hands and did the same several inches over.
My hands and face burned as I reloaded and ran up the stairs.
Cuts and embedded metal fragments from the shattering of the chain in two places when I hit it with a couple of steel slugs were responsible for that. There were ugly powder burns on my hands as well to accent the blood that made me look as if I were wearing black and red gloves. I’d had to aim close to where the chain wrapped around my wrist. If the chain didn’t shatter completely, I’d still have to pull my hands free of metal that wasn’t completely intact, looser but still snug, and would be the new equivalent of razor wire.
That was what had happened, and that’s what I’d done. I’d yanked my hands free, losing large patches of skin down to meat. Nothing I couldn’t live without. Nothing I gave a damn about.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Nik, wait for me, goddamn it. You’d better fucking wait.
I kept running, limping, moving up any way I could. It was hard to breathe and if a piece of bone in your lung felt worse than this, I pitied the bastard that had that. I hit the first floor, didn’t slow down as I ran for the door to the balcony and went up those too. As I staggered out onto the balcony, I was surrounded by color. Subtle but true. Moonlight washed through the stained glass of the giant window I’d seen walking into the church. The soft light wafted in a quiet drift of blue, purple, and the deep green of grass on a night shadowed grave.