Damien shook his head and interrupted her. “No, no. How long since I was out?”
Sheila pursed her lips, not looking like she wanted to answer. Damien caught a whiff of her thoughts, boosted due to their prominence and the physical contact. It was just a whiff, but it was enough to know. He dropped her hand, looking pained.
“A fucking week? A whole goddamn week down the drain? Jesus!”
Brokov’s eyes widened as she stepped back. “How…”
Damien shook his head, feeling a headache beginning to develop; that was like the old days too. Back before he was chosen, even using his gift a little bit was liable to send him to his room with a screaming headache. He could feel that same pressure starting to build now.
“I can’t explain now. Later.” His eyes slipped closed.
The crack of her hand on his cheek was incredibly loud and amplified the little cancer of pain that was blossoming in his skull to fever pitch. Damien’s eyes flew open, the whites already turning a bloodshot red that would linger for the rest of the afternoon, the pupils unevenly dilated. The mark of her hand below that was a glaring patch of white deepening to red against his skin.
“Whuzzat for?”
She smirked a little, the corner of her mouth twisting in what he considered to be a rather sexy way, though he wasn’t much in the mood for thinking that way at the moment. “Just making sure you aren’t going away again. The shit has hit the fan, Mr. Man, and you’d better be awake for it.”
Then she was gone, leaving Damien glaring at the ceiling and wondering—not for the first time—what the hell he had done to end up here.
“Christ.”
Chapter 25
3:30 pm, December 22, 1999
With more than forty-eight hours passed since the discovery of the mess at the morgue, some people—most notably the new widow Hollis—were already growing impatient with the lack of progress. A throng of such individuals now stood between Parker and the door of the RPD, all of them waving signs and shouting. Many of them were weeping, and at least a handful had welts on their faces and forearms that looked self-inflicted. What he thought of, looking them over, were the crowds that supposedly had gathered around suspected witches. These were frightened, grieving people, looking for a scapegoat. It looked like the RPD and its representatives were going to get the honor of being that scapegoat.
It wasn’t just the situation with the morgue—where every corpse that had been waiting for processing, autopsy, or pickup had gone the way of the dodo, with no indication of exactly where they’d gotten to—but also a string of unexplained mutilations, the gangbangers who had jumped aboard just because they could, and the usual batch of crazies and kooks who felt like attaching themselves to the cause of the moment.
As Parker approached, trying to get through them without shoving—God forbid they add a police brutality suit to everything else—and being smacked in the head by one of their signs in the process, people were body-blocking him and shouting how he was just another useless pig, and he was wondering what the fuck was wrong with people. Since the beginning of the month, working here had been like sitting on a powder keg, one that had a real short fuse attached that was ready to burn. Apparently, over the last couple of days, somebody had lit it.
The signs were the thing Parker found the most amusing. With sentiments like “Bring Back Our Dead” and “Smoke the Pigs, Not Our Loved Ones,” you could almost think that they’d gotten the idea the police themselves had caused the mess in the morgue, disposing of the bodies or spiriting them away for some sickening purpose. It wasn’t really funny, and he knew that, but the image of the Reno PD plus assorted hangers-on heading over to the coroner’s office, chopping up upwards of three dozen bodies, setting some kind of funeral pyre or ditching them in the desert, and then returning to dispose of the coroner too—and let us not forget nearly giving poor old Santa a heart attack—was just too vivid and morbidly amusing for him to banish from his mind.
He shook his head as another of the protestors—Pretty soon, we may have to start calling them rioters, the cynical part of his mind pointed out—tried to get in his way. This one was a skinny little kid who looked like he wanted to be a skinhead when he grew up, with his wife-beater shirt; gleaming, hairless dome; and hate-filled eyes that were the color of the ocean at midnight. Parker decided he’d had enough of this shit, so he lifted one of the objects he was carrying, put it at eye level, and shouted into it.
The bullhorn took the force of Parker’s voice, which was already considerable, and amplified it well above the shouts of the crowd and the thumping of car stereos coming from up Virginia Street. The feedback whine that came at the start drove the skinhead back, and the thunderous voice managed to get them to part enough for him to slip through their line.
“If you want your bodies back, move, so I can get to work on it!”
Parker slid through the gap and then past the uniforms guarding the door. They couldn’t do anything about the situation yet, since they hadn’t become violent and technically weren’t in violation of any laws, but they were watching. He shook his head and muttered to himself. As he mounted the stairs, heading up to his office, he let the bullhorn drop and his posture changed to match it, his gait becoming a defeated and depressed mockery of his usual confident stride.
Finally, he made it to the top of the stairs—Third floor, lingerie—and pushed open the door to Homicide. He walked past the empty desks and toward his own near the back of the room. When he got there, Drakanis and Woods were already sitting there. Drakanis was perched on the edge of the desk, and Woods was leaning back in Parker’s chair, grinning in his usual way. Why they’d let him out, Parker didn’t know, but he felt better to have someone else there, even if it was that nutbag.
He arched a brow as he approached. “How’d you two get here first? Didn’t see you in the mess downstairs?”
Damien shrugged, took his feet off the desk, and let the chair fall back to the ground with a bang. “Brokov loaned me her keys. I’ve been here all day.”
Parker turned his attention to Drakanis, who was bouncing a tennis ball on the floor and catching it as it bounced up above his head. He caught it one last time, grinned a little bit himself, and then glanced to Woods and then back to Parker.
“Back door, man. I haven’t worked here in years, and I still know the building better than you? Sad, my friend, sad.”
Parker’s hand shot out and snatched the ball before Drakanis could catch it again. He waggled his eyebrows. “Yeah, and I’m still faster than you, Mikey, so shaddup. Got the analysis back. Not much the prof had to say about it, except that it is a language.”
Woods’ eyes widened. “Great. So I’m a linguistics major now too.” He spread his palms. “I still think I can tell you more straight up than you’ll get out of that tape and a fuck of a lot faster, to boot.”
Drakanis glanced over his shoulder at Woods, his own brows shooting up. “So spill something then. You’ve been keeping me in suspense for too goddamn long. Vince is here now, so you can spill it.”
Woods shook his head, earning a disgusted grunt from Parker. “Nope. Got one more coming. I know you’re getting irked, but just trust me on this one. Just a little further, okay?”
Drakanis shook his head, remembering the way Woods and Brokov had looked at him that night in Woody’s, remembering the remarks they had made. Thinking about that still stung, but he also supposed it had been warranted. Now the two of them were at least somewhat in on what he and Parker were thinking, and Woods claimed to understand a whole lot more than they’d given him credit for, which he would explain if they could all meet together.
So here they were, sitting together and still waiting for one more. Drakanis assumed they were waiting on Sheila, but it didn’t really increase his patience level much. From the look of him, Parker wasn’t too interested in waiting any longe
r either.
Woods could feel the current in the air. Though he’d had a migraine when he’d woken up that had lasted the whole day and yesterday had given him a low-grade throb, today, he seemed mostly okay, though he was still running from a level far below what he was used to. He spread his palms. “Look, I know, you’re tired, you want this to be over, blah blah. I get it, okay? The fucker put me in the hospital, and we’re running short on time. I understand that, too. But this isn’t going to be easy to explain, and I’d rather only do it once. Whether you want her to be or not, Brokov’s in on this, in her way, so you need to do it my way for now, okay?”
Parker made the disgusted noise again as he bombed into Detective Ambrose Travis’s chair, which was across from his own, and started fiddling with one of the pens. Travis, like almost all the other homicide officers in the building, was over at the morgue, still trying to figure out just what the hell had happened. Drakanis, for his part, just studied Woods for a long moment, letting his cop-sense crawl over the man, looking for signs of falsehood and not finding them. In Drakanis’s mind, the man knew his shit and did have something of value to contribute. He was just scared of what it might be. This whole thing seemed to be getting a hell of a lot bigger than he’d signed up for, and it was looking more and more like all of it was tied together somehow.
The three of them sat in silence. Woods was brooding on his own ghosts, which were about to be exposed for perhaps the first time in his life, and Parker was stewing in his own irritation. Drakanis simply disconnected from the whole scene, put his mind into what he called his crime-solving mode. It wasn’t helping much. Too many things only connected if you used the logic of the insane, and the facts that the painting hadn’t shown up in almost a month and they had nothing they could directly attribute to their man since Morrigan’s death weren’t putting a good spin on things.
Parker glanced up, his face painted with the particular brand of misery that only those who cannot stand the silence will ever understand. He started to open his mouth, just to say something—anything—but the looks on the others’ faces got him to close it again. He waited another minute or two and then spilled it anyway. “Come on, say something, you guys. Sitting here like this is fuckin’ killing me.”
Woods shook his head. “Bananas.”
Drakanis looked at Woods with surprise in his eyes and then burst out laughing. After a beat, Parker joined them, laughing until tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. He knew this wasn’t a good sign—it was a form of hysteria, that was what it was—but he couldn’t seem to help himself.
Woods didn’t join them; he just continued to give them his wry smile. He was turning one of Parker’s pens over in his hands and testing himself with it, trying to move it, even just an inch. So far, the pen was winning. As the others were finally starting to calm down, the door creaked and Brokov entered, looking flustered.
“Sorry, sorry. They wouldn’t let me through, and there was this skinhea…” She stopped, her purse halfway down her arm and her hair tangled. She raised a brow at the three men, two of whom appeared to be in the last stages of hysteria and the last who was just grinning at them both.
“Well, I’m glad you guys are enjoying yourselves.” She slung her purse to land atop Travis’s desk, causing Parker to jump, inhale his own spit, and start coughing. Sheila dropped into an unused chair and wheeled it toward the others, so she was sitting in the middle of them, and looked around. “So let’s get this party started.”
Woods waited a bit longer. He rummaged in his coat—an old and weather-worn drover’s coat, since his police issue short leather coat was still in the cloakroom of St. Mary’s, so far as he knew—drew a bottle from one of the inner pockets, and bounced it in his hand.
When it looked like Drakanis had control of himself and Parker wasn’t going to choke to death, he lifted the bottle of whiskey, allowing them all to see the label. “Anyone want a tipple before I start? I can’t guarantee that there’ll be any later on. I’ll need it.” His face had lost much of its sarcastic shine, leaving him with the look of a grim and feral animal. As the lighting changed in the room because of passing clouds, it made him look almost like a corpse, one with two gleaming sapphires that served as its eyes.
Drakanis shook his head at the offer; Brokov and Parker both accepted and passed the bottle around. When it came back to Woods’ hand, he upended it and poured what remained down his throat. Feeling the heat blaze its burning trail over his tongue and down his throat to make a volcano of his gut, Woods smiled. He hadn’t had much stomach for drink before, but after the pain that the janitor had put him in, this was almost pleasant, and it served to sharpen his thoughts.
He took a deep breath and let it slide out slowly. Giving a last shove at the pen, he was rewarded with a flare of pain in the front of his head, and the pen rolled about six inches along the desk. Good deal.
He cleared his throat. “I’m going to tell you a story, and it’s a long one. Napping not allowed. No interruptions either. I don’t think I’ll be able to tell it again.”
The others nodded, solemn and silent. Damien thought they looked like kids at story time in kindergarten. “All right. Once upon a time…”
Chapter 26
5:30 pm, July 6, 1990
Once upon a time, a very boring young man met a woman who wasn’t in the least boring. He was tired and angry, having spent a day doing meaningless labor for a purposeless boss with nothing to show for it but an under-the-table twenty and a case of heartburn and had decided to spend the evening—and the twenty—up at the lake, just to get some fresh air and watch the water.
He was sitting on a bench near the beach, looking out over the water as it cycled from blue to green to red and then to orange, shifting like a chameleon to match the upcoming sunset. He wasn’t really looking at anything in particular until movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he looked up.
A girl was walking down the pier, heading to the end of it. He had looked up too slowly to see her face, but what he could look at was enough to make him forget that prick Charlie, the hauling of boxes, and the impending migraine. Long, tanned legs crawled up into a pair of shorts that had probably been white but now looked bloodstained from the light. A plain hank of rope cinched the shorts around the flare of her hips, and just above that, he could see the tips of some kind of tattoo peeking out as if it were trying to escape the confines of the clothes. He made a mental bet with himself, which he would win later, that it was a butterfly. She was wearing a white button-up middy that day, which was almost glaringly bright against her skin, and then there was the hair, thick and blond and swishing like a tail.
He gathered up what courage he could—and as the seventeen-year-old he was, this was much easier said than done—and walked after her, catching up to her at the end of the pier. He struggled to find something witty to say, something that would really catch her attention, and came up blank.
He could tell from the set of her body, the slight angle of her head, that she knew he was there, but she was not saying anything, and he was almost afraid to come any closer. He had to say something, he decided, no matter how stupid it was. Much as it would years later, the first word to come to mind just slipped from his lips.
“Bananas,” he said, and she smiled and glanced over her shoulder at him.
“That’s how I met Sheila,” Damien interrupted himself and tried to ignore the way Brokov started at that. She knew already that this story wasn’t going to end well for this other Sheila, somehow had intuited it, and the fact that she shared a name with this girl didn’t strike her as a good sign.
Damien sighed and shook his head. “If I’d known where it was going to end up, I don’t think I’d have talked to her that day…”
. . . But he did talk to her, starting with bananas and moving on to introductions. Then they went to dinner, blowing his twenty bucks o
n the Red Lobster Tuesday Special. From that moment, the two of them rarely parted, though neither of them ever felt like making it official to the point of discussing marriage; they simply knew they would be together.
Then came the others, friends they each had met over the years who it turned out all ran in similar circles. All of them shared something of an interest in the occult—some finding it an escape from the annoyances of the everyday world, others finding it an interesting diversion and area of study, still others finding it worthwhile for the image it provided them—and as the circle of their shared friends grew, they began digging into it, deeper and deeper. Through it all, Damien held his secret, that to him: this wasn’t just fantasy or bullshit; he actually did have some kind of powers. Nothing major, mind you, but he could tell you what you were thinking most of the time, and if someone left a door ajar or something, he could close it.
This time, it was Parker who interrupted, with a harsh-sounding, “Bullshit.”
Damien shrugged and spread his palms. “Don’t believe me? Fine. Think of a number between one and fifty.”
Parker smirked at this.
Fine, punk. Try three million and twelve. Point five. Parker had never considered anything of that sort to be real, just good guesses. Thinking outside the boundary was his way of testing the boy. He was at a stage by now where he believed it might be possible, but the thought that Woods had been hiding such a thing all along wasn’t one he was ready to accept.
Damien just smiled. “Thinking outside the box. Good deal. Three million and twelve, point five. Do I win a turkey?”
Parker’s jaw hit his chest, and then he shook his head. “Doesn’t prove a goddamn thing.”
“For someone who’s willing to accept that there’s someone out there running around and giving people heart attacks just by thinking about it and talking to them on the phone, you’re awfully skeptical, you know that, Vince?” Drakanis sounded slightly amused, though the expression on his face was almost blank as he rubbed his temple, like at the onset of a headache. From the look in his eyes, it was going to be a bad one.
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