Darkness of the Soul

by Kaine Andrews

  Parker just shook his head and laid it back in his hands, muttering to himself. Woods had expected that. Parker talked the talk, but he didn’t really seem the sort to survive the trip around the bend that this shit was going to take.

  Maybe it’s for the best if he gets out now. Before something a little more severe than hearing stories about it or having to try to think about it comes along.

  Brokov interrupted his train of thought then, walking toward him and laying her hand over his.

  “How bad is it, really? You don’t think it’s just going to be more corpses, or you wouldn’t bother telling us. You need something here, or think it’s a lot worse than you’re letting on. I can tell from the way you’re looking at us. So don’t bullshit me, Mr. Man. How bad?”

  He weighed his options; the thoughts he’d had when he initially had really talked to her were still lurking, still trying to cloud his judgment of her and the situation, but he tried to shove them away and consider this objectively. Would she have waited by his bedside like she had, helped him get back in here, given him the information she had, done all the other things she’d done, if she was just that angry old ghost back to punish him? He wasn’t sure. He certainly didn’t see any of the other Sheila in her eyes, and that was something he usually noticed almost immediately. It had become a survival tactic, as ingrained in him as stretching out his hand when he was introduced to someone or checking to make sure his fly was up on his way out of a bathroom. None of the warning signs were coming off of her. Still, he’d managed to scrape by primarily by shutting others out, keeping to himself, and ducking for cover whenever a woman entered his life. The two instincts—the one made for trust and the warning system—were currently arguing over which road to take.

  In the end, trust won out, but only by a small margin. She was right, after all; he did need help, and specter of the past returned or not, nobody deserved to walk into a rumble with the god of the talu`shar unprepared. Nobody. He wet his lips, took another sip from the bottle, and then put a kiss on her cheek before shoving his chair back and surveying all three of them.

  “Bad. Like apocalypse bad. You ever read H. P. Lovecraft?” Drakanis and Parker nodded, but Brokov shook her head. That didn’t surprise Woods much. “All right, you know how bad it gets in his books, when some numbfuck is about to call Cthulhu up from the deeps? That’s about the level of bad we’re talking about here. If your boy finishes what he’s started, it’s going to be a slaughter, and I really doubt there’s anybody that will be left that’s got a fighting chance.”

  Time to break it to them. He hadn’t really intended to do it today, but they were going to force his hand. He supposed it was just as well, since the inner procrastinator might have kept waiting until the goddamn thing was loose or something before deciding it’d be time to bring it up.

  “But you, there, Drak. You’ve got a shot. One shot only, and then we’re all fucked, but you’re special. That’s why I’ve been sitting here, pretending to be a cop, and that’s why Karim planted the painting where your wife’d find it. He wanted you out of the way. He’s probably got some fucked-up word for it, but basically, you’ve inherited some little talent, some latent thing, that gives you a crack at it. I got the same deal, once upon a time, but I fucked up when the time came. It’s fucking cold, but I got lucky. The painting wasn’t at hand, and the Warden—that’d be Karim, though if it was him back then, I’ve got no clue—hadn’t been keeping it fed and ready to pop. Only one casualty, that time. This time, we’re talking a hell of a lot more.”

  Parker was still staring, though now he was trying to divide his attention between Woods and Drakanis. He was giving his former partner a look that seemed to have a tinge of jealousy and awe thrown together in some foul mixture in it. Damien was just getting disgust. “So, it’s the end of the world, and Mikey’s the messiah? Didn’t see that coming.” He shook his head.

  Damien barked laughter, which drew a fresh baleful glare from the large man’s direction and a look of irritation from Sheila. He coughed, tried to cover it up, and then laughed a little more. “No. He’s no messiah, and we’re not talking the end of the world. Yet, at least. Some people are just born with the gift, and they’re the only ones who can really do anything about the talu`shar. Anyone else is just a puppet, a piece of meat that it’ll make dance when it feels like it.” He gestured to the window. “See that shit out there? If the painting wasn’t here, that wouldn’t be happening, even if every corpse in the morgue had gone missing. It’s driving them batshit, and it likes people that way. It feeds on it.

  “What Drak there has got is just a gift. It gets him a little bit of immunity to what’s going on. Look at yourselves. I can tell you’ve got a headache, Vinny, and from the way you’ve been scrubbing your temples, I think you’re about ready to get there, Sheila. Probably been feeling that way for a while now, both of you, am I right?” When he got nods from them both, he continued, “That’s the thing, tugging at you. But you,” and at this he turned to Drakanis, “you’re feeling fine, or at least as fine as you ever do. Maybe even a little better, right?”

  Drakanis paused for a moment, considering the question and taking a mental inventory. While he wouldn’t call the state he was in fine, exactly, he didn’t recall feeling ill, like most of the people he’d dealt with recently, and he didn’t really recall any point in the recent past—not since Vince had brought him out of the dream a couple of weeks ago, anyway—in which he had really felt like shit, no matter how many people he’d been around who should have given him all manner of interesting infections.

  “I don’t know about better, but I do feel pretty good, given the circumstances.” Woods nodded and spread his hands as if to say, “Well, there you go.”

  “The difference between me and him,” Damien continued, “is that while I’ve got something like a dagger in my head, our friend here has the equivalent of a tactical nuke. I’m willing to bet that any latents—” He paused, as Sheila interrupted him.

  “Latents?” From the look on her face, he might have been speaking Greek, and it took him a moment to remember that not everyone had his background or the benefit of personal tutoring in his sleep by something that was so close to a goddess that you might as well drop the pretense and use the word anyway.

  “Latents, yes. Folks with the talent who never wake up to it, locking it up in a mental closet and tossing away the keys. Like Drak there probably was, though I think he was tapping it, at least a little bit. His famous cop-sense and all.”

  Drakanis was nodding; it was starting to make a little bit more sense now. But how far does it go? And what’s the risk of it? He talks about using his little knife and being out with a migraine for days; what happens if I drop this tac nuke or whatever?

  Woods didn’t give him a lot of time to ponder, since he was already continuing. “Latents in the area are probably sitting around their houses and wondering why they’re dreaming about some fucking psychopath or keep hearing your name echoing in their head. Some of it may be Karim or the talu`shar—latents are immune to some of it, but they’re great receivers, and I’m sure he’s covered his bases there—but a hell of a lot of it is you, Drak. Kicking off waves like a high-power transmitter, and you’re getting louder and louder as this goes on.”

  Drakanis raised a hand and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Skip to the important part. Whatever it is didn’t end with you dropping Karim, apparently, so why don’t you tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do?”

  Woods smiled a little and shook his own head. It wasn’t his usual smile, the one that conveyed arrogance and self-confidence. It was a rueful one that told them all what they needed to know. His admittance was just a confirmation. “Got me, man. Send the fucker home, trash the painting, sing ‘Kum Bah Yah’ to the asshole, I dunno. You’ll know when you know, and that’s all I can say about it. But we’re gonna have to work on a few things, and I�
��ve still got a little bit more to explain here.”

  Parker arched a brow. “What kinds of things?”

  Woods pointed to Drakanis and nodded. “He knows.”

  Drakanis nodded as well, with a look that told Parker it’d be better if he didn’t ask any more questions.

  Of course I know. It’d be funny if I didn’t. He wants to tell me how to drop that bomb and what to do if it doesn’t work. Drakanis had a sneaking suspicion that he knew what the last-ditch option was: throw himself into the painting, of course. Seal it up with one last tasty sacrifice. He wasn’t sure if it was his pessimism or the latent telepathy he seemed to be picking up on that told him that, but he knew it either way. This was a do-or-die situation, but that didn’t bother him much anymore. This had gone on for longer than it should have, and three of those claimed in the death toll had been people he’d loved, respected, and admired. His own life in trade for ending it didn’t seem so bad.

  Woods could almost read all of that, both from Drakanis’s body language and from picking snippets of it from his mind. Though Drakanis wasn’t really aware of it yet, the broadcasting analogy was fairly accurate, and right then, he was like an AM station that someone had forgotten to power down for overnight, just blaring in Woods’ head—to say nothing of anyone else who might be sensitive to such things.

  Going to have to get him to turn down the volume, or we’ll be fucked long before he gets his crack at the thing itself, he thought. Out loud, he was far less pessimistic. “I just need to get him ready to rock and roll. Like Elvis or some shit, right? It’s probably for the best if you two—”

  Sheila and Parker broke in, talking over one another but both of them expressing the same sentiment: “Oh, hell no!”

  Sheila squeezed his hand, almost to the point of pain, and Woods ground his teeth for a moment as she hollered in his ear, her eyes ablaze with anger. “You’re not telling us to butt out, you asshole. You don’t give us this line and then tell the children to go on home before they get hurt.”

  Parker smirked. “I think she just schooled you, Woods. But she’s right. We’re in. Period. So you get your shit together, teach Mikey whatever it is you need to teach him, and we finish this shit, okay?”

  Woods had known they’d react that way. It wasn’t going to matter. He had a feeling time was a hell of a lot shorter than any of them might want to consider. They could spend that time chasing red herrings while he got Drakanis ready and then went out to take care of it before they realized where he’d gotten off to. It had to play out that way, or they were all screwed. It wasn’t going to matter much; by the time Parker and Brokov figured out what was up, things would either be over or the whole mess would be falling down around their ears anyway.

  Woods shrugged. “Fine, have it your way. You thinking the same, Sheila?” He looked up at her and for a moment was absolutely certain there was nothing there to fear; the look she was giving him, the fact that she’d actually seemed worried banished any doubts.

  She nodded. “You’re goddamn right I’m thinking the same. Just because I’m a glorified secretary around here—or they treat me like one, anyway—doesn’t mean I’m not part of this, and it doesn’t mean I can’t help you.”

  Woods nodded and then pulled himself out of his chair. “Come on then, Drak. We’ve got shit to do and not enough time to do it in.”

  Drakanis arched a brow as he came toward him. “What do you mean, ‘not enough time’?”

  “Takes a lifetime to hone this shit; you’ve been ignoring it for almost that long. Now I have to get your ass up to speed in a week or less. So let’s hustle. Hope you run well on caffeine, because there won’t be much sleeping for any of us.”

  Sheila arched a brow, taking her hand from his shoulder as he pulled away from her. “What do you mean in a week or less? Something else you’re not sharing?”

  Woods shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a feeling. I think the clock is ticking, and we’re about out of time. The entrance to the brave new world of the new millennium sounds about right to set off the big one, doesn’t it?” In fact, Woods knew better; he’d dreamed it last night, when he’d fallen blissfully unconscious in Brokov’s bed. The date wasn’t in a week, not even in five days. He and Drakanis had to have their shit together by Christmas, and that just left forty-eight hours to pull it off. He wasn’t going to tell any of them that though, and he had a feeling once he broke it to Drakanis, the other man would feel much the same. Woods had seen the pain in his eyes and recognized the look as one of somebody who would do what he had to, if it kept someone else out of the line of fire.

  “Now let’s get the hell out of here and get started. Peace.” Woods headed toward the door without another glance back, fully expecting Drakanis to follow him. He wasn’t disappointed, though he could feel the eyes of all three of them burning into the back of his head. It’s going to be a long night. Fuck.

  Chapter 28

  11:30 pm, December 22, 1999

  They were coming. Lintar could smell it in the wind, the way the air took on a new flavor, one ripe with rot and venom that begged to be plucked from the ether like fruit from the tree. Once, the smell might have driven him to worry and fear, making him behave like a rabbit scenting the wolf, but those times were lost in the swirl of his forgotten past. Now it only pushed him on to greater deeds and better planning.

  He knew that they would come for him, but he also knew where and when it would be. The Disciple would try to arrange it so they arrived just as the talu`shar was opened—at least he would if there was any brain left in that pretty little skull—but he was sorely underestimating the force of the being that dwelled within it. He was underestimating the Warden and what he had done for his charge. Woods might have had the power to triumph in the past, but now he was a blown-out candle, and regardless of what Woods or the man himself thought, Drakanis wasn’t ready to deal with what was waiting for him, and Lintar thought it might even break his mind completely to witness it. Then he could be hollowed out, made a puppet for the will of the talu`shar, and all might yet be well.

  Since his apparent resurrection and the feeding frenzy—he knew no other way to describe what he had done—at the morgue, Lintar had claimed this place as his own; one of hundreds of hotel suites in the Silverado, nice and unassuming, had been stained with his essence so deeply that it could no longer be called a room at all. He preferred to think of it as a lair. The painting itself had been moved from the old church that the previous Warden had stored it in—that he had stored it in, if he believed the voice in the darkness—and now hung on the wall, overlooking the room. The obnoxious painting that had formerly occupied the space, one of those stupid things with dogs playing poker that people seemed so fixated on, was currently sitting in the bathtub. He’d split the frame and crushed it to little more than kindling and then had torn the painting in half and turned on the hot water over it. He’d pissed on it, laughing while he’d done so.

  If asked about it now, he couldn’t say why he did any of those things. Something else had been in control, some dark and capricious thing that lived less for the ascension his service promised, cared less about bringing the talu`shar’s inhabitant to the world than it did for simple destruction. That inner thing had gone back to whatever cell it had come from and seemed content to stay there for the moment, but Lintar was concerned. His service was to the beast within the painting, not to whims of destruction. Wasn’t it?

  Perhaps it does not matter. Perhaps the two are, in the end, one and the same. Lintar shook his head and resumed pacing in front of the window, uncaring if anyone could see him up there. Thinking such things was not the road to proper service, and he knew that well. To think such things was to invite punishment, and to seek that when the time was so close was to invite only his own destruction. He did not think the creature within the talu`shar would be as forgiving a second time.

  When he
had come to claim the room, paying with the cash he had found in the doctor’s wallet, he had felt an overwhelming sense of coming home. Walking into the suite was as comfortable as walking into a place that had been made uniquely for him, as he imagined it might feel to at last lie down in the coffin in which you were supposed to be buried; he had felt no need to hide there, and no desire to hide from himself.

  He had shrugged off the stolen clothes, pausing for long enough to suckle at the bloodstains and relish the memory of the kill, of how the doctor and his aide had tasted, and then strode naked through the living room and into the bedroom; that was when he had found the dogs and had dealt with them. In the process, he had cut himself rather badly on the glass and had an uncountable number of splinters driven into his flesh, but those wounds were nothing more than faded gray scars already, and given another hour—perhaps even another minute—even those would be gone from him.

  Now he stood like a king viewing his kingdom, the talu`shar hanging behind him as they both stared out the window at the city below. Down in that mess, in the ant’s nest of scurrying idiots, he could feel the waves of anger and frustration radiating up, coming in small doses as he scanned the streets and sending up brighter flares, which reminded him of the fireworks the Americans were so fond of, in the places where many individuals were gathering and giving way to mob mentality.