by Cole McCade
His finger hovered over Gabriel’s name, his number.
Delgado moaned, shifting restlessly against the tarp.
Vin shut the phone off completely, dropped it into his pocket, and stood.
With a groan, Delgado forced his eyes open, the strain of it written in deep lines across his face. Vin strode to the edge of the tarp and looked down, tilting his head, waiting for Delgado’s eyes to focus. They were a muddy brown, washed-out and dull, but they widened as they locked on Vin.
“Hello,” Vin said.
Delgado screamed.
Vin let him; they were far enough from anything occupied that the only ones who would hear his screams were the rats in the walls and the crows in their tree-perched, sleeping nests. While Delgado screamed, Vin sank into a crouch and unrolled a long canvas bundle onto the tarp; knives of every sort gleamed, their sickle smiles held in place by Velcro straps against the canvas. They caught the faint moonlight through the broken-out window and reflected in shards on Delgado’s horrified face, and the moment his eyes landed on the blades Delgado’s screams turned to whimpers, babbling.
“You,” he gasped, struggling to sit up only to fail when his bound limbs hobbled him and he rolled helplessly over onto his belly, rocking almost comically back and forth in the wet puddle of his own urine. “You—you—you-you-you-you’re dead, I killed you, you’re dead—”
“Yes,” Vin said. “I am. You did kill me. And yet here I am.”
Delgado craned his head back to stare at him, jerking his shoulders, his lips blubbering and his eyes and nose running. “Wh-what…what are you going to do to me?”
“Many things.” Vin studied the reddened, sobbing rictus of Delgado’s face with a faint spark of satisfaction. Yes—this was why he had waited.
And this was only the beginning.
“But in the end,” he continued, “the end result will be the same. You—” He stood, and kicked Delgado over onto his back, rolling him until his calves and arms were pinned beneath him. “—shall simply cease to exist. You will disappear, as you made Rosie disappear. As you made Nanette disappear, if you ever cared to know who she truly was. And I can promise you…”
He settled on one of the knives: a long, curved hunting knife, its edges serrated, its tip hooked, its blade shining like holy benediction. And as he bent over Delgado, its glimmer caught his screaming face, and threw it back in distorted reflection.
“It will be painful,” Priest said, and brought the knife down.
He’d thought the first cut would be hard—but there was only the soft sweet yielding of flesh. As bodies had once cleaved to him in bed with such suppleness, opening before him, now Delgado opened just as supple and malleable: nothing but layers of skin and flesh, tissue and fat and muscle and bone coming apart so obediently and spilling the red parts inside out all over the tarp. Even in the pale moonlight the red nearly glowed with a light of its own, splashing out in copper-scented spurts and splattering on the tarp, Delgado’s face, Priest’s clothing, his crucifix, crusting the benign face of Christ in ghoulish and dripping blood.
Delgado stopped screaming long before he died—his pulse fluttering weakly, his eyes open, his face nearly melted into a resigned and hopeless misery until there was nothing left of his face at all but thin narrow slashes opening into little canyons in the earth of his flesh. He was an altar and Vin worshipped at him, breathing in the scent of his suffering with a euphoric, quiet joy that filled him like the choir of angels and touched him like the lust of devils, a dark and sinuous thing coiling in his veins and throbbing in his gut. His God was not in Heaven; he had found a new God, and it was in the blood, in the crimson, in the last whimpering gasps of a man who had never known suffering until now, as his mouth ran scarlet and his teeth smashed in until every last one was crooked.
But Priest taught him. He taught Delgado the lessons Delgado had taught so many others, engraving them on his flesh until he was a codex of misery. Of suffering. Of weakness and vulnerability. And where once Vin had felt as though no one needed him—not Vaughn, not Gabriel, not anyone—now Priest knew:
Men like Delgado needed men like him, to show them the truth of their place in the world.
By the time Delgado gasped his last breath, Priest was drenched—in blood, in sweat, in holy anointment. He let the knife fall, tilted his head back, and clasped the crucifix against his chest. Sinner was he, sinner and blessed, and in his deepest heart of hearts he once again felt alive, a vampire taking the blood of his victim into himself to once again make him whole.
Next time he would need somewhere bigger. Somewhere better. Somewhere more isolated, less vulnerable.
Next time.
The next time he would find his baptism in blood, and wash himself clean of his sins.
CHAPTER TEN
PRIEST FELT LIKE SISYPHUS, AS he dragged the tarp-wrapped body through the streets of Crow City: trudging endlessly with his burden yet getting nowhere, when each block looked like the last and the featureless, dark buildings blended together into a haze of gray. Always gray, that bursting rush of adrenaline and emotion fading to leave an aftermath that was almost anticlimactic in its emptiness. Like a drug, the high wouldn’t last. The low would come, and drag him under, needing more to feel alive again. To feel real.
And he already knew he would become an addict, when deep under the flesh he hungered fiercely for his next fix.
Hungered enough to ignore the pain digging into his ribs, the warning that he was pushing his luck. Hungered enough to ignore the minutes, the seconds ticking past until dawn, when dawn was when all ghosts faded away, and he needed to be off the streets. Hungered enough not to look too closely at what he was doing, what he intended, the dirty and messy aftermath of a single act of pleasure. In some ways it was like sex: messy, violent, intensely cathartic, a wash of vivid sensations that in the end faded to nothing but the quiet, the exhaustion, the resignation, the cleanup.
He took back streets, but more than once he was forced to conceal himself between buildings when a car rolled past or he caught that particular near-silent cruise of tires on pavement that said a late-night CCPD patrol was gliding through the Ravens. His kill room was only four blocks from Gabriel’s garage, and yet still it took the better part of an hour and a half to make the trek, his silent companion trailing in his wake.
Outside Blackbird Pond, he dropped the shapeless lump before the roll-down garage door in a faint rustle of the tarp. Soft light seeped from under the door; as meticulous as Gabriel was, he’d either fallen asleep in a Vicodin haze before he could turn the lights out, or laid awake even now struggling not to give in to his demons.
You fight yours, my brother.
While I think I have become mine.
Priest gently rapped his knuckles against the garage door; it rattled, waves of motion rolling up its slats, before it went quiet and still. He waited, counting out the seconds, then rapped again. If Gabriel was awake, he’d come. If not, Priest couldn’t risk making enough noise to draw the attention of the last few people who clung to the detritus of the depressed ghetto the Ravens had become.
Then a faint rasp. Rasp-step, rasp-step, rasp-step, the drag of Gabriel’s bad leg. The clank of a lock, a chain, and then the door rolled up. Harsh white light spilled out, silhouetting the stark, sunken geometric shapes of Gabriel Hart’s body. The sweat of withdrawals gleamed on his dusky skin and gathered in the shadowed hollows beneath his eyes. He had the look of a man at war, and it was a battle he could only fight alone.
Priest didn’t know what to do for him. How to fight with him, and yet…and yet…
Gabriel only looked at him, haggard and silent, an unspoken question in silver eyes. Priest bent and dragged the tarp-wrapped body between them.
“I need your boat.”
He flipped the flap of the tarp back, revealing Delgado’s pasty face, rubbery in death, eyes still wide and laced with red veins. A sharp stillness captured Gabriel, arrested like a wolf that had just caught th
e hunter’s scent.
“Vin.” A haggard croak, before sharp, accusatory eyes flew to his face. “What have you done? What the hell did you do? Fuck, I thought you were dead. You were in the fucking newspaper.”
“I did what needed to be done,” Priest said. “What I needed to do.”
Gabriel shook his head. “No. No. There’s never any reason to do this.”
“Is there not?” Priest covered Delgado’s face again, until he was once more nothing: just a shape wrapped in black, meaningless trash to be disposed of. “He preyed on the weak. Now he knows what it means to be weak.”
“He can’t know anything if he’s dead!”
“He knew,” Priest promised softly. “In his last moments…he knew.”
Gabriel stared at him. Comprehension flickered in his eyes, comprehension and sorrow. “Is this where you’ve been? Hunting and killing people? I fucking mourned you, I looked for you, and you let me think you were dead. I can’t lose you, and you let me think you were dead so you could play at murdering people? Fuck, Vin. I can’t…I don’t…what now? Where does it stop? What happens when his friends come after you, or the police?”
“I will fight.”
“You’ll die.”
“Would you rather I looked the other way?” he hissed. “People like him rely on that. On people looking the other way. Walking away. Saying it is not my business, I do not want to get hurt. And so they continue on, unchanged. Unpunished. And they go on to rape again, to kill again, to destroy life after life. Over and over, they give their pain to others because they do not truly understand what pain is.” He clenched his fists. “I can show them. I will show them. I will give them the pain they give others. You could give them the pain that was given to you.”
“Don’t.” Gabriel stepped back, awkward on his bad leg. “Don’t ask me that. I won’t be a part of this.”
“But you will not stop me, either. Because you know I am right.”
Gabriel didn’t deny it. Didn’t say anything, just looking at Priest: Gabriel standing in the light of the garage, Priest in the shadows of the night, a dividing line between them that might as well be the chasm of an endless abyss.
“What happened to you, Vin?” Gabriel whispered.
“What happened to both of us. I simply refuse to lie down and accept it.” Priest offered his hand, reaching for Gabriel. Reaching for the only person he hoped could ever understand this feeling, this need. “Walk with me, Gabriel. Walk this path at my side. Take back your life.”
“No,” Gabriel swore. “Never.”
Priest felt, then: felt the loss of his one true brother, felt the pain of knowing he would be alone in this now and always, that ache curling tight in his chest and burrowing deep. He let his hand fall. “So you are leaving me, then. Turning your back on your blood brother.”
“No.” Gabriel’s gaze hardened; his jaw worked. “I can’t watch you do this. I can’t hurt you enough to stop you. I won’t report you to the police. But just because I choose my battles doesn’t mean I’ve given up on you.”
Priest smiled sadly. “Do you think you will save me, Gabriel Hart?”
“I think I’ve got to damned well try.”
Such fervor. Dio, Priest hoped Gabriel never lost that. Never lost that quiet fire; on the outside Gabriel had always seemed such cool, impenetrable steel, yet inside he burned so hot, and in some ways Priest envied him that.
One of them needed to be worthy of redemption, and Priest had already crossed that line and stood beyond saving.
He caught the beads of his rosary, tangled them in his fingers, gave them one last familiar, loving stroke—then lifted it over his head, untangling it from his hair and offering it to Gabriel. The beads dripped through his fingers like blood, looping and coiling.
“Here,” he said, and when Gabriel only stared uncomprehendingly, insisted, “Take it.”
Almost wary, Gabriel reached out to let the beads and cross pour into his palm. “Why?”
“If you think you can give me faith again…keep it for the day when you return it to me.” He turned away, bending to catch the end of the tarp, taking up his burden once more.
“You’re…leaving. Just like that.”
“I have no other choice. Perhaps there is something still human and whole left within you, and I will not stain it with blood.”
Gabriel’s fist closed around the rosary, and he curled it against his chest. “Vin…”
But Priest hefted the weight of Delgado’s body, and smiled as he walked away from the last person left on earth who actually knew him. Knew him, and had faith in him still. “Farewell, brother. Perhaps one day you will save me yet.”
* * *
BEYOND THE RAVENS THERE WAS the Nests, the dark and silent gleam of the Corvus River, and the soft cries of the birds who bobbed on the water and rode the rise and fall of the waves. On the river’s banks, hidden below the embankment of a tall cement levee, Priest laid Delgado’s corpse out atop the tarp, slit him open from throat to groin, filled his body with loose cement bricks from the levee, then sewed him closed again like some strange doll.
He felt nothing, as he forced the flesh closed over the bulging bricks and closed it with heavy black stitches of nylon cord. The blank, staring eyes and waxy white face didn’t belong to anything human. It was just a sack of flesh, with no meaning to it. Sacks of flesh couldn’t suffer, couldn’t bleed.
And Priest wouldn’t be able to feel again until he made something, someone bleed, every drop a coin to pay the ferryman, penance for the pain they’d caused.
When he rolled Delgado into the water, he slipped in without a sound and fell deep, deep into the dark, just a gleam of white and then gone, faster than Priest had expected. The weight of the bricks would make sure he wouldn’t come back up, and once Priest wrapped the tarp around a brick and sank that, too, there was nothing left of his crime save the blood staining his hands, his arms to the elbow and above.
His wound ached, a low and tired throb that told him it was time to rest. As he washed his hands in the river, he welcomed the pain. He might be a righteous sinner, but he was still a sinner, and pain was his penance for sin even in the name of the right and the just.
And when he’d washed Delgado from his skin, he knelt on the river banks and peeled out of his Kevlar and threaded his belt from its loops, and left stripes down his back in burning fire, lashing his skin to the rhythm of Nanette, Nanette, Nanette. He greeted the sun with the bloom of red on his back and that heat in the pit of his stomach, each time the belt came down to mortify him before the light of heaven—anointing him with pain, fitting for the crime of taking a life.
* * *
THE BIT OF GLASS IN HIS pocket was heavier than a ten-ton weight, when he stood in the alley outside Walford’s shop the next night and waited. He didn’t knock, didn’t call up, didn’t signal, and yet he had the feeling Walford would know. Because he was like that; because he thought, deep down, Wally was waiting, watching, now and then looking out the windows at a sound that might just be the call of a ghost returning to a familiar haunt.
After nearly half an hour, he caught the sound of the shop door opening. He remained where he was: concealed in the shadow of the building, invisible from the street, leaning against the wall just past the corner. Soft steps against pavement, and then Walford’s warmth so close, as the man settled himself against the shop’s front wall, facing the street and practically shoulder to shoulder with Priest, and yet in this moment they were strangers unseen, two voices speaking to nothing at all.
“You came back,” Walford murmured.
“It is done.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Not this time.” He smiled grimly. “Practice makes perfect.”
“Don’t tell me. If I don’t know, dear boy, there’s nothing I can tell.”
“Ah.”
After a hesitant moment, Priest slipped the glass bauble from his pocket. He told himself this was the only reason he’d come, t
his unimportant little thing that he could have left without a word before vanishing without a trace. But it would be a lie; he’d come to say the words he hadn’t said when he’d left, to put a clean end to this and silence that little voice in his mind that whispered what if?
He let his hand fall to his side, drift around the corner of the building, find Walford’s hand. He laced their fingers together, pressed the glass into his palm, then made himself pull back from that warm, familiar touch.
Wally made a startled sound. “What’s this, then?”
“For your niece.”
“It’s lovely.” Walford’s voice softened.
“It reminded me of you.”
“I won’t see you again, will I?”
“It is for the best you do not. It is for the best that no one does.”
“Vincent.” Walford sighed. “Have I done a terrible thing?”
Priest shook his head. “No. Not you. It is not you who are terrible.”
“You sound different.” A pause, then, “You are different. Did I ever even glimpse who you really are? Or am I meeting you for the first time?”
“If you are, then I am meeting myself for the first time, as well.” Priest tilted his head back against the rough brick wall and looked up at the sliver of sky visible past the rooftops. Such a muddled sky, the stars lost, but still waiting past the veil man had made between himself and the heavens. “Perhaps I never truly knew myself. But what I have done…I will do again, and again. I need to.” He spoke to the sky as much as to Walford, a prayer sent on high that would never be answered, a confession to someone who was no longer listening, if He ever had been. “I need to find some sense of balance, even if I must create that sense in blood.”
“You wish to be a monster, and yet you make of yourself a noble monster.” Fond warmth in Walford’s voice, mixed with melancholy. “I think I’ll miss you in my own way. Cantankerous ass.”
“That I am.” Priest pushed away from the wall. It was time to go; to stay meant to bring the demons he’d awakened to Walford’s doorstep. He could no longer be a part of people’s lives. Of anyone’s life. He had made of himself not a monster, but a weapon, and a weapon could all too easily be turned back on the wrong people. “Thank you, Walford. Like Lazarus, I rise from the dead. Like the son of God, I am reborn…and it is your hand that shaped my rebirth.”