Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

  Toby ran his fingers over it, caressing it. He pulled one of the spare bullets from an elastic holder around the stock, examined it, and put it back.

  Nevaeh tapped a contraption mounted over the barrel. “Day/night optics,” she said.

  Toby raised it to his shoulder, sighted along the barrel. “Oh yeah.” He effected a passable imitation of Dirty Harry and said, “This thing can take your head cleeeeeeean off.”

  “Just in case things go wrong,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Only just in case.”

  When they all had their Austin boots on—bending their knees, striding around the clearing, getting used to them—Nevaeh produced two syringes, their needles covered with plastic caps. Amber liquid in both. “Chloral hydrate,” she said. “Fast-acting knockout drug.” She checked them both and handed one to Phin, saying, “Fifteen cc’s for the boy. I have 20 cc’s for Beth.” She slipped it into a breast pocket. “Phin, forget your history with the kid.”

  Toby laughed. “You let him take the microchip, couldn’t catch him, then got your face blown off.”

  “It was Jagger who shot me,” Phin said, glaring at Toby.

  “Phin,” Nevaeh said, waving her hand to get his attention. “Let it go. Just inject him and leave him alone. No extra punches or kicks. And don’t shoot him.”

  “What if it’s an accident?”

  “No accidents.” She didn’t like the way he didn’t meet her eyes. “Phin, you hear me? We can put Toby on it.”

  “Yeah!” Toby said, holding the rifle at port arms. “You can’t trust Phin. He’s got it out for Tyler.”

  “I have it out for his father,” Phin said, glaring again at Toby. To Nevaeh he said, “I hear you.”

  Nevaeh reached into a canvas sack and began handing out walkie-talkie-style radios.

  Phin stared at his, as though she had spat in his palm. “What’s this?” he asked. “Where are the earbuds, the throat mics?”

  Handing one to Elias, she didn’t look at Phin when she answered. “Incinerated, like most of our other gear. I’m working on getting them replaced. Until then . . .” She turned toward Phin, held the radio up to her mouth. “Click the red button to talk.”

  “I know how to use it,” he grumbled.

  “Okay, so,” Nevaeh said. “Phin, Jordan, and I will go to the apartment. I’ll get Beth; Phin, you take care of—” She decided to reword that. “You inject the boy. Jordan, you keep watch. We’ll let you know if we need you.”

  Jordan, bouncing, going eight feet in the air, nodded.

  “Elias, stay undercover unless something happens. Make sure the monks and anyone else who might be there stay out of our hair.”

  Elias was cinching the tanks to his back, making sure the gun-like barrel assembly was securely attached to it and readily accessible over his shoulder, the way Nevaeh stored her long-swords when she carried them.

  “Toby, you said you found an easy entry point?”

  “Follow me. I’ll take you in.”

  “We need you here, watching. Just show me.”

  They stepped to the downhill breach in the rocks around the clearing, and he pointed to the far end of the Southwest Range Building. The ground was highest there, closest to the top of the wall.

  Nevaeh nodded appreciatively. “That’s right where the apartment building starts.”

  “Just watch that jump,” Toby said. “It’s a doozie. See that big boulder at the base of the wall? You want to hit it straight up and down, feet flat.”

  “Got it.” She turned to the others. “Let’s go.”

  [ 41 ]

  Jagger and Owen weren’t able to get close to the nightclub entrance. Blue-and-white Opel Astra cruisers, light bars flashing blue and red, blocked it, and uniformed cops chased them away. Jagger saw a forensic team in white coveralls crouched around an open door halfway down the alley, men and women in plainclothes watching them. At the far end, more cops and cruisers blocked that way.

  Now he and Owen stood on a plaza of flat-rock pavers between a row of shops and a concrete barrier, which lined the edge of the harbor. Several cops were gathered nearby, comparing notes. Another one spoke to people sitting at the outdoor tables of cafés or strolling past. He’d point in the direction of the nightclub, get a shake of the head, and move on to someone else.

  “This is pointless,” Jagger said, watching the demons and angels in the harbor, some on ships, others in or on the water, a few in the air. For the past fifteen minutes, they had both repeatedly touched the fragment in Jagger’s pocket, hoping to spot a visual clue. “They’re long gone.”

  Owen turned in a slow circle, gazing at everything. He scratched his beard. “I thought the Clan would leave something for us to follow.”

  “If we could get to the crime scene . . .”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Jagger was disappointed, not only in their futile attempt to locate the Clan, but also in Owen. He said, “I thought you had connections, people who could get us in there.”

  “I don’t know everybody everywhere. I could probably find an angle in, maybe through the Sledovateli, the National Investigative Service, but it’ll take time. And I’m wondering now what help it would be, getting into the nightclub.”

  Jagger watched the cop question a couple coming out of a bakery, then raised his attention to the sky. That brilliant blue beam was still there, sputtering now, growing dimmer and smaller. Hmmm. He looked over his shoulder at the harbor’s angels and demons. They were more translucent than thirty seconds ago, but sputtering or disappearing. He turned back to the light. It was gone.

  “Hey, hey.” Owen reached back to tap him on the chest. “Look over there.”

  He nodded toward an old bum sitting against the wall near the corner of the strip of shops and cafés. The man’s legs were bent up in front of him, and his forehead rested against his knees. His arms were wrapped around his legs, hands clasped in front. A blue thread of light came out of him, and two angels were crouched beside him, a hand from each resting on his head.

  “The beggar,” Owen said.

  “The one who saw the Clan?”

  “I’ll bet he is.” Owen started for him.

  “Wait a minute,” Jagger said, catching his arm. “What about the angels?”

  “What about them? Just ignore them. Our business is with the old man.”

  Ignore them. Sure.

  One angel turned his head to watch them approach. The beggar lifted his face toward them. His stubbly chin quivered. Owen knelt before him, spoke gently in Bulgarian, and placed a hand on the man’s knee. They conversed, the man’s voice trembly and growing louder.

  Jagger was puzzled and reached into his pocket, past the folds of the cloth, to touch the fragment. The angels sprang into more solid form, like dialing up the brightness of a television monitor.

  Jagger said, “Is he actually talking to you . . . or praying?”

  Owen glanced up. “He’s talking. Said he saw the Clan over there, about where we were standing. One of them—who looked like a model, he says—pressed a rock to his face and . . . well, you know.”

  “But the blue thread’s still coming out of him, and both angels are with him. I thought it was a prayer thing.” He pointed. “You too. I figured it was . . . I don’t know, left over from your prayer in the plane, but now . . .”

  “We don’t know enough about what kind of vision the Stone imparts,” Owen said. “But I do think you’re right—the threads represent direct connectedness to God.”

  “You just said he’s talking to you, not God.”

  Owen shifted to face Jagger more directly. “Do you know the difference between continually and constantly?”

  Jagger scowled at him. “Continually is intermittent, with breaks in between. Constantly means never stopping.”

  “‘Never ceasing’ is the way Luke put it, and Paul wrote, ‘pray constantly’ in several of his letters. You don’t think God would ask you to do something impossible, do you? Or expec
t you never to talk or eat or read? We can do both because God’s doing it with us.”

  “I was never too good at rubbing my tummy and patting my head at the same time.” It’s something Tyler would say when he thought too much was being asked of him.

  “It does take practice”—Owen looked at the old man—“or a big scare. I’ll bet Beth prayed ceaselessly after Tyler got shot, even while talking to you and crying.”

  “If not all the time,” Jagger said. Beth was an amazing woman. He couldn’t remember—if he even noticed—if there was a thread flowing from her last night, when they’d seen the angel fighting the demon in their apartment, before she started praying.

  Owen began speaking again to the beggar.

  Jagger reached out to touch one of the angels. His fingers disappeared into its shoulder. As though he’d moved his hand into a shadow, he felt nothing.

  Jagger yelled, “Look at me!”

  And the angel did.

  [ 42 ]

  “You can hear me,” Jagger said to the angel. “Help us, please. Where are the Clan? Help us stop them. Why won’t you answer?”

  “They’re servants of God,” Owen said, not turning from the old man. “Unlike humans, they’re clear in their duties, unflagging in staying true to them. They aren’t often distracted.”

  “I’m not trying to distract him. I just want him to help.”

  Listening to the beggar, nodding as the old man mumbled, Owen said, “I don’t think our being able to see the spiritual world is going to change the way God does things.”

  “The angel can’t even say hi—or ‘get out of my face’?”

  Owen finally looked up at him. “They’re around us all the time, Jag. Since when have you heard an angel talk to you, with your physical ears?”

  “But I can see them now. I’m looking right at him.”

  “You can see him. He’s always been able to see you. The God Stone doesn’t replace your need for faith. That you think it does may be a good reason why it’s been buried for so long, and why we should get it back from the Clan.”

  Jagger made a face at the angel. “I don’t understand why he can’t just talk to us, give us a hint.”

  “If he has hints to give. He’s a created being. He’s not omniscient; he knows what he’s seen and what God tells him. Even if he knew what we needed to catch up to the Clan, he’s not going to tell us unless God instructs him to.”

  Round and round.

  Jagger said, “So why doesn’t God do that?”

  “He is,” Owen said, “in His own way.”

  “‘His ways are higher than our ways,’” Jagger quoted. Sometimes it felt like a way of excusing God’s capriciousness, His not doing everything He could to help, whatever the situation. Then again, He could snap His holy fingers and make evil go away, make all sadness and grief evaporate. Jagger had accepted that it didn’t work that way in this fallen world. So why couldn’t he accept that God was leading him now, despite Jagger’s being able to glimpse a bit of the spiritual realm? Going back to what Beth had said, he guessed: he could see it, which made it more real to him—though his not seeing it didn’t make it any less real, not really, not in truth. Being able to see it made him expect more . . . maybe not more, but something different. That was his fault, not God’s. Still . . .

  “It’s frustrating,” he said.

  “It can be,” Owen said, turning back to the old man, “with the wrong perspective.”

  Owen spoke, and the man jabbered back. He pointed toward where he’d seen the Clan, then drew a line in the air with his finger, stopping at the roofline above.

  “What’s he saying?” Jagger asked, thinking he knew.

  “Bale was pointing into the sky, saying something about going there, out of the city.”

  Jagger leaned over and grabbed the man’s hand, pulling him up. “Where, exactly?”

  Owen raised his hand to stop him. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  The man was tugging his arm away, trying to stay seated.

  Jagger said, “Tell him to show us where they were pointing!” He realized he was going about it all wrong. He released the man and rubbed the old guy’s bony shoulder. “Tell him I’m sorry.”

  Owen spoke to him, then helped him up. Together they walked into the courtyard and stopped before reaching the breaker wall. The beggar turned toward the shops and pointed over the roofs.

  “That’s where I saw the big blue beam,” Jagger said. “Remember, I told you about it from the plane. Thicker and brighter than anything in the city, than anywhere.”

  “Is it still there?” Owen asked.

  “It’s gone. I saw it flickering before we went over to the old guy. I looked away, then it was gone.”

  Owen nodded. He dug into his pocket, pulled out a wad of cash, and handed it to the beggar. The man took it and bowed his head. His fingers flipped through it, and he held it back to Owen. “Ne. Kolko struva tova.”

  Owen pushed his hand away. “Ne se trevoji.”

  The man smiled and nodded. “Mnogo blagodaria!”

  “Ti si dobre doshal,” Owen said, and watched the man shuffle off.

  “How much was that?”

  Owen said, “He’ll be able to feed his family for a couple months. I wish it were more.” He flipped open the flap on the satchel he wore over his shoulder and pulled out his iPad. He started walking toward a café, saying, “You know the direction of the big beam you saw, southwest. You saw it from the air. Think you can pinpoint it on the map? I can call up a satellite photo and get it to display almost the same altitude and perspective as when you saw it from the plane.”

  “Maybe,” Jagger said. “I described the location to you; it was past some other villages, in the woods.”

  Owen sat at a table under an umbrella with beer logos, none of which Jagger recognized. Jagger scooted his chair around to be closer and sat. While Owen tapped and slid his finger around the screen, Jagger asked, “You think that’s where they went?”

  “The old man seemed to think so. It also aligns with what I believe they’re using the God Stone for, at least until other opportunities present themselves. I pray I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.”

  “What—?” Jagger started, before a waiter stepped up to the table, pulling a notepad from his apron. The guy needed a shave, a change of clothes, and a new attitude; Jagger thought he should have been moving cargo containers to and from the ships rather than serving appetizers to tourists.

  Owen ordered two coffees, and the waiter grumbled something at him.

  Owen told him, “Niama nikakav problem.” He went back to the screen, saying, “They serve only what we would call espresso, in shots. I told him that was fine.”

  Jagger scooted closer. “What is it you think they’re using the Stone to do?”

  Owen handed him the tablet computer. “See if you can find it, the place where you saw the lights.” Jagger took it and waited. Owen sighed. “I’m not superstitious, but sometimes saying something out loud makes it seem more real than just thinking it.” He closed his eyes. “They want to grieve God.”

  “Right.”

  “I believe they’re using it to identify the people who are the closest to Him.”

  “Closest?”

  “The ones most connected to God. Spiritual warriors, or those who have the most spiritual purity.”

  “To do what?”

  Owen opened his eyes, pinning Jagger with his gaze. “To kill them.”

  [ 43 ]

  They’d stolen a van, Cillian being proficient at such things. Following the lights, which all of them now saw, the Clan wound south and west through the city and crossed the Asparuhov Bridge over three canals that linked Lake Varna to the sea. Wide roads narrowed into two lanes of blacktop in dire need of repair. Convenience stores, gas stations, souvenir shops, restaurants, and bars slowly dropped away, yielding to fields and intermittent forests.

  “Pretty out here,” Hester said.

  They crested a h
ill, revealing more of the same.

  “Boring,” came Artimus’s opinion.

  From the front seat, Bale watched him fiddling with his submachine gun, pulling the magazine out and pushing it back in, chambering a round, tightening the sound suppresser, which lengthened the gun’s short barrel by eight inches.

  Bale said, “Did everyone bring suppressors? I don’t know what we’re walking into, but with what we left back in the city, let’s fly under the radar.”

  Cillian was a knife guy, usually carried three SOG Seal knives on him; Hester had her crossbow; and he’d already seen Artimus’s weapon fitted with a suppressor. So he looked at Lilit, who liked pistols—she held up a Beretta semiauto, suppressor attached—and Therion. Never knew what he’d use. He showed Bale a machete.

  They turned onto an even narrower asphalt road and rolled into a wooded area with dense trees, heavy shrubs; the area looked medieval. Several vehicle trails—showing dirt in tires ruts, grass between them—branched off the road into the woods. Bale leaned forward to look into the sky above the trees. Close now. He told Cillian, “Pull off onto the next side trail. We’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  Out of the van, they followed the asphalt road on foot. Bale could see buildings up ahead—low-slung houses, a smattering of nicer ones—probably vacation villas—and the lights streaming into the sky. They rounded a bend and faced a short main street, businesses on both sides, ending in trees where the road bent again. They passed a wooden sign with the name of a village carved into it: Zdravets.

  “Here we go,” Bale said.

  They walked through the village, keeping to one side of the road, trying not to look like thugs. All of their weapons were concealed; still, Bale knew there was no way people wouldn’t notice them or forget having seen them. If there were any people to notice.

  “Ghost town,” Therion said, voicing Bale’s thoughts. They passed houses first, then small shops: a barber, a general store, a livery, but nothing seemed open and no people walked the street or peered out at them from windows. He assumed the men were in the fields, the kids in school, probably bused to a larger nearby town, and the women were doing whatever village women did when their homes were empty.