She recognized the place at once, a bar in the East Village where she and John used to drink before they were married.
The structure was there for a reason, and she charged for the door, kicking it in with all the strength she imagined herself having. The door tore away from the hinges, glass shattering as it flew across the room to smash into the side of the bar.
The bar was visibly empty . . .
All except for one lone table at the far back, the table where she and John would sit and talk about their future together while they slowly got buzzed on cheap beer and wine.
Billy Sharp sat alone.
Theo smiled. She couldn’t wait to tear into this little bastard, almost certain that he had been the one responsible for hijacking her body.
The child noticed her standing there and did not bolt, instead waving her over.
“If you knew what I was planning right now, you wouldn’t be calling me closer,” Theo said, stalking closer. She’d pulled back on her inner light, the tattoos on her body now faintly glowering, waiting for an opportunity to be unleashed again on the nightmarish denizens living within her mind.
“You’re angry, I know,” the child said. He was coloring in a coloring book. The real Billy had loved to color.
She was already thinking about what she was going to do, ripping him out of his seat, maybe forcing him to eat his crayons, before tearing his head from his body.
He stopped her with his gaze.
“Please sit down,” he said, going back to coloring a school of fishes within the book.
“That’s not going to keep me from hurting you,” she growled.
He kept right on coloring a swordfish. “I believe we’re starting to rub off on you,” Billy said.
Theo leaned forward, swatting away the coloring book and crayons with her arm.
Billy looked at her.
“Really?” he said, and sighed, shaking his head. “You’re no better then the riffraff you’ve been dismembering out there.”
“How about the riffraff I’m dismembering in here,” she said, reaching for the front of the boy’s shirt.
Billy’s face twisted, and transformed into something sharklike, biting her hand off at the wrist.
Theo recoiled, clutching the bloody stump to her chest.
“You fucker,” she growled.
Billy held up a single, tiny finger as he chewed noisily, then swallowed.
“You did ask for that,” he said, wiping the blood that covered his mouth away with his arm.
Theo stared at the jagged stump and bone where her hand had been and watched a new one begin to grow.
“You’re only going to make this harder on yourself,” she said, readying to pounce again.
Billy was picking up his crayons from the barroom floor.
“You can try whatever you like,” he said. “But the effect might be similar to what you just experienced. I’m not about to let you cause me discomfort for something I wasn’t responsible for.”
“So you weren’t responsible,” she said. “Perfectly innocent were you?”
“I’m a demon from Hell,” he said with a disgusted look. “I’ve never been innocent, but I had nothing to do with that incident in the warehouse.”
Theo stalked closer to where he squatted.
“You’re lying.”
“I could be,” he said, picking up the last of the crayons and placing them on the table. “But I’m not.”
“Then if you’re not responsible, who is?” she demanded of him.
“I actually have no idea,” Billy said. He was flipping through the coloring book, looking for his next picture. He stopped at a drawing of the Crucifixion, smiled, and grabbed his red crayon and began to color. “One moment we were perfectly under your control, and the next we were free . . . allowed to express our bloodlust for the divine creature.”
He was carefully coloring around Jesus’s crown of thorns.
“It was quite exciting to see what we could do.”
“You’re saying that something else was responsible for allowing you to act on your own?” she asked, feeling an increasing sense of unease begin to form.
“I’m saying that somebody has the ability to flip the switch,” Billy said. He looked up at her and smiled that childish smile. “Personally, I find it all quite thrilling.”
Theo felt the markings upon her flesh begin to tingle—the tattoos that were placed there by Elijah and the Coalition to allow her some control over the demonic entities that ravaged her. Had something been sabotaged, or maybe even a command placed with the markings, that would enable someone to override her control over the infernal entities that plagued her?
She immediately fixated upon Elijah.
“Are we good?” Billy asked. He was now painting the Christ’s body an odd shade of green.
“We’ll never be good,” she said with a snarl.
“One can dream, can’t we?” Billy said, returning to his craft.
She was going to return, to leave her damaged psyche when she felt it.
One moment it was there, then the next . . .
Billy looked up at her and smiled. His teeth were like needles.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “Looks like it’s happening again.”
She felt the demons all around her, those she had torn to pieces converging on her, sensing her panic. They were laughing at her now, taunting her.
For she was no longer in control of herself.
Something . . . someone was calling to her.
And she had no choice but to answer.
20
They pulled up the cracked and crumbling drive of the Carroll Funeral Home, moving the car along to the back, where it wouldn’t be noticed.
“And who are we here to meet?” Griffin asked her as he crawled out from the backseat.
“Nana wasn’t specific,” Nicole said, following him. “She said that he’d be here and would want to talk about stuff.”
“Stuff?” Brenna asked.
Nicole nodded.
“That’s sounds like Nana,” John said, giving the old building the once-over. “If you look up the word ‘cryptic’ in the dictionary, her picture is right there beside it.”
“Good one,” Nicole said. “Maybe we can do knock-knock jokes a little later.”
“Should we knock?” Griffin asked, standing near the back door.
A ghost appeared beside the man, placing a translucent hand upon the doorknob and turning. The ghost repeated this over, and over again.
“Try to open it,” Nicole said.
Griffin did what she said, and the door swung open. “Huh,” he said, going in. “Wasn’t locked.”
“Always a good sign,” John said, as he and Brenna moved toward the back entrance.
Nicole hung back, practically mesmerized by the number of spirits that lingered around the building. It made a kind of sense, she thought, the funeral home being the individual’s last real contact with friends and family before burial.
She reached up to absentmindedly pet Daisy around her shoulder. The cat avoided her hand, slinking from her perch around her neck to land upon the ground and quickly dart inside.
Nicole sighed.
“Guess I’m goin’ in,” she muttered, following the cat.
It was even worse inside. Ghosts were crammed just about everywhere that she looked, almost as if they were waiting for something. And there was something odd about them as well. They were very eager to show her something on their bodies: patches of skin missing from backs, stomachs, legs, and arms. Anywhere that a good-sized piece of skin could be removed but would be covered with clothes when being waked.
“Whoa,” she said.
Griffin, John, and Brenna were mulling about the basement room, and they all looked at her.
“Pro
blem?” John asked.
“Lots and lots of spooks,” she said. “And almost all of them are missing pieces of skin.”
“Pieces of skin?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Patches cut away it looks like.”
“Okay,” John said. “Something to keep in mind as we look for our informant. Any luck?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Nobody that seems to want to talk,” she said. “They just want to show me their missing skin.”
Nicole walked toward the back of the room, avoiding the spirits as if they were material. They seemed drawn to her, reaching out to touch her as she passed, hoping to perhaps gain some substance in order to interact with the world once more.
“Embalming room is over here,” Griffin said. She turned to see him coming out of a side room, gesturing behind him.
She heard a meow from where he’d come.
“Think we want in here,” she said, moving around Griffin to enter the embalming room. There bodies on the tables, their ghosts presiding over them.
She could feel the ghosts all looking at her.
“I think this is it,” she said, going to the very back of the room. There was a hidden door, and she reached to open it.
“Wait,” John said, walking over to her. “Let me do it, just in case.”
“What? Do you think it’s booby-trapped or something?”
“Never can tell,” he said as he laid his hands upon the plaster door and applied pressure. It opened with a click.
The stink of decay wafted out, making them all take a step back.
“That’s a stink that I’ll never get used to,” Griffin said, turning away as he waved a hand beneath his nose.
They found the old man’s body lying in a dried puddle of blood on the floor of the simple, cinder-block room.
“I wonder if this is the guy,” John said, going into the room.
Nicole joined them, seeing what they did not.
“Yeah, I think it is,” she said.
The ghost of the older man sat on the floor, in the corner of the room, Daisy curled in his lap as he petted her. The ghost cat was purring.
“Hey,” Nicole said to the ghost. He did not reply, continuing to pet Daisy.
“She likes you,” Nicole then added.
There was the faintest hint of a smile on the ghost’s face. “Had a cat like her once,” the ghost said. “Never stopped missing her.”
“Yeah, they certainly do worm their way into our hearts.”
The ghost kept on petting the cat.
“Are you the one that Nana . . . ?”
“The old lady?” he asked.
Nicole nodded. “Yeah, she likes to be called Nana.”
“She came to me after . . .” The ghost looked at his stiffening corpse upon the ground. “After they betrayed me.”
“Who?” Nicole asked. “Who betrayed you?”
“They promised that I would be rewarded,” the ghost of the older man said. “If I did what was asked of me . . . and I did for so very, very long.”
“The ones who killed you promised you a reward?” she asked.
He looked at her angrily. “No, not them. The Dark Lords,” he said.
“The Dark Lords,” she repeated. “Got it.”
She could see that the others were watching her, waiting to hear what she had learned. The mention of Dark Lords had certainly gotten their attention.
“I’d been listening to them for years,” he said. “Doing as they asked, looking forward to my eventual reward.”
“Not much of a reward, huh?” she said, looking at his corpse.
The ghost got angry, his pale, translucent features screwing up in fury. “I spent the best years of my life slaving for them . . . putting the map together piece by stinking piece.”
“Map?” Nicole asked him.
He nodded, still petting the cat. “They told me how to create it, the raw materials that I would need. My mother quilted, so I had a rough idea.”
And then it dawned on her.
“The skin,” she said.
The ghost nodded. “Yeah, the skin was how the map was made.”
“So you used the skin of your clients to make this map?”
“At first it was animal stuff,” he said. “Things that I found on the side of the road, but once I got this job, things got a little easier.”
She wondered if he was aware that the people that he’d stolen from were still hanging around. He seemed pretty self-absorbed, so he probably didn’t even notice.
“So over the years, you made this map,” she said.
“I did,” he said. “It was hanging right here from those hooks.” He pointed to the hooks in the ceiling, the metal eyelets screwed into the floor.
“I notice that it isn’t there now,” she said.
Again his expression grew angry.
“They took it,” the ghost said. “Once they got what was inside me, they took the map.”
“What was inside you?”
The ghost nodded vigorously. “Wasn’t even aware, but I guess there was a piece of the key inside me all along.”
“The key,” Nicole said.
“Yeah,” the ghost said. “I guess all they wanted was the map and the piece of the key. They weren’t planning on giving me anything in return—other than this.”
“Man, sounds like you really got screwed over.”
He looked at her then.
“Yeah, I really did,” he agreed, petting Daisy all the more vigorously. Her cat didn’t seem to mind.
“But here’s the thing,” the ghost of the man said. “That old woman . . . Nana is it?”
Nicole nodded.
“Yeah, Nana said that I could really fuck them over by giving up information about some stuff,” the ghost said.
“I bet you know some things . . . have seen some things that could be very helpful to us.”
The ghost seemed to get very thoughtful as he sat there, petting her cat.
“So what do you think?” Nicole asked.
The ghost then looked at her with cold, dead eyes.
“I think I’m ready to start fucking.”
• • •
Elijah looked at the charcoal drawing and felt his blood run cold.
Of course. His mind raced. It made a twisted kind of sense that this would be the location where the Vessel would be found.
His good eye left the drawing, moving around the room to the other drawings of the very same location scrawled upon the walls as well as hundreds of pieces of paper that littered the floor.
“Do you know what it is?” Emma Rose asked dreamily. It was obvious that the girl was exhausted by her vision, as well as by the actions that had followed.
“I do,” he said with a cordial nod. “And I think there is a very good chance that this could be exactly the location we’re looking for. Very good, Emma Rose. Very good.”
“I . . . I think I know it,” she said excitedly.
His heart skipped a beat as he turned his gaze to her.
“That place,” she said, pointing to the image that she’d drawn. “I don’t know how . . . or where, but I somehow know it.”
He smiled with the good side of his face and nodded.
“Perhaps after drawing so many marvelous representations, you just feel like you know it,” he said, hoping to convince her otherwise.
Emma Rose had no memory of her past—of where she had been found, and up until this point, she’d never shown any interest.
“No,” she said, shaking her head vehemently. She grabbed one of the other drawings. “I know this place . . . it means something to me . . . something important.”
Elijah nodded slowly, not wanting to let on that he knew far more than he was willing to share with her.
“Perhaps,” he said.
She looked at him hard, shaking her head no. “Not perhaps,” she said. “Yes, yes this place, whatever it is, wherever it is, means something to me.”
“A breakthrough then, and if that’s the case,” he began. “As soon as this latest situation is settled, we will begin our own investigation—you and I—into why you feel this way.”
She was staring at him now, the intensity of her gaze almost frightening.
“You’re going there?” she asked him, pointing to the drawing he held, while her eyes darted around the room. “Here?”
There was no way to avoid the answer.
“Yes,” he said. “I will take a Coalition team with me, and . . .”
“I’m going with you,” she said. She was practically vibrating as she spoke.
“No,” Elijah said, shaking his head emphatically. “It’s too dangerous, you will remain here under Coalition protection and . . .”
“I have to go,” she said. “The visions were so strong . . . intense . . . I think I’m supposed to go with you . . . to go there.”
His gut response was a most definitive no. There was no way that he would risk the child’s safety in any way, but there did appear to be something to what she was saying.
“Don’t you see?” she asked. “The drawings . . . they’re different than all the others.”
Emma Rose was right, they were.
“I’m in these drawings,” she said. “I’ve never been in my drawings before.” She began to point herself out in each of them. “Here I am, over and over again. I’m at the scene.”
She looked at him again, even more intensely.
“I’m supposed to be there, Elijah.”
He felt it in his gut. She was right.
Elijah sighed and turned toward the door to leave.
“Elijah?” she called after him.
“We will be leaving within the hour,” he said, not turning around. “You will follow the commands of me and my team implicitly. Is that clear?”
He turned ever so slightly to see that she was nodding.
“I do hope and pray that this isn’t the most terrible of mistakes,” he said, opening the door, stepping out into the hall, and closing the door behind him.
Dark Exodus Page 28
