She paced away from Caleb, warped boards protesting under her weight, before turning to face him again. “He almost caused as much damned trouble as you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, asshole, you. I’m going to tell you a couple of things, and you’d better listen because I’m not repeating myself. SPECTR toes the same line as the damned Inquisition—all NHEs are dangerous and have to be destroyed, end of sentence, no exceptions. The Vigilant don’t agree. One of my jobs at SPECTR was to keep an eye out for drakul, to make any reports of them disappear, before an investigation could be launched.”
“I thought they were rare,” Caleb interrupted. “Or, I don’t know, that maybe Gray was the only one?”
She rolled her eyes. “Rare and non-existent aren’t the same thing. We’re pretty sure there’s at least one other in North America right now. We tracked yours all over the southeast for the last twenty years, losing it for a while, then finding it again.” She shrugged. “So I wasn’t completely shocked when I saw the footage of it taking off with your brother’s corpse. I deleted the video, which should have been the end of it. Would have been, except you had to play amateur demon hunter with the Fist.”
Caleb scowled. “It’s not fair—”
“What does fair have to do with anything?” She folded her arms over her chest and returned his glare. “All the sudden, the situation went from a wandering drakul—a good thing, from humanity’s point of view, since it means fewer malevolent NHEs to prey on people—to a drakul in a living body. Which, according to everything we know or guess, is a disaster.”
“Wait, what?” Caleb rose to his feet. “This has happened before?”
“Not exactly. Drakul have been summoned directly into living bodies, but haven’t jumped into a corpse which unexpectedly came back to life the way you did.” She waved a dismissive hand. “We don’t have time for a history lesson. The point is, living drakul have immense power and are damned hard to kill. As you’ve seen for yourself.”
“Yeah.” Blood pasted the hair on the back of his neck to his skin. “You thought I was dead when you came in.”
“Nothing ought to be able to survive a bullet to the brain. If the creature in your head decides to go on a rampage, I don’t know how anyone would stop it.”
“I do not rampage.”
“Gray doesn’t rampage.”
“Well, that makes me feel much better, thanks.” She shook her head in disgust. “Shit, what a mess. We suspected Forsyth was up to something out there in RD, but the best we could do was get an operative on the cleaning staff.”
“He’s building an army of demons.”
She froze, eyes going wide. “Fucking hell. No wonder he wanted the drakul. Does he really know what a drakul is, or does he just think of them as rare and powerful NHEs? The files from the Soviet experiments in the 1950s were supposedly destroyed, but—never mind. It doesn’t matter right now. Damn it, why didn’t you call us like you were supposed to?”
Caleb swallowed. If he had called the moths—Vigilant, whatever—John wouldn’t have gotten caught up in all this. “John said he could exorcise me. It’s why he asked Sean to meet us here, for help. Gray and I…we wanted John to be the one to do it.”
“He couldn’t,” she said. “Not with fewer than seven or eight other exorcists, anyway. But it’s just like Starkweather to play the hotshot.” She shook her head. “But why did RD take John? If they wanted to eliminate a witness, why not just kill him?”
Caleb bit his lip, not wanting to say it aloud. But he didn’t have a choice. “I’ve got a theory. When we broke out, maybe it convinced Forsyth we were too dangerous. He sent out the kill order to Sean. But he still wants to add Gray to his collection of demons.”
“I am not a demon.”
“If Forsyth knows anything about drakul,” Caleb went on, ignoring Gray, “he would realize Gray in a corpse would be easier to recapture. But it would be really hard to track Gray down, since they couldn’t know where he jumped. Forsyth needs some kind of bait, to make sure Gray returns to RD.”
Tiffany’s eyes narrowed. “Starkweather, I take it. Why does the drakul care if Forsyth has him or not?”
He thought back to his conversation with Sean, when the other man tried to convince him to break up with John. “Sean must have realized Gray’s in love with John. And he told Forsyth.”
“In love with…you are seriously messed up, you know that?” She took a deep breath. “Then we sure as hell can’t leave Starkweather there.”
Hope stirred tentatively in Caleb’s chest, fragile as the first shoot of a flower. “You’re going to save him? I thought you didn’t even like each other.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Tiffany took two steps closer to him then stopped, her brown eyes intent. “Okay. I’m going to offer you a choice. You say the word, and I’ll have ten exorcists ready to pry the drakul out of you.”
“Or?”
She hesitated, as if asking herself whether she did the right thing or not. “Or I don’t, and you and the drakul stay together and help us rescue Starkweather.”
* * *
Caleb stood very still, feeling as if any movement would result in some irrevocable decision. “You mean…let the possession become permanent?”
“Time’s up,” Tiffany said. “You’ve only got a few hours left, which isn’t nearly long enough for us to gather our forces and get Starkweather out.”
He watched her warily. “Why not just exorcise Gray then leave him in the bottle for a while, so he can’t go after John?” He didn’t want to put the idea in her head, but surely she’d already thought of it.
She snorted. “You think a bottle can hold something like what’s living in your head? If we exorcise the drakul, it goes for the nearest habitable corpse, whether we want it to or not. From what you say, it will then make a beeline for Starkweather. I’m not leaving Forsyth with a hostage to lure in the drakul. Hell, what if he catches the drakul and forces it into the body of one of his pet soldiers?”
Revulsion curled through them. “I would not like that.”
“By all rights, I shouldn’t be giving you a choice,” Tiffany went on. “I should just have you exorcised.”
“Why don’t you?”
She met his gaze. “Because the drakul saved my life. The wendigo would have taken my face off. All the stories say living drakul are dangerous and scary and bad news of the kind no one has seen in a thousand years. Unless the rumors about the Soviets are true, and they had to encase it tons of concrete and drop it to the bottom of Lake Baikal.” She shook her head. “Thing is, half of what we think we know about them is pieced together from ancient legends and rumors written down by holy madmen. What I do know for sure is the drakul…Gray…has listened. Refused to kill even the possessed when they could be saved. So I’m going to take a chance, and hope like hell I’m doing the right thing.”
She stepped past him, heading for the door. “I’ll leave you alone to think about it. Let me know when you decide.”
The door closed behind her, leaving him alone in the filthy old house, stinking of ghouls and mold. The second abandoned house he’d died in. From now on, I’m sticking to brightly lit high rises.
Gray stirred. “What will you do?”
Leave it to Gray to get right to the point. For a being who had existed a few thousand years, he wasn’t much for wasting time. I guess we have to make a decision, huh?
“No. The choice is yours alone.”
Gray’s words came as a surprise. What? It’s not just my life we’re talking about here.
“I know. But it is not the same.” Gray brushed against him, or at least it felt like he did, in the shared space of their brain. A purring tiger, leaning up against Caleb, warm and solid. “Of course I would prefer to stay with you. To experience beauty and hope and love. And even despair and grief, because these things give a weight to my existence I never had before. But you wanted none of this. You never wished to hunt demons, on
ly to live a life of paint and brush, of color and texture.”
We have a better chance to save John if we stay together.
“Yes.” A hesitation. “But John does not want me. If we choose this, we may lose him.”
Caleb sighed. Yeah. We probably will.
He started to run his hand through his hair, but his fingers snarled in a tangle of semi-dried blood. God. Sean had shot him in the back of the head. He ought to be dead. More, the bullet should have rendered even his corpse uninhabitable, sending Gray on. Can we die?
“I do not know.”
Will we age?
“I do not know that either.”
So if I’m crazy enough to choose to stay together, we’ve got no idea what will happen to us?
“Does anyone?” Gray countered.
Well, most people can at least count on getting old and eventually dying, yes.
“SPECTR may destroy us tonight,” Gray pointed out, apparently under the impression he was being helpful. “Presumably an explosive device powerful enough to vaporize most of our body would not leave enough to heal.”
If you’re trying to reassure me, you’re doing a bad job of it.
“There is no reassurance to be had. There never is.” Old, old memories rose up, bleached of color and feeling: standing up atop a mud-brick ziggurat, its platform awash in the blood of the hundreds of sacrifices it took to call him into this new form, this heavy-limbed creature. “When I was first summoned, I did not know what would happen. I did not understand anything, save I could yet hunt and feed.”
Must’ve been scary.
“It was…strange. And I was alone. Now, we are together.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said aloud. At least they had that. He remembered again the feeling of perfect love, of being held by something vast and alien, which would never leave him. Never turn on him.
If he did this, he’d lose everything. No chance of an ordinary life where he painted and worked odd jobs to get by. He might not understand the full consequences of letting the possession become permanent, but he knew for damn sure his future would be full of blood and screaming.
He wasn’t a hero like John. John, who wouldn’t be at all happy about this decision, who would probably see it as a betrayal of everything he believed in. Caleb would be just another faust.
But at least John would be alive to hate him.
“Okay,” Caleb said aloud. “Let’s find those ghouls, power up, and save John.”
Chapter 9
Tiffany pulled her sedan into the enclosed garage of one of the enormous homes along the barrier islands. Like many of the houses, the floor plan was elevated, which left the ground-level area beneath the first floor free to be used as a garage or storage area. This garage was completely empty, without even the usual random junk people couldn’t bring themselves to throw away, on the offhand chance they might need it someday.
She pulled the sedan well off to the side, as if leaving room for more vehicles. “The others will be here shortly,” she said, climbing out of the car. “I’m going to change clothes. You get some of the blood off your face. This is going to be bad enough without having you looking like something out of their worst nightmare.”
Caleb scrambled out of the car and followed her up the rough wooden staircase leading to the living area. “What is this place?”
“A safe house. Now stop asking stupid questions and wash up. There’s a bathroom through there.”
The house smelled unused, but someone had kept it dusted and stocked with towels, at least. Probably guns and ammo as well. Not too different from a Fist safe house, except the Vigilant were on the other side of the fence when it came to NHEs.
“You do not trust them?”
It’s not that. Except it was. They’re going to help us get back John, and maybe try to stop whatever the hell Forsyth is up to. Which is a good enough reason to go along with them for now.
The mirror above the sink revealed a horror show. A mask of dried blood coated one side of Caleb’s face, and more blood ringed his mouth from the three ghouls Gray had happily chowed down on in the abandoned house. Blood stiffened his hair, and something had dried into one of the locks half-glued to his face. He pulled it loose; it was a fragment of skull.
His skull.
Legs shaking, he leaned his back against the door and slid to the floor. “Oh God,” he whispered, putting his hand to his mouth, while his stomach turned over queasily. Sean had shot him in the head, blown open his skull, scrambled his brains. He shouldn’t be sitting here. He ought to be dead.
“But you are not. Why do you insist on dwelling on such things?”
“Because I’m sitting here staring at a piece of bone out of my own fucking skull,” he hissed.
“I grew it back.”
Hysteria clawed at the back of Caleb’s throat, but he swallowed it. They didn’t have time get crazy about things. The day slipped away, and sitting on his ass freaking out wouldn’t help.
He turned on the water, washed his face and neck, and rinsed the worst of the gore from his hair. He kept his eyes closed the whole time, though, relying on touch, not wanting to see the red water swirl down the drain. When he finished, he toweled his hair and stepped out into the living room to wait for Tiffany.
The room’s huge windows faced the ocean. The sun sparkled off the water; it was almost spring. Not warm enough yet for many beachgoers, but in a couple of months the strand would be packed with sunbathers and wedding parties. Would they all live long enough to see it?
A clock hung on the wall. It was later than he realized. Time was almost up. Even if he’d wanted to change his mind, he couldn’t now, unless the closets came stocked with exorcists alongside the linens.
Another door opened, and Tiffany emerged from a bedroom, dressed in body armor and carrying an assault rifle. She ignored his startled look and instead glanced at the clock. “I’m going downstairs to wait for the others.”
“Okay.”
She left, and it was just him. Or him and Gray. It would always be him and Gray from now on.
He went to the window and pressed his palm against it, feeling the warmth of the sun’s rays. Caleb didn’t move, just stood in silence, listening to his—their—breath and the beat of their heart.
Something shifted deep inside. Slid into place, maybe, or settled, or…he didn’t even have the words to describe it. Like he’d been out of balance for forty straight days and had finally found stable footing.
This was it. SPECTR would officially consider him a lost cause from here on out. Here’s your cue to reveal how it was all a big deception to get me to cooperate, take over my body, and shamble downstairs to eat Tiffany.
“I do not shamble,” Gray informed him with wounded dignity. “Also, Tiffany is a mortal, and thus not food.”
You’re no fun.
“And you have a very strange definition of fun.”
The sound of the garage door opening below rumbled up through the building. Caleb let his hand fall and headed for the stairs.
Two large trucks sat in the garage, along with an SUV. The smell of exhaust stung Caleb’s nostrils. As he came down the stairs, Tiffany turned to look at him; he caught a flash of wariness in her eyes, as if she thought maybe Gray was ambling down to kill them all.
“Mr. Jansen,” said the woman standing next to Tiffany.
Caleb almost missed the next step. “Kaniyar?”
The district chief looked just as she had every other time he’d seen her, with her hair drawn back and her dark eyes sharp as knife blades. Like Tiffany, she wore body armor, and her pet empath, Pittman, stood behind her, watching everyone in silence.
“Very good, Mr. Jansen, your encounter with the bullet left your long-term memory undamaged,” she said.
“I…but…what are you doing here? You’re SPECTR!” He shot a glance at Tiffany, who pretended not to notice.
Kaniyar arched a finely sculpted brow. “Astute observation.” Ouch. “RD’s activities are ab
ove my pay grade. I’ve had…suspicions, shall we say. Especially when Agent Brimm quit so abruptly. Fortunately for me, Special Agent Ward tipped her hand when she couldn’t resist taunting Starkweather over his inability to exorcise you.”
Tiffany only glared sullenly.
“And you were okay with one of your agents working for the Vigilant?” he asked incredulously.
Kaniyar smiled grimly. “As long as I knew about it. As I said, I’ve had my suspicions. What Forsyth and, one assumes, the director himself are doing is in violation of the Geneva Protocol, the Glastonbury Accords, and every other law on the books. I’m not here as a rogue element, Mr. Jansen. I’m here to put things right.”
Whether a congressional hearing would agree or not, he didn’t know, but no sense in saying so out loud. “Oh. Good.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly as she studied him. “Well. This is what you are now.”
Right—she was an exorcist. He’d almost forgotten. “I guess.”
She nodded once. “Very well. Consider this a new field test, if you wish. Now, let’s go get Agent Starkweather.”
* * *
Caleb clung to the highest branches of a live oak and peered through the foliage at RD. Back again, just about twenty-four hours after he’d escaped the first time. Christ, he was sick of this place.
Thanks to the alterations Gray made to his vision, he could see farther and clearer than an ordinary human, certainly at night. Floodlights mounted along the inside walls lit the RD compound almost as bright as day. No doubt to make it easier to spot any of Forsyth’s pet demons who gave its handlers the slip. Or maybe after the sabotage of the day before, they weren’t taking any chances of betrayal from within.
Outside the walls…Forsyth had been busy. A makeshift line of wooden sawhorses, festooned with razor wire, formed an outer defense. Meant to slow Gray down, when he came back in a dead body, not as fast and powerful as a living one?
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