After that, he decided he’d best get out of the line of fire. He was wondering how he was going to find this “Talon,” since Lauryn hadn’t gotten a chance to tell him what the suspect looked like, when he spotted a tall, muscular, dark-skinned man wearing a long, plain, but very well-cut winter coat standing in the ward’s far corner, his dark eyes watching Lauryn in a way Will didn’t like one bit.
Bingo.
Target acquired, Will slipped into his own version of professional mode, checking his pistol and making sure the badge hanging from his neck was out and facing the right direction before strolling over to the stranger like he had all the time in the world. “Hey,” he said when he got there, taking a long moment to look the man up and down. “You Talon?”
The man’s dark eyes flicked to Will’s face for only a moment before going right back to Lauryn. “I am.”
“Great,” Will said, tapping the badge on his chest. “I’m Detective Will Tannenbaum with Chicago Vice. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I’m sure you would,” Talon said, his voice surprisingly deep and calm despite the chaos around them. “We all have questions, Detective, but now is not the time.”
“Actually, I’d say it’s the best time,” Will replied flatly, stepping sideways to block the man’s view of Lauryn. A move Talon didn’t seem to like at all.
Too bad Will didn’t give a damn.
“Lauryn says you were the one who helped her when she was attacked last night,” he said, pulling out his notebook. “How did you come to be in that alley?”
“I was following a sign,” Talon said, moving his head to get Lauryn back into view.
Will didn’t bother writing that down. “Do you live in Chicago?”
“I go where I am sent and remain where I am needed. Right now, that’s here.”
Will arched an eyebrow, but that seemed to be all the man had to say on the subject, and he suppressed the urge to sigh. “Look, pal, I don’t have a lot patience this morning, so we’re going to cut the crap and make this real simple. I’m betting you know a lot more about this—” he tilted his head back over his shoulder at the sea of patients “—than your average guy wandering through Chicago should. I’ve also heard tell that you’ve been stalking my friend Dr. Jefferson, which is illegal in the great state of Illinois. That puts you in a bad spot.”
“Which I can alleviate by telling you everything I know about this situation,” Talon finished for him.
Will grinned. “Nice to see you’ve got a brain under that scowl.” He tapped his pen against his open notebook. “What you got for me?”
“Nothing you can use,” Talon said, finally turning to look at Will head-on. “I am sorry to disappoint you, Detective, but I’m not involved in this. At least, not in the way you hope. As I said, I arrived in Chicago yesterday following a call—”
“A call from who?”
“The one who calls us all.”
Will sighed. This was going to be a long morning. “Look, buddy, I—”
“You don’t believe,” Talon said, giving him a pitying look. “But that’s all right. You’ll come around. They always do. All you need to understand at the moment, Detective Tannenbaum, is that you and I follow similar callings. We both enforce laws and protect the innocent. That makes us allies, and right now, you need an ally.”
Will gave him a flat look. “Do I?”
Instead of answering, Talon just waved his hand at the rows of beds. “It must be clear to you by now that these people are suffering from no ordinary drug. It might have started that way, but what we are seeing now is the evidence of something far more sinister.”
Will didn’t know about that, but he wrote it down anyway. “And what is that?”
“A malady of the soul.”
I had to ask. “Really?”
Talon took his blatant skepticism in stride. “Doubt does not change the truth, Detective. Just ask Thomas.”
“Who’s Thomas?”
“The disciple.”
Will rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Listen—”
“That is advice I should be giving you,” Talon said, cutting him off. “Because if you would stop trying to be right for a moment and actually observe what’s going on around you, you will see that this is no common sickness, which is why Dr. Jefferson’s medicine isn’t working.”
As he said this, Will heard Lauryn’s distinctive gasp. Seconds later, the code alarms went off again as several more victims went into cardiac arrest. He was still watching in shock when he felt Talon step in closer beside him.
“You can’t repair a malady of the spirit by treating the flesh alone,” the strange man said quietly. “You have to approach the problem as a whole.”
“And how do we do that?” Will asked, just to see where this was going.
“I don’t know yet,” Talon admitted, showing a hint of frustration for the first time. “I don’t know how they got to this state, but I can tell you there’s no way they did it on their own. No matter how addicted or hopeless or fallen to sin a person becomes, you can never fall farther than God can catch. No soul is cursed beyond salvation. There is always a road back. But for some reason, these people all seem to be stuck in a dead end. Look.”
He moved to the victim closest to them, a young woman with eyes so full of broken blood vessels, Will didn’t know how she could see. Even so, her eyes were moving rapidly, while her face was contorted in fear, her hands pressing against the restraints in her efforts to fight off something only she could see.
“I can’t reach her,” Talon said sadly. “Even when I pray, she doesn’t hear my voice.”
“Of course not,” Will said, nodding at the track marks on her arms. “She’s high as a kite.”
“Do drugs do this?” Talon asked, pointing at her neck where a strange bruise had begun to form on her blue-tinged skin, almost like a hand was choking her from the inside.
“Damn!” Will whispered, his eyes going wide. “What is that?”
“Something that should not be here,” Talon said angrily. “Like I said, Detective, this may have started with a drug, but no one knowingly invites this kind of horror into their bodies. Something is pulling these people apart, and we need to work quickly to discover its source and stop it before it’s too late.”
He looked at Will like this was supposed to be some kind of huge revelation. Will, on the other hand, was starting to wish he’d taken Lauryn’s warnings about Talon being nuts a bit more seriously. But while he didn’t buy this “malady of the soul” mumbo jumbo for a second, he couldn’t deny there was something seriously messed up going on here.
“Okay,” he said slowly, placing a hand on Talon’s arm and steering him back to the corner. “For the record, I don’t believe you, but just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. That would mean these people are . . . what? Possessed?”
“That’s one way to describe it,” Talon said. “But true possessions are extremely rare. They require either an enormously vulnerable victim or a person who’s actively willing to invite a demon into their bodies. Even then, the demon in question still has to be able to make the long journey from hell to Creation.”
“Demons?” Will repeated, hopes sinking. “You mean to tell me you think all this is the work of the literal devil? The serpent, the dragon, the Great Deceiver, all that crap?”
“He has many names,” Talon said, giving the detective a weighing look. “I understand your skepticism, Detective, but if you can’t see the devil’s hand in a disaster where hundreds of otherwise normal sinners are struck down by an unknown malady whose primary symptom is an overabundance of brimstone in their blood, I wonder how you can see at all.”
“Easy,” Will growled, snapping his notebook shut. “Because I see facts, not religious hocus-pocus.”
“So their cries mean nothing?” Talon countered. “It doesn’t strike you as odd that an entire ward of hallucinating people—several of whom are on drugs that don’t cause hall
ucinations—all happen to be having visions of the same demons?”
“No, I find that incredibly odd,” Will snapped. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to take the hallucinating drug addict’s word for it. I deal with junkies every day. Lots of them see demons. I’ll spot you that this is some strange behavior, but that doesn’t mean we’re dealing with actual demonic possession.”
“There, at least, we agree,” Talon said as he turned back to the victims in the gurneys. “I can’t believe hell has come so close as to allow this many possessions at once. This cannot be a true mass possession. Something else has to be going on, but we still have a problem. Whatever has dragged them down to this state, so long as they stay like this, these people are lost sheep. Easy prey. And where you have easy prey, you have predators.”
“Predators, huh?” Will said, putting up his notebook. “Let me guess, more demons?”
Talon’s eyes narrowed. “Not every evil in this world comes from hell. I’ve met men whose cruelty would put devils to shame. But whatever guise the wolf comes in, the Good Shepherd will protect the flock.”
“Good Shepherd, huh?” Will said, shaking his head. “Let me guess, that’s you.”
“I do my best to serve,” Talon said proudly. “Just like you.”
This was getting so crazy, Will could only laugh. “Me, huh?” he said with a chuckle. “What’s my role in your fantasy, then?” He grinned wide. “Am I the wolf?”
“You give yourself both too much and too little credit, Detective,” Talon said, shaking his head. “You are just a man. The wolf is behind you.”
Will’s eyes shot open, and he spun around, scanning the room, but all he saw was more of the same chaos. However, when he turned around to tell Talon that was a nice try, his suspect was gone.
Cursing himself for an idiot, Will whirled around, his eyes going automatically to every exit. Unless he was sprinting, which Will definitely would have noticed, there was no way Talon could have gotten out of the ward in the split second Will’s back was turned. But even knowing that, it took Will far too long to spot his target, because Talon hadn’t made a break for the doors at all. Quite the opposite. When Will finally spotted him, he was cutting a straight swath into the middle of the room toward Lauryn, who was tending a patient while talking to a tall doctor Will didn’t recognize but instantly disliked.
That set off a whole new round of warning bells. Will couldn’t say what it was about the tall black man with the suave smile and pristine white doctor’s coat standing beside her that unnerved him so much, but he’d learned to trust his gut in matters like this. If he didn’t like someone, that usually meant his subconscious had spotted a warning sign that his brain simply hadn’t caught up with. He wasn’t alone, either. Now that he was looking, he could clearly see that Talon—who strangely hadn’t set off those warning bells—was moving toward the new man, not Lauryn. He was positioning to corner them both when the strange tall man in the doctor’s coat reached into his pocket and pulled out a small glass vial that glowed green as envy.
That was all Will managed to make out before everything went to hell.
Lauryn couldn’t believe how badly this was going.
She’d been here for almost an hour, and they still weren’t done with the initial triage. She’d already had four patients code on her, which was three more than she’d ever had to deal with in a single day. No one had died yet, thank God, but Lauryn had a sinking feeling this mess was going to get worse before it got better. The only good thing she could say about the situation was that at least they were finally getting enough hands in to help. Pretty much the entire staff of Mercy Hospital—doctors, nurses, nurse assistants, techs, volunteers, anyone who could tie a bandage—was now in the ward working at top speed. As a result, there were a lot of people running around that Lauryn didn’t know, but even if she couldn’t put names to their faces, they all knew their jobs, and they did them faster than ever before, racing to stabilize patients whose illness they still didn’t understand.
Except one man.
“Dr. Jefferson?”
Lauryn looked up from the patient whose red eyes she’d been checking to see a handsome young doctor with dark skin smiling crookedly down at her from his impressive height. It was shocking to see—this was hardly a situation for smiling—but people had all kinds of ways of dealing with stress, and smiling was hardly a bad one. She just wished his looked less . . . predatory. “Yes?”
“I’m Dr. Lincoln Black, from Herpetology,” he said, his smile never wavering. “I understand you’re the one who pinned down the sulfur connection?”
“That’s me,” Lauryn said, confused. “I’m sorry, did you mean Hepatology?” Because unless her Greek was wrong, she was pretty sure herpetology was the study of snakes. But rather than dying of embarrassment like any normal doctor would if they got their own specialization wrong, the unnerving man just shrugged.
“Of course, of course, Hepatology,” he said, stepping in a bit closer, which in turn made Lauryn step back. “But you are Dr. Lauryn Jefferson, right? The one who was attacked by the junkie last night?”
Lauryn nodded, glancing back at her patient, who was starting to writhe again. “I’m sorry, Doctor, we’ll have to talk later. I need to get back to—”
“I’ll only be a moment,” Dr. Black said, reaching into his pocket. “I have something to show you. I think it could be the answer you’re looking for.”
That got Lauryn’s full attention. “Really?” she said, head shooting back up. “What did you find? Did someone isolate the compound that’s causing the hallucinations?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Black said. “But I can say for sure that you’re about to get some firsthand experience.”
With every word he spoke, Lauryn felt like the ground was crumbling under her feet. She couldn’t say when it became obvious, but by the time he finished, Lauryn was certain this Lincoln Black was no doctor—of the liver, snakes, or otherwise—and he didn’t mean anyone any good. She was already taking a breath to yell for security when his hand emerged from his lab coat clutching a glass vial that glowed like green fire.
Unfortunately, by the time her stumbling, panicked brain caught up with what her eyes were seeing, it was far too late. The tall man was already bringing the vial straight down into her face. It all happened so fast, she couldn’t even close her eyes. All she could do was stand there watching her death come down. Oddly enough, her last thought was the prayer her dad used to make her say every night before bed.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on.
Four corners to my bed, four angels round my head;
One to watch and one to pray, and two to bear my soul away.
Lauryn had always thought that prayer was macabre what with angels watching over you just in case you died in the night. Now, though, in the terrifying time dilation of panic, it just kept running through her head over and over, getting shorter and shorter with each cycle until it was only one line spinning through her head wildly like a broken record.
Two to bear my soul away. Two to bear my—
And then, without warning, he was there, the avenging angel, standing over her with his sword flashing like lightning as he smashed the green vial inches from her nose, sending the emerald liquid flying as he positioned his body like a wall between Lauryn and the grinning doctor who wasn’t a doctor at all.
“Well, hello, Talon.”
7
The Spirit and the Water and the Blood
For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water
and the blood; and these three agree.
—1 John 5:7–8
The emerald liquid flew out in an arc, splattering onto the linoleum floor with a violent hiss. But though the sulfurous stench of the vile concoction rose up like a physical presence, miraculously, not a drop hit Lauryn. It was the kind of luck that deserved a prayer of thanks, but Talon didn’t dare lower his head or take his eyes off the gri
nning monster in front of him.
“Haven’t seen you in a while, old man,” Lincoln Black said, showing no concern at all for the three-foot-long mirror-bright sword Talon was holding between them. His eyes instead flicked over Talon’s shoulder to Lauryn, who was still frozen in shock. “Still at it, I see?”
“Always,” Talon said, turning his sword so that the edge was angled at his enemy’s neck.
“Okay, that’s enough!”
The shout was loud and close, but neither man moved. Then, at last, Talon glanced to the side just long enough to see Detective Tannenbaum standing beside them with his gun drawn . . . and pointed at him.
“You’re aiming at the wrong target, Detective,” Talon said quietly, turning back to Black, who was smirking.
“Yeah, well, he’s not the one with a sword,” Will growled, finger hovering over the trigger. “But don’t worry—he’s under arrest, too. Now drop the weapon and put your hands up.”
Since Lauryn was still in Lincoln’s reach, Talon didn’t move. Black, however, raised his arms languidly over his head. Aside from that token gesture of compliance, though, he didn’t even spare Will a glance.
“I see you found yourself a new girl to attach to,” he said, flashing Lauryn a charming smile. “Word of advice, sweetheart: don’t stick around. Ladies who hang out with Talon tend to end up with a bad case of dead. But then, maybe that’s how he likes it?” He turned back to Talon with a cruel smile. “A little less temptation in your life, holy man?”
The taunt hit harder than Talon would have liked to admit. For a horrible second, he was back in that night, with Black standing over him, laughing as the blood dripped from his curved sword. And then, like a drowning man catching a lifeline, he remembered.
“Your words mean nothing,” he said, glaring at his oldest enemy. “‘You are of your father, the devil. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.’”
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