Lauryn nodded slowly, but her eyes weren’t on the pallets. She was staring at the vats on the floor where the emerald liquid was bubbling. “That’s . . .”
“The same thing you found on Lenny,” Talon agreed, nodding. “And the substance Lincoln Black tried to use on you.”
“They’re refining it,” she whispered, looking furious. “That black powder is made from the green drug that was causing the OD cases!”
“It’s worse than that,” Will said bitterly, leaning over the railings to get a good shot of the vats. “All of that is Z3X. According to my sources, it’s been added to every street drug sold in Chicago for months. What we’re seeing here is just a ramp-up of production.”
“But why?” Lauryn asked, confused. “This stuff kills people. Why would anyone want to fill the city with it?”
“Because that’s the point,” Talon said, his jaw tightening. Now, at last, it was all coming together. “Remember what I told you about the drug trapping sinners in despair? If what the detective says is true, then that’s why all the patients in the burn ward this morning had the same symptoms despite all being addicted to different vices. Everything they took was laced with Z3X. That was the path. Once the drug pried open the cracks, all the demons had to do was come inside.”
By the time he finished, Will was looking at him like Talon was the one high on drugs. Lauryn, on the other hand, seemed to be giving his words serious thought. That was more than Talon had expected, and he was starting to hope that Lauryn’s faith was growing, when she suddenly turned back to Will.
“You have to call someone,” she said urgently. “Supernatural hoodoo aside, whatever this stuff is, we know for a fact that it’s extremely dangerous and contagious. I’m still not sure what the trigger is, but every addict in Chicago has to be full of this stuff by now. If they start to pop, they’ll attack everyone around them, multiplying the problem exponentially.” She began to shake. “If we don’t do something quick, what happened in the burn ward this morning could happen to the entire city!”
“I know,” Will snapped. “But who the hell am I going to call? I found this place by shadowing the chief of police. The same guy who’s been hushing up what happened in the burn ward. I’d bet a million bucks he’s been in on all of this from the start, which explains why it’s been so hard to investigate. And besides, there’s not a politician in this city Korigan isn’t in bed with.” And Will had seen personally just how tight his hold on the cops was.
“There has to be someone,” Lauryn said.
“Who?” Will asked. “This place has been shipping Z3X like confetti all day. The fact that it’s not being raided as we speak is proof of just how tight the crooked bastard’s hold is. If I call for backup, he’ll just order them to come arrest me instead.”
“So go over his head,” Lauryn said. “Call in the National Guard or something.”
“I would,” Will said. “But Z3X isn’t actually illegal. And despite our theories, we still don’t have actual material proof linking this stuff to the burn ward.”
“What about all your pictures?”
“Those are for the DA,” Will said. “I’m building an ironclad case to nail Korigan to the wall for this. And just in case Korigan’s got the DA in his pocket, too, I’m sending the evidence to the state and national anti-corruption offices as well. Trust me, as soon as this blows up, he’s going down.”
“It’s blowing up as we speak!” Lauryn cried. “Forget Korigan–—we’re talking about a possible citywide outbreak! That’s what we need to stop.”
“If you know how, I’m all ears,” Will said. “But you’re not listening. The police chief of all of Chicago is in bed with this whole operation. If we call for help, all we’ll be doing is letting him know that we know, which means we’ll need to be silenced. That doesn’t end well for us, Lauryn.”
“None of this is going to end well if we don’t do something,” she said, fists clenching. “I’m not going to stand around waiting for people to die. First we find my brother, and then we’re going to figure out how to shut down this factory.”
“It won’t matter,” Will said tiredly. “Like I said, this is just their biggest facility. I saw a dozen more smaller ones, trailing Korigan earlier today, not to mention all the Z3X that’s already out there.”
She threw up her hands. “So we shouldn’t even try?”
“I’m trying to keep you from getting killed!”
“I’m pretty sure my life would be a small price to pay for preventing an entire city from going through what happened at the hospital this morning,” Lauryn said, lifting her chin stubbornly. “You do what you want. I’m going to save my brother, and then I’m going to do whatever I can to fix this. I’m a doctor—that’s what I do. I fix things. It might not be enough, but at least I won’t have to live with myself knowing I could have helped, and did nothing.”
By the time she finished, Will looked ready to throttle her. Talon, however, was bursting with pride. He’d watched this back-and-forth with apprehension, but now he had nothing but confidence. She might not believe, but no one could argue that Lauryn’s heart wasn’t fierce, and in exactly the right place. “Come then,” he said, cutting off Will, who was clearly not done arguing. “Let’s find your brother.”
Lauryn nodded and pulled out her phone, dialing Robert’s number and going still, listening. Talon listened, too, but he didn’t hear a sound. Either Robert’s phone was silenced, or too far away to hear. But just as he was about to suggest a search, Lauryn’s arm shot up to point at something over their heads. “There!”
Talon and Will both spun around to look, squinting up through the metal grate that served as the floor for the warehouse’s second story. Sure enough, at the end of the wall, a light was shining down through the cracks. When they got closer, it became obvious it was from the bright LED glow of a smartphone screen lying facedown on the grate where it had dropped from the hand of the slumped figure collapsed beside it.
“Robbie,” Lauryn gasped, the blood draining from her face before she turned and bolted for the metal stairs at a dead run.
Talon followed her instantly. A few seconds later, Will did, too, cursing under his breath about making as much noise as a herd of elephants—which Talon didn’t actually disagree with. Thankfully, the giant machines churning the pools of Z3X made enough noise to cover, and they made it to the second floor without attracting attention.
Unlike the other half of the upper warehouse area, which served as a packing room, this part of the building’s second story had been done up almost like a loft apartment. And in a corner where a leather sectional had been set up below some tasteful exposed lighting, a young man in a puffy jacket—whose face looked very much like his sister’s—was slumped on the ground, looking like he’d fallen straight off the couches.
Lauryn ran to her brother’s side without a word, but she hissed when she saw the baggie clutched in his outstretched hand. “What’s that?”
“Heroin,” Will replied instantly with the surety of someone who’d answered that question too many times to count.
“Idiot,” Lauryn sighed, glaring down at her brother’s unconscious face. “We need to get him to the hospital.”
“No call for that,” Will replied, reaching into his pocket. “He’s just tripping, but I can fix that.”
She glanced up, confused. “You can?”
“Vice cop, remember?” Will said, pulling out a plastic kit and holding it up for her to see. “We deal with this kind of thing all the time, which means I travel prepared.”
Lauryn nodded like that made sense, but Talon was curious. “What is that?” he asked as Will unzipped what looked like a diabetic’s insulin kit.
“Naloxone shot,” the detective replied, pulling out a prefilled syringe and cracking the plastic head off the needle. “Instantly reverses the opium high. Even if he’s OD’d, this should be enough to bring him back down to earth. Of course, it might not be a pleasant fall, but that’s
the price you pay for putting shit in your system.”
“Just be careful,” Lauryn said, biting her lip. “Just because Naloxone’s common doesn’t mean it’s without risk. You could give him pulmonary edema.”
“I don’t even know what that is, but it hasn’t happened yet,” Will assured her. “Relax. Believe it or not, this is the most normal thing I’ve done all day.”
He stabbed the needle into Robert’s arm, and a second later, the kid shot up with a gasp, his eyes flying open to show the bloody sheen covering both whites.
Talon knew what that meant. “He’s turning,” he warned, grabbing the boy’s shoulders and forcing him back to the ground.
“Not yet,” Lauryn said back, grabbing her brother as well. “Robbie! Can you hear me?”
For a moment, Robert didn’t seem to hear any of it, and then, just like Lenny, he blinked. “Lauryn?”
Relief broke over her face like a sunrise. “It’s me,” she assured him. “I’m here. We’re going to make you better, okay?”
As she spoke, panic glazed over Robert’s face. “You can’t,” he whispered, fighting Talon’s hold. “There’s no way out! The wings, the teeth—they’re everywhere! They’re almost here! They’ll drag us all down to—”
He cut off with a choking sound, and Lauryn cursed under her breath as the bluish tinge began to seep up his arms where she’d grabbed them. “He’s going!”
“So stop him!” Will said, putting his hands on Robbie’s shoulders. “You did it before!”
Talon couldn’t have put it better himself. For her part, Lauryn looked desperate. “I know,” she muttered, eyes wide. “But I can’t . . . I just can’t pray over him and call it medicine! That’s not how this works!”
“But it is how this works,” Talon said, his voice firm as he stared her down. “It’s time to believe, Lauryn. You’ve been shown the truth again and again. Now you have to embrace it and save your brother’s life.”
“Why me?” she whispered, her voice cracking with panic. “You’re they guy with the holy water! I don’t believe in this crazy—”
“You did in the hospital,” Talon reminded her, his voice sharp. This was it, he realized. He’d been following all this time, blindly walking the path he’d been set with nothing but faith to assure him it would all work out. But now, as always, God had led him to exactly where he needed to be. Lauryn may not have believed in the beginning, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see the light. That, Talon knew at last, was why he’d been sent to her. Not only to protect, but to guide. To lead her to where she needed to be, and now that they were finally here together on the brink, Talon was determined not to fail.
“There is no halfway in this, Lauryn,” he said calmly. “Either you believe or you don’t, but you know how to save your brother, because you did it before.”
She shook her head. “I was desperate before.”
“And you are desperate now,” Talon said. “But God is there for us in our desperation. He is everywhere. He’s offering you the rope, Lauryn. But you have to reach out. You have to be willing to take that first leap of faith, or you will never go anywhere at all.”
He reached into his coat as he finished, removing the plastic bottle of blessed water that he’d refilled at her father’s church. “You know what to do,” he said as he held it out to her. “Now heal him as you’ve healed so many others, and believe.”
Lauryn didn’t reply. She just sat there, her whole body shaking like she was fighting something, and then Robbie’s body lurched under their grip, his face contorting in pain. That must have been the last straw. Whatever else she believed or felt, Lauryn had always been a healer, and that was what she did now, grabbing the bottle of water from Talon’s hand and dumping the whole thing over her brother like she was trying to drench him. And as the water fell, Talon knew. He knew it to his bones, knew it like he’d know a miracle happening right under his nose.
Lauryn finally believed.
Lauryn had no idea what she was doing.
Years of practice kept her calm on the outside—doctors never panicked—but inside she was a seething mess of fear and contradictions. Part of her actively hated Talon for making her do this, because she knew it wouldn’t work. As her physiology professor used to joke, if faith healing worked, all operating rooms would be staffed with preachers. Every book she’d read, every day she’d gone to school, every hour she’d pulled in the Mercy ER was a pebble on the mountain of evidence that Talon was asking her to do the impossible, and yet . . .
She looked down at Robbie. Even dressed up in designer wear, it was funny how much he still looked like the little kid she remembered, the brother she loved. She’d gotten so wrapped up in being a doctor, she hadn’t even noticed she was losing him until he was gone. If she didn’t save him now, she could lose him forever, but the only way to do that was to accept what Talon was saying. And while she knew he was right, that it had worked before, doubt still ate at her. She could almost hear her fellow doctors laughing at her for being such a sucker, buying into things she knew couldn’t be true. She could imagine Naree with a look of incredulous scorn as she finally got back to her apartment and tried to explain all this to her roommate. The burn ward this morning had been one thing—there were atheists in foxholes—but this was different. Her life wasn’t on the line. Robbie’s was. If she did this, she’d be putting both of them in God’s hands, the same God she’d spent her whole adult life rolling her eyes at. The fact that she was even considering it made her as crazy as Talon.
But she had to do something.
And so it went, logic against hope, belief against experience, back and forth and back and forth. She might have gone on like that forever, but then Robbie’s body seized under her hands once again, his back arching up off the grate floor so suddenly, she almost lost her grip. And that was what did it, because she’d seen this before. She knew exactly what happened after the seizures started. Like everything else today, it made no medical sense, but as she fought her baby brother’s violent thrashing, Lauryn realized she didn’t care. Everything she’d been wrestling with was still true, but in the face of losing Robbie—of losing anyone else to this scourge—she realized it didn’t matter.
She could be right all day long, and Robbie was still going to die. Despite all her years of medical training, all her knowledge, there was nothing she could do to save her brother, so Lauryn gave up trying to be right or logical. She stopped trying to explain what was happening, stopped trying to make sense of the nonsensical. Instead, she tossed the ego and bowed her head, mentally reaching out with everything she had to the God she’d spent her entire life ignoring.
Please, she prayed, the words falling out of her like tears. You helped me before; do it again. Please save him. Please bring him back to me. Please, God, please, please—
She was still begging when her brother gasped again, only this time it was an explosive sound of relief. Lauryn’s eyes shot open; she grabbed Robbie’s head with both her hands, and then without warning, she began to sob. Her brother’s skin was going back to normal, the sickly bluish color draining away. He still looked like a junkie who’d just been forced out of a flying high, but compared to what could have been, the transformation was nothing short of miraculous.
In every sense of the word.
Even after her surrender, that realization was too much for Lauryn to take in, so she brushed it aside and grabbed her brother instead, squeezing him so hard it was more like a grapple than a hug.
“Lauryn,” Robbie croaked. “Too tight.”
“You damn idiot!” she sobbed, loosening her grip, but only a fraction. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!”
“Do what?” he said, reaching up to grab his head. “I feel like crap. What did you do to me?”
“Kicked you out of your high,” Will said.
The sound of his voice was much closer than Lauryn expected, and she looked up with a start to see him kneeling right beside her, glaring down at her br
other like a wolf. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, kid.”
Robbie blinked at him. “Who the hell are you?”
“Robbie!” Lauryn whispered, but Will just rolled with it.
“Detective Tannenbaum,” he said. “Chicago Vice.”
“Yeah—where’s your badge?”
“He’s a cop, Robbie,” Lauryn said, rolling her eyes. “Trust me.”
He must have, because her brother’s eyes went wide. His fear was so transparent, Lauryn could practically see each step as he worked out what Will’s presence here meant, right before he shoved her away.
“Aw, man,” he said, putting up his hands. “The damn cops? You won’t get nothin’ from—”
“Save it,” Will growled, pulling a pair of cuffs from his back pocket. But just as Lauryn was about to ask if that was really necessary, her brother jerked again, and she glanced up to see Robbie staring not at her or Will or even Talon, but at something behind them, his face going ashen.
“It’s him.”
He sounded so terrified, Lauryn’s first thought was that he was still hallucinating, and then she heard it, too. Someone was coming up the stairs behind them. When she turned around, though, she saw that it wasn’t one of the warehouse workers or even one of the bruisers acting as lookouts. It was someone infinitely more horrifying, because when she followed her brother’s gaze to the stairs, the man from the burn ward was looking straight back at her, leaning on the railings with a sword propped on his shoulder. That was all she managed to see before Talon stepped in front of her with his own blade in his hands.
“Black,” he growled.
“Call me Lincoln,” the man said, his eyes glittering despite the lack of light. “Surely we’re on a first-name basis after all the things we’ve been through together.”
Talon of God Page 22
