“Please,” Korigan scoffed. “I don’t actually believe in all this satanic crap. But St. Luke does. He’s the one running this crazy train, and you’re my ticket off it.”
By this point, Lauryn was utterly lost. “How do you think that’s going to work? I don’t even know—”
She cut off with a gasp as his hand tightened. “Shut up,” he snarled, sending little bits of rotted flesh pattering against her cheek. “Your opinion doesn’t mean a damned thing. All that matters is that the SEE warrior St. Luke and his lackey Black are obsessed with thinks you’re important enough to give you this.” He tapped Talon’s sword against the wall right beside her face. “That makes you leverage, Dr. Jefferson. Leverage I’m going to use to get out of this mess, and if you shut up and do as I say, you might even live through it.”
That was a lie if Lauryn ever heard one, but she was screwed either way, so she played along. “Okay,” she said, relaxing her body in a show of submission. “But even if you do trade me, what do you think St. Luke’s going to give you in return? There’s no medical treatment for Z3X exposure.”
“Nothing you know about,” Korigan said. “But St. Luke isn’t stupid. Z3X is his creation, and you don’t start a chain reaction this big without building yourself a way out.”
Lauryn’s heart skipped a beat. “You’re saying there’s a cure?”
The arm pinning her moved as Korigan shrugged. “Cure, antidote, treatment, I have no idea. But this is St. Luke. The man built his empire on drugs, legal and not, and now he’s using one to take over this entire city. This whole thing was planned from the very beginning, and there’s no way during all of that, St. Luke didn’t build himself an escape.”
For the first time since he’d grabbed her, Lauryn felt a surge of hope. Korigan was actually making sense. Of course St. Luke would leave a back door for himself, which meant there might really be a cure. Maybe finding it was why she’d been sent here! But elated as that thought made her, Korigan wasn’t finished.
“There has to be a way to reverse this,” he rasped. “But St. Luke’s not going to give it away for free, and that’s where you come in.” He lifted his ruined lip in a terrifying grin. “I don’t know what your connection to Talon is, but you’d better play your part and act like a good little font of mystical knowledge. ’Cause if you don’t sell him on your value enough to get me access to that antidote, you’re never going to see another dawn. Now—” he let go of her throat only to grab a handful of her hair, using it like a leash to yank her down the hall “—let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time.”
Lauryn didn’t want to go anywhere with him, but with one of his hands holding Talon’s stolen sword and the other clutched tight around her hair, she had no choice but to try to keep up. The pain in her scalp brought tears to her eyes as Korigan dragged her across the trashed, crow-covered ballroom to a door on the other side that led deeper into the house.
If someone had told her Chicago’s most eccentric billionaire had a secret satanic lab hidden inside his house, Lauryn would have been understandably skeptical. Now, however, after Korigan had dragged her through the debauched ballroom, down a long hallway filled with blasphemous art and then through a false wall into a secret elevator, she was just wishing St. Luke had built his laboratory somewhere more convenient. As much as it hurt, though, she refused to show weakness, though she couldn’t quite stop a sigh of relief when the crooked police chief finally let go of her hair to shove her inside the hidden elevator. But lovely as it was to finally be released from the horrible pain in her scalp, Lauryn’s relief quickly gave way to fear as the elevator descended deep below the house.
When the doors opened again, the view was very different. Spooky as it had been, at least the trashed mansion had been recognizably human. By contrast, the hallway in front of them now looked like some kind of alien prison with its harsh overhead lights, smooth concrete floor, and—worst of all—what appeared to be glass-fronted, steel-barred cells running down either side. With the lights off, Lauryn couldn’t actually see what the cells contained. She was trying to decide if that was a blessing or a curse when Korigan moved to grab her hair again.
Desperate to avoid the pain, she put up her hands in surrender and walked forward on her own, staying as close to the lit center of the wide hallway as possible. On either side, she could hear the things inside the darkened cells, a terrifying mix of pained moans and horrible, inhuman buzzing. If she looked hard enough, she could even see them moving in the dark—hands pressing against the glass walls, masses writhing—so she didn’t look. This, she realized, must be the zoo Korigan had mentioned. It was even more horrible than she’d imagined, so she tried to focus on other things, keeping her eyes straight ahead as Korigan walked her down the middle of the dark hall, her terrified mind clinging to the psalm her father had always made her recite whenever she’d admitted to being afraid. The one that had given her strength the last time she met Korigan.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
Korigan jerked her hair, making her gasp in pain. “I didn’t permit you to speak.”
Lauryn hadn’t realized she was speaking, but the words wouldn’t stop.
I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
“What did I just say?” he snarled, shoving her so hard she stumbled. When he reached down to yank her back up, though, he froze, eyes wide with terror. Above his leather glove, the flesh of his wrist was rotting before their eyes, the gray skin flaking off in huge chunks to reveal the bone underneath. It was a horrifying sight, and for long heartbeat, they were both struck dumb before Korigan grabbed his sleeve and tugged it down, hiding the flesh from view.
“Go,” he snarled, clutching his decaying arm to his side. “Hurry.”
Lauryn didn’t want to do anything he said, but she also wanted to escape this awful place, so she obeyed, picking up the pace as the two of them rushed through the rest of the dark, cell-lined passage to the doorway at the end. Here, the hall opened up into a much larger room. Normally, that would have made Lauryn happy. She wasn’t exactly claustrophobic, but she’d never enjoyed small underground spaces, and anything should have felt like paradise after that horrible hallway. But even though this place was almost airy by comparison to the prison corridor, it was definitely not an improvement.
They had entered what was clearly a lab, but it was like no medical laboratory Lauryn had ever seen. Some of the machines were the same, but interspersed between them were horrible devices that looked like a cross between a mad scientist’s creations and sacrificial altars. Recently used ones, given the astonishing amount of blood that coated their surfaces.
A day ago, any one of them would have been enough to make Lauryn freeze in terror. Now, though, given all the other hell she’d walked through to get here, she just turned away in disgust, scanning the bloody room for the reason Korigan had brought her here.
He was easy to find. In the whole giant room, there was only one person to be seen: a handsome older man in an unspeakably expensive tux standing in the middle of the lab with his back to them, his hands clasped at his sides as he stared into what could only be described as a pure black cube.
“Welcome back, Victor.”
Lauryn jerked back. She knew the voice, of course. She wasn’t even surprised to discover that Christopher St. Luke sounded exactly the same in person as he did on television. What she wasn’t prepared for was what happened when he turned around, revealing a shirt front and white tie that were every bit as blood soaked as the rest of the room. There was blood on his face as well, painting a joker’s smile across the smooth shaved line of his neatly trimmed beard as he flashed Lauryn a hungry grin.
“And you’ve brought a gift.”
The sight of his bloody teeth was enough to make her gag. If Korigan hadn’t still been holding her by her hair, she would have bolted right then and there. But even as she felt herself starting to crack, the memory of her father spoke clearer than ever.
/> Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
“I told you to stop that,” Korigan said threateningly, but St. Luke held up his hand.
“Let her recite her poetry,” he said dismissively. “It has no power here. I’m far more interested in where you acquired that.”
“I thought you would be,” Korigan said, holding Talon’s sword up in front of him like a prize. “The girl got it from her God warrior boyfriend when your man Lincoln Black tricked the idiot into trading his life for hers. A bad move on his part, since I got her in the end.” He chuckled. “So sad. All that sacrifice for nothing.”
“So I see,” St. Luke said, holding out his hand. “Give her here. And the sword. Quickly.”
Korigan’s gloved fingers tightened on Lauryn’s shoulder. “No.”
St. Luke arched a blood-splattered eyebrow. “No?”
“I did what you wanted,” Korigan said. “I tied this city up and put it on the railroad tracks, exactly as ordered.”
“And you have been paid handsomely for it,” St. Luke said. “Everything you asked, I gave: money, power—”
“What good is all that when I look like this?” Korigan spat, pointing at his face.
“Whatever do you mean?” St. Luke asked innocently. “You’ve never looked better.” He grinned at the decaying flesh that now covered half of the police chief’s face. “Your true nature is showing through at last, Victor Korigan. Rotten on the outside as you are on the inside.”
The police chief sneered. “Save your lies for your crazies,” he said, yanking Lauryn back into his chest. “Our previous business is concluded. This is a new deal. You and Black have been obsessed with that drifter who calls himself Talon ever since you heard he was in town. This girl is his prize. I’ll give her to you, and the sword, but in return, I want the antidote.”
St. Luke looked surprised. “Antidote? To what?”
Korigan’s rotting face turned savage. “Don’t play stupid with me, old man. I know you built yourself a way out of this mess. Give it to me. Undo this—” he pointed at his rotted face “—and I’ll give you the doctor girl that warrior of yours gave everything to save. We’ll both get what we want, and then we can end this business cleanly like professionals.”
“Ah, yes,” St. Luke said wistfully. “Business. It’s always business with you, Korigan. But what you don’t understand is that, for me, this situation has never been anything but personal. Tonight is my victory. The payoff of many, many years’ hard work.” He paused there, flashing Korigan a smug grin. “Why would I ever build a way out of that?”
“Stop lying,” Korigan said, though he no longer sounded so sure. “No one’s crazy enough to infect an entire city without making an antidote!”
“Come now, Victor. You can’t have it both ways,” St. Luke said with a laugh. “You thought I was crazy enough to give you my fortune in return for less than forty-eight hours’ worth of work. You can’t then turn around and insist I’m sane enough to build a way out.”
By the time he finished, Korigan didn’t seem to know what to think. He just stood there staring at St. Luke with a look of bewildered horror. Then, with an unearthly howl of rage, he shoved Lauryn away. “You crazy bastard!” he screamed. “You knew this would happen!”
“I did,” St. Luke confessed. “But you have no one to blame but yourself. A smart businessman should have known I’d never have been so free with my fortune if there was any chance of your surviving to claim it.”
“Survive this, asshole!” the police chief bellowed, his voice transformed in rage as he threw Talon’s sword to the ground. The beautiful blade was still crashing into the cement when Korigan pulled his cannon of a semiautomatic pistol out of his coat and aimed it with both hands, emptying the entire magazine straight into St. Luke’s chest.
The rich man didn’t move the whole time. Didn’t even flinch as the bullets ripped into his already bloody chest.
And he definitely didn’t go down.
“What the . . . ” Korigan said, eyes wide as he pulled the trigger on his now empty gun again and again, getting only hollow clicks. “What the hell are you?”
“What you can become,” St. Luke said, brushing his long, elegant fingers over the bloody holes Korigan had just made in his chest. His unmoving chest, Lauryn realized for the first time. “I told you, friend, it’s too late. There is no antidote, no cure, no salvation for anyone in this city. Nothing can save you once the fall begins.” He grinned wide, showing them a wall of bloody teeth. “You were all damned from the very beginning.”
“NO!” Korigan roared, throwing his empty gun at St. Luke, who dodged easily. “I don’t believe in any of this! I’m not—”
But he was. Even as he screamed that he wasn’t, Korigan was changing, his body rotting before Lauryn’s eyes. By the time his voice gave out, he looked like a walking corpse, not that it slowed him down. If anything, he actually seemed to be getting bigger, his putrid flesh pulsing and expanding as he stumbled toward St. Luke.
“You bastard!” he gurgled, the words mangled by his swelling throat as he grabbed the billionaire. “I’ll take you to hell with me!”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” St. Luke said calmly, barely seeming to notice the huge, monstrous hands Korigan had wrapped around his torso. “You see, you’ve got it backwards. I’ve already been to hell, and I brought it back with me.”
His hand shot out as he finished, the elegant, bloody fingers punching right through the wall of Korigan’s bulletproof vest and into the flesh beneath. It was a horrifying sight, but even when his entire hand was inside Korigan’s chest, St. Luke didn’t let go. He did the opposite, clenching his hand around the bones inside the bigger man’s torso before he jerked down, using his own inhuman strength to force the thing Korigan had become to its knees on the floor in front of him.
“Accept your fate, Victor,” St. Luke whispered, his blue eyes gleaming. “Embrace the monster you truly are, or die like so many others on this bloodiest, most beautiful of nights.”
“Never,” Korigan spat, his bloody eyes furious. “I will never be one of your monsters!”
St. Luke’s face fell into a look of supreme disappointment. “Then die,” he said, throwing the rotten man with a flick of his hand straight back into the black cube at the lab’s heart that he’d been gazing into when they’d arrived.
With everything else that had been going on, Lauryn hadn’t had a moment to spare for the strange dark cube at the lab’s center. So far as she knew, it was just another unspeakable terror in the billionaire’s collection. But the moment St. Luke threw Korigan into it, she realized she was wrong.
Though St. Luke had tossed the rotting pile of flesh that had once been Chicago’s corrupt police chief with enough force to send him flying straight across the giant room, the moment he entered the shadows, all trace of what had once been Korigan—his body, his scream, even his stench—vanished. There was no ripple, no fading. He was simply gone, and the longer Lauryn stared into the darkness where he’d vanished, the more sure she became that it wasn’t simple darkness at all. It was something else entirely, something no living soul should see.
“That takes care of that,” St. Luke said, brushing his bloody hands together to remove the last remaining flecks of Korigan from his slender fingers. “Now.” His eyes flicked to Lauryn. “Where were we?”
Up until this point, Lauryn had still been thinking of St. Luke as a man. When his cold eyes found her now, though, she finally understood the thing in the room with her was human in form only. But even as the primal terror that followed turned her legs to jelly and sent her to the ground, the words came again unbidden to her mind, louder than ever.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
“More poetry,” St. Luke said, his footsteps echoing on the bloody floor as he walked toward her. “It really is quite moving. But dazzling with language
is an old con-artist trick: useful only on those too feebleminded to find their way through it. Tell me, little doctor, does that include you?”
He stopped when he reached her, bending over to look her in the eyes. He was so close, the blood from his bullet-riddled shirt—his, Korigan’s, or someone else’s entirely, Lauryn couldn’t even tell at this point—dripped down to land on her clenched fists. Each drop was cold as snow and burned like acid, scoring her skin before she snatched her hands away.
“What are you?”
“You know,” he said with a slow smile. “If you are what I think you are, you know. But the really interesting question here is who are you, Lauryn Jefferson?”
Lauryn set her jaw stubbornly. “A doctor.”
“Really?” His eyes flicked to Talon’s sword, still lying where Korigan had tossed it down on the bloody floor, several feet out of reach. “That’s an awful big scalpel for a doctor.”
“It’s not mine,” she said stubbornly. “It belongs to Talon, and he’s going to be coming for it soon.”
St. Luke grinned like that was a marvelous joke. “Considering he’s with Lincoln right now, I sincerely doubt that. I know the Soldiers of El Elyon can seem infallible, what with their monk-like discipline and Biblical magic tricks, but take it from someone who’s dealt with them for a very long time: planning is not one of their strong suits. So far as I can tell, their only strategy seems to be ‘wait for sign from God, hope it turns out.’”
Lauryn set her jaw. “It seems to work for them.”
“Does it?” St. Luke asked, turning around to wave his hand at the giant room packed full of lab equipment and nightmares. “Do you think all this was built in a day? Or a year?” He shook his head. “I’ve been working on this for ages. If the SEE had any real idea what they were doing, they’d have sent Talon to stop me last year, or the year before that. They most definitely wouldn’t have sent him alone. But sadly for Chicago, God couldn’t be bothered to send one of his cleanup crews around at a point when it actually would have done some good, which is why I have the free time to stand here discussing it with you. My victory is already assured. But just because the idiots who found you first are a bunch of disorganized, borderline psychotic Jesus freaks with terrible planning doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be one, too.”
Talon of God Page 27
