Then he hurried down the embankment toward his friends.
Chapter 25
The second time Helen had emerged from the darkness, she awoke in the crematorium.
The nightmare of her husband beating her to death, now interspersed with images of the little girl in the rain, headlights bearing down, had run on loop in her mind during the intervening time, which she could only describe as an eternity.
And there was something else, too, a hint of something, like sunlight eking around the corner of heavily tinted sunglasses. There was something good mixed in with the bad and awful, something that was asking her—
But before Helen could truly grasp what that was, she was pulled back.
I need you again, sweet Helen. I need your help.
And Helen had helped. She helped gather the other dead, helped make sure that the two meddling cops couldn’t take Carson and Bella away from him.
Before she knew what was happening, Helen found herself at some sort of estate, once again doing the bidding of the voice in her head.
Then she was weeping—as much as a woman missing most of her face and the contents of her skull could weep—as she sent the boy, the skinny boy with the thick glasses, to the Marrow long before his time.
Then Robert had saved her, saved her by condemning her to being locked inside his head, unable to ever get a true sense of the light around the glasses, of the feeling of warmth that she never knew she longed for.
Before Robert had taken her quiddity inside him, completely taken her away from the empty shell of her body, however, the voice had told Helen one final thing.
Something that she tucked away, something that she couldn’t even let Robert know.
I will need you once more, Helen. One more time I will call on you before this is over.
And as much as it pained her to be beholden to another man after what had happened, Helen knew, without doubt, that when the voice came calling she would obey.
She had no choice.
Chapter 26
Cal took two small steps backward and then tripped over the handle of the travois. With a grunt, he fell in a heap on the sandy beach.
“What are you doing?” he gasped, his eyes locked on the two remaining guardian children who now had almost fully emerged from the water. “Tell Aiden to take them out!”
Chloe shook her head.
“I can’t. They’re… they’re just children, Cal. My children. I can’t let him just shoot them here on the beach.”
Cal stared at the rotting flesh hanging off their round faces, their pitch-black eyes, their arms dangling limply at their sides.
“You’ve got some ugly ass children,” he grumbled under his breath.
“These children,” Chloe continued, ignoring his comment. “They were once supposed to protect us from people like my husband,” her voice hitched and she lowered her gaze for a moment, “and my son. People like Michael and Bella and Jonah Silvers. They deserve better than this—none of it was their fault. None of this is their doing.”
Then Chloe Black did the unbelievable. She took a step backward toward the lapping waves behind her.
Cal’s eyes, already bulging out of his head, almost exploded when he saw six other orphan children rise from the water behind the first wave.
“Umm, Chloe? You’re gonna wanna get over here. Children or not, they’re fucking dead and if—”
Once again, Cal’s commentary went ignored.
“For decades, I holed myself up in the tower, in Trellis, trying to keep things together. And after Carson was incarcerated, I thought that was the end of it. But that bastard… that bastard Seth had to go and get Robert involved. And now this,” she took another step backward. The rotting guardian children were within ten feet of her now, and Chloe didn’t seem to care.
“Nice story, Chloe, but maybe you could just—”
“I’m just so tired… after all this time… I’m just so damn tired. I guess I was just too naive to realize it until now, but my time is up, Cal. I’m too old for this fight, too old and too scarred. Too broken. I’m just bringing you down. All this time, I was searching for someone to succeed me without even knowing it, and now I have.”
No, please! You can’t do this! We need you! Cal’s mind shouted as he finally realized what Chloe intended to do.
He turned his gaze to Robert, whose eyes moved frantically from behind closed lids as if he were experiencing the most vivid of dreams.
Wake the fuck up, Robert! Please, you have to stop this insanity.
Chloe took another step backward, and then movement in his periphery forced Cal to whip his head around. He scooted protectively toward Robert, expecting to see another rotting child coming at him from behind this time, trapping them. But it wasn’t one of the orphans; instead, it was Aiden, and he too looked frightened.
And it went without saying that something that scared a dead man put the fear of God in Callum Godfrey.
“Chloe, come to me,” Aiden snapped, stepping forward.
Chloe shook her head.
“Don’t you see? I waited for years for someone to take over, and now that Seth brought Robert into the fold, I’ve found that person.”
Cal swallowed hard and his eyes again moved to Robert at his side, hoping that his friend would suddenly wake up, that Robert would just wake the fuck up and talk some sense into his mother.
Do that weird thing with his hands, maybe, like he had back at the Harlop Estate, and get them out of this mess.
All of them, unscathed.
“Robert can’t help us now,” Cal whispered, raising his eyes to Chloe’s scarred face. “Maybe he can’t help us ever again.”
“You need to come to me,” Aiden said, lowering the gun off his shoulder.
Chloe held up a finger.
“This is it, Aiden,” she took another step backward, closing the distance between her and the first of the children to only a handful of feet. “I’m tired, spent. Look at me.”
Contrary to the command, Cal looked away from the woman’s mangled features, turned his gaze skyward, but when Chloe growled and repeated the words, he leveled his eyes at her.
“Look at me!”
She was bald, the paper-thin layer of skin covering her skull a patchwork of scars from where Leland had cut her all those years ago.
One of her eyes was missing, and her lips were almost completely gone. Her voice, a strangled, hoarse rasp was a consequence of the gash that ran across her throat.
Cal shook his head, trying to prevent his mind from conjuring thoughts of how Chloe must have felt lying on the dusty ground of the abandoned orphanage with her husband’s leer reflecting off the knife as he dragged it across the soft skin beneath her chin.
“I didn’t know—”
Now it was Cal’s turn to interrupt.
“Robert can’t help us! You need to come over here, now! Get away from them!” Cal screamed as he pulled himself to his feet.
“No, Cal, you don’t understand.”
She moved backward again, and Cal felt his chest start to quake. Tiny, fleshless fingers at the end of miniature palms suddenly rose and reached for her.
Decades ago, Chloe Black had taught the students, taught them about the Marrow, about what happens after you die and what it meant to keep the Marrow a one-way street.
And she meant something to them. Maybe not in their current ragged, decaying forms, but deep down in the quiddity that Cal knew they still possessed, Chloe Black meant something to them.
Cal started to sob.
“Robert can’t—”
Chloe shook her head one final time.
“You still don’t get it, do you, Cal? I didn’t know it myself, not for sure, not until you told me you had met the Curator before and remembered him. Then I knew.”
“Chloe, please, you need to—” Aiden began, but the woman had reached the point of no return.
“I don’t want Robert to lead the new guardians, Cal,” she said with a sigh.
“I want you to do it.”
The words so stunned Cal that when Chloe abruptly backpedaled, neither he nor Aiden reacted in time.
“No!” Aiden shouted, and he lunged toward the woman, only to pull back again as the children grabbed Chloe’s falling body.
Cal stared through teary eyes as their tiny hands started to tug at her cloak all the while dragging her backward into the water.
As their forms started to shimmer—either a consequence of the sun reflecting off the waves, or of their bodies passing over—Cal saw Chloe’s ragged slit of a mouth start to open again.
Only this time, he wasn’t sure if he heard the words she said, or simply read her lips.
Find the Curator, Cal. Find the Curator and put an end to this before it’s too late, before the gates to Hell are open forever.
Chapter 27
Ed’s eyes shot upward as the cloudy sky suddenly brightened. There was a brilliant flash, one that sent streaks of red and white across his vision, but it only lasted a second. In its wake were more clouds, only these weren’t the white and fluffy kind as before. These were ominous, with hints of dark gray licking their edges.
There was a storm brewing, of that he was certain.
“What was that?” he asked absently, only half expecting an answer.
“Another one bites the dust,” the man in the rags said with a laugh.
Ed stared at him, a grimace plastered on his face.
“What’d you say?”
The man, who had yet to offer them a name, smiled, revealing his caked brown teeth.
“You don’t need to be worrying about that,” he replied, grabbing the bow of the boat in two hands and giving it a push toward the water.
Ed looked over at Allan, who simply shrugged as he stared back.
“Who are you?” Ed asked, his police instincts taking over. Even though this was as far from his district—as far from NYC—as humanly possible, he couldn’t shut off his detective mind. “Where did you come from?”
The man’s hands, covered in what appeared to be tattered wool gloves, squeezed the wooden bow until his fingertips turned white. He stopped pushing and his smile flickered.
“I’m not from here, I’ll tell you that much. And I won’t be staying long.”
Ed didn’t like the evasive answer; he had spent too much time among thieves and liars and degenerates to know the reason behind these types of responses. But before he could address this, Allan spoke up.
“You mean you’re not coming with us?”
The brown smile returned.
“Heeeelll no,” he tittered, “I don’t belong here.”
Ed’s grimace deepened.
“What do you mean you—”
“Whelp, would you look at that,” the man in rags said, looking down at a wrist that didn’t sport a watch. “My time here is up.”
He gave a final shove and the ass end of the boat—a glorified canoe, really—started to sway in the water. Then he waved his hand across it as if showcasing an expensive piece of jewelry.
“So how about you guys get in? You’ve got somewhere to be as well, don’t you, now?”
Chapter 28
Aiden reached for Cal’s arm, but he pulled away at the last second.
“Don’t touch me,” he whispered as he wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of one hand. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
“We have to go,” Aiden said quietly. “We have to—”
“Neat trick you got there,” a female voice said from behind them. Cal whipped around, and then staggered.
Bella was standing in the sand, feet spread shoulder width apart, hands at her sides.
Aiden stepped around Cal, giving him a protective berth as he placed himself between them.
“Go,” he whispered over his shoulder. “Take Robert and run.”
Cal stared at the demented woman with the hair that looked as if it had been cut by a child using a meat cleaver.
“Oh, the big bad protector, huh?” Bella twisted her wrist and a blade suddenly appeared in her hand. “We’ve played this game before, Aiden. And you lost.”
Bella flicked her other wrist, and now both hands held six-inch long blades. She strode forward, and Aiden did the same, slipping the gun from his shoulder as he did.
“You tried that, too,” she said, and although her face remained stern, Bella seemed to hesitate. “Didn’t work.”
Cal reached down and grabbed the handles of the travois and then slowly rose again.
Bella smirked as she peeked around Aiden at Cal, and then at Robert.
“Huh, the Black boy not doing so well, is he? Never was the strong one of the two. I’m glad I picked Carson. I mean, he’s not perfect, but—”
Cal clenched his teeth.
“What do you want from us?” he suddenly shouted, gripping the handle of the travois as tightly as his blistered hands could manage. “What the fuck do you want from us? You stole Shelly, you have the baby! What more do you want?”
Aiden tried to hush him by holding up a hand, but Cal was suddenly overcome by fury.
“You took everything!” he threw his arms out to his sides. “We’re done! Wasted! Spent! Why don’t you just leave us the fuck alone?”
Bella fully turned to face him now, flashing the blades in quick, almost hypnotic movements.
“Everything? Oh no, little Black, there’s one thing that—”
A shot suddenly rang out, one that took both of them by surprise.
Bella’s left shoulder jerked backward, and her face, previously twisted into a lecherous grin, became contorted in pain.
What the fuck?
Cal turned to Aiden and saw that the end of the rifle appeared to be smoking.
He stared in disbelief.
“How—” he started, but Aiden interrupted him before he could finish sentence.
“Go, Cal. Go now. Take Robert and find the Curator.”
Cal just gaped.
“Go!”
The shout spurred him to action, and he swiveled on his heels, dragging the travois with Robert’s still slumped body behind him.
And then he ran.
Cal ran as fast and as hard as his wasted body could manage, all the while Bella’s voice trailed after him.
“I’m coming for you, Cal. You and Robert. And I won’t stop until I kill you all.”
Chapter 29
Aiden circled to his left, leveling the gun at Bella’s chest this time. It was a long-range rifle, and it wasn’t designed for this application. Still, it would put a mighty big hole in the woman’s chest.
If it hit its mark, that is.
He was still confused as to why the bullet that had struck her in the shoulder had actually done damage. Not as much as it should have—he could only see a spot of blood from the point of impact and she seemed none the less for wear—but it had hurt her.
Unlike back at the orphanage.
Bella shifted to her right, raising her hands with the two blades up in front of her as she did, her injured shoulder a fraction of a second slower than the other. But when she twirled the blades around quickly, so fast that they became blurs of glinting metal, there was no perceptible difference between the two arms.
“I’ve killed you before, Aiden, and I’m going to do it again. And then I’m—”
Aiden pulled the trigger and the rifle went off a second time, the sound impossibly loud as it reverberated off the rock face behind Bella, and then slid over the surface of the water to his rear.
The water that Chloe had been dragged under, the water that had frothed and boiled as the children took her to the Marrow.
The bullet missed and a moment later a shower of rock shards erupted in the distance.
And then it was Bella’s turn. She shifted her weight to one foot, then slid the other way, moving so quickly that Aiden only had time to lean to one side before the blade sliced the skin covering his ribcage.
It was only a shallow wound, but it stung.
&nbs
p; It had been a long time since Aiden had felt anything and it gave him pause. Bella took advantage of this and slipped behind him, using the blade in her other hand to cut the back of his arm.
Aiden grunted and spun away, while at the same time raising the gun.
He was fast, but like before, Bella was faster. He squeezed off another round, the final in the chamber, but this time it just skipped harmlessly across the water.
The next strike from Bella’s blade was no flesh wound.
The entire six-inches of glinting steel slid between Aiden’s lower two ribs. He felt a hiss and then something akin to a balloon deflating as his lung was punctured.
Bella was right. She had beaten him before—had killed him before—and she had done so with blades not unlike these. And this offered Aiden an unusual advantage. Instead of falling away from the strike, as he might have done previously, Aiden twisted, and as he predicted, the knife remained lodged between his ribs, while Bella’s grip failed.
Bella laughed and sprang back, and Aiden tossed the now useless gun to the ground. His side hissing, and his breathing sounding much the same, Aiden brought his hands out in front of him like some sort of bear rising up against a much smaller prey.
I don’t need the gun… all I need is to get my hands on her. All I need to do is grab her and we’ll both go to the Marrow. And this can all be over.
Bella seemed to read his mind.
“You’re too slow, old man. Carson told me about you… said he saw things, saw things in his visions. Baaaaad things that you done.”
Aiden tried to ignore her, but her words took him by surprise.
“And you know what? I realized something. We know someone in common, Aiden Kinkaid ex-militia—”
Aiden lunged, trying to catch Bella by surprise. And he did.
Bella’s eyes widened, and she reared away from him.
He would have grabbed her, would have wrapped his hands around her throat and strangled her right then and there, sending them both to the Marrow, if Bella hadn’t tripped.
The usually sure-footed killer’s heel struck a piece of half-burnt wood from the fire and she fell on her backside, sending a small puff of soot into the air.
Shores of the Marrow Page 10
