She glanced out the window without disturbing the curtain. A man shrieked in the street, clutching a leg that had twisted sideways on impact. His rifle lay forgotten behind him. The men across the way continued to shoot at the Caprice. Sakura raised the REC-7, gauged the height, and then fired three quick bursts, rotating between them to change targets. The first and last hit home, the targets twitching and dropping out of sight, but the middle gunman kept firing.
Cursing her frail, inadequate form, she turned back to the man on the middle balcony just as he opened fire. She grunted at the impact below her right breast and stumbled to one knee, falling to the right as another round thudded into the wall. Each gasp of breath brought fresh waves of agony.
She touched the point of impact and her hand came away wet with blood. The piezoelectric gel in her vest softened as the kinetic energy from the impact dispersed, so she tore at her shirt to survey the damage. The bullet had scattered between two ceramic plates and punctured the carbon nanofiber backing, the lead mangled to an unrecognizable form. She plucked out the mangled slug with numb fingers, coughed, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Bright red blood smeared across her index finger.
She reached for her fallen rifle but her right arm wouldn't obey.
"I'm hit." It came out a gasp.
"Bad?" Matt asked.
"Yes."
A wall hanging shattered behind her, followed by the report of the rifle. She struggled to breathe through the white-hot agony, coughed and spat blood onto the worn, beige carpet.
Matt's shotgun boomed, and the rifle didn't fire again.
Her pain faded, and though she fought the dullness with all her will it closed in around her. A girl stepped around the corner, with dark brown hair in a bowl cut and a cute blue doresu, and around her the world blazed white.
Sakura knew her, and knew the impossibility of it. Still she asked, "Kazuko?"
Her daughter bowed and replied in Japanese. "Yes, Mother. The daitengu came for me with your face and emerald wings, but I am my mother's daughter and saw through its tricks. It could not take me."
"How can you be here, my Kazuko?"
"I am not there, but you come too close to where I am. I can feel your love and shame as physical things, Mother, so strong, too strong. There is much yet for you to do. Open your eyes, Mother. Open your eyes and fight."
Tears streamed down her cheek. "But my Kazuko, I have always fought for you. Why do I fight now?"
Kazuko closed her eyes and bowed. "You fight because it is who you are, Mother. You fight because some cannot. Now get up."
Sakura's eyes snapped open just as the frying pan came down. She reached up, grabbed the descending wrist and jerked. As her attacker stumbled, off-balance, Sakura leapt to the balls of her feet, taking cover behind the concrete wall, and threw. The pan rebounded off the now-fleeing woman's head with a dull thud, and she dropped to her face.
Frowning, Sakura rubbed the wound, sore but manageable under the bulletproof vest.
A mystery for another time.
The door burst open. She pulled her strike but Matt whirled and caught her hand anyway. She sneered, furious that after all her training he could beat her speed.
"I thought you were shot."
She shrugged. "I was. Now I'm not. Status?"
"Guards are dead or run off. The police came up their six and they scattered into the jungle. Kamen's unconscious. You?"
She shrugged again. "Well enough. Keene?"
"Fine. Shook up. A bullet grazed his shoulder, but fine."
* * *
"Yes?" The voice on the other end of the line rasped, a rumble both too deep and too ragged for a human throat.
"You son of a bitch," Karthik said. He grabbed his hair with one hand, pulled, let it go, grabbed it again. "You told me augmentation failed when Jade died."
"It has, except for his. You knew he was dangerous. I warned you to be careful."
"We were careful. Nine men are dead because you didn't spill. What the fuck do you think you're—"
"Don't presume to question me. He'll come for you, him and that sycophant Yakuza bitch, and you need to be gone before he does. Kill the baby and send me the video."
Sweat broke out on Karthik's forehead, sweat that had nothing to do with the mountain air. Words wouldn't come. He swallowed, breathed in, and tried again. "I—we can't."
"It's too late for can't. Tell her to obey me. Her ego is too tied to our approval for her to disobey on something this hot."
"No, that's not it. We tried to kill him and can't. Every time we go to do the deed we . . . just can't. I don't have an explanation, you know? It's like some Golden Child shit or whatever." Karthik looked down at the toddler, blissfully unaware of anything in his drugged sleep. An intense feeling of paternal love squeezed his heart the moment he reached for the pillow, as happened to anyone who tried to harm Adam Rowley.
"That doesn't make sense. Put Libby on the phone."
"Yo, you can't use her name on an open line—"
"PUT HER ON THE GODDAMNED PHONE."
"I can't, Murdock. They took her."
"No."
"The fuck yes they did. They took her, and killed Steve and Jeff and their whole motherfucking crew. They set an ambush and Rowley tore them a new asshole. You should have told us the guy was augged, man. This whole shit's falling apart."
"I did tell you. You chose not to believe. Now close your mouth and open your ears, and I'll tell you how to get her back."
Karthik listened. When he hung up, he turned to Mark, a racist redneck shithead he could barely trust with his wallet much less his life, yet somehow the most trustworthy of his surviving companions in Brazil. Mark looked at him with wide, rheumy eyes, both hands thrust into the pockets of his overalls, fondling with all their arthritic might.
"Mark, we got to skip town, now. Grab the kid, I'll call the chopper."
Mark grinned, exposing toothless gums. "The Master approves?"
Karthik rolled his eyes. "This ain't a cult, moron. He ain't your master, just my boss. And you work for me, so hop fucking to."
* * *
Jason sat in the tiny motel lobby, reading an exegesis on his tablet, which in turn rested on the owner's black and white cat, its grotesquely fat, furry body stretched out in his lap. Between the cat and the blazing fireplace he drowned in his own sweat, and wished he owned something more comfortable than a black clerical shirt and collar. The snow had melted to residual piles of slush in the darkness outside, and at two a.m. the world lay quiet.
He couldn't sleep without drowning in violence and blood, and his haunted dreams had started creeping into his waking thoughts.
Eyes closed, he prayed, for peace and protection and healing, for himself and the love of his life, but as the firelight cast shadows through his eyelids he saw only the ground smoldering beneath a forest of cruel thorns, blood, and dark worms writhing through a protective ring of icy feathers, melting under the black sun.
* * *
Matt frowned at Sakura.
She sat on the bed in her bra and combat pants, admiring the fading bruise under her breast without the slightest sign of modesty. The bruise on her face had faded to a jaundiced yellow, far faster than it should have.
The room contained little more than a bed, a filthy mirror, and a nightstand with the veneer obliterated by generations of cat scratches. Libby Kamen lay spread-eagled on the threadbare comforter, each limb tied to a different bedpost with nylon rope stretched taut.
"That looks a lot better than you led me to believe," Matt said.
Sakura gave him a curt nod. "It punctured the vest. One moment I coughed blood, the next I felt only mild discomfort. The bruising will be gone by morning at this rate."
"You're regenerating."
She rolled her eyes. "I never understand why you waste time on the obvious." She cut him off with his mouth half-open. "How long between regeneration and the return of the whispers for you?"
> He hesitated. "Half a year, maybe a bit more."
"Then let's worry about this in six months." She nodded to Kamen's unconscious form. "We have better uses for time."
Sighing, Matt leaned down and patted Kamen on her unbruised cheek. "Hey. Libby. Wake up."
Her eyes fluttered open, revealing blue-gold irises and dilated pupils, then closed again. Her head lolled to the side, exposing the massive bruise left by Matt's boot when she'd tried to shoot him with shaking hands and zero discipline.
"Concussion," Sakura said. "She'll not think straight a while."
Matt held up a finger to silence her, then turned back to Kamen and held a picture of Adam in front of her face. He snapped his fingers. "Libby, I need you to wake up and look at this."
She opened her eyes again, lolled back and forth, then squinted in the dim light. And then she giggled.
The whispers surged through Matt's consciousness, mingling with his own hopeless rage, urging him to crush the life out of the pathetic excuse for nothing lying before him. Before it happened, he basked in the glorious crunch as his fist obliterated her cranium, and shoved eager fistfuls of steaming brain into his mouth, luscious and creamy like pate and brie.
He blinked, remembered the present, and stayed his hand. "Why are you laughing?"
"Because you're too late, Rowley." Her words slurred around a thick tongue. "They're going to parade your boy in front of the world like the freak he is, the freak you made him, and then when they figure out his tricks they're going to cut his tiny little throat." She giggled again.
Matt took a conscious step back to distance himself from the subhuman beast masquerading as a fifteen-year-old girl. Now the consuming desire to crush her skull had nothing to do with Gerstner Augmentation, nothing to do with whispers or possession or a psychotic break. The purest hate wound its way around his heart and squeezed, smothering compassion and humanity.
Sakura stepped forward, put her hand on Matt's chest and pushed him back an extra step without turning away from the bed. "This boy has done nothing. Why punish him for what his father is?"
"He's an abomination. A sin against life and God and human decency. Like all sin he must be denied before we can enter the Almighty's kingdom."
"How can a child be a sin?"
She laughed again. "I wouldn't expect you to understand."
"Try me."
Kamen's eyes rolled into the back of her head, then flipped back and concentrated on Sakura with obvious effort. "My head hurts. You got anything to drink, bitch?"
"No."
Kamen snorted. "Neither did your kid, there at the end."
Matt saw the blow before it landed and stepped forward, but couldn't get there fast enough to stop it. Sakura's heel-of-her-palm strike to Libby's mouth burst her lips. Blood splattered the pillow and streamed from Sakura's hand as she pulled it back. Libby reeled with a cry of anguish, turned to the side and spat out several teeth. Matt caught Sakura's retracted arm and hurled her away from the bed.
She crashed against the wall, flipped to her feet, and scowled, but cast her eyes down in shame.
Choking on the blood leaking from her shattered nose and mouth, Libby squealed, a pathetic wail that brought Matt back to the roof in Atlanta, to the banshee children keening at him as his act of mercy robbed them of their power and form. He tilted her head to the side to let the blood drain somewhere other than down her throat, and ran his hand over her head in compassion he didn't feel.
"Dammit, Blossom," he whispered through clenched teeth. "I need her to talk!"
Sakura held out her palm. Teeth marks marred the heel of her palm under streaks of blood. "It's healing." She rubbed it on her thigh. "A little."
Matt ignored her and looked down at Libby, now bawling, her tough-girl facade as broken as her mouth. He knelt to put himself at eye level, though with her lids squeezed shut she couldn't see him.
"Hey, I'm not trying to hurt you. I just want my son back. Please."
Blood streamed from Libby's mouth as she smiled and spoke with a new lisp. "I will set my face against all those who turn to mediums and necromancers who commune with the dead, to prostitute themselves by following them, and I will cut them off from all people." Her eyes flashed bright green, the light blazing through her flesh to expose her dark skull beneath. "Your soul is forfeit, and your son's and his progeny to the last generation."
The light disappeared as fast as it came, drowning the room in cold shadow. Libby sagged into a defeated, broken slumber.
Matt turned to Sakura, and her wide eyes said that she'd seen it, too. "What the hell was that?"
Sakura stared down at Libby's unconscious form. "There is something very wrong here."
Matt nodded. "Necromancers? You believe that?"
She replied too quickly. "The dead are dead. All else is myth."
"Yeah. Somehow I don't believe that quite as much as I used to."
Sakura looked up, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. "We need to talk. But first, sedate her."
* * *
The Brazilian government brought Matt, Sakura, and Keene by helicopter to Libby Kamen's retreat deep in the mountains, a villa more than a mansion, almost quaint compared to her palace in Los Angeles. They found it abandoned: no guards, no servants, no sign of occupation. An empty crib sat overturned in an abandoned hallway, the yellow flannel cold.
The house had no landlines to trace, and internet came via satellite.
Matt frowned down at the bedding and spoke into his helmet. "Janet, call the NSA, please. Get me whatever you can about activity on local cell towers in the past few hours."
"On it."
* * *
Three hours later Janet had identified seven calls from the remote area, two from the same phone: a charter jet service operating out of the Zona da Mata airport, and a cell phone in rural Maryland. Zona da Mata confirmed a jet registered to a subsidiary of Kamen Industries taking off that night with a flight plan to Atlanta. It never landed.
Matt, Sakura, and Keene took the helicopter to Brasilia and hitchhiked aboard an embassy jet home. The flight staff paid so little attention to Libby Kamen's battered, unconscious body that they may as well have tattooed "CIA" on their foreheads.
Out of earshot, Keene leaned in to Matt. "When we touch down my office can take her. We've got a rendition site secure enough, it won't be a problem."
Matt exchanged glances with Sakura. "Nah. I've got a better idea."
Keene raised an eyebrow.
"Go back to Boston. We'll be in touch."
"Are you serious?"
Matt closed his eyes and leaned back. "Yup."
Chapter 15
"You've got to be kidding me." Janet stood behind the screen door in light blue flannel pajamas, her hair up in a bun, toothbrush in hand. "You brought her here?"
She opened the door to let them in off her side porch. Matt carried Libby Kamen's drugged, limp body into the living room. Sakura followed, eyes scoping out the corners as if in anticipation of an ambush.
"What possessed you to bring her to my house?"
Matt raised his eyebrows. "Guest bedroom?"
"Couch." God knows what he'd do if he saw the guest bedroom. After her brother's death she'd removed the bed and replaced it with a giant pentagram she used to commune with him. It kept the headaches from blossoming into full-on migraines, and kept her nose and ears from bleeding with the strain. The longer Dawkins remained on the other side, the worse it got—but the bedroom made it bearable.
Matt set Libby on the couch with more care than necessary given her snowed-out condition.
"Why did you bring her here?"
He shrugged. "You traced the call to Maryland."
Janet rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, buying time to figure out how to play the situation. "Yeah, to Baltimore, not Fulton. The only thing you're going to find here is turkeys."
Matt leaned against the wall. "Yeah, I remember that smell from last time. Not sure I understand the appe
al."
Janet shrugged. "Keeps the yuppies out. I like my space. I'm not a big fan of Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons or coworkers walking up my porch unannounced—especially if they're carrying underage drugged celebutante zillionaires they kidnapped from Brazil. She is drugged, right?"
"Yes," Sakura said. "Regular soporific injections to keep her down. There is something off about her and we do not want her waking."
Janet's fingers returned to her scalp. "Off, how?"
"She quoted the Old Testament to us and her eyes glowed green."
"As in, like, Jade green?"
Matt gave a curt nod in her peripheral vision. "Same color as the cross on your back."
Janet shifted under her PJs, the giant tattoo itching as if aware of their attention. The ward against possession had kept the last of the Nephilim out of her mind, but did little to stave off her brother's desperate attacks. "So that means what? Gerstner is back? Growing stronger? Cue the Darth Vader music and all that?"
Sakura scowled. "Is everything humor to you?"
Janet stared her down. "I haven't found much funny in the past ten or so years, no. Certainly nothing today. And you're never funny." She turned back to Matt. "So what are we talking about here?"
Matt shrugged. "We don't know."
"But you came here because there's something you want to talk about but not over the airwaves, right? Or are you just trying to make me an accomplice in a revenge kidnapping?"
"That's not what this is—"
She cut him off with an upraised hand. "Tell it to the judge. The Kamen family owns entire cities and eats politicians—and judges—for breakfast. The cops show up, that's going to be the story no matter who knows different. Now quit wasting time and spill it."
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