This was no good. The Night Angel was still out there. She was waiting, and what’s more, she had seen him. Gil needed to get off this street, get off it now. Anything would be better than waiting there until it was too late. He had to act. He lurched toward the first cop in a comical stagger, both fists balled and raised. “What did you say about my mother?”
“What?”
Gil swung wide, careful not to even come close to hitting the cop. It was going to mean a one-way ticket to the drunk tank, assaulting a police officer. But a night on a cold metal bench in lockup sure beat hanging around to see if that thing was still hungry.
The cop caught his wrists easily, flipped him around, and slammed his head down on the hood of the cruiser. Gil felt his remaining teeth rattle and his mouth fill with the metallic tang of blood. The other cop was quick with the cuffs, slapping them on and clicking them tight. “All right, Grandpa. You can sleep this one off in the NHPD Hilton.”
As they shoved him onto the car’s back bench and slammed the door shut, Gil cursed his folly. No one was ever going to believe him. Not the other street people and sure as hell not the Man. His career as a prophet was over before it even started. He was just another broken vessel, not even fit for the potter’s field.
And then something came to him as they sped off. It might have been a voice in the squeal of the car’s tires or one just in Gil’s head. It is not a prophet’s place to fight demons, the voice admonished. A prophet is to keep faith, to speak truth, and to anoint the deliverer, it said. A prophet is to herald the One Chosen.
Gil suddenly felt as if a ship’s anchor had been lifted from his neck, chain and all. Keep faith—had he not done that? Had he not, like a second Jeremiah, believed when no one else did? Speak truth—that’s what compelled him to spread his warnings, just as Hosea of old warned the children of Israel that they were reaping Baal’s whirlwind. Anoint the deliverer . . . herald the One Chosen—was that not the command of the Lord Himself to Samuel? To anoint a simple boy of the field turned warrior and picked to be king over God’s own people? Of course, those cursed by blindness hadn’t believed him, only the One would believe him. But where would he find him? Where would he look?
Ten
A blinking red wash of light flooded the van’s interior, each flash from the diode punctuated by a soft ping. The van’s sole occupant carefully set down the flask he’d been stirring and capped the petri dish next to it. The research would have to wait. Time to hunt.
He switched off the tracking beacon, one of many that sat dormant in an array. He cross-checked the map tacked above the console, then reached for his worn leather tactical belt. He wrapped it around him, running through his mental checklist as he snapped shut each of its compartments. Pistols, check. Pellets, check. CO2 spares, check. Snap vials, check. Spray solution, check. Salt bag, check. Road flares, check. Auto-snares, not ready yet, better leave behind. Juniper stakes, check.
He racked pellets into the chambers of each pistol and holstered them both. He reached for a jar sitting on the console. The pungent aroma of garlic and burnt holly filled his nostrils as he rubbed a thick daub of the repellent cream into every inch of exposed skin. Then Jack Jackson tugged down the brim of his APEX SECURITY cap and strode through the door of his battle van, into the night.
He stepped swiftly, silently, down the streets of New Harbor. The beam from his heavy Maglite swept the street ahead of him. Soon he reached the drainage grate he’d marked and squatted down. The gap between steel and curb couldn’t have been wider than six inches. Still, it was enough for one of them to get through. He’d seen them do it enough times.
Jack pointed his flashlight at the grate. It glistened against a thin wire lying slack. Tripped for sure. But by what? A rat? Or one of them? He reset the wire and leaned in closer. A telltale patch of goo glinted in the moonlight. Not a rat after all. Jack cursed himself for not getting here quicker. He scraped up a sample and deposited it in a small jar for later analysis. Then he sprayed the entire grate with repellent. That would slow it down if it decided to backtrack. He’d have to check it again later. If there was a later.
A dog’s bark came from somewhere behind him. Jack turned. A few yards away sat a mangy, flea-bitten mongrel. The dog barked again. Jack could tell by the look in its mismatched eyes that neither of those barks were aimed at him. They were for him. They were a warning.
Jack followed the dog’s gaze to the alley across the street. “Stay,” he commanded. He drew out a snap vial with one hand and a pistol with the other. Back hugging the wall, he inched down the alley. He rounded the corner and spotted a young couple perched on a stoop, giggling and canoodling as they took turns puffing on a joint. Just kids.
But what he saw creeping up on them might not be. Instantly, Jack slackened his focus, muting the image to a hazy blur. His eyes might have shown him a ravishing beauty, but it could be one of them. He needed to be sure, or he might end up murdering a pretty girl out on Halloween just trying to spook her friends. Jack raised a snap vial, about to activate it when he felt the press of fur and flesh against his leg. It was the dog, and it barked, much louder than before.
She turned to face him.
The kids turned, too, their faces twin masks of shock at the sight of Jack’s gun. “Run!” he shouted. They obeyed. Jack fought the overwhelming draw of those eyes. They called to him, drowning his sense. In another moment, she’d have him. He’d go to her, and it would be lights out. The snap vial slipped from his weakened grasp. He could feel his gun arm growing weak, his finger slack on the trigger. He gritted his teeth, commanding his hand to obey. Fire. Fire, damn you!
Nothing.
She . . . it . . . IT drew closer. Or was he moving toward her? Jack fought to clear his mind of the poison, push past the seduction to what lay beneath. But all he could think about was how wonderful it might be if he could just give in, how sublime that surrender would be. He took a single step—
And felt the dog’s jaws clamp down on his ankle. It was little more than a nip, but it worked. The spell was broken. Jack fired. The whosh-tchunk of CO2 filled the air, and the pellet sizzled against the brick six inches off target.
His quarry zipped down the alley with a blurred swiftness that never seemed real no matter how many times Jack had witnessed it. He sped off after it. He rounded corner after corner. No sign at all. He scanned the pavement and spotted another drainage grate. His final glimpse was of a beautifully manicured hand sliding through the gap into oblivion.
Defeated, Jack marched back to the mobile battle command center that was his van. The exterior matched his uniform, APEX SECURITY stenciled neatly across both sides. It had been a phone-company van in its daylight life. That was before he’d gotten hold of it. That was before he’d beefed up the suspension, lifted it, replaced the tires with off-road run-flats. Before he’d doubled the gas tanks, installed the ram bumper, the wire light cages, the diamond-steel-reinforced body panels. Before he’d gutted the interior, rebuilding it to his exact specifications with custom surveillance and extermination equipment. Jack was always updating. Always perfecting. There was no other option. The van was his lifeline, his first and last defense in this endless war.
His home.
As he drew near the side hatch, Jack could hear the soft padding of the dog as it kept pace just a few yards back. Hand on the door latch, he turned. “Go away.”
The dog didn’t.
Jack shook his head and climbed inside, shutting the door on both the animal and the night. He had work to do, maps to study, schematics to scan, specimens to analyze and catalogue. A few moments passed before he heard a soft pawing on the lower half of the hatch. He ignored it.
More pawing. More ignoring.
Jack sighed. If not for that dog, he’d be dead right now. He’d be food. The least he owed it was a meal. He pushed open the door to see that the mutt had padded almost out of sight. “Thought y
ou were hungry,” he called out as he set a cardboard container of leftover Chinese on the ground.
The dog bounded back. Not standing on ceremony, it shoved its snout into the cold lo mein. Jack checked for a collar. None. Just another cast-off, fighting its way through it all one hard-scrounged meal at a time. He knew the feeling. As the dog polished off the noodles, Jack weighed his options. The last thing he needed was an attachment; attachments cost. But dogs could see those things for what they were. Some could. This one could. It was something the legends got right. The dog looked up at him, licking the last of the greasy Chinese off its jowls. “All right.” Jack held the door open. “Come on in.”
Again, the dog didn’t stand on ceremony, heading straight for the warmth of the van. Inside, Jack spotted fleas popping off its matted fur. But if those were the only bloodsuckers plaguing him for the rest of this night, he’d count himself lucky.
Eleven
Beth gripped her cell phone tightly. On the tenth ring, she got a computerized “The customer you are trying to reach has a voice mail box that is full.” She slammed the phone against the bar in frustration. She knew that already. She’d been the one to fill it, leaving messages for Zoë all day.
Zoë hadn’t said good-bye before she’d left the club last night. In fact, Beth hadn’t even seen her leave. And this morning, when Beth woke up to another beautiful morning razed by a bulldozer of a hangover, her roommate’s bed was still made. It just wasn’t like Zoë. She always called, always let Beth know she was safe.
She’d tried to keep her mind on work, shoveling ice into the bins, checking inventory, stocking glasses. Business was always slow the day after Halloween, but today was almost dead, and distractions were less than abundant. Just two customers, one of them nursing the same pint for more than an hour. Beth lasted less than fifteen minutes before she made another call.
“Ryan,” she said the moment he answered. “Zoë didn’t come home last night. And I haven’t been able to get a hold of her all day.”
“Oh,” was his response. Beth let the silence hang, making sure it was his only response. After what seemed like forever, she knew it was.
“Oh?” She repeated. It was as if that impenetrable round syllable contained within it all the answers she needed locked into its circular logic. “What do you mean, oh?”
“I mean, relax. She’ll show up. Look, I’ve got a client coming in, in about—”
“Ryan. Zoë never doesn’t call. Like ever.”
“Give it a little while.”
“Ryan!”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Beth,” he offered in a too-honest-for-his-own-good tone that could only mean trouble. “Zoë doesn’t exactly run with the best crowd.”
Which was Beth’s crowd. That’s what he was telling her. “What’s that supposed to mean? That this is her fault?”
“That what is her fault? You’re making it out like she got kidnapped by the Taliban. She probably just went home with one of those club jackasses and is sleeping off a hangover. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Becker!” Hank barked from her elbow.
Startled, Beth almost dropped her phone into the bar sink. How did he always manage to sneak up on people like that? “Gotta go,” she said quickly to Ryan, and hung up.
Hank stood there, arms crossed and glaring. “You know the policy on cell phones during your shift.”
“I know, but—”
“This bar is disgusting.” He ran an inspecting finger under the bar top’s outer lip. It came back with a faint smudge of grime. “Don’t you ever do any side work?”
Beth bit her lip and didn’t say a word. She grabbed a rag and started scrubbing everything in sight as Hank stalked off. The acrid smell of disinfectant made her sneeze repeatedly. And she failed miserably at trying to convince herself that maybe Zoë had just ended up sleeping off a hangover in someone else’s bed. She waited until Hank was safely back upstairs in his lair before she made another call. This one to the police.
“Eighteen hours?” the operator said, a liberal smear of Gimme a break in her voice. “Call back if she’s hasn’t shown in another fifty-four.”
Beth doubted they’d have given her the same brush-off if the call had come from a University telephone number. A pretty white undergrad had gone missing just last year. It made national headlines. Eventually, they found her body in a wall, stuffed there by her love-stricken lab partner.
Beth’s eyes landed on a tumbler of whiskey she’d poured herself hours ago. It sat untouched on the edge of the bar sink next to the cleaning supplies, the glass streaked with sweat, the ice long melted. She knew the whiskey’s burn might scald away at least a bit of her anxiety. Beth reached for the numbness she so craved.
And poured it down the drain. Now was no time to be numb. She turned to the only regular customer she had, a middle-aged architect whose daily routine consisted of working from six a.m. till five p.m., then bringing his latest project into the bar, where he’d hammer away at it on his laptop until last call, polishing off half a bottle of single-malt as he went.
“Mike,” she said. “You got wireless on that thing?”
“Yeah. Why?” he asked without looking up.
“Mind if I borrow it for a little bit? Have to check on something.” She slid him a snifter filled with a triple shot of fifty-year-old Scotch. “On the house.”
“Well, if you put it that way.” Mike twisted his laptop so it faced her. “Could use a break anyway.”
First, she looked up “missing persons” and after scrolling past entries about a band with that same name, got pretty much a recap of what the police told her. Zoë wouldn’t be “officially” missing for another two days. Next, she tried “find person” and was hit with a barrage of services to locate people, estranged lovers, deadbeat dads, convicted felons, con artists, and the like. She checked into local private investigators. All of them charged by the day twice what she made in a week, and none offered a guarantee.
On a whim, she typed in “unexplained disappearances.” Page after page popped up in front of her. She read about tax cheats who pulled up stakes to start over—new city, new name, new life. She found stomach-churning accounts of sex-slave rings where girls were literally grabbed from the street, drugged, and passed around for a few weeks before they wound up breathing ditch dirt in the pine barrens. Other lurid, but completely rational, tales also appeared. None of them seemed right.
Some of the entries, though, were beyond bizarre. Maybe it was just something to take her mind off of Zoë, but Beth found herself entranced by outlandish yarns about dimensional shifts, parallel worlds, and faerie realms—mysterious reports of how entire households would sometimes be found empty, beds still warm, tea kettles whistling away on stovetops. Occasionally, it was entire villages, all over Europe in the Middle Ages. Even in America, it had happened to the fabled lost colony of Roanoke. She opened another window, this one promising to expose the truth about a clandestine group named simply “The Division”—
The laptop’s lid snapped shut, almost snapping her fingers with it. “We’ve got a problem, Becker.”
“No, Hank. I was just—”
“That wasn’t a question. I said we’ve got a problem, period. That problem is you. First personal calls during business hours, now checking Facebook or whatever. You’ve been slipping, Becker, a lot. Seriously, do you want me to send you home?”
Beth peered at the smug look spreading across Hank’s face. “As a matter of fact, yes,” she said, as surprised at the words that popped out of her mouth as Hank apparently was.
Twelve
Jack slid down the dark aisle, the soles of his boots tapping lightly against the church’s aged marble floor. The only light came from a scattered cluster of candles and a small red lantern hanging above the high altar’s brass tabernacle. The faint aroma of myrrh clung to the air like a d
istant memory. As Jack’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw saints stitched into tapestries that hung between stained-glass windows made abstract slate by the moon. Hemming the nave was the Via Dolorosa, Christ’s journey from condemnation to cross to grave, frozen in chipped plaster bas-relief.
Except for Jack, the church was empty. Or so he hoped. His eyes landed on a tiered bank of votives set at the foot of the Blessed Virgin. The flames gave life to the folds of her marble garments. In them, the stone seemed to flutter, and Jack was struck with the desire to light a candle for Sarah in whatever dark place she slept.
Foolishness.
He clicked on his Maglite and swept the area with its beam, scanning for some point of entry—an iron gate, a sunken vent, the door to a crypt left ajar, anything that might lead underground. Jack had begun to notice a pattern in New Harbor. The tripped alarm beacons had all been ones set at grates that dated to before the turn of the last century. That made older buildings, places that might hide long-forgotten vaults and chambers, prime suspects. This church was at the top of his list.
Ironic to think that one of them might make the house of God its home. But Jack knew enough not to follow the old script, the one Bram Stoker and others had laid out. Holy water was just brackish H2O. The host, stale bread. And crosses? Crosses were good for nothing except dying on.
He knelt down to examine a ventilation grate just below a brace of plaster martyrs. He peered closely at the woven bronze fleurs-de-lis that made up the metalwork. An inch of black dust on the crossbar showed that nothing had passed this way but air in quite some time. He stepped into the sanctuary, eyeing a tapestry of Christ casting demons from the Gerasene. But there were no demons to be found here, not tonight. This church was a dead end.
He heard a creak, followed by a faint shuffling. He pointed his light at a bank of pews. He pointed his gun too. “Show yourself.”
As the Worm Turns Page 5
