“But—but you didn’t look for us? For me?” Laurel looked up at him, and for the first time, she frowned a little. “Why not?”
“Well . . . I did talk to your mom. But she told me she didn’t want me to be part of your lives. Then she moved away and changed her name. It took me a long time to track you guys down again, and once I did, I wasn’t sure I ought to contact you. It was Tyler who made that decision. Right, son?”
Tyler, leaning against the wall, nodded. Could he really have grown up in this house, with this . . . thing? He was staring down at his feet, looking remote and almost disinterested . . . but that was a mask, Emma thought. He was scared.
Almost as scared as she was.
“Laurel,” Emma said. She reached into her purse, and Charles’s stare came to fix on hers. She saw the pulse of yellow fire in his gaze, but she was ready for it this time. Although it terrified her, she didn’t let it stop her. She took out the file and handed it over to her daughter. “He’s lying to you. This is the truth.”
Laurel opened the folder and gasped. She clapped a hand over her mouth as she stared at the first photo of her mother’s battered, misshapen face. She turned it over. The next one was of the damage to Emma’s torso. Laurel gave a high-pitched noise of denial. When those pictures had been taken, Emma had been hardly older than Laurel was now.
Charles smiled. He didn’t look away from Emma’s face.
Laurel turned the pages with a trembling hand and looked up with horror in her eyes. Finally, something had gotten through. “Mom!” The word was soft, almost muffled, and Laurel closed the folder and tried to get up to come to her.
Charles’s hand on her shoulder held her back.
“That wasn’t me, sweetheart,” he said, not even making an effort to sound concerned. “I was her boyfriend when that happened. She was already pregnant by me when she was raped. I freaked out; wasn’t my finest hour, Laurel, I know that. But I came back. I came back.”
“Mom?”
Emma held her hand out. Laurel slipped out from beneath Charles’s hand and went to her, and as Emma put her arm around her, she felt a surge of strength.
“He’s lying,” she said flatly. “He attacked me on my way home from school when I was seventeen. I never knew his name, but I knew—I knew what he was.”
“And what am I?” Charles asked, and tilted his head to one side. “Go on, Emma, tell our daughter what you think I am. Let her know just how insane her mother really is.” When Emma didn’t take the bait, he sighed. “Laurel, your mom is sick. I’m sorry, I wish I didn’t have to tell you this, but she thinks I’m some kind of demon, and you and Tyler—she thinks you’re both some kind of demons, too.”
“Not Laurel,” Emma said. “Just the boy. It’s always the boy, isn’t it?”
“You’re insane,” Charles said. “Laurel, do you hear what she’s saying? How crazy that is?”
“Is it?” Emma backed up, toward the doorway. Charles, sitting calmly on the sofa, didn’t move; he watched, still toying with her, still smiling that unsettling little smile. “Is it really? I’m not letting you have my daughter, you bastard. No way in hell.”
“Hell,” he repeated, and he moved his gaze from her to Tyler, who was between them and the hallway. “Funny you should say that, because I’ve got nothing to do with hell. That’s a concept that came long after me. I’m not the devil, you know. I’m just . . . well. They call me a Witness.”
Laurel took in a sharp, trembling breath, and Emma knew just what was happening—the ground was moving under her world. She’d thought it was all malls and boys and simple, though sometimes brutal things . . . but maybe her mom was crazy, and maybe her dad was, too. Her rapist dad.
Maybe it was something worse. Maybe neither one of them was crazy.
“Witness to what?” Emma asked.
“Witness to the end,” he said. “I’m here to see it.”
“See what?”
“Everything,” he said. “I must watch the human race forever. I have to look like one of them to do this. But bodies wear out, and I have to make new ones. Only the most special women will do, Emma. Like you. Like our daughter.” He laughed, then shook his head. “I know it sounds sick. It’s just the way things work for Witnesses. Nothing personal.”
Nothing personal. He’d said that—she remembered it as clearly as she did the feeling of the blood running down her cheeks, of her broken teeth grinding in her mouth. As she remembered the cruel, relentless weight of him on her, and the taste of her own desperate, muffled screams. She remembered that phrase, the dispassionate way he’d said it then. He’d made it almost a chant. Nothing personal, relax, nothing personal . . .
The memory made her lose control.
She still had the knife, and instead of doing what she should have done—lunging for Tyler with it, forcing him out of the way—she went for Charles. For the source of the evil, not its issue. She dove over the coffee table and right into him as he sat on the couch.
And he didn’t even try to stop her.
She sank the blade deep in his guts and pulled up, muscles straining and twitching with the pulse of adrenaline, and something inside her that had been bottled up screamed and jumped and capered with delight.
He was smiling. He was still smiling, she had to make him stop smiling.
Then it was too late to think about what she was doing, there was blood gouting all over her, and he was falling sideways, so much red gushing out of him, all over her, and his eyes rolled back in his head but not before she saw that last guttering flash of poisoned yellow in them.
He never stopped smiling.
Over the roaring in her head, Laurel was screaming. I killed him, Emma thought as she staggered to her feet. It felt good, but it also felt strangely distant. I killed the bastard, finally. He’ll never touch me again. It tasted like victory, but felt like a loss. It occurred to her, slowly, that she’d just killed her daughter’s father in a particularly gruesome way, right in front of her.
But when she turned toward Laurel, she realized that Laurel was screaming for an entirely different reason.
Tyler had moved away from the wall. He was in front of his sister, staring at her, and his eyes were flickering, igniting into a bright, hot, poisonous yellow. Her son said, grinning, “Thanks, Mom. Knew I could count on you to do the hard part.”
Her instinct was to rush blindly at him, to wrest Laurel away, but she knew better; that was what he was waiting for. Instead, Emma backed away, to the still-twitching corpse of the dead man, and pulled the knife free of his body.
Tyler’s grin dialed down from glee to business.
He lunged forward to seize Laurel’s wrist even as she tried to run. He pulled her into a tightly enveloping embrace. “You really should go, Mom. I don’t think you’re going to want to see what comes next, do you? You’ve kind of already been there. Wouldn’t want you to get flashbacks and crack up again. . . . Hey, sis, did you know that dear old Mom spent six months before we were born scratching padded walls and mumbling to herself? And then spent another year after she gave me up getting high? Dear old Mom, the crackhead. They didn’t even let her hold you until you were nearly two, after she detoxed.”
“Stop,” Emma said. She’d never, ever told her daughter about those dark, awful days; she’d tried to forget they ever existed. She took in a deep breath and took a step toward him. Her grip was too tense on the knife, and she deliberately relaxed. “Tyler, you’re as much a victim as I was. You never asked for any of this, and now . . .”
“Sorry, were you talking to someone? Because I know you weren’t talking to little Tyler, that squirming bundle of joy you almost killed when they tried to put him in your arms. If you’d had your way, little Tyler would have had his baby neck broken before he took his first breath. Right?”
“Yes,” she said. She’d lied to Laurel for so long, but it was time for truth now, hard and scalding truth. “I knew what you were, even then.”
“You knew because I
told you,” the thing inside Tyler said, and arched one of her son’s eyebrows. “I told you everything, just like I’ve told each of them, for thousands of years. But nobody remembers, because if they did, they’d go mad—or worse, they’d go sane. You came the closest, I have to admit. You almost knew.”
“Let her go,” Emma said. “Let my daughter go. Take me instead.”
“Nice try. But like I said, I’m a Witness. I see everything. I am the Many-Eyed, the Recorder, the All-Seeing. So I know that right after you got clean and sober, the first thing you did was get yourself fixed, like a stray dog. Too bad; I’d have taken you up on it, just to see the look on your face. But not to worry. Your genetic heritage lives on in this lovely young lady. Time to start the next incubation cycle.”
“You can’t do that,” Emma said. “She’s your sister.”
“Do you think I care about stupid human genetics? I’m eternal, sweetheart, and she’s just a temporary measure to keep me here in flesh. I’ll find someone else for the next go-round.” He shrugged. “Compatible women are always drawn near me. They can’t help it. It’s part of the gravitational structure of the universe.”
And as if his words had unlocked some secret closet in her mind, she knew. She saw. She remembered the vision he’d shoved into her mind as he was planting his seed inside her . . . a vision of a universe so complex, so vast, so cold that it had driven her mad. And always, the Witnesses. Part of the world, waiting, with the keys to open the way to something she could only, incoherently, call the Apocalypse, because the vision of that bloody vista of death and despair couldn’t be looked on directly.
To a Witness, she and Laurel were nothing, nothing at all, but vessels to ensure his perpetuity: broken bottles left empty on the road in the wake of his speeding car.
She also knew something else, something glimpsed in one blinding second—the one thing he’d given her that he didn’t want her to know.
He could be stopped. Not with the silver knife; he’d let her kill his old shell as a sign of his arrogance. He’d done it for his own convenience. If she buried that knife in Tyler’s chest, he’d laugh, spit blood in her face, and cut her to pieces with the same bloody blade.
That spark of hope steadied her in a way that all the fear in the world couldn’t.
“If that’s true, there’s another compatible girl close by,” Emma said. “Let me find her. Let me bring her here. And then you can let my daughter go.”
That surprised him. Finally. She saw him stop and consider her, frowning just a little. “You’d do that? Bring another woman here, knowing what I’ll do to her?”
“I’ll do anything to save my daughter,” she said, and she meant it. “I swear to you, on my soul, I will keep my word. But you have to swear you won’t rape Laurel, seduce her, or harm her in any way while I’m gone. Swear it on your name.”
A flicker of yellow danced in his eyes, and he smiled a little wider. “You have done your homework. All right. On my name, I swear that I will not rape, seduce, or harm your daughter while you are gone.” She felt a little shiver through her bones, a kind of power rippling in the room.
“Mom?” Laurel whispered, shuddering. Tears gathered in her eyes. “Mom, you can’t leave me. You can’t.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said. “But he won’t hurt you. He swore on his name. Try to stay calm. I’ll be back soon.” Emma took in a deep breath, turned to Tyler. “Tell me how to identify her.”
The piss-yellow glare in her son’s eyes flared almost red and then subsided almost to nothing . . . until she could see her human son beneath it. Or the shell that was left of him. Though this broke her heart, it forged it into steel at the same time.
“You’ll know her when you see her,” he said. “They’ve got a glow. Look at Laurel. Really look.”
She turned her gaze on her daughter, and she saw it—maybe she’d always seen it, in some way, but now she recognized it consciously. An aura of gauzy light drifting behind her like mist.
Like wings.
Like angel wings.
“Blood of angels,” the Witness whispered almost in her ear, and she shuddered. “ ‘The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair’ . . . you carry that, Emma, you and Laurel. That’s what makes you perfect.”
She fought to keep her voice from shaking. “Get away from me.”
He took a long step back, and his voice rose to a normal level. “If you go look, you’ll find her. She’ll be close. You won’t have to go too far.”
“Mom—” Laurel pleaded.
“I have to do it,” she said to her daughter. She knew that if she looked in the mirror now, she’d see the same gauzy light behind her own body, but mutilated, dirty, broken. She couldn’t allow that to happen to her own child.
No matter the cost.
Laurel was still calling her name when Emma walked out the door, retrieved the gun from the place she’d concealed it, and got into the car to search for their salvation.
EMMA SPOTTED THE girl less than two blocks away. It was easy. She was the only pedestrian in the quiet neighborhood. She was striding confidently down the dark sidewalk, a tall blond girl, maybe a few years older than Laurel. Under the streetlight, she looked tan. There was a backpack slung over her shoulder. She was wearing a red hoodie with a community college logo on the breast. A girl with her whole life ahead of her.
And those ghostly angel wings whispering through the air behind her.
Emma pulled the car to the curb, rolled down the window, and leaned over to wave at the girl. The girl hesitated, looking around (nighttime, stranger), but then she bent over to look into the car. She didn’t come closer, which was smart; but that didn’t matter, because as soon as the girl’s eyes were level with hers, Emma brought up the pistol and pointed it right at her.
The girl froze.
“What’s your name?” Emma asked her. The girl, terrified, suddenly looking like a child instead of a woman, just stared back at her with blank, shiny eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Jenna,” she finally whispered. “Please don’t—”
“Jenna, shut up now and listen. This won’t make any sense to you, but to save your own life, you better believe me. I want you to turn around and run, run back to campus. Then I want you to find another school on the other side of the world and go there. Get the hell out of here. Don’t come back. Wherever it is you would naturally go? Now do the opposite. Save yourself.”
“I—” The girl licked her pale lips. “Okay, okay, sure, I’ll go.”
“Tonight. I mean it. I’ll be checking, Jenna. You get the hell out of town on the first plane you can find. Act like a psycho killer is after you, because he is. Understand?”
“Yes,” Jenna faltered. She clearly believed she was talking to the psycho killer. Emma felt her attempt had only frightened the girl senseless.
But she sighted the pistol on Jenna’s chest anyway. The girl gasped. “Tell me again what you’re going to do.”
“Transfer. Get out of town,” Jenna said. “I will, I swear! Please—”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Emma said. “But I’m not the one you should be afraid of. If you ever see a man with yellow eyes, don’t hesitate. Run.”
Then she put the gun back on the seat, put the car in drive, and sped away, leaving Jenna bewildered and shaking on the sidewalk. In the rearview, she saw the girl start to run the opposite direction from the way she’d been going.
She’d done the best she could do.
She had no doubt that Jenna would be dialing 911 before she reached the end of the block, so she’d have very little time before the cops would be cruising Rockwall, looking for her van. Emma shook the bullets one-handed out of the revolver, then drove to the pond at the subdivision entrance. She got out and pitched the revolver as far as she could into the murky water, exciting some mallards, and then got back into her van and used her cell phone’s browser to find the nearest church.
It happened to be a Meth
odist church, but the denomination didn’t matter to her; she was compelled to be in a sacred space. She’d avoided churches most of her life, for her own reasons; she’d always felt presence in them, and it had frightened her.
Now, it didn’t. She knew—because of what she’d glimpsed in the Witness’s mind—that the church was where she should be. There was safety there, but it was more than that.
There was power. She just had to find it. It was Laurel’s only hope.
No cars in the Methodist parking lot. The side door had an office hours sign in the window, but of course it was night. Emma expected the door to be locked . . . but when she tried it, the handle turned. She had the sense, strange but very real, that she was expected.
She made her way through the dark halls to the sanctuary, and she went inside; it was a neat, clean place, straight lines of pews with red velvet cushions and burgundy carpet. The arched windows were patterned stained glass, now black with night, and the whole place had a hushed, silent feeling to it. There was an area for the choir behind the pulpit, and a simple wooden cross hanging above the altar. No adornments.
She felt a sudden surge of electricity go through the air, and the bulbs in the fixtures overhead flared on, brightened to an almost unbearable intensity, then went out. The church was left bathed in moonlight, and the feeling of energy racing through it lifted the hairs on her arms. She saw the thin blue crackles of it between her fingers.
And then a voice whispered in her ear, “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She spun, and saw—saw something that her brain refused to process, a raw spiraling tangle of light, bright as the heart of a star. She fell to her knees not out of piety, but out of awe. Even with her eyes tightly closed she could see it hovering before her.
“Do you know who I am?” the voice whispered. It didn’t seem to come from the light; it seemed to be on her shoulder, always on her shoulder.
“Uriel,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it, but the name floated up from her, and she knew it was right. “You’re Uriel.”
Dark Duets Page 7
