The X-Files Origins--Devil's Advocate

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Why do you care?”

  Angelo tugged at a loose thread on the knee of his work pants. Dana watched the muscles in his hand and forearm flex under the brown skin. She thought about his scars. Saturo had scars like that, but not the same ones. And not on his …

  Hand.

  Suddenly Dana could hear Corinda’s voice echoing in her head.

  I see a knife. It flashes silver. It clicks. Not a … hunting knife. Smaller. Something that folds. I see a silver knife in a strong hand. I see scars. On the knuckle of the … ring finger. On the side of the hand. An old injury. He … hurt it … fixing a car. A wrench slipped. Sharp metal. Last year? Yes.

  “Angelo…?” Dana said in a small, tight voice.

  “Sí?”

  “Those scars on your hand. On the knuckle of your ring finger. How’d you get them?”

  He grunted in surprise and looked at his hand. “Those? They’re nothing. I was fixing a friend’s car last year and a wrench slipped. Cut it on some metal. You wouldn’t believe how bad small cuts can bleed. I cut my arm, too, see?” He pushed his sleeve up to show a much longer scar. It must have been very bad, and it cut straight through a small, round tattoo, bisecting it.

  Dana stared.

  It was a tattoo of an eclipse.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked, her voice hollow.

  Angelo glanced at the tattoo and quickly pushed down his sleeve. “I got it before I had the accident at the shop. Better than a year ago. What’s it matter?”

  Dana stood up. “I just remembered,” she said. “I have to be home right now.”

  “Hey,” he said, also rising. “Wait.… What did I say?”

  “No. It’s fine,” she said as she snatched up her backpack and held it in front of her. “I have to go right now. My dad’s expecting me. I’m late.”

  She ran down the steps and across the field and out onto the sidewalk, throwing terrified glances over her shoulder.

  Angelo stood on the bleacher. He looked down at his hand and then at her. Did he frown? Or did his eyes flare with sudden understanding? Dana could not tell.

  She ran as fast as she could.

  CHAPTER 65

  The Observation Room

  5:41 P.M.

  “She knows.”

  Agent Gerlach turned to face the angel. “What do you mean, she knows? Knows what?”

  “She’s seen my face,” said the angel.

  They stood in the hall outside the sacristy of the old church. Through the open doorway, Gerlach could see the strange painting the angel had been working on for the past month. It was disgusting. Not in its shape—since it seemed to be random smears with no attempt at presenting a specific form—but because of the media used. Blood, sweat, tears, and hair. He’d been briefed about how certain kinds of individuals liked to collect trophies.

  Sick stuff, he thought. Killing was one thing, and maybe having some fun during a kill provided a certain kind of entertainment. Gerlach didn’t indulge in that sort of thing, but he understood it. He’d killed people before in ways that provided different kinds of satisfaction. Not like this, though. This crossed a line. This was perverse.

  If it was up to Gerlach, he’d put two in the back of the angel’s head and bury the body where it would never be found. Neat and tidy.

  It was not, however, his call to make. The First Elder and the top guys in the Syndicate called the shots, and they wanted the angel to deliver. If that meant allowing the psychopath some latitude in how he got his jollies, then it wasn’t up to Gerlach to jerk his leash.

  On the other hand, freedom of action was earned.

  “Whoa, wait a minute, sport,” growled Gerlach. “I thought you said that they could only see your dream-face. Now you’re telling me you let her see your real face?”

  Doubt, a rare thing, flickered across the angel’s face.

  The agent took a step toward the killer. “A lot of things could come crashing down if we have to remove her from the equation. You understand what I’m saying?”

  The angel said nothing.

  Gerlach cupped a hand around his ear. “Sorry, didn’t quite hear that.”

  “I understand everything about what is happening and about to happen,” said the angel. “I understand what will happen when the portal opens.”

  Gerlach brushed past him and walked into the sacristy and stopped in front of the painting. He took a couple of pieces of gum from a pack and chewed them for a long, silent minute. The angel came and stood with him.

  “You don’t believe it, do you?” he asked the agent.

  Gerlach chewed.

  “You don’t know what I am,” continued the angel. “Do you?”

  Without turning, the agent said, “You’re a monster.”

  The angel laughed out loud. “We’re all monsters. You’re every bit the fiend that I am. Maybe you’re worse. You’re the actual boogeyman.”

  Agent Gerlach chewed his gum and studied the image of the grigori, or whatever this madman believed it to be, and did not reply.

  CHAPTER 66

  Craiger, Maryland

  5:45 P.M.

  Dana felt lost even though she was walking home.

  Home did not feel like it was going to offer her anything but a room she could hide in and a door she could lock.

  Angelo.

  Angelo?

  Could he be the monster?

  The scars on Angelo’s hand matched what Corinda had said. Did that mean he was the angel?

  Could he be a monster?

  She had no idea how to answer that kind of question, so she tried to catalog what she knew about Angelo. He had a knife—that much was certain. A folding knife with a blade that locked into place that she’d seen him open with an expert flick, and then use to open boxes at Beyond Beyond. He knew cars, too, and worked part-time at an auto body shop repairing damage. Accident damage. He worked at both high schools, too, which meant that he could have known every single one of the victims.

  And his name was Angelo.

  Spanish for “angel.”

  It all fit.

  All the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Almost all. She did not understand why he was doing all this. She couldn’t understand why anyone would. She didn’t understand how he could visit her in dreams. Did he have psychic qualities, too? Sunlight thought so. He’d said that the angel was powerful.

  Did that mean he had looked into Dana’s mind back there on the bleachers? Did he know that she knew?

  “Oh God,” she murmured, and cut a terrified glance over her shoulder.

  And saw him.

  Him.

  Angelo was a block behind her, dressed in his work clothes but with a hood-sweater on, the hood pulled up to try to hide his face. She knew it was him, though. His hands were in his pockets. Was he gripping the knife, ready to pull it out? Ready to …

  “No!” she cried, and then she spun around and ran flat out.

  “Wait,” yelled Angelo. “I want to talk to you.”

  Dana bolted. Her house was still six long blocks away and around the corner. It seemed like it was ten miles. Too far. Forever far away. Her backpack thumped against her spine with every step, but she didn’t want to waste the two seconds it would take to shrug it off.

  She did not know anyone on this block, and all the houses looked dark and quiet. Angelo quickened his pace from a walk to a trot.

  Dana dug in and ran for all she was worth. Behind her she could hear the slap-slap-slap of Angel’s work shoes.

  Run-run-run! she screamed inside her head.

  The footsteps were gaining, but she did not dare take another look.

  Dana cut left through the front yard of a big A-frame house, zigzagged around a pair of fallen bikes, leaped over a soccer ball, jagged left again and raced down the alley between that house and the neighbor’s fence, twisted between swings on a new-looking play set, flung open a small gate, ran through it and into the backyard of the house across the shared driveway. A small dog b
egan barking furiously at her, but she ignored it. Then a much larger dog, a husky, lunged at her and would have taken a nasty bite had it not jerked at the end of its chain. The snapping teeth missed her thigh by less than five inches. Dana left that yard at an even higher speed and tore through two more yards before taking another alley back to the street, and then screamed and jumped sideways as a car appeared out of nowhere, tires screeching, horn blaring. The driver, an old man in a checkered suit, stamped on the brakes and skidded the car to a smoking stop ten inches from her. He leaned out the window and yelled at her.

  “Help,” she begged. “He’s after me!”

  The driver was surprised, angry, and confused. He turned around to look where Dana was pointing.

  The street was empty.

  There was no sign of Angelo at all. Nothing.

  “Very funny,” snarled the old man. “Why don’t you go home and grow up?”

  He put his car into gear and hit the gas so hard he left five feet of smoking rubber behind him.

  Dana stood there, panting, running with sweat, eyes wide and mouth opening and closing like a beached trout. She saw a cracked tree branch hanging low from the willow a dozen feet away, so she hurried over, jumped and caught it, and tore the branch free. It was still green and must have broken during one of the recent storms. Dana stripped off the dying leaves and hefted the stick. It was about twenty inches long and as thick and tapered as a pool cue. The broken end was jagged, but the green wood wasn’t sharp enough to use as a knife. Even so, she was sure that if Angelo came after her, knife or not, she was going to do some damage. She’d used wooden swords and staffs in jujutsu, and having a weapon made her feel safer.

  Only about 10 percent safer, but if that was all the day was offering, she’d take it.

  Clutching her weapon, she began edging toward her street. The sun was dipping behind the trees now, and shadows rolled like a dark tide toward her. Home was still a few blocks away. Dana stopped on the corner and faced back the way she’d come.

  “Don’t,” she said aloud.

  Maybe Angelo would hear it. Maybe he wouldn’t. Either way, saying it gave her some strength. A little, and she’d take that, too.

  She turned and ran down the middle of the street toward her house.

  CHAPTER 67

  313 Sandpiper Lane

  6:01 P.M.

  The night was not done with her, though.

  Dana was still two blocks from home when she saw a girl walk across the street fifty yards ahead. The girl looked familiar. She was black, pretty, and slender. Her hoop earrings bounced as she walked, and the glow from the streetlamp gleamed on the metal of a pendant hung on a silver chain. The girl wore a school team jacket but not in FSK’s blue and white colors. It took Dana a moment to recognize the jacket, and in doing so she realized who this girl was.

  “No…,” breathed Dana as she jolted to a stop. “No … that’s impossible.”

  The colors on that jacket were the green and yellow of a school right over the county line. Oak Valley High. The girl wearing it was Connie Lucas.

  Dana was sure of it, even though the only time she had ever seen Connie’s face was on a stack of photographs taken at the place where she died.

  Fear rooted Dana to the spot, but the name rose to her lips as a question.

  “Connie…?”

  The girl paused, glanced over at Dana, and smiled. It was such a small, sad, knowing smile that it broke Dana’s heart.

  Then, without saying a word, Connie Lucas walked across the street, onto the pavement, and up the short run of flagstones that led to a wooden front porch of a house where no lights shone. Was it her house? No, it couldn’t be. If Connie lived here in Craiger, she’d have gone to FSK. She had to live on the other side of the county line. So whose house was this? Dana had no idea, but Connie walked right in without hesitation, and it was then that Dana noticed the door had been standing open. She quickened her pace and stopped in the street, the stick still clutched in her fist. The door stood open, and inside there was only a black nothing.

  “Connie?” she called again.

  Silence.

  Dana stood there, trying to remember if she had gone home to bed and if this could possibly be a dream. Or was she still hallucinating back in the Chrysalis Room? What was real? Was anything at all real, or had her mind simply broken into so many pieces that none of them would ever fit together again?

  And … how could she be sure of any answer she might come up with? Now or ever? It was terrifying. It was being lost at sea so long that land itself was becoming more of a fantasy than a memory.

  Dana took a few uncertain steps toward the yard but was still unable to see inside. The house remained dark. Had that actually been Connie Lucas? If not, why hadn’t the girl who lived here turned on the lights?

  Turn around and get out of here, said a voice in her head. Her logical self. This is wrong. Stay out of it.

  Dana moved halfway up the flagstone path. “Connie, is everything okay?”

  Run. Angelo could be in there.

  Dana shook her head as if arguing with her better judgment. Angelo couldn’t have gotten this far ahead of her. No way. Besides, she had her stick, and it wasn’t like she was going to actually go in there.

  That was what she told herself as she lifted a foot to step onto the bottom riser of the porch.

  You didn’t even know this girl.

  She hadn’t known Maisie, either, but she had dreamed about her and then spoken to her. Dana went up the three steps very slowly.

  “Connie? What’s going on? Are you trying to tell me something?”

  She was on the porch now. At the open door.

  There was a breeze from inside. Cold and humid, like the rush of air from a meat locker. It smelled, too. Like meat. Not living flesh, but something older, lifeless. Preserved.

  Those thoughts banged around inside her head, breaking furniture, tearing at her courage.

  Run before he sees you.

  The inner voice was begging now, and Dana heard it as clearly as if a twin stood beside her and whispered in her ear. She knew that she absolutely should turn and go. There was no sense to what she was doing. None. No logic, no plan, no advantage. It was wrong from every direction. She was totally aware of that. And yet her traitor feet kept moving her forward. It was like the way she felt when she was walking inside a dream. There was the logic of the dreaming mind witnessing and recording the actions, but the body moved of its own will or as if according to some preset choreography learned way down on the subconscious level.

  And for a moment Dana wondered if, in fact, she was dreaming. Was all of this real? Was any of it? Had she even gone to Beyond Beyond with Ethan? Or met Angelo at the soccer field? Or been chased? Was any of that likely in her actual life? Maybe all this was nothing more than some kind of extended dream, a nightmare. They said that dreams were actually very short even if they felt real. Was everything about the angel, Maisie, Corinda, all of it just a complex fantasy playing out as she slept through a spring storm in her own bed?

  The floor beneath her feet felt too soft, as if she did not stand on it with all her weight. It wasn’t quite the same as when she had astrally projected with Sunlight, but it wasn’t real, either. She almost floated. When she took a breath, the meat-locker stink carried with it the same incense smell of the Chrysalis Room.

  Which was when Dana decided that she was not at home dreaming.

  This was still part of her spiritual trip with Sunlight.

  It jolted her, but at the same time it steadied her. Both in equal measure. All this was part of that same out-of-body experience.

  “Sunlight?” she murmured, and her voice echoed as if she’d shouted in a vast, empty stadium. “Help me.”

  “He can’t help you,” said a voice. It was a male voice, and it was right behind her. Dana screamed and jumped, twisting around as she landed, dropping her backpack and bringing up her hands, ready to fight.

  It was not Angelo
who stood behind her. It was an Asian boy, and beside him was a brown-haired girl with hazel eyes. Like Connie, they both wore Oak Valley High jackets.

  Like Connie, these were teens who Dana had met only through photographs.

  Jeffrey Watanabe and Jennifer Hoffer.

  Dead teenagers.

  Standing right behind her.

  Dana heard the soft scuff of a shoe and she whirled again, and now she saw other ghosts. Connie stood by the far wall, and there were two boys with her. Chuck Riley and Todd Harris.

  And then someone walked out of the adjoining room. Another girl.

  Maisie.

  Dana was surrounded by the dead.

  CHAPTER 68

  313 Sandpiper Lane

  6:09 P.M.

  They stood there, staring at her, their eyes filled with shadows, their mouths smiling with sadness.

  “No,” said Dana breathlessly. “Please … no…”

  Connie raised her hand and touched the pendant she wore. It was a black onyx disk surrounded by twisting red-gold flames. The sign of a total eclipse. Maisie wore the same pendant. Jennifer wore earrings with the same symbol.

  Chuck, Jeffrey, and Todd all removed their jackets and pushed up their sleeves to show tattoos on their upper arms.

  The eclipse.

  Every single one of them.

  “I see it,” said Dana. “What … what does it mean?”

  “The Red Age is coming.”

  Maisie said it. Then everyone else said it at the same time. All of them, speaking in a perfect chorus.

  “I don’t know what that means,” cried Dana.

  Maisie raised her arms out to her sides the way she had in the locker room. Instantly, bright red blood began to flow from her head, side, wrists, and ankles.

  “He will rise,” she said, speaking solo this time. “He will rise and the world will fall.”

  “Who?”

  “They think they control him,” said Maisie.

  “He thinks he controls himself,” said Connie.

  “There is a darkness greater even than the angel,” said Jeffrey.

  “And it will consume him even as he consumes the world,” said Chuck.