by J. S. Bailey
A cold voice cut into Bobby’s thoughts. Stop prying, little rat. He’s ours.
Bobby said, “All right. What exactly did you heal?”
“Your wounds, of course. One of you had a broken nose, some bruised ribs, and a concussion, and some animal had attacked two of you and you’d both lost a lot of blood. I couldn’t let you die.” His dark eyes sparkled. “That would have been terrible.”
“What’s the point of keeping us alive?”
Vincent gave a soft laugh. “We don’t deal in death here. Not usually, anyway.”
Bobby’s skin crawled. “Usually?”
“Accidents happen, of course, but that could be said about anything.” Vincent winced. “I keep praying for one to happen to me.”
Interesting.
Randy folded his arms and glared at the man. Since he was no longer the Servant, he wouldn’t know Vincent was possessed—if he did, Bobby suspected he’d regard Vincent with greater sympathy. “What exactly is this place?”
Vincent’s face became radiant, and the black aura intensified in Bobby’s head. “We call it the Domus. It’s where the dreams and desires of many come true.”
Bobby tried not to smirk. Vincent’s words held the false tone of one repeating lines from a script.
It would be nice to know who’d written it.
“Where…” Randy’s voice faltered.
“What is it?” Bobby asked him, keeping half his attention on Vincent in case he made any sudden moves to harm them.
Randy shook his head. “Nothing.” But the look in his eyes told Bobby otherwise.
“I have been told,” Vincent said, “to take you to a nicer room now that you’re awake. Some of our staff prepared it just for you.”
That didn’t sound reassuring at all. “Is it going to be a storage room, too?”
“Oh, nothing like that.” Vincent gave a soft laugh. “I just know you’re going to love it.”
CARLY WOBBLED, and her vision went gray.
“Isn’t she pretty?” Thane asked.
Carly saw no need to reply.
The much-cleaner room held similarities to the living room upstairs. A television hung on the wall. A loveseat sat before a coffee table on which lay a collection of syringes. There was even a pinball machine and a Space Invaders arcade at one end of the room.
The room itself wouldn’t have given Carly much pause, even with the syringes lying on the table.
The upside-down crucifix hanging on the wall did. About five feet long, it showed off the remains of either a child or a very short adult—Carly wasn’t sure which because the individual mounted on it had no head.
The person had been hanging there for a long time. The skin looked brittle as though mummified, and the pink shirt and denim skirt were threadbare and full of holes.
Please just be a very convincing dummy.
“She’s real, all right,” Thane said as he stood beside her and crossed his arms.
Carly swallowed, unable to pull her gaze from the corpse. She yearned to run from this place and never return again, but her feet remained planted to the floor.
I must be fearless.
“Her name is Layla,” Thane said. “She’s been up there twenty, twenty-five years.”
I must not be afraid.
Carly faced him, more angry than saddened by Thane’s offhand manner. “Okay. So you want me to talk to you. Are you going to just be a jerk and ignore everything I say, or are we actually going to have a conversation?” She was treading dangerous territory by communicating with this monster, but he knew more than she did so she might as well get as much information out of him as possible.
“You’re more interesting when you have an attitude.” Thane gazed lovingly at the corpse on the wall. “Layla was one of the trafficker’s children. Some of them became quite intoxicated one night and thought it would be funny to, well, you know.” He gestured to where Layla’s head should have been. “People get the most peculiar ideas in their heads, and speaking of those, the individuals responsible for this burned hers as an offering to whatever deity they were worshipping at the time. This was after years of sexual abuse. Even the child’s own mother couldn’t get enough of her. You might say Layla’s death was a blessing.”
I must be fearless. “How do you know all of this?” Carly’s voice quaked.
“Because I know everything. Just like I know that deep down you’ve never gotten over your sister’s death. Don’t you know? Jackie’s in a better place. You should be happy for her. Now Cassandra, on the other hand…”
“Carly?” Lupe’s voice, high-pitched with fear, carried down the stairwell. “Is everything all right?”
“Don’t come down here!” Carly darted back into the hallway, thoroughly shaken by Thane’s words. Lupe didn’t need to see the late Rayna Vasquez Robles lying on the floor, and she certainly didn’t need to pay Layla a visit, either.
“Why?” It sounded like Lupe was in the kitchen. “Did you find anyone?”
Carly skirted Rayna’s body and climbed the stairs. “Not exactly. We have to get out of here.” She reached the top of the stairs, welcoming the sunlight coming through the windows.
Wide-eyed, Lupe stood by the counter, still holding the flashlight in a death grip. Her face fell. “No sign of them?”
“No, but I can tell someone was held down there against their will. I found a room full of cots.” And a dead little girl named Layla who’d be older than both of us if someone had let her live.
Lupe was silent for several beats. “We need to tell Phil.”
Carly nodded. “And Dad. Oh, geez. He’s going to have a conniption when he finds out we lost them.”
FRANKIE INHALED deeply, doing his best to maintain some semblance of inner peace.
He’d been angered when he learned that Phil encouraged Bobby and Randy to skip out on the rest of the meeting, but then he realized that if God had called Bobby to perform a certain task as the Servant, it wasn’t Frankie’s place to stop him.
Roger had then driven Frank the First home so Frankie could stay behind and have a long talk with Phil about his faith problem. Kevin returned to the bench outside and stared dolefully at the ground. Frankie was starting to wish he’d left him back in Idaho, but he knew that Bobby needed Kevin too badly for him to have done that.
And then Carly and Lupe showed up claiming that Bobby and Randy had vanished into thin air.
The four of them—he and Phil, Carly and Lupe—stood facing each other in Phil’s living room. “How foolish could you be,” Frankie said, “to have let them out of your sight?”
Carly’s eyes were red from crying. “We tried to act as lookout. We didn’t know they’d disappear.”
Frankie’s voice shook. “Carly Jovingo, you are twenty-one years old. Did you really think you would be able to handle something like this?”
She sniffled. “You don’t have any problem with me counseling people at the safe house.”
“Teaching people to pray is not the same as going after a group of human traffickers. I thought you were old enough to know the difference.”
“That’s right, Dad. Keep insulting me for making a mistake. Nobody can be as perfect as you, right?”
Frankie stiffened at his daughter’s defiance. Where had that come from?
Lupe’s eyes blazed. “Arguing like a group of…of schoolchildren is not going to bring either of them back! Phil, tell him we were right in doing what we did.”
Phil had removed his glasses and was rubbing his eyes with the weariness of a chronic insomniac. “I can’t make that call until I see the outcome of this.” He turned his attention to Frankie. “Are you up to investigating this house to see if they’re trapped inside?”
“Don’t go in there!” Carly shrieked before covering her face with her hands. “I—I looked around. Nobody’s there.”
Frankie could hear what she’d omitted as loudly as if she’d shouted it. “But something else is.”
She nodded.
“Yes, I mind,” she said. “We need to focus on finding Bobby and Randy. And please don’t ever ask me about what I saw again.”
WHILE FRANKIE continued his attempts to pry information out of his daughter, Phil slipped down the hallway and closed himself in his bedroom so he could clear his head. He could hear the murmurings of Allison and their daughter through the walls, and knowing they were safe from harm at the moment brought him a small measure of comfort.
“Father,” he whispered, “let me have the faith that Randy and Bobby will both be unharmed.” And Martin, if you could put an extra word in with the Big Guy, that would be great, too.
Then he slid out his phone and dialed Randy’s number.
No answer.
He dialed Bobby’s and got the same result.
Staring blankly at the muted sunlight spilling through sheer drapes, he tried to come up with a plan. He’d never been the planning type. Randy was always the more likely one to brainstorm new ideas, and Bobby seemed even better at that task than Randy.
Hopefully that meant Bobby would think a way out of whatever situation he and Randy had gotten themselves into. And since Kevin had healed Randy, maybe Randy would be strong enough to incapacitate their foe and free himself and Bobby from wherever they’d been imprisoned. Because they had to be imprisoned somewhere. Where else could they be?
But Carly and Lupe had found blood on the ground. Wherever the two younger men were, at least one of them was hurt.
Even though he knew it was pointless, Phil dialed Randy’s number a second time.
Still, nothing.
Phil returned to the living room, feeling defeated. During his few minutes of absence, his three bickering guests had taken seats and had been joined by Kevin.
“Welcome back,” Frankie said to Phil as he sat next to Lupe on the couch. His face was grim, and Lupe kept biting her lip. “We’ve had a new development since you went back there.”
“I hope that ‘new’ in this instance means ‘good.’”
Frankie frowned. “Carly, tell him what you told us.”
Carly lifted her gaze to Phil’s and cleared her throat. “When I was checking out that house behind St. Paul’s, Thane came back. I tried to ignore him but I finally got fed up and got a conversation going with him. He told me about some bad things that happened there.” Pain flashed through her eyes. “He says he knew about it because he knows everything.”
“Because he’s an evil spirit,” Phil said, not sure where she was going with this.
Carly’s forehead creased. “I thought he was, but now I’m not so sure. It was something he said.” Her face strained with the effort to remember whatever the monster had said to her. “One room in the house looked sort of normal inside, and I was thinking that it didn’t look like a horrible person would live there, and then he said, ‘They’ll tell you one thing when the truth is something else, but I suppose that’s the way of humanity. We all wear a mask, though some wear it better than others.’” She paused and looked at Phil, then at her father. “If he was a demon, he would have said you all wear a mask. But he didn’t. He said we. I—I think Thane is a human.”
Phil opened his mouth to object but then closed it. Carly’s theory was nonsense, of course. An evil spirit like Thane would have said that just to confuse her.
Frankie was thinking along the same lines. He said, “Explain to me, then, how this human can appear and disappear at will and read your thoughts like they’re written in a book.”
“It’s a gift,” someone said softly.
They all looked at Kevin, whose eyes held a gleam of revelation.
“A gift,” Frankie repeated, his tone oozing disbelief.
“Frankie, hear me out.” Kevin lifted his head higher. “Some of us can see the future, or at least get the gist of it. Some of us heal. Some of us understand languages we were never taught. Well, what if there are evil gifts given to people who serve, well, the other side? Kind of like anti-Servants.”
It felt as though someone replaced all of Phil’s blood with ice water. He thought Frankie would say something snide but saw that the man’s face had gone white.
“This is not good,” Lupe said.
DESTROY HIM. Destroy him. Destroy him.
Vincent’s words to Jack at the Domus had taken root in his mind, sending their tendrils deep inside of him.
He couldn’t believe he’d never thought of it before. The very thought excited him almost as much as seeking out new victims did. It wouldn’t be that hard to do, and in the meantime he could even tie up a loose end that had been bugging him.
“Jack? What are you doing?”
Jack set his comb down after slicking his hair back and examined his reflection in the mirror over the dresser in the bedroom where he’d been staying all week. Wanda Livingston, a fellow employee of Troy Hunkler and the apartment’s sole legal tenant, stood a few feet behind him, her black eyebrows raised in a question.
“I just got a call from Troy.” He flashed a grin at her. “He told me to come see him as soon as I could.”
In reality, he and Troy had not spoken. Jack had, in fact, made some calls of his own in order to make certain arrangements, and much to his surprise things were working out in his favor far more than he’d expected them to.
His unseen comrades must have been working hard to help him.
Wanda tossed her curly hair over her shoulder and smirked. “Maybe someone exceeded their quota so you won’t have to bring in five this week.”
“I doubt that. You can come with me to see him if you want. It’s up to you.”
She weighed this for a few seconds. “Fine. But afterward I’m going to dinner. There’s this Thai place on Hillsdale Boulevard I’ve been wanting to try out.”
Jack stiffened. Sometimes Wanda could be almost as much of an airhead as Trish Gunson had been. “If I go anywhere,” he said, “it’ll be to The Pink Rooster. At least there I won’t run the risk of having a cop spot me.” The Hillsdale Police Department knew better than to show up at Vern and Chuck’s place. If a cop stepped through their doors, he was bound to have an unfortunate accident.
Wanda folded her arms. “I didn’t say you were invited.”
“I thought you were fonder of me than that.”
She let out a hollow laugh. “Me, fond of you? You’re not that special. I only let you stay here as a favor to Troy.”
Is that so? Jack straightened the collar of his sky blue polo shirt and winked at his reflection. “We’d better hurry. I don’t want to keep him waiting.”
Wanda shouldered her purse and led the way out of the apartment. As Jack closed the door, he wondered if he’d ever see it again.
If all went according to plan, he’d have a much nicer place to spend his days from here on out.
He slid out his phone and dialed a number. “Angel,” he whispered as they descended the stairs to the parking lot. “Are you busy?”
A radio blaring music in the background fell silent. “No, señor. Listen, some skinny kid came by earlier and started asking too many things about the other night. This whole thing, I knew it was a bad idea.”
“When you say ‘skinny kid’…”
“He had dark hair. Maybe a little younger than you? He was very nosy; it made me nervous.”
Sounded like Bobby Roland had been doing his homework. “Forget about him,” Jack said. “We won’t have to worry about that ‘kid’ anymore after today.” Jack’s invisible helpers had seen to that.
He opened the passenger door of Wanda’s car and climbed inside. Still speaking to Angel, he said, “Tell your boss you need off early and that you need to take a van because your car won’t start, so you should probably fiddle around under the hood and break something in case he checks. If you come up with a decent enough excuse for leaving, he might feel sorry for you and let you go.”
“You need a ride, señor?”
“Meet us at the park and ride
as soon as you can. We’ll be waiting.”
He ended the call, knowing that Angel would do exactly as Jack requested. If he didn’t, Jack would report him to the police for at least one of the crimes Jack knew he’d committed, and then adios, amigo.
“Why are we ditching the car?” Wanda pouted, her eyes full of suspicion.
“We’re not ditching it. I just feel better having Angel behind the wheel than either of us.”
“Fair enough.” Wanda let out a sigh. “I hope this meeting with Troy doesn’t take too long. I’m starving.”
“Me too,” Jack said, though not for food.
ADRIAN FOLLOWED Bobby, his friend, and the other man out into a black- and gray-carpeted corridor that she suspected was underground like her previous prison. It made her think of a hotel, though it wasn’t nearly as lavish as ones she’d visited with Yuri. The air held a funny odor, like a mixture of perfume and disinfectant.
Charlotte had shown her many pictures of Bobby but it was another thing entirely seeing him in person. She could see traces of her father in Bobby’s face—maybe if Rob Pollard hadn’t died so long ago, his presence in her life would have encouraged her to stay with Ken and raise Bobby like a responsible woman would have done.
Now you’re just making excuses. The only person whose fault this is is you.
Bobby lagged behind the others and fell in step beside her. She’d expected him to look older than he did. Right now he just looked like a scared kid desperately trying to keep it all together. “Why did you leave us?” he asked in a low voice.
Adrian forced herself to hold her tears in check. “Because I was too selfish to look beyond myself and care for another person.”
He nodded in agreement, and it sent a knife through her heart. “Charlotte told me you did this to other people, too.”
Dear God, don’t let him hate me. “We shouldn’t talk about this here. Not with anyone else listening.”
They descended a flight of stairs into what must have been a sub-basement and found themselves in a grim corridor decorated with more garishly patterned black and gray carpet, smoky gray wallpaper, and pewter wall sconces flickering with cold light. At first she thought they held candles, but closer inspection revealed small, battery-powered tea lights.
