Harsh Gods

by Michelle Belanger

  “How many of you are hurt?” Officer Roarke asked.

  “I’ve had worse,” Father Frank declared. Officer Potts regarded the old priest skeptically, then bent to the man on the floor. Her eyes went wide when she saw the gaping symbols cut into his skin.

  “What’s all over his chest?”

  “We were wondering the same thing ourselves,” said Father Frank.

  “They all seemed strung out on something,” I ventured. I didn’t make eye contact with either of the cops. I wondered if either of them knew Bobby, and if mentioning him would get them to calm the hell down.

  Potts pulled a pair of gloves from a pocket. After slipping them on, she started checking the unconscious man’s vitals. The instant the officer touched her fingers to the vagrant’s neck, the volume of Halley’s humming spiked. The girl coiled into herself, covering her head with her arms.

  “What the hell’s wrong with her?” Roarke choked.

  “Too loud. Too loud!” she cried.

  “She’s autistic,” Father Frank answered tersely. “She doesn’t know you, and she just had her home invaded. As far as she’s concerned, you’re invaders, too.”

  “But we’re police. We’re here to help,” Roarke said.

  I glanced toward the girl. That pulse of power was back, thrumming heavily upon the air. I didn’t see any of the tendrils, but that didn’t mean nothing was there. I shook my head a little, hoping the padre caught my intent.

  “Let me go to her,” Father Frank offered. “She knows me. Familiar things help calm her.”

  Officer Roarke made a halting gesture. “I’m sorry, but you need to stay right where you are. All of you.” Holstering his gun, he approached Halley.

  “Hey, little lady,” he said, pitching his voice higher in that way some people do when talking to small children or cute pets. He extended his hand in what he clearly meant as a harmless gesture. All I could think of was that old black-and-white Frankenstein movie, where Karloff’s monster tries making friends with a little girl—and she ends up face-down in the water a few frames later. Roarke wasn’t that scary, but he still could’ve palmed Halley’s entire face with his broad, calloused mitt.

  The girl didn’t even notice him. She tightened into a little ball of skinny arms and knobby knees.

  “Too loud!” she said over and over again.

  “She ever get violent?” the cop asked. He paused with his hand hovering just above her shoulder.

  “No,” Father Frank answered, “but I wouldn’t recommend touching—”

  The officer’s hand had already connected. The moment it did, Halley jerked into a sitting position like her spine was set on a hinge. Roarke stumbled backward, yanking his hand away like she’d burned him. Halley turned and pinned him with her gaze.

  “It’s blood. It’s all blood,” she declared in a voice that was hardly her own. “How can you kiss him when that’s all you can taste?”

  Roarke struggled for a response, but all that came out was a tiny squeak.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with this kid?” Potts whispered.

  At the mention of blood, my focus lasered onto Roarke. Blood held a special significance for one branch of my extended family—the Nephilim. They were the next best things to vampires, and I had a litany of reasons to distrust them. Roarke didn’t look like a member of that tribe, but that didn’t rule out a connection. The Nephilim could twist mortals into blood-slaves, supernatural servitors they called anchors.

  Whatever was going on with him, Halley’s words had struck a nerve. The hulking officer blanched so pale his freckles stood out like cornflakes in cream.

  “Lydia?” he finally managed, voice cracking. He didn’t tear his eyes from the girl. “When’s that backup set to arrive?”

  “Ten minutes, tops,” his partner responded. She had paled, too, though she didn’t look quite as rattled as Roarke.

  “I think I’m scaring the kid,” he said.

  There was no question who was pants-shitting scared in the room, but I saw no use in pointing it out.

  “I’m gonna go find the lady who called this in,” he said. “You got this. Right, Lyds?” He backed away from the bed as he spoke, till his broad shoulders connected with the door frame behind him. Halley squatted like a statue in the middle of her bed, eyes gone glassy as she stared a hole through his forehead.

  Roarke was out of the room before his partner could reply. Lydia glared at the empty space where he had stood.

  “Yeah, sure,” she muttered. “Leave me with the freakshow.”

  As soon as Roarke was gone, Halley’s rigid posture melted away and she slumped with exhaustion.

  I racked my brain for signs that might identify a Nephilim blood-slave. Anchors tended to be knuckle-dragging no-necks, and Roarke was bulky enough to fit the bill. Before I could give it any more thought, though, Halley started freaking out again.

  “No. No! Make him go away!” she wailed, head buried in her hands. Another wave of that power pressed down upon the room.

  “He’s gone, honey,” Potts offered. She gestured vaguely to where her mountain of a partner had just stood, but Halley continued to whimper. With a look of annoyance, Potts bent back to the unconscious vagrant. She adjusted the wad of bloody cloth on his head.

  The man’s eyes snapped open. His hand shot out and he seized Officer Potts by the wrist.

  “What the hell?” she gasped.

  His grip tightened, and he used the startled woman’s arm to drag himself into a sitting position. Spittle flew from his mouth.

  “Hands to take!” he shouted. “Eyes to see!”

  With an incoherent shrill of disgust, Potts torqued her wrist to break his hold. He clung with a ferocity born of madness.

  Halley started screaming.

  The vagrant’s head whipped around so sharply all the vertebrae in his neck crackled.

  “A mouth to speak!” he lisped wetly through gaps in his teeth. Potts yanked again to break his grip, but his fingers were locked like a vise. Father Frank darted forward to help the officer.

  “Back off,” Potts snarled. “I’ve got this.” She dropped the bloody rag to free up a hand, reaching across her body to seize her pepper spray. Without breaking eye contact, she hissed, “Last chance, buster.”

  The possessed vagrant roared in her face.

  She averted her eyes and maced him, point-blank.

  Halley coughed on a backwash of fumes. With a peculiar casting gesture, she hurled a hand toward the intruder.

  “My room,” she shouted. “Get out!”

  A shimmering bolt of power that only I could see launched from her fingers at the possessed man. It wasn’t bright, like the power I could throw around, and it didn’t look exceptionally cohesive, but it was enough. It struck the guy in the chest, splashing across the mutilated symbols like some kind of napalm-filled water balloon. The vagrant dropped Lydia’s wrist and began to seize. The heels of his mismatched Army boots beat an irregular rhythm on the floorboards.

  Father Frank turned to me, looking for answers.

  All I could offer was an ineffectual shrug. I didn’t understand as much as I once had, but everything about Halley bent the rules as I currently knew them. My senses told me she was mortal. Mortals didn’t hurl bolts of energy like they’d just graduated from Hogwarts. Psychic mortals, sure—that could happen, and it gave me the heebie-jeebies when it did. But striking a spirit from the Shadowside? That was a power unique to my tribe, the Anakim.

  Even the Nephilim couldn’t do that.

  “Lyds!” Roarke bellowed. “You OK, Lyds?” Wild-eyed, he burst back into the room.

  Halley loosed a little sigh and fell back against the mattress. Her spine bowed once, then she lay terribly still. The vagrant continued to jig against the floor, blood-flecked foam forming at the edges of his mouth as he bit down on his tongue.

  “Jesus!” Potts cried. “Help me with this guy, Jimmy. Shit got real weird.”

  “The girl—?” Roarke asked, thoug
h it wasn’t clear if he was asking after her well-being or about her role in the weirdness. Given the mindfuck that had driven him from the room, I suspected it was the latter.

  “I’ll watch her,” Father Frank said, moving to her bedside whether or not the officers agreed.

  I stayed put against the wall in case Potts was feeling generous with the pepper spray. Scattered at my feet lay the crumpled papers scribbled from top to bottom with Halley’s mysterious script. A set of three symbols identical to those carved in the vagrant’s chest recurred with ominous regularity.

  If only I could read them.

  7

  An ambulance arrived, then more police. They split us up—Father Frank insisted on staying with Halley. I didn’t get a chance to see if they let him, though. I got hustled into the kitchen.

  Then it was a whole lot of hurry up and wait.

  More sirens, more ambulances, and EMTs dragging various bits of equipment through the tidy little house. I leaned just out of sight but not out of earshot. While they strapped Lady Scarface to a backboard, one of the officers—not Roarke or Potts, but some new guy—tried asking her questions. The woman couldn’t even give her own name. She babbled in broken sentences that sounded like word salad.

  An hour went by.

  Then another.

  Finally, Roarke came to interview me. Of course I would get Roarke—half a dozen Cleveland cops scurrying around the Davis home, and I got the one who might have ties to my least favorite tribe. The big guy glanced over his shoulder at the bustle in the living room, then gestured for me to take a seat at the kitchen table. It was tucked in a little breakfast nook, completely out of sight from the rest.

  I hesitated.

  The burly officer flattened his lips into a look, then waved impatiently toward the table again.

  I still didn’t move.

  They had to interview witnesses separately—that was standard procedure, blah, blah, blah—but I still didn’t like the idea of being alone with this lumbering gorilla who looked like he bench-pressed Hondas in his spare time. Was I being a paranoid dick about it? Sure. I was a fan of staying alive. Most of the Nephilim were fans of the opposite, especially when it pertained to guys like me.

  “Quit wasting my time, Westland,” he said.

  That made me dig in even harder. I’d been cooling my heels for close to two and a half hours, and none of the officers had asked for my name. I hadn’t offered it, either, just sat and waited like a good little drone. Now I flashed back to the moment he’d come in through the window. That little lift of his ginger brows.

  “You know me from somewhere?” I demanded, and yeah, I sounded suspicious—because I was. He gave me a look again. This one as much as said, “Why the hell are you even asking?”

  Eventually he grumbled, “Fine. You want to play it like that, but they’re all busy out there. No one can hear us.”

  Right, I mused. Because that totally fills me with confidence.

  Roarke tried herding me back toward the table by advancing one ponderous step at a time. I didn’t appreciate the idea of having the Big Blue Ox all up in my personal space, and there was no direction to go but backward, stopping when my legs met with the edge of the kitchen table. Even so I refused to sit down. Instead, I stood there with my fists stuffed into the pockets of my leather jacket, defiantly meeting his eyes while I held tight to my cowl.

  Roarke practically ground his teeth.

  “Look, Westland. It doesn’t take a genius to see this isn’t an ordinary crime scene. What am I covering up?”

  I squinted, as if seeing him better could lend clarity to his words.

  “Is that a trick question?” I asked.

  He made an unhappy sound, and it came out like the kind of snort I’d expect from an angry bull just before it charged.

  “You’re not as funny as you think you are, and I don’t have time for it tonight. Give me the 411, and stop screwing around.”

  “Yeah,” I said, chewing the inside of my lip. “Thing is, there’s nothing to cover up. Some guys broke in. They acted crazy and threatened the kids, and we beat the snot out of them. Self-defense. End of story.”

  Roarke ground his teeth again, a prominent vein at his temple throbbing. I took subtle pleasure in knowing that I wasn’t good for his blood pressure—though I managed not to grin too much about it.

  On some level I was probably being unreasonable. Not everyone I ran into was tangled up in the messy web of betrayal that tied me back to my extended family. Maybe Roarke was just an overgrown teddy bear, misunderstood because of his size. Maybe Halley’s babble about blood had no connection whatsoever to the Nephilim.

  Maybe I was a tap-dancing Dalek.

  Yeah, right.

  “Fuck this,” the big man spat. “When he said you’d changed, I thought he meant you stopped being an asshole. You don’t want my help, Westland, fine by me. I’ve only ever done you favors because of—”

  He halted mid-rant at the sound of movement near the doorway. His partner, Lydia, stood there. The tense body language between Roarke and me wasn’t lost on her.

  “You ’bout done in here, Jimmy?” she asked. Her glacial eyes shifted between the two of us.

  “Getting there, Lyds,” Roarke replied. He stepped away from me, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked like a big kid who’d gotten caught doing something embarrassing.

  Blood and favors. That seriously screamed Nephilim, and only one of those had any reason to be nice to me—my sibling, Remy. He had some connections with the local police—he’d used them to help cover up the incident on the lake. Was Roarke on my side? I almost felt bad for being an ass.

  Almost.

  “Am I being charged with anything?” I asked.

  Officer Potts canted her head.

  “I don’t know. You feeling guilty?”

  “Well, I did kind of rough up the one I sent down the stairs,” I admitted. “But she came at me with a tire iron, so I’m inclined to say she deserved it.”

  Neither of them answered. The kitchen clock ticked audibly while we held an unofficial staring contest. Lydia broke the silence first.

  “You didn’t see any of the others that broke through the window in the girl’s room, did you?” she asked. “Your priest friend said there were more.”

  I ran my fingers through unkempt hair, leaning a little against the table. I still wasn’t going to tell them everything that was going on—hell, I hadn’t worked out all the details myself. But I figured I’d throw them a bone.

  “When I got to Halley’s room, the others were gone. There was the guy on the floor, and the padre was down. I had the choice to chase after them, or help the priest and the girl. I opted to help. But, yeah. I think there were more.”

  Lydia gave Roarke a look as if to say, “See? That’s how it’s done.” He glared back at her from under his beetling eyebrows, then shouldered past her without so much as a word.

  If Roarke actually was a friend, he had every reason to be pissed off. I made a mental note to talk to Remy so I could sort that out later. No sense in making enemies out of the cops—though it might have been a bit late for that.

  Officer Potts asked me a few more questions, like what had brought me to the Davis house in the first place. I half-lied and said I’d come to help Father Frank look after Halley. The padre and I were old friends, I explained glibly, and we’d done work together before. As far as I’d been able to gather, that was actually true—though it was a good thing Potts didn’t ask when it had happened, or how long we’d been working together. I didn’t have a clue.

  She ran my ID and pulled up my conceal-carry permit. She asked about my firearm. I handed the SIG over for her to inspect.

  “You had this the whole time, and never took it out?” she asked—though she wasn’t asking in her interrogator voice. She seemed genuinely puzzled.

  I shrugged. “Never hit a point where I felt the gun was going to solve any of our problems. Why escalate?” Besides, the firewor
ks I could work with my hands beat a gun any day with nasties like Whisper Man—but she didn’t need to know that.

  Potts looked at me as if she was suddenly seeing a very different person under the mess of whiskers and wild hair. She handed my ID and gun back to me, then walked away.

  I was free to go.

  8

  Once Officer Potts was done with me, I ventured into the living room. Most of the chaos had cleared.

  Upstairs, Tammy sang a lullaby to soothe little Tyson. Her sweet, clear voice echoed hauntingly through the house. The last of the EMTs came down the hall from Halley’s room carrying a mammoth kit of first-aid supplies. He slipped out the front door to a vehicle parked at the curb. Roarke lingered near the bottom of the stairs, taking pictures and entering notes into a tablet. He gave me the stink-eye when I emerged from the no man’s land of the kitchen.

  I briefly considered talking to him, but decided it was in my best interest to avoid Officer McMountain for the time being, so I headed down the hall to check on Halley and the padre. When I got to her room, Halley’s bed was empty. The curtain was down and someone had tacked a section of plywood and plastic across the broken picture window to keep the cold out.

  Father Frank stood off to one side putting his undershirt back on. His ribs were taped up, half-obscuring an old military tattoo that stretched between his shoulder blades. The faded blue lines were going soft at the edges, but it was still possible to read the words Semper Fidelis emblazoned on a scroll above the head of an eagle rampant. The eagle seemed to rise from the topmost layer of medical tape, the tip of one outstretched wing nearly obliterated by a pale, puckered scar—almost certainly from an old bullet wound.

  Curiouser and curiouser… Belatedly, I rapped my knuckles on the wooden door frame to announce my presence.

  “I heard ya about a minute ago,” Father Frank said without turning around. “You’re not exactly subtle with those clunky boots you wear.”

  “Sorry,” I muttered—though whether I was apologizing for the intrusion or the “clunky” boots even I wasn’t sure. I started to withdraw from the room, but Father Frank continued talking with the ease of someone used to dressing around other people—which made me wonder how long he’d been a priest and not a Marine. No one got a tattoo like that just for show. I lingered on the threshold to listen, my back half-turned to give the man his privacy. He might not have cared, but I did.