Lil practically tittered with amusement. I struggled not to twitch at the uncanny sound.
“No, but he promised to take me riding once the weather breaks.” After the two had shared another few laughs at my expense, the attending nurse made a shooing motion.
“Go on and get your paperwork signed,” she encouraged. “And take your fella with you. I don’t want to have to keep track of him.”
“OK,” the Lady of Beasts chirped. She turned and gestured to me. I was already halfway to the nurses’ station. We strode together down the hall, Lil taking the lead. I had the distinct impression the nurse behind us was undressing me with her eyes. I walked a little faster.
“Date night?” I inquired archly.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Lil responded.
“I do not have a white-boy ass,” I muttered.
Lil snorted. “Have you looked in a mirror?” She grabbed me and gave a little squeeze.
The nurse at the station tried to be quiet about it, but I could hear her snickering all the way down the hall. The instant we turned the corner at the end, I seized Lil by the wrist. Normally, physical contact blew a person right into my mind, but Lil had defenses to rival the firewall at the Pentagon. The most I got were tattered echoes of the façade she’d been projecting.
“Don’t touch me,” I snarled.
Lil strained against my grip, but I bore down with more-than-human strength. Her storm-gray eyes locked on mine, and we faced off in rigid silence.
“Seriously, Lil,” I said. “That crossed a line.”
Nearby, a door whispered open.
“You two done playing grab-ass in the hallway?”
We both jumped like guilty teenagers. Father Frank stood a few doors away, a tall cup of take-out coffee clasped in one hand. His knuckles were scabbed over from the fight the night before, and the wound above his eyebrow spread stains of grape and green beneath his weathered skin. His eyes were weary but alert, and they shifted watchfully between me and the Lady of Beasts.
Lil yanked her wrist from my slackened grip while I fumbled for a response.
“Uh, padre,” I managed. “This is Lil.”
He nodded curtly in her direction. “We’ve met.”
Awkward volumes unfolded in the sudden tension across her shoulders. The padre never took his eyes off of her—and not because he was admiring the view.
“I’ll wait out in the hall,” she offered. She strode toward the juncture of the corridors where she could covertly watch the nurses’ station. Folding her arms across her chest, she pointedly turned her back to us.
27
“I hope you got some news for me,” the padre said, still hovering near the door. “I’ve been trying that cellphone of yours all day.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “That’s the old number.”
Father Frank grunted. “Explains a few things. When did you change it?”
“Around the time I lost the old phone in the lake,” I replied.
“When you were attacked,” he stated flatly. Pity, anger, and recrimination all converged upon his face.
“Look, I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. How was I supposed to apologize for a betrayal I couldn’t recall?
For a long moment, he just stood in the doorway, intently searching my face. The force of his scrutiny weighed heavy as the wings on my back. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but he found something. His chin dipped in a terse nod and he grunted again.
“You need to come to Holy Rosary as soon as you get the chance.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but his gaze flicked warily to where Lil stood watch at the end of the hall. His lips settled into a disapproving line.
Something more significant than prayer spurred the request. Meaning taunted at the edges of memory. As I met his eyes, I almost had it. Then it was gone.
“Padre—it’ll have to wait. I’ve got a ton of shit to do after I see Halley.” I craned to look past him into the room. “How’s she been?”
Jaw ticking, Father Frank stepped back from the doorway and gestured me in.
“Good, all things considered,” he allowed.
Ducking past him, I draped Lil’s discarded jacket over a chair. With a final, beetling glance toward where she waited, he pulled the door shut till only a crack of light remained.
There were two beds, but only one was occupied. Halley’s room was dark except for the spectral glow of the monitors clustered around her bed. A girl-shaped lump curled in the middle of it, a dark plume of hair trailing from beneath the upper edge of the blanket. Father Frank laid a finger to his lips, cautioning quiet—though from her breathing, I didn’t think Halley was actually sleeping.
Still, I kept my voice down.
“You have some history with Lil?” I asked.
“One of us does,” he answered. The padre took a long, slow sip of coffee, eyeing me across the lid. “She taking advantage of the fact you don’t remember?”
“Knowing her? Yeah, pretty sure.”
He grunted, then traced a blunt nail along the seam of the thick paper cup. “Long as you know the kind of person you’re dealing with.”
I shrugged. “It’s the devil you know, right, padre?”
Any response he thought to offer was interrupted by a sudden rustling of sheets. Halley dragged herself into a sitting position, an IV trailing from one thin arm, her pink and green rosary twined around the other. For a moment, she resisted her natural inclination and stared straight at me.
“Wingy!” she breathed, clearly delighted.
I smiled despite myself.
“Don’t let Lil catch you calling me that,” I said. “I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Too late.” The voice came from just outside of the door.
The padre shot me a look. “A particularly nosy devil.”
She poked her head into the room. “You’ll appreciate my vigilance if anything tries sneaking up on us.”
Then everything about Lil froze—her stance, her features. She even stopped breathing. Her thundercloud eyes fixed on the slight figure of Halley, crouching on the bed.
“Mother’s Tears,” she swore. She licked lips gone dry with shock.
Halley didn’t return Lil’s stare directly. Instead, the girl’s dark eyes trailed everywhere around the Lady of Beasts. She raised the hand taped to the IV, tracing patterns in the air with one slender finger.
“Fox,” she murmured. “Lion. Weasel. Owl.”
As Halley continued reciting the names of various animals, Lil dropped her voice to a furious hiss.
“You didn’t tell me you were dealing with one of those.” Her warm, bronze skin paled to a sickly shade. She stared at Halley a moment more, then, without further comment, she slipped back out of sight in the hallway. I could feel her shields slam into place with all the crushing finality of blast doors.
“What’s that all about?” Father Frank asked.
Thanks to Terael, I knew—and if Lil could see it at a glance, it was a safe bet others could, too. I didn’t answer right away, though.
“Things are a lot more complicated with Halley than we initially suspected.” Quietly I pulled the door shut until I heard it click. The whites of Father Frank’s eyes stood out in the spectral lights of the monitors.
“She just scared one of the most terrifying women I have ever met,” he breathed. “That can’t be good.” He set aside the coffee and watched me tensely.
“None of the news I have is exactly good,” I said.
He grunted, unsurprised.
Suddenly awkward, I hedged. “After everything at the Davis place last night, I guess you know about my crazy life. Still, a lot of this is going to sound strange.”
A tightening around his eyes deepened the crows’ feet at their edges. It was his only acknowledgement. I swallowed. He wasn’t making this easy. I struggled to order my thoughts, but my brain felt scattered.
“All the writing Halley’s done,” I started. “She hasn’t
written on herself, has she? Like the cuts we found on the vagrant you clobbered?”
Father Frank’s look of horror was answer enough.
Halley shifted position on her bed, worrying the beads of her rosary.
“The ladies went away,” she sighed.
That derailed me entirely. I whirled from the priest to the girl.
“What?”
The sharpness in my tone made her cringe. She turned her focus on an apparently random corner of the room, covering her face with her hair. I held my breath, anxious for her answer.
“Red hair. Black hair. Golden hair, gray.” She ticked off the colors with a rhythm reminiscent of the old rhyme, “Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief.” I moved closer.
“Black hair? Dark eyes?” I held a hand up just below my shoulder. “This tall?”
Halley yelped at my sudden motion, retreating back beneath the blankets.
“Zack, you have to go easy with her,” Father Frank warned.
“Halley, it’s important to me,” I said, keeping my voice soft. “Did you see Lailah? Did she tell you her name?” I stopped short of yanking away the covers.
Father Frank grabbed my elbow, his grip like iron through the thick leather of my jacket.
“You won’t get anything out of her that way,” he said. “Take a few steps back.”
He tugged. I resisted. He refused to let go.
“How is this Lailah connected to the Whisper Man?” he asked.
“No. It’s nothing like that. I—” My breath snagged on the words.
The lines around the priest’s mouth deepened, making his lips look like a parenthetical notation on his face. I finally pulled free of him and paced a tight circuit in the room. With all the layers of shielding I had going, I felt caged.
“I lost someone,” I explained. Muscles in my throat strained against the statement. “It’s a long story.”
He regarded me searchingly. A slight lift to his brows indicated some internal consideration.
“I can walk up and punch most spirits in the face,” I said, clenching a fist as demonstration. I swung it futilely at the air, then opened empty fingers. “You’d think I’d notice if she’d been hanging around, but it’s been a whole month of nothing. Just dreams.”
From where she huddled, Halley started humming to herself. The sound was barely audible through the muffling of the covers, so it took me a few moments to recognize the tune.
“Schism,” by Tool.
Stunned, I halted to stare at the girl-shaped lump on bed. The lyrics welled in memory, timed to Halley’s whispery refrain.
I know the pieces fit…
The same song had queued up on my iPod outside the art museum, entirely too well timed. It couldn’t be coincidence.
“You can see her,” I said. “How—when all I have are dreams?”
“Zaquiel,” Father Frank urged. “Stop, please.” This time he reached for my shoulder. Without thinking, I seized his hand to shove it away.
Explosions blossomed in my vision. Wet jungle heat. Cordite—and the cloying stench of old blood. Direct contact with his skin was like a pile driver to the brain.
There was something else—a tether of power binding him to me.
The instant I became aware of it, strength flowed through it. The power caught me in that gnawing hollow just under the ribs, replacing the exhaustion with much-needed warmth. The dull roar of my headache faded, then ceased.
I whipped my hand away like I’d been burned.
“Sorry,” I breathed, stumbling away.
Father Frank regarded me with mild confusion.
“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” I insisted—but I could still feel the connection and the urge to draw on it was almost overwhelming. A guilty part of me wanted to blame my famished grasping on the Eye, but that soul-hunger was all Anakim.
I hid my hands away in the pockets of my jacket. This was a part of my nature I still struggled with, one of the factors that had led me to lock myself away for over a month. Everything I did—every shield, every ward, every journey through the Shadowside—cost me power, and that power was replenished from people.
I hated it.
Father Frank’s tone was full of gentle reproach.
“I’d give you a kidney if you needed it, Zack. You know that.” He reached for my shoulder again and I was too beside myself to even shrug him away. “You saved my life more times than I can count. This is nothing.”
He held out his other hand, palm cupped like he was catching water from the air. Then he exhaled, steady and slow. His eyes fluttered closed. Reflexively, I clenched down on my shields, but that tie between us anchored some place deep. Through the leather, through all my battered layers of defenses, warmth radiated from him to me. Softly glowing in my vision, he exhaled another breath and I felt it filling up the reserves I’d burned through at the museum.
I didn’t pull away.
Soaking up the power so selflessly offered, I gained a better sense of the pathway it followed. The connection ran both ways, and if I reached out along it, I could almost taste the memory of when I’d created it.
Then I froze as more images rushed along the current of borrowed life, and in an instant, I knew what I’d made of him back in the jungles of Vietnam. Father Frank was an anchor. My anchor. I’d tied him to me, investing him with some of my own power, knowing I would die in that war—and I needed a way home.
“You carried me.” It escaped my lips in a breathless whisper. “All the way back to the States. Not my body, but the most important part of me.”
I marveled at the face of the man I’d intended—forty-odd years ago—to become my father, wondering what had altered that path in our intertwined lives. My parents still lived in Kenosha. I knew them only as a distant fact. Aside from a card that had arrived on my birthday, we didn’t talk.
With the amnesia, I was afraid to reach out.
“I didn’t believe what you told me, but I did what you said, and I survived.” His breath hitched. “That was the hardest part.”
“I can’t believe Foul-Mouthed Frankie became a priest.” The words spilled from my lips, but they belonged to a wholly different self. Father Frank regarded me with haunted eyes.
“Living wasn’t easy when everyone else was dead.”
The wretched ache of his desolation hit me along the link, and we both fell silent. Shards of memory prickled behind my eyes, a broken window to another life. I couldn’t recapture all of it, but I remembered him—a boisterous kid, barely twenty-two when he enlisted.
He was smart and he was strong—not a crack shot, but he never lost his nerve, no matter how hairy the situation. That counted for a lot.
The words in my head were my voice, yet not. I would have been ecstatic over remembering something, except every stolen moment came laced with the trauma Father Frank still carried in the wounded chambers of his soul.
“You’ve seen too much death already,” I whispered. “I’ll make sure we don’t lose Halley.” The trusting eyes of that raw, earnest kid peered out from the lines of the older man’s face.
“I’ll hold you to that, Cap.”
28
“The first thing I need is to find his token.”
We stood apart from Halley, conferring in low voices in the curtained-off side of the room. It was an empty gesture—the curtain did little to muffle sound, and with Halley’s preternatural perceptions, I doubted she needed to hear our voices in order to effectively listen in. Still, our only other option was stepping out into the hall, and that meant including Lil.
Neither the padre nor I felt comfortable bringing the Lady of Beasts into our discussion at the moment. We didn’t exactly debate that part out loud. We both simply knew, in that way old friends shared opinions without speaking.
Now that I was conscious of the bond between us, I understood my instinctive trust for Father Frank. Even so, I found it challenging to act on that camaraderie. I’d struggled for months with truths abou
t myself, ones that I expected the mortal world to hate and fear. Glossing over details or omitting them entirely came as second nature with everyone. So I covered only the high points of what I’d learned about Terhuziel, hesitantly mentioning that he was one of the Rephaim.
Father Frank knew the term.
“The same ones you went after near Hoi An?” he asked.
“What?” Phantom images flickered in my vision, hovering on the boundaries of conscious perception. The urge to seize the compelling fragments vied with my need to sever Terhuziel’s ties with Halley.
Not now.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the fragments away.
“Zack?” Father Frank asked.
He gave my arm a tentative shake. I started, my eyes still closed. I couldn’t say how long they’d been that way.
“We’ll come back to that later,” I said. Emotions for which I had little context roiled in the back of my brain. I did my best to quell them. “Has Halley had any more episodes since they brought her to the hospital?”
“No,” he answered. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised.”
Mentally, I tallied the distance between the hospital and the Davis house in Little Italy. Then I factored in the Whitethorn address. The Kramer residence was closer to Halley’s home by about a mile. Not a huge distance, but then, I could stand ten feet outside of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Terael couldn’t reach me.
“That’s good to know,” I said. “It means either she’s further from his sphere of influence, or she left the token at home.” I stopped, then added, “Probably both.”
“What’s this token look like?” he asked. “Soon as my cell’s charged up, I’ll text Tammy so she can look for it.”
I grimaced. “Uh, about that…”
Father Frank’s lips twitched at the corner—his sole tic of displeasure. He was stoic in all other regards.
“You have no idea,” he stated evenly.
I scrubbed at my stubbled jaw. There was no accusation in his eyes, but I still couldn’t bring myself to meet them.
“It has his Name on it,” I offered lamely.
“Zack, she’s been writing those same three characters for weeks now. They’ve been all over her walls.”
Harsh Gods Page 17
