Harsh Gods

by Michelle Belanger

  “I don’t exactly understand the distinction myself,” I admitted, “but Terael said the token is a crafted thing. I know there’s power in the actual shaping of an item.” A lot of my recent work with wards had led into that territory. “That’s one way relics are made—items that have a solid existence both here and in the Shadowside. It’s got to be something like that. He made it sound like a kind of a holy symbol.”

  Instantly the padre’s eyes grew wide, and I saw in them a reflection of my own chagrined revelation. I couldn’t tell if I made the connection because of him, or if we both arrived at insight simultaneously.

  “Her rosary,” he breathed.

  I slapped my forehead. “Fuck me running. I’m so dense.”

  I shoved the curtain aside. The metal fixtures attached to its track in the ceiling screed and clattered against themselves in a flurry.

  From her position in the middle of the bed, Halley held the sheet open around her face so that it looked like she peered through a tent flap. As I’d suspected, she’d been listening. The instant I charged forward, she dropped the starched white fabric and gave a little squeak.

  “Halley, I need to see your rosary.”

  “No!” she wailed. “You’re going to take it!” She folded in on herself so abruptly, the sheets appeared to implode.

  “Let me try,” Father Frank said softly. He slipped past my shoulder, moving toward the bed with a patient, measured gait. Settling onto the nearest edge of the mattress, he balanced with most of his weight on his legs so he didn’t shift where she crouched.

  “Halley,” he said, and he made the name a song of gentle supplication. “Would you please show my friend the rosary that you made?”

  She burrowed deeper into the mattress, shaking her head so fiercely her hair rustled with a sound like swishing grass. The old priest extended a hand very slowly, not daring to touch her, but simply laying it near an opening in the blankets. He applied enough pressure to the mattress that she would notice.

  “Are you certain?”

  His words possessed a resonance that went beyond the mellow timbre of his voice, and I realized he was using a power—a power very likely acquired through his bond with me. But where my voice could become a thing of fury and destruction, his held only profound and soothing peace.

  “I can’t,” Halley said miserably. She shook her head again, but it lacked the same vehemence.

  “But you’ve always been so proud of your work,” he persisted.

  She sobbed enough to shake the bed. “I’ll never see Papaw again.”

  “Halley, your Papaw was very sick. He went on to a better place.”

  She grew still and very quiet. Tension bunched across her narrow shoulders, which were trembling visibly through the bedclothes. When next she spoke, her voice was so muffled I had to strain to make it out. It sounded like she had her face buried against the mattress.

  “Whisper Man has him.”

  Father Frank and I exchanged worried glances.

  “Is that possible?” he mouthed.

  I shrugged. Judging by all the things I’d witnessed—from shadow-tainted Nephilim to clay vessels enchanted to be soul prisons—I couldn’t rule it out.

  Still, it didn’t sit right.

  I stepped closer and said with all the authority I could muster, “He’s lying to you, Halley.”

  She froze. From the arrested tremors in the blankets, she even held her breath. Father Frank’s lined features held a look of caution, but he nodded for me to go ahead.

  “You know not to trust him,” I said. “He’s hurt you. He sent people to hurt your mom and your little brother. Why would you do anything for him? He only wants to use you.”

  “But Papaw…” she murmured disconsolately.

  Father Frank shut his eyes against the sharp welling of emotion her piteous tone inspired. I got a tidal backwash of it along our recently refreshed link.

  “Did Whisper Man tell you to make that rosary, Halley?” I asked.

  Very hesitantly, she nodded. The room had fallen so quiet it was possible to hear the rasp of her forehead against the fitted sheet.

  “Have you heard Papaw since you made it?”

  Another hesitation, but this time the motion under the blankets was one of slow negation. I crouched down beside the bed, laying my hand not far from Father Frank’s. Knowing she could see them, I eased up on the cowl and extended my wings, holding them out to their full span. They tingled unpleasantly where they intersected with the walls of the hospital room. I kept them open anyway.

  Urgently, I patted the bed.

  “Halley, I know you can see me for what I am. And I know, if you can see me, you can tell if you should trust me. Do you trust me?”

  She caught her breath, then swallowed so hard I could hear her throat click. The thin fingers of her hand snaked out from under the blankets. She walked them over to my own fingers, stopping just short of making physical contact.

  “I trust you, Wingy,” she whispered.

  I could see the beads of the rosary where they twined around the prominent bones of her wrist. It took everything I had not to simply rip them away, but that would wreck the trust I’d gained, and I needed every shred of it for what I planned to do once Terhuziel’s token was out of the way.

  Licking dry lips, I swallowed almost as hard as she had. Cutting him out of my head had sucked. I hoped I understood the technique well enough not to give her a stroke.

  “He’s lying to you, Halley,” I repeated. “He’s lying, and he only wants to hurt you. Give me the rosary, and I’ll show you how to make him go away for good.”

  With the xylophone rattle of ceramic beads, she slid the rosary slowly from her wrist. Depositing it on the mattress in front of me, she whipped her hand back under the covers without another word.

  Beside me, Father Frank expelled a pent-up breath. Worry stitched deep seams in his face.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Now I cut every tie he’s ever made to her.”

  29

  Lying there against the pale expanse of the sheet, the little coil of pink and green beads looked harmless enough, but the minute I touched Halley’s rosary, there was no mistaking Terhuziel’s token. I could feel his twisted, alien mind pressing against the raw spots where I’d cut his presence out of my head. It stirred unpleasant memories from the incident in the museum.

  I slammed down on every shield I had practiced over the past few months, fighting the impulse to hurl the beads across the room.

  “Playing on her devotion to her grandfather. That’s low,” Father Frank growled. “I hope you hurt this bastard good.”

  I held the gaudy string of thick ceramic beads closer to the soft light of the call button mounted near the bed. Expecting to find the Name scribbled on the back of the plastic crucifix, I saw only a MADE IN CHINA stamp. Then I went decade by decade, inspecting each individual bead.

  In the five decades of her rosary, a sequence of ten green beads marked the ten Hail Mary prayers. Carefully tied knots separated each bead. At the end of each decade was a broad, flat bead with the raised pattern of a rose stamped on one side. Shell pink, it sat between two larger knots. That was where the faithful would pray the Our Father before moving onto another set of ten Hail Marys.

  The Our Father bead shimmered with an opalescent coating, so the ceramic looked more like mother-of-pearl. As I turned the bead around on its string, a slightly deeper pink caught my eye. Closer to fuchsia and riddled with round specks of glitter, the darker color picked out the first symbol of Terhuziel’s Luwian Name in painstakingly delicate strokes.

  “Nail polish. Fuck me running,” I muttered. “She painted it on with nail polish.”

  Father Frank leaned over my shoulder, squinting at the prayer beads in my hand.

  “First time I’ll admit I need bifocals,” he grumbled.

  Smooth ceramic whispered against my calluses as I advanced to the next decade. Sure enough, the second glyph was painted on
the back of the next Our Father bead. I held it up closer to Father Frank, though with the dim lighting in the room, I didn’t expect that he would see it.

  “As long as she wore this, Terhuziel could reach her, even if she was nowhere near his domain,” I explained, “but at some point she had to enter his sphere of influence for him to notice her. Where did she go, around the time her grandfather died?”

  I set the prayer beads onto the nightstand, unwilling to handle them any further. Smashing them seemed like the best course of action, but that was going to make a lot of noise—and the ass-ogling night nurse was sure to come running. Maybe Lil had something useful tucked away in that purse-of-holding she toted around.

  “The funeral, of course,” Father Frank responded. “Before that, she visited him twice at the hospital. They had him at the Cleveland Clinic following a massive stroke.”

  Under her covers, Halley whimpered, then tentatively extended a hand. She pawed at where the rosary had been.

  “I miss Papaw.”

  Father Frank moved his hand within her orbit. Her fingers fluttered near his briefly, then alighted for a swift, consoling touch. I wondered how much she read from the priest through that contact—and, given his ties to me, how much he was able to sense in return.

  “The guy who brought Terhuziel into this country is a doctor,” I said. “He was with Doctors Without Borders in Syria, but maybe he also worked at the Clinic. Bobby will know. What about the funeral?”

  Father Frank shook his head. “They didn’t go through Holy Rosary. That was all her father’s side of the family. I can ask Tammy once my cell’s back online.” He avoided mentioning that he’d worn the battery down with useless calls to me all day. I knew enough to feel a pang of guilt.

  “A cemetery’s a good possibility. Plenty of statues,” I mused, “but not very defensible. The Rephaim are used to temples. I can’t see this guy settling for some rinky-dink mausoleum. Not with his ego.”

  Halley patted Father Frank’s hand, and then rolled onto her side under the covers. A moment later, she lifted an edge to reveal part of her face. “I tried to talk to Papaw when they put him in the ground. Are you mad at me, Wingy?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?” I asked.

  She hid her face against the mattress for a moment, then looked up again, making eye contact briefly through the tangle of her hair.

  “Because I let Whisper Man start talking to me.”

  “I’m mad at him, Halley, not you. I—”

  The door swung open and Lil burst in. Her gray eyes flashed fiercely in the dark.

  “What the hell is taking so long?” she growled.

  Halley squeaked and clapped her hands to her ears. Father Frank shot Lil a sour expression.

  “Cool it, Lil,” I said. “You’re scaring the kid.”

  “I just had to burn my trust charm to get that nurse off my back. She’s not an idiot—she knows it doesn’t take this long to sign a damned form.”

  “Halley’s skittish,” I answered. “We can’t rush this.”

  “I was saving that charm,” Lil snarled. “You owe me, Anakim.”

  “Put it on my tab,” I replied.

  She glowered at me, all teeth and fury.

  Halley pulled the covers back over her face, scooting away till her back hit the railing of the bed.

  “Now look what you did,” I grumbled.

  “Ten minutes, Anakim,” she gritted. “You take any longer than that, and I hit the Whitethorn address by myself.”

  “You keep talking like that, and it will take another ten minutes just to calm her down again,” Father Frank warned.

  Lil narrowed her eyes in his direction. I expected a scathing retort, but all she offered was a throaty, “Hrmph.”

  “If you’re bored out there, take this,” I said.

  Scooping up the rosary beads, I tossed Terhuziel’s token at her. It traced an elegant arc of pink and green across the room. Without so much as a glance, Lil snatched it from the air once it neared her. The instant her fingers closed round the thing, she nearly dropped it.

  “Warn a girl next time,” she growled. She held the offensive item out stiffly, pinching the bottom of the crucifix between the nails of her forefinger and thumb.

  “I trust you know how to break it?”

  An eager gleam lit her eyes. “I can do that.”

  “Quietly,” I suggested.

  “Of course.” The smile she flashed carried its own wind chill factor.

  “Good. Make with the smashy.” I turned back to where Halley cowered on the bed. “I could use one less complication for what I’m about to try.”

  Lil started pulling the door shut behind her. “Ten minutes,” she reminded us before it fully closed. Father Frank scowled at the space she had occupied.

  “You seriously trust that woman?” Disapproval was thick in his tone.

  “With the kind of enemies I’ve got, I’m not sure I trust anyone,” I sighed, “but for now, she’s helping. I’ll take it.” A muscle in his cheek ticked as he clenched his jaw, but he held his silence.

  From the hallway came a dull crunching sound, like glass ground under the heel of a boot. All too readily I could picture Lil dancing a wild Tarantella on the Rephaim token. The sound was accompanied by a backwash of power that battered against my shields. Halley twitched. The room filled with the cloying, sick stink of dead worms after a hard rain.

  “You told her to break it,” Halley cried accusingly from within the depths of her blanket cocoon.

  “I did,” I admitted, “but can you hear Whisper Man any more?”

  She held her breath, listening.

  “He’s real quiet now.”

  “But you can still hear him?” Father Frank asked. He turned a worried frown to me. “I thought he was getting at her through that thing. Why can she still hear him?”

  “The token was the easy part,” I admitted. A twist of anxiety knotted in my chest, slowly winding its way through my guts.

  The old priest worked to hide his concern, but I felt it clearly enough. Halley peeked out from under the covers, watching us from the corner of the lone eye she dared to expose. I had counted on her listening. It was easier than trying to work her up to have the conversation directly.

  “He’s been weaving ties into her, like fishhooks in her brain,” I explained. “I can’t say how many exactly, but he’s been at it for weeks. Chances are, he’s in deep.”

  Father Frank clenched his fists in his lap and regarded them gravely.

  “But you know how to fix it,” he said.

  Halley had pushed far enough out of her cocoon to expose her whole face. Now she held the blankets tightly at her chin so they wrapped around her hair like a veil. Her gaze darted between the padre and me. I turned my full attention back to Father Frank before she caught me looking.

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “I can’t fix it.”

  The old priest’s stiff back slumped just a little.

  “That’s not to say it can’t be fixed,” I amended quickly. “But she’s the one who has to do it. It can’t be me.”

  “You can help her at least?”

  I glanced again at Halley. This time I waited for our eyes to meet. She couldn’t hold my gaze for long, but neither did she try to hide her face.

  “I can help her, if she lets me.”

  My own head still felt raw from where I’d slashed away the vicarious tether I’d picked up from Fish-Knife Lady. I had no idea how Halley would fare when it came to cutting his connections to her.

  “It’s not going to be easy,” I added. “I can’t do it from out here. She’ll have to let me into her head, and even then I don’t know exactly how well things will go.” I drew a breath, surprised when it didn’t shake. “I can tell you, whatever happens when we cut him out, the things he’s got planned for her are worse. Much worse.”

  With slow resignation, the old priest nodded. He slumped forward as far as his taped-up ribs would allow, but gave no
heed to the injury. The anxious ache he felt for Halley eclipsed any discomfort in his own battered flesh.

  He jumped when Halley touched her hand to his side.

  “Don’t be sad,” she breathed. He reached around awkwardly and gave her fingers a little squeeze. She allowed it.

  I extended my own hand to Halley—my right one, though I tended to favor my left. The hungry power of the Eye would play no part in what I sought to accomplish with the girl.

  “I need you to make a place in your mind for me to meet with you,” I explained, turning all of my focus her way. I vividly imagined my own process from only hours before at the museum, willing her to understand.

  “Memory palace,” she murmured. “Like Sherlock.”

  The lift of my brows betrayed my surprise.

  “You know what I’m asking you to do?” I pursued.

  She nodded, lifting her eyes to meet my gaze. No words passed her lips this time, but I heard her with ringing clarity.

  Show me how to cut his ties.

  She scooted forward on the bed, pushing some of the covers away. Trailing the IV, she reached her hand to meet mine.

  Our fingers clasped and the dimly lit hospital room abruptly faded.

  30

  I found myself floating in the debris-field of Alderaan. At least, that was the closest thing I could relate to the spreading tangle of chaotic perceptions that confronted me on the outer edges of Halley’s mind.

  Up, down, right, left—debris floated in every conceivable direction. Reflexively, I spread my wings, struggling to get my bearings. The concentric rings of neural clutter spiraled around a central point—brilliantly intense, like a vast, white spindle. Her memory palace. I knew it instantly, but it was so far away.

  Halley’s voice rose plaintively from that internal locus. Too faint for words, the tone nevertheless called and encouraged. I struck the air with wings of light, leaving blue-white trails through the inky black as I dodged spinning chunks of memories. The space rang with recollected sound—her father’s voice, Tyson’s squeal of delight. The rich, resonant rumble of her paternal grandfather’s laughter.