“Are you afraid?” It didn’t seem likely.
A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. “Not really. You?”
“Maybe.” She considered it. “No.” If there was magic, there was nothing to fear.
He didn’t understand, of course. “Good. I’ll take care of you.” A no-parking zone, chipped red paint along the kerb, accepted the car without qualm, and a fire hydrant jutted up next to the rear passenger door. “This shouldn’t take long. She said we just need to drop it off.”
“You think anyone will tow the car?” It was a ridiculous thought, but
“If they do, I’ll jack another one.” He cut the engine and studied the building, the sidewalk, the bags of trash. “Bring the bag.”
Irritation burned behind Cara’s eyelids. Of course she would bring the bag.
Chapter 16
Dark, narrow halls redolent of cheap hot food, crowded human breathing, and grease swallowed them. There was no elevator; the stairwells were bare concrete. Once there had been metal balustrades and carpeting, but both had been torn free, by misadventure or for resale. Instead of going up, though, Evan led them down. Basement, sub-basement, Evan eyed the broken mechanism on top of a fire door and shook his pale head before ushering her through.
Another hall, this one under buzzing fluorescents and without even the pretense of carpeting, ran for a short while, doors on either side. B211, B212—the doors, each with a brand-new, brass deadlock installed, marched steadily to the very end, where the queen of the hallway sat, regal with all her hardware replaced.
B277.
A shiver poured down her back. The bag was heavy, its strap cutting her sweating palm. Her bare knees felt very exposed, her calves cold.
A wide-shouldered man in a black suit stood in front of B277, his broad, scarred hands clasped at crotch level. His hair could have been any color, slicked back under a heavy load of grease, and his posture was that of a doorman blessed with a certain amount of bulk but cursed with seeing too many gangster movies. He puffed up as they approached, his gaze locking onto Cara’s chest until Evan cleared his throat. Then, the doorman noticed the burlap bag, and his eyes widened. He straightened even further, and a faint sheen appeared on his forehead. By the time they reached speaking distance, he was positively dewy.
“Uh.” He cleared his throat. “You’re, uh, from her?”
“She came herself.” Evan indicated Cara, whose throat had closed to a pinhole. Whatever was in the bag had acquired its own gravity, and almost pulled her sideways. The burlap straps sank into her palm, unmercifully.
“Oh. Uh, I thought she was…” The man swallowed whatever he intended to say, and fumbled in his pocket.
Older. He thought I was Lodi. A rancid laugh rose in Cara’s throat. Evan glanced at her; she looked down at the bag. The package inside grew even heavier, she swung it in front of her to hold the straps with both hands.
The doorman finally got the locks to work; his hand shook so badly the top one took four tries. “Sorry,” he kept muttering, glancing over his shoulder with fear-ringed eyes. The grease in his hair was beginning to melt, and a dropping strand curved across his forehead, an arc of nervousness.
It’s all right, Cara wanted to say. Instead, she looked at Evan. “Tell him to calm down.”
“Do you think it would help?” His mouth curled in a lazy, cruel line. When he did so, his profile was handsome, but a rasp of disgust slid through her. There was no reason to be cruel.
The doorman hunched his beefy shoulders. “I got it, I got it.” Metal clicked and slid aside. “Please, I got it. Sir, ma’am.” He pushed it wide and stood aside, waving them forward with frantic little beckoning motions. “See? Please, go on in. Light switch is right there.”
Evan preceded her. The doorman’s hair-oil was clove-scented; a wave of spice over a sharp mildewy trickle of fear. This close, she could see the shabby, shiny patches on his black suit, and the butt of a gun under his left armpit. She might have tried an encouraging smile, but now he was looking everywhere except at her.
The darkness inside was a living wall of ink until Evan found the light switch. Cara, her steps clicking on concrete, blinked as more fluorescents buzz-guttered into life.
B277 was a long low windowless room, the floor turning to tile near the back end. A metal table stood on the tiles, a drain lingered underneath, exhaling a faint breath of sewage.
“Holy shit,” Evan said, softly. “That’s Mason Gregory.”
The door swung shut behind them, and the man outside must have gotten over his fright, because the locks turned one after another and his footsteps squeak-hurried away, cheap wingtips making tired little noises. They stopped before he reached the end, though, and an electric, humming silence fell.
“He locked us in,” Cara whispered.
“It doesn’t matter.” Evan’s was hushed, too. The metal table was actually a gurney, and the shape on it was shrouded and human; a white sheet, folded down, showed the bare iron-haired shoulders of an old man. His blue-lipped face, decorated by a dapper white mustache, was slack and thoughtless. The two livid arms of a Y-incision reached for his shoulders, once neatly mended with black thread. “Mason fucking Gregory. Wow.”
The careful stitches had been snipped, and flesh folded aside revealed the meat underneath.
Burlap cut Cara’s hands. She glided for the table, impelled. “I can’t stop,” she whispered, frantically. “Evan? Evan!”
“You don’t have to.” He sounded very certain. “She said you’d know what to do.”
“Evan…Evan no…no…” Oh, she did. Now that she was here, she knew what was required. Her hands on the corpse, and whatever they would show her.
The thing in the burlap bag began to throb. Thump. Thump.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Chapter 17
It was no use. Struggling, a single drop of sweat trickling down her spine, Cara was dragged forward. The lump in the bag rolled toward the gurney, a bowling ball on a downhill track. Her arms lifted, because the thing—the horrid, thumping lump—rose, straining at the fabric. It levitated, and pulled her resisting body behind it. She tried digging her heels in; they only landed sharply against concrete, tiny guncracks of frustration. When she stepped onto the tile the noise changed. Diamanté buckles glittered angrily, and her shoes, turned traitor, slipped and slithered.
“Cara…” The breath left Evan in a rush. He moved to the door, and she could have told him there was no knob on the inside. The locks were merely round shiny guard-discs on this side, too.
Cara didn’t have to look. She knew. Just as she knew what the thing in the sack was, and what the soft stealthy noises outside the door meant.
Mason Gregory, whoever he was, had to be attended to. The people outside were for Evan to attend to, and from the sound of it, he was going to need whatever magic Lodi had forced upon them both.
I never forced, the old woman’s voice cackled inside Cara’s head. Was it real, or just what she would say?
The sheet whispered aside. Naked, the middle-aged corpse lay on its back, its gut slightly deflated. Busy hands had been at work, removing organs and weighing them, noting a cause of intimate clockwork stoppage—coronary occlusion and liver toxicity from a chemical pushed secretively through a syringe. Pocked bullet marks, long healed, spattered across the belly as well. Cara’s left hand, disregarding the rest of her, plunged into the burlap bag and brought out the wrapped package. It squeezed itself obscenely in her grip, old and vital, and her right hand picked at the butcher’s wrapping. Her palms ached, sensitive, and Evan stood at the door, his pale head cocked.
“Shit,” he whispered. “We have company. I didn’t even know this guy was dead.”
“Who is he?” she heard herself say, from very far away. A dreamy, disconnected question, because she didn’t quite care. Revulsion crawled up her arms, settled behind her breastbone, and she wondered if the mushrooms had merely take
n their time to work.
No, she realized. She couldn’t be poisoned now. Harmed, certainly, possibly even killed—again—but not poisoned.
“Old man Gregory.” Evan stood rooted at the door. “Big wheel. He only owns half the rackets in the city.”
“Someone poisoned him,” she informed him, flatly. “His heart gave out.”
“Was that it?” He reached under his jacket as the sheet fell with a whisper. She had to climb atop the rickety gurney, and neither of her hands would uncramp from around the pulsing thing.
“Help me,” she whispered. “Please help me. I don’t want to.”
“Babe, in about five minutes we’re gonna have other problems. Whatever you’re gonna do, do it quick.”
“Please.” If he would just listen. “I don’t want to. I can’t. Please don’t—”
“Just do it, so we can get out of here!” Evan swore, and kicked the door again. “Waiting for us outside,” he muttered. “God damn it.” He reached for the light switch.
Terror, wine-red and total, swarmed through Cara’s blood. “No. Don’t. No!”
His hand scythed down, and the darkness came back.
It wasn’t just blackness. It was an absence, and in its grasp she remembered, for a single vertiginous second, what had happened when the windows blew and aluminum disintegrated, when gravity crushed a fragile winged tube against unforgiving walls of air and later, earth.
We’re going to have some turbulence, folks.
The paper in her hands parted. Muscle-gristle throb-thudded against her palms, and the squealing thing it had lived in had felt pain and terror before the stun-hammer descended and it was knocked into the absence as well.
Flight 277 to Cincinnati is now boarding.
For a moment, she was so close. The name of the woman boarding that plane, the woman who saw a blonde stewardess’s neck-snapped, bloody-tooth smile as the falling shook and snapped and swept them all, trembled on the other side of a diaphanous veil. All she had to do was brush against it, the woven strands would part, and she could go into the absence with that name, falling like a star into the soft forgetful brushing of dark wings.
But the thing in her hands had its own crude force, hammering and battering at her body. It forced her hands to wrench skin and sawn ribs aside, to thrust the lump of gristle-meat into its proper cavity, to twist and jerk the ribs back into their places. Her palms scorched, her fingers cramping, and the absence roared, cheated of its natural prey.
Noise. Flashes of sterile white light. Cursing, screaming—bones snapped, and Evan roared, a deathless being in a paroxysm of rage.
That’s why there have to be two of us, she realized, dreamily. Her bare knees rested on either side of the body’s naked hips; her hands, spattered with effluvia and embalming fluid, clasped cold, loosely boned shoulders. She bent in a grotesque simulacrum of passion, knowing it was necessary but everything in her screaming and turning away from the violation, her body not her own.
Mason Gregory had visited Lodi, too. Cara could see the man’s bulk in the elevator, his tailored suit enclosing shoulders gone soft from fine living, but his gaze keen and sharp as a scalpel.
You know what I want, he said to Lodi, who cackled in her antique kitchen and drummed her yellowing fingernails on the table.
Yes, the old woman had said. This time, I’ll give it to you.
Screaming. Seizure locked Cara’s traitorous body in position. Energy roared through her into the dumb dense meat beneath, sparking it, drag-harvesting something foul and bleak. Living breath passed from her in a gush, tearing as it left, and that name, the name she wanted, the other name, drew close and whispered behind the cheesecloth curtain…
…and fled down into the well of the absence as an act of power, complete, nailed its unwilling transmitter in place and the recipient of the act thrashed, jolted back into life.
And consciousness.
Chapter 18
Cara spilled aside. Her hip landed on tile with stunning, cracking force, her shoulder, the side of her head. Fluorescent tubes shattered, and the white flashes were from gun muzzles.
Evan moved among the men, almost blurring, slapping aside their weapons. An arm broke, a knee kicked and a skull smashed against concrete, the platinum-haired man didn’t even need to draw his own gun. He winnowed his opponents, and the sounds they made before his foot came down to break a skull and spatter brainmatter across slick solid greyness echoed against stolid concrete. The hallway, framed by the shattered door and the gurney’s stick supports, was a digestive canal, flexing and releasing as it was stuffed with wounded. Each door had opened, disgorging a flood of men in dark suits or jeans and hoodies. Baseball bats, guns, knives—it made no difference. Evan laughed at them, the knives blunted against his fresh new skin, the bullets somehow avoiding him, blunt objects jolting to a stop, reverberating or breaking, meeting a pillar too hard to crush.
The gurney rocked and groaned and the thing on it thrashed. Cara, tossed onto cold tile, tried to close her eyes. They drifted shut, but opened again. The same force that impelled her towards the corpse now refused to let her look away.
The most grievously injured ones fled to the absence, that place denied her. She watched them go, and each one whispered the name she wanted so badly to know. If she could only hear, if the rest of them would just be quiet, she could flee as well.
Two pale blobs swung into view. Heels rough with callus, scaled like dinosaur claws, and old-man toenails yellow and not trimmed often enough. Lividity along the back of the calves was disappearing rapidly as the act completed its work, dragging a torn, mended, weighed, measured, embalmed body into the daylight world again.
Now, the sacrifice, Lodi’s voice whispered, horrifically gleeful.
Evan shook aside blows, shedding them like rainwater. Only three of the men were left—no, a crack of a neck breaking, and there were two. One was the doorman, on his knees and gibbering in an ecstasy of fear, his hands empty.
The last man was young, tanned, in a grey wool suit, a chunky Rolex on his wrist. His .45 barked at almost point-blank range, and Evan simply paused, smiling rather kindly.
“Curtis,” he said, and the name echoed. Somehow the noise of battle had died.
There was nobody left to fight.
“Curtis Gregory,” Evan repeated. “You’ve always been a little shit.”
Stunned recognition spread over the young man’s face. Evan grabbed at the grey wool lapel, drew his fist back.
“Wait,” a gravel-rasping voice said. The snap of command lay under the word, a man used to being heeded, obeyed.
Evan halted. Surprise lifted his pale eyebrows.
Curtis dropped the gun. It landed on a corpse and vanished into the river of the dead.
“Wait,” Mason Gregory repeated. He’d wrapped the sheet around himself, toga-style, and the scaled bottoms of his feet rasped against tile as he took one tentative step, another.
“Daddy…” Curtis moaned. His knees folded; he landed with a crunch on a still-twitching corpse of a man in a Brooks Brothers shirt, red suspenders, pleated trousers, and a neat hole in the center of his forehead from friendly fire.
Cara found she could breathe again. Her head rang, a vast soft brushing of those black feathers. Her own heart kept squeeze-releasing, and that sensation filled her with weary disgust, too.
At least it wasn’t the hideous, compelling itch that robbed her of volition.
“Thank you,” Mason Gregory husked. “You’ve done your job. That one’s mine.”
Chapter 19
Evan shoved the gurney aside with contemptuous ease. It clattered, wheels locked but momentum forcing them to skid, and smacked into the wall. Little bits broke off, pinging, and hit the ground. “Oh, no,” he said, gently, and squatted. “Look at this. Shhh, babe. It’s all right.”
His hands, spattered and speckled with fresh crimson, reached for her. Cara tried to cringe away. “Don’t. Don’t touch me.” If she had to see the horrible
things…feel that pain grating and snapping in her own body…
“Don’t be ridiculous.” His hands closed on her; he slid an arm under her shoulders and pulled her close, putting a knee down. His jeans were blood-spattered, too, and his knee made a soft tacky-wet sound when it met the floor. “I’m not gonna hurt you. See? It’s me. It’s not one of them.”
Better. Stronger. Faster. Was that what he’d bargained for?
“See?” He cradled her, his chin atop her head. “Nothing’s ever gonna hurt you, Cara. We’re going to be together a long, long time.”
“Daddy,” the younger man moaned. He looked a little like John, or maybe it was just the orange hue of tanning beds on pampered but shaven daily skin. His hair flopped weakly.
“Don’t you daddy me,” Mason Gregory said. He bent, creakingly, at a tangle of bodies near the door. His big blunt hands trembled a little, but all in all, he looked remarkably spry for a man recently full of formaldehyde. “You little shit. You try to kill your own father, eh?”
Not try, Cara wanted to say. Succeeded.
Evan’s other arm wormed under her knees. She sagged against him, her hands feeble flutters, trying to push him away.
“It’s all right,” he repeated. “I’m right here.”
“You could have helped me,” she whispered. You could have stopped me, she meant.
“I am helping you.” He leaned in. Closer, closer, his breath mingling with hers.
Her chin fell to the side, avoiding him.
That was how she saw grizzle-headed Mason Gregory lift the gun he’d fished from the river of broken bodies. “My own son,” he said. “My own son.”
No. The cry welled up inside her, but Evan surged upward, and her head lolled. Her chin buried itself in his shoulder, and her shapeless negation mixed with drips and drabs of drying blood, shreds of leather and torn cotton underneath showing slices of pale skin, roughened by use now, no longer soft and baby-innocent.
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