“Right.” Zane stood up, and looked across at me. “And there’s something like this in all those symbols drawn in Dru’s place?”
“Possibly. English Bible gematria is a bit of a thing on the… extreme Christian right.” I sat back down, distracted by the subject at hand. “Conspiracy theorists and apocalyptic types love to predict the end of the world with gematria, one of the reasons that a consulting priest is unlikely to make use of it in an investigation.”
“Right,” he said. “I follow you.”
I blinked a few times, and rubbed my hands on my knees. “You do?”
Zane paused in his labors, looking across at me. “Yeah. I’m pretty interested in that kind of thing. There’s a Lapaʻau in the family on mom’s side. Shaman-healers. I did some Buddhist temple study when I was over in Thailand… got a chance to speak to a couple of Yazidi elders and some Sufis when I was in Iraq. Besides that, I read a lot.”
I leaned forward in consternation. “So why on earth are you in a one-percenter biker gang?”
He cleared his throat, fighting back an embarrassed smile as he rubbed a hand over his scalp. “Weeders have to stick together. Birds of a feather and all that. Besides that, Jenner’s got a lot going for her. She’s been fighting the good fight for twenty or more lifetimes, you know? Revolutions, against the Nazis, in Vietnam.”
“What fight is that?”
“Well… against the Morphorde,” he said. His eyes were very Green, and very earnest.
We had no idea that there lay outside the shell of Eden an endless, hostile void. That the Mirror of the sky turned back something, that the sky was also a defense. Until the Mirror broke. I paused for a moment in shock, recalling the ritualistic words given to me in my dream. “The Morphord?”
He and his get fell upon the forest of the Mothers... they fell upon the meadows and the glades... and they murdered us…
“Yeah. It’s kind of what Weeders do.” Zane seemed to realize he had said too much, and an uncomfortable silence fell over us. After a few awkward minutes, he spoke again. “Anyway… you know… I’m probably really here for the motorcycles.”
“I’ve never ridden one,” I said. The moment had passed, and with it, the connection.
“Really? We need to fix that.” Zane stood, towering over me, and ventured a smile. “We could go for a ride if you want.”
There was a certain appeal to the idea, but as I mulled it over, I glanced at the surgery kit waiting for me beside the toilet. “Perhaps another day. I… really have to treat Binah’s injuries.”
“Sure thing. I should go catch up on some of my reading, speaking of that. Between training and club duty, I don’t get into books the way I used to anymore.”
Despite his words, he didn’t leave, and I didn’t insist. After a while, I cleared my throat. “So… what do you make of our find? The Wolf Grove address?”
“It feels unreal,” Zane replied. He crouched down on the balls of his feet, elbows resting on his knees. “I mean… why would they be buying drugs?”
“None of the children ever showed signs of addiction, or abuse?”
“I… no. I mean, normal bumps and bruises, you know.”
“Were they expressive? Happy?”
Zane thought for a moment, his green eyes darkening as he thought back. “A lot of them were really damaged and depressed because of what happened to them. It’s hard to say. I mean, they did normal kid stuff… ran around, played with toys. But they’d been rejected by their parents, most of them. The norm kids came from the usual messed up home situations that land someone in the system.”
“Besides the school, where do they go?” I sat down on the floor, leaning against the bathtub.
“They’re placed with families, the usual.” Zane shrugged. “The Weeder kids know where to come back when they’re old enough, if they want to join up with any of our factions. We got Duke that way.”
“He was a foster at Wolf Grove?”
“Nah. He’s from a home in South Carolina. We met him there when we were doing this north-to-south charity ride. He’s pretty young… only twenty-two, twenty-three. That’s why he freaked out, you know?”
I regarded him in silence for a moment. “Anyone ever seen the Wolf Grove kids after they’re placed? Follow up with them into adulthood?”
He frowned, thinking, and then reached up to rub his neck. “I assume so, but I mean… they aren’t going to tell us anything about where they go. They’re in another state, and it’s confidential, isn’t it? Caseworkers dealt with them.”
“And the couple, being Pathrunners, were the Weeders who followed up in later years.” My stomach tightened nastily, panging with a sensation that had nothing to do with food.
Zane looked down at the floor, running his tongue over and around his teeth. Even I could tell that the line of thought had left him troubled.
“I don’t know what’s happening, to tell you the truth,” he said. “When we found out about the murder, everyone was so upset they didn’t ask questions like this. I mean, they’re the ones that died. They knew Michael, they knew John, they got on well with everyone. There was nothing about them that… I guess they didn’t seem like people who’d get mixed up in bad shit.”
“That seems to be the consensus.” I sighed. “Food for thought.”
“I don’t know what to think,” he said. “All of it stinks.”
“Mm.” In my opinion, it had stunk from the beginning. Catching and moving twenty-one living children was a kidnapper’s logistical nightmare, for one thing. For another, the signatures left at the house were the kind you left for a revenge killing, not a random murder. They’d been involved in something and reneged on it. ‘It’ could be anything. They could have sold party drugs on the side to put the best food on the table for their adoptees, for all we knew. My own assessment trended towards the cynical.
“In any case, I need to get onto these abscesses,” I said. “We will learn the truth as the evidence comes together. Out of interest, what are you reading?”
“Rumi,” Zane replied. “The war taught me that there’s a lot of things about Islam that I don’t know.”
That bought a momentary smile to my face. Some part of my wizardly nature was gratified by the act of Seeking. It made me think of Crina. “In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”
“Something like that.” Zane flushed a dark reddish brown, the color of cinnamon, laughed, and left. When the door closed, I let out a tense breath.
Brain buzzing, I began to set up for the last activity of the night. Binah’s injuries weren’t the only ones that needed seeing to: It was time to remove the parasite and reclaim my magic.
Chapter 17
Skill at surgery comes naturally when you’ve spent half your life killing people. I’ve been up to my elbows in viscera since I was seventeen years old, but even I feel a moment of mental resistance to the act of sliding a needle in under my own flesh. There is a part of the brain that fights you as you focus, pierce and depress. It screams louder as the anesthetic fizzes and stings in the moments before it fades into warm, furry nothingness. Instinct as old as life itself rails in the back of your mind, the flesh-crawling, tongue-thickening revulsion of taking a scalpel, digging in to your stomach, and drawing it through skin, muscle, and fat.
I was holed up in the bathroom, lying propped up on rolled towels on a freshly bleached tile floor. With surgical gloves chafing my fingers, I made the first incision with steady hands and clenched jaws, careful not to cut the stiff tendrils of matter I could feel brooding under the surface of my belly. That wasn’t the part that set my teeth on edge the most: It was the sudden sense of wariness I felt… the observant pause of something else, something alien, taking note of what I was doing. I hadn’t realized that the damn thing had been moving inside of me all night until it froze.
Grimacing, I worked my fing
ers into the blessedly numb incision, feeling for the edge of the starfish. After a few seconds and a lot of blood, I found it, and worked forceps in from the other side.
It flinched away hard enough that the tip of the forceps jerked up out of the incision. I buckled around my abdomen as an awful prickling rushed through my torso… a sensation that turned to blinding agony as the multi-limbed mass of the parasite plunged deeper into my abdominal wall.
I screamed. I couldn’t help it. Snarling, I pushed past the deep wracking pain that boiled up from underneath the anesthetized patch of skin. I got the forceps back in and snapped then around a lashing tendril. They caught and locked, and this time, the parasite pulled them out of my hand and flung them to the ground, emerging briefly from the wound. I caught a glimpse of a gnashing beak-like mouth before the mass of it shot up into my chest.
My next breath cut with a wheeze, like someone had lowered a heavy load of bricks onto my chest. I could feel whip-like tendrils pushing up around my lungs. I looked down, shaking, to see that the parasite – and the sigil – had had vanished. The ‘legs’ were no longer visible. But I could feel its weight and shape against my ribs… from underneath.
“Fuck. FUCK!” I fought to breathe, pushing the surgical tray back. With shaking hands, I fumbled for gauze and saline. I grabbed the nearest plastic bottle and poured it over the open stomach wound, blind with pain. The smell of pure alcohol stung my nostrils. Fire raged through my nerves in the split second before my eyes rolled back and I passed the hell out.
I woke up struggling for air. The new tightness around my lungs and heart was still there, though the pain had faded to a dull throb. I sat up and coughed weakly, wincing as my lungs expanded within a too-small cage.
It was worse than anything I’d ever felt. It was worse than the upir blood. It was worse than being beaten naked in a bathtub, doused in cold water, and kneecapped. I’d experienced both of those things, I could speak with some authority. This thing, whatever it was, had wrapped my organs in barbed wire, the hooks turned inwards to press against liver, lungs, heart and stomach. It hadn’t been my imagination: the parasite was alive. It was intelligent, and its wordless communication was crystal-fucking clear. “Don’t try that again, punk.”
There was nothing to do except wash the wound, stitch it up, and move on. My trembling anger grew with every tied off piece of nylon. This thing was inside me. Sergei had put something inside my body, and I couldn’t get it out. Not even Jana was able to do that to me. She’d been able to get under my skin, but not in the literal sense. Carmine’s bombastic arrogance had never gotten to me. Compared to Jana, he’d been a carnival side-show villain, a coward and a liar. He hadn’t put anything into me that I hadn’t been able to purge.
I remembered Sergei, smiling while Vera drew his oily orange blood from his dead veins. I remembered her walking towards me, limbs jerking with ancient rigor. A flood of images, bodily sensations, and wordless emotions invaded like poison. Even if I gave up on magic and fled to Europe tonight, I would never be free of Sergei. I would think of him every time I drew breath. Cursing, half-blind with sweat, I pulled the bloody gloves from my hands and plunged them under a stream of icy water, trying to wash the taste of violation from my mouth. It was bitter. Like burned wax.
I bound up my new injury, got properly dressed, and slumped out into the clubhouse. Zane was in bed, and there was no one in the garage except me and Binah. My suitcases and bags were there, lined up in a row and waiting to be sorted, except there was nowhere to sort them to. I was still homeless, technically, though I now had money. Cash, bank cards – assuming my accounts weren’t wiped clean – credit cards, which had almost certainly been abused. I could probably still afford a hotel, and plane tickets, for that matter, but duty plucked at me like needy fingers. The video had affected me in a way I hadn’t thought possible. The dirty business of coke and racketeering was one thing. Everyone that was in that scene were adults who knew exactly what they were getting into. But children? Little girls? These people had never been my brothers.
My breathing was labored as I slumped to the floor and determinedly sorted through the Occult texts rescued from my study. I lingered over the Red Book for a few bittersweet minutes, calming myself with the illustrations while I thought over the decoding process. I’d start with the simplest English Bible gematria first. On the off-chance that the sigils were drawn by a Charles Manson-wannabe, their default language was going to be English. Bible code was based on numerology, so I got a notebook, sketched the sigils from memory, and got to work.
Theories on what had happened to the murdered couple gathered slowly over the course of the day, as I buried my anger and pain, researched code patterns and tried my hand at breaking a few of them. The problem with gematria was that it required significant context and deduction to translate the numbers correctly. The number 557 had multiple possible translations, and depending on whether you did it in Hebrew or English, it could mean anything from ‘Christ the Lord’ to ‘Detroit Lions’. It was the reason that Bible code conspiracy existed – confirmation bias was a real danger in this line of study.
Binah meandered up to me at some point and climbed into my lap to sleep. I was dozing when she startled upright, growling, just as the lock turned in the door to the outside. I looked up, bleary eyed, as Jenner entered.
“Hey Rex.” Jenner was back in her trademark black jeans and spiked leather jacket, a pair of articulated leather gloves hanging from her belt. She was tense, and she looked tired. “You look like shit. John, Michael and Ayashe want to talk.”
“When?” I set my book aside.
“Now,” Jenner said. “It’ll take us about twenty-thirty minutes to get to the museum. Ayashe works just north of Manhattan. John and Tally both work at the Indian Museum. We’ll go together, and you’ll ride with Zane.”
My joints were throbbing, my skin aching with fatigue. I shut the book with a sigh. “It’s only been two nights since you hired me on. I took a bullet in the gut during the raid last night, my cat needs her abscesses lanced, and I am in no way ready to report any progress.”
“Too bad,” she said. “There’s too much that needs explaining, Rex. No one’s happy to know that our kids were kidnapped by your friends in the mob.”
“They were never my friends.” I stuffed Nicolai’s folder into my shirt and got to my feet, fighting the twinges in my back and torso the growing ache from the still-raw incision across my stomach. “And we don’t know if they kidnapped them. Even if they did, they might have been hired by someone else. Contract work is a big deal.”
“Well, consider this your chance to demo your theories.” Jenner jerked her head towards the door. “C’mon. Mason and Zane are waiting.”
It wasn’t raining today, but the sky was low and sullen. Zane was standing beside his rumbling motorcycle, warming the engine as he fastened his helmet and pulled his gloves on. His black jacket was plated over the shoulders and down the arms like samurai armor. His helmet was barely bigger than a dog-bowl, worn with a black skull-face mask that covered nose and mouth. The bike was an enormous matte-black beast of a machine; the decal on the side read Big Cat Crew.
“Hey Rex.” He glanced at my stomach, nose working, but he didn’t say anything as I drew up. Instead, he handed me a heavy jacket not dissimilar to his own, but without patches. It felt like something that wouldn’t have been out of place on a medieval battlefield. There were metal plates welded into the shoulders, and armor in the elbows and forearms. “Time to pop your chopper cherry.”
“Come now. You’ve managed not to be crass for the entire three days I’ve known you.” I glared at him as I pulled the jacket it on and zipped it up, then accepted the full-face helmet that Zane offered me. The jacket was a good fit, but the helmet was tight and claustrophobic. I lifted the visor and left it there.
“Then please, Mister Rex, excuse my impropriety.” He arched both eyebrows, but he was smiling.
“Impropriety?” I sniffed. �
��You must have one of those word-a-day calendars. That’s how you feign an education.”
“My dad’s a university professor, if you absolutely have to know.”
“Let me guess: Pickup Truckology at the University of Detroit?” I changed my gloves for the gauntlets he passed over.
He rolled his eyes. “Dean of Economics at George Fox University, asshole.”
I paused for a moment, arms crossed. “Explain to me again how you ended up in a biker gang?”
“No.” He patted the rear seat. “Butt goes here, feet go on the pegs and don’t come off. You’re gonna have to hold on to me. Lean with the bike when I turn, don’t scream in my ear, and we’ll be good.”
Just as I was about follow his lead and settle on the rear seat, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, and twisted to look back at the clubhouse. It was Binah, trotting out of the formerly closed door towards us. I tapped Zane’s shoulder and pointed. He rolled off the throttle a little and looked across, as perplexed as I was.
The little cat, back to normal after the insufferable trauma of her bath, broke into a limping trot as I attempted to extract myself from the bike. I wasn’t even halfway off when she jumped up onto the front of my trousers and clawed herself into position on my shoulder.
“How’d she get out here?” Zane called back over the din. “We shut the frigging door.”
“Where there’s a way, there’s a Siamese who is too clever for her own good.” I sat back down, unzipped the jacket, and tried to silently communicate my intent as I bundled her into the front of it. To my surprise, she didn’t complain. Her unheard treble purr shuddered against my ribs, silenced by the growl of Mason’s motorcycle as he roared past us.
Zane shook his head and slung himself onto the saddle with the casual ease of an experienced rider, while I used the pegs to perch uncertainly on the rear seat. It put me crotch to tailbone with this relative stranger, who leaned back comfortably as he righted the bike and revved the throttle. The machine stirred like a rolling storm underneath us, rumbling with a deep throated growl. The sound was blue and sweet on the deep notes, red and sharp-tasting on the high. I kept my hands off the vibrating surface at first, but as Zane righted the bike and kicked off the stand, I risked touching the seat. The deep bass purr of the machine traveled through my fingers and straight to my teeth, deep enough to be pleasurable instead of painful.
Stained Glass: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 2) Page 16
