“Van Horn?”
Nail hooked his thumb toward the third door, a heavy plywood construction that had been padlocked shut.
“No help for Gen?”
Nail shook his head.
“Did you . . . ?”
“Did I what?”
“I dunno. Get anything useful out of him?”
“I didn’t ‘get’ anything out of him, one way or the other. He knows about Sobell, though.”
“Knew before, or knows now?”
Nail’s face was stone. “Knows now.”
This was unbelievable, Anna thought. Was it possible for one single goddamn thing to go right? Just one? “You know an interrogation usually goes the other way, right?”
“I’m not about to start cutting on the motherfucker if that’s what you’re getting at. I’m not the fuckin’ Spanish Inquisition.”
“Did you think I was leaving you to make him coffee?”
“Really?” He pulled a shiny length of metal from his pocket and flicked his wrist. Butterfly knife, blade short but wicked-looking. He flipped it around and pointed the butt end toward her. “All yours.”
She stared at it. Just looking at the thing made her want to wipe her hands on her pants. From beatdowns to kidnapping to torture, easy as that? “What are we gonna do if Sobell wants us to kill him?” she said, voice low. “We gotta draw a line somewhere.”
“Yeah.”
She gave Nail a thin smile. “You sure talked tough.”
“Everybody talks tough. I’ve done some fucked-up shit in my time, but you know—heat of battle, and all that. This . . . This is different.” He looked at his hands, as though they’d become strange to him, or maybe he was hoping for some kind of answer there.
“No shit.” She kicked a short length of two-by-four against the wall, crossed her arms, and glared at the doors. Three doors. Genevieve behind door number one, Karyn behind door number two, and one Edgar Van Horn behind door number three.
“Put the knife away. Got the keys?”
Nail unlocked the padlock on Van Horn’s door, and Anna went in. This room looked as though it had once been an oversize supply closet or something—maybe ten feet square, no windows. Anna slid a piece of brick in front of the door to keep it open a crack. Let a little light in.
Van Horn sat on the floor, legs stretched out in front of him, limp. A diffuse stripe of light fell across his thighs, showing the streaks of dust and grime on his pants. He looked up without much interest as Anna came in.
“I hope you’ll excuse me for not getting up.”
“Yeah, it’s . . . It’s cool.” She sat cross-legged against the wall opposite him and took her trusty can of pepper spray from her pocket. Probably she could take him without it, if it came right down to it, but she might as well make sure. She set the can on the linoleum next to her. “You know about Sobell.”
He worried at his lower lip with his teeth and nodded. The nod went on and on, his head tipping back and forth as if it might not stop. “I know a lot about Sobell,” he said, still nodding. “He’s got his hooks into your friend, doesn’t he? The one with the pink hair.”
For the first time, Anna had a disturbing realization, not of how far in Sobell’s pocket she and the crew were, but of how much trust they had put in him. They trusted him to deal with Van Horn so much that they’d never even bothered to disguise themselves around the man. Implicitly assuming, she supposed, that either Sobell would ice Van Horn or the two men would come to an understanding some other way. Somehow Van Horn would never go to the cops, would never hunt them down. What the hell had they been thinking?
He won’t go to the cops. Not this guy, with his weird crew of increasingly dead friends.
“Not exactly,” Anna said cautiously.
“Not exactly not, either, I’m guessing. Genevieve’s got that aura about her—she’s into some very bad things, I think.”
“How did you know her name?”
“I don’t know. Must have heard it somewhere. Do you even know the kinds of things she’s involved with?”
“Her name. Where did you hear it?”
“Has she told you she’s burning her soul up like a candle? Every new parlor trick leaves her less human than before. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”
He wasn’t gloating or teasing—only tired. Anna didn’t give a shit. “I’m gonna count to three, and then—”
“And then what? Mace me? Kick me to death?” Now Van Horn chuckled. “I wish you’d get on with it. I once saw Enoch peel a man like an orange. Kicking me to death would be a mercy, comparatively speaking.”
“Shut up. I want to know about Genevieve, and I want to know now. What did you do to her?”
“Know what he did to deserve that? In Enoch’s eyes, I mean?”
“Genevieve, dirtbag.”
“Screwed up a job.”
“I don’t care!”
“‘And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.’”
“Shut up!”
“That’ll be you, one day. Or your friend. Everybody screws up eventually.”
“Jesus, you think I don’t know that?”
The old man held his head up, trying to meet her eyes even as she dropped her gaze to the floor. She put her hands in her lap and shook her head. Van Horn said nothing.
What a mess.
“I can help you,” Van Horn said softly. His voice, low and hoarse with age and abuse, seemed to float right to her ear. “Just let me go, and I can fix Genevieve right up.”
She coughed up a bitter laugh. “You’re telling me to double-cross a man who you just said skins people who so much as make mistakes. What would he do to somebody who dicked him over on purpose?”
Van Horn’s face was drawn and haggard, and a bleak, horror-stricken expression haunted his eyes. “You don’t want to know.”
Her sense of being trapped in an impossible situation was nearly suffocating. Sobell’s jobs were dirty and getting dirtier, and nothing Van Horn said made her feel any better about that. Not much worse, either, given what she already knew about the man, but definitely no better. She wanted to run, hoping that maybe Sobell’s forces were depleted enough that he couldn’t find her—but it would be nearly impossible to do that without ditching Karyn and without giving up on finding a solution for her. And, of course, Genevieve. Even before her Sleeping Beauty affliction, she hadn’t wanted to run at all. Neither did Nail, for reasons he wouldn’t go into. So what to do? Keep doing what she was doing until the jobs got so heinous she couldn’t do them anymore, and Sobell skinned her and everyone she cared about? Van Horn was likely not offering her any help but rather a direct route to an unusually horrific death . . . but what if he was?
“Why hasn’t he come for me?” Van Horn asked. “Why didn’t you take me straight to him?”
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up. He’s just busy, I guess.”
Van Horn leaned toward her, his face a study in sincerity. “Giving me to Enoch is as good as killing me yourself—you know that? Are you ready to be a murderer?”
“I’m already a fucking murderer,” she said. She wished he hadn’t gone there, digging right at the spot she wanted to keep a corpse buried. He couldn’t know how the showdown at Sobell’s had haunted her, but he sure acted like he did. “Not giving you to Sobell is a good way to commit suicide.”
“Information, then. Tell me what you know about him, about what he wants. I’ll tell you what I know about him—which is quite substantial. There might be some way we can both come out ahead on this.”
Anna hesitated. “How do you know him?” she asked.
“We go way back. I taught him a few things, when he was young. Well, younger. And then, like everyone eventually does, I disappointed him. You would not believe the lengths I went to in order to avoid paying the price for that. It started with faking my own death and got even more ridiculous from there.”
“When you say you taught him a few things . . . you�
�re not talking about things like the basics of money laundering, are you?”
Van Horn shook his head. “Unsavory things of an entirely different nature. Probably not too dissimilar from what he’s teaching Genevieve.”
There it was again, and another spike of fear and anger jolted through Anna’s body. Before she could say anything, though, Van Horn spoke again.
“I’ll give you this for free,” he said. “Your friend will wake up tonight, without intervention from me or anyone else. It’s a temporary effect.”
She hated the hope that flared in her heart, despised it for a lie. “Bull. You have no reason to tell me that.”
“Call it a gesture of good faith. When she wakes up, come see me. We can talk then.”
Chapter 6
“I feel bad,” Sonia said. Tears, stained with faint traces of mascara, streaked her face, yet her mouth was frozen in a wide rictus. She stood in the dusk light, dishwater gray, that came in through the old meatpacking plant’s high windows. She swayed as though she might topple over. “I feel . . . really bad.”
An urge, almost a compulsion, rippled through Sheila’s body—she would tear out Sonia’s throat with fingers and teeth and put an end to the whining, the endless fucking whining—and then it subsided, gone before Sheila could even move in that direction.
Truth be told, Sheila didn’t feel that good herself. It wasn’t any specific thing, no sick stomach or headache, but more a sort of general tenuousness. Was that even a word? She felt thin, distantly connected to the world, her body, and even her own thoughts.
“It’ll be fine,” Sheila said. “Get some rest. Get something to eat.”
“Will we go out tonight?”
“No. I have things to work on. You probably do, too.” That was one nice thing to come from Van Horn’s absence—less traipsing about all over. That had been fun, in its way, and anyway she’d always gone, but her work had always been in the back of her mind. Hadn’t it? That was fuzzy. In any case, she could continue uninterrupted now. She acknowledged that she was afraid as well—their enemies had taken Van Horn, and there were others who would surely see them all killed. If anything, that was more reason to stay out of sight. To keep working.
She walked to her room, past the lounging bodies of the others. They were restive, probably getting hungry. That was fine. They could go out tonight without her, if they wanted to.
She paused inside the entry to her room, looking at the far wall in the light from a gas lantern.
“That’s a lot of writing,” somebody said.
Sheila turned. The woman standing in her doorway was draped in a loose collection of what looked like colored sheets. Rain, that was her name. She’d been around for a while, one of the later additions to the group, though still well before everything fell apart. From the name and the shapeless hippie dresses, Sheila had originally figured her for a flake, but that hadn’t seemed to be true. Rain was solid. Sturdy. Earthy, Sheila would have said, if she were inclined to go with the whole hippie thing.
“It’s a mathematical proof.” I think. “Mathematical” might have been stretching it, but it had a similar feel to it—a set of rules, groping toward an arrangement that somehow signified completion.
“Proving what?”
“I guess I’ll know when I finish it.”
“I made a sculpture out of thousands of splinters picked from a chair,” Rain said. “Is that weird? I think it’s supposed to be weird. I mean, I would have used to think it was weird.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m hungry. Aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t, no.” Her stomach felt neither empty nor full, but now that she thought of it, she wanted . . . something. She wanted to finish this—this proof, or whatever it was, but there was another urge pulling in the opposite direction. Food. The hot wet gush of blood, salty meat tearing from the bone . . .
She kind of wanted to see her son, too.
Sheila shook her head as though to clear it. Where did that come from? Her son was fine. Somebody was on that job, she was sure. Her mother? Yeah, that was probably it. She must have dropped him off at Mom’s before everything got weird. Good place for him, for now.
“Are you coming?”
“Yeah.”
She cast a wistful glance at the wall of equations and went back out to the main room. Everyone had gathered. Van Horn was gone, but the routine was in place now. Sonia stood, weeping and grinning, in their midst.
“I wish Edgar was here,” Rain said.
“Why?”
“I don’t feel so great.”
“I haven’t felt so great for days. Van Horn didn’t help.”
“He used to be able to talk me through it. He knows a lot of stuff.”
“Forget—”
She trailed off as she caught motion past Rain—Sonia, her knees suddenly giving out. Sheila watched her drop in slow motion, folding at the knees, then tipping backward. She watched the arc as Sonia’s head whipped back into the concrete. The sound it made when it hit sent a pulse of excitement through Sheila’s belly.
Sonia twitched for a few seconds and then was still.
The Chosen got up as one and gathered around her body.
Sheila’s stomach growled.
* * *
After, they were too full to move. The nine of them lay around the main room in various states of torpor. Sheila lay on her side, head resting on her arm, willing her stomach to calm down. The first time she’d eaten like this, she threw up over and over again, retched until she thought she’d barf up her skeleton, until she thought her stomach would cramp and seize and draw her into a tight ball from which she’d never be able to uncoil. It had gotten easier later, but it still wasn’t something her system was fully comfortable with. From the look of things, nobody else was coping with it too well, either. It reminded her of her partying days in college—there came a point when you knew, you just knew you shouldn’t slam that next shot, but it was all so much fun you did it anyway. The excitement of drinking paled in comparison to that of feeding, but she liked the analogy.
“I’m worried,” Rain said.
Sheila twisted her head around to see Rain, lying flat on her back behind her. Sheila rolled over. “Why?”
“How many of us were there before? Fifteen? Twenty? It was a lot more.”
“Nineteen,” Sheila said. She remembered them all jockeying for Belial’s favor—she remembered each one as a rival, remembered sorting them in her mind, placing herself in the hierarchy. She’d come late to the game, so to speak, and she’d had a long way to climb.
She hadn’t had to wait long. Kieran, Jessica, and Ernest had disappeared months ago, and Tomas and Inez had been killed in the debacle at Sobell’s place. All to the good, since, other than Tomas, they’d all been closer to Belial than she was. But then Belial had vanished and the Brotherhood had scattered, and the inner circle, the Chosen, had fallen in with Van Horn. Since then, five more had died.
Barry had dropped dead two days before Van Horn was kidnapped, bleeding from every hole in his body. The kid who had inexplicably wanted to be referred to as Douche Bag bought it the next day when some crazed impulse had seized him and he’d sawed off his own left hand. Sheila wasn’t even sure what kind of insanity had to take hold of a person for him to sever one of his own limbs and stay conscious through the whole ordeal, and sometimes she wished the thought didn’t make her so hungry. Sometimes, though, she kind of understood. It hadn’t come as much of a surprise that they’d found Douche Bag still weakly gnawing on his own severed hand when they found him. She thought he’d bled out after that, though another part of her was pretty sure that hadn’t happened at all. Like maybe he could have survived after all, except that the Chosen got very hungry sometimes. Dennis had collapsed the night Van Horn was taken. Alan had killed himself more directly after Van Horn’s abduction by jamming a thin metal rod into his own eye and then slamming his face into a column. He’d laughed the whole time.
&n
bsp; Now Sonia.
“Who’s next?” Rain asked. “You? Me? How long do we have?”
God, the complaining around here. The endless complaining. Worse than a faculty meeting. That didn’t mean Rain didn’t have a point, though, Sheila supposed, and she suddenly felt ill at ease. If she died, there would be no more magic. No more feeding. No sensation at all, just endless void. Endless waiting, with only the faint whispers of the rest of the damned to provide something like diversion.
Boring. So boring. Boring enough to drive you right out of your damn head.
“Maybe we can stop it,” Sheila said.
“How?”
“We can do magic, Rain. There has to be some way we can use it.”
“I made a glass of water float in the air last night. Without the glass—just the water, in the shape of a glass. It was cool, but . . . not very useful.”
Rain was looking at her as though she expected something, but Sheila ignored her. She was already starting to get an idea. It bubbled up from somewhere down in her mind, like a corpse floating to the surface of a still pool, much of it yet unseen, but enough showing to get a sense of it.
She got up, relishing the stiffness in her limbs and the queasy feeling in her belly, and walked slowly to her room. The quiet presence of Rain behind her barely bothered her at all.
She ignored the wall full of writing and began staring at a blank wall. This was how it started—a blank mind. A clean mind. All her best ideas had come to her in this state, when she pushed away the clamor of half-remembered discussions and cheap thrills and let fresh thoughts rise to the surface of her mind. She exhaled, and the vague shape began to solidify.
“What are you doing?” Rain asked.
“Interrupt me again, and I will put this pen through your skull.”
“Sorry.”
Finding somebody was easy. She remembered that. If you had the right stuff. A name was good, but not usually enough. Blood, hair, tears were better. She had none of those things from Belial, and she doubted he would allow himself to be found that way in any case. He was in hiding, she had heard from Van Horn, but she didn’t know where or even specifically why. They had enemies. That was all she needed to know.
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