by Riley Mason
My gun goes back up now I won’t miss the shot and I know that he knows that too. “That wraith that got loose is just the start, he’s coming back and neither my sister or I have any love for him.”
“Who's coming back?”
A smile crosses his face. “The wraith is just the first coming, there’s a whole lot more.”
All of a sudden, I fall in pain and black smoke flows through the room. I can feel things that were whole being to split and crack as I hit the floor. “You don't need to be here,” I hear a woman's voice say. She doesn’t look like the spirit in the long hall anymore, now she's an attractive woman, dark black sheened hair, wide brown eyes. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Of course it does. You don't think he’ll know. You don’t think about what he’ll do to you when he finds out that you deserted. You don't have your powers for no reason, he gave them to you to fight in this war.”
“You don't want him here anymore then I do,” she shouts. “I’d pick humanity over him and what he wants to bring down here.”
I’m on the floor, blood is already spilling out of me and I push my hands into new and fresh wounds that are leaking it faster than I can damn it. I see the girl look at me and then back to her brother. “Leave here Azrael, get out of here, this doesn’t have to involve you.”
“Of course, it does.”
“No it doesn't. Humanity is going to get their hand in this race sooner or later. It’s them using us for their game and the powers that be want it just that way. I need a human on our side, even if it's just one.”
She vanished and suddenly, everything that had opened, closed again. I stand almost in disbelief, the gun back in my hand, it's almost as if time rewound itself. There was no one in the room, the lights had righted themselves, everything was as it was. I tucked my gun into my back and I got to work.
Chapter 48
It wasn’t until I stood again in the hotel that I realized that something was different inside of me. It wasn’t just the healing, there were parts of my memory that were coming back to me. Things that I didn't even realize that I had forgot or even knew were falling back into my head almost faster than I could realize them.
It was hard at first to get a hold of all those new memories and ideas but as they started to move back in, I managed to sift through them. People's names that I’d long forgotten I knew, places, events, dates, all of them were free from some person that had been holding them in purgatory for longer than I thought.
There was something else too, the event that they were speaking about last night, the brother and the sister, something about it touched me somewhere. I didn't even realize it until a few hours after the incident when that memory worked itself back through the line of memories waiting to get back into my head.
The wraith was the start of something, I had read something like that before, it was in some text that I hadn’t seen in a long time but the words were fairly familiar to it. I also knew something else. It’s no cakewalk to raise a fully functional wraith. It takes some serious knowledge and magic to make that happen. That and a dose of something black magic Pagan. There hasn’t been one of those in thousands of years, the last time one was even recorded there were pictures on a wall somewhere in the middle east that documented it. It wasn't even written on paper. It was Starks’ intellect coming back to me and trying to something already in my head.
Gabriel was up to something and he had been teaching himself things that he shouldn't have his hand in. Things that he wasn’t going to be able to handle. The well of old Pagan lore went a lot deeper than most people thought.
I sifted through my computer. Something that was in my head that I could remember. Something that was called the True Night. It was the one thing that was stuck in my head once it passed through there.
There was nothing online that I could find with it. Every time I searched it somehow Google came up empty handed. That wasn’t normal. Google almost never came up empty on a search no matter anything that was put in there.
I stand and I walk to the bathroom. The thin room and its filthy tiles with a smudged mirror and a sink that’s barely still hanging on the wall. I look at the reflection that stares back at me. “I need to speak to you,” I say.
There’s no response but an idea come into my head, it's a way that I can speak to her if I need to.
It was a disgusting thing that was being asked of me and I suddenly felt sick to my stomach to think that I had to do this to actually get some information.
I looked around the room but in the end, I left anyway.
When I was down on the main street I look around, first up the street and then down it. I see a girl standing there, a Burberry raincoat on her body, blonde hair and headphones in her ear. That sick feeling comes back to me but I can’t wait, I have to do it now while my nerve is where it is.
I walk, not brisk but at a casual pace, my eye is on her even though she isn't looking up beyond the glass of her phone. When we’re close, I grab her and toss her into the alleyway and drag her until we're behind a dumpster that's overflowing with cardboard. I scrape my hand on one of the sharpened edges of the dumpster and press my bleeding palm into the girl’s mouth and wait. I watch as her eyes roll back into her head and then roll back down, the same color and look that was on the demon’s face when I saw her in the room and the hall before that.
“Tell me about the True Night,” I say and I watch the possessed girl smile.
Chapter 49
Sam King was an attractive woman, even with tears in her eyes at the bar, she could turn heads. Despite her hand running over her face, people still took note and some took interest.
This was her third round of whiskey that she was taking neat in a small rocks glass and then hitting back on the bar top hard. The wake was today, she was still in the dress that she had worn to it. It felt like it was infected on her skin and that it was fueling the anger inside of her chest.
Leaning back, she ran a hand through her hair and called the bartender over to refill it. It was all a blur since she had gotten out of the hospital, even the conversation with the IA assholes had been smooth compared to seeing the closed casket sitting at the front of the funeral parlor. To see all the family there, knowing that a twin had just been ripped from another twin, seeing them look into her eyes, she hated it.
There was some part of her that thought that being a cop, a detective, making first grade was supposed to protect from those things. That her heart was supposed to be clouded to things like this that were this horrific. That she could see them through some kind of glaze that protected her. When she saw her sister on the ground of her apartment, all of that protection melted away.
The whiskey wasn't doing the job, not as well as she wanted it to at least. She wanted more and she was chasing a stupid and mind-numbing drunk that was playing resistant to her.
“You look like a woman with a story right now,” a man’s voice said to her. She turned to see where it had come from and could see a tall lean man standing there, leaning into the bar and looking at her even though he was keeping most of his attention on the bartender.
“Yea, a story to tell,” she said barely paying attention herself.
“My name is Azrael,” he said to her holding out his hand. She looked at it like the infection in her dress had jumped to his skin.
“You mine as well not even bother,” she said at him, a disgusting look crossed her face.
“Why so harsh?” he asked.
“Tomorrow I have to bury my twin sister,” she said, the bartender refilled her drink and it was back in her hand and to her lips before his reply even came.
“Sorry to hear that. Never good, I lost my brother in Afghanistan,” he said to her. “Hurt like a bitch.”
“I don't know, I don’t know if I can be whole again,” she found herself saying.
“You never really are after that happens. Parents are expected even though it hurts, it's like your heart knows a certain amount
of years are supposed to pass before your mind gets in tune that it could happen. When you're too young, that sting never leaves. I am sorry to hear about your sister.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m Samantha,” she said.
“It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“You as well,” she said, she didn’t hate him, something about speaking to him felt soothing almost comfortable, like it was doing the job that the liquor was failing at.
“Now I have a simple question for you Samantha if you wouldn't mind?”
“What’s that?” she asked hollowing out her glass.
“Would you like to meet your sister's killer?”
Chapter 50
I used the pharmacy down by the Lucky Hotel to fill a few prescriptions that I still had. I needed to start to put my mind back together. It was too fragile from everything that had happened to it, everything that it had seen. Already, I was flirting with insanity knowing full well what my profession demands from my life and my body and now I have a demon living inside of me for the foreseeable future because the second that she steps out, all those wounds which would more than likely kill me will get their chance.
The bag that the pharmacist gives me is like a stocking stuffer on Christmas. I take it, stuff it inside a shopping bag and move on. I’m barely outside when I open the bottles and just start dipping my hands not bothering to read labels or dosage recommendations. I need something inside my system dulling me from all the scraping that’s happening to the inside of my head.
It’s not until I put the bag into my pocket that I feel the envelope there. Its crinkled now but I can feel the impression of the key and the card that’s in there. A smile breaks my face, all I can think about is that someone with my emotional sense right now shouldn’t have a loaded weapon on her, definitely not with a silencer. But I had to, I didn’t trust anyone. How could I? Gabriel could control anyone he wanted at any time to do anything, how could you trust your safety when someone with that kind of ability was out there.
I looked around and found a bench just outside a coffee house. I went in and got a coffee and sat down on the bench. Truthfully, I was scared about what I was going to to find at those coordinates. Part of me was always happy that part of my past was so well hidden, sometimes I would think that it was really for the better, my own curiosity was just a pain in the ass and could never really agree.
It played in my hands as I took out the card and studied the inscription of the coordinates and I knew that it was my handwriting that had scrolled it on the note.
I look around, trying to map the faces around me, anyone of them could be something that I need to be on alert for. Leaning back, I pluck out my phone and touch the coordinates into google. Sure, enough it spits back the location of a bank of Wall Street. Nothing about the bank name is familiar, nothing about the street view is either. If I was there at any point in time I have no real recollection of it but then again that doesn’t really surprise me all that much.
I finish the coffee and throw the cup and bury my face in my hands. This is difficult, it was difficult with the pills, it's more difficult now that I’m supposed to be dead. All I want to do is numb what feelings I have left because to me their nothing more than something that’s a reminder of how incomplete and unfinished I am and my memory will only remind me of how used my entire life has been.
Gabriel is going to kill me. It’s only a matter of time before he realizes that I’m alive and what he did to me on that boat didn’t last forever. I can feel my jaws rolling over one another and the heat burning up from under my skin as the anger starts to strangle my body.
The headache is driving its way back into my head. This time it’s not alone. It's not just bringing that familiar agonizing pain with it anymore. Now there is something attached to it. There’s a body in the center of a room. The room is barely lit but it's enough light to see the work that’s been done to the body. It’s a man that’s there, he’s on his knees and his stomach, chest, and arms are slick with wet blood and sweat. His head is limp I know this because I’m standing there watching him. I know even more because I was the one that did it to him.
I don’t speak even when he pleaded at me to stop. At one point he begged me to stop and offered me anything in this world to stop from what I did to him. There were bruises on my knees and my elbows and my shins but those were typical, I barely felt them anymore I didn’t even notice that some of his blood was still on me, I really didn’t care either.
The door opens behind me but I already know who it is and I watch as the swollen face goes still.
As Gabriel walks in he whispers in my ear that I did a good job as he studies the work that I’ve done. I’m pleased that he is, all I want to do at that moment is serve him. It doesn’t matter what it is, it doesn’t matter what he asks, I want to do it and I’ll never once question it.
The man that’s on the ground isn’t a demon though he wants to be. He’s been around them long enough that he’s been begging to be infected with their spirit. For now, this is how we have to hunt. This is the only way that Chasers can operate is by finding the Identical, the ones that want to be turned. The ones that are serving the demons on this side.
Gabriel turns to me; his face is burdened with anger. “Hold this for me,” he says as he hands me a knife and I gently take it into my hands.
“Tell me where they are?” he asks again, I can hear the tones changing in his voice and I know that if the man knew, there's no defense that he would have to keep that information from him. What he does tell him is that there is another Identical. “He’s the one, he’s the one that next.”
“Why do they hold you?” Gabriel asks. “When they can control your minds, why have men like you to do their errands.”
“Because of the Chasers, the demons are so low in count now, the ones left here. They can’t afford to wander into stray bodies. Living, healthy bodies need to be sought for them while they regain their strength.”
Gabriel takes steps backwards, I know what’s coming already. He looks at me and instructs me. “Slit his throat.”
I walk to him and run the blade through the thin sheet of skin and a stream of blood gushes out. My arm is soaked in his blood, the blade is dripping what it cut out of the Identical.
The blade is at my side, its edge is facing the floor, I would never aim it at Gabriel. Even like this I can see how he looks at me, the desire in his eyes for me as he studies what I am. “Kiss me,” he tells me and I slide my tongue into his mouth and arch my back as he grabs my chest. The memory fades but the headache stays in place.
I scream out something so hideous that I’m sure I tear flesh from my throat as this sounds escapes me.
It cuts off and I look around and see all the sets of eyes on me. It’s enough to set off the controls in my body that force me to move. I don’t run, running would draw too much attention to me. My eyes fixate on a point in front of me and I start to move.
Chapter 51
The Uber lets me out on Wall Street at the corner of Fulton by the Trinity Church. When I get out, the day is still in the thick of its business. There are countless men in suits darting around me, tourists by the hundreds are all around, snapping pictures of all the chaos and the architecture around them.
The second I close the door, I walk into it. Tucking my hands into the pocket of my jacket, one of my hands smothers the key that I won’t take out until I’m in the building. It’s a bank, an old one at that. I don’t know what I would've left for myself in a place like this. I have better stash’s. Chasers were good at stashing things. There are weapons and safe houses all over the city that the Chasers set up and add to for one another.
I open the door and step into the bank. The second I do it's like all the chaos from the street quickly quiets and I walk into the dimness around me. There’s a woman there, standing there in a pencil skirt, she’s young with long blonde hair and her face looks solemn, not uneasy, but not thrilled either.
“How may I help you,” she says to me.
I drag the key out of my pocket. “I need what’s attached to this,” I say back to her. She gives me a look up and down, I don't look like I fit in this place. I barely look like I fit in with the tourists.
“Of course,” she says to me. “Right this way.”
The woman takes me to a room that has a wall of safety deposit boxes of all sizes. The key, as she pulls out the identical cut copy of the one that it’s my hand goes to one of the medium sized boxes at the center of the wall. We push the keys in, twist the same time and I retrieve the box.
I’m nervous to open it even though there isn’t a serious amount of weight to it. I can’t imagine what it is and as much as I want to know I almost don’t at the same time.
Despite my hesitation, I open it and find that inside of it is nothing more than a thumb drive. I reach it and pull it out, studying it, examining it. It’s mine, it’s the brand that I use but I can’t imagine what’s on it.
Peering around the box, I can see that there’s nothing left inside of it. Whatever was in here, the thumb drive is really all that’s left.
I open my jacket and tuck the thumb drive into it.
Wandering back into the crowds of people, I become very protective of the thumb drive. I need it safe and I need to make sure that I get it home and I find out what’s on it.
As I look at the New York Stock Exchange building, I can feel the anxiety start to well up inside of me again. I’m just glad that I have the prescriptions with me. I take some, another mix, another variety of pills that should barley be in the same room with one another and I’m digesting them in the same body.
Whatever this demon wants inside of me, it’s content with letting me continue on the path that I’m on, either that or it's too weak to do anything about it.
A hand touches my shoulder I turn to see the hand then I see the navy color of the officer’s uniform. “I need you to come with me,” he says to me.
