Darkness of the Soul

by Kaine Andrews

  Drakanis shook his head, smirking a bit. “She wants to stuff someone else in the booth, looks like.”

  “Don’t give a fuck what she wants. We’re talking here. Get on with it.”

  “Like I was about to say, though, there’s not much more factual to the mess. A few accounts of it being in this collection or in that gallery, but it always vanishes—usually messily—within a month or so. The painting, by the by, is officially called Talu Shar or some such. No translation offered, and I can’t find it in any dictionary or on any translation Web site. A name, maybe, is anyone’s best guess.”

  They both fell quiet for a moment. Drakanis was staring into his coffee as if the history of the world might be described in the swirl of cream floating in it. Parker nervously flipped his cigarettes end over end on the table. At one of the other tables, someone’s kid started bawling. Didn’t get your Rooty Tooty Pancakes, huh, kid? Parker thought, not without a trace of sympathy. One of the waitresses scurried over to see what the problem was. Their own waitress was still glaring at them from behind the counter, like she could use her incredible mental powers to make them leave.

  Finally, Parker broke the silence. “So, what’s the legend then, since the facts are almost bad enough?”

  “Well,” Drakanis started and then shrugged. “More of the same really. Someone gets their hands on it; they tend to suffer an unpleasant accident. Anyone around them—and usually a few other folks, if the stories are to be believed—tend to go through a run of bad luck; heart attacks, strokes, that sort of thing, they seem to just crop up real frequently all of a sudden. In other words, the same pattern.”

  Parker suddenly felt like a lightbulb had turned on in his head. He felt incredibly stupid for not asking it earlier. Now his eyes burned with such intensity that even Drakanis flinched back at Parker’s outburst. “Hold up; you said this has been going on for how long?”

  “Since the thir… oh, fuck.”

  Parker was nodding. “Right. Now you’re catching on. You’ve been out of the game too long, Mikey. We’re not dealing with one psychopath, not anymore.”

  Drakanis still looked like he wasn’t all there, his eyes wide, jaw resting on his chest, his head shaking. “What, you think the Thuggee or something are running around in Reno, killing people over the damn painting? It still doesn’t make any sense, man. Forget the time difference, just stop and ask why they’d be giving it over to people just to kill them later. Doesn’t jibe.”

  Parker spread his palms. “Unless it’s some kind of sacrifice thing. I mean, you said it was supposed to be in honor of some death goddess, right? Feed it new victims every so often, before it turns on you and gets your ass on the sacrificial altar. Could be more than one. Could be just one, but I’m willing to wager that he’s playing the same old game they were way in the back when.”

  Drakanis leaned back, as if he was thinking it over. There were a few things that meshed with what Parker was suggesting, but he was still somehow sure that they were just dealing with one guy, this time. Not like he couldn’t have gone on the Internet himself and looked all this crap up either. It wasn’t like you had any particular difficulties doing it. But Drakanis wasn’t buying that. Some internal radar, some sixth cop-sense—the reason he’d been good at his job and half the reason Parker had wanted him back—was telling him different. Their boy had known about it, known what the painting was, and what it was supposedly for, and was going for the gold. Their boy was also working alone. Drakanis would lay everything he had on that particular gamble.

  He shook his head at last and continued, “No. Our boy’s alone. But I think he’s following the same rules. Somebody taught him what he’s doing.”

  Parker raised his brows. “Cop-sense?”

  Drakanis just nodded, solemn again. “Cop-sense.”

  There was another bout of silence as Parker sized Drakanis up, trying to decide if he was serious about this or not. He finally broke it, as he heaved himself out of the booth and dropped cash on the table to cover the check. “Fair enough,” he said. “Forensics should be out of our way by now. Let’s go see.”

  Chapter 19

  3:00 pm, December 14, 1999

  The moment of waking was a moment of agony; despite that, Damien Woods counted himself lucky to be feeling anything at all. How he was waking up, he wasn’t sure, but it didn’t diminish the simple pleasure of taking a breath and knowing there would be another one.

  How the fuck did I live through that? What he’d done was supposed to have been fatal, no questions asked, no refunds or exchanges. One life for one life, that was the bargain, and yet here he was. That led him to his second question.

  Where the fuck is here? He opened his eyes, finding it difficult but manageable. It didn’t take much of a look for him to recognize his surroundings. Which hospital he was in, he didn’t know—his own guess was St. Mary’s, but it might have been Washoe Med—but the sickening green tile and the backwash of antiseptic smells marked the place as obviously as the smell of cow shit marked a farm.

  He could hear the incessant beeping of something that might have been a heart monitor coming from just behind his head and tried to turn to check; then he discovered someone had been so kind as to truss him up like a Christmas turkey. He couldn’t guess why, but supposed he must have been thrashing a bit while he was out. Was I out? What the hell happened? He still wasn’t really sure, and he needed to know.

  He tried to move his hands and arms and discovered they were restrained as well, and that it wouldn’t have helped anyway. The call button hadn’t been placed anywhere near his hand. It was probably still racked on the monitor behind him, since he was sure they hadn’t really expected him to wake up anytime soon, if at all, so he was left with his own built-in version.

  He ran his tongue over his lips, closed his eyes, and took as deep a breath as he could. Doing so hurt, badly. Though what he’d done had been almost entirely metaphysical, it certainly seemed to have a good lot of physical side effects, but he wasn’t overly concerned about that. If the nurses came, he was pretty sure he could convince them to cough up a painkiller or two. Might even get some morphine out of this one, buddy. And there was that whole “still alive” thing to consider in the wins column.

  “Hey! Can I get some help in here, please?”

  Christ, even my tongue hurts, he thought, as he waited for someone to answer the summons, hoping they wouldn’t make him repeat it. He wasn’t sure he could try again, given what had ripped its way over his tongue, down his throat, and all through him in that initial effort. He didn’t need to worry about it for long, as a shocked-looking face peered into the room, blinked once at him, and then popped back out like it had never been there. He thought he had recognized the face, just for a second, but things were still looking a little blurry, and the face had popped out too quickly for him to really focus on it all the way. He reached out with his other senses, hoping to at least ascertain that whoever it had been was actually going to get help and was not just some visitor spooked by the strange man screaming in a hospital bed.

  That is not good, he thought, as he tried to sense that other person and got absolutely nothing back. A true neutral—what he called anyone he couldn’t touch with his mind—was rare, and running into one usually signified trouble. He had gotten that far in his thinking when he realized his problem was a great deal more severe than that.

  Letting his psychic senses roam free, he could feel nothing at all. Either the neutral and he were the sole occupants of whichever hospital this turned out to be, or things were past bad and edging into the territory of potential celestial clusterfuck. The former was bad, because that said prison more than it said hospital—antiseptic smell, comforting monitor beeping and ugly green tiles or not—and he doubted it was one that Parker would be dragging his assholes to either. The latter was even worse; he wasn’t feeling the weird mental resistance
that came when someone was sending up smoke signals or trying to keep his mental eyes tied to the physical ones. It was more like being completely blind, and the thought of not having those extra senses scared him. If he was missing those, what else might he be missing? And what if the talu`shar had a few more playmates to throw at him?

  He tried again to sit up, but the pain and the restraints they had put him in—and what the fuck was it, a goddamn straight jacket?—wouldn’t let him get more than a few inches closer to a sitting position. He lost that little ground almost immediately when he quit straining.

  Okay. New plan.

  He wasn’t sure yet that all his gifts had been taken. Making that assumption when it was yet to be tested was just one of many possible roads toward panic, which was ultimately worthless at the moment. With that in mind, Damien reached out with his mind, trying to feel whatever they’d tied him up with so he could undo it—by force, if necessary.

  The same thing that had happened before happened again: precisely nothing at all.

  “Fuck.” He had said it out loud before remembering that it was going to hurt and then was left in a coughing fit as his throat tried to close up and get him to quit breathing and talking forever, instead of just for a little while. He was still sputtering and trying to look around through his tear-filled eyes when the face reappeared, and a tentative voice called for him.

  “Damien? You… oh, fuck it.”

  He knew the voice and knew he should have known to whom it belonged, but it seemed like he couldn’t stop coughing long enough to place it. A blurry shape that he recognized as female rushed toward him and then shoved him to one side. She slammed him on the back with a force that was surprising, given how small the person had looked. It did the trick though; his throat finally let go, and with an explosive final cough accompanied by a thick wad of phlegm that looked more like a blood clot than a pile of snot, he managed to catch his breath.

  More shapes were gathering at the doorway to the room, and judging from the colors—which was about all Damien was able to really judge with any accuracy at the moment—at least one of them was a doctor. A white sheet floated in his field of vision. It was flanked by a pair of red and white blobs, and they were all coming toward him. The familiar voice came again, but Damien was fading out already. To him, it was like listening to a radio station as you pass out of the transmitter’s area.

  Brokov looked toward the doctor as she saw Damien’s eyelids fluttering. She pulled back from the bed and let him alone, so he could lay flat again.

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  The doctor was one of the tribe that had been spawned, seemingly overnight, by programs like ER. He was young, too handsome for his own good, and always radiated an aura of overconfidence and arrogance, but he was still young enough—or maybe dumb enough—to admit when he wasn’t sure about something, given enough reasons. He looked Brokov over for a moment and then shrugged, watching as the nurses started loosening the restraints and checking to make sure Woods’ vitals were within an acceptable range.

  “I really can’t say, Officer. When he came in, he was flatlining.” He flipped through the paperwork on the clipboard he carried—probably mostly for show—and shook his head.

  “Flatlined a total of seven times, no visible cause. No noticeable brain activity. To be honest, Officer, I would have said your friend was going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life.”

  The doctor arched his brows and looked over his clipboard at Brokov in a way that made her want to put her fist through it. “Are you certain you heard him speak, Officer Brokov?”

  Brokov arched her own brow in return and opened her mouth. What was going to come out, she had no idea, but it was unlikely to be kind. However, she was interrupted by one of the nurses—a trainee by the look of her.

  “Doctor Matthews?” The girl couldn’t have been much older than twenty and maybe even younger than that. The look on her heart-shaped face was part confusion and part fear and made her seem even younger as she looked shyly at the doctor through her dark bangs.

  The honorable Doc Matthews, apparently hoping for any excuse to avoid further discussion with Brokov, practically floated toward the bed and the girl. The other nurse was busying herself trying to finish setting Damien to rights, studiously not looking at either her partner or the doctor, and Brokov wondered if Matthews was having a few problems following the old adage of not dating one’s co-workers. His underage coworkers, Sheila’s mind amended.

  “What is it?”

  Matthews and the girl were apparently in their own little universe, and the other girl had made a speedy exit, so Sheila tried again, clearing her throat first.

  “What is it, Doctor?” The force she put on the last word was apparently noticed; the two of them split apart quickly, and the girl shuffled out of the room with one last longing look. Does she even know how bad she’s got it? Sheila wondered. The doctor glared at her, and then he cleared his own throat.

  “Officer Woods is showing brain activity.”

  “You don’t have to sound so depressed by it. I told you he was talking.”

  Matthews gave her a look that could only be interpreted as “don’t tell me my business,” as he pinched Woods’ wrist and counted off the seconds. Then he put the arm back into the bed and stood again. He shrugged. “You have my apologies then, for not believing you.” He sounded about as sincere as a crocodile crying for its last meal, but Brokov decided to let it slide. There were calls to be made, and nobody else had wanted the shit detail of watching over the vegetable, so she didn’t have time to fuck around with some asshole doctor who thought he ruled the world.

  “Fine. Any idea on when he might wake up again? Anything you can give him?”

  “Officer,” Matthews began and then sighed. He shook his head. “I really can’t say. I’m afraid to give him anything, because I still have no idea what brought this on. From what I understand, neither do you. He may wake in five minutes, maybe in five days, maybe even never.”

  Brokov tried to cover her disappointment, both professional and personal. Though she hadn’t really bothered to get to know Damien until just recently, there was a flicker of attraction there that she had hoped to see blossom or be crushed naturally, not chopped off like this. She apparently hadn’t done a very good job of hiding it, she deduced from the suddenly sympathetic look the doctor was giving her. She tried to hide the revulsion she felt at receiving sympathy from someone as slippery as this asshole apparently was, but that must have bled through a bit too. At least he didn’t say anything else or try to touch her. He just nodded once more, cleared his throat, and headed out.

  Brokov turned her eyes back to Woods. She watched his eyelids flutter back and forth so rapidly she thought it was a wonder the eyes behind them weren’t falling out. She hadn’t been the one to find him—that unpleasantness had fallen on Perez—but when they had decided to send someone over with him, to keep them updated, she had been the first to volunteer.

  Now there wasn’t a whole lot to do except make the calls, let Perez and the others know that he had woken up at least once but hadn’t said anything. She was technically off shift anyway and didn’t figure that anyone would begrudge her hanging out there for a little while longer.

  She lifted his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Come back to us, you punk. Can’t dump me that fast, can you, Mr. Man?” She smiled at him, thinking that maybe his eyes had twitched in her direction just a bit at the sound of her voice, but she wasn’t entirely sure. She gave one more squeeze and then headed out into the hall to make her phone calls.

  Chapter 20

  9:00 pm, December 19, 1999

  Woody’s had been redecorated again. The things that had been taken down for Morrigan’s wake had been replaced and made even more gaudy, if that was possible. The music on the jukebox—currently Tom Petty—had been cranked to ear-sp
litting volume once more. Gone were the black curtains and covered mirrors. The whole joint had been returned to neon glitz and moody corners, with little indication that at least two of their favored regulars had been removed from the bar tab in the last month.

  Drakanis sat at the bar, flanked by Parker and Brokov, looking unimpressed with the almost forced mood of the place. Neither of his companions looked particularly happy to be there either; still, it was somewhere they could sit and talk, and familiarity was always shining around the edges, no matter how many decoration teams came through the place. It was too full of memories, both good and bad, for them all to be killed just because of a lighting change.

  Parker, just having finished the summary of the things they knew and the things they suspected, dropped his gaze to the bar once more and stared at his reflection for a long moment. He did not like what he was seeing. He’d lost weight, and while some folks might have said a little of that would do him good, he was starting to look a little hollow. His skin was yellowing and his eyes bulging out of baggy sockets like those of a corpse that had forgotten it was supposed to lie down and stay there. That only depressed him further, so he raised a hand, sticking two fingers up to flag the bartender. Kenny nodded once and raised one finger in return, as he finished up with his customers at the other end of the bar.

  Sheila was looking nowhere near as glum as the two men. Instead, she was wearing an expression that seemed to be made of equal parts wonderment and understanding. Stories of ancient cults and psychic psychos didn’t put her as out of sorts as Parker or Drakanis had thought they might have. Growing up in the time she had instilled her with a fascination for that sort of thing, and having heard the killer’s voice long before either of them had her ready to believe nearly anything about the situation. Perhaps it wasn’t the best mentality to have when getting involved in a murder investigation, but there wasn’t much she could do about that. She rolled her own drink—a strawberry daiquiri—between her palms for a moment and shook her head.