He spent several minutes prodding through everything—even checking the toilet tank in the bathroom—and finding nothing at all. Finally, he closed his eyes, shutting out both the overlay of colors—in there, it was almost solid red and wasn’t helpful at all anyway—and his normal sight. All that was left was darkness and silence, leaving him better able to focus on what he needed.
“If you’re listening, give me a hand here. I’m running blind, boss.”
Parker’s voice was strained, the words forced out against his grain. He wasn’t the type to ask for help from strangers—or from anyone, really, with only rare exceptions—and invader in his head or not, he definitely considered the giver of gifts to be a stranger of the highest caliber. He was about ready to give up; even the magnetic tugging that had brought him up there seemed to have gone on vacation. Then the voice came again, though only in his mind.
Look again, Vincent.
He opened his eyes, and no longer saw the room as he had a moment ago. The destruction was gone, but what had replaced it made even less sense. The carpet wasn’t the too-busy pattern of flowers and playing cards that he’d walked in on; a vibrant yellow shag rug had taken its place. The television was gone, replaced by what looked to be an old hi-fi unit, and the cream-colored metal box underneath the windows—what he guessed was probably either an air conditioner or a heating unit—was missing. An old-fashioned fan swept at the air in tireless circles above the bed.
And there it was; the major difference, the thing he’d been driven there to get. The painting was hanging on the wall next to the window, the frame the same old ugly mahogany piece of shit that Parker remembered seeing once on Michael’s living room wall. The painting itself showed none of the former colors; when he had seen it last, it had looked alive with colors, a thousand different shades all in splatters and strange shapes. Gina had tried to explain to him that it was like one of those inkblot tests, that you saw what you wanted in it, but he had always thought it just looked like someone tripped in a paint factory and knocked over every can in some kind of domino effect.
The painting had none of that sense of clutter now, but he knew it just the same. Now it was just a black piece of canvas, lacking that former vitality, but the black looked slick and oily, almost as if it was shifting ever so slightly. It made him think about the way oil slicks looked if you tried to watch them out of the corner of your eye and some fucked-up story he’d read back in college about this living puddle of slime that lived on a lake and ate some kids. He had a feeling he might know what those kids had felt if he actually tried to touch it.
He realized that hadn’t been the only addition to the room; the disgustingly purple chair was still there, but he realized something was sitting in it now. An indistinct figure was staring at him, gaining solidity the longer Parker stared at it. The body remained faded and impossible to get any detail on, but the face was becoming clear.
“Parker.” Woods’ voice was strained, pain leaking through it and infecting Parker’s mind. The empathic connection was making his whole body ache. “Your gig now, I guess.”
Parker could hear him clearly, though he supposed that wasn’t really an interesting bit of information to anyone. He supposed it would be odder if being half deaf affected your ability to listen to a ghost. He had no doubt that was exactly what he was talking to.
“In so many words, yeah. But come over here. Time’s short.” The thing sitting in the chair, the thing that had once been Damien Woods, was looking decidedly less well by the moment; the facial features that had come out of the swirling mist were starting to crack and split, and something that looked like blood was beginning to run from his nostrils and eyes. Blood didn’t usually turn black and start to burn into your flesh so far as Parker was aware though.
Parker took a step closer to Woods, scowling when Woods lifted one hand toward him. His voice still carried the note of sarcasm and know-it-all irritation over the pain, as he shook his head. “Look, would you quit the Red Riding Hood act and get your ass over here?”
The tone and words, more than anything else, convinced him that it was fairly safe; anything being that irritating when it was falling apart and already pretty much dead had to be Woods, so far as Parker was concerned. The worst of his doubts banished, Parker took the final step forward and grabbed for Woods’ hand.
Whatever he had expected—that his own hand would pass through Woods’ was on the top of the list, but he supposed there were always other possibilities—this wasn’t it. Touching Woods was like sticking his finger into an electrical socket. As the charge passed through him, seemingly conducted from his fingertip up his arm and through his torso, and then burrowed up his neck into his head, Parker fell back, shouting.
It felt like jellyfish were crawling around in his skull, sending barbed spikes into his brain and occasionally giving him a jolt for good measure. Parker went to his knees, still screaming.
“Oh, quit whining.” The voice was calm and collected, cutting through the mental static and shocking Parker into silence. It seemed to have come both from inside his head and the chair where Woods’ ghost had been sitting a moment ago. When he cocked an eye in that direction, Parker realized that he could no longer see anything of Woods in the shape there, and even the gauzy form that remained was rapidly fading.
“What the fuck?”
It’s simple, really. This time, the sound came entirely from inside his head, but there was no mistaking the identity; it was Woods. Yes, it’s me. No shit, Sherlock. No wonder they never made you captain. Now shut up and hang on. I’ve got a lot to show you, and I don’t have long to do it.
“But you’re dead. Aren’t you?”
As a fucking doornail. Quit asking questions and just watch.
Parker felt like someone had turned the inside of his head into a theater, one of those old ones that still had the velvet curtains to either side of the screen, the kind that played the movies on a screen around a hundred feet wide and seventy feet tall or so. The image persisted, and he imagined himself sitting next to Woods in that theater, watching the screen as the lights dimmed and the curtains rose.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat in that mental theater with Woods, while the whole mess played out in front him, starting in the way back with the artist who first conceived of it laying paint on canvas and birthing the talu`shar and driving through centuries of history and thousands of Wardens. It started moving into a time line that was closer to Parker’s heart, when Karim took control of the damned thing, even showing him the death of Mikey’s family. Parker had wanted to turn away from that, but Woods forced him to watch. In the mental theater, his imagination conjured Woods grabbing the sides of his head and forcing it to face the screen, but he knew that was just imagery put up by his subconscious—or some shit that the psychologists would say—to try to make this make some kind of sense to him.
He saw the slaughter, saw the way Karim enjoyed it, even saw how he jacked off over the memory later. Then it came to Damien’s death, and again, Parker tried to look away. Much as he hadn’t liked the man, nobody needed to die like that. Again, Woods wouldn’t let him, forcing him to see and to understand.
Then came the final scene, and Parker’s eyes were opened. He saw not only what the Beast had done, but what it was planning to do, and he tried to pull himself out of the mindscape, to start running before it was too late. Woods stopped him and shook his head. “It’s too late to stop this part. You can only change the ending.”
Then Woods had leaned over to him and had whispered the final piece, the thing he had learned just before he had killed himself; he whispered the truth about what he was, what they all were in a way.
Just as suddenly as he had come, Woods was gone. The static and the sense of something else in his mind departed, and Parker opened his eyes and bolted from the room. Now he lay against the door, shaking his head in an eternal ges
ture of negation, whispering, “No,” to himself repeatedly.
As a man of action, Parker didn’t take long to realize that doing something like that was only going to make sure the future Damien had given him would be made true.
Fuck, for all I know, that’s what he was put there to do. Can’t trust any of them, not anymore.
With that thought in mind, he dragged himself to his feet and started down the hall toward the stairs.
I’m sorry, Mikey. But this shit has to end. Tonight.
Chapter 41
12:00 pm, December 24, 1999
Michael Drakanis, husband of Gina, father of Joey, and well-respected detective of the Reno Police Department, opened his eyes and took in his surroundings with a slight feeling of surprise. A feeling of dislocation followed that, the sense of wrongness that one had when he woke up in an unexpected place or at an unexpected time.
He rolled to the side, hoping to at least find the comforting warmth of Gina beside him, but all he found was cold metal. The other side of the bed was empty except for his service pistol. How it had gotten there, he didn’t know. Part of his mind argued that he had turned it in six months ago, placing it into Captain Morrigan’s waiting hand with a feeling of relief, a sense of “thank God that’s over.” Another part argued that it had always been with him, but that it belonged on the top shelf of the closet, somewhere where it would be safe from accidental discovery by Joey. Both were certain it didn’t belong on the pillow of this unfamiliar bed in this unfamiliar room.
He picked up the pistol, weighing it in his hand even as his jaws cracked in a yawn. There was no doubt it was his; the slash of silver running across the otherwise black grip was there, looking back at him. He still remembered how it had gotten that mark.
He had been just a rookie then and had made a rookie mistake. Reporting to a domestic disturbance, he’d thrown open a door and had his gun out because the perp had supposedly been threatening his wife with the family’s shotgun. The perp had been on the other side and had slammed the door shut on Drakanis’s hand. The gun had caught in the jamb, scoring the grip on one side and the barrel on the other. He’d left it that way since, a reminder against making further mistakes.
Not quite believing it, he turned the .38 over and checked the barrel on the other side for the corresponding mark. There it was, gleaming in the light cast by the ugly yellow lamp next to the bed. Deciding concerns of how it had gotten there could wait, he raised his head and took stock of the room.
He didn’t recognize anything, but it wasn’t hard to guess he was in a hotel room somewhere. The overdone floor pattern, the pink and yellow walls, and the air-conditioning unit under the window that sounded like it was about to murder a fresh set of bearings while it put out air that would only make a polar bear comfortable were all familiar styles for seasoned travelers and the cops who occasionally had to bust them. The where of it didn’t matter, he supposed. The why of it seemed a lot more important to him.
Because you have to finish something. We have a deal, you and I. You’ll get what you want when you do what I want.
He rose from the bed, wavering a little. He looked for a moment to his left, where a door that could only lead to a bathroom lay. He could have sworn he heard voices coming from that direction, and some internal radar claimed there was someone in there, but it didn’t seem too important. Whoever he had made his bargain with and whatever it wanted, it didn’t have anything to do with what was going on in the bathroom, he was sure. What it wanted was in the living room.
He pushed through the swinging door into the living room—Wouldn’t exactly keep the kids from spying on Mom and Dad, he found himself thinking—and saw what was waiting for him.
The living room had been emptied of furniture. An unsightly pile had been created in the small kitchenette, the chairs and the couch and television stacked on one another. Skid marks on the floor marked where the furniture had scored it when it had been shoved over. Only one chair remained in the living room.
“Ah. Detective Drakanis. Did you rest well, my friend?”
Karim—or Karesh, as the thing within the talu`shar had called him—was sitting in the chair, looking like a substitute host for Masterpiece Theatre. Drakanis took a long look, as though he was really seeing Karim for the first time; in a sense, he was. It was just a sad fact of the twentieth century that you didn’t usually pay a lot of attention to the people who cleaned your toilets and dumped your trash. Drakanis supposed that the almost innate invisibility that came with a job like that was probably one of the main reasons that Karim had taken it.
Karim was smiling pleasantly, his dark eyes and coffee-colored skin blending almost into a camouflage pattern with the shadows cast by the jaundiced yellow overhead lights. He was dressed in what looked to be an old smoking jacket, complete with the still-burning pipe resting on the chair by his left hand. Drakanis wondered why the smoke alarms hadn’t gone off yet but supposed little details like mundane security were probably on vacation for the moment.
“You’re a lot smaller than I would have expected.” It was the first thing that came to mind. It was true enough; he had always pictured, for good or ill, that the person who had killed his family would have been a larger man. Now that they were face to face, Drakanis figured Karim was no more than five and a half feet tall and almost too thin for his height. How someone that slight had managed to overpower Gina—who was more than capable of kicking Drakanis’s ass when he got out of line—he wasn’t sure, though he guessed the gifts the Beast gave figured in, one way or another.
Karesh shook his head, laughing. “Appearances can be deceiving, my good detective. But the time for the coming is almost here, and we waste it with small talk. Have you made your choice?”
Drakanis could feel something dark and angry pulsing inside of him, a reservoir of poisoned water that he hadn’t even known existed prior to this moment. It didn’t feel like his own feelings, but something that was projected on him instead, though the distinction was so fine that he wasn’t sure the difference mattered much. His hand, buried in the pocket of his coat—apparently they hadn’t felt any need to undress him before leaving him on the bed, the part of his mind that insisted Gina and Joey were dead noted—tightened around the grip of his pistol.
He nodded, feeling mental sludge begin to leak from him, clouding the air and hopefully making it impossible for Karesh to know what was coming before it hit him. He supposed it wasn’t going to make a difference, since he could feel the same miasma leaking from Karesh himself, but a little extra caution never hurt anyone.
“Excellent. So you’ll be joining our team, then? Good. We should get ready then; so much to do, and so little time.”
Karesh pulled himself up and started to walk toward him, but Drakanis held up his free hand, shaking his head. “A couple of questions first.”
Karesh angled his head and raised a brow. He swept one arm toward Drakanis. “As you wish it. Make it quick, Detective.”
“Where are the others?”
Karesh shook his head. “Damien has chosen to end his own life. He was offered a chance to redeem himself in the glory of the Beast but refused. Your friend Parker is also no longer with us. I’m afraid Officer Taeda grew slightly overzealous in subduing him. Officer Brokov, on the other hand, remains alive and well. We are merely waiting for this unpleasantness to be behind us before allowing her to return to her life. Whatever part of it remains once this matter is resolved, anyway.”
Drakanis nodded, trying not to let the pain show on his face. Vince had been his near-constant companion since childhood and hearing that these shitheads had killed him, just like that, and for no better reason than that he had been in the way was a knife that struck deep in his heart. The part of him that swore his family was alive and waiting for him claimed that it wasn’t going to matter; once this was resolved, Parker would be fine. All of them
would be fine. That was what he told himself anyway.
“Anything further, Detective?”
Drakanis broke out in a cold sweat; his heart was beginning to throb painfully in his chest, and his lungs screamed for air even when he tried to fill them to the maximum. Here it is. The turning point. Lady or the tiger, bud? Take a spin and lose it all.
“One last thing. A message, more than a question.”
Karesh rolled his hand impatiently, brows still arched.
Drakanis moved quickly and without much thought. He pulled the gun out of his pocket, leveled it at Karesh, and squeezed the trigger before he could allow himself to think about what he was doing.
Karesh didn’t even blink, didn’t move before it was too late; the only thing that indicated he realized what was happening at all was a slight widening of his eyes. Before he could do anything further, the bullet tore into the center of his face, tearing flesh away from the bone and giving his head the look of a rotted pumpkin. Blood and brains flew from the hole, with a bigger splash of gore flying out the back and hitting the wall, leaving a smear on the wallpaper that reminded Drakanis of the talu`shar itself. Karesh’s body slumped; his mouth caved in on itself, and the last of the tainted fluid in his skull leaked out through his imploded nostrils.
Drakanis took a deep shuddering breath, trying to clear his head as he tossed the gun to the side. He wasn’t going to need it anymore. The smell of blood and gunpowder filled his lungs, trying to intoxicate him with the scent of death and carnage while the echoes of the shot drifted through the air as they faded. Then he hunkered by the remains of his family’s killer and delivered the message Joey had given him.
“You’re fired.”
Chapter 42
12:15 pm, December 24, 1999
Sheila’s eyes cracked open a fraction of an inch, and vision came back in blurry at first but sharpened rapidly. She realized her perspective didn’t match what it should have been, and it took a moment and some painful turning of her neck to realize why. Manderly was standing at the door with his ear pressed up against it. He must have moved her to get at the door.
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