Chapter 17
Something wasn’t sitting well with Sean Sommers. It wasn’t just the strange conversation with Aiden, although that was definitely part of it, but it was also something that the man in the cloak had said—or, as he called him, the Cloak. The man’s words had sounded strange, just a little off, but he had been so transfixed by the book that at the time he hadn’t thought anything of it.
But now it nagged at him, tugged at the corners of his mind. Wouldn’t let him go.
Sean slipped a cigarette from the pack and brought it to his lips. He lit it, and then stepped out from under the streetlight and into the darkness that the side of the building offered. Puffing away, he turned his thoughts to the events of the past week or so.
For more than six decades, he had been a Guardian, imbued with the responsibility of keeping the status quo, of keeping the Marrow a one-way street. And for most of that time, his work had been uneventful. Like a well-worn pipe, there were occasional leaks, but Sean had managed to stem all of these before they became a flood. But ever since Leland had turned, things had gotten progressively worse. The man in the cloak was right; Robert should never have been brought in to deal with any of this. It was just too dangerous to get him involved. The prophecy decreed that a Guardian was needed to open the rift, and with their numbers dwindling to a new low, finding one was becoming a more and more difficult proposition for even someone as powerful as Leland.
There was Sean himself, but would never let himself be used as a vessel. He may have been old like Father Callahan, but he wasn’t weak like the man had been. He was strong; Sean had seen much, and had lived through even more that scraped just below the threshold of detection by the human eye.
No, he would never let Carson or anyone before or after him use his body or quiddity to open the rift.
Robert, on the other hand…
He still wasn’t entirely sure why he had gone to the man in the first place. He had told the Cloak that he had had no choice, that there were just too many quiddity for him to deal with on his own.
But that was only partly true.
There were more quiddity, certainly, but Robert hadn’t been his only option. But like the words that the Cloak had said while reading the prophecy, something wasn’t quite right and had nagged at him, at his mind, his thoughts, something that he hadn’t been able to fully comprehend.
Something that had convinced him that it was Robert that he needed to recruit, despite the obvious risks. Despite knowing that Carson was locked away, and that Sean had rarely seen an apple fall hundreds of miles from the tree.
Sean took another drag, feeling the hot air swirl in his lungs. The cigarette almost done, he took another one out and used the end of the first to light it.
His mind turned next to what had gone wrong at Seaforth. From what he could gather, it was Peter the IT guy, the one that Sean and the man in the cloak, as the most influential Seaforth board members, had personally recommended, who had cracked. Who Carson and/or Leland had gotten to.
But all of this could have been moot if the Cloak had just let him kill Carson when he’d had the chance. But Sean’s requests, as rational and clearheaded as they were, had gone unratified.
That is, until his encounter with Carson at Seaforth…but what other choice had he had? Locked away, Carson could only do so much. But loose? There was no way he could’ve let that happen. Even the Cloak realized this, as in spite of his proclivities for the Black brothers, his reaction to the man’s death had been unexpectedly subdued.
And Sean had left nothing to chance. He’d believed that Robert would kill Carson in his cell, or else he would have never left them alone together. Part of him had hoped that they would have killed each other—two birds with one stone and all that—but Sean had never been that lucky.
Instead, he had ordered Aiden to blow up the prison as a safeguard measure, and Aiden hadn’t hesitated.
Which brought him full circle.
It wasn’t like Aiden to be obtuse on the phone; the man was as straightforward as they came. He followed his orders without questioning.
Something isn’t right…
A car pulled into the lot of the building complex, and Sean flicked the cigarette behind him and slipped completely into the shadows. The vehicle was a dark blue sedan, one that he recognized from somewhere, but couldn’t immediately place. Sean squinted hard. He could make out the outline of a driver and someone in the passenger seat, but he—
“Sean,” a voice said from his left, and Sean whipped around, his hand going to the gun on his hip. He relaxed when he saw it was only Aiden standing a dozen feet from him. The man’s hands were at his sides, and his expression, as usual, was deadpan. Like Sean, Aiden was standing in the shadows, and he failed to make out many of his features. His posture, his head shape, and his demeanor confirmed that it was him, however.
“Aiden,” Sean replied curtly. “What happened at the Estate?”
Aiden hesitated, and Sean squinted harder. It wasn’t like the man to be unsure of things, especially not when it came to answering Sean’s direct questions.
There is something different about him.
“There was an…incident.”
“Incident? What kind of incident?”
“An attack. Someone attacked the Estate. But I took care of them.”
Sean couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“What? Who? What are you talking about, Aiden? Someone attacked Robert? Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?”
He took a step forward and Aiden bowed his head.
“It was Carson—he’s back, and he wants Robert.”
Sean’s jaw dropped. If anyone else had uttered those words, he would have known it to be a lie, or worse, a terrible joke.
But not Aiden.
Aiden didn’t lie, and Aiden definitely didn’t joke.
“How…how is that possible? I thought…”
His mind flashed to the explosion at Seaforth, of the flames illuminating the storm clouds, reflecting off the heavy downpour.
It can’t be.
When Sean spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper.
“What the fuck happened, Aiden? What the—?”
Then Aiden stepped into the light and Sean almost fell backward.
“Fuuuuuck…”
The man’s outline wasn’t fully solid, and the light around him was wavering slightly.
Sean outstretched a finger and aimed it accusingly at the man.
“You’re…you’re…”
“Dead,” Aiden finished for him.
Something slipped over his head from behind, a thick, coarse fabric, blinding him. Sean tried to turn, but before he could even move, something was driven into his spine—a fist, perhaps, or a foot—and he dropped to his knees. A rope was wrapped around his throat next, pinching the hood tight, while at the same time cutting off his air supply.
His hand went for his gun, but he found the holster.
“That’s right, Sean,” a familiar voice whispered in his ear through the thick fabric. “Aiden’s dead, and you will be too if you don’t do exactly what I say.”
Sean wheezed, trying, but failing, to draw a full breath.
“Robert?” he gasped.
Chapter 18
“How many do you have this time?” Michael asked. The man before him was tall and thin, with a beak-like nose and beady eyes.
To Michael, he looked like an oversized rat.
“Eight. Eight more.”
“Eight?”
The man nodded and moved to the back of the truck. It was a plain vehicle, not like the hearses seen in the movies. That was for the trip to the church, for appearances. After showing in the coffin, the bodies were removed, the pine boxes either sold or recycled, and the bodies were shipped here, to the crematorium, in a plain white cube van.
Or so Ratman had told him.
Michael’s stomach growled as he waited for Vinny to unlock the back of the truck.
It felt like a hundred years since he had bitten off Robert’s index finger, and eons before that when he had nibbled on the girl in the cage.
His next meal was a long time coming, but now he was standing before him. Male meat wasn’t his favorite—testosterone did something to sour the taste—but it would definitely tide him over.
Eight more bodies. Carson is going to be happy with number—he has to be.
Thinking of Carson brought Michael back to their first encounter outside his office building, and their subsequent discussions in the park and then in his car. His initial impression of the man as a deluded psychopath had been dispelled nearly the moment Carson opened his mouth. The man had a way of speaking, of drawing Michael in, and it didn’t hurt that what he said was true; Michael did see something in the faces of his victims as their last breaths puffed out of them. And that air, that stale, often foul-smelling air expelled from their lipless mouths, was a sort of ether to him that rivaled the taste of their flesh on his tongue.
It was a noxious, addictive ether that he believed Carson could acquire for him in spades.
And this was all before he had actually seen the dead come to life, witness a woman with a whiskey bottle sticking out of her head stumble around as Bella flayed her with one of her many tiny knives.
If what Carson had said about the Marrow was true, then it was in his best interest to help the man in any way that he could. And if it meant that he got a little—just a wee little—snack along the way, then that was okay, too.
The smile on his face started to grow, despite the fact that it made the swollen skin on the side of his face and around his eye hurt.
“Hurry up, Vinny. Get the truck open and let’s start chucking the bodies downstairs.” Michael rubbed his sweaty palms on his pants as he waited impatiently for the man to act. He wasn’t at all sure why this man Vinny, who, by all accounts, was one of the others, went along with what Carson said, but he didn’t much care. If he put any thought to it, he might have come to the conclusion that it was Carson’s strange charm, or his unwavering belief in a story, a mythos the likes of which Michael had never heard.
Vinny reached for the keys on his belt to unlock the back of the truck, but he dropped them onto the muddy ground.
His hands were shaking.
“Give me the fucking keys,” Michael grumbled, shoving Vinny out of the way. It had only been a light push, but the man was off balance and slipped onto his ass.
He cried out, and Michael turned to face him.
“Get up,” he instructed. A sound from the back of the truck drew his attention to the plain white door.
His eyes narrowed as he listened closely.
“Okay, okay! I’m getting up,” Vinny replied quickly, but Michael hushed him and focused on the back of the truck.
Are the quiddity here already?
Carson had warned them that they would be coming faster now, especially after what Robert had done to the woman’s body, commandeering her corpse. But Michael wasn’t so sure.
Either way, there were no further sounds from the back of the truck, which he wasn’t sure how to interpret.
He had definitely heard a dull thud only moments ago.
“What are you—?”
“Shhh.”
As he waited, he reached down for the keys on the ground and picked them up. He gave them a little jangle, and waited a little longer.
The only sound he heard was his stomach growling.
“Get over here,” he said to Vinny. The man was pale, his rat nose twitching madly. “C’mon, get the fuck over here.”
He tossed the keys at Vinny and they struck him in the chest. To both of their surprise, he managed to catch them.
Michael indicated the door with a flick of his wrist.
“Open it.”
The man blinked rapidly and stepped in front of Michael, who receded several paces away from the truck.
Just in case, just in case.
In case of what, he didn’t know.
Robert, maybe? Or whoever blew Jonah away?
When Vinny removed the lock and gripped the bottom of the door, ready to throw it up, Michael tensed, preparing himself for the worst.
Nothing happened.
Vinny threw the door open and then he jumped back, as if he had also been expecting something to happen.
Still nothing.
“Fucking rat,” Michael grumbled, finally convinced that it must have just been the engine dying down, or a piece of mud dislodging from the wheel well. “Vinny, grab the first body, bring it downstairs.”
Vinny pulled himself into the truck and then reached down and grabbed the first body. Three times the man had come with bodies since Michael had been at Scarsdale, and all three times the bodies had been in the thick black body bags. This time, however, the first body Vinny grabbed wasn’t wrapped in anything at all. It was just a skinny blond guy with gray skin lain haphazardly on his back, his lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling of the truck. Vinny flipped the body up onto his shoulder, the corpse’s head flipping unnaturally backward.
Fresh—very fresh.
“Hey, where are the bags?” Michael demanded as Vinny grunted and stepped by him.
“Cost-cutting measures,” he said simply. He took one lurching step toward the door, then another.
Michael shook his head.
Reusing and selling caskets was something he could wrap his mind around, but skimping on body bags?
Fucking savages.
More hunger pangs struck him then, and he shook the thoughts from his head. The sooner they got the bodies out of the truck, the sooner he could have his “snack.”
Michael moved toward the truck and pulled himself inside.
The smell was better than he had expected. It didn’t smell great—much like a public restroom, it smelled heavily of chemicals that were barely doing an adequate job of covering up the scent of feces—but it wasn’t horrible, either.
Michael quickly looked down at the bodies in the truck. There were nine of them, including two that couldn’t have been older than ten years of age. As Vinny had said, none of them were in bags; they were just lying on the dirty plywood floor. Some had clearly rolled during the drive from wherever the hell Vinny had come—a funeral home, perhaps, or a cemetery—and one was sandwiched up against the inside wall, compressed there by the body of a nearly naked and much fatter corpse.
Vinny can carry that one, Michael thought.
He reached for one of the younger corpses, a man who looked to be in his mid-twenties, and gripped him by the ankle. He was about to drag him toward the edge of the truck and hop out, to pull him onto his shoulder as Vinny had done moments ago, when he suddenly stopped short.
Eight. Eight more.
Michael’s eyes whipped up. There were nine bodies in the truck, and if he included the one that Vinny had carried away, that made ten.
And then one of the bodies sat up, and Michael stumbled backward. He fell out of the back of the truck, landing hard with an audible schlop in the muddy ground. He scrabbled to get to his feet, to extricate himself from the mud, when a figure appeared at the back of the truck.
He was holding a pistol in one hand and a gold shield in the other.
“Oh, hi there, Michael. We’ve been looking for you.”
Chapter 19
“What the fuck is going on? Aiden, you brought them here? To this place? And you died? What the fuck is happening?”
Sean growled and moved his wrists up and down against the rope that bound them. The hood was actually some sort of thick bag, and it was stiflingly hot inside. Sweat dripped down his face and started to soak the material around his neck, which was still tightly tied by a second rope.
When he yelled, the sound was incredibly loud in his ears.
“How can you bring Robert here? He’s been touched by Leland, you idiot! He can track him now. And if he finds—if he—”
“If he finds who?” demanded another voice that Sean recognized as
Cal’s.
“You! Cal, I should have fucking let you rot in Seaforth.”
Something struck him on the crown of his head and stars spread across the sea of darkness that was his vision. Breathing heavily, he grunted and tried to keep his mind clear, despite the blow.
What the hell do they think they’re doing? How…what…Carson’s alive?
He swallowed hard, thinking back to what he had told the Cloak.
Carson’s dead. Yes, I did it myself.
“Fuck,” he swore, deciding to change tactics. “What do you want from me, Robert? Where are you taking me?”
This time, there was no answer.
Sean closed his eyes and tried to remain calm.
Only he couldn’t do it. The anger that built up inside him was too great.
How could I be so stupid? Duped by Robert and his delinquent friends? By Aiden?
Sean thrashed against his bindings, and then threw his body forward. Completely blind, his face smashed up against what could have only been the back of the front seat. But this didn’t stop him.
He had to get them to stop the car, to pull the hood off. To speak to him.
He immediately rocked to his left, jamming his shoulder up against the door. Something creaked, and he felt the window bow. Encouraged, he threw his body against the window again, and it bowed even more.
“He’s going to break the fucking window! Grab him!”
Sean felt hands grab his arms, but he violently shook his shoulders back and forth, preventing them from getting a solid grip. He launched his head around blindly like a weapon, leading with his forehead, and eventually it cracked against something hard.
Someone cried out, and he felt something hot and wet soak the top of the bag. For a brief moment, the hands on his wrists released, and Sean took this opportunity to throw himself at the window for a third time.
It was an act of simple, blind rage. No forethought went into it, into the consequences; his only goal was for them to stop the car, to stop moving farther and farther away from likely the only person that could help them. The man who could protect them against Carson.
Sacred Heart Orphanage (The Haunted Book 5) Page 8
