“No,” Sean moaned, stumbling backward. His back slammed into the door. “No, it can’t be, please, no, no, no…”
Someone hammered on the door behind him, trying to get out, but he took no notice.
And in that moment, Sean realized why the Cloak hadn’t gotten upset at the report that Carson was dead—it was because he had been still alive.
A mother just knew.
“Please,” he sobbed.
Chapter 48
As soon as Robert turned the corner, he was thrown into a reverie like a lobster into boiling water.
His eyes rolled back and his heels skidded on the dust-covered floor as his body came to an almost cartoonish stop.
He was at his desk sitting beside his brother, staring at the stern-faced teacher in front of him. She was pretty, but strict. Fair, but deliberate.
“Who knows what this says?” she asked, pointing to the Latin words on the chalkboard.
Of course Robert knew what they were, but he didn’t raise his hand right away. He didn’t want to look like the teacher’s pet, like he was getting special treatment. He looked over at his brother, but the boy didn’t seem to be paying attention.
Typical.
“Anyone?”
Eventually, Robert raised his hand, and his mother immediately pointed at him.
“Robert?”
“It says Inter vivos et mortuos, and it means the land between the living and the dead.”
Robert returned to the present with a stumble, barely stopping himself before he fell flat on his face.
Something bad had happened here, something horrible.
Something horrible had happened to his friends, to his mother.
But he couldn’t deal with that now, couldn’t even think about it. Right now, he had to find Shelly.
His mind took him to the room near the back of the orphanage.
The one that he used to have lessons in long ago.
Without thinking, he burst through the door to the room, then immediately stopped short.
“Ah, my dear brother. I expected you to show, but so soon? Always the more eager student, isn’t that right?”
Robert’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed the scene before him.
Carson was in the center of the room, naked, and he was surrounded by what looked like a harem of young boys. Near the back of the class, he caught sight of Michael, and more of the quiddity like the ones at the front door. The corpses were surrounding three people that he didn’t recognize, all of whom looked injured. All of whom were alive.
“Let them go,” Robert demanded, taking another step forward.
“Who?” Carson asked, smiling. The boys and one girl that surrounded him all hung their heads low, but Robert felt that there was something familiar about them nonetheless.
“The men at the back of the room. Let them go.”
Carson laughed.
“Them? Who are they? A bunch of cops that don’t know anything. Who cares about them? I thought you would want me to release—”
Robert’s eyes narrowed.
Shelly.
But when Carson raised his hand and the kids looked up, Robert realized that he wasn’t talking about Shelly at all.
“—your old friends. Our old friends.”
No, he was talking about the boys and the one girl.
Tears immediately welled in Robert’s eyes as he recognized some of their faces, and he was taken back to his childhood again.
He was in a tunnel of sorts, some sort of aluminum tube, looking down through a grate. The kids were there, as well as the teacher, his mother, and they were running. But there was someone else there, too, someone in a faded jean jacket and black hat.
One by one, he cut them down with a blade, slicing their soft little throats, spearing them in their thin bellies. But what he did to the woman was the worst. He took his time with her, cutting hunks of flesh off her face as she screamed for the boys and girls that were lying in puddles of their own blood.
Robert was brought back to the present by Carson’s droning laughter.
“You really didn’t remember, did you?”
Robert wiped the tears from his face.
“Let them go,” he sobbed, but his voice lacked the authority of a few minutes ago. Deep down, he could feel Helen starting to rise, wanting to come to the fore again, to exact her vengeance on Carson, who had given him so much pain.
He pushed back.
Carson shook his head in disbelief.
“You know, I had my doubts that Leland could enact this whole plan, I seriously did. I mean, to make you forget…to bring you and Shelly together. Genius, really. And to manipulate that bastard Sean, that was classic.”
Robert felt his heart pounding away in his chest.
“Wh—what?” he stammered.
Carson laughed again.
“You still don’t get it, do you?”
Robert felt his head start to spin as he considered the implications of what Carson was saying.
Leland was behind all of this? Behind everything?
“Yes, Robert. Everything. He even caused the accident, sent one of his bumbling quiddity in front of Wendy’s car that night during the storm. The lightning storm.”
Robert felt so dizzy that he dropped to one knee.
“Yes, Robert. And Amy. You see, Leland had been following you for some time. He knew about Wendy and her affair, he knew that it wouldn’t be enough to just take Wendy—he needed to take Amy from you, too.”
“No,” Robert moaned. “It’s not true.”
“Oh, it’s true, Robert. And if you don’t believe me, just hang around for another few minutes, and you can ask him yourself.”
Chapter 49
“But…but I saw you die,” Sean whispered. “Robert saw you die.”
“I didn’t die,” Chloe Black croaked. “He tried to kill me, but he didn’t.”
Sean swallowed hard and stared at her face. It was horrible; she was bald, and her scalp was viciously gnarled, like the rolls on the back of a fat man’s neck.
But her face was worse. She had no nose, just a hole in the center, and her left eye was missing. From her cheeks down, the skin was flayed; in some spots, it hadn’t healed completely, even after all these years. She had no lips; her mouth was but a slit just above her chin.
And the mutilation didn’t stop there. There was a long vertical gash running across her throat, which explained why her voice was so horribly disfigured.
“But those kids…I could only save a few of them, bring a few them inside.” Her one good eye drifted upward.
Sean shook his head as he remembered the carnage looking down through the gate in the vent. There was no way that the boys could have survived; in fact, it was only by some miracle that Chloe was still here.
All this time, he’d had no idea.
And yet, it didn’t change anything. Didn’t change the facts. Didn’t change the danger.
“If that baby in there is born…” He let his sentence trail off for a moment, before shaking his head. “We can’t allow it to be born.”
“Sean,” Chloe rasped. “Don’t make me do this.”
Sean stood up straight and stepped forward.
“Do what?”
“This,” she growled. Before he could react, she extended her hands and bowed her head. And then it started.
At first, Sean didn’t know what was happening. But then he started to feel a pull, deep down in the pit of his stomach. It was like the feeling he got in his chest when the quiddity were around, but this time it felt like something was coming out of him.
“What are you doing?” he said, but the words were drawn out, and he barely recognized his own voice.
Chloe bore down, and Sean felt a bout of dizziness come over him. He was reminded of a time long ago, many decades prior, when he had first met Chloe and learned about the Marrow. When she had first made him a Guardian.
But now she was taking it all away.
Sean
took a step forward, but he was off balance and fell to one knee.
The pulling sensation rose up through the pit of his stomach and into his chest. He threw his head back and tried to scream, but the only thing that came out was a horribly dry, croaking sound.
He was on all fours now, but even crawling was beyond his abilities. His head was spinning, remembering his time first here at the orphanage, then with Callahan, dropping off the boys, and then hunting Leland down.
Sean shook his head, trying to clear it, to focus, to stand, to figure out what the fuck the scarred woman in front of him was doing.
But it was no use.
He felt something rise up into his throat, and then it felt like his soul was pulled right out of his mouth. His youth, his essence, everything that made him a Guardian, was gone, stolen by the very person who had given them to him in the first place.
Sean collapsed to the ground, reduced to a steam and heat rising off of him.
Somewhere far away, he heard Chloe speak.
“I’m sorry, Sean. I just couldn’t let this happen.”
He felt a brush of hot air as Chloe walked by and pulled the door to the room behind him wide. Sean, an empty shell now, somehow managed to pull himself to his feet and stagger down the hallway.
Chapter 50
Ed could feel his strength fading, and putting pressure on the wound in his side didn’t seem to be stem the flow. He could feel his blood pulsing from between his fingers.
Never in his right mind had he thought that tracking Michael Young would put him here. The man called Robert was standing in front of the dead, and he was determined to make one last stand.
But seeing what he had, seeing what Carson had done, Ed didn’t know of a way that he could possibly succeed.
“What the shit?” he grumbled. Michael turned toward him in response to his curse, just as Ed got a surprising second wind. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed the man’s arm and pivoted, spinning him around. Michael had been so rapt in what was happening between Carson and Robert that he was taken by surprise.
“No!” he shouted, struggling to right himself. He was on one foot, just an inch or two from one of the dead. Ed tried to make it to his feet, to reach out and shove the man, but the pain in his side was too great and he slumped back against the wall.
Michael smiled.
“You stupid—”
But then Hugh, who had said and done nothing ever since they had arrived at Sacred Heart Orphanage, reached out with his foot and delivered a kick to Michael’s left knee.
The smile fell off his face as he fell backward, crashing into a man that had burns all over one side of his body. At first, nothing happened. In fact, if anything, the dead man actually broke his fall. But then the quiddity seemed to activate upon human touch. His arms snaked around Michael’s body and he started to grab on. Michael tried to shove him off, but the man’s grip was doing something to him.
He started to shake, and his eyes rolled back. And then the whites disappeared, as if ink were dropped into a hole in his skull and then drifted downward, swirling around his eyes until they went completely black.
As if the events of today hadn’t already been enough, Ed saw the man actually start to fade, become slightly translucent at first, before disappearing.
Ed shut his own eyes and allowed the darkness to spread over him like a warm blanket.
Chapter 51
“No!” Carson shouted. Robert glanced over the man’s shoulder and saw a commotion with the detectives and the dead.
Robert wiped his tears away and spurred to action. Using the disturbance as a distraction, he moved around Carson, away from the dead children, and hurried to the back of the room.
“Stop!” Carson shouted, but Robert just kept moving. He wouldn’t let any more people die.
Carson made a sound, a horrible, guttural noise, and the quiddity surrounding the detectives started to turn, to look at him with their horrible black eyes.
Helen, I hope you’re ready for this.
And then Robert fell away, dropping down into the pit of his stomach, allowing the woman to take over. She had been repressed, beaten, murdered by her husband, and in a way, he supposed that her power from beyond the grave was some sort of tangible revenge.
Revenge for everyone who had wronged her.
She grabbed the first quiddity by the throat and tore it out. The second she grabbed by the arm and spun him around. Her other hand caught his chin and yanked against the turn, snapping his neck. Both collapsed quiddity started shaking, and then turned into thick black clouds like the kind that Robert had seen at the entrance to the orphanage.
The third exploded from a high-pressure rifle blast that took out nearly his entire mid-section. Robert felt his body recoil in confusion, but when the fourth quiddity bore down, Helen dispatched him as easily as the other two.
“No!” Carson roared. “What are you doing? Robert! Robert!”
But Robert was only a passenger now.
Two of the three detectives, a young man with blond hair and another, a little bit older with red-rimmed eyes, looked up at him, matching terrified expressions on their faces. The other was breathing heavily, blood spilling from his side.
Carson bellowed again, and now Robert pushed himself upward, displacing the exhausted Helen.
Then he spun around.
“Carson! Let the kids go! They can’t harm me! They can’t take me to the Marrow.”
Chapter 52
Chloe could feel Sean inside of her, his essence filling her very being. But this wasn’t the first time that she had absorbed someone’s quiddity, their soul.
She had done it before in this very place, saving three of the young boys as their lives eked out of them from the wounds delivered by her husband.
By the Goat.
She pushed Sean down with the others.
And then she threw the door to the boiler room open.
“Let her go,” she croaked.
Bella peeked out from behind Shelly’s head, a knife to her throat. For a second, her eyes went wide, and then she grimaced at the sight of Chloe’s mangled face. But she quickly regained her composure. It was clear that, after being with Carson for so long, barely anything surprised her now.
“I don’t fucking think so. Carson wants her, wants her baby. Says it’s important. She is coming with me.”
Chloe drew in a deep, gasping breath.
“No!” Bella shouted. “I heard what you did to Sean. You so much as breathe and I’ll drive this blade deep into her soft neck. And then I’ll cut the little fucking fetus out of her.”
To prove that she was serious, she dug the knife into Shelly’s throat, making a dimple in her skin.
Shelly gasped and tried to move, but Bella’s grip held fast.
“Don’t fucking move.”
Chloe was frozen. If she’d had a proper brow, it would have knitted; if she’d still had tear ducts, tears would have spilled forth.
But she had neither.
“Back up. Back the fuck up.”
Chloe had no choice but to obey, stepping out of the room.
It didn’t make sense that she had overtaken a Guardian, one of the few Guardians remaining, and reduced him to the withering old man that he was, and yet this woman, this small woman with the weird haircut, had gotten the upper hand.
But staring at Shelly’s terrified face, at her burgeoning belly, Chloe knew that this part of the day was lost.
But the battle was far from over.
Very, very far from being done.
“Good, now keep backing up,” Bella ordered as she shuffled with Shelly out in front of her.
No matter what happened, Carson and Leland wouldn’t do anything to Shelly, not with the precious cargo that she carried.
They still had five months to save them all.
To save everyone that was still living.
Chapter 53
A shot rang out, and Robert instinctively ducked. Only
it wasn’t intended for him. In fact, he didn’t think it was intended for anyone. It was a warning shot from Aiden.
He didn’t want to shoot the kids.
Carson, on the other hand, strode forward as if nothing had happened, the children from both their pasts filing in behind him.
“Have you ever thought about it, Robert? About what decision you would make on the shores of the Marrow?”
Robert moved toward Carson.
“What happened to you, Carson? What happened that changed everything about who you are?”
Carson threw his head back and laughed.
“Ah the irony! What happened to me? What happened to me? Isn’t that the question, hmm? What makes me me? What makes an individual unique?” He leaned in close, until their faces were mere inches apart. “That is what matters. That is the only thing that matters.”
Helen, are you—?
But his thought was stolen from him when someone shambled into the room.
Robert pulled away, instinctively moving his arms behind him, doing his best to protect the humans at his back.
Carson also retreated, although not as violently as Robert had.
A man shambled into the room. An old man, hunched, withered, barely able to hold himself upright. At first, Robert thought that it was the Cloak.
And then the man raised his head, and Robert recognized the pale blue eyes, the line of a mouth, even though it was much older than he remembered.
It was Sean Sommers.
Recognition crossed Carson’s face as well, and Robert suddenly realized what was about to happen.
“No!” he screamed, taking a step forward, but someone grabbed his arm. He tried to shrug the hand away, but it was too strong. “No!”
Carson strode toward Sean, who looked like he was having a hard time breathing, let alone walking. And then the students, the quiddity of the dead Guardians, moved with him.
As Robert watched, helpless to do anything, the kids, his friends, started to hold hands, forming a single-file line.
Sacred Heart Orphanage (The Haunted Book 5) Page 17
