“Josie, we have to go outside in the rain.” I slung my jacket back on over the holster. “I’m going to carry you upstairs, but if there are any bad guys up there, I’ll have to drop you. You just run outside, okay? Run for the car.”
She nodded mutely, sagging against the wall.
Josie looked up at me, the shirt wrapped around her body. “Where is everyone else? Did they cut them up?”
“I don’t know, zolotsye’. But we have to go now.” I offered her a hand. After a moment, she accepted. Her fingers trembled against my palm.
Before now, I’d thought of the Morphorde as something blunt and simple. Demons flying at your face, monsters under your bed. People like Jana, whose Neshamah was damaged and crazy, or Lev, who was merely power-hungry. Committed misanthropes like Sergei and Nicolai. What I hadn’t considered was that some Morphorde, maybe most Morphorde, wore masks. Maybe they didn’t know they were evil, or maybe they could live two lives, one wholesome, one tainted. A man could walk into a spotless hospital with a clean lab coat and a white smile, and come home to… this.
As I expected, Josie could barely stand, let alone walk. When we reached the stairs, I didn’t even pause to think, to resent the contact or the responsibility as I swung her up into my arms, bundled her under my coat, and carried her out of Hell.
Chapter 25
I reversed the car into the driveway besides Strange Kitty and all the way back to the garage entry, scattering bystanders loitering under umbrella stands and tarp marquees. The rain was still hammering down as I flung the doors open, collected Josie into my arms, and ran with her – limp and exhausted beyond consciousness – into the relative warmth and safety of the clubhouse.
Talya was in some kind of intense conversation with Zane on one of the sofas against the far wall, watching three of the Tigers shoot pool. When the door banged open, they were first up on their feet.
“Rex!” Talya cried out as I swept past the confused pack of Weeders and headed for the door leading into the house. “What is- oh my god.”
Both of them were right behind me on our way to the bunkroom. I lay Josie down on one of the spare beds, limp and unresponsive. She’d lapsed into a faint sometime on the way home.
I checked her pupils and her breathing, stripping my gloves to feel for her pulse. “She needs fluids and careful warming. Get me the first aid kit… I have a bag of saline in there.”
“Where is it?” Talya asked, her voice high and panicked.
“Here, Tally. I got it.” Zane was already pulling it across the floor from the end of my bed. The street surgery kit was far too large to fit underneath.
I worked quickly, vaguely aware that I still smelled like a charnel ground. I doused my hands in alcohol, pulled on gloves, and set up the needle. We hung the bag from the ladder leading up to the top bunk. I had swabbed Josie clean and was just sliding the needle into the crook of her arm when Jenner stalked into the room.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, out of breath. She smelled of liquor and cigarette smoke. “You found them? Where the living fuck did you-”
“Only one,” I said, concentrating on landing the needle in the vein.
“Oh God. Jesus fucking Christ.” Jenner crouched down by the head of the bed, one of her hands matted through her hair. Behind me, I heard the soft sounds of someone crying.
I tapped the needle, and a small amount of blood flushed back into the tube. I connected the line and opened the flow, and fluid began to wind its way down from the drip chamber. When I was sure it was working the way it was supposed to, I crouched back on my heels and let out a harsh, tense breath.
“’Research’, huh?” Jenner said. She was staring at me, her eyes hard and black.
“I told you. I hit up one of my contacts today.” My voice was cracked, breaking on every other word. “He pointed me to a dodgy transplant surgeon who recently started making a lot of money off children’s organs. I went there to pay him a visit, thinking I could get a lead. He was dead. There was… it… Lily and Dru’s murderer got to him first. Josie was in his basement. She was the only child in the place.”
“Those fucks. They knew we’d find him and they shut him up,” Jenner bounced to her feet, wire-strung. I could hear and smell a clamor of people gathering at the open bedroom door. “What about the others?”
“Two dead,” I said. I swallowed: my throat felt like it was full of sand. “The Blank boys. Moris Falkovich killed them.”
“What the fuck, Rex?” Jenner was pacing back and forth. “What the actual fuck is wrong with people?”
How could I tell her? That the men I knew – Nicolai, Petro, Sergei and Vanya – knew that car parts sell better than whole vehicles? That a healthy kidney was worth a hundred grand on the street? That at least one young mage’s organs, innocently charged with Phi, were being stripped and loaded into the sons and daughters of wealthy people, people who felt their children deserved life more than an anonymous stolen child?
I swallowed, trying to wet my mouth. “I took Falkovich’s computer. He had a computer in his office… it might have evidence on it. Whoever was in there took or destroyed all his paperwork. I don’t know how to search for information on the machine.”
“I do. I’ll find any files that are on there.” Talya sounded thick, her voice tearing like yellow paper in my mouth. “If anything was deleted, I can recover them.”
“Where on Earth did you learn that?” I knelt back, dry-mouthed and woozy.
“I manage I.T at the Museum,” she replied. “That’s my job there… I’m part of the I.T systems project team for the Smithsonian. Can we set up a table near an outlet?”
The question was directed at the room more than it was at any one person. I stood and swayed, catching myself before I stumbled and hit my head against the railing of the bunk. Everything turned black for a moment, and I suddenly found myself on the other side of the room, my arm resting over Zane’s shoulder as he sat us down.
“You need to rest,” he said. “You’re about to pass out.”
“The house was really very unpleasant,” I said. It made sense in my head to point that out. “The computer is in the car outside. You should probably take it somewhere else and leave it far away from here. The car, that is.”
“No worries. But you need to lie down.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” I replied. “I might have hit my head a few times.”
He and Talya ended up arranging pillows into a mound and resting me back against them. My head was pounding with slow, thunderous pain that gathered between my eyes and knocked in time with each heartbeat. When someone gave me pills and water, I didn’t bother to check what they were. I took them, and as soon as the light was turned out, I fell asleep.
It was still dark when I next roused. The moon was full and fat outside the window, and while it was still windy enough to make the panes rattle, the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared. My headache had gone from an eight to a five, but I felt queasy and parched. Binah was curled in a tight ball between my ankles, while Josie slept on her bed on the other side of the room. Her saline bag was nearly empty.
Groggily, I threw back more painkillers and chased it down with an anti-nausea tablet, then rummaged through my medical supplies. I’d been doing more healing than killing since leaving the Organizatsiya, and I had fewer bags of sterile fluids than I had boxes of ammunition. The necessity of going to a pharmacist and restocking was on my mind as I stumbled out into the house, expecting it to be quiet. Instead, the lights were blazing and the common room was laid out like an armory.
Jenner, Zane, Duke and Talya were still awake. The Tigers were finishing getting ready for a bear-hunt: soft body armor, leather jackets, boots, helmets, crossbows and shotguns. They had assembled the computer on the bar counter. Talya was working at the keyboard, scanning lines of white text as it tumbled down a featureless black screen.
“Has something happened?” I moved forwards, relatively steady on my feet. Sokolsky
men have always been notoriously resilient to head trauma.
“It’s five in the morning and Mason hasn’t come back,” Jenner said, her voice flat with forced calm. “Neither have John or Michael. Something’s wrong. We’re going there to search, now.”
“Let me get my things,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”
“You sure you’re up for this?” Zane shrugged on his heavy jacket
“Of course.” I cracked my neck and rolled my shoulders, then carefully turned around and wobbled off back the way I came. It was absolutely a lie, but I had no choice – when it starts raining shit, you never get a trickle. It’s always a flood.
Zane and I took the Buick, while Duke and Jenner rode behind and beside us on their hogs, visors down against the spitting rain and gusting wind. Zane chewed a toothpick, worrying it down to fibers while we cleared the city limit and hit the highway out of town. Binah was fixed to my shoulder, her flank pressed against the side of my head, meowing with excitement as she stared out the window. If pirates could have shoulder parrots, I guess I could have a cat.
The sun was just barely warming the horizon when Zane finally spoke. “What do you think we’ll find there?”
“Not a clue,” I replied. In the back of my mind, I was turning around the words I’d use to discuss his fight on Saturday, the one that I needed him to throw. I could be honest, and tell him what finding Celso meant to me, or I could lie and say it was about the children. For the sake of expediency, I was leaning towards the latter.
“I’m worried,” Zane said. “Someone taking out a couple of Christian counselors is one thing. Mason… man. Mason’s a machine.”
I opened my eyes from where I was dozing against the window. Binah was in my lap, now, sleeping in a tight, twitching ball on my knees. “I guess you must know him well.”
“Yeah.” The big man’s jaw worked. He’d lost the toothpick by now: we’d been driving for nearly an hour. “He went to Vietnam because he wanted to fight. Joined the Marines in 1964, went to war in ’65, and stayed until 1969. He was a true believer back then, he told me. But then he met Jenner.”
I’d been a child during the Vietnam War, far too preoccupied with the depredations of my father and my mother’s death to pay it more than cursory attention. The most significant Vietnam War-related event in my life was its end. “Is she… his wife?”
“No. He wishes, but Jenner isn’t really the marrying type.” Zane smiled, momentarily at ease. “She was Viet Cong, though. That’s the weird thing. They started out as enemies. Jenner was really young – only sixteen or so. She was already unit commander of a rural guerilla team, and she ambushed Mason’s unit and cleared them out. Killed them all. Mason shifted to survive, and she saw it and had to shift to fight him off and protect her men. She kicked his ass and saved their lives, but then her unit and their command basically went and lynched her.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Humans make precious little sense.”
“It’s a pretty common outcome for Weeders. But anyway… somehow, ages after that, she and Mason ended up running into each other in this prison camp. She’d let herself get captured, because she was planning to change and massacre the place. Mason was touring through there with intelligence looking for this one guy they needed to talk to, and he recognized her. So he set up some time with her and they talked. He learned she was an Elder, and the War was lost by then anyway, so they put things aside. He helped her escape and they went to Thailand for a while.”
“I suppose that if you can remember multiple lives, any single war would seem foolish and transient,” I said.
“Yeah. Being an Elder gives you a new perspective on things, I think,” Zane said. “So they organized to split together. I don’t remember the full story of how they got here, but they started the club in 1980 and kept recruiting. I found them when I started fighting. Mason and me went to Thailand together… they’re like my mom and dad.”
I thought about the strong fraternal bond I’d shared with Vassily and was able to draw some kind of parallel. “Mm.”
“Something has to have happened to them.” Zane was shaking his head, mouth grim, brow furrowed. “But I don’t know how. Have you figured out anything about the murders? I mean… you found Josie.”
“I think it’s one person,” I rubbed the joint of thumb and forefinger and stared out at the dark rush of forest from the window. “An individual killer. Maybe hired, maybe on contract, maybe a summoned entity. I’m leaning towards the latter. I don’t think they’re human.”
“What? Why?”
“The computer,” I said. “Everything else had been trashed, including some of the older electronics. It was almost as if whoever was in there didn’t know what it was, to the point that they overlooked it completely. A demon or summoned fetch wouldn’t know what a computer did, even if they’d been instructed to break all of the telephony. It would look like a rock, or a storage hutch or something. Besides that, there’s evidence that the murderer is supernaturally strong and fast. No footprints, no fingerprints. The tendency to leave messages and codes, as well. In the age of forensic evidence, it’s… old-fashioned.”
Zane grunted, rumbling a little in his throat. “Were there messages left at this guy’s house?”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes, recalling the image. When I lay a hand on Binah’s back, it returned vividly. She went still under my fingers as I pet her. “The number thirteen. Two interlocked rings, each with eight marks. The last message was Biblical, so I’m inclined to say 2-16 rather than, say, ‘eighteen’. Thirteen… the thirteenth book of the Bible is 1 Chronicles. New Testament is 1 Thessalonians. Neither of those bring up any strong memories for me… nothing worth leaving a message about.”
“Thirteen’s a gang number. But… Bible content. Four, maybe?”
“Book four is Numbers. Again, nothing especially arresting or descriptive.”
Zane pursed his lips. “What about the letter M? Thirteenth letter of the alphabet.”
M, maybe. M for Mark, or M for Matthew? There were at least five Books that started with that letter. “It could be. I usually have a good memory for these sorts of things, but after tonight… I’ll have to hunt through it when we get back. I’m sure we can find a copy of the Bible somewhere.”
“Yeah.” Zane’s heavy brow furrowed. In the darkness, he looked like a statue at the wheel. “Man. I hope Mason’s okay. If he and the two oldest Elders of the city can’t take on whatever’s there, we sure as hell can’t.”
I sighed. “I’ve known many strong men – and several strong women – who simply ran out of luck.”
“Maybe. Or he’s hunkered down in the forest,” Zane said. “I mean, he’s a goddamned tiger.”
“Is that the gang motto?” I arched an eyebrow. “’We’re the goddamned Tigers?”
“No. As in, he’s literally a white tiger. Weighs like one and a half thousand pounds.” Zane shook his head, and slowed, scanning the trailheads. Jenner ripped past us, turning her head to look, and then waved Zane on as she took a right onto an off-road track.
I stiffened up in my seat as Binah yawned and then stood up with her paws on the dash, fixing ahead on nothing. “I thought it was a faux-pas to reveal someone’s… other form.”
“Secrecy is what got us all into this mess. I don’t think I really care about it anymore.” Zane pulled onto the track, lighting up the way ahead as Jenner slowed down on the slippery track. “Not when people’s lives are at stake. The Fires guys think the Ka is this big holy secret. The Crew are just private about changing, for the most part. But I mean, we call ourselves the Big Cat Crew and don’t worry about it too much.”
Binah looked up at me meaningfully. I could see her in the headlamp shining in through our rear window, though it was pitch dark outside. When our eyes met, I felt something… synapse. A brief connection, a kind of primitive understanding. She had sensed something, transferring her sense of the world to me, even though I had no magical sense of smell of my ow
n. “There’s something out there.”
“What?” Zane carefully steered us around a sharp turn. It felt like we were going downhill.
“I don’t know.” I pulled my flashlight and ritual knife, the engraved one. Using magical objects without being able to do magic was probably not effective, but the grooves held the tea tree oil better than my other knife. “She feels it.”
“Binah?” Zane rubbed the back of his head. “All-Seeing Eye Cat, right?”
“It’s true.” I wound down the window, shining the light out, and sniffed deeply of the cold, damp air.
Ahead of us, Jenner tapped her brake light. She pulled over to the side of the road, leaving her bike running and the headlight on, and waved us down.
We were coming up on a clearing, with a small, sparse meadow in an area of fallen logs. I saw something with an odd shape looming in the shadows of the trees, and my hand tensed on the knife hilt as we pulled up behind her. Zane turned his headlights up, and they lit on the half-hidden form of a white Jeep parked just outside the treeline.
Jenner broke into a run as she pulled her helmet off and threw it heedlessly behind her on her way to the half-seen car. Now that we were stationary, I could make out shapes that were closer by. There was a square block of concrete, strangely enough, and a narrow trail through the grass and fallen logs that led down a small ridge into the forest below.
“Wait! Jenner!” Zane called out, jogging off after her.
But she didn’t wait for us. She fled into the darkness, boots scuffing on the ground, and cried out when she reached the bottom of the trail.
Our flashlight beams swung crazily as we ran to catch up, until light caught the gleam of chrome on the ground. It was Mason’s bike. The huge machine was toppled on its side in the mud, a helmet resting on its crown some distance away. Things had tumbled out of the leather satchels on the sides. Gloves, a wallet, plastic bags.
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