“It’s pretty hazy right now.”
“That’s fine. Just tell me what you remember.”
“Okay. Well, the hospital was letting Abby check-out this morning. I went to see if they needed any help, but Abby and Paul had checking-out down to a science. Abby asked if I could come and see the new place.”
I nodded to myself. Paul probably would have extended the invite, but Abby was going somewhere new. She’d have been uncertain, daunted by the new living situation. Helena was a comparative port of safety and familiarity, no doubt given unofficial status as an aunt. It made sense that the girl would want some kind of support system around her while she assessed her new, temporary home. Helena paused and I could see her concentrating, almost willing her battered brain to dredge up details.
“We were going to stop somewhere and get food, but Abby said she wasn’t that hungry. She looked ill, pale, and sweaty, like she was running a fever. So Paul drove her back here, and I followed them.”
“You came in your own vehicle?” Patty asked.
“What? Oh, yeah, I drove my rental.”
Helena kept looking down at her bloodied clothes. They were distracting her when her mind was already working below par, slowing the process. I caught Patty’s eye and held up a finger. She gave me a frown, but nodded.
“Helena,” I said, “do you have any clean clothes in your car?”
She blinked at me a few times and said, “I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Keys?”
She squinted at me. “Jacket pocket, I think. By the door.”
While Helena did her best to answer Patty’s questions, I went out to her rental car and dug around. I didn’t find clean clothes, but there was a shirt on the backseat that didn’t look or smell too soiled. It had to be better than the bloody thing she was wearing. I took it inside. Helena excused herself to go change, with a warning from Patty not to throw the bloody shirt away. It might be evidence. Patty’s shoulders were hunched and her face pinched in apprehension.
“Tucker took that girl. I need to call in some help. State police, maybe the feds. Kidnappings are almost always federal territory.”
“No,” I said.
“We’ll have to organize search parties to—” her eyes went wide. “Did you just say no?”
“I said no.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten who the deputy is in this room. You don’t get to decide this.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything, Acting Sheriff Michelson. I’ve played this your way, out of respect for your expertise, and because it was the smart move. But now it’s time for you to listen to me. Calling a bunch of people with badges and guns in here won’t help Abby. You saw my back. Tucker did that after I set him on fire. He did that after all of this.”
I swept my hand around the room. Paul and Helena had stood their ground and the living room was in shambles. Furniture was toppled. Books were scattered everywhere and shattered glass made every step a calculated gamble. The blood on the floor was drying into a black pool and looked downright eerie. Patty’s face was going a nasty shade of red that let me know a volcano was about to explode in my face. I didn’t let her get a word in edgewise.
“He isn’t a human being anymore, Patty. No human being could have done all this, taken a terrified girl somewhere, and then come to pick a fight with me. By the way, I basically lost that fight. He’s beyond dangerous and he’s not the entrée. He’s the appetizer. Besides, you don’t need a search party. I know where he took her.”
Patty had worked herself up for a serious screaming at me. That last derailed the fury train, at least temporarily, with pure shock.
“You know? How the hell can you know?”
“Easy. I know what’s giving him his orders and where it is. I also know why it wants her. Tucker took her to it.”
“Where?”
“The school.”
“The school! Why the hell would Tucker take her there?”
“So his master can kill the girl,” said Helena.
“So he’s working with someone,” said Patty.
Helena spared me a look. “She doesn’t want to see it.”
I shrugged. “I know.”
“You’ll have to show her.”
“Why me?”
“Because she knows you,” said Helena.
Despite Helena not actually saying the word “dumbass,” I swore I heard it. I held up a hand to acknowledge her point. “Water, do you think?”
“Probably the safest approach,” she agreed.
“Excuse me,” said Patty, “but would you mind clueing me in here? Show what to who? And what does any of this have to do with what’s happening?”
I sighed, certain of how it would go over, but I said it anyway. “It has everything to do with what’s happening. I’m going to show you magic, Patty. The real deal, live, right before your eyes.”
“Yeah, sure you will,” said Patty.
I ignored her.
“Helena, will you get a glass of—wait, no, scratch that. Patty, will you please get a glass of water. Plain tap water from the sink.”
“Why?”
“Please, just humor me for a minute.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then you’ll explain what you’re on about?”
“Yes,” I said, then added, “and, I’m sorry.”
“For what?” She asked.
I shook my head. “You’ll understand in a minute.”
Chapter 44
“You could have just drawn the water from the air,” said Helena.
“Yeah, but I need her to know it’s really water and that it’s just water.”
“Are you up for this?”
“Does it matter?”
It came out harsher than I meant it to, but that happens when I’m in pain and feeling backed into a corner. Time was slipping through my fingers and I had to do parlor tricks to keep Patty from getting a bunch of people killed with her good intentions. Sometimes, I really do believe it would be easier to just put on a black hat and call it a day. Unfortunately, I couldn’t fill out a black hat any more than a white one. I had too much of a moral code for the one, too little for the other. It’s a gray old life for me.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m feeling time crunched.”
Helena gave me a sympathetic look as Patty came back into the room with a tall glass of water in one hand.
“Okay. I got the glass of water. Now what?”
Helena gave Patty a steady, serious look. “Throw the water at him.”
“Is this some kind of joke? If it is, I’ll arrest you both.”
“It’s not a joke. Throw the water at me.”
Patty looked at me, shrugged, and flung the water at me. It flew at me in a liquid arc and, with a wholly unnecessary flourish of my hand, stopped in midair. Patty’s eyes went very wide. I raised my other hand and threw my arms out to each side. The water split into two portions, coalescing into two small spheres of water that hovered about six inches from the palms of each hand. Like I said, the few things I can do directly are flashy as hell, if not terribly useful. I concentrated and the spheres of water drew out into two snakelike shapes. I sent them spinning around me and, sometimes, through each other. Then I split them into four separate snakes of water, then six, forcing them into ever more convoluted patterns around me. Patty looked torn between wanting to scream and utter fascination.
I sent the snakes of water twirling, spinning, and twining around Helena and Patty. Helena laughed in delight. It was her favorite party trick. Patty stood stock still, as if she was certain that coming into contact with the water would prove lethal. The reality was that she’d just get a little bit wet. The effort of sustaining the magic started to take a toll, so I summoned the water back to me. I gather it into one ball and walked over to Patty.
“Would you mind holding that glass up?” I asked.
She held the glass up in a trembling hand, her face devoid of color. I dumped the water back into the glass and felt a pressure th
at had been building on the interior of my forehead vanish. I sagged a little. The mental effort cost me more than I expected. I forced myself to stand up straight and plucked the cup from Patty’s hand before she started spilling water all over her crime scene. I took a few sips and grimaced.
“God, I hate the taste of chlorine,” I said.
Patty kept looking around, like she really wanted to believe that I’d set this whole thing up somehow and that she’d see the wires and mirrors if she looked hard enough. I waited it out and tried to ignore the voice in the back of my head that was screaming about the time.
“Mother of God,” said Patty, her eyes finally settling on me. “How did you do that?”
“I told you how before we started. It was magic.”
Her mouth worked back and forth, up and down, several times. I expect it went dry on her. What Patty faced wasn’t as hard as what Abby had faced, but it was still a mind-twisting experience of the first order. I took a little pity on her.
“Don’t take it so hard. In this, you’re the civilian. Here’s the big takeaway. What I just did was nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing! It’s impossible. It’s—”
“It’s a cheap trick. Take it from the guy who just did it. The thing inside Tucker can probably do a hundred times as much, now that it’s got direct access to the material world. The even bigger thing it serves is a thousand times more powerful and dangerous. All that’s keeping it from crushing this town and everyone in it is Abby. If it kills her, we all die. If you call in the state troopers and the feds, one of two things happens. They shove me in a room and ask questions until it kills Abby. Then we all die. Two, they ignore me, storm the school, and it kills Abby anyway. Then, we all die.”
Patty tried to shake off the shock the way she had with the holy water, but she couldn’t. That had been a flash of light that came and went in a blink. It was easy to explain away or ignore. My party trick lasted too long to discount or explain away without a lot of time and serious effort.
“So what then? We leave her there to die?”
“No. I’ll go in after her. Try to get her clear before the thing in the school is strong enough to finish the deed.”
She stared at me. “So you really could fight it. You could fight it all along and you let Jeremy kill himself!”
Patty made a move for her sidearm. Helena caught her hand before it made contact with the grip.
“No,” she said. “He can’t fight it.”
“But, he just said—I don’t understand.”
“I’m going in, but not to fight. I don’t have any weapons that will kill it. I don’t even know if I can hurt it. I might be able to reason with it or trick it.”
Helena held up a hand. “I’ve had a thought about that.”
Hope welled up inside of me. “What?”
“Why did it use smoke bindings on the dead?”
I tried to make sense of the change in direction. I tossed my hands up in the air. “Punishment, I assume. It’s taking vengeance on them.”
“But why? It only needed them dead to break the blood chain. Every action it has taken so far has been methodical, driven toward the end of freeing itself. Expending power to bind their souls after they were dead serves no purpose, unless they pose a threat to it.”
I did a lot of very fast thinking, trying to play catch up with Helena’s insight. The theory worked. Individually, no single human soul was a threat to it, but it had been killing people for a long time. The souls of hundreds of murdered people were trapped in that graveyard. I had no clue what that translated to in terms of actual power to wield, but it had to be significant. Plus, all those souls had an axe to grind. I nodded.
“Sure, it makes sense, but it doesn’t do any good. They’re trapped. Free, they might be a viable weapon or a distraction, but they aren’t free.”
Helena gave me a sober look. “But they could be.”
“In theory, yes, if we had the Pope or a bodhisattva handy.”
“I can do it,” she said. “Your friends already told us how.”
I didn’t speak for a long time. I didn’t dare. When I was certain I could use actual words again, I spoke with as much calm as I could. “Absolutely not. You damn well know that there’s a huge difference between knowing how to do something and actually pulling it off. Even The Twins weren’t sure if you could do it.”
“I can do this,” she insisted.
“Even if you can, at what price?”
Helena studied my face for a minute. “She’s fifteen years old, Adrian. She’s spent most of her time in one hospital or another. Her whole life has been about this nightmare. I couldn’t live with not trying. Besides,” she said, her expression hard and brittle at the same time, “who are you to lecture me about prices?”
“That’s different,” I said.
Patty looked at Helena. “Wait, what do you mean? About prices?”
“She doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
Helena turned her face away. “Adrian knows that if he goes into that school, what’s waiting inside will almost certainly kill him.”
“And you know that if you attempt to undo those bindings and fail, it’ll almost certainly kill you.”
I felt the weight of Patty’s eyes on me and glanced at her. She looked at me, then at Helena, and I saw some kind of understanding on her face.
“Why?” Patty asked, the incredulity gone from her face.
“Because the magic she wants to try is about as dangerous as building an atomic bomb in your basement. Anything goes wrong, anything at all, and it’s harps and halos time,” I said.
“That isn’t what she means,” said Helena.
“It isn’t?”
“She wants to know why you’d do this.”
I thought for a moment. “For the same reason you shouldn’t try to unmake those bindings. When you get right down to it, the world won’t suffer if I don’t come out of this. It will suffer if you’re not in the picture, Helena. It’ll suffer if Abby doesn’t come out of it. She’s filled with all the potential of youth. She’s kind. There’s not enough of that in the world. There’s plenty more like me.”
Helena made one of those choked sounds that I knew was someone trying to quell something impossibly painful. There wasn’t much I could do about that.
“God, you’re stupid,” said Patty, rubbing at her eyes. “Okay, let’s say I’m willing to entertain this until I realize how insane it all sounds. Can you actually get Abby clear?”
Helena gave Patty a sharp glance. It was understandable. Helena probably expected a protracted argument or the need for a lengthy explanation. I’d laid the groundwork, though, and kept adding to it very nearly every time Patty and I crossed paths. Whether Patty liked it or not, knew it or not, she was primed to accept the supernatural as a real possibility. She’d just needed the evidence put in front of her eyes.
“It’s—” I hesitated, “possible that I can get her clear.”
She glowered at me. “Can you do it without shutting down these smoke things?”
“I’d say that,” I tried to hedge some more.
“No,” said Helena. “He can’t reasonably expect to get her out without a big-enough distraction.”
Patty rubbed at her eyes again before she looked at Helena. “How sure are you that you can do it?”
“I can do it,” said Helena, then she looked at me. “And I’m going to do it.”
I knew it was a losing battle. She was going to act with or without my help. I tried to think it through, as one part of my brain gibbered the word “time” in an endless loop, and another suggested that I was an idiot for bringing Helena into this mess. I racked my brain for something to improve the odds of success. Barring that, I’d settle for something that minimized the chances of Helena dying in the backlash if she somehow broke the bindings. Sure, Cavanaugh said she’d survive, but I didn’t put much stock in anything Cavanaugh said.
Another little part of my mind decided
to remind me how this was all E.J. Cavanaugh’s fault. Then it suggested how disappointed it was that his current condition prevented me from breaking his nose. I tried to check my anger at the thought of Cavanaugh hiding in his nice, safe, bomb shelter. My mind stuttered there, fixated on the idea, and refused to let go.
“Bomb shelter,” I mumbled.
Helena and Patty spoke in unison. “What?”
I looked at Helena. “What you need is a bomb shelter.”
With that, a plan took form. It was a terrible plan, with about a one-in-a-million shot of success, but it beat the one-hundred-percent certainty of death I’d faced just moments before. I smiled at Helena and Patty, and then I told them my plan.
Chapter 45
People much more experienced than me in the art of war say that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Since I started with that as a fixed truth, I eschewed any kind of exotic, multi-step plan that required every single thing to go right. I went basic. Then we all went to work. It took a couple hours of my fast-dwindling time to get things set up. By the time we were ready, I was resisting the urge to glance at the nigh-setting sun every half-second or so. The three of us stood outside the gate of the graveyard. Helena looked eerily detached and I had a sense that she was already deep inside the gears of the magic she was going to perform. I handed Patty a sheet of paper. Most of my two hours were spent working on it. She frowned down at the scrawled Enochian letters.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“Think of it as, I don’t know, marching orders. I need to make sure that the souls here have a direct path to the school. That paper will do that. Here’s the important thing. As soon as Helena says it’s done, burn the paper.”
“That’s it?”
“Trust me,” I said, “it’s more than enough.”
“I don’t like this, Hartworth. I should be going in with you. What if Tucker’s there?”
“I’m sure he will be. I expect he plans to murder me.”
“And you don’t think that warrants some backup?”
“Stick with the plan. When Helena’s done, burn that and help her into Cavanaugh’s tomb. It should shield her from the worst of the backlash.”
The Midnight Ground Page 29
