“Stabbed isn’t what happens in a car accident,” said Ethan. “Stabbed is murdered.”
“I was hallucinating.”
“Uh-huh. From what I heard, you described Maisie exactly, even to the clothes she was wearing when she died. How did you hallucinate that?”
Dana felt her heart flutter, and this time it wasn’t because a cute boy was paying attention to her. Those words jolted her like electric shocks. “I guess … I mean, I must have heard something.”
“Like what? What was Maisie to you?”
“I didn’t know her. What was she to you?” Dana countered.
He looked genuinely surprised. “Maisie? Nothing. Except that she was in our school. She was one of us, and now she’s dead. She was like us, but someone killed her.”
“How can you even make a statement like that? She died in a car accident. Maybe I didn’t read about it before, but I read the paper yesterday. The cops saying that it was an accident. That it was her doing something stupid and getting herself killed. No … killing herself, even if by accident. No one did it to her. If there was even a hint of that, the sheriff’s department would have said so.”
“Not everything the cops do makes it into the papers, Dana,” said Ethan. “They keep a lot of details out of the press when there’s an ongoing investigation. It’s how they can tell the difference between someone who claims to know details of a murder and someone who really does.”
“Oh, and you know this how? Watching cop shows on TV?”
“No,” he said. “I know this because my uncle’s a cop. So’s pretty much half my family going back to the thirties.”
“And are they all saying this was murder?”
Ethan paused. “Not … all of them.”
“Meaning?”
“Okay, my uncle Frank thinks there’s something hinky.”
“‘Hinky’?”
“Something wrong. He doesn’t believe that there could be this many teenagers dying in exactly the same way if it was only about doing drugs and driving. Five, Dana? The police collect statistics, and that would be high even in Baltimore or Philly or New York. Uncle Frank convinced his captain to set up a confidential tip line so people can call in if they know something.”
“Has anyone called?”
“Yeah, about a thousand nut jobs who have claimed it’s everything from a secret suicide cult to aliens to some kind of secret shadow-government, conspiracy theory junk.”
“Great,” she said dismally.
“It’s okay,” said Ethan. “There may even be something useful in all those calls. It just takes time to sort through them and analyze the data.”
Dana ate a few small bites while she thought that over. “Are you planning on being a cop, too?”
“Me? Not really. I want to be a forensic scientist.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s someone who works for the sheriff’s department collecting and analyzing evidence. Blood spatter, fingerprints, all sorts of stuff. There’s this saying that ‘contact always leaves a trace,’ and that’s what forensic experts look for. You know in TV shows where the cop says he’s sending something to the lab? That’s the forensics department. That’s where the real police work goes on.”
His enthusiasm and passion were evident, and Dana was impressed.
“And your uncle Frank thinks this is murder?” she asked.
Ethan paused before answering. “I think that’s what he thinks.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Okay,” said Ethan. “He hasn’t come right out and said that they were murdered, but the statistics bother him. He lives with my dad and me, and he made copies of each accident case file and keeps going over them. He definitely thinks they’re connected. Sometimes he’s up all night going over the medical examiner’s report and the crime scene photos.”
“Photos?” Dana almost gagged.
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen them?”
“No…,” said Ethan in a way that made Dana believe he had. “He keeps them in his desk. He said they’d give me nightmares, but that’s not true. I mean, I’m not five years old, right? Besides, I’ve seen autopsy photos in books. I have a strong stomach. You need to have a strong stomach if you’re going to be a forensic scientist.” He cut her a look. “You’re pretty tough, too. You didn’t even flinch when we cut open the frog.”
“I guess. That stuff doesn’t bother me.”
“What does?” asked Ethan.
“Everything about this conversation.”
The bell rang.
“I have gym,” said Ethan. “Look, can we talk more later? After school?”
“I have yoga after school.”
“You do yoga?”
“Yeah, and jujutsu, but that’s tomorrow night.”
He stared at her. “Wow. You are so freaking cool.”
“Shut up.”
“Lunch tomorrow, then, okay? No, wait, they’ll probably give us a half day tomorrow for Maisie’s viewing. Why don’t you come by the science club before you go to yoga? There’s four of us now. I know, it’s not cool. We’re a bunch of nerds, but you might, I don’t know, dig it.”
“Because I’m a nerd?”
“There are worse things to be,” he said, giving her a big smile. “Besides, you do yoga and jujutsu. You can be our token cool girl.”
They walked out together and stopped in the hall. The gym was to the left and her art class was to the right.
“You really think Maisie was murdered?” asked Dana, trying to fit the idea into her head.
“I hope I’m wrong,” said Ethan, and left it there. She watched him walk away.
* * *
As soon as her last class was finished, Dana found Melissa and all but dragged her over to Beyond Beyond. They found their favorite table, and Dana told her sister about what Ethan had said. Everything, including the fact that Ethan’s uncle, an actual detective, thought that the deaths might be suspicious. When she was done, Melissa stared at her with huge eyes. Then she blinked and looked at her watch.
“Crap, I have to do my meditation class,” she said. “Don’t. Go. Anywhere. We really need to talk.”
“I have yoga in an hour,” said Dana. “Let’s talk after.”
“I have advanced yoga after that.” Melissa growled. “Doesn’t matter. Wait for me. I want all the details.”
“But … I just told you everything.”
Melissa stood up and grinned at Dana. “I want all the details about you and Ethan.”
“What? No, I—”
But Melissa left. Behind Dana, the cash register went cha-ching and the speakers overhead played strange music, and the day, already strange, continued to spin and spin.
CHAPTER 24
The Observation Room
2:37 P.M.
Agent Gerlach took a call on the car phone.
“He wasn’t just messing with kids’ minds last night,” said the caller. “He went out for some fun and games, too. We only just now found out about it.”
“Of course,” said Gerlach, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his tired eyes shut. “What did he do this time?”
There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line.
“You still there?” said Gerlach. “Tell me what he did.”
“You’d better come see for yourself.”
“Is it bad?”
“No, sir,” said the caller. “I’m afraid it’s a good deal worse than that.”
CHAPTER 25
Beyond Beyond
3:44 P.M.
“It’s important to focus on a still point inside your mind,” said the teacher. “Yoga is about health and peace and a calm mind.”
Yeah, thought Dana as she fought to keep her body aligned in the warrior pose, good luck with that.
Her mind was anything but calm, and peace seemed to be nothing more than an illusion. Less real in every important way than what she’d seen in the locker room. Less real than t
he angel in her dreams.
She stumbled through half a dozen poses, lagging behind the class, drawing the teacher’s attention so often that some of the other “peaceful” participants began heaving audible sighs of frustration and annoyance. Luckily, the class ended with a long, seated meditation. That was good. It allowed Dana the chance to try to piece everything together, to step back and take a look at everything that was happening the way people did when they wanted to see the message of a painting rather than peer closely at the brushstrokes.
She assumed the cross-legged posture, leaning slightly forward, hands palm upward on her knees, eyes closed, breathing slowly in through the nose and out through her mouth.
Ethan wanted to be a kind of cop, a forensic science officer. That had some appeal to Dana, though she’d never considered it before. Not that she really wanted to go in that direction, exactly, but it helped her organize her thinking about everything that was going on. For the past two days she’d felt like she’d been floating from one weird moment to another.
Maisie was dead. That was how it had started.
Except … No, she corrected herself. It started with the dreams. It started with the angel in them. And the strange things he whispered. Most of what he said melted away when she woke up, but some bits and pieces were starting to float back, to tickle her memory. Odd things, though. Ominous and weird.
Despite what had happened in the locker room and the apparent reality of the angel in her dreams, Dana wasn’t sure any of this was real. Or, if it was real, how much of it was true? Whatever it was, it seemed to be getting stronger. Or, perhaps worse was a better word. She’d always had strange dreams, but within days of moving here to Craiger, she’d had the first dream of the dark angel. Was it a kind of clairvoyance? Or maybe telepathy? She didn’t know and would have to ask someone. Melissa, maybe. Or Corinda. In any case, that was where it had started. That was Point One.
Point Two was what happened in the locker room. Hallucination, visitation, whatever it was. Dana didn’t have a vocabulary that included words for something like that. Maisie talked about the “Red Age.” What was the “Red Age”? There was no context, no key to unlocking what that meant, if it meant anything at all.
Point Three was the dark angel. What was he? Sometimes she thought of him as a devil, or the devil; at other times she thought he was an angel. In earlier dreams, the angel had not been violent, and he hadn’t been anywhere near as scary. Even though Dana thought he might be Lucifer, he hadn’t been all that frightening. That was weird enough in its own way, but why had her feelings changed? Was it because of Maisie? Maybe, but Dana didn’t think so. Not entirely.
Point Four …
Was there a Point Four? She had to wrestle her thoughts into order. Yes. Point Four was for five dead teenagers. Five of them. Five car accidents. Five lives snuffed out. Were they really five accidents or five murders? She had no idea. Part of her ached to find out, to grab Ethan and get every detail out of him. Part of her was absolutely terrified at the very thought. Fifty-fifty split.
Point Five?
She hoped there wasn’t one.
“Dana … Dana!”
She snapped her eyes open and realized that everyone else was standing, their yoga mats rolled. The instructor stood in front of her, offering a tolerant and slightly quizzical smile.
“During class I thought you couldn’t even concentrate, and then you go into a meditation so deep you don’t even hear your name when I called you four times. You really went deep, didn’t you?”
“Oh,” said Dana. “Deep. Right. Real deep.”
She got up, grabbed her mat, and hurried out.
Corinda was standing right outside the yoga room, her face grim, eyes filled with strange lights.
“I think we need to talk,” she said.
Dana paused. “Talk about what?”
“About your dreams,” she said. “About five murdered kids, and about the fact that the devil is visiting you.”
PART TWO
THE LARGER WORLD
The more perfect a person is on the outside, the more demons they have on the inside.
—Sigmund Freud
CHAPTER 26
Craiger, Maryland
4:08 P.M.
Agent Gerlach sat on the bottom step and looked at the thing in the room. Naked, painted in blood, grinning as if the world was a joke and only he understood the punch line.
Gerlach sighed heavily, feeling older than his thirty-one years. Feeling tired. He was very aware of the weight of the .45 Colt model 1911 he wore in a nylon shoulder holster. He even thought about how many of his problems might be solved by putting the barrel of that gun against the back of the maniac’s head and pulling the trigger.
Across the room from him, the madman sat cross-legged, naked, smeared with blood, eyes filled with strange lights. Between the killer and the agent lay hundreds of Polaroid photos that showed red ruined things that had once been teenagers. Gerlach had seen those bodies firsthand and he had done what was necessary. It was ugly work, and difficult, but there was a science to it. Car accidents were useful. All that crushing compression, all those sharp bits of glass, plastic, and metal flying around. No one could do the math to work out the ballistics of every piece of debris. You could hide almost anything except a bullet wound. There was a long history of car crashes that had solved problems for the Syndicate and so many other off-the-books agencies. Gerlach wasn’t sure he could even count the number of problems he’d made go away over the last few years. These deaths were different. The latest one had presented its own unique challenge of hiding a different set of injuries.
The photos on the floor told the real story, though. And here was the madman responsible, his body painted red, surrounded by enough evidence to lock him away for a hundred years.
“If you want me to apologize,” said the angel, “you’ll have a long, long wait.”
“No,” said Gerlach. “I wouldn’t wipe dog crap off my shoe with an apology, especially from you.”
“Do you want me to explain?”
“Nope. I know why you did it.”
“Why?” asked the angel.
Gerlach nudged the closest Polaroid with the toe of his shoe. It was a picture of a black girl screaming. “Because you’re a psychopath.”
“There is so much more to it than that.” The angel’s white teeth looked very white. Fractured lines of sunlight slanted down through what was left of the stained-glass window, painting his face with the image of Roman soldiers hammering nails through the wrist of Jesus. The glass was broken and so the soldiers appeared headless.
“No doubt,” said Gerlach, “but ask me if I care. Ask me if I spend a rusty minute of any day giving any thought toward the inner workings of your mind.”
The angel looked up at the cracked and peeling paint on the ceiling, at the exposed laths in the walls. At an elaborate spiderweb spun across the window, from which hung the empty husks of dead moths upon which the spider had fed. “Maybe you should,” said the angel.
“Maybe. But if so, I’ll worry about it tomorrow,” said Gerlach. “My problem today is whether you are going to hit your deadlines.”
“Deadlines,” echoed the angel, enjoying the taste of the word.
“We have a lot riding on this, compadre,” said Gerlach. “Do you even know how much money it’s taken to move all these families into this junkhole of a town? New construction, improved infrastructure, a rebuilt school system, not to mention providing jobs for everyone who isn’t part of the program. Day care, too. All of that costs money, and every day that we have to wait for you, we are burning off something north of one million dollars. Every single day.”
“Money belongs to the human world,” said the angel.
“Yeah, yeah, and you’re not human and by the light of the Red Age you’ll be revealed in all your glory as a nephilim. Right. I’ve heard it a hundred times. I understand how you see things. But let me say this—I don’t know what you are or how
you’re becoming whatever it is you think you’re going to become. Angel, devil, mutant, sideshow freak, whatever. Doesn’t mean a thing to me. It’s a side effect. Whatever makes you what you are is a by-product of genetics taking a sharp left turn somewhere in your family history. Or, hey, maybe it is supernatural and you’re really turning into a demon from hell. I don’t know and, frankly, I don’t care. The only thing I care about is the program.”
“And your deadline.”
“Our deadline, Sparky,” Gerlach reminded him. “You signed up for this. And don’t tell me that we are a means to your end. That wouldn’t be the best way for this conversation to go. Understand me?”
The angel said nothing, but his smile shone like the sun.
“You’ve put a bunch of test subjects in the ground,” said the agent. “I’ve had to do the detail work to make sure it looks clean and tidy.”
“And bravo for staging your little dramas. It’s great theater.”
“Bite me,” said Gerlach, but he grinned. “I need to know two things right now. First, I need you to assure me—and to make me absolutely believe—that those kids were of no significant use to the program.”
“I told you this before,” said the angel, the first trace of annoyance creeping into his voice. “They were failures, dead ends in terms of cultivation. All but two had hit a hard ceiling in the development of their abilities. The Bell girl and this piece of nothing showed promise at first, but as their talents emerged, they began to look in the wrong direction. They thought they understood what was happening, and each planned to do something about it. That couldn’t be allowed.”
“Uh-huh,” said Gerlach, and he let his skepticism show through in his tone. “There was no other way to handle it?”
“No better way.”
Gerlach took a pack of gum from his pocket, unwrapped two sticks, and began chewing them. He didn’t offer any to the angel.
“What is your other concern?” asked the angel.
“You haven’t filed a progress report.”
“It’s pending.”
“It’s late.”
“Things are becoming critical,” said the angel. “I don’t have time to waste. This meeting, in fact, is inconvenient.”