“Yuh-yes,” It’s Me said, the cocky, self-assured tone completely gone from his voice now. It had been replaced by the whiny, panic-stricken quality Phylum so treasured; it told him that the natural equilibrium had once again been reestablished. The wolf. The sheep.
Mr. It’s Me told him everything.
Chapter 18
The pain was bad, but not as hot and sharp as it had been immediately following the confrontation with the hulk in Barron’s apartment. Moving gingerly, Rose slipped off her blouse and turned around, craning her neck backward to get a look at the gunshot wound in the grimy mirror.
After her leap from the balcony, Rose ran blindly, thinking about nothing other than getting into the woods and away from a conflict she wanted no part of. It wasn’t that she was afraid. If she’d wanted to, she was fully confident that she would have disarmed and killed the man who had walked in on her in Barron’s apartment. She may have taken a bullet or two in the process, but the outcome would have been all but preordained. But then the cops had shown up, and Rose’s two millisecond evaluation of the situation had told her she had only one viable option: run. She’d gotten what she came for, and she didn’t need the kind of trouble knocking at Barron’s door. There were at least two cops out there, and if they’d reported the gunshots there would be two dozen more in ten minutes. Operating under those conditions, she might be able to kill three or four of the cops before they took her down, but she didn’t think she would get away.
When the bullet entered, it had done quite a bit of initial damage, she decided. Not a hard-cased round. Something softer. A dum dum, the kind of round designed to inflict a maximum of damage by mushrooming and then rattling around inside the victim instead of simply going in and then coming out, leaving a straight trail.
“Damn,” Rose muttered and spit a red string of saliva into the sink. The bullet must have clipped her lung. She reached her left arm across her chest and over her right shoulder, felt the wound, noting the ragged edges, the craterous width of the hole.
“That’s going to scar,” she muttered. Already, she could see the edges of the wound beginning to draw back together, closing in over the bullet still lodged in her flesh. This had happened to her before, and the itch of the bullet as her body tried to push it out a rift in her skin that no longer existed was impossibly aggravating. Better just to get it over with.
Rose dug into the wound with her forefinger, bringing a fresh wave of white hot agony, and dug for the bullet. Not finding it, she pushed the finger deeper, up to the second knuckle, felt something hard, hooked it with her fingertip, pulled it out.
Panting, Rose let the bullet clink into the filthy sink. It came to rest on the rusty drain screen, gore smeared and flattened at the tip from where it had impacted the bone of her shoulder blade.
“Motherfucker,” Rose whispered, then turned and examined the wound again. Free of the bullet, the wound was closing more quickly, the skin knitting itself back together, leaving a pale white scar. After a few days, the scar would itself be all but gone, but never completely. It would just be another memento of this goddamned life into which she had been born. She pulled her blouse back on, grimacing as she lifted her right arm to fit it through the sleeve.
Anyway, despite the unanticipated interference at Barron’s apartment, there had been forward movement. Rose dug her hand into the front pocket of her jeans and pulled forth the small square of paper she’d stashed there.
Mary Ann Shaw.
Alright then.
* * *
Rose tracked Mary Ann Shaw down in exactly the same way John had done only days before. She had a name and a phone number; all she needed now was an address.
Easy.
Though she could have taken the long way around and scanned through the white pages, Rose didn’t want to waste any more time. Instead, she walked across the street to a shady looking motel fronted by a flickering white and black sign proclaiming it THE RAVEN MOTEL. Inside, a young man with a scraggly patch of black hair on his chin was sitting in front of a computer. Rose could hear voices coming from the monitor and knew he was watching a show online. She asked the young man if he would mind if she used his computer for a moment.
When he said that was against company policy, Rose tore his throat open with a slash of her hand and fed on him. Even as the first salty, coppery-tasting gouts of blood moistened her throat, Rose felt the pain in her back begin to ease.
* * *
Half-an-hour later, Rose pulled up outside of Shaw’s home in the bruised and rusty Toyota Corolla she’d lifted from the lot outside The Raven Motel. She killed the engine and climbed out of the car.
The house in front of which she stood was small, but very neatly kept. A rectangular lawn, fastidiously edged and recently mowed, fronted the place. A bed of brightly-colored flowers ran the length of the façade, and white rope-lights outlined the path from the street to the front door. Several of the windows glowed a soft yellow. Good, Rose thought, she’s home.
She walked to the front door, pulled the screen door open, and knocked. There was no sound for a moment, but then footsteps pounded toward the door.
“Who is it?” A man’s voice.
“I’m here to see Mary Ann,” Rose said in a neutral voice, readying herself. When she heard the bolt turn, she twisted the doorknob and shoved as hard as she could. There was a dull thud as the stout wooden door connected with something solid, a skull, maybe, and then a louder sound as a substantial body hit the floor. Rose pushed into the house and shut the door quickly and quietly behind herself.
A man with thinning blond hair half-sat, half-lay on the floor of the small foyer. He wore checked flannel pajama bottoms and a gray bathrobe. A nasty cut on his forehead leaked blood into his left eye as he squinted up at Rose. He reached up with one hand and clapped it over the wound, yelped in pain.
“Where is she?” Rose said.
The man shook his head and started to stand. Rose planted her foot in his chest and pushed, sending the man catapulting backward into the wall. He fell to the side with a moan, knocking over a small table as he did so and then falling on top of it. There was a crack as the table collapsed beneath his weight.
“If you don’t tell me where she is,” Rose said patiently, “I’ll kill you.”
“I don’t know—” the man said, and Rose cancelled the statement with a kick to his face. The man’s head snapped back and into the wall, plowing a crater in the plaster. He slumped, legs caught beneath him so that he was kneeling. Blood flowed from his mouth and nose, and his nose pressed against his face at an irregular angle.
“Oh Jesus,” he moaned, and spat. A wad of blood and saliva splatted to the floor and a strand of rosy spit stretched from his lower lip and dangled down to his bare, nearly hairless chest.
“Mary Ann Shaw,” Rose said, squatting down so that she could look the man in the eyes. “Here?”
He shook his head, eyes rolling wildly in their sockets. He coughed, and a bubble of blood grew and then popped on his lips, showing his cheeks with a fine drizzle of red. Some got on Rose’s hands and upper arms.
“Where then?” Rose asked, but he didn’t hear. Very slowly, his head fell back against the wall, his eyes closed. Unconscious.
“Shit,” Rose said, standing. She searched the house quickly, going room to room, opening closet doors, checking under the beds, but there was no one else home. Done with her tour, she went into the kitchen to wash the blood off her hands. She was drying her hands with a paper towel when she saw the dry erase board mounted on the wall next to the refrigerator.
Written on the board in black marker, just below a reminder to pay the phone bill and pick up some milk at the market, was: APRIL 21st—LOCK-IN WITH KIDS AT FIRST PRESBY.
“Ah,” Rose said.
There was a sound behind her and she barely got out of the way before a fireplace poker smashed into the wall where she’d just been standing, digging a deep dark rut in the white paint.
Rose
whirled around to face her attacker.
“Get out,” the man snarled. Neither his mouth nor his nose had stopped bleeding, and his chin and chest were slick with fresh blood. It looked like someone had flayed his chest. He held the poker in both hands and brought it back for another swing. “Go now,” he said. “Just get the fuck out!”
Rose regarded him coolly. She brought up a hand and tapped the dry erase board, gave the man a small smile. “Have what I came for anyway.”
He saw what Rose meant and screamed, swung the poker at her head. Rose caught it in mid-swing and snatched it from his hands, then, in the same motion, spun and brought the poker down on the defenseless man’s head. There was a soft and empty sound as bone collapsed beneath the force of the blow and the man fell to the ground, motionless. A stream of blood pumped slowly from his lacerated scalp and spread on the floor in a wide pool.
Rose dropped the poker and searched the kitchen for a phonebook. She found one in a cabinet next to the dishwasher, located the listing for First Presbyterian Church, jotted the address down, and left the house.
* * *
It took her a little longer to locate the church than it had to find Shaw’s home.
After parking the Corolla out of sight, she walked to the front door, found it locked, and so walked around the outside of the building. From inside, she could hear the muffled sound of music and laughter. At a rear entrance she heard approaching voices and pressed herself against the side of the building, behind a row of high hedges.
Two young boys, no older than sixteen, walked into view.
“Over there,” one of them said and pointed, his voice hushed.
“Where?” the other said.
“Behind that tree.”
“Don’t you think she’ll be able to see us?”
“Naw, dude. There are, like, eight thousand other people in there. Like she’s gonna even notice we’re gone for five minutes. I mean, Dorian and Joe are practically fucking in the rec room. I mean, did you see what they were doing? She had her hands down his pants, man. Right there, in the middle of everyone!”
“Okay,” the other said, obviously reluctant. The boys walked to a tree not far from where Rose crouched, and she heard a snick snick sound, recognized it as the sound of a lighter, and then there was the smell of marijuana smoke.
“Pass it over,” one of the boys whispered.
A door suddenly slammed open and light flooded from the inside of the church.
“BOBBY SHAY AND TONY DOMINGUEZ, WHERE ARE YOU?” a woman’s voice called. “I KNOW YOU’RE OUT HERE, AND IF I DON’T SEE YOU FRONT AND CENTER IN TEN SECONDS, YOUR PARENTS ARE GETTING A CALL.”
“Shit, man,” Rose heard one of the boys whisper frantically, “crush that fucker out. I’m dead shit if my parents hear about this. Come on, let’s go.”
There was a flicking sound and a shower of red sparks and the joint skittered to a stop next to Rose’s foot.
“We’re right here, Miss Shaw!” one of the boys called. “Just wanted to get some fresh air!”
Rose tensed. It was her.
As the boys walked back past her, Rose found herself needing to make a choice. If she took the woman now, she’d have to deal with the two boys. No big deal, but if they put up a fight, she didn’t want to have to kill them. On the other hand, she might have to wait all night for another chance like this.
Fuck it.
Rose waited until the two boys were almost at the door, then cupped her hands around her mouth and called out, “Miss Shaw! Is that you? Come quick, please!”
There was a whispered exchange, only part of which Rose could hear.
“Bobby…who else…there?”
“Dunno…didn’t see.”
“…inside. Get Mr…”
The sound of something heavy being dragged over concrete. Rose peeked around the corner of the building and saw the slender shape of a woman silhouetted against the light in the open doorway.
“Who is that?” Shaw called.
Rose said nothing.
After a moment, the woman walked slowly down the short flight of stairs to the grass and started heading hesitantly toward Rose.
Rose waited until the woman was within ten feet of her hiding place, then stepped quietly out from behind the hedges.
“Who is that?” Shaw asked, squinting into the darkness.
Rose said nothing, but stepped toward the woman, closing the distance by half. By the time Shaw really began to understand that something was wrong, Rose had her by the arm in a vice-like grip.
“Come with me quietly and you’ll be fine,” Rose said. “Try to run and you’re dead. And after I kill you, I’ll kill every one of those fucking monsters inside the church.”
There was a moment of silent consideration from Shaw, and then the woman said, “Oh my god, you.”
When Rose pulled her in the direction of the car, she came without a struggle.
Chapter 19
John woke in a bed and sat up, shucking the sheet and thin blanket that had been covering him. In a half-second, the last day’s events played back in the front of his brain: the abduction, the van ride. That was all he remembered, actually. He’d accepted the offer of a Diet Coke in the van as he was beginning to nod off in his seat, and now suspected that one of his captors had slipped some kind of sleeping aid into it.
The first thing John noticed was that he felt good, alive, immediately awake. Usually it took him an hour to really get going, but right now he felt…what?
Rested, he thought. Incredibly well rested.
He registered the texture of the sheets under which he’d slept, and under which his legs still lay. Silk. And the mattress, which John thought must be king-sized but seemed much larger, was somehow soft and firm at the same time.
I’ve never felt anything like this, he thought. This is amazing.
Reluctantly, John threw back the covers and slid his way to the edge of the bed, dropped his legs over the side.
His feet didn’t touch the floor, didn’t even come close. Instead, they hung a good foot above the polished wood. John dropped down and saw, really saw, for the first time, the room in which he’d awoken.
“Holy crap,” he whispered.
He took the room in the only way he could, in stages.
It was a good thirty feet wide, and at least as long. The ceiling was domed, twenty-five or thirty feet at the highest point, painted with a fresco of a blue sky smudged here and there with clouds that were marshmallow white at the center, but stormy gray, almost black, at the edges. The four-poster bed sat squarely in the center, bordered on every side by huge gulfs of space. The bed’s posts reached halfway to the ceiling and each was topped with an inward looking gargoyle.
When he’d managed to get his mind around the proportions of the space, John began to take in the things that filled it.
The bed, of course, which was, indeed, much larger than any bed he’d ever seen. Beneath it, a richly colored Persian rug that looked ancient, hundreds of years old, almost threadbare in places, but still deep in its hues.
In the middle of one of the gray stone walls, a fireplace, the lintel a full six feet tall, gaped like a toothless mouth. In front of the huge hearth, a plush tan couch and a pair of matching high-backed chairs, all arranged around another Persian rug.
A chestnut bar stood against another of the walls, a full liquor cabinet behind it. Five stools sat in front, neatly pushed in. Glasses twinkled from their wall-mounted rack.
A state-of-the-art entertainment center and a black leather couch took up the corner nearest the windows. John saw low racks running along the walls to either side of the entertainment center and it took him a moment to realize that the racks were filled with thousands of DVDs and compact discs.
The entire wall to the right of the entertainment center was made of glass, floor to ceiling. The scene beyond it was pastoral. Grass stretched off, interrupted here and there by the occasional tree. At the far end of his vision, a low bank of
darkness. It was evening and the light was fading, but if John really strained his eyes… Trees, John thought. But how far? Half a mile? Maybe further. Acres and acres of empty, perfectly manicured grass.
His mind went to Connie. She would be wondering where he was, thinking that he had decided not to come. John could imagine her daughter sick in bed, his childhood bed, probably, shivering even beneath the quilts his mother would have given Connie to put over her. John rested his hands on the glass, feeling powerless.
There was the sound behind him of a door opening and John turned around.
A woman stood in the doorway. She was tall and thin and wore a sharp-looking black suit and heels. Dark hair cascaded down over her shoulders.
“Good,” she said, her lightly-accented voice echoing in the huge space. “You’re awake. There’s someone very eager to meet you, John.”
Chapter 20
Albert Navarre, born Alberto Antona Navarro sixty-seven years ago in the tiny Texan town of Maguarichi, was dying slowly. The fact of his impending death did not disturb him—there was no fear of what would come after, or what wouldn’t. There was no crying, no simpering, no begging some hypothetical God for more time. It wasn’t the idea of ceasing to exist that offended Albert. More so, it was what his death would symbolize.
Defeat, final and irrevocable.
Did it matter that this final defeat was one that each life eventually had to endure? Albert had considered the question for many years and, after substantial thought, decided that it did not. He, after all, was no normal man; the rules that applied to everyone else should not, therefore, restrict him. And so he had determined that they would not. He was unique, and would find a way to avoid the most equalizing of all events.
For nearly thirty years he had searched for a solution, and for the entirety of the period during which he conducted his search, Albert had known well the enormity of the task he’d set for himself. The grail after which he quested was the subject of more failed searches than any other.