Black_Tide (25 page)

The room contained little more than a bed, a filthy mirror, and a nightstand with the veneer obliterated by generations of cat scratches. Libby Kamen lay spread-eagled on the threadbare comforter, each limb tied to a different bedpost with nylon rope stretched taut.

"That looks a lot better than you led me to believe," Matt said.

Sakura gave him a curt nod. "It punctured the vest. One moment I coughed blood, the next I felt only mild discomfort. The bruising will be gone by morning at this rate."

"You're regenerating."

She rolled her eyes. "I never understand why you waste time on the obvious." She cut him off with his mouth half-open. "How long between regeneration and the return of the whispers for you?"

He hesitated. "Half a year, maybe a bit more."

"Then let's worry about this in six months." She nodded to Kamen's unconscious form. "We have better uses for time."

Sighing, Matt leaned down and patted Kamen on her unbruised cheek. "Hey. Libby. Wake up."

Her eyes fluttered open, revealing blue-gold irises and dilated pupils, then closed again. Her head lolled to the side, exposing the massive bruise left by Matt's boot when she'd tried to shoot him with shaking hands and zero discipline.

"Concussion," Sakura said. "She'll not think straight a while."

Matt held up a finger to silence her, then turned back to Kamen and held a picture of Adam in front of her face. He snapped his fingers. "Libby, I need you to wake up and look at this."

She opened her eyes again, lolled back and forth, then squinted in the dim light. And then she giggled.

The whispers surged through Matt's consciousness, mingling with his own hopeless rage, urging him to crush the life out of the pathetic excuse for nothing lying before him. Before it happened, he basked in the glorious crunch as his fist obliterated her cranium, and shoved eager fistfuls of steaming brain into his mouth, luscious and creamy like pate and brie.

He blinked, remembered the present, and stayed his hand. "Why are you laughing?"

"Because you're too late, Rowley." Her words slurred around a thick tongue. "They're going to parade your boy in front of the world like the freak he is, the freak you made him, and then when they figure out his tricks they're going to cut his tiny little throat." She giggled again.

Matt took a conscious step back to distance himself from the subhuman beast masquerading as a fifteen-year-old girl. Now the consuming desire to crush her skull had nothing to do with Gerstner Augmentation, nothing to do with whispers or possession or a psychotic break. The purest hate wound its way around his heart and squeezed, smothering compassion and humanity.

Sakura stepped forward, put her hand on Matt's chest and pushed him back an extra step without turning away from the bed. "This boy has done nothing. Why punish him for what his father is?"

"He's an abomination. A sin against life and God and human decency. Like all sin he must be denied before we can enter the Almighty's kingdom."

"How can a child be a sin?"

She laughed again. "I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"Try me."

Kamen's eyes rolled into the back of her head, then flipped back and concentrated on Sakura with obvious effort. "My head hurts. You got anything to drink, bitch?"

"No."

Kamen snorted. "Neither did your kid, there at the end."

Matt saw the blow before it landed and stepped forward, but couldn't get there fast enough to stop it. Sakura's heel-of-her-palm strike to Libby's mouth burst her lips. Blood splattered the pillow and streamed from Sakura's hand as she pulled it back. Libby reeled with a cry of anguish, turned to the side and spat out several teeth. Matt caught Sakura's retracted arm and hurled her away from the bed.

She crashed against the wall, flipped to her feet, and scowled, but cast her eyes down in shame.

Choking on the blood leaking from her shattered nose and mouth, Libby squealed, a pathetic wail that brought Matt back to the roof in Atlanta, to the banshee children keening at him as his act of mercy robbed them of their power and form. He tilted her head to the side to let the blood drain somewhere other than down her throat, and ran his hand over her head in compassion he didn't feel.

"Dammit, Blossom," he whispered through clenched teeth. "I need her to talk!"

Sakura held out her palm. Teeth marks marred the heel of her palm under streaks of blood. "It's healing." She rubbed it on her thigh. "A little."

Matt ignored her and looked down at Libby, now bawling, her tough-girl facade as broken as her mouth. He knelt to put himself at eye level, though with her lids squeezed shut she couldn't see him.

"Hey, I'm not trying to hurt you. I just want my son back. Please."

Blood streamed from Libby's mouth as she smiled and spoke with a new lisp. "I will set my face against all those who turn to mediums and necromancers who commune with the dead, to prostitute themselves by following them, and I will cut them off from all people." Her eyes flashed bright green, the light blazing through her flesh to expose her dark skull beneath. "Your soul is forfeit, and your son's and his progeny to the last generation."

The light disappeared as fast as it came, drowning the room in cold shadow. Libby sagged into a defeated, broken slumber.

Matt turned to Sakura, and her wide eyes said that she'd seen it, too. "What the hell was that?"

Sakura stared down at Libby's unconscious form. "There is something very wrong here."

Matt nodded. "Necromancers? You believe that?"

She replied too quickly. "The dead are dead. All else is myth."

"Yeah. Somehow I don't believe that quite as much as I used to."

Sakura looked up, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. "We need to talk. But first, sedate her."

*   *   *

The Brazilian government brought Matt, Sakura, and Keene by helicopter to Libby Kamen's retreat deep in the mountains, a villa more than a mansion, almost quaint compared to her palace in Los Angeles. They found it abandoned: no guards, no servants, no sign of occupation. An empty crib sat overturned in an abandoned hallway, the yellow flannel cold.

The house had no landlines to trace, and internet came via satellite.

Matt frowned down at the bedding and spoke into his helmet. "Janet, call the NSA, please. Get me whatever you can about activity on local cell towers in the past few hours."

"On it."

*   *   *

Three hours later Janet had identified seven calls from the remote area, two from the same phone: a charter jet service operating out of the Zona da Mata airport, and a cell phone in rural Maryland. Zona da Mata confirmed a jet registered to a subsidiary of Kamen Industries taking off that night with a flight plan to Atlanta. It never landed.

Matt, Sakura, and Keene took the helicopter to Brasilia and hitchhiked aboard an embassy jet home. The flight staff paid so little attention to Libby Kamen's battered, unconscious body that they may as well have tattooed "CIA" on their foreheads.

Out of earshot, Keene leaned in to Matt. "When we touch down my office can take her. We've got a rendition site secure enough, it won't be a problem."

Matt exchanged glances with Sakura. "Nah. I've got a better idea."

Keene raised an eyebrow.

"Go back to Boston. We'll be in touch."

"Are you serious?"

Matt closed his eyes and leaned back. "Yup."

"You've got to be kidding me." Janet stood behind the screen door in light blue flannel pajamas, her hair up in a bun, toothbrush in hand. "You brought her
here
?"

She opened the door to let them in off her side porch. Matt carried Libby Kamen's drugged, limp body into the living room. Sakura followed, eyes scoping out the corners as if in anticipation of an ambush.

"What possessed you to bring her to my house?"

Matt raised his eyebrows. "Guest bedroom?"

"Couch." God knows what he'd do if he saw the guest bedroom. After her brother's death she'd removed the bed and replaced it with a giant pentagram she used to commune with him. It kept the headaches from blossoming into full-on migraines, and kept her nose and ears from bleeding with the strain. The longer Dawkins remained on the other side, the worse it got—but the bedroom made it bearable.

Matt set Libby on the couch with more care than necessary given her snowed-out condition.

"Why did you bring her here?"

He shrugged. "You traced the call to Maryland."

Janet rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, buying time to figure out how to play the situation. "Yeah, to Baltimore, not Fulton. The only thing you're going to find here is turkeys."

Matt leaned against the wall. "Yeah, I remember that smell from last time. Not sure I understand the appeal."

Janet shrugged. "Keeps the yuppies out. I like my space. I'm not a big fan of Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons or coworkers walking up my porch unannounced—especially if they're carrying underage drugged celebutante zillionaires they kidnapped from Brazil. She is drugged, right?"

"Yes," Sakura said. "Regular soporific injections to keep her down. There is something off about her and we do not want her waking."

Janet's fingers returned to her scalp. "Off, how?"

"She quoted the Old Testament to us and her eyes glowed green."

"As in, like, Jade green?"

Matt gave a curt nod in her peripheral vision. "Same color as the cross on your back."

Janet shifted under her PJs, the giant tattoo itching as if aware of their attention. The ward against possession had kept the last of the Nephilim out of her mind, but did little to stave off her brother's desperate attacks. "So that means what? Gerstner is back? Growing stronger? Cue the Darth Vader music and all that?"

Sakura scowled. "Is everything humor to you?"

Janet stared her down. "I haven't found much funny in the past ten or so years, no. Certainly nothing today. And you're never funny." She turned back to Matt. "So what are we talking about here?"

Matt shrugged. "We don't know."

"But you came here because there's something you want to talk about but not over the airwaves, right? Or are you just trying to make me an accomplice in a revenge kidnapping?"

"That's not what this is—"

She cut him off with an upraised hand. "Tell it to the judge. The Kamen family owns entire cities and eats politicians—and judges—for breakfast. The cops show up, that's going to be the story no matter who knows different. Now quit wasting time and spill it."

Janet almost smiled at the rarest sight of her recent life: uncertainty crossing Matt Rowley's face. Sakura's blank expression could mean anything or nothing or both, but a sledgehammer like Rowley uneasy, that sent a thrill of worry and excitement up her spine.

"Umm. What do you know about the afterlife?"

"That's kind of a 'priest' question, isn't it? I'm just a computer gal." The flippant response bought her time to recover from the pointedness of the question.
How much did they know?

"We both know that's not true," Matt said. "You're way more than your job. Did Dawkins—did your brother ever talk to you about life after death? Ever find anything concrete in his research?"

She weighed the value of additional flippancy and decided against it. "Why are you asking me this?"

Sakura licked her lips. "My Kazuko came to me, surrounded by white light. It felt very much like the whispers of Gerstner augmentation but exactly not. Mercy where they are cruel, sadness where they find joy."

"So you're crazy."

Matt shook his head. "I've felt it, too. The whispers are back, but there's something else with them. I can feel people I knew, Akash and Garrett and even Adam sometimes, before they took him. Even you. I've only ever felt Augs and Jade users, and sometimes it feels like they're all there."

"I'm in your head?" She considered running, but knew she'd never make it more than a couple of steps, if that.

"Just a vague impression. You and lots of other people, all tied up together, indistinct, swimming around like a . . ."

"Maelstrom."

He grunted. "Exactly. A maelstrom of people's thoughts."

"My brother?" She watched him for anything, any sign that he knew Dawkins could step through the veil, no matter how little. Matt's face held no guile, and he'd always lacked the imagination to lie with any success.

"Now that you say it, no. I've never felt your brother in . . .  whatever this is. Lots of other people, some long gone, but never him."

"Never?"

He held up his hands. "I'm sorry. I don't have an explanation."

"Who else? Who else do you feel?"

He ran his hands through his hair. "Everyone?"

"Explain."

"It's like they're all there, millions of people swimming through my head." He gave Sakura a small bow. "Kazuko joined them. Blossom and I compared notes. Her daughter passed the same moment, half the world away. I can't explain it, I don't know what it means, but there's something here, something that remains of these people. And I think it's because of Gerstner. She's the only common denominator."

Sakura pulled off her T-shirt.

Janet bit back an obnoxious comment, suppressing the defense mechanism she'd built over so many years in the enemy's nest, and leaned in to examine the faint, puckered scar beneath Sakura's black, no-frills bra.

"Looks old. Get it yesterday?"

Sakura's eyes flashed. "How did you know?"

"COM traffic. You were hit, bad enough to admit it, which must have been pretty damned bad, and then you were fine. Didn't take a genius to figure out something weird happened. Matt said they'd beaten you at the airport, but here you are, no obvious bruising. So there you have it, functional Gerstner regenerates. And if I know it, the assholes at DHS know it."

Matt ran his tongue across his front teeth and tried not to sneer. "We are the assholes at DHS."

"Yes." Janet raised a finger. "But not all the assholes. Not by a long shot." She turned to Sakura. "They've been keeping a close eye on Matt, but are too afraid to touch him, mainly because they're not sure if they can take him without Aug support. You can bet they'll have a stethoscope up your ass before the week's out."