Black_Tide (7 page)

He held up a fist, turned and grabbed the switch on the wall. The marines—and Sakura—removed their goggles and he turned on the lights. Rows of fluorescent bulbs flickered to life, bathing the room in their stark, artificial glow. Aside from the added hum, no sounds greeted their arrival. He dropped his fist.

The marines fanned out to take the side aisles and they swept forward as one, shouting "Clear!" at each new row of crates. Matt slowed as he reached an open area, veering left as Sakura split right.

They stopped.

A huge chalk pentagram, thirty feet across, dominated the back of the hold. Brown-red symbols smeared across the plain steel floor, circling across riveted seams in a mad visual collage that hurt his brain to look at. Gray goose feathers lay scattered throughout the pentagram, random yet somehow part of the pattern. He glanced toward but not at Sakura, and fought down memories he'd rather not re-experience—emaciated men, thorned demons, and Akash Rastogi screaming as they tore him apart, Sakura cutting deep lines in her wrists to free the beast confined within the eldritch cage.

Gritting his teeth against the expected onslaught, he reached forward. Nothing happened as his fingers crossed the line. He stepped forward. Nothing again.

Sakura joined him, phone out, recording the symbols. "These are different."

"They are." Curved, swirling, these glyphs held nothing in common with the sharp, angular runes they'd encountered in the abandoned warehouse in Washington, D.C. Dark circles sat at every chalk intersection, crimson puddles blackened and solidified to a hard, dull mass.

He slung his AA-12 over his shoulder and dropped to a pushup to disturb as little as possible. Putting his nose millimeters from a stain, he inhaled. A sweet smell, like vanilla and old churches, it carried him to summer days on his uncle's farm. He looked up at Sakura. "Beeswax."

"Noted."

Matt pushed to his feet.

A marine yelled. "Rowley, you got to see this!"

Sakura kept filming, her jittery but somehow coordinated camera work the product of modern technology—catch it all, analyze it in slow motion or stills later. He trotted to the very back of the room.

The wall hummed, the mechanical throbbing of the drillship's engines pulsing right through it. All six marines stood, weapons down, staring at a leathery object hanging from a hook on the wall. Thick black thread stitched together pale scraps. Matt didn't have to search for recognizable pieces: ears, noses, hair tufts, eye sockets.

He swallowed and lifted it from the hook, trying not to recoil from the lustrous, well-oiled, almost slippery surface. Spread out it revealed a cloak for a large man, complete with a hood, made of sections of human faces joined with rawhide sutures. Behind him, someone threw up.

"We find our girls?" a marine asked.

Matt shook his head. "Most of these are male. From the looks I'd say adults, and some of this leather is pretty old, five or ten years, easy."

The marine straightened, his face pale. "That's pretty gross, sir."

He put the cloak back on the wall and turned around. "What's your name, Marine?"

"Hatfield, sir."

"All right, Hatfield, get that vomit cleaned up and search these crates. I expect an inventory before forensics finishes up with the cafeteria, but under no circumstances step into or interfere with that pentagram. Clear?"

Hatfield glanced over his shoulder toward the rest of the hold. "You think it's magic or something, sir?"

The doubt in his voice rankled Matt, but a year ago he'd have felt the same way. He'd seen weirder crap that he'd ever imagined, and still didn't know what to believe about any of it. No explanation would stop Hatfield’s nightmares.

"Just follow your orders."

"Aye, sir."

*   *   *

The crates matched the cargo manifest: engine parts, cam shafts, and spare bits. In three days of searching they found nothing else of interest, so the Navy turned the sanitized ship over to Cypriana crewmen flown in from Greece.

From the deck of a US destroyer, Matt watched the
Imperator
churn water toward the Mediterranean at full steam.

*   *   *

Janet LaLonde walked into Matt's sparse office chomping on pale green gum and smelling of wintergreen. He couldn't help but look.

A leggy brunette prone to scandalous dresses and high heels, she hid a stunning intellect behind a white trash exterior calculated to keep people off-guard. And it worked. Her presence in the Estes Kefauver Federal Building drew too much attention, but all of it the harmless kind. Matt admired the shrewd, analytical reasoning behind her brazen disregard for dress code, even as he chided himself for falling for it and admiring the view. She pulled it off far too well.

She tossed a manila envelope on Matt's desk, blasting him with vanilla perfume tinted with pine. "So your swervy-curvies are a riff on paleo-Semitic languages, but nothing we’ve seen before. The grammatical structures are more modern, and it can't be paleo-anything anyway."

"Why's that?"

She opened the folder with a plastic, bright green fingernail and shuffled through the papers, still shots taken from Sakura's video interspersed between pages of linguistic analysis and translation, until she found the one she wanted and jabbed it with a finger. "That. The forty days of St. Martin."

Matt skimmed the information. The Quadragesima Sancti Martini became "Advent" in much later years. St. Martin of Tours lived from 316 AD to 397 AD, a Roman soldier-turned-priest who spent much of his youth razing pagan temples in the name of Christianity. A late pacifist symbolized by a goose, he'd hidden in a goose pen in a failed attempt to avoid appointment as a bishop, and at one time had clothed a freezing beggar with half his centurion's cloak, which he'd cut off with his gladius. After his death, his cloak became a relic, and the priest who wore it became the cloak bearer, or chaplain.

"So these whackjobs are invoking the patron saint of soldiers to do weird black-eyed stuff with little girls?"

Janet smacked her gum. "Looks that way."

"Do we know to what end?"

She sat down and leaned her chin on her folded hands. "Thought you'd never ask. Based on the incantations in that pentagram and the placement of the candles, seems those guys were binding demons into those little girls, and using the saint's body to do it."

"Why would they bind demons in little girls?"

Janet sat back, frowning. "How'd you know I was going to say that?"

Matt furrowed his brow. "You just—"

But she hadn't explained anything. He'd heard it before she'd said it.

"That's . . . interesting." Janet crossed her legs. "When did precog come back?"

"Uh . . . right now. And just that so far."

Her eyes drilled through him. "Whispers?"

"No."
Not yet.

She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, hands splayed flat on his desk. "Don't shit me, Rowley. I need to know who I'm working with."

"No." He held her gaze. "No whispers, not since Italy."

"If they come back—and based on the rest of this stuff I think they're going to come back—you tell me. Maybe we can figure something out."

"Why would they come back? Gerstner's dead."

She stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment. "You weren't precognitive a minute ago, now you are. How dead do you really think she is? Dead doesn't mean what it used to."

Her eyes flicked to the desk, then the wall, then out the window, anywhere but at him.

He leaned forward, drawing her eyes back to his. "What does that mean?"

She didn't flinch, didn't lean away, just chomped on her gum. "A minute ago I tell you—well, I sort of tell you—that some whacked-up cult is possessing little girls with demons, and you don't so much as blink an eye. Your augmentations came back, just yours out of everyone in the world, and she was the source. What do you think it means?"

Her pupils dilated just a hair, and her facial temperature increased under her makeup. He didn't have anything close to Sakura's talent for identifying lies, but under her tutelage he'd learned how to make use of his augmented eyes for more than just night vision. Maybe not an outright lie, but not the full truth.

"You think she's still alive."

"I think she might still be alive, or whatever passes for alive for a Nephilim. Not the same thing. But if she is, she's got her talons so deep in you . . . ." She leaned back and booped his nose with a green fingernail. When he didn't respond, she stopped chewing and leveled him with her best all-business look. "I don't want to have to put you down."

*   *   *

Janet ignored the leers and glares on the way to her office, slipped inside, closed the door, and locked it. The server towers crowding her desk put off too much heat, and to compensate, the air conditioner cranked full blast. With the lights off, multicolored chaos from four screen savers blanketed the room in ethereal clown makeup.

She grabbed a roll of paper towels from the cupboard behind her desk, and set them on the floor. She opened a black plastic trash bag and set it on the floor, then kneeled in front of it.

A deep breath steadied her, then another, and another, slowing her pulse to as low as she could get it. Then she extracted a small knife from her pocket and a sprig of rosemary from her cleavage, pulled open the blade, and drew it across her index finger. The sharp blade caused almost no pain. Blood welled. She squeezed until the surface tension broke and the huge drop dribbled down her finger and across her palm.

Rosemary crushed between her palms mingled with the blood, and an acid tang assaulted her nose. The cross tattoo that spanned her back erupted in pinpricks of freezing cold fire.

"It hurts," Dawkins said. Her brother's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, clawing through her thoughts with no right to be there. Her soul shrieked at the invasion, but she snuffed it to silence through force of will. "I want . . . need . . . Oh, God. Why am I here?"

"I know, D. I'm working on it. I found you as fast as I could."

"It's been so long. How long? Can I stay?"

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. It came away bloody. "Gerstner's fighting her way back. I think she's winning."

His despair wracked through her, an unholy, eternal madness that human thought couldn't contain. Terror snuffed his desperate thirst. "I can't stop her."

She dropped to her knees and leaned forward. Hot blood leaked from her nose and eyes, dribbling down into an expanding pool, black under the flickering server LEDs, yet neatly contained by the plastic bag. "Don't stop her. Ride her coattails, brother. Come back to me on her wings."

"I can't. I just need . . . something . . . something to take the edge off."

She hid her disgust at his hopeless timidity, so in contrast to his living spirit. "You will come back. Here. With me. I'll show you what I've learned."

Glyphs swirled through the pool of blood, curving parodies of ancient Hebrew. The ancient tongue mingled with modern thought which she stabbed like a dagger into his being. He clutched at it, and grasped for more.

She pried his icy claws from her mind and let him go, sobbing through blood as he fell.

Five minutes later she opened a tampon, smeared it through the blood, and bagged it along with the stained tissues she'd used to clean her face. She dropped the bag in the bathroom receptacle on her way out of the office.

*   *   *

Monica turned off the lights, plunging the dojo into the gloom of orange streetlights through giant, department-store windows.

"G'night!" Chris Malec yelled from the parking lot as she armed the security system.

"Night, Sifu." She threw a distracted wave his way and hefted the shoulder bag containing her "ass-kicking gear," as Matt called it, and all the accoutrements she needed to take care of Adam. The car seat shifted in her other hand so she set it down, the crack in the handle pinching her palm.

She jerked back and sucked at the blood blister, swearing under her breath.

Chris got in his car, a blue 1998 Dodge Avenger that looked showroom new, and it purred like a kitten. Like the few other possessions in his ascetic life, Chris cared for it with the respect one would show any priceless artifact. He beeped once on his way out of the parking lot as Monica closed the door. Thank God one of the Chrises in her life wasn't a complete asshole.

She lifted up on the car seat, and the cracked handle split the rest of the way and came off in her hand. "Screw me sideways." Her sneer faltered with a guilty glance to her dozing son. Adam's head lolled to the side with the blissful oblivion only a toddler can manage, his mouth half-open. She licked her palm—no blood, yet—ran ten feet to the truck, tossed the bag on the floor of the cab, and left the door open.

She turned around and froze.

Two men stood over Adam, identical in blue jeans, black turtle necks, gloves, and ski masks. They held pistols, orange light glistening off the black metal. Her heart thudded in her chest. The pain and soreness from the brutal workout faded as adrenaline flooded her system.

The shorter of the two men spoke, his voice a pleasant baritone with a generic Hollywood accent. "Ma'am, get your purse from the truck and set it on the ground, and nothing will happen to your boy."

Adam opened his sleep-filled eyes, groggy and disoriented, and yawned.

She reached back, grabbed the bag, and pulled it to her stomach. Slipping a hand inside, she grabbed the SP101 .357 revolver her daddy had given her when she'd turned twenty-five. The grip felt cool and comforting against her sweaty palm. An image flashed through her mind, the ICAP commando she'd blown away in their bedroom not two years prior, the look of shock and horror in his eyes as the shotgun removed a solid chunk of his chest right through his bullet-proof vest.

"Set it down and step away. No reason to get hurt." His voice snapped her back to the present. Choking down the hopeless sadness, she took a deep breath and assessed the threat as best she could. The men stood with weapons at their sides, neither pointing at her nor at Adam.