Harsh Gods (12 page)

Despite the fact that I hadn’t talked with him in at least three months, he spoke with the easy familiarity of an old friend. I knew we’d been acquainted before Dorimiel ate my brain, but I’d never asked how, and he’d never offered. That might have been a bad call on my part.

I didn’t want another surprise like Father Frank.

“That depends,” I said. I paced with the handset as Lil curiously examined the wards traced lightly along the edges of my desk. “What do you need?”

There was a pause on the other end, and I could readily imagine the trim little officer rubbing the back of his head where his black hair was buzzed short. It was a nervous gesture, and I’d seen it often enough.

“Case came in last night, and your name came up,” he started. “This guy was all cut up—”

“I didn’t do it,” I said a little too quickly.

“Hunh?”

“You’re talking about the Davis thing, right? That guy came like that,” I said. “You can ask Potts and Roarke.”

Lil gave me a querulous look from the sidelines. I gestured for her to mind her own business.

Bobby laughed, more awkward, less nervous.

“Jeez, Zack. Jumpy much?”

“Sorry. Kind of had a rough night.”

“
Kind of?
” Lil mouthed with an exaggerated expression. I scowled, then put my back to her. I curled my wings around myself, knowing she could see them—though I doubted she’d take the hint.

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Bobby said reassuringly. “I was putting off calling anyway. If this is a bad time—”

“It’s not going to get any better,” I said, running my thumb over a spot where I’d nicked my jaw.

Lil snorted behind me. I ignored her.

“So what do you need from me?” I asked as Bobby fumbled for a response.

He sighed, the handset making it sound like a windstorm. “The guy at the Davis house, he had these weird letters carved in his chest. You saw them, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, not certain I liked where this was going.

Park hesitated, like he expected me to say more. When I didn’t, he said, “I was wondering if you could read them, is all. They look an awful lot like something from another case that has me and my partner stumped.”

“Hmph,” I muttered. I left it at that.

“Could you come in, take a look at the photos? Off the record, of course,” he added. “It’ll be like old times.”

Old times?

That was interesting. From messages I’d left myself last November, I knew I had a history with Park. While he was working on the
Scylla
investigation, he’d hinted that he sometimes did me favors. With the amnesia, I hadn’t known what to expect from that, and frankly, I hadn’t trusted the implication. When I hadn’t pursued it, he’d let the matter drop. That, too, might have been a mistake.

“Sure. All right,” I agreed. “When?”

Lil hissed sharply to get my attention. With mounting irritation, I waved her away, still trying to pretend my conversation with Bobby was some variation of private.

“In an hour?” he ventured. “Or—you know—whenever you can make it. I’ll be here most of the night.”

I glanced at the clock. Close to two thirty. I’d promised Father Frank that I’d try to translate Halley’s papers.

“Got a couple of things I need to tie up here, but I’ll swing around,” I responded.

Suddenly Lil reached up behind me and grabbed one of my wings. She dug her fingers in, right at the joint. Jerking, I almost yelped into the phone. I didn’t even know she could do that. Turning as best as I could, I shot her a warning glare. She stood, holding the stack of Halley’s scribbled pages in one hand, the other locked firmly on the joint.

“Let go,” I hissed.

“I didn’t catch that last bit,” Bobby said.

“Couple hours, Bobby,” I answered quickly. “You still at the station on Chester?” I tugged my wing, but Lil held firm. It was the weirdest sensation. I fought down an unreasonable swell of panic.

“That’s the one.”

“Good,” I said in a rush. “See you then. Gotta go.” I hung up before he could ask anything further, reached around, and swatted at Lil’s hand.

“Is this the language?” she demanded.

“What the hell, Lil?” I cried. “Let go of me.”

“This is Luwian,” she said, shaking the pages in my face.

My wing was starting to cramp where she dragged on it. I tried to flex and pull away, but she had me in some kind of joint lock. If she didn’t let go soon, I was going to retaliate, and I didn’t fully trust myself to pull my punches.

“Lil, seriously—you need to let go right the fuck now.”

“I think you’re dealing with one of the Rephaim,” she insisted.

Instantly I forgot about the wing.

“Rephaim?” I said, almost choking. “What makes you say that?”

She’d finally let go, and I struggled with an urge to massage a muscle group that had no real substance in the flesh-and-blood world. I settled for twitching the invisible appendage in her face instead. From the way Lil wrinkled her nose, it was payback enough.

“These are Luwian hieroglyphs,” she explained, ignoring my continued antics as she spread the topmost paper out on the kitchen counter. She plunked down her coffee mug to anchor a curling corner. “This bit is a name,” she said, tapping a nail over an iteration of the symbols that had caught my attention the night before. “Tarhunda.”

“Terhuziel,” I corrected automatically.

“No,” she responded in a tone she might reserve for a thick-headed toddler. “
Tarhunda
. The Luwians didn’t have that suffix your people are so hung up about.”

“I look at those three symbols, and I see Terhuziel.”

“I thought you couldn’t read it,” she replied.

Things got awkward then. Explaining that I’d sucked the knowledge out of the head of a dead homeless woman infringed upon my vow to keep the Eye a secret. I struggled for a moment, then gave up with a silent
fuck it
. The names were so close, it probably didn’t matter anyway.

“Why, can
you
read it?” I managed.

Lil piqued a brow, but for once she let it slide. “You boys weren’t the only ones knocking around back then, you know. You just act like you were.” There was no real heat to it. “When you were babbling last night, you said the language reminded you of Hittite. I wanted to take a peek.”

“I wasn’t babbling,” I objected—though I didn’t even remember bringing up the Hittites.

“You were totally babbling. In shock, and then you passed out cold. You’re lucky I didn’t do something embarrassing to you while you slept.” She shot me a look that was full of mischief, adding dramatically, “Or did I?”

I drew myself up to my full six foot three and gave her my most formidable glare. It fizzled without even a whimper.

“You’re thirty-something and wearing a
Harry Potter
T-shirt, Zack,” she said dryly. “I fail to be impressed.”

“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,” I responded, waggling my fingers in a gesture of make-believe summoning. Lil sighed and shook her head.

“Spare me the road trip through your geekdom.” Still, it got a chuckle. Bolstered by that, I grabbed a clean mug from the drying rack and poured myself some coffee.

“What about these Luwians? I’m an expert on the ancient cultures in that part of the world, and the name’s not ringing any bells.”

The coffee let me know that I was three steps short of starving. I rummaged around in my empty fridge, searching for anything not covered in mold that might pass for breakfast. I had to settle for one of the protein bars left in the pantry.

“You actually eat those things?”

Using my teeth to tear open the wrapper, I ignored her and bent back to the paper.

“I’ve got holes in my memory you could drive an oil tanker through,” I admitted, “but not usually when it comes to raw data. What makes you say Luwian?”

Lil tried to drag her eyes away from the sight of the protein bar, a curl of disgust reaching one nostril.

“Just trust me. I know these symbols. They’re from one of the ethnic cultures the mountain-fortress people gobbled up.” She straightened, rolling her neck until the vertebrae cracked. From the look of thinly suppressed fury on her features, there was more to the story, but she didn’t elaborate. Typical Lil.

“All right,” I acknowledged. “So we have a name tied to a culture. That gives me a general idea of how to Google-whack this guy. Maybe he has some mythic weaknesses. What’s the rest of it say?”

“The usual chest-beating deity stuff,” she responded. Adopting a mockingly bombastic tone, she read, “‘I am the Conqueror, mighty and glorious. Tarhunda is my name.’”

Terhuziel
, my brain corrected, but I managed to keep it to myself. Lil shot me a look like she knew better. Flipping rapidly through the other pages, she continued, almost bored, “‘My breath is the breath of the storm. I rule over land and sky. All bow before my power.’ Blah, blah, blah. You get the picture.” She tossed the stack casually onto the counter beside the first one.

Her recitation, mocking as it was, unearthed a full-body flashback to the voice outside of Lake View. Rattled, I covered it by making a show of very carefully balancing the wrapper of the energy bar on the mound of garbage in my trash.

“So this is an ancient god speaking through an autistic girl?” I quipped, still fighting to shake off the memory. “Wait till I break that to the padre.”

Lil smacked me lightly on the arm. “No, Einstein. He only
thinks
he’s a god. That’s why I’m saying Rephaim. The Idol-Riders were all about setting themselves up as central figures of worship. Storm gods were a favorite, because once they settled into a domain, they could influence the weather.”

“Terael doesn’t do that,” I objected.

“Probably doesn’t have enough power. It’s not like people make sacrifices to him in the art museum.” She thought about it for a moment. “At least, I hope not,” she amended.

“Not typically,” I responded, leaving out the matter of three slain doves. “But if you’re right, we’ve got a real problem.”

“You mean beyond having a rogue Rephaim trying to establish himself somewhere in the city?”

“Your Tarhunda reads as Terhuziel to me. That’s four syllables,” I said, holding up four digits for emphasis. “That’s a decimus.”

“Bleeding Mother,” Lil swore. She smacked the paper as if that could somehow transmit her aggravation to the owner of the name—and for all I knew, it might. Names were power, and among the tribes of my people, they embodied our identities, our abilities, and our ranks. Each syllable was a component of our magic, and the more syllables in a Name, the more power that sibling had at his disposal—by increasing orders of magnitude.

In the books crammed upon my shelves, I’d spilled a lot of ink theorizing about how all of this figured into our natures and our skills, as well as the source we tied back to as a group—because, apparently, we’d lost touch and couldn’t agree on what precisely that origin was. Shut away over the past month, I’d had plenty of time to reacquaint myself with those writings.

The highest rank in each tribe was the primus. As the title implied, each group had only one. The Names of the primae held a total of five syllables, a base of three appended with a suffix spelled variously –iel, or –ael. No matter how it was spelled, that suffix was a word of power in and of itself, simultaneously expressing what we were and what we’d come from. Regardless of tribe, all the brethren shared that suffix and its otherworldly implications.

For every primus, there were ten who held the rank of decimus. The name of each decimus was four syllables in length—two for the base, plus the two-syllable suffix. At the bottom of the ladder were grunts like me. Three-syllable Names—we didn’t get any fancy titles.

If a primus was king of the tribe, a decimus was a lord, except, as far as power went, it was more like warlord, chief, and master-wizard all rolled into one. Dorimiel had been a decimus of the Nephilim, and when I’d faced him last fall, he’d easily wiped the floor with me. Some of that had been the Eye, but even without the ancient icon, the guy had been no slouch. If not for Lil’s timely intervention, he’d have gobbled me up—mind, body, and soul.

If we had another decimus in town, things could get ugly, fast.

“I need to pay a visit to Terael,” I said.

“Ugh.” Lil made no effort to suppress a shudder of revulsion. She harbored such a creeping distaste for the Rephaim, she wouldn’t set foot near his domain inside the Cleveland Museum of Art.

“Once you get to know him, he’s not that bad,” I insisted.

“Sure,” she responded, voice ringing with skepticism. “If crazed, omniscient entities whispering inside your head is your thing, then he’s great.”

“Omniscient is kind of a stretch.” Although hearing her put it that way made me wonder why I hadn’t connected Whisper Man with the Rephaim, and much sooner. That voice in my head had thundered with the same suffocating intensity that Terael sometimes possessed—though ratcheted up to a power of ten.

Terael wielded near-total influence over the security and electrical systems of the art museum, not to mention having the ability to manipulate the thoughts and dreams of its mortal staff. He’d made the entire security detail sleep through a gunfight, for Pete’s sake. All that, and he considered his powers “diminished.”

“I really don’t know how you work with that thing in the same building,” Lil grumbled.

“He’s family,” I objected, then I glanced up at the clock. Almost four.
Shit
—I’d agreed to meet with Bobby, and I still had to check in with Father Frank. I needed to clone myself or something. At least I had news about the language.

Harried, I started searching around for my leather jacket. Lil hooked a thumb toward the hall.

“Bedroom.”

“Oh, right.” I kind of remembered taking it off back there. Walking back, I grabbed the jacket, checking the SIG as I returned to the kitchen. The in-pocket holster was set for a left-hand draw, and while it wasn’t perfect for quick access, it was still the best bet for concealment, given what I typically wore.

Lil eyed me as I cinched the buckle at my waist.

“You had your gun on you last night, and managed to get stabbed anyway?” she inquired archly. “You’ve really let yourself go.”