Harsh Gods (22 page)

“Red hair. Black hair. Golden hair, gray.” She ticked off the colors with a rhythm reminiscent of the old rhyme, “Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief.” I moved closer.

“Black hair? Dark eyes?” I held a hand up just below my shoulder. “This tall?”

Halley yelped at my sudden motion, retreating back beneath the blankets.

“Zack, you have to go easy with her,” Father Frank warned.

“Halley, it’s important to me,” I said, keeping my voice soft. “Did you see Lailah? Did she tell you her name?” I stopped short of yanking away the covers.

Father Frank grabbed my elbow, his grip like iron through the thick leather of my jacket.

“You won’t get anything out of her that way,” he said. “Take a few steps back.”

He tugged. I resisted. He refused to let go.

“How is this Lailah connected to the Whisper Man?” he asked.

“No. It’s nothing like that. I—” My breath snagged on the words.

The lines around the priest’s mouth deepened, making his lips look like a parenthetical notation on his face. I finally pulled free of him and paced a tight circuit in the room. With all the layers of shielding I had going, I felt caged.

“I lost someone,” I explained. Muscles in my throat strained against the statement. “It’s a long story.”

He regarded me searchingly. A slight lift to his brows indicated some internal consideration.

“I can walk up and punch most spirits in the face,” I said, clenching a fist as demonstration. I swung it futilely at the air, then opened empty fingers. “You’d think I’d notice if she’d been hanging around, but it’s been a whole month of nothing. Just dreams.”

From where she huddled, Halley started humming to herself. The sound was barely audible through the muffling of the covers, so it took me a few moments to recognize the tune.

“Schism,” by Tool.

Stunned, I halted to stare at the girl-shaped lump on bed. The lyrics welled in memory, timed to Halley’s whispery refrain.

I know the pieces fit…

The same song had queued up on my iPod outside the art museum, entirely too well timed. It couldn’t be coincidence.

“You
can
see her,” I said. “How—when all I have are dreams?”

“Zaquiel,” Father Frank urged. “Stop, please.” This time he reached for my shoulder. Without thinking, I seized his hand to shove it away.

Explosions blossomed in my vision. Wet jungle heat. Cordite—and the cloying stench of old blood. Direct contact with his skin was like a pile driver to the brain.

There was something else—a tether of power binding him to me.

The instant I became aware of it, strength flowed through it. The power caught me in that gnawing hollow just under the ribs, replacing the exhaustion with much-needed warmth. The dull roar of my headache faded, then ceased.

I whipped my hand away like I’d been burned.

“Sorry,” I breathed, stumbling away.

Father Frank regarded me with mild confusion.

“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” I insisted—but I could still feel the connection and the urge to draw on it was almost overwhelming. A guilty part of me wanted to blame my famished grasping on the Eye, but that soul-hunger was all Anakim.

I hid my hands away in the pockets of my jacket. This was a part of my nature I still struggled with, one of the factors that had led me to lock myself away for over a month. Everything I did—every shield, every ward, every journey through the Shadowside—cost me power, and that power was replenished from people.

I hated it.

Father Frank’s tone was full of gentle reproach.

“I’d give you a kidney if you needed it, Zack. You know that.” He reached for my shoulder again and I was too beside myself to even shrug him away. “You saved my life more times than I can count. This is nothing.”

He held out his other hand, palm cupped like he was catching water from the air. Then he exhaled, steady and slow. His eyes fluttered closed. Reflexively, I clenched down on my shields, but that tie between us anchored some place deep. Through the leather, through all my battered layers of defenses, warmth radiated from him to me. Softly glowing in my vision, he exhaled another breath and I felt it filling up the reserves I’d burned through at the museum.

I didn’t pull away.

Soaking up the power so selflessly offered, I gained a better sense of the pathway it followed. The connection ran both ways, and if I reached out along it, I could almost taste the memory of when I’d created it.

Then I froze as more images rushed along the current of borrowed life, and in an instant, I knew what I’d made of him back in the jungles of Vietnam. Father Frank was an anchor.
My
anchor. I’d tied him to me, investing him with some of my own power, knowing I would die in that war—and I needed a way home.

“You carried me.” It escaped my lips in a breathless whisper. “All the way back to the States. Not my body, but the most important part of me.”

I marveled at the face of the man I’d intended—forty-odd years ago—to become my father, wondering what had altered that path in our intertwined lives. My parents still lived in Kenosha. I knew them only as a distant fact. Aside from a card that had arrived on my birthday, we didn’t talk.

With the amnesia, I was afraid to reach out.

“I didn’t believe what you told me, but I did what you said, and I survived.” His breath hitched. “That was the hardest part.”

“I can’t believe Foul-Mouthed Frankie became a priest.” The words spilled from my lips, but they belonged to a wholly different self. Father Frank regarded me with haunted eyes.

“Living wasn’t easy when everyone else was dead.”

The wretched ache of his desolation hit me along the link, and we both fell silent. Shards of memory prickled behind my eyes, a broken window to another life. I couldn’t recapture all of it, but I remembered him—a boisterous kid, barely twenty-two when he enlisted.

He was smart and he was strong—not a crack shot, but he never lost his nerve, no matter how hairy the situation. That counted for a lot.

The words in my head were my voice, yet not. I would have been ecstatic over remembering something, except every stolen moment came laced with the trauma Father Frank still carried in the wounded chambers of his soul.

“You’ve seen too much death already,” I whispered. “I’ll make sure we don’t lose Halley.” The trusting eyes of that raw, earnest kid peered out from the lines of the older man’s face.

“I’ll hold you to that, Cap.”

“The first thing I need is to find his token.”

We stood apart from Halley, conferring in low voices in the curtained-off side of the room. It was an empty gesture—the curtain did little to muffle sound, and with Halley’s preternatural perceptions, I doubted she needed to hear our voices in order to effectively listen in. Still, our only other option was stepping out into the hall, and that meant including Lil.

Neither the padre nor I felt comfortable bringing the Lady of Beasts into our discussion at the moment. We didn’t exactly debate that part out loud. We both simply knew, in that way old friends shared opinions without speaking.

Now that I was conscious of the bond between us, I understood my instinctive trust for Father Frank. Even so, I found it challenging to act on that camaraderie. I’d struggled for months with truths about myself, ones that I expected the mortal world to hate and fear. Glossing over details or omitting them entirely came as second nature with everyone. So I covered only the high points of what I’d learned about Terhuziel, hesitantly mentioning that he was one of the Rephaim.

Father Frank knew the term.

“The same ones you went after near Hoi An?” he asked.

“What?” Phantom images flickered in my vision, hovering on the boundaries of conscious perception. The urge to seize the compelling fragments vied with my need to sever Terhuziel’s ties with Halley.

Not now.

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the fragments away.

“Zack?” Father Frank asked.

He gave my arm a tentative shake. I started, my eyes still closed. I couldn’t say how long they’d been that way.

“We’ll come back to that later,” I said. Emotions for which I had little context roiled in the back of my brain. I did my best to quell them. “Has Halley had any more episodes since they brought her to the hospital?”

“No,” he answered. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised.”

Mentally, I tallied the distance between the hospital and the Davis house in Little Italy. Then I factored in the Whitethorn address. The Kramer residence was closer to Halley’s home by about a mile. Not a huge distance, but then, I could stand ten feet outside of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Terael couldn’t reach me.

“That’s good to know,” I said. “It means either she’s further from his sphere of influence, or she left the token at home.” I stopped, then added, “Probably both.”

“What’s this token look like?” he asked. “Soon as my cell’s charged up, I’ll text Tammy so she can look for it.”

I grimaced. “Uh, about that…”

Father Frank’s lips twitched at the corner—his sole tic of displeasure. He was stoic in all other regards.

“You have no idea,” he stated evenly.

I scrubbed at my stubbled jaw. There was no accusation in his eyes, but I still couldn’t bring myself to meet them.

“It has his Name on it,” I offered lamely.

“Zack, she’s been writing those same three characters for weeks now. They’ve been all over her walls.”

“I don’t exactly understand the distinction myself,” I admitted, “but Terael said the token is a crafted thing. I know there’s power in the actual shaping of an item.” A lot of my recent work with wards had led into that territory. “That’s one way relics are made—items that have a solid existence both here and in the Shadowside. It’s got to be something like that. He made it sound like a kind of a holy symbol.”

Instantly the padre’s eyes grew wide, and I saw in them a reflection of my own chagrined revelation. I couldn’t tell if I made the connection because of him, or if we both arrived at insight simultaneously.

“Her rosary,” he breathed.

I slapped my forehead. “Fuck me running. I’m so dense.”

I shoved the curtain aside. The metal fixtures attached to its track in the ceiling screed and clattered against themselves in a flurry.

From her position in the middle of the bed, Halley held the sheet open around her face so that it looked like she peered through a tent flap. As I’d suspected, she’d been listening. The instant I charged forward, she dropped the starched white fabric and gave a little squeak.

“Halley, I need to see your rosary.”

“No!” she wailed. “You’re going to take it!” She folded in on herself so abruptly, the sheets appeared to implode.

“Let me try,” Father Frank said softly. He slipped past my shoulder, moving toward the bed with a patient, measured gait. Settling onto the nearest edge of the mattress, he balanced with most of his weight on his legs so he didn’t shift where she crouched.

“Halley,” he said, and he made the name a song of gentle supplication. “Would you please show my friend the rosary that you made?”

She burrowed deeper into the mattress, shaking her head so fiercely her hair rustled with a sound like swishing grass. The old priest extended a hand very slowly, not daring to touch her, but simply laying it near an opening in the blankets. He applied enough pressure to the mattress that she would notice.

“Are you certain?”

His words possessed a resonance that went beyond the mellow timbre of his voice, and I realized he was using a power—a power very likely acquired through his bond with me. But where my voice could become a thing of fury and destruction, his held only profound and soothing peace.

“I can’t,” Halley said miserably. She shook her head again, but it lacked the same vehemence.

“But you’ve always been so proud of your work,” he persisted.

She sobbed enough to shake the bed. “I’ll never see Papaw again.”

“Halley, your Papaw was very sick. He went on to a better place.”

She grew still and very quiet. Tension bunched across her narrow shoulders, which were trembling visibly through the bedclothes. When next she spoke, her voice was so muffled I had to strain to make it out. It sounded like she had her face buried against the mattress.

“Whisper Man has him.”

Father Frank and I exchanged worried glances.

“
Is that possible?
” he mouthed.

I shrugged. Judging by all the things I’d witnessed—from shadow-tainted Nephilim to clay vessels enchanted to be soul prisons—I couldn’t rule it out.

Still, it didn’t sit right.

I stepped closer and said with all the authority I could muster, “He’s lying to you, Halley.”

She froze. From the arrested tremors in the blankets, she even held her breath. Father Frank’s lined features held a look of caution, but he nodded for me to go ahead.

“You know not to trust him,” I said. “He’s hurt you. He sent people to hurt your mom and your little brother. Why would you do anything for him? He only wants to use you.”

“But Papaw…” she murmured disconsolately.

Father Frank shut his eyes against the sharp welling of emotion her piteous tone inspired. I got a tidal backwash of it along our recently refreshed link.

“Did Whisper Man tell you to make that rosary, Halley?” I asked.

Very hesitantly, she nodded. The room had fallen so quiet it was possible to hear the rasp of her forehead against the fitted sheet.

“Have you heard Papaw since you made it?”

Another hesitation, but this time the motion under the blankets was one of slow negation. I crouched down beside the bed, laying my hand not far from Father Frank’s. Knowing she could see them, I eased up on the cowl and extended my wings, holding them out to their full span. They tingled unpleasantly where they intersected with the walls of the hospital room. I kept them open anyway.

Urgently, I patted the bed.

“Halley, I know you can see me for what I am. And I know, if you can see me, you can tell if you should trust me. Do you trust me?”

She caught her breath, then swallowed so hard I could hear her throat click. The thin fingers of her hand snaked out from under the blankets. She walked them over to my own fingers, stopping just short of making physical contact.