Harsh Gods (29 page)

“I’m not going back to the car,” she said sharply.

“No. I already gave up on that. You’ll do what you want the minute my back’s turned anyway,” I replied. “But I don’t want to wreck the electronics any more than I already have. Hang onto them for me.”

She pushed the keys aside, quipping, “It’s dead, Jim.”

I blinked, not sure I’d heard her correctly. “Did you just make a
Star Trek
reference—and in context?”

“I hang out with you too much.” She looked past me at the Kramer house. “Is there a reason why you’re stalling?”

The stately old Tudor rose in the gloom about twenty feet away.

“I’ve seen some of the photos from the crime scene,” I muttered.

Impatience flickered across her features, but then something changed. Maybe she caught the weary look in my own eyes. I couldn’t say. In the next instant, her face didn’t soften exactly, but she tucked the caustic expression away and traded it for something merely ironic.

“You didn’t see enough in those photos, or we wouldn’t be here,” she stated evenly. “Do you want to help that girl, or not?”

She certainly knew how to motivate me.

I turned and headed toward the house. The trails my boots cut in the snow were so obvious, our concerns about stealth seemed foolish, but skirling flakes were still coming down. With luck, the storm would obliterate any signs of our passage.

The cloying energy of the Crossing plucked at my cowl as soon as I mounted the front steps. It made the shadows deeper and all the lines go wrong. Someone had died very close to the front door—probably just on the other side of the threshold. If I relaxed my eyes and opened the part of my vision that peered across to the Shadowside, I could see faint echoes of the struggle.

They drew me in, and I had to make an active effort to cross on my own terms. The stain of death was fresh, and I’d yet to encounter anything quite so intense since my unwilling rebirth in the dark waters of Erie.

“This is going to suck,” I told myself—then I took a deep breath and crossed to the other side of reality.

The door melted before me. The barriers that guarded the entrance and exit points of all our buildings had little substance on the Shadowside. The paths that people cut through their daily comings and goings guaranteed that the energy there always wanted to move. The pull was less in a residential building, as compared to the irresistible undertow that swirled at the entrance of a public location. Even so, the current was noticeable.

I relaxed and let it sweep me into the home.

I face-planted right into the replay of a death. Actually, it was a pair of deaths layered one on top of the other, so intertwined, they were difficult at first to distinguish. Two figures—and then three, and then four—strove with one another just inside the front entrance to the house. They flickered like old-time filmstrips, their colors drained to gray.

Sometimes spirits lingered on the Shadowside, but these weren’t ghosts. They were impressions—echoes of trauma imprinted on the space. The collision of imagery made it hard to pick apart the exact sequence of events. It was like two projectors had been aimed at one screen and left to play dimly on top of each other. Even then, the action wasn’t linear. It stuttered and skipped around, as only the most intense moments of conflict were captured with any clarity.

I moved to the furthest edge of the imprint, trying to make sense of what I could perceive, tying on Lil’s ridiculous makeshift booties as I did. I only had to wait for the action to blink back to the beginning, since echoes like this played on infinite loop and would repeat their grim recording until the emotional residue that had created them finally wore away. That could take decades—centuries, even. I watched, tasting the stultifying play of emotions that surged within the imprint—pain and rage and a single-minded flavor of hate.

One figure was that of a woman—not short, exactly, but certainly smaller than the others flickering through the replay. Her features were painted in shadow, blurred and indistinct. The darkness was thick, saturated with all the horror that had transpired between these walls. The woman became clearer the more I focused on her, so I narrowed my attention, carefully tracking her movements as they unspooled from the front hallway to the door.

The woman—almost certainly Dr. Kramer’s wife—approached the door as if to answer it for someone. I saw her reach cautiously toward the knob, her other hand poised behind her as if hiding something from view. The item itself didn’t leave enough of an imprint to show what it was, though from her position, I suspected it might have been a knife.

The action stuttered, and suddenly she twisted in vicious combat, the imagery confusing because sometimes she struggled with one attacker, other times it appeared to be two. The second one burned like an afterimage in the tracks of the first. I had no idea what to make of that.

The second attacker faded in and out like the ghost of a ghost. Judging from their builds, both attackers were male, and both outweighed the woman by quite a bit. In fact, the second one was immense. Taller than me—taller possibly than my sibling Saliriel who easily stood six foot six. His shoulders appeared impossibly broad, and every movement left trails in the air behind him, lingering like curls of dense smoke.

It took me a moment to process what I was seeing.

Wings
.

Wings that spread behind him like a ship’s sails blown to tatters upon the mast.

Fuck.

Instantly my attention narrowed to that wavering figure. Details unwound. Smoke and shadow roiled around him, shot through with guttering streaks of red. Normally there was little color on the Shadowside, as everything dulled to black and gray. That red gleamed low and angry, like embers kindled in the heart of a forge. The color crackled startlingly between the winged figure and the slightly smaller echo of the man, wedding the two so they moved as if one grew out of the shoulders of the other.

Was this the Rephaim, then, riding a mortal vessel?

That didn’t parse—nothing about the echo of the woman implied that she knew the man who’d showed up at her door. I was certain she was Mrs. Kramer, and I’d have bet good money that her husband was Terhuziel’s primary anchor.

No, this had to be the mysterious fifth man—Booker, the black ops guy who’d gone AWOL and turned up dead. Was he one of the first foot soldiers Terhuziel had claimed? Then why the hell was he attacking the doctor’s wife?

Little wonder Bobby and Garrett were pounding their heads against this case. Maybe I had it all wrong, and Dr. Kramer hadn’t been the one to smuggle the idol into the country. But then why would a possessed Marine randomly show up at the Kramer house?

The doctor was the one with a penchant for less-than-legal souvenirs, and if he’d smuggled the idol into the country, he was the likeliest vessel for Terhuziel to have conquered. It wouldn’t have been a quick takeover—the doc didn’t strike me as soft in the head—but depending on when Kramer got his hands on the artifact, the Rephaim could have taken his time. Smarter minds needed to be coerced with more finesse.

If the doc was the main guy—Terhuziel’s high priest, as it were—then what the hell was up with Booker?

Shoving aside all my assumptions, I stepped directly into the replay so I could experience it from the closest possible perspective. Phantom forms ghosted through me as they repeated their endless cycle of conflict and death, waves of imprinted emotions crashing against my wings. I tried focusing again on the woman, but my senses were overwhelmed by the chaos.

A second winged figure stuttered into view.

This one appeared vastly different from the first, rising like a broken colossus of metal and stone. Shattered wings cut an abbreviated arc in the air behind it, and all the limbs hung in sections, their jagged edges grinding against themselves. Whole portions of his body winked in and out of existence. The stone giant swung a massive fist to swat the figure of smoke and flame like an irksome bug. It raised the other arm as if to swing it, but that limb disappeared in the next instant, leaving him with a useless stump.

The punishment.

Terhuziel was literally in pieces. Suddenly his cries to rebuild himself made all the sense in the world.

Battered and broken, and that asshole still managed to wreak havoc on my town. What kind of nightmare would he become if he actually succeeded in seizing Halley to buttress his power?

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

I redoubled my efforts to sort through the entangled layers of imprinted data so I could understand what had gone down in this misery-stained house. At an impatient wave of my hand, the impressions focused around the wife scattered like mist. The second sequence of imprints grew clearer. Baffled, I stared briefly at my hand. I hadn’t actually expected the gesture to work. That was a useful trick.

I filed it away for later. My heart was already laboring as the inescapable pressure of the Shadowside bore down on me. My time on this side was limited. I had to make it count.

The second layer of events flickered across the psychic landscape. The woman was dead, and the stain of her trauma left cloying streaks of dark upon the space. There was no way to tell how much time had passed since she’d lost the struggle against her unexpected visitor—maybe minutes, maybe hours.

Two human figures clashed furiously inside the threshold, little more than person-shaped silhouettes dwarfed by the winged hitchhikers rising from their backs. It was an epic battle—stone and metal versus shadow and flame.

The scene stuttered again, seeming to rewind, and I saw the man who had attacked the wife gliding toward the door along a path that eerily echoed her own. He was inside the house, and he was alone save for the winged being that shadowed his every step. He… it…
they
crept to the door as if preparing an ambush. The conjoined pair slipped to one side, crouching down in the space that would be shielded once the door swung open.

The imprint flickered back to the struggle. Power arced between the riders and the mortal forms as they grappled. The image flickered again, and the mortal who played host to Shadow-and-Flame suddenly held a blade. It was fucking massive.

The mortal attached to Terhuziel—it had to be Dr. Kramer—dodged but stumbled to one side. His next few motions listed to the left as if burdened by something that was heavy enough to throw off his balance. A messenger bag? He swung it to the ground and the projection of Terhuziel went with it.

The idol.
Terhuziel hadn’t been riding the doctor—Kramer had entered the house carrying the idol in some kind of shoulder bag. That was startling. Terael’s statue back at the museum stood close to four feet tall. Carved of solid basalt, it weighed as much as some cars. Terhuziel’s idol fit in a fucking messenger bag.

Whatever was left of it.

Two-handed, the other guy lifted his sword, and it was just plain ridiculous. He had to be compensating for something. Wreathed with the same swirling shadowfire that eddied through the rider’s tattered wings, the weapon cut a vicious arc through the air—aimed not for Kramer, but for the Rephaim. Power crackled as the blade connected, and the concussion of its impact sent up a rain of blinding sparks. Even as an imprinted memory, that blast packed a hell of a punch, and I staggered back, blinking.

The replay shuddered forward. Shadow-and-Flame jerked suddenly. The body he rode collapsed to its knees. The blow came from Kramer, not Terhuziel. Shadow-and-Flame had gotten so focused on the Rephaim, he all but forgot about the doctor. That mistake had cost him. The mortal body pitched forward. He wasn’t quite dead, but it was coming soon.

Terhuziel had won.

The mortal vessel’s death-throes spread their stain upon the space, twining with the dark veins of agony previously imprinted by the wife. In a last-ditch motion, the dying man’s arm snaked out, striving for the idol in the messenger bag. A glimmering object tucked against his palm. With the desperation of the dying, he flailed to get it to his goal. He never made it. His whole body spasmed and the object tumbled to the floor.

A white disk. Spinning rings of arcane runes pulsed within its center. Like a tiny star, it blazed in the twilight of the Shadowside.

Without hesitation, I knew it for what it was—one of those seals from Terael’s fevered memories, used to lock the shattered Rephaim into their stones.

Just like the one Bobby’s partner had flipped so carelessly across his knuckles outside the station.

Dr. Kramer recognized the item as well. Viciously, he crushed it beneath his heel. In a backwash of power, the entire scene whited out.

There was little chance Booker’s seal had survived.

When I could see again, both Kramer and Terhuziel were gone, but echoes of Shadow-and-Flame lingered on the air, fretting with rage and frustration. With Booker dead, he didn’t seem to have anywhere to go. I couldn’t place his tribe, so I had no way to guess how he might handle the loss of his vessel. He wasn’t Nephilim—that was the only thing I knew for sure. From this perspective, they looked like walking circulatory systems.

Another flash-forward, and only the rank stain of the two mortal deaths remained in the foyer. Shadow-and-Flame was gone. An uneasy awareness crawled across my scalp—I had a feeling I knew what’d happened.

Steeling myself against the persistent drain of the Shadowside, I re-watched the events in the foyer from start to finish, just to be sure. Shadows flickered as everything rewound. The wife, knife behind her, approached the door. Clearly, she didn’t want visitors. Booker had to be the man who she let in—and he killed her for her trouble. Time passed. Booker was elsewhere in the house doing… something.

He heard someone at the door, so he came back to it, cautiously. That was the doctor, with Terhuziel’s idol in a bag. They fought. The thing riding Booker was going to beat Terhuziel, but the doctor did something unexpected.

Maybe he brought a gun to a knife fight
, I thought.

That parsed. Shadow-and-Flame raged. Booker, with his dying strength, tried to slap the soul-lock in place. He failed. Kramer destroyed it, then fled with Terhuziel’s idol. That left Shadow-and-Flame trapped where Booker had died, chewing the air in futile rage until…