Harsh Gods (5 page)

Marshaling my focus, I softly murmured the syllables of my name. The thing jerked away suddenly, like a cuttlefish startled beneath a rock. Before it slipped away completely, a rapid series of impressions flashed behind my eyes.

Not the main force. These were a distraction.

I bellowed for Father Frank, practically leaping down the stairs. Sanjeet stared after me in shock.

“It’s fine. I can handle this,” she called down the stairs. She almost sounded like she believed it.

When I hit the bottom, Lady Scarface was waiting. She’d dragged herself to her hands and knees. She snatched at me, fingers hooking into the leg of my jeans. I kicked her in the jaw. I didn’t do it full-force—given my steel-toe size thirteens, that probably would have killed her. She collapsed again anyway.

Fine by me.

I sprinted toward Halley’s room, my engineer boots thundering against the hardwood. I nearly wiped out on a little plastic lawn mower left in the middle of the floor, but caught myself, splaying my hand against one wall for balance. My wings spread wide reflexively—not that they could exactly help with my balance on this side of reality, but my brain seemed wired to expect that they would.

Still teetering a little, I pelted down the hallway and crashed headlong into the door. When I tried the knob, it was locked. That wasn’t a good sign. I yelled for Father Frank, smacking my hand against the door.

No answer.

The Davis house was old, and this seemed like one of the original doors. The thing was solid. I kicked at it, aiming for the region around the knob. My bloodsucking sibling Remy could probably have yanked the door off its hinges with a single, elegant flourish, but things didn’t work that way for me. I was a lot stronger than your average mortal, but I was no Superman.

I had to bash the heavy rubber heel of my boot against the door three times before the thing finally splintered. I still strained as I shouldered it open—Halley’s hospital bed had been shoved against the other side. The thing weighed a ton.

“Mazetti! Report!” I barked. The words leapt from my mouth before I could question them. For a minute, I felt like I’d been possessed by the ghost of a former self. Memories surged at the edge of consciousness—a jungle. Wet. Stiflingly hot. An urgent sense of purpose jangling like the clarion of an alarm.

The old priest groaned a semi-coherent response from somewhere on the floor. In an instant, the memories scattered. I was myself again—and a little empty for it.

Father Frank levered himself up.

“Where’s Halley?” he muttered. He spat blood. His lower lip was split and a deeper cut purpled above one eye. The room lay in shambles, shattered glass from the big front window crackling underfoot. The rocking chair was in pieces, and it looked like the old priest had been using part of it as a makeshift club. There was blood and some stray bits of hair matted on one splintered edge. A little splash of crimson painted the nearest curtain.

I didn’t think it was Father Frank’s.

Creakily, he pulled himself to his feet, one hand going to his side. Wincing, he sucked a shallow breath. There was a pipe on the floor behind him, and I really hoped he hadn’t been hit in the ribs with that. Old bones were fragile, and they didn’t mend easily. I bent to help him, but he waved me away.

“Don’t worry about me. Where’s the girl?”

Pillows and covers had been torn from the bed, creating deceptively person-shaped lumps on the floor. One of those lumps twitched when I neared it. It moaned with a phlegmy male voice—definitely not Halley. Mismatched Army boots poked out from beneath the blanket. I toed the crumpled form, worried he was playing possum, but the guy just cringed beneath the blanket and groaned again. Down for the count.

I continued searching.

A soft mewling came from a brightly painted toy cabinet on the other side of the room. Covered in flowers and dancing, winged ladies, it matched the fairy theme of the night lamp. It was a little bigger than an old steamer trunk, and its slanted lid lifted half an inch as I approached. I could just make out a single dark eye peering through the crack.

“Halley?” I asked, ducking down so I was closer to her level.

She whimpered in response. The lid snapped shut.

“The kid’s safe?” Father Frank slurred. He pressed the back of his hand against his swollen lip and scowled when it came away bloody. “There were three of them—strong. Two… went out that way,” he added, nodding toward the broken window. “They must have scattered.”

I crouched down in front of the toy chest and very carefully started lifting the lid. The girl inside scuttled backward, pressing herself against one corner with such force, the whole thing jumped. She yanked back on the lid—it must have had some kind of handhold on the inside.

“Come on, Halley,” I said soothingly, intoning each word with as much gentle sincerity as I could muster. “You’re safe now. You can come out.”

I pulled on the lid a little more insistently. She tugged it back down in response. After the third time, she giggled. It turned into a game, like peek-a-boo and tug-of-war combined. Each time I took a turn, she let me lift the lid a little higher. Eventually, I had the toy chest all the way open. Halley lay half on her side, knees tucked up to her chin with her Disney Princess nightshirt pulled down around them. For a girl of her age, she was so tiny. She held herself more like a toddler than a teen.

As she looked up at me, her lips parted in wonder. One word escaped them.

“Wings.”

I had no idea how to respond. I wanted to play it off, but there was no mistaking what held her attention. Forcing an uneasy smile, I reached out to comfort her with a pat on the head. Halley ducked her chin, neatly avoiding the contact. She peered sideways through her lashes, a thick veil of hair draping one eye.

“Pretty,” she murmured, reaching a hand toward my shoulder.

Instinctively, I jerked my wing away. Bad enough she could see them. I didn’t want to find out if she could touch them, too. That went against all the rules as I understood them. I flexed, so both wings stretched well beyond her reach.

Halley’s eyes tracked the movement.

An inhuman voice deep in my psyche screamed for me to kill the girl—kill her now. She was a danger. She could expose me.

I silenced it the most effective way I knew—humor.

“You start thinking I’m a fairy, kid,” I said wryly, “and we’re going to have issues.”

Her gaze flicked forward and, briefly, she met my eyes. She held contact for less time than it took for all the air to rush out of my lungs, yet in that short span, dozens of impressions spilled into my mind—images of everyday objects, flashes of carefully formed letters, snippets of songs. All of it was a jumble, as if she’d dumped out the contents of a drawer, only that drawer happened to be her head. One thought resonated with pristine, near-paralyzing lucidity.

Angel. I would never tell on you.

I blinked dumbly, trying to find my voice. Halley tore her eyes away, then abruptly clambered out of the toy chest. She straightened up less than a foot from me, tugging down her nightshirt. Fragments of her mental chaos still whirled in my mind, everything scattering like smoke when I sought to make sense of it. Only the clarity of her promise remained, echoing like a vast bell struck once, then fading into silence.

Without further acknowledging my presence, Halley stepped nimbly around me and padded barefoot toward her bed. It wasn’t in its usual position, so she grew agitated, pacing restlessly alongside it. I was afraid she would cut her feet, but she somehow managed to dodge every piece of broken glass scattered across the floor. After making little huffing noises of displeasure, she settled onto the bed anyway, pulling up her knees and hugging them to her chest.

“Told you she was special,” Father Frank said. The old priest bent with his hands resting on his thighs, still winded from his fight with the attackers. The cut above his eye bled sluggishly, and he grimaced when a fat drop landed on his lashes. “Stupid blood-thinners,” he complained, dashing it away. There was a
ping
and he pulled his phone out of a pocket. I thought maybe he was calling the police, but instead he wiped his hand on his slacks and rapidly tapped a text. Then he glanced, saw my questioning look, and answered my question before it made it to my lips.

“It’s Sanjeet. She texted to let me know they’re all right upstairs. Tammy’s talking to the police.”

“She’s texting from a floor away?” It came out meaner than intended—fear always brought out my inner asshole.

“Come on, Zack,” he replied. “I’m nearly seventy, and you’re still the old-fashioned one?” The priest laughed, the sound nervous and tight. His wry expression collapsed into a scowl of pain, and his free hand gripped his ribs.

“You going to be all right?” I moved to offer help, but he waved me away.

“I’ll live. You keep an eye on Halley.” The girl rocked quietly in the middle of her bed, regarding us from under the veil of her hair.

I didn’t like the gray stamp of pain on the priest’s patrician features, but I liked the idea of getting close to Halley even less. I stepped around the unconscious attacker sprawled across the floor, and went to the window. A cold wind gusted through the broken panes of glass.

“Street’s empty,” I observed.

“I banged them up good,” Father Frank responded. “They won’t get very far.” He sucked the cut on his lip. “Leave them for the police.”

I could already hear the sirens, rising and falling on the chill night air. Distant, but getting closer. With a grimace I stepped back from the window. I didn’t like cops. I’d been a fugitive myself, not that long ago, and while Bobby Park had helped sort that out, the whole thing had left a bad taste in my mouth.

I poked the blanket-wrapped lump on the floor.

“Any idea who these guys are?”

“You’re usually the one with all the answers.” Father Frank held himself up with the wall at his back, trying to pretend that he could stand without the support.

I grunted a comment that wasn’t, then yanked on the edge of the cover. A middle-aged man tumbled out, half his face covered in blood from an ugly head wound. Given his clothes and the questionable state of his hygiene, it was a fair bet he was homeless, too.

“That’s a lot of blood,” I muttered.

“Head wound,” the padre responded.

“Who the hell sends an army of deranged hobos?”

“Weak minds are easier to control,” Father Frank ventured. “You taught me that.” He pushed himself off the wall, moving like an old clockwork whose pieces didn’t all fit together. Bending to grab one of Halley’s scattered pillows, he yanked off the pillowcase. Wadding this up, he knelt creakily beside the dazed vagrant, then applied pressure to the man’s wound.

“Seriously, padre—you should look after yourself,” I warned. “Broken ribs are no joke.”

“I’ve had broken ribs. These are just bruised. Besides, this guy might talk,” he said with a practicality at odds with his vocation. He held the makeshift bandage in place with one hand, feeling for a pulse at the guy’s throat with the other. Grunting his satisfaction, he swept his free hand along the fallen vagrant’s torso, checking for injuries but also deftly searching for concealed weapons in the folds of his dirty clothes.

“They teach you that in the seminary?” I quipped.

“You know they didn’t,” Father Frank said, and he laughed. He lifted his eyes to mine and we stared for a moment, each struggling to recognize something in the face of the other. “Or maybe you don’t.”

I stepped back awkwardly.

“You dropped off the radar there for the better half of a year, Zack. You planning to tell me what’s up?” He didn’t look at me as he said it, but bent back to the wounded intruder. One-handed, he loosened the man’s stained and ratty pea coat.

“About that…” I muttered, not even certain where I could begin.

Beneath the pea coat, the man wore a shirt of quilted flannel with half its buttons missing. The inside of the flannel was caked with blood, gobs of it clotting in grizzled chest hair. Father Frank picked the cloth away.

“Um, Zaquiel?”

Those syllables alone would’ve gotten my attention, but I saw it, too—gaping red symbols scored the man’s chest, deeply carved into his mottled skin.

“Shit,” I breathed, dropping to one knee to study them closer.

“Shit is right,” the padre said. “Those are three of the symbols Halley’s been writing.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Whisper Man wants in my head,” Halley piped up. It was so easy to forget she perched in the room, silently taking in everything. She hugged her knees against her chest, the rosary dangling from one skinny wrist. “I don’t want him, but I can’t always keep him away.”

Before either of us could respond, a heavy footfall hit the porch. I leapt to interpose myself between the others and whatever new threat might come through the broken window. The curtain shifted, knocking glass from the panes in a tinkling cascade. Spirit-fire danced round my fingers as I readied for another fight.

Whoever was out there stopped, then gave two loud raps on the window frame to announce their presence. More glass shivered musically to the floor.

“Police,” a rumbling baritone announced.

Shit.

I clamped down on my cowl so hard it felt like I was standing inside a vacuum.

The curtain twitched aside, revealing a broad-shouldered man easily as tall as me. His ginger hair was cropped in a high-and-tight, and his smattering of freckles lent a boyish quality to a face that otherwise looked carved from a solid block of granite.

He held a pistol at the ready while his partner, a ponytailed woman nearly as tall as he was, held the curtain aside with one hand and covered him with the other. She tensed her jaw when she saw the gore-soaked man on the floor. The male officer hesitated at the shattered window, gold-green eyes flicking rapidly around the dimly lit room. He settled briefly on me, brows ticking up with recognition.

I didn’t like that one bit.

“We got a call from Tammy Davis,” the officer said.