Harsh Gods (7 page)

Roarke practically ground his teeth.

“Look, Westland. It doesn’t take a genius to see this isn’t an ordinary crime scene. What am I covering up?”

I squinted, as if seeing him better could lend clarity to his words.

“Is that a trick question?” I asked.

He made an unhappy sound, and it came out like the kind of snort I’d expect from an angry bull just before it charged.

“You’re not as funny as you think you are, and I don’t have time for it tonight. Give me the 411, and stop screwing around.”

“Yeah,” I said, chewing the inside of my lip. “Thing is, there’s nothing to cover up. Some guys broke in. They acted crazy and threatened the kids, and we beat the snot out of them. Self-defense. End of story.”

Roarke ground his teeth again, a prominent vein at his temple throbbing. I took subtle pleasure in knowing that I wasn’t good for his blood pressure—though I managed not to grin too much about it.

On some level I was probably being unreasonable. Not everyone I ran into was tangled up in the messy web of betrayal that tied me back to my extended family. Maybe Roarke was just an overgrown teddy bear, misunderstood because of his size. Maybe Halley’s babble about blood had no connection whatsoever to the Nephilim.

Maybe I was a tap-dancing Dalek.

Yeah, right.

“Fuck this,” the big man spat. “When he said you’d changed, I thought he meant you stopped being an asshole. You don’t want my help, Westland, fine by me. I’ve only ever done you favors because of—”

He halted mid-rant at the sound of movement near the doorway. His partner, Lydia, stood there. The tense body language between Roarke and me wasn’t lost on her.

“You ’bout done in here, Jimmy?” she asked. Her glacial eyes shifted between the two of us.

“Getting there, Lyds,” Roarke replied. He stepped away from me, rubbing the back of his neck. He looked like a big kid who’d gotten caught doing something embarrassing.

Blood and favors. That seriously screamed Nephilim, and only one of those had any reason to be nice to me—my sibling, Remy. He had some connections with the local police—he’d used them to help cover up the incident on the lake. Was Roarke on my side? I almost felt bad for being an ass.

Almost.

“Am I being charged with anything?” I asked.

Officer Potts canted her head.

“I don’t know. You feeling guilty?”

“Well, I did kind of rough up the one I sent down the stairs,” I admitted. “But she came at me with a tire iron, so I’m inclined to say she deserved it.”

Neither of them answered. The kitchen clock ticked audibly while we held an unofficial staring contest. Lydia broke the silence first.

“You didn’t see any of the others that broke through the window in the girl’s room, did you?” she asked. “Your priest friend said there were more.”

I ran my fingers through unkempt hair, leaning a little against the table. I still wasn’t going to tell them everything that was going on—hell, I hadn’t worked out all the details myself. But I figured I’d throw them a bone.

“When I got to Halley’s room, the others were gone. There was the guy on the floor, and the padre was down. I had the choice to chase after them, or help the priest and the girl. I opted to help. But, yeah. I think there were more.”

Lydia gave Roarke a look as if to say, “
See? That’s how it’s done.
” He glared back at her from under his beetling eyebrows, then shouldered past her without so much as a word.

If Roarke actually
was
a friend, he had every reason to be pissed off. I made a mental note to talk to Remy so I could sort that out later. No sense in making enemies out of the cops—though it might have been a bit late for that.

Officer Potts asked me a few more questions, like what had brought me to the Davis house in the first place. I half-lied and said I’d come to help Father Frank look after Halley. The padre and I were old friends, I explained glibly, and we’d done work together before. As far as I’d been able to gather, that was actually true—though it was a good thing Potts didn’t ask
when
it had happened, or how long we’d been working together. I didn’t have a clue.

She ran my ID and pulled up my conceal-carry permit. She asked about my firearm. I handed the SIG over for her to inspect.

“You had this the whole time, and never took it out?” she asked—though she wasn’t asking in her interrogator voice. She seemed genuinely puzzled.

I shrugged. “Never hit a point where I felt the gun was going to solve any of our problems. Why escalate?” Besides, the fireworks I could work with my hands beat a gun any day with nasties like Whisper Man—but she didn’t need to know that.

Potts looked at me as if she was suddenly seeing a very different person under the mess of whiskers and wild hair. She handed my ID and gun back to me, then walked away.

I was free to go.

Once Officer Potts was done with me, I ventured into the living room. Most of the chaos had cleared.

Upstairs, Tammy sang a lullaby to soothe little Tyson. Her sweet, clear voice echoed hauntingly through the house. The last of the EMTs came down the hall from Halley’s room carrying a mammoth kit of first-aid supplies. He slipped out the front door to a vehicle parked at the curb. Roarke lingered near the bottom of the stairs, taking pictures and entering notes into a tablet. He gave me the stink-eye when I emerged from the no man’s land of the kitchen.

I briefly considered talking to him, but decided it was in my best interest to avoid Officer McMountain for the time being, so I headed down the hall to check on Halley and the padre. When I got to her room, Halley’s bed was empty. The curtain was down and someone had tacked a section of plywood and plastic across the broken picture window to keep the cold out.

Father Frank stood off to one side putting his undershirt back on. His ribs were taped up, half-obscuring an old military tattoo that stretched between his shoulder blades. The faded blue lines were going soft at the edges, but it was still possible to read the words
Semper Fidelis
emblazoned on a scroll above the head of an eagle rampant. The eagle seemed to rise from the topmost layer of medical tape, the tip of one outstretched wing nearly obliterated by a pale, puckered scar—almost certainly from an old bullet wound.

Curiouser and curiouser…
Belatedly, I rapped my knuckles on the wooden door frame to announce my presence.

“I heard ya about a minute ago,” Father Frank said without turning around. “You’re not exactly subtle with those clunky boots you wear.”

“Sorry,” I muttered—though whether I was apologizing for the intrusion or the “clunky” boots even I wasn’t sure. I started to withdraw from the room, but Father Frank continued talking with the ease of someone used to dressing around other people—which made me wonder how long he’d been a priest and not a Marine. No one got a tattoo like that just for show. I lingered on the threshold to listen, my back half-turned to give the man his privacy. He might not have cared, but I did.

“Halley’s in one of those ambulances, headed to University Hospital. They insisted on taking her in for observation,” he said. “I’ve got to go and be with her—there’s no doctor who will know what to do if this thing gets its claws in her again.”

He settled his plain black cleric’s shirt upon his shoulders and began buttoning it from the bottom up. He focused on the simple task, his long fingers working with a dexterity that defied his years.

“I barely avoided an ambulance ride myself,” he mused. “They wanted me in for X-rays, but I know the difference between bruised ribs and broken ribs—I’ve broken enough bones over the years.”

I chuckled at this. “Anyone tell you you’re a stubborn old coot?”

He grinned, the expression unearthing the remains of a much younger man. “All the time, but I learned from the best—and look who’s callin’ me old.” His smile faltered. “Look, Sanjeet will be down with the car keys any minute now to drive me to the hospital, so we don’t have long. You planning to tell me what’s wrong with you?”

I hesitated, wondering where I could even start. Amnesia was the official story—memory loss due to oxygen privation. It was plausible, considering I’d all but drowned in Lake Erie’s chill waters—not once, but twice.

The truth was uglier than that. My memory hadn’t failed me—it had been assaulted in a willful excision of information. That made it sound surgical, but my attacker had used something more akin to a chainsaw than a scalpel to cut the pieces of me out. Dorimiel’s assault had left me with a head so full of holes it made a sieve look seaworthy.

I sighed through my nose, then stepped more fully into the room, pulling closed what was left of the door. I leaned my shoulders against the wall, ignoring the way my wings ghosted through the physical structures of the house. Father Frank watched me the whole while, his keen, expressive eyes fixed upon my face.

“Come on, Zack,” he urged. “I haven’t seen you look this rough since they burned Xuan’s village on the Mekong.”

Memories—tenuous as shadows—stirred at his words. They carried echoes of emotions. Fury. Loss. A wrenching sense of guilt. And that name—Xuan. I knew it belonged to a woman. Probably not a lover, but someone I’d sworn to protect.

That was where the recollections stopped. If I tried to grasp any of it head-on, the whole thing would be lost. I could remember
around
the holes—usually stuff that wasn’t essential, like the sound of fish leaping in the water. The way the air hung hot and damp and reeking of green. I knew where the Mekong could be found—a detached kind of textbook knowledge about Vietnam ran like ticker-tape beneath the kinesthetic memories of the place—but whatever meaningful kernel these recollections were wrapped around remained hollow at the core, devoured by the hungry worm I knew as Dorimiel.

All the most important ones I carried were like that. Lifetimes’ worth of experience—all gone. My past prior to the moment I dragged myself out of the lake was a jigsaw with the middle punched out, and no reference picture left on the box.

“Zack?” Father Frank urged.

“There was… an incident,” I began. “It jacked up my memory.”

“Jacked up?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Gone,” I said. “It’s all gone. I might as well have met you for the first time tonight.” I turned away as I said it, but not before I caught the stricken look that crushed the dignity from his face. “For what it’s worth, you make a damned impressive first impression,” I offered.

He didn’t seem to hear. Wobbling on legs suddenly bereft of their strength, the priest dropped heavily onto the edge of Halley’s bed. All the air whooshed from his lungs, making him grab at his taped-up ribs.

“How do you forget?” he muttered in a gravelly voice. “You don’t forget. You remember. That’s what you are.”

“I wish,” I answered. Restlessly, I rubbed at the scar on my hand.

“You were attacked.” It wasn’t a question.

I nodded.

Something fiercely protective chased the pain from his face. When he spoke, his voice was all gunpowder and steel.

“Who do we need to hunt down?”

“We?” I replied. “There’s no we. It’s over and done. Nothing you can do.”

From the way he flinched at those words, I couldn’t have wounded him more if I’d knifed him in the gut. He made a fist and stared at it, lying there uselessly in his lap. A muscle ticked in his jaw.

“Don’t tell me that.”

I wondered again what kind of priest the padre was—and if his parish knew anything about his extracurricular activities with the likes of me.

“You lied that night at the church,” he said through gritted teeth. “I knew something was up the minute you left your weapons. I asked, and you said it was nothing. Nothing!” All the fight leapt back to his eyes, only now I bore the full brunt of it. I fumbled for some meaningful response, staggered by his revelation.

“Did you think you couldn’t trust me?” he said. “After everything we’ve been through?”

My thoughts roiled with questions—when did this happen? What weapons was he talking about? Was it a normal thing for me to leave stuff at his church? I was desperate for any answers, but his stricken look of betrayal stoppered my throat.

Before I could collect myself, the door behind me creaked and Sanjeet poked her head into the room. She wore her puffy pink coat and held that silly pompom hat of hers in one hand. A bruise the color of eggplant covered one side of her jaw. Like I had before her, she rapped belatedly on the frame.

“You’re not interrupting,” Father Frank said. I stood with my mouth open, still struggling to marshal my words. Sanjeet looked skeptically between us but didn’t contradict.

“You ready?” She held her keys up.

It took all I had not to chase her from the room and press Father Frank for answers. Now was not the time, though—Halley took priority. I busied myself by gathering the various samples of writing that had been scattered all over the floor during the fight. The police had left them alone—probably had no idea what to make of them.

“Yeah. He’s ready,” I said, neatening the stack, then turning back to Father Frank. “You go look after Halley. She needs you.”

Righteous fire still kindled in his eyes, but at the mention of Halley he settled somewhat. He slid from the side of the heavy metal-framed bed and joined Sanjeet at the door.

“I’ll call you from the hospital,” he said. “Keep me in the loop this time.”

I couldn’t meet the accusation in his eyes, so I focused my attention on the papers.

“And Zack,” he added, a quirk of his lips softening the sting of his words. “Answer your damned phone for once.”

They headed down the hall while I puzzled over the three recurring symbols. The answers to Whisper Man were right in front of me, scribbled in fingerpaint and crayon—I just had to figure out how to read them.

I got so fixated on the problem, I forgot to even mention—they were calling the wrong cell.

As I finished jotting down some notes on Halley’s papers, I realized the other thing that had slipped my mind while I’d pondered the issue of unreadable words.

Sanjeet had the car.