Shadows Fall (40 page)

Hester pegged him with a sharp-eyed stare. She was certainly no longer in the grips of a vision. “How? How do they do this?”

“What does it matter?” Charlie snapped. “We should be out looking for Titus. Do your ghost-talking thing while we walk back to my car. I want to check his place.”

He started to walk away, but she grabbed his arm in a surprisingly firm grip. “Stop! Think.” She stared at him as if he were a petulant child.

“Think about
what?
”

“Why did the boy lead me here? They’re all here now, in fact, all five. Why. Here?”

Charlie balled his hands into fists and growled his utter frustration. “I don’t have time for riddles!”

“He wanted me to come here, to this very spot, why? To see this drain. I think he is trying to tell us that instead of looking at what’s on the surface, we should be looking beneath. Where do shadows go when they fall? Away from the light, into the dark.”

Finally, understanding dawned. Charlie stretched out his fingers, which had started to cramp. He stared at Hester, and she looked like she might pat him on the head for figuring out the riddle, so he backed up a few steps. “There are miles of these tunnels and drains. How will we know where to go?”

Hester pointed at her feet. “We need to get down here. Get me to the bottom of this drain, and they’ll show me the way.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

It sounded like an anguished scream inside my head, but it just came out as a pitiful whimper. The poison had begun to constrict my throat more, and my chest felt like an elephant was sitting on it. I tried to conserve every bit of my energy for breathing, but the sound had slipped out unbidden when David made another cut.

I’d lost count at that point. He was changing his methods with me; I’d learned from Karen that with Brandon, the only one who’d been deliberately bled dry, the killer had made a few strategic and precise cuts to ensure that he would bleed out rapidly.

However, he was toying with me, like a cat batting around a mouse before going in for the kill. I held out a small hope that this change indicated that he was becoming careless, making mistakes. If he killed me, maybe he would leave enough evidence for Charlie to catch him, at least I hoped.

Charlie…

I stared up at the low ceiling. David, or someone else, had strung up several bald light bulbs and they hung from the stone above like eerie little orbs floating around the small space. These might be the last things I saw before I died. I could already feel myself weakening. My body felt lighter, almost hazy, like I was losing my substance. I guess in a way I was—my blood.

A rumbling boom of thunder from topside caused my insides to shiver. As if we needed anything to make this night more macabre, but I could barely bring myself to care anymore. What felt like indifference was really fatigue from blood loss. Between how fuzzy my mind was, and the feeling of the thick, oozing blood flowing along my arms to drip into the buckets, I knew I wouldn’t last much longer. I’d been plagued by lost souls for so long, and I was about to become one. I had no illusions that I would merely slip away into oblivion; my death would not be a peaceful one.

Shadows flickered further down in the drain. A street light cast a patchy pool of light inside through one of the storm drains. The wraithlike shadows must have been from a car or a pedestrian passing by, two things that I may never see again. Before I could succumb completely to self-pity and despair, I started to get angry, because
fuck
if I was going to die in a glorified sewer pipe without some goddamned answers.

With tremendous effort, I gained control over my sluggish tongue and spat out the rag in my mouth. “Why did you take their eyes?” I croaked, finding it even harder to force sounds past my rapidly numbing lips.

Another peal of thunder boomed right after my question and David started, as if he was just remembering I was there. He’d taken a break or—please, gods—finished his cutting, and seemed to have become lost in his own thoughts. He looked over at me and blinked a few times before scooting closer. The crate that he sat on creaked and popped.

“I was purifying them to be received unto the Kingdom of Heaven.”

If I’d had the ability to roll my eyes, I would’ve, because this was the kind of thing that happened when the crazies got religion—just look at Westboro Baptist, for one example. I believed there was nothing wrong with faith on the whole, but for someone looking for an excuse or justification for heinous acts, it became a weapon. “But I thought you killed them because they were unnatural, and therefore against God.”

David nodded vehemently. “Oh, I did. I saved them from their earthly ruin. But I knew if I removed that which was unnatural inside them, that they could be admitted to Heaven, and thus truly saved.”

“So, if Talika Ross was a human chimera, you removed her blue eye because it didn’t belong,” I said, as if it made perfect sense instead of sounding like the ravings of a lunatic.

David nodded again, and smiled—fucking
smiled
.

“With Mara Lewis, it was her eyes and the white patch of hair that marked her mutation, so you cut out her eyes and scalped her.”

I had some misguided notion that when he heard all of his horrible crimes being listed in such a way, that he would suddenly come to realize how much of a monster he was, and feel…regret? Guilt? Anything…

If he felt anything at all, it was…pride. Again, I felt my stomach turn over, threaten to revolt, rise up, and drown me in my own revulsion. He stroked a finger down my arm, smudging the blood there. His eyes were glued to the red rivulets that ran along my pallid flesh. He may don his religion like a cowl, using it as an explanation or a motive, but the man was bloodthirsty. That fact read on his face, as plain as day.

The blood…it’s what he wants, what he hates.
Brandon’s ominous words came rushing back to me, even though I knew it was too late for them to be of any use.

But I still had to hear the rest. “Jade Huneycutt. It was the skin. She was only twelve,” I whispered, my voice breaking, but David showed no reaction to my emotional response. “Dallas Wade. Liver and…and genitals.”

“Enough of this!” David snapped, and made another deep cut to the outside of my forearm. There were no major vessels there. It was all about inflicting pain.

Pulse racing far too fast, I gasped for breath. He wanted me to scream, to stop my questioning, but I didn’t give him either. I managed to bite the inside of my cheek to help me channel my pain, and I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. And I kept talking.

“But Brandon is the one I can’t figure out.” Brandon and I were on a first name basis at that point. We’d certainly seen enough of each other to warrant it. “Why the bloodletting? You didn’t carve him up. You left him intact. Was he too pretty to cut?”

That earned me another fierce slap. My jaw ached, and I wondered idly if he might have broken it. Who knew if I’d even feel it?

“I won’t let you poison me with your filth!” he yelled.

Oh, how I wished I could raise a brow and summon a sardonic expression. “Really? You wanna talk about who’s poisoning who here?”

“It was his blood that was tainted…” David said quietly, jumping back to my original question. “So I removed it.”

I felt the statement like a physical blow. Brandon had become a friend, of sorts, and now I was to share his fate. “Is that what you’re doing to me then? Removing my blood, even though I don’t have any kind of genetic mutation?”

“That you know of…”

I ignored that. I wasn’t going to give him that reason, to make killing me guiltless for him. I just stared and waited.

“You got in my way. You should be glad I’ve chosen to dispatch you humanely. I could’ve had a little fun as a reward for all my hard work.”

Yeah, that time I just barely managed an eye roll. Mistake.

He surged over me and got right up in my face until our noses were almost touching. He brought up his scalpel and pressed it into my skin a fraction of an inch away from my right eye. “On second thought, your eyes look pretty unnatural to me, and your petulance shows in them. Maybe I
should
cut them out.”

I squeezed said eyes shut as tight as I could manage with what little muscle control I had and waited for the pain to come. As I braced myself, I realized something had changed. I could curl my toes.

Chapter Twenty-nine

It had been raining steadily since Charlie and Hester left the storm grate. The more it rained, the harder it would be for them to travel through the pipes. They needed to move fast. He knew of at least three outfalls that could be used to gain ‘entrance’ to the storm water system. They were all relatively the same distance to their intended starting point, the Starbucks storm drain—about a mile and a half.

However, Charlie knew of a shaft that could knock a third of that off the journey. The reason so few people knew about it was because the entrance to it was on private property, specifically that of the NFL stadium.

Driving down Graham Street, he made a left onto a side street that split into a fork. To the right was a power station, and to the left was a gated parking lot for stadium staff. Charlie pulled into the power station parking lot and stowed his car in the shadow of some bushes so it couldn’t be seen from the road.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to look at Hester, who’d been strangely quiet during the ride. “You should stay in the car. I don’t know what kind of condition the tunnels are in. It could be really dangerous. Not to mention we might run into a serial killer down there.”

Turning off the ignition, he handed her the keys. She just stared at his hand with a look of disgust. “You’ll never find
Titus le Harmanosko
without me,
gajo
.”

Charlie huffed out a growly sort of sigh. His patience was fading fast—no, it was
gone
. He was tired of Hester looking down on him and giving him a hard time. He was tired of her making it so difficult for him to figure out what-in-the-ever-loving-fuck she was talking about,
always
. More than anything, he was sick and goddamn tired of her acting like she was the only one who cared about Titus.

“Really? You think you’re so important. If you care so fucking much about him, why’d you kick him out of your family, or tribe, or what-the-fuck-ever?” Yeah, he was losing it, fast.

He thought he saw a flicker of sadness darken her eyes before her face hardened to its usual leathery mask of indifference. “That was not me. The
Kris
and the
Rom Baro
decided his fate.”

“Yeah, and you just let them do it.”

That time, her face really did crumple and tears gathered in her eyes. It was the most emotion Charlie had seen from her, other than anger. “I was wrong for that. You don’t understand our ways. The Rom value nothing above family. You don’t go against the
kumpania
. But Titus was family too. I know that now.”

She stared at Charlie and seemed to dry the tears up through sheer force of will. Hester was a hard woman, but she wasn’t as apathetic as she’d always seemed. She left words unsaid, but Charlie understood.
I can’t lose him again. I can’t let him down again.

As if responding to something she’d actually said, Charlie nodded and put his keys in his pocket. “All right, come on. But you follow me, and if I tell you to stay behind me, you stay put.”

They made their way through the deadened silence of the deep night, crossing over to the other leg of the fork until they came to the gated parking lot. Charlie gripped the chain link gate with both hands, threading his fingers through the links, and started to pull himself up. Then he stopped and looked back at Hester.

Charlie had imagined he’d just scale the fence, or find a way to squeeze through, but he hadn’t realized he’d have a somewhat elderly woman tagging along. “Wait a second. Stay here, I’ll go get the bolt cutters,” he said, eyeing the chain that secured the two halves of the gate.

He turned his back and started walking away, but stopped when he heard the distinct rattle and scrape of metal across concrete. He turned just in time to see Hester hop to the ground… on the other side. She stood there with her hands spread in an ‘are you coming?’ gesture, and Charlie could imagine her tapping her booted foot with impatience.

“Let me guess, it’s a Gypsy thing,” he grumbled as he swiftly scaled the gate. He hadn’t expected an answer, and he wasn’t disappointed. “This way,” he said, tipping his head towards a small copse of trees at the edge of the staff parking lot.

With springtime in full bloom, it was hard to find the shaft at first. Hester hung back while Charlie crashed around through the trees, looking for the rectangular shaft opening. He swept his hand around in a patch of undergrowth until he felt rough, corrugated metal.

“Got it.” Elbowing some young trees aside, Charlie knelt down and wedged his fingers between the metal grate covering the shaft and the concrete edge it rested on and lifted. It was lighter than he expected and he was easily able to slide it over. The shaft was about four feet by six feet, so he moved the cover just enough to allow them to pass through.