Tales of the Unquiet Gods (15 page)

"The restraints should prevent you from hurting yourself, Detective. Or my fellow
Iaphneth
." Pat's mouth went bone-dry at his words, and he wrenched at the straps that bound him securely to the chair. "Oh, this will simply not do."

Snake-quick, Aram reached out and caught Pat's head in a grip of iron. Equally fast, his other hand caught Pat on the tip of the jaw, and his world went white. Through the sudden roaring in his ears, Pat heard heard Aram-
Iaphneth
growl something in the alien tongue, and his limbs twitched. It felt as though his entire body suffered the pins-and-needles of paresthesia at once.

Weight settled across Pat's shoulders, and a scrabbling sensation rippled down his chest. His panicked breath whistled through clenched teeth as he tried once more to pull himself from the binding grasp of the monster in human form.

Pat felt a sharp pain at the back of his neck, and tried to scream. His heartbeat raged as atavistic terror took control, but Pat was no longer in control.

"I am Iaphneth! Now you are MINE!"

He heard a far-off sound, and realized that it was
his
voice, but that he hadn't made it. The part of him that called itself "Pat" slid down into a nightmare of grasping claws in the dark, and horrible, obscene caresses.

9

Pat came back to himself. Remembered terror made a hash of his thoughts, and for a moment, he didn't know where he was. Barely knew
who
he was. His heart still pounded a brutal tattoo in his chest. Breath rushed in and out of nostrils no longer clogged with the rank stench of alien abominations. The sun still rode in the sky, albeit for just a little longer that day.

His hands ached where they sat in his lap, one wrapped around the other. His jaw ached, and he deliberately stretched it from side to side until it popped. He quietly reveled in possessing the ability to perform even that small motion.

Pat remembered briefly - no flashback, this - that dark time under the
Iaphneth's
perverted domination. The malevolent intelligence used him to flout procedure, stomp on civil rights and go where a mere college student was unable.

All while Pat's consciousness had ridden in a cage of chitinous razored legs and groping, fleshy tentacles in the back of his own skull. It took serious effort to refrain from vomiting. Again.

He'd watched as the horrible thing used him to stalk a bouncer, memorizing his habits. He'd observed as it incited a riot using his face, and then sheathed his body in its viscid, clinging secretion and molded it into his father's face, which it picked it out of Pat's memory. His just-relaxed fists clenched again in sudden rage.

When he'd woken up in the hospital with Jaime passed out in the chair next to him, clear-headed for the first time in days, Pat had wept. He'd luxuriated in the erstwhile normal sensation of wiggling his toes. After Jaime had woken up and started asking questions, reality fell on Pat like the proverbial ton of bricks. He couldn't exactly tell his partner he hadn't been in touch because something from a nightmare had been running him like a marionette. Jaime hadn't liked the answer he'd had to give, and hated that Pat hadn't told him everything.

When the bouncer and his girlfriend - or not: he didn't think they were sure of their relationship - walked in the next day, he'd been able to tell them. After all, they'd seen what happened, knew it from experience. Mike had shown him the very coin now nestled in his palm, and described the night from his perspective.

Mike told him about Tourney and his one man crusade against shadow monsters in the underground, and through the courageous veteran, he'd met Melody and felt the power of her music. The park where she played, near the Flatiron Building, was one of the safest places in the city. He'd checked.

And now he'd met Vincent, who matched the descriptions Mike and Avi's friend Anne had given him of a violinist who'd been enthralled by some kind of parasitic intelligence in a nightclub that didn't exist. Anne directed him to a building in Soho, and a door that descended into an empty room. One that distinctly didn't lead into a forest as she'd described.

Pat believed her, though.

He'd shown up for work, only to be put on administrative leave while Internal Affairs "checked into his activities" for the previous week or so. Whole portions of which weren't actually in his memories. Locked in terror in his own mind, Pat just couldn't remember a lot of what happened while the
Iaphneth
rode him. He had no idea where its lair was, for example.

He stared down at the coin, willing it to tell him its secrets. He knew the little object had some doozies. He could feel it, the same way he'd felt drawn to Vincent's battle. He knew it was a battle, even if the kid wouldn't tell him anything. Yet. They'd talk again, Pat knew. Dr. Thomas - Will, who as a student had volunteered in an after-school choir at Pat's church - would make sure he got a chance to talk to Vincent again.

"You've got something for me," he told the little gold coin with the worn, smiling face on one side. The little disc, smaller and thicker than a dime, beat against his raw-worn senses.

That was the other thing he'd gained. A blessing, though Father Morelli at Saint Andrew's might not look at it that way. God knows, Pat would have given it back to erase the last several days. He knew Vincent lived up a floor, not just because he'd mentioned it on the drive, but because Pat could feel him up there. He radiated energy, in a way Pat hadn't felt before the
Iaphneth
.

Certain people had always felt more, well, present than others, but he'd never thought that might be anything spiritual. Too much like the magic in Granddad's stories. He'd felt it with Mike, Tourney, and Melody, too, though in different ways. Given their stories, he was probably responding to the different ways their gifts worked.

He stared hard at the coin in his hand. Vincent passed it to him right before he'd opened the car door, his face inscrutable. Relief flooded his thin face once Pat closed his fingers around it, and he'd actually looked like a seventeen-year-old kid for the first time.

Pat felt the thing in his hand. There was a weight there, a mass, that had nothing to do with the physical world. It worried him. The sense of leashed might was similar to the one he'd experienced the first time he held a gun. Here was something potentially very dangerous. Only this time, he didn't know how to pull the trigger.

Pat turned around and looked at his new rod. His previous one had disappeared from where he'd seen it last. Of course, the other
Iaphneth
could have taken it, but he suspected it had just fallen prey to the Big Apple's homeless population. He could think of worse things. He made up his mind.

Pat drove back to Chelsea. He'd start looking there.

10

The walk from the parking complex gave him time to think. He should have been sleeping, but that was dangerous. Nightmares were nearly constant since he'd woken up without the thing on him. He'd asked Mike about it, thinking the healer had missed something, but Tourney been able to help the most. The cagey veteran told him about his struggles with PTSD, suggesting Pat look into counseling. He'd met guys on the force who'd developed it, but never figured himself for it.

Pat's newly developed mystical radar pinged him a block before he got to the park. His heart-rate sped up dramatically, and he started scanning his surroundings. He wished he had a weapon beyond the pole in his hand. Even that was cased, broken down into sections.

When he got to the park proper, Pat saw the source of the odd sensation. Melody sat under a tree, playing a penny whistle instead of her usual violin. Despite the late hour, a small crowd had gathered, and the hat on the ground in front of the young musician nearly overflowed with loose change, and no few bills.

Pat slouched over toward her. Pat saw when she noticed him, and returned her nod. He'd gotten the impression she didn't really trust him. To be fair, he supposed, most New Yorkers probably didn't really trust the police. He usually didn't, and he
was
the police. But that just meant she must have something important to tell him.

Or something she thought was important, which wasn't necessarily the same thing, as he knew from experience. The spritely notes of her whistle worked her peculiar magic on the crowd. People dragging from one place to another perked up.

He could feel it himself, quite apart from the way her abilities seemed to rasp on his still-raw spirit. He waited - not terribly patiently - while she finished her song. He tried to lose himself in the music. The pain and the way her fingers flickered with sparks of golden magic nobody else seemed to see detracted, though. When the song ended, Pat shuddered, only then realizing how discomforting the use of magic was.

"Thank you, all," Melody said in her quiet soprano voice. "Please, be safe tonight."

She'd told Pat a little of her story, and he was - quite frankly - astonished at her fortitude. True, she rarely smiled, but with a dead father and a barely-functional mother, that made sense. Quite apart from what she'd witnessed all her adult life.

It wasn't great fun to wonder if you were just plain nuts.

The crowd dispersed, behaving in ways strange to the police officer. They smiled at each other; they wished each other safe travels and a good night. Unusual, in Pat's experience, outside of New Year's Eve and bare handful of other occasions. Melody moved out from under the tree, into the pool of light cast by a lamppost. Pat saw she went barefoot. She'd done that at the other park, as well.

"Detective Timmons, I thought I'd find you here." Melody Devreux's serious demeanor gave her an uncommon maturity for one of her relative youth. She didn't look Pat in the eyes, which was unfortunate. She had some of the bluest eyes Pat remembered seeing. Or it was just everything before a few days ago felt wan and gray somehow. Besides, he had no business with any woman, let alone one just out of legally actionable territory.

Pat shook himself. The least little thing seemed to make him lose focus, and that led to trying to push out with his painful, new senses. Testing his surroundings with mental fingers in a way he'd long since internalized with his strictly mundane abilities.

"Miss Devreax, I hadn't expected to see you, at all, tonight." Pat scanned their surroundings. People wandered as they were wont: a couple walked arm-in-arm through along the waterside, a jogger passed them up, a group of youngsters laughed and joked farther into the park. "Please, call me Pat. I have no idea how long I'll get to keep the title."

"I'm not surprised, Patrick -," ever formal, even using a given name, "- but you'll need me tonight, where you're going."

"And where am I going tonight?" Pat forced his tone smooth. Everything supernatural bothered him. All the cops he knew had some kind of superstition - he himself kept a hand-forged iron nail in his pocket thanks his Granddad - but seeing the worst parts spring to horrible life still set him very much on edge.

"It's the new moon tonight, and you're going to find Carla." Pat didn't miss the way her knuckles whitened where her hands gripped the black-enameled whistle.

"I'm going to look for where that thing took me," Pat corrected, forcing the words through the sudden tightness in his chest. The denial fell flat. He'd
been
looking, ever since the hospital discharged him. He'd managed to contact Tourney again, who'd had no luck. Studying and bouncing kept Runey busy, and Anne Cavanaugh's schedule didn't allow for a lot of extracurricular activities. Vincent was, well, Pat wasn't sure about Vincent yet. He was pretty certain Vincent wasn't sure of Vincent yet, either.

"And I can help you," she said, her voice low with intensity. "And I
have
to be there."

Pat kept his hands at his sides, despite an urge to stuff them into his pockets like a recalcitrant schoolboy. All the reasons she shouldn't come sprang to his lips. Then, she looked him in the eye, and the expression in her cobalt eyes silenced him. Her fear - and dogged determination - beat on him.

"How - how do you know?" Pat wasn't sure why he asked. His scalp tightened as his emotions responded to hers. He wanted to hunch his shoulders against an unfelt wind. His mind reeled as if massive, unseen things moved close at hand.

Melody tipped her face down so it was in shadow, her intensely blue eyes no longer skewering him with the force of her intentions. Pat felt shaken, and was shocked to realize he'd somehow jammed one hand into a pocket, where it was clenched around the suspicious gold coin.

"I felt it tonight, while I was playing. Right before you arrived." She tossed her head, sending glossy chestnut hair flaring. She scowled, which set Pat aback before he realized she hadn't aimed it at him. "It just came to me; I'm not sure why. I knew you'd be going to look for those monsters and I knew you'd need me to come along."

"Um."

She nodded in agreement, then bent down to slip her shoes back on.

"Is that - new?"

She nodded again, and when she looked up at him, her face was worried.