The Edge of Ruin (3 page)

Madoc began the meeting. “Grenier is gone. He made bail yesterday, and vanished.”

“And this matters how?” Rendell asked. “Isn’t he useless now? I don’t see any way for him to fuck us up.”

The slow pullback of Madoc’s lips revealed sharply pointed teeth. Rendell sucked in a quick breath. “I agree, but it would have been so pleasant to punish him for his failures.” The tip of his tongue flicked out, and Madoc licked his bottom lip as if tasting that punishment. Madoc returned to the moment. “So, are you ready to approach the Cardinal of Washington, D.C., with your ‘visions’?”

“Are you ready to back them up with a miracle?” Rendell countered. Madoc nodded. “I have a question,” Rendell added.

“You may ask it,” Madoc replied.

“Why aren’t you using one of the other heavy hitters from the Religious Right to inoculate the gate? Why come to me and the Catholic Church?”

“Because of the involvement first of the FBI and now the military.” Madoc shot Rhiana a sideways glance.

And that was her fault. She had offered Richard’s rescuers a piece of information that brought in the cavalry. Despite being his child, despite his seeming forgiveness, she still had a fluttering in the pit of her stomach.

Because he never misses an opportunity to remind me of my transgression. Which probably makes his “forgiveness” not all that sincere.

“Word has filtered out that there are demons there,” Madoc continued “The Catholics are perceived as the go-to guys on demons and exorcisms.” He gave a thin smile. “And once the Virginia compound has been rehabilitated it will give us a nice rallying cry for the fundamentalists: that the Papists have taken control of the place where the Lord will arrive for his Second Coming.”

Rendell absorbed this, nodded slowly. “Anything else?”

“Yes. When you address your followers I want you to strongly suggest that science and scientists are evil, and that they will block the efforts to bring back the age of magic and miracles. We need the scientific community neutralized and eventually destroyed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We don’t want any dissenting voices,” Madoc said smoothly.

And we also don’t want anyone looking too closely at how I bound Kenntnis
. For while Rhiana had used “magic” to summon the power, it was physics that held the creature trapped. It was possible that physics could offer a means to free him, and Kenntnis/Prometheus/Lucifer unbound would put an end to their conquest of this world.

“… and we especially need an interdiction of nuclear weapons.” Madoc’s words penetrated Rhiana’s wandering thoughts. “As hostilities increase we want to make certain that the violence is planned, limited, and carefully directed.”

Rendell looked up from where he was taking notes on his BlackBerry. “I thought you guys fed on death.”

Madoc turned his head slowly and regarded the human. Rhiana saw the black spikes flaring from his human form, anger made manifest. Rendell seemed unaware. “You are mistaken,” Madoc said. “Death itself is like eating ash. It’s fear, hate, grief, despair, and agony that offer the most nourishment. We would rather have a thousand Rwandas then one Hiroshima.”

“Got it,” said Rendell. “Oh, I put out the word to my viewers about that guy you wanted to find, and we got—”

Madoc held up a minatory finger. “We are done for now. Let me walk you to your car.”

Rhiana frowned at the door that closed behind them.
What was it that he didn’t want her to hear?

She pulled a penny out of her pocket. Set it to spinning and glowing, summoned the power, and sent a tendril undulating among the trees and bushes lining the stone walkway. She took out her cell phone. The spell reached out and touched the BlackBerry in Rendell’s pocket, turned it on, and linked it to her cell. Their voices came through clearly.

“He’s in New Orleans,” Rendell was saying.

“And I’ve got someone in New Mexico. He’s going to kill the paladin, and get the sword for us,” Madoc said.

Shock at Madoc’s words caused her to drop the phone; the link shattered, and her phone fused into blackened metal and melted plastic. Rhiana had tried not to think of him since their parting in a dell in Virginia, but now Richard Oort’s chiseled features filled her mind. She wanted him; to love and to punish, to torment and impress, and now Madoc was going to let him die.

“You promised! You promised!” Rhiana whispered. Her throat was tight and small.

The moment the words were uttered she felt foolish and naive. What were Madoc’s promises really worth? Richard was just a human, albeit a unique one, and Madoc and his kind were here to conquer and enslave humans.

Rhiana swept up the destroyed phone and thrust it deep into a pocket. She had to warn Richard. She came up short, picturing how that beautiful face would freeze in aristocratic disdain, how cold those pale blue eyes would become. She had betrayed him. It was foolish to think Richard would ever trust her again. But she had to try. She picked up the hotel phone.

* * *

Dr. Angela Armandariz, Albuquerque’s chief medical examiner, walked past body-filled gurneys that lined the hallway. She took this as a clue that there was no more room in the drawers in the actual morgue. She sighed, and gave up any hope of dinner at a reasonable hour. It was a New Mexico tradition to celebrate New Year’s Eve with gunfire. This year it seemed that everyone had decided to shoot not into the sky but at each other.

Pallid feet, the big toes adorned by tags, thrust from beneath sheets like displays on a butcher’s counter. Her eye was caught by the title on one toe. Dr. Kenneth Wilson. The body on the next gurney was also a “doctor.” She counted seven before she reached the double metal doors of the morgue.

Frowning, she lifted a sheet on the last body. Three long gashes stretched from the skull to the groin. The skin and hair on the skull were laid back, revealing bone. The gashes in the groin went deep into the soft tissue. She gently laid the sheet back down, and checked the other six. They all displayed the same horrible mutilations.

She went into the morgue and keyed the intercom to her assistant. “Hey, Jeff, what’s with the medical convention in my hall?”

“Not that kind of doctors,” Jeff’s voice buzzed through the cheap speaker on the intercom. “They were some kind of big brains going up to the Santa Fe Institute. The staties found the van off the side of the road.”

“Those wounds didn’t look like your average car wreck.”

“That’s just the start of the weirdness. Diego said the van looked like it’d been clawed open. From the
inside
,” he added.

“Uh, thanks, I think.”

Angela wrapped her arms around herself, trying to banish the sudden chill that wasn’t entirely due to the big coolers and fans in the morgue. She would need to tell Richard about this. She hit
PLAY
on the cheap boom box, and U2 throbbed through the morgue. Angela slipped the strap of the big rubber apron over her head, snapped on her surgical gloves, and flexed her fingers.

She walked to the stainless steel autopsy table. It held the naked body of a young Hispanic man. Bruises covered his chest and face, as if a mad tattoo artist had lost control of the needle. The head was caved in on one side. To her practiced eye the groove looked like a baseball bat. The waxy skin depressed under the scalpel’s blade. She drew it down the length of his chest. A red line, formed by muscle tissue and a bit of sluggish blood, followed the path of the cut. She wondered why she was bothering; cause of death seemed pretty fucking obvious.

She was distracted by the bang and squeak as the double doors were thrust open. “
Put ’em in the hall. There’s no room in here
,” she called over U2, not bothering to look up.

The music cut off abruptly. Angela whirled, ready to rip someone a new asshole. She relaxed when she saw Lieutenant Damon Weber. His square-jawed face sagged with fatigue, and the dark bags hanging beneath his eyes made him look like a raccoon.

He swiveled his head from side to side, counting the gurneys, but it was a slow and careful movement, as if his neck were made of glass and would snap if he moved too quickly.

“Yes, I am up to my ass in dead people,” Angela said.

“At least you don’t hear them,” Weber said with the briefest of smiles.

“In this wonderful new year I wouldn’t put that beyond the realm of possibility. What do you need? And please don’t say a report.”

Weber shook his head, grimaced. Angela pulled off her gloves and tossed them in the trash. “Here,” she said and indicating a wheeled metal stool. The big cop sat down, and she set to work massaging his neck. It felt less like muscles than like metal bands shifting beneath the skin. He groaned and allowed his chin to fall onto his chest.

“I need Richard to come in. How do you think that’s going to go over?” The words were muffled, trapped by the tucked chin.

“Like you don’t know the answer to that,” she said, recalling the discussion at the Lumina offices five days before.

Judge Robert Oort had harangued his son for forty-three minutes. Angela knew; she had kept time. In this he had been ably and brutally assisted by his daughter and Richard’s sister Pamela. Pamela had arrived in Albuquerque the day before, been given a crash course in the World According to the Lumina, been touched by the sword, and had instantly assumed a position of authority.

There were facial similarities between the siblings. They both had high cheekbones, pointed chins, and translucently fair skin, but Pamela’s eyes were dark gray rather than pale silver-blue. Richard’s held a sweetness and a vulnerability. Pamela’s were sharp and judgmental. Pamela was attractive with soft light brown hair. Richard was gorgeous with silver/gilt hair. Angela wondered if that cosmic unfairness had added to Pamela’s seemingly constant irritation with her brother. Angela found the young lawyer insufferable, and she said so now.

“Actually, you’re a lot alike,” Weber said. “Which is probably why she bugs you so much.”

“We are not. I would never berate Richard like that.” Angela moderated her tone and shook her head. “Not that they aren’t right. He probably does need to quit.”

“Yeah … maybe … but not right now. I need him. Ortiz called in last night …” His voice trailed away, and Weber scrubbed at his face with a hand.

The rasp of skin on stubble was a reassuringly male sound, and Angela wished she wasn’t standing in a morgue, but at her condo fixing breakfast, and hearing that sound as Richard wandered into the kitchen, and … She shook off the daydream.

“Yeah, and?”

“It was weird shit. About how he wasn’t coming back because he had to go up to Truchas Peak, and wrestle with demons the way his granddad used to.”

Fear rippled down Angela’s back. Captain Ortiz was a hard-nosed cop with twenty-one years of service. What he lacked in imagination he made up for in tenacity. He would never be fanciful or insane.

“It’s because of the gates.”

“
No!
” Weber came off the stool with such force that it went squeaking and skittering away across the concrete floor. “Do not say that! This shit cannot have spread this far or this fast. We’ve gotta have more time, to plan … to prepare.”

“Prepare for what? To do what?”

“Richard has to tell us that,” Weber said.

“Yeah, and you want him to work as a homicide detective, and his dad and sister want him to be Bill Gates, and—”

“And what do you want him to do?” Weber asked.

“I want him to keep me safe.” She hugged herself, her fingers dug into her upper arms, and her throat ached with unshed tears. “Because I’m scared, and he’s the only person who can do that.”

“Poor bastard,” Weber said softly.

They stood silently for a few moments. “So what are you going to do?” Angela asked.

“Tell him I need him, and let him decide.”

* * *

All that remained of her brother’s presence in the grand office at the Lumina building was the faint scent of his aftershave. Richard had listened, eyes veiled by his long lashes, two spots of hectic color high on his cheeks, while she and their father had carefully detailed why he had to resign from the Albuquerque Police Department.

“Well,” she said with satisfaction. “We won.”

“Yes, Richard can be made to see sense.” Judge Robert Oort bent and picked up several papers that had gone skittering off the large multicolored granite desk, swept up by the speed of his son’s departure.

“So now he can concentrate on saving the world.” She laid heavy emphasis on the last three words, only to have her father round on her with fury glittering in his dark blue eyes.

“Don’t take that scornful, doubting tone with me. Do you doubt your brother’s and my word? And if you do … if you think this is all hyperbole and hysteria, perhaps you ought to return to Rhode Island.”

“To what?” she asked. “Somebody burned down our house.”

“The same somebodies who killed your mother,” Robert said quietly. Pain edged the words.

“She committed suicide.”

“Richard was right. She had help.” Robert slid his glasses back on and picked up another document.

“Maybe if I had experienced some of this instead of just hearing about gates and Old Ones who masquerade as gods, and feed on human misery, I might not think this is some kind of hallucination all of you are sharing.”

“You’ve seen the sword, and felt its effect,” the judge said.

That was true, but despite the twisting pain that had seemed to reach down into her very cells when her brother had laid the blade on her shoulder, she couldn’t really tell what was supposed to have happened. Supposedly she could no longer do magic. Well, she had never been able to do magic. She said as much to Robert and then added, “It’s a specious and circular argument, like saying ‘I painted an elephant on my barn to ward off lightning, and, by God, my barn has
never
been struck by lightning.’” She shut the cabinet doors with a bang. “And there is nothing on the news about gates and monsters. Let me see a monster, and then maybe this wouldn’t feel so crazy and surreal.”

“You have. You’ve seen Cross,” her father said.