The Forsaken (14 page)

The damp floor welcomed his battered body. Jude wondered what he was doing here, why he’d come back to this. Why he’d chased this twisted beast here after all. Whatever it was, he felt the thinning of his blood as new slivers bubbled out from the wound. Morgan dragged the blade through the remaining parts, hitting an organ or two.

“I’m sorry, brother, but this is who I am,” Morgan seethed, his beady eyes like a piercing fire. “It is…my darkness.”

One blink more and Morgan was thrown back by a bullet to the chest. He hadn’t seen Jude reach for his pistol. Or if he had, there wasn’t enough time to react with anything besides shock. There was a thud when the body hit. Smoke bloomed in his chest as Morgan took each painful breath. Where had the bullet landed? His heart? A blood vessel?

The sound of the bullet shattered what few senses remained. Jude succumbed to the slow motion once more. The dizzy spell of losing his grip on what was real and what wasn’t. His head dropped back.

The gun sat loosely in his grip. Nausea swam through his gut, or maybe it was the blood coursing weakly inside bone and punctured organs. He closed his eyes, but only for a minute, it seemed. And when he opened them once more, Morgan Cross had vanished.

Jude tore from his sleep with a scream, shaking like he was still there in that cold cathedral with rain bleeding down from a vacant sky. His chest pounded. Ached. No, not his chest. His ribs. His insides. Jude glanced down at the scar. Eventually, he let go of the revolver he kept beneath his pillow. It was slimy with his sweat.

He continued checking his sheets to see if there was blood, but there wasn’t. “Get a grip, Jude. Get a freaking grip!”

A groan pulled itself from his throat. It was four thirty. An hour in the real world felt like an eternity in a dream. Jude rubbed his eyes and reached for the glass of water he always kept beside his mother’s picture on the nightstand.

His morning had begun.

19

THE TEMPERATURE OF THE
prison cell dropped twelve degrees in a matter of seconds. Cold spit crept down his throat. The chill was there one moment, and then it wasn’t.

How this chill moved closer to him he wasn’t sure, but it did. It moved closer fast. Kevin wondered if anyone else had felt it before passing out.

“Wh-wh-o-who’s there?” he said in a shaky voice.

No reply. The guard had left his post. Kevin didn’t know when it was that he, and the several other violent bodies around him, had been left alone, but they had.

Suddenly, the wind passed under him, drifted across his face, his arms. “Whoa,” he muttered. Kevin’s skin wanted to crawl off. His imagination vividly formed new evils in the dark. What was it? A ghost? No, he had stopped believing in ghosts when his infatuation for trading cards and comics changed to dirty magazines and cigarettes.

“I know what you’re thinking,” echoed a voice.

Kevin turned full circle. But there was nothing to be seen that wasn’t always there.

“You want to know if this is real. If
I
am real.” It was a thin, sharp whisper. “But I’m here to assure you that I am real. We are very real.” The voice now had a face to breathe out of. It hadn’t been there a second earlier, but it formed lips and teeth in one blink. Soon, shoulders and a long torso took shape. The dust became man.

Kevin watched, confused and paralyzed. “This can’t be happening.”

“But it is,” the whisper returned. It belonged to a tall man with unkind eyes and a fearful grin. Black, messy hair lay back like surrender. And his teeth glowed like white fire.

Kevin kept waiting for his eyes to peel back. For reality to unfold and put this strangeness to bed. The steel bars had him surrounded. He wanted out.

“You’re terrified, little rat. But do not be afraid; I’m here to set you free.”

“H-ho-how-how did you do that? Who are you?”

“Not who. What.” The dark man came toward him and Kevin stepped back. “Just don’t scream. We’ll be out shortly.”

The man wore a golden crucifix. “Are you one of those priests or something?” Kevin asked.

The man gave no reply.

Kevin tiptoed between the bodies on the floor, the ones who had been the cause of his affliction just an hour earlier. Then he studied the figure’s outfit more keenly. It was a peculiar get-up. No one in these parts wore coats like he had on. But oddest of all were this man’s eyes—hollow yet full with what looked like faces trapped inside. Kevin was instantly consumed with dread. Each red lens seemed to search him inside and out.

Their eyes danced across the cell; the guard was still nowhere to be found. Kevin desperately longed for his brother to deliver him, especially since every one of his cellmates lay unconscious.

“They’re quiet for the time being,” the figure said. “But not asleep forever. Just wounded. Like you. I’ll bet a tired, hurt boy like you wished they were dead, though, for what they did to you.” The dark man handed him a blade.

Kevin took it with little hesitation and made a quick incision in one of his abuser’s wrists. Where he’d made his first incision years ago. Then he stopped himself. He wasn’t sure what it was that held him back, but he couldn’t go through with it, even though every fabric of his being urged him to get payback.

“Take it back,” he said, tossing the knife.

The man reached down and cleaned the edge of the blade, not issuing a sound. It was eerie the way he stroked the tip against his jeans. Like hunters anxious for a second kill.

“How did you know my name?” Kevin asked, wiping his mouth.

“I know more than you can imagine.”

“So what are you?”

“I am man and spirit…and death.” He grinned masterfully. “My human identity is one Morgan Cross.”

“My brother’s ex-partner?”

“Precisely. But the real me, the me who will set you free, is called Azrael.”

Kevin replied, “What is Az-rael?”

“Each culture has identified it as something else. Some call it a god, others an angel of death, some a demon. But he’s so much more.”

“Wh-wh-a-what do you want with me?” Kevin shuddered.

“Much,” came another whisper.

Suddenly, Morgan was no longer there; he’d disintegrated. Kevin listened for a disturbing creaking sound, and he realized the prison cell door was now unlocked and pushed open. The slow, tense creak of the metal scratching at the floor formed needles on his back.

He was mystified. But this all seemed too easy. It had to be something of a dream. Ghosts didn’t exist, did they? Demons and spirits didn’t exist. But how…?

Just then, footsteps approached the hallway. That up-and-down motion of a flashlight belonged to a guard. Kevin felt a pull toward the exit and the freedom he’d wanted since his brother abandoned him.

With little effort, he eased out, bypassed the fat guard and the cameras through a series of ducks and clever maneuvers. He was no novice at avoiding capture. He hugged the wall and counted every breath. Every footstep. Every heartbeat. It was as if he were eight years old again, playing cops and robbers with Jude. Hiding around corners, running from the enemy. But this game didn’t evoke the same kind of amusement.

Soon the sound of footsteps and metal jingling vanished as quickly as the stranger had. The unlocked door to the outside was so close now. All he had to do was walk through it. Walk through and never look back. He knew, though, that an alarm would be tripped in no time. He had to be swift because sirens would come for him.

Kevin pushed open the door, and finally, he was free. The outside air gloved him. Scanning the darkness, he searched for the rescue artist. But there was no one.

As he turned to race into the street, someone crept behind him and wrapped his face inside a cloth bag. His body jerked in efforts to get away, but a now familiar voice invaded his breathing space.

“Stay still, rat.”

“Let me go!” The thick fabric was tight around his cheeks. Raw. There was no chance to swing; he was already cuffed. The blankness of the cloth mask stripped all of his visibility from him.

“I’m no good. You don’t want me!” Kevin screamed. “Just let me go!”

“They’ll come for us if you keep acting stupid. And we don’t want that. No, we don’t want that.”

“Don’t touch me!”

Morgan dragged him toward a parked vehicle located less than a block away and threw Kevin into the trunk. He furiously banged against the car’s interior walls, kicking until his shins began to bleed.

With a jolt, the vehicle launched out of the lot and peeled down the narrow road. The car’s black steel frame blended well with the night.

After only a short while, they came to an abrupt halt. Kevin felt the car shake with new voices. A number of sirens echoed louder and louder. Fear wore him inside out. But it was not the fear of being dragged back to some nameless prison cell that quickened him.

His ears twitched at the sound of rolling beds stuttering across what he believed to be wet, cracked pavement. Short dialogues full of medical jargon made him all kinds of uncomfortable. He didn’t understand half of what they said, but it didn’t matter. Strangely enough, he wished that he were with those voices, those footsteps, or better, being carried off to safety.

The medical jargon, he realized, came from a number of EMTs and orderlies. It was then that it came to him fully. He knew where Morgan had stopped. For what purpose, he wasn’t certain. But Kevin was sure of one thing: In all of the world, there was nowhere he hated more.

It was St. Mary’s hospital, the place where his mother had died.

20

ALL JUDE KEPT REPLAYING
in his mind was the bewildered, almost shattered tone that crept through the phone receiver when the chief informed him of his brother’s prison break. It didn’t take long for Jude to rush down to get more details. First thing he did was fly to the camera room, where Mike and Rachel stood waiting. Mike sipped from a large cup of coffee.

Anxiety blanketed Jude’s face. He was hunched when he walked, his side still aching some. “What happened?” he asked immediately. “How’d he get out?”

“Rachel, tell the hobo outside we found his clothes.” Mike wore an aggravated,
it’s-way-too-early-in-the-morning-for-this
look. Jude had seen it a lot lately.

Rachel arched an eyebrow. The chief had a point; Jude appeared unkempt, to say the least.

“Close the door behind you,” Mike said. “Something rather odd occurred shortly after we checked outta here last night, this morning. Whatever. Your brother broke out of here.”

“What do you mean?” Jude stammered. “Is he okay? What happened to him?”

“What I’m about to show you both cannot leave this room. I haven’t shown this footage to anyone.” There was an intensity in the chief’s words. When he pressed play, the screen bloomed to life.

The picture was a black and white frame. The shots rotated and captured different sections of the cells and the hallways. Mike sped the images forward then paused the frame. “Did you guys catch that?” he asked.

“What?” Jude and Rachel replied simultaneously.

“Right here.” Mike pointed to the bottom of the screen, the left side, where a thin stream of smoke appeared to sift between the steel bars of the prison cell. With one arm aggressively entrenched in the other, he hit play again.

They watched two occupants drop to their knees suddenly, as if struggling for breath. They hit the floor, and Kevin’s shock implied something worse might be coming. Soon after, they watched as he began a brief but peculiar conversation with a person none of them could see. No shape. No voice detected. But Kevin was certainly carrying on with someone in his cell, that much was agonizingly clear. Between short pauses, the smoke appeared and disappeared. And suddenly the cell door unhinged. It was as if there were pieces missing from the feed, certain elements the camera couldn’t pick up. Kevin pushed open the unlocked gate and was free.

“That bug split just like that. In our house, on my watch!” Fury pumped behind Mike’s harsh stare. He threw the remote against the wall, and it shattered to pieces. Rachel tried to pick up the batteries and the back casing, but she was told to leave it alone.

“It’s not possible,” Rachel said.

“I already canned every one of those useless night-shift hacks! Just let the mayor ride me on this one. Please, God, let him ride me.”

Jude sat rigidly in his chair. His mind rewound the images and replayed them several times.

“Who is he talking to?” Rachel added. It was like she meant for the thought to be internal, but it came out unexpectedly, and no one had an answer.

Mike sipped his coffee. He swallowed hard then, with jittery hands, massaged his temple. “I got college roommates who make in thirty days what it takes my outdated carcass to make in six months. Those Wall Street suck-ups spend half the summer on their private yachts in the Caribbean gettin’ pleasured by bimbos half their age. But me, I gotta go home to a nagging wife only to wake up every freaking day to this? There ain’t no peace. It’s just not fair.”

“It’s okay, Chief,” Jude said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Will we?”

“I wish you would’ve listened to me from the beginning. It’s Victor. This is his game. You saw it with your own eyes. He’s the only one who could move like that. Think about it. Kevin’s not crazy. He didn’t spend his high school years locked in his bedroom and staring up into space, wondering if little green men were coming to take him home to the mother ship. He was talking to someone in there. Someone we couldn’t fully see. Someone who’s found a way to cloak himself from the cameras.”