The Forsaken (40 page)

Screaming. Writhing. His corpse frame electrified. The entity brought him even higher, whirling him and smashing his bones against any surface. Jude cursed and seethed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Open your eyes and give us a peek. Pretty please.

He howled. Every strained motion was painfully executed. At length, his face started to rip. His cheeks ballooned then spilled dust. A forceful inhale. Then choke. Then forceful. Choke again. Jude realized his bone structure was changing, shifting.

“What are you doing to me?”

“Making you more like our image.” Jude’s vocal cords stung as Azrael spoke from his own lips.

“Stop it,” Jude cried in return, savagely pulling at his face. The blood from his eyes dripped into the grooves in his hands. “Please.”

He warred with the demon, scratching at the walls to maneuver his way toward the unsure freedom that lay upon solid ground. But his strengths were overturned.

Jude’s hands were immediately dragged to his eyes. He knew he would not last much longer. Sticking two fingers into the lower rim of one socket, he drew even more blood from the greedy, filthy pool. The tips of his fingers stroked the drywall surface.

Before he realized what the spirit was doing to him, the script was already dripping red.

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death
.

He carved out the letter
R
with his nails.

“Murderer. It spells murderer,” he gasped, the revelation storming him suddenly.

That’s right, sonny. Say it once more.

“No! I am…more,” Jude said with gritted teeth. “I am more than you can take, Azrael!”

Jude knew the demon sought to choke him with his own tongue as the words spilled out like poison. Deep inside, he was curious whether he even believed it himself.

Unable to holster tightly to his doubt, Jude slammed his spine against the wall and pulled himself downward toward the floor. His torso was rubber as it stretched. His hands were faith, reaching in desperation for salvation. His heart was a bullet in his chest. With one, blood-curdling scream, he felt a lasting burn.

“Release me,” he said, forcing his eyelids shut.

Guess again, sonny.

At once, Eliam’s words replayed in his mind:
The eyes are the doorway to the soul
. The words became truth. But Jude feared that the creature would devour the thought.

“I don’t care if I have to die. Do you hear me!” Pain evaporated from his lungs. Another shriek ripped out. Jude knew he had to act quickly. “But if death takes me, you bet your sorry hide it’s taking you too!” Jude wiped the fever sweat from his face and swallowed a chunk of spit down hard. Peeling open his lids, he slipped his right index finger behind one eye. There was a tension that spread instantly as he pulled. He felt his already cloudy vision begin to splinter. When would the connection sever, as Eliam had said? How much pressure could his body endure?

We made you whole. We made you complete, sonny. Damn you!

“Maybe I already am, Azrael,” Jude yelled, ripping out the tissue completely. “Oh God!” He squirmed, wishing like hell he hadn’t done it. The pain sank into his bones.

Azrael retaliated with abuse. Some of Jude’s bones were already ground down. Gray powder bled out through the cracks in the skin. Jude’s head began to shake sporadically; he returned to the Haitian beach.

He was the hunter. He was a hungry madman with an insatiable lust pumping through him.

The thirst will last forever.

“Liar! I will not be that man.”

You will never be rid of me!

“Smile for the camera, you filth!” Jude reached his hand into his left socket and drove his nail into the back of his red lens, tearing at it. Jude gazed one last time at Eliam’s church, at the body of his closest friend sprawled out like some crime scene memory. He stared at the dust that once was Morgan Cross and at the carnage that littered the floor. Finally, Jude gazed at his own hands, the victims of impossible methods in this cruel and unholy war.

How long would these snapshots remain part of him?

His lungs had grown weary of shouts, his chest giving way to fatigue and pressure. For a split second, Jude perceived the shape of the demon. He couldn’t fully comprehend how it was that such a thing were possible, how he could feel it and even see it, but he knew he did. Like a haunting apparition now contained within two blind eyes. A vision polluted and forsaken.

Jude suddenly began to fall. Faster. Until he smacked hard against the floor. Shock-filled, he stumbled around blindly in search of where his eyes had fallen. The splashes of light that surrounded certain objects mystified him. As he crawled, he fought the events of the past week, the past hour even. None of it was real, right? God was supposed to tear open the heavens and land here to fight the battle. But maybe some battles were meant to be fought with human hands.

“I beat it,” he murmured, finally locating his eyes. No longer did the demon skulk around in his shell. No longer did he feel its swooning grip tug at his guts.

“I’m free.”

Jude imagined every war film he’d ever watched, pictured how the frightened soldiers crept feverishly beneath barbed wire. How stealthily they scurried across enemy lines. He was those soldiers. He was. Every. One.

He touched the stairs of the altar, sure he’d never outrun the fire eating the carpet, the pews. He edged farther up. He sensed he was close to a staff that held a fading candle. It had some life left to it. He accidentally knocked it over. He knew this candle had been lit by the priest. The smell of ash was already thick in the air, but for some reason, it was like this candle emitted a scent. How he wished it could breathe life once more into his dear friend.

Jude felt some of the rug burning, then. The fire licked his jacket. His elbows would surely blister in a matter of minutes, but he didn’t much care.
This church isn’t gonna last the night,
he mused, so grateful his thoughts were once more his own.

Biting down hard, Jude winced as some of the fire burned the hair on his wrist. The swelling of pain now seemed more intense since the creature’s departure. His elbows stung too. His eyes squished into the grooves of his stained palms. With a tremor in his voice, he threw his eyes into the fire. He sensed their wispy shape, their wind-like, withering fashion, and a peace came.

A terrible shriek erupted just then as the fire mutilated the fleshy tissue. His vision disintegrated and turned to ash. Jude experienced the anguish, sensed his sight splinter and re-splinter. He knew it wouldn’t take long for the fire to fully consume.

One breath.

Then a second.

Am I dead?

Then a third.

No. I’m alive. I’m breathing.

“Jude…Foster.” He spoke his name just to make sure he still could. To make sure it still had meaning.

Jude pushed himself off the altar and crawled toward the priest like a wounded animal. He stopped moving when he felt the priest’s hand with his own.

He held it.

He squeezed it.

Eliam was dead. But he was real. He was faith Jude knew he’d always needed. He believed.

“I wish it had been me, Father. I swear it. I wish it had been me,” he said with deep sorrow.

54

RACHEL COULD SEE RED
and blue light. The throbbing in her head wouldn’t quit. She tasted blood and dirt in her mouth, and in the panic of waking up, she accidentally swallowed some.

A flurry of policemen surrounded the perimeter of the church, now half burned. It stood as a flicker of its former glory. The ceiling was nearly gone and exposed some of the inner sanctuary. Windows were shattered, and glass had sprayed the steps where her body lay just moments earlier. Firemen had doused the flames before she’d come to.

At first she was dizzy, but Rachel had been knocked out before. Not often but enough to know how to stumble out of it. But her eyes were still twitchy, and she tripped over her steps a few times.

The firm hand of a paramedic grabbed her by the arm. “Excuse me, ma’am, but we’ll need to make sure you’re okay before we let you walk off. You may have a concussion.”

“A what?”

“A concussion, ma’am.”

“I’m fine,” she stammered, shaking her arm free.

The storm had ended, but it left its mark. Massive tree branches had been tossed on the small sections of lawn around the church, and power lines were down. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a group of technicians working on the wires, one of them getting shocked.

The wind raced through her shirt, grazing her ribs, almost slipping inside her. Teeth chattering, she relived the brief fight with Morgan Cross, how she sailed through the air like a paperweight before descending upon the cracked concrete steps.

She wasn’t strong enough to beat him on her own. That reality was unshakable.

Her hair was probably a frayed mess. She could feel it, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t care that she looked like a clown with bleeding mascara and a number of facial bruises, or that she had to walk with a limp and that every movement hurt like crazy.

“How is he?” she asked when she saw Mike stepping out of the church, surrounded by a wolf pack of disgruntled detectives and forensics personnel. No doubt they were all pissed about getting called in to handle the chaos. A number of reporters she hadn’t seen before started pulling up, camera crews and the works. It was strange not seeing Chase Vallace among the herd.

Mike dismissed the press with a few vague words and approached her.

“Chief, how is he? Is Jude okay?”

Mike turned to her and sighed. She’d never seen him so hopeless, so depleted.

The sea of faces parted as a group of paramedics carried Jude through on a stretcher. Her heart immediately sank. She wasn’t sure if it was relief trapped inside, waiting to come out, or if it was fear. Fear that he had endured it, and was perhaps changed even more because of it. Was he still the villain who tied Chase up and sucked the life from his body? Was he the maniac who forced himself on her? Or was he the man who tried to save her while they were surrounded in the now ruined church?

She shuddered. She couldn’t come to grips with it all, not now. Not yet. Seeing him alive, even though it was a challenge just to breathe, was causing her to react, and not at all in the manner she expected.

Blood-matted bandages were taped to both sides of Jude’s temple. And his chest had some stitches that looked painful. His head shifted from side to side, like he sensed her presence or like he sensed
something
even though the bandages blanketed his vision. He at last claimed his first full breath.

“Jude!” she gasped. “You’re alive.”

“Rachel.” Jude recognized her voice.

She followed the medics to the ambulance. Once he was laid inside, she put her hand in his. The fear was gone. He seemed so calm.

Jude held onto her with a tight grip. She didn’t think he’d ever let go. But it was only a blink. He was torn from her grasp as the medics attached his stretcher to a gurney and fastened him in. The ambulance would be off in mere moments, and they’d be separated. She didn’t know what would happen after tonight, what would happen to him, or if she’d stay long enough to find out. All she had was this moment.

“Is it you, Jude? Are you…all right?”

“It’s me,” Jude said in a raspy voice.

“What happened to you?” she asked, touching the bandages.

“I made a choice,” he replied definitively.

“It’s gone?”

“It’s gone. You’re not gonna believe this, but somehow, I can still perceive certain things around me, like I know that they’re there, even the shape of your face. I can see, Rachel. I can really see.”

Then he was tucked away in the back of the ambulance truck. She didn’t understand what he meant by
I can really see
. But her thoughts didn’t have the time to process it. The blink was already over. The moment stolen. A real sense of loneliness crept in. She turned back, a crowd of people standing in the aftermath of a terrible storm. In front of her was a man she wondered if she’d ever see again.

She couldn’t bring herself to say anything else to Jude. Her lips quivered. She scratched her scalp, perplexed and worried at the same time.

She said a prayer as the ambulance engine revved.

And then Jude was taken away. No goodbye. No
see ya soon
. No kiss for the road.
Welcome to real life, Rachel. You’re lucky to still have it.
She refused to blink. She didn’t want to come back. She didn’t want to stay here. She knew she would remember this moment until the day she died. And she hated that her mind worked that way.

She wanted so desperately to go with him, but she didn’t. She had become the burned-down statues, the rocks that couldn’t move. But why? The bad guy was gone, wasn’t he? The man she lo…felt something for, was alive. The case was solved. She could finally rest. Why, then, was she frozen?

“Looks like we won’t be turning into pumpkins after all,” Mike said groggily. He lit a cigarette and stood beside her.