The Saint (25 page)

Staring at the broken body in the dirt, Adora was prepared for blood and perhaps some broken bones. But what waited there was more horrible, more terrible than she had imagined. The woman— Adora thought it was a woman because the body had no visible external genitalia—looked shriveled, like her tissues and organs had been sucked dry. Her features were dilapidated, something that belonged on a mummy. Her red hair was filled with oil and dirt, though there wasn't much left on her scalp; most had been pulled away in bloody clumps.

The emaciated creature convulsed suddenly, the muscles under the skin contorting in a constant stream of ripples. Adora watched, horrified, morbidly afraid that the body might rip itself open.

Kris held the body through its spasm. As the violent contractions ceased, the woman turned her head away and vomited up something pink and lumpy that looked like a mix of red fruit and liver. She rolled onto her back and gave a choked, staccato cry that barely escaped her constricting throat. Adora saw tattoos on her chest and belly. The poor creature had been into boy bands.

Understanding hit her, made her dizzy and sick.

“She's not very old, is she?” Adora asked in a cracked voice. “This . . . this woman is just a teenager.”

Kris leaned over and inhaled, his face pained. “No. She is not old chronologically. But she has squandered all her physical and spiritual resources as goblin-fruit addicts always do.”

“My God. Why?” Adora whispered, seeking comfort in his gaze but finding none. “Why would anyone do this to themselves?”

“They have no notion of what the consequences will be. Damn it! We tell the children about heroin and cocaine and cigarettes—but not about goblin fruit. The FDA doesn't even list it as an addictive substance.”

Kris turned back to the shuddering husk. Clouds sprang up out of nowhere and a light rain began to fall around them. This reminded Adora of something, but it took her a minute to place the memory—it had rained in just this way her first night at the Beverly Wilshire.

It's Kris. He's causing the rain,
she thought stupidly, staring at her wilting cuffs, the marabou matting under the rain's increasingly harsh lash. He was making the heavens weep.

“Let go, sister,” Kris said softly to the girl, pulling her gaze up to him.

His voice was the gentlest thing Adora had ever heard. It was like the tone he used on the hostess at Caveman Joe's, yet different. Adora understood that he was coaxing a soul someplace much darker and, for the dying woman, more frightening. The battered face stared up at him. Only one eye seemed able to focus. The chest heaved as she tried to draw in more air. He said again, “Let go, my sister.”

“My . . . baby?” the girl gasped, gulping air that seemed to do her no good. She was strangling like a hanged man at the end of an amateur noose. The rain slowly covered her face with tears.

Adora touched her own cheeks. Some of the moisture there was hot. She wanted to plead with Kris to do something—anything—to end this woman's suffering, but something held her back. She couldn't really ask him to kill, could she?

In answer, the wind swirled around them. It gusted so hard that it blew back her eyelashes and eyebrows, and seemed to force any words back inside of her. Almost, she thought she heard,
Thou shalt not kill.

Joy?

It's not me. And it's not Kris,
she answered, and the small hairs on Adora's nape stood on end. Adora turned around quickly, looking for a physical enemy, though she knew none was there.

Kris ignored the storm. “All will be well, sister.” He leaned closer and whispered something in a language Adora didn't know, but the words raised the hair on the rest of her body. She was fascinated by the long liquid string of vowels that sounded like . . . Gaelic music? That wasn't quite right, but it was the closest description she could think of.

“I hurt,” the goblin-fruit addict whispered, but her body eased even as she spoke and sank in on itself.

“Let go, sister,” Kris said a third time. “Hurt no more.”

The woman gave a last, long, pain-filled sigh and then stilled. Adora didn't see anything, but she thought she could feel the woman's soul rush by as it fled the ravaged body that had been its prison.

Adora's knees gave out and she sank down in the dirt. Her hand found a tired, exposed root of a manzanita plant that clutched the ground with arthritic fingers. She didn't pull hard, because she feared breaking the plant's tenuous grip, and the thought of any more death tonight was unbearable.

Kris closed the woman's sagging eyelids, then picked a small, unnoticed bundle up off the ground. It let out a thin, exhausted wail that was raw with fear and outrage. He turned to face Adora, the baby in his arms. His expression was bleaker than she could ever have imagined.

“That's what goblin fruit does to humans. And, believe it or not, this woman was lucky. She died before she started eating herself, before she turned to murder. Before she sold her baby to the goblin gangs.”

Unable to bear his expression, Adora looked down at the infant in Kris's hands. Its sleeper was wet and filthy. There was also something wrong with the child. The head was shaped like a cinderblock, and its jaw was too jutting. She could see tiny teeth that looked like they belonged on a miniature xylophone. Its scruffy hair was so matted with filth that she could only guess at the color. It also looked malformed in the rib cage.

“Will we take the baby to the mother's family?” she asked, looking about for some sign of habitation and forcing herself to stop her useless crying. She wasn't the one who had died. She was alive and relatively healthy.

“No, they rejected that poor woman and her child. There will be no shelter for the baby there.”

“And the father?” Adora asked, but she already knew the answer.

“You don't understand about the addiction process, do you?” Kris asked. Then he added, “Well, thank the Goddess you don't. Their bodies are the first things some of these poor creatures sell to the goblins—they're usually runaways and have nothing else. The transaction usually turns into a sort of gang rape, since the goblin-fruit pushers travel in packs. She probably didn't know who the father was—and wouldn't have wanted the baby with him anyway.”

Adora shivered. Unable to bear the increasing cold and the proximity to the dead woman any
longer, she reached for the baby, saying, “Give the child to me. You can't drive and also hold the baby.”

Kris hesitated, staring hard at her. “You want to hold this child?”

“Want to? I don't know. It just seems reasonable and right, given our circumstances.” Adora forced herself to meet Kris's eyes. She knew that he could see into her and would sense her reservations. She didn't know how to explain that her hesitation was half that the baby was so odd-looking, and half that the sight of any unprotected child disturbed her, made her anxious. “Look, I wouldn't reject a baby just because it has birth defects and its mother was a junkie. What kind of heartless bitch do you think I am?”

“The baby doesn't have birth defects. It has its father's arms and teeth,” Kris said.

“Those aren't its ribs?” Adora asked, looking again at the filthy bundle. She wasn't sure if this was good news or not.

“No. The mother tried to bind its second set of arms so that it would look more human. If you're going to beg on the streets where normal people live, you need a human baby, not a cross-breed monster.”

“Don't say that—she'll hear you!” Adora pleaded, though she knew the child couldn't possibly understand their conversation.

“I only speak the truth,” Kris replied. He glanced down briefly. “And it's another sad truth that no one wants this baby. As far as the world is concerned, it's inhuman garbage. They would see it as a kindness to leave it here to die.”

Adora put a hand on Kris's chin and coaxed his head up. She looked into his eyes. The sorrow and anger there was unbearable, a knife in her gut until he sensed what he was doing to her and pulled away mentally. She could feel a barrier slide up between them.

“Except you,” she reminded him. “
You
want this child.”

Kris nodded, his lips compressed. In the moonlight, his eyes seemed filled with an angry blue fire. His skin took on a silver glow.

“But I want them all. Every last lost and broken body that has been thrown away like last week's rubbish.” He shook his head. “The truly tragic part is that the cycle never ends. The junkies' kids grow up unloved, outsiders, some little more than animals. Hungry and scared, they turn to their parents' addictions, looking for some relief from their miseries. It's an endless wheel. And there are always more unwanted babies.” His usually lovely voice was harsh and deep, and made her heart constrict.

“Kris, you can't save the world.” When he scowled, she added hastily, “Not all at once. But we can save this bit of it. Give her to me. It's starting to rain hard now. We don't want her to catch a cold.”

Kris tilted his head to the sky as though only just becoming aware of the water that fell on them, and only on them. The line of demarcation was clear in the car's headlights.

“You can tell that she's a girl?” he said, almost to himself. “That's a good sign. I wasn't sure you could see past her arms. You've been so resistant to the idea of having mixed blood yourself—and I can tell this child makes you nervous.”

Adora didn't mention that the sleeper was pink and she'd just been guessing about the baby's gender. Nor did she protest that the situation was abnormal enough for anyone to resist accepting it. He was right. She was very resistant to the idea that she wasn't completely normal or human.

“Of course she's a girl,” she said instead. This time, Adora reached out and took the child. She wrapped her frivolous pink coat around it and staggered to her feet. The baby smelled of the same sour fruit that covered her mother's body. Adora added in alarm, “And her lips are turning blue. We have to get her someplace warm.”

Kris nodded, shaking off the melancholy and anger that had gripped him. “I know a place. I hadn't planned on taking you there just yet, since it's a bit scarier than where my nephew lives, but I think Fate has just intervened. We need a refuge now. The baby is sick and will die without help.”

“Where are we going then?” Adora asked. She pulled the child close, trying to shelter it. Her protective instinct, though unwanted, was exerting itself.

“It's part of what we call the tomhnafurach, but it's an area long abandoned—a fey ghost town. I mentioned it before. It's . . . it's part of my nephew's property, Cadalach, but an outskirt used by the Nephalim.”

“Nephalim? Fallen angels?”

“Giants, not angels—well, not exactly angels. Zayn and Chloe go there sometimes. They'll take this child in. You can stay at the tomhnafurach while I see to the mother's body. I'm not going to leave her on the road where the goblins can get at her.”

Adora shuddered. Seeing, Kris quickly removed his coat. She couldn't tell what it was made of, but it was softer than cashmere.

“She's dead. Why would they want her now?” she asked.

“You have a lot to learn about goblin drug lords. Most humans only become really useful after they're dead,” Kris answered, wrapping his coat around her, then wiping the rain—and her tears— from her cheeks. Again, he stared at his hands as though he could somehow feel her tears.

“Kris, don't put that on me!” she protested. “You'll wreck your coat too. The baby and I are both wet and dirty.”

“That is a tragedy, of course,” Kris said, finally smiling a little. His eyes had returned to normal and the rain had almost stopped. “And yet I am sure that with time I can come to accept a ruined coat.”

Adora let out a slow breath, relieved that he was himself again. “Kris, if . . . if there's any chance of the goblins getting at that body, let's take it now. Put it in the trunk.” It took an effort to say that, and she couldn't repress a shudder at the thought of riding with a corpse, but the thought didn't bother Kris.

He said he was a death fey,
Joy reminded her.
Why would a corpse bother him?

“Okay. That might be best, if you truly don't mind.”

Adora did mind, but she realized that Kris wasn't eavesdropping on her thoughts at the moment.

“It's fine,” she lied.

He carefully eased Adora and the baby back into the front seat of the car, then reached over her to shut off the CD player. The time for music was over.

Adora let the door close on their conversation. Pushing away the horrible thoughts of worldwide addiction his words about goblin drug lords had provoked, she tried to comfort the freezing baby. She hoped the child didn't sense her ambivalence at being a nursemaid. Kris was wrong: It wasn't that she hated the baby's mixed blood, it was that she had never thought to be near any child at all. Children were not supposed to be—not ever—part of her life, because . . . because . . .

You can't protect them?
Joy asked, her voice subdued.

Adora flinched. Yes. Joy was right. Somehow she had always known that she wouldn't be a good mother. She didn't know how to protect anyone, not even herself.

 

 

And a voice called to him in the darkness saying: Awake, awake, put on strength again, my son. For are you not the one who makes the road that shall lead the Redeemed? Arise and build a way of hope for your people who are lost and weary. And hearing the voice, Niklas pulled himself out of dust of the earth and was again made whole.

—
Niklas 5:19