A security guard stood at the end of the corridor, but he was hospital staff. The Hawthorne police had their hands full. Octavian imagined that soon almost all of the police at the hospital would be gone, leaving the orderlies and onsite security to deal with any outbreaks of violence and the frustration of those trying to deal with the long waits and crowded ER.
The door to the last room on the left stood open, but all was dark inside. Octavian glimpsed another boarded-up window. Dr. O’Neil crossed to the room on the right.
“Gregory Wheeler,” Dr. O’Neil began. “Sixteen years old. Paranoid schizophrenic. His room was also hit by that blue lightning, but it didn’t do him any harm.”
She paused, then gestured to Marlon, who tugged at the key ring on his belt and went to unlock the door.
“Of course, that depends on how you define
harm
,” Dr. O’Neil added.
“How do
you
define
harm
?” Charlotte asked, but her voice was absent its usual sarcasm. She really seemed to want an answer.
Dr. O’Neil gave her a strange look, but did not reply.
Marlon opened the door. The lights were low inside. The teenage patient sat in a cushioned chair that looked as though it did not belong in the room at all, and Octavian felt sure it had come from someone’s office. It was not at all the sort of thing one put in the room of a psychiatric patient who might be in danger of hurting himself or someone else. But Greg Wheeler didn’t look dangerous at all. In fact, he looked alert and calm, even curious, and as Dr. O’Neil led the way into the room, the kid looked past her and blinked in surprise when he saw Octavian, as though he’d recognized him. It wasn’t a surprise, really. If Octavian wasn’t precisely famous, he had certainly earned his share of notoriety over the past few years.
The chief came in with them, but Marlon and Officer Moschitto stayed in the hall.
“Greg,” Dr. O’Neil said. “Chief Kramer and I wanted you to meet some people. This is Mr. Octavian, and with him are Miss Shaw and . . .” She trailed off and looked at Charlotte. “I don’t think I caught your last name.”
“Just Charlotte is fine,” the vampire girl said, a glint of pain in her eyes. “I gave up my family name.”
Octavian nodded to the patient. “Greg. It’s nice to meet you. It seems you were very lucky last night, with the lightning.”
Greg gave a small smile, as if to tell Octavian he had no idea what he was talking about, and shrugged.
Then he spoke, and Octavian blinked in astonishment.
“Friggin’ gibberish,” Charlotte said.
“I don’t think so,” Dr. O’Neil said. “It’s a language. I’ve listened to him and there’s structure to it, plus it’s clear he’s saying things that make sense to him. Watch his face and his hands. He’s speaking. We just don’t understand him.”
“I do,” Octavian said.
“So what language is it?” Keomany asked.
Octavian walked over and sat down on the bed, putting himself eye to eye with the boy. Greg Wheeler seemed entirely ordinary. Other than this strange shift in language, nothing about him suggested the influence of chaos or evil. He wondered if that was possible, if the teenager’s schizophrenia—a kind of chaos in itself—could have altered the effect that the chaos storm’s lightning would otherwise have had upon him.
“Peter?” Keomany asked.
Octavian glanced at her, arching an eyebrow. They were all watching him, waiting for an explanation.
“It’s an Old Aramaic dialect that originated in ancient Chaldea. No one’s spoken this language in well over two thousand years.”
They were all staring. Octavian raised his eyebrows and smiled, acknowledging their astonishment. He shared it.
“How the hell does this kid know . . . what is it?” Chief Kramer asked.
“Ancient Chaldean,” Octavian said.
“That. Yeah. How does he know it?”
“Not just him,” Dr. O’Neil said. “How do
you
know it?”
Octavian glanced at Keomany and Charlotte and saw that they were both wondering the same thing. But he didn’t feel like talking about his thousand years in Hell, and now wasn’t the time. Instead, he turned to Greg and spoke to him in that dead language. The kid ought to have been scared, but he didn’t seem frightened at all by this turn of events. They spoke for a couple of minutes while the others only stood and listened quietly, and when Octavian turned to look at them, he thought that Dr. O’Neil and the police chief looked unsettled, and maybe a little afraid of him.
“What did he say?” Keomany asked. “Does he know what’s causing all of this?”
“He has no idea,” Octavian said. “He’s happy. His head is clearer than he can ever remember it being.”
“There’s some dark irony for you,” Charlotte muttered.
“He can’t tell us anything?” Chief Kramer asked.
“Not with words,” Octavian said. “He still understands English but when he tries to speak it, Chaldean comes out. But he has no more sense of what’s going on than we do.”
“Shit,” Chief Kramer snapped. “I thought for sure we had something.”
“Wait, you said he couldn’t tell us anything with words,” Keomany said. “Which means there
is
something we can learn from him.”
Octavian looked at Greg thoughtfully. “Maybe. With all the weirdness erupting all over the place, this could be just another example of that. But maybe it’s not. Here’s something true. At the end of the seventh century B.C., tribes of settlers began to arrive in Babylon. In a short time, they had completely taken over. These were the Chaldeans, and what was once Babylon became Chaldea. But no one—and think about this, with all of the historians and archaeologists who’ve made it their business to piece together the history of humankind—no one knows where the Chaldeans came from. They just began to appear in Babylon, and they spread, and they conquered.”
“No one knows?” Chief Kramer asked.
“No one,” Octavian echoed.
“Not even in Hell?” Keomany said.
Dr. O’Neil stared at her, then swung her gaze around to study Octavian.
Octavian did not smile. “Not the one I was in.”
“You think they were from somewhere else,” Charlotte said. “One of these other Hells that Keomany was talking about.”
“I think it’s possible,” Octavian said.
“This is insane,” Dr. O’Neil whispered, as if to herself.
“This is real,” Keomany told her. “Trust me. I wish it weren’t.”
“The point,” Octavian said, drawing their attention back to him, “is that the fact that he’s speaking Chaldean specifically, and that—unless there’s something I’m missing—we’re not seeing a whole wave of people speaking various ancient languages, makes me think it
is
connected. Whatever this power is, whatever’s brought this chaos to Hawthorne, may have originated with them.”
Chief Kramer threw up his hands. “How do you get from ancient Chaldea to modern-day New England?”
Octavian had no answer, and he knew Greg Wheeler didn’t have one, either. He thanked the boy, who asked him a favor.
“Dr. O’Neil, Greg says he would love you forever if you could get him some chocolate chip cookies.”
The doctor, still in shock from the conversation she’d found herself in, smiled uncertainly and nodded. She went to Greg and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll make sure they bring you some milk, too,” she said. The boy thanked her in a language no one alive would understand. Octavian took a few steps toward the door, closing the distance between himself and his friends. Charlotte’s eyes glinted with fascination and he felt her watching him hungrily, but he couldn’t be sure exactly what it was she hungered for. Whatever it was, he knew he couldn’t give it to her. Keomany appraised him as well, and he was surprised to see a similar look in her eyes.
“You’re full of surprises,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm.
He told himself that chaos was unraveling them all, playing havoc with reason, undermining logic. How else to explain the primal response he felt rising in him at her touch?
“So, what next?” the chief asked. “We’re not any closer to an answer.”
“We might be,” Octavian replied, tearing his focus away from Keomany. “If I start with the assumption that this chaos magic is related to Chaldean sorcery, I might be able to come up with a way to tap into the flow, and trace it.”
“Well, get on it,” the chief said.
Octavian turned to Keomany and Charlotte, but before he could speak, the chief’s radio crackled. Amid the static were screams and gunshots. Officer Moschitto poked his head into the room, face blanched white, his eyes wide. He clutched his radio like a life preserver.
“What the hell is this, now?” the chief snapped, grabbing at his radio.
Moschitto had the answer. “It’s the morgue, Chief.”
“What are they shooting at?” Kramer demanded.
Moschitto grew even paler, having to speak the words.
“The cadavers. They’re shooting at the cadavers.”
MILES
flew down the stairs, taking them two at a time and jumping to each landing, careening off the walls. Amber came down behind him. Several times she called his name, and in the back of his mind he knew he should wait for her. A small voice inside him tried to insist that he send her back up, that she didn’t need to see this or be a part of it, that he should keep her out of harm’s way. But the voice was a tiny thing and could never have been loud enough to break through the roar that filled his head, the frenzy of panic and grief that sent him hurtling down the stairs.
He wanted the old world, the one he’d grown up in. He wanted the world where vampires and demons and magic were imaginary things, where he could pretend the ghosts he’d seen as a boy had been a singular, haunting experience, comforting evidence of the existence of an afterlife and perhaps of God and Heaven and other now quaint reassurances. He wanted an ordinary world, where his grief for the loss of his mother could never have been interrupted by the possibility that . . . the possibility that . . .
Rage filled him. Miles hated magic. It was obscene, what it could do.
They bypassed the lobby level. If they had tried to take an elevator, they would still be waiting up on the fifth floor. At every landing he expected to crash into a security guard, but they were obviously too busy to worry about people on the stairs. The cameras would show the two of them racing down the steps, but whoever was monitoring them probably had better things to do, just like the guards in the ER, and the ones who must already be in the basement.
Miles leaped to the landing where a metal door had been painted with an enormous
B
for
basement
. His right knee buckled and he slammed into the door, grunting in pain.
Amber caught up, hustling down the last few steps, reaching for him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Just twisted it,” he said. He had forgotten that he wasn’t a kid anymore, that at forty-two his knees were no longer up to this kind of punishment. But the shock of pain had woken him from the lunatic rush that had swept over him.
Miles brushed his hand against hers, shaking with manic grief. “You should go back. It won’t be safe.”
Amber flinched, then shook her head. “Just shut up and go. Maybe you don’t need me with you, but I can’t face what’s waiting for me at home by myself. I need a friend, and you’re it. So let’s go.”
If he’d been capable of it, he might have smiled.
He yanked the door open and took her hand, and they rushed into the basement corridor together. No sign indicated the direction of the morgue, but gunshots rang out to the right, and he knew which way they had to go. They ran along the corridor, passing several testing labs where people crouched behind tables and machines, afraid of bullets, and other things as well.
Miles let go of her hand as they reached a turn in the corridor, but he didn’t slow down. He turned the corner and only then did he stop short. Amber staggered to a halt behind him. Two police officers and three security guards—all but one of them men—stood in the corridor, backs to Miles and Amber. The cops had their weapons drawn. In front of them, outside the side-by-side entrances to the morgue and the autopsy room, dead people limped and staggered around almost aimlessly. A skinny middle-aged white man had been flayed open, maybe in the middle of an autopsy when he woke up, and his torso hung open as though his chest and abdomen had been unzipped, organs trailing behind him on the floor and hanging in loops. Two old ladies walked aimlessly, their eyes closed as if they were playing some kind of child’s game.