All the Blue-Eyed Angels (37 page)

“Batshit crazy—both of ‘em,” he said, half to himself.

“Did you know my father’s still alive?” I asked. “Do you know where he is now?” He barely acknowledged the questions—I might as well have been talking to the air.

I looked back to Matt for more answers than Ashmont had provided thus far. Juarez had brushed the hair from the old man’s forehead. He was crying, while Matt continued to leak blood and gasp for breath.

“What about the fire?” I asked Matt. “And my father—Rebecca said she knew a secret about my father. Do you know what she was talking about?”

A flash of panic crossed the old man’s pain-filled eyes. “They killed Becca. They warned us—it’s what happens when you start telling secrets.”

Matt closed his eyes. I turned to Ashmont, who was watching all of this with only mild interest. He’d dropped the shotgun to his side and was using it to prop himself up.

“Who’s they?” I asked. I took a step toward him, no longer mindful of staying out of sight. Ashmont just smiled. “Who set the fire, dammit? Who attacked my mother?”

He looked past me, straight into the woods. Matt started coughing. Jack knelt beside him and tried to staunch a fresh flow of blood.

“I tell you and you’re dead,” Ashmont said. He still wasn’t looking at me. “Just like the rest of us—Matty’s almost there. They’ll get you too, one way or the other. Becca said it was the Angel of Death that struck the match, but you and me know better. He ain’t no angel; I don’t know who the fuck he is, but he’s just a man. Adam wants to pretend it never happened, and Kat’s the only thing standing between you and a bullet that’s had your name on it since the day you was born. There’s a stack of bodies a mile deep and they keep piling up—you really think it’s worth all that?”

I hesitated, but only for a second. “I need to know what happened.”

His eyes flitted to mine for just a second before they returned to the trees behind us. Jack was oblivious, now doing CPR on a dying man whose bloody past would chase him to the grave. I turned around. The world slowed to a series of freeze frames that my brain could barely process.

Twenty yards away, a man stood with a rifle pointed at us. He looked directly at me. In the moonlight, I could make out high cheekbones and a thin, sharp nose.

He fired.

Ashmont never flinched. Never ducked. He fell into the grave where I’d just uncovered Zion’s body, and he didn’t move again. I was dimly aware of Juarez shouting for me to get down, but I ignored him.

When I turned back to the tree line, the cloaked man from my nightmares had vanished into the woods.

I got to my feet and ran after him—through the woods, past the boarding house, down the trail to the ocean. I ran through a blue forest toward the deep black sea and I didn’t stop. Didn’t slow. The ground was rough beneath my feet. I tripped and landed hard, skinned my knees and jarred my bones. I tore my face on a bramble of thorns I couldn’t get free of, while just up ahead the man with all the answers I’d been looking for since childhood ran like a specter through the night.

Except I didn’t believe in ghosts.

I kept running.

He broke off from the path somewhere along the line; I caught glimpses of him through the trees, but he was always out of my reach. He was leading me toward the south side of the island, where the cliffs were high and the drop to the ocean below was fifty feet of hard edges. I couldn’t see him anymore. Heard nothing. Somewhere far off, Juarez was calling for me.

“Ssh,” my father says. It is night in the woods. We are alone. “Don’t make a sound. Hold your breath. Listen to the forest. You can hear a mouse creep, if you listen hard enough.”

I stopped running and held my breath.

Five seconds passed. Ten. Nothing but the wind in the trees and the distant surf, Juarez’s voice sounding more and more panicked as he shouted my name. And then…

Footsteps, moving fast. I followed the sound, running faster than I had ever run in my life. I saw him up ahead—a black silhouette racing like he couldn’t be stopped. I didn’t slow down when he led me off the path again, where the trees grew thinner and the wind got colder. We cleared the forest and reached the cliffs.

He kept running, leading me dangerously close to the edge. I could hear the waves crashing below, could feel a vast emptiness to my left. A single misstep and I’d be gone. The cloaked man was ten feet away, maybe less, when he turned toward me. He stood at the edge of the cliff and smiled. He held a long, bony finger to his thin lips.

“Sshhh.”

He turned to face the abyss.

An instant later, he was gone.

I ran after him, stopping short at the ledge. Below, I could see him make his steady way down the sheer face, hand over hand down a rope anchored into the granite just a foot down from where I was standing. A boat was idling in the waves below. I couldn’t see details, but at least one other person waited for him.

I stood there gasping for breath and watched as the cloaked man, the man in my nightmares, the man who had been a ghost but was now once and for all incontrovertibly proven flesh and blood, climbed into the boat. He disappeared into the night.

I found Jack in the woods fifteen minutes later, calling my name. Blood coated the front of his shirt. When I finally appeared on the path in front of him he stopped short, his breath coming hard. He wiped blood, sweat, and tears from his face with the back of his hand. I’d never seen him so angry.

“Diggs is right—you do have a death wish. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

I swallowed past the boulder-sized lump in my throat. I’d sprained my ankle and scratched my face. My jeans and jacket were torn.

“I’m sorry—I wasn’t thinking. I just… I had to try and catch him. I’m sorry,” I repeated. “Matt…?”

“They’re both dead,” he said numbly.

There’s a stack of bodies a mile deep, and they keep piling up,
Ashmont had said. Matt might have killed Zion and Isaac all those years ago, but were the rest of the deaths really on my father’s head?

“I didn’t find Rebecca,” he said.

I nodded again. I took his hand and led him back down the path. “I think I know where she is.”

August 22, 1990

Joe appears after the shot is fired. He is not there, and then he is. The last remnants of coherence in her tangled brain tell Rebecca that he has been lurking in the background, waiting to intervene when he was needed. He is too late.

Isaac falls first. He sinks to his knees, his eyes wide. The bullet hit him in the chest; the blood soaks his shirt and the ground beneath and he dies almost immediately. Rebecca barely notices, however. Her attention is fixed on Zion. He falls backward, hard, and she worries about him bumping his head until she gets closer and sees the gaping wound in his forehead. His face is still wet with tears, but his eyes do not see. She falls to the ground beside him. Pulls him into her arms.

Matt is screaming—the scream of a madman who will never be silenced. Joe is the only one who is calm, though she can see that he is barely holding on. He takes Matt by the shoulders and steers him away from them. Gives orders that Rebecca only halfhears: “Stay with her, Matty—I’ll come back for you. Just stay here ‘til I can get back. I’ll take care of everything.”

Matt becomes very quiet. Joe takes his gun. He kisses Rebecca’s head and wipes away her tears, but he can’t get her to move away from their dead son.

“I’ll be back, Becca. I’ll take care of you.”

He leaves her there with her dead child and her dead lover and the man who took them both. Matt stands. He is still weeping. He goes out into the rain and disappears down the path. Rebecca is certain she will never see him again.

She hopes she will never see any of them again.

She sings to her son, lying broken in her arms.

The Angel of Death reappears. His brow is furrowed. He touches Rebecca’s head. “What a mess you’ve made,” he says. He smiles at her.

He goes to Isaac’s body and lifts it easily over his shoulder, as though it weighs no more than a sack of flour. He carries the dead preacher down the path, paying no mind to the rain or the blood that drenches his cloak. Rebecca blinks away tears, wipes away her son’s blood. The Angel turns back.

“Your son will rise. If he is Chosen, he will rise. Leave him. Come with me.”

She kisses Zion’s lips. Arranges him as carefully as she can on the granite floor. She stands and crosses herself in a way that Isaac would disapprove of, though the priests she knew as a child would find it only fitting.

She follows the Angel of Death into the rain.

They go to the chapel. The sun is just coming up, and the congregation has already gathered for their early-morning service. Candles are lit, and churchgoers are singing inside. Their voices are hazy—the chorus of drunken sailors rather than a choir of angels. Her Angel of Death drops Isaac’s body at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the chapel. She watches as he latches the door to the chapel, and places a heavy iron padlock on it.

“It is God’s will,” he tells her. “You are here as witness to God’s fury.”

He goes to the back of the barn. When he returns, he carries a metal container of gasoline.

“You can’t—” she says. She feels the first vestiges of reality seeping in. Her son lies dead. And now…

“I have no choice,” he tells her. “This is what’s required. We sacrifice the flock to resurrect the Lamb of God.” He smiles at her again. There is something insincere about the smile; for a moment, she feels as though he is laughing at her.

Sacrifice the flock to resurrect the Lamb of God.

She stands outside in the rain while the angel completes his mission. The congregation is still singing upstairs. Someone is speaking. The Angel of Death returns to her side. He holds up a lighter.

“I’ll go. You stay here. Wait for your son to return to you. Hide from the world until he does.” He moves closer and presses a kiss to her cheek. He smells like blood and gasoline and the fury of a vengeful God. “Tell Adam that Father is watching,” he whispers.

He curls his body around the lighter, shielding it from the wind and rain until a flame appears. It takes three attempts before the gasoline catches and the fire starts. Someone screams inside the chapel. Children cry. When Rebecca looks around again, the Angel of Death has vanished.

She returns to the greenhouse to wait for Zion.

We found Rebecca Ashmont in my father’s cabin, where I suspected she’d been staying since my father left the island. She lay on my father’s bed with her hands crossed over her stomach and her eyes closed. Her once-dark hair had gone silver and there were obviously more wrinkles than there’d been in the photos I’d seen, but she was still a striking woman.

Jack checked her pulse, though the ligature marks around her neck made it clear what he’d find. I thought of the man I’d just chased through the forest; the man I was now positive had attacked me that morning at the old Payson house.

Rebecca and Joe Ashmont; Noel Hammond; Matt Perkins—all dead now.Ashmont had said Rebecca had seen an Angel of Death—that that Angel was the one who burned the Payson Church to the ground. There was nothing supernatural about this man, though; I’d looked in his eyes twice now, and he was nothing if not flesh and blood.

I touched Jack’s arm and motioned him outside. We watched the sun rise over the ocean and waited in silence for Diggs to arrive with the police.

It was late afternoon the next day before I got back to Diggs’ house. I’d been given a clean bill of health at Kat’s old clinic, then sat through several hours of questioning with Sheriff Finnegan and a multitude of much less friendly faces from the state police, while we tried to sort through everything that had happened. Without much luck, as it turned out.

Diggs’ Jeep was gone when I pulled in, but Jack’s Honda Civic was parked out front. The hatchback was open and a couple of boxes were already packed inside. Einstein bolted past Juarez when he opened the front door, and we had a brief but heartfelt reunion before Stein took off to christen a few bushes in my honor. Juarez approached.

He’d showered and shaved and presumably gotten a couple of hours’ sleep. All things considered, he looked a hell of a lot better than I’d expected. Still exhausted, still haunted, but there was a resilience about him that pleased me. It would take a lot more than a few dead bodies and an amnesic childhood to keep Jack Juarez down for long.

He set down the box he’d been carrying. “Police all done with you?”

“For now. They didn’t learn much—since I don’t really know anything.”

“You know who killed them; that’s something.”

“I saw who killed them—but I don’t have a clue who he is, or what he has to do with any of this. My father’s alive, but I don’t know how to find him. More people died because of this thing—whatever it is—and I don’t know why.” I couldn’t keep the frustration from my voice, try as I might. “I’d say that’s not much of anything, actually.”

“It’s more than I have,” he said quietly. I looked at him and saw the same frustration I was feeling, though considerably magnified. At least I knew where I came from; at least I had a place to start.

He touched a scratch on my cheek. “Aside from that, you survived relatively unscathed this time, right?”

“Nothing that time and a little concealer won’t heal. What about you?” I looked him in the eye. He wavered for just a second before the weakness passed and he smiled. It wasn’t so much an attempt to hide the pain as a refusal to give in to it. I liked that.

He shrugged. “I’m fine. Scratches, scrapes, a bruise or two…”

So, we weren’t talking emotional scars today. Fine with me. He moved in a little closer and ran his hand through my hair. I backed up until I hit the Honda Civic. Jack followed me.

“So, you’re leaving?” I asked.

“I’ve gotta get back—I’m starting to forget what I’ve got waiting for me.”

“Which is?”

He took a little while to think on that. “A job I love. Good friends. A bed that’s been empty too long.” He looked at me meaningfully. “What about you? Are you sticking around Littlehope, or can I tempt you out to D.C. now and then?”