Blood Day (26 page)

But Joshua was no man. He was so much more. Sia shivered with pleasure to think of him. She could call him and he would come. No matter where he was, he would always come. Sia closed her eyes and willed the inclination away. She would do this alone. If only to prove to herself that she could.
 

When they set out for Philadelphia, Joshua whispered into Sia’s ear for the entire midnight train ride. He whispered who he was, and who she could be, if that was what she desired. Even after they arrived, as they looked for a taxi, Sia could still feel his breath on her neck. That was when the lights went out. Even the stars seemed to go dark. And the screaming began.
 

Joshua led Sia through the city, pulling her through dark alleys, his dark eyes always watchful, always sharp. As they passed a group of people cowering outside a bar, Sia saw Joshua fighting the urge to stop. His face changed only for a moment, a flash of the beast within, and they were on their way.

Sia’s mother didn’t come to the door when she rang the bell and she felt her heart stop in her chest when Joshua pushed the door open with a finger. It was ajar. Sia felt the splintered wood where someone had forced the door open. She looked at Joshua, who was in turn watching her, his eyes asking what she wanted to do.

“I don’t know if I can see,” said Sia, her voice like a breath. Joshua reached out and stroked her cheek with the tips of his fingers.

“You can,” he said softly. “You’re strong. It’s important to see.” He nodded as if agreeing with himself. “It’s important to know.”

“To know what?” said Sia.

“To know who is to blame. To know who to kill.”

“I’m no killer, Joshua,” she said, but even the hardness in her voice gave her away. She had killed. And she hadn’t regretted it. Looking around at the city, Sia knew she would kill again. Perhaps many times. It was not as troubling as she knew it should be, the idea of killing. But it seemed natural for her. The chill in her chest wasn’t from grief, but anger. She wasn’t afraid, even though she should have been cowering like the others. She peered at Joshua in the dark and she knew she would one day have his strength. She would one day have his hunger. But first she had to see.

Sia walked into the house. When Joshua moved to follow she shook her head. Alone. This is how it had to be. She needed to be strong, she needed to see on her own. Joshua stepped back to wait motionless on the porch and Sia stepped into the dark house.

There were familiar smells here, smells from childhood she associated with home: cinnamon, her mother’s perfume, a sharp piney smell from the cleaner her mother used daily on the floors. But there were other smells mingling with the good; earthy, dark smells. The smell of graves. The coppery, meaty smell of blood.

Sia went by feel through the entryway, across the carpeted living room, into the kitchen. She slipped on something slick on the tiles. Sia grabbed onto the counter to keep her balance, her hand immediately going to a drawer nearby. She pulled out the matches and lit a scented candle that she knew would be on top of the refrigerator. By the smell of too-sweet vanilla Sia lowered the candle to the floor. She saw the heap of what at first looked like rumpled clothing. But the dark puddle around it gave it away. Sia set the candle next to her mother’s face and stared at her unseeing eyes. There was a chunk of flesh missing where it had been ripped out of her neck.
 

Sia sat down on the floor and tried to feel something. The absence of feeling was more alarming to her than finding her mother dead on the floor. She looked impossibly old lying there, impossibly small and fat at the same time. This woman who had kept an iron fist over her life for so long, this woman who had kept Ana like a sword hanging over Sia’s head, who had never been satisfied with anything Sia had ever done, was incomprehensibly unimportant now. In the end, she was nothing but food for monsters.
 

Sia got up onto her knees, hovering over her mother’s face. She was transfixed on how powerless this woman had been in the end. She could feel the blood, growing cold and soaking into her clothes where she knelt. Sia ignored it. Without realizing she was doing it, she reached out two fingers and dipped them into the wound on her mother’s neck. She stared at the fingers, dripping blood that was surprisingly warm. They’d only been minutes late.Ten minutes earlier, Sia could have killed the old woman herself.

Sia blew out the candle and breathed in the smoke as she put the fingers in her mouth, swallowing her mother’s blood like the finest wine.
 

She was standing before she saw her mother’s fist clenched around something shining in the moonlight. She pulled it away and looked at it in the watery light. A tiny bracelet. A trinket she’d given to her daughter. It was engraved and she read the words over and over, remembering having it made, the sweet smile on the girl’s mouth as Sia had draped it over her small wrist and fastened it.

Strength, dear Ana. Always strength.

Sia clutched the bracelet in her hand, the metal cutting into her skin. She could feel the cold blood dripping down her shins where she’d knelt. Ana was not in the house, she knew. But she searched anyway. Nothing was touched, but for her mother.
 

The monsters had taken her daughter.
 

Sia left the house reeking of blood. And she didn’t protest when Joshua disappeared into a seedy bodega, coming back more calm and at ease than Sia had seen him in days. He wiped his mouth.

“They have a secret sex club in the back. Disgusting men.”

Sia shrugged without a hint of concern.
 

“You do what you must to survive.”

“And what do you need?” said Joshua, his breath smelling like the taste still lingering in Sia’s mouth. The taste of blood. She rose up to her tiptoes to kiss his lips, to taste what he tasted.

“Strength,” said Sia. “Always strength.”

Sia looked down at the costume Mathilde had sent to her. She pushed the dress away and crossed the room for her boots and pulled them on. Not bothering with a coat, she strode out of the room, heels clicking as she went down the hall. Nurses and orderlies watched her as she went, eyes straight ahead. She had no interest in talking with any of them. She found the door to the courtyard and was slightly surprised to find it unlocked. She had gone outside with Mathilde, but the woman had always used the key hanging round her neck to open it.
 

Sia felt the cold wind blow her hair as she stepped outside. Her teeth chattered for only a moment, but she was aware of a chill soaking into her boots, numbing her toes. Ignoring it, she walked across the courtyard, past benches and shrubbery, and into the trees.

Twenty-Three

Mike crouched outside the hospital, waiting.

The last time, the only security was a single guard in a booth at the front entrance road. He watched until he was sure the guard was asleep and walked past in the darkness, like he belonged there. But now there were three guards on foot patrolling the road. Mike looked up at the ornate front of the old mental institution. It brought to mind old black and white movies and gaslights and gothic stories about mad doctors abusing patients and houses that looked like castles. He shivered and put his hands in his pants pockets. The wind was blowing fiercely and even his borrowed coat was no match for it. Tiny bits of snowy ice hit his face like shards of glass.
 

Finally, when he was half frozen, he spotted Viv’s car coming up the road. She seemed to search for him as she passed, but he was hidden well behind the plowed pile of snow from the parking lot. Mike watched her as she stopped the car in front of the guards and got out, her hands flailing and her voice rising as she shouted at them. The guards seemed to quail under her ire and she pointed them inside the hall, and, exchanging glances with each other behind Viv’s back, they followed her inside.
 

Mike walked right into the driveway, then the sizable parking lot only a quarter full of cars, and into a transparent shed littered with cigarette butts. There was a magazine with Ambrose Conrad on the cover lying on one of the benches lining the smoking shed, and the walls dripped with sticky brown nicotine. Mike held his breath at the acrid, stifling smell of old cigarette smoke. Smoothing the scrubs Viv had given him, and pulling out the fake badge they had made, Mike made his way to the door marked
Employees Only
. As Viv had told him, the latch was covered with duct tape by a nursing staff that had tired of being interrogated every time they forgot their keys. He opened the door, closing his eyes at the warm air that seemed to greet him.

He stepped inside, only barely registering the Mover van he passed, idling on the curb.

He had to find the girl. Mike thought of Deacon’s screams from a lifetime ago in an abandoned puppet theater and bile rose up in his throat. What would Flynn do if he failed?

“I must be crazy,” Mike muttered as the door to the Rev hospital closed quietly behind him. The smell of iodine was in the air and he had to take a deep breath to calm himself. After this, Joshua Flynn assured him, he would never have to worry about the Revenants ever again.
 

“Just one last job, Novak,” he said. Mike looked around. There was the empty nursing station where the old crone had held her ground like a warhorse in a frothy pink sweater. Mike blinked his eyes as they recovered from the frigid cold. His eyeballs defrosted and he saw the gurneys against the walls. They all had handcuffs attached. He looked around at the doors, all with deadbolt locks on the outside of the doors. Each also had a slide lock set high on the outside of the door.

A radio was on somewhere and he could hear a tinny voice. Not Ambrose Conrad, as usual, but it was similarly raspy and authoritative.

“
Stay in your homes. Do not incite violence and you need not be afraid. We are here to protect…
” Static garbled the voice then, and the radio went silent.
 

“Okay, Sia,” Mike said. “Where are you?”

Mike opened the first door, unlocking it as quietly as he could. The room was empty. The next one was empty too. As was the next. Mike stood in the last doorway and looked over the empty room. A hospital with no patients.
 

“What in the holy hell is going on?”

Mike walked to a set of double doors, but this time they were locked. As he started for another door on the other side of hall, Mike stopped at the last door, which had been left open. And, unlike the other rooms, this one had a large picture window. The curtain was only open a gap, but the light had caught Mike’s eye. He walked in and threw the curtains open and looked down over the courtyard. He saw a very thin woman in an old fashioned black dress walking through the snow toward a copse of trees. Her hair was loose and the wind blew it around her wildly, the black of it standing out in the snow.

“Are you here to save her?” said a voice behind Mike.

He jumped and turned, prepared to fight. The old nurse was standing in front of him, but she looked different. Her skin hung from her face and neck like cloth, her eyes were red and lined with dark circles and her skin was sallow. She hadn’t bothered with makeup and her movements were jumpy, nervous. Her eyes twitched from the window to Mike and back again. If she hadn’t been wearing the same pink sweater, he would have thought she was a different person.

“I know you,” she said, her voice impossibly tired. “You’re the man who spoke to her, the night she arrived. You are very well-known now, Mr. Novak. What did you say to her?”

Mike studied her. She didn’t seem at all upset that he was here. She barely seemed to care. The old nurse came to stand by him at the window where they watched the black-clad figure make her way across the snow.

“I told her I was going to help her,” Mike said.

“And did you?” said the old woman. “Did you help her?” She put a thin, frail hand to the glass as the woman disappeared into the trees.

“No,” Mike admitted. “I couldn’t.”

“I’m not sure any of us can,” she said. “And even if we could, she wouldn’t take it. I thought she was small when she came. I thought she was just like rest of them. Weak in character. Weak in substance. But she wasn’t, was she? I didn’t believe her when she said she could play…” She trailed off, not watching the scene outside any longer, but watching some play acted out that only she could see. A tableau of events that Mike wasn’t privy to.
 

“You didn’t know,” Mike said, unsure what she was talking about but eager to be away. He had to find her. He was sure it was Sia walking across the grounds. He had to find Sia and take her away.

“It was ethereal,” said the woman. Hauser was printed on her badge. “It was as if she were playing the songs in my soul.”

“She played music?” he said. “I’m surprised they allowed it.”

“So beautifully,” said Hauser. Tears sprang up in her eyes. “I can’t stop thinking about the song she played. I can’t stop hearing it. I feel it’s embedded here.” She raised a shaky hand to her temple. “It plays over and over again and I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it.” She turned to look up at him. “It will be playing until the moment I die, Mr. Novak. And she will be the one to kill me.”

“Sia?” said Mike. “Why do you think Sia will kill you?”

“Because,” Hauser said. “She told me she would. And I felt it when she played. The sins I’ve committed, the horrors I have inflicted. I want her to. She can take it all away.”

“I’m supposed to save her,” said Mike.
 

“Someone must,” said Hauser. “Even if she kills you?” said Mike.
 

“I’m not strong enough for this world,” she whispered. “I never knew how weak I was until she showed me what strength was.”

Mike frowned. The woman had clearly gone off the deep end. There was no sanity left in her eyes. She turned back to the window and watched the trees where Sia had gone.

“Will you give me your key?” said Mike, seeing the cord on the back of her neck. “So I can get to her?”