Harsh Gods (8 page)

I stepped quietly from Halley’s room, listening to the unexpected stillness of the Davis household. After all the fighting and chaos, the silence hung like a weight upon the air. The living room was empty, more toys than I remembered scattered across the floor. A mop and pail leaned in one corner where Tammy had apparently tried to clean up all the slush and dirt tracked into the house by the emergency workers. From the look of it, she’d given up.

Tammy and Tyson were upstairs, probably asleep. I closed my eyes, unfurled my senses, and could just barely feel them over the residual echoes of the fight.

A nagging thought wormed its way into my head. I couldn’t shake a guilty suspicion that the situation with Whisper Man had escalated because I’d come into their lives. Trouble seemed to follow behind me as surely as my wings.

Folding Halley’s papers, I tucked them into the front of my leather jacket. Then I tightened the buckle at the bottom and quietly slipped out the front door, pausing on the porch to make sure the door latched behind me. Not that locks made much difference when the bad guys just knocked out the windows when they wanted to get in.

I hesitated, wondering whether or not it was safe for Tammy and little Tyson to be left alone in the home. I might be good at attracting danger, but I also did a bang-up job of kicking its teeth in when it threatened people in my care. The Davises were on that list now—at least until this business got resolved.

The sound of a car door drew my attention to the street. A tall, slender black man in a knee-length coat of heavy gray wool slipped into a sedan parked across from the home. He gripped two steaming cups of diner coffee in his hands, and made a point of not looking in my direction. The door shut quietly behind him. He and his companion were barely visible through the glare of the streetlight on the windshield.

The guy passed a cup of coffee over to the woman behind the wheel. She took it gratefully, wrapping gloved fingers around it for warmth. It didn’t take a psychic to see they were cops.

The police were taking the break-in seriously, and I wondered what they knew that I didn’t. This kind of response wasn’t typical for a first-time home invasion. Maybe the officers expected the remaining vagrants to return to the house. Personally, I figured they were long gone.

Whatever the case, as I stepped off the front porch and cut across the yard, I didn’t envy the officers their chilly vigil. The temperature had dropped in the middle of the night, falling somewhere between arctic and the cold of deep space. The snow on the ground was frozen so thoroughly that it squeaked under my boots. As I walked, bitter gusts picked up wicked shards from the surrounding drifts, flinging them against my face. Only the whiskers saved me from the brunt of it.

The night had stilled to that point where the streets were so empty, the city felt abandoned. No one was out in this sub-arctic chill. The windows of all the houses along the street were dark, their residents dreaming safe until morning.

I stuffed my fists into the pockets of my leather jacket and headed toward Mayfield Road. The white-and-red sign for Mama Santa’s spilled plastic light across the pavement behind me as I turned east, heading up and out of Cleveland’s Little Italy. To my left, the first few sections of wall marked the southernmost boundary of Lake View Cemetery. I hugged the weathered concrete, keeping an eye out for patches of black ice.

The eight-foot barrier of concrete gave way to staggered sections of overgrown masonry. Runnels of ice glittered amidst the patterned segments of quarried stone that dated back to the origins of the massive boneyard. The wall rose higher and higher the further I went on the steepening sidewalk, until it towered fifteen feet or more above my head. Clinging runners of ivy and denuded branches of trees dangled from on high, seeming to spill from a wild garden hidden behind the stone barrier.

A single car climbed the hill toward Coventry, engine purring. It caught me in its headlights and slowed momentarily. I kept my head down, though it was unlikely the driver had any real interest in me. Whoever they were, they were probably just startled to see a scarecrow figure all in black wandering the streets at this hour.

The vehicle ghosted past and I continued the chilly mile-and-a-half trek back to my apartment. My breath plumed against the night and I fell into the rhythm of walking, my thoughts clamoring with all the things I’d witnessed since Sanjeet had brought me to the Davis household. Whisper Man. Halley’s uncomfortably keen perceptions. Whatever the hell kind of history I had with Father Frank. The language scrawled on page after page, all of it unreadable.

The quandary of the channeled symbols gnawed at me, because it was something I thought I should be able to solve. Even with my amnesia, I’d yet to encounter a language that didn’t strike
some
echo of comprehension deep within my mind. Halley’s sigils held a certain passing familiarity, but it was one I frustratingly couldn’t place. They reminded me a little of Hittite, enough for me to be certain they were a language—but if I’d encountered anything like these symbols before, it was never to read them. That was a new experience for me.

More unsettling than the language was the enigma of Whisper Man.

I’d watched cacodaimons riding around in both the living and the dead, so possession was nothing new to me, but cacodaimons were a one-person deal. It took them a lot of effort to go joyriding around in someone else’s skin, and you could see them doing it. Or at least I could. I could also reach across to their side of things and smack them for the audacity.

Whisper Man was an entirely new quantity. From everything I’d seen with Halley and the hobo army, whatever he was, he could control multiple people while remaining all but invisible, even to my psychic perceptions. Just that one little tendril, and as soon as I’d noticed it, it had disappeared.

I had no idea what I was dealing with, and that didn’t sit well.

* * *

The lofty wall of the cemetery on my left began shrinking to meet the sidewalk again. About thirty feet ahead, it gave way once more to an eight-foot fence of lichened concrete. In the distance, the traffic light across from the Mayfield entrance blinked lazily in the frigid night.

I didn’t notice the people until they were right on top of me—literally. There was scrabbling from high above, and then a tattered figure jumped down from the cemetery wall. She hit the sidewalk and rolled to her feet directly in my path. She was followed by a man who dropped with his full weight onto my back. He draped himself over my shoulders, wrapping his arms around my throat. I stumbled beneath the sudden burden, but managed not to fall.

“What the
fuck
?” I gasped. Power leapt to my fingers and I reached up to twist the guy off of me. The angle was wrong, and he clung with a strength that nearly matched my own—a strength that wasn’t properly human.

“Choke him, kill him, make him bleed!” the woman sang in a ragged voice. She circled warily and the amber glow of the blinking traffic light caught the glint of a blade in her hand. Long, slender, and serrated on one side, it looked like a fishing knife—meant for scales, but it would cut flesh just as well.

“Get off me!” I snarled.

Straining to keep the man from locking his arms round my throat, I seized both of his wrists. With a sharp pivot, I smashed him into the wall. His shoulder hit the stones with bone-jarring force. It did nothing to slacken his grip.

“Hands to take. Eyes to see!” He spat the words wetly against my ear.

More of Whisper Man’s crazed vagrants. Great. These were probably the ones who’d gotten away. I wondered if they’d doubled back, and how long they had been following me. Stupid of me not to check.

“Hold him! Hold him!” she cried. “He can’t know. He can’t see. Not this one. Master says he sings the names!”

While I struggled with her companion, the woman darted forward. She held the blade low, and if I didn’t get out of its way I was going to be singing soprano for a very long time. I could move fast when I wanted—a brief, inhuman burst of speed. It wasn’t something I could sustain for long, but it was damned useful in fights like this.

With a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight hanging from my neck, however, even my speed couldn’t save me from her knife. I sidestepped, nearly losing my footing as I hit a patch of ice. It kept the knife-wielding woman from making a castrato out of me, but her blade still nicked me high up in the hollow of one thigh. It was such a swift cut that I only processed it as a brief flash of stinging heat. I teetered under the lumbering burden of the male attacker, controlling the motion in the next instant so his own ballast carried him thuddingly into the wall.

His head smacked into stone. The fingers of his left hand spasmed, and I used the opening to slip my own hand between his arm and my throat. He was skinny as a refugee, tendons and muscles cording over the knobby ends of his bones. Blue-white power leapt between us as I closed my hand round his wrist and jerked hard on his forearm. All the strength fled his fingers, and I tore his hand away.

Following through, I ducked forward, dragging him by that arm till I flipped him from my back. He landed on the sidewalk at the Fish-Knife Lady’s feet, the back of his skull hitting the concrete with an ugly crack.

I staggered backward, my left leg buckling suddenly beneath me.

Something wasn’t right. I didn’t feel pain, exactly, just a rushing sense of heat. It felt like water gushing down my skin.

Except it wasn’t water.

It was blood. Lots and lots of blood. My heart thudded in my head, and answering spurts of crimson gouted from my thigh—a little spray at first, but thicker with each pulse.

Fuck.

She’d nicked the artery. The pressure tore it further with each heave of my racing heart. In a panic I clamped my hand over it, pressing down as hard as I could. The femoral artery—that was a big one. That was bad. That was really bad.

I was going to bleed out.

The street was empty. The nearest house was more than a hundred yards away. I could scream, but no one would hear me. At this hour, no one was awake. Running wasn’t an option. I’d never make it.

With every course considered, then rejected, more life flooded through my hand.

I was immortal, but this body could die. Untethered, my soul would drift on the Shadowside. With my memory loss, I had no idea if I could navigate the process of rebirth that allowed me to survive. So much had been torn from me—maybe I would dwindle to a scrap, and lose myself entirely.

The thought left me terrified.

Fish-Knife Lady lunged again. Desperate to survive, I lashed out with my left hand faster than even I could track. I bellowed the syllables of my Name, even as black spots started chewing the edges of my vision.

How long does it take to bleed out from the femoral?
I knew it was quick. Seizing her wrist, I twisted and felt the bones splinter even as I heard the snap. The knife sailed from her useless fingers. Squealing, she tried a haymaker with her remaining hand, wildly swinging for my face. I brought my forearm up in a block, then crunched my elbow into her nose. The palm of my left hand remained jammed against my leg. Blood spurted through my fingers. Gleaming arcs of it spattered the snow along the curb, a startling crimson against street-stained white.

I won’t die here. Not before I remember myself.

The words thundered over the stuttering pulse in my head. The world smeared hazy around the edges. Headlights starred in my vision. A car—turning onto Mayfield from Coventry Road. A few blocks away. I was close enough to the traffic light, maybe they would see.

No. Not close enough. Not enough time.

The guy on the sidewalk was getting up. Fish-Knife Lady’s broken arm dangled useless at her side, but she wasn’t out of the fight. I’d smashed her nose and it looked like a potato. She squinted around it with bleary eyes, blood making a grisly mask of the bottom of her face. It bubbled on her lips as she whispered—messages from whatever was controlling her, singsong rhythms of madness and pain.

She dove for me again and I welcomed her. My left hand shot out—I knew that was dumb, but there it was anyway, wrapped around her throat till her eyes bulged. I needed that hand to stop the bleeding. What was I thinking? I was dying here. I was going to fucking die.

Still I held her, elbow locked, lifting her up till her feet danced against the air. I dug in my fingers till I could feel the pulse in her neck. It thudded hard and wild against my palm. My own heartbeat leapt in answer, rapid and thready. It trembled down the length of the scar.

Thud.

Light burning around my fingers.

Thud.

A wash of brilliance spilling across her flesh.

Thud.

Heat like a bonfire. A swift, burning river of it, racing along my arm, down through my belly, settling in my leg.

She jigged and twitched as I held her, bloodshot eyes rolling back in her head. Scrabbling with her good hand, her fingers plucked ineffectually at my own.

I didn’t drop her until she stopped moving. By then the blood had staunched along my thigh.

What the hell was that?

I stumbled away from the dead woman, choking on the bitter taste of blood.

Memories exploded like flashbulbs behind my eyes. None of them were my own. I didn’t want to hold on to them, couldn’t stand their feel as they seethed within my mind. A life of loss, addiction, maddened whispers that never let her rest—the flood of foreign data drowned all but the panicked thunder of my heart.

Then another impulse leapt from the torture of her memories to mine. My skull felt too small to contain its booming words.

I WILL REBUILD MYSELF, ANAKIM, AND ALL WILL BOW AGAIN.

A hail of violent perceptions drove me to my knees—chains, smoke, the shattering of stone. On its heels, a strangling sense of panic. The sensations washed through me with no context or order. Spewing desperate curses, I pressed my hands against my ears as if that was going to help block things piped directly into my brain.