Immortal City (29 page)

“Yes,” she said. Just like when he had invited her to the party. It simply came out, as though her true desires could no longer be repressed.

Jacks smiled a dripping, radiant smile. A flash of lightning lit the roof, followed closely by a bark of thunder.

“There are Angels I know who will help us. I can’t fly or the ADC will take me immediately. We need to get off this roof and lie low, travel on foot.”

Maddy nodded. Her decision made, questions began pounding her mind. She pulled out her BlackBerry Miracle and tried to power it up. The screen was black and lifeless.

“Dead from the rain,” Jacks said. “Mine too. They can track them anyway. Come on, let’s get going.”

Jacks began walking toward a door on the far end of the rooftop. Maddy lingered for a moment, thoughtful.

“How did you know?” Maddy asked.

“What?” He strained to hear her over the roar of the downpour.

“How did you know I was in trouble?” she said again. She might not follow the modern Angels, but one thing she did know from her required Angel History reading was that they never disclosed how they made their saves. They simply performed them, leaving the public to guess about their trade secrets.

Jacks’s eyes searched hers. How many rules could he break in one night? “You know I’m not allowed to tell you this.”

Maddy stood where she was. Something in her
needed
to know. “Do you trust me?” she asked quietly. The rain continued pounding down across the Immortal City.

After a moment, Jacks let out a long breath and spoke. “I saw it,” he said simply.

She looked at him through the cascading liquid.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I
felt
it first and then saw it. After I focused on your frequency,” Jacks said. “Every person has a frequency. In Guardian training we learn how to tune to them so we can then do it for each of our Protections. We learn people’s frequencies. That way we can instantly feel when something bad is about to occur and then tune in through the static of all the other human beings. It sounds more complicated than it really is.”

“But with me?”

Jacks paused. “I felt your frequency that first night in the diner. How could I not?” He looked out into the night. “It’s the big secret of how we always know when our Protections are in danger. Tuning to the frequencies. Otherwise it would just be random images, feelings. Like jumbled static.”

Maddy’s heart stopped in her chest. The world around her halted. Everything faded into the background as Jacks’s words rang in her head. The Angel looked at her stunned expression.

“I know it sounds amazing, but to us it’s really no big deal, like flying or anything else we train for that the NAS keeps secret. It’s just one of those things. Like being double-jointed or something.” He laughed.

Even soaking wet, Maddy felt every hair on her body standing on end. Jacks walked over to the roof access door and tried the handle. It was unlocked. He turned to her. Despite the rain, he could see she had gone white as a ghost.

“What is it?”

“We need to go back to my house,” Maddy said. “I have to talk to my uncle.” Lightning flashed right overhead, followed by a vicious crack.

“I’m sorry, Maddy, it’s just too dangerous. They’ll be looking for us there.”

“I have to, Jacks.” Her voice was growing hysterical. “I have to talk to my uncle. It’s important.”

“Maddy, we can’t. It’s out of the question,” Jacks said.

“You don’t understand. I’m going to my uncle’s house,” Maddy yelled through the storm, “and I’m going whether you come with me or not.”

Then the night seemed to literally explode.

It was like a terrible firework lighting up the sky as a finger of lightning reached down and struck a power line on the hill not far away. The crack of the contact deafened Maddy’s ears, leaving them ringing. A plume of blinding sparks erupted from the transmission tower, momentarily illuminating the ghostly Angel City sign, and then, like strands of Christmas lights being unplugged, the streets and neighborhoods of Angel City went dark. They blinked off one by one until Maddy and Jacks were consumed in blackness. The rain continued to splash down, washing the Immortal City’s streets clean under the cover of darkness, churning filth into the overflowing gutters.

A square of light formed in the abyss as Jacks opened the roof access door, bathing them both in the dim light cast from the building’s emergency power.

“Is there any way I can get you to change your mind?” he asked.

“No,” Maddy said stubbornly.

“Okay.” Jacks sighed. “Then let’s go.” He gestured to the door.

Her heart still racing, Maddy followed him out of the rain and into the cold—but dry—stairwell. She couldn’t feel her feet on the metal steps as they descended. Maddy’s scattered mind had focused into a single laser of a thought. It was time to find out what really happened to her mother and father. Time to find out who her parents really were.

S
ylvester sat in his darkened cubicle in the Homicide Division, bathed in the blue glow of his computer screen and the yellow cast of the emergency lighting. The storm had knocked out the power, but the backup generator at the station had kicked on almost immediately. The reduced output was running the computers and the televisions and the few dim emergency lights. The amber glow made the normally bright and sterile police station look strange and eerie. Rivulets of rain traced down the windows as the downpour continued outside.

Sylvester’s cubicle was a temporary one that had been set up for him in the open-air bull pen the detectives all shared. He himself was usually downstairs in a windowless room, double-checking paperwork for other investigators or handling the occasional small property crime. It had been years since he had been invited upstairs. He hadn’t had time to unpack yet. All around him were unorganized stacks of folders and still-unopened file boxes. On top of one of the boxes sat a tub of Red Vines. An indulgence.

The detective had been up at 5 a.m. that morning, investigating another pair of gruesome severed wings. Another star, another Angel—Lance Crossman, who had already been missing. Now probably dead, though they hadn’t found the body yet, only his wings, which had been broken in many places, twisted and cracked. This time the killer hadn’t left them on Lance’s star—with the police barricades and the media coverage, there was no way he or she would have been able to do so unnoticed. Instead, they’d been securely wrapped and delivered anonymously to ACPD headquarters. The desk sergeant who’d had the misfortune of opening the package had been taken to the hospital in severe shock.

After that, Sylvester had gone down to Long Beach. Local police had fished a mutilated, bloated body out of the bay just hours before—Theodore Godson. At least the press hadn’t been able to get any pictures.

Other detectives in ACPD had no leads on this case, and the Angels weren’t being helpful. They’d just wanted it swept under the rug until after the Commissioning, although someone had already leaked to the press the night before that Angels were being killed. A surge of calls with supposed tips flooded the ACPD offices. Sylvester had been out interviewing potential witnesses all day and all night, trying to unearth solid intel. Or the body of this third victim. Instead all he’d been able to collect was gossip, like the fact that Ryan Templeton had had a secret cocaine problem. Not very heavenly of him.

On Sylvester’s computer screen were gruesome images of the crime scenes. Disembodied wings. Glistening blood splattered over the famous stars of the Walk of Angels. He studied the images, scrutinizing them for details that he had missed. As he did, the glitz and glamour of the boulevard seemed to mix and blur with the blood and carnage in a very unsettling way.

He flipped to a prison photo of a man with an unkempt beard and an otherworldly look in his eyes. William Beaubourg. Sylvester had interviewed the three arrested HDF members at the Tombs jail downtown, trying to figure out what they knew about the murders and Beaubourg’s current whereabouts. After being released from San Quentin prison earlier this year, Beaubourg had immediately disappeared, releasing videos on the Internet that talked about the coming “War on Angels.” The jailed operatives seemed to hint to Sylvester that the HDF was behind the Angel murders. But were they just trying to gain notoriety for their cause? Sylvester was unable to piece together what Angel would be helping the HDF. But he couldn’t rule them out.

And then there was Mark. Sylvester was still hunting for hard evidence—all the dots weren’t connecting to point to Mark Godspeed as the culprit. But Sylvester’s gut told him that the Archangel was somehow involved. The detective had already cleared Jackson. His alibi had entirely held up, and he had been seen in public during the time at which forensics figured Templeton was murdered. Plus Sylvester’s long-honed intuition told him the Godspeed kid was clean. Unlike most of the Immortal City.

But Mark: the way he had almost totally discounted Sylvester’s findings, even basically threatening to discredit the detective. How he merely wanted to cover up the murders, not help with the investigation. Was he going for a strange power play among the Archangels? Was managing this panic somehow going to allow him to consolidate control? Sylvester thought back to Mark’s actions almost twenty years before. With those actions in mind, Sylvester would put nothing beyond him. There was no way he could be trusted.

Sylvester flipped through more files, rubbing his burning eyes. He leafed through a stack of reports Garcia had gathered from locals living near the crime scenes. Anybody who thought they had seen something strange had been interviewed. Most were nothing of interest, just fancies of worried people, but he took the time to scan through them anyway. One of the reports he stopped on was from a homeless man who had been sleeping in a doorway next to Theodore Godson’s star on the night of the first incident. The report was several pages long and appeared to be nothing more than the rant of a drunk or a drug addict. Sylvester groaned, pulling the report out of the stack and setting it aside.

Then he stopped. Something on the page had caught his eye. He looked at Garcia’s neat handwriting. There was that word again.

Beast.

He began reading. The man described seeing a
black, shimmering beast
on the boulevard that night
that had seven heads
and
horrible, twisted horns
. But then again the man went on to say the beast looked nothing like the alien spaceship he had seen the previous week. Sylvester sat back in his chair and thought. The witness was clearly unreliable, but the
description
was familiar to him. And specific. The man had counted
seven heads
.

He felt a sudden surge of adrenaline as his mind made the connection. He slid the tub of Red Vines off the file box and dug around until he found what he was looking for. His King James Bible. He flipped the book open, paged through to Revelation, and started to read.

It took him only a minute to find it. Revelation 13:1. He read it twice to himself to be sure:

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

A
beast,
he thought. He sifted through the reports again, reading them with new eyes. He picked out key phrases from the interviews,
felt a strange presence at night,
and
sinking feeling of terror in the dark
. They weren’t just worried. They were feeling something. Sensing that something was wrong. He was convinced. Something as old as time itself, something terrible and forgotten—a myth—was in fact real. And it was loose in the city. His intuition had been right the whole time. He couldn’t prove it, but he knew it as surely as he knew anything. He reached back into the file box and rifled around again until he pulled out a small, ornamental box made of brass. The outside had a series of engravings between small jewels inset in the metal. He looked at it and took a deep breath.

Suddenly a voice from behind startled him.

“Sir?”

He turned to see Garcia.

“What is it?”

“You better come see this,” the sergeant said.

“Jackson Godspeed flying out of his Commissioning? I heard. But I’ve ruled him out already.”

“You’ll want to see this anyway.” Garcia’s expression was grave. Sylvester set the box carefully on the desk in front of him and rose out of his chair.

They walked down the hall together, their bodies throwing long shadows in the amber glow of the emergency lights. Garcia led him to the TV in the waiting room, where several people had already gathered to watch the ANN special report. A serious-looking anchor was announcing the breaking news.

“Angel City police officials won’t comment at this time,”
he said,
“but in what may turn out to be the story of the year, Jackson Godspeed has been linked to the series of gruesome Angel attacks on the boulevard this week. And amid the outcry in Angel City, Senator-elect Ted Linden has called for special hearings on Capitol Hill around what he calls the ‘Angel Question.’”

Sylvester turned to Garcia.

“Jackson? Who did this?”