Stones Unturned (35 page)

Then he runs.

Leonard Graves has honed his body over a lifetime. He is no ordinary man. Balance, even with the wind, is second nature to him, and he races along the rooftop without hesitation, trusting to his training and his instincts. In a flash of insight, he recognizes for the first time that the entire Gothic cathedral is a single enormous crucifix, the whole building formed in the shape of the cross. The entire design is a symbol of sacrifice.

The Whisper is slower, more cautious. Graves is catching up to him.

"Broderick, you're not going to get away!" he calls over the wind. "I won't rest until justice is done."

Laughter erupts from the night sky and carries to him on the night wind. The Whisper reaches the edge of the roof and steps up onto a low stone ledge there, steadying himself on a stone cross that crowns the apex. Below, on Fifth Avenue, cars rumble by.

"Justice, is it?" the Whisper calls, and the way he hangs back and cries the words to the sky, Graves thinks perhaps the question is not meant for him, but for some higher power. "I had faith! I only wanted to save them, redeem them!"

"You destroyed their minds, and then you took their lives!" Graves shouts.

Balanced upon the roof he draws his other pistol again and points both muzzles at the madman.

The wind snatches the wide-brimmed hat from the Whisper's head and carries it away into the night, flipping end over end as it gusts across Fifth Avenue. Emotion ravages the man's face. There is fear there, and regret, confusion and madness.

In his right hand he holds a custom-made black pistol with a long, thin barrel.

"Throw the gun down!"

With a sickly laugh, mouth twisted into a grin of comic absurdity, the Whisper tosses the gun off the roof. It disappears into the abyss of Fifth Avenue that yaws just behind him. Now he clutches the cross on the roof's peak with both hands, and his expression turns to one of anguish.

"You win, Graves," the Whisper says. "There is no redemption, after all. Not for killers like Reinhardt. Or like me."

He throws his arms wide, head tilted, mouth twisted into a sardonic grin. Then he turns and, coat fluttering behind him in the wind, plummets from the edge of the roof.

"No!" Dr. Graves shouts, but the word is stolen away by the wind.

He races to the edge of the roof, holstering his weapons. He grips the same cross that the Whisper had held on to moments before. Quick as he is, Graves makes it to the edge just in time to see the man hit the street far below. The impact is silent at this height. A car swerves down on Fifth Avenue to avoid running over the twisted, shattered corpse of the broken hero. The fallen idol.

For long minutes, Dr. Graves stands there staring down at the small, pitiful figure of that dead man, and he reminds himself of his own beliefs. Whether there is a God or not, Leonard Graves believes in redemption. He must believe in it, or he could not believe in justice.

But for the Whisper, both justice and redemption are now forever out of reach.

"Sir, can I get you anything to drink?"

Clay had been staring out the window of the plane, watching the clouds sweep by as the flight from London made its way toward Florence. The flight attendant was a fortysomething British woman who looked every bit her age yet looked the type who might get more beautiful with each passing year. Clay appreciated the wisdom in a woman's eyes, and the elegance with which some of them grew older.

He smiled at her.

"A glass of red wine would put me forever in your debt."

The flight attendant laughed, more than used to being flirted with by passengers. "That's all right, love. Just the cash will do."

As she served him, Clay glanced up and down the aisle. He found the ghost of Dr. Graves hovering behind a pair of pretty teenaged girls who were curled together in their seats, wrapped in one another's arms like lovers. And perhaps they were. Clay had spent enough time watching Graves watch people that by now he knew it was their peacefulness that fascinated the ghost. Their contentment.

"Thank you," he told the flight attendant.

She winked at him playfully and then moved on to the next row.

After the call from Kovalik, Clay had spent the rest of the layover listening to Graves talk about the New York of his era. He had painted a picture with his words of what he called a golden age of heroism, and the notoriety achieved by certain men and women who had risked their lives to fight crime in ways and with methods beyond the capacity of the police.

The story of the Whisper was one of tragedy, and it had left Clay feeling melancholy and cynical. The man had been brilliant and courageous, according to Graves, but also, quite obviously, demented. Barbaric, the ghost had said, and Clay could not agree more.

Clay sipped his wine and glanced back at the ghost again. The connection between Kovalik's new information, the autopsy on Graves's remains, and the murder of Mayor Bennett, was obvious to both of them now. The chemical stains, mercury residue, and evidence of brain surgery on Graves's skull made it clear someone had performed the same operation on him that the Whisper had performed on the criminals he'd "rehabilitated." It had to have been a more complicated procedure for Graves not to have become as docile as the others. None of the Whisper's victims had remembered their surgery, so that was not a surprise, but then why did Graves have memories of the events leading to his own death that were obviously wrong?

All of these questions niggled at the back of Clay's mind as the plane flew toward Florence. But as he took another sip of wine, two questions bothered him more than any of the others.

If the Whisper had killed himself that night on the roof of St. Patrick's, then who had performed the surgery on Graves? And who, if not the Whisper, had murdered Graves and Roger Alton Bennett?

The planes engines hummed.

Clay took another sip of blood-red wine and glanced out the window at the clouds, but he found no answers there.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It's nothing like Ceridwen's traveling winds
, Danny thought.

Leaping into his father's conjured dimensional doorway was like having himself turned inside out and his guts scraped onto the floor with a rusty butcher knife.

Danny wasn't sure how long he'd been lying in the warm, dry darkness, but he appreciated the coolness of the concrete floor against his aching face. Everything hurt, even what little hair he had left on his body.

Images of Eve, Squire, and the monstrous animal they'd brought with them kept playing in his mind, and he squeezed himself tighter into a ball, trying to protect himself from the painful recollection.

You screwed your friends, Ferrick. Face it,
he thought, and he would see it all play out again — how he had chosen his demon sire over the closest thing to a family, other than his mother, he'd ever had. They had seen him licking the dead woman's blood off his face. The look of horror and disdain on Eve's face was etched in his mind, now. And all he could think about was how it would break his mother's heart if they told her what they'd seen.

Danny wasn't sure he could live with that.

She's not your real mother
, a voice whispered way in the back of his head, and a cold detachment flowed over and through him. Suddenly it was easier to deal with the idea of betrayal. Danny tried to push the troubling thoughts from his head, to rest and recover from his journey through his father's interdimensional escape route, but his senses were awake now — the smells and sounds of his surroundings urging him to rouse himself.

There was, after all, something very familiar about this place.

For the first time since being spat out of the swirling rip in time and space, Danny was able to open his eyes. His eyelids burned, and his eyes ached. He wondered if this was going to be something he'd have to get used to if he was going to stay with the demon —
with my father
.

Sensory stimuli bombarded him as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. The slight smell of mustiness mixed with the perfume stink of fabric softener, and beneath it all the thick aroma of home heating oil. He was in the cellar of a home, that was obvious, but the surprising thing, as he climbed to his feet, was that he knew exactly whose cellar he was in.

By scent alone, Danny knew he was in the basement of his Newton home. His vision cleared, and he glanced around the room, saw the plastic storage bins of tax information and the boxes of Christmas decorations recently moved closer to the stairs because of the quickly approaching holiday season. His old ten speed bike stood gathering dust in the far corner.

He smiled momentarily, and then realized that he was alone.

Where was his father?

More importantly, where was his mother? The image of Baalphegor murdering and eating that old woman flashed across his mind, and he could not stop himself from picturing the same barbaric fate befalling his mother.

"Shit," he hissed.

Danny bolted across the room, navigating the obstacles of the basement with ease, and bounded up the cellar steps two at a time. His pulse raced as he saw that the door up into the kitchen was already open.

When he reached the top of the steps, he barged into the kitchen, heart clenched, holding his breath. He glanced around and for a moment his hideous imagination showed him a glimpse of precisely what he expected to find. Then he blinked and saw that there was no blood splashed across the countertops or the tile floor, no dismembered limbs strewn across the kitchen. A wave of relief began to sweep over him, but he shook it off. The absence of carnage meant nothing. He still had no idea where his father had gone.

He could be tearing her apart in another room right now, dumb ass,
yelled the pleasant little voice in the back of his head.

Frantic, he darted into the living room, and then the dining room, finding them both empty. He hoped that his mother was out shopping or visiting one of her girlfriends.

Starting to calm a bit, Danny headed down the hallway to the foyer, where he noticed the first sign of something amiss. The front door was open wide, and a package — likely a result of his mother's addiction to online shopping — was lying on the floor. He noticed a brown, UPS truck parked by the curb in front of the house.

He picked up the package and placed it on the hallway table. Then he shut the door and glanced up the stairs to the second floor. That was when he smelled it. He knew what it was right away.

The scent of blood. As horrifying as it was to acknowledge what it might mean, it was far worse to realize how much he had grown to like it.

The scent drew him up the stairs. It came from his bedroom at the end of the hall. He paused momentarily, preparing himself. Taking three deep breaths, the stink of blood almost overwhelming him with its intoxicating stench, he strode down the hall, placed his hand against the wood of the door, and pushed it open.

"Holy shit," Danny exclaimed, staring in horror at his room. His posters had been torn down, the walls covered in strange, geometric symbols, written in blood.

Baalphegor was still working, using his claws to paint the sigils upon the egg white walls and ceiling.

"What are you doing?" Danny asked, transfixed by the bloody shapes.

His father looked at him and smiled. The demon squatted behind Danny's bed, which had been pushed haphazardly into the center of the room. As Danny approached he saw the body of the UPS man, torn open and lying on the floor. The demon dipped his claws into a gaping hole torn in the corpse's belly, using the blood as ink.

"This is really fucked up," Danny muttered, a part of him happy that his mother's body was nowhere in the room.

"That's your humanity talking," Baalphegor replied, scrawling a shape that looked like an upside down, capital
A
upon the lower section of bare wall. "There will shortly come a time when something like this will barely register with you."

A war erupted inside of him, in both his heart and his mind. If ever he had witnessed an act of pure evil, this was it. He knew that, understood how completely wrong it was. And yet it thrilled him as well. And that part of him that loved the scent of the dead man's blood reminded him that this was no different from a lion attacking prey on the veldt or hawks snatching mice up from the fields. He and his father, they weren't human.

Danny's hand self-consciously went to the sack of skin hanging from his chest. It throbbed as he touched it, as if aroused by his attentions. Maybe he wasn't human, but he had been given a gift of humanity . . . a gift, and a curse.

"You're saying that murder, and seeing shit painted on walls with blood, and corpses with their bellies torn open will be like, been there, done that?"

Baalphegor looked away from his work, head turning completely around on his shoulders as he nodded. "It will all be . . . what's the expression I'm looking for?" The demon thought for a moment and then snapped his bloodstained fingers. "
Old hat
. Things like this will all be old hat."

At the moment, Danny really didn't see the appeal.

Baalphegor stood erect, admiring his handiwork.

"What's all this for?" Danny asked.

The demon rubbed his hands together. "This will aid you in the next step toward your evolution."

Danny moved closer to his sire, but was distracted by something that protruded from beneath his bed. The hairy paw of a stuffed animal. He bent down and yanked the stuffed monkey out from beneath the bed, brushing clumps of dust from its fake brown fur. He'd forgotten all about it.

His father had given it to him — his human father. It was right before his parents had separated, right before the skin problems that would eventually lead to the discovery much worse than a case of severe psoriasis.