Concrete Savior (22 page)

If she had to see something, why couldn’t she see something useful, like the best job to apply for, the right answer to a test question, or hey, how about those elusive lottery numbers? What she was seeing and passing along to the voice wasn’t meaningful or good. It was horrifying and dangerous, something that should be left alone to happen the way it was meant to. When a person messed with stuff he shouldn’, he ended up with appalling developments, like what had happened with that murderer, Glenn Klinger. That wasn’t Casey’s fault, it was
hers
, and any way she tried to justify it—she hadn’t known what would happen, Vance’s life was in danger, whatever—didn’t change that a whole bunch of people were dead and she was not a single inch closer to getting her husband back.

There was a stack of unopened mail on the coffee table and Gina flipped through the envelopes without really seeing them, just to have something to do with her hands. One envelope was from Harold Washington College, where she’d taken five or six courses over the last two years, with the vague idea of finally getting a degree. Because she’d managed to keep her GPA high, once or twice a year she got a form letter inviting her to join the honor society. Form letter applied only to the contents—every letter was personally signed by the president of the honor society, the envelope individually printed.

She stared at her own name on the front of the envelope. Only once, back when the visions had first started, had she attempted to see something on herself. It had been a failure then, but should she try it now? And if she did see something, would it help or hurt?

Her forefinger seemed to move of its own will, sliding over the surface of the cream-colored paper. She hesitated just before the pad of her finger touched ink, but something in her subconscious stepped in and seemed to shove her hand forward, as if her mind had finally just had enough of this waiting game. Her hand jerked—

Nothing.

No vision, no twinge, not a damned thing.

Gina tossed the envelope back onto the coffee table in disgust, then rubbed her hands together nervously. She’d been doing that so much lately that her knuckles were cracked and raw, but she never remembered to put lotion on them even though she had a bottle of Jergens in the bathroom. She should do it now, while she was thinking of it, but . . . whatever. Her gaze went back to the mail and she picked up the stack again and dug through it until she found what she was looking for. A week before they’d decided to elope in Las Vegas at the end of August, she and Vance had gone to a travel agent and talked to a representative about a cruise wedding. The numbers had gotten real high, real fast, and they had told the woman it was out of their league. Insisting she could get the cost down to something more reasonable and citing sales coming up in September, she’d talked them into leaving their names. She had no way of knowing they’d surrendered to impulse the next weekend, and so here, apparently, was the cruise sale she’d promised.

Gina fingered the edge of the envelope—that’s how she handled almost every pece of paper—and felt her heart begin to pound. Vance’s name was on it, right below hers. The postmark read the day before yesterday, from the Clark Street station in Lincoln Park. The woman’s name wasn’t on the outside envelope, just the name and return address of the travel agency.

She placed the envelope on her knees and stared at it, terrified. Could it . . .
would
it, tell her what she wanted to know?
Did
she want to know that much? She wasn’t sure, because she wasn’t so brainless that she didn’t realize the dangers of trying something like this. That, perhaps, was why she had blocked out even thinking about it before now.

But she had to try. She
had
to.

Before she could change her mind, Gina ran her finger across the ink of Vance’s name.

The living room just . . . went away. As it often was in her visions, everything was painfully clear, as though an enormous, sparkling clean magnifying glass had been placed over a piece of the world just so she could get up close and examine it. That didn’t always mean she knew everything—she might see into someone’s life but never know where they were at the time her vision was taking place. But if she could bear it, she could usually find out. She just needed to be able to stay in the vision long enough.

And sometimes that seemed almost as painful as whatever she was seeing in that strange, omniscient eye inside her mind.

He was in someone’s bathroom, sitting on a chair of all things, right in the middle of the bathtub. Wait—he was
tied
to the chair, and he was very, very sick. His left hand was swollen and streaked with black and green, with red lines of infection crawling up his wrist and feeding into the veins of his arm. Pus and fluids dripped from the black, decaying stump of his severed finger, mixing with the filthy water that had backed up the tub’s drain all the way to the middle of his shins. His skin was pocked with odd little punctures, as if someone had poked him repeatedly with something thin and sharp. A knife? He was sitting in his own waste and he was cold, but that was about it. He was beyond hungry, and beyond pain. He was dying.

Gina forced herself to do what she called “dialing out,” a little maneuver akin to pulling the focus back on a camera lens in order to see the bigger picture. Now she could see more, the whole bathroom, the living room beyond it. It was a pit, the main room in an apartment in some kind of decrepit, filthy building. Cockroaches and silverfish were painfuwhere, but they weren’t as bad as the rats that were drawn by the smell of the rancid water and her husband’s putrefying flesh.

She gagged and squeezed her eyes shut even as she kept one hand jammed against the envelope so she wouldn’t break the contact and lose the vision—if she did, she wouldn’t get it back. She dialed out again, looking for anything that might give her the address, a mailbox, a piece of junk mail, anything. Now she was in the hallway, and it was just as squalid as the apartment; she needed to get farther back, as many times as it would take, so that she could get the building number and the street name.

A female presence, something infernal and dark and indescribably evil, blew past her in the hallway.

Gina gasped and fought to stay in the vision, pushing back against every instinct in her mind that screamed at her to run. Part of her wanted to do what she’d originally intended—dial out and get that damned location—but another
had
to follow this woman back into the dreadful apartment, had to see what she was going to do. Was this the person behind the telephone calls? It had to be. Gina could feel some kind of crazy strength emanating from her, but it wasn’t a good thing. It was
wrong
somehow, in a doesn’t-belong-here way that she couldn’t actually pinpoint. It was
alien.

Even though she wasn’t really there, she couldn’t bear to leave her husband alone with this evil thing.

So she went back in, following an ethereal trail that reeked of everything bad in the world and smelled like potatoes forgotten and left to rot and liquefy on the bottom shelf of a pantry. Her throat spasmed and for a second all she could think of was how badly she wanted to vomit, to clear her throat and lungs of that loathsome scent. But throwing up was a luxury she didn’t have, she couldn’t get physical or open her eyes and suck in the untarnished air of her humid apartment—nothing in the real world could be allowed to turn her back from her vision.

She was back in the bathroom with Vance, watching as the presence—even her abilities weren’t enough to see beyond the strange shroud that appeared to cover it from head to toe—leaned over the rim of the tub and looked at Vance. What was it doing? It was amorphous, completely without shape, and because of that Gina couldn’t tell anything other than a part of it reached over and did something to her husband. It must have been painful because Vance’s head rolled to one side and he moaned—Gina heard him as clearly as if he were sitting on the couch next to her. Then he went abruptly slent and what she was seeing began to fragment at the edges, fade inward like a lens closing around a circle of light. A few seconds later, everything inside her head just went . . .

Black.

She felt suddenly like someone standing in the midst of a totally lightless cave, arms outstretched, vertigo washing over her. Gina waited as long as she could stand it, then her eyes came open; she was standing—she had no idea when she’d done that—with her arms outstretched exactly as she’d imagined, fingers clutching at the unseen darkness she’d thought had surrounded her.

No, not her.

Vance.

Could that blackness mean anything other than he was dead?

“Oh, dear God,” she wheezed. “God . . .
no.
” A dark part of her mind chimed in then.
What did you expect, you idiot? Roses and ribbons?

She sank back to the couch and sat there for a long, long time, until the night and exhaustion dropped her into the same bleak abyss down which she imagined her husband had now fallen.

THE KNOCK AT THE
door came at almost nine-thirty in the evening when Brynna and Eran were just about ready to go to bed for the night. They were both tired from the stress of the day and trying to figure out the ins and outs of Casey Anlon and Georgina Whitfield, how to get her to reveal who Casey might save next so that they could avoid whatever disaster might result from it. There was also the matter of Danielle Myers and what might happen with her once she was released from the hospital. At only nineteen and mentally disabled, the Myers girl seemed harmless enough but Brynna had gotten a glimpse of her potential and how in its own way it might rival the scale of the tragic things accomplished by Glenn Klinger and Jack Gaynor. Brynna was also smart enough to consider that it was a creative world and humans were always coming up with new things to somehow hurt others, sometimes when they themselves least expected it. That meant she could go on to even bigger things.

The rap on the door made enough of a vibration so that Grunt gave a single irritated bark from her makeshift bed in the bathroom. After voicing her annoyance, the dog sighed and went silent. If nothing else, thise Brynna a bit more convinced that their late-night visitor was human and not one of Lucifer’s soldiers.

She and Eran were still not sharing a bedroom—Brynna wouldn’t allow it. They had made love twice now, and after each time Brynna had been more fulfilled, both physically and mentally, than she had ever been in her entire existence. She wasn’t sure what surprised her the most, the physical or the mental part. Physically, she had done things in Hell and on Earth during her time of searching for weak human souls that the man watching television in the other room could never imagine. She’d had lovers whose skills could never be equaled by anyone on this Earth, so her only explanation for the sense of utter fulfillment she felt was that Eran also satisfied her
emotionally
. Lucifer had never touched her in this manner and she had believed for longer than a mere human could conceive that she would spend eternity by the fallen angel’s side. The combination of fleshly gratification and emotional completion was, it seemed, that most exquisite connection about which humans talked in the marriage vows that had, at least once upon a time, been so sacred.

The knock came again and Brynna got up to answer the door when Eran didn’t notice it over the noise of the television. She wore a T-shirt and sweatpants to bed, nothing less and certainly nothing fancier. Had she been living on her own, she would have worn no clothes at all, but the fact that Eran was in the house made that too tempting, for both him and her. She had no preconceived expectations about who the caller might be—Eran never had visitors except for his partner—but when she pulled the door open, there stood the last person she’d thought she’d see, Charlie Hogue.

Brynna froze. For a long moment they stared at each other, then dismay settled over her. The look of desire on his face was unadulterated. She’d seen that look countless times over thousands of years, and it had never ended well for the human involved. That was bad enough, but because the man in front of her was Eran’s brother, this could result in nothing but disaster.

A wide smile spread across his plain face and he spoke first. “Brynna—you’re just the person I’ve come to see.”

“What can I do for you?” She made no move to step aside so he could come in, nor did she give him an invitation. For all her efforts to learn, she still wasn’t that good at socialization; even so she still knew her actions were solidly on the side of rude. After all, newly discovered or not, he
was
a Redmond family member.