Covenant (17 page)

Bernadette nodded back at Rhonda, who held the piano key.

“Yours is a simpler gift. Play whatever instrument you wish, and people will listen. You will hold them in your sway. You will be the Pied Piper of Terrel. They will do as you bid. And if you play for me, I will come to you and dance in your bed all night and all day. We will take your lovers apart, bone by bone. We will cover ourselves in their blood to complete our own sweet love. For I do love you girls, do you know that?”

Bernadette’s body leaned in to kiss Rhonda on the lips, and left bloody mouth prints on each of the other girls in turn.

“These are gifts from me, your genie, your devil.” Bernadette laughed. “Enjoy their fruits. Use them well, for you will pay me for them with your lives. I loan your lives back to you. But I warn you: Ignore my gifts, ignore me, and I will suck your shells as dry as I did this one. Ahh, she was sweet while she lasted.”

With that, Bernadette’s body crumpled to the floor.

“
Let’s make a little Covenant
,” the voice continued, without a mouth once again.

And moments later, the fate of five women was sealed.

Angelica shook tears from her face as she remembered the last time she’d been trapped in this room. When the Covenant had been struck. She’d never meant to keep it. And she knew the others hadn’t either. They’d thought as soon as they’d gotten clear of the cliff that it would all fade away.

But He’d never let them go.

“
The interest on your loan is due
,” a voice chuckled deep inside her head.

Angelica let the tears flow fast and free.

One benefit of working for a big-city daily is that you make contacts. In lots of strange places. And Joe happened to have a couple friends in the adoption industry.

And it was an industry. There was money exchanged in unconscious irony beneath strip-joint tables, and a black market of babies traveling along a pipeline paved with both good intentions and greed. He’d done a whole series on the issue for the
Tribune
, and had managed to make a couple friends in the process, along with the predictable enemies.

The friends were actually an unusual benefit to this particular story. The enemies were natural enough. Nobody liked to be exposed for graft.

That thought brought to mind Ann, his former girlfriend.

Or girl
fiend
, as one particular smartass at the paper had dubbed her.

She’d been well intentioned, if totally unethical in her little graft connection to the alderman who held a lucrative waste management contract over several people’s heads. In trying to take the alderman down, Joe had sent his own lover over the waterfall as well.

The resulting sick feeling hadn’t gone away in an hour or a day or even a week. The scenario had played over and over in his head when he’d been forced to break the story. As it had on almost every day since. But there was some iron within him that didn’t bend. He did not regret his decision to run
the story. To expose her in the tale of corruption. She had made her bed. But he still awoke on his own sometimes to the sound of her accusing cries.

“Joe, they’re going to send me to prison! To prison, Joe!”

She’d looked at him incredulously after reading the page-three story in that day’s
Tribune
. The worst part about it was that she hadn’t come flying at him with fists raised, voice screaming. Instead, she’d simply deflated, as if the article that connected her and the alderman and a handful of other city officials with the graft scam was a giant pin, and she a balloon. She had sunk to the wooden floor of her apartment, legs crossed over each other, head hanging almost low enough to kiss her own toes.

Joe had left her that way, crying in her oversize Chicago Cubs nightshirt, not knowing how to answer for his honesty. Not knowing how to face the fact that his job’s habit—no, duty—of exposing people’s darker activities had finally come home to roost. It had swooped down on his private life in a way that didn’t allow him to maintain his distance from the subjects of his story. This time, he’d fucked up his own life while exposing corruption that was ruining the lives of others.

He hadn’t tried to fix it. That would have made him as corrupt as those he’d exposed. He tried to go back to the newsroom, to take joy in an exposé over the Illinois Tollway Authority. But it felt hollow then. The “story” had ceased to matter to him. In losing the independent spirit of Ann to the truth of the story, he’d killed a part of himself. After a few weeks of staring at his reflection in the newsroom VDT monitors and seeing only empty, half-felt words take shape on their screens, he’d finally walked away. He didn’t even clean out his desk. He’d simply run.

All the way to Terrel.

And now the thirst and drive of “the story,” the thing that had driven him to journalism in the first place, had returned. He’d come out of hibernation, come out of the mind-numbing morass of library renovation and summer festival “coverage” to find himself thirsting after the truth again. And in doing so,
he found himself, again, screwing up the lives of others who had secrets they wished to keep. In his latest story, he was messing with the lives of five women. They would be hurt by his research. But he couldn’t stop. That was why he was waiting for Angie Harkenride to take his call. That was why he was putting up with ten minutes of Kenny G on-hold music on a long distance call. Ultimately, he had always believed in the importance of being a reporter, even if he’d shrunk inside himself and hidden for a while from its consequence.

Kenny G suddenly was replaced by a click and a warm, feminine “Hello, Joe?” that instantly heated his blood. There were some things…and some people, that he missed in Chicago.

“Angie,” he said. “I need you to talk to Brett. I need a little favor.”

As soon as he hung up the phone, Joe found himself wondering how long it would take Angie to get in touch with Brett, and for him to actually search through the records. He hated having to trust his research to someone else’s schedule. He paced the apartment a couple times, knowing that it would probably take hours—or a couple days—before he’d hear back from Brett. Then he realized that there
was
some research that he could be doing himself.

In the rat race of the day, and his rush to get to the registrar’s office to try to narrow down the date of Angelica’s child’s birth and adoption, Joe had almost forgotten his conversation with George in the morning.

He retrieved his backpack from where he’d dropped it by the front door, and pulled out the copy of
Witchcraft, Demonology,
and Possession
, setting it on the table next to his recliner. After fixing himself a Jack and Coke, he sat back in the comfortable chair and pulled the lever to raise his feet.

The copyright in the book read 1956, but he’d never heard of the publisher, Necrorium Press. The contents listed a dozen topics of occult interest, from “Keeping Familiars” and “Calling a Demon” to “Possession” and “Sacrifice.”

He flipped ahead to the chapter on callings, and began to read.

The phone rang, and Joe marked his place in the book and set it aside for later. He hoped it was Brett, though he couldn’t believe that they’d have results this fast.

“Hello,” he said after rattling the receiver out of its cradle on the third ring.

“Joe?” It wasn’t the voice he expected, but his face bright-ened anyway.

“Hey, Cindy,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Well, you know tomorrow’s Friday already,” she said, let ting the sentence dangle provocatively.

“You want to do something?”

“Is that an off er?”

“Dinner, a movie?” he said.

“I accept,” she chirped.

By the time he hung up the phone, Joe had forgotten all about demon calling, and went to the kitchen. After a quick survey of the anemic contents of his refrigerator, he pulled out a paper and pen and started a shopping list.

It was going to be a long one.

Ken’s unconscious form sped through the black veins beneath Terrel’s Peak without protest. His lungs filled with water as his body temperature dropped at a rate that would have alarmed the paramedics from Folter’s Ambulance service, had they been present to measure it.

But they weren’t.

The water swept Ken along like a fallen leaf down its well-worn path, a watery road that led to the warm and salty womb of the ocean.

But the ocean wasn’t to be his final destination.

“
This will do nicely
,” a voice offhandedly announced inside the empty, uncomprehending confines of Ken’s brain. In a slow but deliberate motion, one of the spelunker’s arms lifted and then slapped its weight against the water. The other joined it, and presently, in a strange, spasmodic motion, Ken’s body propelled itself to the invisible shore, a zombie swimmer of the underground.

His face scraped up against the rocky edge of the riverbed, and both arms slapped upward to grasp at the shore, but not before the current had dragged him face-first into a rocky projection. The collision of flesh with limestone was audible throughout the chamber, but it didn’t bother the body’s animator.

“
Good as any other anchor
,” the disembodied voice observed.

Ken’s arms slid across the gray rock to wrap around the L-shaped overhang at the banks of the river. At the same time, Ken’s right knee bent, and with an uncoordinated thrust, his right leg threw itself up onto the bank, out of the water. With a final push against the stone, Ken rolled away from the water, finally moving his entire body out of the cold river. He came to rest on his side, still unconscious and now bleeding from half a dozen gashes, one of which sliced his cheek from eye to chin. He was going to have a hell of a headache when he woke up.

If he woke up.

Joe had never been much of a cook. But there was good reason to have Cindy at his apartment for dinner rather than taking her out to a local restaurant.

People would talk.

Most particularly, people would talk about that big-city newspaper fellow getting his dirty fingers wet in the pan ties of a young girl.

Wasn’t proper. Wasn’t seemly.

Wasn’t what Joe—or Cindy—wanted at the moment. There might be talk if they turned up at a club together, but mostly, the kids drinking and listening there couldn’t care less if a twentysomething guy turned up with a younger girl. The local eatery waitresses and patrons, however, were a different story.

Hence Joe’s current dilemma.

The aisles of Carter’s Grocery had never seemed so foreign, so full of possible pitfalls as tonight. He’d thrown a head of green lettuce into the cart (seemed crisp, but not too hard) followed by a couple tomatoes (hothouse pale, probably tasteless, but what’re you going to do?), a green pepper, a cucumber and a bag of green onions. He then pulled the onions out and tossed them back on the now-misting shelf. Didn’t want to chew up a bad breath salad now, did they?

He walked two steps and then backpedaled.

What was a salad without green onions? Every restaurant he’d ever eaten in put onions in their salads.

He picked up the now-sodden bag of onions and tossed them back to the bottom of the cart.

Then came the salad dressing. He didn’t trust the bottle of Italian he vaguely remembered being half full on his fridge door, so he grabbed a new bottle. Then he considered the fact that she might not like Italian.

He hadn’t asked Cindy about dressings when he’d made sure that salad and steak for dinner were acceptable. So he grabbed French, Thousand Island and a bottle of Bleu Cheese for good measure. They clinked together merrily, toasting the coming evening, in the growing pile at the bottom of his cart.

The steak, he thought he knew how to choose. He only prayed he wouldn’t burn it to a crisp when he slapped it on the grill. He really was hit and miss with his meat preparation, but when it was only yourself that you were feeding, the occasional tough brown shoe for dinner wasn’t a problem.

Tonight he couldn’t afford to serve shoe leather.

He pawed through half a dozen cuts, looking for one with a minimum of fat but still laced with enough white to sizzle up good.

When he’d finally grabbed one, picked up some fresh sour cream for the potatoes and pushed his cart to the checkout, there was (naturally) a line that was six carts long.

Fabulous
.

He scanned the tabloid headlines as he waited, amused with their obvious chicanery. Sometimes they annoyed him; their tall tales and outright lies gave his whole profession a bad name. But mostly, he was amused. People really would believe whatever they chose to, he thought. It all just had to do with what source they chose to sip from. Did the font espouse ascensions and virgin births and resurrections? Future messiahs, past lives, eons of karma? Palm reading, séances
and tarot? Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster or UFOs? A living Elvis? Poltergeists? A cliff inhabited by a malevolent spirit?

But the last wild story, Joe was beginning to believe himself. It was, quite possibly, the only bit of otherworldly nonsense that he’d ever come close to swallowing as truth. And apparently, bizarre as it appeared, it had never made headlines, locally or otherwise.

That, in itself, somehow lent it more credence.

Shaking his head away from headlines of spirits and two—headed babies, he scanned the women’s magazines.
What
Men Won’t Tell You!
screamed one two-inch tall headline.
Wow Him Back To Bed
teased another.
Fifty-six Tips for Better
Sex: the Results of Our Reader’s Poll
bragged still another. Joe smiled. If you couldn’t hook ’em with magic and religion, snare ’em with sex. He’d glanced through some of the articles on tips and sex secrets in the women’s magazines and couldn’t believe that anyone would come back more than once to seek sensual wisdom from those sources. He’d had deeper thoughts about sexual experience when he was fifteen years old and looking at bra ads in the Sears catalogue than the adult scribes at
Cosmo
and
Woman’s Day
offered.

At last, he approached the black treadmill of the checkout counter. Joe grabbed a plastic grocery divider, placed it on the belt ahead of his items and shook his head when he noticed a Kool cigarette ad plastered to it.
Is there no place safe
from advertising?
he thought.
I mean, seriously, a grocery divider?
After separating his groceries from those of the dumpy forty-ish woman ahead of him, he began loading his fourteen items onto the conveyer. He noted with annoyance that the woman ahead of him had brought twenty-three items into the fifteen-items-or-less aisle.

Not only did people read stupid, obviously shallow or false newspapers and magazines, but they
didn’t
read and follow signs, he thought. You see only what you want to see. He
sighed. Mentally he added up his items once more and nodded with satisfaction.

Fourteen.

Joe squirted lighter fluid onto the charcoal and dropped a match. The flame sprang up hungrily, and he went back to the apartment as it fed on itself. Armed with a butcher knife and a wide, deep wooden bowl, he diced and sliced a salad, which he tossed into the fridge, and set the steaks on a platter. Then, cold Miller Genuine Draft in hand, he retreated to the couch to wait for the knock of his young date. He could hear the prying voice of his mother now:
Yes, Joe, she
seems very nice. But she’s just a kid. What do her folks think?
Shouldn’t you try to date someone a little closer to your own age?
What do you have to talk about? What do you have in common?

She’d smile that slightly crinkled, all-knowing smirk of hers, and he’d wither an inch or two before crawling off to his bedroom to feel stupid and guilty in the comfort of loneliness.

“Not this time, Ma,” he said out loud.

The room didn’t answer. Not that he’d expected it to.

Had he?

But he felt funny having spoken out loud to the dead. He got up and went outside to check the grill. A cool breeze was blowing in, and the sun was a bloody blur on the horizon. It was going to be a chilly night.

The coals were well-seasoned; white on the outside with fiery pits of orange in between, when Cindy arrived at the door. She held out a bottle of red wine, which he accepted along with her hand and a quick peck on the lips before she stepped inside.

“Do I want to know where an underage girl like you got that bottle?” he asked.

She winked, and shook her head.

“You look great,” he said, noting that her dandelion yellow
stretch-cotton top clung closely to her chest and midriff and her blue jeans revealed rather than concealed just about every conceivable curve of flesh below that. Her lips glowed with life; her eyes sparkled, even in the dim light of his living room.

“Thanks,” she said, blushing just a little. “I like this outfit. It’s comfortable, and I know some guys seem to enjoy it.”

With that, she winked again and stepped past him.

“I’d be careful about what guys you wear it around,” he countered, and joined her on the couch.

“Are you dangerous?” she asked, eyes wide with feigned innocence.

“Maybe. Hope you’re hungry,” he said, sidestepping her jibe.

“Hope you can cook!”

“That remains to be seen.” He laughed. “That’s why I hope you’re hungry. That way, if this doesn’t work out, you’ll eat it anyway!”

“You hope.”

Joe picked up the TV remote and tossed it to the couch. “Well, if you want food, I’m going to need to get these things on the grill. How do you like your meat?”

“Throbbing?” Her face remained inscrutably blank. But after a second, she couldn’t hold back a giggle.

“I can offer you a fine cut that throbs later,” Joe said, not missing a beat. “But the steaks are quite dead, I assure you. No movement, or throbs, at all. How’s medium rare?”

“Long as it’s not bloody,” she said.

“Done.”

He took the platter and a long fork to the patio and laid the steaks with a sizzle on the grill. As he looked through the grating to judge the intensity of the fires below, a hand slipped around his middle. He saw the delicate tanned fingers creep like a spider across his belt line, descending with a slow but obvious intent.

She’s just a kid
, a voice inside screamed.

Doesn’t act like one
, his conscious mind retorted.

“So, have ya missed me?” she said, interrupting his private argument.

“Yeah,” he grunted, and, ignoring her attentions, flipped the bubbling meat with a fork.

“You?”

“Nope, haven’t missed me at all,” she said.

When he turned around, she was smiling. “I don’t have to go home tonight,” she announced.

“Won’t your parents worry?”

“They think I’m off with a friend from school. I said I probably wouldn’t come back tonight.”

Joe’s groin jumped at that thought. The night they’d spent a couple of hours in the backseat of his car had been heaven. But it wouldn’t compare to the luxury of a bed. And that was obviously a luxury she intended to make use of tonight.

He sure hoped he didn’t burn dinner.

He didn’t.

Joe set the small kitchen table with two plates and bowls, put the salad in the center and set out all of the dressings he’d bought. A tried and trusty corkscrew relieved the wine of its cork, and he filled two long-stemmed glasses with its tart, dark vintage. Then he retrieved the steaks from the grill, which, even though it was outside, had filled the house with the mouthwatering scent of charring beef. His stomach growled and Cindy laughed.

“You keeping a wild animal in there?”

“You just never know,” he said.

He set the meat on the table using the only china he had; luckily he wasn’t hosting a dinner party, since the blue flowered set had only three remaining plates (the claim of
unbreakable
had been suitably disputed, he thought).

She cut her steak as delicately as a princess, he thought, watching her wooden-handled steak knife slice slowly, gently, firmly through the juicy slab of beef on her plate. She
looked up at him with a small smile—a look of thanks and acknowledgement and hunger, all in one small glance. Hers was a face of expression, a mouth that pursed one way to show laughter, the other to spit derision. One wrinkle on her forehead could mean a chapter, and Joe was starting to hope that he was allowed to read the whole book.

“Steak sauce, ketchup?” he asked.

“If it’s any good, it doesn’t need dressing up,” she said, and with exaggerated temerity, brought a fork of steaming pink meat to her mouth.

She chewed a moment, as Joe watched. His eyes waited for the slightest hint of dissatisfaction.

“Well?” he asked after she’d swallowed a piece.

“You can cook for me anytime.” Her teeth shone white as she popped another forkful between them.

He laughed.

What the hell was he getting into?

Bed, as it turned out.

Dinner led to collapse on the couch, and more wine.

They talked some, her about college and roommates and growing up in backwoods Terrel; he about college and roommates and living in a big city. The TV buzzed through old episodes of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
and
Star Trek,
and they scanned past VH-1 and MTV. Finally they settled on a Discovery Channel program about disappearing breeds of penguins and long-armed monkeys. Cindy’s head moved from upright, to leaning against his shoulder, to lying in his lap.

He worried with the latter position that she could feel what was going on in his pants as he looked down on her sweet, slightly flushed face. He longed to bend over and take her tongue into his mouth. He wanted to scoop her snuggling body up in his arms and carry her back to his bedroom. But she was, in his eyes, still a minor. And despite their activities in his car and on the cliff, he felt funny doing anything that might be construed as “forcing” himself on her.
Flirtations aside, if she wanted to go to bed with him, she would have to make the first move.

Ultimately, she made the first, second and third moves.

“I really like you, Joe,” Cindy said out of nowhere. She rose from Joe’s lap to kiss his lips.

“I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had you these past few weeks. I mean, when you first saw me, I was so broken up about…you know. And it still hurts—it does. My family’s been great, but they can’t fill that place, you know? Having you here, though, well, I don’t feel so empty inside.”

Her eyes filled with liquid and Joe just nodded, not sure what to say next.

“And please don’t think I’m just using you to…I don’t know, tide me over till the next guy comes along.”

“Well, I
am
a little old for you,” Joe whispered, not wanting to say it out loud, but somehow feeling that he had to.

“No you’re not.” She shook her head violently. “You’re perfect. You know what you want; you’ve been around a little bit, but not too much. I really like being with you, Joe. I want you to know that, no matter what. I
want
to be with you.”

She kissed him again, deeply, closing her eyes and drawing him tight to her. Then she pushed him down on the couch and began to unbutton his shirt. He didn’t protest, but he didn’t help either. Though when her hands began fumbling with his belt, he felt it was time to intervene.

Pushing her back, he sat up, shrugged off the loosened shirt and scooped her up in his arms as though she were a child. As he stood from the couch, he found that she had done well with the belt. And the zipper. His pants slid to his ankles and he kicked them off as he shifted her weight in his arms. She kissed him again and wrapped her hands around his neck as he maneuvered her carefully around the doorway and into his bedroom.

It had been years since he’d lived with anyone else, but for some reason, he felt the need to kick the door shut behind them. Had there been any other tenants in the small flat,
that flimsy wood wouldn’t have hidden the sound of their lovemaking, regardless. Cindy shed her skintight jeans with a speed and assurance that left Joe marveling.