Harsh Gods (2 page)

I wracked my broken brain for any recollection about Father Frank, and whatever sort of “case” he typically managed—particularly at eleven o’clock on a Friday night. The best I dredged up was a brief flash of an older man, nearly as tall as me, and built like a welterweight boxer. It might have been a memory—or I might have pulled it out of the girl’s head. That usually took physical contact, but catching a stray thought or two wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility.

Then a larger concern began to gnaw at me. It was probably just residual paranoia from the nightmares, but it couldn’t be ignored.

“If it’s that important,” I asked suspiciously, “why didn’t he come here to speak with me himself?”

Something in my look made her back up a step. Anxiety that verged upon fear wafted from her like a sour perfume. I was pretty sure she was responding to my physical appearance—lazy bachelor with a side of Unabomber—but out of reflex I pulled my wings tight against my back. She
probably
couldn’t see them.

My wings weren’t part of the physical world, and mortals gifted with enough sight to peer through to the Shadowside were few and far between. Nevertheless, I felt oddly naked in front of her, despite my jeans and rumpled T-shirt. Belatedly, I tried focusing on a cowl to tuck my inhuman nature more or less out of sight. I was terrible at the things, though, and half the time I forgot to keep one up.

No wonder so many of my nightmares revolved around having my nature exposed in front of a mob of angry mortals. It was my personal version of naked-in-front-of-the-class.

So I pictured the veil of energy settling over me, wings and all, and tried to radiate
just a normal guy.
It didn’t seem to help, though, and my late-night visitor still couldn’t meet my eyes.

“When you wouldn’t respond to his texts or his calls, he was going to head up here,” she mumbled in a subdued voice. “But then Halley started seizing again. So he sent me.”

That broke my concentration, and the cowl shivered to pieces. Pompom Hat Girl didn’t seem to notice. Whatever she might be, she wasn’t psychic.

“Hold on,” I said. “Seizing? What kind of case are we talking about?”

A look of confusion flickered across her dark features.

“An exorcism, of course.”

I stammered as thoughts whirled too fast for my mouth to keep up. A priest wanted
my
help with an exorcism.
Seriously?
That was a smothering level of irony, considering my many winged relations. Was this a regular thing or was the universe having extra fun with me?

How much did my inhuman nature tie into the request? He couldn’t possibly know about me—could he?

I mentally tallied half a dozen scenarios, few of which I found desirable. Eventually, I managed to reply.

“Why don’t you come inside and tell me the whole story?” I offered, hoping it didn’t make me look like a creeper. “And start from the beginning.”

“No.” She shook her head, and the little pompom at the top of her hat bobbled. “I’m supposed to take you directly to the Davis house, or just head back there myself.”

I started to object. She squared her stance and dragged her eyes to meet mine with a hard-won look of defiance. Her anxiety still quavered beneath the surface—something about me had really rattled her—but she held it back with a steely sense of purpose. Her throat hitched with a convulsive swallow, but when she spoke again, a little of that steel could be heard in her voice.

“I don’t really know you,” she said. “I just know that Father Frank trusts you. He needs your help.” At those last four words, I felt an all-too-familiar compulsion tug in my chest.

Fuck.

Had I taken some vow in the distant past, to just drop everything when someone asked for help? If so, I’d forgotten about it—along with nearly everything else—but clearly, forgetting didn’t let me wiggle around the consequences.

I sighed. “Let me grab my leather.”

I snagged my biker jacket from where it had fallen behind the couch, then went in search of my cellphone. I’d thrown that somewhere and had done my best to forget about it. Funny thing, me and memory. There was so much I fought to remember, and just as much I struggled to forget.

While I dug around for the phone, the girl lingered awkwardly in the doorway. She hugged herself in her puffy pink coat, though I couldn’t imagine how she was still cold. The super kept the apartment building somewhere next to boiling in the winter—most of the residents were retirees, except for me.

Her obsidian-chip eyes flickered behind her glasses, taking in the whole of my apartment—the packed bookshelves that lined the living room, the framed pages of illuminated manuscripts hung on the walls, the milk-carton-sized TARDIS perched next to the computer tower not far from an old-school Han Solo posed with his blaster.

Han
always
shoots first.

The books and art and toys were lovingly maintained, everything orderly and in its place—but then there were the stacks of empty take-out cartons scattered across the coffee table. A pile of dirty laundry had made it as far as the easy chair and had sprawled, forgotten, ever since. Half-empty coffee mugs stood like stranded soldiers atop the counters, the side tables, and the mantle over the gas fireplace.

“I know it’s a mess,” I muttered.

“I didn’t say that,” she responded guiltily, looking away from the sink full of dirty dishes.

“Word of advice?” I offered as I finally spied the smartphone half under a pile of notes on the
Book of Enoch
. I checked the charge—it was in the red—and pocketed it anyway. Striding over to my visitor, I said, “Don’t play poker.”

She pouted, then used her middle finger to shove her glasses up her thin, straight nose. On anyone else, it would have been a none-too-veiled response to my smartass comment. With her, it seemed both habitual and oblivious.

While she hovered at the threshold, I buckled the biker jacket like I was girding for war. A vintage piece from the post-punk ’80s, it had been through a lot with me, especially one cold November night on the dark waters of Lake Erie.

My friend Lil paid a professional leather cleaner a small fortune to restore it—a “kindness” she gleefully dangled over my head whenever she could. I’d had my own guy go over it back in January to make a few strategic changes, including a whole new lining with a custom inner holster for my new favorite gun. The thick, black leather with its many zippers and buckles settled across my shoulders with a reassuring weight. I felt comfortable in the hardy second skin. The subtle lines of the SIG against my ribs certainly didn’t hurt.

“All right,” I intoned. “Take me to your leader.”

She stared blankly at me. I was kind of used to that. One thing I’d retained was a near-encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. I found the references amusing, but had long ago stopped expecting anyone else to follow along.

“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Nodding, the girl turned and headed down the stairs. Pushing through the vestibule door, she fought with the outer one, straining against the wind. It was practically like an airlock, and an icy blast from off the lake swept into the glassed-in space. March had come in like a lion, and was still mauling the city with chilly tooth and claw.

Once outside, she winced as the relentless fingers of the wind plucked at the edges of her coat. Quickly, she zipped it all the way to the top before tugging her hat down to cover her ears.

My body registered the temperature in a distant manner. She stared for a moment, then led me to her car—an anonymous white compact. I climbed in and ended up sitting with my knees up my nose. As she put the keys in the ignition, she stole a sidelong glance in my direction. She pursed her lips, but didn’t say anything.

A colorful, laminated rectangle dangled from her rearview mirror, decorated with a little brown tassel. I sent it spinning as I struggled to adjust the seat. Then I caught it between my first two fingers, stilling its wild orbit and muttering an apology.

Looking closer, I expected to see a picture of Saint Christopher. Instead, the image of a woman in a headscarf gleamed in bright, almost cartoon-like colors. She rode a white horse through what looked like a Mughal horde, casually lopping off an opponent’s head with her gleaming scimitar.

“That’s Mai Bhag Kaur,” Pompom Hat Girl explained. “She’s a warrior-saint.”

“I’ve heard of her,” I replied. “She’s Sikh, right?”

My reluctant chauffeur gave me another sideways stare.

“Yes. Not many people know that.”

I snorted. “Don’t let the leather jacket fool you. I’m not some knuckle-dragger. I taught at Case, remember?”

She did that nervous thing with her glasses, then turned her full attention to her crowded ring of keys. Singling one out, she inserted it into the ignition. I tapped the icon of Mai Bhag Kaur, sending it spinning again.

“I didn’t think Sikhs believed in anything like Christian possession,” I said casually. “How’d you end up doing exorcisms with Father Frank?”

“I don’t do exorcisms,” she said curtly. “He teaches me judo and mixed martial arts. In exchange, I give him some of my time. Tonight, that involves driving.”

It was my turn to stare. “Trying to live up to your warrior-saint?” I asked.

She grabbed the icon, stilling it. Her throat worked as she swallowed.

“I don’t like being afraid.”

So I shut the hell up. She put the car in gear and headed toward Mayfield Road. Instead of making small talk, I scoured my cellphone for any calls or texts I might have missed, especially from this mysterious Father Frank who taught judo to Sikh girls and did exorcisms on weekends.

My sibling Remy had sent about a dozen texts over the past two weeks, all of which I’d chosen to ignore. Most of them only said, “
Call me
,” anyway. There were a couple of calls from work—likewise ignored.

Nothing about an exorcism.

“When did you say this guy was calling me?” I asked. If I hadn’t gotten such a wholly guileless vibe from her, I would have been plotting ways to get out of the vehicle—there were a lot of reasons to doubt her story. Given the life I led, it was a good policy to assume everyone was out to get me. Most of the time, they were.

“Last night. Most of today,” she answered. “Maybe fifteen minutes before I showed up. It kept going straight to voicemail, but he said sometimes, you get real busy and turn it off.”

I powered down the smartphone then brought everything online again—which was about the extent of my knowledge of how to screw with the thing. Give me a search engine and I could perform miracles—hand me the hardware that ran the search engine, and I felt like a Neanderthal working a Wii.

The screen reloaded at what felt like a geologic pace. I checked for texts again.

“Nope,” I said. “Nothing.”

As I put the phone away, the scar on that hand gave a twinge. I massaged it automatically. It had been giving me trouble for a couple of months now, always itchy on the wrong side of my skin.

“I made the last three calls myself,” the girl said. “I heard your voice on the message. You have a very distinctive voice.”

“I don’t know what you’re calling, but it can’t be my cellphone.”

“It’s your voice,” she insisted, pulling up to a light.

“I’m telling you, I’ve had this phone since November, and nothing about exorcisms has come through—”

I cut myself off, twitching with the force of revelation. Pompom Hat Girl caught the motion from the corner of her eye, turning her attention from the road long enough to spear me with a quizzical glance. Churning anxiety spiked through my gut, and I didn’t know how much of it made it to my face.

Someone behind us honked as she idled too long, and the car rabbited forward as she gave it too much gas. I barely noticed—my thoughts spun back to a night of pitiless skies, cold, seething waters, and the nightmare shrill of cacodaimons rising from Erie’s muddy depths.

I’d lost so much on that lake.

“Do you have a work phone?” she asked tentatively. I made a monosyllabic sound that wasn’t really a response. Our little compact glided past the high stone wall of Lake View Cemetery, and I found myself drowning in memories.

I’d had a cellphone before that awful night—used it to call the apartment with panicked messages for Lailah. Beautiful Lailah. Dead even in my dreams.

I shoved the thoughts away before they could gut me. I’d spent weeks now fighting not to think of her, video games filling the hole where my memories should be, because whiskey didn’t do shit.

The phone was probably somewhere at the bottom of Lake Erie, buried in the silt and the dark along with the Eye of Nefer-Ka. All I had left of that horror was my Swiss-cheese brain and the scar on my hand.

Sensitive on some level to what I was feeling, my driver sat rigidly behind her steering wheel, eyes resolutely fixed on the road. It made me wonder if some of my emotions were spilling out. The laminated image of her warrior-saint rocked lazily with the motion of the tiny car as we descended into Little Italy.

“When you get a chance, I need that number,” I said.

Maybe there were more voicemails. Maybe one of them was Lailah, and I could finally hear her voice again outside of nightmares. But if my old cellphone lay at the bottom of the lake, how was it even taking calls? It shouldn’t even be in service—I hadn’t paid any bills on it since November.

It made no sense.

“You want the number to your own cellphone?”

“Humor me.”

She frowned, and again, I caught the sour whiff of anxiety, verging upon fear.

“Is my head on backwards or something?” I asked, damping down irritation. “You keep staring at me like I belong in a sideshow. I know I haven’t cut my hair or shaved in a while, but seriously—I can’t look
that
bad.”

Pompom Hat Girl hunched her shoulders and focused on the road. There wasn’t much cause for that level of concentration—traffic was light, and it was too cold out for snow. Old drifts piled up against the sides of the cars parked along the curb, but the street itself was clear.

“You look like someone I met a long time ago.”