Harsh Gods (36 page)

Father Frank strode up and closed his hand around my keys. A tingle of power arced through the contact, followed by a wash of frustration, anxiety, and steely-edged will.

“We are going to my church,” he said, “and then you are driving me to the Davis home. No arguments.” There was power in his words.

“Praying’s not going to help anything,” Lil spat back, “and you’ll waste precious time at the girl’s house. Neither Kramer nor Mal are going to head back there. There’s nothing there they want.”

Father Frank rounded on her, condemnation whittling his features.

“A deranged child-killer just kidnapped her daughter. I need to tell Tammy in person. That’s not something a mother should hear on the news.”

Lil refused to get in the car.

“Quit fucking around,” I snarled. “Every delay costs us.”

“Which is why I’m going after Garrett.”

She folded her arms across her chest, chin jutting stubbornly. The lights in the parking lot picked out a scattering of perfect snowflakes trapped in the waves of her hair.

“Leave her behind,” Father Frank growled. He ducked past me and slid into the passenger seat, slamming the door after him. I marched over to the driver’s side, glaring at Lil across the roof of the car.

“You pick the worst possible times to be a brat.”

“You think that’s what this is about?” she shot back. “You don’t even know where Tarhunda is located, and if he pulls things off with that girl, we are all completely screwed.”

“Rub it in a little more,” I said.

“You’re chasing ghosts, Anakim. I’m going after the sure thing.” She turned smartly on her heel and started across the lot.

“At least let me drop you off at your car,” I called after her.

“The way you drive?” she replied. “I’ll get there faster if I walk.”

Roarke tracked her progress from where he stood beside his partner. Shifting his attention my way, he shot me a quizzical look. I held my hands up in a gesture of frustration. If he wanted insight into the mysteries of Lil’s behavior, he was looking at the wrong guy.

“Come on, Zack.” The driver’s-side door bumped against my stomach as Father Frank pushed it open from the inside. “It’s better if she doesn’t tag along. There are some things at Holy Rosary you need to see.”

“What are you even talking about?” I asked.

“Get in.” He nudged me with the door again, every line of his face telegraphing his urgency. “You’ll understand once we get there.”

Lil was already at the far end of the main lot. No one stopped her, though Roarke continued to stare at her retreating form—probably committing her details to memory. I wondered if he would ask Remy about her later.

That would be an awkward conversation.

I hesitated another moment, squinting as a gust of wind scoured my face with ice crystals. Then, muttering unhappy things about the tactics of splitting the party, I ducked into the Hellcat.

The hospital’s lot had been plowed and salted since the storm, no doubt a fringe benefit of an early morning visit from a battalion of cops. Snow was still coming down in swirling flurries of white, though it was nothing like the flash-freezing blizzard that had pummeled the city earlier. I hit the ignition, cranked up the defroster to clear the scrim of ice forming on the windshield, and headed for Euclid.

It was a short drive to Holy Rosary, but I found myself glaring at the clock every thirty seconds. Time sped faster than I could urge the Hellcat on these roads. The plows had been busy clearing snow and spreading salt, but the pavement was slick with melt and little patches were already freezing over. We practically crawled up Mayfield, and I resisted the urge to pummel the steering wheel every time the tires struggled for grip.

“Ease up on yourself, Zack,” the padre said. “You’ll find her in time.”

I loosed a string of curses as the light ahead of us went from green to yellow in record time. Father Frank didn’t even twitch. When I hit the brakes, the Dodge started to fishtail, so I laid on the horn and just coasted through. The horn was more reflex than necessity. No one was going to broadside us—they weren’t stupid enough to be on the roads at this hour.

“I wasn’t swearing at you,” I said by way of apology. “Lil’s right, though,” I continued, shoving the hair back from my eyes. “I have no idea where Kramer’s taken her. I don’t even know where to start.”

The old priest stared out the window at the passing buildings, their eaves and every lintel lined with fine traceries of snow.

“That’s why we’re going to Holy Rosary before anything else,” he responded. “You need access to your supplies.”

“I’ve got supplies stashed at the church?” I asked. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“I did, back at the hospital,” he said. “At least I tried to. Didn’t want to say too much in front of Ms. Gibson.”

It took me a moment to realize he meant Lil.

“Before that, I left a bunch of messages on your cell—lot of good it did me.” He fixed me with a look of reproach that felt distinctly paternal. “You still haven’t given me the new number, by the way.”

Unlocking the screen one-handed, I held my current phone out to him.

“Text yourself or something. With everything going on, I’ll forget again.”

He snorted. “Same old Zack.”

The road dipped to go under the train tracks, both lanes narrowly girded by stout pylons of concrete. Both hands went on the wheel—it felt like I was threading a needle. Even without the road conditions, it wouldn’t have been fun squeezing the Hellcat through the abbreviated lane.

As we emerged on the other side, the retaining walls blossomed with a vibrant mural celebrating the history of Cleveland’s Little Italy. The domed spire of Holy Rosary rose in the distance above the slumbering neighborhood, the arms of its cross bearing a rounded mantle of white.

“What kind of things are we talking—weapons?” I asked hopefully. “A Rephaim-sized bazooka would be great about now. Or a magical tracking device. I really could use one of those.”

Underneath the jokes, my mind raced through possibilities. Tools and weapons for the current crisis would be handy, but what I longed for—and truly needed—was knowledge to fill some of the holes in my existence. The journals in my apartment were crammed with tons of general information on wards and energy and theories about the tribes, but they were frustratingly sparse when it came to personal details.

Impressions too vague to be classed as memories suggested that I didn’t trust the apartment to be safe enough to leave truly transparent notes about myself. But this stash was in a church with Father Frank—my anchor—to look after it. If that wasn’t safe enough…

A brittle, yearning hope welled up, sharp enough it stole my breath.

Those blades I imagined would really, really be nice.

It was as close to praying as I got. Father Frank’s voice interrupted the moment.

“Hey. Slow down. You’ll pass the entrance.” His arm jerked toward what might have been an empty lot, laden with drifts. Belatedly, I realized it was parking for the church.

I tapped the brakes, but 4,500 pounds of top-of-the-line Detroit engineering wasn’t going to stop in time for that turn.

“Fuck me running,” I grumbled.

“Never mind.” He gestured to a crosswalk just past the church. “Go up to the Montessori school. There’s a side street you can use.”

The thin stretch of concrete qualified as more of a sidewalk than a proper street, but I nosed the Hellcat over a mound of snow at the curb, and cut the engine right next to the stairs leading to the side entrance of the stonework cathedral. Rime-covered saints looked down on us from their vigilant posts across the pediment.

Father Frank unfolded himself from the passenger side, digging a substantial set of keys from the depths of his coat pocket. He gripped the metal railing in one gloved hand as he navigated the snow-covered stairs to the door at the top. Grabbing my phone from where he’d left it on the seat, I trailed after him.

“You never answered my question,” I said.

“You were too busy gathering wool to hear me.”

The padre bent over the lock, sorting through his collection for the right key. The thick suede fingers of his heavy gloves made it a painstaking process. He didn’t say anything for a while. Impatient, I smacked my hand against the railing. Fragments of ice shivered off, dropping into the drifts below. I stared at their jigsaw imprints, wondering if we’d killed Halley by taking this side trip.

“Hard to be specific anyway. Over the years, I’ve seen you bring all kinds of little packages in and out. Last time you came through was around All Souls’ Day.” Cursing, he banged ice from the lock, then tried the key again without success. “It was my turn to say mass, so I only caught you in passing,” he explained. “I’ll be kicking myself about that for a while.”

“All Souls’ Day.” I did some mental math. “That was right before—”

“Your ‘incident?’ Yeah.” He kept his back to me, shoulders stiffening beneath his coat. “Like I said, kicking myself. You came in with some weapons I’ve seen you carry everywhere. I should have known you were in trouble when you left them both behind.”

His displeasure at being lied to, or at least misled, prickled palpably through the frigid air. And I felt bad—I really did. But all my guilt failed to stand before the rush of hope his words inspired. Twined through that rush was a quieter sense—nothing so certain as a memory, but a comfort all the same.

Beyond this door lay tools that would help me win the fight for Halley.

As much as we were pressed for time, Father Frank had made the right call in bringing me here.

The padre finally got the key to work, ice grinding audibly in the lock as he turned the haft. He had to yank on the side door to drag its bottom across the buildup of snow outside. I reached out to give him a hand.

Once inside, we stood in a narrow antechamber with a clutter of snow shovels angling against one corner, together with a squat bucket of salt. He gestured for quiet.

“I’ve got to take us the long way,” he said in a hush. “Father Cerilli is probably already up and getting ready for six o’clock Mass. Easier not to interrupt him—he’ll talk our ears raw.”

Tapping slush from his boots, he led me down a narrow flight of stairs deep into the bowels of the church. We passed through a storage area with ranks of folding chairs—the old metal kind that made it impossible to get comfortable, no matter how you sat.

Shadows crouched in the furthest corners, together with drifts of cobwebs and dust. We passed a boiler room, then more storage, only to emerge into the church hall. Father Frank strode across the vacant space, his damp boots making soft squeaking sounds on the highly polished tile.

Through the double doors at the far end of the hall, we followed a long, narrow corridor to its end. The padre used another key to open the door, reaching in to flick on a single light inside.

Exposed masonry lent a vault-like feeling to the roughly fifteen by twenty space. Wooden rafters stretched dusty and bare over a water-stained cement floor with a worn tan rug positioned roughly in the middle. Old copper pipes ran the length of the left-hand wall, hugging the ceiling to disappear deeper into the building.

Holy Rosary was an old structure, and it showed in the foundation—hand-quarried stone, it was held together with a sandy-colored mortar. Flecks of silica caught the light. An interior section of cinderblock running half the length of the room stood out as a more recent construction, dull and gray by contrast.

Attempts had been made to turn the underground space homey, with framed images of nature photography arranged on three of the walls. In the far corner, a heavy bag hung from the rafters, with a treadmill and a rack of free weights nearby. The treadmill angled so it sectioned off the gym space. A patched green couch that sagged in the middle made up the other divider for that side of the room with a battered old Army trunk squatting in front of it in lieu of a coffee table.

Nestled in the nook created by the cinderblock addition was a spartan desk of pitted wood. Neatly arranged on the desk were some file trays, a tower computer with an ancient CRT monitor, and a triptych of photos in a hinged wooden frame. An old brass crucifix overlooked the desk from the narrowest cinderblock wall, probably hung with masonry screws.

“Be it ever so humble,” Father Frank murmured, gesturing me to precede him into the room. My eyes were drawn immediately to the crucifix before my brain consciously registered the reason. A play of light seemed to glimmer deep within the tarnished brass. Curious, I teased open my vision.

The cross blazed like a beacon.

“Is that a relic?” I asked. I didn’t mean it in the Catholic sense, and from his face, Father Frank knew it.

“You’ve called it that,” he responded. “I know it’s got something to do with your disappearing act.”

I strode past him to investigate. The cross fairly thrummed as I approached it, layers of emotion and purpose spilling from the worn brass image. On the Shadowside, most objects in the physical world showed up as echoes, if they showed up at all. Relics were items that possessed weight and substance on both sides of reality. Like a Crossing, they were often associated with mortal trauma or death.

More than that, they could function like portable Crossings—although they took a hell of a lot more effort to use. It was the difference between stepping through a neatly opened door and squeezing through a partially collapsed tunnel.

“I think I get it,” I murmured, looking past the crucifix to the cinderblock wall. Wards glimmered in the spaces between each gray block, scribed minutely into the cement with what might have been a felt-tip pen. Blue and faded, the scrolling spellwork was nearly invisible unless you peered at it from inches away. When I trailed my hand along a line of mortar, power prickled against my skin.

I recognized it immediately as my own.

“You did good, Mazetti,” I said, not bothering to look up.

“I knew even without your memory, you’d figure that part out,” he responded.

Pressing my fingers against the wards again, I tasted their purpose and resistance. No doubt about it. The two sections of cinderblock had been added to enclose a hidden space large enough to be a walk-in closet—except there was no door. I’d put the Anakim equivalent of a bank vault in the basement of the padre’s church.