Darkness of the Soul (26 page)

Damien did as he was told, and the blast of ice and sugar nearly put him into shock. He felt like if he tried just a little harder, he could feel every pore in his body processing the moisture out of it, sucking up the sugar like the sweet, sweet crack it really was, flooding every cell in an attempt to pull himself back from whatever hole he’d been in. When he couldn’t take any more—without vomiting, at least—he shook his head, drew back, and took a shuddering breath as he felt sweat break out all over his body.

“Christ,” he managed. “I didn’t know a Coke’d induce orgasm.”

Brokov just looked at him, as if the sense in the words hadn’t sunk in yet. Then she burst out laughing, and Damien answered with a grin.

I
could
get
to
like
that
sound,
he thought.
But
is
it
safe?
He wasn’t getting any of the vibe from her that he usually did when that old ghost was getting ready to unload on him, but that didn’t seem to make much difference. Truth be told, he wasn’t getting much of a vibe from anything at all. There was a little spark, just a hint of what she was feeling, but it seemed like his sixth sense was on the fritz.

Bullshit.
It’s
not
on
the
fritz,
and
you
know
it.
He thought he did. When he’d been wandering on Memory Lane, he had begun to put it together. He was back to square one. He’d always had little sparks, little flashes of intuition and sometimes other things, but it hadn’t been until he was chosen that those talents really bloomed. That was what it felt like now; it was like what he’d had before the thing with Sheila and before he’d become the Disciple.

Fuck
a
duck.
Tall
order,
and
stuck
with
parlor
tricks.
He was not looking forward to doing whatever it was he was expected to do, but for now, he felt at least a little relief that he was still alive and kicking—that and that Brokov had come to see him.

“I think the docs will want to see you, Damien. They’re counting you as a practical miracle at the moment.” She got back up, set the soda on the bedside table, and started to head out but was stopped when his hand snapped up and grabbed at her wrist.

He looked almost desperate, almost pleading. In a way, he was. Until he knew how much time he had left, he wouldn’t know how fast he had to move. His tongue ran over his lips, and he whispered, “How long?”

She shook her head, not knowing what he meant at first. “Not very; he’s just down the—”

Damien shook his head and interrupted her. “No, no. How long since I was out?”

Sheila pursed her lips, not looking like she wanted to answer. Damien caught a whiff of her thoughts, boosted due to their prominence and the physical contact. It was just a whiff, but it was enough to know. He dropped her hand, looking pained.

“A fucking week? A whole goddamn week down the drain? Jesus!”

Brokov’s eyes widened as she stepped back. “How…”

Damien shook his head, feeling a headache beginning to develop; that was like the old days too. Back before he was chosen, even using his gift a little bit was liable to send him to his room with a screaming headache. He could feel that same pressure starting to build now.

“I can’t explain now. Later.” His eyes slipped closed.

The crack of her hand on his cheek was incredibly loud and amplified the little cancer of pain that was blossoming in his skull to fever pitch. Damien’s eyes flew open, the whites already turning a bloodshot red that would linger for the rest of the afternoon, the pupils unevenly dilated. The mark of her hand below that was a glaring patch of white deepening to red against his skin.

“Whuzzat for?”

She smirked a little, the corner of her mouth twisting in what he considered to be a rather sexy way, though he wasn’t much in the mood for thinking that way at the moment. “Just making sure you aren’t going away again. The shit has hit the fan, Mr. Man, and you’d better be awake for it.”

Then she was gone, leaving Damien glaring at the ceiling and wondering—not for the first time—what the hell he had done to end up here.

“Christ.”

Chapter
25
 

3:30 pm, December 22, 1999

With more than forty-eight hours passed since the discovery of the mess at the morgue, some people—most notably the new widow Hollis—were already growing impatient with the lack of progress. A throng of such individuals now stood between Parker and the door of the RPD, all of them waving signs and shouting. Many of them were weeping, and at least a handful had welts on their faces and forearms that looked self-inflicted. What he thought of, looking them over, were the crowds that supposedly had gathered around suspected witches. These were frightened, grieving people, looking for a scapegoat. It looked like the RPD and its representatives were going to get the honor of being that scapegoat.

It wasn’t just the situation with the morgue—where every corpse that had been waiting for processing, autopsy, or pickup had gone the way of the dodo, with no indication of exactly where they’d gotten to—but also a string of unexplained mutilations, the gangbangers who had jumped aboard just because they could, and the usual batch of crazies and kooks who felt like attaching themselves to the cause of the moment.

As Parker approached, trying to get through them without shoving—God forbid they add a police brutality suit to everything else—and being smacked in the head by one of their signs in the process, people were body-blocking him and shouting how he was just another useless pig, and he was wondering what the fuck was wrong with people. Since the beginning of the month, working here had been like sitting on a powder keg, one that had a real short fuse attached that was ready to burn. Apparently, over the last couple of days, somebody had lit it.

The signs were the thing Parker found the most amusing. With sentiments like “Bring Back Our Dead” and “Smoke the Pigs, Not Our Loved Ones,” you could almost think that they’d gotten the idea the police themselves had caused the mess in the morgue, disposing of the bodies or spiriting them away for some sickening purpose. It wasn’t really funny, and he knew that, but the image of the Reno PD plus assorted hangers-on heading over to the coroner’s office, chopping up upwards of three dozen bodies, setting some kind of funeral pyre or ditching them in the desert, and then returning to dispose of the coroner too—and let us not forget nearly giving poor old Santa a heart attack—was just too vivid and morbidly amusing for him to banish from his mind.

He shook his head as another of the protestors—
Pretty
soon,
we
may
have
to
start
calling
them
rioters,
the cynical part of his mind pointed out—tried to get in his way. This one was a skinny little kid who looked like he wanted to be a skinhead when he grew up, with his wife-beater shirt; gleaming, hairless dome; and hate-filled eyes that were the color of the ocean at midnight. Parker decided he’d had enough of this shit, so he lifted one of the objects he was carrying, put it at eye level, and shouted into it.

The bullhorn took the force of Parker’s voice, which was already considerable, and amplified it well above the shouts of the crowd and the thumping of car stereos coming from up Virginia Street. The feedback whine that came at the start drove the skinhead back, and the thunderous voice managed to get them to part enough for him to slip through their line.

“If you want your bodies back,
move
, so I can get to work on it!”

Parker slid through the gap and then past the uniforms guarding the door. They couldn’t do anything about the situation yet, since they hadn’t become violent and technically weren’t in violation of any laws, but they were watching. He shook his head and muttered to himself. As he mounted the stairs, heading up to his office, he let the bullhorn drop and his posture changed to match it, his gait becoming a defeated and depressed mockery of his usual confident stride.

Finally, he made it to the top of the stairs—
Third
floor,
lingerie
—and pushed open the door to Homicide. He walked past the empty desks and toward his own near the back of the room. When he got there, Drakanis and Woods were already sitting there. Drakanis was perched on the edge of the desk, and Woods was leaning back in Parker’s chair, grinning in his usual way. Why they’d let him out, Parker didn’t know, but he felt better to have someone else there, even if it was that nutbag.

He arched a brow as he approached. “How’d you two get here first? Didn’t see you in the mess downstairs?”

Damien shrugged, took his feet off the desk, and let the chair fall back to the ground with a bang. “Brokov loaned me her keys. I’ve been here all day.”

Parker turned his attention to Drakanis, who was bouncing a tennis ball on the floor and catching it as it bounced up above his head. He caught it one last time, grinned a little bit himself, and then glanced to Woods and then back to Parker.

“Back door, man. I haven’t worked here in years, and I
still
know the building better than you? Sad, my friend, sad.”

Parker’s hand shot out and snatched the ball before Drakanis could catch it again. He waggled his eyebrows. “Yeah, and I’m still faster than you, Mikey, so shaddup. Got the analysis back. Not much the prof had to say about it, except that it
is
a language.”

Woods’ eyes widened. “Great. So I’m a linguistics major now too.” He spread his palms. “I still think I can tell you more straight up than you’ll get out of that tape and a fuck of a lot faster, to boot.”

Drakanis glanced over his shoulder at Woods, his own brows shooting up. “So spill something then. You’ve been keeping me in suspense for too goddamn long. Vince is here now, so you can spill it.”

Woods shook his head, earning a disgusted grunt from Parker. “Nope. Got one more coming. I know you’re getting irked, but just trust me on this one. Just a little further, okay?”

Drakanis shook his head, remembering the way Woods and Brokov had looked at him that night in Woody’s, remembering the remarks they had made. Thinking about that still stung, but he also supposed it had been warranted. Now the two of them were at least somewhat in on what he and Parker were thinking, and Woods claimed to understand a whole lot more than they’d given him credit for, which he would explain if they could all meet together.

So here they were, sitting together and still waiting for one more. Drakanis assumed they were waiting on Sheila, but it didn’t really increase his patience level much. From the look of him, Parker wasn’t too interested in waiting any longer either.

Woods could feel the current in the air. Though he’d had a migraine when he’d woken up that had lasted the whole day and yesterday had given him a low-grade throb, today, he seemed mostly okay, though he was still running from a level far below what he was used to. He spread his palms. “Look, I know, you’re tired, you want this to be over, blah blah. I get it, okay? The fucker put me in the hospital, and we’re running short on time. I understand that, too. But this isn’t going to be easy to explain, and I’d rather only do it once. Whether you want her to be or not, Brokov’s in on this, in her way, so you need to do it my way for now, okay?”

Parker made the disgusted noise again as he bombed into Detective Ambrose Travis’s chair, which was across from his own, and started fiddling with one of the pens. Travis, like almost all the other homicide officers in the building, was over at the morgue, still trying to figure out just what the hell had happened. Drakanis, for his part, just studied Woods for a long moment, letting his cop-sense crawl over the man, looking for signs of falsehood and not finding them. In Drakanis’s mind, the man knew his shit and did have something of value to contribute. He was just scared of what it might be. This whole thing seemed to be getting a hell of a lot bigger than he’d signed up for, and it was looking more and more like all of it was tied together somehow.

The three of them sat in silence. Woods was brooding on his own ghosts, which were about to be exposed for perhaps the first time in his life, and Parker was stewing in his own irritation. Drakanis simply disconnected from the whole scene, put his mind into what he called his crime-solving mode. It wasn’t helping much. Too many things only connected if you used the logic of the insane, and the facts that the painting hadn’t shown up in almost a month and they had nothing they could directly attribute to their man since Morrigan’s death weren’t putting a good spin on things.

Parker glanced up, his face painted with the particular brand of misery that only those who cannot stand the silence will ever understand. He started to open his mouth, just to say something—anything—but the looks on the others’ faces got him to close it again. He waited another minute or two and then spilled it anyway. “Come on, say
something
, you guys. Sitting here like this is fuckin’ killing me.”

Woods shook his head. “Bananas.”

Drakanis looked at Woods with surprise in his eyes and then burst out laughing. After a beat, Parker joined them, laughing until tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. He knew this wasn’t a good sign—it was a form of hysteria, that was what it was—but he couldn’t seem to help himself.

Woods didn’t join them; he just continued to give them his wry smile. He was turning one of Parker’s pens over in his hands and testing himself with it, trying to move it, even just an inch. So far, the pen was winning. As the others were finally starting to calm down, the door creaked and Brokov entered, looking flustered.

“Sorry, sorry. They wouldn’t let me through, and there was this skinhea…” She stopped, her purse halfway down her arm and her hair tangled. She raised a brow at the three men, two of whom appeared to be in the last stages of hysteria and the last who was just grinning at them both.