Darkness of the Soul (31 page)

Brokov was the first to break the silence that had fallen when Woods had stopped his tale. Sounding breathless and perhaps too curious for her own good, she asked him, “Well? What happened to her? Something sure as hell did.”

Woods nodded, not looking at her. He didn’t want to lie—to lie about this part was perhaps to make the whole rest of the story a lie, and he’d prefer to avoid that if he could—but he also didn’t feel up to explaining to these three strangers what he’d done. The story up to the end he had told without becoming too involved in it, telling it like he felt like he had lived it, as an observer rather than a participant. But telling them what he’d found when he had come home—and worse, what he had done—was just coming too close.

The lie came easily enough to his lips, even though he no longer had his talents available to make it more believable. He simply said it, not looking at any of them, not even to see if they bought it. “She was dead. Twisted, like she was going to transform into the thing in the basement. But she was dead already. Whatever it was, she couldn’t live through it.”

He swallowed, and all of them heard the hard click in the back of his throat.

Parker gave the silence another beat before breaking it with his own questions. His voice was rough, and his head was throbbing like it did when he had bypassed eating for too long. “What was it? The thing you… called up, or whatever. A demon? A ghost? What?”

Woods opened his mouth to answer, but Drakanis spoke first, sounding confident and certain, which wasn’t surprising. Damien thought that the cop’s heritage was finally beginning to peek around the corners; if he could get just one more shove, then maybe he might be ready for this after all. He hoped so, at least.

Drakanis even smiled as he said it. “It was whatever lives in the Talu Shar.”

Brokov and Parker both shot their eyebrows up; if they’d done it any harder, Woods thought they might have flown right off. The image touched him in a way the story hadn’t, and he broke out laughing, drawing their attention to him. He shook his head at their questioning looks and then pointed at Drakanis, nodding as he tried to regain control of himself.

“He’s… he’s absolutely correct.”

Drakanis just nodded, settling in his chair and wondering if he should be counting himself lucky. As horrible as what had happened to Gina was, at least she’d still been
her
when she died. How much worse was it for Woods, who had to see the one he loved turned into some half-human
thing
? How much worse to have had to actually face the god or demon that apparently called the shots? Drakanis wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“So, you’re telling us that
you
summoned it?” Parker’s tone was accusatory. He’d gone from disbelief to blame in a remarkably short period of time, Woods thought, even as he shook his head and raised a hand to get the big cop to shut up for a second.

“Look, I made it physical. Or rather, we did, back then. But not for long. Just one bit of mischief and it was gone again.” Drakanis just nodded again, and Damien wondered how fast his latent powers were blooming. He was catching on almost too fast, and that might be dangerous. Brokov just looked confused.

“Well, whatever’s going on, it seems to me like
something
is fuckin’ physical here, and while I got no problem buying into this whole demon-painting bullshit, I have a fucking
large
problem with you knowing so much about this crap and then telling us you pulled it up out of a goddamn book like some D-and-D nerd’s fantasy, but oh, don’t worry, I put it back, all is cool.”

Parker looked liked he was about ready to begin frothing at the mouth, and Drakanis didn’t appear to be in a mood to leap in and defuse it this time, so Woods stopped him cold by giving him the answer they’d really come for anyway. “Karim’s your man. Now shut the fuck up.”

While it didn’t defuse the situation any, it turned the focus away from Woods and any guilt Parker was about to lay on him. Parker immediately turned heart-attack purple and began sputtering, while Brokov’s eyes turned inward like she was turning it over in her mind. Drakanis, again, simply nodded.

“That’s why you two were in the closet. He’s not really as dead as he was supposed to be, is he?”

Drakanis’s voice was flat, devoid of any emotion. Woods supposed the man had shut it out, pushing it to the side so he didn’t have to think about how close they had all been to the one who’d turned his wife into cold cuts. He didn’t have any real answer to that beyond the one the girl in his dream (Fugue? Memory?) had given him, so he just spread his palms and raised his shoulders.

“The body
was
dead. Whether he is, I don’t know. Whether the body
still
is, I don’t know. I think the answer to all of those is no. I think he woke up about the same way I did and then cleaned out the morgue.”

Parker had put his head in his hands and was shaking it slowly. Now he raised his face, still rubbing at his temples, and stared for a moment.

“Why?” he asked. “Better yet, how?”

Woods turned to him. “You were about ready to chop my head off because I know too goddamn much, and now you’re asking me for all the answers? Christ, I don’t know. I think the
talu`shar
brought him back, somehow, put a time-out on what I did to him. Shit like that doesn’t come easy though, and there’s always a price. I think he waxed the coroner and his assistant because he needed juice. What he did with the corpses, I don’t know, and frankly, I’m not sure I
want
to know. As for the how, you saw the report, and Brokov relayed some of it to me. Cut up and drained of blood, same as all the others. The corpses, their blood spread all over the goddamn room and the bodies themselves missing. My guess is that he tore them all up, looking for whatever it was he needed out of them—life force, the soul, maybe just plain meat—and then got rid of them, probably by sending them to wherever the painting lives. But that’s just a guess, and I don’t know how he did it. I never had that kind of power, and I don’t think he ever did either, unless he got a supercharge or something. I think the thing in the painting did that part.”

Parker just shook his head and laid it back in his hands, muttering to himself. Woods had expected that. Parker talked the talk, but he didn’t really seem the sort to survive the trip around the bend that this shit was going to take.

Maybe
it’s
for
the
best
if
he
gets
out
now.
Before
something
a
little
more
severe
than
hearing
stories
about
it
or
having
to
try
to
think
about
it
comes
along.

Brokov interrupted his train of thought then, walking toward him and laying her hand over his.

“How bad is it, really? You don’t think it’s just going to be more corpses, or you wouldn’t bother telling us. You need something here, or think it’s a lot worse than you’re letting on. I can tell from the way you’re looking at us. So don’t bullshit me, Mr. Man. How bad?”

He weighed his options; the thoughts he’d had when he initially had really talked to her were still lurking, still trying to cloud his judgment of her and the situation, but he tried to shove them away and consider this objectively. Would she have waited by his bedside like she had, helped him get back in here, given him the information she had, done all the other things she’d done, if she was just that angry old ghost back to punish him? He wasn’t sure. He certainly didn’t see any of the other Sheila in her eyes, and that was something he usually noticed almost immediately. It had become a survival tactic, as ingrained in him as stretching out his hand when he was introduced to someone or checking to make sure his fly was up on his way out of a bathroom. None of the warning signs were coming off of her. Still, he’d managed to scrape by primarily by shutting others out, keeping to himself, and ducking for cover whenever a woman entered his life. The two instincts—the one made for trust and the warning system—were currently arguing over which road to take.

In the end, trust won out, but only by a small margin. She was right, after all; he
did
need help, and specter of the past returned or not, nobody deserved to walk into a rumble with the god of the
talu`shar
unprepared. Nobody. He wet his lips, took another sip from the bottle, and then put a kiss on her cheek before shoving his chair back and surveying all three of them.

“Bad. Like apocalypse bad. You ever read H. P. Lovecraft?” Drakanis and Parker nodded, but Brokov shook her head. That didn’t surprise Woods much. “All right, you know how bad it gets in his books, when some numbfuck is about to call Cthulhu up from the deeps? That’s about the level of bad we’re talking about here. If your boy finishes what he’s started, it’s going to be a slaughter, and I really doubt there’s anybody that will be left that’s got a fighting chance.”

Time
to
break
it
to
them.
He hadn’t really intended to do it today, but they were going to force his hand. He supposed it was just as well, since the inner procrastinator might have kept waiting until the goddamn thing was loose or something before deciding it’d be time to bring it up.

“But you, there, Drak. You’ve got a shot. One shot only, and then we’re all fucked, but you’re special. That’s why I’ve been sitting here, pretending to be a cop, and that’s why Karim planted the painting where your wife’d find it. He wanted you out of the way. He’s probably got some fucked-up word for it, but basically, you’ve inherited some little talent, some latent thing, that gives you a crack at it. I got the same deal, once upon a time, but I fucked up when the time came. It’s fucking cold, but I got lucky. The painting wasn’t at hand, and the Warden—that’d be Karim, though if it was him back then, I’ve got no clue—hadn’t been keeping it fed and ready to pop. Only one casualty, that time. This time, we’re talking a hell of a lot more.”

Parker was still staring, though now he was trying to divide his attention between Woods and Drakanis. He was giving his former partner a look that seemed to have a tinge of jealousy and awe thrown together in some foul mixture in it. Damien was just getting disgust. “So, it’s the end of the world, and Mikey’s the messiah? Didn’t see
that
coming.” He shook his head.

Damien barked laughter, which drew a fresh baleful glare from the large man’s direction and a look of irritation from Sheila. He coughed, tried to cover it up, and then laughed a little more. “No. He’s no messiah, and we’re not talking the end of the world. Yet, at least. Some people are just born with the gift, and they’re the only ones who can really do anything about the
talu`shar
. Anyone else is just a puppet, a piece of meat that it’ll make dance when it feels like it.” He gestured to the window. “See that shit out there? If the painting wasn’t here, that wouldn’t be happening, even if every corpse in the morgue had gone missing. It’s driving them batshit, and it
likes
people that way. It feeds on it.

“What Drak there has got is just a gift. It gets him a little bit of immunity to what’s going on. Look at yourselves. I can tell you’ve got a headache, Vinny, and from the way you’ve been scrubbing your temples, I think you’re about ready to get there, Sheila. Probably been feeling that way for a while now, both of you, am I right?” When he got nods from them both, he continued, “That’s the thing, tugging at you. But you,” and at this he turned to Drakanis, “you’re feeling fine, or at least as fine as you ever do. Maybe even a little better, right?”

Drakanis paused for a moment, considering the question and taking a mental inventory. While he wouldn’t call the state he was in fine, exactly, he didn’t recall feeling ill, like most of the people he’d dealt with recently, and he didn’t really recall any point in the recent past—not since Vince had brought him out of the dream a couple of weeks ago, anyway—in which he had really felt like shit, no matter how many people he’d been around who should have given him all manner of interesting infections.

“I don’t know about better, but I do feel pretty good, given the circumstances.” Woods nodded and spread his hands as if to say, “Well, there you go.”

“The difference between me and him,” Damien continued, “is that while I’ve got something like a dagger in my head, our friend here has the equivalent of a tactical nuke. I’m willing to bet that any latents—” He paused, as Sheila interrupted him.

“Latents?” From the look on her face, he might have been speaking Greek, and it took him a moment to remember that not everyone had his background or the benefit of personal tutoring in his sleep by something that was so close to a goddess that you might as well drop the pretense and use the word anyway.

“Latents, yes. Folks with the talent who never wake up to it, locking it up in a mental closet and tossing away the keys. Like Drak there probably was, though I think he was tapping it, at least a little bit. His famous cop-sense and all.”

Drakanis was nodding; it was starting to make a little bit more sense now.
But
how
far
does
it
go?
And
what’s
the
risk
of
it?
He
talks
about
using
his
little
knife
and
being
out
with
a
migraine
for
days;
what
happens
if
I
drop
this
tac
nuke
or
whatever?