Darkness of the Soul (41 page)

“It’ll all be over soon, anyhow. Ayuh, I suppose it will.” His tone was almost regretful, and it sounded more like he was talking to himself than to Brokov.

She started to pull herself up, her hand sweeping for something to grab onto and finding the handle of one of the cabinets under the sink. She put her back against it, eyeing Manderly with a bit of suspicion as she took a quick inventory and found that almost everything was present. Of course, the things that were missing were what she was hoping were still there; her handcuffs and handgun had been removed, along with the Sam Browne belt that they had been attached to. Fragments of memory were starting to float back like the flotsam left over from a bad dream, and nothing she saw there indicated how she’d ended up here. Manderly croaked a laugh at her and shook his head.

“They’re gone. Couldn’t have you waking up and deciding someone needed a few extra holes, now could I?” His grin was rueful, showing off the yellowed teeth he’d earned himself over decades of chewing tobacco and mostly ignoring dental hygiene.

She narrowed her eyes at him, pedaling with her feet to push her back to the door.
Okay,
standard
bathroom
layout
then,
she thought and glared up at him. “Any reason I
would
decide you needed a few extra holes?”

His grin didn’t change, and he didn’t elaborate. “Ayuh,” was his only reply. He seemed content to just stare at her for as long as he felt like; apparently, he was in no hurry to be out of there. He saw Brokov’s hand start snaking up, looking for the handle, and widened his smile. “T’won’t do you no good. It’s locked, like it should be.”

She tried it anyway, just to spite him. Not taking her eyes off of Manderly and his sick-looking grin, she fumbled for the latch and tried to press it down. Nothing. She thought if she really felt like it, she could put enough force on it to snap the lock—bathroom locks, as a general rule, were not particularly strong—but she was sure Manderly wouldn’t give her the opportunity. Sheila slumped against the door, letting her hands sit useless in her lap, and continued to glare.

“So what is this? A kidnapping? Doesn’t seem to fit you, Old Man.”

He shook his head. “Ain’t about kidnapping. It’s about keeping you out of the way—and out of harm’s way—till this is over, that’s all. Soon as we’re done, you get to go back to your plain old life and start the business of forgetting all about this.”

She curled her lip at him, the traces of daddy’s little girl fading away beneath the feral glare. “I don’t think so. I think I’ll be spending quite a bit of time in court with you.”
As
soon
as
I
figure
out
how
to
get
out
of
here,
she thought but didn’t add. She thought there was a glimmer of hope, though. The glass was sitting on the counter, and she was willing to bet that she could dive for it a hell of a lot faster than one crazy old man. Adding to her confidence was the office gossip going around about Manderly’s last physical; supposedly, he was still a crack shot, but his running and rolling days were long behind him. If she could get the glass before he managed to get up, she figured clocking him with it wouldn’t be too difficult. It was one of those with the big, thick base, so it didn’t fall easily and didn’t break when it did, and the back of the old man’s head was probably thinner than that glass. She had to hope, anyway.

Manderly just shrugged, as if he didn’t care one way or the other about her threatening court dates. “We’ll see. I probably won’t live long enough to see it anyway. And you and yours look the type to let a brother in blue die in jail for trying to lend a help, oh, ayuh! It’d be just like the lot of you. Don’t know why you won’t just sit back and let it happen.”

Sheila’s face was slowly dropping, an expression of shock coming in to replace the feral anger she had been displaying a moment ago. “
You
knew?
” She couldn’t get her brain to wrap around the idea, the thought that this whole time there had been people in the department—and she was sure it
was
people; if there were two, there were probably more—working toward this shit, trying to do whatever the hell Damien’s demon wanted. Reason was considering taking a leave of absence, but there was enough common sense left in her to hold back the primal part of her that wanted nothing more than to gouge his eyes out at this second. She could tell it wasn’t going to be possible to keep that animal at bay for much longer though.

“Of course I knew. Do you think I’m stupid? Oh, I can see you do, but for all the wrong reasons.” He gave a rusty chuckle that dropped into a cough, causing him to wince and rub at his chest and throat. “There were choices to make. Choices like your friends are having to make right now, I’ll wager.” He stood up, and contrary to what reports might have claimed, Manderly did it quickly and without traces of pain or stiffness. “That’s what it all boils down to in the end anyway. What kind of concessions you’re willing to make to hang on to what’s dear to you. How big a price are you willing to pay, and how much are you willing to stain your soul while you’re at it?” His fingers filched the glass from the counter even as Sheila decided the time had come and launched herself at it. He stepped away from her with a liquid grace, kicking up the toilet lid and tossing the glass in with a splash as he did so.

“I really wish you would have sat still.”
You’re
going
to
hell,
and
you
know
it,
old
man.
And
for
what?
A
couple
extra
years
of
pains
in
your
chest
and
being
laughed
at
by
the
young’uns?
Should
have
stayed
retired.
Part of him knew that, had known it when he’d taken Karim’s devil’s deal, but life was sweet and what came after was fearsome; in the end, fear had driven him as surely as it did any simple pack animal who hears the rattle of a snake in the grass. Now it was time to pay the piper, and while he didn’t like it, he knew that to refuse was to make his own torment infinitely worse. He could feel the pulses of panic coming from the girl. He would have known even if it wasn’t for the gifts of the
talu`shar
, just from the smell that was coming off of her. It was an electric scent like ozone and wet pennies, the stench of fear and the hormones the body dumped into the bloodstream when a person hit the final war of survival.

Brokov was beyond thinking, driving herself upward just to claw at him and put out his eyes, to take it all out on this bastard, this
traitor
. She sank her nails into his leg and yanked hard, trying simultaneously to pull him down and herself up.

Manderly was thinking that this was almost absurdly like one of the cartoon strips you sometimes saw, where one of those little yip dogs is clinging for dear life to the leg of the postman or someone, trying to drag him down while he goes on about his business without a care in the world. Like those postmen, he found the easiest solution to be the most effective. He drew back the foot that she didn’t have a clampdown on and drove it forward, as hard as he could, into her side.

He had played football for a while in high school, and while that had been nearly sixty years ago and he had never been great at it to start with, some of the old memory of how to kick a field goal was still there; his shoe impacted with her rib cage just the way it should have when there were three seconds on the clock and the team was down by two. The snapping sounds that came from inside her almost sounded pleasing to him, and he felt a moment of remorse for it; that he had fallen so far, to the point where hearing bones break was actually enjoyable, was only further testament to the truth that he had known all along, to the fact that the
talu`shar
, whatever else it was and whatever wishes it could grant, was inherently a bad thing—but he had a debt to pay and so pushed that thinking to the back of his mind.

Brokov felt her ribs break—fuck, it didn’t feel like they had broken, it felt like they had
shattered
—and fell away from him, coughing and sputtering. She could taste blood in her throat and felt sure that whatever he had done to her was fatal, but she didn’t see much use in worrying about that now. They were probably all dead anyway. The best she could hope to do was to take the old bastard with her.

She coiled herself up, ignoring the fire burning in her left side and the way every breath felt like it was raking her lungs across sandpaper, and was about to leap at him when the gunshot came. All the prayers she had ever been taught, the relics of her youth that she thought she had put away for good, came flying back to her. It had been years since she’d bothered to set foot in a church, but she started to pray now anyway.
Better
late
than
never,
she thought as she dove into darkness.

Chapter
38
 

9:30 am, December 24, 1999

“Wake up.” The voice came from someplace high above, drifting down through the air like he imagined the voices of angels must do when it’s time to go. He ignored the request, preferring instead to remain as he was, blacked out—or was he? He couldn’t tell, but being able to hear things probably meant he wasn’t. He lay with his face mashed against the floor and a deep pain radiating through his guts. He thought there was something wrong with this picture but couldn’t decide what it might be; that just made him want to stay asleep or unconscious or dead or whatever he was.

The voice came again, this time far more demanding and not as easily ignored.

“Wake up, Vincent.” Without his willing it, his eyes ripped open, granting him a close-up view of plain black tile covered in pus and blood. He jerked away from the contact. Yelling in surprise and disgust, he threw himself backward and skidded on his ass across the floor.

Parker remembered most of what had happened as he took in the surroundings. He was still in the morgue, but he was the only one. The mess he and Brokov had walked in on was still in the corner, though Drakanis, Woods, and the thing that had been trying to strangle them were all missing. So was Taeda, for that matter.

Bitch
shot
me.
He tried to count how many times he’d gone out and had a gun waved in his face and couldn’t; all he could remember was that never before had he actually been shot. He’d always claimed it was due to his lucky vest.

“Bastards won’t shoot me because they know it won’t do any good,” he had told Drakanis on more than one occasion. Of course, now a bastard had—a cop, no less.

What
the
fuck
did
she
do
that
for?
Of course he knew. It wasn’t hard to make the leap. Taeda and Manderly had been assigned guard duty this morning, and he doubted that had been an accident. If there was one mole in the department, why not two or three? Hell, who knew how many of them there were. For all he knew, the goddamn janitor had poisoned the whole fucking well.

“Stop it, Vincent.” The voice came from lower down this time, right beside him like it was someone speaking in his ear. He jumped, jerking his neck to the side and wincing at the sudden pain that bloomed in his gut. While his lucky vest might well have stopped the bullet, there’s a certain amount of force behind such objects and Kevlar doesn’t do a whole lot about that. He imagined he was probably black and blue from his dick to his neck, and that was if he was lucky. No wonder he’d been out of it.

When he turned to look, there was no one there. He reached for his gun and then realized it was still on the floor next to where he had been. He inched forward, glancing all about, to snatch it from the floor. He checked the clip; the dull gleam of metal in the topmost casing told him what he needed to know.

Fuckers
left
me
for
dead.
Must
have
been
in
a
hurry.
That was pretty much without doubt. The only question here was
who
had left him for dead. He doubted that it had been Drakanis and Woods. Even if Damien was a bit of an asshole, Mikey wouldn’t let him leave Parker behind, especially not if they had taken Brokov, and since she wasn’t present, he had to assume they had. That meant Taeda and whoever was helping her—Manderly almost certainly, but who knew how many others—had probably been the winners. Why none of them had felt the need to put one in the back of his head to make sure was a mystery.

“Vincent. This thinking isn’t getting you any closer.” The voice sounded almost bored by now, as he searched the room again, flattening himself against the south wall, next to the back door.

“Who the fuck are you?
Where
the fuck are you?”

He heard a sigh and felt cold air brush across his face, tickling his lips and nose. “You won’t be able to see me, Vincent. But you can listen, and I advise you do it well.”

“That doesn’t answer question number one.”

“No. But there is no answer to question number one, as you put it. I am many things and people, none of them important. What matters to you is that your friends are missing, may already be dead—and I can guarantee that one of them will be by this time tomorrow—and you must choose whether you will follow them or allow the Beast to rise.”

He tried to tell if the voice was anything familiar and couldn’t; to him, it didn’t sound like a single voice but like dozens layered on top of one another. Every one of them sounded like someone he knew, just off-key ever so slightly. He heard Morrigan in the voice, and Elaine and Mike and more, some of them only bringing on a bit of déjà vu, others hitting him with the full force of memory, but all of them familiar.