Jade Sky (5 page)

Conor had dominated the conversation thus far, and it contented Matt to let him.

"Look, mate," Conor said to Garrett, jerking a thumb Matt's way. "I'm not saying he owes me his life, I'm just saying I saved it. Mister Flappy had him dead to rights, and he just stood there having a piss. The thing picked him up by the neck, and he didn't even struggle. One squish and he'd be done as done."

Garrett waved to the bartender, pointed to the table, and held up two fingers. "Well, I at least owe you a drink. That bonk crushed my ribs like a beer can and would have kept going if you hadn't intervened."

Conor grinned as the server arrived with another round, setting down the drinks and scooping up the empty glasses. "Just doing my job." He chugged his, then narrowed his eyes at Akash. "You got something to say, eh? Irish stereotypes and all that, right?"

Akash raised his hands in mock defense. "No, no, sorry. I wouldn't dream of smearing the good Irishman's name by tying it to your behavior."

Conor clinked his empty glass against Akash's full one, then nodded toward Blossom, reading an ebook at the end of the bar and sipping a cup of tea. "Having a cuppa at a pub. It's unnatural. She too good to drink with us?"

"She doesn't drink," Matt said. "And she doesn't like bars."

"Or celebrations," Garrett said. "Or people."

"Then why's she here, eh?" Akash asked him.

"Matt invited her. And in Japanese culture, you don't turn down an invite without good reason. It'd be a huge insult even if he wasn't her boss."

"Brilliant," Conor said. "In Irish culture, you don't turn down an invite to a pub, period. And if someone pussies out, that's more for the rest of us."

The server brought the next round. Matt sat back and thought of home. His mind returned to the conversation when Akash said, "If that were really an angel, we'd all be dead. No one withstands the wrath of God. Not you, not me. Nobody." Matt wiped away the symbol he'd traced in the condensation on the table, the bisected circle with an 'S' in each half.

Garrett nodded. "Some fights you can't win."

Conor grinned at Akash. "Aren't you a Hindu?"

Akash rolled his eyes. "No. Are you a Catholic?"

"'Course," he replied, and chugged another whiskey. "Protestants don't use katanas." He slammed the glass down. "It's why I know an angel when I see one. Glowy eyes, big wings, shiny. Angel is as angel does."

Matt frowned. "What would an angel be doing in a cave in New Mexico?"

"I was too busy saving your sorry ass," Conor said, pointing both index fingers at Matt, "so I didn't get a chance to ask."

Blossom spoke from the end of the bar. "No such thing, anyway."

"It speaks!" Conor said. "You going to join us, Sakura?"

She shook her head and turned back to her book.

Akash frowned. "She's right, though. It's just a big bonk."

"With wings," Conor said. "Don't forget the shiny, metal-feathered wings." He popped half out of his chair and flashed his eyes at the waitress. "And speaking of wings, gentlemen, Hot Buffalo or Raspberry-Habanero?"

"Sweet and Sour," Matt said, to a chorus of insults that brought his manhood into question with various levels of vulgarity. He waved them off as he got up, then approached Blossom. She looked up from her e-reader and set it down when he sat. He kept his voice low to keep the conversation between them. "You don’t think it was an angel?"

She held up her hands. "More like someone who wants his worshippers to think he was. Makes more sense than proof of angels after all these years."

"Do you believe in God?" He didn't know why he'd asked it, but couldn't take it back once it left his mouth.

She sighed. "I grew up in the traditions of
kami-no-michi
, but even to my parents it was more culture than belief. So, no. You?"

"Sure."

"Sure?" She chuckled, and covered her mouth with her hand, the dainty gesture at odds with her typical dour, mannish affect. "That's your belief? Sure?"

He chuckled with her, but didn't feel it. "Sure."

She looked back at her reader but didn't wake up the screen. In the reflection, her smile turned to a frown as she pulled her hand away. "When I was fourteen I wanted to believe in ancestor spirits, that my parents were still with me, but no matter what I wanted I knew it wasn't true."

Shit,
Matt thought. He didn't mean to turn the conversation to that. He scrambled for what to say, and came up with, "Weren't you working for Tokyo Metro when you were fourteen?"

She blinked. "Ah, that's not in my file."

He raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Yeah, it is. It's in the file Jeff gave me. Said you were an informant after your parents passed, from twelve to sixteen."

Her scowl turned murderous. "That's not supposed to be in my file. They said only my police work goes to ICAP."

"I'm sorry, forget I brought it up."

"No, I will not forget." She hopped off the stool, snatched up her reader, and walked out.

Matt texted Jeff to let him know he might have slipped up, then went back to the others.

*   *   *

"So," Monica said. "It was an angel?" She kicked the dishwasher closed with her foot and fiddled with the cross at her neck. "A real angel with wings and everything?"

Matt tried not to roll his eyes. Monica's responding snort told him he hadn't quite succeeded. "No, of course not. I mean, it had wings, but . . . . No."

"Maybe Conor's right. Why couldn't it be an angel?"

Matt took a moment to choose his words carefully—too far down the wrong road and he'd end up somewhere he didn't want to be. "I don't know, babe. Angels aren't something that modern people see, you know? Jeff figures it's some kind of bonk we've never seen before. With everything else we've seen, big wings ain't out of the realm of possibility."

She scowled while drying her hands on the dish towel. "I wish you wouldn't use that word. They're not bonkers, they're addicts."

They're both
, Matt thought. Bonks who snapped were definitely bonkers, and people who augged themselves to the point of risking GIP were, too, but Matt didn't need precognitive therapy to see the warning signs in her scowl. He held up his hands in supplication. "I'm sorry, you're right. It's hard not to . . . you know." He wasn't sure if she understood his point, or even if he did, but he hoped it mollified her enough.

She smiled her sad recovering-addict smile, then wrapped her arms around his neck. She smelled of jasmine and strawberries. He wrapped her in his arms and cursed his augs.
Are you sure you want to
—

She nuzzled his neck. "Are you sure you want to do this? That thing . . . that man, I mean. He could have killed you."

Matt closed his eyes and bathed in her scent. It wasn't fair. ICAP held no more danger for him than the army or the troopers, maybe even less with second-generation regenerates, and she'd wanted him to take the job as much as he had.
"Yeah, babe, he could have. But he didn't." He squeezed just a little tighter. "I'm a lot tougher than I used to be."
You said Garrett and
—

"You said Garrett and Conor got pretty messed up."

"They were. Then they weren't." She didn't understand
.
That bear hug had left Corporal Garrett with six broken ribs, a punctured lung, a fractured tibia and a bruised stomach. Conor had multiple skull fractures and massive bleeding on his brain. Conor hadn't even slowed down, and ten minutes later they were both right as rain. "We bounce back pretty fast."

She kissed him on the lips. "I don't like that you're in so much danger. Your job with the state—"

"—was safer," he finished. They'd been through this a thousand times in the past three years. After pushing him to accept the ICAP job, and beaming with pride at his acceptance and subsequent promotions, she couldn't accept the risk. They both appreciated the tripled salary, though, plus ten percent since his promotion. "I know, babe. But it's not just that they need me. I need to do this."

Matt thought about the dozens of people they'd rescued from the mine. Jade addicts, doomed to a lifetime of recidivism and struggle, who because of his team at least had a chance to live a normal life, the chance to slough off the shadow they called the Servant. And that counted just his team, just this week.

Thus far, rehabilitation wasn't promising. The initial interviews had gone nowhere. The captives couldn't even be bothered to use the toilet, much less answer questions. After thirty hours or so they'd begun to cry, all of them. An hour or two later they wailed for the Servant and begged to be released to serve her. By the time Matt's team had left New Mexico, they were twitchy and morose, the classic signs of Jade withdrawal, but behaving for the most part like regular junkies. None had come out of it enough to give a statement.

The week since had been a disappointing denouement. Between debriefs and interrogations, a team of normals had brought in fancy equipment to check out the mine. Their results were conclusive: it contained no ornate stairs, no marble, no obsidian. The idea of an entire team sharing a hallucination bothered Jeff, but Matt couldn't shake the certainty that it hadn't been in their minds: it had been real. If anything, that bothered him more.

The inscriptions on the hide had been marker, and forensics had confirmed the skin as human, but they were still waiting on DNA. The report from Linguistics said they were gibberish, meaningless symbols culled from occult books and old horror movies.

The delicate arms around his neck tightened just a little. "You're a thousand miles away, baby." She kissed his sternum.

He shook his head to clear it. "Yeah, sorry. I was thinking about how we'd pay for this place if I left ICAP." He felt bad at the cheap blow, but at some point Monica needed to see the financial truth and accept it. Quitting ICAP meant losing their home.

He felt wetness on his chest. Monica sniffled. "I just don't want to lose you."

"You're not going—" His work phone chirped. He stepped back and looked at the screen.
Jeff.
"Excuse me," he said, disentangling himself from her arms before answering. "Rowley. Go ahead."

Monica leaned back against the kitchen counter.

"Matt, we got a mitochondrial DNA match on that skin you found. Close kin of the Alvarez family, who disappeared last month." Matt stepped onto the porch, slid the glass door closed, and popped in his ear bud. Monica dabbed her eyes with a tissue, then watched him pace on the deck. "We might have some of them in custody, but it's hard to tell. We've only got seven fingerprint matches out of the lot, and three are from a forensics merit badge project in White Sands from 1988."

"Still no cooperation from the perps?" Above him, a squirrel chittered in the pines. A cone landed at his feet, and tree litter drifted down around him.

"Um . . . they're eating at least."

Matt closed his eyes and listened to the wind through the trees. "That's something. So what's next?"

"Well, assuming some of them start talking—"

"I mean for my team." A wet nose nuzzled his ankle. He bent down and scooped Ted into his arms. The Basset tensed on the way up, then relaxed as he settled against Matt's chest, his tail thumping against the deck railing. "Dawkins. What's our next step?"

Jeff answered without hesitation. "I don't know if you're up on just how much that bust roiled the market. That was maybe fifteen, twenty percent of global production for the year. Street prices have skyrocketed, especially in the Southeast. Someone's got to be taking advantage of the supply vacuum."

Matt tried to play out the ramifications in his head. There were too many, so he scratched Ted between the ears instead. "Alright, let's start there."

Akash Rastogi led them down the cobblestone alley, past rickety shacks displaying pirate-themed knickknacks made for the most part of plastic or carved wood. Despite the proximity to the Atlantic, sweat streamed from Matt's pores in St. Augustine's merciless humidity. The whole city smelled of sweating humanity, dead fish, and salt.

Garrett Johnson voiced Matt's unspoken thought. "Where are we going, again?"

With one irritated glance back, Akash pushed through a beaded curtain and into a dark building whose reek of incense bestowed a small mercy on Matt's nostrils. While his regular vision adjusted, his infrared and ultraviolet sight processed the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of angel figurines, statues, carvings, and paintings that covered every available surface. A narrow aisle stretched between them, just wide enough to accommodate a man.

"Rastogi," Matt said, "I thought this was about Jade." Akash disappeared around the corner and reappeared with a large, angelic doll. The ancient wood had crumbled in places, and a bent copper frame held wings of sparse tinsel on its back. Whatever had served as its eyes had long since disappeared, as evidenced by the mildew-stained, empty sockets that stared back at him. The whispers babbled their nonsense as Akash lifted the fraying, moth-eaten robe to reveal a sexless, crude body of the same rotting wood. Matt stopped in shock.

Carved into the doll's chest lay the symbol from the angel's
—
the winged bonk's
—
forehead. He reached for it but stepped back as the proprietor came into view around the corner. A gaunt man, too tall, too skinny, and too pale, with rotting brown teeth, smiled down at him.

"I'm sorry, sirs, that figure isn't for sale." He wiped his hands on a faded purple V-neck and looked up at Garrett. "My, ain't you a big one." His accent seemed to Matt to be more southern Georgia than northern Florida coast.

"Why not?" Matt said. He'd meant to ask, "What can you tell me about it?"

The shopkeeper lifted the doll from Akash with both hands and placed it back on the shelf, pushing back several other figurines to make room. "She's too fragile for you to be handling her. I'm afraid she hasn't held up well in the Florida humidity." Akash muttered an apology as the owner continued. "She was the first to grace this shop with her presence, and the inspiration for my collection."