The Forsaken (41 page)

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t.” He took a puff and handed it to her.

She inhaled once, coughed, and gave it back.

“What a week,” he groaned and spit. “But it’s finally over. Can you believe it?”

Rachel pulled her jacket tighter into her chest and exhaled a long, cold breath. “I’m still waiting to wake up.”

“We got lucky.”

“Yes.”

“You’re shivering.”

“I know.”

With the cigarette pinched between his teeth, he put his hand over Rachel’s shoulder. But his attempts at comforting her didn’t work. He removed his hand quickly. “He’s…gonna be okay. I mean, as okay as he can be, given everything that’s transpired. I’ll be…there’s no one on this earth I wanna tear into more than him.” Mike fumed. “He’s put me through more stress than I thought I could handle. But somehow, there’s no one on this earth I feel sorry for more.”

“He seems…better now,” Rachel whispered, staring at the ambulance until it faded into the black.

“Doesn’t make sense, if you ask me. Crazy son of a gun tore out his eyes.”

The bandages taped to his temples, the blood. He was blind.
“Oh my…” She started, choking up. “How did he…do that? How did he survive?”

“Human beings can survive anything, if they fight. You and I are still kicking, aren’t we?”

“Like you said, Chief, we got lucky.”

“Maybe,” Mike said, looking back at the remains of the church. “Or maybe there’s something I ain’t figured out yet about all this supernatural mumbo jumbo. Demons, soul-suckers, God, it all makes my head hurt.”

“You never were much a believer, were you?”

“Is anybody, really? Until you see something like this, the stuff that just don’t want to fit inside the rule book, you can’t help but lean on concrete facts. Makes you wonder, about a lot of things.”

“I hear that.”

“I just don’t like the blanks, you know. We can’t find any evidence that Cross was even here. Although, I was stupid in ever thinking there’d be prints or anything legit. Whatever. Maybe he burned, maybe he evaporated or whatever it is that he was able to do. I just don’t know for sure, and I don’t like that. I want him to get what he’s got coming.”

“He was in there, Chief. I saw him. I shot him. I tried to kill him myself.”

“Yeah. You got more ferocity than some of the other windbags on the force, I can tell you that. But I want more than this. I want reasons. What happened to Jude…That kinda crap can’t be explained.”

Mike licked his lips then took another drag. He noticed she still stared in the direction of the ambulance, and she hadn’t blinked in the last thirty seconds. “They’re bringing him to hospital now. Figure they’ll keep him there overnight, maybe a few days. I don’t know, run some tests, make sure he didn’t do any real damage to his system. I can’t believe he did it. What makes a man rip out his own eyes?”

“What’ll happen to him?” Rachel finally asked, still unsure if she wanted the truth.

Mike spit again. “I love him, Rachel. You know that.”

“What’ll happen to him, Mike? Tell me straight.”

“He may seem better now, to you. But it’s for the moment. He murdered a man, possibly more, nearly burned down a church, and he tore out his own eyes!”

“He also solved a case, Mike, and had the guts to finish it.”

“Foster is no saint.”

“No one is.”

Mike tossed the cigarette. “I’m looking out for him. He’ll be checked into a psych wing at the hospital. He needs help.”

“So help him.”

“I can’t anymore. I care for him like I care for you, but things are different now. You’ve noticed it yourself. He has changed.”

She knew it was true. But what if there was a part of Jude Foster that no one had yet seen? A part that was healed, safe? Did he really belong in a place like that?

“Is this the part where we wash our hands of him and act like everything’s normal?”

“What do you want me to do?”

She flared her nostrils. “Protect him.”

Mike folded his arms and said, “I am. Jude’s had enough of this life. It broke him. It made him something else. Don’t you get that?”

“It wasn’t him!” she said emphatically.

“Right. ’Twas the demons. We make choices, Rachel.
We
do.
We
think.
We
feel. Whether demons do or don’t exist doesn’t matter. In the end, we say whether or not to pull the trigger.”

Rachel knew it was pointless to argue any further. Jude had chosen, but so had she.

“Look, believe in whatever you want to, but I just don’t know enough of anything spiritual to say with certainty that Jude didn’t commit murder. He’s broken, like it or not.” Mike motioned like he was ready to leave, too frustrated to carry on a religious dialogue so late at night. “Whitney survived the acciden, just so you know. He’ll live, like the rest of us.”

Live. Like the rest of us?
Is that what this was? Living? Following cases with torn-off ends. Putting her faith in something that seemed impossible? Caring for, even loving someone she didn’t even fully know. Was this life? Was this the existence that held her prisoner?

“Looks like this church has seen its last night,” Mike said, scratching his chin. He wanted to touch her shoulder again, to let her know he really did care, but he chose not to. “It’s condemned, just like the other one. If I had my way, I would’ve let it burn to the ground.”

“I just want this night to end,” she said in a hushed voice, ignoring him.

“Everything ends eventually, kid,” Mike said, walking away. In that moment, she swore it was her father alive again, however briefly, smiling as he breathed out cold fog. Mike even looked like her father, walked as he walked, with that hiccup in his step, that slouch in his back, like he was just too tired to pin himself up straight. Maybe he wasn’t too tired, though. Maybe he was just beaten but not dead.

She finally shut her eyes, the stray rain droplets trickling across her lids and down her nose. She could feel him, right here, with her. She didn’t care one bit if the chief believed in other worlds, in God, in demons. Her father was still alive, in some way, still moving. Maybe he was safer.

“Everything ends,” Rachel murmured. “But not everything dies.” She didn’t understand it yet, but those few words were like life itself. If Jude could see, maybe she could too. Maybe she could believe, for real. Mike probably never could.

She replayed the demon’s words from that bad recording in the back of her mind. It was slimy and dirty. But it was part of it. The good with the bad. The hell with the hope.

Everything went quiet around her as she looked out across the city block. She took a step, the pain in her thigh throbbing but not enough to trap her forever in this moment. She was stronger than that. She was more than her fears, more than her father’s failures. This case had changed her too.

“I survived, Dad,” she said, feeling a tear mix with the rain. There was no promise of a normal life—a husband, two-point-five kids, and a checkered lawn. There was no fixing it or wishing Jude to be set free from the new straitjacket life he was heading towards. Mike would have his way.

Still, with each step she took, Rachel knew there was more. Something more than her next breath. Something more than the next sunrise. She had hope.

Jude could be good again. He wasn’t dead. And neither was she.

Preview for

ARSON

Chapter 1

THE LAKE WAS QUIET.

A lazy fog hovered over the surface of the gray water, whispering in the wake of currents and steady ripples. The world seemed dead to Arson Gable, silent anyway. Like the calm before a storm.

It waited.

Arson stepped off the porch onto the lawn; his mind was swimming. This was where he came most mornings while Grandma slept. He cut his gaze toward the lake, that black womb which rested beyond and beneath the rickety dock. It was as if the lake knew his name and his heartbeats, much like the streets and corners of this town knew his name, cold and faceless as they were. Whether he wanted to admit it, this place was home, and there was no going back.

A bright light burned in the sky, somewhere far enough for him to notice but close enough to nearly blind him. He breathed deeply and blinked, welcoming the dark rush of black behind his eyelids. From where he stood, he could see the towering oaks rooted deep in the ground. Their thick branches stretched upward into the clouds, some parts draping over the shady spots of the worn-out cabin. One final glance and he was reminded that these tortuous, beaten things seemed to swallow the world. Just thinking about them—how he’d watched them ruin—made him seem small, so worthless.

Arson made a fist and felt the heat swell in his grip. He wanted to run into the brush, to get lost deep in the small section of backwoods Grandma had forced him to avoid ever since they’d moved here. But he didn’t move.

This town seemed so close-knit and yet so separated. Less than a mile up the road were a country market, restaurants, and a bowling alley. There was even a liquor store, a cheap pharmacy, and some fast-food chains, and a few miles past that, a movie theater and a nightclub. But at the heart of this place was disunity, a fierce and futile fight to be known and accepted. Arson never understood why Grandpa had picked here to have the cabin built, right beside the lake.

As Arson slowly approached the dock, his mind returned to thoughts of Danny, the only childhood friend he’d ever had. Dim mornings somehow made each memory more real, hard to let go and even harder to erase. Was he always here, always watching? Odd how seven years could come and go without warning, as if the world blinked and somehow forgot to open its eyes again.

In all fairness, it had never been his grandparents’ intention to stay anywhere for too long, but it seemed East Hampton, Connecticut, had become a part of them now, a part of him. “One day we’ll be like the rest of them,” he recalled Grandpa saying—a man of ideals, empty dreams, and hopes Arson could never freely call his own.

Eventually, they had grown tired of running. This dull corner of the world seemed ordinary enough for them to believe starting over again as normal folks would be possible. “Forget what happened all those years ago in Cambridge,” Grandma said so many times that Arson imagined her screaming it to him while he slept. But it was always there—the memory—a splinter in the back of his mind. No going back. Ever.

Arson staggered across the dock, images of child play and stupid laughter pouring in all at once. Danny’s face stuck out the most, and behind that he glimpsed their old home in Cambridge and flashes of his first birthday. His mother wasn’t there, though, nor dear old Dad, but that day had been recounted to him only once by his grandfather, and it stuck.

Nevertheless, with every joyous memory, distilled regret was close behind. He sometimes imagined what it might be like to get thrown in jail by some nameless special agent and be forgotten, or to wake up and find strong hands squeezing the life out of him.

Arson was an unusual boy. A freak. He knew it. And he hated it. Whatever lingered inside his bones always left as quickly as it came, breathing out in short moments of fear or rage. Over the years, he’d asked to be examined to locate the source of his imperfection and if possible terminate it. After all, why did he sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with a fever? How come his sweat sizzled when it hit the ground? What was he?

Grandma always argued there wasn’t much point in talking to no-good doctors or even finding out answers to questions he was better off not asking in the first place. Some people were just born with demons, she’d say.

Arson swallowed hard and threw a stone into the water. The splash shattered his reflection, and ripples spread across the dark surface. He wondered why he was the way he was, wondered why those little girl’s parents quit looking all of a sudden, why the investigation against two stupid boys evaporated. Perhaps they didn’t care about retribution, or maybe they were just sick of chasing shadows.

I want to be free, Arson thought, nausea creeping up into his gut. While boats raced along the surface of the lake, Arson stared in awe. They vanished so easily, like mist gliding across the water and dissolving into nothingness. What if men could do the same? There was a man once, he’d heard, who walked upon water and didn’t sink. Maybe he could too. Maybe one day there would be those who believed in him.

Arson’s gaze moved over the lake, across to the other side, where Mandy Kimball lived, and her neighbor, his science teacher from the ninth grade. Then his eyes drew back to the ripples spread out before him, to the dying cabin behind him, as he spit. Beads of sweat streamed down his bony frame, his ash-brown hair trapped inside the gritty creases of his forehead. Arson listened for the lake’s soothing melody but couldn’t hear it. He focused instead on the sound his feet made atop the splintering dock, kind of like the way swings sounded in cheap horror flicks—empty, rocking back and forth to no melody at all. Closer to the edge he came, lingering.

With shut eyes, he stepped out onto the water and began to sink. Peace soon abandoned him to the lake’s shallow world. In a blink, he was looking through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy.