7 Souls (30 page)

“Mary, what are you doing?” Ellen howled. “Where are you going?”

“Ellen?” A man’s shaky voice came from the hall just outside the door. “Ellen, is that you?” The brass knob on the warped door rattled violently. He was trying to come in. “Ellen, it’s Uncle Larry—you’ve got to come with me now. Right now, okay? Unlock the door.”

“Mommy’s dying!” Ellen cried out, looking back through the window. “She’s dying in the snow and Mary’s going away. Why is she going away?”

“Ellen, please, sweetheart, just open the door. We don’t have any time.”

Ellen heard a pair of heavy footsteps bound up the rickety stairs, and then there was another man’s voice in the hall. A very angry man.

“Don’t talk to my daughter,” the deep, angry voice said. Even though it sounded so horribly mean, Ellen thought she recognized it.

Daddy?

“Mort, something’s wrong with you, okay?” Larry said, breathing heavily. “Something’s wrong. I know you, all right? We made a mistake, but … you’re not a violent man. This isn’t you. Just put down the gun, all right? Let me get your daughter out of here, and then we can talk. We’ll talk—just you and me.” The doorknob rattled again—so loud and so hard that it looked like it would burst off. “Ellen, sweetheart, open the door now. Open it.”

“She’s not your sweetheart!” Daddy growled. “Don’t talk to my family!”

“Daddy?” Ellen called out. “Daddy, Mommy’s dying in the snow and you need to save her.”

“Mort,” Larry pleaded. “Please don’t. Please. Just let me get Ellen out.”

On that last word, Larry broke the knob clean off the door. He pulled the door open partway, when Ellen heard two more deafening cracks. She covered her ears and backed up against the window.

Larry was standing strangely still in the partially open doorway. There were two little, smoking black spots on his chest, and red blood trickling down his arm. Something was wrong with his eyes. They looked dazed and his arms and his legs went limp. He lurched forward, collapsing at the door.

Suddenly, there was the oddest silence. Ellen was so scared that she couldn’t get her body to stop shivering. She felt like she was going to pee.

Larry’s body was lying in a heap, in front of the partially open door. Ellen could see only a sliver of the dark hall outside, and she couldn’t see her daddy at all.

“Daddy …? Daddy, are you out there …?”

There was no answer, and she began to shiver worse than before.

“Daddy …?”

She craned her neck to try and see around the door, but loud sounds scared her back against the wall. First the sound of metal clattering to the floor, and then something much heavier. Something big. It hit the ground so hard that she felt the vibration in the wood under her feet.

“Ellen …” She heard her name in a choked whisper. “El,” the voice said again. “Come to the door.”

It sounded like her daddy. Stepping off the stack of books, Ellen crept to the door and peered through the crack, over Larry’s motionless body.

She saw her daddy sitting on his knees. His square, stubbly face was drenched with sweat and as white as the sky. His jet-black hair was stuck to his forehead like a wet mop. He was still wearing his suit from the party, but it was rumpled and dirty, and he was tugging desperately at his shirt collar with both hands.

“El,” he croaked. “Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with me….”

He was making horrible hiccuping noises in his throat like he was choking—like something wouldn’t let him breathe. A flush of blue and purple was showing under his pale white skin, as his eyes grew wider.

“Daddy, what’s happening? I don’t understand what’s happening.” Ellen was so scared she couldn’t move.

“El, don’t hate me,” he said. “Don’t hate …”

And then he stopped. Everything in Daddy just stopped. His head fell to his chest, and then the rest of him fell forward. The side of his face slammed flat against the floor. His bulging eyes were wide open, but he wasn’t moving.

“Daddy?”

He wouldn’t answer her.

“Daddy, what’s wrong? Daddy?”

She darted back to the window and climbed her stack of books, peering out into the distant trees, where her mother was still trying to dig her way out.

All Ellen could do was stand there and watch Mommy suffer. She could only watch and slap at the window with her numb, burning hands.

Where are you, Mary? Where are you? Why did you walk away into the snow? You can still come back and save Mommy. You can save all of us
.

*   *   *

I
F THE SPELL FAILS
, the Spell-Caster expires
.

It’s me or Ellen
, Mary thought.
So what do I do?

But she knew. She’d known for a while; she’d observed over and over that she couldn’t change what had happened—thinking about it had been too confusing, and her faith that she could save herself was too strong to let her face it. But she’d always known.

With her final, desperately weak store of willpower, fighting the agony of not being able to breathe, she began crawling toward the suite’s bedroom, mustering a hidden reserve of adrenaline that got her to her feet and let her stagger forward through her darkening tunnel vision. She was barely staying upright as she stumbled toward Mary Shayne. Mary had dropped the gun, and in her final moment of consciousness before Ellen’s body collapsed from suffocation, Mary swung her arm down and swept the gun from the carpet, pulling the slide back as she collapsed forward onto her own back, pushed her own body down onto the bed, pressed the gun to the back of her skull and pulled the trigger.

III
THE AKH

H
E HAD DREAMED OF
pain, and golden eyes; rooftops chilled by wind. He almost woke more than once, first in the ambulance, rocking in the traffic, cold metal against his wounded chest, shrill sirens piercing his ears as they roared forward through the night. Then he faded and woke again with a flashlight in his eyes; he had to say his name and he did that, barely, his throat scratching and burning; he smelled pungent antiseptic and breathed cold, dry air. Then he slept without dreams, outside of time, as if the ancient world and the present day were one and the same, merged together as they always had been in his deepest imagination. Awakening for a fleeting moment in cold darkness, hearing the dull, repeated beeping tones of the machines and the ghostly, distant footsteps of a night nurse, he had been afraid, and he must have called out, because somebody came and checked on him, a black silhouette against the emerald green light of the machines, and then he had fallen back asleep again.

Now sunlight flooded through his eyelashes; a warm red glow that made him feel safe. The sheets itched his legs, and he felt a painful tug and a cold numbness across his chest. He tried to open his eyes as slowly as he could, but the brilliant sunlight pierced his eyes and made them stream with tears.

Someone held his right hand and squeezed it. He turned his head, weakly, and the dark blur sharpened until he saw a girl’s lovely face, framed by short dark hair and obscured by eyeglasses.

“Hey,” Ellen said. She squeezed his hand again, and smiled. She was wearing her burnt-orange Gap hoodie—the same as the last time he’d seen her.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey.”

“How do you feel?” A tear ran down Ellen’s nose and she sniffed and awkwardly brushed it away and then brought her hand back to his. “Do you—do you feel all right?”

“Hurts,” Dylan whispered. “Not so bad.”

His eyes were clearing—he could see the Styrofoam-paneled ceiling and the ancient television that hung above his bed from a black steel post and the wide window that filled the room with sunlight. Between the comblike slats of the blinds, the sky was a rich, bright blue.

“You can breathe,” Dylan told Ellen. His voice was coming back.

He heard the unmistakable sound of a man clearing his throat and realized that he and Ellen weren’t alone. Someone else was there, on the left side of the room, silhouetted against the window; as his eyes adjusted, Dylan saw a small, well-built man with dark, mottled skin and close-cropped black hair flecked with gray. Under a dark suit jacket and a beige overcoat he wore a white checked oxford shirt that looked like it had been made from graph paper. His bright blue eyes stared right back at Dylan’s.

“Dylan, are you all right?” the man asked flatly as he approached the bed. “Do you feel like talking?”

“Who—” Dylan coughed, which hurt his chest, and Ellen squeezed his hand again.

“Dylan, I’m Detective Mateo,” the man went on in the same even, quiet voice. “I’m from the fifteenth precinct’s detective squad; I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Questions—”

“It won’t take long.” Mateo pulled a notebook from his back pocket; he was clicking the button on a ballpoint pen with his other hand. “I promise; I’ll be out of here before you know it.”

“I’ve already talked to him,” Ellen said. She still had Dylan’s hand in hers, and he didn’t mind one bit. “I’ve told him everything I know.”

“Who shot you, Dylan?” Mateo raised his eyebrows.

“I don’t—I don’t know.”

Truer words were never spoken. He had absolutely no idea. As his head cleared, he remembered bits and pieces of what had happened; he remembered waking up driving a car, and the frantic nightmare hour he’d spent with Mary Shayne, racing to his own apartment and then ending up at hers, and finding the book of spells in the Shaynes’ foul-smelling study—it was coming back to him in more detail—and then going to answer the door …

And then, nothing.

“I’m sorry,” he told the man with the tanned, pockmarked face and the bright blue eyes. “I’m sorry, I can’t—I can’t remember.”

“That’s actually fairly common,” Mateo said, sucking in his cheeks as he wrote in his notebook. The ballpoint’s scratching was very loud in the quiet, air-conditioned room. “Trauma can cloud a victim’s memory, particularly with a violent trauma like gunshot. It generally passes. Here’s another question: before you lost consciousness, did you see who shot Mary Shayne?”

Shot Mary
—This didn’t make any sense to Dylan, at first. As he thought about it, he realized he had no idea how to answer.
This is a homicide detective
, he told himself.
Speak very carefully—he won’t miss much
.

“At the Peninsula Hotel,” Detective Mateo went on. “You passed out from”—Mateo flipped back a page in his notebook—“blood loss and shock, at approximately three this morning, which is very close to where the coroner puts the time of death for Ms. Shayne. So I’m wondering if you have any memory of her getting shot, Dylan.”

“No,” Dylan said, a bit too quickly. He was afraid to glance at Ellen, because of course he remembered completely; he remembered Ellen gasping for breath and staggering across the ruined carpet and through the bedroom door, hefting the gun and firing it at Mary’s head. He thought he’d never forget it.

It wasn’t really Ellen, though. It was Mary. It was Mary, after she died—revisiting the Ka of the seven people who killed her
.

“There’s a lot of amnesia in this case,” Mateo said, frowning at his notebook and flipping pages. Outside the window, a car horn honked—it sounded fairly distant, and Dylan realized he had to be on a fairly high floor. “I’ve interviewed all five eyewitnesses,” Mateo continued, “and I can’t get a thing out of them—they literally have no memory of most of the day, if you can believe it.”

That’s the spell
, Dylan thought.
They can’t remember
.

“But you know what’s funny?” Mateo didn’t sound amused at all; he sounded resigned. “I actually
can
believe it. I mean there must have been at least three bottles of vodka for each of them. It was party time, that’s for sure.” He shook his head. “No wonder nobody knows what happened. They’re not even sure how they ended up at the hotel.”

“Everyone’s out there,” Ellen told Dylan, tipping her head toward the room’s wood-paneled door. “Joon and Trick and Amy and Scott. They’ve been up all night—since Mary died. The cops have talked to all of them.”

“Not that it’s done any good,” Mateo said, sighing heavily as he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a small photograph. “Do you know who this is?”

Dylan peered at the photograph. It was a blurry, black-and-white mug shot of somebody he recognized, but just barely. “He was at the party,” Dylan said, remembering a young, chiseled guy dancing with his shirt off. “But I didn’t talk to him. Who is he?”

“He’s Mason Pike, twenty-one years of age, resident of the Bronx, and he’s DOA as of five-twenty-five this morning, Dylan. The reason I’m wondering if you know him—and I’ve asked all your friends the same question—is that the gun that killed Mary Shayne is registered to him. Exact ballistic match to her, and to you. And not only that”—Detective Mateo flipped another page in his notebook—“the gun’s covered in Mason’s fingerprints, and Mary Shayne’s fingerprints, and a few others we’re still working on—two distinct sets of latents.”

“And he’s dead?” Dylan repeated. The bright blue sky outside the window behind Detective Mateo was nearly blinding him; he was having trouble thinking his way through what he was hearing. “I don’t understand. How—”

“Shot point-blank by one Armando Delgato at approximately four
A.M.
; we’ve got Delgato in custody. Apparently it was a long time coming: several witnesses from the party confirm that Delgato and Pike had an altercation there earlier in the evening, and according to the hotel staff, a gun was fired.” Mateo shrugged. “These white boys trying to be gangsta, thinking they’re Bloods and Crips … anyway they had some kind of beef and he showed up dead this
A.M.
The part I don’t get”—the detective returned his level gaze to Dylan—“is why bullets from his gun ended up in your chest and Mary Shayne’s head. You’re absolutely sure you don’t remember getting shot? It’s not coming back to you?”

“No,” Dylan said truthfully.

“I explained it to the detective,” Ellen said, and something about her tone made Dylan turn his head—painfully—and look at her. Ellen’s eyes looked unusually alert and bright. “Mason was at the party. He’s a friend—he
was
a friend—of Trick’s. He got out the gun and showed it to a couple of people; Joon Park touched it, and so did my—so did my sister. And so did I.”

“And he liked her,” Mateo asked. He glanced up from his notebook, where he’d been writing. “He had a real thing for Mary, isn’t that what you said?”

“That’s right,” Ellen went on, and Dylan felt her grip tighten on his hand. “So when Mary brought Dylan home, I figure Mason must have followed them to Mary’s house. My house. He must have shot Dylan, and then …”

“The emergency call,” Mateo said, nodding. “Your mother called nine-one-one at two-oh-four
A.M.
, reporting a gunshot. Which frightened the assailant away—”

“—and he must have followed Mary back to the hotel and shot her there,” Dylan said. Ellen squeezed his hand, and he avoided looking at her. It hadn’t been difficult to pick up the logic of the story Ellen was telling.

“But you followed him.” Mateo was frowning at his notebook. “You got up off the floor with a gunshot wound to the abdomen and made your way down to the hotel to save Ms. Shayne, but you were too late.”

“I don’t remember,” Dylan said again.

Detective Mateo stood motionless, staring at his notebook. After a moment he raised his eyebrows and closed the notebook, audibly exhaling as he reached to return it to his back pocket.

“All right,” Mateo said, raising his eyebrows. “I guess I buy it. I mean”—he grimaced—“it’s a weird one, make no mistake. But we’ve got the gun, we’ve got the prints, we’ve got ballistics, we’ve got motives … when the lab work comes back, if the prints on the gun are Ms. Shayne’s”—he indicated Ellen—“and Joon Park’s and Mary Shayne’s, then I guess that’s all she wrote.”

Dylan could hear Ellen exhaling with relief.

Then the door was swinging open and Dylan sat up straighter in the bed as Dawn Shayne came into the room, wearing a black overcoat, her face pale, her eyes red and wounded. Detective Mateo stepped toward her. Ellen reached for her mother and hugged her tightly. “Dylan,” Mrs. Shayne said in a husky, tired voice. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

“Hi, Mrs. Shayne,” Dylan said, trying to smile.

“After what we’ve been through together,” Mrs. Shayne told him, leaning to kiss his cheek and flooding his nostrils with the aroma of cigarettes, “I think you can call me Dawn. You had me talking forever last night, just trying to keep you conscious.”

What?
Dylan had no idea what she was talking about.

“He doesn’t remember, Mom,” Ellen said quickly.

“I’ll leave you alone,” Mateo said briskly. “Dylan, I may have some more questions for you later, when you’re feeling better.”

“Are you going to catch the killer?” Dawn Shayne demanded. “Are you going to find the—the monster who killed my daughter? He’s got to be caught. I want him
punished
for what he did to her.”

“We have a suspect,” Mateo told her, “but he’s gone—he’s deceased, ma’am. That’s all the punishment he’s going to get, in this life, anyway. Besides”—Mateo was making his way out of the room—“you really shouldn’t be thinking in terms of revenge, Mrs. Shayne. It’s not a good idea. It’s never a good idea.”

“Amen to that,” Ellen said quietly.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” the detective said, nodding at all of them and leaving the room. He pulled the door shut behind him.

Mrs. Shayne stood at Dylan’s bedside with her shoulders slumped forward. She struggled through a fit of wet coughs. “It’s not fair,” she whispered, peering down at the sterile white floor. “I had to stand there and identify my daughter’s body and that boy is not even going to face retribution.”

“Mom—”

“That boy is already dead—that’s not justice.” Mrs. Shayne lifted her head and locked eyes with her daughter. “He should have to
pay
for what he did—he should have to
suffer
. He should feel the way I feel right now, every day, for the rest of his life.”

“Mom, stop.” Ellen wrapped her arms tightly around her mother’s stiff body. “We can’t do this anymore.”

Mrs. Shayne stared back at Ellen. “Do what?”

“I know what it feels like,” Ellen told her. “I know that feeling like there’s knives and needles in your stomach—like they’re just going to keep cutting away at you until someone pays for what they did—but you have to let it
go
, Mom. Mason’s gone. If you let all that anger keep slicing away at you, then you’re just going to end up … empty.”

“I know that.” Tears were running down Mrs. Shayne’s cheeks. “I know that. I should have let it go. I should have forgiven her.”

“Wait, who?”

Mrs. Shayne reached out awkwardly, groping toward Ellen and falling into her daughter’s arms. She nestled her head beneath Ellen’s chin.

“I’m
the mother,” Mrs. Shayne said, her voice muffled by Ellen’s shirt front. “Mary was just a child, Ellie. I should have forgiven her
then
, and we could have had all this time together like a real mother and daughter.”

“It’s okay,” Ellen said weakly. Her face was contorted, Dylan saw—she was beginning to cry. “It’s okay, Mom.”

“No it’s not. I never said it to her. I never told her I forgave her. I thought we’d have more time. Now she’s gone.”

“But that’s just her
body,”
Ellen argued. “Her body’s gone, but her soul is still here with …” Ellen flashed Dylan a glance that he couldn’t understand. “I mean, I
think
her soul will stay with us in a way. I think I can feel her with us … watching over us … hearing us sometimes. Don’t you believe that, Mom?”