Bad Bones (20 page)

“He put himself in our hands, offered himself to us, in a way, by trying to help you.” Rafael slid a hand out from inside his cloak. “And now it is
your
turn to offer
us
something… To repay the debt you owe to
me
for your ingratitude.”

Gabe felt something being pressed into his chest and his hands automatically moved to hold it.

“Take this.” Rafael stepped back. “Handle it with care, treat it with the respect an instrument of the gods deserves.”

Gabe looked down and saw he was holding the gold knife, its wide, curved blade shining like a vicious grin. For a moment he thought he must be imagining what was happening. And then he looked up and saw Rafael, smiling at him, move to his right and bow slightly, like he was welcoming him somewhere. As he stood aside he revealed the altar and Gabe saw Anton, pinioned like a butterfly, his T-shirt ripped apart to expose his chest. He was being held down by the four men. A fifth person, a woman, had a rope around his neck, so all Anton could do was stare at the ceiling of the chapel.

“You have seen this, you know what must be done,” Rafael whispered in Gabe’s ear. “So, do it…”

Gabe’s hands locked around the knife handle, and he found himself walking towards the altar, arms raised high above his head.

Gabe could hear his heart thundering, feel the sweat joining his tears as it poured down his face, the salt making his eyes sting. Inside he was screaming to himself that in any other reality he would be spinning round and lashing out at Rafael, splitting
his
ribcage open with the knife blade, reaching in and pulling out
his
beating heart. Not about to do it to Anton.

He was being used to kill his own friend, who hadn’t known the danger he was getting himself into – how could Ant have known that he would be risking everything by trying to help? Of all the grim and appalling things Rafael had ever done, in all the times he had been alive, this had to be the worst. There was no reason to it… How could a person be
so
twisted? How could Rafael be making him do this? Yet here he was, about to make a sacrifice of someone he’d grown up with, known since he was four years old!

Behind him Gabe was aware of the assembled company of Rafael’s followers standing in silence, a hushed, eager quiet hanging in the air like a hawk waiting to fall on its prey.

“They await,” Rafael said quietly, inside Gabe’s head. “They have been waiting for
so
long, boy, and now is their time… It is now the Next Time, and you have the honour of spilling the first blood, the first of
so
much blood! Everything is ready, a sickle moon hangs over us and nothing can stop this great day from dawning! Do it
now
!”

The hideous thing was that Gabe could feel his mouth twisting into a ghastly impression of a grin… Rafael was making him smile as he looked straight down into Anton’s panic-stricken eyes, bloodshot from crying, wide with abject fear and full of disbelief. The last thing Ant was going to see would be the person he trusted most smirking as he was about to kill him.

Gabe fought against the pull of his muscles, trying to override Rafael’s instructions, but it was no use. Then, as his arms pistoned down, he made one final, violent effort to alter the course of the knife. It coincided with Anton’s last-ditch attempt to escape,
surprising his captors by jerking sideways like he’d been hit with a thousand bolts of lightning. The two events were only milliseconds apart, but that was all it needed for the knife to miss its target. Instead of crashing through Anton’s sternum and splitting it apart, the razor-sharp blade merely glanced off the lower side of his ribcage and landed with the full force of Gabe’s downward thrust on the stone altar slab.

The crowd still saw blood and roared its approval. They thought the job had been done. Next they expected to see the final cut and they were all holding their breath for the long-awaited sight of a still-beating heart held up high. It had been promised to them.

Gabe turned and found himself looking straight at Rafael. Direct eye contact. Locked on, like a laser-guided missile. And then the strangest thing happened. Behind the gold mask Rafael blinked first.

For a moment, a precious few seconds, as Rafael tried to take in the wholly unacceptable truth that events had not gone as he had planned, his hold over Gabe momentarily slipped. The survival circuit in
Gabe’s brain sensed this and kicked into action. It was involuntary, his spirit’s last desperate attempt to cling to life. The deep, feral urge to exist took over and Gabe swung round like a crazed dervish, the knife held out horizontally at neck height.

It sliced open the jugular of the man holding one of Anton’s arms, a massive gout of arterial blood pumping out and spraying across the chapel.

It caught Rafael’s left arm at the elbow as he unthinkingly tried to defend himself, severing the joint completely.

And as Gabe spun full circle, the blade’s journey ended as it embedded itself deep in the head of the man still holding one of Anton’s legs.

Harrowing screams filled the air, as the herd instinct Rafael had created to control the congregation dissolved into a mindless panic. Trapped in this small, cave-like space, ancient fears bubbled up to the surface, made all the worse when first one person, then two more, got pushed too close to a cluster of candles and their clothes caught fire.

In the middle of the spiralling mayhem Gabe saw Anton, still lying on the altar even though no one was holding him down any more.

“
Ant!
”

Scared witless, holding the bloody rags of his T-shirt against his wound, Anton shrank back.

“We gotta get outta here, guy.” Gabe glanced over his shoulder at the hellish chaos behind him. “We
gotta
go!”

“You … you…” Anton shook his head as he pointed an accusing finger at Gabe.

“No, no! That wasn’t me, Ant, it wasn’t!”

“It
was
you, boy!”

In the growing pandemonium, Gabe had forgotten about Rafael. Bad move. He looked round to see the man weaving unsteadily behind him, the gold skull mask shimmering as it reflected the flames that now licked at the wooden rafters of the chapel roof.

“
You
did this!” screeched Rafael, and seemingly oblivious of what had happened to him, he swung what was left of his arm out, blood flying. “All my plans, so carefully laid… All gone, because of
you
, boy!”

Behind Rafael, Gabe could see a screaming, hysterical mass of people, more and more with their clothes and hair ablaze, all crammed together as
they fought manically to get out. Except for some reason the doors were refusing to open. If there was ever a vision of Hell, he thought, this was it. And he and Anton were trapped in it too.

“I promised you would die!” Rafael yelled above the din, bending down to yank the sacrificial knife out of his dead follower’s head. “And you will… Both of you will! Rafael Delacruz has
always
been a man of his word!”

As Rafael raised the knife a small, overweight man, ablaze from head to toe like a vast tallow lamp, staggered by, screaming hysterically. What happened next wasn’t something he’d had time to think through, it was an unconscious, reflex action, pure and simple. Gabe kicked out wildly at the burning man, who reeled sideways, arms flailing, into Rafael. The ancient fabric of his cloak, tinder-dry, caught fire instantly, going up with an audible
whoomp
and enveloping Rafael in a deadly cocoon of flames. Gabe reeled back from the heat, mesmerized by the roaring inferno in front of him. Rafael was gold all over now.

Unable to drag his eyes away, Gabe couldn’t believe it when he saw the man, his flesh now melting
to the bone, pull his shoulders back. Knife raised, he was ignoring reality and somehow going on the attack again.

Which could not be happening because
he was on fire…
But instead of killing Rafael, the flames seemed to be feeding him, giving him even greater power. Then Rafael’s chest rose, as if he was about to hold his breath, and it looked like the fire was being drawn deep inside him, making it appear that his heart was glowing a fierce orange.

The attack never came. Instead, quite suddenly, Rafael collapsed on to the chapel floor, the flames dying with the man. Gabe stared at the lifeless body, not quite able to take in what had happened… The man who had promised to kill him was dead.

“What the hell is going on?”

Gabe looked back at Anton, who was watching him cautiously. “I’ll tell you when we get out of here.”

“And how exactly are we gonna do that, bro?” Anton slid awkwardly off the altar as burning debris began falling from the roof.

“Guess we could try busting a window, right?”

“Guess we could,” Anton said, staying just out of reach of Gabe.

“I told you, it wasn’t
me
doing that thing with the knife, Anton. Honest to god…”

“Sure
looked
a whole lot like you, dude.” Anton shook his head. “We are toast, man… I mean,
literally
, we are toast if we don’t shift our asses.”

The only thing Gabe could see that he might be able to break a window with was the old strongbox. Bending down to pick up the chest, he stopped. “You hear that?”

Ant frowned. “What?”

“Sirens?”

“Could be… Let’s not wait and see, man. Right?”

“Yeah, right…” Gabe picked up the chest, lighter now that the solid gold mask had been taken out, ran towards the nearest window and threw it…

Gabe scrambled to his feet coughing, helped up by Anton who he’d insisted got out first. He looked back in through the busted window at the inferno – a complete nightmare scene he’d probably made worse by letting more air in – and knew they had just made it out before it was too late. He couldn’t stop staring, stop feeling he should at least have tried to get someone else out.

“Them or us, man.” Anton pulled him back. “It is what it is. There’s nothing you coulda done.”

In the distance the sirens were getting closer.

“What were you—?”

Anton and Gabe both started talking at once, Anton nodding for Gabe to go first.

“How did you, you know, get caught up in all this, Ant?” Gabe could smell burning and saw all the hair on his forearms had been singed off. “I had a fit when I saw you being dragged in.”

Anton moved further away from the chapel, wincing slightly and holding his side as he walked. “See, it was all over everywhere, that you’d got yourself arrested? So I went down to that house near the church.” Anton looked at the blood on his hand and absentmindedly wiped it off on his jeans. “Saw you roll up with this guy, you acting like you were all kinda spaced out, and wondered what was up… It was weird, like I was sure there were
gun
shots from inside the house? But the cops outside ignored it, and then you come walking back out like nothing’s up. Like I said, weird. So I followed you.”

“You did?”

“Sure.” Anton glanced at the approaching squad cars, lights going, sirens adding to the wailing from inside the chapel. “Like, at first I just wanted to see you were OK, which you were. And second, I thought the guy was a cop. Then I figured maybe he wasn’t a
good
cop, when he drove out to this place.”

“Why didn’t you call someone, your cell out of juice?”

“I
did
call someone, I’m not a total knucklehead. It just wasn’t 911.” Gabe frowned. “I thought it would
take too long to get them to take me seriously, OK? Thought I should stay following you.”

“So who…”

“I got Stella’s number from one of the other girls and called her, told her everything. Figured she could sell it better’n me. Time it’s taken them to get here, looks like she had trouble too.”

“But how’d they get you, Ant, what happened?”

“I dunno… Saw a coyote outside this place, like it was on guard? I figure it must’ve got my scent or something, cos the next thing I know it’s coming for me and has me cornered, and then these couple of spooky guys appear and take me off.” Anton flopped back against a gravestone, grimy and blood-spattered and looking like a refugee from a war zone. “OK, bro, your turn. You were stupid enough to have
some
thing to do with Benny Gueterro and ended up here? How did that happen?”

“This place –” Gabe nodded towards the chapel – “it’s nothing to do with Benny.”

“He’s dead, and his van was outside that house, right? There’s a connection, dude.”

“Yeah, kinda…” Gabe looked past Anton at the
squad cars now screeching to a halt, uniformed men bursting out of them. “But you’re gonna have to wait for me to explain what it is.”

Gabe sat on the red moulded plastic seat, Anton next to him. They were in a room, in some department, in a hospital, somewhere. Neither of them had asked where they were, or what time it was, both of them were strung out and exhausted. It had been the strangest of days.

They’d been through the ER, they were clean, checked out and patched up. Anton had needed patching up more than Gabe, who just had a few burns and a couple of blisters as physical evidence of what he’d been through. The plasters on Gabe’s hands were no match for the plate-size dressing Anton had over the gash on his side, for which he’d been given a tetanus jab and a couple of serious painkillers. They’d been brought into the room by a nurse, who’d given them some candy bars and cans of soda and told them their parents should be arriving soon. Oh, and by the way, there were some officers who wanted to talk to them too.

Gabe opened a candy bar and took a bite. “Is there a story we have to get straight?”

“You tell me, bro,” Anton popped a can. “It’s your gig, all I did was follow.”

This was the first time they’d been on their own since the police had arrived at the chapel and up till then they’d had no chance to talk. Now there was time, Gabe didn’t know what to think or say. Maybe he should just claim he was suffering from amnesia. It might work. Just deny all knowledge, of anything, and keep denying it no matter what they said. He sighed and stuffed the rest of the bar in his mouth. That plan might’ve worked, except that Anton and Stella were involved. Back to square one.

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” Anton chugged some soda. “I read that somewhere.”

“You, read?”

“Sure, why not? You think I’m stupid?”

“No, I just never seen you with a book. Who said that, anyway … the remembering thing?”

“No idea. Sounds reasonable, though, right?”

Gabe sat back in the chair and stared at nothing in particular, thinking, yeah, it did sound reasonable.
But only if the truth wasn’t going to make you sound like you were completely insane. Which to be be honest, with himself at least, he was somewhat surprised he wasn’t, considering what he’d been through these last few days.

“I also read it was better to make no excuses than make bad ones.”

Gabe turned and stared at his friend like he was a total stranger who had just dropped in out of nowhere.

Anton finished his can. “Just saying, bro.”

“Are you a replicant or something?”

The door opened before Anton could reply. A man in a beige suit came in; he left the door ajar.

“My name’s Mr de Soto, Detective de Soto. Your parents are here, but we need to have a word with you both before you go home.” The detective jerked a thumb out of the room. “Just down the corridor…”