Beneath the Skin (10 page)

The rush of water, a river, echoed up from somewhere deep, and the chilly air clung to her skin, beading on her face. An odd scent lingered in the mist-laden air, the crackling smell of ozone. Merri drew in a breath, tasting the air, wondering if a thunderstorm had blown through Damascus a few hours earlier.

Merri held up a hand as she caught a glimpse of a house in between the trees. She tucked herself against the lichenlaced trunk of a pine. A flash of peripheral movement told her Emmett was doing the same.

She frowned. She should be able to see two houses. She only saw one. Maybe the satellite images had made the houses look closer than they actually were or maybe she was at a bad angle.

Motioning that she was moving forward, Merri slipped from one tree trunk to the next until she stood behind a rain-dripping oak at the driveway's beginning. What she saw slammed her heart against her ribs, trapped her breath in her throat.

A cave's dark mouth stretched across the ground, an opening into the earth's heart. An unseen river pulsed through its veins, its roar echoing into the air. But that wasn't even the most bizarre thing in view, wasn't the thing that dried her mouth, no.

"What ... the ... hell?" Emmett whispered.

Gleaming white statues of winged beings in various postures ringed the cave. Some stood, others crouched or knelt, while those captured in flight--wings slashing up or down--capped the standing statues like a celestial Stonehenge. Blue sparks flickered like fireflies over the white stone, skipped along the butter-smooth wings.

On the cave's east side, a small house squatted, its front door wide open, its interior dark, its windows shattered. The guest cottage looked like a bombed-out home on the edge of any war zone--minus the graffiti. Glass glittered in the dew-beaded grass like fire-sparked prisms.

No main house. No Dodge Ram, no Trans Am, no vehicles, period. Their perps had either driven them away or the cave had swallowed them all. Including their perps?

"What the hell happened here?"

Merri shook her head. "You got me, partner."

A low rumble, like distant thunder, rolled through her--the frantic drumming of dozens of hearts. She zeroed in on the guest house. She frowned. The pills were messing with her again. No
way
the cottage was filled to the rafters with panicked individuals.

Signaling for Emmett to hold, Merri
moved
past the statues, across the ravaged lawn and chewed-up asphalt to the guest cottage. Glock in both hands, she paused beside the empty front window. The rain-stained edge of a sage green curtain fluttered in the cool breeze. She listened.

No patter of hearts from inside. Just silence. The thunder seemed to be coming from ... Merri's mouth dried. She turned to face the circle of statues, her own pulse pounding hard and fast through her veins. Not possible.

Emmett scrunched across what remained of the lawn to join her, Colt in both hands, his wary gaze on the cottage at her back.

"I didn't give you the all clear," Merri said.

"And you didn't wait for backup," Emmett drawled, coming to a halt beside her. "Anyone inside?"

A breath of fetid air wafted from a glassless window.

Merri shook her head. "No one alive, anyway."

She caught the sound of careful footfalls coming up from the highway below. Miklowitz and Holmes. When the two field agents hunched into view, guns in hand, rain jackets crinkling, she waved them to the guest cottage.

Both men stopped and stared, varying shades of alarm and confusion rippling across their faces. Miklowitz was the first to pull himself together and hurry across the remnants of the lawn and driveway to the guest house, Holmes following.

"Christ," Miklowitz breathed, stopping beside Merri. "What the hell happened?"

"Where's the freaking house?" Holmes added in a low voice as he joined them. "Any sign of Prejean, Wallace, or Lyons?"

"No," Emmett said. He nodded at the cottage's yawning doorway. "My partner says there's no one alive inside. Y'all check the house for bodies to ID. We'll check that." He pointed at the cave with his Colt.

Hearts hammered and pulsed through Merri's consciousness, a frenzied pounding. She found herself walking toward the circle of statues as if caught in a tractor beam, moving forward without thought, a single refrain drumming in her mind, over and over:
Not statues. Not statues. Not statues.

She halted in front of a male figure. His hands were lifted in front of himself, his face averted, as though warding off a blow. She drank in all of the statue's details--the braided and twisted open-ended collar circling his throat, the nipples on the bare chest, the muscle definition, the fall of fabric in his kilt, the upper arch of his wings.

From within the white stone, a heart fluttered, the sound slowing as Merry listened. She touched a gloved and shaking finger to the figure's face. Tiny blue sparks crackled into the ozone-spiked air.

"This is unreal, Goodnight. What's going on?"

"I don't know," Merri replied. "But I
do
know these aren't statues."

"Aren't
statues? Is that the stay-awake pills talking or are you actually saying these are real angels and that someone Medusaed them into stone?"

"Looks kinda like statues of the Fallen," Merri said, her gaze lingering on the featherless wings. She drew in a deep breath of ozone-spiked air to calm her wild pulse.

"The Fallen? You mean as in fallen angels?"

"The Elohim, yeah." Merri stepped out from behind the oak, her palms sweating around the grip of her Glock.

"You shitting me?"

"Nope."

Merri moved to the next statue, a female, her gown clinging to voluptuous curves, her wings flaring behind her, her desperate gaze on the sky above, her hands at her mouth. Merri's gaze moved up as well, to the angel capping this statue and the previous one, an angel in flight, wind whipping through the length of her hair and rippling the fabric of her gown, wings cutting though the air, her expression one of joy.

"Merri?"

"I hear their hearts, Em. I hear their goddamned hearts."

Emmett whistled low and long. "Jesus Christ! Jesus fucking Christ. But who or what could turn fallen angels to stone?"

Merri sensed power in each stone figure, power that tingled against her gloved fingertips. She remembered tales of Fallen magic, whispers of angelic battles.

Back in the beginning--when the Elohim fought their wars for power over the mortal world--blue fire lashed through the air, girl, filling it with the smell of lightning just before it strikes.

Or so a wandering
llygad
told me, back in the day, Merri-girl.

Just fairy tales, or so she'd always believed. Even vampires had myths and legends. But as Merri paced her way around the circle of stone angels, each face was a masterpiece of shock, fear, disbelief, and horror. Except for the capping stone angels, who'd been captured in luminous white stone as they winged through the night sky--and it had to have been at night, right? Maybe even as she and Emmett had stood in Rodriguez's living room talking to Gillespie.

Maybe during their flight down to Portland.

She regarded the cave that the Fallen surrounded. Water roared in the darkness below. And she thought she heard something beneath that, a voice, no--
voices.
She held up her hand, motioning for Emmett to hold still and keep quiet, and listened.

Three different voices singing in unison:
Holy, holy, holy.

The hair prickled on the back of Merri's neck. The voices sounded off, cold, inhuman. And not just vampire inhuman--something-out-of-deepest-darkest-nightmare inhuman. She shot Emmett a glance.

"I hear voices below." She pointed to the cave mouth. "Three voices, singing."

Emmett frowned. "Singing?"

Merri nodded. "But it's weird. The voices seem intertwined somehow."

Stepping past the stone-captured Fallen, she walked to the lip of the cave and knelt in the dirt. Holding her Glock down at her side, she leaned forward on her left hand and peered into the thick darkness below. Cold, moist air reeking of ozone and fresh-turned soil and rushing water wafted against her, chilling her to the bone.

She caught the faint gleam of the river far below. Moisture glistened on stones protruding from the cave's throat. Beneath the river's rush, voices drifted like mist, warbling a multiple-throated chorus,
Holy, holy, holy.

Merri shivered. She had the strong and undeniable feeling that whoever--or
whatever
--was singing in the darkness below was about as far from holy as she was from mortal.

She felt Emmett kneel down beside her, caught his anise and ice scent and felt soothed. Her partner didn't believe in monsters or fairy tales, and that calmed her. He leaned forward to peer into the cave too.

Something moved down in the darkness beside the river, something pale and thick, humping along the stone like a gigantic slug.

Holy, holy, holy ...

With a half-strangled gasp, Merri shoved away from the cave mouth, heart hammering, falling on her ass. "Something's down there," she choked out, refusing to take her eyes off the cave's black lip. "Something moving." Something that might climb out of the cave and hunch into the stark and unforgiving light of day.

"What?" Emmett asked, his voice tight, on alert. "What's down there?" A peripheral flash of movement told her he'd leaned over farther in his effort to see into depths mortal eyes couldn't fathom.

"No." Merri reached over and grabbed Emmett's arm, hauled him away from the cave. "I don't know what's down there, but I don't think it's--"

An abrupt bumblebee buzzing vibrated against Merri's taut nerves and she
moved
on pure instinct, locking her fingers around her partner's arm and hauling both their asses away from the cave and past the Fallen Stonehenge to the safety of the pines in a single blurring rush.

When she stopped, Emmett stumbled free of her grasp and up against the trunk of a pine tree. He dipped his hand into the pocket of his windbreaker, pulling out his cell phone. He held it up as it buzzed and bumbled in his hand, a huge grin on his face.

Cheeks burning, Merri glared at him, daring him to say anything.

Emmett glanced at the cell phone's screen. His grin faded.
Gillespie,
he mouthed. Thumbing the TALK button, he said, "Chief."

Emmett raked a hand through his auburn hair as he listened, all mirth vanishing from his face. He nodded. "You got it, Chief. Just gone. No idea what happened. But we stumbled across a wounded fed, SA Brian Sheridan. Someone put a slug in his thigh." He listened for several more moments, then said, "Roger that." He ended the call and slipped the cell phone back into his pocket.

"What's the news?" Merri asked as his gaze lifted to meet hers.

"Gillespie wanted to let us know that the house was gone." A wry smile touched his lips. "Code 54. And he's on his way here."

"Great," Merri murmured. A secure-and-contain order meant that anyone who wandered onto the scene--a newspaper carrier, a hiker, a child chasing a ball--would be scooped up and tossed into an evidence van to be debriefed.

Looking past Emmett, Merri caught movement as Holmes and Miklowitz stepped out of the guest cottage, their faces grim. Spotting her, Miklowitz shook his head.

"Our perps don't seem to be here--alive or dead," she said. "Unless they were gobbled up by the cave."

Emmett sighed. "If they're alive, no telling where they are. Prejean's either Sleeping somewhere safe or buzzing on stay-awake pills."

Merri nodded. "Provided he's alive."

"What the fuck happened here?" Emmett asked quietly. Strain edged his voice. "I mean--fallen angels morphed into stone, a missing house, and a mysterious cave. How is this even possible?"

"Don't know, partner." Merri turned away and scanned the oaks and evergreens following the gentle slope of the land up to the stand of mist-garlanded pines at its crest. A gleam of white from within the shadows beneath a fir's heavy branches caught her eye. Another of the Fallen or ...

The image of pale, pale skin and deep, dark eyes flashed into Merri's mind and her pulse leapt into high gear. Her fingers tightened around the grip of her Glock.

Merri
moved.
She breezed through wet undergrowth, thorns catching at her slacks, her suede jacket, hooking, then tearing free. Even before she reached the figure, she realized it wasn't Prejean. Just more blue-sparked stone.

Halting in front of the kneeling fallen angel, Merri wondered why this one was so far from the others. Trapped within white stone, the angel's heart pulsed. Her waist-length stone locks rippled in chiseled waves from her bowed head, framing her face. A slender open-ended collar encircled her throat.

The fallen angel's wings were curved forward as if in an attempt to shelter herself, her eyes closed, her hands clenched into fists in her lap. She didn't look horrified or shocked or enraptured like the others ringing the cave.

Whatever had happened, they'd been caught off guard.

Not
her.
She'd knelt before the inevitable, a supplicant for mercy she'd known she wouldn't receive. Whoever she was, she would've had a prime view of what was happening to the house and her companions. Yet she hadn't attempted to escape.

Maybe she couldn't escape.

Merri crouched and touched the angel's knotted fists. Blue sparks snapped the smell of ozone into the pine-scented air. Cold iced Merri's spine.

Who or what had the power to transform the Fallen to stone?

And why had the Fallen come
here
?

6
KNIFE'S EDGE

OUTSIDE DAMASCUS, OR
THE HAPPY BEAVER MOTEL
March 25

CATERINA WAITED UNTIL HEATHER'S breathing had shifted into the easy rhythm of sleep, then she rose to her feet and padded to the desk. She plucked Von's leather jacket from the back of the chair and pulled it on, trying to keep the jingling to a minimum. She caught a faint whiff of motor oil and smoky incense from the jacket's lining.