Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (6 page)

“Excuse me, but this area is off limits,” said the officer. He had kind blue eyes and a round face that would probably always look younger than he was. Right now he was probably in his twenties, but he looked like a kid to me.

Gage showed him his badge and the boy smiled in relief. “I am so happy to see you guys. I’m getting totally freaked out being here alone.”

“Why are you here alone?” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to have someone with you?”

“Supposed to,” said the kid. “But there’s some big homicide going on, they needed all the help they could get. “

“Because of the judge’s murder?” I said. “Even for a public official, that seems pretty over-the-top.”

“Nah, that’s old news,” he said, not questioning that I knew about the judge. I loved these badges. “Mass murder happened a couple hours ago. My partner went in, but I never heard back from him. And someone had to stay here.”

“Lucky you,” said Gage. He looked past the kid at the enormous hole in the ground. “You see anything come out of there?” he said. “Any noises or funny feelings?”

The kid looked at me, frowning. “He’s completely serious,” I said. “Best just answer the question.”

He took off his hat and smoothed his hair. “I haven’t seen anything,” he said. “But the mayor was here.”

“The mayor?” I said. “What did she want?”

“Dunno,” he said. “Just sort of looked into the hole and left without saying anything. Kind of weird.” He frowned. “Something else weird, too. I got here before the sun came up, around 4:30, and there was this light coming out of the hole, like someone had lanterns down there. Like, really deep down, ‘cause it was sort of dim. Like when the sun shines through the curtains.”

“Anything else?” said Gage.

“Can’t think of anything,” said the kid.

Gage and I slipped under the police tape and walked gingerly across the cracked pavement.

We were at the section of road that was starting to turn in on itself. Bits of the street crumbled down into the hole, hitting the sides and dinging off the metal of the streetlight and semi truck. Gage and I got on our bellies and peeked over the edge. Even on a briskly bright day like today, with a cold sun lighting up the winter landscape, the pit was so deep that I could not even begin to fathom the depth of it. I imagined falling into it would be like Alice, following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole and falling for so long she had time to have tea on the way down. Only falling into this rabbit hole would be incredibly unpleasant. There would be no conveniently-placed magic mushrooms. Definitely no tea. This was the road to Hell. Literally.

Gage and I scrambled back from the edge, apparently entertaining the same vein of thought. We retreated some distance from the pit, then looked back at it, both lost in thought.

“Why here?” I said.

“Why summon here?” said Gage.

“Yeah. I mean, why not in the middle of the art museum or a swimming pool, or City Hall for that matter? Why this particular spot?”

“Good Summoners know their stuff. Where the weak spots are, what spells to use, that kind of thing. They have to get creative because it’s all under the radar. Everything’s unknown, or close to it. So whoever did this would have known where to go, the exact location. Whether it was a thin spot between Hell and our world, or if that was the spot that corresponded with the place in Hell they were going for and they were a powerful enough summoner to barrel through. It’s another universe, Hell is, but it’s not another physical world. It’s hard to explain, and we don’t have a lot of time on our side.”

“We have a week,” I said.

“Says your dad,” said Gage. “Sorry, sis, but I’m not going to take his word as gold. ‘Specially since I don’t trust him. And you shouldn’t either.”

“I agree with you there,” I said. “But why would he lie about that?”

“Was he particularly fond of the truth before?”

“No.”

“Add to that he might be in on this. What was the deal with his personal guard?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like him,” I said. “It was like he was big and small at the same time, and itching to be both. And then the badges didn’t work on him.”

“That don’t mean nothing,” said Gage. “Badges only give people a sense of who we’re working for, for what we’re doing. Somewhere in their minds, somewhere they can’t quite reach, they know exactly who we are, but in their conscious mind they just know that they should cooperate. If someone’s bad, they don’t care one way or another. Some of them, they get a little sentimental, scared about the afterlife, if you know what I mean. It’ll put the fear of God in them. But the really evil bastards don’t see any upside to cooperating. ” He looked at me. “The psychos, the sociopaths and whatnot, they love chaos. Crave it, even. They don’t care what form it takes. And we’re just the guys that are trying to put an end to their fun.”

“I really needed to take a class before I started this job,” I said.

“If it makes you feel any better,” said Gage, “all this is new to me, too. I’ve never dealt with a Dark and I’ve only read about Summoners. You’re better at the detecting stuff than I am.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think you might be a natural.”

“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,” he said.

“We should head back to the car,” I said. I nodded at the young officer as we passed him, but then remembered something he said. I turned to the kid. “What was that about a mass murder?”

“I said there was a mass murder,” said the kid.

“Did it happen nearby?”

“Yeah. That’s why my partner went. It was so close. Just a few blocks that way,” he said, pointing to his right.

“Got someone in custody?” I said.

“They took him in,” he said. “I heard it on the radio.”

I looked at Gage. “You were right,” I said. “It is all happening much sooner than Sasha said. You can’t trust a con.”

“Hey, ” said the kid, “if you see Officer Singh tell him I been trying to reach him on the radio.”

“Will do,” grunted Gage.

The old townhouse had once been a nice place. The tiny front garden, though frozen like everything else, looked tidy, the iced-over rose bushes clipped and packed around with fall’s decomposing leaves. It was the nicest house on the block, even after they added more lanes, widening the highway right up to the front of the once prosperous-looking row of brick dwellings. The roar of cars and trucks and Jake brakes was not so good for the real estate business. One of the neighboring properties had a
For Rent
sign staked at a jaunty angle in the hard ground with a phone number scrawled in permanent marker at the bottom. Another had frosted weeds crumpled over the faded plastic children’s ride-on toys left there.

I walked past a couple of ghosts, but pretended I didn’t see them. I had a job to do, after all. Living trumped the dead. Again with the yellow tape. Gage and I flashed our badges to the officer, and he let us proceed to the house.

Most of the cops had already gone home. There was a serious-looking woman with black-framed glasses and spiky hair dusting for fingerprints. A man in a puffy coat was taking photographs. But the thing that drew our attention was the blood. There was so much of it. It splattered the living room walls and the pale carpet looked like a Jackson Pollack painting. A pool of it lay just at the bottom of a set of stairs.

“Good God,” said Gage, covering his nose with his jacket against the warm, coppery smell of blood..

“You okay?” I said. “You can go outside if you want.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?” he said.

“The blood? Not really. I’ve helped the cops on some pretty grisly cases. You get used to it. It’s good to be working again.”

Gage’s eyes were wide. He stood next to me for a minute while I looked at the scene. I liked to take everything in and just think for a bit. After a little while Gage quietly stepped outside and I heard the sound of gagging. Lightweight.

I stood in the middle of the room and scanned the scene. There was more than one body’s worth of blood, for sure. But something seemed off. It wasn’t your usual homicide scene, but I couldn’t say immediately what it was. I turned slowly, letting my eyes slide around, taking in the walls, the floor, the side table, the knick knacks, the television, the dining table surrounded neatly by four chairs. I stopped turning. That was it. It was extremely neat. Once you got past the shock of the blood, it was obvious that not a thing was out of place. Not a photograph was knocked over, not a single glass figurine was smashed. And it didn’t look like the killer had straightened anything up afterward. It was more like he had been in absolute control, had killed quickly, but then started to play with the blood.. The blood told one story of the death and pain inflicted, and the room told another, about the joy of the kill.

All I knew about Darks was what I learned from Sasha and Gage. But to me this seemed evil. I looked at one of the photographs. A red-haired man had his arms around a sweet-looking woman with pale, curly hair and two small children. They were all smiling. In fact, they looked extremely happy in every single one of these photographs. At the beach, kids pink with sunburn; at the zoo, kids on the back of a statue of a hippo, parents standing by looking at them lovingly; and an older picture, with younger versions of the man and woman in their wedding clothes kissing. I frowned. I’d seen that woman somewhere, but couldn’t remember where.

“The only thing it loves is killing and pain. They lock them deep in the pits because they like to slip into people’s bodies.”
That’s what Sasha had said about the Dark. He may have lied about how long it took them to get frisky, but I was willing to bet he wasn’t lying about this. The room was practically shouting out that a Dark had been responsible for this. I looked at the wedding picture again. Where had I seen her before?

I walked outside and joined Gage, who was leaning against his car, looking weary. “Sorry,” he said. “Told you I wasn’t used to this stuff.”

I shrugged. “It takes time.” Something caught my eye. It was the ghost I’d avoided on the way in. A woman holding two bundles to her chest. “Aw, Christ,” I said.

“What?” said Gage.

I gritted my teeth. “That’s how I knew her face,” I said. “The wife, she’s standing over there.”

Gage looked. “I don’t see nobody.”

“Of course you don’t,” I said. “She’s dead.”

“Oh,” he said. “Right. You gonna go talk to her?”

“It would probably be helpful,” I said. “I hate this stuff, though.”

I approached her. She had been an attractive woman, and even now her curls hung around her face, and her now-mournful eyes made her look almost alluring in a blonde goth kind of way. She saw me coming and clutched the bundles tighter to her chest.

“Hey, I’m Niki,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Can you see me?” she said.

“Obviously.”

“Can anyone else see me?”

“No. You could say I’m sort of special.”

“Abnormal?” she said, shrinking back a little.

“You’re not really in any position to point fingers, lady,” I said.

She sighed and looked down at herself. “I guess you’re right. I’m dead now, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. She adjusted the lumps she was holding, sort of cradling them in her arms. “I’m Sadie,” she said. “Sadie Chenowith. These are my children.”

“Children?” I said. She showed me the bundles. Two ephemeral children cooing and smiling lay swaddled in two different blankets. They were paler than Sadie, nearly transparent. “Sadie, aren’t your children much older than this?” I said.

She frowned and pulled the babies back to her chest. “What are you talking about?” she said. These are my babies.”

“Fine. It’s okay, Sadie, don’t get upset. I’m here to help you. What happened to you? You were attacked.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. She smiled down at the ghost babies in her arms.

“Sadie,” I said. I was trying to be gentle, but I wasn’t exactly a patient person. “Please look at me.” She looked up and I could see that she was suffering. There was an emptiness behind her eyes. And I knew. I don’t know how I knew but I did. “Sadie, where’s your husband?” I said.

She pursed her lips and shook her head. She looked down at the babies. “I don’t think that was my husband,” she said. She frowned, drawing her perfectly arched eyebrows together. “And I don’t think these are my children. They look like my children, but how can they be babies?”

“Sometimes,” I said, “people keep things with them that gave them comfort. Maybe this is how you like to remember your kids. But you have to understand that they’re not really there, Sadie. You’re projecting them. I’ve never ever seen the ghost of a child. And I’ve been doing this a long time.”

“I know,” she said. “I think I knew that.” As she said the words, the bundles swirled into the air and disappeared, the smiling faces of the children hovering in front of her for a moment before fading into nothing. Sadie let her arms hang down limply. She closed her eyes. “It couldn’t have been him,” she said. “It was some kind of monster, I just know it. Not Gary. Not my husband.”