Catacomb (26 page)

He wondered if Finnoway was on the other side of that mirrored glass. Was his reach that far? Or was it enough simply to fake a break-in and plant Dan’s DNA on a piece of broken glass or a spot of carpet? Ingenious, really; once they had part of his body, they had
him
.

He thought of Abby and Jordan back at the apartment, panicking, trying in vain to help him out of a situation that had no happy ending. He should have told them about Oliver’s suspicions, that his finger wouldn’t be used for twisted old magics, but for sabotage. But what could his friends truly
do
? If anything, Oliver and his rifle seemed like a better bet.

The police had confiscated his phone and wallet, leaving him utterly without connection to the outside world or his identity. He would get a phone call soon and eventually a lawyer, but somehow he didn’t think that lawyer would be very sympathetic to his story.

No, if it came to a trial, he had the horrible feeling already that he would be put in prison for murder.

The lights in the shoe-box room abruptly cut out. Dan shivered in the piercing cold, looking up and around, trying to make sense of the shadows that pressed in on every side. It was torture. They weren’t even going to treat him like a human being.

His wound was bothering him, the aspirin having long since worn off.

The door to the room opened and closed in one breath, the flash of outside light cutting in so quickly he didn’t have a chance to turn and see who had entered the room before he was shuttered into complete darkness again.

A rush of cold brought every hair on his body to attention, and then a face emerged across the table, growing out of the darkness like a pale and deathly flower. He had never noticed how much Finnoway’s head, with its sparse hair, square jaw, and high cheekbones, resembled a skull.

“You,” Dan said weakly.

“In the flesh.” Finnoway smiled at him, breezy, the lights sputtering back on, but only lighting the room enough for Dan to see to the ends of his hands. “Speaking of, I hear you’re missing a bit of that.”

“Thanks to you.”

Finnoway sat on the edge of the rectangular metal table. His suit was black, making him melt into the edges of the murky darkness. He had tucked a briefcase under one arm. Clucking his tongue, he wagged a finger at Dan.

“Now, now, careful with those baseless accusations, son.”

“Don’t call me that,” Dan growled.

“But that’s what you are,” Finnoway said casually, opening the briefcase and balancing it on one thigh. “You are whatever I say you are. You are
whoever
I say you are. My son, my nephew, my paper boy . . .” He tossed a single piece of paper onto the table and it spun out toward Dan, landing upside down. Dan reached for it, twisting the edges so he could read the print. A birth certificate. His.

“Where did you get this?” he stammered, yanking his hands back as if scalded.

“This is going to be a real education for you.” Finnoway rummaged in the briefcase again, this time bringing out a stack of photographs. He laid them out one at a time on the table. “There’s a bin under the table if you need it.”

Dan soon understood why. The photos, playing out in chronological order, made his stomach clench in horror.

“Micah was a good boy. A
loyal
boy. Oliver tries to be, but he’s a predictable failure, given his idiot family. You know, when Oliver turned you in, I thought you were just a stroke of luck. Here comes Danny Ash,” he said playfully, almost giggling, “the last little loose end to be snipped. But it’s worse than all that, isn’t it? Micah was one of us, and you watched him die. You did nothing while he was
murdered
.”

Dan’s throat felt like sandpaper. He couldn’t speak or tear his eyes away from the pictures being lined up in front of him.

“And now you’ve gone and murdered my assistant, Daniel. That was very bad of you.” Finnoway’s smile endured, as did his singsong tone. “You see, here is where you wrestled her to the ground. Tamsin was strong, but you’re stronger, aren’t you? And this one is where you punched out a few of her teeth. When
that didn’t satisfy you, the pliers did. There are a lot of teeth in the human mouth, more than you might expect. It takes a long, long,
agonizingly
long time to pluck out all thirty-two.”

Dan shook and finally turned away. The last picture was too much, just a gaping, empty mouth. He could feel that tiny bit of hospital candy bar rolling around nauseatingly in his stomach. Her smile had been pretty and perfect, and now there was nothing left of it at all.

A soft rustling drew Dan’s attention, even if he refused to look at the horrifying photos. Finnoway produced a small black velvet bag and upturned it. A cascade of glittering white teeth spilled onto the table, scattering and rolling, dropping off the table and twinkling like falling beads.

“She fought back, though, didn’t she? The spitfire . . . Going so far as to bite off your little finger.”

Finnoway’s grin was slow and easy, and the way he deliberately emphasized each word made Dan cling to the chair under him. It wasn’t possible, was it? But he hadn’t seen the raw wound of his taken finger. He had no idea how it had been done, or with what. . . .

He doubled over, reaching for the bucket and retching up the contents of his stomach.

“You can get a person to do anything, provided the right motivation is given,” Finnoway added softly, flicking away one of the fallen teeth that had landed too close to his expensive trousers.

Dan wiped at the sour taste in his mouth, relieved when Finnoway gathered up the photos like a spread of playing cards and tucked them back into the briefcase. “S-so what do you
want me to do?” Dan croaked. “What’s my motivation?”

“I want you to rot in prison for the rest of your meaningless life, because you’re an
Ash
, and just like your mother, you can’t seem to help but get annoyingly underfoot,” Finnoway told him with a faraway smile. “And you will. Rot in prison, I mean. You take medication, don’t you? Mild dissociative disorder? You lose time occasionally, right? Minutes, even hours . . . Plenty of time to murder an innocent girl and flee the scene.”

Dan shook his head fiercely. No, no, this wasn’t right. It couldn’t happen this easily. He couldn’t be this powerless. “I haven’t had an episode in a long time.”

“Are you sure?”

Dan thought back to the night in the Ninth Ward, when he’d lost so much time on the way home and had to recall it in pieces. He remembered falling asleep in the taxicab this morning, and wondering how it could have happened so fast. Those hadn’t been blackouts, surely?

“You see,” Finnoway said smartly. “You’ve had them—your whole life, you’ve had them. And that’s all a jury will need to hear about that. Your little finger lodged in a dead girl’s throat will just be the icing on top.”

Dan felt boneless. Defeated. He sat back heavily against the chair, pinned there by the waves of nausea and terror that seemed to crash over him one after another. He knew the question he wanted to ask, and so he did it, even though it hardly mattered now. He would be branded a murderer—in all the history books, the files, the photos, this would be his legacy. His life.

“You killed my parents,” he said softly. Sadly.

“They took a long dive off a steep cliff in a Cadillac,” the Artificer replied with a shrug. “That’s not something most survive.”

“But
you
did it,” Dan whispered, tremulous with rage. If he didn’t keep control he would lash out, dive across the table and throttle Finnoway just like Finnoway claimed Dan had throttled Tamsin. He might as well earn his sentence. “You drove them to it.”

“And you would never be able to prove as much.”

It was tempting to play his hand, to tell Finnoway about the call Abby was making to Maisie’s coworkers in hopes that it would buy him some leverage. But that would be a mistake. He didn’t want Finnoway on their trail at all. He needed time. Time for Abby and Jordan to get help before one of Finnoway’s people got to them first.

Dan looked at the teeth scattered across the table and closed his eyes. He did have one bit of leverage left. One desperate hope to trade up. “What’s worth more to you, me sitting in jail or a powerful talisman? A person’s blood means something to you people, right? Their legacy determines the talisman? Luck turns into luck, power turns into power. That is, if those things even work.”

“Of course they work,” Finnoway sneered, squinting down his beak of a nose at Dan. “What do you know about it?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Dan lied. “But I know my family tree. And my family tree doesn’t just have Ashes, it has Crawfords. Go ahead, look it up. Look up Warden Daniel Crawford. The man did all kinds of experiments. He knew a lot about passing on a legacy. I bet his bones would make a
mean talisman. I could tell you where they are.”

“This is an amusing game, but I’m not interested in playing.”

Dan shrugged, hoping he looked more confident than he felt. His stomach trembled, threatening another vomiting spell. “Your loss.”

The Artificer circled him, watching, buzzard-like and silent. Then he paused behind Daniel’s chair, and in the dim light of the room, Dan could see the glow of a mobile phone reflecting off the metal table. Finnoway was reading.

“Hm.” A chilly pause. “Interesting. More interesting than an Ash, that’s for certain.”

“So what does that mean?” Dan asked. “Still want me to rot in prison?”

Finnoway’s dark laugh echoed off the walls and in his head. “Oh, you’ll still rot, Daniel, but now that I know how powerful your blood is, you’ll be rotting in pieces.”

“D
oes your wife know you’re a complete head case?” Dan asked, swaying slightly in the passenger seat of Finnoway’s car.

He had been handcuffed, and with the help of Officer James—who it turned out wouldn’t have required much evidence at all to bring Dan in—smuggled out down a long, narrow hallway and through the back door of the police station. They had hurried him across the parking lot, perhaps nervous about drawing attention. That gave Dan hope, at least. He was tempted to scream to try to get help right then, but Officer James had a gun, and there was also the matter of Finnoway’s two new assistants, who were waiting to meet them. They were both young women, dressed as sharply and cleanly as Tamsin once was, but Dan could see a bulge under each of their blazers. Three armed captors would be hard to escape.

Now those two armed women sat in the back of the black Rolls-Royce, silently keeping an eye on Dan and Finnoway in the front. But Dan was interested in the wedding band on Finnoway’s hand. He was trying to imagine the woman who would marry him.

Finnoway rested one wrist lazily on the steering wheel as he drove, and laughed wryly at Dan’s question. His cufflinks
flashed in the afternoon sunlight—tiny silver molars. “I’m surprised at you, Dan. I thought your generation was supposed to be so progressive. Do you think that just because she’s a woman and a mother she’s some kind of blameless saint?”

“She married you,” Dan replied darkly. “So I guess that means she’s a total nightmare, too.”

“If pressed, I’d say Briony is the more sadistic of the two of us,” Finnoway answered. It was a serene observation, one he made with a fond, distant smile. Ugh. Dan didn’t want to know what kind of moment he was remembering. “Sorry to say you probably won’t be making her acquaintance. She’s rarely at the Catacomb at this time of day. Little Jessy has Tae Kwon Do.”

Jesus. They made the Bender family look like the Brady Bunch.

“She doesn’t ride motocross, does she?” Dan asked bitterly. It would be just so fitting if his shadow on a motorcycle was Finnoway’s batshit wife.

“Not to my knowledge. Why?”

Dan huddled against the window, weak with hunger and a more insistent, gnawing feeling that left him feeling sore and fragile. “No reason.”

His hand ached, but he didn’t want to give Finnoway the satisfaction of seeing him in pain. Dan clenched his jaw, trying to ignore the persistent throb and burn.

The route from the police station gradually turned familiar—Dan had gone up and down these same streets twice now, once when chasing the masked vandals, and again when he traced his way back to the funerary home. He didn’t need to be told where to walk, though the Artificer’s assistants helped him along anyway. They were headed to the basement door, Dan knew. He
noticed they were shuffling over a deep, single tire tread in the pavement as they marched him up to the curb.