Harsh Gods (38 page)

I untwined the scorched filament, then reverently lifted the lid. Glinting curves of metal danced with the candle’s yellow light.

Twin blades—by all appearances, hand-forged—rested against a lining of gray foam cut to their precise shape, one fixed to the bottom, one strapped to the inside of the lid. The blades were about six inches in length, the full weapon stretching just shy of a foot. Each appeared to be crafted from a single piece of steel, running uninterrupted from pommel to tapering tip. Smooth strips of supple leather twined together to cover the hilts.

Meticulously scribed sigils shimmered along the leather of the grips. The blades themselves were unadorned save for a single symbol etched just above the cross-guard. There, gleaming with subtle threads of blue-white power, shone the first syllable of my Name, scribed in that alternately sinuous and angular script I’d seen referenced in my journals as the First Tongue.

These weapons were the physical doubles of the spirit-blades I could summon—or at least, their closest feasible equivalents in the flesh-and-blood world. They were the daggers I’d remembered in that brief flash during the duel with Malphael, and as they lay gleaming in their polished case, I wondered how any power had stolen away their memory.

I held my free hand poised above the bottommost blade, caught in a delicious moment of anticipation. With measured reverence, I closed my hand around the hilt. The contact sent an exhilarating electricity all the way to the tips of my wings. A faint corona of flame erupted along the blade, and the sigil above the hilt burst forth with blue-white brilliance. In the backwash of power, the flame of the single candle wavered, then winked out.

Didn’t matter. With the flame-kissed blade, I had ample light by which to see.

Thrilling with excitement, I grabbed the lovingly crafted twin of the weapon. Wrapping my fingers around the hilt felt like the completion of a circuit. I held the blades crossed in front of me, my face uplit in their ghostly blue glow. The wind of power blew the hair back from my brow.

Had any mortal witnessed my grin in that moment, they rightly would have trembled and fled.

I stepped out of the sealed storeroom with the knife case clutched to my chest, that maniac grin still creasing my features. If my expression—or sudden materialization—startled Father Frank, he didn’t show it. The priest stood alone in his basement sanctuary, his back rigid with patient determination. He held his coat draped over one arm, ready to throw it on at any moment. A Desert Eagle rested in a shoulder holster set for a right-hand draw.

There was something deeply surreal in seeing the lines of the holster strapped over the priest’s black garb.

“You look like a cat who found a whole cage full of canaries,” he said.

“Way better than that.”

Returning the crucifix to its peg, I laid the knife case near the pile of electronics on the desk and drew out the blades. The padre’s brows lifted as I brandished the glittering weapons with a triumphant flourish.

His chin dipped in a swift nod of approval. “Now you look like you.”

“You don’t happen to have sheaths that might fit these things, do you?” I ventured.

“Weren’t they in there?”

“In that mess?” My laugh came out bitter. “I almost overlooked the blades. Did you know I have silver certificates in there? Do banks even take those any more?”

Father Frank made a pensive sound. Tossing his coat across the back of his desk chair, he bee-lined for his footlocker. A mug, a stack of papers, and some other personal clutter rested on its surface. With quick, efficient movements, he transferred these to the floor. As he worked to get the lid open, the rattle of its latches stirred green-drenched echoes in a distant corner of my mind.

“I think I’ve got enough to MacGyver something,” he said. Dragging the footlocker closer to the couch, he bent almost bodily into the depths of the thing, rummaging through its contents.

“Take your time,” I sighed. “I still have no clue where to look for Halley.”

“No tracking charms in there, then?” He withdrew a tattered sheath of woven nylon cloth, olive green and stained along one side. Holding it up, he eyeballed it against the length of the blades. With a downward quirk of his mouth, he cast it aside.

I grimaced. “Nothing I recognized as such.”

He bent back to the trunk, sorting through a baffling array of old military gear—including, if I trusted my eyes, a moth-eaten old ghillie suit. A few more sheaths made it to a growing pile by his feet, none of them quite the proper length or width for the daggers.

Waiting was never my strong suit, and I paced a restless circuit of the room, hands still fisted round the blades. The sigil-inscribed leather wrapped along the grips thrummed against my palms with a familiar tingle of power.

“It’s probably good Lil struck out on her own,” I said, struggling to convince myself of the fact. “We’ll cover more ground.”

Father Frank scoffed. “You think she’s still working on this? I bet she got in her car and drove straight out of town. She’s not much of a team player, Zack.”

I thought back to Lil’s cool efficiency on board the
Scylla.
She’d taken down most of Dorimiel’s blood-powered goons all by her lonesome.

“It’s best to count Lil as her own team,” I responded. “Army of one.”

“Sure. She’s efficient when it suits her,” he allowed. “Doesn’t mean you can trust her to see a job through to the end.” He chucked a battered sheath of water-stained leather in my direction. “Try this.”

It wasn’t wide enough by half and the loop at the top was cracked through the middle. Even if it had fit either of the knives, there was no way I could fix it to my belt. I tossed it back.

“No dice?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“It’s the damned curve on those things,” he said.

I tried sticking one of the daggers into the inner pocket of my jacket to see if I could make that work. The second time I jabbed myself in the ribs, I gave it up as a bad plan. Chewing my cheeks, I debated putting the blades back in their case and just leaving. Even if I had to fly around the Shadowside and do an aerial search for Terhuziel, it would accomplish more than just waiting around.

“I think I got it,” he announced.

Gathering his collection of scavenged supplies, he brought the pile over and dumped it onto the desk. From a drawer, he produced a roll of electrical tape. I eyed it skeptically.

“What are you going to do with that?” I demanded.

“Trust me for once,” he said.

Boiling over with impotent fury that had nowhere else to go, I glowered at him, knuckles whitening as I gripped the daggers. He glared back and didn’t flinch—not even when faint shimmers of blue-white fire licked along the blades.

“Put those things down for a minute, take off your jacket, and calm the hell down,” he said tightly. “Rage may get you through a fight, but it rarely helps you plan it.”

Maybe he used his voice trick on me, because some of the singing fury in my veins abated. Huffily, I put the daggers on the desk next to their polished wooden case. Calm returned by slow degrees. Shrugging out of my jacket, I draped it over Father Frank’s coat on the back of the chair.

“You’re right,” I admitted.

As soon as I extended my forearm, he started building the sheath along the underside, layering cardboard and nylon and wrapping it all in place with lengths of electrical tape. I held the weapon steady while he tested the fit, making little adjustments along the way.

“Now, think.” He kept his voice low as he continued working, the rhythm of the process finding its way into his words. “About Halley. About this rogue Rephaim. About his plans for her.” He finished on one wrist and started up on the next. The heft of the dagger strapped to my forearm dredged up a potent kinesthetic memory. It felt
right
. Father Frank kept up his soothing patter. “You’ve probably picked up on something already and you’re just too frustrated to see it.”

“Maybe,” I allowed. I flexed my fingers and rolled my wrist, adjusting to the bands of tape hugging up and down my arm. “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten how half my brain works any more.”

He gestured for me to hold the dagger on the other arm. He was almost out of electrical tape. “If not your brain, what about Halley’s?”

“Hunh?” I stood with my right arm extended, the left clasping the blade along its length while Father Frank dug around in his desk for another roll of electrical tape. The one he found was halfway gone. I hoped it would be enough.

“You were in her head, Zack,” he reminded me. With a blunt nail, he picked at the leading edge of the tape, holding the roll nearly at arm’s length as he tried to see the little line of black against black. “While you were in there, what did you see?”

I shrugged, casting my thoughts back to the experience.

“It’s all fairy tales and Disney Princesses,” I said.

Father Frank gave up squinting at the electrical tape to turn a disapproving frown at me. “You’re telling me this bastard spent weeks insinuating himself into her psyche and he left behind not a single footprint you could track?”

I shook my head. “The only thing weird in there, aside from me, was this classic villain’s castle that belonged on the cover of
Better Homes and Dungeons
. It showed up when the Rephaim attacked.”

“Castle?” he pursued. “Describe it to me exactly as you saw it.”

“It was just a symbol,” I objected. “Believe me, it was too over-the-top to be anything else.”

“People pack a lot of information into symbols, Zack.” He hitched his jaw in the direction of the cross. “You should know that better than anyone.” He finally got the tape to cooperate and was back to anchoring the second makeshift sheath to my forearm.

“All right,” I conceded. “It’s not like we’ve got anything better to go on.”

Stilling my breathing, I focused on my memory of the girl’s psychic space, building each element as vividly as I could. My eyes slid shut in concentration and the persistent tug of tape along my forearm as the padre continued to work faded into the distant background. Like a movie advanced in slow motion, I rolled each frame of the encounter forward in my mind until I came to that final confrontation. When I spoke, my voice had dropped to a soft rumble, the words coming slow and sleep-thick.

“A castle. Black stone. Round, peaked roof. Gargoyles. Maybe trees in the background. Definitely lightning.”

With sudden urgency, Father Frank grabbed my hand, guiding it to a bit of tape.

“Tamp that down and we’re done. I need to find something.” Puzzled, but too focused on my internal landscape to argue, I pressed along the edge of the tape and secured the final loop.

The sound of drawers being upended made me crack open one eyelid. Father Frank rooted through his desk with frenetic purpose, scattering files and small office items across the floor at our feet. With a bark of success, he yanked a little booklet from the very bottom of a stack of fat manila folders crammed in the lowest drawer of the desk. It was a brightly colored tri-fold brochure—the kind they often gave out in tourism offices. He waved it at me like a talisman.

“Like this?” He stabbed a finger at a picture on the back of the brochure.

It wasn’t a castle, but a tower. Dark stone. Round, peaked roof. The image was almost too small, but I could pick out the figures of gargoyles ringing the top.

“Kind of,” I allowed, “if it was blacker, and I was looking down from about ten feet above the roof. Where is this?” I turned the booklet over curiously.

It was a brochure for plots at Lake View Cemetery.

“Fuck me running,” I hissed. “That damned place.”

“The building you saw is the Garfield Monument,” Father Frank said. He snatched the brochure from my hand, hurriedly flipping to the inside. “There’s a massive statue of the former President.”

“
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
” I snarled. “He’s been right up the hill this entire time!”

As I railed, my phone on the desk went off like a joy buzzer. The sound was so unexpected, I nearly yelped. It was a call coming through, not a text, so the cycling vibrations made the device skitter sideways across the pitted wood. I caught it before it shook itself right off the edge.

Only three people who mattered a damn in my life had this new number, aside from the padre—Bobby, Remiel, and Lil.

I didn’t recognize the number.

“You going to answer that?” Father Frank asked.

The phone kept buzzing. I almost hit “ignore.”

Curiosity won out. I tapped the button for the call.

“About fucking time,” Lil snarled from the other end.

“Hello to you, too,” I said.

“Shut up and listen. I don’t have a lot of time.” I could barely hear her over the blare of music and a constant, rhythmic thrum.

“Are you driving?”

“Again those wonderful powers of observation,” she snapped. “I found Mal with my tracking charm. I’m tailing him right now. He had the same idea, though—he’s using pieces from the rosary to home in on Tarhunda—but I think I know where he’s headed.”

My eyes settled on the tower looming darkly on the back of the brochure.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Lake View.”

“Ahead of me for once. Color me impressed,” she allowed. “But that cemetery covers acres of land. The Rephaim could be holed up in any of the mausoleums.”

“It’s the Garfield Monument,” I replied. For once, I allowed myself to gloat. It wasn’t often I was more clued-in than Lil. “I’ve got a picture in front of me. Enclosed structure, easily fortified, big-ass statue that’s pretentious as fuck—exactly the sort of thing a former godling would want for his evil lair.”

“Hrm,” she said. I could hear the ratcheting of her fingernails even above the noise of the car.

“What about Halley?” I demanded. “Any sign that Mal’s learned about the girl?”

Beside me, Father Frank grabbed both of our coats from the chair. Tucking his into the crook of his arm, he held out my jacket, making sure the sleeves didn’t catch on the daggers as I put it on. The tips snagged a little at the elbows if I bent my arms too severely, but otherwise, the improvised sheaths held.