The Dark Communion (The Midnight Defenders) (24 page)

“So, it’s not bread anymore,” Ape said.

“It’s actually the body of Christ.”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“It’s faith.”

I didn’t have faith anymore. I didn’t need it. Faith was believing, despite the odds, and I knew for a solid fucking fact that the Big Man was there. The reason I couldn’t be a priest anymore was because I didn’t like the bastard. I couldn’t shepherd people into loving Him when I hated the fucker myself.

I looked away and heard him take a slow, steady breath. “The Dark Communion,” he continued. “Is partaking of the body and blood of sinful man.”

It explained the house. The bones, the bodies. Fuck, even the half-eaten rats in the basement meant that between kids the tramp was likely eating jerky when he couldn’t get steak.

“God created man to be perfect,” Finnegan said. “Because of Original Sin, Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit in the Garden, humanity is flawed, inherently dark, corrupted. But Jesus was perfect, and the Eucharist is a…well, I guess you could call it a ritual of the church, used for atonement.” He set his putter to the side and walked around the desk to his chair.

“That by eating the body of Christ,” Ape said, “You become more like Christ.”

“Yes,” Finnegan said. He opened a drawer and started rifling through its contents. “Because man is sinful, eating…flesh…” He said the word like it left a horrible taste on his tongue. “…is the same as giving in completely to sinful nature, in effect shunning the redemption of Christ.”

“And you become a beast,” I said, remembering that fucking bigfoot thing in Stone’s neighborhood. “A Wendigo.”

The priest shut one drawer and opened another, dug through that one as well. “At its furthest extreme,” Finnegan said. “Yes. But there’s a metamorphosis that takes place. A hibernation.”

“A cocoon,” Ape breathed, his eyes suddenly going wide. He looked at me suddenly. “Butterflies,” he said.

“Fantastic,” I said. “Rainbows!”

“No. Butterflies and moths. Their cocoons are made of silk.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Silk, Jono.” He arched an eyebrow at me.

“Like….”

He nodded. Like the room in the fucking house. “Pearson must have been getting ready to hibernate, ready to change,” Ape said.

“Ah, here it is,” Finnegan said suddenly. He held up a little business card with a single, ten-digit number printed on it. “I’ve gotta call the Hand on this. It’s big. It’s…”

I ignored him. Fuck the Hand. They didn’t return phone calls. “So how does this Dark Communion take control of someone?” I asked, looking at Finnegan.

“What do you mean?”

“The thing that’s doing this, manipulating these people into the Dark Communion, is possessing them. How?” Ape said.

Finnegan shrugged. “I have no idea. Communion isn’t designed to control people.”

Of course it’s not, I thought. That’s what religion is for.

“Then why is he doing it in the first place? If it doesn’t have anything to do with how he controls them, why even do it?” I asked.

Finnegan shrugged. “I can’t answer that for you.”

“Maybe not.” I looked at Ape. “But I know someone who might.”

Ape nodded in understanding. “Okay,” he said. He seemed a bit reluctant. “Let’s go talk to Lorelei.”

I nodded, eager to be in the open air again.

“If someone is utilizing the Dark Communion, he could be building an army,” Finnegan said. “I’ll make a call.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Jono, he’s trying to help,” Ape said.

“Really,” Finnegan said. “I want to. I have to do something.”

“We’re fine,” I told him. “But cheers just the same.”

“Jono…,” Ape said.

“You want to help, tell that bastard Hunter to return my fucking phone calls.”

Finnegan nodded slowly. “I’ll let him know.”

I studied him a minute, his eyes met mine fiercely. There was a glimmer in them, a fire inside. “He speaks fondly of you,” he said. I had no idea who this man was, but he knew me, knew my stories, the things that I’d done. Even before the Hand, when I was with Finn, he knew. And there was something both deeply unsettling and completely satisfying about that. “Hunter would talk to you. You know where he is.”

“If he wanted to see me…,” I started to say and stopped.

The priest’s eyes were full of an understanding I didn’t comprehend.

I shook my head and turned to Ape. “Fuck it. We don’t need his help. Let’s go.”

Ape sighed. “I’ll be in touch, Austin.”

“Just make it back alive,” came the reply. “Allons, Dieu ayde.”

Let us go on, God assists us.

“I doubt that, Father,” I said with a laugh.

“Where you’re going,” he said, “I pray you’re wrong.”

.

29

As we pulled away from the curb, I said, “So since when do you still hang around with the Hand?”

“I never really stopped. Not with Austin, anyway.”

I shook my head. If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have gotten angry. Instead I just felt calloused, numb. “I thought we agreed?”

He looked at me, his eyebrow arching. He didn’t say anything, but I’d known Ape long enough to know what he was thinking: “Really? You want to have this conversation?”

“Didn’t you call Hunter?” he asked, focusing back on the road.

“I did,” I said, my tone matter-of-fact, unapologetic. “But I don’t get coffee with him.”

“Austin’s not a bad guy, Jono. Whatever bad blood exists between you and the rest of the Hand…”

“And you.”

“I don’t harbor resentment or ill will toward them. I disagreed with what happened, yes. I chose a different path when I left with you. Maybe I wasn’t with the Hand long enough to share the emotional betrayal that you clearly feel. But we’re on the same side when it all boils down to it. It’s not us against the Hand against the Midnight. It’s us,” and he drew a big circle in the air with his finger, indicating not just us in the car, but probably the entire city, and likely beyond. “…humans, against non-humans. If we don’t have each other, then what? We were brothers, Jono, soldiers.”

“Then why are we flying solo, heading in to Godknows-what – some fucking Midnight Bogey with his underground serial-kidnapping, cannibal bum army – and all we have is a wing and a prayer? If they’re our fucking Soldier buddies, our fucking brothers, then why aren’t they here? Why hasn’t Hunter called me back, Ape?”

I could feel my blood begin to boil, fuck callousness, as Ape said, “I’m sure they’re busy.”

“Busy in a circle jerk. Maybe Finnegan’s a decent bloke, but the rest of them are content to sit there with their dicks in their hands while we do all the real work. Hunter fucking owes me, and where the sodding hell is he?”

“That’s what this is about.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re scared.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, that’s it. You’re scared. That’s what happened at the house, too. You were affected by fear, and it threw you off. Now, we’re getting closer to the source, and it’s making you jittery.”

“What? Jittery?”

He looked over at me – or maybe, down at me from his high horse – and smiled.

“Fuck you,” I said again. “I’d just feel better if we had an army backing us.”

“Talk to Anderson.”

“I’d rather take two men with Hand training that knew what the fuck they were up against than a whole precinct full of vanillas.”

“Two? I thought you wanted an army.”

“I just want all of those wasted years to count for something. All of those fucking stories Finnegan has heard, this legacy…or whatever…that I’d left behind, to give me clout enough that I could get some back-up once in awhile.” I took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Maybe they do have some fucking prior engagement, but this thing goes back months. Kids have been disappearing for fucking months, and it shows up as a blind spot on their radar? This is bigger than that.”

I glanced over at Ape and saw a look of faint annoyance. “Austin wanted to help,” he said.

“He’s a fucking desk jockey. We don’t need his help.”

“Are you serious?! Are you really serious? You’re talking about wanting help from the Hand and when one of them offers to pitch in, you turn him down only to continue whining no one will help?”

“What about that Poundstone bloke? He’s the size of a truck. He could smite them all with that fucking battle axe and we’d be home before dinner.”

“Smite? You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re fucking ridiculous. That’s all you have to say? Fucking drive the car,” I snapped. “If you didn’t want to set me off, you shouldn’t have brought it up.”

As we pulled into the parking lot of the Siren's Song, I noted only three cars: an old rusty hatchback, a black and chrome Hummer – undoubtedly belonging to Victor, the gorgon – and a brand new convertible Ferrari 360 Spider, sparkling emerald in the morning sun, which given her expensive taste, no doubt belonged to Lorelei.

The club closed at dawn, and I knew the front entrance would be locked, so we headed to the side door, which was propped open. Nearby, a scruffy-looking man was clinging to the side of a dumpster, a pile of black hefty trash bags on the ground below him leaking yellow grease and sagging with their own lumpy weight.

He nodded at us as we approached, popping his head out of the dumpster long enough to say, “Help you guys?”

He had long, greasy black hair, a piercing through one of his thick, dark eyebrows, and a tuft of black fuzz on his chin that stood at attention and called to mind old pictures of a pharaoh. He wore a torn black shirt with striped chef pants, and a soiled apron dangled around his neck, the straps hanging flaccid like limp noodles at his side. There was a time I knew every bloke in the place by sight and name. I didn’t know this man.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re looking for Lorelei.”

The sun was behind us, and he had to squint to look in our direction. He brought a gloved hand up to shield his eyes. “Club’s closed,” he said. “Have to come back tonight.”

I shook my head and smiled as politely as I could manage. “She’s a friend,” I said. “She told me to come see her.”

“She’s got many friends,” he said.

“Not like me.”

He looked at me funny. “What makes you so special?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know.”

He shook his head. “She’s busy. Come back tonight.”

“Look, I can come back in an hour with the FBI and a warrant,” I said. “But I don’t want to have to do that. I have too much love for the lady of the house to disrespect her or the establishment like that.”

He smiled crookedly at me and hopped from the dumpster. He landed lightly on the balls of his feet and began to approach, his wiry physique writhing back and forth in his best impression of a tough-guy walk. “Are you threatening me?” he asked. He cocked his head to the side and arched an eyebrow at me.

“No,” Ape said, coming up behind me. “But I am.”

I turned to him and couldn’t help but note the wild, savage look in his eye. He strode over to the man and stood toe-to-toe with him. I had to hand it to the cook. Despite his obvious height, weight, and muscle disadvantage, he refused to back down. Ape looked down at him, he looked up at Ape, and something of a snarl passed between them.

“Gentlemen,” came a ringing, melodic voice from the open doorway on my left.

All three of us spun to see Lorelei as she stepped outside, her red hair alight in the brilliant morning sun, a stark contrast to the white leather pants and sleeveless scoop-neck blouse she wore. She looked between Ape and the cook as she talked, but turned and smiled when she saw me. “Jono,” she cooed. “I should have known.”

“When there’s trouble,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

“Causing it,” she said. “What brings you here?”

“You told me, next time come see you,” I said. “I’m here.” She looked marvelous, even with the faint impression of exhaustion pressing heavily upon her. I was used to seeing her that way; it’s how she tended to look after a busy night. Especially one in which she hadn’t fed.

“I meant alone,” she said sweetly. Then not so sweetly added, “Not to bring your…pet.” Ape glared over at her. “Hello, Mr. Towers.”

Ape didn’t say anything, he just breathed steadily, controlled.

“Well?” I asked. “Are you going to invite us in?”

“The club’s closed, Jono.”

“That’s kinda the point. What brings me here, I wanted to do without the looming stare of your customers.”

“Not to mention the urgency we find ourselves under,” Ape added. “We couldn’t wait until later.”

“For the case,” I said with a wink.

She shook her head and sighed. “Oh, very well.” Her face softened as she looked at me. “Why do I put up with you? I suppose I can take a break from my morning duties.”

I stepped forward, drew closer to her. I thought to reach out and touch her, but before I could, she said, “Why don’t you both follow me inside where we can…discuss matters more privately.” She looked at her cook and added, “Back to work, Menkh.” She turned and walked into the club. I moved to follow, paused to set my hand on Ape’s shoulder. “Come on.” Reluctantly, he broke away from the cook’s gaze and turned his back on the man.

The morning air was cold outside, and the warmth of the club’s hallway was welcoming. Lorelei looked casually over her shoulder at me and said, “So you have too much love for me?”

I felt my face flush with warmth. “Heard that, did you?”

She smiled coyly and turned away. “You really ought to be more careful, Jono, who you pick fights with. Menkh is a Selkie.”

“Selkie? Really? Too bad he didn’t have his skin on him, love.”

“It’s called a selkind. And he’s made an apron out of his. All he had to do was tie the straps around his waist and he’d have the ability to shred you into tonight’s main course.” She took no pleasure in her words, just stated them as fact.

Selkies were typically peaceful nature spirits, and their selkind was a cloak of sorts taken from the animal they wanted to assume the form of. Selkies in lore tended to take the form of seals or swans. Think the Grimm Fairy Tales. “Glad I missed his flippered wrath,” I said with a smirk. “Maybe next time we can balance a ball on his nose.”

“You laugh, but his selkind was taken from a behemoth.”

“Behemoths are extinct,” Ape said.

She turned to him, startled and offended by the words. “You don’t believe me?”

Ape shook his head. “Where did he get it?”

“I gave it to him, of course,” she said. “I’d had it for many years. It was a trophy. Of course, I was sad to part with such a beautiful rug, but it was worth it to secure the services of such a wonderful cook.”

“A behemoth cook?”

She nodded.

I’d never seen a behemoth, obviously they weren’t very common. “Am I supposed to be scared?”

“Oh, they’re quite terrifying,” she said, stopped outside a door. She opened it and motioned for us to enter. “Tremendous size and strength coupled with a savage killing speed.” She shrugged, entered the room behind us, and closed the door gently. “He’s made better use of it than I ever did.”

Her office – despite her fancy taste – she kept simple, only an antique wooden desk made from a dark, earthy wood, a large filing cabinet in pristine condition, and a book shelf.

“With guards like Victor and his buddies,” I said, “Having a back-of-the-house behemoth seems a bit extreme.”

She took a seat behind the desk in a high-backed leather chair, looking regal and elegant. She motioned to the two, lower-backed, matching chairs across from her. We sat. I caught a strange look from Ape and couldn’t help note the strange irony that a former priest should feel more at home in a strip club than a church. What can I say, the sinners are much more fun.

“Any good card player knows you don’t show your whole hand,” she said. “You’ve seen my clientele.”

“That’s actually what brings us here today,” I said. “I ran in to Seven again last night.” I watched her face for a reaction, but there was none. The pleasant smile remained intact. “He said something about one of your presumed customers, something he overheard you say.”

She closed her eyes. “You are doing the detective thing to me again,” she said, and the calmness in her voice appeared forced, her smile less genuine. “You know how I detest that, Jono. If you have something you want to ask me, just ask it.” She opened her eyes again, and they dazzled and danced like glitter, like light on the surface of a brook. “I didn’t ask you in to play games with you.” She glanced at Ape. “At least not while he’s here.”

I nodded. “Bad habit.” I looked at Ape, and he was sitting there, fidgeting in his seat. I looked back at her and said, “There’s a Bogey in town wielding the Dark Communion, and Seven said you might know something about it. I need to know, love. Innocent lives are on the line.”

“The children you’re looking for?” she said, a bit quieter.

“Do you know who’s behind it?”

There was silence, tension. She looked between me and Ape and then said, “Yes.”

“Did you know about it the other night? When we talked?”

“Yes.” She must have seen the look on my face turn cold and hard, and quickly added, “But I had no idea that it was related to what you were looking into.”

I slammed my hand down on the arm of the chair. “Dammit, Lori…”

Ape leapt to his feet and said, “You could have helped us stop this two days ago?”

Given his recent aggression, I thought he might do something stupid and leapt to my feet, as well. Ape was strong, but Lorelei was stronger, even physically exhausted as she was.

I put a steady hand against Ape’s chest, but it was in vain. By the time I could get to him, his face looked calm, complacent even. His eyes became large, glossy, and vacant.

It took me a moment to realize the entire atmosphere had changed, become electrified, energized. A tingling crept over my skin, and the hair on my arms and neck stood at attention. I could feel the warmth of her charm radiating out of her as if from a furnace.

Lorelei smiled at Ape, ignoring me completely. “That’s enough,” she said. “I would like you to stand outside in the hallway.”

“Of course,” Ape said. He didn’t say a word to me, but turned and walked through the door, closing it behind him.

I turned to Lorelei and said, “That was unnecessary.”

“He makes me uncomfortable. I wish you hadn’t brought him here. It makes it difficult to talk to you when he’s always giving me those looks. Plus, I can smell him. It’s distracting.”

“It’s not that he doesn’t like you. It’s just that he doesn’t like what you do to me. Did, rather. He’s just looking out for me. Or jealous from the sex we had.” I shrugged. “And what do you mean, smell him?”

“Like a freshly baked cake. It has been days since my last proper feeding, but even were I full, it would still entice me. Your friend is filled with anger.”

“His uncle just died,” I said. “It’s not a good time for him right now.”