He looked down his long nose and snorted. “Go. I’ll be right there. I’d say do something annoying to distract them from my entrance, but that’s a given.”
“Ass,” I said fondly. “Three minutes or I’ll tell them about the time you stared at my teacher’s breasts. The one that was a stripper? Remember her and how you—”
“Out.” He pointed, but he was almost smiling now.
I levered myself off the dresser and closed the door behind me, moving as if it didn’t feel as if my ribs were made of ground glass. I was proud of that.
Back in the main room, I asked Ishiah and Robin, “Jack . . . what do we do now? How do we figure out how to kill him? How do we even find him? Does knowing he was an angel help us at all?”
Ishiah, looking less like an angel with his wings tucked off wherever and dressed in a faded blue shirt and jeans, was already on his feet and had been long enough to start pacing. My question stopped him. “It does,” he said abruptly. “Of course it does. How could I be so blind? Churches.” He swiveled to face me. “He’s trying to save sinners if in a very macabre and twisted manner. He’s gathering followers. He still believes in prayer and souls. He would be most at home in a church. Abandoned ones most likely or we’d have heard about congregations going missing.”
That was good. That was goddamn excellent. There couldn’t be that many abandoned churches in New York. With real estate at a premium they wouldn’t be empty long before they were turned into a trendy pizza place with stained glass windows of the Virgin Mary.
I was at Nik’s door fast this time and I didn’t think that was possible. Opening it, I said, “Nik, we know where to look for Jack. Grab your sword.”
He didn’t have to, and he didn’t have to look for Jack. Jack had found him instead. Nik was gone.
The room was empty.
14
Niko
Twelve Years Ago
When I woke up, I felt empty. My mind blank, my skull hollow. It was a long time before a distant and misty path woven out of confused thoughts appeared. For every step on it that I took toward consciousness, I took two back. It reminded me of the dreams where I could see my room around me, but I couldn’t move—the feeling of being stuck halfway between the dream world and the real one.
This was the same. Or that’s what I thought, but what I was seeing wasn’t my room. It wasn’t any of the rooms I’d slept in, and there were many, in my life. There was the thickness of shadows and the slow swing of one dangling lightbulb. A cloud hung around the glow—a halo around a fogbound moon. It should’ve been peaceful. I’d spent many nights outside under the stars and moon when Sophia had worked a carnival. I’d liked that part, that feeling of floating up into the sky, the feeling of serenity.
I didn’t feel serene now. I felt terrified. As one half of my mind was hypnotized by the swinging stand-in for the moon, the other half was screaming. I needed to move, I needed to go, I needed to stop him. But where and who, I didn’t know. The adrenaline spiked my heart into a rhythm so fast and desperate I could hardly breathe and I didn’t know why.
My eyes drifted from the light to the wall. Concrete blocks with the sheen of moisture. Farther down was a cracked concrete floor. More than cracked—shattered. I could feel the damp in my lungs and I could smell . . . I jerked in a hard breath and spasmed, the floor scraping the cheek that rested on it.
I’d been at home. I’d been with Cal.
No.
I’d been at home and Cal was gone.
I smelled it. One corner that was darker than the others, but even in the dark I could see where the floor fell away into a deeper darkness.
Cal was gone.
I vomited. Not much, only a trickle, but it tasted sharply of chemicals.
Homemade chloroform.
This time I moved with more purpose. There was pain in my shoulders as I tried to inch across the floor. Stopping, I drew in several ragged breaths and tried to sit up. It took me several tries and nearly ten minutes, but I made it and by the time I did, I knew where I was.
I was in a basement. Junior’s basement and through the pounding headache the stench was stronger, making the smell of vomit nothing. Death and decomposition. I could see the blurry outline of stacked bags of quicklime against another wall. It could do only so much this close to the pit dug in the corner. The haze across my vision was fading and I saw that too clearly, but not as clearly as the rot I choked on. If it smelled this tainted and wrong to me how badly had it smelled to Cal when I’d tried to tell him this maniac was a grocery store butcher?
At that moment, choking on air that reeked of dead bodies and seeing that my hands were fastened with police-issue cuffs around a metal support pole, I realized big brothers don’t get to mess up.
Not once.
Not ever.