If I wanted to lie to myself and grasp at straws, I would. In my life I’d learned one thing: the truth will kill you as often as it sets you free.
The next church was Jack’s. Not his one true church, but it belonged to him. The first floor was empty, but the basement was home to fourteen fucking hoodie-wearing acolytes. If I never saw another hoodie or whoever had spread the fashion gospel on those goddamn things, I’d be happy as hell. The men had been sleeping when I came down the stairs. It was a small area, meant for storage, not a dormitory, but that’s the purpose it served now. They sat up on old sleeping bags, not one of them with a knife in hand. From the direction they were reaching they slept with them under flattened, ancient pillows. It was a good place if you were smart enough to sleep with your hand under there grasping the handle. They weren’t that smart. They did know me. I saw it in the set of their jaw, the disgust in their eyes. One stood up—the leader, ready to face me unarmed. That’s what a brave if stupid leader would do. The rest were all still reaching for those knives when I sent Jack a message.
It was a messy one.
But sometimes you have to make a mess to get the point across.
I did think about it, Nik, before I did it, as you’d told me to. I decided if the consequences of being Auphe over human in this instance meant getting you back, it was more than worth it.
The basement was covered in gore, charred flesh, far-flung limbs when I finished walking down the stairs to jump the last stair to the concrete and moved across to the one remaining—the one I hadn’t opened a gate within to turn inside out, upside down, round and round. He was still standing, the one who would know of any of them, where Jack might be. That hoodie had been white; it was Carrie-crimson now, but he was covered in a little worse than pig’s blood.
I grinned at him with teeth that couldn’t be as sharp and wicked in reality as they felt in my mind. “Careful. The floor’s slick. I wouldn’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.”
That disgust in his eyes was gone. It’s easy to hate an idea—that of a Godless creature—to want to destroy what was behind it . . . when it’s only an idea. It’s harder when that idea is a reality right in your face. Dripping down your face in this case. That’s when there’s only room for fear. This guy might think he was going to Heaven when he died, but God oh God, he didn’t want to die like that, now did he?
I circled him. “It’s funny really. When I was a kid . . . and I was once a kid, hard to believe, I know. But when I was little, one of the scariest things I came across was a jack-in-the-box. I practically pissed my pants at the sight of one.” I tugged on his hood as I’d tugged on Nik’s braid hours ago. “Yet now that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for Jack in his godforsaken fucking box and you’re going to tell me where that box is.”
He did.
I didn’t doubt that he would. He could barely get the words out fast enough; they tumbled over each other, a run of stones racing down the side of a mountain. That was usually a warning sign of something bigger and worse to come
This wasn’t any different from that.
There may have been an assumption on his part that I’d let him live if he talked. I wasn’t an idiot and I wasn’t na?ve. I’d dealt with the Auphe race. Jack was a poison, a disease that could spread even if he was gone. The Auphe had taught me to be a fan of the scorched earth policy. Burn it, salt it, let nothing ever grow here again.
That’s what I did, and then I went to find Jack.
*
Jack’s church was one of those I thought of as real churches. Not real in a sense of what one worshipped in an ugly church was inferior to what one worshipped in this type of church. It was just what I’d grown up seeing in movies and on TV as the epitome of the House of God. It was stone with a steeple that pierced a sky now purple and pale orange with dusk. There was a stained glass window in front that was two stories tall. There was no scene, no grazing sheep, or sunlight streaming from the sky. It was a complex mixture of rectangular and square shades of glass—a thousand windows, each leading to a better place. The doors were a dark wood and arched at least four feet over the tallest person to walk through them.
I saw all of this once I’d gotten through a fence much more secure than had been at the first church. I gated through it. I had no time for a fence this difficult. This one even came with the kind of razor wire you saw on prison fences. It was ugly and evil, an odd choice to surround a building even I thought of as beautiful. Jack was inside there though, a cancer that made all that beauty an empty shell that didn’t yet know it was terminal. Didn’t know there was no cure strong enough to save it.