CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
October 14 a€￠ 4:59 A.M.
Chaz:
Midnight poured down into my gut, cold and stark. The monster that took Isabelle hadna€?t contacted us yet. I had a team of people searching the Grid for any clues. I hated to admit it, but my niece would probably turn up in the Underground Circus. I had to have people in place, watching for her.
All of them would be watching for a five-year-old, almost six-year-old, girl who would be sold in a few hours to the highest bidder.
Right now Angelique and Pete were sleeping off the venom that some punk had shot into their veins. In the morning, theya€?d help put together the disjointed pieces of this puzzle. Somehow theya€?d each played a part in this and it was time for them to confess.
Whether they wanted to or not.
But I didna€?t know if I would survive that long. Isabelle was out there somewhere, scared and alone. Waiting for someone to rescue her.
I stood on a wrought-iron balcony, overlooking the French Quarter. The day had been sliced neatly in half, divided down the middle into dark and light and I was poised on the edge of both, wondering what would happen next. I felt like I had been in this position all of my life. Waiting for a bolt of lightning to shoot down from heaven. Hoping that someone would expose the evil that had taken up residence all around me.
It was finally time for me to make a decisiona€”to fight, to die if I had to, risk everything to stop this madness. I didna€?t even know what the kidnappers wanted or who they were.
But I knew what I wanted. I could feel it boiling in my blood like a virus.
Revenge.
I wanted to see some monstera€?s head on a pike, hear the beast drowning in the moat just outside the castle walls, and then bring the princess home, safe.
When had I turned into a warrior with barbed-wire flesh? I never asked to play this part. This was my Gethsemane, my rocky garden crucible. And I could tell a sacrifice was coming.
It was an hour before dawn.
Below me the streets flowed heavy with fog, a river of hazy gauze, a mist that stalked the city every night on panther paws. A cotton-like silence filled the sky. It ate sounds and spit them back out, half-born. Streetlights curved overhead; they winked and then went off. Suddenly the whole world narrowed down to the single street, covered with cobblestones and lined with double gallery houses, stunningly beautiful in their decay.
A phantom light danced through the mists. A precursor to the sun.
The City That Care Forgot began to reveal itself when a man on the street started to play a trumpet, the soft, haunting melody stirring ghosts from the mists. Shrouds and skeleton-like creatures emerged from the vaporous mists; they danced and swayed. People dressed for Carnival, high on life, high on black-market alcohol, high on whatever illegal drug they could afford. Like sinuous snakes they followed the music, hips swinging, arms lifted high in mock worship.
I watched as they shifted through white shadows, until finally they disappeared through a doorway.
And then I was alone.
Is this what purgatory used to be like, back before God emptied it of the dead, before there were no more souls left? No one prayed for the dead anymore. The Pope forbade it twenty years ago.
Pray for the living, that was what he said we should do.
But nobody listened. Instead we all forgot how to pray.
I fell to my knees then as the damp, dark fog swirled around me; I lifted my hands to the heavens that I could no longer see.
In the dark night of the soul, faith feels as dry and brittle as autumn leaves.
Spare Isabelle, I prayed. Please. If there must be a sacrifice here, then let it be mine.
This time, let it be mine.