Dana knew guns. Military brats always did. Her brothers and Dad took her and Melissa to the range in any town where they lived.
“You can’t touch a gun unless you’re going to be smart about it, Starbuck,” her dad said the first time they’d gone to a gun range. That was what he called her: Starbuck. And he was Ahab. It started when they’d first read Moby-Dick together. A book she loved and Melissa hated. A book that created a connection with her father that Dana didn’t always feel. A connection that seemed to be interrupted way too often. Sometimes he was hard, distant, cold; and his coldness chilled her and pushed her away. But then he’d smile and there would be a secret twinkle there, as bright as the North Star, and he’d call her Starbuck and she’d call him Ahab and things would be okay.
The gun in the holster was not a model she had ever seen. She looked at the reflection of the weapon but did not touch it.
It’s not yours, said a voice inside her mind. Not yet.
Then she noticed that her reflection was wrong. Different. The face looking back at her wore the same frown she felt on her mouth, but this face was older. A woman’s face, not a girl’s. Not much older, though. Ten years? A little less. Old enough, though, to show that the years had not been easy ones. There was a rigidity to the face, a glitter of doubt and submerged anger in the eyes.
And fear.
There was real fear there, too. Hidden, compressed, repressed, shoved down, pushed back. But there.
“I’m afraid,” said her reflection. Her voice was different, too. Older, not as soft, more controlled.
“Afraid of what?” Dana asked her reflection, speaking as if this were a different person.
The reflection answered. “I’m afraid to believe.”
Dana licked her lips. “Me too.”
The reflection looked sad, as if that was the wrong answer. “What are you afraid of?”
Dana said, “I’m afraid that God is speaking and no one is listening.”
“I know,” said the other Dana. Motes of dust swam in the air on both sides of the mirror, moving in perfect synchronicity even though the two Danas were so different.
The woman with her face leaned close and whispered, “He’s coming for you.”
“What? Who?”
The woman suddenly gasped and drew her gun. It was so fast, with an oiled grace that could only have been possible after years of practice. She hooked her fingers on the edge of her jacket, swept it back, released, used her thumb to pop the restraining strap, closed her fingers around the gnarled hard plastic grips, slid the weapon out, raised it, took it into a two-handed grip, held it steady with one finger laid along the trigger guard. And all so, so fast. A heartbeat and then the gun was up. Pointed at Dana … no, pointed past her.
The gun barrel was a black eye, steady and deadly, but the face behind the gun was twisted into a mask of horror.
“He’s here!”
Dana spun around toward the darkness that suddenly filled her bedroom. For one heartbeat there was nothing to see.
And then he stepped out of the shadows.
A man.
The angel of light.
Devil or monster or ordinary man, she didn’t know which.
Tall, painted a cold blue by the spill of moonlight that slanted through her window. Dressed in clothes so dark it was as if he wore garments made of shadows. Wings folded behind his broad back.
But he had no face at all.
His curly black hair framed a face with high cheekbones and a strong jaw, but where there should have been eyes, a nose, and a mouth, there was nothing. Not a mask, she was sure. Nothing.
And yet she knew that he could see her. That he was smiling with the wrong kind of hungers. That he was completely aware of her—both the real her and the fantasy older version in the mirror.
The angel raised his hands, and Dana could see that he was holding up things he wanted her to see.
In his right hand he clutched several long, wickedly sharp iron nails.
In his left he held a crude mallet made of hardwood and steel.
The fingers of both hands were smeared with blood.
“Run,” whispered the older Dana. “I’ll try to hold him here. Run … run!”
Dana could not run. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe.
The wings behind the angel’s back suddenly rustled, and then they spread out, huge, broad, filling the room behind him. The moonlight showed them to her with crystal clarity. They were not the soft, beautiful feathered wings of an angel of heaven.
They were the black, leathery, mottled wings of something from the pit of hell.
Dana screamed herself awake.
CHAPTER 15
Craiger, Maryland
3:58 A.M.
The angel sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by thousands of pieces of broken mirror, each reflecting a different version of his face.