Dana pushed away the memory. “That was sad, but this—” This is different.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said.
“I know.”
In the yard a lonely cricket chirped. Suddenly a second one chimed in. They pulsed out of sync and then gradually fell into harmony. It was nice. It screwed one of the loose bolts back into place on the machinery of the world.
“Ahab?” she said.
“What is it, Starbuck?”
“I know it’s late, but can we read for a little? We haven’t done that in a long time.”
She felt a spasm in his chest, as if the request hurt him somehow. But he said, “Sure. Go get it. It’s on the coffee table.”
She went inside and brought out the old leather-bound copy of Moby-Dick. Dad put on his reading glasses and opened the book to the place where they’d left off long ago. It wasn’t their first time through the book. They knew the story by heart, but that wasn’t why they came back to it. It was the thing that connected them, and Dana sometimes wondered if the book was as much a lifeline to him as it was to her. There was a sadness in her father she’d never understood, and she suspected that his coldness was as much a defense mechanism as it was part of his being a professional military man. She knew for sure that a heart beat inside his bearlike chest.
She wanted to find some way to truly unlock him. She wondered if he was different at sea. She liked to think that he yearned to be riding the waves, chasing whales, navigating by the stars—and that his gruffness was from being trapped on land, and not from being trapped on dry land with his family. But she never asked, because she might find out the truth, and that would hurt too much, because sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free.
They read the book and the crickets sang to each other in the grass, and for a while, at least, the shadows kept their distance.
CHAPTER 57
Craiger, Maryland
11:03 P.M.
The angel thought about Agent Gerlach and his masters in the Syndicate. He thought about what they wanted of him, what they needed from him, and what they thought about him.
They thought he was a madman, that he was out of control, that he was becoming a danger to their plans. They were working to save the world. Maybe some of them actually believed it. Gerlach seemed to. But they were going about it the wrong way. The Craiger Initiative was good, and it might even give them the weapon they needed.
Maybe, but the angel did not believe it. Oh, he believed that what he was doing for them would create weapons, even incredibly powerful ones, but the enemy they all fought was so very much more powerful. No army of psychic children could hope to oppose it. No, the angel believed that the Syndicate was going to lose the whole planet.
He, on the other hand, would not. He had a different idea about how to fight the future.
With the grigori and their children, the nephilim.
How could any fleet of invaders hope to win against a host of angels and giants?
He had tried to explain this to Gerlach, but the conversation had gone nowhere. The angel could see the doubt, the mockery, the fear in the agent’s eyes.
The angel pitied him.
He pitied everyone who failed in his or her faith. When the painting on the wall was complete, when it changed from blood and hair and grease and sweat into a portal, then the faithless would burn in the same fires as the enemies of this world.
CHAPTER 58
Scully Residence
11:43 P.M.
The house was still and even the crickets outside had fallen silent.
Sleep seemed impossible. Dana lit the special incense Sunlight had given her and tried meditating, but failed. She tried yoga, and failed at that, too. Finally she crawled into bed and lay staring at the ceiling, trying to force her brain to shift from emotional reaction to logical analysis. There was a line from a Sherlock Holmes story she’d read once that really seemed to fit, and she spoke it aloud so that the sound of the words would reinforce the truth of the observation. It was from the short novel The Sign of Four.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Absolutely, she thought. But what is the truth?
She tried to recatalog the facts as she knew them, updating a mental file as detached and precise as Uncle Frank’s case files.
Point One: There have been six deaths of teenagers in Craiger, Maryland.
Point Two: All those deaths appear to have happened because of car accidents.
Point Three: None of the victims had been drinking.
Point Four: Five of them had something in their blood called 5-HT2A receptor agonists. Since Uncle Frank did not yet have the toxicology results for Todd Harris, Dana didn’t know if he also had that stuff in his blood, but it was likely.