And then, like a ravenous wolf, he leaped at her and drove her to the ground.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
Monk had no good idea where to start.
He had a bad idea, but it scared the hell out of him. It hurt him just to think about it.
He sat in his car and punched the steering wheel until his fists ached.
“No,” he said to the night. “This isn’t my goddamn fight. This isn’t mine to fix.”
The storm raged around him.
“Please, no,” he begged. “I don’t want to do this.”
He tried calling Rain’s phone one more time and still got nothing. His heart was hammering now.
Monk started his car and drove away.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
Rain fell backward with Dylan on top of her, but she landed well, the way she had learned in dance class, tucked her chin, rolled backward over her left shoulder. The motion turned her into an axel, and it threw Dylan over her. He smashed upside down into the trunk of a tree.
Rain scrambled to her feet and started to run, stopped because it looked like Dylan was hurt. She even took a step toward him, reaching out, ripped in half by mother’s need and woman’s survival. But Dylan swiveled his head around and leered at her, blood running from between his lips and up his chin.
“He said you wouldn’t fight,” said Dylan. “He said you were empty of everything. I’m so glad he was wrong.” He spat blood onto his hands, looked at it, then licked it off. “This is going to be delicious, Mommy dear.”
He oriented himself and slowly began getting to his feet.
“Why are you doing this?” Rain demanded. “I never meant to hurt you. I gave you up because I couldn’t raise you like you deserved.”
“You didn’t even try,” he said with real pain in his voice.
“I was sixteen!”
“So what? How’s that an excuse, Mommy dear? I heard Jesus’s mother was only fifteen. She did okay. You really think being sixteen is an excuse for throwing me away?”
“I thought you’d be adopted by good people.”
He spat at her. “Good? Good? You gave me to the boogeyman. I lived in a cellar my whole life. Do you want to know how many times I was beaten? Want to know the things they did to me down in the dark? Do you want to know how I learned about pain? Do you want to know how I learned how to eat that pain the way he eats hope? It was my food, and they kept me very well fed.” Tears broke and rolled down his livid cheeks. “Do you want me to … to tell you what you did to me?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry? Sorry?” His voice disintegrated into a sob but then swelled with immense fury and turned into a roar that shattered the world.
Rain screamed, whirled, and ran.
Dylan stood panting, fists balled, giving her a chance. Letting her run, the way a cat would. The way a monster would.
Rain crashed into bushes and through hedges. Skeletal fingers of sapling trees plucked at her like beggar children. The nightbirds flapped noisily overhead, jeering and diving to tear at her cheeks and scalp and arms with their razor-sharp beaks. One of them tried to land in her hair like a bat, but Rain grabbed it with both hands, tearing it free and losing hair as she did it. It tried to bite her hands, but she gave its neck a savage twist, delighted and disgusted by the snap of hollow bones. Rain let the bird fall and ran, and all around her the other birds cried out in fury.
The boy gave a huge, mad laugh and launched himself in pursuit, his body hunched so far forward, that he ran sometimes on all fours like a dog.
That’s not my son. That’s not my Dylan! Those words banged around inside Rain’s head.
“Moooommmmmeeeee!” cried the thing that pursued.
Suddenly, a form rose up in Rain’s path, making her skid to a stop. Dylan was nowhere in sight, maybe circling her. The figure was short, crooked, broken. An old Japanese man wearing the saffron robes of a Tibetan monk. His head was shaved, and his eyes were filled with fire. He stood with his head canted too far to one side and there were vicious rope burns around his throat. He reached out to her and tried to speak, but his voice was a raspy croak as words tried to claw past all the damage in his throat.
“Gomen’nasai,” he wheezed.
Rain did not understand Japanese, but Monk had told her what those words meant. He was apologizing, and she realized that she knew why. This man had tried to warn her, but sixteen-year-old Rain was too scared, bullied, and confused to understand. He had wanted her to do what was best for Dylan by keeping him. It had been something vitally important to Mr. Hoto, and Rain had misread his warning and done exactly the opposite.
“It’s not your fault,” Rain said. “It’s me. You tried to help, but I didn’t listen.”
Tears glittered in his dead eyes. He tried to apologize again, but his throat would not make anything more than a hoarse croak. A shudder swept through him, and he dropped down to his knees. Past him, just outside the last row of trees, Rain could see the tall white edifice of Torquemada’s. The flashing red hand winked on and off, throwing the color of blood onto the night. The monk turned his body stiffly to point that way.
He tried to say something else, but then a howling shape came crashing out of the bushes and slammed Hoto to the ground. The monk screamed as Dylan, foam flying from his mouth, tore at him with fingers curled like claws. Then the flock of nightbirds dove down, crashing into the monk, tearing at him. Tearing him apart.
“Stop it!” screeched Rain, bashing at the birds, grabbing at Dylan’s shoulder. He spun at her touch, quick as a cat, and bared his teeth at her. But not teeth. Not really. Not anymore.
His mouth was filled with long, pointed, red-smeared fangs.
Dylan was more than insane. He had become a monster.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
Monk pulled his car to a squealing stop, one tire up onto the curb. He was out and running across the pavement and up the steps, crashing through the door, and ran up the stairs. He stopped on the third floor and stared at the hall, half dreading to see yet another body swinging from the pipes. The hall was empty, though. Yellow crime scene tape hung limp around the ladder.
Monk went over to Hoto’s apartment, tried the door handle, found it locked.
“Fuck it,” he said and kicked it in.
The place was a mess, proof that the crime scene people and detectives had been through every inch of it. They hadn’t cleaned anything up, though. The words were still on the walls, and the blood was still spattered on the floor. Monk knelt, removed a vial from his pocket, used his knife to scrape some of it up, then took his small bottle of holy water from his kit and added the seven drops. He replaced the stopper, shook it to mix the contents, and put it away.
Then he left the apartment, pausing only long enough to wipe his fingerprints from the doorknob.
He started toward the steps to go back down, then glanced up. The mailboxes downstairs listed Joplin as being on the fourth floor. Maybe he would have information about how to contact Rain’s friends in the Cracked World Society. He went up, found the right door, and knocked.
“Joplin!” he yelled. “Open up. I’m a friend of Rain’s. I need to find her. Open up.”
There was no answer. On impulse, he tried the knob, and it turned. Monk leaned in and was about to call out again. And stopped.
There was a big canvas on an easel in the center of the room and several other canvases scattered around like they’d been blown by a wind. Or hurled. Paints covered everything. The canvases, the floor, the walls, the furniture, the ceiling. Everything was covered in fresh paint. Not random spattering but images. Artwork. Rain was there. Beautiful as an angel, lying sprawled in a chair made from blocks of color. Her eyes were the most realistically painted part of her, and they were unfocused and dead. Not merely junkie’s eyes but eyes that had lost the ability to see even the narcotic light inside drugged dreams. They were dead eyes in a living face. And Monk had seen that before. In the eyes of slave children in third-world
countries. In old women who had outlived husbands and children. In child soldiers in Africa and Asia. It was a hopelessness so acute that it stabbed him.
The other faces on the walls were strangers to Monk, but probably not to Joplin. Two of them might have been parents; a pretty woman might have been a sister. Others. Their faces were animated as if talking, laughing, living; but in each of them the eyes were dead.
And so were the eyes of the young bearded man who sat in the overstuffed chair that was positioned in front of the canvas. He sat there, pale and still, eyes open and empty, and all his colors leaked from the deep cuts torn in Joplin’s wrists.
Monk exhaled slowly and squatted down beside the chair, unable to bear his own weight of grief. He put his face in his hands and listened to the screams in his head.
Six seconds later, the phone rang. He did not recognize the number.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m calling for Gerald Addison,” said an officious female voice.
“Speaking.”
“Are you a friend or relative of a Miss Lorraine Thomas?”
Monk’s heart went cold. “Why? Has something happened to her?”
“I’m an emergency room intake nurse at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in—”
“I know it. What happened to Rain Thomas?”
“Your business card was on her person. This is the only number we had. Miss Thomas has been in a serious accident,” said the nurse. “Do you know if she has any family in the area?”
On impulse, Monk said, “I’m her family.”
He said it as he was running for the door.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN
Dylan slammed into Rain and drove her down with such force that the whole world flickered. For one split moment, she was not in the park in the Fire Zone—she was on the street, covered in glass and blood. Sirens filled the air, and the flashing of the red hand was replaced with the blue and red of emergency vehicle lights.
Pain owned her in both worlds.
Hands were on her in both. She could feel the clawing, grasping animalistic hands of her ruined son; but she could also feel the strong, kind, desperate hands of firefighters and EMTs trying to pull her from the wreckage of …
Of what?
She tried to turn her head to see, and there was a microflash of the Red Rocket crumpled around her, torn and dead, with smoke curling up and fluids leaking out. She turned to see Sticks crushed inside a fist made of torn steel, his eyes open and empty.
Then Dylan grabbed her throat, and she was snapped back to the darkened park, on cold grass, being murdered. His fingers were like bands of ice around her throat, and she tried to bash them away, twist them, tear at them. It was like fighting a statue. His muscles were rigid, and he was on top of her, using his weight—however meager—to push his hands down, to crush the life from her.
“Dylan … please … don’t…” Each word came out faint, choked to a whisper.
The words seemed to hit him like slaps. His eyes cleared for a moment, with the insanity being replaced by something else. Hurt.
“You threw me away like trash,” he said in the coldest voice Rain had ever heard. “Junkie whore has an inconvenient little piglet and throws him to the dogs. Fucking bitch.”
“No!” she cried. “No, I—”
He let go with one hand and struck her a savage blow across the face. Blood and broken teeth sprayed onto the grass.
“You gave me to the monsters,” he said in a fierce whisper, bending low to spit the words at her. “Do you have any idea what they did to me?”
He hit her again.
“My whole life?”
Hit.
“Raised by monsters.”
Hit.
Rain sagged down, bleeding heavily, trapped in a world of pain. There was something wrong with her left eye, then she realized that the glasses were still on, though the side pieces were twisted out of shape and the sharp end of the temple piece gouged into her brow. The cracked lens was shifted over, and now she was forced to look through the fragment and to see the world more fully—in all its horrible reality. She saw the face of this version of her son. Not the Dylan of her dreams, and not the terrified boy on the train. Not the shifty-eyed version glimpsed on the street in Manhattan or the sad-eyed Dylan she’d seen outside of Joplin’s apartment. This version of her son was older, definitely closer to thirteen. Now she could see the facial bluing of adolescent beard and the harder lines of his face. He was much more like Noah, except a Noah driven mad by all that he had experienced, driven to the edge of hope and then over into personal darkness. Rain could see all that now. This was what her son would become; it was the impact point along the line of trajectory his life had taken since she’d given him up. This was truly the monster version of him. Corrupted, broken, emptied of optimism and love. A shell, a golem made of nothing but dirt and hatred. His face was the face of the boy in the morgue.
Nightbirds flapped around the boy as he raised his fist one final time, ready to kill her and by doing it, kill them both. Then the air was shattered by the roar of a car engine.
Doctor Nine is coming, thought Rain’s dying brain. He’s here. My boy is bringing him through. This is my fault. I failed and this is all my fault.
Her inner voice spoke in the same voice as the parasite, and in a moment of clarity that was coming too late to save her, Rain realized that there was never any difference between them.
The car engine suddenly roared louder. Too loud. Headlights smashed across the scene, turning skin white and blood black. Dylan turned, a smile of dark triumph blossoming on his hard mouth, as if to say, See what I’ve done, Doctor? See what a good boy I am?
“Rain!”
A man’s voice called her name. Dylan’s smile faltered, and Rain looked past her son’s cocked fist to see the grille of a huge car. Blood red with yellow lines running along its sides and the words The Red Rocket painted in fiery letters. The car slewed to a stop six feet away, and the driver’s door flew open and Sticks stepped out.
Sticks.
Tall and powerful, his brown skin unmarked by burns, his legs strong and his arms corded with muscle. Sticks, whole and young and alive.
Come to save her.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
Monk called the hospital and said that he was Rain’s older brother. The nurse took his information and, using the kind of careful verbiage they’re trained for in sensitivity classes, told him that she was in critical condition and invited him to come and “be with her.”
They never put it that way when things were good. Or even carefully optimistic.
Monk did not go to the hospital. Instead, he drove to the tattoo parlor to see Patty Cakes. The vials of blood rattled in his pocket.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE
“Leave her alone,” said Sticks, his voice stronger than Rain had ever heard it. Confident, filled with power and command.
Dylan raised his head and studied Sticks.
“Sticksssssss,” he hissed, drawing it out like a reptile. “I know you.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“Oh, yes,” said Dylan, his voice strangely old. “I remember watching you burn.”
Sticks paused, his face registering surprise. “What?”
“What?” said Rain at the same time.
Dylan grinned like a jackal. “Oh, yesssssss. I remember watching your black skin bubble and blister. I saw it run like tallow as the fire danced along it.”
It was almost Doctor Nine’s voice, but not quite. The voice of one of his creatures. A shadowy voice, starved and awful.
“Sticks … what is he talking about?” asked Rain.
Dylan looked at his mother and back to Sticks. His eyes brightened. “You didn’t tell her, did you?”
“Shut up,” said Sticks.
Through the cracked lenses of the reading glasses, the driver looked at least ten years younger, a man of twenty or so. A pair of silver dog tags hung around his neck.
&nbs
p; Dylan touched his own face, placing his fingers beneath his eyes. “I have my father’s eyes,” he said. “Ask my mom. I can see everything my father ever saw. I saw what you did.”
“Shut up,” Sticks repeated. “You don’t see shit.”
“Did you think that by finding my mother and being her friend you could atone?”
“I didn’t go looking,” said Sticks, his voice losing its edge. “I was called. I … just found her there.”
“Tell her the truth,” said Dylan.
“Sticks,” asked Rain, “what’s he saying? What’s he mean?”
“Tell her, Corporal Alexander Stickley,” taunted Dylan. “Go ahead and tell her what my eyes have seen. Go ahead and tell her about the last thing my father’s eyes ever saw.”
Rain looked at her friend. “Sticks?”
Sticks said nothing, but as he stood there, he changed again. His skin turned a dark red and then began to bubble as blisters rose all along his arms and face. The blisters swelled and popped, seeding the air with a fine pink mist. His hair melted away, and he staggered back, reaching for support as his legs twisted and withered and died.
As he fell, a shape rose around him. It was not quite real, not solid, but Rain could see all of it. It was a vehicle, an army Humvee. Fifteen feet long, tan, with heavy armor plates. As soon as it appeared, it lifted on a balloon of explosive force, crashed over on its side, and burst into flames. The troops inside tried to escape, but the doors were jammed shut. Their screams rose to ungodly howls as the fire from the land mine touched them with yellow fingers and turned them each into a blazing torch. One man, the driver, crawled out of the vehicle, his skin and clothes on fire, his legs shattered and melting. He rolled over and over in the sand to try to douse the blaze.
Inside the Humvee, visible for a moment through the window, was a young man with kind eyes filled now with terror, and brown hair that flickered like a candle. He screamed and screamed and beat on the window for as long as he could, until the smoke and flames consumed him. The Humvee burned and burned, and then it faded, leaving the air smudged with soot and cries. The driver was all that was left, and he lay on the ground where Sticks had fallen. One and the same.