Dylan turned to Rain. “You didn’t know, did you? Didn’t even suspect?”
All she could do was shake her head as she stared down at Sticks.
“You just happen to meet a veteran who was burned when his vehicle ran over a mine. A coincidence? And he knew about the Fire Zone? He found you on Boundary Street? All of that a coincidence? God, Mom, I’m only a kid, but I’m not that stupid.”
“No … it’s impossible…”
“Impossible died when you gave me up,” sneered Dylan. “Now everything is possible, and that means all the bad things, too. You gave up on me and on everything and invited Doctor Nine in, Mommy, and he brought with him all his favorite shadows.”
Sticks appeared even worse than he had at the diner. His burns were raw and glistening, and Rain realized this was how Sticks looked when he was first injured. It was awful to see. And yet she did not move to help him. The things Dylan said battered her with all the uncompromising force of truth. This man had known Noah. He had driven the Humvee that terrible day. He had rolled over an IED. He had crawled to safety while the other soldiers burned. While Noah—beautiful, kind, gentle Noah—had burned.
While her son’s father had burned and screamed and died.
“As attempts at redemption,” said Dylan, still speaking with a voice beyond his years, “this one was pathetic. No actual plan. Certainly no skills. A crispy-critter cripple in a big, shiny car. There’s not even a country-western song in that.” He leaned over and spat on Sticks. “Because of you, I never had a chance, did I?”
Unable to wipe the spittle away, Sticks looked up at the boy-thing. “I … I’m sorry.”
Dylan kicked him in the face. Hideously fast, brutally powerful, the whole side of Sticks’s face collapsed, and teeth flew through the air.
“No!” screeched Rain, lunging forward to get between them.
Dylan backhanded her, mashing already torn skin, dimming the lights. She reeled against the grille of the Red Rocket.
“Oh, don’t worry, Mommy. I haven’t forgotten about you. Your moment is coming. Our moment is coming. But first I need to—”
Sticks suddenly darted out a hand and clamped scorched fingers around Dylan’s ankle. The boy yelped in surprise and pain, and steam rose from the dying driver’s grip. There was a sound like sizzling flesh, and the cuffs of Dylan’s dirty jeans began to blacken.
“Let me go!” cried Dylan.
“R-Rain,” gasped Sticks. “Run.”
Balancing on his trapped leg, Dylan raised his other foot and kicked Sticks over and over again.
Rain pushed away from the car, turned to run.
Almost ran. Took a step.
Did not run. Instead, with a howl of grief, she flung herself at Dylan and wrapped her arms around him. Unbalanced and surprised, Dylan fell. Rain held on as they fell. Sticks did not let go, either. The three of them were caught in a strange and terrifying dance. The blackened trousers popped with yellow fingers of fire and they raced along the material so fast it was as if Dylan were doused with accelerant. His legs blazed, and still Rain held on. Dylan screamed and thrashed, and still Rain held on. He head-butted her and bit her with his fangs, rending her, and still Rain held on. He spat at her as the flames marched over his clothes and dug down into the skin beneath, and still Rain clung to her son. Even when the flames spread to her body, her clothes, her hair, she never let go.
And they all burned together.
CHAPTER NINETY
“You’re insane,” said Patty. “I won’t do it.”
Monk sat on a stool, stripped to the waist, face still running with rainwater. The two vials lay on his hard palm.
“You’re telling me all kinds of stories,” she growled. “Crazy shit. The kid’s little, then he’s ten, then he’s a dead thirteen-year-old? How’s that work?”
“Fuck if I know,” Monk admitted. “Rain thinks they’re all the same kid. Her kid.”
“Who’s only supposed to be ten years old right now.”
“Yes.”
“So how’s he a thirteen-year-old in the morgue?”
“Was in the morgue.”
“Oh, right,” she said, “someone stole his body and burned it. That makes it all make sense.”
“Look,” said Monk, “this is some mystical bullshit. Not sure how the time thing works with the kid, but I believe Rain’s right. This is her son. He’s alive now and he’s going to kill himself in two or three years.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Closest I can come to a theory is something Jonatha Corbiel said,” he explained. “If this Doctor Nine is an essential vampire who feeds on hope, and if Dylan was born to be some kind of spiritual leader, what she called an ‘ascended master,’ who reignites hope when it’s burning out of the world, then Doctor Nine wouldn’t just want to kill him. No. If he’s had the kid all these years, then it would make more sense to ruin him, corrupt him, but also break his heart. Who knows, maybe he’s been force-fed a lot of propaganda about his mother abandoning him. Maybe the kid’s Hannibal Lecter Junior by now. Maybe, but I don’t think so. He started showing up in Rain’s visions as a younger version of himself and maybe as he is now. The older version is the one who killed himself, so it would seem that we’re getting close to the point where maybe Dylan loses hope in himself. Or in his mom. Or in everything. Not sure. If he killed himself, or if he is going to, then we can suppose he bottomed out, right?”
“And you believe all this?” asked Patty. “It doesn’t make sense. It can’t be real.”
Monk touched one of the faces on his chest. “Does this? Does what you do? Or me?”
Patty picked up the first vial. “Still not all blood, though.”
“Maybe there’s enough.”
“Even if there is, wouldn’t that trap the kid? Let’s face it, Monk, the ghosts who ‘hire’ you,” she said, using fingers to make air quotes, “don’t exactly pass on to eternal peace. They’re stuck with you and you with them. Is that what you want for the kid?”
“The kid’s still alive, Patty. Maybe it won’t work like that. And we have Hoto’s blood, too.”
“You don’t know that, Monk. You can’t.”
He gave her a bleak stare and a smile without a trace of humor. “What choice do we have?”
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
Rain burned, but she did not die.
The flames hurt so badly, so insanely badly, but if this was what Noah felt in his last moments, then she would bear it and die and become ash. Like he was ash. Like her life was ash. Dylan thrashed wildly, but the fires seemed to burn him worst of all. His skin withered and melted and flickered to the night. She held him. All the time she did, as they burned together, mother and son, she whispered the same thing over and over again. Not an apology. There had been enough of those to bury them both under a mile of dead rock. No. As they died, she kissed her son’s charred flesh and said the only words that could be heard through the roar of fire.
“I love you,” she said. They burned and burned.
And then the flames flicked and faded. Sticks was gone, leaving only a smear of ash. Dylan lay within the iron circle of Rain’s arms. He was so frail now, weightless. The fires faded out, and Rain lay there, bleeding from where she had been beaten but not burned. The fires had raged, but they had not consumed her.
It was Dylan who was gone. He was there only for a moment longer, a pale shadow made of hate. Then he crumbled into hot ashes in her arms and the winds blew every trace of him away. Rain put her hands over her eyes and begged to die.
She heard a sound.
A long, insistent, frantic beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
And a voice, a stranger’s voice, said very clearly, “We’re losing her. I need a crash cart.”
What a funny thought, mused Rain. How can they lose me when I’m already lost?
CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
Rain opened her eyes up and expected to see nurses and doctors clustered around, fighting to save her life.
She did no
t. Instead, she looked up into the gentle eyes of Caster Bootey. He was sitting on the park bench, and she lay with her head on his thigh. Her skin felt hot, though, and she looked down to see that she was covered with ash.
“Oh … my … God.”
Caster lifted her into his arms, held her as she bucked and sobbed.
“My dear young woman,” he said softly, “be strong. You are so close to understanding everything. I know it’s hard for you to believe me. It’s hard to hear through the pain.”
“Dylan!” she wailed. “I’ve lost him!”
“No,” he said, “you have not.”
Rain pushed off and looked up at him. “What?”
“That wasn’t your Dylan, and you know it.”
“It was!”
“No,” said Caster, “it will be. It may be. Things are running fast in that direction, but that boy, that animal of a thing with Dylan’s face, is years away. He is not yet born. Not into that life. Doctor Nine owns that creature, but he does not yet own your son.”
“I … don’t understand.”
“Then listen while I whisper a secret to you.”
She tried to listen. She tried so hard.
But someone yelled, “Clear!”
And a huge white bomb blew her out of the world.
CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
“Mrs. Creighton-Thomas?” said the nurse. “I’m calling from…”
There was more. Alyson listened to it without comment. The accident. The condition of her daughter, the damage done. It was all about damage done. She listened and sipped her vodka and stared at the child dancing on the TV screen.
“I think you should come to the hospital to be with her,” said the nurse. “She is—”
Alyson hung up the phone, reached out a languid hand, and scooped the five white pills from the end table, put them into her mouth, swallowed them with vodka.
There were five more. And there was more vodka. The phone rang again, but she did not care to answer it.
She did not care.
CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
Rain stood on the street.
No park bench, no park. No Caster Bootey, no Sticks. No birds. No Dylan. Only her, standing outside of Torquemada’s. The heavy doors stood ever so slightly ajar, enough to allow a whisper of the Music to seep out and fill the darkness around her. She thought she knew the name of the song even though she’d never heard it before. The Music was like that. It shared so many things with people who listened the right way.
Rain felt that something in her had changed. She could hear more levels of the Music than she had in any of her dreams. That’s because you’re dead, whispered her parasite.
If that were the case, then this level of awareness might be worth it.
The door handles wanted to be touched, to be pulled, to yield to her need. The doors wanted to open and let her in. The Music and the dance floor waited just inside. Beautiful, mad, swirling, hungry. Hers. If she took that step.
She had a thought. It isn’t a light people follow when they die. It’s the Music. That was true, she considered, but not completely true. She did not yet have the whole thing worked out in her head. Was the Fire Zone heaven? No. That seemed wrong. Too shallow an answer. Too corny. Was it even an afterlife, maybe a secular one? No, not that, either.
The Fire Zone, she decided, was the Fire Zone. Complete in itself, requiring no more specific a definition. She touched the glasses she still wore. They were no longer damaged from the fight. Rain turned her head and looked through the crack, then turned around and looked out at the Fire Zone behind her. It was not the Fire Zone at all. She was in a crowd scene. Nurses, doctors, people yelling, machines whining. She tried to speak, but her mouth was blocked.
There were three other people in the room with the medical staff, but no one seemed to notice them. Or maybe it was that the hospital staff could not see them. The trio stood apart, unnoticed, unmoving. The Japanese man, Mr. Hoto. Sticks. And Dylan. Not the thirteen-year-old Dylan but a younger one. Eight or nine, dressed in baggy clothes and standing with a skateboard tucked under his arm.
The problem was that she could see right through all three of them. Like they were ghosts. Or maybe that’s what she was becoming. Maybe only the dead could see the dead.
Something moved outside, and she turned to look out the window. A black bird landed on the outside sill. Ugly and dirty and dead.
“Oh, God,” she breathed. “They’re coming.”
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
Monk stared at himself in the mirror. He was stripped to the waist and pasted with sweat and blood. His torso and arms were covered with faces, including the new one on his chest.
It was not exactly a face, though. It was faces. Two of them, overlapping, merging, and yet retaining their identities. Patty had cell phone pictures to work from. A dead boy in a morgue. A dead man hanging from a rope. Her needle drilled the ink into Monk’s skin, in that one empty place over his heart where he once told her he would never get a tattoo. A place he’d been superstitious about ever covering. The ink was cold, but it still burned. It felt like frostbite.
He tried to take a step toward the chair where he’d left his shirt, but his knees buckled and he went down hard.
“Help … help me up,” he gasped. Monk was a big man, Patty Cakes was a small woman, but they managed. When Monk was back on his feet, Patty pushed him against the wall so he wouldn’t fall. She dabbed the blood away and then helped him pull on his T-shirt and zip up his hoodie.
“You should rest,” she said.
“I can’t,” he wheezed.
“I know,” said Patty. She rose to tiptoes and kissed him gently on the lips. He took her in his arms and held her with all the strength he had, burying his head in the soft cleft formed by her shoulder and neck. Then he staggered away from her. His eyes were glazed, unfocused, filled with pain.
“You can’t drive like this,” she said, then she recoiled from him as his expression changed. First to amazement, and then to awe, and then to a mingled mask of horror and anger.
He pushed past her, his words blurred into a cry of inarticulate madness as he blundered out into the storm.
CHAPTER NINETY-SIX
A nurse came in, saw that Rain was awake, asked inane and ordinary questions, then ran off to find a doctor. A cute Pakistani doctor who looked like he was sixteen came hurrying in. He asked the same questions and Rain gave the same answers.
Then she asked, “My friend was driving the car. His name is Sticks. Alexander Stickley?”
She let it trail off because their faces became wooden.
“I’m so very sorry,” said the doctor, “but Mr. Stickley did not survive the accident.”
Rain closed her eyes, and there was a tiny flicker of satisfaction that the man who had killed Noah had died the same way. Burning in a crushed metal box. It was an ugly thing to be happy about.
“How bad am I?” she asked.
The faces remained wooden, and it took the young doctor a while to decide how to break the news. Rain braced herself, knowing it was going to be bad. It wasn’t. It was worse.
He talked and she listened, and it was a description of how her life, as she knew it, was done. Multiple fractures—pelvis in five places, left femur, both tibias, right fibula, ribs, various and assorted smaller bones. Damage to liver, spleen, and right kidney. Damage to lower intestine. Damage to uterus. Heart failure.
He kept reciting the list. The nurse looked like she wanted to flee.
Rain listened to it all and did not weep. She did not scream or protest. Maybe that was the drugs in her system. Maybe she had reached a point of acceptance where having her body destroyed was not only inevitable, it was appropriate. With enough damage, maybe it would finally be okay for her to simply cash it in, buy a ticket for the night train and see what the next incarnation had to offer. Had to be something better than this. Besides, dying here was still better than dying in a crack house.
Rain took a chance. “Has
anyone called my mother?”
“Yes,” said the nurse, though her eyes slid away.
“Is she coming?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll, um, check with the intake nurse. But … your brother said he was coming over.”
“My brother?”
“Sure, Gerald?”
“Oh,” said Rain. “Fine. That’s fine.”
Then the nurse brightened. “Oh, and you’ll be happy to know the EMTs were able to salvage your glasses. The lenses are cracked, but not bad. They’re in pretty good shape. We can have someone contact your optometrist to get a new pair.” She opened a drawer in the bedside table. “Do you want to put them on or…?”
“Yes,” said Rain. “Please.”
The nurse helped her because Rain’s hands were swollen into angry red sausages. The nurse and doctor said some more useless things and left. The door swung shut on silent hinges. As it closed, it revealed a figure who had been waiting for them to leave. It was a little boy of about ten. He was thin and dirty, but beautiful. He smiled at her.
“Hello, Mommy,” said Dylan.
CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN
Monk knew that he had no business operating heavy machinery in his condition. He could barely see the streets, and it wasn’t because of the rain. The tattoos on his skin had begun to come alive, and there was a war going on inside his head. Or his soul. He had never been able to determine which it was.
Before, starting back when he got the very first face inked onto him, it had been a very personal thing. One ghost. One set of memories. One need for some kind of justice. Not vengeance. Justice. He never accepted the cases from ghosts who simply wanted payback—that kind of thing was a dead-end proposition with no way for anyone to win. Stopping serial murderers, though, that was why Monk took the risks he took, even though the cost was a real prick.