“I know you did, baby. I believe you, don’t worry.”
“She didn’t care,” he went on. “She had this whole fantasy about me loving her, wanting her. She thought. . . . It was crazy. I don’t even know how to tell you.”
Grace nodded her understanding. She couldn’t speak anymore. The tears had overwhelmed her.
He opened his mouth again, trying to think how he could ever explain to her what had happened next, his metamorphosis, how Margo had died. He was just about to stumble on, just about to try to find a way to break the rest of the terrible truth to her. . . .
But here—as he approached the very core of the matter—as he stepped into the center of the whirlwind he had created for them—a strange thing happened.
He solved the case of Dominic Abend. He realized where he could find the man. And he knew what he had to do.
It was Grace—she was the last piece of the puzzle. It was seeing her in that new light that helped him understand the rest. It was Grace and her choices and the body of Angela Bose, bloodless and withered nearly to the bone, and that shifting thing that had approached him in the forest, in the heart of the storm, a few hours ago, that mutating presence and its incomprehensible mutter, which was a darkness beyond the world speaking into his own mind, and the echo of his own mind answering. He remembered Imogen’s words: A force that can’t become real without a human will to embody it. And that made him think about Goulart, how Goulart had snapped at him: You think that lowlife Kraut piece of shit has enough money to buy me with? Which brought him back to Grace, who had said of Goulart: There comes a time in a person’s life when doing wrong just makes perfect sense to him. That’s when the Enemy can make his move on him.
Grace’s choices, the will she embodied, the voice in the woods, Goulart’s choices . . . in a cascade of simultaneous deductions, Zach realized what Goulart had done and where Abend was waiting for him. He knew what would happen next, and he knew that he, Zach—he alone—was the only person alive who could stop it, the only man on earth who could destroy this near-eternal gangster before the force he had unleashed spread everywhere and corrupted everything.
He understood that the job was his alone to do and that, if he was going to succeed, he had to do it now. There was one more night of the full moon, the final night for Abend to use the dagger before its power deserted him, the final night for Zach to heal the rift in reality through which the evil had come, to bring the wolf and the dagger back together again and finally end them both. He knew where he had to go, and there was only just enough time for him to get there. With the storm, with the traffic, with the rush hour, it might already be too late. But he had to try. Alone. Right now.
He was still looking at Grace, his lips parted, the unbelievable truth of Margo’s death on the tip of his tongue. She had lowered her eyes to her picture frame. Her tears were falling onto the glass. They seeped into the crack and ran along the line of it. Outside, the rain fell harder. A gust of wind made it splatter against the windows.
Time was passing. Night was coming. The moon. He had to go.
He sat down at the table beside her. He took her hand again, held it in both his hands this time, as she’d held his.
“Listen to me, Grace. There’s more to say between us, I know. A lot more. But I can’t say it now.”
Sobbing, she looked up at him. She shook her head again, bewildered, forlorn.
“I have to leave here,” he said. “I know where Dominic Abend is—or where he’s going to be.”
Grace drew herself up, taking a large breath, steadying.
“If I’m lucky and fast, I’m going to meet him there,” Zach went on. “If I’m very lucky and very fast, I’m going to kill him.”
Fighting back her tears, Grace managed to nod.
He went on: “And if I don’t come back—”
“Zach!” she said, her voice shuddering.
“If I don’t come back. . . . There’s only one thing you need to know, okay? One thing you always have to remember.” He held her hand in his. She waited, crying. He swallowed hard. “I don’t have the words to tell you what you are to me, all you are. But it’s everything,” he said. “If I could reach into the past. . . .” He shook his head, choked up. That wasn’t what he wanted to say. He continued: “Just . . . don’t ever for a second . . . if you’re alone, or if it’s the night and you’re awake, thinking about things . . . if I’m not here anymore—”
“No. . . .”
“If I’m not here. Don’t you ever for a second believe that I ever loved any other woman but you. You understand me? Don’t you believe that, Grace. Because that would be a damned lie. That would be. . . .” He couldn’t continue. He merely gripped her hand harder.
Then he stood up. “I’m so sorry,” he managed to say again.
Without another word, he turned away from her and walked through the living room to the door.
“Don’t you let that man hurt you, baby!” Grace cried out behind him, her voice ravaged with tears. She stood up so fast, her chair fell over with a clatter. She raised her fist at him. “Don’t you let that bad man hurt you!”
Zach walked out of the house into the rain.
30
WINDWARD
In the Crown Vic, behind the wheel, Zach fed Goulart’s number into the tracking app on his phone. It was no good. Goulart was offline. That figured. But it didn’t matter. He knew where his partner was going.
Windward Mansion. It was a ruin north of the city, in the woods above the Hudson River. Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell had told him about it back when all this started. Goulart had made several trips there in the middle of the night, she said. She had thought he was using it as a message drop. But that wasn’t it. And nothing Goulart had said about his illness could explain those visits either.
Because he was going there to meet Abend. It was their contact place, their rendezvous. That was the only scenario that made sense. And if that’s where they met, if that was their spot, then that was where Abend would be tonight—because tonight the gangster would be meeting Goulart one last time to pay him what he owed.
The moon would come up about forty minutes later tonight than last night. That meant there were about two and half hours until moonrise. On a good day, with no traffic, the drive to Windward would be two hours long at least. But the storm had snarled the highways—Zach had seen it on the drive back from Connecticut. He wasn’t sure he could make the journey in time. And he felt a strangling fear of what would happen if the moon caught him before he got there.
He used the traffic gizmo on his phone to chart his course. He used the Kojak light and the siren to clear the way. The flasher and the noise carved out stretches of space for him on the passing lane of the Throgs Neck Bridge. The East River and Long Island Sound clashed black and turbulent below him as the Crown Vic raced past the trudging parade of home-bound cars. Not as bad as he’d feared it would be. Still another half hour before the rush began in earnest. He had that much going for him, at least.
Out of the city, the traffic got better, but the storm grew worse. The lightning and thunder returned full force, and for long stretches the rain dropped in enormous gobbets that exploded on the windshield and seemed to melt the view into a blurred, running mess. Zach kept his foot heavy on the gas. He never touched the brake. On the Hutchinson River Parkway, he hit puddles of flood where the water arced up from either side of the car like silver wings and the tires hydroplaned and lost all traction. He felt the car sledding out of control, but he never slowed. Somehow, the tires caught again before the winding road wound away from him. The light flashing, the siren screaming, the Crown Vic raced on.
His phone buzzed where it lay on the passenger seat. The readout told him it was Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell. He didn’t answer. Rebecca was redeemed in his eyes now. She was self-serious and political, but honest, untouched by Abend. She had sniffed out Goulart’s corruption and tried to bring him down. She’d had plenty of personal grudges to spur her on, but
she’d been in the right of it and that’s what counted in the end. Still, he let the phone buzz on. Only he could do this. Anyone else would only be in the way. It was better to trust no one now. Better, in fact, to stay off the air.
He reached to turn his phone off so he couldn’t be tracked, but before he did, it buzzed again. Goulart this time. Back online. That surprised him. His partner must be getting nervous, wondering where Zach was.
Zach picked the phone up. Keeping half an eye on the rain-drenched windshield, he called up his own tracking app. It found Goulart—on the same highway, about twenty miles behind him. Good, he thought. He turned his phone off, even as Goulart tried to call him again. He thought: We’ll meet soon enough, face to face.
By this time, the lightning was striking over and over rapidly. The sky lit up everywhere, flickered and went dark, and flickered again. The thunder crashed so massively, it made the car rattle. And the rain, which already seemed to be falling harder than rain could ever fall, fell harder yet. Now too, after a while, when the lightning struck, when the flickering ended, the sky was darker than it had been before. Night was near.
And now the ghosts returned.
He saw them out there in the darkening rain. Dim figures, barely discernible through the dusk and downpour. They watched him pass with mournful expressions and haunted eyes. Once, as the dusk imperceptibly died into the night, as the car’s interior, lit only by the dashboard’s green-blue lights, became difficult to see, he sensed a presence near him. He smelled that nauseating mingled stench of rotting meat and cigarette smoke. He glanced up in the mirror, expecting to see dead eyes staring back at him. Instead, he saw nothing but the backseat shadows. He glanced over at the passenger seat. Nothing but the shadows there as well.
And just then, the lightning struck and Gretchen Dankl was beside him. She was visible only for an instant but, in that instant, he saw her gaze at him with tragic sorrow. She was confessing with her eyes what he had already guessed out in the woods earlier that day: that she had failed—that all the werewolves over the last three and a half centuries had failed—because they feared to succeed. They did not want to reclaim the dagger. They did not want to end the curse. The consequences were too terrible. They were too afraid to face them.
And so they had left the job unfinished. They had left it for him.
Then the flickering lightning snapped out, and there was nothing in the passenger seat but the shadows again.
He drove on through the rain and the darkness.
As he left the Taconic State Parkway, he turned off his siren. He buzzed down the window, reached out into the rain, and pulled his flasher in, tossing it on the floor. He wanted to travel the last miles inconspicuously, approach the mansion in secret. He drove along one wooded two-lane, then another. His headlights turned the downpour silver. Lightning etched the tangled shapes of naked autumn trees, their branches tormented by the high winds.
There were no signs leading to the mansion, but he knew the way. He turned off the last two-lane onto a rutted road. The road wound upward, deeper and deeper into the storm-tossed forest. Nothing here but trees around him—swaying trees and rain and lightning—and the climbing macadam full of cracks and divots. The Crown Vic bounced and rattled over the broken pavement, making its way upward.
In the black and chaos of it all, he nearly missed the trailhead, but a violent flash picked it out of the darkness just before he passed it.
There was a wide dirt fire road that led off the damaged macadam and up into the woods. A diamond-link fence blocked the way. The fence was held shut with a padlocked chain. Zach drove past it and continued a few dozen yards, traveling slowly until he spotted a turnout. He stopped then. He brought the Crown Vic around in a three-point turn until he was facing back the way he’d come. Then he slid into the turnout, edging the car as close to the tree line as he could get it.
The turnout was overhung by swaying oak branches. The car huddled under them and under the darkness of the night. Zach killed the lights. Killed the engine. He did not think Goulart would see him there, not unless he was on the lookout for him.
He took off his seatbelt. Twisted around to reach into the back seat. He got ahold of his plastic raincoat. In the tight space behind the wheel, he had to struggle to get the coat on. When he was done, he fetched a flashlight out of the glove compartment. He held the flashlight on his lap and waited.
The rain thundered on the Crown Vic’s roof. He had gotten here in good time. He still had more than twenty minutes left before the crisis. He sat and felt the minutes going by in an electric silence. The silence was worse to him—more suspenseful—than a ticking clock. It was as if the seconds were sneaking past him unseen. Sixteen minutes to moonrise. Fifteen. Zach sat still. As the minutes dwindled, his heartbeat grew louder and kept the time for him, but that was just as bad as the silence, maybe worse.
A rumble of thunder and then, finally, a double smear of white on the Crown Vic’s rain-drenched windshield. Headlights. Goulart. Zach watched him approach. He couldn’t see the make of the oncoming car, but he guessed it was his partner’s own Camaro. It slowed as it reached the trailhead. Stopped.
Zach held his breath. Had Goulart spotted him? No, he just had to get out of the car to unlock the gate, that’s all. Zach sat very still and watched. Goulart’s headlights illuminated the wash and play of rainfall on the windshield. Through the moving sheet of water, Zach saw the driver’s door of the Camaro swing open. The lights inside the car went on. He could make out Goulart’s shadow, washed to liquid by the running liquid on the glass. And he saw too the blurry shadow of his passenger.
The fact that Goulart had not come here alone surprised him for only a second. Then, with a subtle wave of nausea, he understood. This was Goulart’s offering, his part of the bargain. This was what he was bringing to the sacrifice: the dagger’s next victim.
A second more, and Zach knew who it was—or, that is, he guessed who it was and then he saw and knew for sure. Because now she lit a cigarette—and at the same moment, the rain ran heavily down the Crown Vic’s windshield and for that moment the view half-cleared and the orange flame of the lighter clarified her face behind the Camaro’s ticking wipers.
Imogen Storm. Of course. That was why Goulart had moved so quickly to seduce her. Not just because she was so young, her life force so powerful—unlike the homeless men and women Abend had settled for up till now—but she was dangerous too, a smart reporter who was getting close to the truth. Abend could silence her and refresh himself at the same time, keep his secret and go on living.
And Goulart would be healed by her blood. That’s what it was all about in the end. Life. Time. More life, more time. Goulart had spoken the truth: he would never have sold himself for money. He was too good a cop for that. But he was sick. He was terminal. He was desperate. And he believed in nothing, nothing that was worth dying for anyway. Why should he not then live? It was as Grace had said. In his hour of darkness, when doing what was wrong made perfect sense, he had had nothing to keep him from corruption.
Zach sat still in the deep shadows behind the Crown Vic’s wheel. The match-light played over Imogen’s pixie features, her turned-up nose, her short, nearly blue-black hair. Zach was touched by how young she was, how unconcerned and unafraid even here, even now, convinced and pacified by whatever Goulart had told her, probably already half in love with him, the only man who had ever believed her. Zach felt again how much he liked her, and it made his heart hurt.
Then she had her cigarette lit and the flame winked out and a fresh wave of rain poured down Zach’s windshield. Zach squinted through the rippling tide as Goulart returned to the car, as he dropped in next to Imogen and shut the door. The Camaro’s interior lights went off and both passengers vanished into the shadows. The car’s headlights began to move again. They turned and started up the dirt lane into the forest.
Zach sat for another moment. He watched as the glow of the car sank away into the bowing and sweeping trees—
watched until it was swallowed by the blackness of the storm.
Then he stepped out into the rain and followed on foot.
31
SACRIFICE
Even now, after all he’d seen of it, the force of the tempest surprised him. The wind drove at him hard from the side, nearly knocking him off balance. The rain lashed and stung his face and instantly drenched his clothes everywhere they weren’t covered by his raincoat: his shoes, the bottoms of his pants, the exposed cuff of his suit jacket. Soon, even his shirt was somehow clammy.
All the same, conscious of the time, he moved quickly. Goulart hadn’t relocked the gate. Zach went through, bent his body against the storm, and pushed into the woods.
The going was tough. The dirt road rose steadily. The hard-packed surface was soft with water, nearly mud. All around him, the wind gasped and howled with a voice like phantoms and pushed against him with phantom hands. The rain that soaked him thundered on the bare branches and on the fallen leaves. It left deep, dirty puddles all along the way, and brown streams that flooded the gutters. Lightning tore the sky. It showed the trees towering all around him, bending and swaying violently like orgiastic dancers. Thunder followed and shook the air as if with wrath. It drowned out every other sound—then died, and left only the thunder of the rain.
Head bent, teeth gritted, Zach followed the weak yellow beam of his flashlight up the road. It wasn’t a long way. The hill was not high. A few more minutes of bullying through the storm, and he broke out of the tree line into a scraggly clearing.
Though the night seemed black in these last minutes before moonrise, he could, in fact, make out the even darker shape of the ruin against the sky. Big—the mansion was really big and hulking and ominous. With a melodrama that melodrama wouldn’t dare to imitate, a single zigzagging bolt of lightning knifed the air behind the structure, and the whole scene was revealed: the surrounding of broken trees and half-grown scrub; the remains of fences standing slanted in the mud; the turrets and gables, arches and broken windows of the massive building itself—the whole ghostly array.