“Why would the Ontongard land their ship in upstate New York? Why not some place remote—like Africa?” Sam asked.
“Because Hex is in the United States, and doesn’t like to travel.” Ukiah finished the food and resealed the lid. “It puts him at mercy of the elements and human beings.”
“And there’s Niagara Falls for power,” Max said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Hoover Dam was their backup landing site.”
“Perhaps. But all hell lets loose in Pittsburgh. The Dog Warriors stumbled onto Hex’s plan and killed Janet Haze’s supervisor, who was a Get. Hex, in trying to salvage the plan, infected Janet Haze. She lost the remote key and got herself killed. Hex involved the FBI while trying to recover the key. Indigo raided several dens, and the Pack made sure those Gets stayed dead, leaving Hex shorthanded. All that means Hex probably pulled his Gets out of Buffalo, leaving the cult nothing to fight.”
“And we blow up the mother ship,” Max added. “And kill Hex, so everything goes quiet, as far as the cult is concerned.”
Ukiah nodded. “I think Core was planning to move to Butler already and might have been just waiting for Parity’s parents to clear out of their house. All things considered, I think Core sees Pittsburgh as the origin of the demons, not Oregon.”
Max stopped for a red light. “If your prey goes suddenly silent, I imagine you get fairly paranoid.”
It had the ring of profound truth. “Yes, I think you’re right. They mistranslate something Hex says to mean that the Ae can kill the demons en masse and that becomes Core’s top priority.”
Max glanced in the rearview mirror at him, a look full of worry. “Can they?”
“No. Trying to will only make the Ae more deadly, but Core doesn’t realize it.”
“Shit.”
“In the same conversation, the cult mistranslated ‘breeder’ to mean nephilim—the offspring of angels mating with humans.” Ukiah sagged back in the seat, trying to piece together the events. “Most likely, Gunter had a photo in a local newspaper, so they raided his studio for everything he shot that day and then some. The pictures found on Zip clearly showed that a baby was recovered from the airport terminal, which confirmed the nephilim theory in Core’s mind. He assumed that Kittanning was turned over to Child Youth Services.”
“With their skills,” Max said, “the cult could have hacked CYS for the list of infants in foster care without anyone being the wiser.”
Ukiah hadn’t thought of that, but it made sense. “But none of the CYS kids are listed as found abandoned at the airport. So Core decides to kidnap all kids under a certain age and test them using the machine Hex used to make Kittanning a baby. Then I came home and made the evening news. Core recognized me from the photos, Socket did a search to get my ‘home’ address, and Goodman was ordered to kidnap Kittanning.”
“Only Goodman decided to ransom Kittanning,” Sam said. “Which gets him killed.”
Ukiah nodded. “Goodman’s view of religion had nothing to do with demons and everything to do with his sexual obsessions, but he was broke and dependent on Core. The ransom would have given him the money he needed to leave Core. Sensing the double cross, Core had his people tap into the spy satellite and follow Goodman back to the farm.”
“That wouldn’t have been too hard to do if Goodman was in communication with Core,” Max said. “Once he called in to Core, they could have traced the call back to Goodman’s location and lock on to him.”
“After they got Kittanning,” Ukiah continued, “they tried to test him and he proved to be the one they were looking for by turning into a puppy.”
“A puppy!” Sam cried.
“A wolf dog puppy.” Ukiah measured the size with his hands. “So big.”
He told them about his failed attempt to rescue Kittanning and Hash’s comments about Kittanning being recaptured. “Socket is taking Kittanning to Core, wherever he is, so he can key the Du-ae and do this Cleansing ritual. Parity told me that it had something to do with water.”
“Well, the Allegheny River comes within twenty miles of Butler through the city of Kittanning,” Max said. “Or he could be setting up at Lake Arthur, or Lake Erie.”
Lake Arthur was a small man-made lake just west of Butler, and Lake Erie was just over an hour’s drive.
“Eve might know something,” Sam said.
“What?” Ukiah said.
“Think of it. Adam left everything he knew behind in California to join Core, and finds him fighting monsters. Pissed to hell, he breaks off with Core and tries to set up his own paradise. If he’s like any other divorcee in the world, he’s bitched like crazy to his new girlfriend about his ex.”
“Maggoty ideas,” Ukiah murmured, and then quoted back what Eve had said. “In prison, Billy had crazy ideas, but they were small as fly eggs. It wasn’t until these new friends of his filled him up with so much shit that the eggs became full maggots. But Goodman had that backward. It was Core filling his friends up with crazy plans.”
Ukiah replayed in his mind the conversation with Eve, the broken little sex toy in the blackberry bushes, bruises blackening to the color of ripe berries. Neither that discussion nor the one Ukiah had with Indigo after her questioning of Eve held any clues of where Core could be holding the ritual. At this time of night, there would be no accessing the girl either.
There had been so little evidence at the farm. The cult had carefully picked over everything and taken away anything damning. The only thing left behind had been the mural. As he considered, he started to see the biblical symbolism that he missed before: the tree of knowledge, the tempting snake, and the forbidden fruit. He considered the other images in the painting. The mysterious leaves had been wormwood. There had been information on the Temple’s Web site about the falling star called Wormwood. Ukiah realized that the “sun” in the upper left-hand corner had been a star, dropping the leaves of the plant of the same name down to the treelike object.
Suddenly Ukiah realized that the drawing hadn’t been of a tree, but of the three rivers, the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers joining to create the Ohio River. Only in the painting, the wormwood leaves turned the Allegheny black as death shortly before the confluence.
“They’re going to poison the Allegheny, which will take out the Ohio and the Mississippi, the whole way down to the Gulf of Mexico,” Ukiah said.
“What?” Max and Sam both cried.
Ukiah quoted back the Scripture related to the symbolism. “The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the water, because it was made bitter.”
Max made a face in the rearview mirror. “How do you figure any of that matches Pittsburgh and Du-ae?”
“I think,” Ukiah said slowly, feeling his way, “this is what Goodman and Core might have parted on. Core planned to poison the water and Goodman saw it as a reference to the End Days. Goodman seemed to think the end of the world was coming—that was the whole point of having the farm with its own water source and no dependence on the outside world.” Ukiah then explained the mural. “But Core didn’t seem to act like that. He was planning to ransom me after the ritual.”
“God save us from idiots,” Max muttered and then frowned. “Oh, shit, the Allegheny Water Authority treatment plant is on the Allegheny, right next to the Waterworks Mall.”
“Should we call the police?” Sam asked.
“We don’t have enough to call nine-one-one.” Max passed his phone back to Ukiah. “Call Indigo. She might be able to scramble someone to the treatment plant just on suspicions.”
Indigo’s phone rang and rang, frightening Ukiah, until she finally answered, shouting, “Special Agent Zheng.” In the background was the ceaseless roar of a big fire and a siren growing nearer.
“Indigo, it’s me, Ukiah. I’m with Max.”
Apparently the siren dr
owned him out, because she shouted, “Where?”
Somewhere close to Indigo, a man was shouting, “Get behind the barrier. All nonemergency people get behind the barrier!”
Ukiah tried again, louder. “I’m with Max and Sam!”
“What happened here in Butler?”
“The Temple of New Reason knows about the Ontongard, but the cult thinks the Gets are demons.” He struggled to keep the conversation short and precise. “Core has the water death, Kittanning, and the two babies. He thinks by sacrificing the children, he can create a poison that will affect only the Ontongard. He’s doing the ritual tonight.”
“Tonight?” she cried, and then waited as an emergency dispatcher blared a garbled report over a fire truck’s radio. “Do you know where?”
“We think at the Pittsburgh Water Authority, on the Allegheny. If he gets the Ae to work, he could kill millions of people.”
“Are you sure?” Indigo shouted over the din on her side.
“No. It’s a wild hunch, that’s all.”
“Well, wild or not, we can’t afford not to act on it,” Indigo said. “I’ll make it look a little less wild and ram it down throats on this end.”
The fire dispatcher drowned the conversation again.
“Indigo, I left two people tied up in the master bedroom when I escaped: one on the bed and the other in the bathroom. I don’t know if the cult freed them before the house went up.”
“What about the two men in the driveway? Do you know who killed them?”
Two men? “No. I didn’t go out the front.”
“If I didn’t know any better, I would say the Pack had been here.”
He felt his hackles rise. If the Pack had been in Butler, they would have been searching for him and he would in turn sensed them. “Indigo, the cult had Ontongard cut up into rats in the basement. If there were any Gets in the area, they would have zeroed in on the mansion.”
There was silence from Indigo. The sound from the fire changed, as she turned slowly in a circle. Was she studying the crowd watching the fire, wondering if they were Gets?
“Could they smell you on me?” she asked, cupping the phone now, speaking quietly.
“I don’t think so. The Ontongard have the same senses, but they don’t use them the same way as the Pack. They lack the wolf taint. They seem to hunt by sight alone.”
“Oh, that’s comforting,” Sam murmured quietly from the front seat.
“I have to go after Kittanning,” he told Indigo.
“I can take care of myself,” Indigo said. “I’m not alone. Agent Fisher is here; I know she’s human.”
“Be careful.”
“You too.”
He hung up, torn. Agent Fisher thought the Ontongard was a run-of-the-mill terrorist group; she had no idea how exotic a threat she and Indigo faced. “Max, I left Rennie sleeping at my moms’. Did you call there after the police found my bike on the turnpike?”
“They said you went to get gas. I had them wake Rennie up to ask him where you were heading on the turnpike. He didn’t know, but he was going to see.”
Which meant he had no way of contacting the Pack quickly.
They were crossing over Highland Park Bridge when he hung up on Indigo. Below them, the Allegheny River was an absence of light. Downriver, barges waited for their turn in the locks to bypass the dam. Upriver, a train crawled across its own bridge. At the end of the bridge, they had swung onto Route 28; the same road Ukiah had rocketed up to save Indigo the night Kittanning was “born.”
Route 28 took them behind the Waterworks Mall. They exited now onto Fox Chapel Road. At the red light, they stopped facing the mile-long water treatment plant.
“That’s it?” Sam asked.
“Yes.” Max scanned the other cars in sight. “The question is, where is the cult?”
Ukiah reached out to sense Kittanning’s Pack presence. He found him on the edge of his awareness. He leaned forward to point upriver. “Kittanning’s that way. He’s moving. Hurry.”
The light changed and Max turned left onto Freeport Road and gunned it. The Hummer leapt forward. They chased Kittanning’s presence a mile down into the town of Blawnox.
“Wait.” Ukiah pointed toward the river. “We passed him.”
Max took the first right onto Center Street, drove down over the railroad tracks, and down another four blocks before coming to a dead end overlooking the river. Ukiah leapt out as Max stopped the Hummer.
“Ukiah!” Max yelled.
Sam threw open her door and caught hold of Ukiah on his way to the river. “Kid! No! Wait!”
“Kittanning’s out there!” Ukiah checked less by the strength of her hold and more by the worry that he’d hurt her, if he wrenched himself free.
A set of stairs led down to a narrow beach with picnic tables. Ukiah, though, pointed out at the blackness of the river. As Ukiah watched, a boat eclipsed a beacon light on the far shore, proving that something was moving upriver.
“On the other side of the river?” Max came around the front of the Hummer. “Or on the boat?”
“The boat.” Ukiah tried to gently wriggle himself free.
“You can’t chase down a speedboat, kid,” Sam said. “Use your head. We have to get ahead of them, not kill ourselves playing catch-up.”
Max, though, was looking downriver, where the treatment plant lay hidden by the curve of the river. “If the water treatment plant is downriver, why are they going upriver?”
“Maybe they already poisoned the water,” Sam said.
“Shit,” Max cursed. “If it’s in the water already, we’re totally screwed.”
Ukiah closed his eyes and pressed through his connection with Kittanning.
At the bow of the speedboat, Kittanning stood tense in a new plastic dog carrier. He “remembered” the machine riding in the stern of the boat; it was a bad, bad thing. None of the humans seemed to realize that death rode with them, merely waiting for power and instructions to start its killing. Socket stood at the wheel of the boat, watching the dark water ahead intently. The babies slept, unaware, unharmed. Kittanning sensed Ukiah then, becoming aware of the connection “Daddy? Daddy?”
“Hush. Quiet. I’m coming. Stay quiet.”
Kittanning crouched, waiting, trusting.
“No, they haven’t set up yet,” Ukiah said.
“Where the hell are they going then?” Sam asked.
“There are islands upriver,” Max said. “They’re mostly uninhabited. Isolated. They could set the machine up and it could pour poison into the water unnoticed.”
“How many islands?” Sam asked. “A dozen? Two dozen?”
Ukiah called up the river maps in his perfect memory. “There’s five more in Allegheny County: Sycamore, Nine-mile, Twelvemile, Fourteenmile, and Jacks Islands.”
The boat passed a green channel light, rounding the bend to slip out of sight.
“There are marinas all along this shore,” Max said. “Let’s get a boat.”
They scrambled back into the Hummer. Rather than trying to work their way through the narrow one-way streets, Max merely drove the Hummer down the railroad tracks until he hit a street running alongside the river.
The first marina they found was the Bell Harbor Yacht Club, with a hundred and thirty boat slips and a place to buy fuel. Luck held, and there was a light on in the small marina office, although the door was locked. A sign on the door stated the office manager was a Bobby Bradley, and that the office had closed at the sane hour of six p.m.
Ukiah pounded on the door, and got a man, presumably Bradley, to open the door.
“We’re closed. I’m just trying to get the quarterly taxes done.”
“We need a boat,” Ukiah said. “Do you rent them?”
“Oh, no, we don’t rent boats here,” Bradley said. “You’d have to . . . gee, I don’t know where you would go to rent a boat at this time of night.”
“We’ll buy a boat then.” Max came up behind Ukiah, carrying his briefcase.
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Bradley laughed. “All I have here is the Endeavor, a forty-foot cruiser for a hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Okay. We’ll take it. Does it have gas in its tank?”
“No, no, no.” Bradley waved Max’s questions aside. “I don’t take personal checks for that amount—especially at this time of night. I’ll need a certified check.”
“How about cash?” Max held up his briefcase and lifted the lid. The ransom money still filled the briefcase.
Bradley’s eyes widened at the bundles of twenties. “That will work,” he said weakly. “Do you have any experience in river boating?”
“I do,” Sam said. “My dad and I lived on a boat for a year in Portland.”
“Let me get the keys.”
There would be more haggling over the boat later, paperwork for the state with registration, licenses, and whatnot. Bradley tested a random selection of the twenty dollar bills just to verify they were real, and then handed over the keys. He trailed behind them, listing out what they would have to do after their “test run.” They each took two bags of gear from the Hummer, loaded down Bradley with two more, and carried them out onto the wooden deck of the marina.
Ukiah had expected one of the low, sleek speedboats that were common with water-skiers. The Endeavor was built on the same sleek lines, but expanded to contain an extremely compact house. Bradley scrambled ahead to turn on lights in the cabin to show off a kitchen, dinette, leather sofa, bathroom complete with shower, and two bedrooms.
“It sleeps four,” Bradley called from inside the cabin, “but you fold this down, then you can squeeze in six.”
Sam laughed at the boat’s size, murmuring, “Bennett, I love your style.” And then clambered up to the rooftop steering. “What’s the draft on this baby?”
“I think its forty-four, or forty-six, something like that.” Bradley came out of the cabin, leaving all the lights on. “I’d stay in at least ten feet of water, though you could probably squeak through as shallow as four and a half, but you’ll be risking damaging your propellers. The shoreline has rocks and whatnot from old bridges and landings.”
Max dropped his bags of gear on the seats of the dinette and started to dig through bags. “Get the lights, kid.”