Bad Bones (12 page)

“You don’t know for
sure
she took it, Gabe…” Stella accelerated away the second the lights turned green and drove as fast as she dared; the last thing they needed was for a cop to pull her over for speeding.

“No … no, I don’t. Not for sure.” Gabe had never felt so tense and frustrated in his whole life. “But I know my sister, and she is just
so
goddam
nosy
… I should’ve known… Oh God, what’ve I done?”

“Nothing, Gabe.” Stella slowed to a halt for a ‘Stop’ sign, then sped away. “You didn’t know, you
couldn’t
have known what she was going to do,
or
that the things you’d found were so dangerous. How could you?”

“It’s the next left.”

“Got it, thanks.” Stella reached over and patted his arm.

Gabe found himself relaxing slightly at her touch.

Up ahead he saw his house, the family SUV
parked out front, under the car port, lights on in the front room, everything looking completely normal. Stella pulled up on the driveway and they both leapt out, Gabe making straight for the side passage. He slammed the gate open and tore down to the kitchen door, Stella only a few steps behind him. Skidding to a halt, Gabe hesitated for a moment, then grabbed the handle and burst into the kitchen. It was empty, the rest of the house as silent as a stopped clock. For a couple of seconds Gabe didn’t move, then Stella pointed at the sink.

“Gabe … what’s that?”

Drops of something, something dark, spattered on the pale cream tile of the work surface. And, now he looked, on the floor too. He moved closer, needing to get a better look but not wanting to, scared at what he might find, and saw there was a knife in the sink. There was blood on its ten-centimetre-long serrated blade.

“Mom! Dad!” Horrific slasher-vid images flickered in his head. Remy, poor little nosy Remy ripped to pieces by coyotes, gouts of blood splashed all down
her T-shirt, the old man smiling, his teeth and face with blood on them, Remy’s blood.

He ran for the door, which opened before he got there, his mom looking a mixture of puzzled and annoyed; she appeared to be fine, not a drop of blood anywhere on her. “Gabe, what on Earth’s the matter?”

“Mom, the blood… Where’s Remy? What’s happened to her?”

“Remy? Nothing’s happened, she’s at Janna’s, for a sleepover.” Gabe’s mom saw Stella and she smiled fleetingly in acknowledgement and looked back at her distraught son. “What’s going on, Gabe, why would you think the blood was anything to do with Remy? Your father cut his hand slicing a bagel, I was just dealing with it.”

“What? Janna’s? She’s at
Janna
’s?” The look on Gabe’s face was so intense you could almost see the question marks hanging over his head. “When did she go? That’s only a couple of blocks away … Saloma Avenue. OK, OK – look, I can’t explain right now, Mom. I can’t… I have to go.” He glanced at Stella. “We have to go…”

“What’s going on, Gabe? I’ve never seen you like this…” Gabe’s mom, fraught now, turned to Stella.
“Has he taken something, did
you
give it to him?”

“No, Mrs Mason! No, I didn’t … he hasn’t.” Stella shook her head. “It’s nothing like that, honest.”

“Gotta go, Mom.” Gabe grabbed Stella’s hand and ran.

Halfway back to the car, Stella tried to slow him down. “Wait a second – what if Remy left the medallion here, Gabe?”

“If she’d left it here,
he’d
be here. That’s what he wants.”

Stella stopped and stood her ground. “Remy might’ve left it behind, and that man mightn’t have got here yet, Gabe. You don’t know, you haven’t looked.”

“I know my sister. Believe me, she’s got it with her. You stay and look if you want to, but I have to get to Janna’s…”

“OK, you’re right.” Stella ran to the driver’s side of her car. “Let’s go…”

As they drove away, Gabe’s phone picked up a call, his mom’s ringtone. He didn’t want to take it, but the look on his mom’s face as he’d left the kitchen made him realize he had to tell her something. He accepted the call.

“Yeah, Mom, look, it’s OK… No, I’m not high or anything like that, really. OK? No, no, I didn’t do anything… You’re just gonna have to trust me… Call the cops?” He looked at Stella, making an
‘I
don’t know face’. She made a similar one back. “No, Mom, don’t do that… I’ll explain later.” Gabe cut the call and slumped back in his seat. “This
has
to be a nightmare. Any minute now I am going to wake up. It can’t be happening.”

“I
really
wish…” Stella slowed as they approached a junction.

“Straight across, and I think it’s the next right turn.”

And then there it was, Saloma Avenue, Remy’s best-friend-forever Janna’s house a couple of hundred metres down on the right. Gabe had walked her there any number of times. And now they were getting close he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t go storming in, like he had done at home, like he wanted to…

“Which house?”

Gabe focused in on the street. “There –” he pointed out of the car – “the blue plastic mailbox.”

As Stella pulled over to the kerb, Gabe’s heart sank. It looked as if the front door was ajar, a
narrow ‘V’ of light spilling out on to the front porch. That would not ordinarily have been such a bad thing. But tonight? Tonight he knew exactly what the phrase ‘blood ran cold’ meant. But Remy was in there. He had to get her out and he couldn’t do that sitting in the car.

“OK…” Gabe’s left hand automatically reached up for the cross around his neck as he opened the car door.

The two of them ran up the porch steps, both stopping at the front door; the wood around the lock was splintered. Voices were coming from inside, then a blare of music. Gabe wanted to yell out for his sister, but fear of what he might find stuck the words in his throat, choking him. He dry swallowed as he pushed the door open further, took a hold of himself and walked into the house.

Like the kitchen back at home, the front room at Janna’s was also empty, but with signs that people had recently been there, and left in a hurry. The TV was on, playing an ad for some gross double-size bacon-cheese-and-everything burger. On the oval coffee table, set in front of a big, open fireplace, there were soda bottles, one on its side still dribbling
its dark brown contents on to the carpet; half-empty plastic glasses, candy and snack food scattered everywhere. Looked like a food fight had started, but where were the sleepover girls?

Where the heck was Remy?

Gabe was trying to make some kind of sense of what he was seeing when, in a sliver of silence between ads, other voices could be heard. Muffled, raised voices from somewhere else in the house. The hairs on the back of Gabe’s neck stood to attention and his scalp prickled. He shot a glance at Stella and made a dash across the room for the door that led to the rest of the single-storey house.

“Remy!” Gabe hauled the door open.

Down at the end of the wide hallway, his back to him, stood a figure in faded jeans, a brown leather coat and a red baseball cap. If Father Simon was right, a reborn, resurrected Rafael Delacruz. And at his side, hackles up, ears flat back, stood a slim, grey coyote. Which probably meant there was another one around somewhere. Gabe stopped, checked behind him – no coyote – and looked back down the corridor. The double doors to the large master bedroom at the rear of the house were closed and
behind them Gabe could hear the girls crying and shouting.

With just a cross hanging round his neck, Stella there beside him, the last thing Gabe felt like was the cavalry, riding in to the rescue. More like the Lone Ranger. But his sister was in real danger and here he was. What he should do next he hadn’t quite figured out, except that doing nothing was not an option.

The figure at the end of the corridor made the first move. He turned round, slowly, and even at a distance Gabe could immediately see there was a difference, something strange about the man he now understood to be this Rafael. His face looked younger, and he seemed to be standing up straighter, the shoulders of his jacket filled out better.

Was that a trick of the light…? Was he also imagining the deep red glow in the man’s eyes? The worms of an old, old fear of the peculiar and the unknown awoke in the pit of Gabe’s stomach, squirmed into life and began eating into him.

He could feel Stella’s breath on his neck she was standing so close. She’d tensed up as this person, he couldn’t be called ‘old’ any more, had turned round. She gasped, shocked, the moment she saw his face, gripping Gabe’s arm tight as if she’d fall over if she let go. Gabe wanted to tell her it was all going to be
OK, but that would be a lie and they’d both know it.

“You gotta go, Stella.” Jaws clenched, Gabe edged backwards. “Get out, now…”

Rafael, the coyote at his side, was coming towards them, walking head held up now. Proud. He was flexing his fingers, and then he splayed them and held his arms out wide in front of him, just like he was coming to embrace Gabe and Stella. Except, like the coyote, he was snarling and the look on his face was anything but warm or welcoming.

“Go, Stella…”

“No. I know you won’t leave without Remy … and I’m not leaving without you.”

Under any other circumstances Gabe would have been kind of flattered by that statement. Watching the man with a murderous fire in his eyes coming towards them, he just felt the weight of extra responsibility land like a vulture on his shoulder, panic slithering up from his gut, trying to take control. An emotional pincer movement.

And the closer Rafael came, the worse it got.

He and the coyote were now over halfway up the hallway, and Gabe could feel the air around him crackling with static electricity. Fear made real.
He couldn’t stop his synapses sparking, like crazed firecrackers going off, jumping here and there, from one random, idiot idea to another. All he’d done so far was move back into the TV room, which wasn’t even a half decent Plan B.

The knowledge gained from all the years of reading comic books and watching action movies said that what he
really
needed was some kind of kick-ass weapon. A rocket-propelled grenade, maybe a flamethrower, either would be great, they really would. He’d never even held a pistol, let alone anything bigger, but right now he could
really
do with some leverage – that was for pretty damn sure.

And then, with no warning, the banshee wailing came s-c-r-e-a-m-i-n-g back into Gabe’s head.

The jolt was much greater than it had been in the canyon. The sound louder. Higher-pitched. Sharper, like red-hot needles jabbing in his brain. Again and again and again. Somewhere a small part of him realized that the strangled screaming was coming from him, and the warm, sticky fluid he felt on his hands, that was his too. Father Simon had known he was going to die, and here he was, about to go into the final fade.

Stella, who had been sticking to him like they were Velcroed together, staggered away as she saw Gabe, face contorted and gargoyled, bent double, hands to his ears, blood leaking through his fingers.

It was the sight of her horrified, wide-eyed expression that snapped something inside Gabe and gave him access to a core strength he never knew he possessed. This Rafael, this dead-priest-walking, wherever he came from and however he’d got here, was not simply going to trample all over him like he was no more than dirt on the ground, and then discard his lifeless husk.

Not going to happen.

Summoning up what felt like an almost superhuman degree of control, Gabe forced himself to ignore the pain, push it away and stand straight, legs apart. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Hands clenched tight, the outward expression of the huge effort he was making to stop himself from falling apart, he stared back at Rafael, looked straight into the heat of his dark, burning eyes.

Father Simon believed
he
, Gabriel Mason, had somehow brought this evil back to life, dragged it here from whatever hell it had been sent to centuries ago.

Father Simon believed he’d
prayed
and his prayers had been answered in the shape of the thing now just a few metres away from him. And Gabe had, for a moment, believed it could be true, got sucked right into Father Simon’s story.

But it wasn’t
his
story.

He could see now how it had to be. Wavering
like a candle near an open window, the dim light of revelation illuminated the truth. He had to believe in his own story or he was lost. Gone.

Instead of giving in, Gabe did the opposite and went on the attack.

“I don’t believe in you, in
any
of this!” Gabe fumbled inside his T-shirt and grabbed at the cross, yanking it so hard it felt like a red-hot knife slicing across the back of his neck.

He held up his fist, defiant, the cross dangling from its broken chain, and threw it at Rafael. The intricate tangle of fine gold links and the cross they were attached to seemed to float through the air between them. A twisting, snake-like arc of precious metal and symbolism. Gabe followed after it, fists flying. All the pent-up anger that he’d kept tamped down for days now rose up to the surface and boiled over. He’d been scared for far too long. It wasn’t his fault that he’d stumbled on the skeleton, found the gold and taken it to help his family out of some bad times!

Not! His! Fault!

Gabe punched Rafael’s stunned face. He could feel his knuckles as they hit bone, saw the astonishment in those coal-dark eyes, watched blood drops fly
lazily from the man’s mouth. Every punch hurt Gabe too, sent shockwaves of pain buzz-sawing through him, but he couldn’t stop. He would die before he stopped. This close to the man the air around them became feverishly, suffocatingly hot, the smell of old earth overpowering, but through it all there was just one thought ringing, clear as a bell in Gabe’s head. Kill him!

In between punches Gabe saw Rafael’s look of surprise and disbelief change, and figured he was about to begin fighting back. Gabe was expecting to have to fend off a rain of iron-fisted jabs, which didn’t come. Instead his opponent dismissively pushed him away, then stepped back and pointed at him.

“
It doesn’t … matter to me … what you believe…
” Rafael’s chest was heaving, his words punctuated by deep, rattling breaths, making him sound so very old. “
We … are … connected, acolyte…
”

Gabe stood, unsteady on his feet, puzzled. Why wasn’t Rafael fighting? What was he saying? What did he mean,
connected
?

“No.” Gabe shook his head, tiredness soaking through him. “No, we’re not.”

“
Denial is pointless … you came to me, you found me
… you do believe and you are the first of so many more … the first disciple!
”

“No…” The voice was in Gabe’s head. Again. He hadn’t realized at first, but Rafael’s lips weren’t moving. The man was right, denial was pointless. There was a connection. And he had made it possible, he had allowed this wicked, corrupt monster to breathe again. To breathe and become more and more powerful with every breath.

“Gabe?”

Gabe glanced to his right, shocked to see Stella brandishing a wrought-iron poker in both hands… The second coyote had made an appearance and Stella was making like Xena and fending off both of them with the poker.

“Gabe, what’s happening? Why are you just standing there,
looking
at him?”

“
You cannot break this
.” In front of him Rafael smiled, eyes hooded, his top lip curled back. “
Bring me what is mine. All of it. I have work to complete, a mission to accomplish!
”

The next chunk of time – minutes, possibly a lot of minutes, Gabe had no idea how many – went by in a total blur.

Rafael was there when he turned towards Stella and the coyotes, and he had disappeared when he looked back. In his place, Stella was now standing in front of him, frowning, concerned. She shook him gently, then she too was gone, between one blink and the next, only to return with a damp cloth, which she started wiping his face and hands with.

The room filled with all kinds of people, some he recognized, like Janna’s parents, most he didn’t. It was chaotic, everyone talking at the same time, some crying, a few shouting, some in uniform, quite a number of them talking directly to him. At him. Gabe didn’t even try to make sense of what was going on. There were handshakes, and for some reason he couldn’t fathom, pats on the back. But Remy was there; little nosy Remy was hugging him, crying then not crying. There, alive and unhurt, with her pink Hello Kitty backpack, clutching his hand. And then they were walking down the driveway with Stella. Stella holding Remy’s other hand. He was with Remy in the back of the car, still gripping the crucifix and broken chain, then putting it in his pocket. Stella driving away from Janna’s house. And as she drove, the further down the road they got,
it felt like the world finally came back into focus, sound synched with vision. Tuned in.

“You were brave, Gabey.” Remy leant in close. “Everyone said.”

“I don’t know about that.” Gabe gave his sister a hug.

“You were,” Stella glanced back. “Believe me.”

“Remy?” Gabe tried to sound as nonchalant as he could. “That little thing you borrowed from my room, yeah?”

Remy, who could spot trouble coming a mile off, moved away from her brother slightly. “You had so much, and it was the littlest, Gabey, so I didn’t think you’d notice… And I only
borrowed
it, honest.”

Gabe held out his hand. Remy dug into the front pocket of her pink Hello Kitty backpack and gave him the medallion.

“Sorry, Gabey…”

“It’s OK.” Gabe squeezed Remy’s shoulder. But no way was it OK, no way at all.

There was a tap on his bedroom door, which Gabe knew would be his dad. He’d figured he wouldn’t be
able to get away without some kind of confrontation about what had happened at Janna’s, and he supposed now was as good a time as any to have it. He had a story which, as Remy was asleep, no one would be able to check on straight away, so there was nothing left to do but get it over with.

“Yeah?”

The door opened and his dad came in, this time walking straight over and pulling up the ratty office chair Gabe had salvaged off the street a couple of years ago.

“OK … you kind of freaked your mother out, earlier on.” His dad sat back, the old chair creaking. “You and Sarah rushing out of the house like that, no explanation.”

“Stella.”

“Sorry, Stella. And I know everything worked out fine, Gabe, but what I don’t understand is how
you
knew there was anything going on at Janna’s in the first place?” His dad made a ‘beats me’ face.

“It was a hunch.”

“A hunch?”

“Yeah…” Gabe shrugged, hoping he looked way more relaxed than he felt. “Like, there’s been some
guy hanging round and I was, you know, worried?”

Gabe’s eyes flicked from his dad to his laptop screen and back. He was going to have to take a risk now, and hope it worked out.

“Remy saw him too.”

His dad stiffened. “Did you tell the cops this?”

“I guess so…” Gabe rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and shook his head. “I guess I did, I don’t remember. It’s all, you know, kind of like a blur? What I did and what I said?”

“Sure, I understand.” Gabe’s dad reached over and patted his knee. “A bit of a shock, right?”

Too right,
Gabe thought, smiling lamely and nodding.

His dad got up. “You did good, Gabe, real good… You must be tired.”

“Yeah…” No argument there.

“End of the day, all that matters is that you’re both fine.” His dad went to the door. “Crazy world out there… See you tomorrow, OK?”

“Sure, dad,” Gabe said, thinking,
You have no idea…