Sacrifices (26 page)

“If that's how you choose to look at it. All turns on the angel. To destroy or be destroyed.”

“I might have a line on the first bit. The relic, not the mob. Give me a day or two to run it down. Meanwhile, don't stop looking. Remember, we're in this together.”

The demon nodded.
Now
Sobell felt like laughing.

“Sobell thinks we
need an angel,” Anna said as she put her phone on the table. She felt like kicking the damn thing through a window, and she wasn't sure why. Possibly it was the maddeningly slow nature of the trickle of information she was slowly compiling, and possibly her demon was just feeling extra murderous at the moment. “I don't even know what that means, exactly, but that's what Gen says.”

“What else does Sobell know about it?” Karyn asked.

“Just that. He didn't say why we need one or what we were supposed to do with it. Gen just said he thought that might be the key, and that the priest probably knew how to get ahold of one, and that Sobell thinks we should be careful about using the word ‘angel' because they're actually really horrible, or something like that.”

“I just got a text from Elliot,” Karyn said. “She's got something on the priest. Nail's on his way. Want to ride along?”

“Uh, actually, no.” Anna didn't care for the worried way Karyn's forehead wrinkled up. “Right before Gen called, I got a call from Freak. Uh, Luisa Moreno. She wants to meet. I figured I'd go check that out.”

“You want Nail to take you?”

“No, I'm good. Really. I promise I won't work even a little dark magic. I'm just talking to a kid, that's all.”

“All right.”

Anna grabbed her keys and left before Karyn's
concern grated on her any more. Karyn meant well, her heart was in the right place, and she was probably even
right
, for the most part, but Jesus. This was getting old.

She found Freak at a corner not far off the exit from the 5, hanging with some of the kids Anna had seen before. She recognized Momo, anyway, though his partner Heavy was nowhere to be seen. To Anna's surprise, Freak opened the car door and got in.

“Let's get outta here for a few minutes, huh?” Freak said. She looked around the interior of the car, opened the glove box, shut it. “You got old wheels.”

“I didn't hear you offer to pick me up,” Anna said. “Your ride in the shop?”

“Just go, huh? I need to look at someplace else for a bit.”

Anna turned around and headed back up the 5. Freak didn't talk at first. Instead, she busied herself playing with the sun visor, the cup holders, the little compartment between the seats. Kid had a ton of nervous energy. It was already getting on Anna's nerves.

“No, fuck no,” Freak said as Anna hit the turn signal for a downtown exit. “I can't look at that neither. Just drive.”

“Okay.”

Another mile passed. Freak picked up a bunch of paper scraps out of the compartment below the radio and started going through them.

“I think there's a Wendy's receipt in there, if you're really interested,” Anna said. “Come on, kid. What's on your mind?”

“Uh. I wanted to, uh, thank you. For the doctor. My pops got pretty fucked-up, but the doc fixed him up all right. Didn't even give us no bill. Said you'd take care of it.”

“Yeah,” Anna said. She reminded herself that Moreno likely wouldn't have been in that position if she hadn't broken the wards, but there was, strangely, no guilt associated with the thought.

“What happened?” Freak said.

“You should probably ask your dad that.”

“I did. He said, ‘I ain't gonna lie to you, girl,' and then
he didn't say nothin' else. He didn't lie to me, but he didn't tell me a fuckin' thing. Bum a smoke?”

Anna handed her the pack.

“I hate that fuckin' priest,” Freak said as she tapped the cigarettes against her palm. “Pops didn't want to talk about it, but come on. I know he didn't get jumped or nothing like that. The guys are still talking 'bout the crazy shit that went down yesterday. I ain't no idiot.” She lit up, took a drag off the cigarette, and blew smoke out her nostrils. “I hate that fuckin' priest,” she said again.

“I think he's trying to help you out.”

Freak flicked ash in the ashtray. “My ass. Looking at us with those sad eyes all the time. He's doing this for
him
, not us. ‘Come, ye hood rats, into my arms and I'll give you a big fuckin' hug and then go off'n stroke my hard-on while I think about how good I am.' I tell you what, shit only got worse since that son of a bitch come around.”

“What do you think he really wants, then?” Anna asked.

“Way he goes on about ‘atonement' and all that when he's had a few, I'd say he's working off some guilt. My old man just about thinks he walks on water, though. Stupid. Guy feels like he done wrong, I wish he'd just go off and say a million Hail Marys, leave us the fuck alone.”

Freak fell silent and turned to watching the other cars, looking curiously into each one as it went by, checking out the occupants, the driver, the stuff jammed in the back window. “I'm pretty worried, though,” she said after a while. “He's all fired up about something now. Stayed up half the night talking, praying, talking again. Like my old man needs that shit.”

“How you doing with all this?” Anna asked.

“Me?” Freak scoffed. “Good enough, I guess. I look around, though, and I ain't stupid. How's this end? Just keep going like this forever? Naw. People gonna die. Way things are going, Flats and the 'Teeners gonna kill us all. We'll take a bunch with us, I guess.” She flashed a
G
with her hand and smiled ironically. “Gant Street forever.”

Anna couldn't find an adequate response to that. She drove.

*   *   *

Through her eyes, Karyn saw a bewildering mess. The bar was crowded with dozens of overlapping figures, body parts elongated and meshed with objects like a Giger nightmare—the patrons of the place over the coming weeks or months, all at the same time. A garbled stream of sounds from a dozen different TV programs came from the corner, voices murmuring quietly, and, above it all, sounds of passionless fucking coming from the bar where, fortunately, she couldn't see much of anything.

She couldn't even see Elliot with her eyes. The woman was buried in all the other crap. Nail, walking right behind Karyn, might as well have been a thousand miles away.

It had seemed like a good idea to meet somewhere other than the municipal building, since word of Karyn's constant visits there would surely get around if she kept it up, and it would likely be even more conspicuous in the evening after the building was closed. Maybe she should have opted for something less public, but she wondered if it really would have mattered.

The demon image led Karyn to Elliot, who had seated herself in back and claimed the corner. Karyn frowned. “I don't suppose you could . . .” She tipped her head toward the other seat, the one with its back to the entire room. Elliot rolled her eyes, but she got up and moved. Karyn wedged herself into the corner, and Nail pulled up a chair next to her.

“You ready for this?” Elliot asked. Her teeth showed in a wide grin, and Karyn wondered just how isolated this FBI division was.

“Let's have it.”

“First things first. The priest's name is Alonzo Abas. Spanish. He's no longer a priest, actually. He was defrocked in 1999.”

“Okay.”

“Moreover, he was actually excommunicated.”

“Okay.”

“For practicing witchcraft.”

Karyn thought Elliot expected her to be surprised,
and maybe she would have been if she hadn't been so tired, but the news that the man was up to his eyeballs in the occult wasn't exactly news. “Okay,” she said again.

“They didn't burn him at the stake?” Nail asked.

Elliot's grin faltered. “I don't think that's standard practice these days. Secular governments frown on religious authorities carrying out executions no matter what the reason.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Nail said.

She gave him an uneasy chuckle, as if she wasn't sure if he was joking but was trying to humor him all the same. “I haven't been able to get the details, but the excommunication happened after some kind of occult accident that left several people dead. The event was covered up, but the excommunication made a lot of noise. His family has priests in every generation going back at least to the seventeenth century.”

“You'd think it'd be hard to keep that up,” Nail said. “Ain't like being a priest is something you hand down to your son.”

“They're very devout, and they tend to have lots of kids. They managed. According to my sources, he tried to appeal the decision all the way to the top and got nowhere.”

“Okay,” Karyn said. “He screwed up, outed himself as a practitioner, got some people killed, got tossed out of the church, and brought disgrace on the family name. So? What's he doing here?”

Elliot unfolded a large piece of paper, about the size of a place mat, with a drawing stretched over the whole of it, labeled in tiny letters. A family tree, it looked like.

“Here's Abas,” she said, pointing at a name close to the bottom. “What else do you see?”

Don't play games with me,
Karyn wanted to say, but Nail put his finger on the paper right away. “There,” he said. “Moreno.”

“Four generations back,” Elliot said, nodding. The grin was back, full force. “I don't have records for that branch, but there were quite a few of them.”

Nail leaned closer, squinting to read the small print. Karyn couldn't see what he was looking for, but she could tell that the overall shape of the tree was nearly diamond-shaped. “They're dying out,” she said.

“Yeah,” Nail said. “Whole damn family's getting pretty thin on the ground these days.”

“Yes, it is,” Elliot said. “Abas must have searched half the world to find some outflung branch of his family tree.”

“But why?” Karyn asked.

Elliot shook her head. “I'm not entirely sure.”

*   *   *

Karyn and Nail didn't go back to the welding shop after meeting with Elliot. Anna called, bubbling with news, moments after they left Elliot in the café, and declared that they absolutely needed to talk and she absolutely needed to eat. They ended up meeting at an old-fashioned diner, where Anna ordered the biggest steak on the menu.

“‘Blue'?” Nail asked, after Anna ordered and the waiter had gone.

“‘Very rare' doesn't quite cut it, and they look at you funny if you order it raw.”

“Didn't know you were still worried about that kind of thing.”

“I'm trying, okay? And what's with you people? You don't eat anymore?”

“Elliot bought lunch,” Nail said. “And that's not all.” He brought Anna up to speed, and then Anna returned the favor. Karyn watched the exchange, still struggling to get anything useful from her visions. One moment Anna was gone, and the next she was there with a bloody gash in her forehead, laughing. Nail, surprisingly enough, was his normal self for once, with nothing weird about him. Once Karyn would have regarded that as a mercy, but right now it just felt like her pain-in-the-ass talent was being more of a pain in the ass than usual. Playing hide-and-seek.

When they'd finished talking, Karyn put her hands on the table. “So, where does that leave us?” she asked.

“Well,” Nail said, staring thoughtfully into space, “I
think Freak's got the right of it. This priest, Abas—he's trying to get right with God.”

“Huh?” Anna said.

“The Abraham and Isaac thing he mentioned. The family connection. But look at the story—it's not about Abraham and his son. It's about Abraham staying on God's good side. My guess? Abas is in the wilderness, so to speak. He fucked up. So now he's down here digging up graves, defiling dead family, and doing his freaky acts of charity on behalf of these people because either it's penance or he's looking for a way to atone, or both. It ain't about Moreno at all.”

“Yeah, there's something there,” Anna said. “You should have seen his face when I mentioned Belial, and Moreno's kid says he's been all excited and praying nonstop ever since.”

“Can you hook us up with him?” Karyn asked her.

Anna tapped the table with her fork and glanced toward the kitchen.

“Anna?”

“Huh?”

“You with us here?”

Anna shrugged. “What? I'm hungry.”

She tried to suppress the feeling that she was dealing with a child, but that was the sense she had, and there couldn't be a worse time for it. Karyn might have had a line on the future, sometimes, but when that didn't work, Anna was the one who had a sense of people. “The priest. Can we meet him?” Karyn repeated, trying not to sound like she was lecturing an idiot and only sort of succeeding. “Can we trust him?”

Anna stopped tapping the fork. She took it in both hands, pressed her thumbs in the middle, and bent it into a U. “That depends on what we need to trust him with, I guess. What are you thinking?”

“We throw in with him. I think we might have common cause. He's looking for the same relic we are. He obviously knows something, and if he's really as focused on atonement as you think, I bet he'll jump at the chance
to help us neutralize Belial. He might even have answers himself that he'd be willing to trade for information.”

“He said he can't do an exorcism. He also might just kill Belial and fuck me over.”

“We have to talk to him. We have to find out. We're no closer to finding that damn relic than we were a week ago.”

Anna cast another glance toward the kitchen and sighed. “All right. I'll set it up. I don't think he's gonna want to do
me
any favors, but maybe we can work something out.”