The Tenth Order (23 page)

Hunter collapsed to the ground. Curling into a ball, he rocked back and forth as the pain from a thousand illusory wounds slowly dissipated. He thought he heard voices shouting, but couldn’t be sure. Everything was distant and vague, the only firm reality the cramps gradually leaving his body. Hunter gently ran his fingers across his arms and chest, reassuring himself he was in one—albeit very battered—piece.

“You saw the sigil, Bath.” Hunter finally made out Mika’il’s voice. “He’s ours.”

“We all saw it. We all saw it change.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s
Elohim.
”

“Maybe we should try another
agioi
?” Karen suggested, her voice strained.

“The laws are clear,” Mika’il’s voice rang through the drafty barn. “One trial, one family. I don’t care how many times his sigil changed, it says
Elohim
now. He’s going with us
.”

“I don’t like it, but she’s right,” another voice said. Hunter thought it was the one who had officiated. Yahriel.

“You dare,” Bath hissed.

“Never mind,” Mika’il said. Two hands lifted Hunter, pulling him to his feet. It was the heavily muscled man who had stood next to Mika’il earlier, the—
what did they call him?—
Domination
. He eyed Hunter, and nodded respectfully.

“If you wish to make a protest to the Grigori, be my guest,” Mika’il walked past Hunter, heading toward the exit. “In the meantime, he stays with us.”

Hunter swung back and forth, not sure who to follow. Karen stood next to Bath, their heads lowered in quiet conference. Her eyes found Hunter, and a look of disgust crossed her face. She crossed to him and spat on the ground.

“I should have left you to rot,” she snarled. “Better I died that day than bring another of your kind into the world.”

“Karen,” Hunter said softly, but the muscled man holding his arm yanked him back and started toward the door. Behind him, Bath glared.

“We’ll meet again,” the small man said, eyes gleaming. “Just wait.”

Hunter didn’t get a chance to respond, though, because his guard had already pushed him through the exit. “Easy,” Hunter said. “I might need that arm later.”

The man laughed. “You have no idea.” He eased his grip, allowing Hunter to find his own gait now that they were outside. “But enough talk for now. Conversation is better served with a glass of something brown and aged. We’ll get there.”

The night was still cold and silent, the fields empty, tall grass waving faintly in the frosty wind. They walked for a pace, and then the muscled man stopped, bringing Hunter to a halt as Mika’il swept past. Her five followers followed quickly, keeping at least twenty feet behind their leader. After a moment the muscled man resumed their pace.

They followed the group silently for several minutes before Hunter finally asked, “Where are we going?”

“Home, little acolyte,” his guard said. “We’re going home.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“No fucking way,” Jackie whispered under her breath as Hunter Friskin disappeared before her eyes. “No, every-loving-mother-fucking way.”

When she first saw him, tall, broad-shouldered, looking every inch the Greek god she’d seen in her photographs, Jackie assumed it was just wishful thinking. The long nights, stress-soaked days, and a little dose of good, old-fashioned Catholic guilt had finally combined to send her over the edge. That was, until she met his steel gray eyes and knew this was no apparition.

He had run, of course. They always did. And Jackie pursued—even if she was more than a few drinks in—chasing down the street like a madman, shouting Friskin’s name. But her mind was only partially focused on the chase. What she was really thinking was what to say when she finally caught him: O
kay, buddy, you’re under arrest. Only, can you answer a few questions first? Like, I know this is weird and all, but, uh—you don’t happen to know any angels, do you?

She thought she saw two figures run between a parked car, and followed, praying it wasn’t just a couple of college kids feeling adventurous. As she turned the corner and passed the car, she saw the edge of Friskin’s coat disappear down a shadowed alley. “Freeze, asshole!”

She leapt around the side, smiling as she anticipated Friskin’s face—and that’s when she saw two figures, backs turned to her, blur into the distance with superhuman speed.

O
kay, Riese, obviously it’s not superhuman. The angel stuff has you on edge, you’re just seeing things
.
Nobody can move that fast, and if they could Friskin would be starting for the Broncos, not working some crap job at a funeral home. See? Told ya’ you shouldn’t have touched that shitty bourbon.

It was all just illusion. A trick of the mind. Shadows playing on shadows, combined to create—

“Bullshit,” Jackie said, and turned to the cathedral towers rising in the distance, a black silhouette against the half moon. From where she stood the buttresses looked like long, skeletal hands.

Maybe it was the bourbon—
hell, it’s
definitely
the bourbon—
but Jackie was certain,
certain
, that this had something to do with the priest.

Valdis locked the church’s front door behind him, and headed for the lone car in the parking lot. He hadn’t signed out the old Ford truck, but didn’t think any of his brother’s would mind. Who else would use the communal vehicle this late on a wintry night?

As he reached the truck, the priest transferred his sheaf of papers to his other hand, trying to pull the keys from his oversized coat, and promptly dropped the stack. Mumbling curses in a long dead language, he knelt in the snow and reached under the truck, searching for his notes. The press of cold, heavy steel against the nape of his neck stopped him.

“I don’t have any money,” Valdis said, his voice trembling.
Lord, if you’re there, please not now. Let me die somewhere warm.
“But you can have the truck if you’d like. It’s not much, but you might be able to sell it.” Valdis held up the keys, his eyes fixed on the ground.

“Get in,” a voice said, muffled and suspiciously high-pitched. Valdis wrinkled his eyes, took a gamble, and stood. Turning, he was both relieved and terrified to see the face of Detective Riese.

“Detective, this is completely unacceptable,” Valdis said in a level voice. He did his best to pass a convincing frown, but his heart was beating so fast he was afraid it would burst from his chest.

Riese motioned with her gun toward the truck. “I said get in.”

“Look, I’m sure we can work out whatever—”

“Now!” The detective took a step forward and Valdis leapt back. He turned and fumbled the keys into the lock. Climbing inside he cursed silently, looking at the moon and trying to gauge how much time he had left. He could still make it, but he would have to rid himself of the detective somehow.

“Now what?” the priest asked after Riese ran to the passenger side—the firearm trained through the windshield—and climbed in.

“Now we go wherever you were planning when I interrupted you.”

“The laundry? Not very exciting. My undergarments are quite plain.”

Jackie didn’t laugh. “Come on. I know you’re not a great liar, but seriously? Try bringing some clothes next time.”

Valdis’ shoulders fell. “Please,” he said. “Not now. Not tonight.”

“Why? You have somewhere else to be?”

“Just tell me what you want,” he pleaded. “I already told you, I don’t know where Hunter is.”

“’Hunter?’ You on a first name basis with murderers, Father?” Jackie flicked the gun. “Just drive. Go wherever you were planning originally, and I’ll sit here quietly. Cross my heart.”

Valdis closed his eyes, said a quiet prayer and started the engine. How much longer could he play this game? The detective was obviously not giving up, and the priest didn’t think there was anything he could say that would convince her to let the whole thing go. If she didn’t know who Hunter really was, she at least had some idea he wasn’t normal. Maybe the best course was to play this out and see where it took him.

“I should warn you,” Valdis said. “I don’t exactly know where I’m going. At the moment it’s just a hunch.”

“That’ll be enough,” replied Jackie. Then, in a whisper Valdis was sure he wasn’t supposed to hear: “It has to be.”

“Well shit. It’s a good thing I didn’t get my hopes up.” Jackie looked over the wide, empty prairie and sighed. They had driven for two hours through empty, snow-littered fields, finally stopping in the middle of nowhere. It was a hell of a disappointing finale. “I thought there’d at least be some hot chocolate at the end.”

Valdis said nothing, gazing from the side of the road toward a distant, invisible spot. His brow was knit, eyes narrowed behind hilariously large glasses. He kept scanning the field, looking for all the world like a dejected hound dog. Jackie half expected him to howl.

He wasn’t completely wrong, though; there was definitely something here. Tire tracks stood out in the moonlight. By Jackie’s count at least three different sets. It looked like the priest’s “hunch” was correct—Valdis wasn’t the only one interested in this spot.

“Those tire tracks look fresh,” Jackie said. The moonlight burned brightly against the fresh snow, giving the field an eerie glow. She wasn’t sure if Valdis was listening, but the silence was making her jumpy, so she continued, “Probably only missed em’ by an hour or so.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered,” The priest said quietly. “Even if we had been here an hour ago we wouldn’t have seen anything.”

Thank God. Old Man River is still alive.
“I’m going to go ahead and disagree with you,” Jackie said. “There would have been at least two or three cars. Look, you can see the separate tracks. One goes toward the city, and at least two—”

“You said you were a woman of faith, Detective Riese,” Valdis interrupted her.

Jackie’s stomach flipped. She looked away from the priest. “No, not really. I mean, I used to go to church with my family and everything, but I never bought the religious stuff.”

“Not even when you were young?”

“Well…” Jackie twisted the sleeve of her coat, then stopped, realizing what she was doing. She hadn’t done that since she was six. “Okay…yeah, maybe. I guess when I was a kid it all seemed pretty real. I mean that literally, you know? I thought that picture of God you have at the church—the one in the stained-glass?—was actually the man himself. I thought he hung out in that window and watched to make sure we didn’t fall asleep during Mass.”

The priest chuckled, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “I don’t imagine you were the first child to believe that. God can appear quite…
permanent
to the young.”

Jackie nodded. Then said, awkwardly, “Look, I…about the gun. I didn’t mean it. I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but...”

“Nevermind,” Valdis turned from the dark horizon and met Jackie’s eyes. “You’re in it now, regardless. I hope this is what you wanted.”

Jackie, lost in childhood memories, said nothing.

“You’re going to need faith to get through this,” Valdis said. “I have years of research to guide me, and Hunter has himself—which is empirically all the evidence you need—but
you
, Detective Riese, are going to need every ounce of child-like, God-is-in-the-window faith you can muster.”

Jackie turned from Valdis and examined the empty prairie, pretending to search for more tracks. It had been a long time since she felt comfortable talking about faith.

Valdis, seeming to sense her mood, kept silent and joined Jackie in watching the snowy field. In front of them were miles of open, flat prairie. It was dull, lifeless, the color bleached by snow and moonlight. Empty. The visage should have made Jackie feel calm, serene. It was the kind of image that would have been framed in a doctor’s office. Instead, she just felt tired and frustrated.

“Okay, enough,” she said, after a minute of silence. “Why are we here?”

“You’re the one doing the kidnapping,” the priest replied.

“Yeah, well, I might not have thought that—” But just then Valdis leapt forward, and Jackie’s words halted mid-stream as the little man bent over at the side of the road, his hand buried wrist-deep in the snow. He groped through the powder, his eyes screwed with concentration, then yanked his hand free and grinned. Years seemed to fall off his face. He walked over to Jackie, his fist held before him. Leaning close, she wondered what the priest could have found that would have elicited such excitement.

In his outstretched hand he held an iridescent egg shell.

After that, Jackie was forced to reassess her situation. Where once she had been the kidnapper, it was growing apparent she had become the kidnapped.

Jackie had fired question after question at the small priest as he pointed the decrepit truck at the mountains and drove for the next five hours. He finally began to slow as the sun rose behind them, illuminating the towering mountains with a faint, over-cast dawn. When he hadn’t ignored her questions outright he had given cryptic answers, and after two hours Jackie had given up and allowed Valdis to spend the rest of the trip in silence.