Nine
BREAKING AND ENTERING
WE WALKED THROUGH the trees without talking.
Only the whisper of branches made any sound, along with the occasional call of an owl or a much more high-pitched sonic ping of a bat. I also heard sounds that I assumed had to be feral cats scuffling and looking for food... or possibly raccoons, which I knew lived in pockets all through the more wooded areas of the city.
I barely tracked those things as we walked.
I found I was on high alert already, even though I could only see the barest glow of lights around the Legion of Honor in the distance.
I was wearing the bullet proof vest Black had given me in his office, the same one he’d stuffed in a canvas bag before we got in the helicopter.
We’d retrieved everything out of the trunk of that hatchback car with blacked out windows we’d left parked on a side lot of the VA hospital complex. The lot where Black’s employees left the car had few streetlights at night, I learned. It was also lined with trees, and stood close to the beginnings of the path that would lead us into the back end of the park around the Legion of Honor. In addition to the equipment Black had given me, the bags held Black’s own guns of course, and a collection of knives that made me nervous when Black first uncovered them.
Other things in the hatchback included ammunition magazines and that third, much heavier black canvas bag, the one I didn’t ask too many questions about back at his office. Given its obvious weight and larger size, I suspected it contained larger capacity magazines and possibly larger weapons.
It turned out I was more or less right about both.
Flashbacks hit me inexplicably every few minutes now, mainly to the hills of Afghanistan despite the vastly different terrain. I suspected the big guns had something to do with it.
More and more, this felt like a military operation, not a private investigator’s snooping.
For the same reason, my nerves ratcheted higher with each step we took.
At least I wasn’t carrying one of those heavier weapons myself.
Black, on the other hand, wore some kind of high-tech short rifle on a strap under his long coat––something I confess I wasn’t familiar with at all, and might have been custom-made. In addition to the modified rifle, he wore at least three handguns I’d seen him slot into holsters, as well as a long knife stuck in an upside-down sheath from which an ivory handle curved outwards at the small of his back.
I suspected he had more than what I saw.
I didn’t ask, but my eyes were pretty wide by the time he finished gearing up.
I also checked my own two handguns about four times while watching him do it, once again conscious I might have to use my weapons on him, depending on how tonight went.
I kept that thought in the much quieter parts of my mind, however.
Black and I hadn’t talked much when I got back to the restaurant, or while we geared up in that dark corner of parking lot under a broken streetlamp.
He’d looked me over in the restaurant when I slid back into the leather booth across from him, after leaving Ian. I’d seen his gold eyes narrow, even as his mouth twisted in a harder grimace.
“You smell like him,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “He pissed all over you, didn’t he? I’m not sure if I should be flattered or annoyed.”
He said it like he was trying to sound amused, but I didn’t see much real amusement on him. Truthfully, he’d sounded more angry than annoyed.
“Ian doesn’t have to piss on me,” I said, giving him a warning look as I picked up my glass of wine.
Black’s frown deepened, but he didn’t answer.
The rest of the time we mostly just sat there, eating and drinking.
Our conversation remained minimal through most of the meal, although he did answer a few questions I had about the action-packed evening he had planned.
Black finally seemed to make up his mind to ignore me altogether towards the end of the main course, pulling out his large-screened phone and using it for what looked like research. Watching him, I doubted he was getting most of his information from public sources.
I decided to ignore him as well.
We’d finished our food entirely by then and he’d ordered us both cappuccinos.
I turned on my phone, intending to scan articles on the wedding killer to see if there had been any new developments. Of course, I’d managed to forget over that span of however-many minutes that my phone had been switched off for hours.
It lit up like a Christmas tree the second I turned it on.
Six voice messages from Ian, which he’d already more or less warned me about. A dozen more texts, most of those ending in question marks, also from Ian.
He wasn’t the big winner of the evening though.
I had another twenty or so texts from Nick, each employing caps-lock more liberally than the one before. The progression was pretty easy to follow.
1:19 PM - Letting Black go. Lawyers here. Sorry about before.
And then:
1:42 PM - Hello? Did you leave your phone off again?
And then:
2:04 PM - Don’t be pissed, Miri. Call me. I need to talk to you.
And then:
2:22 PM - Outside Black’s. Downtown. CALL ME.
I scrolled through a few more like that.
And then:
3:04 PM - SICK? ARE YOU F-ING KIDDING ME? Even gomey didn’t believe that horseshit. Call me.
I scrolled through a few more.
4:25 PM - SENT ANGEL BY YOUR HOUSE. NO ONE HOME. CALL ME. I MEAN IT.
I scrolled through a few more threats, seemingly one every half-hour, then saw:
8:10 PM - I’M PUTTING OUT A FUCKING APB AND CALLING IAN IF YOU DON’T ANSWER ME IN THE NEXT HOUR. NOT KIDDING.
Letting out a growling sigh of frustration, I ignored Black’s questioning look as I tried to decide if I should answer. Nick would know from his phone settings that I’d finally seen his messages, assuming he was still watching.
Which he would be. Of course.
Taking a breath, I decided I didn’t have much choice.
9:02 PM - Chill the fuck out! Didn’t have my phone. Went out for drinks with Lacey when my headache got better. Ian’s back. We’ll talk tomorrow.
I didn’t have to wait long for an answer.
9:03 PM - BULLSHIT. WHERE ARE YOU, MIRI? I NEED TO TALK TO YOU. NOW.
Grumbling under my breath again, I typed in a note.
That time I did the caps-lock thing too.
9:03 PM - WELL YOU CAN’T. IAN’S BACK. TOMORROW NICK. I MEAN IT.
I didn’t wait for him to answer.
Turning off my phone, I flipped it over and pried the casing off the back with my fingers, remembering how Ian had traced me here using my SIM card. Once I had the casing off, I removed the SIM card itself. After pulling my wallet out of my purse, I stuck it in a pouch near the credit card slots.
I pulled out one of the other SIM cards I had in there then and checked the number.
I’d gotten in the habit of switching out SIM cards where it made sense, using my office phone and a forwarding service as my main number for business cards and the rest.
Truthfully, I picked up the habit watching Ian, who had four or five on him at any given time, given his job, along with some kind of high-tech security app that allowed him to change his actual IMEI number, which identified the phone itself, independently of the phone number, I mean. He probably thought I didn’t notice how often he switched those out, but he didn’t deny it when I remarked on it, either.
For me it was simply one more byproduct of working closely with the police and having a fiancé with an obscenely high security clearance.
Also, yeah, my work put me in contact with some dangerous people.
Given that, I switched out SIMs every few months usually. I only gave the direct line to close friends, and then only when they asked––usually they just used the forwarding service like everyone else, since most claimed it was a pain in the ass to reprogram my number as often as I changed it. I also had a second SIM card I used for work when I had a client I thought might be dangerous. I’d gotten in the habit of giving that number to Nick, too.
I carried a third one as well, that no one knew about but me. I used that one only for emergencies. I contemplated using it now.
“Don’t bother,” Black said. “If they’re tracking you, they already know where you are. Unless you have the same program as your boyfriend.”
I glanced up and found Black’s eyes on me, more specifically on my hands.
“Okay with a different bar?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.
Black didn’t bother to nod.
While I popped the battery out of my phone with my fingers, he just lifted a hand to our waiter, signaling for the check.
About thirty or so minutes later we were in a different bar on Clement Street. We’d taken a cab most of the way there, after walking down the hill towards Ocean Beach.
The second bar was darker, dingier and more of a hole in the wall, with blacklight posters on the walls and Asian pop music playing out of the retro-styled jukebox. Most of the patrons were Chinese hipster kids who probably worked at tech companies in the valley. The majority of them looked barely twenty-five to me, but somehow, they seemed even younger.
They ignored us, which suited me fine.
At the same time, we blended in weirdly, since most of them wore dark colors and had their eyes locked on their phones just like Black did.
I ended up doing the same.
I popped the battery back in my phone, knowing it was unlikely to ping off cell towers without the SIM card, and that I should be able to use the bar’s wifi for basic surfing. Once we’d settled at a table near the back exit, I finally got a chance to scan for articles on the wedding murders myself, looking to see if there had been any new developments.
There hadn’t been really.
I winced when I saw an image of Black being led into the police station in handcuffs, thinking immediately of Ian watching the nightly news. Black’s head and face had been blurred though, so all you could see were the rings on his fingers under the cuffs and the black clothes and his arms and hands covered in blood. Reporters mentioned that the police let him go a little more than twenty-four hours later.
Nothing I saw, either in photo or video, showed Black’s face.
They hadn’t even mentioned his name.
Black must have damned good lawyers to keep that stuff out of the news, without even the obligatory “alleged” and “person of interest” words attached... much less off the dozens of voyeuristic and conspiracy sites that obsessed on the wedding murders online. Most of those sites had a pet conspiracy about the identity of the killer (or in some cases, killers), as well as a creative diversity in motives, connections to the victims and so on.
At the end of an hour of reading through posts, I still didn’t feel like I’d learned much. Eventually I’d sighed, popped the battery out of the back of my phone, and wandered to the bar to order a caffeinated soda.
We left the bar right around ten-thirty.
Truthfully, the idea of us doing anything that night apart from getting arrested––or, best case, freezing our asses off waiting for someone who never bothered to show––seemed like an insane long-shot to me now.
Assuming Black wasn’t the killer himself, of course.
Following his graceful and nearly-silent steps down a sand-and-dirt trail between pine and redwood trees heading north, I found myself thinking again how dangerous this was, even apart from the sheer improbability of our catching the killer.
Why the hell would I believe Black about any of this?
Even if I believed he didn’t intend to kill me––which for some utterly irrational reason I still did––why would I believe his crazy theory about other-dimensional astrology systems and their connection to alien wedding rituals and anti-human terrorist plots?
While all of it sounded equally implausible in Black’s penthouse that afternoon, strangely, it hadn’t sounded as dangerous.
But now, the idea that we could just pop down here to check out Black’s theory in the middle of the night without police back-up struck me as deeply delusional, and not only because Black was armed like he expected to be breaking into a maximum security penitentiary.
We were reaching the edge of the wooded park.
I could see a brighter glow of orange-tinted streetlights in the distance, even though we faced the back-end of the building, which remained in shadow. We’d just crossed a small wooden foot bridge when the path sloped up to the last line of trees. Beyond that was a landscaped lawn that wrapped around the structure up to the fountain and courtyard.
We were about to enter the park-like grounds when Black motioned for me to follow him to the left instead, taking me through a path-less cluster of trees around the west side of the building. Within a few minutes I saw the stone patio and tables outside the lower floor restaurant. Black used military hand-gestures to let me know we were entering the building there.
It hit me again that we were really breaking in. I found myself gripping the handle of the gun poking out by the left side of my ribs, but I didn’t draw it.
I liked having him in front of me at least.
Well, assuming he wasn’t working with anyone else.
Glancing behind me, I opened my mind, listening for the thoughts of other people.
People besides me and Black, that is.
When I did, Black came to a dead stop. He looked back at me sharply, his irises picking up a faint light from... somewhere... some light behind me, maybe from something on the grounds of the military-owned land, or maybe the moon.
Before I could think about why he was looking at me like that, he took a long step in my direction. Catching hold of my arms in his fingers, he lowered his head, speaking softly in my ear once he was near enough.
“We’re tracking one like me,” he said. “And you.”
“Yeah?” I said, just as quiet.
“Yeah? Don’t do that,” he said, lower still. “Don’t try to read me. Don’t look for them with your mind. They might feel it... or hear it.”
Moving my head away from his, I could only stare up at him in the dark.
His expression didn’t move.
“I don’t want them to know what you are,” he added, harder.
The silence between us deepened.
“You hearing me, doc?” he whispered. “You can’t control that, I want you to head back. To the car. Now.”
Weirdly, his words caused me to relax.
Which, if he’d been a psychopath, might have been their purpose.
I shoved that fleeting thought out of my mind.
“Got it,” was all I said.
Like him, I avoided words with hard sibilant, or “s” sounds.
“Okay?” he said.
I nodded, my hand still on the gun. “I got it. Go.”
He nodded, then turned, walking with those oddly silent steps of his through the trees. We didn’t emerge out onto the lawn itself until the last possible minute, after we’d walked the tree-lined road with the golf course on our left and the museum on our right, bringing us directly across from that outdoor patio with its closed umbrellas over round tables.
I followed him out onto the lawn, conscious that I was holding my breath as we approached the patio. We walked between those stone tables and dark, folded umbrellas. I could see the streetlights to our left, at the front of the building. I could even see part of the view past the building itself, although the trees of the Presidio made most of that dark apart from shimmering reflections of the moon on occasional glimpses of water.
Within seconds, I found myself with Black against the white wall of the building. We stood just to the right of the glass doors leading into the restaurant’s main dining area. I was about to ask Black how he planned to get us past the alarms and security cameras when he touched the headset he wore and spoke in a murmur.
“Dark,” I heard him murmur.
I happened to be looking at the control box to the alarm over a doorway inside the restaurant. Being pitch black in there, it was the only light I could see beyond a faint illumination beyond the arch of that same door.
I watched the indicator light turn from red to green.
A bare second later, Black turned to me. “Ready?”
I nodded, my heart hammering in my chest. I was never someone who froze in combat situations. Still, I wasn’t one of those weirdos who got off on them either.
“Liar,” Black murmured next to me.
I wasn’t sure which thing he meant, so I only frowned.
Giving me a faint smile, he inserted a metal cylinder into the locking mechanism under the metal handle of the door. I held my breath as he turned it easily to the right, hitting a faint resistance before there was an audible click.
A master key of some kind.
Withdrawing and pocketing the cylinder, Black pushed open the sliding glass door.
Then we were inside, walking between tables in the dark.
Both of us had guns in our hands now.
I was more conscious of the possibility of friendly fire than unfriendly at that point––meaning I didn’t want to accidentally shoot some poor security guard who came down here looking for a snack.
I knew they must have actual living guards in a place like this.
When I’d brought that up to Black over dinner, he’d seemed unconcerned.
“Cameras will go down when my team pulls the plug on the alarms,” he’d told me, leaning over his plate of half-eaten steak to show me some flickering of program code sent to him by his people. “They’re working on getting us video feed streaming to the monitors. It’ll have to be a loop, so there’s some chance it’ll be picked up by their software... although my team is aiming for a loop of twenty minutes, so we likely have that, minimum, to get inside, unless they pick up on the signal tampering. Or notice the moon.”
“The moon?” I’d paused with a forkful of grilled salmon halfway to my mouth. “What does that mean?”
“There’s a moon tonight,” he said, equally dismissive as he tapped the glass window with the backs of his fingers. “Twenty minutes is long enough for it to move. They’ll take the sample loop as close as they can, but depending on cloud cover and the moon’s position...”
“Okay,” I said. “I got it.”
I was staring out the window though, thinking, and Black must have seen it on my face. For some reason, he didn’t ignore it that time.
“What?” he said.
“That spiral pattern,” I said, looking away from the window. “You know what it is?”
He made a vague gesture with one hand. “I might.”
“What is it?”
“I said ‘might,’” he said, sharper, his sculpted lips turning in a faint frown. “That wasn’t a figure of speech, doc.” His expression still hard, he made a more conciliatory wave with the same hand, lowering his voice. “I’ve seen it before. Not only in this world. I haven’t had time to research it fully, and I wasn’t familiar with the group back in our home dimension... but the symbol’s not dissimilar to something I remember there.”
“Where?” I said.
“I just told you.”
I shook my head. “No. I mean what was the context? Secular? Religious? Political? Where did you see it? In that... other place?”
“I saw it written on walls. And on flags belonging to a sect operating there. A religion, I guess you could say.”
I frowned. “Was it a religion?”
“It would probably be most accurate to call it a radical sect of a religion,” he said, taking a sip of his wine. “One with... political aspirations. The religion itself was more mainstream.” Hesitating, he met my gaze. “It was race-related. The three spirals, they represented the three main races. That was a big part of their ideology.”
“There were three races there? Three humanoid races?”
“Yes.” Chewing on a piece of steak and swallowing, he shrugged. “Well... one was extinct. Or a myth. Depends on who you asked. Only two existed when I was there.”
I nodded, deciding to shelve that for now, too.
Then, thinking about his words, I shook my head, putting down my fork.
“What exactly do you plan to do?” I said, wiping my hands on the napkin in my lap. “Shoot the guy? Talk to him?”
“Both, perhaps,” he said, giving me a cryptic smile. His eyes grew more serious when he added, “I want to know what he is first, Miriam. And if he’s working alone. If I didn’t need to know those things, I’d just call the police. Let your friend Tanaka handle it.”
I let out a disbelieving laugh. “Right.”
“I would,” he said, sounding a little offended. “Why wouldn’t I?”
I had no idea how to answer that. So I didn’t.
I had to hope he had some plan, though.
Something beyond “talk to the guy.”
Glancing at my watch, I hoped like hell Ian was dead asleep by now, too.
As I thought it, Black peered his head out of the doorway between the restaurant’s main dining room and the hallway leading into the downstairs exhibit halls. I knew the staircase to the upper floors lived near the restaurant’s entrance as well. After Black checked to make sure the coast was clear, he turned to me. He showed me a screen with dark blue letters on a pitch black background, presumably to minimize brightness.
Virus has been activated, the letters read. Security will be busy. 10 mins.
He typed again, his fingers moving with a mechanical precision.
They’ll check down here last, the letters read. We need to hide before they do. My people will keep motion sensors off if they can. Can’t count on it.
I gestured my confusion.
He typed again. Under the pyramid. Angel.
That time I just nodded, tightening my hands on the gun.
I should have known.
Those spirals couldn’t have been a coincidence.
Swallowing my misgivings, I followed Black, my gun pointed down but still in front of me. I kept my eyes on his back as he moved silently across the tile floor. I also kept my ears and eyes open, glancing up as we passed beneath the staircase, listening with my ears that time, even as I scanned the dimly lit passage with my eyes.
I remembered his warning about not trying to use my mind in here.
Suddenly, that felt like a pretty big handicap.
I looked down even as Black aimed us down a smaller corridor.
I remembered the passageway. Now that I knew where we were going, I tried to remember the exact layout of this lower floor. The near-perfect darkness didn’t help, partly because everything looked so different than it had that afternoon, but also because it was easy to get turned around, forget what direction we were traveling. I had the blueprints memorized according to their relation to the directions of the compass, so losing that disoriented me.
Alcove lighting under a few works of art hanging in the hallway helped me to find my way back to the map, as well as dim, floor-level illumination around two doors we passed. I also saw one flickering, cracked Exit sign, and a few times, smaller panel lights, probably from security cameras that Black seemed to think were all switched off.
None of those lights traveled far.
Truthfully, they disoriented me as much as they helped in terms of seeing what was around us, breaking up my night vision if I looked at them too long. But they got me oriented more or less to the blueprints again.
Most of the floor was completely dark; I wasn’t sure if that was Black’s doing too, meaning something related to whatever his people had done to turn off security. Even the bathrooms we passed were dark, but maybe the security guards used a different set upstairs.
I still hadn’t heard anyone.
We walked through another archway and into an exhibit room that was nearly pitch black. My heart pounding harder, I raised the gun, my fingers resting on the barrel just above the trigger. Indistinct shapes made me startle a few times, seeing what might have been people.
In all three cases, they turned out to be sculptures.
We left through another arched doorway on the other side and entered a room that appeared to be mostly furniture. If I was remembering accurately, this room was a historical re-creation of a European King’s parlor room, someone from Bourbon France, I think. I remembered marveling over the details they’d included that afternoon: old musical instruments and sheet music and a writing desk along with gorgeous bookshelves filled with rare books, many of which appeared to be real, on loan from some collector or another.
This had to be one of the rooms with motion sensors, I thought.
Some of the items in here had to be priceless.
The realization didn’t do much for my nerves.
It was too quiet. I found myself wondering exactly what Black’s people had done to keep the security guards so occupied upstairs.
When we reached the next archway, I knew something was wrong.
Light came from that entrance.
I’d expected some light under the pyramid itself, of course. Even with the partially cloudy sky, the moon was nearly full, so I’d expected there to be a blueish glow in the room housing the statue of the angel.
But the light I could see in the room ahead wasn’t blue. It flickered and glowed a darker yellow, nearly orange where it leaked into the adjacent exhibit hall.
Like fire.
My heart hammered louder under my ribs, feeling like it might crack a bone. I was having trouble breathing, although I couldn’t yet attach anything concrete to the feeling.
Still, some part of me knew... felt it...
Black came to a dead stop when he saw the same light.
Then he walked carefully around it, avoiding the illuminated swath of floor as he headed for the arched entryway connecting the two rooms. When he reached the shadowed segment of wall to the right, he went completely motionless, staring inside the room at an angle without letting any part of himself touch the light.
Then he turned, his gold eyes strangely visible in the dark.
He motioned with a hand, again using military signals to tell me to walk to his left, to go around the light to the other side of the open archway, opposite him.
Lowering the gun, I did as he asked.
I stepped carefully, following the shadow all the way back to get to the other side of the arch without being seen by anyone in the lit room.
I reached the opposite side of the door seconds later. Remaining in shadow, I stared into the lit side of the room I could see without putting my face into the opening and therefore the light.
From here, that flicker of orange and yellow definitely looked like candlelight.
Fire, anyway.
I also saw a snippet of what looked like writing on the far wall. I didn’t recognize any of the characters, but that wasn’t what drew my attention at first. The symbols had been done in ragged, uneven brush strokes, using a dark red liquid. I really, really hoped that dark red “paint” wasn’t what my mind immediately wanted to tell me it was.
I could smell it though, even from here.
That dense, coppery scent wafted in the air, seemingly made worse by the flickers of candlelight. I caught the faintest whiff of smoke too, but somehow it was that coppery smell my brain fixated on the most intently.
Maybe it was some animal instinct still hard-wired in my DNA.
I glanced at Black, and saw him lurking in the shadow as well, his gold eyes scanning the opposite segment of the exhibit hall. It occurred to me that from where he stood, Black had a much wider view of the overall room. I couldn’t see the angel statue from where I was, just the edge of that writing on the wall covering part of one painting, along with the archway leading out what must be the southwest end of the central exhibit chamber.
From his angle, Black must be able to see the actual statue.
Even as I thought it, he frowned.
Then he let out an audible sigh––audible enough that I jumped, realizing only then how quiet both of us had been.
He looked at me, meeting my gaze with his lion-like eyes.
“We’re too late, doc,” he said.
He spoke softly, but not in a whisper.
Before I could react, he re-holstered his gun. I stared at him, uncomprehending as he entered the exhibit hall without hesitation, his mouth set in a grim line as he walked out into the light and crossed the threshold. I stood there, still gripping my own gun in both hands, breathing harder as some part of my brain continued to grapple with his words.
Unlike him, I kept my gun out as I followed him. I held it in both hands, if aimed at the floor. In fact, I only reinforced my grip on the handle as I walked out into the light.
As soon as I turned the corner, I let out an involuntary gasp.
I saw her first... before I saw the rest, I mean.
I stared at her for a few full seconds before I made sense of any other part of the scene... or what her awkward pose meant.
Her arms were spread up and out in that same curved loop over her head. Her head itself tilted backwards, a dark red slash showing where her throat had been cut.
She wore a wedding dress.
Her dress flowed out longer in back than the ones in pictures of the other murders I’d seen, with a built-in train. Instead of lying flat in the simulated pose mirrored by the other two, she’d been stretched into that pose with the help of the angel and horse statue, as well as what must be wire or thread. Whatever it was, it didn’t show up immediately in the flickering candlelight.
Someone had lit upwards of thirty or so white candles, using them to surround the angel statue, and to illuminate the killer’s display.
One of each of her forearms had been tied to one each of the angel’s wings. Her hands had been positioned carefully, in a way that again suggested wire or string holding them in that perfect, delicate-fingered position like a ballerina’s pose.
Her legs had been posed into the exact same position as the other victims’ as well, with the difference being that this one was more or less vertical versus being displayed on her back. The left leg stretched straight, the toe pointed and most of the leg visible below the dress, which had been bunched up in front nearly to her waist. The right leg had been bent at the knee, the toe also pointed and apparently tied up with the same mechanism that kept the hands in place.
Whoever had cut her throat sawed into the flesh and muscle so deep they’d nearly severed her head from her body. Her head hung at that grotesque angle as a result, the yawning cut facing the skylight, the surrounding skin of her neck bone-white in contrast.
Someone had carved the three spiral symbol at the base of her throat. From the amount of blood soaking her chest, I suspected they’d carved it there, as well. The symbol at her throat covered most of her collarbone area, appearing almost black in the candlelight.
I stared at her, knowing she was dead.
Moreover, she’d been dead for some time.
No blood covered the floor beneath her. None ran from that slash on her neck.
A metal pail stood on the stone tile floor in front of her, weirdly innocuous-looking. It had been placed with obvious deliberation however, since it stood in perfect symmetry with the displayed body and the statue, forming a triangular point between the angel’s wings.
I winced when I realized a lot of the coppery smell came from that pail.
Covering my mouth and nose with one hand, I looked away from her, fighting nausea, even as I kept the gun pointed roughly in her direction.
My eyes shifted to the wall.
I could see two lines of symbols now, covering the length of the room on that side.
I had no idea what they meant.
“It’s writing,” Black breathed.
I glanced at him, realizing only then that I’d forgotten he was there.
“What language?” I said, my voice less than a whisper.
He gave me a grim look, not answering. Then he spoke a language I’d never heard before. His words rang out with an alien melodiousness, mixed with rougher, more guttural sounds that were somehow even more foreign.
A ringing silence fell after he finished.
Then he spoke again, in the same clear voice. It wasn’t until he got a few words in that I realized he was translating the words that time, speaking English.
“And a great wail rose when the gods spoke,” Black said. “...For the door to that other place must need be lost, and those on the other side forgotten...”
When he finished speaking, the silence deepened once more.
In it, all I heard was the faint hiss of guttering candle flames.
“What does it mean?” I finally whispered.
Black looked at me. Something in his eyes made him appear lost deep in thought, his mind a million miles away. I watched that more distant look fade, right before his expression hardened, making him look dangerous.
“It means he knows about me,” he said.
He closed the distance between us is two long strides. I didn’t flinch but felt myself tense, gripping the gun I held more tightly, still aiming it towards the floor and roughly in the direction of the dead girl. If Black noticed, it didn’t slow him down. He walked right up to me, his gold eyes even more animal in the candles’ flames.
“...He knows what I am. We need to get out of here. Now, Miriam.”
He caught hold of my arm.
As he did, an explosion ripped through the skylight overhead, knocking both of us down.