“He didn’t know why he authorized it.” Rule shook his head in a marveling way.
“Neither of us did until we saw the report from the agency that tracks sales of gadolinium.” She sighed. “I was hoping it was the wrong James French. That happens sometimes, though the social security number was a match. But I should have told you. There was so much going on, and we were late, but . . . I should have told you.” He’d have kept an eye on Cullen if he’d had more warning. As it was . . . “Would Cullen have killed French if you hadn’t stopped him?”
“He loves Toby, and he had an unpleasant experience with gado many years ago.”
Which did not answer her question . . . or maybe it did.
He hugged her closer for a moment. “About those dishes. You had another phone call from Ruben. I can handle the cleanup, if you need to go.”
She shook her head, a leaden feeling in her stomach. “I’m not needed. I already notified Deacon and the hospital. Ruben’s sending a Medevac chopper to pick up Hodges. He needs more expert care than he can get here.”
“Why?”
“Roy Don Meacham died a couple hours ago. Progressive neurological damage, they said. Just like the dogs.”
DARKNESS and light are the same to one without eyes, yet it remembered night. It remembered so much more than it had before—not what it needed most to remember, but other things. Things like night, street, boy . . . when the boy left with the other warmth, it had almost followed. It had been excited because it remembered boy and had wanted to see what a boy did. There had been something about the other warmth, too . . . something familiar.
That was it, yes. It hadn’t remembered, but for a moment it had seemed there was something to remember. But it wasn’t drawn to that warmth the way it was to the man. The one who knew it.
It had formed a plan. It would stay near the house until the man came out. Somehow it would speak to the man. If it could hang on to words long enough to speak to the man, maybe it would know what to ask.
So it stayed outside the house. It knew walls once more, but that wasn’t why it didn’t enter, for it also remembered sliding through walls. This puzzled it—why did it remember walls as a barrier? But this house would not admit it, not through walls or doors or windows. It didn’t know why.
Perhaps the man had forbidden it to enter.
It cringed back upon itself. Yes, that might be. It didn’t remember a forbidding, but it forgot so much, so much. Still, it remembered attacking the man. While in the old man’s warmth, it had tried to kill the man. The horror of that moment made its pieces clatter together, a harsh and painful dissonance.
In its misery, it had allowed The Voice to call it back. But The Voice fed it poorly, with such small lives—sparks only, little sparks that flared for a second, then were gone, swallowed by the cold.
It had left The Voice, searching until it found the house once more, the house where the man was.
The man had nearly killed it. It shuddered, remembering that as well. It had bared its throat—the warmth’s throat—and tried to hold itself still for that terrible judgment, which was the man’s right.
It had failed, and fled.
Coward.
That word it didn’t want to remember, but it did. Yes, the man had probably forbidden it entry to the house, and it had to obey the man. It deserved no better. But it was cold, so cold again . . . always cold, unless it was in a warmth. Even feeding well didn’t warm it for long. But the right warmths were so hard to find . . .
Hunger and cold and a longing so keen it drowned the rest drew it closer to the house whose walls wouldn’t allow it in. It could feel the warmths inside, several large warmths other than the man. They didn’t interest it until one warmth shifted, moving its thoughts or its self in a strange way. Opening . . . For a second it saw a way in.
Then it was gone. A door had opened in that warmth, then shut. It hung there, astonished, as still as it could be with its crashing, disintegrating pieces.
The door didn’t open again.
Disappointment crushed it. It needed to feed. It needed to feed and be warm—oh, how it needed that, before it began losing night and street and boy and all that it had remembered.
It was afraid to enter the small warmths the way it had before. They lacked words. Maybe that was why it had lost words for so long: it spent too much time in the small warmths. But it couldn’t hold itself together much longer. It needed . . . needed . . .
The Voice was calling. It heard, and all its pieces vibrated with hate. Not yet. It wasn’t going back yet to the thin meals and commands and—and something it couldn’t remember, but that it hated above all the rest. It had a plan. It hadn’t followed the boy because . . . because . . .
Why hadn’t it followed the boy? It couldn’t remember. It had had a plan, but it couldn’t remember.
Screaming in silent rage and despair, it lost its hold on where it was and began drifting. The Voice was calling, tugging at it. It gave up and allowed this. The Voice would feed it.
Maybe this time it would find a way to make The Voice feed it properly. Maybe if it fed enough, it could kill The Voice. That felt right. Important. Kill The Voice, and it would regain . . . something. Something it needed so much.
The comfort of this new plan eased the pain of losing the other one. Something involving the boy . . . It did remember the boy.
Maybe, once it fed, it would remember what it needed from the boy.
THIRTY
THE next morning was Saturday. In July, the sun sticks his head over the horizon around six twenty. Rule dragged Lily out for a run at six.
Since he’d woken her even earlier for another sort of exercise, she didn’t complain as much as she might have—especially when he was right. She needed a good run to clear her head.
It was almost cool at that hour. The air was thick, the ozone warning high, but the mercury had dipped below seventy by at least a degree. Maybe even two.
She didn’t push herself until the last mile, so was able to fill Rule in on where the investigation was headed. Laying it out for him cleared her head, too. By the time she was in the shower, washing off the sweat, she’d figured out what the next step needed to be.
They’d soon have a list of graves to be salted. Headquarters was working on it. That was one great thing about turning fed—she could get information a helluva lot faster, even when she needed data from several jurisdictions.
The hundred-mile radius around Halo included multiple North Carolina counties as well as parts of South Carolina and Virginia. That was the problem, Lily thought, with these dinky little eastern states. A hundred miles this way or that, and you ran right out of state. Plus they needed to sort by sex—the ghosts were consistent about calling the wraith “he”—and time of death. The major power wind of the Turning had hit at 2:53 EST, so they were excluding deaths after four p.m. that day.
They’d received the first list well before Lily left for dinner: eighty-two deaths that might have produced the wraith. Unfortunately, it turned out to be incomplete. After a great deal of thinking, pacing—and the occasional sketching of arcane symbols in the air, which worried the cops in the room no end—Cullen had declared that the spell casting could have taken place up to two days after the death. Blood retained a magical connection to the deceased for that long. He thought it likely the spell had been cast very soon after death, but they had to look at deaths over a period of two and a half days.