Eventually everyone went to their rooms. I sat on the bed and stroked Ghost’s fur. The following morning we’d be on a plane back to California, and leaving all this behind. The crap in Washington was going to be sorted out by Aunt Sallie, who would kick ass and take names.
“It’s okay, Ghost,” I said. “It’s all okay.”
Which neither of us believed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The priest was middle-aged and he’d seen it all. Desperate drunks looking to make a bargain with God. The broken heart who had no other lifeline to grab. The fallen and the falling. The displaced ones who came because the doors were open. Those sad ones who came in just to see if they were still welcome. People whose faith was cracking but who wanted to cling to belief.
So many kinds. Father Steve often mused that he could fill a book with the different types. Multiple volumes. He knew that only half of them still identified in some way as Catholic. The rest were a mixed bag of Christians, lapsed-somethings, agnostics, or atheists who were having a crisis of their own lack of faith. Why Immaculate Conception? Easy. It was in a part of town where the crime rate was low enough to risk keeping the doors open all night. A lot of cops came in here. People from the crisis centers took the Metro to come here.
It was all the same to him. Father Steve was a practical guy. He’d been a chaplain in the First Gulf War and had logged time as a missionary attached to crisis hospitals in five different African countries. Since then he’d been running Immaculate Conception, mostly doing counseling, taking confessions, and working the night shift. It was a big church and there were three priests, of which he had middle seniority and no ambition to run the whole shebang.
He preferred keeping the candles lit for the wanderers who came in for quiet reflection at odd hours. Right now, there were six people in the various pews. Each sitting as geographically far away from each other as was possible. He admired the desperate geometry of it.
The old woman closest to the front was a widow who had been in every three or four days since her husband of sixty-four years passed from cancer. She was one of the brokenhearted ones, because she’d outlived her husband, both daughters, and three grandchildren. She sat rocking in silence, and Father Steve knew that no words existed to offer comfort, and no advice — no psychology or scripture — could adequately explain to her why she survived while everyone else she loved died.
Then there was the guy who ran the NA meeting. Not using, earning his ten-year chip, and running a successful meeting was in no way a buffer against hearing the stories his fellow NA members told. He’d once admitted that he felt like he was carrying those stories around as surely as if they were tattooed on his skin.
The other four tonight were new, but there were always a lot of those.
Father Steve made just enough noise to ensure they all knew he was there in case they needed something more than the setting and the atmosphere.
Then he spotted a seventh visitor he hadn’t noticed before, seated in the shadows to the left of the basin of holy water, just outside the circle of yellow light cast by the flickering candles. Late thirties, he judged; well dressed but with a kind of disheveled air about him. As if the man was rumpled rather than his suit.
He needs his soul dry-cleaned, mused Father Steve, then chewed for a moment on that thought. It was accurate, but he could not pinpoint why it was right.
There was a sound and everyone in the church looked up as a bass growl filled the air. It was not very loud and not sharp. Not like an explosion, and not quite thunder. Then Father Steve felt the floor vibrate beneath his feet. For a moment he thought it was a subway train rocketing along beneath the ground, but the sound was wrong, and the vibration was too strong.
The guy from Narcotics Anonymous said it out loud, putting a name to it. “Earthquake.”
He was right and everyone knew it. They sat where they were. No one rushed for the protection of a doorway. The rumble was low, soft… and then it was gone.
“Thank God,” said the NA guy.
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Father Steve and, as all eyes were suddenly on him, he made the sign of the cross in the air and gave a blessing for the safety of one and all.
The others said amen.
Except the man in the shadows, who caved slowly forward, placed his face in his hands, and began to weep.
No one heard him whisper, “I’m sorry.”
Not even Father Steve.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Harry woke up slowly. It hurt. His body ached, and there was a feeling like a splinter driven into his mind. He sat up, gasping, drool hanging from his rubbery lips. Understanding coalesced with slow reluctance. The citadel in Syria. The tomb raiders. The hidden chamber and the green glow and the…
His head whipped around but the strange doorway was gone. It was all gone. Ghul and his people, those damned tentacles, the glimpse of some alien sky. All that was left was a trace of the green glow. A fragment of something that gleamed like glass, or crystal, lying on the stone floor near the base of a pillar. It pulsed like a heartbeat, the light waxing and waning very slowly.
Violin stood over it, and by that bizarre light Harry could see her expression, and it froze the heart in his chest. He had never before seen a look of such profound and personal horror. It twisted her lovely face into an ugly mask of disgust and hate and fear.
“V–Violin…?” he whispered, tripping over her name. His voice was hoarse and cracked.
She turned her head very slowly toward him. It was a strange movement that, in the strangeness of the moment, did not look at all human. It was more like a praying mantis swiveling its head. Her dark eyes looked like orbs of black onyx and he saw no warmth at all in them. However, the horror and fear slowly drained from her expression, like sand from a broken hourglass.
“Violin?” he asked again.
She blinked once. Slowly. Then again. And after a third blink there was a change. She was back.
“Harry?” Violin murmured in a voice stretched paper thin with tension. She took a step toward him, caught him under the arm, and jerked him to his feet with such shocking force that Harry went stumbling several paces forward. But he skidded to a stop when he realized that she’d accidently propelled him toward the piece of green crystal. Violin cried out, but Harry began backpedaling, pinwheeling his arms like a sloppy tightrope walker. Violin caught his shoulder and pulled him farther away. They stood for a moment, panting as if they’d run up ten flights of stairs, staring at the pulsing green object.
“What is that?” he asked in a church whisper.
Violin licked her lips. “Something that should not be here.”
“‘Here’ where? In this frigging tomb?”
“No,” said Violin. She shook her head as if trying to clear her thoughts, then pulled a compact satellite from a pouch on her belt. “No signal,” she said after a moment.
“Violin, what is that thing? It makes me feel weird.”
She turned and suddenly jerked to a stop, staring at him, her eyes wide but face wooden. “Harry,” she said in a slow, calm, controlled voice, “put that down.”
“Put what down?”
Then he felt the weight in his right hand and looked down to see, with total astonishment, that he was holding his pistol. “I… I…”