Neither Jack nor Crock ever picked up. Becca reached the sheriff, though, and he promised to have Jack call. Theresa was sitting at her kitchen table when her phone finally rang in her hand, startling her so she almost dropped it.
“Jack, somethin’ terrible’s ’bout to happen,” she told him, all the pent-up scared flooding out with the words.
“I know,” he said. The sound of his voice—she’d never heard that tone before—stopped her.
“How do you know? Me and Becca just did figure it out our own selves.”
“Figure what out? You didn’t see it on television?”
“See what on television?”
“Turn the television on. It’s still all over the news.”
Becca crossed the room and turned on the set. She changed the channel a time or two, looking for—an image burst on the screen that took a second to process. Two men were—Daniel!—on their knees.
The sight swallowed up every bit of oxygen in the air. Theresa heard Becca cry out from a great distance and then she could hear the voice of the news anchor reading from an email he said had been sent to all the national media outlets last night.
“No one is safe. Nowhere is safe. The blood of these two will herald the shedding of blood this day in cities all across the country. The revolution has begun, and from the ashes of destruction will rise the phoenix of a new order. A new America. Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
Theresa was afraid, alright. So scared for Daniel she had to swallow hard to keep from chucking up her breakfast.
Daniel. They was a man standin’ behind him a-fixin’ to chop off his head!
“Only one voice in American politics called this one,” the talking head droned on as Theresa’s eyes gobbled up Daniel’s face. He’d been beat up somethin’ fierce.
“Democratic party candidate Chapman Whitworth has been saying ever since he entered the race that domestic terrorism posed the greatest threat to America.”
The screen then showed a clip of one of Whitworth’s speeches.
“Chasing hooded figures in the desert is a dangerous misdirection of resources. We must look within our own borders for those who seek to destroy us.”
Jack had been right! All that death, all those innocent people—Chapman Whitworth had planned and executed it all. And he meant to orchestrate more death—would attack other cities just like he was planning to do in Cincinnati. Was she and Becca supposed to stop them other attacks, too? How did God intend to pull that off?
“…know where the efreet is,” Jack was saying and she tried to concentrate, focus on that. “Ariel told us. We have to get to it to…stop it. That’s Daniel’s only hope. The only hope of all the people Whitworth is planning to massacre today. That doesn’t give us much time and it’ll take you and Becca an hour and a half to get here.”
Theresa couldn’t breathe. There was a sudden tightness in her chest, an overwhelming sense that something was terribly wrong with all this. Like she’d felt the whole time Chapman Whitworth was tricking them into getting him publicity. She’d ignored the feeling then, but it was bigger and stronger now and she wasn’t gone ignore it again!
“You got to give me some time.” Theresa choked out the words, then shoved the phone at Becca. “You tell him what we know about them letters and that manhole cover. And tell him we’ll call him back.”
She got up from the table and walked in an unsteady gait out of the kitchen and down the hallway to Bishop’s office. She pushed the door open. She could see brown bloodstains on the floor where they’d killed the snake last night. She stood for a moment on the threshold, then stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
Theresa had only been in this room three or four times in all the long years she and Bishop had lived in this house. Two walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases so jammed with books they spilled out onto the floor. And even more volumes had been shoved into the space between the tops of the books and the bottoms of the shelves above. Becca’d put the bulletin board back up on the wall and hung on the rack above it the scimitar Theresa’d used to kill the snake.
She stood looking at the scimitar for a moment, hadn’t never paid much heed to it before. It was old, with swirls and hand-carved designs and symbols on the handle that might have been words in some language she didn’t know. The blade was silver, maybe even real silver from the tarnished look of it, and it coulda sliced through a solid hickory mop handle easy as it did that snake.
She never come in Bishop’s study or into the one in their house in Bradford’s Ridge because Bishop didn’t want her to. And she didn’t want to, neither. She knew what was in all them books—some so old the bindings had rotted away so’s Bishop’d had to lift ’em careful or they’d fall apart in his hands. On the pages of them books was descriptions of pure evil. What it looked like. What it acted like. What it done in the world. On and on.
How that man of hers—and frail little Becca!—had come in here day after day and let consummate evil out of them books into the air with ’em was more than Theresa could comprehend.
She went to the desk and sat down in Bishop’s chair, all broke down from him sittin’ in it, and let the reality sink in. Jack knew where the efreet was hidin’ and needed her and Becca to hurry on down there so’s they could go into that dark evil hidey-hole and do what it was they had to do. Or maybe die tryin’.
But Theresa’s mind kept swerving away from that and back to them people who was gone be at the Better Day Society ball.
What was gone happen to them? They was expecting more than a thousand people, all decked out in costumes and looking forward to havin’ theirselves a good time. And somebody—maybe a whole bunch of somebodies for all she knew—was working right this minute on a plan to butcher the lot of them. Every last one.
Fire. Smoke. Broken glass. Body parts flying through the air.
A Frisbee with OSW7—no, with LMSD—printed on it cutting a man in half.
Jack wasn’t gone come back here and save them people like he saved Andi. He couldn’t. Not with what he had to do, what he’d been assigned to do. So was all them people just gone have to get murdered?
She closed her eyes and prayed.
What are you doin’ here, Lord? You just want me to get in the car and drive away and let all them people get blown into little bitty pieces?
I know you done said I got to go fight this—
She stopped then, thinking.
When was that, exactly? When was it God had picked her out to do battle with the efreet?
Why, it was…was…
Dawning awareness lit her mind like turning up the dimmer switch on the chandelier in Miss Minnie and Mr. Gerald’s foyer.
Point of fact was it’d been Theresa who’d decided that was her job, not God. She’d made up her mind she was s’posed to take Bishop’s place and she hadn’t never bothered to run that decision by God to see what he might have to say about it one way or the other.
Maybe that wasn’t what she was s’posed to do a’tall.
It’d been orchestrated so’s she and Becca wasn’t down there in Bradford’s Ridge right now, when it was time.
Things happened for a reason.
When she returned to the kitchen, where Becca sat with big tears streaming down her cheeks, Theresa felt even more exhausted than she had before, if that was possible. She knew her face showed it. Had to. She was running pretty near empty now and wasn’t no way to hide a thing like that. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that she might not survive what lay ahead. Might be that none of them would. That wasn’t for her to say, though. Her job was to suit up and show up—as Bishop used to say—and let those a whole lot higher on the food chain than a fat old woman figure out the rest of it.
“Do what you done before, sugar,” Theresa said, gesturing to the phone in Becca’s hand. “That FaceTime thing. We all need to talk.”
When Jack’s face appeared in the phone’s view window, Theresa sat down next to her, snuggled close so they could both see.
“Everybody there on that end?” she asked Jack. “We all need to have a say in this.”
“All aboard,” Jack said, panning the phone so Theresa could see the others. They had gotten into Jack’s car—for privacy, Theresa supposed. Crock was in the front passenger seat and Andi leaned over from the backseat.
Theresa got right to the point. “Me and Becca…we ain’t gone be comin’ down there today, Jack.”
Becca stared at Theresa, dumbstruck. “What do you mean we’re not going?”
Theresa rolled her eyes. “How many things can ‘we not going’ mean, child? We stayin’ here. The thing down in Bradford’s Ridge—it’s not for us to do.”
Jack’s face registered shock, distress and fear. He tried real hard to keep emotion out of his voice when he spoke. He didn’t manage it, but he did try.
“You mean…I’m going to…go after the efreet alone?”
“That ain’t what I said. I said that task there is not what’s been laid out for me and Becca to do. But you ain’t gone be by yourself. You’ll have Crock and Andi with you.”
It built up and built up until it just finally blew out of Jeff’s mouth and into the world.
“This is an awfully small place to have such a big elephant in the middle of the room,” he said. “What we’re not talking about…who we’re not talking about is—”
“Don’t!” Daniel’s voice came out of a silence as thick as mud. “Just…don’t.”
“Look, I don’t know about this kind of thing—you do, you’re the minister. All I know is that we’re both going to stop breathing, permanently, in—”
“Do you think I want to spend my last breaths talking about…my wife and you?” Suddenly, Daniel barked out a sardonic laugh. “This ought to be one of Dante’s Nine Levels of Hell—spending your last hours on earth locked in a dark room with the man who was sleeping with the woman you love.”
“Or with the man who got her first. Who gave her his name. Who fathered her child.”
The silence breathed. In and out. Jeff could hear the sound of it pounding like surf in his ears.
“You loved Emily.” It wasn’t even a question. Daniel’s voice was devoid of emotion, sounding like an automated attendant.
“Not…as well as you did. Or as purely as you did. Or as faithfully as you did. I’m not the man you are, Daniel. But with whatever there is in me to love, I gave it all to Emily.”
The silence lasted one heartbeat. Two. When the question came out of the darkness, Jeff was sure Daniel Burke would rather have cut his own tongue out than ask it.
“And did she—?”
“Love me?” Jeff let the silent surf pound, listening to it crash on the rocks again and again. “If you’d asked me a week ago, I’d have puffed out my chest and said absolutely! That’s what I told myself, convinced myself. But the truth…all the truth I know is that I think…not.”
He was surprised that the last word came out in a strangled sob. He hadn’t known he was going to say that. If he planned it, he wouldn’t have said any of it. Because now that he’d said it, he had to face the reality that it was—to the best of his understanding—true. She’d been smitten with him, enjoyed him, wanted him. But she hadn’t loved him, not really. She’d said as much.
“Her cell phone…after she died, what did you do with it?” Jeff asked. “Did you read her texts?”
“I didn’t spy on Emily!” Daniel’s voice was as full of emotion then as it had been devoid of emotion before. “I think he…Victor Alexander stomped it. It was lying broken on the floor beside…”
Beside her body.
Jeff heard himself speaking again, words he’d never even thought before, truth he hadn’t accepted at the time and had never even peeked at in the months since.
“I sent her a text that day, that afternoon right before…” He dragged his mind away from the image of her his pain had sketched in his mind when he’d learned she’d been murdered, an image that’d haunted the dark hallways of his worst nightmares ever since. For all its horrific detail, though, it was imaginary. Daniel had seen reality. “I just asked her, ‘Are you okay?’”
“Why are you telling me this—do you really think I want to hear about your conversations, what you said to each other!”
“She texted me back. The time stamp…it was a few minutes before she died.” She hadn’t meant it, he’d told himself. She was just upset. He’d change her mind. As soon as he saw her, held her, kissed her…
He felt a sudden lump in his throat and had trouble pushing the words out into the darkness, heard his voice thick and tear-clotted. “She said, ‘It’s over, Jeff. I’m sorry. Goodbye.’”
The silence flowed like oil back into his ears.
“Why are you telling me this?” It was the same question, but it was only that this time—a question.
“Oh, don’t think I would have let that be the end of it,” Jeff said. “Just: ‘Bye-bye, see ya, have a nice life.’ No way! I’d have gone after her, I’d…”
He would have done anything to win her back. No matter what it took. He’d never have let her go. But before he had a chance, a demon had stolen her from him. From both of them. “I’m telling you because you have a right to know…Emily picked you.”
As Jeff Kendrick accepted the truth of those words for the first time, he decided dying wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
A stab wound in the thigh was not the most serious injury Major Charles Crocker had sustained in more than a quarter of a century in law enforcement. Not even close. He’d been a beat patrolman in Chicago in 1980, off duty, on his way to the hospital for the birth of his second child, when an “officer needs assistance” call came over the radio. He’d been the closest unit, so he’d responded to the call and found an officer pinned down by a teenager hyped-up on meth, waving a pistol around, trying to shoot out all the streetlights. In a hurry to cap the kid so he could be on his way, Crock tried to take him down before any more backup arrived. That departure from procedure earned him a bullet in the kneecap at point-blank range—and a lifetime devotion to following safety protocols. If the kid’d been using anything but a .22-caliber popgun, Crock probably would never have walked again. Back then, there was no such thing as knee-replacement surgery. As it was, the subsequent limp contributed to the peculiar bow-legged gait that had been mimicked unmercifully by every officer who’d served with him in the thirty-three years since.
The knee wasn’t his only world-class wound. A few years after that, working crowd control during a riot over some perceived injustice or another, Crock had been stabbed in the side with an icepick that slid in between the front and back panels of his Kevlar vest. Punctured a lung.
He’d once fought off the attack of a pit bull, too, and had the scars on his hands and arms to prove it. He’d been whacked on the head more times than he could count and kicked in the privates easily as many.
But no injury he’d ever sustained in all those years had caused him as much pain as the one he’d suffered when a little boy with curly brown hair stabbed a pair of scissors into his leg.
It hurt all out of proportion to the severity of the injury, spearing jagged shards of pain in heartbeat bursts through his body from his groin to his knee. The agonizing throb, throb, throb hadn’t even blinked at the massive doses of pain relievers he’d popped like some crackhead after he left the hospital. The drugs had made him dopey—that was all—so he’d stopped taking them, just gutted it out. He’d gnawed down to splinters every cinnamon toothpick he’d brought with him as the pain robbed him of even a dozing rest last night. He’d been sitting up in a chair fully dressed—why go to bed if he wasn’t going to sleep?—when the troops had arrived that Jack had summoned to care for Ariel Murphy.
And the thing was, he knew why the wound hurt so bad. There was pure evil in it. It was not random violence by a meth-head teenager, it had not been inflicted by a fanatic in the throes of mob mentality or some drunk in a bar, angling for a fight. It was focused, intentional evil from the pit of hell itself. He’d seen it in the little boy’s eyes as he drove the scissors as far as he could into Crock’s leg—a maniacal, unrestrained, raging hatred that was breathtaking in its ferocity. Crock had barely caught the briefest glimpse of the demon’s shadow and that had been bad enough. He could not imagine the horror it must have been for three twelve-year-old children years ago to behold a demon prince up close and personal.
Now, it looked like Theresa intended for him to find out.
He was the first to react to her glib pronouncement that he was to accompany Jack and Andi—Andi!—into the belly of the beast, into the cave in the bowels of the earth where hell had opened up a door into the world and evil had slithered unencumbered through it.
“Whoa there,” he said. “Let’s back up, take the bologna off the bread and start over with this sandwich. What could possibly make you think I’m qualified to fight an efreet?”
“Course you ain’t qualified,” Theresa said. Her big earnest face filled the whole screen of Jack’s phone. Crock wished Becca would tell her to hold it farther out in front of her because she had a mildly cyclops-ian look. “Ain’t none of us qualified, come to that. God don’t need qualified, he just—”
“Needs willing. I know, you said that before. But there’s unqualified and then there’s un-qualified. I haven’t darkened the door of a church since sometime during the Bush administration—Bush one. His first term. And come to think of it, that was a synagogue, not a church—for a bar mitzvah.”
He knew he was babbling, dodging and weaving while he tried to get his mind to face head-on what she was suggesting. “Maybe a synagogue’d get you a few points, but not nearly enough—”
“It ain’t about points, Major Crocker,” she said. “It’s about having a pure soul.” She rushed on before he could interrupt. “I don’t mean one ain’t got no splotches on it. We all got them and some of us’s got more’n others. I mean a soul that’s protected by God as one of his own.”
Okay, he was a believer. Check that box. But so were millions of other people, any one of them better suited to this task than he was.
“You think it’s an accident that it’s come to this?” Theresa wasn’t just talking to Crock anymore but to all of them. “Like maybe God was busy makin’ babies or designin’ butterflies or paintin’ rainbows in the sky and all that’s happening here just kinda slipped his notice? Don’t you see? God orchestrated it this way—with you there and us here. So that means it’s the way God had in mind to do it all along.”
There was silence. Nobody spoke. But Crock couldn’t let go yet.
“You…the rest of you, you’ve been thinking about this, or things like this, your whole lives.” In his own ears, his voice sounded echoey and hollow, like he was speaking out of the bottom of a rain barrel. “How am I supposed to get ready to fight a demon, to cast it out or whatever it is we’re supposed to do with it, in half an hour?”
“Ain’t no way to get ‘ready’ to cast out a demon. You just got to stand, refuse to be cowed by pure evil. There ain’t nothin’ to prepare you for a thing like that. Ain’t like you can practice—get a little better at it and a little better at it ’til you finally master the skill. Either you can do it or you can’t.”
Crock felt a stab of pain in his leg. The pain of evil. And the thought of seeing face-to-face an evil far more powerful than what glowed in the eyes of the little boy who’d stabbed him froze his breath in his throat and he couldn’t speak.
Theresa spoke to him again. Her voice was gentle and kind. “Major Crocker…Crock…I’ll admit you is an unlikely choice, but Moses wouldn’t have been no first-round draft pick, neither.”
He finally managed to get words out. “Just my luck.” His voice was airless, though, with no volume at all. “The one-millionth customer, winner of a year’s supply of microwave popcorn.”
“It ain’t luck. It ain’t chance. He picked you to do this—for a reason, though it ain’t likely you’ll ever find out what that reason is. You told me God give you back your life twice and you been askin’ why for years. I s’pect this is why.”