THREE WEEKS LATER
ONCE MORE, Logan made slow, rumbling progress on his Harley, down that same road of busted pavement. When the road ended, he came once more to a blue mailbox on a large, iron post. Logan turned his bike to the right and crossed a cattle-guard and once more drove up to the neat little house.
He had not exactly been in high spirits the first time he’d made this journey, not with what had been coming. That mindset had been nothing compared to the black mood he was in, had been in since carrying AJ’s body out of the sewer. He had no business feeling this way, according to Cain. They’d won, after all. Not the war, true, that was still coming, but this had been a major battle, and they’d come out victorious.
It shouldn’t have happened that way, Logan thought as he had countless times in the last weeks, as he had told Cain over and over. AJ shouldn’t have died.
It was always going to be the girl, Cain reminded him.
Logan pushed these thoughts from his head as he rounded the last bend, and the neat little house came into view,
Jin was already waiting for him on the porch. Logan turned his bike up the little path connecting the driveway to the front walk, pulling his bike up to the steps of the porch. He took from his pocket that same small, square parcel, once more wrapped in plain, brown paper. The retired detective reached out for it with a shaking hand, but then hugged it tightly to his chest once it was back in his possession.
“Mr. Perish,” the retired detective said by way of a greeting, nodding.
“Keep your notes handy and sharpen your knives, Jin,” Logan said. “Things are getting worse.”
He twisted the throttle on the bike and left, the rear wheel digging a long, black stripe of exposed soil through the lushly green and well-kept lawn, the owner of the house staring after him, the parcel cradled in his hands.
***
Five Months Later
Clover stood in the bathroom, staring at herself, naked from the waist up. She looked at the bulge of her stomach that once had been a flat plane. Though this still amazed her, worried her, fascinated her, broke her heart, and filled it just the same, it was not, at this moment, why she looked in the mirror.
She stared at her naked left breast, trying to find any kind of discoloration of the skin or anomaly of the flesh. She raised her left arm and rested it across the top of her head, testing it for lumps with her right hand the way they’d been taught in high school. She found nothing; no redness or irritation of the skin, and certainly no lumps, but this did not bring the relief she had anticipated.
She closed her eyes and, like a flash from a strobe light, she saw that horrible, grinning face; the dirty-pale and psychotically gleeful visage of a crazed god. For a moment, she felt the path of his finger across her skin like a burning trail of slime, and then it came again. A deep throbbing ache inside her breast, building to an almost unbearable crescendo of pain.
She closed her eyes and bit her lip, grunting against the pain as it built and built, and then held…held…held longer than ever before. She gripped the edge of the sink to keep from falling, and then finally, finally, it broke, receding like the remnants of a wave sucked back into the ocean after crashing against the beach.
No, the current absence of a lump brought no relief, only the worry it was in there, quietly but quickly metastasizing—growing, ever-growing—until it would be too late to treat. She opened her eyes, staring into them through the mirror, chewing her lip and wiping away the sweat that popped up across her brow.
Outside, she heard the dog, a rescue Malamute she’d named Nikolai, as he barked.
She put her bra and shirt back on.
Maybe with that fucking book out of the house… Clover thought, trailing off. The dog barked louder.
She left the bathroom and headed toward her bedroom, pausing to straighten a framed picture John had given her from his time in Mexico after he had gotten out of the hospital. It had been the last time they’d spoken, and likely would be, John had said.
He’d said it sitting right there at the small apartment she used to live in, one of his large, blocky hands over hers. He said this was also why he had been the only one from the department at AJ’s funeral, going to which, he told her, had cost him a recent promotion.
My name’s been scrubbed from the case, he’d said to her, looking a little ill when he’d said it. So’s yours, and his. It’s all been redacted.
What are they saying happened?
The official story is some bullshit about meth addicts, witnesses, everything tied up with the three of you in WITSEC.
Three of us?
John had cleared his throat and straightened his tie and rubbed the back of his head and did everything but look right at her. Soon to be family of three now in WITSEC.
They had not only erased AJ’s name from the case but had also erased his death. That visit had ended with her screaming at him. Classic bit of Messenger Killing, that had been. She didn’t regret it, but she also hoped she would someday see John again.
Outside, she ambled over to the large, wrought-iron gate that fenced her two acres. With the help of a forged marriage certificate and some other pertinent legal documents in those first awful two days after AJ’s death, also courtesy of John, or at least some people he knew, she’d inherited the assets of AJ’s adoptive parents, as well as the trust his birth parents had set up for him. She couldn’t bear to step foot inside AJ’s childhood home, so she’d moved a little further south where the weather was better and there weren’t so many memories.
“Ms. Danning?” the man on the other side of the fence finally spoke.
“It’s Lancaster actually,” Clover said, and hit the button to unlock the gate. The stranger swung it open and stepped into the yard.
“I take it you’ve been informed on why I’m here?”
“The Book.”
“Yes. I’m a Dogmatic Investigator. My name is Cain Dulouz, and—”
“I’m not sure I want to know any of that,” Clover said, quietly, while staring down at her feet.
“Well, in any case, I…we wanted to thank you.”
“Thank me?” Clover said quietly.
“Yes,” Cain said. “You did an extraordinary thing.”
Clover saw the father of her unborn child lying on the ground with a hole punched through him every night in her dreams, sometimes over and over. She saw him coughing blood out through his grin, his mother’s throat ripped out and all the world’s dead standing up to come after her, his name called out over a dead tongue a thousand times.
But she was more than the sum of her nightmares, wasn’t she?
Okay, yeah, she was a girl who had saved the world once upon a time, had taken up an ancient burden she hadn’t entirely understood. Unknowingly, at the time, also placing that burden on her child. Clover wrapped one hand protectively around her stomach, the other holding an old leather bag out at arm’s length as if it contained something vile and nasty.
She supposed maybe it did. She hefted its immense weight for a final time. She had read a lot of that book. The parts she was supposed to, anyway. Some pages were locked to her and were meant to be read by someone else. Now, she just wanted to be rid of it. Always had, in truth.
“There something in here for you, Mr. Dulouz?” Clover wondered aloud.
The Dogmatic Investigator snorted and took a pull off a tiny silver flask, which then disappeared back into his coat. He took the burden from her as though it were nothing, and she hated him a little for it. When he opened the bag, it was filled with a soft light, and the expression on his face was one of reverence. He took the book out and inspected it, then looked at her.
“No, not for me, I just need to hang on to it a while.” Cain let a small grin slip out from under the shadow cast by the brim of his Sam Spade hat and held his hand out. Like magic, there was a business card in it.
“Why are you giving this to me?” Clover asked, studying the card.
“You’ve taken on this burden, Ms. Lancaster. You and I both have been cursed and blessed with the knowledge that things like these exist so, if you should notice anything…out of order, you’ll know how to reach me.” Cain turned to go, the book back in its bag and all of it tucked safely beneath his arm, when he stopped suddenly and faced her again. “By the way, I have a message from an associate of mine. I believe you’ve worked with him before.”
“Who? Logan?” She hadn’t heard from him since…
Cain nodded. “He sai—”
“I’m not getting involved,” Clover said, a little louder than she intended.
Cain smiled a thin smile and looked at her. “He just wanted me to say hello, ma’am. You need to understand something, though. You’ve done a great service to the universe, no one would ever say any different. You’re not the only one to do that, though. Another man I’m working with, his name is Harry—”
“I’m not getting involved!” Clover said.
“You’re already involved,” Cain snapped, narrowing his eyes a little. He then shook his head and took another drink from his flask. “Your battle is over, for now, and your enemy was vanquished, but there are always more of them. There’s a little girl on the east coast, Nina’s her name. Less than a year from now, she’s… Look, when her time comes to step up, and step up again, and again, she’s going to do it. Right now, she’s only eleven years old. That’s why I gave you that card.”
“I’m done,” Clover said.
“Bad things are happening,” Cain said. “There’s a war coming, and it’s been coming for a long time. If you want there to be a world left for that little boy in your belly to live in, for anyone to live in, you may have to re-think that.”
Clover’s eyes stung with the tears about to start running down her cheek.
Cain held his hands up, palms out. “I didn’t come here to upset you, but to thank you, and to warn you, and tell you we always need people like you.”
“You can’t have him!” She said, her hands now around her belly, around the little life in there, all she had left of AJ.
At her feet, Nikolai bared his teeth and growled, then barked at Cain, who was already nodding, the expression of a harried messenger tasked with delivering news he knows no one wanted to hear stamped across his face.
“Why me?” she asked without knowing she was going to. She stepped forward and grabbed the sleeve of his overcoat, looking into his flat, brown eyes.
“It was always going to be you,” Cain said softly. “What’s the saying your people here use? That particular star of yours has been in alignment a looong time. Just as long as AJ’s was. I’m talking hundreds of years. Generations. Not to say it couldn’t have happened another way, but this was always an option. You know that, right? Take comfort in the fact you never had a lot of choice in the matter once you set upon a certain path. If A then B then C. You felt it, didn’t you? The night you met him.”
“Felt what?” she asked, her voice a whisper because she knew.
“The Hand of Providence,” Cain said, and her body broke out in goose flesh. “The feeling of not being moved exactly, but that everything, every single thing you were doing, was right. What you were supposed to be doing.”
She swallowed hard and wiped at her eyes and nodded. It didn’t make it easier. Nothing made anything any easier.
“I know,” Cain said, nodding his head as though he had heard her thought. “I know this has been harder on you than I likely can imagine, and I’m sorry.”
Clover started to cry, and Nikolai whined, looking up at her.
“You know what would have happened if you hadn’t picked up that knife, and I don’t know if that’s any comfort to you, what you stopped from happening, but it should be. Anyway, it was a pleasure to meet you. And you’re right, get that checked.”
She jumped a little, thinking of moments ago, staring at herself in the mirror, left arm up, and then draped sideways across her head.
“As soon as possible, get it checked. Please.” Dulouz said, then tipped his hat to Clover and gave her another, “Ma’am,” then turned and left.
She lingered, watching as the other man walked away, wiping a tear off her face with the heel of her palm. She could see the outline of a car through him, and a tree as well. She watched as Cain Dulouz walked away, growing transparent, disappearing before he’d reached the end of the long drive, and wondered if he had arrived the same way.
“They can’t have you,” Clover whispered, her hands once more wrapped around herself. She looked down at the curve of her belly as she spoke but couldn’t have said if she was trying to reassure her baby, or herself.
Later that night, when she finally made it to bed, Nikolai asleep at her feet, she slept soundly and without dreams for the first time since that fateful night she'd walked into a gas station and, within the first five minutes, she had seen a dead body—though it was upright and walking at the time—and, also, she had fallen in love.