Chapter 19
He was gonna prove himself. Show himself as holy and blessed by God as Jerry and Carl and Pam. God had chosen him, too. Chosen all of them.
Preacher Dale had said as much. They’d all been chosen. They were the children of God—the human children of God.
The Bible didn’t say nothing about Arcanids. Not in specific words like orc or elf or faun, and not in general. They weren’t created by God, which meant they could only have been created by the devil.
I set down the wallet, which belonged to a man named Walter Amaro, according to Hart and to the man’s driver’s license. I’d also touched several other things that they’d confiscated from his pockets, including keys, some change, a pen, and a rubber band ball.
Most of the objects were a mixture of thoughts from work, impressions of the lunch kitchen where he’d gotten the change, and vitriol directed at Arcanids and Arc-humans. Almost nothing specific about the victim he’d assaulted—an elf woman named Keelie McCauley.
I set the wallet aside, then reached out and wrapped my hand around the crowbar he’d used to beat her.
He didn’t understand why no one else saw what he saw. Why no one else realized that the beauty of such creatures was only skin deep. That it was designed to seduce and enthrall, to drag human souls into sin and corruption. What other purpose could such inhuman, otherworldly beauty have?
He was going to take that, at least, away from her.
He didn’t think he’d be able to kill her—he might have been one of God’s chosen, but he couldn’t take someone’s life. Not even a monster’s. But he could take away the beauty that she used to corrupt those around her.
She glanced back, and her silvery eyes skipped over him as though he were nothing. As though she didn’t see him at all.
He would make sure she saw him. Make sure she knew that she had been judged and found wanting. Just like Preacher Dale had said.
I released the bar, then looked up, meeting Hart’s lavender gaze first. “Do you want me to keep going?” I asked. I didn’t really want to go through the assault itself, even though I knew the woman had survived. She was an elf—while he’d done damage to her, she’d ultimately been able to escape.
Hart frowned, but it was Raj who answered. “No. We have what we need.”
I looked over at him, surprised. “What did you need?” I asked.
“Confirmation that the reason they’re doing what they’re doing is Preacher Dale,” Cass answered.
“Ah,” I replied. I’d given them that.
There was a buzz, and Hart pulled his phone out of his pocket, glancing at the screen. He frowned, tapping at it. “I might have something else,” he said.
“What?” Raj asked him.
“This was Dan,” he replied, waggling the phone. “He’s bringing us something for Rayn.”
“Did he say what?” Cass asked.
Instead of answering, Hart shoved his phone into the middle of the table, the messaging app open. Cass was the one who picked it up.
“A couple uniforms pulled over a pickup with a busted headlight and expired registration stickers.” She glanced around the table.
“In Dan’s words, ‘some shit went down,” and they’re holding the driver.
Dan’s got something for Rayn to check so we know who this guy actually belongs to, the RPD or us. ”
I glanced over at Hart, who took his phone back.
He was being uncharacteristically quiet, and I frowned.
Something was bothering him. I wondered if it had to do with the case, or if it was something else.
Not that it was any of my business, but I like Hart, and I didn’t like the idea that he might be unhappy.
“What’s going on in that pretty head of yours, Keebler?” Raj asked, and I turned to look at him, confused about why he was teasing Hart when Hart was so obviously—
Oh.
Hart’s lavender eyes flicked up, and his upper lip curled slightly. “You’ve got a boyfriend, don’t you, Tony? You into threesomes?”
“Oh my God, stop.” Cass put her hands over her ears. “We do not need to think about that, right Drew?”
Drew shrugged, then gestured at Hart.
“Ugh,” Cass replied. “I’m surrounded by people who like men.”
I assumed from that statement that Cass did not, although I knew that Drew was married to a woman, so he probably wasn’t only interested in men.
“I want to talk to this fucking asshat,” Hart replied. “Because that holier-than-thou shit is the world’s worst fucking excuse to cover the fact that he just wants to hate other people for not being as stupid and ugly as he is.”
I watched the corner of Raj’s lips quirk and realized that he had successfully prodded Hart out of whatever bad mood he was in. “And?” Raj asked, almost smothering the satisfied look on his face.
Hart looked up and met Raj’s eyes. “He’s prepping them for a fucking purge,” he said, and his tone was deadly serious.
Raj frowned. “What?” Whatever he’d been expecting Hart to say, it hadn’t been that.
“A mother-fucking purge,” Hart repeated, then looked at each of the rest of us in turn. “C’mon people. That’s what this shit is setting them up for. He’s testing who’s willing to kill and who isn’t so that he knows who’s gonna come with him on the final purge.”
“Purge of… what?” Cass asked, her voice worried.
“Who,” Hart corrected.
I almost said whom, and then decided that this was probably one of those moments in which grammatical correction probably wouldn’t be welcomed. Or, more specifically, in which it would make people seriously annoyed instead of just a little annoyed.
“Who, then,” Cass said.
“Us,” Raj replied softly, his eyes now directed down on the crowbar. “Arcanids at least, which means they’re likely to target Arcanid-focused organizations. So Hands and Paws, the AARC offices—”
“The AAYC,” Hard put in, his voice hard. Taavi worked at the Arc-Arcanid Youth Center.
Raj lifted his eyes to mine. “And Arcanid-owned businesses,” he said softly.
“Well,” Ward said, his arms crossed over his chest. “We’re not closing down.”
Raj scowled at him.
“Told you,” Hart said.
“Mr. Campion—”
Ward almost looked amused. “I’m not going to do it just because you ‘Mr. Campion’ me, Agent Parikh.”
A muscle ticked in Raj’s jaw. “I am trying to keep you and your employees safe,” he ground out between clenched teeth.
“And I appreciate the warning about yet another group of crazy people—sorry, Rayn.” He grimaced.
Ward tended to apologize to me every time he used the term ‘crazy.’ I wasn’t sure whether to be touched or offended by that.
“But if I closed down every time somebody wanted to hurt me, my husband, my kids, or my coworkers, I wouldn’t ever be open, so fuck that. ”
I agreed.
“He’s got a point, Tony,” Hart remarked. “People do want to kill him a lot.”
“You are not helping, Keebler,” Raj half-growled.
“I don’t know why you think I’m trying to help,” Hart replied. “I don’t think he should shut down.”
Raj glared at him. “There is a direct threat against Arcanids in this city, one whose size we’re uncertain about.”
“And whose targets you don’t actually know,” came Mason’s voice from the hallway. He was carrying Grace, who was clearly refusing the nap he had been trying to get both babies to take.
“Did Zane go down?” Ward asked him, and Mason nodded. Grace had one of Mason’s braids in her mouth along with her thumb, her green cheek resting on his shoulder.
Raj huffed a breath out through his nose, a sign that I knew meant he was annoyed. “No, we don’t know their targets,” he admitted. “But we do know they’ve killed four and assaulted one Arcanid thus far. And we know that the preacher is openly advocating anti-Arcanid hate.”
Mason nodded. “And we make up six percent of the population, so there are quite a few of us to choose from.”
“You—”
“Let it go, Raj,” Hart said softly. “You’ve warned them, so they know to watch their asses.”
Behind us, the bell rang over the doors as Dan Maza pushed his way through them. I was betting that Hart had told him where we were. “Hey,” he said, reaching down into his satchel. “I come bearing gifts.”
I had the feeling he didn’t mean that in the conventional sense.
“Oh, be still my beating heart,” Hart drawled, coming over and taking a set of evidence bags from him. “Wha’d you bring us?”
“A pen from the cup holder, a receipt for gas, and a rosary that was hanging off the rear-view.”
Both Raj and Hart frowned at that.
“What?” Maza asked, looking between them.
“Rosaries aren’t usually an evangelical thing,” Raj replied.
“I didn’t ask his specific denomination, but no,” Maza agreed. “Rosaries are pretty Catholic.”
“Our perps are evangelical,” Raj said, still frowning. “This might not be one of ours.”
Maza pulled out a small tube next. “Well, you can run this through your fancy FBI lab equipment a lot faster than I can get the state lab to do jack shit, so you can tell me if it really is deer blood on there or if the uniforms got it right.” He held it out, and Raj stepped forward and took it.
“We’ll do that,” he said.
I reached out a hand, and felt everyone’s eyes on me. “Give me the pen,” I said. People played with pens, especially pens in the cup holder. It was most likely to have something useful.
Hart handed me the bag, and I pulled it out myself, then tried to search back through time, looking for flashes of thoughts that would put me at around the right time.
Looking for night-time, warmth, earlier in the fall.
Then I found it.
The pen made a satisfying tapping sound as he teetered it between his fingers, waiting. Waiting for the opportunity that he knew would come. Preacher Dale had promised it would.
“It’s him,” I said, dropping the pen back in the bag.
Maza’s jaw dropped.
“You’re sure?” Raj asked me, and I shot him a look that I very much hoped conveyed how little I appreciated him questioning my abilities. His cheeks darkened slightly. “You’re sure,” he said again, although this time it wasn’t a question.