Chapter 12
I'm on my third coffee when Paul calls.
I've been up since before dawn, which is to say I never really went back to sleep after the stomping stopped.
My phone rings. Somehow I find the energy to answer it. It’s Paul.
Why is he calling me at the crack of dawn?
"Check your east window," Paul says, before I can speak. "Right now. There's been a third murder."
The dread that moves through me is cold and immediate. I'm already crossing the apartment.
I reach the east window and raise the binoculars and spot it almost immediately — eight blocks out, another rooftop, the now-familiar scene of detectives securing a murder crime scene.
"My contact called an hour ago." Paul's voice is tight. "They found a body in the water tower. Most of a body." A pause. "The head is missing."
I don’t know how to respond so I stay silent.
I simply sweep the surrounding architecture. Methodical, systematic. I take in the blur of rooftops, a rush of modern and gothic architecture but there’s no sign of the grotesque.
“You’re looking for it, aren’t you?”
“Yes. But it’s not here.”
This is a break in the pattern.
My eyes drift to the bedroom doorway. To the dust still visible on the duvet in the pale morning light, the thin line that sifted down from the ceiling last night. Evidence that the shifting weight above me wasn’t a figment of my imagination.
"Paul, I have to go."
"Sara—"
I end the call.
Now gripped by a new idea.
I have to head up to the roof.
Something large and heavy was moving around up there last night. And perhaps it left some trace of its presence.
I pick up Eleanor's leather jacket from the chair and put it on. I don't think about why.
Then I head for the roof.
The roof door creaks open.
For one strange second, I hesitate in the doorway, caught between the dim stairwell behind me and the washed-out gray light above the city. Something is different today. There is a rotten stench in the air.
I step onto the roof and stop in my tracks. There are dead pigeons everywhere.
Dozens of them carpet the rain-slick surface, small gray bodies scattered across the concrete as if the sky opened and dropped them here.
Some lie whole and still, wings bent at unnatural angles.
Others have been torn apart and reduced to a crimson pulp.
Heads missing, chests opened, feathers plastered to the roof in wet clumps, darkened by blood and water.
For a moment, my mind refuses the image. Then the wind shifts, and the smell comes again.
My stomach tightens.
Something moves behind me.
I spin.
Oh my God… the grotesque is on the parapet. Directly behind me.
It wasn’t there when I opened the door. I know it wasn’t. I would have seen it. It is impossible to miss, impossible not to see, massive and crouched on the stone edge like a thing that has been waiting all morning for me to arrive.
Up close, it is worse.
Through binoculars, it was a shape. A silhouette.
A medieval nightmare perched against the sky.
Here, with no glass between us, I can see every detail.
The muscular haunches, the folded wings, scaled and ridged like something reptilian, the long birdlike head with its demonic horns. It is the size of a large person.
No, larger.
I stand frozen in front of it. Trembling flesh facing frozen stone. Somewhere below, the city continues with its impossible indifference. Traffic, sirens, a horn rising and fading. Life going on beneath a rooftop covered in dead birds, and lorded over by a stone grotesque that feels alive.
I take one step back toward the door.
The grotesque remains still.
I take another.
Still nothing.
My gaze flicks for less than a second toward the roof access door behind me, just long enough to measure the distance. Six feet maybe. Seven. Close enough.
Not dramatically. It hasn’t crossed the roof in a blur or lunged at me or done any of the things my panicked brain is suddenly prepared to see.
But it is no longer on the parapet.
It is on the roof now.
I can’t deny that it moved a few feet closer.
My breath stops.
I stare at it, trying to convince myself I’m wrong. That the angle changed. That I moved and not it. That fear is rearranging distance inside my head.
Then I force myself to look at the parapet. The place where it was crouched a second ago is empty.
You’re not imagining things.
My pulse races as the grotesque faces me from the rain-slick concrete. The wings flared slightly now, the long head lifted, blank stone eyes fixed on mine with a terrible patience.
I look away on purpose.
Just for a fraction of a second.
A test.
I snap my eyes back.
It has moved again.
Even closer.
A sound comes out of me, small and involuntary. Not a scream yet.
Don’t look away.
I begin backing toward the door, slowly at first, then faster, one hand extended behind me, searching for the handle without taking my eyes off the thing in front of me.
Dead pigeons shift under my shoes. Feathers stick to the soles.
My heel slides in something wet, and I catch myself before I fall.
The grotesque does not move while I watch it.
That is the rule. It can’t move while I watch it. Or maybe not a rule, maybe this monster is playing mind games.
I reach behind me and touch the door handle.
Relief flashes through me, bright and useless, because the next problem arrives immediately.
I have to turn around to open it.
One second.
That’s all I need.
One second.
I grip the handle behind my back and pull.
It doesn’t open.
For a stupid, panicked instant, I think it is locked, and my eyes tick down toward my hand.
When I look back, the grotesque is in the middle of the roof.
Only a few feet away.
Oh my God.
I can see the wet gleam of rain collecting in the grooves of its wings. The pitted texture of the stone. The dark stains around its claws.
The door scrapes behind me. Open.
Then a gravelly voice rasps beside my ear.
“Stop running, child.”
The voice is not behind the door. It is behind me.
I spin toward it.
A man stands only a few feet away.
He is a bloody ruin in the shape of a man, bones jutting beneath torn skin, face crushed into a red mass that still somehow has eyes. His clothes hang from him in wet strips. I know him. Recognize him from Paul’s video. This is Malcolm Shuster. The homeless man who saw Eleanor die.
The second rooftop murder victim.
His mouth opens again.
“Stop running from?—”
Another voice cuts him off.
“—who you are.”
I turn so fast the roof tilts beneath me.
The second man stands near the HVAC units.
Late twenties, heavily tattooed, broken limbs hanging at impossible angles. His body is limp and shattered, yet upright in the rain, held together by an unholy force.
This is Steve Burrow. The gallery owner. The first victim.
His face slowly turns toward me, a puppet being pulled by a string.
“You know what she was,” he says.
“No,” I whisper.
“And you know what you are,” Malcolm says.
I stumble backward.
My shoulder hits the roof door. For one blessed half second, I remember the door, the stairs, the way out.
Then my thoughts turn to the grotesque.
No! I looked away again.
I turn back and oh God, now it’s directly in front of me. Only inches away.
So close I can see the black hollows where the stone eyes should be smooth. My whole world becomes wings and claws and rainwater running over carved muscle. The thing towers above me, impossible and silent, and I feel the cold of it in my teeth.
I scream.
The sound tears out of me as I lurch sideways. My foot catches the edge of one of Eleanor’s planters. The clay shifts under my weight, and suddenly there is no roof beneath me, only air and rain and the violent certainty of falling.
I hit the concrete hard.
The back of my skull cracks against the roof.
Pain detonates white behind my eyes.
For a moment, the city disappears.
There is only sound, rain, thunder, my own breath coming in ragged bursts.
I try to roll onto my side, but the roof moves under me.
The skyline swings, and the dead birds blur into gray smears.
My stomach rises, and I press one hand against the concrete to keep myself from sliding back to the ground.
Get up!
The thought is mine, but it sounds far away.
Get up now.
I push myself onto one elbow.
Dizziness crashes over me, thick and nauseating. The grotesque swims in and out of focus near the center of the roof, a dark winged shape that seems to exist in several places at once.
Then I hear something else.
A soft rolling sound. Wet, uneven. Coming toward me.
Thunk. Something bumps lightly against my arm.
I look down.
Horror constricts my chest. I’m looking at… Marian’s severed head.
For a second, my brain gives me only pieces. Gray hair matted with blood, eyes open too wide, mouth frozen in the shape of a scream, the ragged red ruin of the neck.
My scream this time is different. Higher. It rips through the roof and vanishes into the rain.
I scramble backward, slipping on blood and feathers, kicking at the concrete, trying to get away from her, from the birds, from the impossible thing at the center of the roof.
My hand finds the edge of a planter. I drag myself halfway upright.
The roof tilts again.
The grotesque moves toward me through the blur.
The head injury is catching up now. My vision pulses dark at the edges. The rain feels distant, the city sounds muffled, like I am already underwater.
I take one lumbering step. Then another.
My knees fold.
I hit the roof again, this time without the strength to break the fall.
The last thing I see is the grotesque above me. Its wings spread.
The creature’s shadow opens across the roof, swallowing the dead birds, the broken planters, Marian’s staring face, the gray sky overhead.
Then the shadow reaches me.
And the world goes dark.