Chapter 26
The roof door fights me when I push it open.
For one panicked second, I think the wind will throw it back in my face. Then I put my shoulder into it and drive forward, and the door bursts outward into the storm.
Rain hits me so hard it steals my breath.
I step onto the rooftop with Eleanor’s leather jacket plastered to my shoulders, the occult book hidden beneath the jacket where I can feel its hard rectangular shape against my ribs.
The storm is alive up here.
Wind tears across the roof in violent sheets. Rain needles my face. Lightning pulses behind the clouds, the whole sky lighting and darkening as if something enormous is breathing above the city.
I take three steps onto the roof and stop.
I realize I’m not alone up here.
At first I think they are shadows cast by the storm. Strange shapes that loom along the parapet. Distortions created by rain and fear and lightning. But then one of them turns its head, and another follows, and another, and I understand that the darkness has people inside it.
Dozens of them.
They stand along the edges of the roof in a silent procession, their forms thin and incomplete. Faces without detail, clothes without color, bodies reduced to suggestions. Some are barely more than smears of shadow against the rain.
I’m looking at the missing neighbors, the forgotten tenants.
The parade of the dead watch me in silence.
A sound comes from near the far parapet, and my eyes find Paul.
He lies crumpled near the ledge, one arm twisted beneath him, his face bruised and blood-streaked. Rain runs over him in sheets. For one terrible second I think he might be dead, and something inside goes cold.
Then he moves. His head lifts, and his eyes find mine.
I exhale with relief.
“Paul,” I say, but the wind takes his name apart.
He sees the jacket first. Then the pendant.
Lightning flashes, hard and white, and for that instant I see myself reflected in his face. Paul looks afraid of me.
Not for me. Of me. That hurts more than I expect.
Then the ghostly figures along the parapet begin to turn.
One by one, the shadowed faces angle in my direction, and I feel the weight of their attention settle across my skin. Recognition moves through them. They think I am her. Eleanor. The woman who took their lives.
Suddenly, a massive shadow glides across the roof.
The figures lower their heads in sudden deference.
I look up.
Something circles inside the storm.
I see almost nothing at first. Then lightning pulses behind the clouds, and the shape resolves for half a breath: wings spread wide, body hunched, head lowered as it wheels above the Overton.
The grotesque is here.
The creature drops to the roof.
I feel the impact in my teeth. Rain explodes outward from the place where it touches down, and the planters shudder along the parapet. The figures of the dead bow lower. Some seem to dissolve at the edges, as if even in death they cannot bear to be too close to it.
The grotesque crouches at the center of the roof.
Waits.
It is not fully visible as the storm keeps part of it for itself.
Rain and shadow cling to the creature, slide over black stone-like skin, fill the grooves of its wings and run from the points of its claws.
But I can see enough. More than enough. The muscular body, the beast’s coiled power.
The long birdlike head raised toward me with those blank eyes that somehow project intention and intelligence.
My body wants to run.
Every old animal part of me screams for it. Head back to the door. Rush down the stairs. Get out of the building. Out of the city. Out of this inheritance.
Instead, I walk toward it.
“Sara,” Paul says.
His voice is thin and broken, almost lost beneath the storm.
I do not look at him.
I can’t. If I look at him too long, I might become myself again, and that part of me is terrified and wants to live. Desperately wants someone else to solve this.
So I keep my eyes on the thing Eleanor called into the world.
The grotesque lowers its head. One enormous wing unfurls around me. Rain no longer hits my face, wind no longer claws at my hair. The wing arches over me, shielding me from the worst of it. The gesture is revoltingly intimate, like the monster is claiming me.
Paul makes a desperate sound somewhere behind me. He thinks I am surrendering.
I need the grotesque to think that too.
I stop a few feet from it.
The creature leans toward the pendant and its jaws part.
I lower my head as if offering myself.
“Sara,” Paul whispers. “Look at me.”
I keep my eyes down.
My right hand slides inside Eleanor’s jacket. For one terrible second, my fingers slip on the wet leather and find nothing. Panic flares hot in my chest. Then I touch the book’s cover.
The grotesque goes absolutely still.
Slowly, I draw the occult book from beneath the jacket and raise it between us.
The storm seems to pause. The dead along the parapet lift their heads. The creature’s blank eyes shift from the shattered pendant to the book like it knows what I’m up to.
“I know what you are,” I say.
The sound that builds in the grotesque’s chest is not a growl.
It is lower than that. Older. A vibration that travels through the roof and into my bones.
I hold the book high with one hand.
With the other, I reach into the jacket again and find the bottle of whiskey I shoved into the inner pocket before leaving the apartment. My fingers close around the neck. I pull it free and pop the cap with my thumb.
The grotesque shifts.
I pour the whiskey over the book.
The liquid spreads across the cracked leather, soaking into the pages, running down my wrist. The smell of alcohol cuts through the rain.
The creature launches.
I dive sideways.
A claw rakes the air where I stood an instant before, and I hit the roof hard, shoulder first, pain flashing through me as I skid across wet concrete.
The book lands several feet away.
The figures along the parapet stir. Their faces turn toward the leather-bound book of occult rituals. Whispers fill the air.
I scramble after the book.
The grotesque descends on me in a blur of wings and rain.
I scream and go down, palms slamming into the roof. For a second there is only pain, hot and bright, cutting through everything else. I roll before the next strike lands, and the claw gouges the concrete beside my head.
The book remains just out of reach.
I crawl toward it.
The grotesque circles now, determined to not let me get my hands on the book.
A shape moves at the edge of my vision. Paul.
He drags himself upright against the parapet, every motion a kind of agony. His face is nearly colorless beneath the blood. One arm hangs badly. In his other hand, something catches a pulse of lightning.
My crucifix. He still has it.
“Paul, no,” I gasp.
He doesn’t listen.
He throws himself forward, half falling, half crawling, and reaches the book before I do. His fingers close around the soaked leather.
The grotesque turns toward him.It moves with such sudden purpose that the dead along the parapet recoil.
Paul looks up and sees it coming. For once, there is no joke in his face. Only fear. He hurls the book toward me. I catch it against my chest, the impact driving the breath from my lungs.
The grotesque lunges at Paul.
I don’t think. I run at it and throw my entire body into its side.
It is like hitting a wall.
A wet stone wall with wings and claws and impossible strength. Pain explodes through my shoulder, and I bounce off, hitting the roof on my side. But for half a second, the blow shifts the creature’s angle.
Half a second is enough. Paul rolls away as the claw comes down where his chest was.
I clutch the book and force myself to my knees.
The grotesque turns back to me. No more circling. This time it comes straight on.
I fumble inside the jacket for Eleanor’s lighter. My fingers are wet and numb, sliding over the metal, almost dropping it once, then twice.
The creature closes the distance in heavy strides.
My fingers tighten around Eleanor’s ornate lighter. The wheel scrapes. Nothing. A spark dies instantly in the rain.
The grotesque raises one claw.
Paul shouts something I can’t hear.
I strike the lighter one more time. This time the flame catches.
Small, trembling. For one second, everything narrows to that tiny point of fire cupped in my hand.
The grotesque stops and tilts its head.
The dead along the parapet lean forward, their shadowed faces turned toward the flame.
The grotesque charges.
I hold the burning lighter to the soaked pages.
“I’m not her,” I say.
The flame touches the book.
For half a second, nothing happens.
Then the pages ignite.
The book erupts as if the fire has been waiting inside it for centuries. Blue-orange flame races across the cover and into the pages, climbing through the whiskey, through the ink, through whatever words Eleanor spoke night after night in this apartment while the building listened.
The grotesque shrieks, and the sound splits the sky.
It recoils violently, wings beating the rain into sheets. The dead along the parapet convulse, their forms blurring, faces stretching toward the fire as if they are seeing sunrise for the first time in years.
I hold the burning book out in both hands.
The heat is immediate and brutal. It scorches my palms. Smoke fills my throat. Burning fragments peel away and vanish into the storm, but I do not drop it.
I will not drop it.
The grotesque thrashes at the center of the roof, clawing at itself, tearing gouges through its own stone-like body. Chunks of shadow and rain and blackened matter break away from it and dissolve before they hit the roof.
The figures along the parapet begin to disappear. One by one, almost as if they are being released from a nightmarish form of purgatory.
Their shadowed faces lift toward the storm, and for a moment some of them almost look human again.
Then they are gone.
The fire consumes the book faster now. Pages blacken, curl, collapse into ash. Symbols flare and die. Lines of text writhe across the burning paper, as if trying to escape the flames.
The grotesque lowers its head and charges me one final time.
I stand my ground.
Paul screams my name from somewhere behind me.
The creature closes the distance, wings spread, claws extended, jaws open wide enough to swallow the dark.
The last pages burn away in my hands. The book comes apart. Ash lifts into the storm.
And that’s when the grotesque breaks apart. Its body fractures into darkness, the wings shredding upward into black ribbons, the claws dissolving inches from my face. The blank eyes remain for one final instant, fixed on me with a hatred so pure it feels almost alive.
Then they go too.
A violent clap of thunder drowns out the creature’s final bellowing roar.
For several seconds, I can’t hear anything.
Then the world returns. Rain. My own breathing.
Paul coughing somewhere behind me. The roof is empty.
The parapets are bare. No dead souls, no stone monster crouched against the storm.
Only broken planters, rainwater running toward the drains, and the city beyond the ledge, still alive beneath the thinning clouds.
I stay on my knees because I don’t trust my legs.
The storm begins to ease. The rain softens by degrees, loosening its grip on the roof. The clouds shift overhead, and somewhere far beyond the buildings, I sense the first pale suggestion of morning trying to find its way in.
A hand touches my shoulder.
Bloody, shaking but alive.
I reach up and grab it hard.
Paul lowers himself beside me with a sound that is half groan, half laugh, and together we stay there in the rain, neither of us speaking, because there is nothing left to say.