Chapter 23
Four days later the green slopes of the Santiago City Veteran’s Cemetery lay drowsing under mist and the shadows of rain clouds. Dripping evergreens stood guard over the silence of the dead, fog collecting between slender boles of streetlamps and the thicker lines of cedar, juniper, yew.
Rowan, safe in the shadow of a huge cedar, scanned the cemetery again.
She’d parked on the east side, in the warren of back streets she knew from growing up, and jumped the fence.
Her head was stuffed with aching and the persistent wrapping of cotton-wool.
She’d barely slept, impelled by the sudden, irrational, but undeniable desire to see her father’s grave for the first and maybe last time.
I couldn’t even go to his funeral. Someone else took the flag on his coffin. Someone else was here—probably his friends from the VA and the Moose Lodge. Maybe Marta from the bridge club. I think Dad really liked her.
She breathed in the familiar wet air of Saint City—green and damp, vegetation and the salt breath of the bay, growth exploding from rain-soaked ground, all held cupped in air full of humidity.
Under saturated Nature lurked the other smells of cities: car exhaust, humanity, desperation, money, danger.
Tears lodged hard and unforgiving in her throat. Memory turned like a wheel.
Her father, grinning as he lifted a six-year-old Rowan.
Teaching her how to change the oil filter in Tuna, Mom’s old silver Volvo.
Celebrating with a bottle of Dom Perignon when Rowan graduated college, and celebrating again with a supper at La Tourelle’s in the University District when she graduated nursing school.
Dad’s hands, veined and old, chopping garlic for chicken noodle soup, and his younger hands bandaging a scrape on Rowan’s knee.
Hands solid and firm on Rowan’s shoulders, as they watched her mother’s coffin lowered into the ground.
Rowan had sobbed without restraint, numb with grief and wondering guiltily why her talent hadn’t warned her, while her father’s weeping was done privately.
How much had it cost him to be strong for her sake?
She had never thought about it until now.
They were so in love. Her mother laughing and affectionate, a counter to her father’s stalwart military rectitude.
Dad hadn’t been distant or severe, just…
well, too martial to engage in spontaneous hugs or celebrations.
Despite that, Rowan had never felt a moment’s doubt of her parents’ love for her, or each other.
It was the one thing saving her sanity in the face of her freakish abilities and her inability to control them.
The unconditional acceptance of both parents had reassured her at every turn.
Her best friend Hilary was buried at Mount Hope. Much as she wanted to visit the grave, Rowan didn’t think she could stand seeing Hil’s name on a headstone. Although she’d probably never have another chance to come back and visit.
Fury rose again, rage and the weird, twist-burrowing headache, impelling her through the increasing haze of exhaustion. She decided it looked safe enough and slipped from the cedar’s shelter, brushing her hands together briskly.
Each step was a struggle. Even the slight hill up to the section housing her father’s simple white marker stole breath from her lungs and strength from her legs. She fought her way up the slight rise, glad nobody was among the headstones to hear her wheeze.
Justin had given her the photos and map of her father’s gravesite, trying in his own way to help her deal with the shattering grief.
For some reason the headache got worse when she thought of him. No amount of pain medication or quiet meditation would make it go away. Her head was a large glass pumpkin balanced on a wobbling neck. It invaded her sleep, the harsh sucking pain, until she could barely think straight.
She checked the markers. No. No. No.
Oh, God. God help me. There it was.
Major Henry Price, US Marine Corps. His rank, his dates of birth and death. The carved letters rough under her fingers as she knelt, tracing her father’s name.
“Oh, Dad,” she whispered. “I miss you. God, how I miss you.”
He’d liked Justin almost immediately. Of course, Justin had chased off that Sig in the parking lot—at the time, neither she nor her father had any idea that a government agency would be trying to kidnap or kill her.
Now Rowan wondered how much of Dad’s liking Justin had been a small push, nothing harmful, just enough to insert this seemingly innocent stranger into their lives.
Her head gave another sharp pain-twist. It hurt to think of Justin. But what else could she think of? What else—and who else—did she have left?
Nobody, that’s who. Sigma had robbed her of everything.
“I’m going to make them pay.” Her voice shook as her fingertips brushed the P, the R, the I.
Dad believed in honor and truthfulness. It would have hurt him to think that the government and country he’d fought for was responsible for things Rowan had seen Sigma do.
Broken bodies, battered minds, psions screaming as they suffered through Zed withdrawal—a whole parade of horror.
If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, been shot at, lived with the suffocating fear, she might not have believed it herself.
It defied belief.
“Anton.” That was the name of her enemy. Colonel Anton.
But if you want to know who’s in charge of the program, it’s Anton… Sig Zero-Fifteen… the worst Sig installation in the country.
Where’s that?
New Mexico.
Henderson had cautioned her never to go near White Sands in New Mexico, or Mount Shasta in California.
Big Sig installations, like Langley. Just isn’t worth the risk.
The General’s face had been so grim she hadn’t asked more.
She should have, though; maybe she could have done something sooner, stopped this endless parade of trauma and death.
The sight of her father’s headstone blurred, tears welling hot and acid from the deepest part of her grief. Oh, Daddy. I’m going to do what I can. I’m so sorry.
This was entirely her fault as well, the bare white stone with the bloodless carving—nothing to tell how her father was one of the greatest cooks alive, how he could turn scraps into a feast, how he loved books on hauntings, the unexplained, psychic phenomena, all sorts of woo-woo, and how just the sound of his voice could make a little girl feel safe and special.
There was nothing but this chunk of rock, carved with birth, death, name, and rank.
No color, no life, her father’s comfortable old age in the house he’d paid for with the daughter he loved all cut short by the goddamn fucking Sigs.
Because that daughter was, to put it kindly, a freak.
Rowan scanned the cemetery again. No sign of any activity save herself, the fog, and silent trees keeping watch over the brave dead.
“I love you, Daddy,” she whispered, and wished she had time to visit her mother’s grave too. It suddenly didn’t seem right that they were buried in separate cemeteries, her mother on Mount Hope with Grandma Parker, and Dad here. They should be together.
Yet another thing Sigma would pay for.
Rowan ghosted through the cemetery, found a handy spot, and muscled herself over the high stone wall.
If there were security cameras, let them see her.
She hadn’t been here before because it was too dangerous, the one place Sigma could be sure of kidnapping her; it was fucking anticlimactic to show up and have nothing happen.
Of course, Sigma couldn’t be watching all the time, and they probably were busy with the teams Henderson had sent to cause havoc all over the map, covering the retreat to Headquarters.
She found the car—the faithful blue Subaru, this time with Missouri plates instead of Georgia—undisturbed and got in, resting her aching head against the steering wheel. Justin.
Thinking of him paradoxically made the pain easier to bear. She was used to missing him, true, but the brief period of seeing him again drove home just how much. It would have been just as true to call her Delgado’s shadow.
He was the only stability in her fragmented world.
Her fault, again, that he’d been taken and tortured, suffered God-knew-what that he didn’t want to talk about, not even to her. Self-loathing crawled over Rowan’s skin, just like the soft maggot fingers squirming inside her brain.
When she surfaced, staring at the world outside the car, the fog had thickened.
She twisted the key and was rewarded with a softly purring engine.
She switched on the headlights, spent a few minutes wending aimlessly down the hills.
When she found herself on the very north end of Smyrna Avenue, she knew miserably what she was about to do, and couldn’t stop herself.
It was like a train wreck or an automobile accident. She simply could not look away. Down Smyrna, stopping at stop signs and creeping through uncontrolled intersections, passing the laurel hedge blocking the sight of the dilapidated old Taylor house.
She didn’t want to look. Gooseflesh stood out hard and knobbed on her arms. A right on Ninth Street, two blocks… and she brought the car to a halt, heart rising in her throat.
The neat, well-kept two-story house was now a shambles. Rowan made a small, hurt sound in the back of her throat, staring at the broken windows, the lawn rank with weeds.