Chapter 13
Van knew his lies and Donna’s lies couldn’t match up, so he tried to say as little as possible and tell as much of the truth
as he thought he could afford.
“A woman named Jayne Nighswander,” Donovan said. “And her thug of a boyfriend, Ronnie Volpe. We killed them first. They died
the King.”
“Why did they have to die?” Dr. Patrick asked him.
It was the second or third week of January—he couldn’t be sure of the exact date—and Dr. Patrick was still full of pep and
vigor. If anything, she was fizzier than ever, like the first drink was just hitting her bloodstream and she was ready for
the dance floor. She could hardly sit still and often fumbled her BlackBerry or backed into lamps. Maybe he should’ve guessed
something was up sooner than he did.
“I owed them money for drugs,” Van said. He was fairly sure they didn’t know about Arthur or Gwen or Colin, and he intended
to keep it that way for as long as he could. “I couldn’t pay and I was scared. It was really Donna’s idea. Donna wanted to
save me. Donna has a thing for rescuing people from scumbags.”
“Why did you pick her? The Nighswander woman?” Mr. Valentine asked Donna.
“She has a sister, a little sister, Tana? At the time Tana was only eighteen, nineteen. Jayne was prostituting her. Jayne had run up big debts with drug dealers, so she pimped her sister out for every cent she could get. She even offered her to Van once. Jayne Nighswander was a disgusting person. You can’t fix a person like that.
They’re like those flesh-eating bacteria, you just have to hit something like that with a blast of flame, before it can make too many people sick. ”
Donna watched Valentine tap some notes on his BlackBerry and smiled.
“So you wanted to kill Jayne Nighswander,” Dr. Patrick said. “To protect yourself. Why not run her down with your car one
night? Or buy a gun?”
Van was always grateful when he didn’t have to think up a lie. Coming up with a convincing line of bullshit was too much work.
The early detox days of icy sweats and hallucinatory dreams were behind him, but he was still prone to grinding migraines,
and now and then his heart fluttered in a way that left him breathless and scared. Atrial ventricular contractions, Nurse
Lansing said—nothing to worry about. He worried anyway.
“No, I didn’t want to kill her. I wanted her to be dead. Do you see the difference?”
“You didn’t want to do it yourself.”
He nodded his aching head. “Also, you have to remember—back then, I was heavily into ’shrooms and Willie Nelson. I wanted
to get in touch with some cosmic forces. I wanted to throw open the doors of perception, like Jim Morrison, and maybe have
an erotic encounter with an alien or an angel. You know all the paranormal stuff they used to talk about on Unsolved Mysteries? Haven’t you ever wanted to see a UFO or the thing supposedly swimming around in Loch Ness? Haven’t you ever wanted to see
a giant monster?”
Dr. Patrick laughed—a little shrilly.
“Well,” she said. “Obviously.”
There were sweat patches on her silk blouse, under her armpits.
“Tell me about the dragon,” Mr. Valentine said.
Sometimes his right foot would jiggle up and down, until he noticed and made himself stop. It was a new habit, something that had started in the last couple of days.
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” she said. “For weeks now. When do I get to see my brother? You promised we could go for a walk
together. Outside. You said if we cooperated. You said we could trust you.”
“Tell me how he predates on his victims.” He put a hand on his knee to halt his idiot jackhammering leg. “What does he do
to them?”
“You know what he does.”
“I know how it ends,” he said. “But you told me Jayne Nighswander and Ronnie Volpe ran. What were they running from?”
“They began to see him. They’d go for a drive at night and glance up into the sky and see him flying above them, blotting
out stars. Or Jayne would get up in the middle of the night because she heard a sound, and he’d reach for her from under her
bed.”
“How can he be large enough to blot out stars, but small enough to fit under her bed?”
“Because . . . he wasn’t really curled up under the bed at all. He was curled up in Jayne’s mind. He wasn’t in the sky, he
was in her imagination. I think it’s easier for him to leave the Long Dark and slip into his target’s mind than it is to take
a physical form . . . The border between a person’s thoughts and the Long Dark is . . . softer. More permeable. Porous enough
so he can whisper through it.”
“What else did they experience? Phantom smells?”
“Yeah. He smells like charred wood in the rain.”
Valentine’s right knee started going again.
“Let’s talk about how you pick targets. You aren’t the first to summon King Sorrow to our world. We know he was over Dresden
in the Second World War. Wolf Messing wrote about him in his journals. He called him ‘Imperator Slez,’ which might translate
as the Emperor of Tears. A study of his journals, and of the larger historical record, indicates that you would need someone’s
true name to choose them for death. One is safe from King Sorrow—from you—if you don’t have their true identity.”
“That’s right. Unless we bring him through in our own immediate defense.”
Mr. Valentine lifted his chin, studied the blank white ceiling. “Do you know my name, Donna?”
Donna began to smile.
“Joe Valentine.”
“That’s a good name. That’s who I am in this room. Did someone—Mr. Francis perhaps—slip and give you a different name? Just
by accident?” He clapped not one, but both hands on his right knee to stop it from moving again.
“Why do you ask?” she said. But she thought she already knew. “How are you sleeping these days, Joe?”
He filled his chest with air, exhaled slowly. Donna thought he was making a conscious effort to be impassive.
“If you know my name,” Valentine said, “my other name, my outside name—you need to be honest about it, Donna. You need to tell. You will tell . . . if not now, then later. But I’d be grateful if I didn’t have to go to a lot of bother to get an honest answer
out of you.”
“Are you worried I know your name?” Donna asked him. “Or are you worried someone else knows it? Someone who smells like charred wood in the
rain?”
The tip of his pale tongue appeared to touch his lips. He got up suddenly, so suddenly his chair almost fell over, would’ve fallen over if he didn’t reach out to catch and steady it. She was sure by then . . . so sure she wanted to laugh.
He must’ve seen her amusement on her face because he nodded, his gaze distant. “All right. You had your chance to come clean.
I’ll let it go for now. We’ll take it up again—next time we talk.”
She thought they’d talk again tomorrow morning, same as always. But next time came sooner than that.