A Darker Place (56 page)

And still she could find no sign of them. She stood for a moment in the lee of a wide, scorched-smelling oak tree and tried to gather her thoughts. Other than the house, which possibility Anne’s mind refused to consider, there was only one place they could be. She wiped the edge of her white T-shirt across her filthy face and prepared to turn her back on the moaning adults and the screaming children—only to be grabbed by the shoulders and shaken furiously by a maddened figure shouting and spitting in her face. It took a moment to see Marc Bennett beneath the soot and the distorting terror and fury, and to interpret his words as a demand to know where Jonas was.

Her own fury flared to meet his. She shook off his grasping hands and slapped him hard, and when he took a surprised step backward she leaned into him, ten inches shorter and ready to tear him to pieces.

“You stupid piece of shit,” she spat at him. “Your beloved tin-pot god went nuts. He went and sat in your alembic and set the place on fire around him, to see if he could make himself immortal.”

“What are you talking about? What alembic?”

“The steel alembic you have in your basement. The one you use to lock boys in when they misbehave.” God, she didn’t have time for this. She tried to push past him, but he grabbed her right shoulder again and pulled her back to face him.

“You’re the mad one here, you bloody woman. That’s Steven’s alembic you’re thinking of. Now, where the hell is Jonas?”

Anne gaped at him, and her own hand came out to grasp his upper arm. The two of them stood as if they were hanging on to each other for support in the flaring, feverish light of the fire.

“Are you telling me you don’t have an alembic?” she demanded.

“You think you know the first thing about us, all the high secrets, don’t you? You don’t know shit. We don’t have an alembic for initiates. We don’t need one. The whole place is an alembic.” He freed his hand to gesture at the house, and she followed his fingers to see the stepped-up pear-shaped wall of the front of the house, now devoured in flames, and the chimneys at the top gathered together like a stem—or like a plug at the neck of a vessel. As she watched, one of the chimneys teetered, then fell away into the flames.

She swung her gaze back to his face, and when he saw her eyes, he tried to retreat. Her fingers dug in and held him.

“Where would Jonas go?” she demanded.

“What do you mean?”

“His ‘power nexus’—where is it?”

But she knew. Before Bennett opened his mouth, she knew.

“The abbey,” he said. “But how—”

She seized him by the lapels of his striped pajamas and pulled his head down until his face was almost touching hers, all the fury and fear of the last weeks lying naked in her face. “If you go there, if you so much as stir from this place, I will rip off your balls and feed them to you.”

She saw her string of brutal monosyllables hit home, saw the fear in his eyes telling her that he did not doubt that she was perfectly capable of carrying out her threat. Then she turned and ran, stumbling in the uncertain light and cursing the branches and thorns that caught at her, plucking at her clothes, tearing her skin and slowing her down. Away from the glare of the fire, the sky was growing light, and when she fought her way out of the
woods and into the abbey clearing, the day was already there.

So were Jason and Dulcie. They were not alone.

Anne stood, gasping for breath and fighting for calm with streams of black ash and bloodred sweat running down her face, her once-light-gray running pants filthy and torn, her heart pounding from exertion. Seeing Jonas seated on the altar stone, one distant corner of her mind abruptly knew, with the sure revelation of a light going on, that Samantha Dooley had never left Change, that she had given her life to Jonas Seraph’s search for Transformation, that her remains now lay beneath the stone that Jonas had patted so affectionately when he first showed his new partner this place.

She was barely aware of the knowledge. The whole of her vision was taken over by the sight of Jonas Seraph, sitting on the newly settled stone, a shotgun resting across his folded knees, its barrels pointed directly to where Jason sat, half turned away from Jonas, his arms wrapped protectively around Dulcie. Anne walked forward slowly, and Jonas saw her.

“You are late!” he shouted furiously. “The fire must be nearly out—I called for you an hour ago.”

Anne tore her eyes away from the two frozen children, and continued up the grassy aisle toward Jonas with her hands out at her sides, fingers splayed and palms down in the gesture of peace.

“I’m here now, Jonas, so you can let the children go.”

He did not seem to be listening; instead, he had begun to stare at her with what looked like reverence. “My vision,” he breathed. “A woman in white with the sweat of many colors on her face, giving birth to the golden-haired man.”

“Let the children go, Jonas,” she repeated. “They’ll just be in the way.”

His focus shifted to her face. “Innocence is needed.”

“Two
are needed, not four. I am the innocent here, and all the sacrifice you need.”

“I don’t…” he wavered.

Anne took another step forward, talking calmly. “Jonas, the fire is past its peak. You must have the female for your male, the moon for your sun, the mercury for your sulfur. You need me, Jonas. Now or never.”

She reached down for the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head. She wore nothing underneath it but the lumpy buckskin medicine pouch between her breasts.

She kicked off her shoes and moved across the cool grass to stand directly in front of Jonas. Without hesitating, she shoved her thumbs into the waistband of her sweatpants, peeled them off, and dropped them onto the turf. Turning her head slightly to meet Jason’s astonished eyes, she said, “Take Dulcie and run,” and then she threw herself at Jonas.

Anne’s final awareness was of gratitude. Jason ran, with Dulcie in his arms: It was not all in vain.

From FBI documents relating to the Change case, Somerset
compound. Evidence photograph showing sketchbook
belonging to Jason Delgado
.

At eight-thirty on that May morning the sun had been up for hours, slanting across the hills and fields of southern England, dispelling the dew from the rich grass and the flourishing hedgerows. The air was still, the leaves motionless, and neighboring farmers in their fields and barns only now began to pause and sniff the air, wondering if the slow-moving haze in the air might not be connected to those distant sirens that had awakened them during the night.

The trees around the brick shell that had been a Victorian manor house were scorched and withered from the heat. Those farther away were no longer green but gray, laden down with the dirty snow of ash. The air was heavy with the stink of burning things, timber and foam rubber, plastics and fuel oil, leather and flesh—although whether the flesh was human, animal, or both would not be known for many hours. And now a great number of combustion engines made their contribution, spewing fumes into the sweet May morning, all the petrol and diesel motors that had first trickled, then surged into Change as soon as the camouflaged guards had stood down. Police and fire personnel, ambulances and emergency communication vans, NCIS investigators with Social Services hard on their tail, and the media left slavering at the gates to snatch photographs through the windows of the departing ambulances.

At eight-thirty on that magnificent spring morning, two more children came stumbling out of the woods. The boy wore a pair of running shorts, a once-white T-shirt, and one high-topped athletic shoe; the small girl had on a long flannel nightgown, filthy and torn, and her
black hair was a wild mat of leaves and twigs. Both were shocked and footsore, badly scratched and caked in mud from their long, circuitous battle through the English jungle. They stopped at the edge of the clear ground, gaping at the incomprehensible sight before them. The girl whimpered, and the boy gathered her up into his arms and stood for a minute, studying the strangers.

Jason knew a cop when he saw one, even an English cop wearing a tweed suit, and although this was the first time in his life he had actually sought a policeman out, once he had chosen his man he did not hesitate. He adjusted Dulcie’s weight in his aching arms and carried her up the drive toward the man, waiting at the tweed elbow until the man finished giving instructions to a pair of uniformed police constables.

“The bastard in the car, Bennett, knows where he is, but he’s not telling. So have your men spread out, and for God’s sake, be careful—he may be armed, too.” When the two uniforms had trotted away, the man looked down at Dulcie and then quickly at Jason. “Is she hurt, lad? You need to take her over to that tent by the big tree, you see?”

“She’s not hurt. Not much,” he corrected himself at Dulcie’s protest, and went on firmly. “There’s a man with the FBI in the United States named Glen McCarthy. I really need someone to help me get in touch with him.”

The man looked puzzled, and then to Jason’s amazement he said, “I wish that was the hardest thing I had to do today.” He raised his head and shouted across the yard, “Hey, McCarthy. There’s one of your countrymen here, wants to talk to you.”

Jason watched the approach of this mysteriously conjured figure of ultimate authority with a mixture of suspicion and awe.

“You wanted me?” the man asked in his American accent, and then took a closer look at the girl. “Dulcie?”

“Mr. York!” Dulcie cried. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re Glen McCarthy?” Jason asked incredulously. “With the FBI?”

“That’s me.”

“Ana told me that if I—”

“Where is she?” McCarthy demanded.

“She’s in the abbey.”

“She’s naked,” Dulcie said, and let out a high-pitched giggle. Glen stared at her briefly before turning to Jason.

“Show me,” he demanded.

Jason refused to move, just shook his head violently and cast a significant glance down at Dulcie.

“Oh my God,” Glen murmured, and turned away with his hand across his mouth.

Jason looked around and spotted Benjamin and his mother. He led Dulcie over to them, dropped to his knees, and told her that she would have to stay with Benjie for a few minutes while he took Glen McCarthy to find Ana. Dulcie’s lip trembled, but she allowed her brother to transfer her hand to that of Benjamin’s mother, who picked up a blanket and wrapped it around Dulcie’s shoulders. Jason went back to Glen.

“Okay,” Glen said grimly. “Let’s go.” He looked around for the first policeman, and called, “Paul! Okay if we borrow a car?”

The tweed-covered arm waved its permission, but Jason said, “I don’t think you can get there in a car.”

The Land Rover took them most of the way, leaving them a five-minute walk to the abbey ruins. Glen strode across the uneven ground, torn between the habitual need to hurry toward the scene of any disaster and the deep knowledge that he really did not want to lay eyes on Anne Waverly’s dead body.

She was there, naked, as Dulcie had said. She lay in a welter of blood across the still figure of a big, bearded man who appeared to have taken the main brunt of the shotgun blast that had downed them both. There had been a struggle, the boy Jason started to explain. His young voice broke, loosing tears of despair and self-loathing to run down his scratched and filthy face. Ana had tried to get the gun away from Jonas, and it went off. He should have stayed; he could have helped her. He should have put Dulcie down in the woods and come back to Ana, but the gun went off then, and they ran for help and got lost, and it was his fault, all his fault.