Jade Gods Read online

  Unharmed, her shattered mind couldn't hold the memory, but she'd seen the video a thousand times. Everyone had, except maybe a handful of isolated monks in the Himalayas who didn't have YouTube. Half a year of refusing to give interviews or go on shows hadn't dulled the world's appetite for the miracle woman and her angelic son, yet she still couldn't wrap her head around a church built to worship her little boy.

  Adam sat in the living room amid a pile of play blocks, extra-large Lego knockoffs as big as his hands that even the most determined toddler couldn't swallow. If he knew of the blasphemies committed in his name, he cared less about them than trying to corral Ted in a wall of cheap plastic. The Bassett Hound, capable of destroying his prison with one shake of his head, instead lay on his back, legs in the air, head flopped to the side, snoring.

  The intercom beeped. She pressed the button on the wall. "Yeah?"

  "Ma'am," Aaron Walters's deep voice resonated through the hall. Usually assigned to driveway duty, his massive frame and conspicuous pistol kept most people from approaching the house. "Mr Rees is here to see you."

  Most people.

  "Unca Rees!" Adam clapped his hands.

  "What does he want?" She let mere annoyance overwhelm the hurt and anger in her voice. Aaron had no reason to know or care about their history, save that they'd once been friends, that neither Matt nor Monica considered him a threat, and that despite both of those he wasn't exactly welcome.

  "He brought a book he says might interest you. Got a weird cross on the front."

  She caught herself chewing on the inside of her cheek, stopped, and rested her head against the wall. The cool surface soothed a sudden headache, if only for a moment. "Yeah, okay. Send him in. But just him."

  "He's alone."

  "Thanks."

  She opened the front door and waited, fists on her hips, for Jason to make his way to the porch, feet crunching on the gravel and crushed stone. Graying hair shaved close to his head, he looked more a skinhead than a priest as he climbed the stairs in a tattered denim jacket, jeans, and black T-shirt. His priest's collar had disappeared with his new devotion, his pending excommunication a paperwork formality working its way through the Vatican.

  He smiled and she stifled the urge to punch him, to kiss him, to thank and beat him for everything he'd done for her and put her through over a decade of love, lust, shame, and at last, friendship. If the same war raged behind his steel gray eyes, she didn't see it.

  Without asking he stepped inside, turning to muss Adam's hair before handing her the book. Heavy, the suede cover had lost most of its fuzziness to leave behind cracked goatskin smoothed with centuries of fats and oils. It smelled of peppermint and cinnamon, warm and sharp.

  She read the Hebrew on the front and frowned. "I ain't looking for messengers."

  "There's an entry on the nephilim, toward the end, but the language is a bit archaic. You might have to find someone to—"

  "I have a guy."

  Rees closed his eyes, a hint of a smile touching his lips. "Of course you do."

  She set the book on the counter and put her fists on her hips, all too aware of the confrontational nature of the gesture. He wouldn't get the slightest pretext to extend his stay, not while the madness with the church persisted.

  He said nothing, so she waited.

  His degrees in psychology and divinity might help him play her, but she didn't need a college education to battle an obsessed recovering alcoholic, priest or no. They shared far too much ground on that score.

  He broke, as she knew he would. "Aren't you going to look at it?"

  "Maybe later." Curiosity burned through her, but she didn't let it touch her face. "I'm a bit more concerned with what made you bring it here."

  "Couldn't I just be—"

  "No. You don't need excuses to come here, except that now you need an excuse, and this book was it. So what? What do you want, Father?" A small part of her shuddered at his hands and lips on her skin, a memory dredged through a long-fought haze of methamphetamines and alcohol, buried by time and guilt and a renewed loyalty to her husband.

  "I just thought you might like—"

  "What I'd like is for you to stop that atrocity going up across the street."

  He sighed. "You know I have nothing to do with that."

  A flash of red shot through her vision, as close as she'd come to hate directed at another person in her whole life. "You're their priest."

  "Pastor. And you know that church started before I'd joined, and would go up without me. I'm doing what I can to keep them focused on Christ's love—"

  "As evidenced through my son."

  "Yes." He stepped forward, breath hot on her face, stale coffee and greasy breakfast sausage lingering under the citrus tang of his aftershave. "Your son, who is a living miracle."

  Eyes locked, she just managed not to slap him. "He's just a little boy."

  "And you're just a dead woman he brought back to life. If that isn't divine, what is?" He followed as she stepped back, not allowing her room to recover.

  "My son ain't God."

  "Nobody's saying he's God, or that either of you are saints – nobody anyone's taking seriously, anyway. But he's touched by the divine. Everyone sees it. Everyone knows it. Why can't you accept what's right in front of your eyes?"

  Fingertips to his sternum, she extended her hand. Wiry strength from a lifetime of martial arts forced him back a step. "What about those people across town? Those thinking him and me are demon-spawn, rescued by Satan to bring about the end of days? They've seen the same things you've seen, but they don't go thinking my boy's the second coming."

  "We don't think he's the second coming."

  "But you think he's a messenger."

  "He is a messenger, can't you see—"

  She jutted her finger out toward the door. "You need to go."

  "Can I speak with your son for a moment?"

  "Unca Rees!" Adam stretched out his arms from behind the baby gate, hands clenching excitedly, unsteady legs straddling the still-snoring Ted. Jason took a step toward the living room.

  "No."

  "Unca Rees!"

  Another step. "He wants to say hi."

  "I said no."

  He turned toward her and sidestepped toward Adam's grasping hands, and she dropped into a ready stance. Cold rage surged through her, ice cracking and reforming in her blood.

  "If your next step ain't toward the door, I'm going to shred your knee so bad you won't never walk right again. Might break a couple bones for good measure. Now go."

  He didn't move, though his eyes flickered to her fists and feet. "I just want—"

  "GET OUT!" She advanced and he scrambled back, jerking open the glass door to stumble onto the front deck. Fingertips on the handle, she forced a hostile smile. "Thanks for the book. Don't come back."

  He opened his mouth to protest and she shut the door, jerking the new curtains in place to block the view to – and more importantly from – the outside. Leaning her head to the side, she pressed the intercom button as the ice in her veins thawed. "Aaron, make sure Jason makes it safely off the property. Don't hurt him unless he gives you an excuse."

  "Will do, ma'am."

  With a sigh she rolled her head toward the living room, where Adam pouted at the closed curtain.

  "I know, little man. I like him, too, maybe more than I should. But he's gone crazy, and you don't need none of that, least not until you're older."

  Adam looked at her, nodded – a gesture filled with far too much adult understanding – and flopped down next to Ted. The plastic blocks burst apart, scattering across the floor with the force of his frustration. Ted opened one eye at the telekinetic display, yawned, and closed it again.

  "I know, baby. Now pick those up. Being mad ain't a reason to make a mess."

  Unless he
learned to control his outbursts, and they went into hiding, Adam would never have a normal life. But she'd be damned before she let him become an object of worship.

  * * *

  George Needel set down his hammer and watched with everyone else as Jason Rees pulled his arm out of the jacked security guard's grip and stumbled across the street. Workers and parishioners on the ground mobbed the fallen priest, hoping for word of Adam Rowley or his blessed mother. Though obviously flustered, Rees calmed their fervor and set them back to work, the model of an effective leader with a clear mission. But George didn't care about any of that.

  He kept his eyes turned toward Rees and used the excuse to track the guard. Seven steps back to the mailbox, another thirty-four to the front steps. He didn't speak into his earpiece, but did double-check the pathway around to the side deck before returning to the porch, just like after the FedEx man two days earlier and the babysitter the day before that. Routine, routine, routine.

  Needel picked up his hammer with his right hand, and thrust his left into his pocket. Without looking he sent a message to Shane Keene at the Office of Planning and Development: "Mission is go."

  CHAPTER THREE

  The phone rang four times before it picked up, and Matt tried not to worry with each successive beep.

  "Hey, baby." Monica's voice filled him with relief.

  "Everything okay?"

  "Sure, why wouldn't it be?"

  He let out a breath. "I don't know. I just wish I could be there, what with all the commotion."

  Through the wall the shower turned on, Janet making good on her promise to clean up. The flowing water garbled her voice, a murmured undercurrent punctuated by pauses – a conversation, not talking to herself.

  "It's fine," Monica said, interrupting his eavesdropping. "I miss you, and the boys miss you. Ted piddled on the kitchen floor again, and Adam keeps asking where you are. Jason brought me a book with some interesting stuff in it a couple days ago, but none of it pertains to egregoroi in particular, just messengers and heralds and the like. Interesting reading, but nothing we haven't seen before."

  The nephilim that had called herself Gerstner had not only freed several of the Watchers, the egregoroi condemned to the eternal pit of Tartarus for laying with human women in the time before the Great Flood, she had snapped a spell that had sent Monica to her own personal hell – or maybe someone else's hell, if she could be believed – and brought his wife back only to have her murdered weeks later. Saved by their son, Monica had poured herself into learning as much as she could about these insane, powerful beings that only Matt could stand up to and survive.

  As much as he didn't want to involve his delicate wife in the violence of his job, he needed help more than ever, and of all people on the planet he knew he could trust her. And maybe Jason. Maybe. To a point.

  "Well, tell him I said thanks next time you see him."

  "Yeah, I'll send some muffins across the street. Or something." The flat anger in her voice made him smirk. "Hey, little man! You want to talk to daddy?"

  He spent the next few minutes responding to Adam's nonsensical babble, said goodbye to his wife, and hung up. Through the wall Janet had stopped talking, instead humming through the slosh of water.

  Matt the Tennessee State Trooper would have taken the downtime as an opportunity to exercise, perhaps go for a jog or visit a nearby gym. Since his augmentations had returned after Gerstner's destruction – or temporary destruction – he remained a wall of muscle well beyond the peak of human perfection without lifting a finger much less a barbell. With a sigh he sat on the bed and turned on the TV, flipping through channels to find something worth watching.

  He stopped at an attractive black woman in her forties, sitting on a loveseat between two men he recognized. Ronald Kellett, a tall, wispy ghost of a man in his mid-eighties, spoke in a discordant blend of proper British and Texan drawl. "I'm not trying to be insulting, but Mr Rush is nothing more than a cult leader, and with the developments of the past months this is as irresponsible as it is dangerous. Humans must stand up for humanity, and against the inhumanity that beckons men like Mr Rush to its demonic embrace."

  Matt recognized the redheaded bombshell that stood behind the leader of Humans for Humanity, the same woman that had given him a bottle of water in Kellett's office more than a year prior, and wearing the same stark white, thousand-dollar skirt-suit that showed off far too much cleavage and legs for a church-based organization.

  Nigel Rush squirmed in his seat. Too tall, too thin and as pale as milk, his skin gleamed under the TV lights in contrast to his rumpled brown suit. The Ul blazed from his white tie, a circle cut with a line, each half filled with a sinuous squiggle, in embroidered red. Rush had given the symbol a name to Matt, though Matt had seen it on the head of the first egregoroi he'd encountered, before he knew about or believed in damned angels or nephilim, before he'd seen the Ul on Ben Case's crosses at Lake Barnacle, or on the tattered skin of Conor Flynn's victims.

  "Y'all can call something a cult just because it's new, but naming it such doesn't diminish its power." Rush smiled, his teeth still brown and rotting despite his increased public profile, his south Georgia drawl a stark contrast to the charisma behind his voice. "More people witnessed the multiplicitous Ramiel's death at the hands of Matthew Rowley, more people witnessed his wife's death and resurrection at the hands of her divine son, more people have seen these things in real time than believe in all of Christianity. Whether or not they have embraced the truth is only a matter of time and increasing revelation, so it matters not to me whether Mr Kellett and his ilk call us a cult. His misguided prayer group is of increasing irrelevance in an age of miracles."

  The moderator turned to Kellett. "Mr Kellett?"

  The redhead bent low to whisper in Kellett's ear, her blouse just managing to keep the program PG-13. Kellett nodded, then creased his lips in a thin smile before speaking to the moderator, not his opponent. "And this kind of fervor is exactly why we need Humans for Humanity. Mr Rush is so convinced that these creatures are divine, but has his own research not shown us their true nature, that they are outcasts from heaven, banished for eternity by Almighty God? It has."

  Rush's smile widened, revealing red sores on his gums. "Banished by God, yet here they are. If the banishment were God's will, then surely so is their return."

  Kellett opened his mouth, closed it, then tried again. "You seem to take their rule as desirable—"

  "Inevitable."

  "—and that, Mr Rush, is why all men and women of God must oppose you. These creatures are Satanic, and you—"

  Matt turned off the TV. Nigel Rush hadn't yet shown up in White Spruce, though Jason had indicated that the strange man intended at some point to make ‘a pilgrimage’. In words and action Rush had yet to do anything Matt would call dangerous, but Matt would never forget the wisp of blackness writhing behind the man's pale irises.

  He stripped off his shirt and tossed it to the floor on the way to the bathroom. If he hadn't needed a shower, he did now.

  * * *

  He emerged from the steam-filled bathroom wearing only a towel, and grunted in surprise at Janet, who sat on his bed in a cream blouse and pale blue miniskirt, legs crossed to provide the illusion of modesty while propping up her laptop. They'd given each other their room keys on a ‘just in case’ basis; despite each being a model of physical perfection – hers genetic, his through the magical science of Gerstner Augmentation – the attraction went nowhere beyond appreciation, and their relationship had never threatened to go anywhere past work. Matt would never cheat on Monica, and to Matt's knowledge Janet had never shown the slightest sexual interest in anybody.

  "A little privacy?"

  She glanced up and back at the screen. "Nothing I haven't seen. Get dressed, we're going to dinner."

  He turned around, let the towel fall, and slipped into a pair of clean blue
jeans. "T-shirt or polo?"

  "Whatever blends in better at Denny's."

  He pulled on a T-shirt and a light gray windbreaker emblazoned with the Special Threats Bureau logo, three plain letters on the Homeland Security shield. Anyone who knew of the STB would recognize him by face – despite their extraordinary funding the office consisted of Matt, Janet, and three dozen minions, and reported directly to the Director of Homeland Security. Tasked with isolating and destroying supernatural enemies of the United States, they outsourced ninety-nine percent of their intelligence and, thankfully, almost all of their paperwork to other divisions in DHS.

  "All right, let's go to Denny's."

  She held up a finger, then ignored him to type, nails clacking against the keys.

  He knew she'd finish on her own time, so he sat on the bed and looked at the screen.

  A military drone with a forty-seven-foot wingspan soared high above the Fredericksburg metro area, and from it spilled hundreds of tiny objects. Light blue, they deployed tiny iridescent wings and scattered, buzzing rooftops and clinging to walls and under windowsills to map out the area around the restaurant, including the Motel 6 where they now stood.

  "I didn't realize the food was that bad."

  Janet rolled her eyes. "Our contact said she'd meet us there in an hour. I assume she'll be early, and unless she's either honest or an idiot she'll bring backup. I want to know what we're walking into before we walk into it."

  "That's, like, less than a half-mile from here. Coincidence?"

  She shook her head. "She let me pick the venue."

  "And you chose Denny's?"

  Janet's glare held no humor. "The reviews for this place are wretched, even for a Denny's. Bad service, sticky tables, no soap in the restrooms. I figure we'll have a half-dozen employees and maybe that many patrons. Public enough to be a pain in the ass, but not a lot of collateral to worry about if things go south. So let's drive a while, turn around, and go to Denny's."

  "How will we know her?"