Stained Glass

Chapter 16

We split at the clubhouse, tired and stunned. Zane was apparently living here, because he disappeared into the top floor of the house while Jenner and Duke went to call John Spotted Elk and Michael to tell them what we’d learned. That left me, my suitcases, and my cat in the Twin Tigers M.C flophouse. There was no time for me to rest: The night’s work had only just begun.

The first thing I did was have a shower and put on real clothes. After weeks and weeks of greasy jeans and worn t-shirts, the sensation of fine wool and clean, smooth cotton was the closest I had ever come to physical ecstasy. I had to tighten my belt by two extra holes, but when I looked at the mirror and saw a clean man, a well-dressed man with a collared shirt and tie and proper leather gloves, I recognized my face for what seemed like the first time in years.

The next thing I did was walk to the nearest convenience store and buy cat food. Binah ate like a starving wolf. I sat by her bowl, cross-legged, watching on as she cleared the dish and licked out every crumb of minced chicken. My once beautiful and sleek familiar was now nothing but skin and bones.

Nothing could be done for her injuries until she was clean, but I had never bathed a cat before. She was my first pet, and while I had a working knowledge of the habits of felines, animals are not a big feature of the Murder, Inc lifestyle. There are a lot of things that cats, hitmen and mages have in common, though… neatness, caution, patience, the predatory instinct. One thing I especially liked about her – and about cats in general – was her fastidious nature. She was sure to enjoy a bath the same way I had enjoyed my first recuperative shower.

Dutifully, I stripped back down to undershirt and trunks and ran a shallow warm bath. I added some shampoo and some hydrogen peroxide to the water, then lay a couple of towels beside the tub before I went to the kitchen and fetched her. Binah licked her whiskers in satisfaction as I carried her to the waiting bathroom and shut the door. She was still weak from her prolonged incarceration, and did not resist me as I lowered her into the water… where she promptly exploded into a howling whirlwind of claws and teeth.

“Binah, stop kvetching.” My first instinct was to hold her in the tub to try and get her adjusted to the water. The cat slipped through my hands, launched herself at the side of the tub, and sunk her claws a quarter inch into my forearm. “Bin-AAARGH!”

Let it be noted that when your familiar is wet and covered in soap, she is automatically stronger, faster and more capable of defending herself than you are of restraining her.

Using my flesh as leverage, Binah hauled herself from the bathtub in a wave of water and suds and bolted at the closed door, howling like a firetruck.

“Binah!” I set off in hot pursuit, blood streaming down my arm. I made the mistake of bending down from the waist to scoop her up, and the deep tissue bruising I’d taken from the bullet made itself known. My gut cramped, and I slipped and fell on the now-wet tiles while Binah dashed under the bathroom sink.

For several long moments, I just lay there on my side in a pool of water and blood, staring at my shivering cat. My growing conviction that this GOD organism was actually out to get me was intensifying by the moment, and only grew stronger as I picked myself up and my familiar, sensing my intent, scrambled underneath the claw-foot bathtub and hissed.

After a good ten minutes of pursuit, I finally caught Binah up in a towel and immersed her while wrapped up. She wailed the whole way through, but she couldn’t claw me. With the towel as buffer, I washed her, rubbed her down, balmed her wounds, and used a safety razor to carefully lift the dirt-black scabs from her burns. The warm water revealed that some of them needed to be lanced, but doing that while she was wet was unwise. When she was clean, I drained the bath and let her scramble out, grimacing as she flung dirty water up into my face.

Someone rapped the bathroom door and twisted to look back, buckling when I straightened too fast and my entire back spasmed. “Who? What?”

“Hey, is everything all right in there?” Zane’s raspy voice was muffled behind the wood.

“No.” I replied sourly. The bathroom was trashed. Binah was hiding behind the sink again, washing her face with a paw. She radiated pure, unadulterated disdain.

Zane cracked the door open and peered inside to see me slumped on the edge of the bathtub, soaked, grimy and bloody. “Well… okay. This happened.”

“Cats don’t like baths.” I pulled the cuffs of my gloves higher up along my wrists. The claw wounds immediately began to itch, so I pushed them down again.

Zane sniffed, looked between me and the sulking cat, then back to me. “I could have told you that.”

I took up the drier of the two towels, and began to mop up the mud from the floor around the tub, grunting as a stab of pain shot through my chest on one side. The more time passed, the more I wondered if the first shot to the chest had actually broken one of my ribs. Rib fractures were like that… you sometimes didn’t feel them until they moved.

“Hey, Rex?”

I glanced up, and found Zane regarding me with an odd, piercing expression. “What?”

“Now that I can see you properly, I need you to tell me something,” Zane said. His voice was low and sonorous. “Tell me you didn’t know about the kids.”

I knelt back, the towel still bunched in my hand. “I didn’t know about the children or the videos. I swear on my sworn-brother’s grave.”

He held my gaze for a space, nostrils flaring, and for the first time, I glimpsed the animal he hinted at but never spoke of. It was in the eyes and the poise of the throat and legs. Under the intimidating, introverted exterior, Zane had the graceful intensity of an ambush predator.

“Good.” He eased down by inches. “You need a hand?”

I looked up at him, momentarily confused. When I was this tired, the default answer was ‘no, I already have hands’, but the metaphor sunk in after a moment’s reflection. “Yes. Help me clean, and I can start testing out gematria.”

“Roger that.” Zane got the towel, and bent to the task of cleaning. Binah slunk to the closed bathroom door and began to paw at it. “What’s gematria?”

“Gematria is where letters are assigned certain meanings and are associated with numbers, which also encode their own separate meanings. The gematric tables that occult magicians use to compose invocations is fundamentally based on an esoteric Judaic tradition of decoding hidden meanings in the Torah. It’s complex.”

“Complex is the right word.” To my great relief, he started on the hard to reach places, leaving the easier surfaces to me.

“In its most simplistic form, people think of gematria as being ‘Bible code’,” I continued. “The idea that combinations and patterns of words in the Bible – when turned into numbers – have hidden meanings.”

“Right.” Zane stood up, and looked across at me. “And there’s something like this in all those symbols drawn in Dru’s place?”

“Possibly. English Bible gematria is a bit of a thing on the… extreme Christian right.” I sat back down, distracted by the subject at hand. “Conspiracy theorists and apocalyptic types love to predict the end of the world with gematria, one of the reasons that a consulting priest is unlikely to make use of it in an investigation.”

“Right,” he said. “I follow you.”

I blinked a few times, and rubbed my hands on my knees. “You do?”

Zane paused in his labors, looking across at me. “Yeah. I’m pretty interested in that kind of thing. There’s a Lapaʻau in the family on mom’s side. Shaman-healers. I did some Buddhist temple study when I was over in Thailand… got a chance to speak to a couple of Yazidi elders and some Sufis when I was in Iraq. Besides that, I read a lot.”

I leaned forward in consternation. “So why on earth are you in a one-percenter biker gang?”

He cleared his throat, fighting back an embarrassed smile as he rubbed a hand over his scalp. “Weeders have to stick together. Birds of a feather and all that. Besides that, Jenner’s got a lot going for her. She’s been fighting the good fight for twenty or more lifetimes, you know? Revolutions, against the Nazis, in Vietnam.”

“What fight is that?”

“Well… against the Morphorde,” he said. His eyes were very Green, and very earnest.

We had no idea that there lay outside the shell of Eden an endless, hostile void. That the Mirror of the sky turned back something, that the sky was also a defense. Until the Mirror broke. I paused for a moment in shock, recalling the ritualistic words given to me in my dream. “The Morphord?”

He and his get fell upon the forest of the Mothers… they fell upon the meadows and the glades… and they murdered us…

“Yeah. It’s kind of what Weeders do.” Zane seemed to realize he had said too much, and an uncomfortable silence fell over us. After a few awkward minutes, he spoke again. “Anyway… you know… I’m probably really here for the motorcycles.”

“I’ve never ridden one,” I said. The moment had passed, and with it, the connection.

“Really? We need to fix that.” Zane stood, towering over me, and ventured a smile. “We could go for a ride if you want.”

There was a certain appeal to the idea, but as I mulled it over, I glanced at the surgery kit waiting for me beside the toilet. “Perhaps another day. I… really have to treat Binah’s injuries.”

“Sure thing. I should go catch up on some of my reading, speaking of that. Between training and club duty, I don’t get into books the way I used to anymore.”

Despite his words, he didn’t leave, and I didn’t insist. After a while, I cleared my throat. “So… what do you make of our find? The Wolf Grove address?”

“It feels unreal,” Zane replied. He crouched down on the balls of his feet, elbows resting on his knees. “I mean… why would they be buying drugs?”

“None of the children ever showed signs of addiction, or abuse?”

“I… no. I mean, normal bumps and bruises, you know.”

“Were they expressive? Happy?”

Zane thought for a moment, his green eyes darkening as he thought back. “A lot of them were really damaged and depressed because of what happened to them. It’s hard to say. I mean, they did normal kid stuff… ran around, played with toys. But they’d been rejected by their parents, most of them. The norm kids came from the usual messed up home situations that land someone in the system.”

“Besides the school, where do they go?” I sat down on the floor, leaning against the bathtub.

“They’re placed with families, the usual.” Zane shrugged. “The Weeder kids know where to come back when they’re old enough, if they want to join up with any of our factions. We got Duke that way.”

“He was a foster at Wolf Grove?”

“Nah. He’s from a home in South Carolina. We met him there when we were doing this north-to-south charity ride. He’s pretty young… only twenty-two, twenty-three. That’s why he freaked out, you know?”

I regarded him in silence for a moment. “Anyone ever seen the Wolf Grove kids after they’re placed? Follow up with them into adulthood?”

He frowned, thinking, and then reached up to rub his neck. “I assume so, but I mean… they aren’t going to tell us anything about where they go. They’re in another state, and it’s confidential, isn’t it? Caseworkers dealt with them.”

“And the couple, being Pathrunners, were the Weeders who followed up in later years.” My stomach tightened nastily, panging with a sensation that had nothing to do with food.

Zane looked down at the floor, running his tongue over and around his teeth. Even I could tell that the line of thought had left him troubled.

“I don’t know what’s happening, to tell you the truth,” he said. “When we found out about the murder, everyone was so upset they didn’t ask questions like this. I mean, they’re the ones that died. They knew Michael, they knew John, they got on well with everyone. There was nothing about them that… I guess they didn’t seem like people who’d get mixed up in bad shit.”

“That seems to be the consensus.” I sighed. “Food for thought.”

“I don’t know what to think,” he said. “All of it stinks.”

“Mm.” In my opinion, it had stunk from the beginning. Catching and moving twenty-one living children was a kidnapper’s logistical nightmare, for one thing. For another, the signatures left at the house were the kind you left for a revenge killing, not a random murder. They’d been involved in something and reneged on it. ‘It’ could be anything. They could have sold party drugs on the side to put the best food on the table for their adoptees, for all we knew. My own assessment trended towards the cynical.

“In any case, I need to get onto these abscesses,” I said. “We will learn the truth as the evidence comes together. Out of interest, what are you reading?”

“Rumi,” Zane replied. “The war taught me that there’s a lot of things about Islam that I don’t know.”

That bought a momentary smile to my face. Some part of my wizardly nature was gratified by the act of Seeking. It made me think of Crina. “In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.”

“Something like that.” Zane flushed a dark reddish brown, the color of cinnamon, laughed, and left. When the door closed, I let out a tense breath.

Brain buzzing, I began to set up for the last activity of the night. Binah’s injuries weren’t the only ones that needed seeing to: It was time to remove the parasite and reclaim my magic.