Nightwise (19 page)

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Sometime later, I was sitting at the table again in the interrogation room. Always in the interrogation room. There was a cold soda and a pack of cigarettes in front of me. Skinny was still sitting with the same smile twitching at the edges of his face. He had his folder open in front of him. He recited a litany of names. One of them was my real name—the one that had power over me.

“So,” he said as he finished the list of names, “which one is really you? We gave your profile to the Hidden Oracles at Quantico, along with all of the proper tributes and blood sacrifices, and got all of these possible results back. Your face is hidden in shadow from the Oracles' sight. That is an impressive bit of working. So we do this old school. Save yourself the aggravation of another session with Lou, just tell me who you are.”

“Why, so you can put a compulsion glamour on me to answer your questions?” I said, fumbling with the pack of smokes. I wished they were American Spirits, but these would do. It was hard to tell if the look on Skinny's pinched face was amusement or controlled anger. I held out the cigarette, and Skinny lit it with a white lighter.

“Those are bad luck, y'know,” I said. Skinny's face split into a smile.

“So, we have a player,” he said to Lou. After all Fat and I had been through together, I figured I should call him Lou. “They are bad luck, funny guy, they are real bad luck.”

Lou worked me over real well. He went up to the edge he had taken me to the day before and gave me hope it was coming to an end, and then he went over that edge, hard. I was in agony, and then terror welled up in me as he kept going. He took my partly smoked cigarette and burned me on the face, in one of my eyes, with it.

“Your name,” Skinny said, “and it stops.”

I said nothing. I have no fucking clue why. I knew if they kept this up I would break and I would do anything they asked me to do, tell them anything. Give up Grinner, Christine, the baby, Magdalena, Geri, anyone, everyone, to just stop this pain and the disfigurement. But then I got pissed at myself for that and decided I rather fucking die than be that little snitch bitch. And there was still that nagging thing in my head if I could just think, just have the time to reason it out without a concussion, or pain, or hunger buzzing in my head.

“Askh Lou's mom,” I muttered, and spit blood in Lou's wide face.

More “quality time” with Lou followed. More questions, more witty replies that resulted in new and startling levels of pain, disfigurement, and permanent injury. There was no longer a line; Lou was destroying me in as painful a way as possible.

“Your name?” Skinny said again and again. Sometimes it was, “Why did you murder him?” or “Who do you work for?”

Each time my answer was a nonanswer, sometimes smart-ass and defiant, other times just sobbing sounds. I couldn't cry. Lou had put out cigarettes on my tear ducts by that point.

Lou took out a straight razor, and he cut one of my ears and most of my nose off. He whispered in my ear, “Your eyelids are next.” I felt his raging erection against me as he began to cut at the corner of my one remaining, squirming eyeball.

“No,” Skinny said, and he stood. “Lou, that's enough.”

“The little fucker is about ready to crack,” Lou said defiantly, like a kid pleading with his mom to have five more minutes to play before he has to come in for the night.

“No, save it for tomorrow,” Skinny said. “Bring him over here.”

Grudgingly, Lou planted me back in the chair. I slumped over, my face hitting the table. Lou pulled me back and then smashed my face back on the table several more times. Blood flew everywhere.

“Jesus, watch it!” Skinny shouted. “I don't want to have to go home to Sally and the kids with this skell's fucking blood all over me. Pull him up.”

Lou did. It was hard to focus; I was more out of it than aware. Skinny leaned close as he dabbed the bloodstains off his tie.

“Do you know why I let Lou go so far with you today?” Skinny asked. I couldn't answer. A bubble of blood swelled between my shredded lips and shattered teeth and popped.

“Because tonight you will be injected with the same potion they pumped into you last night—a combination of alchemy and biotechnology. Microscopic golems. Magical nanotech that accelerates your whole body's metabolism and heals you completely. And tomorrow morning, you will be fine. You will have aged a few months, but you will be fine physically and ready for another day of this and another and another. Do you understand, funny guy? You get the punch line?”

I stared stuporously at Skinny, but the awareness must have registered in my one functioning eye, because Skinny nodded and smiled broadly.

“That's right, no dying here, no matter what I let him do to you, no escape, no release. And the memory of each thing he does to you, the dreams of it, the dread of the next time you come to this room and what will await you—those are forever.”

I made a little sound. It was very weak and feeble, but it made both men laugh. I didn't have enough of me left to be angry or even fully afraid. I was like a suffering animal, and I just wanted it to stop.

“Tomorrow, I will not ask you any questions,” Skinny said, “and I will make sure Lou here cuts your tongue out first thing. So have a good night's sleep, funny guy.”

And after a little more “me time” with Lou, they buried me back in the deepest, darkest part of the Tombs.

Skinny was as good as his word the next day.

Time became intervals of torture and healing.

The only food I got was what Darren managed to steal for me. I was so broken by the time they returned me in the evening, I was unaware of dinner. And the healing coma that the tiny magical robots in my cells put me into ensured I missed breakfast. If I was lucky, I caught a few lunches a week before the detail came to get me for my time in the interrogation room.

I felt my humanity slipping away, my mind turning to liquid that couldn't hold a tight thought or defend a position, and reasoning was getting harder every day. Between the lack of food, the drugs, and the torture, they were breaking me, it was working. Darren became my anchor to objective reality. Part of me was waiting for him to be gone one night when they returned me, another prop, another way to give me a scrap of hope and then take it away, but so far he seemed to be real.

I woke as usual, feeling fine physically, but now, daily, my mind was dull, and it was hard for me to do much but stare. Thought was like pushing against a wall of mud. I counted on Darren to tell me how long I had been here. It was about a month now, he said. Thirty days, thirty trips to the interrogation room. Thirty healing treatments. I had fantasies at one point of Geri, Grinner, and the gang crashing into Rikers in some daring
Matrix
-like raid and saving my ass. I didn't dream that anymore; I didn't dream at all except of the torture in the interrogation room. Sometimes I couldn't tell the dreams from the reality.

My beard stretched to my stomach now and my hair to my midback. Both were streaked with silver. I had no clue how much the healing elixir was aging me, but I knew that the rush of my accelerated metabolism was now being checked by my near constant starvation.

A white Styrofoam box sailed across the corridor. It landed with a thump by my bars, and a second later another food box fell.

“Two?” I asked Darren. My voice sounded strange to me now, alien. Words felt thick and odd in my mouth.

“Yeah, man,” he said from the darkness of the other cell. “I think it's your anniversary or something, and you deserve a little treat, Crowley.”

I worked the boxes through the bars and opened the first one. It was piled with food—bacon, sausage, hamburgers, fries, scrambled eggs, ham sandwiches, potato chips, and a baked potato. The second one contained pizza slices, tacos, mashed potatoes, even a hunk of steak.

Sitting on top of the piles of food were two joints, one in each box.

“Merry Christmas!” Darren said and laughed.

“Where the hell did you get this?” I said, and I think I smiled for the first time in a thousand years.

“Don't got matches, though,” Darren said, and I saw him standing with a big grin of his own and a joint dangling between his teeth. “Don't got a light, do you?”

I slipped my hands out past the edges of the bars and pointed at his blunt with my index finger.

“Accendere,”
I whispered to the stale air. The tip of his joint became cherry red, and smoke coiled away from it.

“Whoa,” he said, and then laughed.

“Yeah.” I nodded and sat back down on the bunk. “I get that a lot.”

“How, how'd you do that, Crowley, man?”

“Sweet old lady taught me how to do it,” I said. “I learned the fancy words some other places, but she taught me to listen to the fire and the air and the water. I wish I'd listened better.”

I got off the bunk and lifted one of the legs. The leg was hollow, and I pulled out a crumpled cigarette pack. Inside were four cigarettes and the white lighter I had palmed on the first day.

“How did you get this smoke?” I asked.

“Shit, man, it's prison,” Darren said. “Even in this part, it's still prison. I used to suck off this guard in exchange for part of the weed he confiscated in the cell searches in the general population. I stockpiled it. Like your food there.”

“Darren, my man, I think I have a notion.” I began to eat, wolfing down the food eagerly. I set the two joints, my cigarettes, and the lighter to one side and kept stuffing food into my mouth. “Do you know who the Seraphim are?”

“The what? Angels, right? Angels in Heaven,” Darren said.

“Yes, but wrong Seraphim. They are the secret police of the Illuminati. They make the Secret Masters' enemies disappear. They are smoke and shadow, everywhere and nowhere, and they have our asses in the belly of the beast.”

“New World Order, yeah, I hear you,” Daren said.

The food was helping. I paused, went to the sink, and filled it with water. Then I muttered a simple purification spell Granny had taught me. It worked. The wards were on the bars and locks and were keyed to destructive or countermeasure-style spells, complex magics. But Granny's simple old-as-the-hills purification spell worked just fine. The old ways, the simple ways. Magic, like water cutting into rocks, finding its way. The narrow focus wards were a cheap solution to keep magical cons from busting out. It was a loophole. And I just loved loopholes.

“So, if these guys are the all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful masters of the world, and we are their prisoners, then why don't these cops know more than they do?”

“Maybe they are trying to trick you into confessing?” Darren offered, taking a long drag on his joint, holding it nestled in his lungs, and then slowly exhaling the mellow smoke. “Trying to get you to slip up.”

“Why would it matter to them?” I said, tossing one empty carton away and starting to work on the second one. “They know, right? They are going to play cat and mouse with me for a fucking month and keep asking the same damn questions?” There was a long pause. I got up and drank half a sink full of clean water. My head was clearing fast.

“They don't know,” Darren finally said. “They are fishing. They don't fucking know.”

I laughed and licked my fingers and wiped my lips and beard. “Yep. They are on a fishing expedition. They said something the first few days, about the Inugami…”

“The what?” Darren said.

“They were asking why I had Trace at the ritual site. They thought I had summoned the Inugami, so it wasn't them that sicced them on us; it was someone else. Not the Secret Masters, not the Illuminati. I made the assumption because the cops grilled Trace, but I could have been giving them too much credit. Maybe it was Slorzack after all, or someone clearing the path for Slorzack.”

I tossed the second empty box on the floor and burped. It felt so good.

“What the hell is an Inugami?” Darren asked. “What the fuck is a Slorzack?”

“I'll tell you when we are out of this shit hole,” I said, lying back on my bunk and smiling, holding my belly. “I'm going need you to do a few more things for me, Darren, and one of them is going to be very hard to do. Very.”

“Okay, Crowley,” Darren said, choking a little on the smoke from his joint. “What you need, man?”

“I'm going to need all of your dope, any rolling paper you got.”

“Okay, man. Done. I got the better part of a dime bag.”

“And, here's the really tough part,” I said.

“Yeah,” Darren said, leaning against the bars and taking another drag.

“I need you to believe me when I say I'm coming back to get you the hell out of here, man.”

 

THIRTEEN

Another eternity in the interrogation room. Another fugue of nightmares and hypodermics. I had told Darren to try as hard as he could to wake me earlier. He did. It was like fighting my way up from dark, warm water.

I pulled my ass out of bed, groggy, starving, and still hurting a bit. The pain actually felt good to me. It was bearable, and it spurred me on.

I told Darren what I needed. He didn't even balk. He tossed me a box of breakfast with his bag of weed inside with the food. It was time to get to work. When Lou had been carving on me last night, I swore it was going to be my last night in that room and in this cell.

Darren had pretty good shit. I began the ritual after I ate breakfast. It took some effort to coax my body back to the practice of magic. They had almost broken my will, and a Wisdom without will is nothing. I sat on the floor of my cell, crossed my legs, and straightened my spine. My breathing became my universe: slow, even, in and out, in through the mouth, out through the nose. Slowly, I opened each petal, each chakra, wide. My body became a distant shadow. I sensed the forces flowing, crashing, moving, blocking all about me. The winds of the world howled through me like an open window, they cleansed me, renewed me.