Wicked Prayer (31 page)

Oh, God,
Brian thought.
The shrunken head! It’s talking!

“Get used to it, pulpit-boy,” Raymondo said. “Now open the book to the page we marked, and let’s get this show on the road.”

First a dusty bruise in the sky . . . battered by the dark fist of evening . . . and then blackness descending over all.

Night had fallen just that fast.

The constellation Corvus shone above. The Crow soared beneath its pure white light, but the bird didn’t really need the stars at all.

The odor of hellfire exhaust soiled the desert air. The Crow smelled it.

Dan Cody smelled it, too. He followed the odor like a bird dog.

To Las Vegas Boulevard. To Wedding Chapel row.

Enchanted starlight rained down on a quaint Victorian up ahead.

The Little Chapel of the Stars.

Johnny Church’s Merc waited in the shadow of the chapel.

The Crow circled, landed on the neon sign that loomed above the parking lot—a neon sign sprinkled with neon stars.

Hurry, Dan,
the bird cawed
.
Before it’s too late.

Raymondo recited the ceremony from the black book, but Kyra barely heard the words.

Her thoughts had flown like the Crow, on dark wings that led her to a woman called Lilith Spain.

Lilith had never struck Kyra as someone special, despite her bloodlines . . . Kyra had certainly never imagined that the actress possessed a connection to the Crow’s dark power.

But she’d seen that power glowing in Lilith Spain’s eyes.

Black, black pupils on a framed
People
magazine cover.

Lilith Spain ... a woman with the eyes of a Crow.

Looking at those eyes, Kyra realized that Spain had to be the last link to her vision . . . and the Crow’s power. For Kyra Damon believed in fate. Fate had led her to the book and the rope, to Johnny and Raymondo. Fate had led her to a blue-eyed Crow at the Spirit Song Trading Post, and with that woman’s eyes Kyra had beheld an ancient constellation in the night sky, a pattern of stars that led her to Las Vegas. . . where she had found a woman who’d made a wedding dress for Lilith Spain. But fate had reserved that dress for Kyra Damon, just as it had brought her to the same chapel where Erik Hearse had slipped a wedding ring on Lilith Spain’s finger . . . and where Johnny Church would, moments from now, slip the Crow woman’s wedding ring on Kyra’s own waiting finger . . .

Yes, fate—and a pair of eyes that glowed like black pearls— would deliver Kyra’s destiny.

Strength everlasting . . . and immortality . . . and vengeance.

Kyra looked up and met the minister’s terrified gaze. His lips were masked with duct tape, but his eyes seemed to beg an answer to a question he was unable to ask.

Raymondo asked it in the minister’s stead, and it was a blasphemous question that could never cross the lips of a man of God, and there was only one answer Kyra could give.

“I do,” she said.

Johnny Church took her hand in his, but she didn’t feel his touch.

After all, Johnny was just a stand-in for a power he couldn’t even imagine.

Kyra raised the third finger on her left hand, just slightly.

Dead black diamonds gleamed on the wedding ring.

Cold silver touched Kyra’s flesh.

Encircled it.

She closed her left hand into a fist.

She embraced the strength of the Crow.

Halfway across the parking lot, the pain hit Dan Cody like a sledgehammer. He dropped to his knees, and the Colt .45 slipped from his left hand, and the sawed-off shotgun fell from his right.

The weapons clattered to the pavement as another jolt of agony slammed through Dan. This one was locked in rib cage prison, just like Dan’s bright red beating heart. . . and it pulsed inside him one last time and then it exploded ... a final, undeniable eruption of flesh and muscle and Dan was sure that bone prison bars had shattered inside him, their brittle shards carving a tunnel through his chest. . . and the life force the Crow had locked inside his body was escaping as Kyra Damon reached out to steal it and—

Dan opened his mouth, but he couldn’t even gasp . . . because the facility of breath that the living took for granted was not a talent shared by the dead.

Dan fell forward. His hands hit ground, and black pavement skinned the flesh from his palms. Above him, the Crow cawed. But Dan heard no words that could guide him, only the squawk of an ordinary bird—

Black-nailed fingers coiled in Dan’s long hair.

A supernaturally strong hand raised his head.

“You’ve come to the wrong place, cowboy,” Kyra said.

“Yeah,” said Johnny Church. “This is a wedding chapel. . . they do funerals down the street.”

Kyra Damon kicked Cody hard, one heavy dominatrix boot cracking against the dead man’s jaw.

“Oh,
yeah!"
Johnny yelled. “That’s my wife! That’s the girl I married!”

Kyra barely heard him. Cody flopped on his back like a dead fish, and she raised her boot again and there came the whisper of tightly laced leather escaping the slit of a satin wedding dress, and her sharp steel toe cracked the dead man’s ribs, slammed into him again and splintered the bony tangle, slammed him one more time and drove shattered ribs through muscle and flesh like knives.

“This boy’s in
trouble!"
Johnny Church whooped. “Forget the
nurse!
Better call the
hearse!"

Cody curled up in a ball at Kyra’s feet. Kyra knelt and grabbed him by the hair, raising his head close to her lips. She whispered in his ear: “I thought I’d never see you again, Cody. Thought you’d never get out of that freezer. Thought you and your Injun bitch would rot under the Arizona sun together.” She laughed. “Believe me, cowboy, by the time I’m done with you you’re going to wish that it had happened just that way.”

She smashed Dan’s face against the pavement.

Black shrapnel flew as his scratched sunglasses shattered.

Another trip to the blacktop and his nose broke, bone snapping like a pencil.

Kyra didn’t stop there. She kept on pounding, using Cody’s head like a hammer.
WHAM!
Skinned his forehead clean.
BAM!
Painted pavement with his blood.
CRACK!
Scored his skull with spiderweb fissures.

“I’m strong now, cowboy,” Kyra said. “As strong as you must have been when you bashed your way out of that freezer. I’ve got to tell you, it feels good.”

Dan opened his mouth. Kyra Damon had stolen something from him—something much greater than strength—and his words were only a whisper, because there was no breath inside his lungs to drive them, nothing inside him anymore but the force of will he’d been born with and the dying ember of the Crow’s dark power.

“You’d better finish me now,” Dan said. “Because if you don’t, I’ll—”

“You’ll
what,
cowboy?” Johnny laughed. “What’re you gonna do, Danny Boy?
Bleed
on her?”

“He won’t even have a chance to do that,” Kyra said. “It’s all over for you, Cody. You had your chance and you blew it. I’ve got one more stop to make, and then the gifts the Crow gave you will be mine. And believe me, I won’t waste them the way you did.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said.
“Failure
ain’t in our vocabulary, Hopalong.”

“That’s right.” Kyra let go of Dan’s hair, and his head cracked against the pavement. “So lie here and rot, Cody. That’s all that’s left for you to do. Another day, and I’ll have everything I ever wanted. Keep your eye on the clock. The last shred of power will leech from your bones in a couple circuits of the hour hand. You’ve got twenty-four hours, Cody. At the outside. Then you’ll be like every other corpse in the world . . . and the Crow will be like any other bird.”

Sirens wailed in the distance. Kyra glanced at the chapel doorway. Ella Valentine ducked out of view, but Kyra had seen the cell phone clutched in the chapel owner’s hand.

“I wish we could have fragged ’em all,” Johnny said. “I’m really missing a sense of
completion
here.”

“No,” Kyra said. "No more Crowbait. Not when we’re this close.”

“Yeah ... I guess you’re right.”

But the big gearhead couldn’t leave it at that.

Kyra knew he couldn’t, and so did Dan Cody.

He drew his pistol, and—-for the second time in as many nights—Johnny Church shot Dan Cody in the back.

Heavy boots rang on pavement, and Johnny Church’s voice rang in Dan’s head:

"Happy trails, cowboy!"

Brian Brunswick Cooke drained his flask, but the effort came
to naught. Even good Irish whiskey couldn’t take the edge off the cold sobriety of fear.

The minister stepped outside. The night was quiet, except for the wail of a police siren . . . maybe ten or twelve blocks away. Brian knew the authorities would be here soon, and that meant he didn’t have much time. If by some miracle the poor soul who lay in the parking lot was still clinging to life, he might want to share his final moments with a man of God.

The stranger lay facedown in a lake of blood, near a Dodge Durango parked at the comer of the lot farthest from Las Vegas Boulevard.

The man didn’t move as Brian rushed to his side.

Brian rolled him over. Behind the minister, Ella Valentine gave a little shriek as she saw the stranger’s wounds. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, Christ, Brian . . . this is
horrible.”

And it was. The man’s chest was a hole of scarlet gore, his heart shredded by a bullet from the bridegroom’s gun. But the horror did not end there—the right side of the man’s forehead was skinned clean off, and his right eye was a pulpy mess the color of a spoiled egg, and a jagged crack split his gleaming, exposed skull.

“This is really bad,” Ella sobbed. “And just when we were doing
a little better, too. But now . . . well, no one’s going to want to get married here after
this.
I might as well close up shop.”

"Do what you want,” Brian said. "It doesn’t matter to me . . . not after the things I saw tonight. I’m quitting. I’ll never enter that chapel again.”

They traded looks. Ella nearly said more, but thought better of it. Brian didn’t care in the least what the woman might say. He wasn’t even curious. He just wanted her to go away.

“I’ll go out to the street,” Ella said, as if sensing Brian’s mood. "I was so rattled when I called the cops. I’m not even sure I gave them the right address. I’ll flag them down when they get here.”

“That’s a good idea,” Brian said, even though he knew the police got their address information from a computer system. There was no way they’d miss the chapel.

Still, Brian wasn’t sorry to see Ella go. For some strange reason, the minister wanted to be alone with the dead man.

The sirens were closer now. Four blocks away . . . maybe three.

Brian clasped the dead man’s hand in his own. The stranger’s flesh was already cold, and the minister didn’t understand how that was possible. It had all happened so fast—

Every bit of it. The man with the gun . . . and the woman in black . . . and the shrunken head, a dead thing spitting blasphemies while Brian’s own tongue was still.

Brian held tightly to the dead man’s hand, as if searching for answers in his cold flesh. “I never believed in the darkness,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper. “Not until tonight. But now I believe. And I pray that the Lord is stronger than the Devil, that the light really can banish all shadows. I want to believe that. Lord, I want to—”

The dead man’s hand gripped Brian’s.

Hard.

Brian gasped, his eyes flashing open. The dead man sat up, then stood up . . . stiffly. He grabbed his guns from where they lay in a puddle of blood and started toward the Dodge.

“Do me a favor, preacher,” he said as he slid behind the wheel.

"Y-yes,” Brian stammered, barely able to open his mouth.