Dark Before Dawn Page 12

  Arthur sucked in his breath.

  “Are you sure?” my mother demanded, her face full of concern.

  “No, of course I’m not sure,” I snapped, irritated. “But I’m worried enough about what Rorie said to take it seriously. You saw her—she’s practically hysterical. This boy—if we can call him that—claims to know where we live. Apparently he threatened Rorie when she tried to intervene. He said he would kill us if she told anyone.”

  My mother gripped the long, billowy cascade of her sweater about her, her shock subsumed by the systematic problem-solving that her mind had automatically kicked into.

  “What do we know about the situation? Anything specific?”

  I looked at Arthur carefully, hoping he could read the warning in my eyes. Do not react. Do not react to what I am about to say.

  “We think he’s been taking her to the Bluff,” I said. “Rorie never actually went into whatever building they’re using, thank God, so we aren’t really sure where to look. But it’s a small neighborhood, so I’m sure we can get somebody to talk.” I paused, bracing myself to say the next words aloud. “And we know that the boy’s name is Luke.”

  As I’d hoped, Arthur didn’t flinch at the name. But then he looked at me, and I could see in his eyes what I was glad my mother couldn’t: that he was as concerned as I was that this, finally, was how Lucas was making his return known to us.

  My mother was already moving back to the kitchen to grab her phone. “We need to call the police. And Macey’s parents. Immediately.”

  A part of me wanted to grab her arm, to stop her. I still remembered the last sight I’d had of Lucas, standing over Michael’s body. If he really had returned, we were all in danger. Why should we do anything rash? Luke had been bringing Macey home every night, according to Rorie. She still showed up at school most of the time, albeit not in great shape. We could wait this out tonight, make sure Macey was safe at home before getting the police involved.

  But then the lawyer in me spoke. What if this wasn’t Lucas? What if it was just some trafficker who needed to be put away? If we didn’t catch him in the act, even if we could hide Macey away so that he’d never find her again, the court wouldn’t be likely to act before he went after some other little girl—maybe even ours—and do it all over again.

  My brain was screaming. Didn’t we all see? Maybe this was what he’d planned—to trap us! To punish me for the countless ways that opening Heaven’s Gate failed to get him what he wanted. It was too dangerous to face him without knowing more about the situation.

  And I could hear what my mother would say if I voiced these fears aloud.

  One night more of abuse in his hands is too much for any girl, Hope. I would expect you, of all people, to realize that.

  Of course I knew. Of course. There really was no choice except to act.

  We had to take the fight to him now.

  Just as Lucas expected me to—just as he expected all of us to— so that we played right into his hands.

  I ran my fingers through my hair and started pacing. “Okay, then, what do we do? We can’t go charge the Bluff by ourselves. And we can’t take Rorie with us. Nor can we leave her here alone.”

  “Are you still in touch with that special agent? The one who handled Hope’s disappearance?” Arthur asked, turning to my mother.

  “Agent Hale?” she asked, startled. “Well, no, but he would be easy enough to find. I don’t think he’d have retired quite yet. I may even still have his cell phone number in my contacts.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “That’s brilliant, Arthur. Mom, try to call him. If we can get the GBI to raid the Bluff, we might be able to get Macey out and shut the whole thing down.”

  “I’ll try him right now, Hope. Maybe he can tell us how to handle informing Macey’s parents, too.” My mother swept out of the room.

  I waited until I knew she was out of earshot before I turned to Arthur.

  “It’s him. I just know it’s him,” I said. “But why would Lucas do this, Arthur? Why target Rorie’s friend?”

  He frowned. “She’s not the target. You are. He’s using her to ultimately get to you. You have to be very careful, Hope.”

  My forehead furrowed into pleats of worry. “Maybe you should go find Michael before things get out of hand,” I said.

  Arthur shook his head. “I’m not sure that’s wise. It will leave you all unprotected. He’ll come if he is supposed to. He—or Gabrielle—will sense that you need it, and if you do, he’ll bring the entire brotherhood pledged to Aurora’s defense.”

  “And if we don’t need him, I don’t want to distract him or Gabrielle from what he’s supposed to be doing.” I recognized the logic in Arthur’s argument. “You’re right. We’ll be better off with you here. Just in case.”

  He smiled, a fleeting tenderness that showed the extent of his worry. “I’ve always been here to watch your back. Ever since you were a bitty baby. You know that, girl.”

  I reached over to squeeze his hand, thinking just how much we had needed his protection—then, and now.

  “I know.”

  My mother had been technically correct, but a little optimistic. Agent Hale was only one week shy of his retirement. But, as he and my mother reckoned, one week was plenty of time to stage a raid on the Bluff, and plenty of time to figure out exactly where Macey was being taken when she disappeared from school.

  He still had a soft spot for my mother. I suppose it was because he felt sorry for her, the way he’d had to let her know about my father’s death right in the middle of my missing persons case. But whatever the reason, he didn’t hesitate to say yes when my mother suggested he let Tabby and me stand and watch the operation with him on the night it all went down. We had good reason to be there, of course—me to help any victims freed in the raid with their legal needs, Tabitha to provide expert psychological exit counseling. But I knew the ease with which we were integrated into the stakeout had a lot to do with his loyalty to my mother—as well as his need to move quickly.

  In our navy GBI windbreakers, holding binoculars that we periodically scanned over abandoned buildings and flophouses, Tabby and I waited for something to happen while Hale directed the operation below. From our perch, we could see the desolation that heroin had wreaked upon the neighborhood. It was like a patchwork quilt—here, a square yard, its actual dimensions obscured by weeds that had grown higher than a car; there, the burned-out shell of a home razed by arson or accident, never cleared; opposite, a building that could only generously be called a shanty, shiftless people loitering about its perimeter, waiting for a dealer or maybe something even worse. Here and there, a tidy, manicured lawn interrupted the fabric of decay and neglect, evidence of a determined homeowner fighting against the tide that threatened to engulf the neighborhood.

  No one strolled the crumbling asphalt streets. No neighbors leaned over neat picket fences. What fences stood were made of chain link and were more likely to hold back a vicious pit bull than anything else.

  It was hard to believe we were less than a mile from downtown, some of Atlanta’s greatest landmarks only a stone’s throw away. It was like a war zone had been thrown down in the middle of suburbia and left, forgotten, for twenty years. I pulled back from the window and shivered—it was no wonder that with my sheltered upbringing, I’d never even heard of this place.

  Arthur had stayed behind at home with my mother and Rorie to make sure they were safe. Macey’s foster parents were waiting at their home, too. They’d been shocked when the GBI contacted them, overwhelmed. Hale had handled them gently, informing them of their daughter’s situation as delicately as he could, picking his way through the conversational land mines while Macey’s foster mother averted her eyes, her cheeks staining red. His reminder that Macey would need to go to the ER immediately after the operation, before she could be released to them, washed over them without acknowledgment. I think they preferred to stay in a state of ignorance than to know the details of the horrible things th
at had undoubtedly been done to their foster daughter, things that were unspeakable in the manicured lawns of Buckhead. Hale had already taken their statements so that nothing would hold them up from taking their daughter when the time came.

  He’d taken Rorie’s statement, too. My hair had stood on end as she’d given her detailed description of Luke, and the police artist had rendered her interpretation of Rorie’s words in charcoal: slowly, Lucas’s visage had sprung from the page. He hadn’t even cared enough to adopt another physical persona to hide himself. It was as if he was brazenly flaunting the fact that he was back, rubbing my face in my helplessness. It was then that I knew for sure his intention: he was coming for me. He would hurt me in whatever way he could, and he wanted me to know it.

  But maybe I was wrong, after all. Maybe it was my own mind, projecting my memories onto an artist’s sketch. After all, it couldn’t be Lucas—for if it were really Lucas, wouldn’t Michael have come back? Wouldn’t he have invoked the oaths of the angels who’d pledged themselves to Aurora’s safety, all those years ago?

  But aside from Arthur, none of them had shown their faces.

  So it couldn’t be him.

  I kept chasing the logic, endless circles in my head around the question that kept insinuating itself: if this is Lucas, then where is Michael?

  Hale’s voice crackled across the agent’s walkie-talkie. “We’re going in.”

  Tabby and I huddled at the window frame and peered outside through the binoculars. Several blocks away, a swarm of men wearing bulletproof vests and helmets had surrounded a ramshackle brick building. It was hard to tell, but from the boarded up doors off of the second-floor balcony, it looked like it used to be a motel.

  Deep in the recesses of my memory, the images of the men who’d once rescued me as a little girl, when I’d been held hostage in another run-down motel, sprang too vividly to life. Shaking my head, I chased away the thought and turned back to the window.

  The men regrouped, signaling at each other with their hands as they stealthily made their way up the staircase to surround the perimeter of the building. Then there was a flash of light, and smoke billowed around the building, obscuring the main door.

  When the smoke cleared, the men had vanished into the building.

  High-pitched shrieking suddenly shattered the quiet night. A few hollow pops—gunfire—split the air. Then, nothing.

  I thought of Macey, somewhere inside the building. She was barely a teen—still a child, really, despite all that had happened to her in her short, desperate life. Would she have heard the boom of the flashbang grenades when they detonated? Would she have been caught in the showers of splintering glass as her would-be rescuers smashed in the windows? How many others were trapped inside with her? Would she get swept up in hysteria as the raid took place, caught in a stampede of terrified women and children, or would she manage to drag herself away to cower in a corner, huddling away from the noise and the bullets screaming across the room? Would she be coherent enough to welcome her rescue?

  I expected to feel her danger, to relive it myself, even, but I felt nothing.

  “What’s happening?” Tabby demanded, pointing at the agent’s walkie-talkie. “Why aren’t they telling you what’s going on?”

  “Ma’am, they’re a tad busy right now. They’ll let us know when it’s all over.”

  We all waited and watched.

  Finally, the voice on the walkie-talkie spoke: “We’re bringing them out.”

  Tabby and I crowded the window again. Several men and women filed out, their handcuffed arms pulled behind them. They were mostly defiant, not bothering to hide their faces, moving slowly as if to deliberately provoke the agents.

  “We have the girls.”

  White uniformed EMTs ran against the current, trying to make their way through the crowd to the victims. And after what seemed like forever, a small klatch of girls—some of them too small even to be teenagers—shuffled out of a different door. They huddled together, hiding their faces as the officers shielded them from prying eyes.

  And suddenly, darting over the street which was now crowded with onlookers, a murder of crows, raucous and noisy, swarmed and wheeled, blocking out the setting sun.

  “Crows,” I whispered, dropping the binoculars. A cold chill crept up my spine.

  “Something’s wrong,” Tabby stated, confused.

  “Let me see,” I said, pushing her away from the window and drawing up my binoculars so I could get a better look. There was some kind of commotion—the EMTs and agents were arguing, separating the girls. I was so caught up in what I was watching that I didn’t even notice that the agent had taken a phone call.

  I put down the binoculars just in time to see him end the call.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, afraid of what he might say.

  He ran a hand through his tousled hair. “That was Hale. It seems Macey isn’t there. Nor was this Luke character your sister told us about. One of the witnesses claimed to have seen them both leaving together, that he was angry, yelling at her for getting him in trouble. The witness heard that Luke was taking Macey home.”

  “Home?” I swallowed hard.

  “Home.” The agent instinctively understood my fear. “Agent Hale suggests you call your mother, now, just to be sure she’s safe.”

  My heart stopped. As quickly as I could, I punched in the number to the house into my phone, but no one picked up. I tried her cell phone, but it just rolled over to her voice mail.

  Immediately, I turned to the agent. “Call Hale. Tell him to have your buddies meet me at the house.”

  “No way,” he said, grabbing his jacket. “My car is faster. I’ll drive you.”

  As I hurried after him, Tabby at my side, I couldn’t help but wonder—Michael, where are you?

  ten

  LUCAS

  “You’re sick,” Macey wailed through her tears, shaking from the force of them.

  “I am,” I acknowledged humbly. I paused, taking her in. I’d forced the poor thing to watch as I’d cut down her foster family— her just reward for even once thinking she could escape me. “I’m sick, but I love you, Macey.” I dragged a bloody hand across her cheek, gently, wanting this to be the moment when I fused fear and love, rendering her incapable of ever, ever questioning me again. “I did it all for you, to free you from their judgment. And I’ll do the same to you, if you ever try to leave me. You belong to me, now. So wait here, like a good girl.”

  She cried as I closed the car door on her and contemplated my next move.

  Of all human pursuits, I always had a soft spot for the game of chess. Pitted against someone overmatched, one could theoretically achieve checkmate in four moves. Indeed, there is a name for such an outcome: the fool’s mate.

  But one is rarely put in such a superior position. And a good thing, for what would be the fun in that? No, the challenge, the delight of the game, is to envision all of it from the very start: the unrolling of move and counter-move in one’s mind, probing your competitor’s temperament and mind to find the soft underbelly of weakness—be it overconfidence or impulsiveness—that will let you lure him into your trap, start him on a path that has but one end.

  It is a clash of intellect in which even a pawn, the lowliest of pieces, can be pivotal.

  As the last of the sun ebbed away, the dusk cloaking us as we surrounded Mona’s house, I could not stop the tiniest smirk from lifting the corner of my mouth.

  “Queen’s gambit,” I murmured, relishing the moment.

  Every move I had made had led us to this confrontation. Targeting Macey—whom I’d just left behind whimpering, terrified, in the back of the car being guarded at the curb—was easy. That pulled in Rorie, who was much too confident—a credit to her mother, I thought begrudgingly—to have fallen for more direct means. Like dominos falling, each piece moved into place, giving me exactly what I needed.

  If I couldn’t destroy Michael physically, I could destroy his world. What’s more, by co
nfronting him here tonight—him and all those who’d sworn to protect the girl, all those whom I and my fellow fighters would take by surprise, stealing her from them as they watched and tried vainly to stop it—I could make him feel he was to blame.

  To blame for the murders—the blood of which Hope would also imagine, sticky and hot, on her own hands. To blame for Hope’s sister’s capture. To blame for the degradation Rorie would experience, which would be yet another failure Hope would count, over and over, in her calculus of all she’d done wrong. Their shared guilt over what was about to happen, the mistrust that would result from Michael’s inability to protect Rorie in her hour of need, would tear Michael and Hope apart—and the sick love of angels for humans would be trampled in the dust, once and for all.

  A question from one of my crew broke through my reverie. “Queen’s gambit—what’s that?”

  I turned, extending my patience to the ignorance of the Fallen Angel next to me. I shouldn’t expect him to follow the elegance of my plan, nor to understand my reference to human pastimes that, for the most part, we deemed beneath us. After all, he—like the rest of the Fallen surrounding me this night—was simply the muscle of this operation. An extra precaution, for surely the whole assembly of angels pledged to protect Rorie would be here tonight in this, her hour of greatest need.

  “Never mind,” I bade him indulgently. And waving an arm, I gave the signal to charge.

  We burst through the door, our black armor glistening in the falsely cheerful lights of the Buckhead manse, fanning out to clear the rooms, cornering our prey.

  It came like a series of snapshots, monochrome bursts of understanding thrust upon my searching mind.

  Room after empty room, abandoned.

  The dining room table, set for a dinner that had been pushed away, untouched.

  The huddled figures at the end—only two—looking up from their whispered conferencing, startled.

  I stared, nonplussed, as Mona scrambled away from the table, her face a mask of shock, Arthur pushing her back protectively as he rose. He glanced hastily around the room, counting us off, a sheen of sweat breaking out on his forehead.