The PowWow

The building was empty when we went in.

Not abandoned — occupied in the way that spaces are occupied when whoever is using them has stepped out temporarily and intends to return. Equipment cases along one wall. Folding tables. Extension cords running to a bank of outlets that had been added recently, the work visible in the rawness of the installation. Someone had been here often enough to make it comfortable and nobody had told the space to look like anything other than what it was being used for.

The wrongness was present the moment the door closed behind us.

Not the ambient wrongness of the park or the alley. Denser. More settled. The specific quality of a space that had been used for something it wasn't built for, repeatedly, long enough that whatever had been done here had left a residue in the walls and the floor and the cold air that the refrigeration units were pushing through the space.

Jacob moved left. I moved right. Standard.

We found it at the back of the unit, positioned against the far wall between two industrial refrigeration panels — a tank. Cylindrical. Large enough that I spent a moment recalibrating my estimate of Cross's operational scope before landing on something that sat uncomfortably in my chest.

It was covered. Sealed. The refrigeration units on either side of it running steadily, maintaining whatever temperature the contents required.

I knew what the contents were.

Jacob stood beside it. Said nothing for a moment. Then, quietly, the way he said things that came from somewhere deeper than analysis —

"For the life of the flesh is in the blood."

Leviticus. The verse landed in the cold air of the industrial unit with the weight of something that had been true for a very long time and was being violated in this room.

I looked at the tank. "The possession ritual needs it," I said. "That's why the exsanguination. They weren't just taking it. They were storing it. Using it." I looked at Jacob. "Cross has been preparing more. The sixteen from the alley were just the beginning. Where are all the other bodies?"

Jacob's jaw tightened.

The doors opened.

All of them. Simultaneously. The main entrance, two side doors, a loading access at the rear. The particular coordinated entry of something that had been waiting outside for us to be sufficiently positioned and had decided that moment had arrived.

They came in from every direction.

Thirty of them, give or take. Not the Goth group — different faces, different ages, the same yellow eyes, the same coiled fury wearing whatever bodies Cross had found available since the alley. Newer. Still carrying the full force of whatever had taken up residence in them without the weeks of occupation that had shown in the original group.

And Cross.

Coming in through the main entrance with the particular confidence of a man who had prepared this ground and believed in his preparation. He looked different here than he had at the rallies, the airs of an aide entirely gone, replaced with something that had been underneath it the whole time. The deal he'd made showing in his face now that there was no reason to conceal it.

He had a gun.

Trained on Jacob. Both hands. Steady. His eyes locked on my brother with the focused certainty of a man who had done his research and drawn the correct conclusion about which of us had spoken the name in the alley.

"Not this time," Cross said.

Jacob stood completely still.

Cross smiled. It didn't reach anything above his mouth. "I've been promised this space is secure. Whatever you did in that alley — " he gestured with his chin at the ceiling, the walls, the room, " — it won't work here. The one I serve has guaranteed it."

I looked at Jacob.

Jacob looked at me.

"Delusion," he said quietly, his hand finding my shoulder, "is in our favor."

I almost laughed. Managed not to. Cross read the almost-laugh and his eyes moved to me with the expression I'd last seen on Nathanial's face — the dismissal. The recalculation that filed me under irrelevant and moved on.

Same mistake. Different man.

Cross signaled.

They came.

I moved.

The Nephilim speed arrived the way it always did — not like acceleration, more like the world slowing down around me while I remained at normal pace. I was through the first wave before they'd fully committed, redirecting, controlling, keeping them occupied and keeping myself between as many of them and Jacob as the geometry of the room allowed.

Jacob wasn't fighting.

He was standing.

The gun on him kept him still and Cross kept the gun steady, watching Jacob with the focused attention of a man who had made one tactical decision and was committed to it entirely.

Which meant nobody was watching me.

I stopped moving.

Found the ground under my feet the way Jacob had found it in the alley.

Drew myself up.

I raised my right hand and the room felt it before I spoke — a change in pressure, a shift in the quality of the air, the wrongness pulling back slightly from whatever was coming the way darkness pulls back from a light being switched on.

"In the name of Yeshua Hamashiach," I said, and my voice in that space was not my usual voice — it was my voice carrying something that wasn't mine, the authority granted from somewhere I had no claim to except through the One who had every claim, "I command you to leave these vessels and begone."

The keening arrived.

Not like the alley.

The alley had been manageable. Terrible, but manageable. This was the alley multiplied by the enclosed concrete space and the sheer number of departing presences and whatever the refrigeration units did to the acoustics and possibly by the stored blood in the tank reacting to the name spoken over it — all of it compounding into a wall of sound that had no good description except that it was the sound of things being removed from places they had occupied without consent, furious and agonized and guilty, and it filled every cubic inch of the industrial unit simultaneously.

Jacob went to his knees.

I went to my knees.

Cross dropped the gun.

His hands went to his ears and his face did something that had nothing to do with the demonic and everything to do with a man whose guarantees had just failed him completely and comprehensively and in real time.

The possessed hit the floor the same way they had in the alley — laid, not collapsed, the ground catching them gently as whatever had been using them departed and left the bodies to their own considerable relief.

The keening peaked.

Held.

Then died.

The silence afterward was the cleanest silence I had ever heard in my life. The complete absence of the wrongness, the space returned entirely to itself, the cold air just cold air again.

I stayed on my knees for a moment. Breathing.

Jacob was already lifting his head. His expression was the expression from the alley — the gratitude of a man watching something go the way it was supposed to go. He looked at me and something in it was different from every other time he'd looked at me in a crisis.

Pride was still a sin.

But what was in his face wasn't pride. It was something cleaner than that. The recognition of a brother.

Cross ran.

My legs were already moving before my brain had finished the instruction. The Nephilim speed finding its purpose — not through a crowd this time, not through a park. Across thirty feet of concrete floor, past the bodies of thirty people sleeping off a demonic occupation, straight at a man who had spent months recruiting and corrupting and storing the blood of the people he'd led into darkness and was now discovering that the exit was blocked.

I hit him at the far wall.

Clean. Controlled. Nothing an NFL scout would have been impressed by but entirely sufficient for stopping Cross.

We went down in a tangle, but with my speed, I controlled the fall. I had him secured before he'd finished landing, one arm behind his back, the other occupied with communicating clearly to the floor that it was staying where it was.

He was already ranting.

"It's not possible," he said. The consultant's voice was gone entirely. What was left was raw and bewildered and genuinely shaken in a way that had nothing performed in it. "Two people. You can't — nobody has that kind of faith. It's not — you can't both — "

I picked him up by the collar.

Looked him in the eye.

"For where two or three are gathered in His name," I said, "there He is among them."

Cross stared at me.

I turned him toward the door.

"Matthew," I said. "Eighteen twenty. You should've done your homework."

Jacob fell into step beside me as we walked Cross toward the exit. Thirty people sleeping on the concrete behind us. A tank of stored blood that Rachel was going to have significant forensic questions about. A case that was going to require considerable creative statement-writing before it was fit for official documentation.

Jacob looked at Cross. Then at me.

"Levi," he said.

"Yeah."

"Well done."

Two words. From Jacob. In that register.

I held that the whole way to the door.

Outside, Rachel was already out of the Highlander. Her eyes went to Cross, then to Jacob, then to me. The professional assessment running its full sequence in approximately two seconds.

Then her eyes stayed on me.

I handed Cross to her. "He'll need processing," I said. "He's going to have a lot to say. Most of it is going to sound like someone who needs significant psychiatric evaluation."

Rachel looked at Cross, who was already explaining loudly that what had happened in that building was a violation of specific contractual guarantees and that the party responsible was going to hear about this through appropriate channels which he could not at this time name for reasons that were entirely practical and not at all related to fear.

Rachel looked back at me. "Psychiatric evaluation," she said.

"Almost certainly," I paused. “You know what? Strike the almost part.”

Jeremiah was out of the second car, standing quietly, taking in the industrial park and the brothers and Cross with the particular stillness of a man who had sent people into things and was accounting for their return.

Jacob went to him.

I watched my brother reach Jeremiah and the older man put a hand on his shoulder and say something I couldn't hear from this distance, and Jacob bow his head slightly in the particular way he bowed it when he was receiving something he needed.

Rachel stepped close to me.

Not professional distance. The other kind.

"You're alright," she said. Not a question. Just confirmation, stated quietly, for her own benefit as much as mine.

"Yeah," I said.

Her hand found mine. Briefly. Then she was turning back to Cross with the focused efficiency of a detective who had a suspect in custody and considerable work ahead of her.

I stood in the parking lot of an industrial park at the river end of the east commercial district and looked at the sky and said thank you in the continuous present tense until the words ran out and what was left was just the feeling itself, which was enough.

More than enough.