Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(64)

That shirt.

Dad.

She stood there and buried her face in her hands and started to cry.

“Dana…?” said a voice. Dad. She looked through her fingers and saw him come down off the porch. “Dana, is that you?” he growled. “Melissa said you were out studying, but you’re seriously pushing it, young lady. It’s after ten. What could you be thinking? With everything that’s happening in town, I think we need to talk about your judgment and common sense.”

She wanted to run away right then. Instead Dana broke and ran toward him, racing the rest of the way to her house, and her dad came down the steps and jogged forward, arms out, to gather her in. He hesitated for a fragment of a moment, and then he pulled her to him and held her close in those strong arms, kissing her hair as she clung to him, sobbing uncontrollably.

“Daddy … oh, Daddy.”

William Scully held his daughter firmly as if he were the anchor that held her to the world. Stopped scolding and did not ask her what was wrong. He did not pollute the moment with questions. They would come later. Instead he held her and whispered her special, secret name.

“Starbuck,” he said, and there was the thickness of tears in his voice, too.

*

Later they sat together on the porch swing. She had her sweater on and lay with her head against his chest. Silence was a friend to both of them, and they welcomed it.

It was only when it was getting late that her father spoke.

“You know you can tell me anything,” he said gently.

She said nothing.

“Is it a boy?”

“What? No.”

“School?”

“No.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Dana, is it the kids who have been getting themselves killed?” When she did not answer that, her father sighed, deep and heavy. “I know it was hard on you when that teacher died back in San Diego.”

Dana pushed away the memory. “That was sad, but this—” This is different.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said.

“I know.”

In the yard a lonely cricket chirped. Suddenly a second one chimed in. They pulsed out of sync and then gradually fell into harmony. It was nice. It screwed one of the loose bolts back into place on the machinery of the world.

“Ahab?” she said.

“What is it, Starbuck?”

“I know it’s late, but can we read for a little? We haven’t done that in a long time.”

She felt a spasm in his chest, as if the request hurt him somehow. But he said, “Sure. Go get it. It’s on the coffee table.”

She went inside and brought out the old leather-bound copy of Moby-Dick. Dad put on his reading glasses and opened the book to the place where they’d left off long ago. It wasn’t their first time through the book. They knew the story by heart, but that wasn’t why they came back to it. It was the thing that connected them, and Dana sometimes wondered if the book was as much a lifeline to him as it was to her. There was a sadness in her father she’d never understood, and she suspected that his coldness was as much a defense mechanism as it was part of his being a professional military man. She knew for sure that a heart beat inside his bearlike chest.

She wanted to find some way to truly unlock him. She wondered if he was different at sea. She liked to think that he yearned to be riding the waves, chasing whales, navigating by the stars—and that his gruffness was from being trapped on land, and not from being trapped on dry land with his family. But she never asked, because she might find out the truth, and that would hurt too much, because sometimes the truth doesn’t set you free.

They read the book and the crickets sang to each other in the grass, and for a while, at least, the shadows kept their distance.





CHAPTER 57

Craiger, Maryland

11:03 P.M.

The angel thought about Agent Gerlach and his masters in the Syndicate. He thought about what they wanted of him, what they needed from him, and what they thought about him.

They thought he was a madman, that he was out of control, that he was becoming a danger to their plans. They were working to save the world. Maybe some of them actually believed it. Gerlach seemed to. But they were going about it the wrong way. The Craiger Initiative was good, and it might even give them the weapon they needed.

Maybe, but the angel did not believe it. Oh, he believed that what he was doing for them would create weapons, even incredibly powerful ones, but the enemy they all fought was so very much more powerful. No army of psychic children could hope to oppose it. No, the angel believed that the Syndicate was going to lose the whole planet.

He, on the other hand, would not. He had a different idea about how to fight the future.

With the grigori and their children, the nephilim.

How could any fleet of invaders hope to win against a host of angels and giants?

He had tried to explain this to Gerlach, but the conversation had gone nowhere. The angel could see the doubt, the mockery, the fear in the agent’s eyes.

The angel pitied him.

He pitied everyone who failed in his or her faith. When the painting on the wall was complete, when it changed from blood and hair and grease and sweat into a portal, then the faithless would burn in the same fires as the enemies of this world.





CHAPTER 58