Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(67)

51

SAINT JOHN CAME SLOWLY OUT OF THE FOREST AND STOOD AT THE EDGE of the plateau. The crashed steel angel lay where it had died two years ago. The gray wanderers who had been the crew of the plane still hung from their posts.

Everything was as it should be.

He bent and studied the ground, but there was no easy story to read. The top shelf of the plateau was mostly flat rock, baked hard by the sun and unable to take a footprint. The tracks of the two teenagers had petered out a quarter mile back, and now Saint John was unsure if he had come the right way.

He looked up at the open hatch. Had they gone up into the thing?

He smiled and shook his head, dismissing that level of heresy in children so young. They would not remember airplanes anyway—they’d grown up in a world without such machines. Or . . . mostly without them.

He walked to the base of the plastic sheeting and gave it an experimental tug.

It was solid enough, and he debated climbing up, but he dismissed the idea. There was nowhere to go in there, no reason to try. If the children had been real flesh and bone, then they would surely die up there. If they were, as Saint John suspected, merely spiritual beings pretending to be human teenagers, then they would have no need to enter the shrine.

What would be the upshot if he were to go up and look for himself?

Apart from the direct insult to Mother Rose, whose shrine this was, it would surely be viewed as a lack of faith on his part.

These children had tried to tempt him into an act of transgression. A sin. He smiled.

It was a clever trap, but his faith was stronger than his curiosity. His faith was his armor and his sword.

A sound distracted him—the roar as a quad motor started—and he walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down to see which of his reapers was down there.

Saint John froze, his breath catching in his throat.

What he saw was not any of his people.

Instead he saw a big man buckling a girl—another teenager—onto the back of an idling quad. The girl was a complete stranger.

The man, however, was not.

Nor was the monstrous mastiff who stood wide-legged beside the machine, its body clad in chain mail and spikes.

Oh, he certainly knew this man.

This sinner.

This kind of heretic.

He mouthed the man’s name. “Joe.”

Saint John’s hand strayed to the handle of his favorite knife, hidden as it was beneath the folds of his shirt.

And then he understood.

The two teenagers he had followed had manifested on earth only partly to test his faith, and he had passed that test here at the Shrine of the Fallen. But they had a higher purpose, and one that was of great importance to the reapers and their cause.

Saint John now knew where Joe was.

Joe, however, did not know that Saint John of the Knife, the man he had tried to kill so many times, crouched on the edge of a cliff not a hundred feet above where he stood.

Joe knew the secrets of Sanctuary. If those secrets could be wrested from him, then they could be used to destroy Sanctuary. And oh how it needed to be destroyed. Not just for the evil that it represented, but also because of the temptation it offered to the corrupt.

Like Mother Rose.

Saint John knew full well that if his dear Mother Rose were to reach Sanctuary first—reach it and take it—then she would become a great and terrible threat. To him, to the will of God. She would become the dark queen of this world, and if Saint John could not prevent that, then God would turn his back on him and close the pathway to darkness forever.

The key to all of it was the ranger named Joe.

Joe would soon beg to reveal the secrets of Sanctuary. The sinner would tell Saint John everything and anything he wanted to know.

And Saint John would not mind at all if Joe had to scream his answers.





52

LILAH WOKE WITH A START AND IMMEDIATELY GRABBED FOR HER GUN, DREW it, raised it, and pointed it, all in a fraction of a second.

“No,” said the man who sat across from her.

Beside him a monster of a dog growled a deep-chested warning.

“Who are you?”

Before the man could answer, a wave of nausea struck Lilah, and she turned away to throw up.

There was a small pit in the ground already there in case she needed to throw up. Lilah quickly bent over it. The retching and spasming hurt. A lot.

But strangely, not as much as she’d expected it to.

She clutched the pistol, still pointing it in the general direction of the stranger. When her stomach had nothing left, she sagged back and gasped.

“There’s a canteen with clean water and a cloth to wipe your face,” said the man.

She studied him warily. He was a big man, lean but muscular, with blond hair shot through with gray and a face that was cut by laugh lines and scars. Deep blue eyes and very white teeth. He wore jeans and a camouflage T-shirt. There was an automatic pistol holstered on his right hip and a sheathed katana placed within easy reach on the ground.

“You’re not Tom Imura.”

“Ah,” he said. “That’s what you meant.”

“What?”

“Before you passed out, you called me Tom.”

Lilah said nothing. Instead she appraised the dog. She had seen mastiffs before—they were popular among the bounty hunters. The dogs were fierce, powerful, and able to take down anyone—man, zom, or apparently, a full grown wild boar. This dog was one of the biggest she’d ever seen. Easily two hundred fifty pounds. Probably more. His body was wrapped in a coat of light chain mail, and long bands of segmented metal ran from shoulders to flanks. Metal spikes stood up along the bands. A horned war helmet sat unbuckled by the dog’s feet.