Forsaken

CHAPTER NINE

Sam didn't talk to him either at the transit stop or once on board the streetcar. Standing deliberately and conspicuously apart from him, she refused to even look in his direction. As they bounced and jostled in the crowded trolley cab, he saw her reach into her pocket, pulling out her cell phone. She hooked her arm around a nearby pole to steady herself while holding the phone up to her head with one hand, hunching her shoulders and plugging her ear with her opposite fingertip.

From between tourists jockeying for window seats, he saw her shoot him a sudden glance. He had no accounting for her expression, a mixture of anger and bewilderment, and wished he knew who she was talking to and what they might be saying.

Probably Dean again, he thought, looking down at his feet, at the puddle of his shadow beneath him, merged and tangled with dozens of others surrounding him. Trying to convince her I'm nothing but a con artist out to sue the hospital. And once he finds out about the gun, he'll try to tell her she's in danger with me. Never mind the fact I'd never hurt her. Never in a million...

His thoughts trailed off and he watched in nearly mesmerized fascination as his shadow seemed to spread, stretching out in thin rivulets and slender, crooked seams, seeping into neighboring shadows and widening from there, devouring them, swallowing the distance between him and Sam across the cab.

The Eidolon.

When it slipped and slithered its way beneath people's feet and between their legs, at last reaching Sam, he could suddenly hear her. More than this, he could hear the other side of her phone conversation too, as if he was taking part in it.

"Never seen anything like this in my life," Bear was telling her. "There's no crossover point, no bifurcation, no typelines, deltas, nothing."

"Speak English, Bear. I don't understand," Sam said, practically yelling into the phone, because it was that noisy on the streetcar. Which made it equally impossible that Jason could hear her. "Is it Jason's fingerprint or not?"

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," Bear said as the streetcar came to a jolting stop at the next depot, knocking Jason forward into the people jammed in front of him. The doors screeched as they folded open at both the rear and aft of the car, and Jason was banged and jostled again as people struggled to either board or disembark at the stop.

"It's not that's it's not Jason's fingerprint—it's that it's no one's fingerprint," Bear said. "I know it was dark in the room when I took them, but I've been doing this for twenty-five years. I know the routine. I took his prints, but there's nothing there. Nothing, Sammi. Now maybe he's been surgically altered somehow, but even then, I don't..."

Bear's voice faded into garble as Jason was distracted by a sudden strange feeling, an icy prickle stealing down his spine. He'd felt it before, just that morning, in fact, when the priest, Gabriel Darrow, had come to visit Sam at the bar. He glanced toward the front of the streetcar, lifting his head and straining to look over the crowd of hats and heads just as a man stepped into view, boarding the cab.

With a black do-rag wrapped around his head and a long black trench coat enveloping his lean frame, he towered over the rest of the riders. His skin was pale, a cadaverous hue accentuated by his dark clothes, sharp features, thin mouth and dark eyes ringed in thickly applied black liner. Just above the bridge of his nose, half-hidden beneath the hem of the scarf around his head, was a mark like a smutch of soot or a burn, a wide-mouthed V, a black chevron etched into his skin.

He might have been just another Goth hoodlum. The city was full of them, along with a wide variety of other derelicts, society's lost or forgotten underbelly from every far-flung corner of the country, drawn to the city by its year-round mild temperatures and the promise of certain fellowship. Mostly teens or young adults as well as drug addicts, they'd panhandle in the street by day and prostitute or party at night. Jason had undoubtedly seen thousands of them in his lifetime.