Page 90 of The Rut in the Road

I nodded. I wasn’t, really, but I was okay enough. I wasn’t too tired, I wasn’t going to throw up, and my headache was almost gone. Or, at least, it had been when Raj had picked me up at Beyond the Veil this morning. Vi was working the desk, and I’d wanted to make sure she was all set with the post-séance paperwork before abandoning her.

I cleared my throat, and everybody except Raj looked at me. “Then I’ll do more,” I said. “In case we do have that in one of these.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Cass said.

“That’s my job,” I replied, although it was Raj I was watching. He still didn’t turn my way.

I didn’t wait for permission, and picked up the pen again, focusing on the last thing I’d gotten from it.

Jerry and Carlhad both been chosen. She was glad it had been them—both because she agreed that something needed to be done about the corruption of the human race, just as the Reverend Preacher had said, but also because she would be too afraid to do it herself.

But if God called her to take action to purge the corruption from the world, called on her to destroy one of these monsters, by whatever means she had to hand, she would do so.

After all, that’s what the Reverend Preacher had told them to do—to destroy the monsters in their midst.

I sat back,my eyes closed as I tried to breathe through the anger that surged up in my chest at having to share thoughts with someone who thought of people as monsters. Not just people, people I cared about. People like Raj. People like Hart and Mason and Fiona… and Grace and Zane. Babies who knew nothing about the world or why someone like this woman and her fucked up church would want to hurt them. Kill them.

I took a long, deep breath, then let it out again.

“That’s it, right?” Cass asked, turning first to Raj, who wasn’t looking at any of us, and then Hart, when it became clear that Raj was going to stay keenly interested in whatever was happening among the office cubicles outside the conference room. “That they’re supposed to destroy the monsters?”

“It could be taken metaphorically,” Raj answered, not turning around, although I could tell from his tone that he was just as angry as I was.

“Bullshit,” Hart said.

“That’s as may be,” Raj replied. “But a lawyer could still make the argument, and we need it more airtight than that.”

“Then give me something else,” I said. “If it’s here, I’ll find it.”

I didn’t findwhat I was looking for, although when I thought about it later, I supposed that made sense. None of what Drew and Cass had brought back from their trip to the Church of Holy Judgment had been things that would have been carried in the service—or, at least, not handled during a service.

They were office supplies, a brochure, that sort of thing. Things that people handled while thinking about their grocery list, what they wanted to make for dinner, what time they had to pick up their kids, or, most often, what they thought about Dale Durant.

A paper clip had been handled by Durant himself, but, as Raj reminded us, the fact that he’d thought about his desire to cleanse all of the city with holy fire wasn’t enough to hold him for exhorting his followers to murder.

Hart had not been happy about that, although Raj reminded him that he was probably personally very lucky that thoughtcrime wasn’t actually prosecutable.

What I did find on the paper clip was the fact that Durant printed out his sermons in order to mark them up before he gave them. And if the vitriol and righteous indignation on the paper clip was any indication, the sermons themselves were highly likely to contain exactly the sort of thing Raj was looking for.

The problem, of course, was that we would need to actually get a copy of one of those sermons, either a marked draft or, even better, an audio recording.

Cass had offered to go in undercover, since she and Drew had already gone in once. “We wanted more information about the church,” she argued. “So wouldn’t we want to actually attend a service?”

Drew was nodding.

“Only if this dickweed gives the same sermon to the public that he gives to his fucking cultists,” Hart replied.

Cass had frowned. “What do you mean?”

“It means that the Church of Holy Judgment undoubtedly has two faces,” Raj replied. “One they show the world, and one they keep hidden amongst only themselves. Since you can’t exactly register your organization as one that openly advocates for the extermination of some percentage of the population—atleast not yet—they can’t risk newcomers being exactly what Cass would be, if she attended a service.” His tone was bleak, and I wanted to dosomethingto alleviate that despair. But since he wouldn’t even look at me for more than half a second at a time, I didn’t think he’d appreciate it if I tried touching him or asking what I could do.

“Yeah, that shit,” Hart confirmed.

“Damn,” Cass replied, slumping in her chair.

Hart’s phone buzzed, and he turned it over, then looked over at Drew. “What about some kind of repair or building inspection?” he asked, clearly pulling the idea from a message Drew had sent him. I’d never heard Drew speak—I didn’t know if he could or did—but that never seemed to present a problem for anyone on the team.

“It has potential,” Raj replied, his expression thoughtful. “It’d be easier if we knew what kind of repair they might actually need, though.”