The Bishop's Legacy

The Bishop's face came apart in pieces.

In the dream, Arthur stood on the Everett dock with his boots sinking into something wet and warm, watching Leopold Glasser's skull fracture in slow motion—bone splitting like wet wood, fragments spiraling outward through air thick with the smell of sulfur and copper. The Bishop's mouth kept moving even as the jaw separated from the skull, forming words Arthur couldn't hear over the roar of something vast and hungry pressing against the membrane of the world.

Behind Glasser, the boy stood in shadow. Jeremy. His eyes were black from lid to lid, and when he opened his mouth, Emily's voice came out—small and sweet and five years old, asking why Daddy never came home.

Arthur tried to reach for the photograph in his pocket, but his hands were slick to the wrists and the pocket was full of teeth. The dock groaned beneath him. The water below was not water. It churned with faces—dozens of them, children's faces, mouths open in silent screams, their eyes rolled back to whites. Thirty faces. Thirty names on a list, the letters dark as dried blood.

The Bishop's body hit the dock. Where it fell, the wood blackened and split, and from the cracks rose the sweet-rot stench of something that had died and refused to stay dead. Glasser's hand twitched once, twice, and then the fingers began crawling toward Arthur's ankle like a pale spider detached from its body.

He woke gasping, hand locked around the tranquilizer pistol beneath his pillow, heart hammering against cracked ribs. The sulfur smell lingered in his sinuses for three full breaths before the stale mildew of the Shamrock Motor Inn replaced it. Water-stained ceiling. Highway light crawling across stucco. The low drone of semis on the interstate.

The phone rang at 3:47 in the morning.

Arthur had been awake for the better part of two hours since the nightmare released him. Sleep was a negotiation he'd stopped having, so he lay in the dark running scenarios instead—where Jeremy would go first, which cells he'd activate, what pattern would emerge from the chaos. Headlights crawled across the stucco as cars passed on the highway outside, and he tracked them absently while his mind built and dismantled possibilities. The Everett shipyard crept back in through the gaps—not the tactical details but the sensory ones: the wet-meat sound of Glasser hitting the dock, the copper taste in Arthur's own mouth where he'd bitten through his cheek, the boy's scream cutting through the salt air as he fled into the darkness.

The worst part wasn't the violence. He'd survived worse—dealt worse, if he was honest with himself. The worst part was the boy's face in that last moment before he ran. Not rage, not hatred, not the cold emptiness of someone conditioned beyond feeling. Fear. The raw, animal terror of a child who had just watched the only father he'd ever known die in front of him. Arthur had seen that fear before, in a photograph he couldn't stop looking at—a crime scene photo from his own kitchen, the one the detective had tried to keep from him, showing Emily's face frozen in the same expression.

That was what the nightmare was really about. Not Glasser. Not the dock. The look in a child's eyes when the world stopped making sense.

He rolled onto his side and picked up the burner phone from the nightstand. Only one person had this number.

"Arthur." The voice on the other end belonged to Cardinal Richter, thin and clipped, filtered through encryption that made it sound like the man was speaking from the bottom of a well. "We have a situation."

"It's four in the morning, Your Eminence. It had better be a situation."

"A church in Duluth, Minnesota was attacked six hours ago. Three dead. The priest who called it in described the assailant as a teenage girl who moved objects without touching them."

Arthur sat up. The springs of the cheap mattress groaned beneath him. "Telekinesis?"