“Fuck!”
I took cover back behind the wall.
And then the damndest thing happened.
No more gunfire erupted.
I waited about a dozen more seconds, expecting them to become impatient, before I myself couldn’t wait any longer and turned. There were…no enemies. Nothing. No one was outside.
“Unpredictable,” I muttered to myself.
It was another mind game.
And then something else whizzed at me, and I hit the floor. I looked up when it hit the wall to see, of all fucking things, a goddamn arrow lodged into the building. What the actual fuck?
And then I looked more closely. There was a piece of paper wrapped around the arrow. These fuckers…
“Spawn!”
“I’m fine. Gimme a second.”
I grabbed the arrow, yanked it out of the splintered wood, and took it back into church.
“They’re mixing their shit up,” I said. “Making it impossible to replicate patterns. They’re fucking good. Maybe even better than we thought.”
I ignored the concerned looks on Cole’s and Sonny’s faces and placed the arrow on the table.
“They fired this fucker into the wood,” I said. “I didn’t think it was the fucking fifteenth century, but I guess they wanted to get a message across.”
“Arrows also don’t make a noticeable sound when you fire them,” Cole pointed out.
Fuck. Why didn’t I think of that?
I ripped off the piece of paper and opened it up. It looked like one of those weird images you saw in stores that you’d scan with your phone to be taken to a URL.
“Is he trying to give us some code?” Satan said. “What sort of fucking joke is this?”
“Hold on, let me,” Sonny said.
“You sure?” I said.
“It’s a burner phone; you get ‘em when you’re president or VP.”
Huh, interesting.
Sonny held his phone up to the image as we crowded around the phone. It took a second for the image to load, but when it did, it was unmistakable. It was a live look-in somewhere, in someone’s apartment.
No.
Hers.
The Cook sisters.
“How the fuck did he get a camera in there?” Satan said. “And…fucking King is there?”
And then, as if to make matters even fucking worse, King looked over his shoulder, stood up, went over to the camera, and waved with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“They fucking bugged the place somehow,” Cole said. “I don’t know how, but King got inside there. And he’s holding them hostage.”
