Blue Bloods (Blue Bloods 1)

"Are you all right?" Schuyler asked, rushing to his side. "You're bleeding."

"It's just a cut," he said, wiping the blood, which had run red, but was blue in the light. "I'm okay. Are you?"

She felt the side of her neck. The bleeding had stopped. "How did you know?" she asked.

"That it would attack you? Because it had once before, so I knew it would do it again. Killers tend to go back and finish what they started."

"But why - "

"I didn't want to see you get hurt because of me," Jack explained brusquely.

Is that all? Schuyler wondered.

"Thank you," she said softly.

"Did you see it?" Jack asked. "Did you?"

"Yes." She nodded. "I did."

"It can't be right," Jack said. "It's a trick." He shook his head. "I don't believe it."

"It's not. It has to follow the laws." Schuyler said gently.

"I know about the Sacred Language," Jack snapped. "But it has to be a mistake."

"No mistake. Those are the rules of creation."

Jack glowered. "No."

The monster had shown itself for one brief moment, when it had no choice but to obey Schuyler's words. The monster had shown its true form. And it was the face of the authority behind New York, the face of the man who single-handedly changed the city to bend to his will.

The face of Charles Force.

His own father.

CHAPTER 40

Schuyler told Jack everything she'd put together, hoping that it wasn't true. "It's him. He was there on the night Aggie died. I saw him at the basement of The Bank. He was coming out of the Repository. I remember now. It puts him in the scene of the crime. It was him, Jack."

Jack shook his head.

"You can't deny what you saw. It was your father's face."

"You're wrong. It's a trick of the light, something else." He kept shaking his head and staring down at the blood on the sidewalk.

"Listen to me. Jack, we have to find him. My grandmother said Silver Bloods don't even know what they are. Your father might not even realize he's been possessed."

Jack didn't argue this time.

She put a hand on his arm. "Where is he?"

"Where he always is. The hospital."

"What do you mean? What hospital?"

"Columbia Pres, but I don't know what room. I don't know what he does up there. Only that he visits someone there a lot." Jack said. "Why?"

"I think I might know where we can find him," Schuyler said.